Fredy didn’t cry over her. She had given him what he needed: calm at home and validation of his reputation as a seducer. He went to the summer resorts and the winter spas and received innocent postcards from his sports partners. The family took each harmless greeting as a clandestine confession of love. Fredy’s actual affairs were with hotel chambermaids and a generally available widow whom he considered the great love of his life. The Perlefters had no anxiety that their son would forget himself and marry a pretty woman without any money. They knew him, the family, and they trusted in the power of the blood.
And it truly seemed that Fredy was letting his eyes roam over the daughters of the land in order to locate love and a dowry to defray its cost. It was clear to him that he must have an attractive wife. Although she should have money she should also be generally pleasing to men. There existed this type of girl in the world, and Fredy courted them. He spoke with them about respectable things. He read a couple of books to acquire potential topics of conversation, and he believed that I could be a valued guide for him in these matters. I recommended history books to Fredy, for I believed that the best way to impress educated women was by spouting forth dates. I had no experience with educated young women. But I soon learned from Fredy that they were bored by historical dates. I picked up a book on art history and recommended a conversation about paintings. These women didn’t go to museums on their own. I resorted to natural history. Fredy read the chapter in which the piquant processes of the science of procreation and reproduction are detailed and was henceforth no longer reluctant to discuss natural history. And he would have luck with it, for he soon began to court a young girl whose father owned a majority stake in the Hinke Beer Brewery. It seemed that Fredy’s scientific references made an impression on the girl. Fredy was invited ‘to the house’. He brought a bouquet of flowers, and he went by automobile. I have never in my life seen a bouquet like that. It was expensive, discrete and exotic, and yet it was still winter. Who knew from what garden these flowers had come? Perhaps they cemented the relationship.
Everyone awaited Perlefter’s return. A celebratory atmosphere spread through the house as if in anticipation of joyous events. Fredy received no more letters. Suddenly he had grown and was ready to become engaged. While I squandered my formative years with useless thoughts, he grew into mature adolescence and positioned himself into a profitable marriage. He was a splendid boy, and he fulfilled his destiny in an exemplary fashion and to everyone’s satisfaction.
V
Unfortunately Fredy’s engagement could not be officially celebrated. You see, one had to consider his sister, who was older than he. And, as far as anyone knew there was not a suitor in sight.
It was a shame. The eldest had already dispensed with men. She was, unfortunately, named Karoline, and that troubled her and paralysed her courage before men. Although known as Line in the family that also irritated her. She had once been pretty; to me she’d once been very pretty. Oh, as I arrived at Perlefter’s she still wore her hair in a ponytail and swayed her hips when she walked. Her hair was brown, hard, crackling and unruly. She was very arrogant, little Karoline. She was a character. She didn’t cry; or, more accurately, at least not when anyone could hear her, for her small grey malevolent eyes were often red. She was the wisest and most taciturn member of the family. She was always sitting with books and always achieved the best grades and was rarely sick. Back when I still played with the children she tormented me the least. She isolated herself from me, and there was always some invisible fence around her. She read the most books and always placed one on her lap when she came to the table and hastily gulped down each bite so she could return to reading. At night it was her light that burned the longest.
But it seems that the education of a young girl can damage her charms. For, although Karoline had reached that age when she was not yet quite marriageable but at the point when an interest in men should have awoken within her, it proved that she had absolutely no interest either in her own appearance or in men. Indeed Karoline wore her crackling, unruly, provocative hair smooth and brushed back, and as a result one saw that she had a high, pale, arched mathematical brow and small, pretty earlobes whose delicacy was lost in consideration of this significant forehead. Every young man grew afraid of this head. Every man had to take this girl seriously and consequently could not fall in love with her.
Karoline studied mathematics and physics and was an assistant in some scientific institute. There she put on her heelless sandals, a blue work uniform, took a manly umbrella in her hand and in her wide breast pocket were jingling keys and a glasses case of black cardboard. Karoline was converted into a doctor.
The family praised her delicate ears and her hair, which to them and others were more consoling than the scientific standing of their daughter. But soon even the family succumbed to the allure that seems to surround laboratories and assistants, and everyone admired the achievements of such a young child.
‘She should have a husband,’ said Frau Perlefter.
Karoline became angry when one spoke of her. She rushed out of the room and slammed the door shut; the walls shook, and from behind the door one could hear sobbing.
It was customary in the Perlefter family that everyone kissed one another. Only Karoline kissed nobody. At great celebrations, at farewells and birthdays, she blew cool fleeting kisses from indifferent cheeks.
She had cold dry hands with pale, flat fingers. Her fingers looked like rules.
A husband was sought for her.
Sometimes Tante Kempen came; she had already dealt with many girls in the family. Tante Kempen had large brown shining eyes that seemed to absorb everything but in reality were practically blind. Glasses had been prescribed which, out of vanity, she spurned.
She knew all the suitable families, this Tante Kempen. Every week she was invited to a different house. She was like a wandering spider, spinning her web from one corner of the city to another or like a wind distributing fruit seeds around the world.
Tante Kempen had identified a man for Karoline. He was a lecturer who needed money in order to become a professor without worries, a scholar, a pleasant, forgetful young man. But Karoline was terrified of scholars.
The Perlefter family didn’t know what to do. Frau Kempen began to consider the other daughters. In any case, Karoline went her own way, and I will get to this later when the occasion arises.
Frau Kempen focused on the second child, who was called Julie. She was gentle, pale, anaemic, and she drank Chinese wine and swallowed iron pills that caused chronic constipation. The doctor ordered her to take walks, but to do so Julie would need comfortable sandals of the type her sister Karoline wore.
Julie wore vain high heels and small patent-leather boots that caused her pain. She liked to buy fabric, colourful scraps of lace which she stored in the drawer of her chest. What she liked most was to lie on a cold bed and sort remnants of silk. She had four seamstresses, for new and old clothes, for both alterations and ‘modernization’. All the men liked Julie, and she left the selection up to Tante Kempen.
Herr Perlefter, who was ever practical, wanted to have an engineer in the family but not the type who could design bridges. Herr Perlefter wanted a practical building engineer who could appraise a house. During this time there were many inexpensive homes being constructed, but each appraisal cost ‘a fortune’. And yet engineers earned so little. Perlefter wanted to have a handyman in the house.
Frau Kempen searched frantically and could find only an architect with artistic ambitions.