Billiards at Half-Past Nine (16 page)

Blue sky, a whitewashed wall, alongside which the poplars, like ladder rungs, led down and away to the outer yard, where a sanatorium attendant was shoveling leaf mold into the compost pit. The wall was too high, the rungs too far apart. He would need four or five steps to cover each intervening space. Watch out! Why did the yellow bus have to travel so close to the wall, creeping along like a beetle? Today it had brought only one passenger—him. But was it really he? Who? If only he could climb the poplar ladder, go hand over hand from rung to rung. But no. Always upright and unbending, never lowering himself, that was the way it had to be with him. Only when he knelt in a pew, or at a starting line, did he abandon his upright stance. Was it he? Or who?

On the trees in the garden, in Blessenfeld Park, there had been neatly painted signs, saying: 25, 50, 75, 100. He had knelt at the starting line, to himself muttered, ‘On your mark … get set … go!’ Then sprinted off, slowed down, went back and read off the time from his stopwatch. Again he knelt down at the starting line, murmured the starting signal to himself, dashed
away, this time lengthening out the trial stretch just a little. Often it was a long time before he even got past the 25-meter mark, still longer before he reached the 50 and eventually ran the entire course right to the 100 mark. Then he entered his time in his notebook: 11:2. It was like a fugue, precise, exciting, yet marred by intervals of intense boredom, yawning eternities on summer afternoons in the garden, or in the Blessenfeld Park. Start, return, start, a minimal increase, then back to the starting point once more. And when he had sat down beside her, to evaluate and comment on the figures in his notebook, and reflect on his system, it had been at once exciting and a bore. His training had smelled of fanaticism. The strong, slender boy’s body gave off the serious sweaty smell of those who know nothing as yet of love. Her brothers, Bruno and Friedrich, had smelled like that, too, when they got off their bikes, heads full of times and distances, and went into the garden to try and relax their fanatical leg muscles by means of fanatical compensating exercises. Father had also smelled like that when he swelled out his chest at choir practice, when breathing had become a kind of sport in itself, and singing had lost all its pleasure. Bourgeois earnestness, mustache-framed, had taken its place. Seriously they had sung and seriously had ridden their bicycles, and their leg muscles, chest muscles, mouth muscles, all had been serious. On their cramped legs, cramped cheeks, hideous purple blotches had appeared. They’d stood for hours on end on cold fall nights to shoot hares hiding among the cabbage stalks. And only at dawn, at long last, had the hares taken pity on straining human muscles and taken off zigzag through a hail of shot.
Whywhywhy?
Where was he now, the one who carried that secret laughter inside him, hidden spring in hidden clockwork, which lightened the unbearable pressure, eased the strain? He, the only one who had never partaken of the
Host of the Beast?
Laughter behind the pergola,
Love and Intrigue;
she was leaning over the parapet, watching him come out by the printery gate, and go, light of step, toward the Cafe Kroner.
He carried that secret laughter inside him like a spring. Was he her quarry, or she his?

Careful, careful! Why always so upright, so unbending? One false step and you’ll topple into blue infinity, or be dashed to pieces on the concrete walls of the compost pit. Dead leaves won’t cushion the impact, the granite side of the steps won’t be any pillow. Was it he? Who, then? Huperts, the sanatorium attendant, was standing meekly at the door. Would the visitor like tea, coffee, wine or cognac? Let me think; Friedrich would have come on horseback. He would never have come by the yellow bus, crawling alongside the wall like a beetle. And Bruno, he’d always had his stick with him, when he came. He beat time with it, till time was dead, chopped up time, slashed it into bits. Or snipped it into pieces with his playing cards, which he flung in the face of time like blades, night after night, day after day. Friedrich would have come on horseback, Bruno never without his stick. No cognac for Friedrich, no wine for Bruno now. They were dead, those foolish Uhlans, had ridden into machine-gun fire at Erby le Huette, believing they could fulfill bourgeois virtue through bourgeois vice, meet the obligations of piety with obscenities. Actually, naked dancers on clubhouse tables did not offend respectable ancestors as much as one might have thought, these ancestors having been in fact much less respectable than they looked in their gallery portraits. Cognac and wine struck off the list of drinks forever, my dear Huperts. Then, how about beer? Otto’s gait was not so elastic. His was a marching step, drumming en-em-y, en-em-y on the hallway tiles and en-em-y on the pavement, all the way down Modest Street. He, Otto, had gone over to the Beast very early. Or had his brother, when he was dying, passed on the name ‘Hindenburg’ to Otto? Fourteen days after Heinrich’s death, Otto had been born, to die at Kiev. No use fooling myself any more, Huperts. Bruno and Friedrich, Otto and Edith, Johanna and Heinrich, all dead.

Nor will my visitor be wanting coffee, either, Huperts. He is no longer the one whose secret laugh I could hear in his every step. He’s older. For him, tea, fresh and strong, Huperts, with milk but no sugar, for my upright and unbending son, Robert, the one who always fed on secrets. Even now he’s carrying one around with him, locked in his breast. They beat and furrowed his back, but he didn’t bend, didn’t give up his secret, didn’t give my cousin George away, the one who’d mixed gunpowder for him in the Huns’ apothecary. He swung himself down between the two ladders and like Icarus hung poised with outstretched arms at the doorway. He’d never land in the compost pit or be smashed to smithereens on the granite. Tea, my dear Huperts, fresh and strong, with milk but no sugar. And cigarettes, please, for my archangel. He brings me somber messages that smack of blood, messages of rebellion and revenge. They’ve killed the blond boy. He ran the hundred meters in 10:9. Whenever I saw him, and I saw him only twice, he was laughing. He mended the little lock on my jewel box for me with his clever hands, something the carpenters and locksmiths had been trying to do, but couldn’t, for forty years. He just picked the thing up and it worked again. He was no archangel, just an angel, name was Ferdi. He was blond and fool enough to think he could use firecrackers against the ones who’d eaten the
Host of the Beast
. He didn’t drink tea or wine, beer, coffee or cognac, just put his mouth to the water tap and laughed. If he were still alive, he’d get me a gun. Either he or that other one, a dark angel that one, the one who didn’t know how to laugh, Edith’s brother. They called him Schrella, he was the kind you never call by his given name. Ferdi would have done it. He’d have ransomed me out of this crazy-house where they’ve stuck me, done it, he would have, with a gun. But here I am, doomed and damned. It takes giant ladders to reach the world. My son, see, is climbing down one to me.

“Good afternoon, Robert, you do like tea, don’t you. Don’t flinch when I kiss you on the cheek. You look like a man, a man
of forty; you’re getting gray at the temples and you’re wearing narrow trousers and a sky-blue waistcoat. Isn’t that too conspicuous? But perhaps it’s good to go around disguised as a middle-aged gentleman. You look like the kind of office boss people would like to hear cough, just once anyway, but who’s too refined to permit himself such a thing as cough. Forgive me if I laugh. How clever the barbers are today. That gray hair looks real, and the stubble on your chin like a man’s who has to shave twice a day but does it only once. Clever. Only the red scar hasn’t changed. They’ll know by that, anyway. But maybe there’s a remedy for that, too?

No, you needn’t worry, they didn’t touch me, they left the whip hanging on the wall, just asked, ‘When did you see him last?’ And I told the truth: ‘In the morning, when he went to catch the streetcar to go to school.’

‘But he never arrived at school.’

I didn’t say a word.

‘Has he tried to get in touch with you at all?’

The truth again. ‘No.’

You’d left too plain a trail, Robert. A woman from the barracks district near Baggerloch brought me a book with your name and home address on it. Ovid, gray-green hard cover with chicken muck on it. And your school text was found five kilometers away. The box-office girl from a movie house brought it to me, with one page missing. She came into the office pretending to be a client and Joseph showed her in to me.

A week later they asked me again: ‘Have you been in touch with him at all?’ And I said, ‘No.’ Later on, the one who’d been to the house so often, Nettlinger, he came, too. He said, ‘For your own sake, tell the truth.’ But I had; only now I knew you had gotten away from them.

Nothing from you for months on end, son. Then Edith came, and said, ‘I’m expecting a child.’ I was terrified when she said, ‘The Lord has blessed me.’ Her voice filled me with fear. Forgive me, but I’ve never liked mystics. The girl was pregnant
and alone. Father under arrest, brother disappeared, you gone, and on top of that they had held her in custody and questioned her for fourteen days. No, they didn’t lay a hand on her. How easily the few lambs had been scattered, and now only one, Edith, remained. I took her in. Children, the Lord was certainly pleased with your foolishness. But you might at least have killed him with your homemade bomb; now he’s become chief of police. God preserve us from martyrs who live to tell the tale. Gym teacher, chief of police; goes riding through the city on his big white horse, leads the beggar raids personally. Why didn’t you at least kill him? With a bullet through the head. Firecrackers don’t kill, my boy. You should have come to me. Death’s made of metal. Copper cartridges, lead, cast iron, shrapnel—they bring death, whining and wailing, raining on the roof at night and rattling on the pergola. Fluttering like wild birds:
the wild geese rush through the night
, and dive down on the lambs. Edith is dead. I had her certified insane. Three authorities wrote out their opinions in elegantly unreadable writing on white parchment with an impressive letterhead. That saved Edith from them. Forgive me for laughing. Such a lamb she was. Her first child at seventeen, the second at nineteen and always so know-it-all. The Lord has done this, the Lord has done that, the Lord has given, the Lord has taken away. The Lord, the Lord! She never realized the Lord is our brother, and that among brothers you can laugh sometimes and feel at ease, even if you can’t among Lords and Masters. As for myself, I had not realized that wild geese preyed on lambs; I’d always thought they were peaceful, plant-eating birds. Edith lay there as if our family coat-of-arms had come alive, a lamb with the blood flowing out of her breast. Though in her case there were no martyrs or cardinals, hermits, knights or saints standing around in adoration. And there she was, dead. Try and smile, my boy. I tried to myself, but couldn’t manage it, least of all with Heinrich. He played with you and hung sabres on you and put helmets on your head, and made you into a
Franceman or Rooshian or Englandman, and sang—that quiet boy—
got to get a gun, get a gun
. And when he was dying he whispered that horrible password to me, that Beast’s name, ‘Hindenburg.’ He wanted to learn that poem by heart, he was such an obedient little boy, but I tore up the piece of paper and scattered the pieces like snowflakes into Modest Street.

But drink your tea, Robert, it’ll get cold. Here are the cigarettes, come closer. I must talk very softly. No one must hear us, Father least of all. He’s a child, he has no idea how bad the world is, and few the pure in heart. He’s one of them. A quiet man, no blemishes on his pure heart. Listen, you can save me. I’ve got to get a gun, get a gun and you must get one for me. I could easily shoot him from the roof garden. There are three hundred and fifty holes in the pergola. I can take a long, careful aim as he turns the corner at the Prince Heinrich Hotel on his white horse. You have to take a deep breath, I’ve read all about it, aim and squeeze the trigger. I’ve tried it out with Bruno’s cane. When he turns the corner I’ll have two and a half minutes, but whether I’ll be able to fire the other bullet, too, I don’t know. There’ll be a lot of confusion when he falls off his horse, and I won’t be calm enough to take a deep breath, aim and squeeze the trigger a second time. I’ve got to make up my mind, the gym teacher or that Nettlinger. He ate my bread and drank my tea and Father always called him “a bright boy.” Now just see what a bright boy he turned out to be. He ripped the lambs to shreds and beat you and Schrella with barbed-wire whips. Ferdi paid too high a price for what he got out of it, burning a gym teacher’s feet and breaking a dresser mirror. Not powder and wadding, my boy, powder and metal.…

Here, son, drink your tea, then. Don’t you like it? Are the cigarettes too stale? Forgive me, I never had much to do with them. You look so handsome like that, with gray at your temples and fortyish, like a born attorney. It makes me laugh, just to think you could ever look like that. How smart the barbers are today.

Don’t be so serious. It’ll pass, we’ll take trips out to Kisslingen again. Grandparents, children, grandchildren, the whole tribe, and your son will try to catch trout with his hands. We’ll eat the brothers’ wonderful bread and drink their wine and listen to Vespers:
Rorate coeli desuper et nubes plurant justum
. Advent. Snow on the mountains, ice on the brooks. Choose your season, boy. But Advent will please Edith the most. She has the smell of Advent about her, she hasn’t realized that meantime the Lord has come, as a brother. The brothers’ singing will gladden her adventist heart, and gladden that dim church your father built, St. Anthony’s in the Kissa Valley, between two farmsteads, Stehlinger’s Grotto and Goerlinger’s Place.

I wasn’t quite twenty-two when the Abbey was consecrated, I’d only finished reading
Love and Intrigue
a little while before. I still had a little girlish laughter left in my throat. In my green velvet dress from Hermine Horuschka’s I looked like a girl just come from her dancing class. No longer a girl, not quite a woman, like someone who’d been seduced, rather than married, in my white collar and black hat. I was with child already, and always on the verge of tears. The Cardinal whispered to me, ‘You should have stayed at home, dear lady, I do hope you’ll be able to last it out.’ I did last it out, I wanted to be there. When they opened the church doors and began the consecration rites, I was frightened. My little David, your father, had turned awfully pale, and I thought, now he’s lost his laugh. They’re killing it with all their ceremony. He’s too small and too young for this; hasn’t got enough mannish seriousness in his muscles. I knew I looked sweet with my green dress and my dark eyes and my snow-white collar. I’d made up my mind always to remember it was all a game. And I had to laugh, thinking how the German teacher had said, ‘I’ll test you and see if you can get an A.’ But I didn’t get an A, for I was thinking about him all the time. I called him David, the little man with the sling, the sad eyes and the laugh hidden deep inside. I loved
him, every day waited for the moment when he’d appear at the big studio window, and I used to watch him when he left the printery door. I sneaked into choir practice at the Glee Club and watched him, to see if his chest expanded and contracted like the others in that show-offy, manly way, and could see by his face he wasn’t one of them. I had Bruno smuggle me into the Prince Heinrich when the Reserve Officers Club met for billiards, and watched him, the way he crooked and uncrooked his arm, struck the ball and sent white-green, red-green flying, and found out about that deeply hidden laugh. No, he never put the
Host of the Beast
to his lips. I was afraid he wasn’t going to pass the last, the very last and hardest test of all, the Dress Inspection they gave on that fool of a Kaiser’s birthday in January, a march to the monument on the bridge, parade past the hotel where the general would be standing on the balcony. How would he look, marching past down there, decked out with history, heavy with destiny, while the trumpets and drums were sounding and the bugles blowing for the charge? I was afraid and worried he might look ridiculous. Ridiculous was the one thing I didn’t want him to be. They should never laugh at him, always he at them. And I did see him do the goose-step. Heavens, you should have seen him. As if with every step he was stepping on a Kaiser’s head.