One Monday morning, after he’s stuffed himself full of courage the whole of the day before, he went to work, and the boss walked in and presented him with some trifling thing, maybe a fountain pen, or an inkwell, and the employees put flowers on his desk, because that Monday marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of his entry into the firm, and he had forgotten about it. And so now he can’t resign.
I think I am going to call him Gabriel.
Today, Sunday, Gabriel will set his gramophone on the table in front of him. And a Caruso record put together from shellac and warble will pour over Gabriel the chant and melody of an unfamiliar world where figures and steel nibs are unknown.
Canaries like to mark Sundays as well. In the first-floor window is the bird cage and the canary recites an Eichendorff ode. Or maybe it’s something by Baumbach.
On the red tablecloth rests a white crocheted doily. The children can’t be dissuaded from propping their elbows on it, and rucking it up.
I have never seen the mother except in a blue dressing gown. She is very quiet, I think she was born in slippers, and I’m sure she has a shuffling and embittered soul.
She scolds the children for rucking up the tablecloth. What does she have to have a tablecloth for, I wonder, and once I sent her a couple of drawing pins in a matchbox, with instructions for their use. But she went on chastising the children.
Today, on Sunday, though, she had cake for them. The children rucked up the tablecloth, but their mother stood in the window and took delight in the declamations of the canary. She had on a white blouse. And no trace of any slippers.
But Sunday evenings are sad. I see the tabby cat sitting on the third-floor window sill. The teacher has gone out.
Each time the clock sends a quarter hour ringing out over the copper roofs of the town, the cat stretches. I suspect that she is keeping count of the strokes, and is impatient for her mistress to come home.
Sometimes she looks down, and for want of a handkerchief, waves with her tail when she sees the teacher coming.
The teacher has gone to visit her brother, who is a retired infantry captain with hearing loss. It takes her for ever to tell him there is no news. That’s what has caused the teacher to be gone such a long time.
“I swear I’m going to sack her!” says the cat, and is terribly agitated.
Sunday evenings are thin and mealy, as if they already belonged to Monday. Gabriel is back to being a double-entry bookkeeper, and the girls iron their creased white dresses and smell of bread and butter. The world is full again.
Berliner Börsen-Courier, 3 July 1921
* See J. R.’s 1920 story “Career” in his Collected Shorter Fiction.
50. The Office
Because I am going abroad, I am required to call on various offices, many offices, grey buildings, grey-white rooms, gentlemen at desks, gentlemen behind counters, gentlemen in worn suits, with embittered faces, with moustaches and bald heads, with widening partings and spectacles, with blue pencils in their top pockets — wretched men, wretched offices. There is no more than a partition between us, but it is a whole world. I lean against desks and see red, blue, purple inkpads and hammer-headed rubber stamps, chewed-up pens, toothmarks sunk in brown pencils, old pictures, office calendars with the frayed remnants of old, torn-off days, scraps of paper in tin frames, gnawed by the tooth of time which eats a date for breakfast every morning. I pass through corridors, unreal, almost dream-like corridors, past waiting people propped on umbrellas reading newspapers. Sometimes a door opens, and I steal a look inside and see a man sitting, a desk standing, a calendar hanging, just as in the room I will shortly set foot in, even though the one carries the number twenty-four, and mine is sixty-four. A couple of flies bombard the windowpanes, hurling their little black bodies against the glass, while a third stands on the tin lid of the inkwell rubbing its nose with its frail legs. The ink in the inkwell is drying, crusts are forming round the edges, blue-black crusts, dried, prematurely wizened figures, reminders, files.
At the front desk sits a young man and at the back desk an older man. The young man has white-blond hair, which is nice and unruly, it objects to being parted, and then he has a blobby round nose and a red Cupid’s bow and a dimpled chin like a girl. There is the child in his face still, his blue eye is earnest and adorable like a boy’s playing cops and robbers. His hands have dumpy shapeless fingers, and one of them is already wearing a wedding band. His waistcoat is gently swelling over the beginnings of a pot belly, emblem of his career. His briefcase is still new, the fair hands of a young wife have stuffed it full of sandwiches, a sleepy morning tenderness still clings to his lips, and he is friendly, gentle, fair, he makes a modest joke in order to encourage me, the “pending case”, to a light-hearted rejoinder. He is the man on the other side of the barrier. The sunken wall, the partition dividing us, is shattered; with the longing of a man on a desert island he looks up at me, heart overflowing with gratitude. He is like the stationmaster who sees the express race past him every day without stopping — and I am just as exotic here, just as strange and mysterious as the train that never stops. This young official would like to detain me, he wants to know what it’s like in those countries I have visited, and where I hope to go. He wants to know about more than the countries. He is young, he longs for human conversation, he takes an interest in me, he is still unhappy at his desk, not yet chewing his pencils, he too has bold dreams. He still has the sacred faith in the impossible, he is determined to one day leave this room, to have money, to sit in express trains, to see Mt Fuji for himself. But when I come back to this office in twenty years’ time, then he will be the older gentleman at the back desk who will give me a doubtful look over the top of his bifocals, an elderly gentleman with a bald patch and the dry skin coming off it in little flakes. Fresh ink will have crusted around the edges of the inkwell, the two hundredth generation of flies will be assaulting the windows. And my friend, I fear, will be chewing pencils.
Prager Tagblatt, 20 July 1924
51. The Destruction of a Café
The café was as old as a church.
Stout pillars supported the ceiling, which seemed to disappear in the gloaming. It was flat, and covered with paintings. But because it was propped by pillars, and grey cigar smoke clouded it, you couldn’t help feeling that it was vaulted, that you had arches overhead that sheltered but also swaddled you, a roof and also a robe.
The pillars were dark brown, and a polished bark covered them, as if they had reverted to the status of trees. At eye-level they put out iron hooks, decorated by iron foliage. The tables stood in their shade. One knew the size of the pillars, where each one began and ended; but measured with that measure that has no units, but is nevertheless real and true, the pillars were endless, and whoever leaned on one was alone, as alone as in a room by himself. Someone else might be resting against the other side of the pillar. But he was a hundred years away. The din of conversation was muffled by the coats that hung on the hooks, trapping indiscretions in their folds. It was possible to sit in the middle of the café, and yet remain as concealed as in the middle of a forest.
To enter the café, you had to push aside a heavy green velvet curtain with leather trim. It was heavier and fitted more snugly than a door of iron or oak. It was draped around the shoulders of the entry, like a winter cloak. You batted it aside, walked in, and straightaway it closed behind you. You were in the warm — whether it was autumn or February or even Christmas.