Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart by Irmgard Keun

Author:Irmgard Keun [Keun, Irmgard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

The cheerful adviser

The cheerful adviser is me. Liebezahl has offered me temporary employment in his swelling empire. He now has departments for podiatry, charms, talismans and scents, departments for magical cloth, for clairvoyance and crystallography and the interpretation of dreams, departments for color, astrology, chiromancy, and graphology.

To help both me and himself, Liebezahl had the idea of extending and supporting his enterprise by taking on a general adviser. Of course, I’m hardly ideal for such a post, but Liebezahl views me as a friend, and he likes to help his friends, inasmuch as economic responsibility will allow. He’d like to give me a run, anyway—at least give me time to buy a coat and a few other necessities. Lord be thanked, it’s summer. I don’t have to shiver and bless every warm day. I don’t like to recall my last coat-less winter. Nor do I want to be ostentatiously poor when Laura and the others come. That would be importuning and could compel the good people to charitable acts that might be their undoing. I am already making efforts to eat regular meals so as not to look too hollow-cheeked. I would quite like to earn some money as well, so that I would be able to go away somewhere. I don’t know where I would go, and my plans are rather ill-defined, but I’d like to create at least the possibility for myself to travel.

The idea of the cheerful adviser was Johanna’s. Liebezahl and I then developed it, after my own initial opposition. It seemed embarrassing to me and not something I could do.

Liebezahl let me have a small whitewashed room with a flame-red carpet and dark-stained oak furniture. At first, he had thought in terms of an Oriental bazaar in which I would be lounging on plump cushions. I would be wearing a burgundy turban and be known as “Camilo, the Font of Eternal Wisdom.” In my condition of utter destitution, given appropriate payment, I would have been prepared to stroll about with a scarab in my navel, a leopard skin over my shoulders, and a coffeepot on my head, and to be called “Epaminondas, the Sphinx of the Northern Lights,” or anything else for that matter. But in purely technical, business terms I thought the Liebezahl concept ill-conceived. Very well, then let me be a sobersides in a lab coat, playing the headshrinker. I didn’t advise that either. Finally, Liebezahl understood that the attention of wide sections of the population was most likely to be engaged by something that approached it in the familiar manner of the advice columns in magazines—something along the lines of “Ask Uncle Baldwin” or “Great-Aunt Adele Gives Advice.”

My consultancy comes with an outer office with a secretary and a heap of reference books.

I had no influence on the promotional literature Liebezahl devised for me. According to that, I am a miracle of goodness, patience, experience, neighborliness, empathy, insight, practical common sense, intelligence, and worldly wisdom. I am uncorrupted, modest, cheerful, serious, discreet, instinctive, warmhearted.

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