> Dose 3 · 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 Chapters 22–24.

25. SPRING

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

Eugenie was standing 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 their service tunics, 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 a few too many snowdrops and spring snowflakes. And here comes Fräulein Winkel. Well, miss, how are you? Yes, let’s try it on once more.”

Eugenie stood there in her casino toilette. Fräulein Winkel was kneeling, 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 is it? Come now, you can talk to me. A little higher up here, don’t you think? And this gathering a little fuller. Temptations, now that it’s spring, or is it worries? Perhaps I can help you?”

“Yes, if you really want me to tell you. But please hold still, or I’ll end up pricking madam. 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 signed and sealed.”

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

“Maybe that’s so. You’re probably right.”

“Don’t cry, Fräulein Winkel, dear child, just go on and talk.”

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

“And now?”

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

“Annettchen, he said? I see. Yes, that is bitter. Isn’t there anyone 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, madam, and the clasp like this?”

“No. Like this, rather, 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 is always making sheep’s eyes, and my friend Lischen and I 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 I’m very beautiful. You may sometimes have thought I married my husband for his money. But I had no need of that whatsoever. But I had been through a very great disappointment before. We in Russia aren’t as strict as people are 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 it goes without saying that I thought the earth must stand still. He took me in his arms and said, ‘What do I care for the world, and tomorrow’—oh, I can hear it as if it were yesterday—‘we’ll 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 all the torments 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, my dear young 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 my present husband. I couldn’t make up my mind right away; it was the same for me as for you. I loved the other one. But then I let myself be loved, and I became very happy that way. When you do the loving yourself, you’re always trembling and afraid and lonely, and you need friends you can pour your heart out to. But when you’re loved, then you know that whatever happens, you have someone you can rely on—and now you give some thought to Lehmann.”

“Yes, madam, let’s try the dress on once more. But there’s this, too: when you have nothing, that’s hard as well. I’d like to set up on my own, and my old boyfriend said I could always come to him, but you don’t want to do that, it’s embarrassing, to end up owing him something on top of it all.”

“And how much would you need to start?”

“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 right from the start, it won’t work at all, even if someone lends it to me.”

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

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

“Take them, and make money with them.”

“Oh, such kindness, such kindness.”

“My husband said: The childless woman has the most children, and they must be provided for, so I’ll always give you a bundle of thousand-mark notes that we won’t talk about and won’t enter in the accounts.”

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?”

“But, 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 small, 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 believe I am 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; observe a noble moderation. 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!

Here came the guard! At a window of the university stood Privatdozent Waldemar Goldschmidt and saw the opera house, the Linden, the curved baroque facade of the library, saw the guard marching in step, white summer trousers, blue tunics, shining buttons, red collars, white plumes, and the drummer at the head, “fifers and drummers, a martial sound.” An immense crowd. At his window stood the old Kaiser, as he did every day around noon, when the guard came marching up.

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

The door opened.

“My dear colleague, what an honor!”

“I heard at the library that you’re using the very volume of the Monumenta that I need.”

“It is, of course, at your disposal.”

“You were just watching the popular enthusiasm?”

“The very same phrase was going through my mind. Our aged sovereign, revered by all, 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 was recently in my native region, studying Hessian dialect expressions. It is good to refresh one’s boyhood memories in one’s own small homeland, before they are entirely absorbed into our so 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 part of the freedom Germany possessed before the war. A historical principle: the victors always become the cultural imitators of the vanquished.”

“We have triumphed our way into servitude. This legacy of the defeated Caesar is, in my eyes, the greatest crime he committed against humanity. I could forget Napoleon’s Second of December, but not the German reaction after the victory!”

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

“I’m surprised, my young friend, that you see France that way. I know, after all, that you’re related to a good many people over there.”

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

“In France, where centralization was driven 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 penetrated down into the smallest matters. With us in Germany, it is precisely the reverse. If we have some outstanding man, we try above all to show ourselves independent of his influence, and each of us, however insignificant he may otherwise be, prides himself on choosing his own direction, even an admittedly worse one, merely to prove this independence in fact. 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 become a full professor?”

Waldemar shrugged.

“The faculty wishes it, so I’ve heard.”

“Oh, no,” said Waldemar. “If I had myself baptized, they would let me into the sacred circle. But I’m suspect for other reasons, too. Whoever wants to blow away the dust and abolish privileges doesn’t find favor with the great. Besides, one can be baptized because one considers Christianity a further development of the old religion of the prophets, a milder, gentler ethic, centuries younger, after all. But all such considerations must give way the moment baptism brings advantages. It is surely repugnant when an act born of the finest stirrings of conscience, of reflections of the most personal kind, leads to an appointment. 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 of a new Civil Code wait a while longer for its final form.

He had already walked a few steps down the Linden when a coupé pulled up right beside him.

“Waldemar.”

“O Susanna, life is beautiful after all.”

“Would you like to get in?”

“No, on the contrary—you get out. I have a mind to introduce a beautiful woman to 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?”

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

“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 table to be had. Officers sat there, beautiful women, a few landowners, Junkers from the provinces.

“Back there sits the ancient Count Perponcher, and over there Count Waldersee, a man on the rise, a general at court,” 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? Moselle?”

“No, I’d rather have a Rhine wine.”

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

“And if that’s what I want?”

“Suits me.”

An hour later.

“Shall we have our 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, caught 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 protest and resistance, this contempt for all untruth!

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

“Why do you say no when you feel like yes?” She sensed 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’d be cross?”

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

“Oxen, in the true sense of the word. Hence this silly idolizing of young girls.”

The fire was burning in the fireplace.

“Our coffee is getting cold,” said Susanna.

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

Waldemar got dressed. What was singing there was love, was passion. Susanna loved him. But he had had bad 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 didn’t.

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 along chalk lines or played marbles in the hollow between four cobblestones. Father strung twine along the balcony for the Virginia creeper or tinkered with the dovecote. Mother sewed.

“I’m just goin’ over to the Fresh Mutton for a beer, just the one beer.”

“Paule, do you really have to?”

“Aw, never mind, I’ll be back soon.”

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

“If I had a little wife like you, somethin’ steady, I wouldn’t go near the pub,” said the lodger.

“Hey, mister, what’s gotten into you! You didn’t rent me along with the bed. Let go!”

“I’m only sayin’, honey, seein’ your husband keeps you on such short rations. You could do better with me.”

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

The freckled apprentice announced Mayer, the insurance agent, to Paul.

“Ah, good afternoon, Herr Mayer.”

“Good afternoon, Herr Effinger. I thought I’d come myself for once. Things are easier to discuss when people know each other personally. Misunderstandings usually creep in when one writes.”

“Well, here is the insurance policy. There were several points I wanted to take up.”

“You’ve built up a fine works here, Herr Effinger. I, of course, am a wreck.”

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

“Oh, I’m an old man, Herr Effinger. Nobody sang over my cradle that I would end up an insurance agent.”

“That’s life!” said Paul.

“How right you are. If I still had the sarcasm of my youth, I would say it’s mainly because the profession of insurance agent was still quite 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. Whoever didn’t know it doesn’t know what living means. The sixties in Paris—that was one long cancan, of the mind as well. You’re still young, Herr Effinger, but I feel that you have some understanding for a man who has failed. I owned the banking house of Mayer, Lamprecht & Co.”

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

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

“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 they were small people back then. It breaks my heart when I happen to walk past it now. During the renovations, I went and looked at it on the sly, 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 have pasted dark leather wallpaper. Unbelievable, truly.”

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

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

Paul thought, And he went bankrupt, too.

“The Gotthard Tunnel has me on its conscience.”

“A great deal of money was lost on it.”

“I know that song by heart, 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 it easy, Fräulein Mayer,” said Paul.

“No, no, but at least I earn a living.”

“That’s hard for a young girl. Just the other day, a young girl came to me asking for work copying letters. But young girls in an office are 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 generally the womenfolk are needed in the family. There’s a child to raise, an invalid to nurse.”

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

“Then she’s high-strung.”

“Do you think so?”

“In my opinion, yes.”

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

Broad Friedrichstrasse at the Weidendamm Bridge. A railway over the river, a little omnibus with a pony, a one-legged man calling, “Wax matches, wax matches,” and whores hitching up their skirts, many ruffles rustling. A gentleman with a monocle, and carriages on their way to the theater.

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

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

“Adieu.” “Adieu.” “Adieu.”

“A nice young man, Amalie, don’t you think?”

“A little dry.”

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

“I’m only saying. They’ve cut Mother’s piecework rate again. Twenty pfennigs to sew a skirt. Comes to maybe ten marks a week. And that’s not counting the lamp oil or the thread.”

“Amalie, you’re tearing my heart to pieces.”

“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. That proves he gets a lot more for a 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 Brandenburg margraves. Next to it is the Gray Cloister, Bismarck’s school.

“No getting through, yet again.”

“You stupid goat, somebody oughta stretch your mutton legs for you, so you can see there’s a horse standin’ here!”

“My good man, don’t curse like that!”

“Don’t you talk to me like that, with your barbered snout!”

“Amalie, come along, never mind the rabble.”

“Heavens, Father, if I could talk to the middleman like that, he might pay fifteen pfennigs more per skirt.”

“My child, don’t forget who you are.”

Dear, unsuspecting Father! thought Amalie.

How the hallway stank! How nasty the apartment smelled, of all the woolens, of the tenants! If only they could have had it repapered, at least, 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 was waiting outside the opera house. For a year and a half, he had gone almost every day to Charlottenstrasse, where she had a charming three-room apartment near the opera. Here she received her friends in an elegant dressing gown and elegant little slippers.

One evening, Waldemar had run into Theodor at her place. Theodor was perched on a tabouret at her side, ceaselessly kissing her drooping hand.

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

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

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

A brazen girl accosted him and pulled him into a little shop, where a red lantern burned in front of the curtained windows. 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, gave way for a short while. Her name was Wanda, and she had no parents. Kicked around by foster parents, she had been seduced by a lodger when she was barely fourteen. She had held jobs, too. But this way was easier. Only the madam exploited her. On the greasy sofa, a gentle compassion blossomed in Theodor for this child, who was as dainty and velvet-skinned as a doe.

“Will I see you again?”

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

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

Here, with this streetwalker he did not know, he poured out his heart; here he could say how forsaken he was, that he loved a clever, beautiful, and important woman, a great artist, that he was being betrayed.

The girl said, “Nah, don’t go killin’ 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.”

All this 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 coin. “Now don’t go out again tonight,” he said. “Get some rest.” He gave her a kiss.

The sap! 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!