“A rigorous masseuse. We just forgot to tell you. But you should be happy to have had an experience of that kind. It’s rare in small cities!”
“I’m not happy. Throw my things out here.”
We succeed in luring him in again after he has dressed behind the lilac bush. We give him a drink. But we cannot get him to leave the table. He maintains that the mood is gone. Finally Hungermann reaches an agreement with the Iron Horse and the Madame. Bambuss is to have the right to return within a week without additional payment.
We go on drinking. After a while I notice that Otto seems to have caught fire despite everything. He keeps glancing across at the Iron Horse and pays no attention to the other ladies. Willy orders more kümmel. After a while we miss Eduard. He appears a half-hour later sweating, saying that he has been for a walk. The kümmel gradually produces its effect Suddenly Otto Bambuss gets out paper and pencil and begins secretly making notes. I look over his shoulder. The title is “The Tigress.” “Hadn’t you better wait a while with your free verse?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “The first impression is the most important.”
“But after all, you only had one slash across your bottom with a whip and then a couple of bangs on the head with a washbasin! What’s tigerish about that?”
“Just leave it to me!” Bambuss pours another kümmel through his straggly mustache. “That’s where the power of imagination comes in! I am already blooming with verses like a rosebush. What am I saying? Like an orchid in the jungle!”
“Do you think you’ve had enough experience?”
Otto shoots a look full of lust and dread in the direction of the Iron Horse. “I don’t know. But certainly enough for a small volume in boards.”
“Speak up! Three million has been paid out for you. If you don’t need it, let’s drink it up.”
“Let’s drink it up!”
Bambuss tosses down another kümmel. It’s the first time we’ve seen him like this. He has shunned alcohol like the pest, especially schnaps. His poetry thrived on coffee and elderberry wine.
“What do you make of that?” I ask Hungermann.
“It was the blows on the head with the washbasin.”
“It was nothing at all,” Otto howls. He has downed another double kümmel and pinches the Iron Horse on the bottom as she goes by.
The Horse stops as though struck by lightning. Then she turns around slowly and examines Otto as though he were some rare insect. We stretch out our arms to protect him from the expected blow. For ladies in high boots a pinch of this sort is an obscene insult. Otto gets up wavering, smiles absently out of nearsighted eyes, walks around the Horse, and unexpectedly lands a hearty blow on the black underwear.
Silence falls. Everyone expects murder. But Otto seats himself again unconcernedly, lays his head on his arms, and goes to sleep instantly. “Never kill a sleeping man,” Hungermann beseeches the Horse. “The eleventh commandment!”
The Iron Horse opens her mighty mouth in a silent grin. All her gold plumbing glitters. Then she strokes Otto’s thin, soft hair. “Children and brothers,” she says, “to be so young and so silly again!”
We leave. Eduard drives Hungermann and Bambuss back to the city. The poplars rustle. The bulldogs bark. The Iron Horse stands in the second-story window and waves at us with her Cossack cap. Behind the cat house stands a pale moon. Mathias Grund, the poet of the “Book of Death,” clambers out of a ditch. He thought he could cross it like Christ crossing the Sea of Gennesaret. It was a mistake. Willy is walking beside me. “What a life!” he says dreamily. “And to think you actually make money in your sleep! Tomorrow the dollar will be even higher and my shares will be climbing up after it like agile little monkeys!”
“Don’t spoil the evening for me. Where’s your car? Is it having puppies like your shares?”
“Renée has it. It looks well in front of the Red Mill. She takes her colleagues driving between performances—they burst with envy.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
“We’re engaged,” Willy explains, “if you know what that means.”
“I can imagine.”
“It’s funny!” Willy says. “Nowadays she often reminds me very much of Lieutenant Helle, that damned slave driver who made life so miserable for us in preparation for a hero’s death. Exactly the same, in the dark. It’s a scary and refined sort of pleasure to have Helle on the back of his neck defiling him. I’d never have guessed I would get fun out of something like that, you can believe me!”
“I believe you.”
We walk through the dark, gloomy gardens. The scent of unrecognized flowers is born to us. “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,” someone says, rising like a ghost from the ground.
It is Hungermann. He is as wet as Mathias Grund. “What’s going on?” I ask. “It hasn’t been raining here.”
“Eduard put us out. We sang too loud for him—the respectable hotelkeeper! Then, when I tried to refresh Otto, we both fell into the brook.”
“You too? Where is Otto? Looking for Mathias Grund?”
“He’s fishing.”
“What?”
“Damn it!” says Hungermann. “I just hope he hasn’t fallen in. He can’t swim.”
“Nonsense. The brook is only a yard deep.”
“Otto could drown in a puddle. He loves his native land.”
We find Bambuss clinging to a bridge over the brook and preaching to the fishes.
“Are you ill, Saint Francis?” Hungermann asks.
“Yes indeed,” Bambuss replies, giggling as though that were madly funny. Then his teeth begin to chatter. “Cold,” he stammers. “I’m no open-air man.”
Willy gets a bottle of kummel out of his pocket. “Who’s rescuing you again? Uncle Willy, the provider. Rescuing you from inflammation of the lungs and cold death.”
“Too bad Eduard isn’t here,” Hungermann says. “Then you could rescue him, too, and found a society with Valentin Busch. Eduard’s Rescuers. That would kill him.”
“Spare us your bad jokes,” says Valentin, who has been standing behind him. “Capital should be sacred to you, or are you a communist? I will divide mine with no one. Eduard belongs to me.”
We all have a drink. The kummel sparkles in the moonlight like a yellow diamond. “Are you going somewhere else?” I ask Willy.
“To Bodo Ledderhose’s singing club. Come along. All three of you can dry out there.”
“Splendid,” Hungermann says.
It occurs to no one that it would be simpler to go home. Not even to the poet of death. Tonight liquids seem to have an irresistible attraction.
We walk on beside the brook. The moon shimmers on its surface. You can drink it—who was it who said that once and where and when?
Chapter Fifteen
“What a surprise,” I say, “and so early on a Sunday morning!”
I had imagined I heard a burglar groping around in the dawn twilight; but on coming downstairs, at five in the morning, I’ve found Riesenfeld, of the Odenwald Granite Works. “You must have made a mistake,” I say. “This is the Lord’s day. Not even the Stock Exchange works today. Still less we simple deniers of God. Where’s the fire? Or do you need money for the Red Mill?”
Riesenfeld shakes his head. “This is just a friendly visit Had a day to spare between Löhne and Hanover. Just arrived. Why go to a hotel at this hour? I can get coffee just as well here. How is the charming lady across the street? Does she get up early?”
“Aha!” I say. “So it was lust that drove you here! Congratulations on your youthfulness. But you’re out of luck. Sundays her husband is at home. An athlete and knifethrower.”
“I’m the world’s champion at knife throwing,” Riesenfeld replies, undisturbed. “Especially when I’ve had some country bacon and schnaps with my coffee.”