Especially in the afternoon that intense quiet brought on a repeated feeling of fatigue and I sank into a state of unconsciousness with a raging temperature. Sometimes, a wave of nervous disenchantment flushed my cheeks. Long hours of morose lethargy followed. I’d adopted an infantile attitude to everything, relapsing intermittently into dread triggered by a vision of the way things seemed linked logically together, by a sense of the fated naturalness of the greatest catastrophes. My heart thudded and leapt and stiffened my legs. An apparition almost always floated before my eyes of a voluptuous, grotesque figure — a woman in a blouse and a gentleman with a small topper and large mustache — or I’d imagine some physical sensation. Even so my mouth felt parched, my head fuzzy, and my joints couldn’t sustain me. Most astonishingly, children never cried. They must have been born already briefed. They had never stopped in my family. These were afternoon moods. In the morning, a poor man occasionally drifted into the yard, leaned on a tree, and sang a song that sounded like a mournful psalm. I heard him from my bed, a potassium chloride pill on my tongue. I’m not familiar with the kind of songs the poor of Berlin sing: the Lumpen-proletariat. They are what you call songs of the poor, of poverty without hope. Many couldn’t rise to a song and didn’t dare look up at the windows for alms. They’d harangue in blurred, mumbling voices, with startling highs and lows. Now and then, an exasperated neighbor would angrily fling open a window and a black arm would emerge: the coin fell with a plop into the mud. Other poor people came with a young boy carrying a trombone or flugelhorn. The brass introduced absurdly desperate, explosive blasts into the yard. However, this group didn’t seem as poor as the others; the instruments in their hands, their hungry fervor and play-acting amused, brightened, and sustained them. The occasional rag-and-bone man with a booming voice passed through. One carried a briefcase under his arm and wore a hat tilted over the back of his neck, a purple cravat, a pink celluloid collar and a good quality dark suit that sagged slightly as posthumous garments generally do. You’d have said that man, an Israelite in looks, was probably a trade-union secretary.
For a moment I thought I’d entertain myself observing the windows of other high flats. I was soon disabused. The houses seemed dead, and if anyone ever budged behind those panes of glass, they seemed at a loss. It was only in the afternoon, if it didn’t rain, at dusk, that a window opened and a woman with her hair in a bun emerged to beat a mattress with a stick. The whiteness of the snow highlighted the actual color of the blocks: reinforced concrete covered in a layer of cheap pebbledash the color of burnt cork. Towards the top the cement was cracked and large dirty patches stood out, stains from leaking liquids the frost studded with lurid twinkles. The shapes and figures were unspeakably alarming. By the evening, the flats livened up. Darkness fell abruptly. There were days we had to switch on the light at three o’clock. When the bulb lit up I’d feel a hazy, childish sense of relief. I looked at the other houses: a light with a green shade; the weary glimmer of a bulb hanging from a bare, white ceiling; a pale glow on a stretch of wall that must be gaslight. One rectangular window secreted a purple-yellow beam that died a death on the snow in the yard with the hesitant charm of moonlight. I could see the corner of a freezing kitchen in one flat; in another, an old man reading the newspaper, his head a blur in the bright light; and a dining room sideboard in yet another, a fruit bowl with two oranges standing there — that exuded a misty glow that suggested they were plastic. All that absorbed you and there was no escape: anonymous, characterless misery; immersed in the house’s cold silence, it was hard not to believe the world was a place of bitterness. Yet something pleasant did exist in Frau Berends’ block: the sound of a distant piano, one you sometimes heard late at night. I never discovered where that piano was or where the notes came from. It was like a wave of gentle quivering, liquid music that penetrated through walls and dissolved. It was ethereal, shadowy, a pure sound, at once soft, velvety, and profound. Nothing transcendental, naturally! I often imagined that piano; I’d see a young gentleman and lady playing: four hands. She wore a plum-colored dress that was slightly too big. He was fair, had a clerk’s small nose and wore a tuxedo that was perhaps too tight. Now and then, when it was time to turn the page, they looked into each other’s eyes, enraptured. Then rested and ate a slice of cheese. I imagined them swathed in warm, discreetly lit comfort: they were symbols of social progress. I could have spent a lifetime listening to that piano, and the nights they didn’t play I missed their delightful idealism as keenly as if I’d missed my supper. The program they played was my program. It’s most likely that had I lived in a suitable environment, my feelings would have readily appreciated their sublime nobility. My responses have, in fact, always been commonplace and ordinary. They played exquisitely prosaic Italian pieces, Handel’s sumptuous largo, and several Vienna waltzes from the year ’12: waltzes with monocles for generals and diplomats, and several French and Russian pieces. I like everything bourgeois, pleasant, and digestible, and the taste of these distinguished homespun pianists met my needs exactly. My room was the one in the house where you heard them best, and Frau Berends sometimes tiptoed to my door and put her ear to the keyhole.
At this point Frau Berends was quite upbeat. Every day she was visited by a man they said was a retired army lieutenant. He was small, stocky, fair, pink, and featureless, and spoke with a quiet, nasal twang. They would shut themselves in the kitchen and mumble for hours on end. As it was hard to imagine they were talking about anything of any importance, it was most likely they simply kept each other company opposite an empty sink and rows of dishes. He’d often come after supper and they always stayed in the kitchen except for the odd day when they sat in the sitting room listening to a military march on the phonograph. They’d switch off the electricity. A long gas flame burned under the jug of water for the tea. A dull fluorescent glow flitted over things, and, seated opposite each other, their loose skin drooped. They looked deflated. No one bothered to find out who he was or why those two met. Frau Berends had visibly changed and one could say that she lived her life as if we didn’t exist. We’d pass in the corridor and I’d have a pleasant word for her but she never deigned to reply. She was absentminded and remote. I noticed how they would go out after lunch on days where there was a sunny spell. She dressed up: a heavy black dress and a hat strewn with tiny purple flowers. They looked like a family portrait from twenty years ago. Generally they strolled across a park, and their favorite spot seemed to be a distant park in Wilmersdorf. The lieutenant had a friend who was its lifelong concierge. They’d walk slowly back at dusk holding a sprig of fir. They crossed large, undeveloped areas, dotted with tin huts and cabbage and radish patches over which wet imperial flags flapped. Then they’d go down various dark, solitary streets and arrive home on their last legs. Even so one day the lieutenant suspended his visits. The postman started to leave letters and postcards. It was a short excursion, probably a family tragedy. In effect the letters had mourning edges. Frau Berends read them anxiously; her back to the door, she ripped the envelopes open in a tizzy.