I was loath to touch the composition, but how could I have no curiosity about the message there attached? Being the Two Friends champion at pick-up-sticks I had the steadiness required to slip it free. There, in a childish but not ungraceful hand, I read: Wir bauen die Ente.
Why this should make the hair stand on my neck I could not say. Was I frightened of my wife or of the maid? I rushed to my dictionary and you might consider my feelings (in this city where everyone knew everything about me, where the most innocent action created hostility and suspicion), you might imagine my racing heart, when I learned that Ente = “duck.”
Yet the dictionary was just a little thing, and I rushed off to seek a live translator who was, of course, alas, Frau Beck.
She looked up, smiling, from her ledger, and I noted, for the first time, that despite her whole presence being like a dry and wrung-out cloth, her little brown eyes were soft and rather wary. I thought, you are a widow.
“Who is Ente?”
“Sir, it is a duck of course.”
“What does it say about the duck, Frau Beck?”
She placed the small note on her counter, dipped her pen and—all the while smiling—corrected the child’s handwriting.
“Herr Brandling,” she said, “we will make your duck, of course. It will be ready in two hours.” Her misunderstanding was clear enough, but I did not wish to argue with her. So rather than further damage her opinion of me, I contracted to pay her for a duck I could not eat.
“Now you must walk, Herr Brandling. You must be healthy. You are in Germany, you must exercise. In two hours you will dine again.”
I would have interrogated her further, but the major-domo—an awful creature with a limp—chose that moment to begin an argument with the old woman who was mopping the front steps of the hotel. “Walk, Herr Brandling,” Frau Beck cried, rushing to the scene of the conflict. “You will be pleased.”
I began my stroll with no particular plan, wandering the little streets as many visitors had done before me. I had no curiosity about anything except the meaning of this note. I rather feared it was belligerent.
There were just as many clockmakers’ shops along the streets as yesterday but I had no stomach for them, and so chose streets that took me out into the countryside or to the church which I believed I could not be blamed for entering. Then of course it was Catholic so I thought it best to leave.
The backstreets were not so different from a provincial English town where the shopkeepers chalk their wares on the door posts. So it was, by luck, I recognized a stationer’s where I managed to negotiate the purchase of an envelope and a stamp (“Brief-marke”) which I understood to be of sufficient value to get a letter to my boy. In an empty beer garden, I found a single chair beneath a chestnut tree. I tore a page from my notebook and described for Percy the tiny merry-go-round. As my memory is rather good, I managed to fill both sides and then a third with a full account of all the little figures and their motions. I encouraged him to see this as a promising start. I was hopeful, I wrote, of more good news in the next letter. I was a liar, but what choice did I have? It was essential, even in my absence, that his magnetic agitation be maintained as much as possible.
I returned to the inn with no appetite and Frau Beck led me immediately to a parlour adjacent the main dining room. This was panelled in dark wood and hung about with a number of fusty tapestries depicting what were said to be “Rumanian Hunters.” The windows being rather small, the light distinctly funereal, it required candles even in the middle of this sunny spring day. It was some time before I made out the considerable figure of a man seated in the corner.
He addressed me in a deep voice, “Guten Tag.”
He looked like a soldier, a major uncomfortable in his mufti.
A waiter arrived, his head lowered in such a way that, had he been a dog, his ears would have been flattened on his head. I was by now in a panic about the duck which I attempted to cancel by ordering an omelette.
“Of course,” he said. “Immédiatement.”
“How do you enjoy Karlsruhe, Brandling?”
Brandling? The hair rose on my neck. He was a large man, with a neck as wide as the gleaming head which he kept completely bald. His brows were black and heavy and clearly kept in shape with the same mad barbering he brought to his moustache.
I thought, was it you who wrote the note? At the same time I thought, this is ridiculous.
Two waiters arrived (Immédiatement, indeed) to present me with—no omelette, no beer—but a duck which had been prepared with fruit and cinnamon and other ghastly ingredients that would more properly be found in pudding.
The stranger kept on at me, stretching his arm along the back of his banquette. He had nothing before him but a book in which he appeared to sketch. It occurred to me that, although his broad shoulders suggested a plebeian, he was a pretender to the role of artist. That is, he exhibited a sort of insolence not unlike various individuals who had dined at our table when Mr. Masini was finishing his first “portrait” of my wife.
“Your meal is agreeable,” he demanded.
I did not reply.
“You are the bloke who went to Hartmann with your plans?”
Bloke was I? Indeed. “I’m afraid I know no Hartmann.”
“Hartmann the clockmaker,” he insisted, using English as if he had been wet-nursed by a cockney. “You spoke to him about your plans. You are Mr. Brandling, I believe?”
“Am I?” I said. “Indeed.”
“You scared the pants off Hartmann.” A cigar was ignited and in the flare I saw how his jacket strained against his arms.
“Herr Hartmann is not from here,” he said, “but if he was from Karlsruhe, what would it matter? The idiots have no idea of who they are. They spend their time trying to be Prussians. They are living in a dream,” he said.
I was doing my best with the meal, that is, not very well at all.
“Do you know what I am talking about?” the ruffian demanded.
At home, I would have confidently become deaf and blind. In Karlsruhe I did not know the form.
“They are living in a dream,” he insisted.
So then, finally, I spoke to him. “I do not understand you, Sir.”
“Then,” said he, rising as he spoke, “I think it is time for me to join you.”
I was appalled to see the giant come towards me. My brother, doubtless, would have left the room. But I, Henry Brandling, sat like a great big English bunny, and permitted the “bloke” to deposit his leather book beside my meal. This ill-treated volume held, between its pages, countless numbers of other sheets, all of different sizes and colours. The whole was tied together with a leather thong.
He shouted in German at the waiter, demanding what turned out to be an ashtray. When that wish was satisfied he turned his attention to my meal. No question of consulting me. I should have pulled his nose for him but I sat like a dressmaker’s dummy and permitted him to use the handle of the butter knife to deftly, one might say surgically, separate out the elements in the sauce, and with each of these excisions he asked a question, not of me, but of the servant. Finally he ordered it removed, or at least that seemed a consequence of what he said.
“Next we will have cognac,” he announced.
I thought, perhaps he is a mayor, an ill-mannered farmer risen through the ranks. I thought, Good luck with your cognac old chap.