Carl und Gerlinde (XXV)
What good did it do Carl that he actually had a suppressed love for cleanliness and tidiness if he found no service person who actually rekindled this long dormant passion of his?
In fact, he no longer expected miracles! After all, even the sixth attempt at getting a cleaning lady worth her name only resulted in making his house look more like an asylum for the homeless than the representative abode of a department manager at TRIGA! Why, Carl asked himself every day – and recently even during his sleepless nights – was it so terribly hard to find a lady in Germany who actually did some good cleaning work at a reasonable price and not at the same time look like a walrus?
Mind you, Carl did not insist on someone with Heidi-Klum looks! But on the other hand, he did not at all feel like – as he remembered from childhood when riding the ghost train – getting the fright of his life whenever coming home unexpectedly and meeting one of those monstrous cleaning ladies who were busy with the vacuum cleaner and whose body odour actually gave him allergic coughing fits! He was certainly not expecting too much if he refused to continue subjecting himself to this kind of psychic terror week after week, was he? Especially if you took into consideration what high prices those cleaning amazons charged?
To be sure, his new, seventh attempt, Frau Ilisevicz, did not give Carl the impression that his modest flat was turning into an asylum for the homeless after four weeks. Instead, however, it seemed to mutate into some kind of ’horse breeding farm’ in an alarming manner. Because, instead of simply tidying and cleaning everything, the robust, horse-faced Frau Ilisevicz moved her wiry backside among whinnying sounds over all the accumulated mountains of old newspapers, empty plastic wrappings, moldy food left-overs and discarded drinks packages with such ignorant stamina that Carl not only started believing she was a ’horse re-incarnated’, but also one of the ’blind horses’ that used to work in mining tunnels. Yet there was one fact that contradicted such blindness: as elegantly as a Lipizzan horse, she managed to dance around all the overflowing ash-trays and dirty plates sitting on the chairs and the huge carpet in front of the TV set, dexterously never once causing any of those objects to be moved by even a millimeter! Neither did she ever blindly trip over any of the pile of shorts or socks, or the rolled-up heap of vests or sweaty t-shirt clumps. Instead, she saw them as steeples that motivated her to jump over them, rather than, perhaps, lift them or – heaven forbid – put them into the washing machine.
Carl had made three attempts at putting a stop to this progressive ’home-turning-into-a-stable’ and alienation process. But each time he regretted it the very second the unmindful words crept over his lips, because his breathy admonitions always caused such an hurricane-like Indo-German/Serbo-Croatian thunderstorm of words that the only way to safety was instant flight.
Compared with this ear-splitting Serbo-Croatian non-stop soundtrack, even the reprimands he had to expect from his secretary Bettina with respect to his failure seemed to be downright ridiculous: like a soft, consoling aspiration from heaven!
And perhaps it was actually this quiet, motivating intervention by his secretary that made him put a final stop to the unmentionable ’Ilisevic Thunderstorm’. Maybe it was not because of the strange fact that, during the last few weeks, he had to take up his pre-arranged clothes-brush each morning before leaving his house and brush the dust, horse-hair and remaining straw from last night from his business suit…
Luckily, Hannelore had given him some advice with the subsequent Frau Moravec, which, imprudently, caused positive expectations in Carl! Hannelore had said that a very, very good girl-friend had urgently recommended Frau Moravec for him. At an aside, she had added that it might be a good idea for him to let breakable objects disappear before she started work …
Or course, Frau Moravec did not have the athletic behind of the ’Female Horse Ilisevicz’, neither could she whinny as charmingly. In fact, with her strong, dark fluff and pressed-together lips surrounded by wrinkles she looked more like someone who had been dealt a hard blow by life and barely survived – but, boy, could she clean! After two weeks, Carl’s ’Quasi Horse Farm’ was again in such shape that he not only identified it as his own home, but also realized all of a sudden that he was again starting to enjoy coming home after a long day’s work. The only drawback was that wounds he had believed long healed broke open with a vengeance and he was painfully reminded almost on a daily basis of his beloved Gerlinde – who had also always seen to it that everything was clean and tidy!
Somehow or other, however, he was quickly getting uneasy about having had to look for a glass after brushing his teeth for two days. And both in the bathroom and the restroom for guests, the glass toilet-brush holders also seemed to be suddenly missing. One of the two expensive clay ravens on the hall cupboard seemed to have disappeared, too. And in the spare bedroom for guests, the night lamp with the coloured glass lampshade – which, incidentally looked absolutely hideous but was a memento from his mother – apparently also somehow vanished into thin air! Mind you, it had not totally vanished: when he wanted to make space in his rubbish bin for a bucket full of dried dispersion paint, he actually discovered the poor lamp. It lay there in a terribly desolate state, squeezed in right at the bottom of the bin…
The discussion with Frau Moravec – Hannelore had agreed to be present – was a teary affair! With each new outbreak of sobbing, the good lady told him how sorry she was for everything that had happened. She said she certainly did not know what was the matter with her, but lately, all those particular pieces she had intended to clean or dust had been slipping from her fingers! It had happened totally without her doing anything, Herr Carl had to believe her, she sobbed. Afraid to lose this well-paid job, she had unfortunately hidden or disposed of all the broken objects, because she had hoped that something so clumsy would never again happen to her – and then it happened again!
Of course, she was going to pay – as far as this was possible – for all the damage she had done, Frau Moravec sniveled. She was desperately trying to do some damage control on her longish nose which had turned purple and seemed to be threatening to burst at any moment like a blown-up rose bud.
There was nothing Carl could counter against this stream of tears!
Nor did it help that Hannelore was present. Consequently, Carl interrupted the mountain torrent of tears shed by Frau Moravec by cautiously asking her to, please, not keep any future damage secret but instead tell him immediately, or else put broken objects onto the table in the corridor. Exuberantly happy with having been given this second chance, Frau Moravec wanted to embrace Carl, probably drowning him in tears in the process because of how clumsy she was. Carl, however, again chose cowardly flight over heroic death by drowning …
Of course, being as naïve as he was, Carl had not anticipated what he would find sitting on the table in the corridor over the next four weeks: the damaged table vacuum cleaner and the formerly beautiful big salad bowl, as well as two framed prints from the corridor that Gerlinde had given him a long time ago, the radio alarm clock and the expensive spiral-shaped lamp from the sitting room side table! In view of this new damage rate, he then found it no longer very hard to put a stop to the involuntary destruction campaign by a Frau Moravec who really did excellent cleaning work in his house. He paid her two months‘ worth of wages and ordered her to stay away from his home until further notice!
And just when this gigantic cleaning lady problem seemed to be manifesting itself so hopelessly that even Hannelore could do nothing more than listlessly shrug her tiny shoulders and Carl again stood at the beginning of yet another bleak phase of helplessness as he returned home from his office totally drained and unnerved, well aware that the only refuge remaining to him now was to find relief in his daily infusion of red wine – who else but Gerlinde would he find sitting in his living room on a Tuesday in August! Fresh and tasty like a ripe peach, she gave Carl such a lovely smile that, regardless of his red face and jittery knees, he was immediately aware of just now having the final solution to his pain of a cleaning lady problem within reach …
KH
(Translated by EG)
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