I see Karl Brill jump as though someone had shot him. He lives in common-law marriage with Frau Beckmann, who is bis housekeeper. No one knows why he does not marry her—-unless perhaps it is that same stubbornness of character which makes him cut a hole in the ice so that he can go swimming in winter. Nevertheless, it is his weak point.
“If I had such a jewel,” the fat man mutters, “I would carry her in my arms and clothe in her satin and silk. Silk, red silk—” He is almost sobbing and is tracing voluptuous forms in the air. The bottle beside him is empty. He is a tragic case of love at first sight. I turn away and go on playing. The picture of the fat man trying to carry Frau Beckmann in his arms is more than I can stand. “Get out!” Karl Brill shouts. “This is too much. I don’t like to throw a guest out, but—”
A dreadful scream comes from the back of the room. We leap up. A little man is dancing around there. Karl jumps toward him, seizes a pair of shears and turns off one of the machines. The little man faints. “Damn it! Who would expect anyone to play with a soling machine when drunk?” Karl cries indignantly.
We examine the hand. A few threads hang out of it. The machine has caught him in the soft flesh between the thumb and index finger—fortunately. Karl pours schnaps on the wound, and the little man comes to. “Amputated?” he asks in horror, seeing his hand in Karl’s paw.
“Nonsense, the arm is still attached.”
The man sighs in relief as Karl shakes his arm in front of his eyes. “Blood poisoning, do you think?” he asks.
“No. Only the machine will get rusty from your blood. We’ll wash your flipper with alcohol, put some iodine on it, and tie it up.”
“Iodine? Doesn’t that hurt?”
“It stings for a second. Just as though your hand had drunk a very strong schnaps.”
The little man pulls his hand away. “I’d rather drink the schnaps myself.”
He gets a not-too-clean handkerchief out of his pocket, wraps up his paw, and reaches for the bottle. Karl grins. Then he looks around uneasily. “Where’s Fatty?”
No one knows. “Perhaps he’s made himself thin,” someone says and earns a round of laughter.
The door opens and the fat man appears. Bent double he staggers in, behind him Frau Beckmann in her salmon-pink kimono. She has twisted his arm behind him and is propelling him into the workshop. With a mighty shove she lets him go. The fat man falls on his face in the women’s shoe section. Frau Beckmann makes a gesture as though dusting her hands and goes out. With a mighty leap Karl Brill is beside the fat man and yanks him to his feet. “My arm!” whimpers the rejected lover. “She has twisted it out of the socket! And my belly! Oh, my belly! What a kick!”
He doesn’t need to explain. Frau Beckmann is a fair antagonist for Karl Brill, winter swimmer and first-class gymnast. She has already broken his arm twice, not to mention what she can do with a vase or a poker. One night less than six months ago she surprised two burglars who had broken into the workshop. Afterward both were in the hospital for weeks; one of them has never recovered from a blow on the skull which also cost him an ear. He still can’t talk straight.
Karl drags the fat man into the light. He is white with rage, but there’s nothing more he can do—the fat man is finished. It would be like beating up a typhus patient. The fat man must have received a frightful blow in the organ with which he intended to sin. He is unable to walk. Karl can’t even throw him out. We lay him in the back of the shop on a pile of leather trimmings.
“The nice thing about Karl’s is that it’s always so jolly here,” says a man who is trying to give the piano a drink of beer.
I walk homeward along Grossestrasse. My head is swimming; I have drunk too much, but that was what I intended to do. The mist sweeps past the isolated lights still burning in the show windows and weaves a golden veil around the street lamps. In the window of a butcher shop an alpine rosebush is blooming beside a slaughtered pig with a lemon gripped in its waxy snout. Sausages are arranged in a cosy circle around them. It is an affecting picture, harmoniously combining beauty with utility. I stand in front of it for a time and then wander on.
In the dark courtyard I collide with a shadow. It is old Knopf, who is once more standing in front of the black obelisk. I have run against him with my full weight and he staggers and throws both arms around the obelisk as though intending to climb it. “Sorry I ran into you,” I say. “But why are you standing here? Can’t you attend to your necessities in your own house? Or, if you’re an exhibitionist, why not on a street corner?”
Knopf lets go of the obelisk. “Damn it, now it’s down my trousers,” he mutters.
“That won’t hurt you. Well, you can finish up here nowas far as I’m concerned.”
“Too late.”
Knopf staggers across to his door. I go upstairs and decide to send Isabelle a bouquet of flowers tomorrow with the money I have won at Karl Brill’s. That sort of thing, to be sure, usually brings me nothing but bad luck. However, I don’t know of anything else to do. For a time I stand at the window looking out into the night and then I begin very softly and somewhat shamefacedly to repeat words and sentences I would like sometime to say to somebody, but for whom I have no one except possibly Isabelle—who doesn’t even know who I am. But who does know that about anyone?
Chapter Thirteen
The traveling salesman Oskar Fuchs, called Weeping Oskar, is sitting in the office. “What’s new, Herr Fuchs?” I ask. “How is the grippe progressing in the villages?”
“Pretty harmless. The farmers are well fed. In the city it’s different. I have two cases where Hollmann and Klotz are on the point of closing. A red granite monument, polished on one side, with two bossed socles, a yard and a half high, two million two hundred thousand marks—and a small one, forty inches high, one million three hundred thousand. Good prices. If you ask a hundred thousand less you’ll get them. My commission is twenty per cent.”
“Fifteen,” I reply automatically.
“Twenty,” Weeping Oskar declares. “I get fifteen from Hollmann and Klotz as it is. So why the betrayal?”
He is lying. Hollmann and Klotz, for whom he travels, pay him ten per cent and expenses. He gets expenses anyway; so he would be doing business with us for ten per cent extra.
“Payment in cash?”
“You’ll have to see to that for yourselves. The people are well off.”
“Herr Fuchs,” I say. “Why don’t you join us? We’d pay better than Hollmann and Klotz and we can use a first-class traveler.”
Fuchs winks. “It’s more fun for me this way. I’m an emotional type. When I get angry at old Hollmann I throw a job your way as revenge. If I worked for you at the time I’d get angry at you too.”
“There’s something in that,” I say.
“What I mean is, then I would betray you to Hollmann and Klotz. Traveling in tombstones is so boring you have to do something to cheer yourself up.”
“Boring? For a person who puts on such an artistic performance every time?”
Fuchs smiles like Gaston Munch of the city theater after playing the role of Karl Heinz in Alt Heidelberg. “One does the best one can,” he concedes with colossal modesty.
“They say you have developed splendidly. Without artificial aids. Simply through intuition. Is that right?”
Oskar, who formerly had recourse to slices of raw red onions before entering a house of mourning, now maintains he can produce tears freely like a great actor. Naturally that is an enormous improvement. Now he does not have to enter a house weeping, as he did when he used the onion technique, nor, if the business lasts some time, do his tears dry up—for of course he could not use the onions while he was sitting with the mourners—on the contrary, he can now go in with dry eyes and during conversation about the departed break into natural tears, which of course produces a much stronger effect. It is like the difference between genuine and artificial pearls. Oskar maintains he is so convincing that he is often comforted and cosseted by the survivors.