Going to the Dogs by Erich Kastner

Author:Erich Kastner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-687-0
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

When he reached the flat in the evening, his legs were unsteady with the long hours of tramping. He wanted to go straight to Cornelia and tell her what had happened. The very thought of the coming scene stirred him deeply. Or perhaps he was merely hungry.

Frau Hohlfeld, the landlady, frustrated his intention. She was standing in the corridor, and whispered with unnecessary secrecy — but such was her habit — that Labude was there. Labude was sitting in Fabian’s room. He evidently had a bad head. He had come to apologize because he had left the club on the previous night without taking leave of his friend. Actually his reason for coming was quite a different one. He wanted to know what Fabian thought of his affair with Selow.

Labude was a moral man, and it had always been his ambition to write a clean record of his career without notes and without errors. As a child he had never scribbled on blotting-paper. His sense of morality resulted from his love of order. The disillusionment he had suffered in Hamburg had upset the organization of his private life and thus disturbed his morals. His spiritual timetable was imperilled. His character had lost its handrail. Now he, who was useless and unhappy without an aim in life, came to Fabian, the expert in aimlessness. He hoped to learn from him how to experience unrest without becoming restless.

‘You are looking bad,’ said Fabian.

‘I never closed my eyes all night,’ confessed his friend. ‘This Selow woman is both melancholy and vulgar in the same breath. She can sit on a sofa for hours, mumbling indecencies as though she were repeating a litany. It’s more than I can listen to. She drinks alcohol in such quantities that it makes you tight to look at her. Then she remembers she’s alone in the flat with a man, and makes me wish I’d taken out an insurance policy. And yet I’m sure her feelings are not those of a normal woman. At the same time, I don’t think she’s a lesbian. Curious though it sounds, I think she’s a homosexual.’

Fabian let his friend go on talking. Nothing seemed to surprise him and therefore Labude grew calm. ‘Tomorrow I’m going to Frankfurt for two days,’ he told him, before he left. ‘Rassow is coming too. We want to form an active group there. Meanwhile the girl can stay in my number-two flat. She’s had a hell of a time in the last few months. She can have a good sleep. Good-bye, Jacob.’ Then he went.

Fabian entered Cornelia’s room. What would she say when she learned he had lost his job? But Ruth Reiter, the sculptress, was sitting there. She looked wretched, was not at all surprised to see him, and gave him a summary of what she had already told Fräulein Battenberg: Little Kulp had been taken to the infirmary. She had suffered internal injuries, and Wilhelmy, the wooden-legged candidate for death, had been lying since the previous night in her studio, gasping for breath and absorbed in the prospect of dying.

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