Telegrams of the Soul by Peter Altenberg

and gave it to Tíoko.
    â€œWhere’d you get that?!” asked the boy, while the girl thought nothing of it.
    â€œWhere, wherever!” replied the tutor.
    Later the boy said: “You were kind and gentle with Tíoko and you believe that she was the same with you; but it’s the opposite.”
    The tutor peered at him, as if to say: “Stupid person, that’s the solution to the riddle of our muddled life.” But he said: “Fortunatina, wasn’t Tíoko gentle and sweet? You see! She came with us like a faithful companion, never let go of your hand. What pleasure she took in the glass pearls. And in everything else. Her cleanliness, her wonderfully smooth cool skin, her ivory white teeth, her gentle hands and feet, the aristocratic grace of her gait!”
    The boy thought: “No matter what he says, he bought her.”
    Fortunatina said in parting: “Tíoko, I love you.”
    The boy thought: “Fortunatina makes a big deal out of everything.”
    The tutor kissed Tíoko.
    Fortunatina felt: “They’re all gentle,Tíoko, the poor lioness, my tutor. It’s just like in paradise, where people and wild animals—.”
    The boy said: “How much did the glass beads cost? How did you come to have them on you? Go ahead, tell me.”
    â€œHow come, how come?! You have to open every person’s heart with the key that fits that lock.”
    The boy thought: “Tíoko’s a funny one, that’s all.”
    Fortunatina felt: “I want to cry, for Tíoko, for the lioness, for everything.”
    At the zoo exit the aguti still sat there in their cage, the stupid people kept tossing in bread rolls and sugar cubes. In the light brown varnished little Swiss chalet sat the attendant, still selling lemon yellow entrance tickets and dark green reduced price tickets for groups, soldiers and regular visitors.
    â€œAre you tired, Fortunatina?” asked the tutor.
    â€œA little—.”
    â€œLet’s sit down then—.”
    There was a bench in a thicket of trees, surrounded by lawns planted with trees. They all felt the pleasant peacefulness, huddled together, as it were. The tutor took a four-stranded necklace of white glass beads with a gold clasp out of his pocket and lay it around Fortunatina’s neck.
    She trembled with the joy of paradise.
    No one said a word.
    The boy was all flustered.
    â€œYou can smell the grass—,” said the tutor.
    They all inhaled the pleasant scent which the earth exhaled from its wondrous lungs, actually from the pores of its skin.
    â€œWhat will Tíoko do tonight?!” asked the girl.
    â€œShe cleans the clothes and shoes, makes the bed, fills the wash-basin with water for the zoo attendant you saw at the entrance.”
    â€œI took her for the daughter of the king!”
    The tutor kissed her gently on her blond head.
    â€œI have a regal piece of jewelry on,” she felt, “like Lady Dudley, four strands of immaculate pearls, priceless, maybe worth four million—.”
    The late afternoon earth-lawn gave of its steamlike, foglike freshness to the tired people seated on the hard wood bench, and to the couples in hidden corners of the park who longed for dark and silence. The thickets of trees stood like clouds over the firmament of the lawns. Tíoko trembled back in the zoo, draped the thin heliotrope-colored calico wrap over her wondrous brown breasts that ordinarily hung free and lovely as God made them, granting the noble eyes of men a picture of earthly perfection, an ideal of vitality and the blossoming of life.
    Then she crouched on a little wooden stool and peeled potatoes for supper.
    â€œWhat is Tíoko up to?!” thought the child on the bench.
    The tutor held her white hand in his, his wonderful brotherly hands—.
    â€œAllons—,” said the boy, “it’s awfully boring here and we’ll catch a cold. Fortunatina is bound to