He was a short man with an egg-shaped head, the pointed end of the egg lengthening into a black beard continually in motion. His small velvet eyes, fitful gestures, and thrust-forward mouth made him look like a mouse. The impression was so immediate and so strong that I thought it perfectly natural that he should give his r’s a long and sonorous roll as if he were munching something in secret as he spoke. The quinine he gave me only increased my conviction there was something mouse-like about him, and the confirmation of said conviction proved so strange and touched on facts so central to my childhood that I believe the incident worthy of recounting.
Not far from our house there was a shop that sold sewing machines. I spent hours there every day. The owner was a young man by the name of Eugen who had just completed his military service and hoped to earn a living from the shop. He had a sister, Clara, who was a year younger than he. They lived together on the outskirts of town and spent all day in the shop, having neither friends nor relatives.
It was a rented room and had never served as a place of business. The walls had not been repainted and were covered with garlands of violets and faded rectangles where pictures had once hung. A bronze lamp, also left from before, hung from the middle of the ceiling. It had a dark-red majolica lampshade decorated along the rim with green porcelain acanthus leaves in relief. It was highly ornamented, old and old-fashioned, but imposing. It looked something like a gravestone or a retired general wearing his former uniform in a parade.
The sewing machines stood in three rows separated by broad aisles running to the back of the room. Every morning Eugen took pains to wet the floor with water using an old tin he had made holes in. He deftly coaxed the dribble that emerged into clever spirals and figure eights and occasionally signed his name or wrote out the date. The paint on the wall clearly called for such finesse.
At the far end of the room a wooden screen separated the shop proper from another, smaller area, the entrance to which was covered by a green portière. Eugen and Clara spent much of their time in this back room and always had lunch there so as not to leave the shop unmanned. They called it “the green room,” and I once heard Eugen say, “It really is like the room where actors await their entrances. When you go out into the shop and spend a half hour selling a sewing machine, are you not playacting?” Then, using a more learned inflection, he added, “Life as a whole is pure theater.”
Behind the portière Eugen would play the violin. He laid the music out on the table, then bent over it, patiently deciphering the staves of complicated notes as if trying to unravel a skein of knotty thread into one long, slender strand, the thread of the melody. A small petroleum lamp on a trunk would burn all afternoon, filling the room with a dull light and throwing the violinist’s distorted shadow on the wall.
I went there so often as to become part of the furniture, so to speak, a kind of extension of the old oil-cloth sofa I would sit on, motionless, heeded by and bothering no one. I went because Clara would make her afternoon toilet in the back room. She kept her wardrobe in a small armoire and looked at herself in a broken mirror that she leaned against the lamp on the trunk. The mirror was so old that the polish had completely worn off in places and actual objects showed here and there through the back of the mirror, merging with the reflected images as in a double exposure.
Sometimes she took off nearly all her clothes and rubbed cologne into her armpits, lifting her arms with no embarrassment, or between her breasts, sticking her hands between her shift and her body. The shift was short, and when she leaned over I had a full view of her shapely legs tightly encased in their black stockings. She looked very much like a half-naked woman I had seen on a pornographic postcard that the park pretzel vendor had shown me. She aroused the same vague swoon as the obscene picture, a kind of vacuum in the chest and a fierce pang of desire in the groin.
I always sat in the same place — behind Eugen on the back-room sofa — waiting for Clara to complete her toilet, because then, on her way into the shop, she would have to pass between her brother and me in a space so narrow that her calves could not help rubbing against my knees. I looked forward to that moment every day with the same impatience and the same torment. It depended on any number of trivial circumstances that I observed with a combination of exasperation and acute sensitivity. All that had to happen was that Eugen should feel thirsty or tire of playing or that a customer should come into the shop and he would abandon his place, thereby leaving Clara room to pass without touching me.
Every afternoon as I approached the door of the shop, my long, quivering antennae would come out and test the air for the sound of the violin. The moment I heard Eugen playing, I breathed a sigh of relief. I would enter slowly and shout out my name from the threshold so he would not think I was a customer and interrupt his piece. If he paused so much as a second, it might check the flow and magic of the melody and induce him to put down the violin for good that afternoon. But this was not the only unfavorable adventure possible. All kinds of things could go wrong in the back room. .
As long as Clara was still at her toilet, I kept an ear out for the faintest of noises, an eye out for the slightest of movements. Eugen might give a cough, for instance, and, swallowing a bit of saliva, announce that he was off to the café for a pastry. A trifle like that, a single cough, could herald the monstrous calamity of a wasted afternoon. Indeed, the whole day would have gone to waste, and that night in bed, instead of turning over leisurely in my mind (and pausing over each detail to “see” and savor it as it deserved) the moment when my knees touched Clara’s stocking, instead of delving, molding, and caressing the thought, I would toss and turn feverishly in the bedclothes, unable to sleep and impatiently awaiting daybreak.
One day something totally out of the ordinary occurred. The adventure presaged disaster at first, but had a surprise ending, one so sudden and dependent on such a minor incident that the pleasure it subsequently gave me was like a construction made of incongruous objects that only a prestidigitator could hold together. In one fell swoop Clara radically altered the tenor of my visits, gave them a new meaning and new titillations. It was rather like the famous chemistry experiment in which a crystal dropped into a red liquid instantly transforms it to a bright green.
I was sitting on the sofa in the usual place, waiting with my usual impatience, when the door to the shop opened and in came a customer. Eugen immediately left the back room. All appeared to be lost. Clara proceeded with her impassive toilet while the conversation in the shop dragged on interminably. The question was whether Eugen would return before Clara had finished dressing. I found it painful to follow the two events, Clara’s toilet and Eugen’s conversation, realizing that they would run parallel to each other until Clara went out into the shop or they came together in the back room like trains in a film racing madly toward each other, about to crash or speed past depending on whether a mysterious hand intervenes to shunt one of them onto a siding at the last moment. Meanwhile, the conversation kept on its course and Clara kept powdering her face.
I tried to help fate by pushing my knees close to the table, but to reach it I would have had to perch at the very edge of the sofa — an awkward position or, at the very least, comic. I had the feeling that Clara was looking at me in the mirror and smiling.
Shortly thereafter she finished rounding her lips with lipstick and gave her cheeks a final dab of powder. The perfume floating through the room made me dizzy with desire and despair. It was when she walked past me that the thing I least expected took place: she rubbed against my knees as she did every other day (or perhaps even a bit more, though surely that was only my imagination) with an air of indifference implying there was nothing between us.