Billiards at Half-Past Nine (18 page)

Was it the damp bed linen or the dampness of the walls that made him shiver? Now he was permitted to leave the station at which his mother had posted him. Caption: ‘Edith, Joseph.’ He trod out his cigarette on the floor, went downstairs, hesitantly worked the door handle, and suddenly remembered his mother, as she had looked standing at the telephone. Smiling, she had signed him to be silent as she said into the mouthpiece, ‘I’m so very glad, Father, you can marry the two of them on Sunday. We’ve got the papers here and the civil marriage will be taken care of tomorrow.’ Had he really heard the priestly voice reply, or had it been a dream? ‘Yes, my dear Mrs. Faehmel, I shall be very glad when this embarrassment is out of the way.’

Edith had not worn a white dress and had refused to leave Joseph at home. She had held Joseph in her arms while the priest asked for the two yeses, and the organ played. And he hadn’t worn black. No point in getting all dressed up. No champagne. Father hated champagne. And the bride’s father, whom he had seen only once, had disappeared without a trace; also no sign of the bride’s brother. Been wanted for attempted murder, even though he would have nothing to do with the package of gunpowder, and actually had tried to prevent the affair.

His mother had hung up the receiver, come toward him and had laid her hands on his shoulders, saying, ‘Isn’t the little boy sweet! You must adopt him immediately after the marriage,
and I’ve remembered him in my will. Here, have some more tea. I know you must have drunk good tea in Holland. Don’t be afraid, Edith will be a good wife, and soon you’ll have passed your exams. I’ll furnish an apartment for you, and don’t forget you can always smile to yourself when you have to go into the army. Keep quiet, and remember this: in a world where raising your hand to someone can cost you your life, there’s no more room for such feelings. I’ll fix up an apartment for you. Father will be glad. He’s gone out to St. Anthony’s—as if he’ll find any solace there.
How weary these old bones
, my boy. They’ve killed your father’s secret laugh, the spring has snapped. It wasn’t made to stand this sort of tension. There’s no use in your using fine words like tyrant any more. Father just got to the point where he couldn’t bear being penned up in his studio, and what’s left of the old Otto was giving him nightmares. You should see what you can do about making up with Otto. Please, please try. Go now, please.’

Attempts to smooth things over with Otto. He’d made many such moves, climbing stairs, knocking on doors. That thickset young man had not even seemed like a stranger to him, the eyes had not even looked at him with a stranger’s regard. Behind that pale, wide forehead had been the will to power in its simplest form, power over timid schoolmates, over passersby who had failed to salute the flag. Power which could have been a touching thing, had it been confined to suburban sports centers or street corners and made a matter of three marks won at a boxing match, of a gaily dressed girl taken to the movies by the winner and kissed in a doorway. But there had been nothing moving about Otto as there had been at times about Nettlinger. Otto’s power had not been used to win boxing bouts or brightly dressed girls. In his brain power had become a formula, stripped of utility and freed of instinct, almost hateless, and exercised automatically, blow by blow.

‘Brother’ was a great word, a mighty word, echoing
Hölderlin. Yet even death, it had seemed, was not enough to invest the word ‘brother’ with meaning when the death had been Otto’s death. Not even the news of Otto’s death had brought reconciliation.
Killed at Kiev!
What a ring it might have had—a ring of tragedy, of greatness and brotherliness. It could have been as moving, taking his age into account, as a grave-stone inscription: Killed at Kiev, Aged Twenty-Five. But it had had no ring to it, and to no avail his attempts to effect a reconciliation after the event, as before. You two are brothers, after all, he had been told. And so they were, according to the registry office and the midwife’s deposition. Had they really been strangers, perhaps he might have been able to feel the emotion and grandeur of it, but strangers they had not been. He had seen Otto eating and drinking, tea, coffee, beer. But Otto had not eaten the same bread as he had, drunk the milk or coffee he had drunk. And worse still with the words they had exchanged. When Otto said ‘bread,’ it had sounded less familiar to his ears than the expression ‘du pain,’ when he had heard it the first time not knowing it stood for bread. They were sons of the same mother and father, had been born in the same house and grown up in it together. There they had eaten, drunk and wept, breathed the same air and taken the same way to school, and laughed and played together. He had called Otto ‘Junior,’ had felt his brother’s arm around his neck, felt for him in his fear of mathematics, helped him, boned with him day after day to dispel the fear, had managed it, too, really had succeeded in taking away his brother’s fear. Now, suddenly, after he had been away for two years, only the husk of Otto was left. Not even strange any more. Not even the pathos of the word. It just didn’t go, it didn’t fit, sounded wrong when he thought of Otto, and for the first time he’d understood Edith’s phrase about taking the
Host of the Beast
. Otto would have handed his own mother over to the hangman, if the hangman had wanted her.

When, on one of his conciliatory missions, he had actually
climbed the stairs, opened Otto’s door and gone in, Otto had turned round and said, ‘What’s the use?’ Otto had been right. What was the use? They were not even strangers, knew each other perfectly, knew how one disliked oranges, how the other preferred beer to milk, how one smoked little cigars rather than cigarettes, how the other put his bookmark in his prayer-book.

He had not been surprised to see Old Wobbly and Nettlinger going up to Otto’s room, or Otto meeting them in the hall, and it had horrified him when it occurred to him that they were both more familiar to him than his own brother. Even murderers were not murderers all the time, not at every hour of the day and night. Murderers, like railroad men, checked in and out of work, went home, relaxed. These two were a jovial pair, clapped him on the shoulder, and Nettlinger had said, ‘Come on, now, wasn’t I the one who let you get away?’ They’d sent Ferdi to his death, and Groll, and Schrella’s father and the boy who’d brought the messages, dispatched them to where you vanished without a trace. But now—let’s forget it, boy! Don’t spoil the game. No hard feelings. Sergeant in the Engineers, demolition expert, married, an apartment, book of discount stamps, two kids. ‘You needn’t ever worry about your wife, nothing will happen to her as long as I’m around.’

‘Well,’ his mother had said, ‘have you talked with Otto? No use? I knew it, but you have to keep trying, again and again. Come here, quietly, I want to tell you something. I think he has a curse on him, bewitched, if you prefer to say it that way, and there’s only one way to set him free. I’ve
got to get a gun, get a gun
. “Mine is the vengeance,” saith the Lord, but why shouldn’t I be the Lord’s instrument?’

She had gone to the window and taken her brother’s walking stick from the corner between the window and curtain, the brother who had died forty-three years before. She had raised the stick to her shoulder like a gun and aimed, taking a bead on Old Wobbly and Nettlinger. They were riding by outside, one on a white horse, the other on a bay. The moving stick had
precisely indicated the tempo of the passing horses, as if timed by a stopwatch. They came round the corner by the hotel, into Modest Street and rode along to the Modest Gate, which presently cut off the view. Then she had lowered the stick. ‘I have two and a half minutes,’ that is, take a deep breath, aim, squeeze. Her dream’s fabric was tear-proof, nowhere could the finespun lie be rent. She put the walking stick back into the corner.

“I’m going to do it, Robert, I shall be the instrument of the Lord. I’ve got patience, time doesn’t touch me at all. You shouldn’t use powder and wadding, but powder and lead. I’ll have revenge for the word, the last ever to leave my son’s innocent lips: ‘Hindenburg.’ The Word he bequeathed to this earth, I must wipe it out. Do we bring children into the world to die at the age of seven whispering ‘Hindenburg!’? I’d thrown the bits of torn-up poem down into the street, and he was such an obedient little fellow he begged me to write a copy for him, but I refused, I didn’t want that madness to cross his lips. In his delirium he tried to put the lines together, and I put my hands over my ears, but listened to him just the same through my fingers. ‘If God you need, let out a yell.’ I tried to force him out of the fever, to shake him awake, and get him to look me in the eye and feel my hands and hear my voice, but he went right on: ‘As long as German woods stand high / As long as German banners fly / As long as German tongue remains / So long will live that name of names!’ It almost killed me, the way he still put emphasis on the ‘that’ in his fever. I gathered all his toys together, and took yours, too, leaving you to howl, and I piled all of them on the blankets in front of him. But he never came back to me, and he never looked at me again, Heinrich, Heinrich. I screamed and prayed and whispered, but he kept on staring into fever-land, where there was only a single line ready waiting for him: ‘Hindenburg! On to the fight!’ He started to say it, and the last word I heard from his mouth was ‘Hindenburg.’

I have to have revenge for the mouth of my seven-year-old son, Robert, don’t you understand? Revenge on those who go riding past our house to the Hindenburg monument. Shiny wreaths, with gold bows, and black and violet ones, will be carried behind them. Always I’ve thought, won’t he ever die? Will we have to have him dished up to us on postage stamps for all eternity, that ancient Beast whose name was the very last word my son ever uttered to me. Are you now going to get me a gun?

I’ll take you at your word. It needn’t be today, or tomorrow, just sometime soon. I’ve learned to be patient. Don’t you remember your brother Heinrich? When he died you were getting on for two. We had a dog called Brom at the time—have you forgotten?—he was so old and wise that he turned the pain you two caused him not into meanness, but into sadness. You two held on to his tail and had him drag both of you through the room. Have you forgotten? You threw the flowers you should have laid on Heinrich’s grave out of the carriage window; we’d left you in front of the cemetery, and later you were allowed to hold the reins from up on the coachman’s box. They were made of cracked black leather. You see, Robert, you do remember. Dog, reins, brother—and soldiers, soldiers, endless soldiers too many to count. Have you forgotten? They came up Modest Street and swung round in front of the hotel and then down to the railroad station, dragging their cannon behind them. Father held your arm, and said, ‘The war’s over.’

A billion marks for a chocolate bar, then two billion for a single candy drop, a cannon for half a loaf of bread, a horse for an apple. Always more. And then not even a half-groschen for the cheapest bar of soap. Nothing good could come of it, Robert, and they didn’t want it to. They kept coming in through the Modest Gate, and turning, all tired out, toward the station. Steadily, steadily, they carried the great Beast’s name before them: Hindenburg. He made sure there was order,
down to his last breath. Is he really dead, Robert? I can’t believe it, ‘Chiseled in stone, in bronze indite. Hindenburg!’ He looked like national unity itself, with his buffalo-cheeks on the stamps. I tell you, he’ll have us back at the same old stand, he’ll show us what political reason leads to, and money reason—a horse for an apple, and a billion marks for a piece of candy, then not even half a groschen for a cake of soap, and always everything in an orderly fashion. I’ve seen and heard how they carried his name around in front of them. Dumb as the earth, deaf as a tree, and making sure all the time there was order. Respectable, respectable; honor and loyalty, iron and steel, money and a distressed agriculture. Careful, my boy, in the misty fields and the rustling forests, careful, that’s where they’ll be consecrating the
Host of the Beast
.

Don’t think I’m crazy, I know exactly where we are. In Denklingen. You can see the road out there, between the trees running along the blue wall, to where the yellow buses crawl by like beetles. They brought me here because I let your children go hungry, after the last lamb had been killed by the fluttering birds. It’s war, you can tell time by the promotions. You were a second lieutenant when you went away, and after two years a first lieutenant. Are you a captain yet? This time you won’t do it in less than four years; then you’ll be a major. Forgive me if I laugh. Don’t carry the thing too far, with your formulas in your head, don’t lose patience and don’t accept any favors. We aren’t going to eat a crumb more than we get on the ration cards. Edith is agreeable to that. Eat what everybody eats, wear what everybody wears, read what everybody reads. Don’t take the extra butter, the extra clothes, the extra poem which dishes up the Beast in a more elegant fashion.
Their right hand is full of bribes
, bribe money in a variety of coins. I didn’t want to have your children take any favors, either, so they might have the taste of truth on their lips, but they took me away from them. It’s called a sanatorium; you’re allowed to be crazy here without being beaten. They don’t splash cold water over your
body and they won’t put you in a straitjacket without your relatives’ consent. I do hope you won’t let them put me in one. I can even go out when I want, for I’m harmless, completely harmless, son. But I don’t want to go out, I don’t want to know what time it is, or have to feel every day that his secret laughter has been killed and that the hidden spring within the hidden wheels has snapped. All at once, you know, he began to take himself seriously. Became pompous, I tell you. Whole mountains of stone went up, entire forests of lumber were cut down and concrete, concrete, you could have filled Lake Boden with it all. They try and forget themselves in building things, it’s like opium. You’d never believe all the things an architect like that can put together in forty years—I used to brush the mortar spots off his pants and plaster splashes from his hat, and he used to lay his head on my lap and smoke his cigar. And we chanted our ‘Do you remember?’ litany, remember 1907, 1914, 1921, 1935—and the answer was always a building—or a death. ‘Remember how Mother died, how Father died, and Johanna and Heinrich. Remember how I built St. Anthony’s, St. Servatius’, St. Boniface’s and St. Modestus’, the viaduct between Heiligenfeld and Blessenfeld, the monastery for the White Friars, the Brown Friars, convalescent homes for the Sisters of Mercy,’ and every answer rang in my ears like a ‘Lord have mercy on us’! Building after building, death after death. He began to chase after his own legend, imprisoned in a liturgy of self. Breakfast every morning in the Cafe Kroner, when he would rather have been eating breakfast with us, coffee half milk, rolls and butter. He didn’t at all like soft-boiled eggs and toast and that disgusting paprika cheese, but he began to believe he did. I was frightened. He began to get angry when he didn’t get a big assignment, where before he’d simply been glad when he got one. Do you understand? It’s a complicated mathematics, as you move toward the fifties and sixties, with the choice of either emptying your bladder on your own monument or gazing up at it in awe. No more twinkling eyes. You
were eighteen, then, and Otto was sixteen. And I was scared. I’d stood up there in the pergola like a sharp-eyed watchful bird, had carried you both in my arms, first as babies at my breast, then as children, then held your hands, or you’d stood beside me, already taller than I was, and I watched how time went marching by below. Time boiled up, struck and we were paying a billion marks for a single piece of candy and then didn’t have three pfennigs for a roll. The savior’s name, I didn’t even want to hear it, but they hoisted the Beast onto their shoulders regardless, stuck him in stamps on their letters and repeated the litany: respectable, respectable; honor and loyalty, beaten yet not beaten. Order. Dumb as the earth, deaf as a tree, and down there in Father’s office Josephine drew him across her damp sponge and stuck him, in all colors, on the letters. And your father, my little David, slept through it all. He didn’t wake up until you’d disappeared, when he saw how a package of money could cost a life. One’s own money, wrapped in newspaper and passed from hand to hand. When his other son had suddenly become the husk of a son. Loyalty, honor and respectability—then he saw it. I warned him about Gretz, but he said, ‘He’s harmless.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but you’ll see what harmless people are capable of. Gretz is the kind who’d betray his own mother.’ And my own clairvoyance frightened me when Gretz actually did betray his own mother. He did, Robert, he betrayed his own mother to the police. Just because the old woman kept on saying, ‘It’s a sin and a shame.’ She didn’t say any more than that, just that one phrase, until one day her son said, ‘I can’t stand it any more, it’s against my principles.’ They dragged the old woman away and stuck her in an old people’s home, and certified her insane, to save her life, but as it turned out this precisely caused her death. They gave her an injection. Didn’t you know the old woman? She used to throw the empty mushroom baskets over the wall to you, and you took them apart and used the reeds to build huts. When it had been raining a long while they turned a dirty brown, then you let them
dry and I let you burn them. Have you forgotten that now? The old woman whom Gretz betrayed, his own mother? Of course, he still stands behind the counter, fondling his flaps of calf liver. They came to fetch Edith, too, but I wouldn’t let them have her; I ground my teeth and screamed at them and they gave in. I kept Edith until the fluttering bird killed her. I tried to keep him off, too; I heard his rushing wings as he dived down and I knew he was bringing death. He smashed his way in through the hall windows, triumphantly. I held up my hands to ward him off, but he flew between them. Forgive me, I couldn’t save the lamb, and remember, Robert, you promised to get me a gun. Don’t forget. Watch out when you climb ladders, my boy. Come here, let me kiss you, and forgive me for laughing. How clever the barbers are these days!”