When late that afternoon Oskar, with his baggage including the new drum given him by Raskolnikov, the painter of madonnas, returned brandishing the registration form, a freshly shaved Hedgehog, who had meanwhile no doubt washed his feet, led me into the living room.
The living room smelled of cold cigar smoke. Of cigars that had been lighted several times. There was also a smell of carpets, valuable carpets perhaps, which lay in several layers all over the room. It also smelled of old calendars. But I didn’t see any calendars, so it must have been the carpets. Strange to say, the comfortable, leather-upholstered chairs had in themselves no smell. This came as a disappointment to me, for Oskar, who had never sat in a leather chair, had so vivid a notion of what leather upholstery must smell like that he suspected this leather of being artificial.
In one of these smooth, unsmelling, and, as I later ascertained, genuine leather chairs, sat Mrs. Zeidler. She had on a grey tailored suit, which fitted her only very approximately. Her skirt had slipped up over her knees, revealing three fingers’ breadths of slip. Since she made no move to arrange her clothing and, it seemed to Oskar, had been crying, I did not dare to greet her or to introduce myself in words. My bow was a silent one; in its last stages, it turned back to Zeidler, who had introduced his wife with a motion of his thumb and a slight cough.
The room was large and square. The shadow of the chestnut tree in front of the house made it seem larger and smaller. I left my suitcase and drum near the door and, holding my registration form, approached Zeidler, who was standing near the windows, Oskar did not hear his own steps, for he walked on four carpets—I counted them later—four superimposed carpets of decreasing size which, with their fringed or unfringed edges of different colors, added up to a strange color pattern. The bottommost carpet was reddish-brown and began near the walls; the next, approximately green, was largely hidden by furniture, the heavy sideboard, the china closet filled entirely with liqueur glasses, dozens of them, and the spacious marriage bed. The third carpet was of a blue design and ran from corner to corner. The fourth, a solid claret-color, supported the extensible dining table covered with protective oilcloth, and four leather-upholstered chairs with evenly spaced brass rivets.
Since there were more rugs, hardly intended for that purpose, hanging on the walls, and still others rolled up in the corners, Oskar assumed that the Hedgehog had traded in carpets before the currency reform and been stuck with them afterwards.
The only picture was a glass-covered likeness of Bismarck, hanging on the outer wall between two seemingly oriental rugs. The Hedgehog sat in a leather chair beneath the Iron Chancellor, to whom he showed a certain family resemblance. He took the form from my hand, studied both sides of the official document alertly, critically, and impatiently. His wife asked him in a whisper if anything was wrong. Her question threw him into a fit of rage which made him look still more like the Chancellor. The chair spewed him out. Standing on four carpets, he held the form out to one side and filled himself and his waistcoat with air. With one bound he was on the first and second carpets, looking down on his wife, who had meanwhile taken up her needlework, and pouring forth words on the order of: WhoaskedyouI’dliketoknow? Nobody’sgoingtodoanytalkingaroundherebutmeme! Shutthatmouthofyoursandkeepitshut!
Since Mrs. Zeidler kept her peace and attended unflustered to her sewing, the problem for the Hedgehog, as he treated the carpets, was to let his fury rise and fall with an air of plausibility. A single step took him to the china closet, which he opened with such violence as to call forth a general tinkling. Carefully, each outstretched finger a precision mechanism, he picked up eight liqueur glasses, removed them undamaged from the case, tiptoed—like a host planning to divert himself and seven guests with an exercise in dexterity—toward the green tiled stove, and then, suddenly throwing all caution to the winds, hurled his fragile freight at the cold, cast-iron stove door.
The most amazing part of it was that during this performance, which required a certain accuracy of aim, the Hedgehog kept a bespectacled eye on his wife, who had risen and was trying to thread a needle by the right-hand window. Scarcely a second after his annihilation of the glasses, she carried this delicate operation, which required a steady hand, to a successful conclusion. Then she went back to her chair and sat down, and again her skirt slipped up disclosing three fingers’ breadths of pink slip. With a malevolent though submissive look, the Hedgehog had followed his wife’s movement to the window, her threading of the needle, her return to the chair. No sooner had she resumed her seat than he reached behind the stove, took up dustpan and brush, swept up the fragments, and poured them into a newspaper, which was already half full of shattered liqueur glasses. There would not have been room for a third outburst.
If the reader should suppose that Oskar recognized his old glass-shattering self in the glass-shattering Hedgehog, I can only say that the reader is not entirely mistaken; I too once tended to transform my rage into shattered glass—but never in those days did anyone see me resort to dustpan and brush!
Having removed the traces of his wrath, Zeidler sat down again. Once more Oskar handed him the registration form that the Hedgehog had been obliged to drop in order to have both hands free for the liqueur glasses.
Zeidler signed the form and gave me to understand that he expected order to reign in his flat, where would we be if everyone did as he pleased, he was in a position to know, he had been a salesman for fifteen years, sold hair clippers, was I familiar with this article?
Oskar made certain movements from which Zeidler could infer that I was adequately informed on the subject of hair clippers. Zeidler’s well-clipped brush suggested confidence in his merchandise, hence effectiveness as a salesman. After he had explained his work schedule—a week on the road, two days at home—he lost interest in Oskar. More hedgehoggy than ever, he sat rocking himself in the squeaky light-brown leather, his eyeglasses sparkled, and with or without reason he muttered: jajajajaja. It was time for me to go.
First Oskar took leave of Mrs. Zeidler. Her hand was cold, boneless, but dry. The Hedgehog from his chair waved me toward the door where Oskar’s baggage stood. I already had my hands full when his voice came to me: “What you got there, tied to your suitcase?”
“That’s my drum.”
“You expect to play it here?”
“Not necessarily. There was a time when I played quite a lot.”
“Go ahead as far as I care. I’m never home anyway.”
“It is very unlikely that I shall ever drum again.”
“And what made you stay so little?”
“An unfortunate accident hampered my growth.”
“Well, I only hope you don’t give us any trouble, fits and that kind of thing.”
“The state of my health has improved steadily in the last few years. See how nimble I am.” Thereupon Oskar, for the benefit of the Zeidlers, did a few flips and semi-acrobatic exercises he had learned in his theatrical period. Mrs. Zeidler tittered while Mr. Zeidler assumed the look of a Hedgehog on the point of slapping his thighs. Then I was in the hallway. Past the nurse’s frosted-glass door, the toilet door, and the kitchen door, I carried my belongings, including drum, to my room.
This was in the beginning of May. From that day on I was tempted, possessed, overwhelmed by the mystery of the trained nurse. My feeling for nurses is a kind of sickness. Perhaps it is incurable, for even today, with all that far behind me, I contradict Bruno my keeper when he says that only men can be proper nurses, that a patient’s desire to be cared for by lady nurses is just one more symptom of his disease. Whereas, still according to Bruno, your male nurse takes conscientious care of his patient and sometimes cures him, his female counterpart, woman that she is, beguiles the patient, sometimes into recovery, sometimes into a death pleasantly seasoned with eroticism.