She led me down the halls.
She stopped in one room.
“That’s it. .,” she said, “will you take a look at her. .!”
Seated there was a strawberry blonde American girl who looked like an angel and like the heavens and all the flowers in the field!
My fat aunt and I just stood there. .
My aunt, the mortadella sausage, folded her hands and whispered quietly: “God protect her!”
I led her back. .
She was altogether flustered. “I beg you,” she said, “don’t breathe a word of this to my husband or my daughter, I just showed her to you because you’re so crazy. .”
I looked her in the eyes and said: “Of course. .”
Then she said: “Will you get a load of the high-class boys my daughter’s hobnobbing with. .?!”
“Pst,” I said, “from the standpoint of the national GNP. .”
“Indeed,” she said, “but I also want Elsie to marry well, rich and happy. .”
“Of course. .,” I said, “are you happy, Auntie?”
“I’m too fat and too crazy for happiness. .,” she said, “but that’s between me and you.”
“To the last point at least I can attest. .,” I said, whereupon my aunt exploded in laughter.
Career
The press photographer who was supposed to photograph two walls of my room because “the big European illustrated magazines” wanted to give their eager readers a glimpse of P.A.’s digs, said: “I’d like to include in the picture a piece of your desk.”— “That’s altogether unnecessary, since, first of all, I don’t have a desk, and second, I do all my writing in bed. Why don’t you include a bit of my bed!”—I said: “So how do you become a press photographer? I only know how you become a poet. You’re a disgrace to your kind-hearted parents, a failed lawyer, doctor, book dealer and then nothing at all. But how do you become a press photographer?!”
The man wrinkled his brow into deep pleats — I never actually observed this happen, before or then and there, but since they put it that way in novels — and began: “I had a voice, bass, baritone and tenor all rolled in one!”
“Must one have that if one wishes to become a press photographer?”
“I had a voice! Opera director Herbeck, who happened to be in the audience incognito, approached me and said: ‘Go to Gänsbacher tomorrow, sing him what you sang today, he’ll give you lessons, there’s no fee!’ I had no idea who Herbeck was, Gänsbacher either. Only my father wept tears of joy and my mother said: ‘I always knew it!’ (It’s a mother’s job to know everything in advance when things happen after the fact and the father’s iron severity melts into hot and discrete tears at the first sign of some ‘success.’) Gänsbacher said to me: ‘Damn good!’ After the seventeenth lesson I took a trip to Luxembourg, and when, all sweaty from rowing, I sneezed in the skiff, a chilly gust blows by and I lose my voice. The next day Gänsbacher said to me: ‘Get lost and don’t you ever come back. You’re done!’ My mother said she saw it all coming, and my father said: ‘You’re a shirker through and through.’ Well, so then I went and became a press photographer. And, believe me, I’m just as happy as I was with that stupid singing!”
The Bed
Your bed is wonderful, a kind of refuge from the perils of waking life! But also a peril in and of itself — a kind of pre-casket, that is, in preparation for your passing. In bed your life absorbs obstructive strengths, all that which is supposed to hold back your demise lets go! Only outside your bed are you actually able to resist the thousand hostile forces of your life! In bed you are inescapably prone, decayed, and you yourself decay. Your bed shelters your preexistent store of strengths, but simultaneously hinders access to the new strengths to be derived from the fluid life of day! You withdraw yourself from the useful fight. Your bed is a kind of pre-casket! It is death in life! A soft death that permits a rising. But never forget it, grownup: children in the cradle, invalids in bed sleep endlessly long! That simply means they’re not yet up to living. Or else they’d tolerate “the waking state.” The waking man lives, the sleeper has died!
You can make amends for many sins with ample sleep—. But what if you commit none? Your bed is your pre-casket. As soon as you fall asleep in it, some precious thing or another perishes in you!
Celebrity
We were once a large group of artists in a champagne pavilion at “Venice in Vienna” in a summer wine garden. Three sweet young girls immediately joined us. Someone in our group told them: “Girls, don’t you know in whose company you have the honor of being seated today? That gentleman over there happens to be the famous painter Gustav Klimt!”—“You don’t say—,” the girls replied nonchalantly. Then a fourth girl joined them and said: “Girls, do you know who that is?! It’s him, no doubt about it—.” “Aw, what’s the big deal, who could care less whoever he is—.” —“But that’s the guy who paid for twelve bottles of Charles Heidsieck champagne at the Casino de Paris last winter!”—“No kidding, is that really him?! Right! Now I recognize him! Hey, Mr. famous painter, here’s lookin’ at you!”
P.S. The local representative of Charles Heidsieck champagne once said to me at a late hour: “Say, Peter, I was just wondering if you could ever include my company in one of your sketches? In which case, Peter, you can swig as much as you like!”
Now I hope with some justification to drink my fill. By the way, that time with Klimt & company, it wasn’t Charles Heidsieck we were drinking, it was Pommery. But since the one is just as good as the other, and besides, we still get to drink on it, who cares?!
Poem
I hired a girl for the night.
So what.
Before she fell asleep she said: “Are you a poet?”
“Why? Could be. So what.”
“I once made up a poem myself—.”
“?!?”
“How dear to me you are.
Now you’re so far—.
So what.
Let ’em write on my gravestone:
‘I love you alone!’
Nobody will know who and whom—.
So what.”
I gave the girl ten Gulden instead of five—.
“Oh,” she said with a smile, “five is all we agreed on.”
“So what. My calculation’s on the mark. Look here, my girl, how precisely I tally—
five for your sweet body and five for your sweet soul!”
Love
He loved her desperately and in vain. You always only love desperately when it’s in vain!Then she fell very, very ill. So she said to him: “I feel pity for you. I want to show myself to you more naked than naked!” And she unrolled a large sheet of paper on which her x-ray had been printed. “Oh, what a darling little skeleton!” he said, delighted. “But I beg you this one favor, just don’t go and show it to Mr. — ; that much advantage I’d at least like to have over that dog!”
Theater Evening
She couldn’t take the poodle with her into the theater. So the poodle stayed with me in the café and we awaited the mistress.
He stationed himself so as to keep an eye on the entrance, and I found this very expedient, if a bit excessive, since, honestly, it was only half past seven in the evening and we had to wait till a quarter past eleven.
We sat there and waited.
Every carriage that rattled by awakened hope in him, and every time I said to him: “It’s not possible, it can’t be her yet, be reasonable, it’s just not possible!”
Sometimes I said to him: “Our beautiful, kind-hearted mistress—!”