Billiards at Half-Past Nine (27 page)

She screamed and cried and tried to put her arms round me, but I held the knife in front of me, point forward. She went on talking about schooling and studies, screamed and cried, but I ran out through the back door into the garden, and across the field to the priest, and told him all about it. He said, ‘She is your mother, Nature’s rights are Nature’s rights; and until you’re of age, she has a right to you. It’s bad business.’ And I said, ‘Didn’t she give up her rights when she played that
He ordered me to
game?’ And he said, ‘You’re a smart little thing. Remember that argument.’ I remembered it and brought it out every time they talked about feeling it in the blood, and I kept on saying, ‘I don’t feel it in my blood, I simply don’t feel it.’ They said, ‘It’s inconceivable, cynicism like that is unnatural.’ ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘He ordered me to
—that was unnatural.’ They said, ‘But that’s more than ten years ago, and she’s sorry for it.’ And I said, ‘There are some things you can’t be sorry for.’ ‘Do you,’ they asked me, ‘intend to be harder than God in His judgment?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not God, and that’s why I can’t be as forgiving as He is.’ So, I stayed with my parents. But there was one thing I couldn’t prevent. My name wasn’t Marianne Schmitz any more, but Marianne Droste, and I felt as if something had been cut out of me.—I still think of my little brother,” she said softly, “who had to play the
He ordered me to
game—and do you still believe there’s something worse, so bad that you can’t tell me about it?”

“No, no,” he said, “Marianne Schmitz, I’ll tell you about it.”

She took her hand away from his eyes, and he straightened up and looked at her; she was trying not to smile.

“Your father really can’t have done anything as bad as that,” she said.

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t as bad as that, but it was bad enough.”

“Come on,” she said, “tell me about it in the car, it’s almost five o’clock and they’ll be waiting now; if I had a grandfather I wouldn’t keep him waiting, and if I had one like yours I’d do everything for him.”

“And for my father?” he asked.

“I don’t know him yet,” she said. “Come on. And don’t keep it back, tell him as soon as you have an opportunity. Come on.”

She pulled him up, and he put his arm round her shoulders as they went back to the car.

The young bank clerk looked up pityingly as Schrella pushed his five English shillings and thirty Belgian francs across the marble counter.

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” said Schrella, “that’s all.”

The young clerk set his adding machine in motion, and peevishly cranked the handle—even the small number of cranks he had to make expressed contempt—jotted a few figures on a form and pushed a five-mark note, four groschen and three pfennigs across the counter.

“Next, please.”

“Blessenfeld,” asked Schrella quietly, “can you tell me if No. 11 still goes there?”

“Does No. 11 still go to Blessenfeld? This isn’t the streetcar information office,” said the young clerk, “and in any case I really don’t know.”

“Thank you,” said Schrella, sliding the money into his pocket. He made way at the window for a man who pushed
a bundle of Swiss francs across the counter. And heard the handle of the adding machine respectfully begin to make a large number of respectful turns.

‘Politeness is really the most effective form of contempt,’ he thought.

The railroad station. Summer. Sun. Gaiety. Weekend. Hotel bellboys lugging suitcases toward the platforms. A young woman was holding up a sign: “Travelers to Lourdes assemble here.” Newspaper vendors, flower stalls, youngsters with brightly colored beach towels under their arms.

Schrella walked across the square, stood on the traffic island and studied the streetcar schedule. No. 11 still did go to Blessenfeld. There it was, waiting at the red traffic light between the Prince Heinrich Hotel and the chancel of St. Severin’s. Then it moved along, stopped, emptied and Schrella joined the line of people waiting to pay at the conductor’s box. He sat down, took off his hat, wiped the sweat from his eyebrows, dried the lenses of his spectacles and waited in vain, as the car began to move, for feelings to come to him. Nothing. As a schoolboy, he’d gone back and forth on No. 11 four thousand times, his fingers stained with ink, listening to the other children’s silly chatter which had always been a source of appalling embarrassment to him; conic sections, the pluperfect, Barbarossa’s beard which went on growing and growing through the table,
Love and Intrigue
, Livy, Ovid bound in gray-green cardboard, and the farther from the city the streetcar went, on its way to Blessenfeld, the quieter grew the chatter. At the edge of the old town, those with the most educated voices had got off, splitting up amid the wide, gloomy streets of substantial houses. Those with the next-best-educated voices got off at the edge of the new town, splitting up amid narrower streets of less substantial houses. Only two or three remained who went all the way to Blessenfeld, which had the least substantial buildings of all. And as the streetcar rocked on past allotment gardens and gravel pits to Blessenfeld, conversation returned to normal.
‘Is your father on strike too? They’re giving four and a half per cent discount at Gressigmann’s. Margarine is five pfennigs cheaper.’ There was the park, with the green of summer long since trampled flat, and the sandy strip around the wading pool stirred up by thousands of children’s feet and covered with litter, paper and bottle tops. And there Gruffel Street, where the junk dealers’ lots were continually filled to overflowing with scrap metal, rags, paper and bottles; where a lemonade stall had been opened up in the midst of wretched poverty, an attempt by a skinny unemployed laborer to set up as a trader. And, before long, he’d got fat and his stall was decked out with chrome and plate glass, and glittering automats had been installed. Getting hog-fat on pfennigs, getting bossy though only a few months before he’d been forced to obsequiously lower the price of a lemonade by two pfennigs, meanwhile whispering anxiously, ‘But don’t tell anyone else.’

No feelings would come to him as he went rocking on in No. 11 through the old town, the new town, past allotment gardens and gravel pits to Blessenfeld. He had heard the names of the stops four thousand times: Boisserée Street, North Park, Blessischer Station, Inner Ring. They sounded strange, the names, as if out of dreams which others had dreamed and vainly tried to let him share; they sounded like calls for help in a heavy fog, while the almost empty streetcar went on toward the end of the line in the afternoon summer sun.

There on the corner of Park Line and the Inner Ring had stood the stall in which his mother had attempted to set up a fish-fry business, but had been undone by her compassionate heart. ‘How can I refuse those hungry kids a bit of fried fish when they see me frying it? How can I?’ And Father said, ‘Of course you can’t, but we must close down the stall, there’s no more credit, the dealers won’t deliver any more.’ Mother had dipped the fillets of fish in egg and breadcrumbs, then let them fry in hot oil while she heaped one, two or three spoonfuls of potato salad on the paper plates. Mother’s heart had not
remained
firm against compassion
. Tears had welled out of her blue eyes and the neighbors whispered, ‘She’s crying her heart out.’ She ate no more, drank no more, and her plump, full-blooded body changed into a thin, anemic one and nothing remained of the pretty barmaid everyone had loved at the station bar. Now she did nothing but whisper
Lord, Lord
, paging through dog-eared sectarian prayer books that foretold the end of the world, while out on the streets the red flags fluttered in the dusty wind and other people bore Hindenburg’s head on placards through the streets. Screaming and violence and shooting, and piping and drumming. When she died, Mother had looked like a girl, anemic and thin. Asters on the grave and a thin wooden cross: Edith Schrella, 1896–1932. Her soul had been sobbed out, and her body mingled with the earth in the Northern Cemetery.

“End of the line, sir,” announced the conductor. He climbed out of his box, lit a cigarette butt and walked up front. “Sorry, we don’t go any further.”

“Thank you.” He’d climbed in and climbed out at the No. 11 terminus four thousand times. The rusty rails went on and lost themselves among barracks and old excavations. Thirty years before, there had once been a projected extension of the tram service there. Now, lemonade stalls: chromium, plate glass, glittering automats and orderly rows of chocolate bars.

“A lemonade, please.”

The green concoction in a spotless glass tasted of sweet woodruff.

“If you don’t mind, sir, put the paper in the basket, please. Taste all right?”

“Yes, thank you.” The two chicken legs were still warm, and the tender breast was crispy, baked in the very best quality fat, all preserved in the cellophane pack clipped tight with Special Picnic Insulating Clips.

“That smells pretty good. Want another lemonade with it?”

“No, thank you. But I’ll have six cigarettes, please.”

He could still recognize, in the plump proprietress, the gentle, pretty girl she once had been. Those blue, childlike eyes, during their First Communion lessons, had moved the romantic chaplain to adjectives such as “angelic” and “innocent,” and now they had grown hard and businesslike.

“That’ll be ninety pfennigs, please.”

“Thank you.”

The No. 11 in which he had arrived was ringing its bell for departure. But he hesitated too long, and found himself imprisoned in Blessenfeld for another twelve minutes. He smoked and slowly drank the rest of his lemonade, trying to recall, through that pink and stony face, the name of the young girl she once had been—a blonde, flying through the park with windblown hair, shouting and singing, and enticing boys into dark doorways, after the resemblance to an angel had become a thing of the past; teasing hoarse declarations of love from them, while her brother, no less blond, no less angelic, made vain attempts to summon the street boys to noble deeds; a carpenter’s apprentice and a hundred-meter runner, beheaded at dawn for a piece of folly.

“Please,” said Schrella, “I’ll have another lemonade after all.” He stared at the immaculate parting in the plump woman’s hair as she bent to hold the glass below the tap of the balloon. Her brother had been the angelic Ferdi. Her own name later on had been hoarsely whispered from youth to youth, from mouth to mouth like a certain password to Paradise. Erika Progulske would help you get rid of your need and
she won’t take a thing for it
, because she likes it.

“Do we know each other?” She smiled and set the glass of lemonade on the counter.

“No,” he said, smiling back, “I don’t think so.”

Don’t encourage the frozen memory to thaw; such frost-flowers would only turn into dull dirty water and run down the pane. Evoke nothing, never expect to bring back childhood’s austerity of feeling in adult souls grown soft; you’ll just
find out that now
she takes something for it
. Careful, just don’t start talking.

“Yes. Thirty pfennigs. Thank you.” Ferdi Progulske’s sister looked at him with professional friendliness. You gave me relief, too, and
took nothing for it
, not even the bar of chocolate gone soft in my pocket, although it wasn’t meant as payment, only as a present, but you wouldn’t take it. And you set me free with the compassion of your mouth and hands. I hope you didn’t tell Ferdi; part of compassion is discretion, and secrets once turned into words may become deadly. I hope he didn’t know, when he saw the sky for the last time, that morning in July. I was the only one he found in Gruffel Street, prepared for noble deeds; Edith didn’t yet count, she’d only turned twelve and the wisdom in her heart wasn’t apparent as yet.

“Don’t we really know each other?”

“No, I’m sure we don’t.”

You’d accept my present today; your heart has stayed firm, but not in compassion. Already, a few weeks later, you had lost the innocence of childish sin; you’d already made up your mind it was better to get rid of pity, decided you weren’t going to be a weeping blonde slut and sob your soul away. No, we don’t know each other, we really don’t. We won’t be thawing out any icicles. Thank you, Goodbye.

There at the corner was still the Blesseneck where Father had been a waiter. Beer,
schnapps
, meat balls, beer,
schnapps
, meat balls, all served with an expression in which mildness and doggedness mingled in a kind of unity, the face of a dreamer to whom it was a matter of indifference whether he served beer,
schnapps
and meat balls in the Blesseneck or lobsters and champagne in the Prince Heinrich or the kind of breakfasts of beer and chops or chocolate and cherry brandy which the whores ate after a night at the Upper Harbor. Father had brought home traces of those sticky breakfasts on his cuffs, brought good tips home, but had not brought home what other fathers brought, after-work good spirits, which could
be translated into shouting and teasing, into protestations of love or tears of reconciliation. Always that dogged mildness in his face, a lost angel who hid Ferdi under the taproom table, where the police found him, between the beer pipes. And who, when he knew he was going to die, kept his smile; the sticky stuff was washed out of his cuffs and the waiter’s white shirt starched so it was stiff and shining; they came for him only the next morning, as he was going off to work with his sandwiches and his patent leather shoes under his arm. He got into their car
and was not seen again
. No white cross, no flowers for the waiter Alfred Schrella. Not even
shot while attempting to escape—was simply not seen again
.

Edith had ironed and starched, polished the extra pair of black shoes, cleaned the white ties, while I studied, playfully studied—Ovid and conic sections, the thoughts and deeds of Henry the First and Henry the Second and Tacitus, and William the First’s and William the Second’s thoughts and deeds. Kleist, and spherical trigonometry. Talented, talented, quite unusually talented, a worker’s child who had to learn exactly what the others had to learn, in face of four thousand times more obstacles, and dedicated furthermore to noble deeds. I even allowed myself one additional, personal pleasure:
Hölderlin
.