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minutes, making pointless attempts to improve her appearance. She pushes what’s left of a black comb through the remnants of her yellow-gray hair, she changes the brown blouse for a green one, and now she looks just as pitiful as before—as far as Gilgi’s concerned. She herself considers it a marked change for the better when she looks in the battered mirror above the chest of drawers, and that’s the main thing, after all. And because she’scurious now, expecting something, she gradually develops something which looks like a face. A gray face with a chunky nose, inflamed eyelids, a narrow-lipped mouth, and awful teeth. The beautiful grandmother writes to her granddaughter … To end up with a face like that! Why did you let such a thing happen to you? With a face like that, people can’t love you, no matter how hard they try, it’s impossible. They can sob, scream, laugh, sob—and what about my father! What could he possibly look like? And Gilgi feels her face becoming paler and her eyes retreating deep into their sockets.
    I’ll start to feel better now, she thinks, as Fräulein Täschler closes the door from the outside. The stink and the close air, they were what I couldn’t stand. When they reach the street, she breathes in deeply. That doesn’t help. She coughs, twice—there’s something in her chest she can’t shift. And there are vapors before her eyes, she can’t see properly, maybe she’s asleep, and it’s all just a bad dream.
    Then they’re sitting in the bar on the corner. Fräulein Täschler has a small light ale and an open sandwich on the table in front of her. She’s eating like a very elegant lady, with a knife and fork. Gilgi is drinking a double shot. Eating is impossible, she can’t stop thinking about the cold, sticky remainder of the fried potatoes in the room up there, and she can’t stop feeling that a chunk of those fried potatoes is in her mouth. Another shot! She downs it in one gulp. She shudders, but she still wants to retch. She has the sensation of having become completely removed from herself. There you are, on first-name terms with reality, and suddenly it’s a stranger to you and you don’t know how to approach it … but that doesn’t suit us, that doesn’t suit us at all.
    Gilgi drinks another shot, and another. She has absolutely no cause to shudder now, the stuff is going down like water. Usually she’s not interested in alcohol, or even avoids it, but now she’s pleasantly surprised that, just by spending four lots of fifteen pfennigs, you can conjure up such a nice bright red to replace the crappy black before your eyes. Good for you! Right, now she’ll just get to the bottom of this, of how everything was and how it developed. What’s there to be afraid of? She’s holding her life firmly in her hands, and it’ll take a lot more than this business to make her lose her grip. And we’ll put a stop to all the soppy emotionalism we’ve been indulging in recently while we’re at it.
    “Wow, Frollein, when I see you tossing ’em down like that, I feel quite drunk myself. An’ such rough liquor too!” Fräulein Täschler orders herself a cherry brandy, and everything about her is so elegant that the Minister of Culture or President Hindenburg or Frau von Kardorff and her political salon … there’s no point of comparison, because Germany simply hasn’t seen such fearful elegance since it abolished the monarchy in 1918.
    “Didn’t you have a child once?” Gilgi asks.
    She’s drunk five shots now, and they’ve removed any desire for a roundabout approach. And I can tell you straightaway that the tearful reunion scene between mother and child, with or without embraces, is off.
    Fräulein Täschler has had a face for the last half-hour, and now she has eyes, too, tiny, glittering little points. “What d’you mean, Frollein?”
    Gilgi shrugs her shoulders. Answering a question with a question, that’s just what she wants to hear. “Well, you