Free An Offering for the Dead by Hans Erich Nossack

waited quite a while, and they chatted — I no longer know about what. I must confess that I uneasily listened towards the door. For I venerated more than anyone or anything the man who was still to come, and I was afraid I would not pass his strict muster. My father and my teacher were also uneasy, although they tried to conceal it. Only the fat man remained calm and utterly sure of himself.
    Finally, the man we were expecting came — accompanied by my brother. Perhaps they had first met on the stairs, perhaps earlier. My brother, incidentally, was the youngest of us, even younger than I. To my astonishment, his head was bandaged; indeed, some blood had oozed through on the right side of his forehead. Now I knew he had once been hurt in an accident; but that was a long time ago, and he usually did not wear a bandage. So he must have been injured again, or else the old wound had broken open.
    I was always very worried about him. He would easily get enthusiastic about something, but was just as quickly disappointed, and it was to be feared that someday, the wrong word, randomly spoken, might reduce him to despair. No one knew better than I how much tender shyness was meant to be disguised by his somewhat eccentric behavior, and what unsated hunger for life was masked by the cynical curl of his lips. So he did not care if from one minute to the next he did the exact opposite of what he had only just claimed in all earnestness; and if people then felt shocked, he would even jeer at them. That was how I had first met him. He had been sitting in a restaurant garden with a number of students, entertaining them with his jokes. The students were fairly drunk and they guffawed at what he said. Incidentally, he too was a student in those days. I was sitting at the next table and I had noticed that he glanced at me several times as if trying to determine whether I was laughing too. Finally, since the noise was becoming too much for me, I stood up, paid, and left the restaurant. At the exit from the garden, he was suddenly at my side, and without so much as asking me whether I even cared to have him come along, he said: "Those professors try to teach us that those mountains back there and these trees and the gables of the houses and that puddle there, which reflects the stars, and this soft night wind that grazes through the archways, and the laughter that we hear from the meadows — that in reality, all those things may be something entirely different and would stop being what they are if we no longer felt them as such. The people who talk to us like that have their podiums and their tenure; it is easy for them to talk. But what can we go by if we are still nothing?" And as we walked side by the side through the streets of the old town, he spoke to me about those things with such girlish tenderness, as befitted the mild summer night. But he broke off somewhere in mid-sentence and said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world: "Now let's visit the hookers and act like pigs!" And that was where we went. He acted very familiar and exuberant with the girls, and I was eager to see what would come of it. But one of the girls leaned over me and said: "Take him away. It would be too bad about him." I do not know what prompted her; but it dawned on me that she was right, and that no purer boy existed than this one who was experimenting there with indecencies. She had spoken so softly that he could not possibly have heard, and yet he seemed to have: for he took his hat and left the house. In the street, he tried to spit in a virile way and cursed: "God damn it, not even these women know what they are here for."
    We often sat up all through the night; I spent most of my time with him. In this way, I casually learned things about him that he would never have admitted if asked directly. If, for example, I had asked him why he acted so nervous, he would have laughed and replied: "Quite simply out of fear! I once met a man in the street,