After Midnight by Irmgard Keun Read Free Book Online Page B

rather drunk. He ordered another round of kirsch, and insisted on all of us going on to the pub in the Old Town with the ox-bone on the wall and his name carved on it.
    Pielmann and Gerti actually did go off with Kulmbach to look at the bone. The place was open all night, he said, or in any case if he knocked in a certain way they’d always let him in.
    I’ve often noticed how pleased and proud men are at having to knock in a certain way at the doors of perfectly harmless pubs, in order to get in. I expect there are some men who take to politics just for the sake of the secret signals you have to give.
    I was rather surprised, at first, to find Gerti was going with them instead of staying with me, but she was very sad, and terribly distraught, and in that sort of state a woman would rather a man she doesn’t like for company than a woman she does. A man is a man, after all.
    I didn’t go with them. I didn’t want to be as lonely as I would have been in their company. Pielmann would be comforting Gerti: Gerti always has someone to comfort her, and who have I got? Kulmbach had nothing on his mind but his bone.
    And I promised Liska to go and look for Heini, so that’s what I’ll do.
    I wish Franz were here now. He wrote me that letter. “Dear Sanna …”
    I am afraid. Fear is rising around me, like rising water, up and up, never stopping. It’s like death by drowning. I could go straight home, but what would I do there? I don’t feel sleepy. Who loves me? Whom do I love?
    I’ll go and find Heini. At night he always goes to that café in Goethe Street where they serve beer.
    There’ll soon be wallflowers out in this little square, with flowers like velvet, smelling the same way they look. God help me.
    One of dead Berta’s little shoes was lying under the table. The proprietor picked it up and fingered it, as if he were planning to keep it as a pledge.
    Everything is so sad. I can’t help thinking of Franz, and the way his baby brother died. I can’t help thinking of Aunt Adelheid, who wanted to see me in prison.
    It is nearly three years ago I left Lappesheim and came to Cologne. I arrived at the big railway station. It smelled of dust and hot sunshine. It was a summer afternoon. Therewas hurry and bustle all around me: sweating people, suitcases in motion. I hadn’t come very far, but I was arriving here to start a new life, and I was full of pleasurable apprehension. Suddenly a pair of long black arms went round me, and hard straw scratched my face. It was Aunt Adelheid, scratching my face with her hard straw hat instead of kissing me with her mouth. I felt at once we weren’t going to love each other, and I hadn’t even seen her face yet. Then I did see it. It was sharp and grey, with narrow, dark, glittering eyes. Aunt Adelheid’s voice was shrill and sharp. Everything about her pierced and cut you. I felt like crying.
    Then somebody took my hand. And didn’t say anything, just looked at me quietly and thoroughly. He was tall and thin, with a pair of patient shoulders. He had a pale, serious face, and I thought his brow looked gentle and thoughtful, though it didn’t seem particularly striking. His eyes and brow and mouth and shoulders, in fact, all looked a blur to me, smudged and running together. All I could really see clearly was the glaringly bright red silk scarf he was wearing. It looked ridiculous. What man wears a scarf like that? Then I saw the man’s arms. They hung by his sides, long and sad, like the arms of captive apes with no real reason left for climbing, so that their long arms now seem superfluous.
    The man was Aunt Adelheid’s son Franz, my cousin. I thought he was crazy. I felt like laughing.
    I didn’t laugh; I didn’t cry.
    Franz carried my case for me. His long arm got even longer, his patient shoulders more patient than ever.
    Franz works in a solicitor’s office, but he’ll never get to be head clerk. He has his strengths, but they’re not the sort thatget you anywhere