> Dose 20 · 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 5–24.

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 it was off to the Riviera, to Nice, to the Hotel Barblan.

Along Tiergartenstrasse raced the horses. Beautiful women, veils fluttering around their top hats, and the gentlemen bareheaded or in round hats. Along Tiergartenstrasse walked the officers in their undress frock coats, 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 there in her casino toilette. 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 miserable! What’s the matter? Come now, you can talk to me. A little higher up here, don’t you think? And this drapery a little fuller. Temptations, now that it’s spring? Or worries? Perhaps I can help you?”

“Yes, if you really want me to talk. But please stand still, or I’ll prick you, madam. I had a gentleman friend—madam will understand—a handsome gentleman, and I could have told myself right from the start that nothing would come of it. But that’s how we are—you never believe it. And then he got married. Well, that’s just how it is, and I always imagined he loved me, and everyone knows how rich gentlemen marry—money and the same station, and that settles it.”

“Tell me, Fräulein Winkel—I don’t mean to hurt you—but doesn’t a woman compromise herself a little if she . . . well, how shall I put it, if she grants a man certain 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 tell me.”

“So I made myself believe he’s bound to be unhappy, and his wife is terribly ugly, and he’s sure to cheat on her.”

“And now?”

“And now I’ve run into him. And she’s so beautiful, you can’t describe how beautiful she is, and a nurse from the Spreewald was with them, too, pushing 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 upon us.’”

“Annettchen, he said? 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, madam, and the clasp like this?”

“No. Better like this, don’t you think?”

“Yes, like that. We’ve got a new young man at the shop, Lehmann, who keeps the books. He runs after me and goggles at me like this all the time, 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 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 me very beautiful. Perhaps you’ve sometimes thought I married my husband for his money. But I had no need to do anything of the kind. No, I had suffered a very great disappointment before that. 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 a strikingly handsome officer of the Guards. And we had the chance to meet alone, and he was in love and reckless, and, in short, he kissed me, and of course 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 simply had to come to the city woods. But he didn’t come. I suffered every torment 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, decent letter—and whether I wanted to 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, miss, 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—I was just like 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 you can pour your heart out to. But when you’re loved, you know that, whatever happens, you have someone you can rely on. And now, give some thought to Lehmann.”

“Yes, madam, let’s try the dress on once more. But it’s also true that when you’ve got nothing, it’s hard. I’d like to set up on my own, and my former boyfriend said I could always turn to him, but you don’t want that, do you—it’s embarrassing, to end up owing him something on top of it all.”

“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 somebody lends it to me.”

Eugenie took two thousand-mark bills out of 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 must be provided for, so I’ll always give you a bundle of thousand-mark bills that we won’t talk about and won’t account for.’”

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 in the glove box right away.”

“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 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 am sweet. I sat at the piano and played Schumann’s ‘Frauenliebe und -leben’; ‘Since I have seen you, I think I am blind; ever as in a dream, you alone I find.’ 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 played the piano a little too much.”

“Don’t overdo it, my daughter, don’t overdo it. Keep to the golden mean. 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 Waldemar Goldschmidt, Privatdozent, and saw the opera house, the lindens, the curved baroque facade of the library, saw the guard, the lockstep, white summer trousers, blue tunics, gleaming buttons, red collars, white plumes, and the drummer in front, “fifers and drummers, a martial sound.” An immense crowd. 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? It would have to be created entirely anew. Roman law, cut to the measure of slaves and property, had many defects. 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’re using the very volume of the Monumenta I need.”

“It is, of course, at your disposal.”

“You were watching the popular enthusiasm just now?”

“The very same words were 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 back in my native region, to study Hessian dialect expressions. It is good to refresh one’s boyhood memories in one’s own small homeland before they are wholly 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 part of the freedom Germany possessed before the war. A principle of history: the victors always become the cultural imitators of the vanquished.”

“Our victory has won us our servitude. That legacy of the defeated Caesar is, in my eyes, the greatest crime he committed against humanity. I could forget Napoleon’s coup of the second of December—but not the German reaction after the victory!”

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

“I’m surprised, my young friend, that you see France that way. After all, I know you have all sorts of relations 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*. Fortunately, our political fragmentation has so far protected us from the general effect of such pernicious influences, which reached down into the smallest matters. With us in Germany it is just the reverse. If we have some outstanding man, we seek above all to show ourselves independent of his influence, and each of us, however insignificant he may otherwise be, makes it a point of honor to choose his own direction, even an admittedly worse one, merely to show that he really is independent. 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 March 16, 1887: if things go on like this in the new German Empire, clinics and libraries will be turned back into barracks. The spirit 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 on other counts, too. The great are not well disposed toward anyone who wants to blow away the dust and abolish privileges. Besides, one may be baptized because one regards Christianity as a further development of the old religion of the prophets, a milder, gentler ethic—an ethic that is, after all, centuries younger. But all such considerations must give way the moment baptism brings advantages. It is repugnant when an act arising from the subtlest stirrings of conscience, from deliberations of the most personal kind, leads to a position. A premium on spinelessness.”

“You are right.”

The great man left the room. Goldschmidt took his hat, coat, and cane. Let the commentary simmer, 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 Unter den Linden when a coupé pulled up 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 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? It won’t hold.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are 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 think—or what 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?”

“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 I, Susanna?”

He stood up, crushed 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 all reluctance and resistance, this contempt for every 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 free to be honestly sensual!

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

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

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

“Oxen, in the truest sense of the word. Hence this silly idolizing of the young girl.”

The fire was burning 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 robe, 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 holding her. He kept believing that one day it would work 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 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 going down to the Fresh Mutton for a beer—just the one beer.”

“Paule, do you have to?”

“Aw, don’t fuss, I’ll be back in no time.”

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

“If I had a little wife like that, something nice and firm, I sure wouldn’t be going to the tavern,” said the bed lodger.

“Hey, what do 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 do better with me.”

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

The freckle-faced apprentice announced Mayer, the insurance agent, to Paul.

“Ah, good day, Herr Mayer.”

“Good day, Herr Effinger. I thought I’d come in person for once. Things are easier to discuss when people know each other personally. In writing, misunderstandings usually creep in.”

“Well, here’s the insurance policy. There were several points I wanted to raise.”

“You’ve built up a fine business here, Herr Effinger. As for me, I’m a wreck.”

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

“Ah, I’m an old man, Herr Effinger, and nobody sang it 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’d say it’s 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 didn’t know it doesn’t know what life is. The sixties in Paris—that was one long cancan, of the mind as well. You’re still young, Herr Effinger, but I sense that you have some understanding for 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 meant. In ’59 we had the issue of the Sardinian war loan in our hands. 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 want to say anything against Oppner & Goldschmidt, but in those days they were small people. It breaks my heart when I walk past it now and then. During the renovation I went and had a look at it in secret, old fool that I am. It isn’t my house anymore. They’ve painted it all wrong. And over those bright paintings, so enchantingly light, those barbarians have pasted dark leather wallpaper. Unbelievable, truly.”

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

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

Paul thought: Well, he did go bankrupt.

“The Gotthard Tunnel was my undoing.”

“A lot of money was lost on that.”

“I could sing you a song about that, but apart from ten percent, I have no debts left. I’m still paying it off. I owe it 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 teeming crowd on Chausseestrasse!

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

“No, no, but at least I’m earning.”

“That’s hard for a young girl. Just the other day, a young girl applied to me for a job copying letters. But young girls in the office—it’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 womenfolk are needed in the family. There’s a child to bring up, 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 behind. We’ll lose each other. And in this neighborhood, too.”

Broad Friedrichstrasse at the Weidendammer Bridge. The railway over the river, a little omnibus with its little horse, a one-legged man crying “Wax matches, wax matches,” and whores hitching up their skirts, a rustle of many ruffles. 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, although I always have a great deal to do.”

“Adieu.” “Adieu.” “Adieu.”

“Nice fellow, Amalie, isn’t he?”

“A bit dry.”

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

“I’m only saying. Mother’s had her piecework rates cut again. Twenty pfennigs to sew a skirt. 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 telling it as it is. The contractor—a nasty piece of work—says the firm squeezes him, too. I’d like to know who he supplies. He won’t say. Which 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. In the ancient castle of the margraves of Brandenburg lies the wool. Next to it stands the Gray Cloister, Bismarck’s school.

“No getting through again.”

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

“Mister, don’t swear like that!”

“Don’t you give me lip, with that pomaded snout of yours!”

“Amalie, come, leave the rabble be.”

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

“My child, don’t forget who you are.”

Dear, oblivious Father! thought Amalie.

How the hallway stank! How foul 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 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 daily to Charlottenstrasse, where she had an enchanting three-room apartment near the opera. Here, in an elegant dressing gown and elegant little slippers, she received her friends.

One evening Waldemar had found Theodor at her place. Theodor was perched on a tabouret at her side, ceaselessly kissing her dangling hand.

Theodor waited. Waiting with him at the stage door were several admirers. But waiting with him, too, was a coupé lined with white silk, footman and coachman sitting motionless on the box. 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, like most of his friends, but as a man.

Now he stood beneath 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 it? And if he knew, what then? Shoot him down? Challenge him? Kill himself?

He walked on, on and on, back and forth, every which way.

A brazen girl spoke to him and pulled him into a little shop with curtained windows, in front of which a red lantern was burning. Erna Schmidt’s wine parlor. 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 little while. Her name was Wanda, and she had no parents. Knocked about among foster parents, she had been seduced, at barely fourteen, by a bed lodger. She had worked, too. But this way was easier. Only the madam took advantage of her. On the greasy sofa, a gentle 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 cry.

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

Here, with this strange streetwalker, 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, no 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.”

All this in a shop with a red lantern in east Berlin, Erna Schmidt’s wine parlor.

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 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!