“Why not?! You think I’m all that stupid?!”
“No, yes. But once and for all, you didn’t write this letter!”
“Who else do you think wrote it?!”
“That I don’t know. You’re the only one that knows it. Listen, Mitzi, I’ll give you one hundred Crowns if you tell his name!”
“One hundred Crowns? Make it one fifty!”
“It was Peter!”
“What Peter?!”
“Peter, you know, Peter Altenberg!”
The letter: “Saw you again last night at the ‘Tabarin!’ Couldn’t talk to you, didn’t dare to. So there I was seated face to face with the guy that had me for a whole year butt-naked under the covers. . It was just no use!”
“How did he ever come to draft this letter for you?!”
I said to him, I said: “For God’s sake, write me something I’d have written if I knew how to write!”
“So the letter’s from you after all?!”
“That’s what I said from the start!”
So then she patched things up again with the Count.
Coffeehouse
You’ve got troubles of one kind or another — get thee to the coffeehouse!
She can’t make it to your place for whatever perfectly plausible reason — to the coffeehouse!
Your boots are torn — to the coffeehouse!
You make four hundred Crowns and spend five hundred — coffeehouse!
You’re a frugal fellow and don’t dare spend a penny on yourself — coffeehouse!
You’re a paper pusher and would’ve liked to become a doctor — coffeehouse!
You can’t find a girlfriend up to snuff — coffeehouse!
You’re virtually on the verge of suicide — coffeehouse!
You loathe and revile people and yet can’t live without them — coffeehouse!
No place else will let you pay on credit — coffeehouse!
I Drink Tea
Six P.M. approaches. I sense it coming on. Not as intensely as the children sense the approach of Christmas Eve. But I sense it all the same. At six on the dot I drink tea, a festive satisfaction that never disappoints in this burdensome existence. Something you can count on, to have a becalming bliss at your beck and call. A given completely free of life’s vicissitudes. Pouring the good mountain spring water into my lovely white half-liter nickel-plated receptacle already gives me pleasure. Then I wait out the simmer, the song of the water. I have a huge, semispherical, deep, brick-red Wedgewood cup. The tea comes from the Café Central, wafting with the scent of high mountain meadow, of wild bugle and sunburned pasture grass.
The tea is golden yellow-straw yellow, never brownish, always light and unoppressive. I smoke a cigarette along with it, a “Chelmis, Hyksos.” I sip it very very slowly. The tea is an internally stimulating nerve bath. You can bear it all better while drinking it. You feel it inside, a woman ought to have that effect. But she never does. She hasn’t yet acquired the culture of serene sweetness so as to affect you like a noble warm golden-yellow tea. She believes she’d lose her power. But my six o’clock tea never loses its power over me. I long for it daily in just the same way and lovingly let it wed my body.
Perfume
As a child, rummaging around a drawer in the desk of my beloved, oh so beautiful Mama, the desk made of mahogany and cut glass, I found an empty perfume bottle which still retained the potent scent of a certain unidentified fragrance.
Many times I’d sneak over and sniff at it.
I associated this fragrance with all the love, tenderness, friendship, longing, sadness in the world. But for me all these feelings were bound up with my Mama. Later fate fell upon us, unsuspected, like a horde of Huns and inflicted heavy losses all around.
And one day I dashed from perfumery to perfumery hoping to possibly find in the little sample bottles the fragrance from the mahogany desk drawer of my late beloved Mama. And finally, finally I found it: Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, from Paris.
And I remembered the bygone days when Mama was the only womanly presence able to arouse pleasure and pain, ardent longing and deep despair, but who would always, always forgive whatever I’d done and who fretted over me and perhaps even before falling asleep at night prayed for my future happiness. .
Later, many young women in their guileless sweet zeal sent me their favorite perfume to thank me from the heart for a beauty tip of my devising, namely that every perfume ought to be rubbed into the skin all over the naked body right after the bath so that it wafts forth like the body’s own true natural essence! But all these perfumes were like the scents of breathtakingly beautiful but rather poisonous exotic flowers. Only the fragrance Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, from Paris, brought me a melancholic tranquility, even though Mama was no longer there and could no longer forgive me for my sins!
On Smells
Women are enormously impressionable, they so easily take on the smells of their surroundings! If she was in the dairy, then for hours afterwards she’ll smell of milk, her hands, her hair, her entire body—. If she was at the green grocers, she’ll retain for hours the smell of all the greens, like a mixed vegetable soup—. In the garden she smells of lilacs or linden trees or just of garden—. On the high mountain meadow of cow pasture land and fresh cut meadow. This is a tragic fate; since she always smells afterwards of the last lout she was with, of the last snob and his repulsive scent, his foul odor of duplicity! She never smells of poets since poets keep a respectful distance, probably on account of their artistic egotism. Most often women smell of “smart alecks” always too close for comfort! That’s when they are most receptive to smells—. Noble ladies definitely ought to remain outdoors in nature or stick to the saintly solitude of their own domicile. It stinks everywhere else!
Even good books never stink, they are the distillation of all the malodorous sins one has committed of which one has finally managed to extract a drop of fragrant humanity!
But the other sins can’t be distilled!
Tulips
There are geniuses among the tulips, too, just as there are in every manifestation of the organic! Like orchids, for instance. I once had a white tulip that stayed shut tight, immaculate and virginal, for a full fourteen days despite the warmth of my room and water. Only then did it open and brazenly display its stamen and its pistil. And so it remained for another eight days. Others, for instance, will open on the spot in a warm room and water, and are already complete in all their splendor; their petals fall as if stunned by the blow. Still others, especially the speckled ones, evidently just shrivel up like little old grannies, without losing their petals they die off, doggedly resisting life. You throw them away even though there could still be a little spare life left in them! And it may well be so. Tulips are not without smell, they exude to the eyes! It may well be the most exciting, longest lasting scent there is!
Flower Allée
Six A.M. It is dry, cool, the sky is a wan white blue, bleu-lacté the French writers would say—.
A florist dealing in artificial flowers flings back gray wooden shutters, open for business.
In the dusty window display, spring blooms in sloe blossoms; summer in cornflowers; fall in pink and lilac asters and the feathery pompoms of dandelions.
A pale shop girl carries white roses out into the street, with which she decorates a carriage parked outside. The flowers smell like old muslin.
Flower Allée — or this afternoon at four! Box seats, five crowns! Let’em spread the money among the people, thousands profit indirectly, you have no idea! It trickles down to — Why it’s just impossible to think it all the way through.