Karl however had no feelings for that girl. In the rush of memories from an ever-dimming past, she sat in her kitchen, with her elbows propped up on the kitchen cupboard. She would stare at him whenever he would come into the kitchen for a glass of water for his father or to pass on some instructions from his mother. Sometimes she would be writing a letter, awkwardly sitting beside the kitchen cupboard and drawing her inspiration from Karl’s face. Sometimes she would hide her eyes behind her hands, and then no words could get through to her. Sometimes she would kneel in her narrow little room next to the kitchen, praying before a wooden cross; Karl would then shyly watch her from the passage through the narrow crack of the door. Sometimes she raced around the kitchen and jumped back, laughing like a witch, if Karl got in her way. Sometimes she would shut the kitchen door after Karl came in and hold on to the latch until he demanded to leave. Sometimes she brought him things he did not at all desire and pressed them silently into his hands. But one time she said, “Karl,” and led him, still shocked at the unexpected familiarity, into her little room, which she then locked with much grimacing and sighing. She almost choked him as she clung to his neck, and while asking him to undress her, she actually undressed him and put him into her bed as if she wanted no one else to have him from now on and wished to caress him and coddle him until the end of the world. “Karl, oh, my Karl!” she cried, as if by gazing at him she were confirming her possession, while Karl saw absolutely nothing and felt uncomfortable in the warm bedding that she seemed to have piled up specially for his benefit. Then she lay down next to him and wanted to extract some secrets from him, but he could tell her none and she was annoyed, either in jest or in earnest; she shook him, she listened to his heart beating, she offered her own breast for him to do the same, but she could not induce Karl to do so; she pressed her naked belly against his body, fondled him between the legs so repulsively that Karl thrust his head and neck from the pillows, then ground her belly against him a few times—it felt as if she were part of him, and perhaps this was the reason he was seized by a dreadful helplessness. He was weeping when he finally reached his own bed, after she entreated him repeatedly to visit her again. That was all it was and yet his uncle had succeeded in making a grand story out of it. And that cook 2 had evidently been thinking of him and notified his uncle of his arrival. That was very kind of her and he hoped to one day repay her.
“And now,” cried the Senator, “I would like to hear loud and clear whether I am your uncle or not.”
“You are my uncle,” said Karl, kissing his hand and receiving a kiss on the forehead in return. “I’m very glad to have met you, but you are mistaken if you believe that my parents speak only ill of you. But aside from that, your speech contained several errors, that is to say, I mean, everything didn’t really happen like that. But you can’t judge things so well from here, and besides, I don’t think it will cause any great harm if these gentlemen are slightly misinformed about the details of a matter that could hardly interest them very much.”
“Well said,” remarked the Senator, guiding Karl over to the visibly sympathetic captain and asking: “Don’t I have a splendid nephew?”
“I am happy,” said the captain, with a bow that only a militarily trained person can execute, “to have made your nephew’s acquaintance, Mr. Senator. It is a particular honor for my ship to have provided the setting for such a meeting. But the voyage in steerage must have been less than pleasant, it’s difficult to know who’s traveling down there. Of course we do everything possible to make the passengers in steerage as comfortable as possible, much more, for example, than the American lines, but we have not succeeded yet in making this excursion a pleasure.”