She read it again and again. A rigid toughness came over her, a determination to understand him, and gradually it dawned on her that perhaps he wasn’t disguising himself, omitting things, lying. Flight, swindling, theft – these were all the hallmarks of his outer life, but their life together was love. What else could they possibly have shared, what else did they want to know of one another?
Life was monotony, but on a glorious beach somewhere he was building the glittering tent of their love in all its gaudiness, and everyday matters were kept out.
She wrote to him. He wrote back. She wrote. Immaterial things, just as he did. She was mistaken in him, he was just like everyone else. He wrote. She wrote. He stopped writing.
7
One dark winter evening a man came towards her on the avenue, walked right up to her, she panicked, he laid his hand on her shoulder. It was he.
They held each other, breathless with happiness they looked into one another’s eyes. ‘I can’t believe it’s you.’ – ‘I love you so much.’
All the intervening things were forgotten. Shuddering, her body remembered the grip of his hand, her lips tasted his much-missed mouth, she felt at peace against his chest.
‘It’s really you!’ And: ‘Wait here. Once things are quiet in the village, I’ll come and get you.’
She went away from him, turned round, ran back into his arms. Her eyes sparkled with all the purple of the long-set winter sun. Slowly, with a clumsy modesty the trees seemed to sag, and then he was kneeling over her, rubbing her forehead with snow. ‘It’s joy,’ she said, ‘you’ve been too long away.’
Greedily he stared at her face, which was the loveliest face in the world, it seemed to have got paler and narrower, and the eyes sparkled in a mild, sad joy as before.
She walked away from him. She came back for him. She locked him up in her room, he stayed there for days and nights, she took her place at table as ever, she went with her mother to visit the sick, maybe someone happened to knock on the door and he, half-asleep, happened to call out ‘Come in.’
She didn’t ask him any questions, there was nothing to ask, he was there. And yet everything felt different to before. In those two weeks it would only have taken the consent of her father, and everything would have ended in the traditional way.
Now she knew deep down that this was and would remain impossible, their love could only exist away from everyone and against everyone, it had become that fairy tale that was probably the thing he had always wanted.
Brighter, purer and more lambent was the flame of their love as it rose towards heaven. They held each other faster because, as they well understood, every hour could be their last. Time and again they caught one another up, one slid away into exhaustion, the other roused him with a look, and the seeking, imploring look started everything up again. They knew no fatigue, sleep meant forgetting, and forgetting was death, pressed up against one another, feeling the surging breath like a wave, a softly veiled brightness. Then the look again. And then love.
8
One night she had been out and was late coming home, she unlocked the door and found him gone. Her first instinct was to think she had made a mistake. Had she failed to lock the door when she went? No, no, he was gone, without a note, without a last embrace.
She sat down on the side of the bed, her bed that still bore the impress of his body. This was the end, she had always known it would come, now she had to be brave. She had had a dream of an intensity very few people experienced. She had had a matchless lover who had been all hers, who had never spoken a cross word to her or made a disrespectful remark. His love was youthful and new, and now he was gone before it could age.
What was she doing sitting there? She jumped up. Perhaps he’s at the far end of the avenue, waiting for me. Perhaps he had to run away again. Always on the run. My poor darling.
She looked for him all night. The shuffling through snow, in the small circle lit by her torch, kept her heart distracted. Once, she thought she came upon his traces, then she lost them again, among others’. This endless looking, the constant chance that he might turn up at any moment and throw his arms around her, exhausted. When she turned back to go home it was clear to her that she was leaving him behind. But later on, waking from deep, dreamless sleep, she knew that he was there, and she here, and everything was over.
Later she noticed some money was missing. With a joyful lurch she thanked him for not desecrating their love by turning to her for money, all that had been kept outside. All there was between them was love and love alone …
Or did he hope she might disdain the thief so as more easily to live without the lover? He was way beyond the reach of rejection. She breathed, she lived, she loved, those were all unquestioning functions, did she stop to ask herself whether to breathe or not?
He was probably having a hard time. He would have to struggle, and just as his love had been extreme, his life probably was as well. Other women were bound to intrude, but because his love would always be new with every one of them they didn’t take anything away from her. To her, he would always remain the one he had been.
Later still it was discovered that his things were gone. The attic had been broken into and his suitcases were gone, constables came to look for whoever must have helped the thief with horse and cart. She was left with the irksome feeling of having wandered around following false trails on that snowy night, while he was long gone in a swift conveyance; left with the irritation of not knowing whether he had come back for her love, or just to pick up his things.
She saw him, hardly out of her embrace, slinking around in the dark attic, trying locks, filing keys. She saw him gauging the depth of her exhaustion, rootling around in her things, taking a print of her keys – and, smiling, he turned the unchanged face of his love upon the incensed woman.
Perhaps he had never loved her at all.
9
The rings subside that a stone makes in water, and so experience fades. The days passed and made weeks, the weeks turned into months, and when Ria invoked her memory of the man who had been her lover, she found it harder and harder to remind herself of his face, his gestures, the way he spoke. Already she was confusing him with others. Perhaps the only reason she thought he was exceptional was because he was the first man in her life? Perhaps any other man would have had the effect on her that he did?
She looked around, her movements that had become slow and slothful tautened; she agreed to leave the estate, to go to a seaside spa with her parents. He surely wouldn’t come again, and if he missed her this time, that was his loss.
In the little harbour town they had a couple of hours to wait for their ferry. They strolled over grass-grown cobbles, looked up at brick gables, walked round churches and tried to remember what they had learned of Gothic and Romanesque at school, they took in every dress and hat, and in this way they also – bored and half-abstracted – took in a strange vehicle, large, blue, loaded with wood, pulled by ten or a dozen fellows on belts. Two uniformed men gave them a sabre-jangling escort.
‘Convicts doing road work,’ explained her father.
‘Father!’ she exclaimed. ‘Look, Father!’
There he was, standing next to the shaft, quite unmistakable in spite of the ugly gear. Under the round convict’s cap his pale, shattered face, his shoulder leaning into the strap and, shooting a furtive look at the escort, he felt for a cigarette end, picked it up as he walked, shoved it into his mouth.
She caught his eye and he, looking at her standing on the pavement, made a quick movement, as if to flee, and his cold, knowing look admitted everything to her, that this was now his life, that this too was his life, and that he had always reckoned on it being so.
‘Father!’ she exclaimed. ‘Father!’
‘You’re right, that does look like Martens,’ he said in surprise.
10
She was waiting, now she was waiting for him again, there was nothing for him to do but return to her as soon as he was at liberty
again. Months went into a year, and then another: not a squeak from him. It was as though she had cried out into space and was waiting and waiting for a reply. None came.
She spun a tissue of lies and secretly went back to the town, she saw the blue cart with the convicts but she didn’t see him. She plucked up all her courage, she went to the prison and asked after Martens. There’d never been anyone there by that name, she heard. She didn’t try again.
So where was he? Was he on the way up or the way down? Was it conceivable that, while she was leading her same unvarying life, he was in danger, fleeing, cheating, swindling, being captured and always, always suffering indescribably for her, and thinking of her?
One day, one hour, she held a letter from him in her hand. She read it and she knew: now everything really was over. She had never experienced him as so wretchedly small. He asked for her hand, they should run away together, the hot words on paper that were intended to make her blood wild were the product of a cold, calculating brain. He hadn’t been thinking of her at all, he had only her money in mind.
The last nonsensical step of a man facing suicide, she thought, and scrunched up his letter. She never read it again, she forgot it.
11
She married. She lived quietly and happily at the side of her husband, she had children. She had interests and pursuits, she had money, she no longer knew anything about the girl she had once been.
On the street once, over her shoulder, a voice said: ‘Ria.’
She spun round, it was the same old youthful face as before, laughing with the knowledge of a love that was always there and always would be.
They walked together, talking only of those early days, when they had played chess together, when he had crept up to her room at night. Their voices trembled. A full, obliterating summer opened before them, there were still purple tents standing by the glittering sea, far, far away from all known life. Their hands reached for each other. ‘We do love each other!’ – ‘We do love each other!’
They met many times, this wasn’t an adventure, it was their life. Husband and children were husk, this was heart and core.
He disappeared, he came back. He turned up on her doorstep begging for a bowl of soup, he walked past her with a smile, she saw him dancing in operettas, her speeding car flung dust in his face as he was breaking stones.
He was everywhere and nowhere, here and there, up and down. She no longer forgot him, she knew she never would. He was everything she had lived for, nothing else had any meaning.
She grew very old and very patient. One day she saw her youngest daughter in the park with a man. She walked on by, they didn’t see her. Her heart spun in turmoil. It was him, young, odd, captivating, as he had been in her early days, now with her daughter.
She wanted to make a fuss, then she smiled. And there was everything in that smile: understanding and forgiveness, forgetting and love, and the long, long duration of their passion.
Tales from the Underworld
(1928)
My Friend the Crook
I met him in the fourth-class waiting room past midnight, in the wee small hours. He had a newspaper on his lap, full of cigarette ends. Every end was carefully broken open, and the tobacco emptied into a tin. He was doing well, the tin was almost full.
Otherwise, things weren’t so hot for him. He didn’t have a penny piece in his pocket, and he hadn’t eaten anything all day. If he remembered correctly, he had been hungry for a while now.
‘Can’t be helped. No one has money these days, so crooks like me are up against it. Not that I’m planning anything. I’m only a week out of clink. Mind you, if I had five hundred marks … I have an idea—’
All the time he spoke, no one escaped his rapid observation. He saw them all, sized them up like a hunter his quarry. ‘That fat bespectacled feller with the walrus moustache, he’s a cop. Well, my papers are okay. Those guys are so full of themselves! As if I’d come to a place like this if they were looking for me. But he’s after someone …’
We looked at the man propping up the bar with a half-pint in front of him. I thought he might be a chef or a glazier or something, chewing the fat with the chilly barmaid. ‘He’s looking for someone,’ muttered Otsche, the crook, ‘and it’s a greenhorn, otherwise he wouldn’t be putting himself on show like that.’
What was it he wanted five hundred marks for?
‘Three hundred would do, at a pinch. I don’t mind telling you, you won’t steal it. Something I’ve done once before, as it happens, in Frankfurt. A small ad in the paper: “Lost: one silver-handled riding crop. If found, kindly return to Frau Masoch, Schulgasse 3.”’ He looked at me expectantly.
‘So—?’ I asked uncomprehendingly.
‘A spanking,’ he said laconically. ‘The bell never stopped ringing. All of them crème de la crème, with fat wallets. You’d be surprised at the demand there is for it.’
He laughed. Whatever people wanted, there was money to be made from it. His job was to scope out the market. ‘But of course we had to shut up shop after a couple of days, before the cops got wind of it.’
The plainclothesman at the bar was still quipping away. ‘Wonder who it is? No one local, I’ll be bound, I know them all.’
And again: ‘But you have to look the part. Let me tell you something: your fizzog doesn’t matter, just so long as your trousers are pressed and your hands are manicured. And then of course you need to speak proper, which isn’t so easy for some of us. Then people will trust you. You tell them you’re a doctor, and you pronounce di-a-ther-mi-a and ar-te-ri-o-scle-ro-sis without stumbling, and show their wives you’re kind-hearted if something happens to go wrong, then you can leave your wallet behind, they’ll be happy to treat you.
‘But the plainclothesman over there’s making me nervous. I wouldn’t worry so, if it was me he was after.’ He scanned the room. The dim bulbs were wreathed in cigarette smoke. The rumpled, sleepy clientele were lost in dreams. ‘Who can it be?’ He had another look around, then whistled through his teeth. ‘It’s a she! That’s why I didn’t get it first time. See the little girl in the corner with her head on her arms pretending to sleep? She’s no more asleep than I am! She’s got her foot on a little valise, that’s where the loot is!’
‘Are you sure, Otsche? He’s not even looking at her.’
‘Yeah, but there’s a mirror behind the bar where he can overlook that whole corner. Hang on a mo.’ He had rolled himself a cigarette, now he strolled, hands in pockets, to a table where a couple of depressed-looking workers were sitting over their coffee. He got himself a light, started a conversation and moved back and forth, keeping himself between the mirror and the girl. The fellow at the bar took a step to the right, and the crook followed suit, a step to the left didn’t get any better results, so the walrus moustache paid up and went over to a fruit machine from where he enjoyed unrestricted vision.
A couple of minutes later Otsche was back. ‘You were right,’ I said. ‘He is after her, and she knows it. Just now, when you blocked his view, she took a look at the door to maybe make a dash for it.’
‘Maybe she does know. What’s certain is that she’s a goner. There’s no helping her.’ His cheerfulness was gone and he was chomping agitatedly on his roll-up.
‘You’re upset, aren’t you, Otsche, you’d like to try and help her.’
‘You’re damned right I would!’ he spluttered. ‘I know, you’re a gent, so you’ve no idea how mad the likes of us gets when he sees a plainclothesman and thinks of interrogations and trials and choky. I’ve been out for a week, and if I get involved now I’ll be in for a year or two at least. No, I’m going to keep my hands clean, I won’t touch anything for the next three months.’
He fell silent and looked over at the girl. She seemed to be asleep, and the policeman was walking up and down like someone waiting for a train.
‘Not that I’m scared, mind you. But these high-minded episodes always go wrong. If I was stupid enough to start something here so th
at he had to nab me and the little miss could fly away, what’s in it for me? She doesn’t even know who I am, and if she did, well, no woman waits two years for a man behind bars. Don’t come to me with women.’
‘But I’m not asking you to do anything, Otsche. I think it’s very sensible of you to keep your nose clean.’
‘Baloney!’ he retorted. ‘All you know is from thrillers, so of course you believe in honour among thieves. Crap! Nothing makes a writer happier than when a crime has been brilliantly cleared up by a fancy-dan detective, and the crook’s behind bars. But where’s the fun in that for us? It’s not much of a return for me, for my bit of chivalry. Two years’ hard. Is that what you’ve got in mind for me?’
He had been getting increasingly wrought up. The sleepy souls at the adjacent tables were turning to see what the trouble was.
‘Calm yourself, Otsche,’ I said. ‘I don’t want anything of the sort. Keep your nose clean, and—’
‘There!’ he said. ‘Here we go. Another plainclothes cop.’
A tall, fair-haired, clean-shaven man was standing next to the glazier, and they were both staring openly at the girl. She sat there, face turned to the wall, valise within easy reach.
‘We don’t need to sit and watch this, Otsche,’ I said. ‘Come on. We’ll find somewhere that’s open, and I’ll buy you dinner.’
‘I’ll tell you what you can do with your fucking dinner,’ he yelled. ‘You can shove it!’
The two detectives turned to us.
‘Calm down,’ I tried to placate him. ‘People are staring.’ I put my hand on his shoulder, to try and induce him to leave.