Joseph Roth - Perlefter - The Story of A Bourgeois

Fredy loved to recount his various adventures. There was always something happening wherever he found himself. Horses bucked, automobiles crashed into each other, old women were crushed under the wheels, streetcars ran out of power, drunks fought each other, a girl dropped a milk pot. There was nothing too trivial. Everything that happened was worth recounting. Fredy recorded in a notebook the various jokes he had heard. He read some of them out. The others, he said, were unsuitable for women. Nevertheless he was asked to tell them. He recounted them in a low voice, and his sisters acted as if they had not heard. Regardless, they left the room immediately after the punch-line. Fredy rode every morning in the hippodrome. By lunchtime he claimed he could not sit. A gallop had ‘upset’ him. He drank his soup standing. After the meal he sat down. He had forgotten the galloping. He was regarded within the wide circle of family as a dangerous heart-breaker. He struck up a conversation with young girls in front of the department store. Then he wrote them letters. He showed these missives to his sisters.

‘You’re not going to believe it!’ he said. ‘This Margot is from one of the best houses.’

Frau Perlefter was convinced that all the daughters of the bourgeois houses were in love with Fredy. At one point he made the acquaintance of a Hungarian journalist named Roney. Herr Roney was looking for a wealthy man for a singer named Ilona. He found Fredy Perlefter, and all three were satisfied. Ilona didn’t like Fredy at all. He didn’t love her either. But her name was in the newspapers and on the billboards. The Perlefter family went to films in which she played a supporting role and to the cabarets in which she sang. Ilona was not so young any more. Her picture stood on Fredy’s writing-table along with a couple of letters written in large stiff strokes on pale purple paper. The letters lay there, casually strewn across his desk, and his sisters secretly read them. Fredy came home and said bitterly, ‘You’ve already read my letters!’ but was actually pleased.

Since Fredy ‘had something’ with Ilona, he entered into those wonderful circles where art blends with sin and justifies it. Behind the scenes it was quite different. Outside the boundaries of middle-class society much was not only permitted but also desirable. ‘Art’ legitimizes even debauchery. Through his relationships within the arts Fredy put the whole family into an adventurous mood. Fredy used up half of Frau Perlefter’s spending money. He wore, henceforth, silk shirts and gave his opinion on his sisters’ clothing. He must have known what attracted those women living in that world in which the main thing was the effect, the effect about which people would gossip. Frau Perlefter and her daughters were far removed from wishing to be such a woman as Ilona. But to be mistaken for an Ilona in certain circumstances was the dream of the Perlefter girls. There came a free spirit to their clothes, a new rhythm in their lives; their appearance received a fantastic boost; they let each other tell jokes without embarrassment any more and spoke with frank gestures of truths which for girls of good families should be but fairy-tales.

Yes, with the entry of this Ilona into Fredy’s life a lot changed. One even spoke about his long and torturous sexually transmitted disease, and Frau Perlefter, feeling left out, asked Fredy all kinds of discrete details. The boy had to invent them in order to avoid losing his reputation. He had made love to Ilona three times and endured her and her friends for three months. The letters stopped. He began speaking to young girls again, and as he had already indulged in the realm of the arts he no longer wrote to girls who were the daughters of wealthy citizens but, rather, to the denizens of the theatre world. Within the family, however, reverence and awe for the first in the series of artists, Fräulein Ilona, were preserved. Quite often a family member came across her name in the newspaper, spoke her name aloud, and distant relatives who were reliant upon Perlefter’s good will came to tell that they had heard and read of Ilona’s latest ventures.

Fredy didn’t cry over her. She had given him what he needed: calm at home and validation of his reputation as a seducer. He went to the summer resorts and the winter spas and received innocent postcards from his sports partners. The family took each harmless greeting as a clandestine confession of love. Fredy’s actual affairs were with hotel chambermaids and a generally available widow whom he considered the great love of his life. The Perlefters had no anxiety that their son would forget himself and marry a pretty woman without any money. They knew him, the family, and they trusted in the power of the blood.

And it truly seemed that Fredy was letting his eyes roam over the daughters of the land in order to locate love and a dowry to defray its cost. It was clear to him that he must have an attractive wife. Although she should have money she should also be generally pleasing to men. There existed this type of girl in the world, and Fredy courted them. He spoke with them about respectable things. He read a couple of books to acquire potential topics of conversation, and he believed that I could be a valued guide for him in these matters. I recommended history books to Fredy, for I believed that the best way to impress educated women was by spouting forth dates. I had no experience with educated young women. But I soon learned from Fredy that they were bored by historical dates. I picked up a book on art history and recommended a conversation about paintings. These women didn’t go to museums on their own. I resorted to natural history. Fredy read the chapter in which the piquant processes of the science of procreation and reproduction are detailed and was henceforth no longer reluctant to discuss natural history. And he would have luck with it, for he soon began to court a young girl whose father owned a majority stake in the Hinke Beer Brewery. It seemed that Fredy’s scientific references made an impression on the girl. Fredy was invited ‘to the house’. He brought a bouquet of flowers, and he went by automobile. I have never in my life seen a bouquet like that. It was expensive, discrete and exotic, and yet it was still winter. Who knew from what garden these flowers had come? Perhaps they cemented the relationship.

Everyone awaited Perlefter’s return. A celebratory atmosphere spread through the house as if in anticipation of joyous events. Fredy received no more letters. Suddenly he had grown and was ready to become engaged. While I squandered my formative years with useless thoughts, he grew into mature adolescence and positioned himself into a profitable marriage. He was a splendid boy, and he fulfilled his destiny in an exemplary fashion and to everyone’s satisfaction.

Unfortunately Fredy’s engagement could not be officially celebrated. You see, one had to consider his sister, who was older than he. And, as far as anyone knew there was not a suitor in sight.

It was a shame. The eldest had already dispensed with men. She was, unfortunately, named Karoline, and that troubled her and paralysed her courage before men. Although known as Line in the family that also irritated her. She had once been pretty; to me she’d once been very pretty. Oh, as I arrived at Perlefter’s she still wore her hair in a ponytail and swayed her hips when she walked. Her hair was brown, hard, crackling and unruly. She was very arrogant, little Karoline. She was a character. She didn’t cry; or, more accurately, at least not when anyone could hear her, for her small grey malevolent eyes were often red. She was the wisest and most taciturn member of the family. She was always sitting with books and always achieved the best grades and was rarely sick. Back when I still played with the children she tormented me the least. She isolated herself from me, and there was always some invisible fence around her. She read the most books and always placed one on her lap when she came to the table and hastily gulped down each bite so she could return to reading. At night it was her light that burned the longest.