> Dose 10 · 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 15–24.

# 25. SPRING

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

Eugenie stood beside her lady’s maid, who was packing. The next day they would be off to the Riviera, to Nice, to the Hotel Barblan.

Along Tiergartenstrasse the horses raced. Beautiful women, veils fluttering around their top hats, and the gentlemen bareheaded or in round hats. 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, miss, 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 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 worries? Perhaps I can help you?”

“Well, if you really want me to talk. But please stand still, or I’ll end up pricking madam. I had a gentleman friend—madam understands—a handsome gentleman, and I might have known right away that nothing would come of it. But that’s 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 compromise herself when she . . . well, how shall I put it, when she readily grants the man rights before marriage? I mean, she sinks in men’s esteem.”

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

“Don’t cry, Fräulein Winkel, my dear child—just talk.”

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

“And now?”

“And now I’ve run into him. And she’s so beautiful—there’s no describing how beautiful she is—and there was a Spreewald nursemaid with them, too, with a baby carriage. And as they went past, I happened to hear him say, ‘Oh, Annettchen, what happy people we are, all of nature is smiling upon us.’”

“Annettchen, he said? I see. Yes, that is bitter. Is there no one, then, 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 one more stitch at the shoulder, madam, and the clasp like this?”

“No. Like this instead, don’t you think?”

“Yes, like that. There’s a new young man at the shop—Lehmann, he keeps the books—and he follows me around and is always goggling at me like this, 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 goggle. 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. Perhaps you’ve sometimes thought I married my husband for money. But I had no need of that whatsoever. No—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 out for a walk. At a grand carnival ball I had met a strikingly handsome officer of the Guards. And we had the opportunity 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 is the world to me? 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 must come to the city woods. But he didn’t come. I suffered 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 whether I would see him one more time. 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 lacked 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 I became very happy that way. When you love, you’re always trembling, and afraid, and lonely, and you need friends to pour your heart out to. But when you are loved, then you know that whatever happens, you have someone you can rely on—and now think it over, where Lehmann’s concerned.”

“Yes, madam, let’s try the dress on once more. But there’s this, too: when you haven’t got anything, it’s hard. I’d like to set up on my own, and my former gentleman friend said I could always turn to him, but you don’t want that, it’s embarrassing, to end up owing him something after all that.”

“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 just won’t work, even if somebody 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 it and make money with it.”

“Oh, such kindness, such kindness.”

“My husband said, ‘The childless woman has the most children, and they have to be provided for. So I’ll always give you a bundle of thousand-mark notes that we won’t talk about and won’t put on the books.’”

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

“Yes, I have them here.”

“Very good. 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 collected a few winter things from the lady’s maid as well and left, the boxes over her arm.

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at eleven 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 am sweet. I sat at the piano and played Schumann’s ‘Frauenlieb und -leben’; ‘Since I saw you, blind I seem to be; always, as in a dream, it’s you alone I see.’ 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 played the piano a little 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 in the afternoon!

The guard was marching up! At a window of the university stood the 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 jackets, shining buttons, red collars, white plumes, and the drummer out in front, “fifers and drummers, a martial sound.” A crowd beyond counting. At his window stood the old Kaiser, as he did every day at noon when the guard marched up.

Popular enthusiasm, thought Waldemar—here, for once, for the right man; tomorrow, for the wrong one. The law? One would have to create the law entirely anew. Roman law, cut to fit slaves and 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 have the very volume of the *Monumenta* I need.”

“It is at your disposal, of course.”

“You were just watching the popular enthusiasm?”

“The very same phrase was going through my mind. Our universally revered, aged 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 was recently in my native region, studying Hessian folk expressions. It is good to refresh one’s boyhood memories in one’s own small homeland before they are entirely absorbed into this beautifully ordered empire.”

“I had no idea you were a federalist!”

“I have always been one. Centralism is utterly un-German. We are hard at work forfeiting a part of the freedom that 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 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 backs of the books, the world-famous scholar sat opposite him in the radiance of his long, snow-white hair.

“I am surprised, my young friend, that you see France this way. I know, after all, that you have all sorts of relatives over there.”

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

“In France, where centralization was driven to such an extreme, no one was promoted who did not swear *in verba magistri*. Our political fragmentation has fortunately protected us so far from the general effect of such pernicious influences, which reached down into the smallest circumstances. With us in Germany, it is precisely the reverse. If we have an outstanding man, our first concern is to show that we are 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 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 imperfect. I tell you, here on March 16, 1887: if things go on like this in the new German Empire, clinics and libraries will be turned back into barracks. 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 hear.”

“Oh no,” said Waldemar. “If I had myself baptized, they would let me into the sacred circle. But I’m suspect in other ways, too. The great don’t look kindly on a man who wants to blow away the dust and abolish privileges. Besides, one may have oneself baptized because one regards Christianity as a further development of the old religion of the prophets, as a milder, gentler ethic—centuries later, after all. But all such considerations must give way the moment baptism brings advantages. It is repugnant when an act born of the finest stirrings of conscience, of the most personal deliberation, leads to a post. A premium on spinelessness.”

“You are right.”

The great man left the room. Goldschmidt took his hat, coat, and stick. Let the commentary stew, and let § 1378 of the draft of 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 lovely 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. And what do you think of my success?”

“The Count? He won’t keep.”

“Why?”

“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 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 should 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 heavy, Susanna”—and he looked into her eyes.

“And what if that’s what I want?”

“That 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 grand piano and played the “Magic Fire Music.”

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

“And what about me, Susanna?”

He stood up, swept the woman into his arms, and 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 all demurring and resisting, 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 sensed that he didn’t like it. “Shame on you for being ashamed!”

What a blessing, thought Susanna as she lay beside him, to be allowed to be frankly sensual!

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

“But Susanna! Are there men who would be cross?”

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

“Oxen—in the literal sense. Hence this ridiculous idolizing of the young girl.”

The fire was burning in the fireplace.

“Our coffee is getting cold,” said Susanna.

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

Waldemar got dressed. What sang there was love, was passion. Susanna loved him. But he had been badly burned by 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 in the afternoon!

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

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

“Paule, do you have to?”

“Oh, leave off, I’ll be back soon.”

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

“If I had a little wife like you, something nice and firm, I sure wouldn’t go running off to the bar,” said the bed lodger.

“Hey, you, what do you think you’re doing! I don’t come with the bed. Let go!”

“I only mean, what with your husband keeping you so short. You could do better with me.”

“Don’t you say a word against my husband. It’s just ’cause we’ve only 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 in person for once. It’s easier to talk things over when people know each other personally. In letters, misunderstandings usually creep in.”

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

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

“But, 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’d 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 is chiefly 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 knew the Paris of the Second Empire. Whoever did not know it does not know what life means. The sixties in Paris were one long cancan—of the mind as well. You are still young, Herr Effinger, but I sense that you can understand a man who has failed. I had the banking house of Mayer, Lamprecht & Co.”

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

“Yes, you know what that name meant. In ’59 we handled the issue of the Sardinian war loan. I financed the Luxembourg railway.”

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

“All over. 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 now and then. During the renovations 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, so enchantingly light, these barbarians have pasted dark leather wall coverings. Truly unbelievable.”

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

“No, no, and I don’t mean to bore you. I am an aesthete—yes, I do understand something about art.”

Paul thought, Yes, and he went bankrupt, too.

“The Gotthard Tunnel has me on its conscience.”

“A lot of money was lost on that.”

“I could sing you a song about it. But apart from ten percent, I have no debts left. I’m still paying them off. I owe that to my name and to my daughter. She’s just coming to collect 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 in the evening! What a teeming 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 position copying letters. But young girls in the 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 usually 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 eccentric.”

“Do you think so?”

“In my opinion, yes.”

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

Broad Friedrichstrasse at the Weidendammer Bridge. A railway over the river, a small omnibus with its little horse, a one-legged man calling, “Wax matches, wax matches,” and whores gathering up their skirts, all their ruffles rustling. A gentleman with a monocle, and carriages driving to the theater.

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

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

“Goodbye.” “Goodbye.” “Goodbye.”

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

“A bit dry.”

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

“I’m only saying. They’ve cut Mother’s rate for her piecework again. Twenty pfennigs to sew a skirt. That comes to maybe ten marks a week. And that’s not counting the kerosene, 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’s supplying. He won’t say. That proves he gets much more for a skirt than he lets on.”

Wool market on Klosterstrasse. Königstrasse, between Alexanderplatz and the Palace, is jammed with covered wagons. In the ancient castle of the margraves of Brandenburg the wool lies in storage. Beside it is the Gray Cloister, Bismarck’s school.

“No getting through, as usual.”

“You stupid goat, somebody ought to put you through your paces so you’d notice there’s a horse standing here.”

“My good man, don’t swear like that!”

“Don’t you talk to me with that la-di-da snout of yours!”

“Amalie, come along, leave the rabble.”

“Heavens, Father, if I could talk to the middleman like that, maybe he’d pay fifteen pfennigs more for a skirt.”

“My child, don’t forget who you are.”

Dear, oblivious Father! thought Amalie.

How the hallway stank! How horribly the apartment smelled of all the woolens, of the tenants! 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 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 been going almost daily to Charlottenstrasse, where she had an enchanting 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 had been perched on a stool at her side, ceaselessly kissing her dangling hand.

Theodor waited. With him, at the stage door, waited several enthusiasts. But with him there also waited a coupé lined with white silk, on whose box a footman and a 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 how it would end. He loved—not platonically, as most of his friends did, but like a man.

Now he stood there, cast out, abandoned, without explanation, on the Linden in the rain, in the dark. What now? Wait outside Widerklee’s house? But surely she was 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 pulled him into a small shop with curtained windows, in front of which a red lantern was burning. Erna Schmidt’s Wine Bar. 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 across. 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. Shoved around among foster parents, she had been seduced by a bed lodger when she was barely fourteen. She had worked, 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 fawn.

“Will I see you again?”

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

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 remarkable woman, a great artist, that he was being betrayed.

The girl said, “Nah, no killing—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 Bar.

The girl got dressed.

“Are you going out again?” asked Theodor. The girl nodded. Theodor gave her a gold piece. “But 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 in the morning!