In England Fran had learned to say “Lift” for “Elevator,” “Zed” for “Zee,” “Labóratory” for “Láboratory,” “Schenario” for “Scenario,” and “Shi” for “Ski.” And before she had ever left America she had been able to point her Europeanism by keeping her fork in her left hand. But now she added to her accomplishments the ability to make a European 7 by crossing it, and ardently she crossed every 7, particularly in letters to friends in Zenith, who were thus prevented from knowing what figure she was using.
The four great mysteries of life in postwar Berlin, not to be explained by the most diligent searching of history and economics and Lutheran theology, are all connected with apartment-houses, and thus are they: Why can no visitor get into an apartment-house after eight in the evening without protocols? Why are the automatic elevators kept locked, so that no visitor can use them? Why does no Berlin landlord provide modern locks, but always compel his tenants to carry a bunch of keys comparable in size to those used in the Middle Ages for closing cathedrals? Why does a landlord who has spent a hundred thousand marks on a marble staircase (with neat gilt edgings and mosaic inserts) refuse to spend a mark a night to provide lights in the hallways? They are dark. They are very dark. A light may be had by pressing a button, which provides illumination for a time, but in all the history of Berlin that time of illumination has never been known to last while a visitor climbed from the ground floor to the top.
On the top floor of an apartment house on the Brücken Allee lived Kurt von Obersdorf, and on the vertiginous way up to it Sam pointed out these four mysteries, and was pleased to have Fran agree with him.
They were received by Kurt’s maid. She was an ancient thing, rusty and feeble and in some doubt as to what to do with Sam’s hat and stick. While she puttered, Sam looked about. The apartment had a narrow corridor, the drab plaster rather flaked, and adorned with a yellow-stained engraving of St. Stefan’s Dom in Vienna. Over a doorway were two crossed swords.
Suddenly Kurt bounced out on them, slimmer and looser than ever in dinner clothes, took Fran’s wrap himself, spoke to the creeping servant with that mixture of scolding and family fondness which only a European can manage, and prattled:
“I am so glad! I was afraid you would be angry with me for my clumsiness about Die Neuste Ehe the other evening and punish me by not coming. Let me tell you who are the other guests. There are your cousins, Dr. and Frau Biedner, and the Baroness Volinsky—she is such a pretty girl, a Hungarian; her husband is a Pole, a terrible fellow; he is not coming, thank God!; and Theodor von Escher, the violinist—he is such a von‑derful violinist!—and his wife, Minna—you will fall in love with her, and Professor and Frau Braut—he is professor of economics in Berlin University, such a brain, he knows more America than anybody—he will prove to you that in two hundred years America will be a wilderness again, you will like him so much! They are a funny mix’ lot, but all speak English, and I wanted you to meet different kinds. Fran, you look like a heaven’s angel in ivory! Kom’ mal!”
He ushered them, as though they were royalty, into a small, shabby, friendly apartment in which three people seemed a crowd. The chairs of old brown leather were hollowed and listed; the couch was covered with what Sam viewed as “some kind of yellow silk,” though Fran whispered later that it was “perfectly priceless old damask.” The pictures were largely photographs of friends, officers in Austrian uniform. But there were shelves of wildly disarranged books, and Sam noted later that they were in German, English, Italian, and French. He observed a dozen ponderous and dismaying volumes on American law and banking and history, the sort of tomes which he had always admired in libraries and shunned in the home.
When the door to the right was opened for a moment, Sam saw a narrow bedroom with a mean camp bedstead, racks of gorgeous ties, a picture of a beautiful girl, a crucifix, and nothing much else. That, with the little dining-room and a mysterious kitchen somewhere and a bathroom old enough to be historic, seemed to make up the domain of the head of the house of Obersdorf.
There were cocktails, agitatedly mixed by Kurt in a glass pitcher, and there was dinner (not very good) and conversation (tremendous). Under Kurt’s hectic captaincy, there was none of the timid burgher decorum of dinner at the Biedners’; also there was more to drink, including an Assmannshauser champagne which made Sam determined to explore the Rhine Valley. Anyone who didn’t shout from time to time received Kurt’s worried attention. Kurt was convinced that a person who was silent in his house had either ceased to like him—and probably for good reasons, for some hideous sin he had unconsciously committed against them—or else was suffering from a hidden malady which ought to be treated out of hand.
But between the shouts, most of the conversation was carried on by Professor Braut.
When he first surveyed that learned man, who left with you the impression that he had whiskers even in his eyes, Sam had decided, “This bearded beauty may know something about economics in Germany, but I’ll bet he doesn’t know anything about the land of the safety-razor!”
Professor Braut turned to him. His accent was much thicker
