“I’ve eaten so rarely with gentlemen at table that it’s hard for me to judge,” Erika replied to the landlady’s question. “The only gentleman I know well is my grandfather, but what attention or politeness can I expect from him? My aunt and I both look after him.”
“Mr Studious would probably like ladies to look after him,” said the landlady.
“So it should be, that ladies look after men, not the other way around,” said the landlord.
“Why should that be?” countered the landlady.
“Because there are more women than men,” explained her husband. “What’s more, they’re trying to take over all the men’s occupations – well, such as serving at table here. At least I would have nothing against it.”
“What do you think about it, miss? I don’t dare to argue with the young man about it today.”
“Perhaps our landlord is right,” Erika replied to the landlady.
“Mr Studious, would you tell us what happened to you today?” the landlady now turned to me directly.
“Happened to me? So far, nothing,” I answered.
“But later, what will be happening?” the landlady pressed me.
“Who knows? Maybe… There may be redundancies later,” I told her.
“I see!” said the landlady, considering, as if she now understood everything. “So that’s it!”
And for a little while complete silence reigned at the table, as all eyes turned on me.
“They’ve been talking about redundancies for years, but so far the number of staff has just kept increasing,” said the landlord at length, as if wanting to console and calm not only me, but everyone else sitting at the table.
“See that you don’t become redundant too,” said the landlady to her husband in a tone that suggested that she wished for it.
“I could use the holiday,” he replied.
“Couldn’t you two change places?” asked the landlady.
“There would be no profit in that, at least not for your spouse,” I explained, “fathers with families are not being laid off.”
“Well then, it’s quite simple: get married quickly,” said the landlady.
“Easy to say!” sighed the gentleman. “But where to get children just as quickly?”
“Where does a poor man even find a wife?” I said, and my words must have come from the heart, because Erika looked at me somewhat reproachfully. The landlady noticed her look – and I felt it.
“This is now spiteful talk against women,” said the landlady half-jokingly. “There are so many young girls who would go with a poor man, if he’s acceptable in other ways. What do you think, miss – would you go for a poor man if you loved him?”
This question made Erika’s ears burn, but she had time to recover, because the landlord commented on his spouse’s words: “Well, you see, my dears, all roads lead to Rome: happily we’ve got around to love again. How nice that everyone’s stomach is full; otherwise our appetites might have vanished.”
“Leave out the silly jokes now, the young lady wants to answer,” said the landlady.
And Miss Erika did answer, looking the landlady in the eye across the table: “My lady, I can’t answer your question, because I’ve never been in love with a man, and no man has wanted me for his wife.”
“You know, miss,” said the landlady now, “I don’t believe that until today you haven’t loved anyone, and even less do I believe that no one has wanted you for his wife. Are men blind these days, or what?”
“I suppose they are,” replied Erika adding, “at least as far as I’m concerned.”
With these words she got up from the table, as if she no longer wanted to continue the conversation, and moved with her young charges to another room. Now the landlord said to his wife, “Why do you embarrass the poor girl?”
“How do I embarrass her?” countered the landlady. “Young girls like it when they’re asked about getting married.”
“But you always talk as if there was someone here that she loves, and with whom she should get married,” declared the landlord.
“Carry on with your own story,” contested the landlady, but a red flush did steal across her face. “Our young man is so dumb and passive that… Mr Studious, does it seem to you too that I’m trying to bring you and the young lady together somehow?”
“No, I’ve never noticed that,” I replied. “That would be too wild – me and a baroness!”
“Wouldn’t it?” agreed the landlady, adding, as she turned to her husband, “You hear that? You’re the only one who reads such wild things and innuendos into my words. Nobody else does!”
When I went up to my room, I wanted to throw myself down on the sofa, but my eye fell first on the forgotten letter. I tore it open and read: Wait for me today, please, a quarter of an hour before the usual time, and over on the other side, not the usual place. Erika. I had to read it three times before I realised what the letter said. And then I was seized by an inexplicable terror. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps because I thought of what would have happened if I had completely forgotten the letter left on the table today and had gone to meet Erika at the usual time? Or were the words a quarter of an hour before the usual time, and over on the other side something to cause anxiety? Did I perhaps detect in the letter a tone that caused fear? Did I feel that the writer of those lines had not yet been made as dull and insensitive as I who was reading them?
And when I had thought about it, I started to consider those blows that had rendered me so dull and senseless that day. Firstly, of course, the redundancy. But after all, this wasn’t such a great surprise that it should have left me in a state of shock. The main cause must still be that old man, as I was still consistently calling the white-haired baron. And by that I didn’t mean to belittle him or insult him – no, but it was a sign that I no longer saw in him so much as a baron or former lord of the manor as an ordinary mortal – as person who had experienced much more of life than I had, and who had the same feelings as every old person, every old man I had met thitherto, but his understanding was somewhat different.
Yes, one of the blows must have been the fact that I went to talk to the baron, but happened upon a man who only had a past. He was tethered to the present by only one living soul, and even that one I wanted to take from him, to start building a future for myself. That is why he told me everything I’m now trying to understand. But actually I still don’t understand what he was accusing me of when he concluded that as a Korporant I lacked real seriousness about life. That was his term for it. What was he actually demanding or expecting of me? That same separation from this country and its people that he and his kind had been cultivating for centuries? Or, if he had not been doing that – as he tried to demonstrate – what was my task, then? Only the creation of a so-called upper stratum, rooted in the land and the people? So that I, for example, would claim some sort of privileges, while my kinsfolk – father, mother, brothers, sisters and so on – should be overlooked. But only a baron could think like that, not an ordinary old man, as I was beginning to regard him. That would go against common sense and human feelings. It would be ridiculous.
And yet he was speaking of it in terms of holiness. Actually, afterwards I had a clear feeling that for him the corporation was the dwelling place of this holiness, not only God in any form at all, as he expressed it. Or in his view, did the corporation come first and God second? God was left only when the corporation and its sanctity didn’t exist? For he only came to the question of God when he was disappointed in the sanctity of my corporation. That is how it appeared to me in retrospect.
As to the question of God, here at least everything is clear to me. For an old man like him, with his past, it could not be otherwise if he had to catch hold of God. Formerly, when he sat in his manor house and power enslaved him, it was natural that there had to be some sort of higher power, which gave him superior privileges and benefits, and now, when those privileges and benefits had gone, his great consolation was that there was still God, whom no nation or revolution could take away from him.