Free Tubutsch by Albert Ehrenstein Page B

had then apprenticed him to a cobbler, because the butcher's lads also wouldn't tolerate a secondary school pupil among them, and then he found the profession far too disgusting. All that bloodletting! But in the year of '48 [1] , when the citizens of Klausenberg decided that it was time they also had their own to-do, he had done his bit, albeit with the local band . . . A fellow student, who had been awarded worse marks than him, became the director of the observatory in Vienna, and a few steps away from it, in a dingy little room stinking of gruel, sits a man whose wife goes charring and whose only daughter is married in Agram. A man too old, too gentle, too poor to be able to afford a helper, a man who after much pleading, must be glad when his customers don't walk out on him because he is so slow . . . Now his wife has managed to find him a small sideline. Every day I see the weak little man with his shaking hands taking a paralytic out in her wheelchair. For which he receives a little pocket money and is not even allowed a small glass of wine on Sundays, no! But instead he may choose a book from the paralytic's library and completely wreck his half-blind eyes reading the tiny print, while another — Counsellor to the Court, Baron, Commander of the Order of Franz Josef, etc. — gets paid for summoning the eternal stars down to earth, drives about in a proper carriage, lives right in the lap of luxury — for no better reason that that he didn't have a butcher for a guardian . . .
    This is my only social contact, an old cobbler and — of course! — a ruined hat-maker who is in no way remarkable except that he made it to Mexico under Emperor Max. He has nothing to say about this land except that it was very hot. Be that as it may, in my eye he is a man of importance, I have no one else among my acquaintances who has gone further than him . . . and there is something exotic in the air when he says: "Yes, in Velacruz!" and I ask dutifully what it was about this place and he cracks his only joke: "Yes, in Velacruz, they ain't gotta slivovitz to match th e likes of ours." . . . I am al ways loyal and laugh, can't spoil things with him. He is the ombudsman for the poor, and maybe he will at last help me gain Viennese citizenship. I could do with a little sinecure one day . . .
    I used to have one more acquaintance, a bow-legged Doctor Philosophiae who also completed the course at the export academy and knows an unbelievable number of languages. His name is Schmecker, he's employed at the central bank, works for all he's worth, and doesn't allow himself a holiday. For that reason I once said to him: "Yes, my friend, there are a few drawbacks when you want to end your days as a bank manager." He really will become a bank manager, but that "end your days" has spoilt his fun in advance, and if he sees me approaching in the distance, he looks away when I draw near.
    I also used to have a distant relative, Norbert Schigut, the representative. Once he met me unannounced on the street and imparted to me triumphantly, without any invitation on my behalf — he clearly wanted to forestall any rumours — that although his wife had recently walked out on him, she came back again shortly after, full of remorse. This often happens, I remarked. As for myself, I had always written with a dip pen, had changed to a fountain pen, only to clasp my quill once more in disappointment, without that being reason enough to give up the hope of one day coming into possession of a typewriter. He ingenuously replied that this had probably been due to the poor quality of the fountain pen, and by happy chance he was just at that moment representing a first class maker of fountain pens from America. I fell into an unending fit of laughter, although still able to consider whether I shouldn't wrap up a bit of this laughter and save it for gloomier times, but the peculiar fellow went his way, insulted, as if my laughing had been intended as an attack on his