The Boxer (26 page)

Irma immediately stopped crying, turned on the light, and posed the
insane
question: “How long have you known?”

“Since right now,” he said, “let’s go back to sleep.”

The following afternoon, while Mark was at school, she behaved normally, but Aron found that her friendliness was affected. He figured that she regretted having opened yesterday’s topic and having forced his confession. He felt relieved that Irma now knew where she stood; yesterday’s conversation had clarified the situation. Now he hoped once and for all to be spared such sieges. She wouldn’t provoke such a thrashing a second time, only a long silence would bring back the old ease.

But Irma was
too proud or too dumb
to be silent for long. After her housework was done, she started over from the beginning. She asked, “Were you being serious last night?”

“Yes,” Aron said.

She nodded, as if that was the answer she were expecting. She then asked him to list all her flaws, openly and without mercy, she said; perhaps she could discard one or another. He found this funny and touching. He said, “Dear child, how can you say something like that? Do you think a man can tell a woman she should behave in this way or that, then love her?”

Irma raised her hand as if she had immediately recognized the simplemindedness of her request. She asked, to change the subject, if Aron thought that, in the future, marriage between them would be out of the question.

“I can’t say that either,” he said. “I’m only asking you for the last time to cut it out.”

“Is that a threat?”

Her question, Aron says, sounded like the abrupt end of all modesty. He sat there in silence and thought, Irma would never become his wife, like Lydia had once been and Paula
playfully
could have become. He was angry that she should torment him with her foolish questions instead of demanding that he explain why he had lived with her for so long without loving her.
That would bother anybody
. But not Irma apparently; she was intent only on arranging a wedding, why, he still did not understand. Stubborn and nonsensical, she tried to change their current situation without realizing he would not be pushed in the direction she wanted. Aron went shopping.

When he came back, Irma asked him, as if no word had been spoken on the matter: “Please tell me, Arno, why are you so afraid of marriage? Did you have a bad experience?”

To this he said, “I won’t be angry if you leave.”

After a
frightful second
, she stood up and left the room. To cry undisturbed outside, Aron thought, but she came back with two empty suitcases and started packing. She was astonishingly composed, after all those years, he found. Her face betrayed nothing but concentration; she didn’t want to forget anything. Aron watched her for a couple of minutes, then he asked if he could help her. She ignored the question, so he went out. He didn’t want to give the impression that he was sitting there only to make sure she didn’t take something that wasn’t hers. When he went back to the room a while later, she had filled only one suitcase; all the cupboard doors and the drawers were open. He said, “Mark will be back in two hours. You’ll say good-bye?”

Again she said nothing. Aron took a porcelain figurine from the closet, one he knew Irma liked particularly, and held it out to her. She ignored it. (The figurine still stands in his living room — two large black dogs fight while a very small brown one brightly holds a bone in his mouth. Aron says that if he hadn’t offered the figurine to Irma, she would have taken it for sure.) Once she finished packing, she leafed through the common photo album and took out two photographs. In one of them Mark was wearing his boxing outfit; in the other he was with her on the beach by the Black Sea. She laid the pictures on top; then she closed the second suitcase and was finished. Aron knew that it made no sense to ask her, in her condition, if she wanted to drink a cup of tea with him. Suddenly he felt sorry for her.

“I only want to tell you one more thing,” she said. “Think carefully about why I stayed by your side all these years.”

“Well, why?” he asked.

“Think about it.”

It was an outright demand to consider the worst reasons, the most disadvantageous for Aron, as the right ones. Nevertheless he was thankful that she spared him the list; even in anger she couldn’t overcome
what remained of her modesty
. He said, “Fine, I’ll think about it. Do you have enough money?”

“Thank you very much.”

He took three thousand marks from his little box, he cannot explain why that precise sum. At the time, he says, he thought that three thousand marks were appropriate; there wasn’t a fixed rate. He opened the second suitcase, put the money on top of the photographs, and closed it again; she wouldn’t have taken it, he thought, in her hand. In the corridor he asked where she was thinking of going. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I don’t want to pursue you. Just in case you forgot something.”

“I didn’t forget anything, Aron,” she said. Those were her last words; she probably went to her parents’.

Aron stood baffled, staring at the slammed door. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out how she knew the secret of his name; she had never used it before. Perhaps he had slipped up once without noticing — there were no documents in the apartment. In any case, he says, the last day with Irma had been the most eventful of their life together, and her very last word had been the most significant.

S
ince, with the passage of time, the house threatened to fall to pieces, Aron hired an elderly lady from the neighborhood to come three mornings a week to guarantee a minimum of order — an arrangement worked out with the help of the neighborhood grocer.

All of a sudden, the focus of the stories shifts to Mark; all the other people have disappeared. From this point on, Mark represents Aron’s only connection to the outside world. Mark is described to me as a boy who didn’t feel the need to communicate. Aron declares that while Mark’s relationship with him was open it was not overly friendly. He often felt that Mark was struggling with problems he knew nothing about, and his occasional declarations that he was always available if his advice was needed never prompted Mark to discard his reserve.

Mark’s career as a boxer was long over. Training took up so much time that two years later Mark lost all interest; his schoolmates didn’t dare challenge him anymore. Instead he immersed himself in his studies; Aron wouldn’t have been upset if Mark had studied less, because he considered him bright enough to get passing grades without working too hard. To rein in his eagerness to learn, Aron gave Mark theater tickets or money for other distractions, but he soon realized that for Mark the issue wasn’t being the best;
the subjects
actually interested him. In which case, Aron says, any further attempt to hold him back would have been a sin, like an attempt to thwart his thirst for knowledge. He asked Mark how he could help him with his studies, Mark should call on him at any time. At first Mark didn’t know how, then he gave him a piece of paper with titles of books and names of authors. Aron became the client of several bookstores and antiques shops in remote corners of the city; //
was a pleasure
.

*  *  *

W
hat kinds of books did he read?”

“I can’t remember, there were so many. The Bible was one.”

“Where are they now?”

“Sold.”

“Sold? After Mark read the books he sold them?”

“Not him, me. Just three years ago — they took up so much space. I put an ad in the paper and sold them all.”

T
he closer graduation came, the more Aron was interested in which subject Mark wanted to study at the university. Aron would have liked him to become a
doctor or a jurist
, yet he knew he could not influence Mark’s decisions. The possibility of influence, he says, had slipped from his fingers at one point; the need for advice had to be matured, but at this stage both of them decided their personal affairs on their own. To an outsider that may have looked like independence, Aron says, except that his own independence was purely theoretical: since he had virtually no personal affairs, there was nothing to decide.

“Maybe I won’t study at all,” Mark once said.

“Not at all?”

“We’ll see.”

He probably didn’t realize how much he frightened his father with that statement. From then on, Aron refrained from any further prying; he wanted to avoid an escalation of Mark’s aversion to the university out of defiance.

Thus he started his own investigation. Without telling Mark, he went to the university and asked how soon before one intended to enroll the application had to be submitted. He also wanted to know how good the chances were for applicants to be accepted in each of the various departments. He discovered that chances looked good for lawyers, less so for doctors. The employee at the admissions office smiled at the efforts of a solicitous father. He said, “If you want to be on the safe side, you should choose something like teaching.”

One day, out of context, Mark said, “Mathematics.”

“Mathematics?” Aron asked. “What about mathematics?”

“I will study mathematics,” Mark said.

He was very confused, Aron says; until that moment he had never for an instant thought of mathematics — so, very confused, but no longer afraid. A few minutes later, after the word had been repeated several times, mathematics actually didn’t sound bad. Mark declared he had decided for mathematics because he wanted to have a job in which the accuracy of the results could be determined by precise formulas and weren’t dependent on other people’s opinions.

D
id you often talk about politics?” I ask.

“Almost never,” Aron says. “What made you think of that?”

“Because the reason he gave you for wanting to study math is a political one,” I say.

“How did you arrive at that idea?” Aron shakes his head. “What he said was that you can argue about taste but not about numbers. You think that’s politics?”

A
ron mentions something odd — on Mark’s high school diploma there were an abundance of As, except in the subject of mathematics, where the teachers had graded his performance with a B. Aron feared that this might make it difficult for Mark to be accepted as a math major. He took him to task for not having made an effort to shine in the very subject most important to him. Did he think this B was some sort of a joke?

“Stop grumbling,” Mark said. “I did my best, it just wasn’t good enough.”

“I don’t believe you,” Aron said.

His worries proved unfounded; after a couple of nervous days the notice came to the house that nothing stood in the way of Mark’s enrollment. At which point Aron, wanting to make a little speech, said, “Sit down and listen to me.” He wanted to talk to Mark about how serious life was, as he would now find out for himself, about the end of his salad days, which he must not look back on with regret. Serious work, he wanted to say, above all when crowned with success, can bring great joy. And he didn’t want to forget to mention that, as Mark must know by now, one was responsible for one’s own progress. Yet after afew words Mark patted him on the back
paternally
and said, “It’s okay, Papa, I already know that.”

At first Aron was angry but, he says, he found Mark’s interruption understandable — young people have their own idea of how to be polite — and soon after he even considered it a sign of character. With this remark, Mark had spared them a lecture that would have
naturally
sounded wooden and shallow. Mark wasn’t the kind of person who pretended to be interested when he really wasn’t.

Halfway through the holidays, Mark asked Aron for three hundred marks. He wanted to go camping with his friends. Where? That would be decided along the way. Aron gave him the money, and Mark disappeared for almost four weeks. The unfamiliar solitude made no difference to Aron; he was only worried about Mark. For the first time since the end of the war Mark was out of his sight; once he got a postcard from Mecklenburg: “Everything’s fine, Mark.”

During those four weeks Aron often had to dwell on something inevitable, the day when Mark would leave home. Mark had hinted at nothing of the kind,
but life hinted at it;
students everywhere lived away from their parents, and not just for lack of space. Aron dreaded that moment but resolved not to stand in the way if ever Mark should express such a wish. He decided, however, to refrain from doing anything that would encourage this desire. Therefore, no deciding for him; no prying as far as possible; no pestering over trivialities; tolerance.

When Mark returned from his trip unscathed, the days resumed their normal rhythm. Neither then, nor in the following period of time, did Mark indicate in any way that he wanted an apartment of his own. Now and then he would bring girls home; Aron didn’t make any comments beyond the usual ones that men tend to exchange. As far as he could judge, the girls were decent in every respect. However, the nightly visits were clearly not to his liking; it was all he could do to keep his mouth shut. Otherwise Mark solemnly studied mathematics.

O
ur work is delayed by Aron’s illness. He’s sick for six months, so seriously in fact that I am afraid he won’t make it.

We sit as usual at the living room table, and he tells me student stories that I would have gladly skipped; he interrupts himself in the middle of a sentence. He stands up and goes out without saying a word. I’m worried that my face didn’t look attentive enough for his taste. I wait for a good ten minutes, until I have a feeling something’s amiss. He’s not in the kitchen; the bathroom door is locked from the inside. I knock and call out his name, but he doesn’t reply, so for the first time in my life I break down a door. As I head toward it I can’t help thinking how crazy this is, ridiculous. Aron is lying motionless on the tile floor, and I panic. I pull at him, try to lift him up — I can’t — how will I get him to my car? I think, With help from the neighbors. The first neighbor I find is more levelheaded than I am; he calls an emergency doctor. Together we carry Aron to the bed and moisten his forehead; he looks incredibly pale. The doctor answers me: “No, he’s not dead.”