Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

cap, making the yellow knitted Latin letters B and Z, the newspaper’s famous acronym, run diagonally across her forehead, and as Frau Schappel pulls a good deal of change out of her coat pocket with her right hand, she presses her broad left thumb against her left nostril, which has a whole network of fine red veins running across it, like rivers on a map, while blowing a lungful of air through the other nostril. This is Frau Schappel’s way of regulating her breathing rhythms—then she lifts her head slightly and calls over to the bar: “Erna, a cuppa coffee!”

It’s been that way for twenty-five years. Erna serves Frau Luise Schappel four cups of coffee a day, which add up to four times twenty-five, that is, 100 times 365, 36,500 coffees all told, and then the leap years need to be added on, and Sundays and holidays subtracted. On those days Frau Schappel doesn’t sell the B. Z.; she lies in bed on Brunnenstrasse until three o’clock, ventilating her vocal cords, and only here and there do words burst forth, when Frau Schappel argues with her husband about who holds the record in selling the magazine. “He hawks ’em now, too. He needed a do-over, seeing as he was once a radical comedian, yes indeed. He has the same name as Stresemann.”

Gustav?

“Nah, Gus. But he’s still a beginner. I’ve been at it for twenty-five years, starting in 1904. Until 1904 I sold flowers, on Unter den Linden. Who still buys flowers, I ask you? Do you know the local barber Gilbert’s shop at the corner of Exerzierstrasse and Kanonierstrasse, I’ve been there the whole time. You know, neither storms nor rain nor heat nor frost. What’s it down to today. Forty-five. That’s nothin’. In 1917 it was up to seventy, but your hanky still froze to your face, in 1910 I almost lost my mind and passed out, and in the fall we can never dry off. We deal with so much crap just to keep you in the know.”

Once again Frau Schappel presses her thumb against her left nostril, emitting a strangely booming sound, the kind a broken saxophone might make. After a big gulp of coffee, she begins to sort through the pile of money with the tip of her index finger peeking out of her torn black glove; her finger and the glove are the exact same color: the half-groschens with the half-groschens, the groschens with the groschens, and the marks with the marks. Whenever she comes across a three-mark coin, she shakes her weighty head and says, “Back then I got a taler!”—and everyone at the Taubenschlag instantly knows what’s coming.

Here is the story of the crown prince and the taler:

It was 1914, in April or May, not a hint of war as yet, when he came riding along in his coach, from the general staff’s offices on Leipziger Strasse, down Behrenstrasse, to the castle. Sitting next to him was his adjutant, Mühlenberg, Mühlenreich, Mühlendorf, or something of that sort. Frau Schappel saw the coach coming, recognized the crown prince, and began to wave newspapers around, the way Robinson had with his nightshirt when he saw the first ship sail past his island.

Then it got even better: the crown prince stopped—on my honor—right in front of Frau Luise Schappel, the adjutant handed the crown prince a taler, and the crown prince handed it on to Frau Schappel, Frau Schappel handed him a B. Z., as she stood there trembling with fear and feeling ill, and stammered out, “Thank you very much, His Highness, Crown Prince!” The crown prince gave her quite a nice wave, and the coach disappeared. This pattern repeated every day.

Frau Schappel had been instructed by the adjutant, who went to Gilbert’s to get shaved, not to address the crown prince as “His Highness, Crown Prince,” but rather simply as “Imperial Majesty,” and she needed to “step lively.” Alas, our Lieschen really wanted to step lively, but when he showed up, Frau Schappel grew red as a beet and kept on saying, “His Highness, Crown Prince.”

Yes, those were nice times for Frau Schappel, she knew that he bought the newspaper “just for fun,” because “he never ever reads,” surely he made his daily trips along Behrenstrasse for her sake, Frau Schappel was less interested in the taler. But she soon figured out for herself that, no, he didn’t come just on account of Frau Schappel: over at no. 58, the address of the Friedrich Wilhelm Life Insurance office, the telephone receptionists lined up at the window, day after day, all dolled up, waiting for him excitedly.

Frau Schappel had an idea why he bought the newspaper from her every day: her newspaper stand was straight across from the windows where fifty girls with bright-red little faces hung there like ripe grapes, and Frau Schappel was already forty years old. She was overcome with jealousy.

Well, and then the war came, and that was that.

Frau Schappel drinks her third coffee today, remarks that the papers from Bolivia and Paraguay are now selling well, she talks about her best days, about the sinking of the Titanic, about the first weeks of the war, about Fritz Haarmann and Charles Lindbergh and Krantz and the Zeppelin blimp. Meanwhile, one drop after another splashes out of Frau Schappel’s nose right between the half-groschens and groschens sorted neatly on the tabletop.

Der Querschnitt, issue 2, February 1929

Stroheim, the Man We Love to Hate

His name is “Von,” pure and simple, and nowadays every child in Hollywood knows who “Von” is. Erich von Stroheim, that was too cumbersome. They pulled the “Von” out of his name and are inordinately fond of calling him that exclusively, as though wishing to flaunt the three noble letters on this playground for parvenus, and they pronounce this “Von” like “one.” And if a Hollywood greenhorn should ask, “Why do you call Stroheim ‘one’?”—the answer is: because every company can shoot only one film with him, then it