Three Comrades Read online

  "Everything ready, Lilly?" I asked.

  She nodded. "I've had my trousseau a long while."

  "A wonderful trousseau, she has," said Rosa. "Antimacassars even!"

  "Antimacassars? What; are they for?" I asked.

  "Oh, come, Bob!" Rosa looked at me so reproachfully that I immediately explained I knew, of course, what they were: lace covers, crocheted furniture ornaments, the symbol of little bourgeois respectability, the sacred symbol of married love and paradise lost. They were none of them pros'titutes by temperament; they were the wreckage of middle class existence. Their secret ambition was not vice, it was the marriage bed. But they would never have admitted it.

  I sat down to the piano. Rosa had been waiting for that. She was, like all these girls, fond of music. As a farewell gesture I played all her and Lilly's favourite songs. To begin with, "The Maiden's Prayer." The title was perhaps not specially suited to the place, but it was a tune with plenty of go and jingle. Then followed "The Birds' Evensong," "Alpine Glow," "When Love Dies," "Harlequin's Millions," and finally "Home, Sweet Home." Rosa was particularly fond of that one. pros'titutes are at one and the same time the hardest and the most sentimental of people. They all joined in, Kiki singing contralto.

  Lilly got up to go. She must go and collect her bridegroom. Rosa gave her a resounding kiss. "Good luck, Lilly. Don't take it too hard."

  Laden with presents, she left us. God knows, but she had quite a different look from before. The hard-bitten expression, common to all who have to do with human baseness, was wiped away; her face had softened; it actually had again something virgin.

  We were standing in the door waving to Lilly when Mimi suddenly started blubbering. She had been married herself, but her husband had died of pneumonia in the war. If he had been killed, she complained, she would have had a small pension and would not have had to go on the streets.

  Rosa patted her on the back. "Hell, Mimi, don't lose heart. Come and let's have another drop of coffee."

  The entire party turned back into the International like so many hens into a pen. But the right atmosphere was there no more. "Play us one more to finish, Bob," said Rosa. "Something to buck us up."

  Then I also took my leave. Rosa slipped some more cake into my pocket. I presented it to "Mother's" son, who was already setting up the sausage stall for the evening.

  I considered what I should do. I did not want to go to "The Bar" in any case; nor to the cinema. What about the workshop? I looked at my watch. Eight o'clock. Köster must be back by now; if he was there, Lenz would not go on jawing by the hour about the girl again. I went.

  There was light in the shed. And not in the shed alone— the whole courtyard was flooded. Köster was there by himself.

  "What is this in aid of, Otto?" said I. "Sold the Cadillac?"

  Köster laughed. "No, Gottfried's doing a bit of floodlighting, that's all."

  Both headlamps of the Cadillac were on and the car had been shoved forward so that the beam shone through the window into the yard and fell directly upon the plum tree. It looked marvellous standing there, so chalky white, the darkness like a black lake lapping about it on either side.

  "A grand show," said I. "But where is he?"

  "Gone to fetch some grub."

  "Good," said I. "I am feeling a bit low myself. It's probably only hunger."

  Köster nodded. "Eat while you can, Bob; the old soldier's first law. I went off the rails myself this afternoon —entered Karl for the race."

  "What?" said I. "On the sixth?" .

  He nodded.

  "But, damn it, Otto, all sorts of big guns will be starting in that."

  He nodded again. "In the sports-car class against Braumüller."

  I rolled up my sleeves. "To business then, Otto! Wholesale oil baths for the favourite."

  "Half a mo'," said the last of the romantics, who had just come in. "Fodder first." He unpacked supper, cheese, bread, raucherwurst as hard as a brick, and sardines. With it we drank good cool beer. We ate like a gang of hungry threshers. Then we set about Karl. For two hours we worked on him, testing and greasing everywhere. Afterwards Lenz and I sat down to a second meal. Gottfried turned on the Ford's light-as well. In the collision one of the headlamps had remained intact. From the twisted chasis it now stared up into the sky.

  Lenz turned round satisfied. "So, now bring out the bottles. We must celebrate the Feast of the Flowering Tree."

  I placed the cognac, the gin, and two glasses on the table.

  "And what about yourself?" asked Gottfried.

  "I'm not drinking."

  "What? Why not?"

  "Because I'm fed up with this damned boozing."

  Lenz contemplated me awhile. "Our child has over-schnapped himself, Otto," said he at last to Köster.

  "Then let him be, if he doesn't want to," replied Köster.

  Lenz filled his own glass. "The lad has been a bit cracked for some time."

  "There are worse things," said I.

  The moon rose big and red over the roof of the factory opposite. We sat awhile in silence.

  "Say, Gottfried," I began at last, "you consider yourself a bit of an expert in matters of love—"

  "An expert? Man, I'm an old master," Lenz modestly replied.

  "Fine. Then you'll be able to tell me: in love does one always behave like a damned fool?"

  "How do you mean, like a damned fool?"

  "Well, as if one were half-tight. Skite and blather and swindle."

  Lenz burst out laughing. "My dear baby! The whole thing is a swindle. A wonderful swindle by Mama Nature. Look at the plum tree, for instance. Making herself more beautiful than she will be afterwards. It would be just terrible if love had any truck with truth. Thank God the damned moralists can't get everything under their thumbs."

  I sat up. "You mean, without some swindle it just wouldn't go at all."

  "Absolutely not, my child."

  "A man' can make himself damned ridiculous though," said I.

  Lenz grinned. "Mark this one thing, my boy: never, never, never can a man make himself ridiculous in the eyes of a woman by anything he may do on her account. Not even by the most childish performances. Do anything you like—stand on your head, talk the most utter twaddle, swank like a peacock, sing under her window—anything at all but one thing: don't be matter-of-fact. Don't be sensible."

  I began to brighten. "What do you think, Otto?"

  Köster laughed. "He's probably right."

  He got up, went over to Karl and put up the bonnet. I .fetched the rum bottle and a glass and put them on the table. Otto switched on the car. The engine purred, deep and strong. Lenz had his feet up on the window ledge and was staring out into the night.

  I drew up beside him. "Were you ever drunk when you were with a woman?"

  "Often," he replied without stirring.

  "And?"

  He looked at me sideways. "You mean, and then mixed things up a bit? Never apologise. Never talk. Send flowers. No letter. Only flowers. They cover up everything. Even graves."

  I looked at him. He did not stir. His eyes glittered in the reflection of the white light outside. The engine was still running, softly growling, as if the earth beneath us were quaking.

  "Well, I guess I might as well have a drop," said I and opened the bottle.

  Köster switched off the engine. Then he turned to Lenz.

  "The moon's bright enough now to be able to find a glass, Gottfried. What about turning off the illuminations? The Ford anyway. The damned thing with its cockeyed searchlight reminds me of the war. It was no joke at night when those things reached out after your aeroplane."

  Lenz nodded. "And that there reminds me—well, no matter." He got up and turned off the headlights.

  The moon had risen high over the factdry roof and was now hanging like a yellow Chinese lantern in the upper branches of the plum tree. The branches swayed gently back and forth in the light breeze.

  "It's extraordinary," said Lenz after a while,
"the way men put up monuments to every conceivable sort of person —why not occasionally to the moon or to a tree in blossom?"

  I went home early. As I opened the hall door I heard music. It was the secretary's, Erna Bönig's, gramophone. A soft, clear woman's voice was singing. Then came a quiver of muted violins and strumming guitars. And again the voice, piercing sweet as if it were overflowing with a great joy. I listened to catch the words. It sounded strangely moving here in the dark corridor between Frau Bender's sewing machine and the Hasse's family trunks, the way the woman there sang so softly.

  I looked up at the stuffed boar's head over the kitchen door. I heard the housemaid rattling dishes. "How can I live without thee?" sang the voice a few steps away behind the door.

  I shrugged my shoulders and went into my room. ' Next door I heard an excited argument. A few minutes later there was a knock and Hasse came in.

  "Am I disturbing you?" he asked wearily.

  "Not at all," said I. "Will you have something to drink?"

  "I'd rather not. Just sit a bit."

  He gazed dully in front of him.

  "You're well off," said he. "You're alone—"

  "Ach, nonsense," I replied. "Always to be sitting around like this alone, that's nothing either—you take it from me."

  He sat sunken in his armchair. His eyes were glazed in the half-light that entered from the street lamp outside. The narrow, round shoulders . . .

  "I pictured life so different," said he after a while.

  "We all have," said I.

  After half an hour he went back again to make peace with his wife. I gave him some cigarettes and a half-bottle of curacao that had been standing in the cupboard from some previous occasion—unpleasant, sweet stuff, hut quite all right for him. He didn't understand such things.

  Softly, almost soundlessly, he went out, a shadow into the shadow, as if he were already extinguished. I closed the door after him again. As I did so a scrap of music floated in from the passage—violins, banjos.

  I sat by the window. Outside lay the graveyard in the blue moonlight. The coloured rockets of the electric signs climbed up over the treetops and the gravestones gleamed out of the darkness. They were quiet and unterrifying. Cars hooted close by them and the light of the headlamps wiped across their weather-worn inscriptions.

  I sat a long while and thought of all sorts of things. Among others, of how we came back from the war, like miners from a pit disaster, young and disillusioned of everything but ourselves. We had meant to wage war against the lies, the selfishness, the greed, the inertia of the heart that was the cause of all that lay behind us; we had become hard, without trust in anything but in our comrades beside us and in things—the sky, trees, the earth, bread, tobacco, that never played false to any man—and what had come of it? All collapsed, perverted and forgotten. And to those who had not forgotten was left only power-lessness, despair, indifference and schnapps. The day of great dreams for the future of mankind was past. The busy-bodies, the self-seekers triumphed. Corruption . . . Misery . . .

  You are well off, you are alone, Hasse had said. All very well—the man who is alone cannot be forsaken. But sometimes, at night, the whole artificial structure collapses, life turns into a sobbing insistent melody; out of the senseless grinding of the everlasting barrel organ, rises up a whirlwind of wild desires, cravings, melancholy, hope, without direction seeking an object. Ach, this pitiful need for a little bit of warmth—-couldn't it be two hands then and a face bowed near? Or was that too only deception, surrender, and flight? Was there nothing then, but to be alone?

  I shut the window. No, there was nothing. For anything more, there was too little solid ground under one's feet.

  But next morning I rose early and, before going to work, knocked up the proprietor of a little flowershop. I selected a bunch of roses and asked him to send them off at once. It felt a bit strange as I slowly wrote the address—Patricia Hollmann—on the card.

  Chapter V

  In his oldest clothes Köster had gone off to the income tax office. He meant to try to get our tax reduced. Lenz and I were alone in the workshop.

  "Well, Gottfried," said I, "now for the old Cadillac!"

  Our advertisement had appeared the night before. So to-day we might reckon on customers—if anybody came at all, that is. Anyway we must have the car ready.

  First we went over the varnish with polishes. It took on a wonderful shine and already looked as if it had cost another hundred marks. Then we filled up the engine with the thickest oil there is. The pistons were no longer first rate, and knocked a bit. The thick oil made up for that and the engine ran wonderfully quietly. And in the gears and the differential we put plenty of grease to make them completely silent.

  Then we drove her out. In the neighbourhood was a stretch of very bad road. We took her over it at fifty kilometres. The body rattled. We let a quarter of an atmosphere out of the tyres. That was an improvement. We let out another quarter. Now there wasn't a sound.

  We drove back, oiled the squeaking bonnet, stuck a bit of rubber in between, put hot water in the radiator so that the engine would spring to it all right, and sprayed the car underneath once again with a petrol dust remover, so that it shone there as well. Then Gottfried lifted his hands to heaven. "Now come, blessed customer! Dearest possessor of a pocketbook, come! As the bridegroom awaiteth the coming of the bride, so we wait for thee!"

  The bride kept us waiting. So we shoved the baker's puffing billy over the pit and began to take down the front axle. We worked steadily for some hours without speaking. Then I heard Jupp at the petrol pump start to whistle, "See what is coming here . . ."

  I clambered out of the pit and looked through the window. A little, undersized man was walking around the Cadillac. He looked solid and respectable.

  "Look here, Gottfried," I whispered, "do you think that's a bride?"

  "Sure," said Lenz after the first glance. "Look at the expression. Suspicious already, before anybody is there. Get busy. I'll stay here in reserve—and come afterwards, if you can't manage it. Remember the tricks."

  "Right." I went out.

  The man looked at me out of cool, black eyes.

  I introduced myself: "Lohkamp."

  "Blumenthal."

  That was Gottfried's first trick—introduce yourself. He said it created at once a more intimate atmosphere. His second trick was to hold back to start with and let the customer talk, and then hoe in later when the moment had come.

  "You have come about the Cadillac, Herr Blumenthal?" I asked.

  Blumenthal nodded.

  "There she is, over there," said I, and pointed.

  "I see that," replied Blumenthal.

  I gave him a quick glance. Look out, thought I, a wily customer.

  We walked across the yard. I opened the door of the car and started the engine. Then I kept quiet to give Blumenthal time to make his observations. He would be sure to find something to criticize; then I would start in.

  But Blumenthal did not examine; he did not criticize either. Like me, he said nothing also and just stood there like a blockhead. There was nothing for it, I should have to take out my knife and fork.

  I began to describe the Cadillac, slowly and systematically, as a mother her child, trying at the same time to worm out of the fellow whether he knew anything at all. If he were an expert then I must go more for the engine and the chassis; if he knew nothing, then for comfort and the knicknacks.

  But as yet he betrayed nothing. He let me talk until I felt like a balloon.

  "What would you want the car for? For the city or for travelling?" I asked at last, in the hope of contact that way. perhaps.

  "For everything," explained Blumenthal.

  "Aha. And would you drive it yourself or with a chauffeur?"

  "Depends."

  Depends. The man was no better than a parrot. He belonged to an order of Trappists, evidently.

  To liven him up I tried to get him to try something. Usually that made custom
ers more amenable. I was afraid he would go to sleep on me otherwise.

  "The hood for such a large body is remarkably light," said I. "You just try to close it. You can do it with one hand."

  But Blumenthal thought it was unnecessary. He could see it.