“In the poetry club there’s nothing but poetical evasion. What I want is the truth. Otherwise why am I alive and not a worm?”
“The truth?” Arthur bleats. “That’s something for Pontius Pilate! It has nothing to do with me. I am bookseller, husband, and father; that’s enough for me.”
I look at the bookseller, husband, and father. He has a mole on the right side of his face beside his nose. “So that’s enough,” I say cuttingly.
“That’s enough.” Arthur replies firmly. “Indeed, sometimes it’s too much.”
“Was it enough when you were twenty-five?”
Arthur opens his blue eyes wide as he can. “When I was twenty-five? No. I still wanted to become it at that time.”
“What?” I ask hopefully. “A human being?”
“Owner of this bookstore, husband, and father. A human being I am anyway. But not yet a fakir.”
He waddles quickly away after this harmless second shot to wait on a lady with a copious, drooping bosom who is looking for a novel by Rudolf Herzog. I quickly leaf through the books about the happiness of renunciation and promptly lay the aside. During the day one is considerably less receptive to this sort of thing than at night when one is alone and there is nothing else available.
I walk over to the shelves that contain the works on religion and philosophy. They are Arthur Bauer’s pride. Here he has, collected in one place, pretty much everything that humanity has thought in a couple of thousand years about the meaning of life, and so it should be possible for a couple of hundred thousand marks to become adequately informed on the subject—for even less really, let us say for twenty to thirty thousand marks; for if the meaning of life were knowable, a single book should suffice. But where is it? I glance up and down the rows. The section is very extensive, and this suddenly makes me distrustful. It seems to me that with truth and the meaning of life the situation is the same as with hair tonics—each firm praises its own as the only satisfactory one, and yet Georg Kroll, who has tried them all, still has a bald head just as he should have known from the beginning he would have. If there were a hair tonic that really grew hair, there would be only that one and all the others would long ago have gone out of business.
Bauer comes back. “Well, found something?”
“No.”
He looks at the volumes I have pushed aside. “So then, there’s no point in being a fakir, eh?”
I do not directly contradict the silly joker. Instead I say: “There’s no point in any books at all. If you look at everything that is written here and then at the way things are in the world, all you’ll want to read is the menu in the Walhalla and the family notes in the daily paper.”
“What’s that?” asks the bookseller, husband, and father in quick alarm. “Reading is education! Everyone knows that.”
“Really?”
“Of course! Otherwise what would become of us booksellers?”
Arthur rushes off again. A man with a closely trimmed mustache is asking for a work entitled Undefeated in the Field. It is the great success of the postwar period. In it an unemployed general proves that the German army was victorious in battle to the end.
Arthur sells him the gift edition in leather with gold edges. Gratified by the sale he returns. “How would you like something classical? Second hand of course!”
I shake my head and point silently at a book I have found in the meantime on the display table. It is called The Man of the World, a Breviary of Good Manners for All Walks of Life. Patiently I wait for the inescapable, shallow jokes about fakir-cavaliers and the like. But Arthur cracks no jokes. “A useful book nowadays,” he tells me earnestly. “It should come out in a large, cheap edition. Well then, we’re quits, eh?”
“Not quite. You still owe me something.” I lift a thin volume—Plato’s Symposium. “I’ll take this too.”
Arthur does some mental arithmetic. “It doesn’t quite come out, but all right. We’ll call the Symposium second hand.”
I have him wrap up the Breviary of Good Manners, for I would not for the world be caught with it. Nevertheless, I determine to study it that very night. A little polish harms no one, and Erna’s contemptuous comments still ring in my ears. The war made savages of us, but today one can only afford coarse manners if one has a thick wallet to make up for them. That, however, is something I do not have.
Full of contentment I step out into the street. The uproar of existence greets me instantly. Willy roars by in a fiery red town car, without seeing me. I press the breviary for men of the world firmly under my arm. Forward into life! I think. Here’s to earthly love! Away with dreams! Away with ghosts! That goes for Erna as well as for Isabelle. As for my soul, I still have Plato.
The Altstädter Hof is an inn frequented by wandering actors, gypsies, and carters. On the second floor there are a dozen rooms for rent and behind there is a large room with a piano and gymnastic equipment where variety artists can practice their numbers. The chief business, however, is the bar. It not only serves as a meeting place for traveling actors but is frequented by the underworld of the town as well.
I open the door to the back room. Renée de la Tour is standing beside the piano practicing a duet. In the background a man with a bamboo cane is training two white spitzes and a poodle. To the right two muscular women are lying on a mat smoking. And on the trapeze, her feet inserted beneath the bar and between her hands, her back thrust through, Gerda Schneider swings at me like the winged figurehead of a galleon.
The two muscular women are in bathing suits. As they loll about, their muscles play. No doubt they are the lady wrestlers on the program of the Altstädter Hof. Renée roars good evening to me in a first-class drill sergeant’s voice and comes over. The dog trainer whistles. The dogs throw somersaults in the air. Gerda whishes smoothly back and forth on the trapeze, reminding me of the moment in the Red Mill when she looked up at me from between her legs. She is wearing black tights and has a red cloth knotted around her hair.
“She’s practicing,” Renée explains. “She wants to go back to the circus.”
“The circus?” I look at Gerda with new interest. “Was she ever in the circus?”
“Of course. She grew up there. But the circus went broke. It couldn’t go on paying for the lions’ meat.”
“Was she in the lion act?”
Renée laughs like a sergeant major and looks at me mockingly. “That would be exciting, wouldn’t it? No, she was an acrobat.”
Gerda whooshes over us again. She looks at me with staring eyes as though she wanted to hypnotize me. But she is not seeing me at all; her eyes stare from exertion.
“Is Willy really rich?” Renée de la Tour asks.
“I believe he is. What people call rich today. He has various enterprises and a pile of stocks that go up every day. Why?”
“I like men to be rich.” Renée gives her soprano laugh. “All women like that,” she roars then as though on the drill field.
“I’ve noticed that,” I tell her bitterly. “A rich profiteer is better than a poor but honest employee.”
Renée shakes with laughter. “Wealth and honesty don’t go together, baby! Not these days! Probably they never did.”
“Only if you inherit it or win it in a lottery.”
“Not even then. Money ruins character, don’t you know that?”
“I know. But then why do you consider it so important?”
“Because I don’t care about character,” Renée chirps in a prim, old-maid’s voice. “I love comfort and security.”
Gerda whirls toward us in a perfect salto. She comes to rest half a yard in front of me, rocking back and forth on her toes and laughing. “Renée is lying,” she says.