how she makes her living. All in all, it’s a nice building, and I live with a quiet family.”
That was the account I gave my aunt about my apartment. It was more lively though, because an oral presentation is more vivid than the written word.
“You’re a poet!” shouted Auntie. “Just write up what you said, and you’ll be just as good as Dickens. Actually you interest me much more. You paint when you speak! You describe your building so that one can see it. It makes one shudder! Keep writing, make it come alive. Put people in, beautiful people and preferably unhappy ones!”
I really did write it down, as it stands with the noises and sounds, but just with myself in it, no action. That came later!
IV.
It was in the winter, late in the evening after the theater. There was a terrible snowstorm, so it was almost impossible to make any headway walking.
Auntie had been to the theater, and I was there to see her home, but it was hard to walk oneself, much less help someone else. All the cabs were taken. Auntie lived far over in town, but my room was close to the theater. If that hadn’t been the case, we would have had to stand in the sentry box for who knows how long.
We struggled along in the deep snow, surrounded by the whirling snowflakes. I lifted her, held her, and pushed her along. We only fell twice, but we fell softly.
We reached my gate where we shook ourselves off. We shook ourselves on the stairs too, and we still had enough snow on us to fill up the floor in the entry.
We took off our coats and other clothing that could be taken off. The landlady lent Auntie dry stockings and a robe. She said it was a necessity, and added that Auntie could not possibly get home that night, which was true. She asked her to make do with the sofa in her living room, where she would make up a bed in front of the always locked door to my room. And that was done.
A fire burned in my stove. The teapot was brought to the table, and the little room became cozy, if not as cozy as at Auntie’s, where there are thick curtains in front of the door in the winter, thick curtains over the windows, and two-ply carpets with three layers of heavy paper underneath. You sit there as if in a tightly corked bottle of warm air. But, as I said, it was cozy there in my place too. Outside the wind howled.
Auntie talked and told stories. Back came the days of her youth and back came the brewer, old memories.
She remembered when I got my first tooth, and the pleasure the family took in it. The first tooth! The tooth of innocence, shining like a little white drop of milk—the milk tooth.
First came one, then others, a whole line. Side by side, upper and lower—the most lovely baby teeth, but yet just the vanguards, not the real ones that have to last for a lifetime.
They came too, and the wisdom teeth also. Flankers of the rank, born in pain and with great difficulty.
And they leave again, every one of them! They go before their service is up. Even the last tooth goes, and that’s not a day of celebration. It’s a melancholy day.
And then you’re old, even if your spirit is young.
Such thoughts and talk aren’t pleasant, and yet we talked about all this. We went back to childhood years. We talked and talked. It was midnight before Auntie went to bed in the room next door.
“Good night, my sweet child,” she called. “Now I’ll sleep as if I’m lying in my own bed.”
And she slept peacefully, but there was no peace either in the house or outside. The storm shook the windows, slammed the long dangling iron hooks, and rang the neighbor’s portal bell in the back building. The lodger upstairs had come home. He was still taking his little walk up and down. He took off his boots and went to bed and to rest, but he snores so loudly that good ears can hear it through the ceiling.
I couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t calm down. The weather didn’t calm down either. It was immensely lively. The wind whistled and sang in its fashion and my teeth also began to get lively. They whistled and sang in their fashion, and struck up a terrific toothache.
There was a draft from the window. The moonlight shone onto the floor. The lighting changed as the clouds came and went in the stormy weather. There was a shifting of shadow and light, but at last the shadow on the floor took shape and looked like something. I looked at the moving shape and sensed an icy cold blast.
A figure was sitting on the floor, thin and long, as when a child tries to draw a person on a blackboard with chalk. The body is a single long line. A line and one more are the arms, and the legs are also each just a line, with the head a polygon.
The figure soon became more distinct. It seemed to have some kind of dress on—very thin and fine, but that showed the figure was a female.
I heard a humming sound. Was it her, or the wind that was buzzing like a horsefly in the window crack?
No, it was Mrs. Toothache herself! Her Awfulness
“It’s nice to be here,” she hummed. “These are good lodgings. Swampy ground, boggy ground. The mosquitoes have been buzzing around here with poison in their sting, and now I have the stinger. It has to be sharpened on human teeth, and they’re shining so whitely on him in the bed. They have held their own against sweet and sour, hot and cold, shells of nuts and stones of plums! But I am going to rock them and shock them, nourish their roots with a drafty wind, and give them cold feet!”
It was a horrible speech from a horrible guest.
“So you’re a poet!” she said. “Well, I’ll teach you all the meters of agony. I’ll give you iron and steel in your body, and put wires in all your nerves.”
It was as if a glowing awl plunged into my cheekbone. I twisted and turned.
“An excellent set of teeth!” she said. “An organ to play upon—a mouth-organ concert, splendid, with kettledrums and trumpets, a piccolo, and a trombone in the wisdom tooth! Great music for a great poet!”
She struck up her music, and she looked horrible, even though I saw no more of her than her hand—a shadow
