“More serious than you,” I reply. “Fräulein Schneider is no singer as you suspect. She can make lions jump through hoops and ride on tigers. And now forget the policeman that’s in you as in all true sons of our beloved fatherland and serve us our dinner!”
“Well, lions and tigers!” Eduard’s eyes have grown big. “Is that true?” he asks Gerda. “You can’t believe a word this fellow says.”
I kick her foot under the table. “I was in the circus,” Gerda replies, not understanding the reason for this byplay. “And I’m going back to the circus again.”
“What is there for dinner, Eduard?” I ask impatiently. “Or do we have to give you our whole life story in installments first?”
“I’ll go and see myself,” Eduard says gallantly to Gerda. “For such a guest! The magic of the sawdust ring! Ah! Forgive Herr Bodmer’s erratic behavior. He grew up during the war with bogtrotters and got his education from his sergeant, a hysterical postman.”
He waddles away. “A fine figure of a man,” Gerda says. “Is he married?”
“He was, but his wife ran away from him because he is so stingy.”
Gerda runs her fingers over the damask tablecloth. “She must have been a silly woman,” she says dreamily. “I like thrifty people. They save their money.”
“That’s the silliest thing you can do in the inflation.”
“Of course you have to invest it wisely.” Gerda looks at her knife and fork of heavy silver plate. “I imagine your friend here does that all right—even if he is a poet.”
I look at her in some amazement. “That may be,” I say. “But others get no advantage from it. Least of all his wife. He made her work like a slave from morning till night. Having a wife means to Eduard having someone to work for him for nothing.”
Gerda smiles ambiguously like the Mona Lisa. “Every safe has its combination, don’t you know that, baby?”
I stare at her. What’s going on here? I wonder. Is this the same girl who was dining with me last night on sandwiches and milk for a modest five thousand marks, admiring the view and talking about the magic of the simple life? “Eduard is fat, dirty, and incurably stingy,” I announce firmly. “I’ve known him for years.”
Riesenfeld, that expert on women, has told me once that this combination would scare off any woman. But Gerda seems not to be an ordinary woman. She examines the big chandeliers hanging from the ceiling like transparent stalactites, and sticks to her dream. “Probably he needs someone to take care of him. Not like a hen of course! He seems to need someone who appreciates his good qualities.”
I am now openly alarmed. Are my peaceful two weeks of happiness already slipping away? Why did I, fool that I am, have to drag Gerda here, to this place of silver and crystal? “Eduard has no good qualities,” I say.
Gerda smiles again. “Every man has some. You just have to bring them out.”
Fortunately at this moment the waiter Freidank appears, pompously bearing a pâté on a silver platter. “What in the world is that?” I ask.
“Goose liver pâté” Freidank announces haughtily.
“But it says potato soup on the menu!”
“This is the menu Herr Knobloch himself ordered,” says Freidank, a former lance corporal in the Commissary Department, slicing two pieces—a thick one for Gerda, a thin one for me. “Or would you rather have potato soup according to your constitutional rights?” he inquires cordially. “It can be done.”
Gerda laughs. Angered at Eduard’s cheap attempt to win her with food, I am about to order potato soup when Gerda kicks me under the table. On top she graciously exchanges plates with me. “That’s how it should be,” she says to Freidank. “A man must always have the larger portion, don’t you think?”
“Well, yes,” Freidank stutters, suddenly confused. “At home—but here—” The former lance corporal doesn’t know what to do. He has had orders from Eduard to give Gerda a generous slice but me a mere sliver and he has followed those orders. Now he sees the reverse happening and almost has a nervous breakdown; he must assume responsibility and doesn’t know what to do. Prompt obedience to orders has been bred into our proud blood for centuries—but to decide something by one’s self is another matter. Freidank does the one thing he knows: he looks about for his master, hoping for new orders.
Eduard appears. “Go ahead and serve, Freidank, what are you waiting for?”
I pick up my fork and quickly cut a piece of the pate in front of me, just as Freidank, true to his original orders, tries to change the plates. Freidank freezes. Gerda bursts into laughter. Eduard takes command like a general in the field, appraises the situation, pushes Freidank aside, cuts a second good-sized piece of pate, lays it with a gallant gesture in front of Gerda, and asks me in a bittersweet tone: “Do you like it?”
“It’s all right,” I reply. “Too bad it’s not goose liver.”
“It is goose liver.”
“It tastes like calf’s liver.”
“Have you ever in your life eaten goose liver?”
“Eduard,” I reply, “I have eaten so much goose liver that I vomited it.”
Eduard laughs through his nose. “Where?” he asks contemptuously.
“In France, during the advance, while I was being trained to be a man. We conquered a whole store full of goose liver. Strasbourg goose liver in tureens with black truffles from Peügord which are missing in yours. At that time you were peeling potatoes in the kitchen.”
I do not go on to say that I got sick because we also found the owner of the store—a little old woman plastered in shreds on the remnant of the wall, her gray head torn off and stuck on a store hook as though impaled on the lance of some barbarian tribesman.
“And how do you like it?” Eduard asks Gerda in the melting tones of a frog squatting happily beside the dark abysses of melancholy.
“Fine,” Gerda replies, going to work.
Eduard makes a courtly bow and withdraws like a dancing elephant. “You see,” Gerda says beaming at me. “He isn’t so stingy after all.”
I put down my fork. “Listen, you circus wonder with your sawdust halo,” I reply, “you see before you a man whose pride is still severely injured, to speak in Eduard’s jargon, because he was left flat by a lady who ran off with a rich profiteer. Is it now your intention to pour boiling oil in the still unhealed wounds, to borrow Eduard’s baroque prose again, by doing the same thing to me?”
Gerda laughs and goes on eating. “Don’t talk nonsense, my pet,” she commands with her mouth full. “And don’t be an injured liverwurst. Make more money than the others if that’s what’s bothering you.”
“Fine advice! How am I to make it? By magic?”
“The way the others do. They’ve managed somehow.”
“Eduard inherited this hotel,” I say bitterly.
“And Willy?”
“Willy is a profiteer.”
“What is a profiteer?”
“A man who knows all the angles. Who deals in everything from herrings to steel shares. Who does business where he can with whom he can and how he can as long as he manages to stay out of jail.”
“Well, there you seel” Gerda says, helping herself to the rest of the pâté.
“Do you want me to be one?”
Gerda cracks a roll with her strong teeth. “Be one or don’t just as you like. But don’t get in a stew if you don’t want to be one and the others do. Anyone can complain, my pet!”
“That’s right,” I say, perplexed and suddenly very sober. A mass of soap bubbles suddenly seem to be bursting inside my skull. I look at Gerda. She has a damnably reasonable way of looking at things. “You’re perfectly right, you know,” I say.