Telegrams of the Soul (4 page)

“Indeed,” said one, “her husband considers it a savings for the GNP, you get more out of nutritious matter, digest it all; laughter is healthy. Grief—a waste of vital strengths, joy—a savings! It's all a chain reaction.”

A young girl said: “I think her laughter is a kind of crying; it's pretty much the same . . . only in reverse . . .”

“Don't talk such nonsense,” they said to the young girl. “You're already ditzy enough.”

One night I met my aunt with her daughter at a ball. She had on
a red silk gown, was very fat and looked just like a mortadella sausage. The daughter hobnobbed with millionaires' sons with noble “vons” tacked onto their names and decked out in snow-white tails with gold buttons.

My aunt said to me: “Say, I want to tell you something, come with me . . . !”

She led me down the halls.

She stopped in one room.

“That's it . . . ,” she said, “will you take a look at her . . . !”

Seated there was a strawberry blonde American girl who looked like an angel and like the heavens and all the flowers in the field!

My fat aunt and I just stood there . . .

My aunt, the mortadella sausage, folded her hands and whispered quietly: “God protect her!”

I led her back . . .

She was altogether flustered. “I beg you,” she said, “don't breathe a word of this to my husband or my daughter, I just showed her to you because you're so crazy . . .”

I looked her in the eyes and said: “Of course . . .”

Then she said: “Will you get a load of the high-class boys my daughter's hobnobbing with . . . ?!”

“Pst,” I said, “from the standpoint of the national GNP . . .”

“Indeed,” she said, “but I also want Elsie to marry well, rich and happy . . .”

“Of course . . . ,” I said, “are you happy, Auntie?”

“I'm too fat and too crazy for happiness . . . ,” she said, “but that's between me and you.”

“To the last point at least I can attest . . . ,” I said, whereupon my aunt exploded in laughter.

The press photographer who was supposed to photograph two walls of my room because “the big European illustrated magazines” wanted to give their eager readers a glimpse of P.A.'s digs, said: “I'd like to include in the picture a piece of your desk.”— “That's altogether unnecessary, since, first of all, I don't have a desk, and second, I do all my writing in bed. Why don't you include a bit of my bed!”—I said: “So how do you become a press photographer? I only know how you become a poet. You're a disgrace to your kind-hearted parents, a failed lawyer, doctor, book dealer and then nothing at all. But how do you become a press photographer?!”

The man wrinkled his brow into deep pleats—I never actually observed this happen, before or then and there, but since they put it that way in novels—and began: “I had a voice, bass, baritone and tenor all rolled in one!”

“Must one have that if one wishes to become a press photographer?”

“I had a voice! Opera director Herbeck, who happened to be in the audience incognito, approached me and said: ‘Go to Gänsbacher tomorrow, sing him what you sang today, he'll give you lessons, there's no fee!' I had no idea who Herbeck was, Gänsbacher either. Only my father wept tears of joy and my mother said: ‘I always knew it!' (It's a mother's job to know everything in advance when things happen after the fact and the father's iron severity melts into hot and discrete tears at the first sign of some ‘success.') Gänsbacher said to me: ‘Damn good!' After the seventeenth lesson I took a trip to Luxembourg, and when, all sweaty from rowing, I sneezed in the skiff, a chilly gust blows by and I lose my voice. The next day Gänsbacher said to me: ‘Get lost and don't you ever come back. You're done!' My mother said she saw it all coming, and my father said: ‘You're a shirker through and through.' Well, so then I went and became a press photographer. And, believe me, I'm just as happy as I was with that stupid singing!”

Your bed is wonderful, a kind of refuge from the perils of waking life! But also a peril in and of itself—a kind of pre-casket, that is, in preparation for your passing. In bed your life absorbs obstructive strengths, all that which is supposed to hold back your demise lets go! Only outside your bed are you actually able to resist the thousand hostile forces of your life! In bed you are inescapably prone, decayed, and you yourself decay. Your bed shelters your preexistent store of strengths, but simultaneously hinders access to the new strengths to be derived from the fluid life of day! You withdraw yourself from the useful fight. Your bed is a kind of pre-casket! It is death in life! A soft death that permits a rising. But never forget it, grownup: children in the cradle, invalids in bed sleep endlessly long! That simply means they're not yet up to living. Or else they'd tolerate “the waking state.” The waking man lives, the sleeper has died!

You can make amends for many sins with ample sleep—. But what if you commit none? Your bed is your pre-casket. As soon as you fall asleep in it, some precious thing or another perishes in you!

We were once a large group of artists in a champagne pavilion at “Venice in Vienna” in a summer wine garden. Three sweet young girls immediately joined us. Someone in our group told them: “Girls, don't you know in whose company you have the honor of being seated today? That gentleman over there happens to be the famous painter Gustav Klimt!”—“You don't say—,” the girls replied nonchalantly. Then a fourth girl joined them and said: “Girls, do you know who that is?! It's him, no doubt about it—.” “Aw, what's the big deal, who could care less whoever he is—.” —“But that's the guy who paid for twelve bottles of Charles Heidsieck champagne at the Casino de Paris last winter!”—“No kidding, is that really him?! Right! Now I recognize him! Hey, Mr. famous painter, here's lookin' at you!”

P.S. The local representative of Charles Heidsieck champagne once said to me at a late hour: “Say, Peter, I was just wondering if you could ever include my company in one of your sketches? In which case, Peter, you can swig as much as you like!”

Now I hope with some justification to drink my fill. By the way, that time with Klimt & company, it wasn't Charles Heidsieck we were drinking, it was Pommery. But since the one is just as good as the other, and besides, we still get to drink on it, who cares?!

I hired a girl for the night.

So what.

Before she fell asleep she said: “Are you a poet?”

“Why? Could be. So what.”

“I once made up a poem myself—.”

“?!?”

I gave the girl ten Gulden instead of five—.

“Oh,” she said with a smile, “five is all we agreed on.”

“So what. My calculation's on the mark. Look here, my girl, how precisely I tally—

five for your sweet body and five for your sweet soul!”

He loved her desperately and in vain. You always only love desperately when it's in vain!Then she fell very, very ill. So she said to him: “I feel pity for you. I want to show myself to you more naked than naked!” And she unrolled a large sheet of paper on which her x-ray had been printed. “Oh, what a darling little skeleton!” he said, delighted. “But I beg you this one favor, just don't go and show it to Mr.—; that much advantage I'd at least like to have over that dog!”

She couldn't take the poodle with her into the theater. So the poodle stayed with me in the café and we awaited the mistress.

He stationed himself so as to keep an eye on the entrance, and I found this very expedient, if a bit excessive, since, honestly, it was only half past seven in the evening and we had to wait till a quarter past eleven.

We sat there and waited.

Every carriage that rattled by awakened hope in him, and every time I said to him: “It's not possible, it can't be her yet, be reasonable, it's just not possible!”

Sometimes I said to him: “Our beautiful, kind-hearted mistress—!”

He was positively sick with longing, twisted his head in my direction: “Is she coming or isn't she?!”

At one point he abandoned his guard post, came close to me, lay his paw on my knee and I kissed him.

As if he'd said to me: “Go ahead, tell me the truth, I can take anything!”

At ten o'clock he began to whine.

So I said to him: “Listen pal, don't you think I'm antsy? You've got to control yourself!”

But he didn't put much stock in control and whined.

Then he started softly weeping.

“Is she coming or isn't she?!”

“She's coming, she's coming—.”

Then he lay himself perfectly flat on the floor and I sat there rather stooped over in my chair.

He wasn't whining any more, just stared at the entrance while I stared ahead of me.

It was a quarter to twelve.

She came at last. With her sweet, soft, sliding steps, she came quietly and collected, greeted us in her mild manner.

The poodle whined, sang out and leapt.

But I helped her off with her silken coat and hung it on a hook.

Then we sat down.

“Were you antsy?!” she asked.

As if one said: “How's life, my friend?” or: “Yours truly, N.N.!”

Then she said: “Oh, it was just wonderful in the theater—!”

But I felt: Longing, longing that flows and flows and flows from the hearts of man and beast, where do you go?! Do you perhaps evaporate in the heavens like water in the clouds?! Just as the atmosphere is full of water vapor so must the world be full and heavy with longings that came and found no soul to take them in! What happens to you, dear emotion, the best and most delicate thing in life, if you don't find willing souls greedy to soak you up and derive their own strength from yours?

Longing, longing, that flows from the hearts of man and beast, flooding, flooding the world, where do you go?

Conversation with my ten-year-old dinner guest, Karoline B., the little daughter of a poor widow, perfection in the making, already a profoundly human creature.

“Tomorrow, Sir, I have to travel far out to the ‘Doll Doctor' in the Fifth District!”

“What ever for?”

“Somebody gave me a doll. She only has a top half.”

“Curious!”

“Why curious?! If she'd had a bottom half, too, they damn sure wouldn't have given her to me!”

I wrote to the department store G.: “For the last few days my heavenly little thirteen-year-old friend with the ash-blond hair, the light gray eyes and the black lashes has been spreading out for my perusal eight to ten homely little swatches of silk on a patch of grass all gray from the dust of automobiles, saying: ‘Which is the prettiest?! The gray one with the lilac-colored threads, don't you think—.' I asked her what all these little swatches were about, whereupon she replied: ‘They're hard to get. This girlfriend of mine, she's got a sister who works for a tailoring outfit in Vienna. And my friend left me ten of her best samples, 'cause we're real pals, see. But we tell the other girls they're only rags to wipe the ink off pens. 'Cause if them other girls knew that they were good for nothing and we just like 'em, that's all, they'd be so sad that they didn't have any—.' ” In response to the above, the department store G. sent me a big box full of the loveliest silk remnants, little silk swatches, particularly pretty Japanese and Indian patterns, for my thirteen-year-old friend. That evening, ten schoolgirls gathered in a circle on the lawn, in the center of which, enthroned, as it were, on the box, my fanatically adored little friend, a shoemaker's daughter, held court. She picked up every little swatch of silk and passed it around the circle to each of the stunned girls struck dumb with amazement. The oldest girl said: “Can you really buy enough material of each little rag to make yourself a whole dress?”—“What for, you silly goose, aren't the rags much nicer just as they are?” replied my heavenly little thirteen-year-old. The automobile dust of the rich enveloped lawn and lane in a thick white fog, while the clouds were pierced by blood-red zigzags from the setting sun. Whereupon my friend shut the box and said: “End of silk swatch show for today, ladies and gentlemen—,” hoisted the box onto her dear little ash blond head and said to me: “Tonight I'll sleep tight and dream sweet sweet dreams, but not of you, no Sir, I'm going to dream about your wonderfully lovely little swatches of silk—!”

I wanted just once for a half day to live the life of a rich man. I arranged to have myself picked up at my place by a ravishing lady and her husband in their Mercedes. I was driven to my barber, on Teinfaltstrasse, to rejuvenate myself, especially with a splash of the menthol-scented French brandy cologne on the head. An ersatz for any cold bath! Then we drove to Baden. There we took baths in the Kurhaus private tubs, 24 degrees Celsius. Then we had them unlock cool hotel rooms and slept for a good half hour. Then we ate Solo asparagus and fricasseed calves' brains. Then we drove on to Heiligenkreuz. In a cool hall we sipped steaming hot tea with lemon. We dashed back home in the evening.