The Clown Read Free Page A

difficult, then got into real trouble when he was earning two thousand, and finally, when he reached three thousand, he found that once again he could manage quite well, and from his experience devised the profound formula: “Up to five hundred a month one can manage quite well, but between five hundred and three thousand is utter misery.” Kinkel wasn’t even aware of the embarrassment he was causing: he rattled on in a kind of Olympian cheerfulness, smoking his fat cigar, raising his glass of wine to his lips, gobbling cheese sticks, until even Prelate Sommerwild, the group’s spiritual adviser, began to get fidgety and changed the subject. I believe he introduced the word “reaction” and Kinkel immediately swallowed the bait. He lost his temper and stopped in the middle of his discourse on the subject of a twelve-thousand-mark car being cheaper than one for four thousand five hundred, and even his wife, who embarrasses everyone with her mindless adoration of him, breathed a sigh of relief.

3
    For the first time I felt more or less comfortable in this apartment; it was warm and clean, and as I hung up my coat and stood my guitar in the corner, I wondered whether an apartment was perhaps after all something more than a delusion. I have never been one for staying in one place, and never will be—and Marie is even less settled than I am, yet she seems bent on becoming so. She used to get restless when I was booked to appear for longer than a week in one place.
    Once again Monika Silvs had been as kind as ever when we sent her a telegram; she had got the keys from the janitor, cleaned the place up, put flowers in the living room, filled up the refrigerator with all sorts of things. On the kitchen table was some freshly ground coffee, and beside it a bottle of cognac. Cigarettes, a lighted candle next to the flowers on the table in the living room. Monika can be terribly sentimental, and sometimes her good taste deserts her; the candle she had put on the table for me was one of those cheap decorated ones and would definitely not have passed the test of a “CatholicGroup for Matters of Taste,” but most probably she had been in a hurry and unable to find any other kind of candle, or hadn’t enough moeny to buy a more expensive, attractive one, and I was aware that it was on account of this awful candle that my affection for Monika Silvs was approaching the borderline set by my confounded inclination toward monogamy. The other Catholics in the group would never risk being sentimental or committing a breach of good taste, they would never expose themselves to criticism, anyway they would sooner do so in a matter of morals than in a matter of taste. I could even still smell Monika’s perfume in the apartment—it was much too sophisticated for her, some stuff called, I believe, Cuir de Russie.
    I lit one of Monika’s cigarettes from Monika’s candle, got the cognac from the kitchen, the phone book from the hall, and lifted the receiver. Believe it or not, Monika had fixed that up for me too. The telephone was connected. The high-pitched buzzing seemed to me like the sound of an immense heart, at this moment I loved it more than the sound of the sea, more than the breath of storms or the growl of lions. Somewhere in that high-pitched buzzing were hidden Marie’s voice, Leo’s voice, Monika’s voice. I slowly replaced the receiver. It was the only weapon I had left, and I would soon be making use of it. I pulled up my right trouser leg and examined my grazed knee; the scratches were superficial, the swelling minor, I poured myself a large cognac, drank half of it and poured the rest over my sore knee, hobbled back into the kitchen and put the cognac away in the refrigerator. Only now did it occur to me that Kostert had never brought me the bottle I had insisted on. No doubt he felt that for disciplinary reasons it would be better not to bring me any and had thereby saved the Christian cause seven marks. I made up my