After Midnight by Irmgard Keun

Author:Irmgard Keun
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781935554714
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2011-05-23T21:00:00+00:00

I am sleeping wide awake. My thoughts are dreams, my dreams are thoughts. I was supposed to be talking to Heini about Liska, but I can’t do that in front of all these people. Heini’s arm is around my shoulders; he doesn’t even realize it. How Liska would envy me. He never speaks to her as informally as he was speaking to me just now.

Cigarette ash is always falling on Heini’s suit, and then he looks all grey and dismally snowed under. When Liska is around she sometimes brushes the ash off his clothes. And sometimes she says, “Do you mind if I pick that thread off your collar?” with a kind of embarrassed laugh, blushing. But there isn’t any thread on Heini’s collar; she just wanted to touch him.

Liska has never got any farther with Heini than the removal of threads. And now she is as if she had broken into a hundred thousand pieces, she is flying in the air like motes of dust. She keeps putting herself together again in a different way, like some intricate mosaic which she thinks might appeal to Heini. This sort of thing is a great strain on a woman. And how is anyone to know what Heini really does like, seeing nothing seems to please him? Liska would do best to stay as she is. But what is a person, really? You never think you’re good enough for the person you’re in love with, anyway.

Maybe Heini happens to say, “They’re terrible, those showy big women with their ballooning breasts and magnificent Teutonic hips. I see a woman like that with a small husband and I can’t help thinking of a cow with a flea hopping about on it.” The moment Liska hears that she shrinks, even her bosom gets smaller.

Heini may say, “I can’t stand that obtrusive poster-like style of health, like an advertisement screeching out the virtues of buttermilk and apple syrup.” He doesn’t say it to Liska. He isn’t thinking of Liska at all when he says such things. But Liska instantly turns pale, powders her face till she’s even paler, thinks her back and her stomach hurt, and looks sick and tired.

Or Heini may say the only voices he likes are the clear, ingenuous kind, and Liska immediately starts talking in a funny, clear voice, opening her eyes with wide, child-like excitement, as if she were taking her First Communion.

A few days later, Heini says he feels worse hearing shrill, screeching female voices than having to eat stinking meat, a shrill female voice can poison his entire system. Shrill voices are corrupt, slovenly, uncultivated, says Heini. The voices of tenement dwellers. “They’re too lazy to fetch their kids in off the street at mealtimes, those women, so they yell down at them from the fourth floor. And what sort of voice is a poor female throat supposed to produce, then? I’ll tell you: a woman’s voice should never be raised louder than is necessary for the person sitting opposite to hear her.

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