’Cause if them other girls knew that they were good for nothing and we just like ’em, that’s all, they’d be so sad that they didn’t have any—.’ ” In response to the above, the department store G. sent me a big box full of the loveliest silk remnants, little silk swatches, particularly pretty Japanese and Indian patterns, for my thirteen-year-old friend. That evening, ten schoolgirls gathered in a circle on the lawn, in the center of which, enthroned, as it were, on the box, my fanatically adored little friend, a shoemaker’s daughter, held court. She picked up every little swatch of silk and passed it around the circle to each of the stunned girls struck dumb with amazement. The oldest girl said: “Can you really buy enough material of each little rag to make yourself a whole dress?”—“What for, you silly goose, aren’t the rags much nicer just as they are?” replied my heavenly little thirteen-year-old. The automobile dust of the rich enveloped lawn and lane in a thick white fog, while the clouds were pierced by blood-red zigzags from the setting sun. Whereupon my friend shut the box and said: “End of silk swatch show for today, ladies and gentlemen—,” hoisted the box onto her dear little ash blond head and said to me: “Tonight I’ll sleep tight and dream sweet sweet dreams, but not of you, no Sir, I’m going to dream about your wonderfully lovely little swatches of silk—!”
I wanted just once for a half day to live the life of a rich man. I arranged to have myself picked up at my place by a ravishing lady and her husband in their Mercedes. I was driven to my barber, on Teinfaltstrasse, to rejuvenate myself, especially with a splash of the menthol-scented French brandy cologne on the head. An ersatz for any cold bath! Then we drove to Baden. There we took baths in the Kurhaus private tubs, 24 degrees Celsius. Then we had them unlock cool hotel rooms and slept for a good half hour. Then we ate Solo asparagus and fricasseed calves’ brains. Then we drove on to Heiligenkreuz. In a cool hall we sipped steaming hot tea with lemon. We dashed back home in the evening.
The meadows wafted sweetly and the forest stood black and motionlessly melancholic beneath the still light of the evening sky.
In Vienna I said goodbye.
Seated in the Café Ritz I spotted that young woman whom I have long found pleasing to look at. Brown hair, blue straw hat, upturned nose. I wanted to bring the day to a festive conclusion. So I sent her three wonderfully dark roses and an egg punch, the favorite drink of most women of her kind. She graciously accepted, exceptionally.
Then she came over to my table and said:
“Does it really give you such a great pleasure to pay your respects to me?”
“Yes, indeed, or else I wouldn’t do it!”
“Well, then, I don’t even have to thank you for it—!?”
“No, not at all, the pleasure is all mine!”
That was my day of affluence.
There’s one dirt cheap pleasure I know that’s altogether free of disappointments, to study the train schedule from mid-May on and pick out the very train with which you would, if only . . . So, for instance, at 8:45, you’re already up and about and even shaved (to travel unshaven is only half a pleasure, better, if need be, to go without washing); so at 8:45 with the southbound express to Payerbach, and from there by one-horse carriage (my favorite driven by Michael Ruppert, Jr.) to the heavenly idyllic Thalhof Hotel. Once there you do nothing at all for the moment, seeing as you’re actually still seated in your room in Vienna poring over your travel plans. Enough, everything’s fine as it is, facing the forest, the cowshed, the horse stable, the bubbling trout brook, the laundry yard, the woodshed, where once, thirty years ago, with Anna Kaldermann—you gathered wood, and in the distance the hills near the Payerbachgräben where my father wanted to acquire a plot of land planted with sour cherry trees to flee to the holy refuge of nature, while my mother said: “Not until our two daughters are wed, my dear!” So there you sit before your travel plans, 8:45 departure time, dreaming sweet dreams free of the burdens of reality, and you just saved, conservatively speaking, at least twenty Crowns. For every change of place taxes the cost of your stay!
“I’d like to have a blue balloon! A blue balloon is what I’d like!”
“Here’s a blue balloon for you, Rosamunde!”
It was explained to her then that there was a gas inside that was lighter than the air in the atmosphere, as a consequence of which, etc. etc.
“I’d like to let it go—,” she said, just like that.
“Wouldn’t you rather give it to that poor little girl over there?”
“No, I want to let it go—!”
She lets the balloon go, keeps looking after it, till it disappears in the blue sky.
“Aren’t you sorry now you didn’t give it to the poor little girl?”
“Yes, I should’ve given it to the poor little girl.”
“Here’s another blue balloon, give her this one!”
“No, I want to let this one go too up into the blue sky!”—
She does so.
She is given a third blue balloon.
She goes over to the poor little girl on her own, gives this one to her, saying: “You let it go!”
“No,” says the poor little girl, peering enraptured at the balloon.
In her room it flew up to the ceiling, stayed there for three days, got darker, shriveled up and fell down dead, a little black sack.
Then the poor little girl thought to herself: “I should have let it go outside in the park, up into the blue sky, I’d’ve kept on looking after it, kept on looking—!”
In the meantime, the rich little girl gets another ten balloons, and one time Uncle Karl even buys her all thirty balloons in one batch. Twenty of them she lets fly up into the sky and gives ten to poor children. From then on she had absolutely no more interest in balloons.
“The stupid balloons—,” she said.
Whereupon Aunt Ida observed that she was rather advanced for her age!
The poor little girl dreamed: “I should have let it go up into the blue sky, I’d’ve kept on looking and looking—!”
The old man came home from the puppet theater with his granddaughter Rosita.
He was crab-red. With his white hair on top of his head, it was really spring in winter.
“What a shame not to have seen that—!” he said and gave a side- long glance at Rosita.
“Of course I would’ve loved to have come along,” said the pale young mother, preparing potato salad with vinegar, holding up the two little yellow bottles to the light so as to tell them apart.
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