Billiards at Half-Past Nine (10 page)

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 project. 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 years—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.

That pedestal—there was no monument on it then—I laughed as I drew it in the Cafe Kroner, while the waiter was serving me my paprika cheese. Point is, I’ve always felt sure about the future, so sure that to me the present has always seemed like the past fulfilled. So then, was this my first, my very first, breakfast in the Cafe Kroner? Or was it the three-thousandth? Only one thing could keep me from breakfast at nine every day at the Cafe Kroner—a
Higher Power
. In this case in the form of my commander-in-chief, when he called me to the colors, that fool you see down there still riding toward the west on his bronze warhorse. Paprika cheese? How about it? Was this the first time I was eating it, this peculiar reddish-white spread that didn’t taste half as bad as it looked, which I’d invented, in order to add the important personal note to my planned Cafe Kroner breakfasts, aboard the Northern Express as it roared toward the city? Or was I pasting it onto my rye bread for the thirtieth time, while the waiter takes away the egg cup and pushes the marmalade over the tabletop? Out of my coat pocket I took the one and only instrument I could depend on, when taken by visions so sudden and precise, to remind me, in my maze of fantasy, of place, day and hour—my pocket diary. It was Friday, September 6, 1907. And this breakfast was indeed my first. Until today I had in fact never drunk real coffee, only the substitute kind made from malt. I’d never eaten an egg for breakfast, only oatmeal, brown bread and butter and a slice of sour pickle. But now the myth I had it in mind
to propagate was about to take shape. Indeed, it was already on the way toward its goal when the cook’s ‘Paprika cheese?’ echoed my order. What was this goal? The Public. All I had to do now was wait there, simply stick around until ten o’clock, half-past ten, drinking cognac with a bottle of mineral water until the cafe slowly filled up, sit there with my drawing pad on my knee, a cigar in my mouth and pencil in hand, drawing, drawing, while bankers with their worthy clients went by me to the conference room, followed by waiters carrying bottles of wine on green trays. While clerics came in with confraters from foreign parts, fresh from a round of sightseeing at St. Severin’s and praising the city’s beauties in broken Latin, English or Italian. While government officials gave notice of their high rank by taking time out for a ten-thirty office break to drink a kirsch and mocha. Then there were the ladies who came in from the produce market with cabbages and carrots, peas and plums in woven leather bags, showing off their housewifely training, proving how clever they were at squeezing bargains out of weary peasant women, then gobbling up a hundred times their savings in cakes and coffee, brandishing their coffee spoons like swords, getting indignant about the cavalry captain who—‘on duty, too, did you ever …!’—had blown a kiss to a certain cheap flirt of a creature on a balcony, the same captain, by the way—‘oh, I can prove it, you can just bet on that!’—who’d left at half-past four that morning by the service entrance. A cavalry captain at the service entrance! For shame!