Such were these young men. Those of them who claimed the spirit fancied themselves to be homosexual, although they liked young girls better. They made off with girls, too, if nobody noticed. As for the young Fredy Perlefter he was still wavering over which sex to choose. But after it became clear to him that he would carry on his father’s business he decided upon normal sexual intercourse. It was good to see, as the true nature of the young man gradually broke through. He shed the illness of his childhood days like one outgrows old clothes and in the course of several months became a hero and a sportsman. At the same time his face was also changing, becoming ever more the old, round and slightly girlish face of Perlefter. Fredy’s eyes were also colourless and played the events of the world without surprise, wonder, love, compassion or bitterness. With a fearlessness that left him unfazed he plunged into various hazardous sports, and while his family feared for him he won first prize in swimming, track and field and winter sports, and his foolish face graced the illustrated newspapers. I believe that he had no idea he was placing himself voluntarily in the proximity of Death and was not sensible enough to have fear. He had only ambition. He wanted to be the spoiled darling of the family and remain that way, achieving it indirectly by means of heroism. Thus he and his father, in different ways, both arrived at the same goal. Fredy liked to complain about sore muscles. He had ‘trained’ too hard. He showed several bruises. For weeks he had an arm in a black sling. His mother fed him. One had to hold his jacket and put his socks on for him. After he had definitively decided on the female sex he slept with one of the servant girls and earned himself his first sexually transmitted disease, of which he was quite proud and of which the entire family knew but about which nobody spoke. The servant girl left the house and took a silver service along with her. For weeks this service was the topic of conversation. The oldest daughter maintained that it was silver plate and a wedding gift from Herr Hahn who gave nothing real. Frau Perlefter cried anyway. For her it was silver. To annoy his sister Fredy said that he himself had seen the mark. It was silver. Frau Perlefter’s widowed sister, who delighted in the losses of others, confirmed Fredy’s assertion.
Fredy loved to recount his various adventures. There was always something happening wherever he found himself. Horses bucked, automobiles crashed into each other, old women were crushed under the wheels, streetcars ran out of power, drunks fought each other, a girl dropped a milk pot. There was nothing too trivial. Everything that happened was worth recounting. Fredy recorded in a notebook the various jokes he had heard. He read some of them out. The others, he said, were unsuitable for women. Nevertheless he was asked to tell them. He recounted them in a low voice, and his sisters acted as if they had not heard. Regardless, they left the room immediately after the punch-line. Fredy rode every morning in the hippodrome. By lunchtime he claimed he could not sit. A gallop had ‘upset’ him. He drank his soup standing. After the meal he sat down. He had forgotten the galloping. He was regarded within the wide circle of family as a dangerous heart-breaker. He struck up a conversation with young girls in front of the department store. Then he wrote them letters. He showed these missives to his sisters.
‘You’re not going to believe it!’ he said. ‘This Margot is from one of the best houses.’
Frau Perlefter was convinced that all the daughters of the bourgeois houses were in love with Fredy. At one point he made the acquaintance of a Hungarian journalist named Roney. Herr Roney was looking for a wealthy man for a singer named Ilona. He found Fredy Perlefter, and all three were satisfied. Ilona didn’t like Fredy at all. He didn’t love her either. But her name was in the newspapers and on the billboards. The Perlefter family went to films in which she played a supporting role and to the cabarets in which she sang. Ilona was not so young any more. Her picture stood on Fredy’s writing-table along with a couple of letters written in large stiff strokes on pale purple paper. The letters lay there, casually strewn across his desk, and his sisters secretly read them. Fredy came home and said bitterly, ‘You’ve already read my letters!’ but was actually pleased.
Since Fredy ‘had something’ with Ilona, he entered into those wonderful circles where art blends with sin and justifies it. Behind the scenes it was quite different. Outside the boundaries of middle-class society much was not only permitted but also desirable. ‘Art’ legitimizes even debauchery. Through his relationships within the arts Fredy put the whole family into an adventurous mood. Fredy used up half of Frau Perlefter’s spending money. He wore, henceforth, silk shirts and gave his opinion on his sisters’ clothing. He must have known what attracted those women living in that world in which the main thing was the effect, the effect about which people would gossip. Frau Perlefter and her daughters were far removed from wishing to be such a woman as Ilona. But to be mistaken for an Ilona in certain circumstances was the dream of the Perlefter girls. There came a free spirit to their clothes, a new rhythm in their lives; their appearance received a fantastic boost; they let each other tell jokes without embarrassment any more and spoke with frank gestures of truths which for girls of good families should be but fairy-tales.
Yes, with the entry of this Ilona into Fredy’s life a lot changed. One even spoke about his long and torturous sexually transmitted disease, and Frau Perlefter, feeling left out, asked Fredy all kinds of discrete details. The boy had to invent them in order to avoid losing his reputation. He had made love to Ilona three times and endured her and her friends for three months. The letters stopped. He began speaking to young girls again, and as he had already indulged in the realm of the arts he no longer wrote to girls who were the daughters of wealthy citizens but, rather, to the denizens of the theatre world. Within the family, however, reverence and awe for the first in the series of artists, Fräulein Ilona, were preserved. Quite often a family member came across her name in the newspaper, spoke her name aloud, and distant relatives who were reliant upon Perlefter’s good will came to tell that they had heard and read of Ilona’s latest ventures.