Perlefter by Joseph Roth Page B

family and remain that way, achieving it indirectly by means of heroism. Thus he and his father, in different ways, both arrived at the same goal. Fredy liked to complain about sore muscles. He had ‘trained’ too hard. He showed several bruises. For weeks he had an arm in a black sling. His mother fed him. One had to hold his jacket and put his socks on for him. After he had definitively decided on the female sex he slept with one of the servant girlsand earned himself his first sexually transmitted disease, of which he was quite proud and of which the entire family knew but about which nobody spoke. The servant girl left the house and took a silver service along with her. For weeks this service was the topic of conversation. The oldest daughter maintained that it was silver plate and a wedding gift from Herr Hahn who gave nothing real. Frau Perlefter cried anyway. For her it was silver. To annoy his sister Fredy said that he himself had seen the mark. It was silver. Frau Perlefter’s widowed sister, who delighted in the losses of others, confirmed Fredy’s assertion.
    Fredy loved to recount his various adventures. There was always something happening wherever he found himself. Horses bucked, automobiles crashed into each other, old women were crushed under the wheels, streetcars ran out of power, drunks fought each other, a girl dropped a milk pot. There was nothing too trivial. Everything that happened was worth recounting. Fredy recorded in a notebook the various jokes he had heard. He read some of them out. The others, he said, were unsuitable for women. Nevertheless he was asked to tell them. He recounted them in a low voice, and his sisters acted as if they had not heard. Regardless, they left the room immediately after the punch-line. Fredy rode every morning in the hippodrome. By lunchtime he claimed he could not sit. A gallop had ‘upset’ him. He drank his soup standing. After the meal he sat down. He had forgotten the galloping. He was regarded within the wide circle of family as a dangerous heart-breaker. Hestruck up a conversation with young girls in front of the department store. Then he wrote them letters. He showed these missives to his sisters.
    â€˜You’re not going to believe it!’ he said. ‘This Margot is from one of the best houses.’
    Frau Perlefter was convinced that all the daughters of the bourgeois houses were in love with Fredy. At one point he made the acquaintance of a Hungarian journalist named Roney. Herr Roney was looking for a wealthy man for a singer named Ilona. He found Fredy Perlefter, and all three were satisfied. Ilona didn’t like Fredy at all. He didn’t love her either. But her name was in the newspapers and on the billboards. The Perlefter family went to films in which she played a supporting role and to the cabarets in which she sang. Ilona was not so young any more. Her picture stood on Fredy’s writing-table along with a couple of letters written in large stiff strokes on pale purple paper. The letters lay there, casually strewn across his desk, and his sisters secretly read them. Fredy came home and said bitterly, ‘You’ve already read my letters!’ but was actually pleased.
    Since Fredy ‘had something’ with Ilona, he entered into those wonderful circles where art blends with sin and justifies it. Behind the scenes it was quite different. Outside the boundaries of middle-class society much was not only permitted but also desirable. ‘Art’ legitimizes even debauchery. Through his relationships within the arts Fredy put the whole family into an adventurous mood. Fredy used up half of FrauPerlefter’s spending money. He wore, henceforth, silk shirts and gave his opinion on his sisters’ clothing. He must have known what attracted those women living in that world in which the main thing was the effect, the effect about which people would gossip. Frau Perlefter and her daughters were far