The Clown Read online

  No money for a taxi, and for the first time in my life I could have really used one: my knee was swollen, and I hobbled painfully across the station square to the Poststrasse; it was only two minutes from the station to our apartment, they seemed endless. I leaned against a cigarette vending machine and glanced across to the building in which my grandfather had presented me with an apartment; tasteful units dovetailed nicely into one another, the balconies painted in discreet colors; five floors, five different colors for the balconies; on the fifth floor, where the balconies are all painted terra cotta, is my apartment.

  Was I acting out one of my numbers? Inserting the key in the front door, noticing without surprise that it did not melt, opening the elevator door, pressing number five: a gentle hum bore me aloft; looking through the narrow pane of glass in the elevator onto the sections dividing each floor, and, beyond each section, out through the window on each floor: the back of a monument, the square, the church, floodlit; then a black section, a concrete ceiling, and again, in slightly altered perspective: the back of the monument, the square, the church, floodlit: three times, the fourth time only the square and the church. Inserting my key in the lock of my own front door, noticing without surprise that this one opened too.

  Everything painted terra cotta in my apartment: doors, woodwork, built-in cupboards, a woman in a terra cotta housecoat on the black sofa would have matched nicely; no doubt it would be possible to get one, the only trouble is: I suffer not only from depression, headaches, laziness, and the mystical ability to detect smells through the telephone, the most terrible affliction of all is my disposition to monogamy; there is only one woman with whom I can do everything that men do with women: Marie, and since she left me I live as a monk is supposed to live; only—I am not a monk. I had wondered whether I ought to drive out to the country and ask one of the priests in my old school for advice, but all these jokers regard human beings as polygamous creatures (that’s why they defend monogamy so strenuously), I would be bound to seem like a freak to them, and their advice would be confined to a veiled reference to the domain in which, so they believe, love is for sale. I am still prepared to be surprised by Protestants, as in the case of Kostert, for instance, who actually managed to astound me, but with Catholics nothing surprises me any more. I have always felt a great deal of sympathy and understanding for Catholicism, even when four years ago Marie took me for the first time to this “Group of Progressive Catholics”; she was anxious to produce some intelligent Catholics for my benefit, and of course she secretly hoped I would be converted one day (all Catholics have this ulterior motive). The very first moments in the group were terrible. I was then at a very difficult stage of learning to be a clown, I was not yet twenty-two and I rehearsed the whole day long. I had been looking forward very much to this evening, I was dead tired and was expecting some kind of cheerful get-together, with plenty of good wine, good food, perhaps dancing (we were very badly off and couldn’t afford either wine or good food); instead the wine was bad, and the whole evening was rather as I imagine a seminar on sociology under a boring professor. Not only was it exhausting, it was exhausting in an unnecessary and unnatural way. They started off by praying together, and all through this I didn’t know what to do with my hands and face; I feel one shouldn’t expose an unbeliever to a situation like that. Besides, they didn’t merely recite an Our Father or an Ave Marie (that would have been embarrassing enough, with my Protestant upbringing I have had more than enough of all kinds of private prayer), no, it was some text or other composed by Kinkel, very programmatic “and we beseech Thee to give us the power to do as much justice to the traditional as to the progressive,” and so on, and only then did they proceed to the “Subject for the Evening,” on “Poverty in the Society in which we live.” It was one of the most embarrassing evenings of my life. I simply cannot believe that religious discussions have to be that exhausting. I know: it is hard to believe in this religion. Resurrection of the body and eternal life. Marie often used to read me from the Bible. It must be difficult to believe all that. Later on I even read Kierkegaard (useful reading for an aspiring clown), it was difficult, but not exhausting. I don’t know whether there are people who use designs by Picasso or Klee for embroidering tablecloths. It seemed to me that evening as if these progressive Catholics were busy crocheting themselves loincloths out of Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, Bonaventure and Pope Leo XIII, loincloths which of course failed to cover their nakedness, for—apart from me—there was no one there who wasn’t earning at least fifteen hundred marks a month. They were so embarrassed themselves that later on they became cynical and snobbish, except for Züpfner, who found the whole affair so ghastly that he asked me for a cigarette. It was the first cigarette he had ever smoked, and he puffed away at it unskillfully, I could see he was glad the smoke hid his face. I felt dreadful, for Marie’s sake, who sat there, pale and trembling, while Kinkel told the story of the man who earned five hundred marks a month, got along very well on it, then earned a thousand and found it got more difficult, then got into real trouble when he was earning two thousand, and finally, when he reached three thousand, he found that once again he could manage quite well, and from his experience devised the profound formula: “Up to five hundred a month one can manage quite well, but between five hundred and three thousand is utter misery.” Kinkel wasn’t even aware of the embarrassment he was causing: he rattled on in a kind of Olympian cheerfulness, smoking his fat cigar, raising his glass of wine to his lips, gobbling cheese sticks, until even Prelate Sommerwild, the group’s spiritual adviser, began to get fidgety and changed the subject. I believe he introduced the word “reaction” and Kinkel immediately swallowed the bait. He lost his temper and stopped in the middle of his discourse on the subject of a twelve-thousand-mark car being cheaper than one for four thousand five hundred, and even his wife, who embarrasses everyone with her mindless adoration of him, breathed a sigh of relief.

  3

  For the first time I felt more or less comfortable in this apartment; it was warm and clean, and as I hung up my coat and stood my guitar in the corner, I wondered whether an apartment was perhaps after all something more than a delusion. I have never been one for staying in one place, and never will be—and Marie is even less settled than I am, yet she seems bent on becoming so. She used to get restless when I was booked to appear for longer than a week in one place.

  Once again Monika Silvs had been as kind as ever when we sent her a telegram; she had got the keys from the janitor, cleaned the place up, put flowers in the living room, filled up the refrigerator with all sorts of things. On the kitchen table was some freshly ground coffee, and beside it a bottle of cognac. Cigarettes, a lighted candle next to the flowers on the table in the living room. Monika can be terribly sentimental, and sometimes her good taste deserts her; the candle she had put on the table for me was one of those cheap decorated ones and would definitely not have passed the test of a “Catholic Group for Matters of Taste,” but most probably she had been in a hurry and unable to find any other kind of candle, or hadn’t enough moeny to buy a more expensive, attractive one, and I was aware that it was on account of this awful candle that my affection for Monika Silvs was approaching the borderline set by my confounded inclination toward monogamy. The other Catholics in the group would never risk being sentimental or committing a breach of good taste, they would never expose themselves to criticism, anyway they would sooner do so in a matter of morals than in a matter of taste. I could even still smell Monika’s perfume in the apartment—it was much too sophisticated for her, some stuff called, I believe, Cuir de Russie.

  I lit one of Monika’s cigarettes from Monika’s candle, got the cognac from the kitchen, the phone book from the hall, and lifted the receiver. Believe it or not, Monika had fixed that up for me too. The telephone was connected. The high-pitched buzzing seemed to me like the sound of an immense heart, at this moment I loved it more than the sound of the sea, more than the breath of storms or the growl of li
ons. Somewhere in that high-pitched buzzing were hidden Marie’s voice, Leo’s voice, Monika’s voice. I slowly replaced the receiver. It was the only weapon I had left, and I would soon be making use of it. I pulled up my right trouser leg and examined my grazed knee; the scratches were superficial, the swelling minor, I poured myself a large cognac, drank half of it and poured the rest over my sore knee, hobbled back into the kitchen and put the cognac away in the refrigerator. Only now did it occur to me that Kostert had never brought me the bottle I had insisted on. No doubt he felt that for disciplinary reasons it would be better not to bring me any and had thereby saved the Christian cause seven marks. I made up my mind to call him up and ask him to send me the money. The dirty dog ought not to get off so lightly, besides I needed the money. For five years I had been earning much more than I needed, and yet it was all gone. Of course I could continue to make the rounds of the cheap music halls at the thirty to fifty mark level, as soon as my knee healed up properly; I didn’t really mind, in those low-class places the audience is really nicer than in the vaudeville theaters. But thirty to fifty marks a day is simply not enough, the hotel rooms are too small, you keep bumping into tables and chairs while you are practicing, and I don’t feel a bathroom is a luxury, or that, when you travel with five suitcases, a taxi is an extravagance.

  I took the cognac out of the refrigerator again and had a drink from the bottle. I am not an alcoholic. Alcohol does me good, since Marie has gone. Besides, I wasn’t used nowadays to being short of money, and the fact that all I had left was one mark, with no prospect of being able to earn much more in the near future, bothered me. The only thing I could really sell would be the bike, but if I decided to do the cheap music halls the bike would come in very handy and would save me taxi and train fares. There was one condition attached to my possession of the apartment: I was not allowed to sell it or rent it. A typical rich man’s gift. There’s always a snag. I managed not to drink any more cognac, went into the living room and opened the phone book.

  4

  I was born in Bonn and know a lot of people here: relatives, friends, former schoolmates. My parents live here, and my brother Leo, who became a Catholic with Züpfner as godfather, is studying at a Catholic seminary here. I would have to see my parents again if only to fix up about the money. But maybe I’ll hand that over to a lawyer. I haven’t made up my mind about this yet. Since the death of my sister Henrietta my parents no longer exist for me as such. Henrietta has been dead for seventeen years. She was sixteen when the war drew to a close, a lovely girl, with fair hair, the best tennis-player between Bonn and Remagen. In those days the girls were being told they ought to volunteer for anti-aircraft duty, and Henrietta did, in February 1945. Everything happened so fast and went so smoothly that I didn’t take it in. I came out of school, crossed the Kölnerstrasse, and saw Henrietta sitting in a streetcar which was just leaving for Bonn. She waved at me and laughed, and I laughed too. She had a small rucksack on her back, and she was wearing a pretty navy-blue hat and her heavy blue winter coat with the fur collar. I had never seen her in a hat before, she had always refused to wear one. The hat altered her very much. She looked like a young woman. I thought she must be going on an outing, though it was a strange time for outings. But in those days the schools were capable of anything. They even tried to teach us algebra in the airraid shelter, although we could already hear the artillery. Brühl, our teacher, sang “Songs of Devotion and Patriotism,” as he called them, in which he included “Behold the house of glory” and “Seest thou the dawn in eastern skies?” At night, when for once it was quiet for half an hour, all we could hear was the sound of marching feet: Italian prisoners of war (it had been explained to us in school why the Italians were no longer our allies and were now working for us as prisoners, but to this day I have never really understood why), Russian prisoners of war, women prisoners, German soldiers; marching feet all night long. Nobody knew just what was happening.

  Henrietta really looked as if she were off on a school outing. They were capable of anything. Sometimes when we were sitting in our classroom between airraid sirens the sound of real rifle shots came in through the open window, and when we turned in alarm to the window Brühl would ask us if we knew what it meant. By that time we knew: another deserter had been shot up there in the woods. “That’s what will happen to all those,” said Brühl, “who refuse to defend our sacred German soil from the Jewish Yankees.” (Not long ago I ran into him again; he is old now, and white-haired, a professor at a Teachers’ Training College, and is said to be a man with a “courageous political past,” because he never joined the Party.)

  I waved once more in the direction of the streetcar which bore Henrietta away, and walked through the grounds to our house where my parents were already having dinner with Leo. We had thin soup, potatoes and gravy for our main course, and an apple for dessert. Not until we got to the dessert did I ask my mother where Henrietta’s school outing was going to. She gave a little laugh and said: “Outing? Nonsense. She has gone to Bonn to volunteer for the Flak. Don’t peel your apple so thick. Look, son, watch me,” and she actually took the peel from my plate, snipped away at it, and put the results of her frugality, paper-thin slices of apple, into her mouth. I looked at Father. He was staring at his plate and said nothing. Leo was silent too, but when I turned to my mother again she said in her soft voice: “You do see, don’t you, that everyone must do his bit to drive the Jewish Yankees from our sacred German soil.” She looked across at me, I had a strange feeling, then she looked at Leo in the same way, and it seemed to me she was on the verge of sending us both off to the front to fight the Jewish Yankees. “Our sacred German soil,” she said, “and they have already advanced far into the Eifel Mountains.” I felt like laughing, but I burst into tears, threw down my fruit knife and ran upstairs to my room. I was afraid, I knew why too, but I couldn’t have put it into words, and it enraged me to think of that damned apple peel. I looked at the German soil in our garden covered with dirty snow, I looked toward the Rhine, across the weeping willows to the mountains on the other side of the river, and the whole landscape seemed crazy to me. I had seen a few of those “Jewish Yankees”: they were brought down by truck from the Venus Mountain to an assembly point in Bonn: they looked frozen, scared, and young. If the word Jew conveyed anything at all to me, then it was someone more like the Italians, who looked even more frozen than the Americans, much too tired to be scared. I kicked the chair beside my bed, and when it didn’t fall over I kicked it again. It finally toppled over and shattered the glass top of my bedside table. Henrietta with her navy-blue hat and rucksack. She never came back, to this day we don’t know where she is buried. When the war was over someone came and told us she had “fallen near Leverkusen.”

  This concern for the sacred German soil is somehow comical when you realize that a good proportion of brown-coal mining shares has been in the hands of our family for two generations. For seventy years the Schniers have been making money out of the scooping and digging the sacred German soil has had to submit to; villages, forests, castles fall in the path of the dredgers like the wall of Jericho.

  It was not till some days later that I discovered who it was who might have claimed to be the originator of “Jewish Yankee”: Herbert Kalick, then fourteen years old, my Hitler Youth leader. My mother had generously put our grounds at his disposal so we could all be trained in the use of bazookas. My eight-year-old brother Leo was along, I saw him marching past the tennis court with a practice-bazooka on his shoulder, his face as serious as only a child’s can be. I stopped him and asked: “What are you doing?” And he answered in deadly earnest: “I’m going to join the Boys’ Brigade—aren’t you?” “Sure,” I said and went along with him, past the tennis court, to the firing range where Herbert Kalick was just telling the story of the boy who at the age of ten had been awarded the Iron Cross, somewhere in Silesia, where he had wiped out three Russian tanks with bazookas. When one of the boys asked the name of this hero, I sai
d: “Superman.” Herbert Kalick’s face went yellow, and he shouted, “You dirty defeatist!” I bent down and threw a handful of cinders in Herbert’s face. They all went for me, only Leo remained neutral, he was crying, but he didn’t help me, and in my fear I yelled at Herbert: “You Nazi swine!” I had read these words somewhere, written on the barrier at the railway crossing. I didn’t really know what they meant, but I had a feeling they might be appropriate here. Herbert Kalick stopped the fight at once and turned official: he arrested me, and I was shut up in the firing-range shed among targets and wooden pointers, till Herbert had rounded up my parents, Brühl the teacher, and somebody from the Party. I howled with rage, trampled on the targets, and kept on shouting at the boys outside who were standing guard over me: “You Nazi swine!”

  After an hour I was taken to our drawing room for a hearing. Brühl was almost beside himself. He kept on repeating: “Ought to be wiped out—wiped out, that’s what they ought to be,” and I still don’t know whether he meant physically or, so to speak, morally. I must write to him care of the Teachers’ Training College and ask him to clarify this in the interests of historical accuracy. The chap from the Party, the deputy district leader, whose name was Lövenich, was quite reasonable. He kept saying: “Don’t forget, the boy is barely eleven,” and because he had an almost soothing effect on me I even answered his question as to where I had come across this dreadful expression: “I read it, on the railway barrier at the Annabergerstrasse.” “Didn’t someone say it to you?” he asked, “I mean, didn’t you actually hear it said?” “No,” I said. “The boy doesn’t know what he’s saying,” my father said, putting his hand on my shoulder. Brühl scowled at my father, than glanced nervously toward Herbert Kalick. Obviously he interpreted my father’s gesture as being far too strong an expression of sympathy. My mother, who was crying, said in her soft, stupid voice: “You can see he doesn’t know what he is doing, he doesn’t realize—if he did, I would have to turn my back on him.” “Go ahead, turn your back,” I said.