Read Gilgi for Free Online Page A

had a child once, didn’t you?”
    “I?? Had a child?? You’re quite mistaken.” There are hostile lines around Fräulein Täschler’s nose and mouth.
    “Maybe you forgot,” Gilgi suggests helpfully.
    “I got a very good memory, Frollein, an’ when you’ve always been a decent woman, it’s easy to remember.”
    “Well, why not drink another cherry brandy, Fräulein Täschler!”
    And now the words gush out of her like a waterfall, and she tosses the cherry brandy down as she goes, and overall she becomes just a tiny bit less elegant than Frau von Kardorff.
    “I mean, Frollein, if you say standards’re bad now’days, well, what I say is, there’ve always been all kinds, and our sort’ve always kept themselves decent, but the high-class people, well, I could tell you an in-ter-est-ing story if I wanted to.” She pauses, and sighs: “Yerse, one is much too decen’!” The sigh unmistakably expresses regret.
    Gilgi drinks another shot and decides that this can’t go on. Is she supposed to sit here all night with Fräulein Ladies’ Dressmaker Ring Twice, discussing problems of ethics? “Go on, drink another cherry brandy, Fräulein Täschler!” This business of looking for your mother runs into money! But now she wants to straighten it out, now she goes for broke.
    “I thought you had a child, because I know a girl, she was adopted by a family—what’s their name again? Kron—and she’s twenty-one now …”
    Whereupon Täschler leaps up, screeching, and a plate falls to the floor. So she’s on the right track after all! It’s only now that Gilgi notices how hard she’s been hoping that the whole thing was a mistake, or a misunderstanding, or something—but whatever it was, not true.
    “You’re the child!” Täschler shouts as understanding dawns, and she subsides back onto her chair. Gilgi tries to work out if that was the voice of their common blood that just spoke. For the voice of their common blood to speak now would be in accordance with the rules. My blood is deaf and dumb, I should make an appointment with the doctor, or maybe I’ve just had too much to drink.
    “Nah, nah, nah, I knew right away there was somethin’ wrong about you. So you’re the child!”
    In Gilgi’s head a fan is whirring, her hands are lying limply and tiredly in her lap. “So why did you say at first that you didn’t have a child, it doesn’t matter, it’s not immoral.” That makes Täschler laugh, a shrill, tinny sound, with her head wobbling from one side to the other, it’s embarrassing to hear her, and even more embarrassing to watch her. And she laughs and giggles and sways back and forth on her chair. “Well, Frollein, we should have another little drink on the stren’th of it.” Her laughter ends in a dry cough, saliva shines on her chin, her chunky nose is dotted with blackheads like a peewit’s egg. Why did you turn into that! Whose fault is it, whose? Yours, no doubt about it, but not yours alone. Gilgi sees jagged red letters in a gray fog: What are you doing with your life? She doesn’t move, she doesn’t speak—what is there left to say?—she’s not waiting for anything. She’s an exclamation mark at the end of some red letters: What are you letting happen to your life!
    Täschler tells her story. Her arms are spread out across the table. Gilgi listens.
    “It’s twenny-one years ago now, when I was sewin’ in high-class homes. Always makin’ old clothes into new ones, which a more expensive dressmaker wouldn’t’vedone. An’ I can tell you, Frollein, I was a good-lookin’ girl. So I was workin’ in this house, a mother an’ daughter, name of Kreil. Frollein, gimme your hand!” Gilgi gives it to her. “Swear to me, Frollein, that you’ll never tell anyone else what I’m goin’ to tell you.”
    “I swear to you,” Gilgi says.
    “Maybe we’ll both make somethin’ from it yet!” Täschler has glittering little dots of eyes. “Right, the Kreils, it was jus’ the