Billiards at Half-Past Nine Page 10

  To this proposal I wrote a civil answer: ‘I shall be delighted to consider your kind offer again as soon as I have completed the private studies which will be detaining me some time longer in this city.…’ I sealed the envelope, stuck on the stamp, went back to the windowsill and looked down into Modest Street. The folding rule, brandished by Kilb’s office boy, flashed like a dagger. Two employees from the hotel were loading the boar onto a handcart. I would sample wild boar meat that evening, at the Germania Glee Club’s stag party. I would have to listen to their jokes, and of course they would fail to note that I was laughing at them, not at what they said. Their jokes were as repulsive to me as their sauces, and up here at my window I laughed my laugh, as yet still not knowing whether it sprang from hatred or contempt. One thing only I knew: it was not a laugh of joy.

  Gretz’ young servant girl had placed white baskets full of mushrooms beside the boar. The cook in the Prince Heinrich was already weighing out the spices, kitchen help were grinding the knives, worried extra waiters were standing at home in front of their mirrors straightening their ties as they tried them on and asking their wives—the smell from worn trousers being pressed filling the kitchen—‘Do you suppose I’ll have to kiss the Bishop’s ring if I have the lousy luck to wait on him?’ Down below the apprentice was still wielding the folding rule. Eleven-fifteen. I brushed my black suit, made sure my velvet bow was knotted straight, put on my hat, drew out my pocket diary, no larger than a flat matchbox, and looked within: September 30, 1907, 11:30, Kilb’s, deliver design. Ask for receipt.

  Careful now! How often I’d rehearsed it all—down the stairs, across the street, down the corridor, into the reception room.

  ‘I’d like to speak to the attorney personally.’

  ‘What is it you want to see him about?’

  ‘I’d like to submit a design. The St. Anthony Open Competition.’

  Only the apprentice would look surprised, hold the folding rule still, look round and then, abashed, turn his face back to the street and to his legal forms, mindful of the office rule: ‘Discretion, discretion!’ In this office shabbiness was style. Portraits of legally learned ancestors hung on the walls, inkwells were eighty years old, the folding rule a hundred and fifty. Prodigious transactions were consummated here in silence. Here entire city districts changed hands, and marriage contracts were signed and sealed, contracts in which the bride’s annual clothes allowance was larger than what a probate clerk would earn in five years. Here, too, however, the honest cobbler’s 2000-mark mortgage was officially witnessed, here the doddering old pensioner deposited his will, leaving his bedside table to a favorite grandchild. The legal affairs of widows and orphans, of workers and millionaires were settled here in strictest confidence, in view of the proverb on the wall: ‘Their right hand is full of bribes.’ No reason, then, to look up when a young artist wearing a worn suit handed down to him by his uncle delivered a package, rolls of drawings wrapped in foolscap, or when he erroneously imagined the attorney himself should give the matter his personal attention. The head clerk sealed the package, the rolls of drawings, pressed the Kilbian emblem, a lamb with blood flowing from its breast, onto the hot sealing wax, while the blonde girl clerk of righteous aspect wrote out the receipt: ‘Monday, September 30, 1907, 11:35 A.M. Herr Faehmel, architect, delivered into our custody.…’ Had not a glimmer of recognition passed over her pale, friendly face as she held the receipt out to me? I was delighted by this unforeseen response, because it proved to me that time after all was something real. See, then, this day, this minute did truly exist. But it had not been me who had proved it, by my actually having gone downstairs from my studio, by having crossed the street, entered the corridor and the reception room. Nor had it been proved by the blood-red wound left by the seal. It had been proved by the blonde clerk’s unexpected smile of kindness. She surveyed my worn suit and then, as I took the receipt from her hand, she whispered, ‘Good luck, Herr Faehmel.’ These were to be the only words within the past four and a half weeks which branded time, which reminded me that there were signs of reality in this game I had set in motion. Time, this incident revealed, was subject to outside intervention, and not entirely governed out of the privacy of my dreams, a world in which the future seemed like the present, the present like something that had happened centuries past, and that which had been became that which was yet to come. Time was more than a childhood thing, to which I could run for refuge as, when a little boy, I had run to my father’s arms. My father, he had grown silent, years heaped up around him like layers of leaden stillness. Organ stops pulled out, High Masses accompanied by song, for first-class funerals song at length, rather less for second-class, no song at all for third-class ones. And now silence. So still that merely thinking about him oppressed my heart. He had milked cows, cut hay, threshed grain, until the chaff stuck like an insect cloud to his sweat-drenched face. He had waved the baton for the youth club, the union club, the rifle club and the Saint Cecilia Club. He never opened his mouth, never complained. He merely sang in church, cut beets, cooked potatoes for the pigs, played the organ, put on his black sacristan’s coat, over that his white robe. No one in the village noticed that he never spoke, for whenever they saw him he was busy doing something. Two of his four children died of consumption and two lived on: Charlotte and myself. My mother was a gentle woman, the kind who love flowers and pretty curtains, who sing songs at their ironing and tell stories by the fireside in the evening. As for Father, he drudged on, built beds, filled sacks with straw and killed chickens, until Charlotte died. Now the Mass of the Angels, church all in white. The priest sang, but the sacristan did not respond, did not pull out the stops, made no organ chords. The priest chanted on alone. Still mute, the procession formed in front of the church to move off to the cemetery. Troubled, the priest asked, ‘But Faehmel, my dear, good Faehmel, why didn’t you sing?’ For the first time ever I heard my father give voice to an emphatic utterance, and was startled to hear how hoarse it sounded, the same voice that could sing so softly in the organ loft. He said it low, with a growly undertone: ‘No singing for third-class funerals.’ Haze over the Lower Rhine, damp fog wraiths coiling and dancing across the beetfields, crows in the willows cawing like Mardi Gras rattles as the troubled priest read the graveside liturgy. Never again did Father conduct for the youth club, the union club, the rifle club, never again for the Saint Cecilia Club, and it was as if, with that first sentence I ever heard him utter—I was then sixteen, Charlotte died at twelve—it was as if with that first sentence he had found his voice. Now he talked more, about horses and officers, which he hated, and he said menacingly, ‘Bad luck to you all, if you give me a first-class funeral.’

  ‘Yes,’ the blonde said to me again, ‘I wish you the best.’ Maybe I should have turned back the receipt then and there, asked for the sealed package, the rolls of drawings, and gone home. To marry the mayor’s daughter or the contractor’s daughter, build fire stations, little schools, churches and chapels, and dance with the hostess at country housewarmings while my wife danced with the host. Why challenge Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein, great names of church architecture? Why bother? I felt no ambition, money did not tempt me. I would never need to go hungry. I could always play skat with the priest, the pharmacist, the innkeeper, the mayor, go hunting wild boar, build ‘something modern’ for newly rich peasants—but the apprentice had already rushed from his windowsill to the office door and was holding it open for me. ‘Thank you,’ I said, went out through the entrance hall, crossed the street, climbed upstairs to the studio and leaned on the sill there, which was trembling from the pounding of the presses. That was on September 30, 1907, around 11:45 A.M.

  “You’re right, Leonore, the presses are a nuisance. How many cups they’ve smashed on me, when I wasn’t careful. Go slow, child, take it easy. If you keep on working like that you’ll have more sorted out in a week than I would in fifty years. No, thanks, no cake for me. You don’t mind if I call you child, do you? No need to b
lush at flattery from an old man like me. I’m a monument, Leonore, and monuments will never harm you. Old fool that I am, I still go to the Cafe Kroner every morning and eat my paprika cheese, even though I’ve long since stopped liking it. I owe it to my contemporaries not to ruin my legend. I’ll found an orphanage, a school, perhaps, provide for scholarships, and somewhere, someday, they’ll cast me in bronze and unveil me. You’ve got to be there, Leonore, and have a good laugh. You can laugh so prettily, did you know? I can’t any more, lost the knack of it. Yet I used to think a laugh was a useful weapon. It wasn’t, really, just small deception of sorts. If you think you’d like it, I’ll take you with me to the University Ball and introduce you as my niece. You’ll drink champagne and dance and meet a young man who’ll be good to you and love you. I’ll set you up with a nice little dowry … yes, take a real good look at that up there, the overall view of St. Anthony’s, two by three meters it is. Been hanging here in the studio for fifty-one years. It was hanging up there when the roof was blown in, which accounts for those mould stains you see on it. My first big assignment, a colossal job; barely thirty, then, I had ‘arrived.’ ”

  And in 1917 I couldn’t summon the nerve to do what Johanna did in my stead. When Heinrich was standing up there on the roof by the pergola, she tore that poem he had to learn by heart out of his hand. He was reciting it in his serious child’s voice:

  ‘Said Peter, guardian of Heaven’s gate,

  I’ll put the case to higher fate,

  And see, within a trice was back:

  Bluecher, sir, luck’s a thing you do not lack!

  It’s leave for you, with time no bar.

  (And saying this, flung Heaven’s gate ajar.)

  Take off, old warrior, give ’em hell,

  And if God you need, let out a yell.’

  At the time Robert wasn’t yet two, and Otto not even born. I was on leave and for a long time had known clearly what I’d only sensed before: that irony wasn’t enough, and never would be, that it was only an opiate for a few privileged ones, that I should be doing what Johanna did. I, in my captain’s uniform, should have spoken to the boy. But I merely listened, as he went on reciting:

  ‘And General Bluecher came below

  To lead to victory, blow on blow;

  With Hindenburg let’s march along,

  With Prussia’s savior, fortress strong.

  As long as German woods stand high,

  As long as German banners fly,

  As long as German tongue remains,

  So long will live that name of names,

  Chiseled in stone, in bronze indite.

  For you, our hero, hearts beat bright—

  Hindenburg! On to the fight!’

  Johanna snatched the paper out of the boy’s hand, tore it up and threw the bits down into the street. They fell like snowflakes in front of Gretz’ shop. No boar was hanging there in those days. The Higher Power reigned supreme.

  It won’t be enough for you to laugh, Leonore, when they unveil my statue. Spit on it, child—in my son Heinrich’s name and for Otto, who was such a fine boy, and good, and because so fine and good, and so obedient, more of a stranger to me than anyone in this world. And spit on me for Edith’s sake, the only truly gentle lamb of a person I ever saw. I loved her, mother of my grandchildren, my daughter-in-law, yet I couldn’t help her, any more than I could help the carpenter’s apprentice, whom I saw only twice, or the youngster I never saw at all who slipped messages from Robert—on bits of paper no bigger than penny candy wrappers—into our letter box, and for that crime was swallowed up in a concentration camp. Robert was always clever and cool and never ironic. Otto was different. He had a heart; yet suddenly he went over to the Beast and grew away from us. Yes, spit on my statue, Leonore, tell them I asked you to; I’ll give it to you in writing, if you want, and have it notarized. You should have seen that apprentice; he made me understand the phrase: Angels came and ministered to him; they chopped off his head. You should have seen Edith and her brother, Schrella, whom I saw but once, the time Schrella came across our courtyard on his way up to see Robert. I was standing at my bedroom window and laid eyes on him for only a moment. But that was enough to make me afraid. You could see both disaster and salvation written on his face. Schrella—I never heard his Christian name—was like some holy sheriff, sticking invisible foreclosure notices on people’s houses. I knew it might cost my son’s life, still I let Schrella go across the courtyard, shoulders bent; the oldest of my two living sons, a gifted boy; Edith’s brother foreclosed on him. Edith was different. She was so deep in the Bible she could make fun of it all, in a Biblical way. During the air raids she used to laugh with her children. She gave them Biblical names, Joseph and Ruth. Death held no terrors for her. But she never realized how much I mourned my dead children, Johanna and Heinrich. And she never knew that Otto, the stranger, died, too, the one dearest to me. He loved my studio and my drawings, used to drive with me to the building jobs and drink beer at housewarmings. He was the workmen’s pet. He won’t be coming to my birthday party tonight, Otto. How many guests have been invited? You can count the clan I founded on one hand: Robert, Joseph, Ruth, Johanna and of course myself. Leonore will sit in Johanna’s place. But what shall I say to Joseph when he tells me, with boyish pride, how the reconstruction work at St. Anthony’s is getting on? They’ll be having a dedication at the end of October. The brothers are hoping to sing the Mass of the Advent in the new church. These old bones are getting shaky, Leonore. And they have not fed my lambs.

  Yes, I ought to have given the receipt back, and broken the red seal and got rid of it; then I wouldn’t have to be hanging around here waiting for my granddaughter, that pretty, pretty dark-haired nineteen-year-old. Same age now as Johanna was when I was standing here fifty-one years ago and saw her over there in the roof garden. I could make out the title of her book, Love and Intrigue. Could it be my Johanna who still reads Love and Intrigue over there today? Can she really be gone? Might she not still be at lunch with Robert in The Lion? Did I run away from that confidential man-to-man talk among the reserve lieutenants, on the way giving the doorman his indispensable cigar, and come up here merely for the sake of being here? Merely to perch up here from ten-thirty to five? Just to climb upstairs past freshly printed piles of books and diocesan booklets? What were they printing then on Saturday afternoons on white paper? Edification, or election posters for all the people committed to the Beast? No matter, the walls quaked, the stairs shook, the women brought out stack after stack of printed matter and piled them up until they reached as far as the studio door. Meanwhile I lay here in the studio, practicing the art of simply being here. I felt myself being pulled along as if by the suck of a dark wind tunnel which would hurl me out toward where I could not tell. I was pulled down into the vortex of a primeval bitterness, saturated with the ancient futility of all things. I saw the children I would have, the wine I would drink, the hospitals and churches I would build. And with it all I heard the sound of the clods of earth that would fall on my coffin, muffled drum sounds dogging me. I heard the women singing, the ones who fed the presses, the folders, the packers, some voices bright, others dark, sweet or rough. They were singing a simple song out of happiness for the afternoon break from work in prospect. But to me it sounded like a funeral dirge. It evoked love in the dance hall, poignant moments of ecstasy by the cemetery wall, the grass smelling of autumn. In it I divined the joys of young motherhood presaging the tears of mothers grown old, and the melancholy of the orphan home, where a brave young girl resolved on staying pure. Yet the selfsame fate would befall her, too, in the dance hall, poignant ecstasy by the cemetery wall, the grass smelling of autumn. The women sang on, their voices like a well-wheel always dipping into the same even water. They were singing a dirge for me, while clods of earth tumbled onto my coffin. From under lowered lids I looked at the walls of my studio, which I’d tapestried with drawings. Majestic, in the center, the pinkish photocopy, scale 1:200, of St. Anthony’s
Abbey. In the foreground the hamlet of Stehlinger’s Grotto, with grazing cows, a freshly dug potato field, with smoke rising from a fire of burning vines. And then, in powerful basilican style, the Abbey itself, which I’d boldly modeled after the Romanesque cathedrals, with the cloister low, severe and somber, cells, refectory and library, figure of St. Anthony in the center of the cloister garth. Set off against the cloister the big quadrangle of farm buildings, granaries, barns, coach houses, own grist mill with bakery, a pretty residence for the steward, whose job it was also to take care of the visitors on pilgrimage. And there, under high trees, simple tables and chairs at which to eat a meal, with dry wine, cider or beer, before setting out on the journey back. On the horizon, another hamlet, Goerlinger’s Place, was sketched in, with chapel, cemetery, four farms, grazing cows, and, to the right, rows of poplars marking the boundary of the tilled land where the working brothers would tend the vineyards, where cabbages and potatoes, vegetables and grain would grow, and where from the beehives delicious honey would be taken.