After Midnight by Irmgard Keun Read Free Book Online Page A

her husband she’s had about enough of this and she’d like to go home. Berta is still standing on the chair. She begins reciting the poem all over again.
    A little German maid you see .
    A German mother I shall be ,
    My Führer, and I bring to thee
    The fairest flowers of …
    But suddenly the big white bunch of lilac is lying on the table. Glasses fall over; the lilac is floating in a puddle of schnapps and beer. Berta is lying on the lilac as if it were a bed, her face buried in the damp and faded flowers. Everyone has jumped up, beer is dripping off the table, some people are mopping their wet suits. “Now, now, now!” says Herr Silias. “Bedtime for you!” cries Frau Silias. A waiter comes running up with a dishcloth and turns little Berta over. Her face is a bluish white, her hands are clenched into rigid little fists.
    Frau Silias suddenly screams, loud and long.
    The proprietor comes over.
    The SS men and the rest of us stand there in silence, our feet in the muddy puddles of liquor.
    There is a dark forest of people around us, silent, rustling. A man in a hurry forces his way through the forest of people. “The waiter called me,” he says. “I’m a doctor.”
    He raises Berta from her lilac bed. He lays her down again, shrugging his shoulders. “She’s gone,” he says, quietly. “Dead,” he says louder. Frau Silas screams and screams and screams.
    “Their bill comes to forty-seven marks,” the proprietor is saying to the waiter, right beside me. “Who do you suppose we give it to now?”

3
    I AM STANDING OUT IN THE STREET. MY HOME IS the night. Am I drunk? Am I crazy? The voices and sounds all around fall away from me like a coat. I’m freezing. The lights fade out. I am alone.
    Little Berta Silias is dead.
    We sat together in a corner of the Henninger Bar a little longer: Herr Kulmbach, Gerti, Kurt Pielmann, and myself. Gerti was pale and trembling. Kurt Pielmann quietly put a comforting arm around her. Gerti let him, and did not move. Herr Kulmbach was distraught. The whole world suddenly seemed so sad. Only a few of the customers had stayed on. Little Berta had been carried away, and Frau Silias was led out still screaming.
    Lights were switched off. The last few customers sat there in a sad, twilight gloom. Their whispered conversation sounded like the pattering of raindrops in the bar.
    He himself was not a happy man any more, Herr Kulmbach suddenly confided. He wasn’t popular in the Party because he sometimes offered criticism. He used to be one of the seven top SS men in Frankfurt. There’s a pub in the Old Town, he said, with a big bone hanging on the wall—the bone of an ox, not a horse. The landlord wouldn’t sell horseflesh, he serves nothing but the best, fresh food, you don’t have to bother about that so much with horseflesh.
    “Like to see that bone, would you?” Kulmbach asked us, his voice sad, full of entreaty. “We seven Frankfurt SS men carved our names on it. My name’s there too. You can see it clear as anything. Hellmuth, that’s my first name. I don’t have a say in anything now, I don’t get promotion, I won’t be getting promotion either. Folk get promotion that haven’t got half my campaigning experience behind them, but they’ve got plenty of money, or their parents have plenty of money. And now they can go over my head. It was a different story when we were campaigning. Now you sometimes don’t want to go on. What’s the point of anything any more? Oh, the tales I could tell you …”
    They were playing the National Anthem on the radio, so it must be midnight. Herr Kulmbach got to his feet, raising his hand. Other people suddenly stood up here and there in the bar, pale hands raised in the dim light. Next came the Horst Wessel Song, about the brown battalions …
    “Mind you, ’course the Führer doesn’t know the kind of thing that goes on,” said Herr Kulmbach, looking as if he might weep, which would not have surprised me, for he was really