The footsteps had gotten quite close. Turning my back to the street, I was fiddling with the door. I had taken on an air as if about to open it and enter, and had bent down.
When the footsteps came right behind me, I made a great effort not to fall and not to let out a small cry, and held the wall beside me. The woman continued on her way; I came out from where I was and, with the fear of losing sight of her again, began following very closely. I hadn’t seen her face. Although I was so afraid of encountering her, I was now walking five or six steps behind her. The woman appeared not to notice this. Since I was looking for a place to hide in the face of the possibility she might see me, why had I come here and waited for her path?
Why was I now going after her? Could it be her? From where was I judging that a woman passing through a street at any hour of the night had to pass through the same place again the next evening? I wasn’t in a state to answer all these questions.
I was following her with a palpitation that never decreased, and the more I thought of the possibility she might suddenly look back and see me, the more excited I became… I was walking with my head down, seeing nothing but the asphalt sidewalk, following the sound of footsteps.
Suddenly these sounds stopped. I remained where I was. Bowing my head even more, I waited like a convict. No one approached me, no one said: “Why are you following me?” Only after a few seconds did I notice that the place where I was standing was more brightly lit than other parts of the avenue.
I slowly raised my eyes: There was no woman in the middle. A few steps ahead was a rather famous cabaret, its door illuminated with electric lights. On a huge sign jutting out toward the street, the word “Atlantik” written in blue bulbs was flashing on and off, and at the bottom of the writing were shapes made from bulbs resembling sea waves. A man about two meters tall in gold-embroidered clothes and a red cap standing at the door bent down and invited me inside. I understood the woman had entered here and approached the man without hesitation:
“Did the woman in a fur coat walking before me just now enter here?”
The doorman bent down once more:
“Yes!” he said.
There was a very meaningful smile on his face. The possibility that this woman was one of this place’s regular customers suddenly passed through my mind. Her coming at the same hour every evening showed this.
Taking a deep and comfortable breath, I took off my coat and entered the hall. Inside was crowded. In the middle, in a hollow, was a round dance floor; across from it an orchestra; at the edges high and secluded boxes. More than half of these had their curtains closed; the couples inside would occasionally come out to dance, then enter their boxes again and draw their curtains. I went and sat in one that apparently hadn’t yet been occupied by anyone. I ordered a beer. My palpitation had passed. With unhurried eyes I looked around. I hoped to find her, the woman in a fur coat, the person who had been keeping me awake for weeks, at one of these tables with an old or young rake beside her, and when I saw how this woman to whom I had given such great importance, such deep meaning, put herself on the market, I would be freed from my empty dreams. She wasn’t at the tables around the dance floor. She must have entered one of the boxes. I felt myself smiling bitterly. I was angry at my insistence on looking at people with eyes other than what they were. Although I had reached twenty-four years of age, I still hadn’t escaped the naiveté of my childhood. What extreme impressions a simple, perhaps not even beautiful painting had left on me, what vast hopes it had given birth to. I had given so many meanings to that pale human face as to fill books, had found in it qualities that didn’t exist in reality at all. Whereas she, like many young women, was running after vulgar pleasures in such entertainment places. The wildcat fur I had watched with such respect was also surely the payment for her services in such places.
I decided to take the boxes with closed curtains one by one under eye arrest to recognize those inside; half an hour later I had completely memorized the passionate couples in these private corners. It was certain the woman in a fur coat wasn’t in any of them. Even daring to arouse everyone’s curiosity, as curtains opened and closed, I was carefully looking inside. In none of them was there anyone sitting alone or as a couple and not going out to dance.
I fell into a distressed hesitation again. Had I seen wrong this evening too? Only one woman in Berlin didn’t wear such a fur, after all? Besides, I hadn’t even seen her face. Was it possible for me to recognize by her walk a woman who had fixed her eyes on me with a mocking smile in my drunken state one evening before?
Let’s see, had I really seen her last evening? Or was everything, as I had been interpreting since this morning, merely a vision?
I began to be afraid of myself. What was happening to me? To fall so much under the influence of a painting… Then to think the woman there had appeared before me at night, then to follow a random woman based on her footsteps and fur… There was no other solution but to leave immediately and put myself under strict control.
The hall suddenly darkened. There was only a faint light where the orchestra was. The dancing area had emptied. After a bit, heavy music began. A thin violin sound was heard from behind the instruments. The sound was slowly approaching. A young woman wearing a white and very low-cut dress descended, continuing to play the violin. In a very low but alto voice close to a man’s voice, she began to sing one of the songs that were fashionable at that time. A spotlight, drawing an egg-shaped circle on the floor, was illuminating the artist.
I immediately recognized her. Now all my hesitations, my thousand and one kinds of meaningless assumptions had flown away. An ache enveloped my insides again. It seemed very sad to me that she had to work here, having to scatter so many false smiles around her, having to make such unwilling coquettish airs.
It was possible to imagine the woman I had seen in the painting in every situation, even going from lap to lap. But I wouldn’t have brought to mind I would see her like this. In this state, there was a wretchedness so clear as to be incomparable with the proud, self-sufficient, strong-willed woman I had kept alive in my mind.
“It would have been better if I had seen her as I had just thought, drinking drunk with men, dancing and kissing!” I thought. Because she would do these things willingly after all. She would do them forgetting herself, throwing herself into it. But it was obvious she absolutely didn’t want to do this work she was now doing. There was nothing extraordinary in her violin playing, and her voice was only beautiful in itself, or rather effective. She was singing songs trembling with complaint, as if pouring from a drunk boy child’s mouth. The smile standing like a patch on her face seemed to be waiting for a small opportunity to disappear; indeed, after bending toward one of the tables and hurling a few faint melodies toward the customers, when going to the other table her face would become serious for a moment, taking on exactly the expression I had seen in her picture. Nothing in the world has seemed as bitter to me as a person melancholy by nature trying to laugh by force. At one of the tables she approached, a young and drunk man slowly got up from his chair and kissed her on her bare back. A wrinkling like a snake bite passed across the woman’s face and an icy shudder through her body, but this was very brief, perhaps lasting less than a quarter of a second.
Then I saw her straighten up and look at the man with a smile, and with her eyes almost trying to say “Oh, how well you did!” and turning her eyes to the woman who was the man’s table companion and appeared angry at this action of the person beside her, shaking her head with an expression wanting to say “Please forgive, sir, men are free to do such things to us!”
After each song, a few claps were heard and the woman would signal with her head for the orchestra to play something else. Then beginning another song with that same thick and complaint-filled voice, advancing from table to table, dragging her feet that disappeared under white skirts over the parquet, and at the bedside of drunk couples wrapped around each other’s necks, or before the closed curtains of boxes where what was happening inside couldn’t be seen, leaning her head on the violin, she would wander her not very skillful fingers on the strings.
When I saw her approaching my table, I fell into great panic. I didn’t know how to look at her, what to do. Then I laughed at this state of mine. Was it possible for her to recognize a man she had seen in a dark street at midnight last night? What else could I be to her but any young man, a customer who had come here to have fun and find a fun companion? Despite this, I had bowed my head down. I saw her skirt, its ends dusty from dragging on the ground, and beneath this her white, low-cut shoe whose toe stuck out a bit. She wore no stockings. On the upper part of her foot, where her toes began, was a small part about a finger’s width whose pinkness was evident despite the spotlight’s dull white light. When my eyes caught here, with a shudder and shame as if I had seen her entire body naked, I raised my eyes up. She was looking at me carefully.
She wasn’t singing, only playing the violin. That artificial smile wasn’t on her face. When our gazes met, she greeted me amicably with her eyes. Yes, without any exaggeration, without smirking at all, she greeted me like an old friend. She did this simply by opening and closing her eyes once, but in a way clear enough to leave no possibility of mistake. Then she laughed. She laughed with a laugh that spread across her entire face, open, clean, without lies. She laughed as one laughs at an old friend… After playing for a while and greeting me once more, this time with her eyes and head, she went to other tables.
I felt a tremendous desire to jump up from my place and throw myself on her neck and kiss her crying. I didn’t remember ever being so happy in my life, my insides expanding so much. How was it possible for one person to make another person so happy, doing almost nothing?
A friendly greeting and a clean smile… And at this moment I wanted nothing else. I was the richest man in the world.
Following her with my eyes, I was murmuring: “Thank you… Thank you!..” And I was pleased to see that what I had thought while watching the painting in the exhibition had turned out right. She was exactly as I had imagined… Would she have looked at me with such familiar eyes, greeted me, if she were otherwise?
At one point a doubt passed through me like a sting: I wonder if she mistook me for someone, I said. Or did she greet me as a precaution because this face she saw in a disgraceful state on the street last evening didn’t seem foreign to her and she couldn’t remember where she knew me from? But there was no slightest hesitation on her face, no absent-mindedness indicating she was searching her memory… She had looked into my eyes with complete confidence, then laughed. Whatever the case, her showing me this closeness was enough to make me the happiest person in the world. I was sitting at my table with that impudent and comfortable smile of people content with their lives, looking ahead of me, around me, and at the young woman who had now gone to the other end of the hall. Her dark, wavy and short hair had fallen to her nape. As her bare arms moved, her waist bent slightly right and left, small muscle movements occurred on her back.
After singing her last song, she disappeared behind the orchestra with quick steps; the lights came on again. I stayed for a while in the joy of my happiness, thinking of nothing. Then I asked myself, “What should I do now?” Should I go outside immediately and wait for her at the door?.. For what purpose?..
Although I hadn’t spoken even a word with her, if I waited for her path and said “May I accompany you to your home?” what judgment would she pass on me? Would I respond to her showing me a bit of interest with such a stock rake sentence?
I judged that the most polite action would be to leave immediately and come again tomorrow evening. I would advance the friendship slowly… This much was even too much for one night… Besides, since childhood I had feared wasting happiness, had wanted to save a part for later… This behavior, true, caused me to miss many opportunities, but I always refrained from frightening my fortune by wanting more.
I looked around to call the waiter. My eyes caught on the woman coming toward the hall, passing through the orchestra. She didn’t have her violin in her hand. She was walking quickly. When I saw her approaching my side, I looked around… She was coming to me, to my table. She was smiling amicably like a moment ago.
She stood before me and extending her hand:
“How are you?” she said.
Only at this moment did I recover somewhat from my confusion and think to stand up.
“Thank you… I’m well!..”
She sat in the chair across from me. She shook her head to throw back the hair falling on her cheeks, then fixing her eyes on me:
“You’re probably angry at me?” she said.
I was completely astonished. Because I couldn’t understand what she meant, all sorts of inappropriate possibilities were coming to my mind.
“No,” I said. “What nonsense!”
Her voice wasn’t foreign at all. It was natural that I knew every line of her face by heart, that I had even found in her far more meanings than existed in reality. I had engraved her picture in my head by watching it for days, then had thoroughly completed this depiction with the Madonna painting. But her voice… I must have heard this somewhere. Perhaps in very distant times, in my childhood… Or perhaps only in my imagination.
I made a movement to free myself from thinking these things. Since she was across from me and talking with me, it was now unnecessary and meaningless to occupy myself with other things.
The woman asked again:
“So you’re not angry… But then why didn’t you ever come again?”
Oh no!.. She had really mistaken me for someone else… I moved my lips to ask “How do you know me?” With a thought that wasn’t very honest, I gave this up. What if upon this question of mine she realized her mistake and got up and left with a brief apology?
The longer this wonderfully beautiful dream continued, the better. I had no right to cut it, to leave it half-finished, to wake up even at the cost of reality.
When the woman saw I wasn’t answering, she moved to another question:
“Do you receive letters from your mother?”
After a tremendous confusion lasting less than a second, I jumped from the chair. Grabbing her hands:
“Oh my God, that was you?” I shouted. I had understood everything. I remembered where I knew this voice from.
The woman gave a clear laugh:
“You’re a very strange child!” she said.
I remembered this laugh too. This was the woman who had come beside me while I sat absent-mindedly before that painting in the exhibition and asked what I found in this picture, who had laughed when I said “It resembles my mother,” saying “Don’t you have a picture of your mother?”
I couldn’t understand at all how I hadn’t recognized her then. Had the painting enveloped me so much as to take from my eyes the power to see the original?
“But you didn’t resemble that painting at all then!” I murmured.
“How do you know?” she said. “You didn’t look at my face!”
“No, I don’t think so… How could that be?”
“Yes, you looked several times… But how?.. As if not to see!…”
Then, pulling her hands that were still inside my palms:
“When I returned to my friends, I didn’t say you didn’t recognize me,” she said. “Otherwise they would have laughed at you a lot!”
“Thank you!”
She thought a bit; a cloud passed through her eyes; suddenly becoming serious:
“So, do you still want to have such a mother?” she said.
I paused, not remembering at first. Then I answered quickly:
“Of course… Of course… And how!”
“You said exactly the same thing then too!”
“Perhaps…”
She laughed again.
“But can I be your mother?”
“That, no, no!”
“Perhaps your sister!”
“How old are you?”
“Does one ask such a thing? But never mind, twenty-six!.. You?”
“Twenty-four!”
“See? I can be your sister!”
“Yes…”
We were silent for a while… I felt there were boundless things to say to her inside my head, things that wouldn’t end even if spoken for years… But none of them was coming to my mind at this moment. She too was looking ahead without saying anything. She had rested her right elbow on the table. Her hand was simply left on the white cloth. She had fingers that tapered toward the small tips and gave the feeling that their bones were very fine, and their tips were red, as if cold. I remembered that the hands I had held in my palm a moment ago had indeed been cold. Wanting to take advantage of this in my own mind:
“How cold your hands were!” I said.
She answered without hesitation:
“Warm them!” And she extended both at once.
I looked at her face. Her eyes were commanding and willful. It was as if she found nothing extraordinary in abandoning her hands to a man she was speaking with for the first time. I wonder?.. The same inappropriate possibilities kept coming to my mind. To push these from my head by saying something:
“I was a bit excused in not recognizing you at the exhibition!” I said. “You were so cheerful, even mocking… Then, how shall I say it, your every state was the opposite of the one in the painting… Your hair was short… your skirt was short too and your dress was very tight… You were walking almost running, almost hopping… It was certainly a difficult thing to liken you to that dignified, thoughtful, even somewhat sorrowful painting that critics called ‘Madonna’… But I’m astonished… So I must have been very absent-minded!”
“Yes, very… I remember you from the first day you came to the exhibition. While you were walking around as if bored, you suddenly stopped before my portrait… You began to look with such strange attention that even passersby found it odd. At first I too had thought you were likening the painting to someone you knew. Then you began coming every day… I fell into a curiosity you can easily understand. Several times I approached beside you and watched the painting with you, almost head to head. You weren’t aware of anything; although you occasionally turned your eyes to this spectator disturbing your comfort, you didn’t recognize me. There was a strange charm in this absent-mindedness of yours… As I said, I was curious too… Finally I decided to approach and talk with you. The other painter friends were also curious about you… They insisted too… But I wish I hadn’t done it… We lost you completely… You didn’t come to the exhibition again!”
“I had thought they would make fun of me!” I said. But I immediately regretted it. She could take offense at these words. But she:
“Yes, you’re right!” she answered.
Then, running her eyes over my face as if searching for something:
“You’re alone in Berlin, aren’t you?” she said.
“In what way?”
“I mean… Alone, that’s all… Without anyone… Spiritually alone… How shall I say… You have such a manner…”
“I understand, I understand… I’m completely alone… But not in Berlin… I’m alone in the whole world… Since childhood…”
“I’m alone too…” she said. This time taking my hands into her own palms: “Alone enough to drown…” she continued, “alone as a sick dog…”
She squeezed my fingers considerably, raised them a bit upward, and then struck them on the table:
“We can be friends!” she said. “You’re newly getting to know me, but I studied you for fifteen or twenty days… You have a manner unlike everyone… Yes, we can be very good friends…”
I looked at her face strangely. What did she mean? What could a woman propose to a man in this way? I knew nothing. I had no experience and I didn’t know people at all.
She had noticed this. On her face, with the anxiety of a person fearing having gone too far, fearing being misunderstood:
“Don’t you think like other men…” she said. “Don’t try to give other meanings to my words… I always speak openly like this… Like a man… Besides, many of my aspects resemble men… Perhaps that’s why I’m alone…”
She looked me over from head to toe for a long time. Suddenly:
“You also have a bit of femininity…” she said. “I’m realizing it now… Perhaps that’s why from the first moment I saw you I judged there was something I liked in you… You have a manner particular to young girls…”
Hearing this phrase I had heard so much from my mother and father from a person I was speaking with for the first time astonished and upset me…
She continued speaking:
“I won’t be able to forget your state last evening!” she said. “Every time it came to mind all night I laughed… You weren’t struggling like an innocent young girl wanting to defend her honor. Yet it’s not very easy to escape from Frau van Tiedemann.”
Opening my eyes in astonishment:
“Do you know her?” I said.
“How could I not know her, she’s my relative! My uncle’s daughter… But we’re estranged now… Not me… My mother doesn’t want to see her; because of her ways… Her husband was a lawyer. He died in the Great War… Now, in my mother’s expression, she’s leading an ‘inappropriate’ life… But what’s it to us?.. What happened last evening? Could you escape? How do you know each other?”
“We’re staying at the same pension. Last evening, thanks to a coincidence, I saved my skin. At our pension there’s a Herr Döppke who’s closely interested in your cousin; we encountered him.”
“They should at least get married.”
With this sentence I understood she wanted to close the subject. We were silent for a while; we both wanted to examine each other without showing it, and during this time when our eyes met, we continued looking with an approving smile wanting to say “I’m pleased with what I see.”
I was the first to break the silence:
“So you have a mother?”
“Like you!”
I was embarrassed as if I had asked something meaningless. She, noticing this, changed the subject:
“I’m seeing you here for the first time!”
“Yes. I had never come to such places… Only this evening…”
“This evening?”
Gathering all my courage:
“I followed you!” I said.
She was a bit surprised:
“Was it you following me to the door?”
“Yes. So you noticed!”
“Of course… How can a woman not notice such things?”
“But you didn’t look back!”
“I never look back…”
She was silent for a while. She thought about something, then with a roguish smile:
“This is also a kind of entertainment for me!” she said. “When I sense someone following me on the street, I insist on not turning my head, overcoming all my curiosity, and during this time many possibilities pass through my head: The person behind me could be young, could be an old and collapsed woman hunter, a rich prince, a poor student, even a drunk vagrant. I try to determine who it is from the sound of their steps, and in this way, the road ends without my understanding how it passed… So it was you this evening?.. But from your hesitant steps I had thought you were an old and married man.”
Suddenly looking into my eyes:
“Did you wait for my path!” she said.
“Yes.”
“How did you guess I would pass through the same place this evening too? Did you know I worked here?”
“No, but what do I know… perhaps, I said… In fact, I perhaps didn’t even say it; without realizing it, I found myself there at the same hour… Then when you were passing, I hid in a doorway from fear you would see me.”
“Let’s go… We’ll talk on the way…”
When she saw my confusion, she asked:
“Don’t you want to take me to my home?”
I immediately jumped up from my place. This movement of mine made her laugh:
“Don’t hurry, my friend,” she said. “I’m going to go change my clothes. You wait for me at the door in five minutes!”
She got up quickly. Gathering her skirt with her right hand, she disappeared behind the orchestra with quick steps. While going, she had looked at my face again, greeting me by blinking those wonderful eyes like a friend of forty years.
