Listen, Mitzi, I’ll give you one hundred Crowns if you tell his name!”
“One hundred Crowns? Make it one fifty!”
“It was Peter!”
“What Peter?!”
“Peter, you know, Peter Altenberg!”
The letter: “Saw you again last night at the ‘Tabarin!’ Couldn’t talk to you, didn’t dare to. So there I was seated face to face with the guy that had me for a whole year butt-naked under the covers. . . . It was just no use!”
“How did he ever come to draft this letter for you?!”
I said to him, I said: “For God’s sake, write me something I’d have written if I knew how to write!”
“So the letter’s from you after all?!”
“That’s what I said from the start!”
So then she patched things up again with the Count.
You’ve got troubles of one kind or another—get thee to the coffeehouse!
She can’t make it to your place for whatever perfectly plausible reason—to the coffeehouse!
Your boots are torn—to the coffeehouse!
You make four hundred Crowns and spend five hundred—coffeehouse!
You’re a frugal fellow and don’t dare spend a penny on yourself—coffeehouse!
You’re a paper pusher and would’ve liked to become a doctor—coffeehouse!
You can’t find a girlfriend up to snuff—coffeehouse!
You’re virtually on the verge of suicide—coffeehouse!
You loathe and revile people and yet can’t live without them—coffeehouse!
No place else will let you pay on credit—coffeehouse!
Six P.M. approaches. I sense it coming on. Not as intensely as the children sense the approach of Christmas Eve. But I sense it all the same. At six on the dot I drink tea, a festive satisfaction that never disappoints in this burdensome existence. Something you can count on, to have a becalming bliss at your beck and call. A given completely free of life’s vicissitudes. Pouring the good mountain spring water into my lovely white half-liter nickel-plated receptacle already gives me pleasure. Then I wait out the simmer, the song of the water. I have a huge, semispherical, deep, brick-red Wedgewood cup. The tea comes from the Café Central, wafting with the scent of high mountain meadow, of wild bugle and sunburned pasture grass.
The tea is golden yellow-straw yellow, never brownish, always light and unoppressive. I smoke a cigarette along with it, a “Chelmis, Hyksos.” I sip it very very slowly. The tea is an internally stimulating nerve bath. You can bear it all better while drinking it. You feel it inside, a woman ought to have that effect. But she never does. She hasn’t yet acquired the culture of serene sweetness so as to affect you like a noble warm golden-yellow tea. She believes she’d lose her power. But my six o’clock tea never loses its power over me. I long for it daily in just the same way and lovingly let it wed my body.
As a child, rummaging around a drawer in the desk of my beloved, oh so beautiful Mama, the desk made of mahogany and cut glass, I found an empty perfume bottle which still retained the potent scent of a certain unidentified fragrance.
Many times I’d sneak over and sniff at it.
I associated this fragrance with all the love, tenderness, friendship, longing, sadness in the world. But for me all these feelings were bound up with my Mama. Later fate fell upon us, unsuspected, like a horde of Huns and inflicted heavy losses all around.
And one day I dashed from perfumery to perfumery hoping to possibly find in the little sample bottles the fragrance from the mahogany desk drawer of my late beloved Mama. And finally, finally I found it: Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, from Paris.
And I remembered the bygone days when Mama was the only womanly presence able to arouse pleasure and pain, ardent longing and deep despair, but who would always, always forgive whatever I’d done and who fretted over me and perhaps even before falling asleep at night prayed for my future happiness . .
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