Little Man, What Now? (2 page)

‘Sonny!’ she said. ‘Sonny …’

‘It’s true,’ said the doctor. ‘No doubt about it. And believe me, Mr Pinneberg, a child is good for a marriage.’

‘Doctor,’ said Pinneberg and his lip trembled. ‘I earn one hundred and eighty marks a month! Please, Doctor!’

A weary look came over Dr Sesame’s face. He knew what was coming next. He heard it thirty times a day.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Please don’t even ask me. It’s out of the question. You are both in good health. And your income is not at all bad. Not—at all—bad.’

‘Doctor!’ cried Pinneberg feverishly.

Lammchen stood behind him and stroked his hair. ‘Leave it, Sonny, leave it! It’ll be all right.’

‘But it’s absolutely impossible!’ exclaimed Pinneberg—and then stopped. The nurse had come in.

‘You’re wanted on the phone, Doctor.’

‘You wait and see,’ said the doctor. ‘You’ll be glad in the end. And as soon as the baby arrives, you come straight to me and we’ll see about prevention then. Don’t think it’s safe just because she’s feeding the baby. So, there we are … Courage, young lady.’

He shook Lammchen by the hand.

‘I’d like to …’ said Pinneberg, taking out his wallet.

‘Ah yes,’ said the doctor, half-way through the door, and looked once more at the two of them, appraisingly. ‘Well, fifteen marks, sister.’ ‘Fifteen …’ said Pinneberg slowly, and looked towards the door. But Doctor Sesame had already gone. Pinneberg took out a twenty-mark note with a great deal of fuss and watched frowning as the sister wrote out the receipt and handed it to him.

His forehead cleared a little. ‘I’ll get that back from the health insurance, won’t I?’

The nurse looked at him, then at Lammchen. ‘Confirmation of pregnancy?’ She didn’t even wait for the answer. ‘No, you won’t. None of the insurance schemes pay out for that.’

‘Come on, Lammchen,’ he said.

They went slowly down the stairs. Lammchen stopped at a landing, and taking one of his hands between her own, said: ‘Don’t be so sad. Please don’t. It’ll be all right.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said he, deep in thought.

They went a little way along Rothenbaumstrasse, then turned off into Mainzerstrasse. There were tall buildings there and a great many people. Lines of cars drove past. The evening papers were out. Nobody paid any attention to the two of them.

“ ‘Not a bad income”, he said, and then took fifteen marks out of my hundred and eighty. Daylight robbery!’ ‘I’ll manage,’ said Lammchen, ‘I’ll manage somehow.’ ‘Dear Lammchen!’ said he.

They turned out of Mainzerstrasse into the Krumperweg, and there it was suddenly quiet.

Lammchen said: ‘That explains a lot of things.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing really, just that I’ve felt sick every morning. And things were funny, generally …’

‘But you must have noticed something.’

‘I just kept on thinking, oh, it will come on soon. It’s not the first thing you suspect, is it?’

‘Perhaps he’s made a mistake!’

‘No. I don’t think so. It all fits.’

‘But it could be a mistake.’

‘No, I believe …’

‘Listen to me, will you! It is possible.’

‘Everything’s possible.’

‘Perhaps your period will start tomorrow. If it does, I’m going to write that man such a letter!’ He relapsed into thought. He was composing the letter.

After the Krumperweg came Hebbelstrasse with its beautiful elm trees. The two of them walked deep in thought through the summer afternoon.

‘I shall ask for my fifteen marks back as well,’ said Pinneberg suddenly.

Lammchen did not reply. She was concentrating on placing one foot in front of the other and taking great care where she walked. Everything was so different now.

‘Where are we going?’ he suddenly inquired.

‘I’ve got to get home,’ said Lammchen. ‘I told mother I’d be back.’

‘That’s all I need!’ he said.

‘Oh don’t start scolding me, Sonny,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll make sure I can get down again at half-past eight. What train are you catching?’

‘The half-past nine.’

‘Then I’ll go with you to the station.’

‘And that’s it, is it?’ he said. ‘That’s all for another two weeks.
What a life!’

Lütjenstrasse was a real working-class street, always teeming with children, impossible to say goodbye properly there.

‘Don’t take it so hard, Sonny,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘I’ll manage.’

‘All right,’ he said, and forced a smile. ‘You’re the ace of trumps, Lammchen. You win every trick.’

‘And at half-past eight I’ll be down again. Promise.’

‘Can’t you kiss me now?’

‘No, I can’t, honestly. It would be all over the street in a minute. Cheer up! Do cheer up!’

‘Well, all right then, Lammchen,’ he said. ‘Don’t you take it too hard either. It will all work out somehow.’

‘Of course it will,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to go all soft just like that, am I? Well, bye-bye for now.’

She whisked up the dark stairway, her vanity-case knocking against the banisters, tap, tap, tap.

Pinneberg stared after the gleaming legs. How many thousand times had Lammchen vanished out of his reach up those damned stairs.

‘Lammchen!’ he bellowed. ‘Lammchen!’

‘Yes?’ she inquired from above, leaning over the banisters. ‘Wait a moment!’ he called. He stormed up the stairs, stood breathless before her and gripped her by the shoulders. ‘Lammchen!’ he said, panting from excitement and lack of air. ‘Emma Morschel! Why don’t we get married?’

MOTHER MORSCHEL—MR MORSCHEL—KARL
MORSCHEL: PINNEBERG GETS DRAGGED INTO
MORSCHELLAND

Lammchen Morschel said nothing. She disengaged herself and
sank gently onto a stair. All the strength had suddenly gone out of her legs. She sat and looked up at her young man. ‘Oh God!’ she said, ‘Sonny, would you really do that?’

Her eyes lit up. She had dark blue eyes with a green tinge. And now they were fairly overflowing with light.

As if all the Christmas trees of her life were glowing inside her, thought Pinneberg, so moved that he felt embarrassed.

‘Right you are then, Lammchen,’ he said. ‘Let’s get married. As soon as possible, eh?’

‘You don’t have to, Sonny. I can manage. But you’re right—it’d be better for our Shrimp to have a father.’

“ ‘Our Shrimp”,’ said Johannes Pinneberg, ‘of course, our Shrimp.’

He was quiet for a moment. He was struggling with himself. Should he tell her that his proposal had had nothing whatever to do with the Shrimp and everything to do with the fact that it was very unfair to have to wait three hours out on the street for his girl on a summer evening? But he didn’t tell her. Instead, he pleaded: ‘Do get up, please, Lammchen. The stairs are bound to be all dirty. Your best white skirt …’

‘Who cares? What do we care about any old skirts! I’m so happy. Johannes! Sonny!’ Now she was well and truly on her feet, and threw her arms around his neck again. And the house was good to them: out of the twenty sets of tenants who went in and out by these stairs not one person came by. Despite the fact that it was the early evening rush hour when the breadwinners were coming home and the housewives were running out for some forgotten ingredient for their evening meal. No one came by.

Then Pinneberg broke free and said: ‘Surely we can be doing this upstairs now we’re engaged. Let’s go up.’

Lammchen asked dubiously: ‘D’you want to come with me straight away? Wouldn’t it be better for me to prepare Father and Mother first? They don’t know anything about you.’

‘Best to get it over and done with,’ declared Pinneberg, still quite determined not to go onto the street. ‘Anyhow, they’re bound to be pleased, aren’t they?’

‘Maybe,’ said she, thoughtfully. ‘Mother will be. Very. But father, well, you know, he really likes getting a rise out of people, but he doesn’t mean it. You mustn’t take offence.’

‘I won’t,’ said Pinneberg.

Lammchen opened the door onto a little hall. A voice rang out from behind another door which was slightly ajar: ‘Emma! Come here! This minute!’

‘Just a moment, Mother,’ called Emma Morschel. ‘I’m just taking off my shoes.’

She took Pinneberg by the hand and led him on tiptoe into a little room with two beds in it which looked out into the yard.

‘Put your things down there. Yes, that’s my bed. That’s where I sleep. Mother sleeps in the other bed. Father and Karl sleep across there, in the big bedroom. Now come with me. Wait a minute, your hair!’ She quickly ran a comb through the tangles.

Both their hearts were beating hard. She took him by the hand, they crossed the hall and pushed open the kitchen door. A round-shouldered woman stood bent over the stove, frying something in a pan. Pinneberg saw a brown dress and a big blue apron.

The woman did not look up. ‘Emma, run down into the cellar now and fetch me some briquettes. I can ask Karl till the cows come home …’

‘Mother,’ said Emma, ‘This is my friend Johannes Pinneberg from Ducherow. We want to get married.’

The woman at the stove looked up. She had a brown face with a strong mouth, a sharp, dangerous mouth, a face with bright sharp eyes and thousands of wrinkles. An old working woman.

The woman shot a sharp, angry glance at Pinneberg. Then she turned back to her potato-cakes.

‘Silly young fool,’ she said. ‘So now you’re bringing your blokes
home, are you! Go and fetch me some coal. The fire’s nearly out.’

‘Mother,’ said Lammchen, trying to laugh, ‘he really does want to marry me.’

‘Get the coal, will you, girl!’ shouted the woman, working away with her fork.

‘Mother! …’

The woman looked up. She said slowly, ‘Haven’t you gone yet? Do you want a slap on the face?’

Lammchen gave Pinneberg’s hand a fleeting squeeze. Then she took up a basket and shouted, as cheerfully as she could ‘Back in a moment.’ Then the hall door slammed.

Pinneberg stood, abandoned, in the kitchen. He looked cautiously towards Mrs Morschel as if the very act of looking at her might irritate her, then across towards the window. There was nothing to be seen but a blue summer sky and a few chimneys.

Mrs Morschel pushed the pan aside and fiddled with the stove rings. There was a lot of clanging and clanking. She prodded the fire with the poker, muttering to herself.

‘Excuse me …?’ asked Pinneberg politely.

These were the first words he spoke at the Morschels. He shouldn’t have said anything, for the woman descended on him like a vulture. In one hand she held the poker, in the other the fork she had been turning the potato-cakes with, but that wasn’t the worst, despite the way she was brandishing them. Her face was worse, with all the wrinkles twitching and leaping; worse still were her cruel and angry eyes.

‘If you bring shame on my girl!’ she cried, beside herself with rage.

Pinneberg took a step back. ‘But I do want to marry Emma, Mrs Morschel,’ he said nervously.

‘You think I don’t know what’s up,’ pursued the woman undeterred. ‘I’ve stood here for two weeks and waited. I’ve thought: she’s going to tell me something. I’ve thought: soon she’s going
to bring me the fellow. I’ve been sitting here waiting.’ She drew breath. ‘She’s a good girl. You man, you, my Emma’s not some piece of dirt for you to play with. She’s always been cheerful. She’s never said a cross word to me—Do you mean to bring shame on her?’

‘No, no,’ whispered Pinneberg nervously.

‘Oh yes, you do,’ shrieked Mrs Pinneberg. ‘You do. For two weeks I’ve been standing here and waiting for her sanitary towels to put in the wash, and nothing. How did you do it?’ Pinneberg had no reply.

‘We’re young people,’ he said softly.

She was still angry: ‘You … what sort of a person are you to get my girl to do that!’ Then she began muttering to herself again: ‘Pigs, all you men are pigs. Ugh.’

‘We’ll be married in as short a time as it takes to get the papers,’ explained Pinneberg.

Frau Morschel had gone back to the stove. The fat was spitting. ‘What are you anyway? Can you afford to marry?’

‘I’m a book-keeper. In a grain merchants.’

‘So you work in an office?’

‘Yes’

‘I’d have preferred a man from the shop floor. What do you earn then?’

‘A hundred and eighty marks.’

‘After deductions?’

‘Before.’

‘That’s all right,’ said the woman. ‘It’s not too much. My daughter should stay the down-to-earth girl she is.’ And then, flaring up: ‘And don’t think we’ve anything to give her. We’re working-class people and we don’t do that kind of thing. She’s only got the bits of linen she’s bought herself.’

‘It’s not necessary,’ said Pinneberg.

Suddenly the woman flared up again: ‘You haven’t anything
either, have you? You don’t look the thrifty kind. No one who goes around in a suit like that has money left over.’

Lammchen’s arrival with the coal spared Pinneberg the necessity of confessing that Mrs Morschel had about hit the mark with her comment. Lammchen was in the best of moods. ‘Has she eaten you alive, you poor boy?’ she asked. ‘Mother’s a real tea-kettle, always boiling over.’

‘Don’t cheek me, you young scallywag,’ scolded the old lady. ‘Or you’ll get that slap after all. Go into the bedroom and have a kiss and cuddle. I want to talk to father alone first.’

‘Well, have you asked my fiancé whether he likes potato-cakes? Today’s our engagement day.’

‘Get along with you!’ said Frau Morschel. ‘And don’t lock the door. I want to be able to keep an eye on the pair of you and see you’re not getting up to anything.’

They sat facing each other across the table on the little white chairs.

‘Mother’s just an ordinary working woman,’ said Lammchen. ‘She has a sharp tongue but she doesn’t mean it.’

‘Oh, she meant it all right,’ said Pinneberg, grinning. ‘D’you realize your mother knows what the doctor told us today?’

‘Of course she knows. Mother always knows everything. I believe she liked you.’

‘Oh, come on! It didn’t sound like it.’

‘Mother’s like that. She’s always telling people off. I don’t notice it any more.’

They were silent for a moment, sitting opposite each other like good children, their hands outstretched on the little table.

‘We’ll have to buy rings,’ reflected Pinneberg.