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PARTISAN REVIEW
being, a mixture of smugness and unashamed aggressiveness, very much
excited her. Amidst the screaming, the waiters, the beer-benches, and the
vapors, under the addictive yellow gaslights, she had to call out with rap–
ture, "I've never met a man like you before, Mr. Schwertschwanz." He was
so pleased, he touched her. While a troop of soldiers marching by outside
whistled the well-known folk song, "Little Maria, you sweet little crea–
ture," etc....
Without a spoken agreement, the lovers, arm-in-arm, moved in the
direction of the student's room when they left the boozy saloon. Upstairs,
Maria Mondm.ilch lay down, with her legs crossed, on a sleep-sofa near the
bookcase. The actor sank into a soft chair, next to which a small table with
an ornate bottle of cognac stood. Talking was difficult. Each wanted to sob
out to the other how much he or she had suffered from childhood on.
They wanted to gobble each other up, so greedy were they as the minutes
went by. Something stood between them. The actor drank the cognac. The
student played nervously wi th her hands and feet.
The actor could no longer bear his agony. He cried out gently-it was
as though something had been shattered to pieces-"I shall be frank. I am
syphilitic." Some tears rolled down his cheeks. He was startled by how
insincere he was. The student held her hands in front of her face. As the–
atrically as he. But unconsciously.
He had miscalculated. Her erotic excitement was out of control. She
wriggled on her sleep-sofa. She held out her hand to him. She whispered:
"Poor man, come." He did not take her hand. With lowered eyes, in a face
filled with unhappy renunciation, whose effect had been tried out on many
hysterical women, he said: "You of all people should know that contact
with me might give you an infection, al though in the last few years my
Wasserman test was always negative." Then she said heroically: "Frankness
deserves frankness. I am a virgin."
Instinctively she had taken vengeance. He no longer had control of his
overwrought senses. Like a cat he pounced onto the girl in the middle of
the sleep-sofa. Now she fought him off. Ready, with anxious eyes, to give
herself
to
him.
As they were wrestling the student sang her theme song: "I am Maria
Mondmilch, the girl, the virgin. Open your door for me. You, I tried the
surface of many men's flesh, old men and young. I tempted them all. In all
of them I sought my man. No one penetrated me deeper than my skin ...
.I
prowled around during the days. Ran during the nights. I slept in the same
bed with musicians and aristocrats. I was with salesmen and with pimps
and with students. I ran around with bicycle artists and with lawyers. I let
no man pass without looking him in the eye. Whether it rained. Or was
winter. Or the sun shone. No one could call me his woman. No one was
