Hobohemians

44She thinks he’s the only one understands her. Viktor says he made English love to her, telling her she ought to write the story of her life. Poor little Lotte! She couldn’t write her name. Still that’s what flatters them, even more than money. Tell a servant girl she’s an artistic whore. All for love and the feeling, as Viktor says. Himmel [Heavens], she’s actually smiling at me! Willy looks fierce.

45Willy watched Heinke long-legged shaking hands round tables.—Hope Heinke comes here. Find out where Viktor is. Must be a good sort, Heinke. Goes round once a day to Viktor’s dirty old studio. Never there when I am, but I’m chiefly there at meal times. He sits playing chess all afternoon to please him. If Heinke wins, Viktor bangs him on the head with the chessboard. Remember that time he came in with a bandaged brow. Can’t afford from point of view of health to win more than once in a month. Viktor: ‘I look at the paintings of these dirty dogs and I only get depressed. Heiligesakrament [Holy sacrament]! They paint better than I do, I begin to believe. That’s bad enough. But for these halfwits to beat me at chess as well. That is too much. Smack. I bang their heads.’

46Heinke was there the first night I went to Viktor’s. Lotte did that well, saying to Viktor: ‘That is a young Englishman over there, the Hindou told me. You speak to him. He will be able to write about you in English papers and you will sell thousands of pictures.’—He came very politely across the table to me. How pleased he was when I said I would come to see his work next day. Lotte, wearing breeches, opened the door. She always wore those then, had nothing else, had to put an old frock over them when she went out. I wonder whom she got them from. Made her look fatter than she was. Straddled her way over to the potatoes baking on a stove lid, the room tight with leaking smoke. A cliff of charity coal left by insistent organisation for necessitous Hebrews, a sack of beans, a ham wrapped up in coal dust, a paling of black bread fencing off a corner’s cobwebs. I should have kept that essay, could have sold it. A charity so determined and a recipient so unwilling. They made him accept it though.

47When I went in, Viktor was washing his collar. He took it off, soaped it, got a nailbrush, brushed it. I moved the butter out of the range of flying soap. He turned the damp collar, nailbrushing it soapily towards the butter. I shook flecks of soap off the ham. Lotte made sweet coffee while Viktor dried his collar over the stove. She lay back on the mattress opening her breeched legs and smiling at me. I suddenly felt I had known her nights and nights. She went to a corner to put on her vest and looked to see if I was looking. Not to be caught out so easily. She discovered I was sitting on her frock on the mattress and came for it. Viktor showed me his etchings.

48Lotte shook the frock down over her hips and hunted for the mirror. Viktor said he would join us in the café. Lotte and I left. Where was Heinke then? He must have gone.