“Of course! We already know each other.”
Willy was grinning all over. The next second he received a terrific blow on the ear. “You pig!” Fritzi said. “You want to come to bed with me? That’s the limit!”
“What do you mean?” Willy stammered. “All the others—”
“All the others? What do they matter to me? Have I studied the catechism with them? Have I done their homework? Have I seen to it that they didn’t catch cold, you snot-nosed rascal?”
“But now I’m seventeen and a half—”
“Shut up! Why, it’s like wanting to rape your mother! Out of here, you juvenile delinquent!”
“He’s going to war tomorrow,” I said. “Have you no patriotism?”
She looked me in the eyes. “Aren’t you the one who let the snakes loose? We had to shut the place up for three days while we searched for those reptiles!”
“I didn’t let them loose,” I said in self-defense. “They got away from me.” Before I could say any more, I, too, had been boxed on the ear. “Lousy rascals! Out with you!”
The noise brought the Madame in. Indignantly Fritzi explained the situation to her. She, too, recognized Willy instantly. “The redhead!” she gasped. She weighed two hundred and forty pounds and shook with laughter like a mountain of jelly in an earthquake. “And you! Isn’t your name Ludwig?”
“Yes,” Willy answered for me. “But we’re soldiers now and we have a right to sexual intercourse.”
“So, you have a right!” The Madame heaved with renewed laughter. “Do you still remember, Fritzi, how scared he was that his father would find out he had thrown a stink bomb in Bible class? Now he has a right to sexual intercourse! Ho ho ho!”
Fritzi couldn’t see the humor of the situation. She was genuinely angry and offended. “As though my own son—”
The Madame had to be held upright by two men. Tears streamed down her face. Bubbles of saliva formed at the corners of her mouth. She held her belly with both hands. “Lemonade,” she gasped. “Waldmeister lemonade! Wasn’t that—” coughing, gasping—”your favorite drink?”
“We drink schnaps and beer now,” I replied. “Everyone grows up sometime.”
“Grows up!” a renewed attack of gasping on the part of the Madame, mad barking by her two bulldogs which heard her and thought she was being attacked. We withdrew cautiously. “Out, you thankless swine!” the irreconcilable Fritzi screamed after us.
“All right,” Willy said at the door. “Then we’ll just have to go to Rollstrasse.”
We stood outside in our uniforms with our deadly weapons and our stinging ears. But we did not get to Rollstrasse, the city’s other cat house. It was a two-hour walk, all the way to the other side of Werdenbrück, and so we had ourselves shaved instead. This, too, was for the first time in our lives, and since we had no experience of intercourse, the difference did not seem as great to us as it would later on—especially since the barber insulted us too, by recommending erasers for our beards. Later on we met more of our friends and got pretty drunk and forgot the whole thing. So it came about that we marched into the field as virgins and seventeen of us fell without ever knowing what a woman is. Willy and I lost our virginity half a year later in an estaminet in Houthoulst in Flanders. On that occasion Willy got a dose, was taken to the field hospital, and thus escaped the Battle of Flanders in which the seventeen virgins fell. This proved, as we could see even at that time, that virtue is not always rewarded.
We wander through the mild summer night. Otto Bambuss sticks to me as the only one who admits to knowing the cat house. The others have been there too, but act innocent, and the only one who brags that he has been an almost daily guest there, the dramatist and author of the monograph “Adam,” Paul Schneeweiss, is lying: he has never been there.
Otto’s hands are sweating. He expects priestesses of lust, bacchantes, and demonic beasts of prey and is not quite sure but that he will be driven back in Eduard’s Opel car with his liver torn out or at least without testicles. I comfort him. “People don’t get mangled in the bordello more than once or twice a week at most, Otto! And the injuries are usually not too serious. Day before yesterday Fritzi tore off a guest’s ear; but so far as I know you can have an ear sewn on again or replaced by a very natural-looking celluloid one.”
“An ear?” Otto stops.
“Of course there are ladies who don’t tear them off,” I reply. “But you’d hardly want to know them. What you want, after all, is the primeval woman in all her splendor.”
“An ear is a pretty big sacrifice,” Otto remarks, drying the lenses of his spectacles.
“Poetry demands sacrifices. With an ear torn off you would be in the truest sense a blood-drenched lyricist. Come along!”
“Yes, but an ear! Something that can be seen so easily!”
“If I had my choice,” Hans Hungermann says, “I would much rather have an ear torn off than be castrated, to speak frankly.”
“What’s that?” Otto stops again. “You’re joking! That doesn’t happen!”
“It happens all right,” Hungermann declares. “Passion is capable of anything. But be calm, Otto: Castration is a punishable offense. The woman would get at least a couple of months in jail—and you would be avenged.”
“Nonsense!” Bambuss stammers, smiling painfully. “You’re just making fun of me!”
“Why should he make fun of you?” I say. “That would be mean. I recommended Fritzi to you for that very reason. She is an ear fetishist. Overcome by passion she convulsively gets hold of her partner’s ears, with both hands. So you can be absolutely sure you won’t be injured elsewhere. She doesn’t have a third hand.”
“But she still has two feet,” Hungermann explains. “Sometimes they perform wonders with their feet. They let the nails grow and sharpen them.”
“You’re just pretending,” Otto says in torment. “Don’t talk nonsense!”
“Listen to me,” I reply. “I don’t want you to be maimed. You would profit emotionally, but your soul would be impoverished and your poetry would suffer. I have here a pocket nail file, small, handy, and made for accomplished worldlings who must always be elegant. Take it. Keep it hidden in the palm of your hand or slip it into the mattress before things start If you see that it’s getting too dangerous, a little harmless prick in Fritzi’s derrière will be enough to do the trick. No blood need flow. Whenever anyone is bitten, even by a gnat, he lets go and reaches for the bite, that’s one of the axioms of life. In the meantime you’ll escape.”
I take out a red leather pocket case in which there are a comb and a nail file. It was a gift from the faithless Erna. The comb is made of artificial tortoise shell. A belated wave of rage rises in me as I take it out. “Give me the comb too,” Otto says.
“You can’t hack at her with a comb, you innocent satyr,” Hungermann declares. “That’s no weapon for the battle of the sexes. It will break on the convulsed flesh of the maenad.”
“I don’t want to hack at her. I want to comb my hair afterward.”
Hungermann and I look at each other. It seems that Bambuss no longer believes us. “Have you a first-aid package with you?” Hungermann asks me.
“We don’t need one. The Madame has a whole apothecary shop.”
Bambuss stops again. “That’s all nonsense! But what about venereal disease?”
“This is Saturday. All the ladies were examined this afternoon. No danger, Otto.”
“You know everything, don’t you?”
“We know what’s necessary for life,” Hungermann replies. “And usually that is something entirely different from what you learn in school and in the institutions of higher learning. That’s why you’re such a unique specimen, Otto.”