The Boxer (28 page)

I
lay the letter on the table; curiously I think that I have never read a letter by an illegal immigrant from East Germany. Aron asks, “What do you think?”

“What should I think?” I say. “It’s a letter.”

He takes the letter and starts reading it, serious and concentrated, as if he were coming across each line for the first time. I don’t disturb him, even if there is a long pause. Aron takes his time, he doesn’t always read this slowly. Toward the end of the letter, his eyes fill with tears. “He wasn’t even twenty-one at the time,” he says quietly. He sounds full of admiration — writes such letters and isn’t even twenty-one — he wipes his face. But it doesn’t help, his face keeps crying. Mark releases emotions that aren’t so easy to repress. Aron goes to the cupboard and puts the letter in a shoe box. I ask, “Did he write other letters?”

I see that he can’t speak as he would like to; he goes up to the open window and leans out. Even his shoulders are crying on him, I know he doesn’t want to irritate me with his silence, I understand him completely. I leave; when I glance up discreetly from the sidewalk, his window is closed.

The following day there’s a little package on the table tied up with string, I estimate sixty to seventy letters. I undo the knot, pick up the one on top, and recognize it as yesterday’s letter. As I’m about to remove the second one from its envelope, Aron says, “No, don’t read it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want you to. They’re nobody’s business.”

“Then why did you put them here?”

“Because you’re skeptical,” Aron says. “You asked me if he wrote other letters — here’s the answer.”

I’ll only be able to read the letters with his permission, so for now, I have no choice but to comply. (Two days later we go for a little walk. When we get outside he notices that it’s cooler than he thought, he asks me to get a jacket for him from the apartment. He gives me the keys. In the apartment I remember the shoe box. I think, the opportunity will certainly arise for me to put the letters back unnoticed, but the fear of being discovered keeps me from stealing them. I can’t read them there, Aron is waiting outside the door; five minutes later he would know what I’m up to in his apartment. An hour later, when we’re back in the room, I suddenly get the audacious suspicion that Aron may have marked the letters, he could have been testing me.) I say, “It’s ashame. In this or another letter Mark must have answered your questions; correspondence is like a conversation. I could have a clearer idea of what you wrote to him.”

“For the hundredth time,” Aron says, smiling, “you are so skeptical. No matter what I tell you, you’ll think I wrote something completely different.”

“Nonsense. It’s just that no event can be replacedby its description, not even the best one.”

“You know what?” he says after a pause. “Let’s perform an experiment.” He talks loudly and has a merry face; perhaps he wants to show me how thoroughly he has overcome the mournfulness of the previous day. He says, “I’ll let you read all the letters, but first you must pay a little price. First you must tell me what I might have written him.”

“I can’t,” I say

“Don’t be such a coward,” he says encouragingly, “be a sport.”

I’m not sure. I think of possible reproaches in the letters to Mark, reprimands that may have lost their sharpness with time, defiant and proud claims — one can get along perfectly well on one’s own, it was better than ever before. I can imagine pleas, beseeching pleas for Mark to return, promises even. But I won’t play the game. I say, “No, no, I can’t guess.”

Aron nods, as if my answer were the most self-evident. In his eyes, I’m the kind of person who avoids taking risks and always does what’s most obvious — a little boring. He says, “Relax, I didn’t write to him.”

“You never answered him?”

“Does that surprise you?”

“You never wrote him a letter?”

He waits for the effect of his punch line to end, then he will let me know that he had no other choice. Mark’s departure had not only a physical meaning but primarily a moral one. To him it felt like the evidence of the utmost lack of interest in his father; he felt spat upon. Therefore, he considered Mark’s letters hypocritical, their intelligence couldn’t change that. Perhaps they were also the expression of a bad conscience, yet he couldn’t do much with a bad conscience if no attempt was made at reconciliation. And he, Aron, didn’t want to be a party to this hypocrisy. To enter a conversation, an increasingly cheerful chat via mail, doubtlessly implied participation, he says — Mark would have liked that. He asks me, “You understand that these aren’t my current thoughts? That I’m only telling you what I thought at the time?”

I nod.

“If traveling means getting around,” he says, “then he got around the world a lot. Look at the stamps.”

I leaf through the envelopes and see that they come from a wide range of countries — France, Morocco, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Mexico — there isn’t a single postcard. Mark never stayed in the same place for very long; there is only one letter from each country. In between there is always a letter from Hamburg; yet even on the letters from Hamburg I read different addresses below the sender’s name. If I’m not allowed to read the letters, at least I want to register the information proffered by the envelopes. Aron says, “Notice the last letters.”

The last one comes from Israel, I see, the previous one, the one before that, I count up to seven. With some effort I manage to make out the date of the last stamp. May 1967.

I
want to be honest with you: to say that I didn’t write to him is only a half-truth. When I received his first letter, I went to West Berlin — it wasn’t a problem at the time. I sat on an airplane and flew to Hamburg; within four hours of the arrival of his letter I was in Hamburg. I showed the envelope to a taxi driver, who found the road with no trouble; it was a shabby house. I had no idea what I would say to him; I thought that the moment I’d see him something would come to mind. But he wasn’t home. A woman opened the door; when I told her I was Mark’s father she let me in. The apartment was rather large, every room was rented to a different person, doors were constantly opening and closing. The woman said she had no idea when Mark was coming back, I could wait if I wanted. I sat down in his room and waited; the way he lived made me sick at heart. A bed and a closet and a chair, not even a desk but boxes. I sat there until nightfall; then the woman came in, I was embarrassed. I said I would leave and come back next morning, but she said it didn’t matter to her if I slept there. I slept in his bed, but the following day he didn’t come either. I looked around for a hotel in the neighborhood, I bought a toothbrush and underwear and went to his apartment twice a day to ask for him. In the meantime I did some sightseeing. I even went drinking once, on a road like that. On the fifth day the woman asked me if it wouldn’t be easier for me to leave a note, so he could call me when he came back. No one knew if he would come back the next day or in a month or never. I went there for two more days. The woman had to swear that she really had no idea where he could be, then I wrote him a note. I wrote: ‘Come back, this business can’t be so important for you to let your father die.’ Then I went home. In his following letter he wrote that he had been to Dortmund for a couple of days with an acquaintance and that he was upset he had missed me. If I had the time and the desire, he wrote, I should go visit him again, I should only warn him first. No word about my note, not even in his following letter. And now you know why I didn’t write to him.”

A
kron bought himself a television set. He finally retired. I don’t understand what he means by that. He considered a number of ways to pass the time, he says: feeding swans by the river, attending events organized by the Jewish community, or events organized by the victims of fascism, buying himself a dog, taking a little trip now and then, studying the wedding announcements in the newspaper. He considered all these and more and gave up. He thought he realized that the loss of Mark hurt him particularly because he knew it was his last. From a certain perspective one might even consider it an advantage; he had nothing left to lose, at least nothing that might hurt him.

The housekeeper guaranteed a minimum of order; Aron hardly ever saw her. He usually slept so late that she would have finished her work by the time he got up. Once she asked if it would be all right if, from time to time, she and her husband came over in the evening to watch some TV. Aron was taken aback by her audacity but consented. But he already regretted his decision during their first visit; her husband was a primitive person who said hardly a word, he stared at the set, his face impassive, and only budged from the most comfortable chair in the room when the program was over.
Besides
, he never let his pipe, which stank hideously, go out. Aron had to ventilate the room for half the night. They came more and more often, in the end almost every day, until one day Aron set the alarm for the morning and told the housekeeper that in the future he didn’t want any more visits. At that stage she resigned; she thought she didn’t deserve such pettiness.

From then on the apartment went to seed. Aron had reached the point, he says, where one even stops trying. (At the beginning of our acquaintance I found his rooms were in a frightful mess, they looked like a rubbish heap. In the meantime things have come to look different. He has a housekeeper again; I had to coax him for a long time before I was allowed to find him one.) But he let himself go wherever he still could; for example, he no longer paid any attention to his health. He smoked and drank again as much as he pleased, he lost all notion of time. He slept when he was tired and got up when he couldn’t sleep anymore, it had nothing to do with the fact that it was day or night. He didn’t wear his watch anymore. When the TV program was over or too boring, he went to the bars; his heart caused him hardly any trouble, except for
understandable
little attacks.

No one knew him in the bars, there were different guests and owners. But that soon changed; the owners greeted him in a friendly way because he was a quiet customer and provided a good turnover; the guests liked him because he never hesitated to buy a drink for someone who was thirsty. Sure, he says, some of them thought he was a sucker and took advantage of his generosity; yet as long as this took place within limits he controlled, it didn’t matter to him.

Once he had drinks with a man who had had some sort of argument with his wife. His wife was in love with another man, or he didn’t love his wife anymore,
whatever;
after a couple of drinks the man said he didn’t know where to spend the night. Aron offered him a bed, and the man gratefully accepted. A couple of days later another man said to Aron, You’ve already helped so-and-so, can I sleep at your place too? Aron granted him hospitality too, but soon he was sorry he had, because the man was very invasive. The next morning he disappeared with the second key, came back in the evening, slept there for several nights running,
completely at ease, as if he were at home
, one evening he brought a woman along. Aron threw him out and looked for another bar, in which nobody knew about his generosity.

Four times a year he received a postcard from the organization of those persecuted by the Nazi regime. Aron was required to go for medical checkups, or they offered him discussion groups if he wished to talk about his problems, or a member of the commission wrote announcing his visit. These last-named cards goaded Aron to a frenzy of activity. He was suddenly ashamed of the way he lived, of the apartment’s state of neglect, the stifling atmosphere. Suddenly he would stop drinking, and for several days he cleaned the apartment until it looked liked a
human being lived there
. He put the card announcing the visit on the table as an admonition; he didn’t want his visitor to think he was a case requiring special care — under no circumstances. The fear that they might force him to go to a home weighed heavily on him, and he succeeded in concealing his true condition,
sometimes just barely
. The member of the commission, usually a friendly woman Aron’s age and with a similar past, would find Aron in a cozy room. Sometimes, he says, he waited impatiently for her knock; if she hadn’t come with a purpose, perhaps he would have tried to make friends with her. They sat and drank tea and liquor, she was never in a rush. Topics of conversation were never lacking — they talked about new medicines or about the old times or about world politics or about children who outgrow us. When she left she was presumably convinced of leaving behind, as far as she could guess, a balanced person.

Mark’s letters arrived approximately every four weeks. Unlike the cards from the organization, they weren’t a reason to sober up; they always distressed him anew and hindered his attempt to forget.

After the first letters, in which Mark, as I learn summarily, primarily confined himself to describing his living conditions, he gradually turned to the question of why his father never replied.
He pretended
to be deeply concerned. He wrote that Aron had to understand how much his silence frightened him, even if he deserved punishment. He didn’t even know whether Aron was silent because he was angry or because something had happened to him. Therefore he didn’t even know if the silence was a punishment; apparently in one of the letters he wrote: “At least write to me saying that you will never write to me again.”

One Sunday afternoon the doorbell rang. Aron opened the door, and a young woman he had never seen before was standing in front of him. She looked at him, smiled, and was silent until he asked her what she wanted. At this she mumbled an apology, saying she had gone to the wrong door. Aron says he didn’t have sufficient presence of mind to interpret the situation correctly. Surprised, he simply watched as she went down the stairs. Her smile was suspicious. In the following letter from Mark he read: “Now at least I know that you’re still alive.”

After that, Mark didn’t complain about Aron’s silence anymore; his letters kept coming regularly, almost punctually once a month, as if at some point he had committed to it. They gradually lost all color, Aron says; with time they became inconsequential. To be fair, however, one must admit that in the long run it’s almost impossible to write meaningful letters to someone who doesn’t react. Yet, for whatever reason, in the following years he could only guess the important events in Mark’s life. Since the possibility of asking was out of the question, often only vague hints were available to figure out
what actually happened
.