Peter
Altenberg
FLIRT
"I'm
sitting for the first time with a poet," she said, shuddering, as it were,
within herself.
He
said: “You have splendid hands, Fräulein---She thought: "A true poet --
!"
Then
he said: “You're pale; you seem exhausted. You must never, never, never let
yourself be awakened from sleep in the morning. Who wakes you up?!"
"Mamma."
"Sleep
is the true, perhaps only charitable gift we have of an otherwise hard and
pitiless nature!"
She
thought: "How he expresses himself- A true poet!',
Then
he said: "I'd like to be a preacher-butjust for the sanctity of slee~like
Jesus Christ was for universal things, and I-iebknecht and Tolstoy for others!
The exalted prophet of the holy right of the human system to abundant
self~nding sleep! Woe unto you, CTimina4
murderer, ~ stroye~; who awakes a
person asleep whom nature has set about healing and liberating, and so disturbs
and thwarts nature's holy plans!
"A
mother who awakes her daughter from sleep is no mother!
"One
thing should be holy to you-nature in her
mystenous woi* of replenishing what
the pitiless struggle of the day has wrenched from the exhausted organism!
Amen."
The
young woman thought: "A prophet; a fanatic - - - too bad!"
Later,
he said to her: 'Woman!? Who earned this tide of honor?!? When I asked a girl
what kind of rice is the noblest, she was struck dumb and didn't know what to
say! A lady once said to me: "My dear sir, we always have the finest rice,
isn't that so, laarl?! Not at all bad, wouldn't you say?!?" But she had no
idea what distinguishes the "finest rice"!
The
young woman thought: "A cook - -- too bad!"
Then
she said: "Well, what distinguishes it?!?"
He:
"Every kernel of rice should be perfectly translucent, like fine
aia1)~'~tcr, with no dull or cloudy places. When you cook it, it should stay
very soft and yet retain its complete shape, as if it were still hard and
uncooked! Firm and tender at the same time. Like refined people."
She
said quite sadly: "Must a 'woman' just be able to understand
"No,"
he said. "But rice, one of the finest, most tender, and most easily
digestible foods, a source of warmth for
its coldness, represents, one could say, the holy world of substitutes for lost energies! To help a
man regain his strength, his stature, his passions, his highest functioning-to
want to help him so, to be able to help him so-that is what it means to be a
'woman!'
A
true woman!"
The
young woman thought: "I don't understand that at all. A fool --- too
bad!"
Then
they spoke about the glass lemon squeezer, "Columbus's egg, as he called
it. That is to say, he spoke, and she yawned inwardly, appreciative and
knowing. "When you think of how it used to be in the old days, it's
frightful. You could get a cramp in your thumb, and half the juice remained
sitting in the lemon while the unnecessary seeds were in the glass. But now,
with the glass lemon squeezer for 50 hellers, the juice flows like a clear
brooklet into the lower groove while the useless seeds remain in the upper one.
And the skin itself is dry on the inside like the Gobi Desert. Now a usurer and
a floozy can really say: 'I squeezed him like a lemon!"'
The
young girl's friends were terribly envious that the poet conversed 'with her
aside so long and so intently.
One
of them said: "What could they be talking about?! I have absclutelv no
idea."
Another
said: "Maybe about Maeterlinck, or at the most still about Ibsen."
The
third said: "About love!"
The
fourth: "About adultery, of course.
But
the youngest thought: 'What difference does it make what you talk about with a poet-
you'
re talking with a poet"'
Flirt,"
1913. original text in Was der Tag mjr zuträgt: .Fünfundsechzig neue
Studien (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1924), 305-9.