Little Man, What Now? (7 page)

‘That’s all very well, Lammchen, but …’

‘You can tell me everything, Sonny, everything! I’m not a gormless lamb, whatever you call me. I know I haven’t anything to reproach you with.’

‘Yes, yes, Lammchen; but you know it isn’t as simple as that. I’d like to but it sounds so silly … so …’

‘Is it something to do with a girl?’ she asked resolutely.

‘No, no. Well, actually, yes, but not in the way you think.’

‘How, then? Just tell me, Sonny. I’m dying to know.’

‘All right, Lammchen, if you must.’ But then he hesitated again. ‘Can’t I tell you tomorrow?’

‘Now! On the spot! How d’you think I’m going to get to sleep when I’m racking my brains over this? It’s something to do with a girl but not to do with a girl … It sounds so mysterious.’

‘Well then, listen. I’ve got to begin with Bergmann. You know I started off here at Bergmanns?’

‘The outfitters? Yes, I know. And I do think drapery is much nicer than potatoes and fertilizers. Fertilizers—d’you sell actual manure as well?’

‘Now Lammchen, if you’re going to make fun of me …’

‘I’m listening.’ She had settled on the window seat and was looking alternately at her young man and the moonlit landscape. She was quite happy to look at it now, and very pleasant it looked too.

‘All right; so at Bergmanns I was head salesman and got a hundred and seventy marks.’

‘A hundred and seventy marks for a head salesman!’

‘Will you be quiet! I was always the one to serve Mr Emil
Kleinholz. He used up a lot of suits. He drinks, you see. He has to, for business reasons, with the farmers and the landowners. But he can’t hold his drink. He falls down in the street and ruins his suits.’

‘Shame! What does he look like?’

‘Listen, will you! It was always me that had to serve him. Neither the boss nor the boss’s wife could get him to order anything. If I wasn’t there, they never had any luck with him, but I always sold him something. And all the time Kleinholz kept on at me about if I ever felt like a change and if I ever got fed up working for a Jewish firm, that he had a good clean Aryan business, and a good job as a book-keeper, and I’d earn more with him too … But I thought: you can talk away! I know when I’m well off, and old Bergmann is not at all bad and always fair to his employees.’

‘So why did you leave him and go to Kleinholz?’

‘It was over a complete trifle. You see, Lammchen, the custom here in Ducherow is that every morning the shops send their apprentices to get the mail from the post office. The other people in our line all do it: Sterns and Neuwirths, and Moses Minden. And the apprentices are strictly forbidden to show each other the mail. And the name of the sender has to be heavily crossed out straight away, so that our competitors don’t know who we’re buying from. But the apprentices were all at school together and they get nattering and forget the crossing out. And some of the businesses actually encourage them to nose around, Moses Minden in particular.’

‘How petty everything is here!’ said Lammchen.

‘It’s just as petty in big places. So what happened was that the Veterans’ Association wanted to order three hundred windcheaters. And we four clothing businesses were all asked for a quote. The competition were nosing around to find where we were getting our designs from. And because we didn’t trust the apprentices, I said to Bergmann: “I’ll go myself, I’ll get the post for the time being.” ’

‘So? Did they find out?’ asked Lammchen eagerly.

‘No,’ he said, highly affronted. ‘Of course not. If an apprentice so much as squinted at my parcels from ten metres away, I threatened to give him a clip round the ear.
We
got the order.’

‘Oh, come on Sonny, will you get to the point? When are we coming to the girl who isn’t what I think? All that is no reason for you leaving Bergmanns.’

‘I told you,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘It was all over a trifle. I fetched the mail myself for two weeks. And the boss’s wife thought it was a very good arrangement, because there was never anything for me to do in the shop between eight and nine anyway, and in that time, while I was away, the apprentices could sweep the store-room. And so she simply declared, “Mr Pinneberg can get the mail every day”, and I said, “No, that’s not my job. A head salesman doesn’t run round town with the parcels.” And she said, “Oh yes you will!” and I said, “No, I won’t” and in the end we both got into a temper, and I said to her: “You can’t order me around. It was Mr Bergmann who employed me.” ’

‘And what did he say?’

‘What could he say? He couldn’t put his wife in the wrong! He tried hard to persuade me, and in the end he said, very embarrassed, when I kept on saying No: “In that case, we’re going to have to go our separate ways, Mr Pinneberg!” And I’d really got going by that time, so I said, “All right, I’ll leave on the first day of next month.” And he said, “You must think it over, Mr Pinneberg.” And I would have thought it over, but by an unlucky chance Mr Kleinholz came into the shop that very day, and he noticed I was worked up, and got me to tell him all about it, and then he invited me to his house in the evening. We drank cognac and beer, and when I got home that night I had been taken on as book-keeper at a hundred and eighty marks. And knowing hardly anything about proper book-keeping at all.’

‘Oh, Sonny. And your other boss: Bergmann? What did he say?’

‘He was upset. He tried to talk me out of it. He kept saying: “Take it back, Pinneberg. Don’t rush to your doom with your eyes open. How can you think of marrying that schicksa when you can see the memme’s driving the father to drink, and the schicksa is worse than the memme?” ’

‘Did your boss really speak to you like that?’

‘Oh yes, there are still a lot of real old-fashioned Jews around here. They’re proud to be Jewish. I’ve often heard old Bergmann say: “Don’t be so nasty, you’re a Jew!” ’

‘I’m not so keen on Jews,’ said Lammchen. ‘What did he mean about the daughter?’

‘Ah, you may well ask; that was the snag. I’d lived in Ducherow for four years and never knew that Kleinholz was dead set on marrying off his daughter. The mother is bad enough, carping all day and slopping around in crochet cardigans, but the daughter: what a cow! Called Marie.’

‘And she’s the one you were meant to marry, you poor boy?’

‘I
am
meant to marry her, Lammchen! Kleinholz only employs unmarried men; there are three of us at the moment, but it’s me they’re gunning for the most.’

‘So how old’s this Marie?’

‘Dunno,’ he said shortly. ‘Yes, I do. Thirty-two. Or thirty-three. Anyway it’s neither here nor there because I’m not marrying her.’

‘Ah heavens, you poor boy,’ said Lammchen pityingly. ‘Do people really do that? Twenty-two and thirty-three?’

‘Of course they do,’ he said sourly, ‘quite frequently in fact. And if you ever want to make fun of me, just insist on me “telling you all” another time.’

‘I’m not making fun … But you must admit, Sonny, it does have its funny side. Is she a good match then?’

‘No, actually not,’ said Pinneberg. ‘The business isn’t bringing in much any more. Old Kleinholz drinks too much, and then he buys too dear and sells too cheap. The son will get the business,
and he’s only ten. Marie will only get a few thousand marks if that, so that’s why nobody’s taking the bait.’

‘So that was it,’ said Lammchen. ‘That was what you didn’t want to tell me. And that was why you got married in dead secret with the car-hood up and your hand with the ring in your trouser pocket?’

‘Yes, that’s why. Oh God! Lammchen, if they found out that I was married, the women would turn him against me in a week, and I’d be out. And what then?’

‘Then you’d go back to Bergmanns.’

‘No chance! Look …’ He swallowed, but carried on: ‘… Bergmann foresaw the Kleinholz job would go wrong and he told me so. He said: “Pinneberg, you’ll come back to me! There’s nowhere else in Ducherow for you but Bergmanns. Nowhere. You’ll come back to me, Pinneberg, and I’ll take you back. But I’ll make you beg. You can hang around the Labour Exchange for a month at least and come begging to me for work. That sort of chutzpah has to be punished!” That’s how he talked, and I can’t go back to him. I can’t and I won’t.’

‘Not even if he was right? You know yourself he was right.’

‘Lammchen,’ he said, pleadingly. ‘Please, dear Lammchen, don’t ask me to do it. Yes, of course he was right and I was a silly ass, and it wouldn’t have done me any harm to carry the parcels. If you kept on asking me, I would go to him and he would take me. And then his wife would be there, and the other salesman, Mam-lock, who’s a fool, and they’d never let me forget it, and I’d never forgive you for it.’

‘No, no, I won’t ask you to do it, and we’ll manage. But don’t you believe it will come out, however careful we are?’

‘It mustn’t come out. It must not! I did everything so secretly, and now we’re living out here, no one will ever see us together in town, and if we do ever meet on the street, we won’t greet each other.’

Lammchen was quiet for a while, but finally she spoke: ‘But we can’t stay here, Sonny, you must see that?’

‘Just try it, Lammchen,’ he begged. ‘Just for the fortnight till the first of the month. We can’t give notice before then anyhow.’

She reflected for a while before she agreed. She glanced sideways at the bridle path track but could distinguish nothing. It was too dark. Then she sighed: ‘Very well, I’ll try, Sonny. But you know yourself that it can’t go on. We could never be happy here, never.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you. And the rest will work out all right; it must. I have to keep my job, at all costs.’

‘At all costs,’ she echoed.

And then they took one more look at the country, the quiet, moonlit country, and went to bed. They didn’t have to close the curtains; there was no one to overlook them here. And as they were falling asleep, they seemed to catch the distant rippling of the Strela.

WHAT SHALL WE EAT? WHO MAY WE DANCE WITH? MUST WE GET MARRIED NOW?

On Monday morning the Pinnebergs were at the breakfast table, and Lammchen’s eyes were fairly sparkling: ‘Today’s the day it all begins!’ And with a glance at the chamber of horrors: ‘I’m going to clear up this tip.’ And, glancing into her cup: ‘How do you find the coffee? Twenty-five per cent beans!’

‘Well, since you ask …’

‘Yes, Sonny, if we want to save …’

Whereupon Pinneberg pointed out to her how he had always managed to afford ‘real’ coffee every morning. And she explained to him that two people cost more than one. And he said he had always heard that it was cheaper to be married; that it was cheaper for two to eat at home than for one to eat out.

A long debate was setting in, when he said, ‘Good grief, I’ve got to go! And fast!’

They said their goodbyes at the door. He was half-way down the stairs when she called, ‘Sonny love, wait! What on earth are we going to eat today?’

‘Don’t mind,’ echoed back the answer.

‘Tell me, please tell me! I’ve no idea …’

‘Neither have I!’ And the door below slammed.

She rushed to the window. There he was on his way already, waving first with his hand then with a handkerchief. She stayed at the window until he had passed the lamp-post and finally disappeared behind a yellowish house-wall. And now, for the first time in her twenty-three years, Lammchen had a whole morning to herself, a flat to herself, and a shopping list to make out all on her own. She went to work.

Pinneberg, however, met the town clerk Kranz on the corner of Main Street and greeted him politely. Then something occurred to him. He had waved to him with his right hand, and on his right hand was the ring. He hoped Kranz hadn’t seen it. Pinneberg took the ring off and placed it carefully in the ‘secret compartment’ of his wallet; it stuck in his throat, but what must be, must be …

Meanwhile, Emil Kleinholz, dispenser of Pinneberg’s daily bread, was up and about with his family … It was never a pleasant moment, because they were all in a bad mood straight out of bed and apt to tell each other home truths. But Monday morning was in general particularly bad, for on Sunday night Father was inclined to escapades, for which the moment of awakening brought revenge.

For Mrs Emilie Kleinholz was not a gentle woman; in so far as one can tame a man, she had tamed her Emil. And indeed on one or two Sundays of late things had passed off very well. Emilie had quite simply locked the front door on Sunday evening, treated her husband to a flagon of beer with his dinner, and later gave him the
required lift with some cognac. Something like a family evening had then ensued: the boy, who was a misery, moaned and groaned in a corner, the women sat at the table sewing (for Marie’s trousseau), and Father read a newspaper, saying intermittently: ‘Mother, let’s have another one.’

Whereupon Frau Kleinholz invariably said: ‘Father, think of the boy!’ and then poured a little more out of the bottle, or not, according to her husband’s condition.

That was how this last Sunday had gone off, with everyone then going to bed around ten.

Mrs Kleinholz woke at about eleven; it was dark in the room, and she listened. She heard her daughter Marie next door whimpering in her sleep, as she often did, the boy making the usual noises at the foot of the paternal bed; only Father’s snores were missing from the chorus.

Mrs Kleinholz groped under her pillow; the front-door key was there. Mrs Kleinholz put on the light; her husband was not there. She got up. She went all through the house. She crossed the yard (the lavatory was in the yard). Not a sign. Finally she discovered that an office window was slightly open, and she had definitely shut it. She was always very definite about that kind of thing.

Mrs Kleinholz was in a boiling, seething rage; quarter of a bottle of cognac, a flagon of beer and all for nothing! She put on a few clothes, threw her mauve quilted dressing-gown over the top, and went to seek her husband. No doubt he was in Bruhn’s pub at the corner, knocking back a drink.

Kleinholz Grain Merchants, on Market Place, was a good old-fashioned firm. Emil was the third generation to possess it. It had grown into a sound, respected concern with three hundred customers of many years’ standing—farmers and estate-owners. When Emil Kleinholz said: ‘Franz, the cotton-seed flour is good,’ Franz didn’t ask for a content-analysis, he bought it, and lo! it was good.