But there were none – no places for me, at least not for a long time. Occasionally I got some smaller positions, but they didn’t last long. Yet day after day, month after month, they helped me onward, and I also sought extra sources. I did what so many young people try to do: I started to write, “to create” something and “to rush off” the odd translation. As we have so many newspapers and journals in this country, I thought that I would have to be a complete fool if I couldn’t cobble together some vaguely suitable lines of prose.
In those days I smeared a lot of expensive paper with foreign ink, because I wanted to do things properly and soundly at least as far as my raw materials were concerned. The result was that in some quarters I was regarded as an upstart or even a rich young man who wanted to make a name for himself in literature – there were such people in this country – and they were very surprised when I talked of payment. What the hell are you wasting expensive paper for, if you’re writing for money? I was asked – and I was stuck for an answer.
It took some time before I could get a foot in the door with my “creations”, and even then perhaps not on my own merits but through the old-boy network. But who cares! The main thing was to make a breakthrough, as I called my partial advantage. At any rate, work and activity, effort and bustle, gave me faith in myself, and no longer did I go around with the hangdog air I had when I went to the country and then returned. I even had enough faith in myself to write this book.
And so perhaps I would have waded through thick and thin, if something had not happened that flung me back to square one, in terms of my state of mind. Suddenly I was again the plaything of forces whose existence I didn’t want to believe in. It all appeared to be just a game, a tease, a deception and an illusion whose origins were unclear. Maybe it was too, but then illusions meant more to me than facts.
Coming home one day I found a letter in the box whose address made my heart tremble so that I could feel it in my hands. For a moment, I felt that for a long time I’d done nothing but wait for this letter and this handwriting, as though my life were a dream.
It was pure coincidence that I came home so early that day; I often stayed out until late evening, if only to show the landlady how little I valued the lunches that she forced on me with lies and deceptions. But my “bohemian ways” were promoted by a conviction, acquired I don’t know from where or how, that if you want to become a writer – and I did at the time – you have to be homeless. In other words, you mustn’t go home, but spend your time anywhere else.
Why I came home early that day I don’t know. Was it pure chance or was I led by some presentiment? Who knows? If I had somehow been delayed, it would have been hard to imagine what would have happened to me. The mere thought of it made my heart, all my blood, run cold. But now I ran upstairs, locked the door and ripped the letter open, to find only a few words:
I will wait for you this evening
at eight o’clock on the Avenue of Lies. E.
That was the whole letter, but I read it and read it as if I couldn’t read it to the end. Every word seemed a mystery with some ominous significance. Why would we meet at all? And why so late? Why did she call the walk we loved so much the Avenue of Lies? Or did she mean some other place by that name? What sort of place? No, it must be that place! The place where she had spoken of lying to her grandfather, and where I confessed to my own lie. Or were other lies connected to that walk? Did she want to speak of them, or was this the start of something new?
I was wondering about that when there was a knock at the door. Of course it was Loona with her food – the food that was stolen and the source of so much mendacity – for only she would creep up the stairs like a cat. Gladly I would have shoved her and her “stolen goods” down the stairs, but what could I do, I had to let her in.
“Today I don’t have the slightest appetite,” I complained while the girl placed her plate on the table and I felt the hidden letter burning a hole in my pocket.
“You have a new sweetheart again, sir?” observed the girl with a bashful smile.
“I might have a secret one that I don’t know of,” I replied.
“There are no such sweethearts,” she said. “See that you don’t get sick.”
“My head is so groggy,” I remarked.
“If the trouble’s in your head, then eating will help,” she explained.
“But if it’s in the heart, what am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied, “but if it’s in the stomach, pepper and ashes will help.”
“I think my trouble is more in the heart or the head than the stomach, so I don’t need to eat pepper or ashes,” I told her.
“You’re making a joke, sir – you haven’t done that for ages,” she said, stopping by the door and holding on to the lock. “Madam did say that lately you’ve been happier than before.”
“Where did madam get such a good look at my face?” I asked.
“On the street, I suppose; she would say, ‘Thank God, sir seems to be getting over that German lass,’” she explained.
“Did she call the young lady a lass?” I asked, scarcely able to control myself at the girl’s use of the word about Erika. When I looked her in the face and let my eyes wander all over her, it seemed incomprehensible to me that I had felt pity for her and let myself be twisted this way and that inwardly.
“Madam has been calling her that to me right from the beginning; only at the lunch table would she say ‘miss’ and ‘my young lady’, because you and the children were there,” she said.
“I and the children,” I repeated. “So the young lady was a ‘lass’ and I was counted as one of the children?”
“Didn’t you know that already, sir?” she cried in amazement. “Madam is always saying, if a woman doesn’t have children, she remains a ‘lass’ till her death, even if she marries ten times. Childless women run after men like young lasses, so madam says. But men, she says, always remain children, because they don’t bring children into the world. An adult person has to have given birth, madam says.”
“So make sure you don’t remain a lass until you die,” I said.
“Madam is always saying that. She says, ‘Listen, Loona, you have the sort of face that’ll keep you a lass until you die, because love won’t come to you.’ But she always comforts me and says, ‘Happy are the people who don’t know what love is, because love is a terrible thing’ – that’s what madam says. And to get children you don’t really need love terribly much; it’s enough if you just like a man a little.”
“Perhaps the children would come even without liking him,” I observed.
“You’re joking again, sir,” she smiled bashfully, “but madam is talking seriously when she says, ‘Loona, look what a terrible thing love is – a person doesn’t want to accept food any more, or anyone, then you have to feed him on lies and deceptions like some animal.’ That’s what she says about you, of course, sir. But about the young lady she says, ‘If she falls head over heels for a man, there’s no other cure for her love than marriage.’”
Those words dumbfounded me, so that soon Loona had to end her tale, of course in the hope that she could continue it next time, because she was obviously trying to keep the pledge she had given: not to deceive me any more, and tell me truthfully everything she heard madam say about me. But perhaps madam really was right, that I had declined her kind offer regarding the lunches because of love? And did Erika really fall head over heels for a man to find a cure for her love? Might a solution be sought here to today’s letter, inviting me to a meeting? Did the words “Avenue of Lies” indicate that everything was somehow deception and lies?
My brain and my heart were torn by endless, maddening questions. I almost went crazy from reading the terse letter over and over again. The food lay where the girl had left it, and when I finally noticed it, it was completely cold and congealed, especially since it was roast lamb with potatoes. I took a couple of pieces, but my mouth became lined with cold fat and I left the rest untouched.