Prater Violet Read Online Free PDF Page B

immediately. It is characteristic of the whole. It commands the attention.”
    Sitting very close to me, and pausing only to draw long breaths from his cigarette, he started to describe the opening sequence. It was astounding. Everything came to life. The trees began to tremble in the evening breeze, the music was heard, the roundabouts were set in motion. And the people talked. Bergmann improvised their conversation, partly in German, partly in ridiculous English; and it was vivid and real. His eyes sparkled, his gestures grew more exaggerated, he mimicked, he clowned. I began to laugh. Bergmann smiled delightedly at his own invention. It was all so simple, so effective, so obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of it myself?
    Bergmann gave me a little pat on the shoulder. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”
    â€œIt’s wonderful! I’ll note that down before I forget.”
    Immediately, he was very serious. “No, no. It is wrong. All wrong. I only wanted to give you some idea … No, that won’t do. Wait. We must consider…”
    Clouds followed the sunshine. Bergmann scowled grimly as he passed into philosophical analysis. He gave me ten excellent reasons why the whole thing was impossible. They, too, were obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of them? Bergmann sighed. “It’s not so easy…” He lit another cigarette. “Not so easy,” he muttered. “Wait. Wait. Let us see…”
    He rose and paced the carpet, breathing hard, his hands folded severely behind his back, his face shut against the outside world, implacably, like a prison door. Then a thought struck him. He stopped, amused by it. He smiled.
    â€œYou know what my wife tells me when I have these difficulties? ‘Friedrich,’ she says, ‘Go and write your poems. When I have cooked the dinner, I will invent this idiotic story for you. After all, prostitution is a woman’s business.’”
    *   *   *
    THAT WAS what Bergmann was like on his good days; the days when I was Alyosha Karamazov, or, as he told Dorothy, like Balaam’s ass, “who once said a marvelous line.” My incompetence merely stimulated him to more brilliant flights of imagination. He sparkled with epigrams, he beamed, he really amazed himself. On such days, we suited each other perfectly. Bergmann didn’t really need a collaborator at all. But he needed stimulation and sympathy; he needed someone he could talk German to. He needed an audience.
    His wife wrote to him every day, Inge two or three times a week. He read me extracts from their letters, full of household, theatrical and political gossip; and these led to anecdotes, about Inge’s first concert, about his mother-in-law, about German and Austrian actors, and the plays and films he had directed. He would spend a whole hour describing how he had produced Macbeth in Dresden, with masks, in the style of a Greek tragedy. A morning would go by while he recited his poems, or told me of his last days in Berlin, in the spring of that year, when the Storm Troopers were roving the streets like bandits, and his wife had saved him from several dangerous situations by a quick answer or a joke. Although Bergmann was an Austrian, he had been advised to give up his job and leave Germany in a hurry. They had lost most of their money in consequence. “And so, when Chatsworth’s offer came, you see, I could not afford to refuse. There was no alternative. I had my doubts about this artificial Violet, from the very first. Even across half of Europe, it didn’t smell so good.… Never mind, I said to myself. Here is a problem. Every problem has its solution. We will do what we can. We will not despair. Who knows? Perhaps, after all, we shall present Mr. Chatsworth with a charming nosegay, a nice little surprise.”
    Bergmann wanted all my time, all my company, all my attention. During those first weeks, our working day steadily