Billiards at Half-Past Nine Page 8
The phone rang and it was pleasant to have Leonore take up the receiver and listen to her voice as she answered the unknown caller. “The Cafe Kroner? I’ll ask His Excellency.”
“Wants to know how many people to expect this evening? Birthday party?” Would the fingers of one hand be enough to count them off? “Let me see. Two grandchildren, one son, myself—and you. May I have that pleasure, Leonore?”
Five of them, then. The fingers of one hand were enough.
“No, no champagne. Everything just the way it was ordered. Thank you, Leonore.”
She probably thinks I’m a little dotty, but if I am, it’s nothing new. I saw everything before it happened, knew exactly what I wanted, knew I’d get it. Only thing I never knew, and still can’t figure out to this day, is why I did it. Was it for money, fame, or simply because it amused me? What was it I was looking for, that Friday morning fifty-one years ago, September sixth, 1907, when I walked out of that railroad station over there? From the moment I set foot in the city I had my moves all figured out, an exact daily routine, the steps of a complicated dance all down to a tee—myself soloist and ballet master all in one. Cast and decor were there for the asking, not costing a penny.
I had only ten minutes left to dance my first routine. That is, walk across the station square, out by the Prince Heinrich Hotel, kitty-corner across Modest Street and into the Cafe Kroner. It was on my twenty-ninth birthday that I came to the city. A September morning. Cab horses were standing guard over their sleeping drivers. Hotel boys in the violet uniform of the Prince. Heinrich were lugging suitcases in the wake of guests on the way to the railroad station. On bank buildings substantial iron gratings were being pushed up for the day, to land with a solid sound in their storage racks. Pigeons, news vendors. Uhlans, a troop of them, riding by the Prince Heinrich, with the captain waving at a woman in a rose-red hat, standing veiled on the balcony. She blew him a kiss. Hooves clattering on the cobbles, pennants and plumes fluttering in the morning wind, organ music coming out of the big open door of St. Severin’s.
I was excited, took a street map out of my coat pocket, unfolded it and looked at the red semicircle I’d drawn around the railroad station. Five black crosses indicated the cathedral and the four adjacent churches. I looked up and tried to locate the four church spires through the morning haze. The fifth, St. Severin’s, was no trouble. There it was in front of me; its enormous shadow made me shiver a little. I looked down at the map again. Right. A yellow cross indicated the house where I’d rented a studio and a living room for six months, paid in advance, 7 Modest Street, between St. Severin’s and the Modest Gate. It had to be over there to the right, where a group of priests were just crossing the street. The semicircle I’d drawn around the station had a radius of one kilometer. Somewhere inside that red line lived the woman I would marry. I’d never met her, didn’t know her name. All I knew was that I would take her out of one of those patrician houses my father had told me about. He’d served three years here, in the Uhlans, soaking up hatred, hatred for horses and officers. A sentiment I deferred to, without sharing it. I was always glad my father didn’t live to see me become an officer myself—lieutenant in the Engineer Corps Reserves. I burst out laughing that morning fifty-one years ago. I laughed and laughed. I knew I’d take a wife from one of those houses, that she would be called Brodem or Cusenius, Kilb or Ferve. She would be twenty years old and now, right this very minute, she would be leaving morning Mass on her way home to put her prayerbook back in the hall closet. She would arrive at just the right moment to be kissed on the forehead by her father, on the way, rumbling bass and all, through the hall and out to the office. For breakfast she would eat bread and honey, drink one cup of coffee. ‘No, no, Mother, no egg, please.’ Then she would read off the dates of coming galas to her mother. Might she go to the University Ball? She might.
By the University Ball at the latest, on the sixth of January, I would know the one I wished to make my own, would dance with her. I would be good to her, love her, and she would bear me children, five, six, seven of them. They would marry and present me with grandchildren, five times, six, seven times seven. I saw my troop of grandchildren, and myself, an eighty-year-old patriarch, lording it over the clan I proposed to found. At birthday celebrations, funerals, weddings and silver weddings, christenings. Infants would be handed over to be held in my old arms. There would be great-grandchildren for me to love as I had loved the pretty young things my sons had married. These, meanwhile, I would invite to breakfast, give candy and flowers, paintings and eau de cologne. I could see it all as I stood there, ready to begin the dance.
I stared at the porter as he wheeled off my luggage in his cart to the house at 7 Modest Street, the padlocked hamper with my linen and my drawings, the little leather valise containing papers, documents and my money. My money—four hundred gold coins, net proceeds of twelve years’ work, spent in country builders’ field offices, working in the draughting rooms of second-rate architects, at workers’ housing developments, industrial plants, churches, schools, clubhouses sketched out, planned, built. Money which represented construction estimates plowed through backwards and forwards, to the very last dry specification—‘and the sacristy paneling shall be made of the best clear walnut, the best-grade hardware used.’
I know I laughed as I stood there, yet to this day for the life of me I don’t really know why or what made me do it. But I can say I wasn’t laughing out of pure joy in being young and alive. There was mockery and derision in it, even malice, yet just how much of each I’ve never been able to tell. I was thinking of the hard benches I’d sat on during evening classes, when I went to learn arithmetic, mathematics, drawing, the manual arts, and how I’d struggled to learn dancing and swimming. I laughed thinking of myself as a lieutenant in the Engineer Reserves, stationed with the 8th Battalion in Coblenz. At how I used to sit, in the city, at the famous Elbow of the Rhine, where two rivers come together, and there found the Mosel just as dirty as the greater stream. I had lived in twenty-three furnished rooms; I’d seduced landlords’ daughters and been seduced by them myself. I saw myself slipping barefoot through moldy-smelling hallways to exchange caresses, including that supreme tenderness which again and again turned out to be a fraud. Lavender water and hair let down. Horrible living rooms where fruit never intended to be eaten grew old in bowls of greenish glass, where hard words such as brute, honor, innocence came my way and never a whiff of lavender water. Shuddering, I saw what the future had in store for me, saw it, not in the face of the ravished one, but in her mother’s face. Truth of it was, I was not a brute; I had never promised a soul I’d marry her; and I didn’t want to spend my life in living rooms where fruit never intended to be eaten grew old in green glass bowls.
Always more drawing. When I came back from night school I calculated and drew from half-past nine till midnight. Angels and trees, cloud shapes, churches and chapels, Gothic ones, Roman ones, Romanesque, Rococo and Early Victorian—and modern ones besides, if you please. I drew long-haired maidens with soulful faces hovering above doorways, their long hair sweeping down either side the door like a curtain, with the part in the hair drawn sharp, precisely in the middle above the doorway. And the landlords’ daughters, during these laborious evening hours, brought me weak tea or weak lemonade, inviting me to intimacies which they thought of as daring. Meanwhile I drew on, especially detail, since I knew that this was what they—who were they, anyway, the ‘they’?—would be most likely to go for: door handles, ornamental gratings, Agni Dei, pelicans, anchors and crosses entwined with hissing snakes rising up to strike but all in vain.
I always remembered the trick my last boss, Domgreve, had pulled, pulled only too often. His gimmick was to drop his rosary beads at the critical moment after we’d looked over the site. The pious peasants had proudly shown us the field intended for the new church, and afterwards the deacons, upright and bashful, in the back room of some village pub had announced their intention of going along with the p
roject. It was at this juncture the rosary would somehow be drawn out with cigarettes, coin or watch, providentially dropped and picked up with an air of simulated confusion. That, at least, was something I could never laugh at.
“No, Leonore, that A on the folders and drawings and estimates doesn’t mean Assignment, it means St. Anthony. St. Anthony’s Abbey.”
With a deft touch and a soft step she imposed order, the kind of organization he had always loved and had never been able to maintain. It had been too much, too many jobs, too much money.
I’m a little crazy now, and I was crazy then, in the railroad station square, fingering the loose coins in my coat pocket to see how much I had, checking on my drawing pad, the green box with my pencils in it, testing the set of my flowing velvet four-in-hand, feeling around the rim of my black artist’s hat, and letting my hands move farther down, over the tails of my suit, the only good one to my name, left me by Uncle Marsil who’d died of consumption as a young teacher. By then Uncle Marsil’s gravestone was already covered with moss, out there in Mees, where, when he was twenty years old, he beat time with his baton in the choir loft, drummed the rule of three into farm kids’ heads and, in the dusk of evening, went out walking on the moors, dreaming of young girls’ lips, of bread and wine and the fame he hoped to win with his neatly turned verses. Dreams dreamed on moorland paths, two years of dreaming, until blood gushed from his mouth and carried him off to the far shore, leaving behind a copybook filled with verses, a black suit for his godson, two gold coins. And, on the greenish curtain of the schoolroom, a bloodstain which his successor’s wife could not take out. Also, a song, sung at their hungry teacher’s grave by children’s voices: ‘Watchman, whither has the swallow flown?’
I took another look back at the station, at the ad by the turnstile gate to the trains, put there so recruits reporting for duty couldn’t help but see it. It said ‘I recommend to military personnel my genuine, long-established Standard Underwear, designed by Professor Gustav Jaeger. Also, my genuine Pallas Underwear, patented in all civilized countries, and my genuine Reform Underwear, designed by Dr. Lahmann.’
It was time to start the dance.
I walked across the streetcar tracks, past the Prince Heinrich Hotel, across Modest Street, hesitated a second in front of the Cafe Kroner. In the door glass, backed with taut green silk, I saw my own reflection. I was a slightly built young fellow, almost a shrimp, a cross between a young rabbi and a bohemian, hair black, clothes black, with a vaguely countrified look. I had another laugh, and went in. The waiters were just starting to put vases of white carnations on the tables, to straighten out menus bound in green leather. There they were, the waiters, in green aprons and short black jackets, with white shirts and white ties. Two young girls, one blonde and rosy, the other brunette and pale, were arranging cakes on the buffet, making little piles of biscuits, renewing the cream dressings and polishing the silver cake knives bright. Not a guest in sight, and inside all clean as a hospital before the superintendent makes his rounds. Light as a feather, a solo dancer, I threaded my way through the waiters’ ballet. Here all was training and drill, fine, very fine. I liked the way the waiters flitted from table to table, the way they set down saltcellar and flower vase with an air, gave the menu a nudge to achieve what was obviously a special angle in respect of the saltcellar. The ash trays were snow-white porcelain with gold rims. Good. I liked that. All a delightful surprise. The city, so different from the holes I’d been stuck in up to now.
I went to the farthest left-hand corner, threw my hat on a chair, put down drawing pad and pencil box beside it, and sat down. The waiters were coming back from the kitchen, soundlessly pushing tea wagons ahead of them, distributing bottles of condiment, hanging up newspaper holders. I opened my drawing pad and read—for the hundredth time!—the newspaper clipping I’d stuck inside the cover: ‘Open Competition: Construction of a Benedictine Abbey, to be located in the Kissa Valley, between the hamlets of Stehlinger’s Grotto and Goerlinger’s Lodge, at a distance of approximately two kilometers from the village of Kisslingen. All architects who consider themselves competent may participate. Entry forms obtainable from Dr. Kilb, solicitor, 7 Modest Street. Fee, 50 marks. Deadline for delivery of plans: noon, Monday, September 30, 1907.’
I went climbing about among heaps of mortar, piles of brand-new bricks which I checked to see how well they had been fired in the kiln. I climbed mountains of quarried basalt that I intended to use for framing doors and windows. The cuffs of my pants were muddy, my vest all splattered with lime. I lost my temper in the construction sheds and said violent things. Those mosaic stones I needed for the Agnus Dei over the main entrance, why hadn’t they been delivered yet? Terrible arguments, scandal. Credits cut off then granted again. By Thursday afternoon master mechanics already were getting lined up outside my office, though their pay checks weren’t due till Friday. At night, exhausted, I climbed aboard the overheated local in Kisslingen, sank back on the cushioned seats of the second-class compartment and was hauled through the darkness past miserable little beet-villages. Meanwhile the trainman, half asleep on his feet, called out the stations: Denklingen, Doderingen, Kohlbingen, Schaklingen. On the platforms mountains of beets were piled, ready for loading, gray in the dark like mountains of skulls. On we went, past beet-villages, beet-villages. At the station I fell into a cab and then, once I got home, fell again into my wife’s arms, to be kissed, to have my work-strained eyes tenderly stroked, to have her run her fingers over the mortar stains decorating my sleeves. Over coffee, my head in her lap, I smoked the cigar I’d been longing for—a sixty-center—and told her all about the masons and their swearing. Not really bad when you got to know them. A little rough, maybe, a little on the Red side, but I knew how to get along with them. What you had to do was set them up with a case of beer now and then, kid along a little with them in their own lingo. And never grouse about anything to their face or they’d dump a whole load of mortar all over your feet, the way they did to the Archbishop’s clerk of works, or maybe let a plank slip from way up on the scaffolding, the way they did to that government architect. The big beam smashed to smithereens right in front of him. ‘Dearest, don’t you suppose I know it’s me who’s dependent on them, not they on me? That goes wherever anything’s being built, here or anywhere else. Of course they’re Red, why shouldn’t they be? The main thing is, can they swing a trowel and help me meet my deadline. When I take the commissioners up on the scaffolding, a friendly wink works wonders.’
‘Good morning, sir. Breakfast?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said, but shook my head when the waiter started to give me the menu. Instead I raised my pencil and ticked off the items I wanted in the air, as if I’d eaten that kind of breakfast all my life.
‘A pot of coffee, one with three cups, please. Toast, two slices of rye bread, with butter, marmalade, one boiled egg and paprika cheese.’
‘Paprika cheese?’
‘That’s right, cream cheese with paprika.’
‘Very good, sir.’
Without a sound he glided, the green ghost of a waiter, over the green carpet past green-covered tables to the kitchen counter, and the first ritual of my little performance promptly evolved. The supers were well rehearsed and I was a good director. ‘Paprika cheese?’ the cook inquired from behind the kitchen counter. ‘That’s right,’ the waiter said, ‘cream cheese with paprika.’ ‘Ask the gentleman how much paprika he wants on his cheese.’
When the waiter came back I’d begun to draw the front of the railroad station. I was just sketching in the window frames with firm strokes. He stood there, waiting, until I raised my head, took my pencil off the paper and put on a look of surprise.
‘Permit me to ask, sir, how much paprika do you want on how much cheese?’
‘A thimbleful of paprika thoroughly worked into forty-five grams of cheese. And listen, waiter, I’ll be eating breakfast here tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the day after that, in three weeks, three months, three y
ears—you hear? And it will always be at the same time, around nine.’
‘Very good, sir.’
That was how I wanted it, and that’s how it worked out. Exactly. Later on many a time it used to scare me, the way my plans worked out so perfectly. Why, it wasn’t more than a couple of days before I was ‘the gentleman with the paprika cheese.’ A week later it was ‘the young artist who always comes to breakfast about nine.’ And after three weeks it was ‘Herr Faehmel, that young architect working on a big assignment.’
“Yes, yes, child, all that stuff has to do with St. Anthony’s Abbey. The Abbey goes on for years, Leonore, decades, right up to the present. Repairs, additions, then, after 1945, reconstruction from the old plans. St. Anthony’s is going to take up a whole shelf. Yes, you’re right, we could use a ventilator around here. It certainly is hot today. No thank you, I don’t want to sit down.”
The kaleidoscopic window was framing the blue afternoon sky of September 6, 1958, and the outline of the rooftops, all gaps filled in. Teapots on gay tables in the roof gardens. Women on deck chairs, lazily sprawled in the sun. And the station below, swarming with returning vacationers. Could that be why his granddaughter, Ruth, had failed to show up? Had she gone off on a trip herself, putting aside Love and Intrigue? Carefully he dabbed at his brow with his handkerchief; heat or cold never had made much difference to him. Over there in the right-hand corner of the kaleidoscopic window the bronze Hohenzollern kings on their bronze steeds kept right on riding toward the west, as they had been doing for eight-and-forty years. Including that one there, his erstwhile commander-in-chief. You could see the fateful vanity of him, in the very way he held his head.