“You’ll see soon enough! Cowards! Betrayers of your country! Up!”
“Get away from our table,” Georg says. “Do you think we need directions from minors?”
A man of about thirty pushes his way through the crowd. “Have you no respect for your national anthem?”
“Not in cafés when it’s being used to start a brawl,” Georg replies. “And now cut out this nonsense and leave us in peace!”
“Nonsense? Do you call a German’s most sacred feelings nonsense? You’ll pay for that! Where were you during the war, you shirker?”
“In the trenches,” Georg replies, “unfortunately.”
“Anyone can say that! Prove it!”
Willy gets up. He is a giant. The music has just stopped. “Prove it?” Willy says. “Here!” He lifts one leg a little, turns his posterior lightly toward the speaker and there is an explosion like a medium-sized cannon. “That,” Willy says conclusively, “is all I learned from the Prussians. Formerly I had nicer manners.”
The leader of the crowd has sprung back involuntarily. “You said coward, didn’t you?” Willy asks grinning. “You seem a little jumpy yourself!”
The host has come up accompanied by three husky waiters. “Quiet, gentlemen, I must insist! No arguments here!”
The orchestra is now playing “Birdsong at Evening.” The defenders of the national anthem retire with dark threats. It’s possible that they will fall on us outside. We look them over; they’re sitting together close to the door. There are about twenty of them. The battle will be pretty hopeless for us.
But suddenly unexpected help arrives. A dried-up little man approaches our table. He is Bodo Ledderhose, a dealer in hides and old iron. We were with him in France. “Children,” he says, “I’ve just noticed what’s going on. Am here with my club. Over behind those columns. We’re a full dozen
and can give you a hand if those ass-faces want to start anything. Agreed?”
“Agreed, Bodo. You were sent by God.”
“Not that. But this is no place for respectable people. We just dropped in for a glass of beer. Unfortunately the host here has the best beer in the city. Otherwise he’s an unprincipled asshole.”
It strikes me that Bodo is going a bit far to demand principles from so simple a human organ; but it is elevating just the same. In bad times one ought to make impossible demands. “We’re going soon,” Bodo continues. “Are you?”
“Right away.”
We pay and get up. Before we reach the door the guardians of the national anthem are already outside. As though by magic they suddenly have cudgels, stones, and brass knuckles in their hands. They stand in a half-circle in front of the entrance.
Bodo suddenly is between us. He pushes us to one side and his twelve men walk through the door in front of us. “Something you want, you snot faces?” Bodo asks.
The guardians of the Reich stare at us. “Cowards!” says the leader finally, the man who was about to fall on three of us with twenty men. “We’ll catch you yet!”
“Very likely,” Willy says. “That’s why we spent a couple of years in the trenches. But see to it that you always have odds of three or four on your side. Superior force is very reassuring to patriots.”
We walk down Grossestrasse with Bodo’s club. The sky is full of stars. There are lights in the store windows. Sometimes when you are with wartime comrades it still seems strange and splendid and breathtaking and incomprehensible that you can wander about this way, free and alive. Suddenly I understand what Wernicke meant about thankfulness. It is a thankfulness not directed toward anyone—a simple gratitude at having escaped for a while longer—for eventually, of course, no one really escapes.
“What you need is another café,” Bobo says. “How would ours do? We haven’t any roaring apes there. Come along, we’ll show it to you!”
They show it to us. Downstairs they serve coffee, seltzer water, beer, and ice cream—upstairs are the assembly rooms. Bodo’s club is a singing society. The city crawls with clubs, which all have their weekly meetings, their statues and bylaws, and are very serious and self-important. Bodo’s club meets Thursdays on the second floor. “We have a good polyphonic male choir,” he says. “Only we’re a little weak in first tenors. It’s a funny thing, but probably a lot of first tenors fell during the war. And the rising generation isn’t old enough yet—their voices are just starting to change.”
“Willy is a first tenor,” I tell him.
“Really?” Bodo looks at him with interest. “Sing this, Willy.”
Bodo flutes like a thrush. Willy flutes in turn. “Good material,” Bodo says. “Now try this!”
Willy manages the second too. “Join our club,” Bodo now urges him. “If you don’t like it you can always resign later.”
Willy demurs a little, but to our astonishment swallows the bait. He is immediately made treasurer of the club. In return he pays for two rounds of beer and schnaps and adds pea soup and pigs’ knuckles for everyone. Bodo’s club is politically democratic; but among the first tenors they have a conservative toy dealer and a half-communistic cobbler; one cannot be choosy in the matter of first tenors, there are so few of them. During the third round Willy announces that be knows a lady who can also sing first tenor and bass as well. The members of the society are silent, doubtfully chewing their pigs’ knuckles. Georg and I take a hand and explain Renée de la Tour’s accomplishments as duettist. Willy swears that she is not really a bass but by nature a pure tenor. There ensues a hugely enthusiastic response. Renée is elected to membership in absentia and is thereupon immediately made an honorary member. Willy pays for the necessary drinks. Bodo is dreaming of inserting mysterious soprano parts that will drive the rival sing clubs crazy at the yearly contest because they will think Bodo’s club contains a eunuch, especially since Renée will naturally have to appear in male attire since otherwise the club would be classified as a mixed choir. “I’ll tell her this very evening,” Willy announces. “Children, how she will laugh! In every key!”
Georg and I finally leave. Willy keeps watch over the square from the second-story window; like an old soldier he reckons on the possibility of an ambush by the guardians of the national anthem. But nothing happens. The market square lies peaceful under the stars. Around it the windows of the bars stand open. From Bodo’s meeting place come the melodious strains of “Wer hat dich, du schöner Wald, aufgebaut so hoch dort oben?”
“Tell me, Georg,” I ask as we turn into Hackenstrasse, “are you happy?”
Georg Kroll lifts his hat to an unseen presence in the night. “I’ll ask you another question,” he says. “How long can one sit on the point of a needle?”
Chapter Eleven
Rain pours from the sky. Mist streams up from the garden to meet it. The summer is drowned, it is cold, and the dollar stands at a hundred and twenty thousand marks. With a mighty crash a section of our gutter breaks from the roof and falls; water shoots across the window like a wall of gray glass. I sell two angels of bisquit porcelain and a wreath of immortelles to a frail woman whose two children have died of grippe. Georg lies in the next room coughing. He, too, has grippe, but I have fixed a mug of mulled wine for him. Besides, he has a half-dozen magazines lying around and is making use of this chance to inform himself about the latest marriages, divorces, and scandals in the great world of Cannes, Berlin, London, and Paris. The indefatigable Heinrich Kroll comes in wearing striped trousers, bicycle clips, and an appropriate dark raincoat. “Would you mind if I dictated a few orders?” he asks with incomparable sarcasm.
“By no means. Go right ahead.”
He gives me the commissions. They are for small tombstones of red granite, a marble plaque, a couple of grave enclosures—the commonplaces of death, nothing special. Then he stands for a time, irresolute, warming his backside at the cold oven, looking at the collection of rock samples that for the past twenty years has been lying on the shelves of the office, and finally bursts into speech. “If difficulties like this are going to be put in my way, it wont be long before we’re broke!”