> Dose 1 · Machine translation (Claude Opus 5.5, October 2026) of Gabriele Tergit's *Effingers*, Chapter 25, from the second study on after-babel.vercel.app; this branch first read Sophie Duvernoy's English translation of Chapter 24.

25. SPRING

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at ten o’clock in the morning!

Eugenie stood beside her lady’s maid, who was packing. The next day, she was to leave for the Riviera, for Nice, for the Hotel Barblan.

Along Tiergartenstrasse raced the horses. Beautiful women, veils fluttering around their top hats, and the gentlemen bareheaded or in bowlers. Along Tiergartenstrasse walked the officers in undress uniform, broad red stripes down their trousers, on their way to the Great General Staff. It was quiet. Now and then, children’s laughter rang out from the gardens.

“It’s really a shame to go away,” said Eugenie. “Berlin is so lovely in March. I’ve already told Kniep to plant more crocuses next year. We have rather too many snowdrops and spring snowflakes. Ah, and here’s Fräulein Winkel. Well, Fräulein, how are you? Yes, let’s try it on once more.”

Eugenie stood in her casino gown. Fräulein Winkel knelt, her mouth full of pins, adjusting something at the hem.

“I don’t like it at all, my girl, the way you always put the pins in your mouth. Frieda, bring Fräulein Winkel a pincushion. Fräulein Winkel, you look so wretched! What’s the matter? Come, you can talk to me. A little higher up here, don’t you think? And this gathering a bit fuller. Temptations, now that it’s spring—or is it worries? Perhaps I can help you?”

“Well, if I’m really to talk. But please stand still, or I’ll stick Madam with a pin. I had a gentleman friend—Madam will understand—a handsome gentleman, and I might have known from the start that nothing would come of it. But you know how it is, you never believe it. And then he got married. Well, that’s how it goes, and I always imagined he loved me, and everyone knows how rich gentlemen marry—money and the same station, and then it’s all settled.”

“Tell me, Fräulein Winkel—I don’t mean to hurt your feelings—but doesn’t a woman lower herself if she… well, how shall I put it… if she grants a man his rights before marriage? I mean, she sinks in men’s esteem.”

“Maybe so. You’re probably right.”

“Don’t cry, Fräulein Winkel, dear child. Go on, talk to me.”

“So I imagined he was sure to be unhappy, and his wife was very ugly, and he was bound to be unfaithful to her.”

“And now?”

“And now I’ve run into him. And she’s so beautiful, you can’t begin to describe how beautiful she is, and there was a Spreewald nursemaid with them, too, with a baby carriage. And as they walked past, I happened to hear him say, ‘Oh, Annettchen, what happy people we are, all of nature smiles upon us.’”

“He said ‘Annettchen’? I see. Yes, that is bitter. Is there no one who loves you? We always want to do the loving ourselves, and we’re never grateful enough when someone loves us.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s so. Now just one more stitch at the shoulder, dear Madam, and the agraffe like this?”

“No. This way is better after all, don’t you think?”

“Yes, like that. There’s a young man who’s just started at the shop, Lehmann, he keeps the books, and he runs after me and makes such sheep’s eyes at me, and my friend Lischen and I, we can’t help laughing when he twists his hat into a sausage while he’s talking to me.”

“One should only ever marry men who make sheep’s eyes. I’ll take the dress off, and you can sew it right here. You know the Councilor, you know how clever and good he is, but he was never handsome, and I know you think me very beautiful. Perhaps you’ve sometimes thought I married my husband for his money. But I had no need of that whatsoever. The truth is, I had suffered a very great disappointment before. We in Russia aren’t so strict as people here, where it’s frowned upon if a young girl so much as goes for a walk. At a great carnival ball I had met an officer of the Guards, as handsome as a picture. And we had the chance to meet alone, and he was in love and reckless, and, in short, he kissed me, and, as is only natural, I thought the earth must stand still. He took me in his arms and said, ‘What do I care about the world? And tomorrow’—oh, I can hear it as if it were yesterday—‘we shall meet.’ I went, and—in vain. All around me was snow and ice, and I kept thinking he was bound to come to the city woods. But he didn’t come. I went through every kind of hell in that moment, and then I received a little note: he didn’t know, and whether he could dare, and responsibility—it was a very honest and decent letter—and would I see him once more. I wrote ‘Yes,’ and we went for a walk. I saw that he loved me, I felt it, but he said, ‘I think we should part now,’ or, ‘Please, dear lady, it’s clouding over, it might snow.’ He didn’t have the courage of his love. So I ran home, and at home sat the man who is now my husband. I couldn’t make up my mind right away; it was the same with me as with you. I loved the other one. But then I let myself be loved, and it has made me very happy. When you are the one who loves, you are always trembling and afraid and lonely and in need of friends you can pour your heart out to. But when you are loved, then you know that whatever happens, you have someone you can rely on. So now, you think it over, about Lehmann.”

“Yes, Madam, let’s try the dress on once more. But it’s like this, too: when you have nothing, that’s hard as well. I’d like to set up on my own, and my former gentleman friend said I could turn to him at any time, but one doesn’t want that, it’s so embarrassing—to end up beholden to him on top of everything.”

“How much do you need to get started?”

“I’ve worked it out—about two thousand marks, but that’s a lot of money, and if I have to pay such high interest straightaway, it won’t work at all, even if somebody does lend it to me.”

Eugenie took two thousand-mark notes from her dressing table.

“Why, that’s—what can I say!” cried Käte Winkel.

“Take it and make money with it.”

“Oh, such kindness, such kindness.”

“My husband said to me: The childless woman has the most children, and one must provide for them, so I’ll always give you a bundle of thousand-mark notes that we won’t talk about and won’t keep accounts of.”

Eugenie looked in the mirror once more. “This fashion really is too silly. How much more padding are we supposed to tie on back there? And what does Frau Koller say? Long yellow gloves?”

“Yes, I have them here.”

“Very nice. Frieda, put them straight into the glove box.”

“Will Madam recommend customers to me when I set up on my own—or even come herself?”

“Why, my dear, I know what you can do. Of course—that goes without saying.”

Käte Winkel also collected a few winter things from the lady’s maid and left, the boxes over her arm.

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at eleven o’clock in the morning!

Sofie sat in her room at the little wobbly desk, took up an agate penholder, and wrote:

“I love you. I dream of you. Why did you tell me that I’m sweet. I sat at the piano and played Schumann’s A Woman’s Love and Life; ‘Since I saw you, I think I must be blind; always, as in a dream, I see only you.’ When will you come to see us again? I don’t dare ask Theodor.”

And then she addressed an envelope and asked white-armed, red-cheeked Anna to deliver the letter. The letter went to Arnold Kramer.

“You look so flushed, Sofie. Aren’t you feeling well?”

“It’s nothing, Father, nothing at all. Perhaps I’ve been playing the piano a bit too much.”

“Don’t overdo it, my daughter, don’t overdo it—keep to a noble measure. Fräulein Kelchner, you’ll take the girl to the Tiergarten later.”

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at one o’clock in the afternoon!

The guard was marching up! At a window of the University stood Privatdozent Waldemar Goldschmidt. He saw the Opera House, the Linden, the curved Baroque facade of the Library, saw the guard, marching in step, white summer trousers, blue tunics, gleaming buttons, red collars, white plumes, and the drummer at their head, “fifers and drummers, a martial sound.” A crowd past counting. At his window stood the old Kaiser, as he did every day at noon when the guard marched up.

Popular enthusiasm, thought Waldemar—this time for the right man, tomorrow for the wrong one. And the law? The law would have to be made entirely anew. Roman law, tailored to slaves and to property, had many flaws. How far could one do without it in the new Civil Code?

The door opened.

“My dear colleague, what an honor!”

“I heard at the Library that you are using the very volume of the Monumenta that I need.”

“It is entirely at your disposal, of course.”

“You were just watching the popular enthusiasm?”

“The very same phrase was going through my mind. Our universally revered, white-haired sovereign may deserve it. But you know where I stand on Bismarck. The greater the man, the greater the shadow.”

“My young friend,” said the old historian, “I recently went back to my native region to study Hessian folk expressions. It is good to refresh one’s boyhood memories in one’s own small homeland before they are entirely absorbed into the beautifully ordered Empire.”

“I had no idea you were a federalist!”

“I always have been. Centralism is utterly un-German. We are doing our utmost to forfeit a portion of the freedom Germany possessed before the war. A historical principle: the victors always become the cultural imitators of the vanquished.”

“We have won ourselves our servitude. This legacy of the defeated Caesar is, in my eyes, the greatest crime he committed against mankind. I could forget Napoleon’s Second of December—but never the German reaction after the victory!”

Waldemar stood with his back to the Linden, where the military marches were still sounding. In the high room, lined with the black leather spines of books, the world-famous scholar sat across from him, resplendent with long, snow-white hair.

“I’m surprised, my young friend, that you see France that way. I know, after all, that you have all sorts of relations over there.”

“That has never prevented me from seeing France more clearly than people who spend only a few blissful weeks in Paris.”

“In France, where centralization was carried to such a high degree, no one was promoted who did not swear in verba magistri. Our political fragmentation has, fortunately, protected us until now from the general effect of such pernicious influences, which reached down into the smallest affairs. Here in Germany it is just the reverse. If we have some outstanding man, we strive above all to show ourselves independent of his influence, and each of us, however insignificant he may otherwise be, makes a point of choosing his own direction, even an admittedly worse one, merely to demonstrate that independence. I am speaking,” he said, suddenly more animated, “in the present tense, but I ought to be speaking in the past. I tell you, here on the sixteenth of March, 1887: if things go on like this in the new German Empire, clinics and libraries will be turned back into barracks. The life of the mind is in danger; it is being devoured by the State and by machines. And what about you? When will you be made a full professor?”

Waldemar shrugged.

“The faculty wishes it, so I hear.”

“Hardly,” said Waldemar. “If I had myself baptized, they would let me into the sacred circle. But I am suspect on other counts, too. Whoever wants to blow away the dust and abolish privileges finds no favor with the great. Besides, one might be baptized because one regards Christianity as a further development of the old religion of the prophets, as a milder, gentler ethic—one that came, after all, centuries later. But all such considerations must give way the moment baptism brings advantages. Surely it is repugnant when an act born of the finest stirrings of conscience, of deliberations of the most personal kind, leads to a post. A premium on spinelessness.”

“You are right.”

The great man left the room. Goldschmidt took his hat, coat, and cane. Let the commentary stew, and let Section 1378 of the draft for a new Civil Code wait a while longer for its final wording.

He had gone only a few steps down the Linden when a coupé stopped right beside him.

“Waldemar.”

“Oh, Susanna, life is beautiful after all.”

“Won’t you get in?”

“No—on the contrary, you get out. I have a mind to show a beautiful woman the spring. Let’s have lunch together at Hiller’s. Agreed?”

“Agreed. What do you say to my success?”

“The Count? He won’t keep.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re an artist and not a kept woman.”

“But a faithful lover.”

“Perhaps.”

Oh, what sweetness there was on this March day! Soft was the red carpet, soft the sofa that received Susanna Widerklee, soft the armchair in which Waldemar sat.

There was hardly a seat to be had. Officers sat there, beautiful women, a few landowners, Junkers up from the provinces.

“Back there sits ancient Count Perponcher, and over there Count Waldersee, a coming man, a court general,” said Waldemar. “Lobster, then rump steak, I think—or would you like something else, Susanna?”

“I’m as hungry as a bear, but that suits me.”

“And what shall we drink? A Moselle?”

“No, I’d rather have a Rhine wine.”

“It’s strong, Susanna,” and he looked into her eyes.

“And what if I want that?”

“Suits me.”

An hour later.

“Shall we have coffee here, or at your place?”

“At my place, I think.”

“Good, Susanna, good.”

Susanna had the curtains drawn and the lamp lit. Waldemar sat down at the piano and played the Magic Fire Music.

“The Count,” she said, “is very charming.”

“And I, Susanna?”

He stood up, pulled the woman to him, kissed her mouth. They knew each other. Susanna longed for him. He led her the few steps to the bedroom. Oh, how she loved him, this swift storm, this deep indifference to coyness and protest, this contempt for all untruth!

“Oh, don’t, please don’t,” said Susanna.

“Why do you say no when you feel like saying yes?” She felt that he didn’t like it. “Shame on you for being ashamed!”

What a blessing, thought Susanna, as she lay with him, to be allowed to be honestly sensual!

“Waldemar, are you cross with me when I kiss you like this?”

“Why, Susanna! Are there men who get cross about that?”

“Not cross, but disappointed. They want a pure woman.”

“Oxen—in the literal sense. Hence all this silly idolizing of young girls.”

The fire burned in the fireplace.

“Our coffee’s getting cold,” said Susanna.

They fetched the coffee from the next room, crouched before the embers, and drank the mocha. Susanna slipped on a dressing gown, went to the piano, and sang, “The lotus flower is afraid…”

Waldemar got dressed. What was singing there was love, was passion. Susanna loved him. But he had had bitter experiences with her once before. Not to go through all that again. There was no keeping her. He always believed it would work out one day after all, but it never did.

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at five o’clock in the afternoon!

Quitting time on Chausseestrasse. Children hopped over chalk lines or played marbles in the hollow between four paving stones. Father strung twine on the balcony for the Virginia creeper or tinkered with the pigeon loft. Mother sewed.

“I’m going down to the ‘Fresh Mutton’ for a beer, just one beer.”

“Paule, do you have to?”

“Aw, leave it be, I’ll be back soon.”

“He’ll go and drink away a week’s wages again!”

“If I had a little woman like you, something nice and solid, I wouldn’t be going to the pub,” said the lodger.

“Hey, you, what d’you think you’re doing! You didn’t rent me along with the bed—let go!”

“I’m only saying, seeing as your husband keeps you so short. You could have it better with me.”

“Don’t you say a word against my husband. It’s only ’cause we’ve just got the one room. That’s the only reason.”

The freckled apprentice announced a visitor for Paul: Mayer, the insurance agent.

“Ah, good afternoon, Herr Mayer.”

“Good afternoon, Herr Effinger. I thought I’d come in person for once. It’s easier to talk things over when people know each other personally. In writing, misunderstandings usually creep in.”

“Well, here is the insurance contract. There are several points in it I wanted to take up.”

“You’ve built up a fine business here, Herr Effinger. I, on the other hand, am a wreck.”

“Why, Herr Mayer, how can you say such a thing! You look splendid!”

“Oh, I’m an old man, Herr Effinger. And no one ever sang me a lullaby about ending up an insurance agent.”

“Such is life!” said Paul.

“How right you are. If I still had the sarcasm of my youth, I would say it’s chiefly because the profession of insurance agent was still fairly unknown in the year I was born. I was born in 1822. I have known the world. I have known the Paris of the Second Empire. Anyone who didn’t know it doesn’t know what living means. The sixties in Paris—it was one long cancan, of the mind as well. You are still young, Herr Effinger, but I sense you have sympathy for a man who has failed. The banking house of Mayer, Lamprecht & Co. was mine.”

“Oh!” said Paul, full of admiring surprise.

“Yes, you know what that counted for. We handled the issue of the Sardinian war loan in ’59. I financed the Luxembourg railroad.”

“Well, well, a great firm, a wealthy house.”

“All gone. My father built Emmanuel Oppner’s house. I don’t mean to say anything against Oppner & Goldschmidt, but in those days they were small people. It breaks my heart when I walk past it nowadays. While they were remodeling, I went and looked at it in secret, old fool that I am. It isn’t my house anymore. They’ve painted it all wrong. And over the bright paintings, of such enchanting lightness, those barbarians pasted dark leather wallpaper. Unbelievable, really.”

“I don’t understand much about such things, Herr Mayer.”

“No, no, and I don’t want to bore you, either. I’m an aesthete, yes, I understand something about art.”

Paul thought: And he went bankrupt, too.

“The Gotthard Tunnel was the ruin of me.”

“People have lost a lot of money on that.”

“I could tell you a thing or two about that. But apart from ten percent, I have no debts left. I’m still paying it off. I owe that to my name and to my daughter. She’s just coming to fetch me—the poor girl gives piano lessons. Won’t you walk a little way with us?”

What a spring day, this Saturday in March 1887, at six o’clock in the evening! What a throng on Chausseestrasse!

“You don’t have an easy time of it, Fräulein Mayer,” said Paul.

“No, no, but at least I earn something.”

“That’s hard for a young girl. Just recently a young girl applied to me for a job copying letters. But young girls in an office—that’s no good. A woman is best off at home.”

“But what if she has no one to offer her a home?”

“Then of course it’s dreadful. But usually the female members of a family are needed. There’s a child to bring up, an invalid to nurse.”

“But what if a girl doesn’t want that?”

“Then she’s eccentric.”

“Do you think so?”

“In my opinion, yes.”

“Father, you’re falling far behind. We’ll lose each other. And in this neighborhood, of all places.”

The broad Friedrichstrasse at the Weidendamm Bridge. The railroad over the river, a little omnibus with its little horses, a one-legged man crying, “Wax matches, wax matches,” and whores hitching up their skirts, many ruffles rustling. A gentleman with a monocle, and carriages driving to the theater.

“We turn off here. Perhaps we’ll see you at our place sometime.”

“With pleasure, Herr Mayer, although I always have a great deal to do.”

“Adieu.” “Adieu.” “Adieu.”

“A nice fellow, Amalie, isn’t he?”

“A bit dry.”

“You mustn’t always find fault with young men.”

“I’m only saying. Mother’s rate for her piecework has been cut again. Twenty pfennigs to sew a skirt. That comes to maybe ten marks a week. And that’s not counting the lamp oil, or the thread.”

“Amalie, you’re breaking my heart.”

“But, Father, I’m only saying how things are. The middleman, a nasty fellow, says the firm squeezes him, too. I’d like to know who he supplies. He won’t say. Which proves he gets much more per skirt than he lets on.”

Wool market on Klosterstrasse. Königstrasse, between Alexanderplatz and the Palace, is jammed with covered wagons. The wool is stored in the ancient castle of the margraves of Brandenburg. Next to it is the Gray Cloister, Bismarck’s school.

“No getting through, as usual.”

“You stupid goat, somebody ought to stretch those mutton legs of yours, so you can see there’s a horse standing here!”

“My good man, don’t curse so!”

“Don’t you talk to me like that with your la-di-da mouth!”

“Amalie, come along, leave the rabble be.”

“Goodness, Father, if I could talk to the middleman like that, maybe he’d give fifteen pfennigs more per skirt.”

“My child, don’t forget who you are.”

Dear, unsuspecting Father! thought Amalie.

How the hallway stank! How foul the apartment smelled, of all the woolens, of the lodgers! If only they could at least have had it repapered before they moved in!

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887, at eight o’clock in the evening!

Widerklee was singing the page in Figaro. Theodor waited outside the Opera House. For a year and a half, he had been going almost daily to Charlottenstrasse, where she had a charming three-room apartment near the Opera. Here, in an elegant dressing gown and elegant little slippers, she received her friends.

One evening, Waldemar had come upon Theodor at her place. Theodor was perched on a low stool at her side, ceaselessly kissing her drooping hand.

Theodor waited. With him at the stage door waited several admirers. But with him, too, waited a coupé lined with white silk, on which the footman and the coachman sat motionless. What he had feared came to pass. Theodor saw Widerklee, in her evening cloak, step quickly into the coupé. Theodor was nearly out of his mind with jealousy. He had never thought about this affair, never considered the end. He loved—not platonically, like most of his friends, but like a man.

Now he stood, cast out, forsaken, without explanation, under the lindens in the rain, in the dark. What now? Wait outside Widerklee’s house? But she was surely driving to the other man. Who was it? And if he knew, what then? Shoot him down? Challenge him? Kill himself?

He walked on, on and on, back and forth, this way and that.

A brazen girl accosted him and drew him into a little shop with curtained windows, in front of which a red lantern burned. Erna Schmidt’s Wine Tavern. The girl was very young, barely seventeen. She took Theodor into a back room, lay down without further ado on the red woolen chaise longue, and drew a curtain. The girl, who turned out to be very beautiful, enchanted him. She comforted him. Her brazenness, her depravity, receded for a little while. Her name was Wanda, and she was an orphan. Shunted from one set of foster parents to another, she had been seduced by a lodger when she was barely fourteen. She had worked, too. But this way was easier. Only the madam took advantage of her. On the grimy sofa, a tender compassion blossomed in Theodor for this child, who was as delicate and velvet-skinned as a fawn.

“Will I see you again?”

“I don’t know,” said Theodor, and began to weep.

The girl crouched down beside him. “Why ever are you crying, sir?” she asked. She stroked him.

Here, with this street girl, a stranger, he poured out his heart; here he could say how forsaken he was, that he loved a clever, beautiful, and remarkable woman, a great artist, that he was being deceived.

The girl said, “Nah, don’t go killing anybody, you might get life for that. You mustn’t take it so hard.”

“But I can’t live without her.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get her back.”

So it went, in a shop with a red lantern in the east of Berlin, Erna Schmidt’s Wine Tavern.

The girl got dressed.

“Are you going out again?” asked Theodor. The girl nodded. Theodor gave her a gold piece. “Now, don’t go out again tonight,” he said. “Get some rest.” He gave her a kiss.

The chump! she thought, and waited until he was out of sight. Twenty marks was a lot of money, but how long did a girl stay young?

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness at three o’clock in the morning!