I walk on. Some people are coming out of the city hospital. They are clustered around a woman whose right arm is in a sling. A smell of disinfectants comes from her. The hospital stands in the darkness like a mountain of light. Almost all the windows are bright; every room seems to be occupied. In the inflation people die fast. That’s something we have noticed too.
In Grossestrasse I go to a delicatessen store that is usually open after the official closing time. We have made a deal with the woman who owns it. She received a medium-sized headstone for her husband, and we in return have a credit of six dollars at the exchange rate of September 2. Trading has long since become the style. People trade old beds for canaries and knickknacks, jewelry for potatoes, china for sausages, furniture for bread, pianos for hams, old razor blades for vegetable parings, old furs for remade military blouses, and the possessions of the dead for food. Four weeks ago Georg had a chance to acquire an almost new tuxedo in exchange for a broken marble column and foundation. He gave it up with a heavy heart simply because he is superstitious and believes that in a dead man’s possessions something of the departed lingers for a long time. The widow explained to him that she had had the tuxedo chemically cleaned; therefore it was really completely new and one could assume that the chlorine fumes had driven the departed out of every seam. Georg was sorely tempted, for the tuxedo fitted him, but in the end he gave it up.
I press the latch of the door, but it is locked. Naturally, I think, staring hungrily at the display in the window. At last I walk wearily homeward. In the courtyard stand six small sandstone plaques, still virginal, no names engraved on them. Kurt Bach has turned them out. It is really a prostitution of his talent, being considered stonemason’s work, but at the moment we have no commissions for dying lions or war memorials in bas-relief—therefore Kurt has been turning out a supply of very small inexpensive plaques, which we can always use—especially in the fall when, as in the spring, we can count on a large number of deaths. Grippe, hunger, bad food, and lowered resistance will see to that.
The sewing machines behind Knopf’s door hum quietly. Light from the living room where the mourning clothes are being sewn shines through the glass. Old Knopf’s window is dark. Probably he is already dead. We ought to put the black obelisk on his grave, I think, like a sinister stone finger pointing from earth toward heaven. For Knopf it would be a second home, and two generations of Krolls have failed to sell the dark accuser.
I go into the office. “Come in here!” Georg shouts from his room.
I open the door and stop in amazement. Georg is sitting in his easy chair, with illustrated magazines strewn in front of him as usual. The Reading Club of the Elegant World, to which he subscribes, has just supplied him with new provender. But that is not all—he is wearing a tuxedo with a starched shirt and a white vest to boot, a perfect magazine version of the fashionable bachelor. “After all!” I say. “You disregarded the warnings of instinct and succumbed to worldly self-indulgence. The widow’s tuxedo!”
“Not at all!” Georg preens himself complacently. “What you see is evidence of woman’s superiority in the matter of inspiration. It is a different tuxedo. The widow traded hers to a tailor for this one, and so I get paid without injury to my sensibilities. Look at this—the widow’s tuxedo was lined in satin—this one has pure silk. It fits me better, too, under the arms. The price was the same in gold marks because of the inflation; the suit is more elegant. Thus, by exception, sensibility has paid out.”
I look at him. The tuxedo is good but not altogether new. I avoid injuring Georg’s feelings by pointing out that this suit in all likelihood comes from a dead man too. What, after all, doesn’t come from the dead? Our language, our customs, our knowledge, our despair—everything. During the war, especially in the last year, Georg wore so many dead men’s uniforms, sometimes still showing faded bloodstains and mended bullet holes, that his present disinclination is more than neurotic sensibility—it is rebellion and the wish for peace. For him peace means, among other things, not to have to wear dead men’s clothes.
“What are the movie actresses up to—Henny Porten, Erika Morena, and the incomparable Lia de Putti?” I ask.
“They have the same problems we do!” Georg explains. “To turn their money into commodities as fast as possible—cars, furs, tiaras, dogs, houses, stocks, and film productions—only it’s easier for them than for us.”
He glances lovingly at a picture of a Hollywood party. It is a ball of incomparable elegance. The gentlemen are wearing tuxedos like Georg’s or tails. “When are you going to get a dress suit?” I ask.
“After I’ve been to my first ball in this tuxedo. I’ll skip off to Berlin for that! For three days! Some time when the inflation is over and money is money again and not water. Meanwhile, I’m making preparations, as you see.”
“You still need patent-leather shoes,” I say, irritated to my own surprise at this self-satisfied man of the world.
Georg takes the gold twenty-mark piece out of his vest pocket, tosses it into the air, catches it, and puts it back without a word. I watch him with gnawing envy. There he sits, with no cares to speak of, in his vest pocket a cigar that will not taste like gall, as Wernicke’s Brazilian did, across the street lives Lisa, who is infatuated with him simply because his family were businessmen when her father was a day laborer. She idolized him when he was a child wearing a white collar and a sailor cap on his curls while she traipsed about in a dress made from one of her mother’s old skirts—and this admiration has endured. Georg need do nothing more; his glory is secure. I don’t believe Lisa even knows he is bald—for her he is still the merchant prince in a sailor suit.
“You’re lucky,” I say.
“I deserve to be,” Georg replies, closing the copies of the reading circle Modernitas. Then he takes a box of sprats from the window seat and points to a half-loaf and a piece of butter. “How about a simple supper and a glance at the night life of a medium-sized city?”
They are the same sort of sprats that made my mouth water when I saw them in the store in Grossestrasse. Now I can’t bear the sight of them. “You amaze me,” I say. “Why are you eating here? Why aren’t you dining on caviar and sea food in the former Hotel Hohenzollern, now the Reichshof?”
“I love contrast,” Georg replies. “How else could I exist, a tombstone dealer in a small city with a yearning for the great world?”
He stands in full splendor at the window. Suddenly from across the street conies a husky cry of admiration. Georg turns full face, his hands in his trouser pockets to show the white vest to full advantage. Lisa dissolves, as far as that is possible for her. She draws her kimono around her, executes a kind of Arabian dance, unwraps herself, suddenly stands naked and dark, silhouetted in front of her lamp, throws the kimono on again, puts the lamp at her side and is once more like a gardenia in her greedy mouth. Georg accepts this homage like a pasha and grants me a eunuch’s share. In a single moment he has consolidated for years to come the position of the lad in the sailor suit who so impressed the tattered girl. Tuxedos are nothing new to Lisa, who is at home among the profiteers in the Red Mill; but Georg’s, of course is something entirely different. Pure gold. “You’re lucky,” I say again. “And how easy! Riesenfeld could burst a blood vessel, compose poems, and ruin his granite works without accomplishing what you have done by just being a mannequin.”