Billiards at Half-Past Nine (8 page)

‘It goes to your house,’ I said.

‘Anybody who comes to my house comes by water, even the police. Even my son comes by boat, when he comes at all, which isn’t often.’

‘Are the police there now?’

‘What do you want to know that for, sonny?’

‘Because they’re looking for me.’

‘Been stealing?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I just refused the
Host of the Beast
.’

Ships, I was thinking, ships with dark holds, and captains
with a lot of practice fooling customs men. I won’t take up much room, no more than a rolled-up carpet. I would get across the border stowed in a rolled-up sail.

‘Come down here,’ said Trischler. ‘They can see you up there from the other side of the river.’

I turned around and let myself slowly slide down the embankment toward Trischler, grabbing at bunches of grass as I went.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ the old man said. ‘I know your face, but I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Faehmel,’ I said.

‘Of course. They’re after you, it came over on the early morning news. I might have known it when they described you. Red scar on the bridge of the nose. That was when we rowed across at high tide and ran into the bridge piles when I misfigured the current. You banged your head on the iron gunwale.’

‘Yes, and I wasn’t allowed to come over here again.’

‘But you did come again.’

‘Not for long—until I got on the outs with Alois.’

‘Come on. And duck when we go under the swing bridge or you’ll get a dent in your head—and they won’t be letting you come here again. How did you get away from them?’

‘Nettlinger came into my cell at sun-up. He took me out the back way, where the underground passages lead to the railroad cut, by Williams’ Pit. He said, “Get lost, start running. All I can give you is an hour’s lead; after that I’ll have to report it to the police. As it is I’ve had to go right around the city to make it here.” ’

‘So that’s it,’ the old man said. ‘That’s what you get when you start throwing bombs! You would go and take an oath and—anyway, yesterday I packed up one of your boys and shipped him across the frontier.’

‘Yesterday?’ I asked. ‘Who was it?’

‘Schrella,’ he said. ‘He holed up here and I had to make him leave on the
Anna Katharina.
’

‘Alois always wanted to be mate and steer the
Anna Katharina!
’

‘He is mate on the
Katharina
. Come on, now.’

I began to stagger as we went toward Trischler’s house along the slant-topped wall at the foot of the embankment. I got to my feet, fell again, again got up, and doing this jerked skin and shirt apart, stuck them together, pulled them apart, over and over, and the pain, like thorns being stuck in my back again and again, made me half lose consciousness. Movements, colors, smells from a thousand memories became all mixed up, piled one on top of the other. All sorts of numbers floated through my mind, changing color, taking on different angles and directions, generated out of me by the pain.

High tide, I thought, high tide, as again a desire came over me to throw myself in and be carried away to the gray horizon.

In my dreamlike state I was troubled by the question whether a barbed-wire whip could be hidden in a lunch box. Movements remembered changed into lines, which joined into figures, green, black and red ones, representing, like a cardiogram, a particular person’s rhythms. The way Alois Trischler jerked his line to set the hook when we were fishing in the Old Harbor, the way he cast his lure out into the water, the way his arm traveled as he held his rod against the pull of the current, thus indicating its speed. Also, the way Nettlinger raised his arm to throw the ball into Schrella’s face, the trembling of his lips, the twitching of his nostrils, these changed into a gray design like a dead spider. Like so much information coming over a teletype from somewhere I couldn’t place, people unfolded out of my memory, so many stigmata. Edith, the Edith of that evening after the rounders game when I went home with Schrella. Edith’s face out in the park at Blessenfeld, when she lay under me on the grass, all wet from the summer rain. Raindrops glistened on her blond hair, rolled along her eyebrows, a garland of silver drops on Edith’s face which rose and fell with her breathing. This garland was fixed in my
memory in a form suggesting the skeleton of some sea creature found on a rust-colored beach, its constituent drops multiplied into countless little clouds of the same size. Then there was the line of her mouth as she said to me, ‘They’ll kill you.’ That was Edith.

I was tormented in the dream by having lost my school bag—I had always been meticulous about everything—and I found myself tearing my gray-green copy of Ovid from a scrawny chicken’s beak. I haggled with the usherette in the movie house over the Hölderlin poem she had ripped out of my anthology because she found it so beautiful:
Firm in compassion the eternal heart
.

When I came to it was suppertime, with Frau Trischler bringing in the meal, milk, an egg, bread, an apple. Her hands became young when she bathed my flayed back in wine. Pain flamed through me when she squeezed wine from the sponge and let it flow into the furrows on my back. Afterwards she poured oil over me, and I asked her where she had learned to do it like that.

‘It tells you how in the Bible,’ she said. ‘And I’ve done it once before, on your friend Schrella! Alois will be here the day after tomorrow and leave Ruhrort Sunday for Rotterdam. You needn’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘They’ll get you through. On the river people know each other, as if they lived on the same street. More milk, young man?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Don’t worry. Monday or Tuesday you’ll be in Rotterdam. Now what is it? What’s the matter?’

Nothing. Nothing. The all-points bulletin was still out: red scar on bridge of nose. The father, the mother, Edith—I felt no desire to calculate the differential of their kindnesses, to count off the rosary of my pain. The river was bright and cheerful, with white excursion boats flying gaily colored pennants, freight carriers painted red, green and blue, carrying coal and wood back and forth, from here to there. On the
other side of the river ran the green boulevard, the terrace outside the Cafe Bellevue was snow-white. Beyond, the tower of St. Severin’s, the sharp red light running up the corner of the Prince Heinrich Hotel, and my parents’ house only a hundred steps more. They would be sitting down to dinner now, a full-dress meal with my father presiding over it like a patriarch. Saturday, celebrated with sabbatical formality. Was the red wine too cool? The white cool enough?

‘More milk, young man?’

‘No thanks, Frau Trischler, really.…’

… The men on motorcycles went racing through the city from billboard to billboard with their red-bordered bulletins: ‘Execution! The Student, Robert Faehmel.…’ Father would be saying a prayer at the supper table:
He who has been scourged for us
. Mother’s hand would describe a pattern of humility at her breast, before saying: ‘It’s a wicked world, not many are pure in heart.’ And Otto’s resonant heels would be beating out brother, brother, on the floor of our house, on the flagstones outside, on down the street to the Modest Gate.…

That hooting outside was the
Stilte
, the clear notes cutting into the evening sky, white lightning furrows in dark blue. Now I was stretched out on a tarpaulin, like someone being prepared for burial at sea. Alois lifted up one side of the canvas to wrap me in, and, woven white on gray, I could clearly read: ‘Morrien. Ijmuiden.’ Frau Trischler bent over me, weeping, and kissed me, and Alois slowly rolled me in as if I were a particularly valuable corpse, and took me up in his arms.

‘Boy!’ the old man called after me, ‘don’t forget us, boy!’

Evening breeze, the
Stilte
giving another hoot of friendly warning. The sheep were bleating in their pen, the ice cream man was shouting ‘Ice cream, ice cream!’ then stopped, which no doubt meant he was filling crumbly cones with vanilla ice cream. The plank swayed when Alois carried me aboard. A low voice asked, ‘Is that him?’ and Alois answered, in the same
low way, ‘It’s him.’ Leaving, he murmured to me, ‘Remember, by Tuesday night you’ll be in the harbor of Rotterdam.’ Other arms carried me below decks down a companionway. It smelled below first of oil, then of coal, and finally of wood, the hooting now seemed far away, the
Stilte
shuddered, a deep rumbling sound grew stronger. I could feel we were moving, on down the Rhine, always farther away from St. Severin’s.”

St. Severin’s shadow had drawn nearer. Already it filled the left-hand billiard room window, and was closing in on the one to the right. Pushed forward by the sun, time drew closer like a threat, filling up the great clock which would soon spew it out in terrible chimes. The billiard balls rolled on, white-green, red-green. Years were cut into pieces, seconds, seconds drawn out into eternities by the clock’s calm voice. If only he wouldn’t have to fetch more cognac, anticipate calendar and clock, put up with the sheep-lady and
a thing like that should never have been born
. Better just to hear the
Feed my lambs
saying again, hear about the woman who had lain in the grass in the summer rain, about the boats coming to anchor, the women walking up gangways, the ball that Robert hit, Robert who had never taken the
Host of the Beast
, who played on wordlessly, always making new patterns with cue and ball on two square meters of green table.

“How about you, Hugo?” he quietly said. “Aren’t you going to tell me any stories today?”

“I don’t know how long it went on, but it seemed forever to me. Every day, after school, they beat me up. Sometimes I stayed put until I was sure they’d all gone home to eat, until the cleaning woman arrived, down in the hallway where I was waiting, and asked me, ‘Why are you still hanging around, boy? Your mother must be looking for you.’

But I was afraid, I even used to wait until the cleaning woman had gone, and get myself locked in the school. I didn’t
always get away with it; most of the time the cleaning woman threw me out before she locked up. But when I managed to get locked in, I was glad. Then I scrounged food in the desks and garbage pails which the cleaning woman had put out in the hall for the collector, plenty of sandwiches, apples and leftover cake. That way I was all alone in the school and they couldn’t do anything to me. I hid in the teachers’ clothes closet behind the cellar stairwell, because I was afraid they might look in through the window and find me. But it was a long time before they found out how I used to hide out in the school. I squatted there often for hours, waiting until it was nighttime and I could open a window and get out. Lots of times I would just stare and stare at the empty schoolyard. Can anything be emptier than a schoolyard, late in the afternoon? It was fun, until they discovered how I was getting myself locked in the school. I scrunched up there in the teachers’ closet or underneath the window ledge and waited to see if I could feel something I only knew by name—hatred. I wanted to hate them real bad, Doctor, but I couldn’t. I was just plain afraid. Some days I waited only till three or four o’clock, thinking they’d be all gone by then and I might run across the street quick, past Meid’s stable, round the churchyard and then home, where I could lock myself in. But they took turns going home to eat—that was one thing they couldn’t do, go without food—and when they jumped me I could smell what they’d been eating, even before they got real close, potatoes and gravy, roast meat, ham and cabbage. And while they were working me over I used to think, why did Christ die, anyway? What good did it ever do me? What do I care if they pray every morning, take Communion every Sunday and hang a big crucifix in the kitchen, over the tables where they eat their potatoes and gravy, roast meat, ham and cabbage? Nothing, that’s how much I care. What’s it all amount to, if they lie in wait every day and beat me up? It’s been going on like this for five or six hundred years. Yet they’re always shooting off about how old their church is, and they’ve
been burying their ancestors in the churchyard for a thousand years, for a thousand years they’ve been praying and then eating potatoes and gravy, and ham and cabbage with the Crucifix on the wall. So what? You know what they used to holler at me when they were beating me up?
God’s little lamb
. That was my nickname.”

Red-green, white-green, from the billiard balls new figurations emerged like so many signals. Then were swiftly scattered. Leaving naught behind. Music with no melody, painting without likeness, quadrilaterals, rectangles, rhombs, endlessly multiplied. Clicking billiard balls caroming from green cushions.

“And later I tried another way. I locked the door at home, piled furniture in front of it, whatever I could find, boxes, mattresses, odds and ends. Until they told the police, who came to get the boy who was playing hookey. They surrounded the house and hollered, ‘Come out of there, you devil.’ But I wouldn’t come out and so they broke the door down, shoved the furniture to one side and then they had me. They took me off to school, to be thrashed again, pushed into the gutter again and again made fun of with that
God’s little lamb. Feed my lambs
—but I was one lamb they didn’t feed, if I ever was His to begin with. No use, Doctor. The wind blows, the snow falls, the trees turn green, the leaves fall—they go right on eating potatoes and gravy, ham and cabbage.

Then, of course, sometimes my mother was at home, drunk and dirty, smelling of death, giving off the stink of decay, screaming, ‘
whywhywhy!
’ She yelled it more times than all the
Lord have mercy on us’es
in all the priest’s prayers put together. Used to drive me crazy when she hollered ‘
whywhywhy
’ like that for hours at a time. I ran away in the rain, a God’s little lamb soaked to the skin, hungry, mud sticking to my shoes, all over me. I got plastered with wet mud from head to toe, hiding down there in the beetfields. But I’d rather be down in the
mucky beet rows, letting the rain pour on me, than listen to that awful
whywhywhy
. Then, sooner or later, someone or other would take pity on me and bring me back home, or back to school, back to that hole called Denklingen. So then they walloped me again and called me
God’s little lamb
, and my mother kept on with her
whywhywhy
rosary, so I ran away again, and again someone took pity on me, and this time they took me to a child-welfare center. No one knew me there, none of the kids and none of the grown-ups, but I hadn’t been two days in the center before they were calling me
God’s little lamb
the same as before, and I was afraid, even though they didn’t beat me. They laughed at me, because there were so many words I didn’t know. The word ‘breakfast,’ for instance. All I knew was ‘eat’—whenever anything was there, whenever I found anything. But when I looked at the bulletin board and saw ‘Breakfast: butter, 30 grams; bread, 200 grams; marmalade, 50 grams; coffee and milk,’ I asked someone ‘What’s breakfast?’ They all surrounded me, the grown-ups, too, laughing and saying, ‘Don’t you know what breakfast is? You’ve never had breakfast?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘How about the Bible,’ one of the grown-ups said, ‘haven’t you ever read the word breakfast there?’ And then the other grown-up said to him, ‘Are you sure the word breakfast’s in the Bible?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘but somewhere, in some reading or other, or at home, he must have heard the word breakfast at least once. After all, pretty soon he’ll be thirteen, and savages aren’t that bad, it just goes to show how poorly people speak today.’ I didn’t know, either, there’d been a war a little while before, and they asked me if I’d ever been in a cemetery where it said ‘Fallen’ on the gravestones, the way we Germans say it when we mean ‘Killed in Battle.’ I told them, yes, I’d seen ‘Fallen.’ Then what did I think ‘Fallen’ meant? I said I imagined that the people buried there had died from falling down. That made them laugh louder than they had at ‘breakfast.’ Then they gave us history lessons, from the earliest times on down, but soon I was fourteen, Doctor, and the hotel manager came
to the center and we—all of the fourteen-year-olds—had to line up in the hall outside the rector’s office, and the rector came out with the hotel manager. They walked past us, looking us over, and then both said, as if they had only one mouth between them, ‘We’re looking for some boys to go into hotel
service
. We need boys who will know how to
serve.’
But the only one they picked was me. I had to put my things in a box right away. Then I came up here with the manager, and in the car he said to me, ‘All I hope is you never find out how much your looks are worth. You’re the purest God’s little lamb I ever laid eyes on, that’s for a fact.’ I was afraid, Doctor. I still am. I’m always thinking they’re going to beat me.”