stab at those four years and some gaiety should show up here and there, it’s nothing but the truth. However, that gaietywas often of the desperate kind seen in some medieval paintings, where the laughter of the redeemed is sometimes akin to the expression on the faces of the damned.
So somehow we managed, and after each move not only our relatives and friends but also the bailiff and the beggars were quick to discover our new address: my mother never sent anyone away, and she had an unruffled way of neither regarding bailiffs as enemies nor treating them as such. As a result, we received much good advice from them, and the pawnshop remained a familiar place to us. I can’t say it was a good time. We were both depressed and reckless, not the slightest bit sensible. At the very moment when we could least afford it, we would go out to a restaurant for a meal. We would invite “furnished gentlemen,” as long as we had any, for a game of cards, slyly intending to win twenty pfennigs for a pack of Alvas or Ecksteins, until we found to our amusement that they had similar plans, so we would pool our resources and enjoy a smoke together.
Every opportunity to make money was seized on; the worst catastrophe of all was an attempt we made to earn some, perhaps even acquire wealth, by addressing envelopes. We did own a typewriter, the one I later used to type my first short stories, influenced by Dostoievski, later by Bloy. (But I also wrote a novel, by hand, somewhat to the surprise of my future wife because the “hero” had two women.) The enterprise ended in disaster. Our employer, who was unemployed, also hoped to get rich with homemade birch rods for St. Nicholas to use on naughty boys. Not only did he expect us to type theaddresses: we also had to pick them out of a telephone directory and supply the stationery. Question: who needs birch rods for St. Nicholas? Bakeries, pastry shops, grocery stores—a laborious job. Eventually it turned out that our employer was even worse off than we were—I don’t know whether he ever unloaded any birch rods, and we never asked for more than the agreed wage, which came nowhere near covering our expenses.
And of course we helped in the workshop, if any help happened to be needed. With a wobbly two-wheeled handcart (which also did duty during our moves), we conveyed great stacks of new or repaired furniture to government offices. (Memories of Revenue Offices South, Old Town, and North! And the Regional Finance Administration on Wörth-Strasse, past which we sometimes stroll today on our way to the Rhine.) At night in the cashier’s office of Revenue Office South (originally a Carthusian monastery secularized in 1806), we renovated the floor, which was said to date from Napoleonic times. We hoped to find coins, old ones if possible, overlooking the fact that Carthusian monks of the eighteenth century weren’t likely to have walked around with purses in their habits, and that latter-day visitors to the Revenue Office kept a tight grip on their pennies.
I was somewhat more successful in giving private lessons. The demand was small, the supply enormous: there was a plethora of unemployed teachers, B.A.’s, M.A.’s, and students, as well as sufficient not unemployed elementary and high school teachers anxious for some extra income. Immense supply, tiny demand, and that, of course, pusheddown the prices (Oh, free market economy!). I found my first pupil through an advertisement, a nice boy whom I coached in Latin and math for fifty pfennigs an hour. I was more scared of his tests in school than he was; the result of those tests was the mark of success for which his parents were watching and waiting. I applied the method my brother had used with me: opening up gaps, closing gaps, and lo, he improved. An attempt at tutoring in French failed miserably, due to that boy’s mother’s excellent knowledge of French; she was quick to discover my gaps, graciously paid me off, and sent me
So somehow we managed, and after each move not only our relatives and friends but also the bailiff and the beggars were quick to discover our new address: my mother never sent anyone away, and she had an unruffled way of neither regarding bailiffs as enemies nor treating them as such. As a result, we received much good advice from them, and the pawnshop remained a familiar place to us. I can’t say it was a good time. We were both depressed and reckless, not the slightest bit sensible. At the very moment when we could least afford it, we would go out to a restaurant for a meal. We would invite “furnished gentlemen,” as long as we had any, for a game of cards, slyly intending to win twenty pfennigs for a pack of Alvas or Ecksteins, until we found to our amusement that they had similar plans, so we would pool our resources and enjoy a smoke together.
Every opportunity to make money was seized on; the worst catastrophe of all was an attempt we made to earn some, perhaps even acquire wealth, by addressing envelopes. We did own a typewriter, the one I later used to type my first short stories, influenced by Dostoievski, later by Bloy. (But I also wrote a novel, by hand, somewhat to the surprise of my future wife because the “hero” had two women.) The enterprise ended in disaster. Our employer, who was unemployed, also hoped to get rich with homemade birch rods for St. Nicholas to use on naughty boys. Not only did he expect us to type theaddresses: we also had to pick them out of a telephone directory and supply the stationery. Question: who needs birch rods for St. Nicholas? Bakeries, pastry shops, grocery stores—a laborious job. Eventually it turned out that our employer was even worse off than we were—I don’t know whether he ever unloaded any birch rods, and we never asked for more than the agreed wage, which came nowhere near covering our expenses.
And of course we helped in the workshop, if any help happened to be needed. With a wobbly two-wheeled handcart (which also did duty during our moves), we conveyed great stacks of new or repaired furniture to government offices. (Memories of Revenue Offices South, Old Town, and North! And the Regional Finance Administration on Wörth-Strasse, past which we sometimes stroll today on our way to the Rhine.) At night in the cashier’s office of Revenue Office South (originally a Carthusian monastery secularized in 1806), we renovated the floor, which was said to date from Napoleonic times. We hoped to find coins, old ones if possible, overlooking the fact that Carthusian monks of the eighteenth century weren’t likely to have walked around with purses in their habits, and that latter-day visitors to the Revenue Office kept a tight grip on their pennies.
I was somewhat more successful in giving private lessons. The demand was small, the supply enormous: there was a plethora of unemployed teachers, B.A.’s, M.A.’s, and students, as well as sufficient not unemployed elementary and high school teachers anxious for some extra income. Immense supply, tiny demand, and that, of course, pusheddown the prices (Oh, free market economy!). I found my first pupil through an advertisement, a nice boy whom I coached in Latin and math for fifty pfennigs an hour. I was more scared of his tests in school than he was; the result of those tests was the mark of success for which his parents were watching and waiting. I applied the method my brother had used with me: opening up gaps, closing gaps, and lo, he improved. An attempt at tutoring in French failed miserably, due to that boy’s mother’s excellent knowledge of French; she was quick to discover my gaps, graciously paid me off, and sent me
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