He is lying to support Riesenfeld. “It’s different with me,” I explain. “Also because of the war. I went in when I was a little over seventeen. Now I am twenty-five; but I still feel like seventeen. Like seventeen and seventy. The War Department stole my youth.”
“With you it was not the war,” Riesenfeld replies. “You’re simply a case of arrested intellectual development. That would have happened to you if there’d never been a war. As a matter of fact, the war really made you precocious; without it you would still be at the twelve-year-old level.”
“Thanks,” I say. “What a compliment! At twelve everyone is a genius. He only loses his originality with the onset of sexual maturity, to which you, you granite Casanova, attribute such exaggerated importance. That’s a pretty monstrous compensation for loss of spiritual feedom.”
Georg fills our glasses again. We see that it is going to be a tough evening. We must get Riesenfeld out of the depths of cosmic melancholy, and neither one of us is especially keen on being involved in philosophical platitudes tonight. We should prefer to sit quietly under a chestnut tree and drink a bottle of Moselle instead of in the Red Mill commiserating with Riesenfeld over his lost youth.
“If you’re interested in the relativity of time,” I say, briefly hopeful, “then I can introduce you to a society where you can meet experts in that field—the Poets’ Club of this dear city. Hans Hungermann, the writer, has elucidated the problem in an unpublished sequence of sixty poems. We can go there right now; there’s a meeting every Sunday night with a social hour afterward.”
“Are there women there?”
“Naturally not. Women poets are like calculating horses. With the exception, of course, of Sappho’s pupils.”
“Well then, what’s the social hour?” Riesenfeld asks.
“It consists of running down other writers. Especially the successful ones.”
Riesenfeld grunts contemptuously. I am ready to give up. Suddenly the window in the horse butcher’s house across the street lights up like a brightly lit painting in a dark museum. Behind the curtains we see Lisa. She is just getting dressed and has nothing on except a brassiere and a pair of very short white silk panties.
Riesenfeld emits a snort like a ground hog. His cosmic melancholy has disappeared like’ magic. I get up to turn on the light. “No light!” he snaps. “Have you no feeling for poetry?”
He creeps to the window. Lisa begins to draw a tight dress over her head. She writhes like a serpent. Riesenfeld snorts aloud. “A seductive creature! Donnerwetter, what a rear end! A dream! Who is she?”
“Susanna in the bath,” I explain, trying to intimate delicately that at the moment we are in the role of the old goats watching her.
“Nonsense!” The voyeur with the Einstein complex never moves his eyes from the golden window. “I mean what’s her name.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. This is the first time we’ve seen her. She wasn’t even living there at noon today,” I say to whet his interest.
“Really?” Lisa has got her dress on and is now smoothing it down with her hands. Behind Riesenfeld’s back Georg fills his glass and mine. We toss off the drinks. “A woman of breeding,” Riesenfeld says, continuing to cling to the window. “A lady, that’s easy to see. Probably French.”
As far as we know, Lisa comes from Bohemia. “It might be Mademoiselle de la Tour,” I reply. “I heard someone mention that name yesterday.”
“You see?” Riesenfeld turns around to us for an instant. “I told you she was French! One can tell right away—that je ne sais quoi! Don’t you think so too, Herr Kroll?”
“You’re the connoisseur, Herr Riesenfeld.”
The light in Lisa’s room goes off. Riesenfeld pours his drink down his time-parched throat and once more presses his face against the window. After a while Lisa appears at the door and goes down the steps into the street. Riesenfeld stares after her. “An enchanting walk! She does not mince; she takes long strides. A lithe, luscious panther! Women who mince are always a disappointment. But I give you my guarantee for that one.”
At the words “lithe, luscious panther” I have quickly downed another drink. Georg has sunk into his chair, grinning silently. We have turned the trick. Now Riesenfeld whirls around. His face shimmers like a pale moon. “Light, gentlemen! What are we waiting for? Forward into life!”
We follow him into the mild night. I stare at his froglike back. If only, I think enviously, it were as easy for me to bob up from my gray hours as it is for this quick-change artist.
The Red Mill is jam packed. All we can get is a table next to the orchestra. The music is too loud anyway, but at our table it is completely deafening. At first we shout our observations into one another’s ears; after that we content ourselves with signs like a trio of deaf mutes. The dance floor is so crowded that the dancers can hardly move. But that doesn’t matter to Riesenfeld. He spies a woman in white silk at the bar and rushes up to her. Proudly he propels her with his pointed belly across the dance floor. She is a head taller than he and stares in boredom at the balloon-hung ceiling. Lower down, Riesenfeld seethes and smolders like Vesuvius. His demon has seized him. “How would it be if we poured some brandy into his wine to make him tight quicker?” I ask Georg. “The boy is drinking like a spotted wild ass! This is our fifth bottle! In two hours we’ll be bankrupt if it goes on like this. I estimate we’ve already drunk up a couple of imitation marble tombstones. Here’s hoping he doesn’t bring that white ghost to our table so that we’ll have to quench her thirst too.” Georg shakes his head. “That’s a bar girl. She’ll have to go back.”
Riesenfeld returns. He is red in the face and sweating. “What does all this amount to compared to the magic of fantasy!” he roars at us through the confusion. “Tangible reality, well and good! But where’s the poetry? That window tonight against the dark sky—that was something to dream about! A woman like that, even if you never see her again, is something you’ll never forget. Understand what I mean?”
“Sure,” Georg shouts. “What you can’t get always seems better than what you have. That’s the origin of all human romanticism and idiocy. Prost, Riesenfeld!”
“I don’t mean it so coarsely,” Riesenfeld roars against the fox trot “Oh, if St. Peter Knew That.” “I mean it more delicately.”
“So do I,” Georg roars back. “I mean it even more delicately!” “All right! As delicately as you like!” The music rises to a mighty crescendo. The dance floor is a variegated sardine box. Suddenly I stiffen. Laced into the trappings of a monkey in fancy dress, my sweetheart Erna is pushing her way through the swaying mob to my right. She does not see me, but I recognize her red hair from afar. She is hanging shamelessly on the shoulder of a typical young profiteer. I sit there motionless, but I feel as though I had swallowed a hand grenade. There she is dancing, the little beast to whom ten of the poems in my unpublished collection “Dust and Starlight” are dedicated, the girl who has been pretending for a week that she is not allowed out of the house because of a mild case of concussion. She says she fell in the dark. Fell indeed, but into the arms of this young man in the double-breasted tuxedo, with a seal ring on the paw with which he is supporting the small of Erna’s back. A fine case of concussion! And I, imbecile that I am, sent her just this afternoon a bunch of rose-colored tulips from our garden with a poem in three stanzas entitled “Pan’s May Devotions.” Suppose she read it aloud to this profiteer! I can see the two doubled up with laughter.
“What’s the matter with you?” Riesenfeld roars. “Are you sick?”
“Hot!” I roar back and feel sweat running down my back. I am furious; if Erna turns around she will see me perspiring and red in the face—when more than anything I should like to appear superior and cool and at my ease like a man of the world. Quickly I wipe my face with my handkerchief. Riesenfeld grims unsympathetically. Georg notices this. “You’re sweating quite a bit yourself, Riesenfeld,” he says.