A Perfect Waiter (8 page)

Klinger was familiar with New York, he'd lived there. Klinger was widely traveled and Jakob had accompanied him there. He could ask him about it, but he wouldn't dare. Still, he would have no choice but to pay Klinger a visit in the end, he knew it, and Klinger might already be aware of his reason for coming. Erneste had never read any of his novels, he didn't read books. Books didn't interest him. He was tired when he came home at night. If he'd opened a book instead of going to bed, he
would have fallen asleep over it in no time. He'd have liked to own a TV but couldn't afford one. He was saving up. Another two years, and he would be able to buy himself one.

He didn't know much about Klinger, but he'd heard a few months ago that his wife had died. Years earlier he'd read that Klinger had declined to return to Germany in spite of numerous appeals from German politicians. Erneste, who never bought a newspaper or magazine, had read this at the hairdresser's he visited every three weeks. All the newspapers had reported Klinger's refusal, even the
Schweizer Illustrierte
, which was Erneste's usual reading matter at the salon.

According to the
Schweizer Illustrierte
, Klinger had replied that he intended to remain in Switzerland. He saw no reason to return to the native land that had driven him out. Switzerland was his new home, he declared, and he had owned a Swiss passport for several years. “One more Swiss, one less German!” quipped the hairdresser, who had read no more of Klinger's books than Erneste. These days, nobody asked Klinger to return to Germany anymore. Times had changed and he was old. He no longer commented on political developments, Erneste surmised.

He had seen Klinger once around ten years ago. He'd been sitting in the Restaurant am Berg with his wife and a stranger. Erneste had waited on him, but the great man naturally hadn't recognized him. “An imposing figure in an immaculately cut dark suit,” was the manager's description
of him. Many of the restaurant's customers could be described as imposing figures, notably the conductors who often ate and drank there after concerts. But equally imposing were the Swedish and German, Spanish and Italian opera singers of both sexes.

Erneste hadn't been expecting it. While they were walking down to the lake—it was on a Sunday morning in July, two months almost to the day after his arrival in Giessbach—Jakob had, out of the blue, draped his left arm around Erneste's shoulders and kissed him.

Nothing had happened to warrant that kiss, other than the fact that it might not have escaped Jakob how ardently Erneste had been yearning for his touch throughout those past few weeks. Sympathy for the exigencies of a man in love, especially a man in love with another man, was no reason for kissing him like that—kissing him not in the seclusion of their attic room but outside in the open and visible from all directions, a thoroughly dangerous environment in which unwelcome onlookers could be expected to appear at any moment.

Jakob didn't kiss Erneste like a brother, or like someone kissing his father or mother. He kissed him like a lover, without fear or inhibition—a trifle clumsily, too, because he probably hadn't had much practice at it. In kissing Erneste he was doing something forbidden. He knew it, yet he did it. He did it in a place where they might
have been caught unawares, for hotel guests could have come upon them at any moment. The weather was fine, just the weather for strolling down to the lake—before or after a swim, with or without children, hand in hand or walking decorously apart—and returning to the hotel by cable car. They risked being seen because the shrubs and trees around them provided only sparse protection from unwelcome eyes. Jakob was endangering himself and endangering Erneste, but he overrode all his misgivings.

He wasn't deterred in the least by his own audacity. His desire to kiss his friend was evidently stronger than his fear of being rejected. In spite of his own desire for physical contact with Jakob, or for that very reason, Erneste would never so much as have ventured to brush against him, whereas Jakob, the inexperienced young man from Germany, was doing, and doing with complete unconcern, what Erneste would never have dared to do and would always be grateful for. Jakob had no fear of being rejected, so he made the first move. Wherever that move would lead in the end, it now led straight to paradise.

Jakob's tongue took possession of Erneste's mouth, invading it unimpeded. Needless to say, Erneste returned the kiss as willingly and ardently as he had received it. His breathing quickened, sucking air from Jakob's lungs, and his heart pounded. Nothing could have surprised him more than this reckless onslaught, just as nothing could have delighted him more than this fulfillment of his dearest wish. He had never dared to hope that it could
genuinely be fulfilled. He had too often dreamed that Jakob's arms were around him, and now they really were. He was in paradise at last, filled with lust and sensuality, apprehension and fear of discovery.

At first, however, he strove to maintain a certain distance between them, not wanting Jakob to feel how crudely his desire was manifesting itself. Aroused as never before, with his penis engorged to bursting point, he naturally had to maintain this gap of a few inches, this hurdle, only until it was cleared by Jakob himself. When his body abruptly thrust itself against Erneste's, it was obvious that each of them was as aroused as the other. Their bodies and temperaments complemented each other.

So there they stood on the shrub- and tree-lined woodland path leading down to the lake, closely entwined and inadequately shielded from the gaze of potential witnesses who could not but disapprove because they would regard the sight that met their eyes as “sick and depraved”—the list of current descriptions was a long one. Jakob might not be acquainted with it yet, but Erneste was. Despite this, they not only kissed but began to touch whatever their hands could reach without interrupting their kiss, without severing the bond between their lips. Their hands roamed over shoulders and back, neck and hair, arms, hips and buttocks—or over the cloth, at least, that covered the flesh, sinews and muscles beneath.

It was Erneste who summoned up the courage to put his right hand on Jakob's penis, whose presence he had
long felt. Without hesitation, unafraid of being repulsed, his hand enveloped the cloth beneath which Jakob's penis strained as powerfully, crudely and shockingly as his own.

Jakob didn't recoil. On the contrary, he pressed even closer, his penis sliding obediently through Erneste's fingers beneath the cloth. Erneste felt the glans, gripped the shaft, cupped his hand around Jakob's testicles. Jakob groaned aloud. Erneste stifled the sound with his lips. Jakob was trembling all over. No one had ever touched him where Erneste's hand now lay, and while the ball of Erneste's thumb moved slowly up and down between glans and shaft, navel and scrotum, his own hand soon found its way to Erneste's penis. He groaned again between two intakes of breath, and this time a sigh escaped his lips. To Erneste, his breath felt like a silken cloth fluttering in his ear.

It was little short of a miracle that no hotel guests or Sunday excursionists crossed their path during those five minutes of perfect bliss. If they had, there would undoubtedly have been a scandal. But Erneste and Jakob had the shameless good fortune to be alone in the world for a few moments, alone and unobserved. Nobody came their way, neither adult nor child. Had they been caught, they would have been dismissed the same day.

Erneste had recommended that Jakob, who felt condemned to inactivity at the sideboard, should be promoted to waiting table, and he'd eventually gotten his way. Monsieur Flamin, who hadn't failed to notice Jakob's
courteous manner, was persuaded by Erneste to give him suitable employment, at first on the terrace and later in the dining room. He also, when required, provided room service.

Although Jakob's gratitude to Erneste was beyond doubt, it wasn't gratitude that had prompted him to kiss Erneste that afternoon. That kiss and embrace were an expression of some other emotion—how profound an emotion, time would tell. He must have known that his behavior represented a threat to himself as well as to Erneste, who found it an abiding mystery why he should so recklessly have exposed himself to the danger of discovery. Not wanting to shake Jakob's nerve, however, he refrained both then and later from inquiring why he had kissed him that first time, some halfway down to the lake, before they turned around and headed back to the hotel. They had detached themselves after a minute or two, but it was all they could do to keep their hands off each other.

It hadn't been hard to convince Monsieur Flamin, who had been observing him for long enough, of Jakob's talents. Having had a few words with him, Flamin announced that he was willing to give him an opportunity after only two months. A smart, good-looking youngster
—un jeune homme adroit et flexible avec une pareille jolie gueule d'amour
—was always welcome. Had Monsieur Flamin seen the two of them at that moment, he might not have dismissed them even though there was no shortage of willing employees. He would merely have turned away and
pretended not to see. Monsieur Flamin wasn't easily shocked.

It was always the same images that haunted Erneste that night, whether awake or tossing to and fro in a state of semiwakefulness. They were and remained identical: two menacing reflections. He would have certainly been rid of them had he managed to turn on the light and get up, but he couldn't. He didn't turn on the light or get up, he lay prostrate, so the images persisted, flowing out of him and back again, drifting through him as he drifted through them. He didn't turn on the light, took no sleeping pill, waited, fell asleep, dreamed, woke up, dreamed again. It was interminable—an interminable, inescapable, exhausting cycle.

A light was on across the way, he knew. His shadowy neighbor, almost a shadow of himself, was pacing up and down. He knew this although he couldn't see her. While he was endeavoring to sleep she staunchly remained awake, and he saw two images in his dreams, one of today and one of the old days, both equally motionless, equally distinct, equally cold and crisp, one overlaying and suppressing the other. His soul felt the touch of ice and was touched by it, frozen and petrified.

One image was of Jakob standing motionless in front of the airliner, an image from his imagination, his imaginary image of that morning: a white airliner against
a dark background. The other was of Jakob and himself. Not an imaginary image but the actual, authentic moment when they touched and kissed for the very first time. It was so close and clear in his mind's eye, the incident it represented might only just have occurred. He could feel the other tongue in his mouth without being aware of his own, could feel the pressure of the other body and only now became conscious of his own, a cold body, cold but not unfamiliar. The time of intimacy was long past, cold and incalculable, and the tongue in his mouth might have been composed of nothing—of wax. And while the first image might have signified how far apart they'd grown—he himself had never traveled by air—the other was an unmistakable indication that the gap between them hadn't widened by a millimeter since then. Even though the other body had become unfamiliar to him, it was unfamiliar but close at hand.

Such were the two images he couldn't shake off that night, which accompanied him into sleep and wrested him from it once more. He awoke and felt the pressure of his body, fell asleep and continued to feel it, but in either case, whether he was asleep or awake, the images were somber, not warm, not sunny like that summer afternoon in July 1935, but gloomy as the autumnal night that cheerlessly encompassed the town and its inhabitants, his neighbor, himself, and, somewhere or other, Jakob as well. There was darkness around them, darkness in front of the airplane, darkness behind it. Everything was as cold and dreary and confused as his life had been since Jakob's
letter. His life had undergone a minuscule change: sleepy indifference had given way to hectic activity. He could no longer control his thoughts and emotions and hold them in check—couldn't control them at all. What he had left behind him lay ahead of him once more. It had simply been a comforting illusion to believe that he'd left his time with Jakob behind him; it had never been behind him. He had never left Jakob. Jakob was as present as if he had never gone away; Jakob and he were mutually pervasive. That, at any rate, was what Erneste felt between waking and dreaming in the small hours, after he had opened and read Jakob's second letter.

It was somewhat longer than the first and made a confused impression. Jakob seemed to have written in great haste. Erneste didn't know what to make of it. He knew nothing of America and took no interest in politics, which had so far failed to bring him any luck.

Jakob's second letter read: