Little Man, What Now? (19 page)

And that’s how it began. Lammchen needed to go on walks in her condition. And now they had something to go and see: dressing-tables. They went on long voyages of discovery, there were some districts and side streets which were one mass of carpenters’ shops and little furniture factories. There they stopped and said, ‘Take a look at that one!’

‘All that grain in the wood looks fussy to me.’

‘D’you think so?’

In the end they acquired favourites, the chief of which stood in the shop of a certain Himmlisch in Frankfurter Allee. The speciality of the Himmlisch establishment was bedrooms. They seemed to attach some importance to this fact, since their sign read: ‘Himmlisch for Beds. Modern bedroom-suites a speciality.’

There had been a bedroom-suite in their window for weeks, not very expensive, seven hundred and ninety-five marks inclusive of mattresses and genuine marble tops. But, in line with the current fashion for chilly night-time excursions, without chamber-pot cupboards. One of the pieces was a dressing-table in Caucasian walnut …

They always stood for a long time looking at it. It was a good hour-and-a-half’s walk away. Lammchen stood there, and finally said: ‘Ah, Sonny, if one could only buy a thing like that. I think I’d
weep for joy.’

Pinneberg thought a moment ‘The people who could buy it,’ he remarked wisely, ‘wouldn’t weep for joy. But it would be great to be able to.’

‘It would,’ confirmed Lammchen, ‘It would be wonderful.’

And then they turned for home. They always walked arm in arm, with his arm through hers, so that he could feel her breast, now growing fuller. It gave him a pleasant sense of home in these vast streets thronged with strangers. But it was in the course of walking home this way that Pinneberg had come on the idea of surprising Lammchen. They had to begin buying furniture some day, and when they had one piece the rest would surely follow. That was the reason why he had got off at four today. Today was the thirty-first of October, pay day. He hadn’t let out a word of it to Lammchen; he was simply going to have it sent and then behave as though he knew nothing about it.

But a hundred and seventy marks! It was out of the question. Quite simply out of the question.

However, you don’t say goodbye to your dreams as easily as that. Pinneberg didn’t feel up to just going along home with his hundred and seventy marks. He would have to be cheerful when he arrived. Lammchen had been reckoning on two hundred and fifty. He started in the direction of Frankfurter Allee. To say goodbye. And then never go to the window again. There was no point in it. For people like them a dressing-table was out of the question, all they might be able to stretch to was a pair of iron bedsteads.

He arrived at the shop window with the bedroom-suite in it, and there, to one side, stood the dressing-table. It had a rectangular mirror with a delicate greenish hue in a brown frame. The dressing-table itself was rectangular, too, with a set of drawers to right and left. It was really rather mysterious how one could fall in love with a thing like that when there were thousands of others like it or almost like it, but this was the one, the only one.

Pinneberg looked at it, at length. He stepped back, then forward; it was just as beautiful either way. The mirror was a good one too. It would be lovely to see Lammchen sitting in front of it in the morning in her red and white bathrobe … It would have been lovely.

Pinneberg sighed sorrowfully and turned away. Nothing. Nothing. Not for you and people like you. Other people manage it, goodness knows how, but not you. Go home, little man, and fritter away your money on whatever you like—and can afford—but not on things like that.

At the next street corner he looked back once more. Himmlisch’s shop-window gleamed as heavenly as its name. He could still make out the dressing-table.

He did a sudden about-turn. Without hesitation, without giving the piece of furniture another glance, he quick-marched up to the shop door …

And while he was doing it, a great deal went through his head.

‘What does it matter in the end?’

And: ‘You’ve got to start somewhere. Why should we always have nothing?’

Then quite determinedly: ‘I want it and I’m going to do it. Just once in my life I want to have been like that, and hang the consequences.’ A little bit further down the line, and that is the mood in which a man steals, fights and kills. And it was in this mood that Pinneberg bought a dressing-table. To him it was all the same.

‘May I help you, sir?’ asked the elderly salesman, a dark man with a few streaks of hair plastered over his skull like anchovies on a plate.

‘You’ve got a bedroom-suite in the window,’ barked Pinneberg, seething with anger. He sounded very aggressive. ‘Caucasian walnut.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said the salesman. ‘Seven hundred and ninety-five. A bargain. The last of a series. We can’t produce them at that
price any more. If we were to do it again, it would cost at least eleven hundred.’

‘How come?’ asked Pinneberg scornfully. ‘Wages keep on falling.’

‘Taxes, sir. And import duty. Can you imagine the import duty you pay on Caucasian walnut! It’s tripled in the last three months.’

‘For something that’s so cheap, it’s been standing a long time in your shop window.’

‘Money,’ said the salesman. ‘Who’s got money today, sir?’ He laughed mournfully. ‘I haven’t.’

‘Nor have I,’ said Pinneberg brutally. ‘And I don’t want to buy the bedroom-suite. I’ll never get so much money together in my whole life. I want to buy the dressing-table.’

‘A dressing-table? If you’d just like to step upstairs. The single items of furniture are on the first floor.’

‘That one!’ shouted Pinneberg, pointing indignantly. ‘I want to buy that dressing-table.’

‘The one in the set? Out of the bedroom-suite?’ said the salesman, as the penny gradually began to drop. ‘I’m very sorry, sir, but we can’t sell off individual items out of the set. Because then we couldn’t sell the suite. But we do have some very nice dressing-tables.’

Pinneberg made as if to leave.

‘Almost exactly the same,’ said the salesman hurriedly. ‘If you’d like to take a look at them, just a look.’

Pinneberg snorted. He glanced around. ‘This is a furniture factory, isn’t it?’

‘Yes?’ said the salesman nervously.

‘So,’ said Pinneberg. ‘If you’ve got a factory, why don’t you make another dressing-table like it? I want that one, understand. So make a copy. Or don’t sell it to me, I don’t mind. There are lots of other shops where you get decent service.’

And while Pinneberg was saying all that, and getting more
and more worked up, he was inwardly aware of being a swine, that he was behaving as badly as his worst customers. That he was treating the confused and anxious old gentleman atrociously. But he could not help it, he was in a rage against the world, and everyone in it. It was the elderly salesman’s misfortune that he was the only one available on whom Pinneberg could vent his wrath.

‘One moment please,’ stammered the old man. ‘I’ll ask the manager.’

He vanished and Pinneberg stared after him with sorrow and scorn. ‘Why am I being like this?’ he thought. ‘I ought to have brought Lammchen along, Lammchen is never like this.’

‘Why is she never like that?’ he reflected. ‘Things aren’t easy for her either.’

The salesman came back. ‘You can have the dressing-table,’ he said briefly. His tone had changed considerably. ‘The price will be a hundred and twenty-five marks.’

Pinneberg thought: ‘A hundred and twenty-five! That’s crazy. These fellows here are having me on. The whole suite only costs seven hundred and ninety-five.’

‘I think that’s too expensive,’ he said.

‘It’s not expensive at all,’ said the salesman. ‘A first-class crystal mirror like that costs fifty marks on its own.’

‘And what would it be if I paid by instalments …?’

Now money had reared its head, the wind had all gone out of Pinneberg’s sails. He had become very small and the salesman very large.

‘Instalments are not possible in this case,’ said the salesman in a superior tone, looking Pinneberg up and down. ‘It was only done as a favour, in the expectation that later on you would patronise …’

‘I can’t go back now,’ thought Pinneberg desperately. ‘I came on so important. If I hadn’t done, I could go back. It’s crazy. What will Lammchen say?’

And aloud he said. ‘Right, I’ll take the dressing-table. But you
must send it to my house today.’

‘Today? It’s too late to do that. The staff are off in quarter of an hour.’

‘I can still go back,’ said something inside Pinneberg’s head. ‘I could go back, if I hadn’t made such a fuss.’

‘It has to be today,’ he persisted. ‘It’s a present. Any later and it would be pointless.’

And as he said it he reflected that Heilbutt was coming, and it would be fine for his friend to see what a present he was giving his wife.

‘Just a moment, please,’ said the salesman and vanished again.

‘The best that could happen,’ thought Pinneberg, ‘would be if he said that it was too late to do it today, and then I could say I was sorry but it would be no good. I must be ready to leave the shop quickly.’ And he positioned himself near the door.

‘The manager says he will lend you a handcart and the apprentice. You will have to give the apprentice a tip because it’s after working hours.’

‘Well …’ said Pinneberg, hesitating.

‘It’s not heavy,’ said the salesman comfortingly. ‘If you push a bit from behind, the apprentice will be able to pull it. And be careful with the mirror. We’ll wrap it in a cloth …’

‘All right, done,’ said Pinneberg. ‘A hundred and twenty-five marks.’

LAMMCHEN HAS A VISITOR AND LOOKS AT HERSELF IN THE MIRROR. NO ONE MENTIONS MONEY ALL EVENING

Lammchen was sitting in the regal bedroom darning socks. Darning is by its nature one of the most depressing occupations in the world: nothing brings home to women so clearly the crazy futility
of what they do. Because once a thing really goes into holes, there’s no point anyway, you have to keep on doing it wash after wash. Most women get unhappy while darning.

But Lammchen was not unhappy. Lammchen scarcely noticed what her hands were up to. Lammchen was doing some calculations. He’ll bring in two hundred and fifty, they’ll give fifty to Mama, though actually that was much too much, considering she did five or six hours’ work for her every day. A hundred and thirty has to do for everything else, that leaves sixty …

Lammchen leaned back slightly for a moment, to rest the small of her back. She got a lot of pain there now … She’d seen layettes in the Kadewe department store for sixty marks, and for eighty, and for a hundred. That was crazy, of course. She was going to make a lot of it herself. It was a pity that there was no sewing-machine in the house, but sewing-machines weren’t in Mrs Mia Pinneberg’s line.

She wanted to discuss all that with Pinneberg straight away this evening and go shopping tomorrow; she wouldn’t be happy till she had everything laid in. She knew very well he had some other plans, she had noticed he wanted to buy something; he was thinking about her shabby winter coat no doubt, but there was time for that, time for everything but the layette, which had to be there, ready.

Mrs Emma Pinneberg let fall her young man’s woollen sock and listened. Then she felt her belly, very gently. She laid a finger here, and there. There it was! The Shrimp had just moved, there. It was the fifth time she had felt him move in the last few days. Lammchen glanced scornfully in the direction of
The Sacred Miracles of Motherhood
lying on a nearby table. ‘Rubbish,’ she said aloud, and meant it. She was thinking of a particular passage, a mixture of erudition and sentiment, which went: ‘Exactly half way through pregnancy the baby first begins to move in the womb. The expectant mother thrills to the delicate tapping of her unborn
child with never-ceasing wonder.’

‘Rubbish,’ thought Lammchen again. ‘Delicate tapping. When it first happened I thought I was being pinched by something that couldn’t get out. Delicate tapping, what rubbish!’ But she smiled all the same. It didn’t matter what it felt like, it was still wonderful, it was beautiful. It showed the Shrimp was really there, and now she must make him feel that he was expected, and expected with joy, that everything was ready for him …

Lammchen started to darn again.

The door opened a crack, and Mrs Marie Pinneberg’s somewhat tousled head looked in. ‘Hans not there yet?’ she asked, for the fifth or sixth time.

‘No, not yet,’ said Lammchen shortly. This was getting on her nerves.

‘It’s nearly half past seven. He wouldn’t have …?’

‘Wouldn’t have what?’ asked Lammchen sharply.

But the older woman had her wits about her. ‘I wouldn’t dream of saying, my dear daughter-in-law!’ she replied with a laugh. ‘You of course have got a model husband, who never stays out on pay-night for a drink.’

‘Sonny never has a drink,’ declared Lammchen.

‘Exactly. Just as I said. Your husband wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

‘He wouldn’t.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘No.’

The head withdrew. Lammchen was alone again.

‘The old cow,’ she thought angrily. ‘She’s always after us, stirring things up. And all she’s worried about is her rent really. Well, if she’s reckoning on a hundred …’

Lammchen started to darn once more.

The bell rang outside. ‘Sonny,’ thought Lammchen. ‘Has he forgotten his key? No, it’ll be someone for Mother, she can answer
it herself.’

But she didn’t go, and there was another ring. With a sigh, Lammchen went into the hall. Her mother-in-law’s face peered round the door of the Berlin-style living-room, already half in her war-paint. ‘If it’s someone for me, Emma, show them into the little room. I’ll be ready in a moment.’

‘Of course it’s someone for you, Mama,’ said Lammchen. The head disappeared, and Lammchen opened the door just as the bell rang for the third time. There stood a dark man in a light-grey overcoat, with his hat in his hand, smiling. ‘Mrs Pinneberg?’ he inquired.

‘Just coming,’ said Lammchen. ‘Why don’t you take off your coat in the meantime. And step into this room here.’