All the wealthy members of the family and their distant relatives subscribed to this magazine. It had a somewhat obscure name. It was called The Blue Margin, and I guessed that Herr Dr Feld himself had devised the name. Many collaborators spent their Wednesday afternoons at Frau Margarete Sedan’s. She wore wondrous clothes and gained a little weight. She met all sorts. A young lecturer in history was recommended to her. He came and gave lectures on Napoleon to a small group. Within the circle that surrounded Margarete Russia was in vogue. Margarete began to learn Russian. Her teacher was a refugee Russian engineer with no papers and no money. He liked to speak of the cruelty of the Bolsheviks, and one could tell that he had lived through it. He favoured all people who were upset by revolutions. It was quite agreeable to please these people, because it was they who had money. The engineer gave Russian lessons to many women. He was a small agile man with a bald head and deep little watery eyes. Margarete said there was something demonic about him. Herr Sedan spoke with him about electricity. Occasionally the engineer switched to business. He had dealings with the film industry, and he sold equipment on commission. He rejected nothing. He accepted everything that came across his path. For a time he ran the publicity for a Russian cabaret. In the winter he accompanied the Sedan family to Switzerland. In the winter’s calm of a health resort, in the face of the majestic mountains, something must have happened that induced Herr Sedan to decide to divorce Margarete. The engineer found other students. Margarete returned to Perlefter’s house.
So there she was. Frau Perlefter cried for three weeks. Margarete came to the divorce proceedings in chaste high-necked clothes. Her lawyer said, ‘Lovely.’ In the evening Tante Kempen arrived with a new suggestion. Herr Perlefter was going to a sanatorium in an effort to recover. He would give some thought to a new son-in-law later. But scarcely a day before his departure Margarete brought a bank official to the house whom everyone liked because he was so modest. Perlefter postponed his travels. Two weeks later Margarete married her bank official. Herr Perlefter took him into business. Suddenly Dr Feld was back. He began to opine from within the pages of The Blue Margin. Margarete promised to provide the means. He bought her jewellery, and a week later the whole world could see her picture in The Blue Margin. The Wednesday afternoon gatherings lived once more.
Margarete was fat again. As soon as she married she grew, and nothing could help her. Every morning she did gymnastics. A masseur was recommended, a noted masseur who served the most distinguished houses in the city and commanded the highest prices. He was a handsome muscular man in leather leggings with a wide mouth and white healthy teeth. The bank official was jealous, but it was no use. He played no role at all in the household. When Margarete was in a good mood she stretched out her hand to him. He had to kiss it. When he wanted to speak she interrupted him. Eventually he began to brew tea, tend to the hearth, fetch water and run to the pharmacy. He wanted to be useful. He recounted to patient listeners school stories and anecdotes about life on the stock exchange. He was, unfortunately, a bad storyteller, and from his first sentence one could already predict the end of his story. Dr Feld despised him. Dr Feld was practically as revered as the masseur. Margarete confessed her sorrows to him. The bank official was dumb enough to defend the accuracy of the scales. He wanted to prove that the masseur was superfluous, but he demonstrated only his own expendability.
So passed the months. Perlefter was in the sanatorium. His wife lived with Fredy, whose wife was going to have a child. Karoline also bore a girl. The chemist took her out for a walk. He was a good father and no longer felt a need to invent gunpowder. He pushed the pram, lived outside in the austerity of the countryside and demonstrated a genuine interest in leatherwear.
VIII
While Herr Perlefter was in the sanatorium, recovering from the calamities that had afflicted his house, there landed on one of the European coasts Leo Bidak with his wife and six children along with his entire fortune, which one could fit in a straw basket and still have room to spare. I knew Leo Bidak from my childhood and from my home town. He was related to Alexander Perlefter, who granted no special significance to this family link. Leo Bidak came from San Francisco. He had survived several earthquakes and had missed the European world war. He left to earn money, but he returned as a beggar, and he once again sought ‘a reason for existence’ after having had to give up several existences on both sides of the ocean.
He was forty-two years old, a family man, and he had experienced much and learned nothing. He’d had a few different jobs, and not one of them had he mastered to perfection. In his youth he had been a longshoreman in Odessa. Back then he could still break thick paving stones on his knee and balance a Cossack sabre on his fingertip, crack a hazelnut between his fingers and uproot young trees with one hand. He was so strong that he was compelled to demonstrate his prowess, and since dock work did not strain him enough he supplemented it through fights in saloons and quiet alleys. On Sundays he appeared as a wrestler in a circus and followed the rules just as minimally as the laws of the country, which he despised, because he was one of those unusual people for whom the state was a stupid institution that robs liberty. Consequently Leo Bidak had not only the authorities for enemies but also professional associations, and as he had never belonged to the Association of Athletes he was considered in the sports world to be a querulous outsider who won all the prize competitions without paying any contributions, enjoying all the privileges without subjecting himself to the obligations. In addition, Bidak was a favourite of the crowd, who had no qualms when he made a mistake and forgave all his illegal moves while others who did the same were booed out of the arena. And so Leo Bidak had to fend for himself, a rebel within his own profession, unclassifiable in any category or species, lonely and mighty, averse to society and his own confederates, against both worlds. He was short and fat; his hands were round and soft with short fingers like those of a child, and yet his grip was firm. These hands were like iron when they were clenched into fists. I once saw Bidak’s palms and was amazed at their clear and simple lines, the likes of which I have never encountered in anyone else. There were three heavy furrows, two lateral creases and a long line. Everything else was smooth, like a palm of sanded skin. According to the rules of palmistry Bidak had at least 150 years to live, without sickness, without pain, without complications. His hands were tools; when he wasn’t working or hitting they hung there limp from his strong round wrists like a pair of hammers.
Even his face was simple. It consisted of a low forehead, tiny blue eyes, a short nose, a small but wide chin and two strong cheeks, on whose surface muscles could be seen flexing. Behind the forehead lived the simplest of minds: the eyes had nothing else to do except look out for danger; the nose needed only to smell, the mouth only to eat. Even Leo Bidak’s hair was only there to meet the requirements of nature. It had no colour. It was neither thick nor thin, neither hard nor soft, and Bidak wore it as God let it grow, falling down over his forehead or cut very short, depending on whether or not he had money to go to a barber.
For Bidak had no money, and he earned only a little. The wages he made at the circus he drank and gambled away. Three dice of human bone rattled constantly in his right trouser pocket. He won at games only when he was drunk; he lost when he was sober, and that is why he never came into money, because he spent whatever he had. He lost on the street whatever else he put up — paper, watches, a pencil, smooth pebbles, keys and tools. He needed the stones to practise marksmanship. He had such skill with slingshots that he could hit a specific windowpane on a moving train. On free afternoons he went out into the fields through which the train crossed, lay down in the grass and made a mental note when he heard a train coming to hit the third or fourth or fifth windowpane of the third to last car. He always hit it. That behind the windowpane people sat he knew. That he might unknowingly hit one delighted him much. Sometimes he flew a kite made out of newspaper. He carried a ball of hard dark-blue twine in his pocket, twine that he, with his small, wide and sharp teeth he could chew through and with which he could sew his clothes and also his boots.