more step nearer to Kromer and his world, that bit by bit I was fairly headed downhill, and I retorted by defiance. Let the Devil carry me away, now there was no turning back! I counted the money fearfully; while it was in the box it had sounded like such a lot, but now in my hand there was miserably little of it. It came to sixty-five pfennigs. I hid the box in the vestibule, held the money in my clenched fist, and left the house, feeling different from any other time I had walked through that gate. From upstairs someone called after me, it seemed; I departed swiftly.
There was still plenty of time; I sneaked by roundabout paths through the narrow streets of a changed town, beneath clouds never before seen, past houses that looked at me and people who were suspicious of me. On the way I recalled that one of my school chums had once found a thaler coin in the Cattle Market. I would gladly have prayed to God to perform a miracle and let me make such a find, too. But I no longer had any right to pray. And, even so, the money box wouldn’t have been made whole again.
Franz Kromer saw me from a distance, but he walked toward me very slowly, seeming to pay no attention to me. When he was close to me, he signaled to me imperiously to follow him, and continued walking calmly, without looking around even once, down Straw Lane and over the footbridge until halting among the last houses, in front of a construction site. No work was going on there, the walls stood there bare without doors or windows. Kromer looked around and went in through the doorway, and I followed. He stepped behind the wall, beckoned me over, and held out his hand.
“Have you got it?” he asked coolly.
I drew my clenched fist out of my pocket and shook out my money onto the flat of his hand. He had counted it even before the last five-pfennig piece stopped clinking.
“This is sixty-five pfennigs,” he said, and he looked at me.
“Yes,” I said timidly. “It’s all I have, I know it’s not enough. But that’s all there is. I have no more.”
“I would have thought you were smarter,” he said, scolding me almost gently. “Between men of honor things should be orderly. I don’t want to take anything from you unjustly, you know that. Take back your small change! That other man—you know who—won’t try to beat down my price. He’ll pay.”
“But I simply don’t have any more! This came from my money box.”
“That’s your affair. But I don’t want to drive you to despair. You still owe me one mark and thirty-five pfennigs. When will I get it?”
“Oh, you’ll definitely get it, Kromer! I don’t know right now—maybe I’ll have more soon, tomorrow or the day after. You realize I can’t talk to my father about it.”
‘That doesn’t concern me. I’m not the type to want to do you harm. After all, I could get my money before noon, see? And I’m poor. You’re wearing nice clothes, and you get better stuff to eat for lunch than I do. But I say no more. For my part, I can wait awhile. Day after tomorrow I’ll whistle for you, in the afternoon, then you’ll settle up. Do you know my whistle?”
He performed it for me. I had heard it often.
“Yes,” I said, “I know.”
He went away as if I had nothing to do with him. It had been a business transaction between us, nothing more.
**
Even today, I think, Kromer’s whistle would give me a start if I heard it again suddenly. From that time on I heard it frequently; I seemed to be hearing it constantly. There was no place, no game, no task, no thought that that whistle didn’t pierce through; it robbed me of my independence, it was now my fate. I spent a lot of time in our little flower garden, which I loved, during the gentle, colorful autumn afternoons; and a peculiar urge led me to play childish games of earlier years once more; to some extent I was playing the role of a boy younger than I actually was, a boy still good and free, innocent and secure. But in the midst of it, always unexpected and yet always frightfully disruptive and surprising, Kromer’s whistle came from somewhere or other, cutting the thread, destroying the illusions. Then I had to go, had to follow my tormentor to bad, ugly places, had to make an accounting to him and be dunned for money. The whole thing lasted a few weeks, perhaps, but it felt to me like years or an eternity. I seldom had money, a five- or ten-pfennig coin stolen from the kitchen table when Lina left her shopping basket lying there. Each time, Kromer bawled me out and heaped scorn on me; I was the one who wanted to fool him and cheat him out of what was duly his; I was the one who was stealing from him; I was the one who was making him miserable! Not often in my life have I taken my distress so much to heart, never have I experienced greater hopelessness or loss of independence.
I had filled the money box with game tokens and put it back where it was; no one asked about it. But that, too, could come down around my ears any day. Even more than Kromer’s vulgar whistle, I often feared my mother when she walked up to me softly—wasn’t she coming to ask me about the money box?
Since I had presented myself to my devil without money a number of times, he began to torture and exploit me in another way. I had to work for him. He had to make deliveries for his father, and I had to make them for him. Or else he commanded me to perform some difficult feat, to hop on one leg for ten minutes or to attach a scrap of paper to a passerby’s coat. Many nights in dreams I continued suffering these torments and lay bathed in sweat from those nightmares.
For a while I became ill. I vomited frequently and was subject to chills, though at night I was sweaty and feverish. My mother felt that something was wrong, and displayed a lot of sympathy, which tortured me because I couldn’t repay her with my confidence.
One evening when I was already in bed she brought me a piece of chocolate. That was a reminiscence of earlier years in which on many evenings, when I had been well-behaved, I had received similar comforting tidbits at bedtime. Now she stood there and held out the piece of chocolate to me. I felt so bad that all I could do was shake my head. She asked what was wrong with me, and stroked my hair. I could merely blurt out: “No! No! I don’t want anything.” She put the chocolate on the night table and left. When she tried to ask me about it on the following day, I pretended I didn’t remember anything about it. Once she sent for the doctor to see me; he examined me and left instructions that I should wash in cold water every morning.
My condition in that period was a sort of insanity. In the midst of our household’s orderly, peaceful existence I was living as frightened and tormented as a ghost; I didn’t participate in the life of the others, and rarely took my mind off my troubles even for an hour. With my father, who was often irritated and questioned me, I was cold and reserved.
[3. Lateinschule, “a school in which Latin is taught,” is sometimes synonymous with Gymnasium, sometimes, as here, with an elementary school that prepares talented and/or well-to-do children for the Gymnasium. In any case, it is contrasted with the Volksschule, the ordinary public elementary school.]
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