Peaches
Copyright 2005, RVRaiment
(rvraiment@yahoo.com)
All rights reserved. Content
may not be copied or used in
whole or in part without
written permission from the
author.
Copyright 2005, RVRaiment
(rvraiment@yahoo.com)
All rights reserved. Content
may not be copied or used in
whole or in part without
written permission from the
author.
Peaches
By R V Raiment
Copyright 2005 rvraiment@yahoo.com
Short hairs prickle, prising themselves from the gentle film of her perspiration, as fresh grass, newly-trodden,
rises from the cling of dew. Ilse shakes her head abruptly, the thick auburn curtain swirling in movement, and
squirms inwardly as people do when someone ‘steps on their grave’.
Someone is watching her in the silence, and that awareness makes her sharply conscious of her posture and her
dress, any possible indiscretion.
Her father, ageing, limping, had lifted the hooked pole this morning and placed it in its ring, only to find the
awning would not come, that it was stuck again. His age and limp meant that she would have to do the climbing,
and the pressing urgency he always manifested to get the flowers out and fill the stands and vases for when the
customers began to arrive, sent her hurrying to fetch the cumbersome wooden stepladder. Finding a stable
place among the cobbles and on the uneven paving was not easy, nor would her father demean himself to assist,
but she had managed it, and had ascended the rungs in order to try to work on the canopy bar, to try to work the
awning loose.
Even in those few steps, the angle of the morning sun was such that she climbed from shadow headfirst into
sunlight and her hair, neck and shoulders thrilled quietly to its warmth. It was effort, however, which raised the
perspiration, for the awning remained stubborn quite a while, unresponsive as she jiggled and shook it in order to
work it loose.
She felt the sudden give and had to fight for a moment to keep her balance, holding the canopy rim in place lest
it should swing forward and drag her from the steps, send her crashing to the stones. Then she felt it - that
being watched.
Anxiety and the sudden thought that someone was gazing up her skirt was gone in the briefest instant. Her skirt
was demure, fashionable in length if not in cut. That the fabric was thin with wear disguised itself somewhat in
pleats, and it was modest enough, respectable enough for a shop assistant at the shabby, back-street florist’s.
Whoever was watching, then, could not see anything that might cause her more embarrassment than their simply
watching did. She could feel it still.
She was afraid to meet the eyes that were watching her. It could not be her father, this time, for her peripheral
vision contained the shop doorway into which he had recently disappeared. It could be the policeman whom she
called ‘sir’ or ‘excellency’ to his face, as did everyone, and called ‘Franz Josef’ behind his back, as did everyone,
on account of his ridiculous moustaches and swollen paunch. Franz Josef watched, as he did everything, with the
frightening intensity of the natural bully.
It was not Franz Josef, nor her father. Ilse pretended for a moment to be struggling still with the awning, then
began to draw it slowly out, casting secret glances into the rippling reflections in the shop’s darkened window.
Reflected in the age-warped glass as if in the water of a gently swelling river, she saw much of the cobble-stoned
street behind her, the ancient terraced houses which lined its pavement, its ornate lamp posts and a parked,
leaning bicycle that she knew belonged to Herr Schroeder. Flickering movement in the top, furthest left of the
window, mirrored the passage of an early streetcar and other traffic on the waking main street which could just be
glimpsed beyond the corner.
On that corner, where the cobbled street became the Heldenstrasse, and taking advantage of its imminent busy-
ness and the sunshine, Fat Adolf had set up his master’s fruit barrow for the benefit of morning commuters. It
was not Fat Adolf, however, who had her under surveillance, for he was notoriously short-sighted – to the lasting
satisfaction of the urchins who took turns to pilfer from his barrow later in the day. The vendor was bowed
myopically over the stall, counting items of fruit into a paper sack. It was the man who stood beside him who
watched her.
Easing the canopy down and out, locking its stays in their wall mounts, she turned to observe her observer,
careful to exhibit no obvious interest. He had turned away as she descended, hiding his own interest in her, and
was gesturing at the fruiterer’s display.
Fat Adolf reached lugubriously across the barrow, fed yellow-orange fruit into the already laden sack, then
touched the brim of his shapeless cap as the customer counted money into his rubicund hand.
Time was passing. Rather than incur that quick-fire wrath of her father’s which seemed always to wait in ambush,
Ilse began to erect the simple trestle table which was the basis of their main display. Struggling with the table’s
heavy legs, careful of its ancient splinters, she glanced, now and then, into the window which reflected her to
herself as it showed her the street behind. The watchful buyer-of-fruit strolled from left to right behind her,
pausing only when Ilse’s reflection mostly obscured his own.
She saw his face lift and turn, his eyes swivel toward their target, and watched him step back a pace and into her
clearer view, almost as if he knew she was watching. Windows of souls, hers curious, his darkened and veiled by
distance and by the shadow of his fedora, met and held in the plate glass sheet. His own seemed to glint a little,
perhaps picking up some small ricochet of sunlight from their makeshift mirror, and yet they were fixed, without
doubt, on hers.
And holding her gaze thus, as it seemed deliberately, he reached blindly but with no less deliberation into his
paper sack, groped and felt within it. An instant later she saw him raise a piece of fruit to his lips – a peach – and
seemed to see a smile in shadow.
White teeth now betraying his smile the more, his tongue lapped out between their rows, dipped languidly into the
navel around the stalk and curled a long moment before he withdrew it. Then Ilse watched him bite, his teeth
sliding deep into the warm, firm flesh, juices streaming and dripping. She caught her breath, and then he was
gone, strolling along the street and passing out of sight. Deep within her something ghostly sighed a sigh of
wistful yearning, somehow disappointed and yet waiting.
Ilse gazed at fingers – her fingers – surprised to find them resting on a spot on the glass where only moments
ago his face had mirrored mysteries.
“You are to get the flowers out sometime today?”
Her father’s sarcasm, chill as the darkest depths of his mean emporium, awoke her from a reverie in which she
saw and thought nothing she would ever recollect, a moment of time suspended and lost in silent, unconscious
wondering at the meaning of what she had just seen.
“Of course, papa!” Instantly licking a finger she dabbed the moisture onto the glass where her hand had
touched, then polished it with her apron, disguising anything he might have noticed in an industry solicitous of the
shop’s appearance. And quickly, now, she began to lift out the boxes that Ernst the driver had delivered
yesterday.
Recognizing in Ilse’s action only the urgent efficiency of labour duly inspired by him as master, and seeing a fear
in her too commonplace for him to suppose it held any greater meaning, her father disappeared again, his face
impassive, into the cool, dank bowels of his shop.
Business was slow, as it always seemed to be these days, and, after he had dined, her father condescended to
allow her to slip across to the small café Frau Horstmann ran in her house across the street, to have the bread
and soup which was her daily lunch-time fare.
A space which had once served as a domestic drawing-room was now crowded with half a dozen tables at which
local labourers and artisans of the poorer orders could huddle to ingest the plainest and most simple fare. A few
men from the enamelware factory came here, a pair of local housepainters, students sometimes, and scant
enough samples of the labouring poor to keep a roof over Frau Horstmann’s head.
Ilse sat, as always, in a corner near the window, that she might watch the shop across the road and dash to her
father’s assistance if ever the hoped-for flood of customers arrived. They never did, yet still there were the times
when his carriage and the tilt of his large head betrayed to Ilse her father’s dangerous impatience and sent her
scurrying to some perfunctory and unnecessary service.
She lived under his roof and ate his bread, and for that and other offences he knew what he was owed.
Ilse did not see the man arrive. Perhaps that waiting ghost did, but something stirred her and caused her to
glance up. There he was, a couple of tables from her. And there he sat, drinking Frau Horstmann’s coffee,
eating one of her pastries.
No-one who could afford coffee and one of Frau Horstmann’s cakes could really be considered poor enough to
warrant eating here, and that rendered him an enigma to her and to the two hod-carriers who happened to be
lunching there. And if purchasing and eating confectionery marked him out, his next action did so even more,
since Frau Horstmann shared the deep and enduring repugnance of her catering species to anyone partaking of
their own food whilst sitting in her establishment. Yet, Frau Horstmann un-protesting by even a glimmer of her
expression, the stranger now pulled from his pocket, polished on his sleeve and prepared to eat, a peach.
There was something in the gaze that met Ilse’s which made her want to avert her eyes, but she found herself
just as helpless as she had been before, watched him smile, watched him this time run his fingers softly round the
fat sweet morsel, slide them softly the length of that evocative cleft, then raise the fruit to his lips and bite.
Had she given vent to the gasping breath which she now fought to contain within her aching chest, there was not
a one there who would not have heard it and remarked it. She saw his gaze switch suddenly to the window,
followed it helplessly with her own, and spied her father standing, arms akimbo, his impatience almost tangible.
Thus Ilse fled and faced the brief eruption of her father’s ire, which he held controlled – as anyone could see, for
he was careful that his expression and posture made it evident – purely as a result of his deep and inbred dignity
– and ran the trivial errand he required. Fetching tobacco, this time, she would as usual not return to her chilling
broth, paying due penance for being born. She would watch for the stranger’s departure, but discover she had
missed it.
In her attic room above the shop that night, Ilse dreamed of peaches and a man who looked to her like the new
rising star Ramon Novarro, only somewhat older and perhaps the more handsome for it, and who sat eating
succulent fruit as he watched her, naked, bathing.
On the following day she chafed, her father away on some business and returning late to the shop so that she
was all the later for her luncheon. She had seen the stranger neither come nor go, but little tasks kept ever
dragging her indoors and she knew she might have missed him.
And he was not there of course when she sat down, alone, and she was not surprised, wondering only why she
had ever thought he might be. Lunchtime was long gone.
Yet moments later, there he was, sitting two tables away. Coffee, again, and a pastry again. And a peach, again.
She wanted to cry out, to demand to know of him just what it was he was doing, but she could not. ‘I am eating a
peach, silly girl,’ he would say with a laugh. 'What does it look like I am doing?’ And he would point out the silly
girl to Frau Horstmann, who would laugh, as sympathetic as she might be, and who would share the joke, as
sympathetic as she might be, with all her clientele, as she stood, her bosoms heaving, an impending avalanche
above the small lakes of their soup.
Her father would hear of her foolishness, and she would pay, dearly.
How could she try to explain the manner of his eating, the way his fingers stroked the peach fuzz hair around that
cleft, the way his tongue caressed it, his lips too, before those teeth sank white and exultant into moist fruit flesh?
How could she explain what it did to her? She could not, by any means. The warm echoes of those fingers and
their subtle exploration, the moist ghosts of that tongue, those lips, that wrought an aching havoc in the warm fruit
of her body, brought the small and tingling pit sussurating to its juicy surface? They would not laugh at that.
Most of all, her father would not laugh at that.
His peach consumed, she watched the man depart and struggled to feed her broth into a belly tied in knots. And
later still she slept and dreamed and woke perspiring, a wetness on the mattress twixt her legs which sweat alone
could not explain.
The next day he was absent, and Ilse dined unwatched, relieved and yet disappointed.
Another day passed, and another, and, as a result, Ilse made her own discoveries, hearing Frau Horstmann
lament disappointedly as she placed bowls of soup before Otto Grunwald and his companion; “Again, no Herr
Fischer today!”
Grunwald scowled up at her – without intent, the configuration of his face and permanently slitted eyes making
his every expression appear thus – and queried:
“Herr Schiffer? The fruit-eater?”
“Yes. His doctor requires that he eats it, you know? Some medical condition.”
“Some doctor with money, no doubt,” growled Albert, Otto’s near-twin in his paint and whitewash stained
coveralls, without looking up from his plate. “I do not understand why he dines here, unless it is to gloat over our
poverty.”
Frau Horstmann looked pained, sensing some insult to her enterprise, but Albert did not see it, and Otto said
nothing, afraid of what his companion’s candour might lead to. Frau Horstmann contented herself with remarking:
“He is a very nice man, and a gentleman too, which is more than can be said for some.”
On the third day Herr Schiffer returned, to Frau Horstmann’s evident pleasure, but that day was a bad one. Ilse
could not raise her eyes to his, but kept her face averted.
After she had left, Schiffer engaged his hostess in conversation, proving more amiable and loquacious than she
had known him, and towards the end, as if it mattered not at all, he raised the matter which had been his true
objective:
“That girl who was in before. She is the florist’s daughter, not so?”
“Ilse? Yes. A pretty thing, but sad.”
“Is she unwell?”
“Unwell?”
“Yes. She did not appear her usual self to me this morning. And when she took her seat it looked almost as if it
pained her.”
“Ah.” Eva Horstmann was not a stupid woman, and nor was she unsympathetic. In the hard days since the war
there had been not a few to discover the generosity of spirit which underlay the brisk and business-like
demeanour she affected as part of her role. How often she forgot, it seemed, to pick up the money they set on
the table, even, sometimes, to ask for it, and how odd that those who could least afford to eat always seemed to
get the deepest bowls.
Indiscretion, however, was not her forte. Her clients’ business was, after all, her clients’ business, and breaches
of confidence would result in little good. But she liked this man, without knowing why. She leaned in close,
conspiratorially, her expression that of someone who knows she is saying something that she should not but feels
she must confide:
“Herr Baumer beats her sometimes.”
“Beats her? Why? I scarcely know her or him, of course, but she seems a dutiful and responsible daughter?”
“It is mostly when he drinks.” Frau Horstmann sat down at the table, an event that was almost unheard of. “Frau
Baumer was a beauty – you can see that Ilse does not get her looks from him. She was very young when she
married him, and it is even said that she did not marry him of her own free will.”
“An arranged marriage?”
Eva frowned, then almost whispered:
“It is said that he bought her.”
Schiffer’s handsome eyebrows rose abruptly:
“Bought her?”
“Ja! From a man who owed him money. It is said that he claimed her hand in settlement of the debt.”
“Unglaublich! But then, what happened to her, and why does he beat his daughter? Is she somehow to blame?”
“Of course not.” Frau Horstmann answered the final question first. “He used to beat poor Leni, his wife, also, and
she too was but a little thing. One day, not long after Ilse was born, she ran away and was not heard of again
until the police discovered her body, on wasteland near the canal. The poor child had been murdered.”
“How very terrible! Do they know who did it?”
“I should not say this, Herr Schiffer, but there are those who suspect Herr Baumer himself may have done so.”
“Could not the police prove it?”
“They did not try very hard. This is very hard to say, especially of the mother of that lovely child, but where the
body was found is a place that certain ladies are known to conduct their business. It was said that what remained
of her clothing and the make-up she was wearing suggested that she had been driven to turn to that profession,
and that it was in the course of that that the murder had taken place.”
“I see.”
“Herr Baumer will not speak of it to anyone, but he has been heard shouting at Ilse, calling her a… you know… a
whore… just like her mother, and it is at such times that he beats her.”
“Why does she not run away, do you think?”
“Where would she go, Herr Schiffer? No-one has any money these days, everything is so expensive, and work
gets daily more scarce, even for those who have a trade. She knows no-one outside this street. Where would
she go?”
Karl-Heinz Schiffer was one of those men whose youth and casual handsomeness, like the beauty of many
women, served often to obscure his real nature. Those who did not know him saw his smile, his playboy
handsomeness, and assumed that they were the sum of the man. But Schiffer was a man who knew very real
power, a man whom other, not inconsiderable men, regarded with no little fear. And like many men become
conscious of a considerable power concealed within themselves, Schiffer liked to play sometimes, to tease, to
make sport with others in games to which he alone knew the rules.
Engaged, now, in a game that had come to have significance for him, he had determined his next play and had
planned to speak to Ilse, to apologise with patent sincerity for having perhaps made her uncomfortable, and to
offer her a proposition. The timing for his play was almost right, but it seemed to him, now, that Herr Baumer was
a better choice of approach.
A secret meeting in a bar, too, seemed eminently appropriate. He did not rise to shake hands as Baumer
arrived, only remained seated and watched him for a moment.
“Well? I am a busy man, Herr… Schiffer, is it?”
“Yes.” Schiffer began very reasonably; “My apologies, Herr Baumer. You are not too busy to take a drink, I
trust?” And seeing that he clearly wasn’t, Schiffer ordered another Stein from the waitress, bade her keep them
coming and offered her a substantial note.
She liked her tip, very much, and was pleased to see the way that the money remained on the table as if to say it
was only waiting to be expended and could not bother to make the return journey to his wallet for so brief a stay.
Schiffer watched the bigger man drink. Baumer enquired less brusquely this time:
“So?”
Schiffer did not immediately reply, but did something rather strange instead. He drew out his wallet again, for one
thing, despite that there was drinking money enough already on the table to see them through beyond tomorrow,
and proceeded to extract from the leather first one note and then another, and then another, and so forth. When
he finished and returned the wallet to his pocket – and Baumer had already seen that there were many more
such notes within it – five pieces of paper, aside from his beer change, lay in the middle of the table. Each was
worth several thousand Reichsmarks, and it was more money than Baumer had ever seen in one place at one
time.
And now Schiffer reached into the pocket of his coat, and brought out a peach. He set this, too, on the table,
resting his hand upon it, stroking it reflectively.
“A great deal of money, Herr Baumer,” he said quietly; “isn’t it?”
Baumer coughed. “Ja. A great deal.”
“In a day or two it could be yours, if you wish.”
The florist spluttered in his beer.
“Mine?”
“Yes. And more like it. Much more.”
“More? How much more? And for what?”
“I am prepared to go higher, Herr Baumer; perhaps as high as a quarter million.” He watched the other man’s
face carefully. “If you will sell me your daughter.”
“A quarter million Reichsmarks for my daughter? Is this some stupid joke?” The words were right, but neither the
intonation nor the expression on Baumer’s face quite fitted.
“No joke. I want her. With such an amount of money you would not need her. You could employ a dozen people
in her place, and at a rate that would allow them to eat better than they would at Frau Horstmann’s.”
“And why – how – could she be worth a quarter million Reichsmarks to a man like you, Herr Schiffer?”
Schiffer studied the peach. He said quietly:
“You beat your daughter, Herr Baumer.”
“I..!”
“You beat your daughter, Herr Baumer. Please do not deny it. It is scarcely a secret.”
“And what if I do?” Baumer’s anger was half-real and half-pretence. “What is it to you?”
“It is nothing to me, Herr Baumer,” Schiffer smiled; “except insofar as it tells me that she can be of little value to
you. With a quarter million Reichsmarks you could pay for someone to take your beatings, and to fuck you
afterwards if you chose to. Nonetheless,” he added, smiling; “I am curious to know why you do so?”
Baumer leaned forward, setting his empty Stein aside and picking up a fresh one that the ever-attentive waitress
had delivered, and his voice, thickening already, came out in a hiss:
“I beat her because she is a whore, as her mother was a whore! And it is my right!”
“I do not question your right, Herr Baumer; only your wisdom.”
“What?”
“I am a very wealthy man, Herr Baumer – far wealthier than you could guess. And as a man I have certain tastes
in women, and I know other men who have certain tastes in women – beautiful women who can be counted upon
to… how shall I put it? To submit, perhaps, to certain routine indignities? Your Ilse could be very useful to me.”
“She is still my daughter.”
Schiffer smiled;
“Of course she is. But for a quarter million Marks?”
“She would not consent. She would scream and make a fuss. The police would become involved, and I do not
want that. Some of them have long memories.”
“The ones who thought you murdered your wife, you mean? They never proved that, did they?”
Baumer poured beer down his throat, grinning;
“No, they never proved it. I am not stupid.”
“I agree with you, Herr Baumer, that if you told your daughter what I proposed she could hardly be counted upon
to come quietly. That, however, depends upon your telling her and, as you have just said, you are not a stupid
man.
“I will pay you a quarter of a million Reichsmarks this coming Friday afternoon, by which time you will have Ilse
clothed and packed for a whole new life. You will explain to her that I am in the movies – and indeed I do have
interests in the movies – and that I have fallen in love with her and am determined to make her a movie star. She
looks like a dreamer – I don’t doubt that dream will suffice.”
Baumer answered Schiffer’s cynical smile with a deep-throated, ugly laugh: “Nein. She will run to you to escape
my belt and will encounter yours instead! It is too perfect.”
“You agree then?”
Baumer’s eyes fixed on the money and Schiffer answered his unspoken question:
“Take it, but do not spend it – any of it – until she and I are safe away and no-one can get suspicious. The rest
of the money I will bring on Friday. You can count it before we leave, whilst she is waiting in the car.”
“Gut! Oh so very good!”
“Just one thing more…” Schiffer picked up the peach and rolled it in his hand, lifted it towards his lips. “For the
next few days, Mein Herr, you will treat your daughter as a princess, explaining that I will be sending you a regular
commission, and you will keep the use of your belt to holding up your trousers. A wealthy man has powerful
friends, Herr Baumer, and if I discover you have laid a hand on her you will come to much regret it. I prefer,” he
said, eyes gleaming, “that my peaches arrive unblemished.”
Baumer watched him bite, watched the juices drip, and saw a darker salaciousness than ever Ilse had done. It
made him smile, and kept him smiling, all the short walk home.
How Baumer delighted, as Frau Horstmann, bless her, delighted, in the transports of joy to which his news
reduced the florist’s daughter. Not that his delight stemmed from the same kind source. And how he delighted in
dropping little hints which explained his new civility even better than did money, of the need for an actress to be
hale and sound for her public.
When Friday came and the long and gleaming Daimler coasted gently to a stop outside his store, Baumer
exchanged her shabby suitcase for another that was less so and which, in the shaded light of the store-room
proved to be all that Schiffer had promised. The stupid girl wept to leave him, sought assurances that he would
be alright.
As he steered the car away from the kerb, glancing at her in the mirror, Schiffer asked the girl if she approved of
his ‘lucky car’.
“Lucky?”
“Yes. This car has served me very well, Fraulein Baumer, and has only once ever broken down on me in many
miles of driving. That once was on the Heldenstrasse, and had I not decided to take a walk that morning I might
never have seen you outside the shop.”
“And seeing me that once has led to all this? I cannot imagine how. It must be a very lucky car for me, then.”
Schiffer smiled. She asked him:
“Where are we going?”
“To buy you some clothes, first, I think. As lovely as you look in that dress there are others that will become you
better. And since you are to live with me for a while, at least, it will be better if you are dressed in a manner
befitting your future role.”
“To live with you?” Ah, such maidenly anxiety in the eyes that met his in the mirror.
“Nearby, at least, Ilse. I am going to take care of you now.”
The shopping trip, the endless modelling for his approval – approval which seemed so much to matter to her now
– and the caress of fine fabrics, the time spent in the care of the girl assistant who helped her select good
underwear, the unending exchange of what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of high denomination bank notes
on Herr Schiffer’s part, astonished and amazed her. Such qualms as she had – and she was not without them –
she buried in her excitement.
And when they finally arrived at his hotel suite, excitement threatened to overwhelm her. She had never in her
life seen anything like this, the ultimate in opulence in her previous experience a glimpse of the foyer of the small
cinema she sometimes passed by on her errands, stopping only to look at the stills and the posters and to
dream, just a little. Only now the dream had come true.
Or had it?
Opulent as it was, there were just the two bedrooms, and each of those sat side by side. When the bellhop had
left they remained just the two of them, an intimacy in itself which many would consider improper, and alone and
unchaperoned the doubts she had suppressed rose up anew. This was him. This was the man who had stared
at her, and who was gazing at her now with an expression she had not the experience to read. This was the man
who had licked and tongued peaches in a way that had entered her dreams, even invaded her body. Ilse
Baumer grew afraid and, suddenly, suspicious.
She had not been without suspicion before, but she had buried it, and who could blame her? She was being
taken away from her father, whom she loved despite the fact that he abused her as he did, and escaping the
tight-rope walk she was daily compelled to tread in order to keep his wrath at bay, escaping the broad leather
strap, its pain and her humiliation, was reason enough not to question too deeply. She could even reason that
nothing she went to could be much worse, but that conviction quailed within her now. Suddenly she said, fixing
her gaze upon him:
“Tell me, Herr Schiffer, please.”
“Tell you? Tell you what?”
“Tell me, please, how I really came here, and why. This is not about the movies, is it?”
Schiffer smiled.
“You think not?”
She did not answer, only gazed at him steadily, both of them aware, now, of her vulnerability. He smiled ruefully:
“You have seen through my ploy, Ilse? You want to know the truth?”
“Please!”
He gazed at her a long moment, so intently that she turned her face away and caught sight of the great silver
fruit-bowl in the centre of his table. Peaches. Then:
“What I told you about my lucky car, Ilse, was true. I was fortunately in no hurry, and decided to walk, stopped to
buy fruit at a barrow, and saw you.
“As you stood at the top of the stepladder the sunlight caught you, glowing in your hair, and as you leaned
forward your dress fell that way too, pressing itself on the shape of your body. I have a special affection for
peaches, I am sure you remember.”
Ilse coloured. Schiffer continued:
“I was able to watch you for quite some time, to study the way you moved and held yourself, and I liked what I
saw. It was nothing more than an idle fancy then. And in my idle fancy I thought I should like to see you more
closely, and became intrigued.
“I followed my inclination. I had time on my hands. And because I am as I am – because I like to practice jokes
and can be in some things rather foolish – I began to play a sort of joke on you. I wondered, you see, how long it
would be, how much it would take, before you walked up to me and slapped me in the face.
“I did not know your story, or your father’s, then, and would not have behaved so inconsiderately if I had done. I
learned that he beat you, as he beat your mother, that he called you a whore without any reason and would have
called you worse had you so much as spoken to me. And I learned – or, at least, I was told and believed – that
he had obtained your mother in purchase, had taken her in settlement of a debt.”
Ilse murmured:
“He told me the same. It is true.”
Schiffer nodded: “I decided, therefore, to purchase you.”
The girl whirled to face him.
“To purchase me! You cannot mean that! I am not a beast to be bought or sold!”
“Even so, Ilse, I paid your father a quarter of a million Reichsmarks for you this afternoon.”
He watched her begin to mouth the sum back at him, unable to find her voice at first, then:
“A quarter million Reichsmarks? You must be insane!”
Schiffer’s smile unsettled her.
“You are worth far more than that, believe me.”
“You cannot mean that. Not on such an acquaintance? No;” she answered herself; “Not on any acquaintance!”
Schiffer laughed. She wanted to know:
“And my father sold me?”
“Yes, and I don’t doubt he would have sold you for less.”
“Then why offer him so much, unless you are a fool?”
“I would have offered him a million, if he had pressed me.”
She seemed to ignore that. She said:
“There is something else, too, isn’t there? I believe you, truly. But suddenly I find it hard to believe he could
easily relinquish the pleasure it gave him to hurt me.”
“I told him I was buying you in order that I could beat you, force you to my will and to the will of others.”
Her face paled:
“And is that, then, your plan?”
He answered softly:
“I bought a peach, Ilse. I bought it as I buy other peaches, hoping, yes, to taste its fruit. Hoping that, for a while
at least, the peach would consent to be mine.”
“For a quarter million Marks!”
Schiffer laughed:
“I am not in the movie business, Ilse, as I told you, and like many others it would be difficult, I think, for you to
guess what my principal business is. Most of my peers are pear-shaped men in late middle age, though it seems
to me that most of them are born so, and most of them are bald and have moustaches.
“I like jests, Ilse, and I have played the most delightful jest I have ever known, today, simply because I saw a
peach I found it impossible to resist.
“I would like you to be mine, or at least to try to be. If the time comes that you do not wish to be so, you need
only say and you can go, and properly provided for, I promise.”
“It was a costly jest, Herr Schiffer.”
Schiffer shook his head: “That is the jest, itself.”
“I do not understand. Was the money counterfeit? Are you a criminal?”
“Better still, Ilse, the money was perfectly real.” He paused to enjoy the look of perplexity on her face. Then he
explained, simply:
“My business is money, Ilse. I deal in money, with banks and governments, just as my father did before me and
his father before him. I have excellent instincts, too, with money, but even if I am wrong – which is very, very
unlikely – you are worth every pfennig I have spent. And should I find I am wrong, and I will know it soon, a letter
from me to the police, confirming things your father told me, will leave him with little leisure to enjoy the money. I
may even get it back.
“But the truth, dear girl, is this. Our government faces a crisis. Reparations from the last war are at the heart of
it, and secrecy surrounds it, but some of us are aware of the policies they plan, and they are lunatic and
catastrophic. They have been printing money. They plan to print more, and the Mark is becoming debased.
That is why I have been quite busy translating everything I own, and much that others own too, into Sterling and
Dollars and anything but Marks.
“Today I paid a quarter million Reichsmarks for a peach. In a matter of days, or weeks, your estimable father will
find that he has traded you for meaningless paper. In a matter of a very short time he will be lucky if a quarter
million will buy him so much as a loaf of bread.”
“That is surely not possible?”
“That is surely only too possible, but only time will tell. And if the inflation some of us predict and have been
trying to warn the government about does come to pass, Germany will be a very uncomfortable place to be.”
“Then what will happen to us… to you… when that happens?”
“What will happen to ‘us’, I hope, my beautiful peach, is that we will sigh and shake our heads as we read all
about it in the American newspapers. Our tickets are booked, and we are leaving tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow. It will be a great adventure.”
He watched her, both still standing, trying to grasp the enormity of all that he had said. She said quietly:
“I do not even know your first name.”
“Karl-Heinz,” he answered. “My friends call me Karl.”
Ilse, as if dreaming, began to slide her new and favourite dark red day-dress off her shoulders, listened to it fall a
sussurating whisper to the floor. Her underwear was distinctly a la nouvelle mode, a pale pink chemise of silk
patterned with flowers, the straps sliding easily from her shoulders, and he gasped as it fell away from the twin
fruit of her strawberry-nippled breasts.
She paused a moment, gazing at him, then unfastened the garters on each leg by turn, coaxing her new dark
stockings down. Wearing only her silk knickers, now, the pattern of the chemise reflected in embroidered side
panels and around their borders, she turned away from him, leaning forward just that little as she let the knickers
fall, then turned to gaze at him across a perfect shoulder.
“Does Herr Schiffer approve of his purchase?” she asked him, quietly.
“Please, Ilse, it is not like that… I never meant…”
Ilse smiled softly: “I know. It is alright, Karl. I understand.”
And Karl gazed on his peaches, the perfect peaches he’d first glimpsed within their dull grey wrapping, and grew
hard, and hot, and wanting. Walking slowly to him, Ilse now embraced him shyly, her own grip tightening as his
arms enfolded her and pressed her to him.
Echoes of a dream stirred within the fruit of her, juicing, and she felt his answering hardness, led him to the
master bedroom and undressed him.
As a nation slept unknowing, heedless of impending nightmare, a broker who liked jesting and a virgin newly free
learned what it is to dream whilst waking, floating on clouds of skin and heat and tongue. Karl-Heinz tasted fruit
with sweeter juices still, licked a tiny pit in soft moist flesh and planted seed in an agony of joy, cream to the
loveliest peach in Nature.
End
Copyright 2005, R V Raiment (rvraiment@yahoo.com)
All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or in part without written permission from the
author
By R V Raiment
Copyright 2005 rvraiment@yahoo.com
Short hairs prickle, prising themselves from the gentle film of her perspiration, as fresh grass, newly-trodden,
rises from the cling of dew. Ilse shakes her head abruptly, the thick auburn curtain swirling in movement, and
squirms inwardly as people do when someone ‘steps on their grave’.
Someone is watching her in the silence, and that awareness makes her sharply conscious of her posture and her
dress, any possible indiscretion.
Her father, ageing, limping, had lifted the hooked pole this morning and placed it in its ring, only to find the
awning would not come, that it was stuck again. His age and limp meant that she would have to do the climbing,
and the pressing urgency he always manifested to get the flowers out and fill the stands and vases for when the
customers began to arrive, sent her hurrying to fetch the cumbersome wooden stepladder. Finding a stable
place among the cobbles and on the uneven paving was not easy, nor would her father demean himself to assist,
but she had managed it, and had ascended the rungs in order to try to work on the canopy bar, to try to work the
awning loose.
Even in those few steps, the angle of the morning sun was such that she climbed from shadow headfirst into
sunlight and her hair, neck and shoulders thrilled quietly to its warmth. It was effort, however, which raised the
perspiration, for the awning remained stubborn quite a while, unresponsive as she jiggled and shook it in order to
work it loose.
She felt the sudden give and had to fight for a moment to keep her balance, holding the canopy rim in place lest
it should swing forward and drag her from the steps, send her crashing to the stones. Then she felt it - that
being watched.
Anxiety and the sudden thought that someone was gazing up her skirt was gone in the briefest instant. Her skirt
was demure, fashionable in length if not in cut. That the fabric was thin with wear disguised itself somewhat in
pleats, and it was modest enough, respectable enough for a shop assistant at the shabby, back-street florist’s.
Whoever was watching, then, could not see anything that might cause her more embarrassment than their simply
watching did. She could feel it still.
She was afraid to meet the eyes that were watching her. It could not be her father, this time, for her peripheral
vision contained the shop doorway into which he had recently disappeared. It could be the policeman whom she
called ‘sir’ or ‘excellency’ to his face, as did everyone, and called ‘Franz Josef’ behind his back, as did everyone,
on account of his ridiculous moustaches and swollen paunch. Franz Josef watched, as he did everything, with the
frightening intensity of the natural bully.
It was not Franz Josef, nor her father. Ilse pretended for a moment to be struggling still with the awning, then
began to draw it slowly out, casting secret glances into the rippling reflections in the shop’s darkened window.
Reflected in the age-warped glass as if in the water of a gently swelling river, she saw much of the cobble-stoned
street behind her, the ancient terraced houses which lined its pavement, its ornate lamp posts and a parked,
leaning bicycle that she knew belonged to Herr Schroeder. Flickering movement in the top, furthest left of the
window, mirrored the passage of an early streetcar and other traffic on the waking main street which could just be
glimpsed beyond the corner.
On that corner, where the cobbled street became the Heldenstrasse, and taking advantage of its imminent busy-
ness and the sunshine, Fat Adolf had set up his master’s fruit barrow for the benefit of morning commuters. It
was not Fat Adolf, however, who had her under surveillance, for he was notoriously short-sighted – to the lasting
satisfaction of the urchins who took turns to pilfer from his barrow later in the day. The vendor was bowed
myopically over the stall, counting items of fruit into a paper sack. It was the man who stood beside him who
watched her.
Easing the canopy down and out, locking its stays in their wall mounts, she turned to observe her observer,
careful to exhibit no obvious interest. He had turned away as she descended, hiding his own interest in her, and
was gesturing at the fruiterer’s display.
Fat Adolf reached lugubriously across the barrow, fed yellow-orange fruit into the already laden sack, then
touched the brim of his shapeless cap as the customer counted money into his rubicund hand.
Time was passing. Rather than incur that quick-fire wrath of her father’s which seemed always to wait in ambush,
Ilse began to erect the simple trestle table which was the basis of their main display. Struggling with the table’s
heavy legs, careful of its ancient splinters, she glanced, now and then, into the window which reflected her to
herself as it showed her the street behind. The watchful buyer-of-fruit strolled from left to right behind her,
pausing only when Ilse’s reflection mostly obscured his own.
She saw his face lift and turn, his eyes swivel toward their target, and watched him step back a pace and into her
clearer view, almost as if he knew she was watching. Windows of souls, hers curious, his darkened and veiled by
distance and by the shadow of his fedora, met and held in the plate glass sheet. His own seemed to glint a little,
perhaps picking up some small ricochet of sunlight from their makeshift mirror, and yet they were fixed, without
doubt, on hers.
And holding her gaze thus, as it seemed deliberately, he reached blindly but with no less deliberation into his
paper sack, groped and felt within it. An instant later she saw him raise a piece of fruit to his lips – a peach – and
seemed to see a smile in shadow.
White teeth now betraying his smile the more, his tongue lapped out between their rows, dipped languidly into the
navel around the stalk and curled a long moment before he withdrew it. Then Ilse watched him bite, his teeth
sliding deep into the warm, firm flesh, juices streaming and dripping. She caught her breath, and then he was
gone, strolling along the street and passing out of sight. Deep within her something ghostly sighed a sigh of
wistful yearning, somehow disappointed and yet waiting.
Ilse gazed at fingers – her fingers – surprised to find them resting on a spot on the glass where only moments
ago his face had mirrored mysteries.
“You are to get the flowers out sometime today?”
Her father’s sarcasm, chill as the darkest depths of his mean emporium, awoke her from a reverie in which she
saw and thought nothing she would ever recollect, a moment of time suspended and lost in silent, unconscious
wondering at the meaning of what she had just seen.
“Of course, papa!” Instantly licking a finger she dabbed the moisture onto the glass where her hand had
touched, then polished it with her apron, disguising anything he might have noticed in an industry solicitous of the
shop’s appearance. And quickly, now, she began to lift out the boxes that Ernst the driver had delivered
yesterday.
Recognizing in Ilse’s action only the urgent efficiency of labour duly inspired by him as master, and seeing a fear
in her too commonplace for him to suppose it held any greater meaning, her father disappeared again, his face
impassive, into the cool, dank bowels of his shop.
Business was slow, as it always seemed to be these days, and, after he had dined, her father condescended to
allow her to slip across to the small café Frau Horstmann ran in her house across the street, to have the bread
and soup which was her daily lunch-time fare.
A space which had once served as a domestic drawing-room was now crowded with half a dozen tables at which
local labourers and artisans of the poorer orders could huddle to ingest the plainest and most simple fare. A few
men from the enamelware factory came here, a pair of local housepainters, students sometimes, and scant
enough samples of the labouring poor to keep a roof over Frau Horstmann’s head.
Ilse sat, as always, in a corner near the window, that she might watch the shop across the road and dash to her
father’s assistance if ever the hoped-for flood of customers arrived. They never did, yet still there were the times
when his carriage and the tilt of his large head betrayed to Ilse her father’s dangerous impatience and sent her
scurrying to some perfunctory and unnecessary service.
She lived under his roof and ate his bread, and for that and other offences he knew what he was owed.
Ilse did not see the man arrive. Perhaps that waiting ghost did, but something stirred her and caused her to
glance up. There he was, a couple of tables from her. And there he sat, drinking Frau Horstmann’s coffee,
eating one of her pastries.
No-one who could afford coffee and one of Frau Horstmann’s cakes could really be considered poor enough to
warrant eating here, and that rendered him an enigma to her and to the two hod-carriers who happened to be
lunching there. And if purchasing and eating confectionery marked him out, his next action did so even more,
since Frau Horstmann shared the deep and enduring repugnance of her catering species to anyone partaking of
their own food whilst sitting in her establishment. Yet, Frau Horstmann un-protesting by even a glimmer of her
expression, the stranger now pulled from his pocket, polished on his sleeve and prepared to eat, a peach.
There was something in the gaze that met Ilse’s which made her want to avert her eyes, but she found herself
just as helpless as she had been before, watched him smile, watched him this time run his fingers softly round the
fat sweet morsel, slide them softly the length of that evocative cleft, then raise the fruit to his lips and bite.
Had she given vent to the gasping breath which she now fought to contain within her aching chest, there was not
a one there who would not have heard it and remarked it. She saw his gaze switch suddenly to the window,
followed it helplessly with her own, and spied her father standing, arms akimbo, his impatience almost tangible.
Thus Ilse fled and faced the brief eruption of her father’s ire, which he held controlled – as anyone could see, for
he was careful that his expression and posture made it evident – purely as a result of his deep and inbred dignity
– and ran the trivial errand he required. Fetching tobacco, this time, she would as usual not return to her chilling
broth, paying due penance for being born. She would watch for the stranger’s departure, but discover she had
missed it.
In her attic room above the shop that night, Ilse dreamed of peaches and a man who looked to her like the new
rising star Ramon Novarro, only somewhat older and perhaps the more handsome for it, and who sat eating
succulent fruit as he watched her, naked, bathing.
On the following day she chafed, her father away on some business and returning late to the shop so that she
was all the later for her luncheon. She had seen the stranger neither come nor go, but little tasks kept ever
dragging her indoors and she knew she might have missed him.
And he was not there of course when she sat down, alone, and she was not surprised, wondering only why she
had ever thought he might be. Lunchtime was long gone.
Yet moments later, there he was, sitting two tables away. Coffee, again, and a pastry again. And a peach, again.
She wanted to cry out, to demand to know of him just what it was he was doing, but she could not. ‘I am eating a
peach, silly girl,’ he would say with a laugh. 'What does it look like I am doing?’ And he would point out the silly
girl to Frau Horstmann, who would laugh, as sympathetic as she might be, and who would share the joke, as
sympathetic as she might be, with all her clientele, as she stood, her bosoms heaving, an impending avalanche
above the small lakes of their soup.
Her father would hear of her foolishness, and she would pay, dearly.
How could she try to explain the manner of his eating, the way his fingers stroked the peach fuzz hair around that
cleft, the way his tongue caressed it, his lips too, before those teeth sank white and exultant into moist fruit flesh?
How could she explain what it did to her? She could not, by any means. The warm echoes of those fingers and
their subtle exploration, the moist ghosts of that tongue, those lips, that wrought an aching havoc in the warm fruit
of her body, brought the small and tingling pit sussurating to its juicy surface? They would not laugh at that.
Most of all, her father would not laugh at that.
His peach consumed, she watched the man depart and struggled to feed her broth into a belly tied in knots. And
later still she slept and dreamed and woke perspiring, a wetness on the mattress twixt her legs which sweat alone
could not explain.
The next day he was absent, and Ilse dined unwatched, relieved and yet disappointed.
Another day passed, and another, and, as a result, Ilse made her own discoveries, hearing Frau Horstmann
lament disappointedly as she placed bowls of soup before Otto Grunwald and his companion; “Again, no Herr
Fischer today!”
Grunwald scowled up at her – without intent, the configuration of his face and permanently slitted eyes making
his every expression appear thus – and queried:
“Herr Schiffer? The fruit-eater?”
“Yes. His doctor requires that he eats it, you know? Some medical condition.”
“Some doctor with money, no doubt,” growled Albert, Otto’s near-twin in his paint and whitewash stained
coveralls, without looking up from his plate. “I do not understand why he dines here, unless it is to gloat over our
poverty.”
Frau Horstmann looked pained, sensing some insult to her enterprise, but Albert did not see it, and Otto said
nothing, afraid of what his companion’s candour might lead to. Frau Horstmann contented herself with remarking:
“He is a very nice man, and a gentleman too, which is more than can be said for some.”
On the third day Herr Schiffer returned, to Frau Horstmann’s evident pleasure, but that day was a bad one. Ilse
could not raise her eyes to his, but kept her face averted.
After she had left, Schiffer engaged his hostess in conversation, proving more amiable and loquacious than she
had known him, and towards the end, as if it mattered not at all, he raised the matter which had been his true
objective:
“That girl who was in before. She is the florist’s daughter, not so?”
“Ilse? Yes. A pretty thing, but sad.”
“Is she unwell?”
“Unwell?”
“Yes. She did not appear her usual self to me this morning. And when she took her seat it looked almost as if it
pained her.”
“Ah.” Eva Horstmann was not a stupid woman, and nor was she unsympathetic. In the hard days since the war
there had been not a few to discover the generosity of spirit which underlay the brisk and business-like
demeanour she affected as part of her role. How often she forgot, it seemed, to pick up the money they set on
the table, even, sometimes, to ask for it, and how odd that those who could least afford to eat always seemed to
get the deepest bowls.
Indiscretion, however, was not her forte. Her clients’ business was, after all, her clients’ business, and breaches
of confidence would result in little good. But she liked this man, without knowing why. She leaned in close,
conspiratorially, her expression that of someone who knows she is saying something that she should not but feels
she must confide:
“Herr Baumer beats her sometimes.”
“Beats her? Why? I scarcely know her or him, of course, but she seems a dutiful and responsible daughter?”
“It is mostly when he drinks.” Frau Horstmann sat down at the table, an event that was almost unheard of. “Frau
Baumer was a beauty – you can see that Ilse does not get her looks from him. She was very young when she
married him, and it is even said that she did not marry him of her own free will.”
“An arranged marriage?”
Eva frowned, then almost whispered:
“It is said that he bought her.”
Schiffer’s handsome eyebrows rose abruptly:
“Bought her?”
“Ja! From a man who owed him money. It is said that he claimed her hand in settlement of the debt.”
“Unglaublich! But then, what happened to her, and why does he beat his daughter? Is she somehow to blame?”
“Of course not.” Frau Horstmann answered the final question first. “He used to beat poor Leni, his wife, also, and
she too was but a little thing. One day, not long after Ilse was born, she ran away and was not heard of again
until the police discovered her body, on wasteland near the canal. The poor child had been murdered.”
“How very terrible! Do they know who did it?”
“I should not say this, Herr Schiffer, but there are those who suspect Herr Baumer himself may have done so.”
“Could not the police prove it?”
“They did not try very hard. This is very hard to say, especially of the mother of that lovely child, but where the
body was found is a place that certain ladies are known to conduct their business. It was said that what remained
of her clothing and the make-up she was wearing suggested that she had been driven to turn to that profession,
and that it was in the course of that that the murder had taken place.”
“I see.”
“Herr Baumer will not speak of it to anyone, but he has been heard shouting at Ilse, calling her a… you know… a
whore… just like her mother, and it is at such times that he beats her.”
“Why does she not run away, do you think?”
“Where would she go, Herr Schiffer? No-one has any money these days, everything is so expensive, and work
gets daily more scarce, even for those who have a trade. She knows no-one outside this street. Where would
she go?”
Karl-Heinz Schiffer was one of those men whose youth and casual handsomeness, like the beauty of many
women, served often to obscure his real nature. Those who did not know him saw his smile, his playboy
handsomeness, and assumed that they were the sum of the man. But Schiffer was a man who knew very real
power, a man whom other, not inconsiderable men, regarded with no little fear. And like many men become
conscious of a considerable power concealed within themselves, Schiffer liked to play sometimes, to tease, to
make sport with others in games to which he alone knew the rules.
Engaged, now, in a game that had come to have significance for him, he had determined his next play and had
planned to speak to Ilse, to apologise with patent sincerity for having perhaps made her uncomfortable, and to
offer her a proposition. The timing for his play was almost right, but it seemed to him, now, that Herr Baumer was
a better choice of approach.
A secret meeting in a bar, too, seemed eminently appropriate. He did not rise to shake hands as Baumer
arrived, only remained seated and watched him for a moment.
“Well? I am a busy man, Herr… Schiffer, is it?”
“Yes.” Schiffer began very reasonably; “My apologies, Herr Baumer. You are not too busy to take a drink, I
trust?” And seeing that he clearly wasn’t, Schiffer ordered another Stein from the waitress, bade her keep them
coming and offered her a substantial note.
She liked her tip, very much, and was pleased to see the way that the money remained on the table as if to say it
was only waiting to be expended and could not bother to make the return journey to his wallet for so brief a stay.
Schiffer watched the bigger man drink. Baumer enquired less brusquely this time:
“So?”
Schiffer did not immediately reply, but did something rather strange instead. He drew out his wallet again, for one
thing, despite that there was drinking money enough already on the table to see them through beyond tomorrow,
and proceeded to extract from the leather first one note and then another, and then another, and so forth. When
he finished and returned the wallet to his pocket – and Baumer had already seen that there were many more
such notes within it – five pieces of paper, aside from his beer change, lay in the middle of the table. Each was
worth several thousand Reichsmarks, and it was more money than Baumer had ever seen in one place at one
time.
And now Schiffer reached into the pocket of his coat, and brought out a peach. He set this, too, on the table,
resting his hand upon it, stroking it reflectively.
“A great deal of money, Herr Baumer,” he said quietly; “isn’t it?”
Baumer coughed. “Ja. A great deal.”
“In a day or two it could be yours, if you wish.”
The florist spluttered in his beer.
“Mine?”
“Yes. And more like it. Much more.”
“More? How much more? And for what?”
“I am prepared to go higher, Herr Baumer; perhaps as high as a quarter million.” He watched the other man’s
face carefully. “If you will sell me your daughter.”
“A quarter million Reichsmarks for my daughter? Is this some stupid joke?” The words were right, but neither the
intonation nor the expression on Baumer’s face quite fitted.
“No joke. I want her. With such an amount of money you would not need her. You could employ a dozen people
in her place, and at a rate that would allow them to eat better than they would at Frau Horstmann’s.”
“And why – how – could she be worth a quarter million Reichsmarks to a man like you, Herr Schiffer?”
Schiffer studied the peach. He said quietly:
“You beat your daughter, Herr Baumer.”
“I..!”
“You beat your daughter, Herr Baumer. Please do not deny it. It is scarcely a secret.”
“And what if I do?” Baumer’s anger was half-real and half-pretence. “What is it to you?”
“It is nothing to me, Herr Baumer,” Schiffer smiled; “except insofar as it tells me that she can be of little value to
you. With a quarter million Reichsmarks you could pay for someone to take your beatings, and to fuck you
afterwards if you chose to. Nonetheless,” he added, smiling; “I am curious to know why you do so?”
Baumer leaned forward, setting his empty Stein aside and picking up a fresh one that the ever-attentive waitress
had delivered, and his voice, thickening already, came out in a hiss:
“I beat her because she is a whore, as her mother was a whore! And it is my right!”
“I do not question your right, Herr Baumer; only your wisdom.”
“What?”
“I am a very wealthy man, Herr Baumer – far wealthier than you could guess. And as a man I have certain tastes
in women, and I know other men who have certain tastes in women – beautiful women who can be counted upon
to… how shall I put it? To submit, perhaps, to certain routine indignities? Your Ilse could be very useful to me.”
“She is still my daughter.”
Schiffer smiled;
“Of course she is. But for a quarter million Marks?”
“She would not consent. She would scream and make a fuss. The police would become involved, and I do not
want that. Some of them have long memories.”
“The ones who thought you murdered your wife, you mean? They never proved that, did they?”
Baumer poured beer down his throat, grinning;
“No, they never proved it. I am not stupid.”
“I agree with you, Herr Baumer, that if you told your daughter what I proposed she could hardly be counted upon
to come quietly. That, however, depends upon your telling her and, as you have just said, you are not a stupid
man.
“I will pay you a quarter of a million Reichsmarks this coming Friday afternoon, by which time you will have Ilse
clothed and packed for a whole new life. You will explain to her that I am in the movies – and indeed I do have
interests in the movies – and that I have fallen in love with her and am determined to make her a movie star. She
looks like a dreamer – I don’t doubt that dream will suffice.”
Baumer answered Schiffer’s cynical smile with a deep-throated, ugly laugh: “Nein. She will run to you to escape
my belt and will encounter yours instead! It is too perfect.”
“You agree then?”
Baumer’s eyes fixed on the money and Schiffer answered his unspoken question:
“Take it, but do not spend it – any of it – until she and I are safe away and no-one can get suspicious. The rest
of the money I will bring on Friday. You can count it before we leave, whilst she is waiting in the car.”
“Gut! Oh so very good!”
“Just one thing more…” Schiffer picked up the peach and rolled it in his hand, lifted it towards his lips. “For the
next few days, Mein Herr, you will treat your daughter as a princess, explaining that I will be sending you a regular
commission, and you will keep the use of your belt to holding up your trousers. A wealthy man has powerful
friends, Herr Baumer, and if I discover you have laid a hand on her you will come to much regret it. I prefer,” he
said, eyes gleaming, “that my peaches arrive unblemished.”
Baumer watched him bite, watched the juices drip, and saw a darker salaciousness than ever Ilse had done. It
made him smile, and kept him smiling, all the short walk home.
How Baumer delighted, as Frau Horstmann, bless her, delighted, in the transports of joy to which his news
reduced the florist’s daughter. Not that his delight stemmed from the same kind source. And how he delighted in
dropping little hints which explained his new civility even better than did money, of the need for an actress to be
hale and sound for her public.
When Friday came and the long and gleaming Daimler coasted gently to a stop outside his store, Baumer
exchanged her shabby suitcase for another that was less so and which, in the shaded light of the store-room
proved to be all that Schiffer had promised. The stupid girl wept to leave him, sought assurances that he would
be alright.
As he steered the car away from the kerb, glancing at her in the mirror, Schiffer asked the girl if she approved of
his ‘lucky car’.
“Lucky?”
“Yes. This car has served me very well, Fraulein Baumer, and has only once ever broken down on me in many
miles of driving. That once was on the Heldenstrasse, and had I not decided to take a walk that morning I might
never have seen you outside the shop.”
“And seeing me that once has led to all this? I cannot imagine how. It must be a very lucky car for me, then.”
Schiffer smiled. She asked him:
“Where are we going?”
“To buy you some clothes, first, I think. As lovely as you look in that dress there are others that will become you
better. And since you are to live with me for a while, at least, it will be better if you are dressed in a manner
befitting your future role.”
“To live with you?” Ah, such maidenly anxiety in the eyes that met his in the mirror.
“Nearby, at least, Ilse. I am going to take care of you now.”
The shopping trip, the endless modelling for his approval – approval which seemed so much to matter to her now
– and the caress of fine fabrics, the time spent in the care of the girl assistant who helped her select good
underwear, the unending exchange of what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of high denomination bank notes
on Herr Schiffer’s part, astonished and amazed her. Such qualms as she had – and she was not without them –
she buried in her excitement.
And when they finally arrived at his hotel suite, excitement threatened to overwhelm her. She had never in her
life seen anything like this, the ultimate in opulence in her previous experience a glimpse of the foyer of the small
cinema she sometimes passed by on her errands, stopping only to look at the stills and the posters and to
dream, just a little. Only now the dream had come true.
Or had it?
Opulent as it was, there were just the two bedrooms, and each of those sat side by side. When the bellhop had
left they remained just the two of them, an intimacy in itself which many would consider improper, and alone and
unchaperoned the doubts she had suppressed rose up anew. This was him. This was the man who had stared
at her, and who was gazing at her now with an expression she had not the experience to read. This was the man
who had licked and tongued peaches in a way that had entered her dreams, even invaded her body. Ilse
Baumer grew afraid and, suddenly, suspicious.
She had not been without suspicion before, but she had buried it, and who could blame her? She was being
taken away from her father, whom she loved despite the fact that he abused her as he did, and escaping the
tight-rope walk she was daily compelled to tread in order to keep his wrath at bay, escaping the broad leather
strap, its pain and her humiliation, was reason enough not to question too deeply. She could even reason that
nothing she went to could be much worse, but that conviction quailed within her now. Suddenly she said, fixing
her gaze upon him:
“Tell me, Herr Schiffer, please.”
“Tell you? Tell you what?”
“Tell me, please, how I really came here, and why. This is not about the movies, is it?”
Schiffer smiled.
“You think not?”
She did not answer, only gazed at him steadily, both of them aware, now, of her vulnerability. He smiled ruefully:
“You have seen through my ploy, Ilse? You want to know the truth?”
“Please!”
He gazed at her a long moment, so intently that she turned her face away and caught sight of the great silver
fruit-bowl in the centre of his table. Peaches. Then:
“What I told you about my lucky car, Ilse, was true. I was fortunately in no hurry, and decided to walk, stopped to
buy fruit at a barrow, and saw you.
“As you stood at the top of the stepladder the sunlight caught you, glowing in your hair, and as you leaned
forward your dress fell that way too, pressing itself on the shape of your body. I have a special affection for
peaches, I am sure you remember.”
Ilse coloured. Schiffer continued:
“I was able to watch you for quite some time, to study the way you moved and held yourself, and I liked what I
saw. It was nothing more than an idle fancy then. And in my idle fancy I thought I should like to see you more
closely, and became intrigued.
“I followed my inclination. I had time on my hands. And because I am as I am – because I like to practice jokes
and can be in some things rather foolish – I began to play a sort of joke on you. I wondered, you see, how long it
would be, how much it would take, before you walked up to me and slapped me in the face.
“I did not know your story, or your father’s, then, and would not have behaved so inconsiderately if I had done. I
learned that he beat you, as he beat your mother, that he called you a whore without any reason and would have
called you worse had you so much as spoken to me. And I learned – or, at least, I was told and believed – that
he had obtained your mother in purchase, had taken her in settlement of a debt.”
Ilse murmured:
“He told me the same. It is true.”
Schiffer nodded: “I decided, therefore, to purchase you.”
The girl whirled to face him.
“To purchase me! You cannot mean that! I am not a beast to be bought or sold!”
“Even so, Ilse, I paid your father a quarter of a million Reichsmarks for you this afternoon.”
He watched her begin to mouth the sum back at him, unable to find her voice at first, then:
“A quarter million Reichsmarks? You must be insane!”
Schiffer’s smile unsettled her.
“You are worth far more than that, believe me.”
“You cannot mean that. Not on such an acquaintance? No;” she answered herself; “Not on any acquaintance!”
Schiffer laughed. She wanted to know:
“And my father sold me?”
“Yes, and I don’t doubt he would have sold you for less.”
“Then why offer him so much, unless you are a fool?”
“I would have offered him a million, if he had pressed me.”
She seemed to ignore that. She said:
“There is something else, too, isn’t there? I believe you, truly. But suddenly I find it hard to believe he could
easily relinquish the pleasure it gave him to hurt me.”
“I told him I was buying you in order that I could beat you, force you to my will and to the will of others.”
Her face paled:
“And is that, then, your plan?”
He answered softly:
“I bought a peach, Ilse. I bought it as I buy other peaches, hoping, yes, to taste its fruit. Hoping that, for a while
at least, the peach would consent to be mine.”
“For a quarter million Marks!”
Schiffer laughed:
“I am not in the movie business, Ilse, as I told you, and like many others it would be difficult, I think, for you to
guess what my principal business is. Most of my peers are pear-shaped men in late middle age, though it seems
to me that most of them are born so, and most of them are bald and have moustaches.
“I like jests, Ilse, and I have played the most delightful jest I have ever known, today, simply because I saw a
peach I found it impossible to resist.
“I would like you to be mine, or at least to try to be. If the time comes that you do not wish to be so, you need
only say and you can go, and properly provided for, I promise.”
“It was a costly jest, Herr Schiffer.”
Schiffer shook his head: “That is the jest, itself.”
“I do not understand. Was the money counterfeit? Are you a criminal?”
“Better still, Ilse, the money was perfectly real.” He paused to enjoy the look of perplexity on her face. Then he
explained, simply:
“My business is money, Ilse. I deal in money, with banks and governments, just as my father did before me and
his father before him. I have excellent instincts, too, with money, but even if I am wrong – which is very, very
unlikely – you are worth every pfennig I have spent. And should I find I am wrong, and I will know it soon, a letter
from me to the police, confirming things your father told me, will leave him with little leisure to enjoy the money. I
may even get it back.
“But the truth, dear girl, is this. Our government faces a crisis. Reparations from the last war are at the heart of
it, and secrecy surrounds it, but some of us are aware of the policies they plan, and they are lunatic and
catastrophic. They have been printing money. They plan to print more, and the Mark is becoming debased.
That is why I have been quite busy translating everything I own, and much that others own too, into Sterling and
Dollars and anything but Marks.
“Today I paid a quarter million Reichsmarks for a peach. In a matter of days, or weeks, your estimable father will
find that he has traded you for meaningless paper. In a matter of a very short time he will be lucky if a quarter
million will buy him so much as a loaf of bread.”
“That is surely not possible?”
“That is surely only too possible, but only time will tell. And if the inflation some of us predict and have been
trying to warn the government about does come to pass, Germany will be a very uncomfortable place to be.”
“Then what will happen to us… to you… when that happens?”
“What will happen to ‘us’, I hope, my beautiful peach, is that we will sigh and shake our heads as we read all
about it in the American newspapers. Our tickets are booked, and we are leaving tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow. It will be a great adventure.”
He watched her, both still standing, trying to grasp the enormity of all that he had said. She said quietly:
“I do not even know your first name.”
“Karl-Heinz,” he answered. “My friends call me Karl.”
Ilse, as if dreaming, began to slide her new and favourite dark red day-dress off her shoulders, listened to it fall a
sussurating whisper to the floor. Her underwear was distinctly a la nouvelle mode, a pale pink chemise of silk
patterned with flowers, the straps sliding easily from her shoulders, and he gasped as it fell away from the twin
fruit of her strawberry-nippled breasts.
She paused a moment, gazing at him, then unfastened the garters on each leg by turn, coaxing her new dark
stockings down. Wearing only her silk knickers, now, the pattern of the chemise reflected in embroidered side
panels and around their borders, she turned away from him, leaning forward just that little as she let the knickers
fall, then turned to gaze at him across a perfect shoulder.
“Does Herr Schiffer approve of his purchase?” she asked him, quietly.
“Please, Ilse, it is not like that… I never meant…”
Ilse smiled softly: “I know. It is alright, Karl. I understand.”
And Karl gazed on his peaches, the perfect peaches he’d first glimpsed within their dull grey wrapping, and grew
hard, and hot, and wanting. Walking slowly to him, Ilse now embraced him shyly, her own grip tightening as his
arms enfolded her and pressed her to him.
Echoes of a dream stirred within the fruit of her, juicing, and she felt his answering hardness, led him to the
master bedroom and undressed him.
As a nation slept unknowing, heedless of impending nightmare, a broker who liked jesting and a virgin newly free
learned what it is to dream whilst waking, floating on clouds of skin and heat and tongue. Karl-Heinz tasted fruit
with sweeter juices still, licked a tiny pit in soft moist flesh and planted seed in an agony of joy, cream to the
loveliest peach in Nature.
End
Copyright 2005, R V Raiment (rvraiment@yahoo.com)
All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or in part without written permission from the
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