After Midnight by Irmgard Keun Page B

self-assured girls among my friends, and I went to no end of trouble to try and be like them. The boys put on airs as well; I was afraid they’d think me silly and stupid. Often I joined in their laughter, afraid they might notice I didn’t really understand what they were laughing at. I wanted them to admire me as much as they admired themselves. It was fear made me want to be one of them; they were always ganging up on someone, one person at a time, and I didn’t want them ganging up on me. So I went along with them over Franz, making even nastier jokes about him than they did. I felt proud when they laughed at my jokes, but I was ashamed of myself too.
    When I had to pay a quick visit to the Ladies and got out of the noise and the laughter, I used to feel sad and disgusted. I’d leave the Ladies as fast as I could, scared even to take the time to comb my hair. I was afraid the others would be laughing at me while I was gone, as indeed they were.
    Franz went on being nice, and I went on being nasty.
    One day there was an exhibition in Cologne, in theNeumarkt: an exhibition of venereal diseases and the consequences of inter-racial breeding within a nation. It was organized by the Strength Through Joy movement. Aunt Adelheid and I went to see it, because there was nothing indecent about it, it was in the cause of scientific explanation, so it was our duty to go.
    I was fairly well used to the idea of horrors, from what they had told us at gas mask drill, but now I was actually seeing eroded embryos preserved in spirit. And pictures of little babies whose eyes were just hollows full of yellowish-green pus. Women whose deformed breasts and buttocks touched the ground. Models of old men looking like crazy little children, and little children looking like ancient, wrinkled old men. And blood and pus and sticky red sores everywhere. All as a result of venereal diseases and inter-racial breeding. And then people have to go inventing poison gas too. Makes you quite surprised, speaking as a human being, to be alive at all and not have your entire body eaten away.
    We were studying the eroded noses section when an elderly gentleman came up and spoke to Aunt Adelheid. He took his hat off, very politely. “I believe we’ve met, ma’am,” he said. His head was bald and round and brownish-grey, and his lower lip was thick and red, drooping like a mattress hung out of the window to air.
    “Why, so we have, Assistant Secretary!” said Aunt Adelheid, beaming in a proud and happy way.
    We got into conversation. The Assistant Secretary—his post was in the Civil Service—always used to buy his notebooks at Aunt Adelheid’s shop. “A shocking sight, eh?” he said, pointing to the eroded noses.
    “Yes, indeed,” said Aunt Adelheid gravely. “Terrible, everyone ought to see it, it’s a warning to us all.” Don’t ask mewhy Aunt Adelheid needed a warning. She was over fifty, with no chance left of catching a venereal disease. Unless she got it from eating unwashed fruit off a barrow in the street.
    The Assistant Secretary saw us home. He was very earnest and very polite.
    He took to calling at the shop to buy notebooks quite often. His name is Ludwig Wittkamp; Aunt Adelheid told me so. It’s quite surprising to find an important official like an Assistant Secretary has an ordinary personal name of his own. What does he need one for? He lives in the Hohenzollernring, though it is also hard to imagine him going about the ordinary business of living.
    He bought the cheapest little notebooks he could find in our shop. He thinks highly of orderliness, and writes down all his expenses. Especially when he goes away, because that’s when your expenses can get right out of hand, before you know it you’ve spent a whole three marks and can’t say where it went.
    One day the Assistant Secretary invited me out to the Beery Donkey to eat mussels. I felt very proud, and wrote home, and to my friend Josefine Leyendecker in Lappesheim,