The Clown (18 page)

“Yes,” I said.

“And I am prepared to finance that for you.”

My knee felt as fat and round as a gasometer. Without opening my eyes I groped my way around the chair, sat down, groped for the cigarettes on the table like a blind man. My father cried out in alarm. I can pretend to be a blind man so well that people believe I am blind. I felt blind too, maybe I would stay blind. What I was acting was not a sightless man but a man who has just lost his sight, and when I had finally got the cigarette into my mouth I felt flame from Father’s lighter, felt, too, how violently it trembled.

“Son,” he said anxiously, “are you ill?”

“Yes,” I said softly, drew on the cigarette, inhaled deeply, “I am terribly ill, but not blind. Pains in my stomach, my head, my knee, a rapidly proliferating depression—but the worst thing is, I know perfectly well Genneholm is right, about ninety-five per cent, and I even know what he went on to say. Did he mention Kleist?”

“Yes,” said my father.

“Did he say I must first lose my soul—be totally empty, then I could afford to have one again. Did he say that?”

“Yes,” said my father, “how do you know?”

“Hell,” I said, “after all I know his theories, and where he
gets them from. But I don’t want to lose my soul, I want to get it back.”

“You’ve lost it?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“In Rome,” I said, opened my eyes and laughed.

My father had really gone quite pale and haggard with fear. His laugh sounded relieved and yet annoyed.

“You rascal,” he said, “was the whole thing put on?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “not entirely and not well. Genneholm would say: still far too naturalistic—and he is right. Pansies are usually right, they have a tremendous sense of empathy—but nothing else. However.”

“You rascal,” said my father, “you really took me in.”

“No,” I said, “no, I didn’t take you in any more than a genuinely blind person takes you in. Believe me, all that groping and feeling around for support is not absolutely necessary in every case. Many a blind man acts the blind man though he really is blind. Right now, before your very eyes, I could hobble from here to the door in such a way that you would cry out with pain and pity and call a doctor immediately, the best surgeon in the world, Fretzer. Shall I?” I had already got up.

“Don’t, please,” he said, distressed, and I sat down again.

“Please, do sit down yourself,” I said, “I wish you would, it gets on my nerves when you stand around like that.”

He sat down, poured himself some soda water and gave me a puzzled look. “I can’t make you out,” he said, “will you give me a straight answer. I will pay the fees for your tuition, you can go where you like. London, Paris, Brussels. Only the best will do.”

“No,” I said wearily, “that’s just it, it won’t. Studying is no good to me any more, all I need now is work. I studied when I was thirteen, fourteen, till I was twenty-one. Only you never noticed. And if Genneholm believes I could go on studying now—then he’s stupider than I thought.”

“He is an expert,” said my father, “the best I know.” “The best there is, even,” I said, “but he’s only an expert, he knows something about theater, about tragedy, commedia dell’arte, pantomime. But just look what happens to his own attempts at comedy when he suddenly turns up with mauve shirts and black silk ties. Any amateur would be ashamed of himself. It isn’t critics being critical that is so bad—the worst thing about them is that they are so uncritical and lacking in humor toward themselves. It’s a shame. Of course, he really is an expert—but if he thinks I ought to begin studying again after six years on the stage—that’s nonsense!”

“You don’t need the money then?” asked my father. A slight trace of relief in his voice made me suspicious. “Oh yes I do,” I said, “I need the money.” “Then what do you want to do? Go on performing, under these circumstances?”

“What circumstances?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, embarrassed, “you know what your press is like.”

“My press?” I said, “for the last three months I’ve only been appearing in the provinces.”

“I managed to get hold of the reviews,” he said, “I have been through them with Genneholm.”

“Damn it all,” I said, “how much did you pay him?” He flushed. “Never you mind,” he said, “now, what are your plans?”

“To practice,” I said, “to work, for six months, a year, I don’t know yet.”

“Where?”

“Here,” I said, “where else?” He hardly managed to hide his dismay.

“I won’t bother the family and I won’t compromise you, I won’t even come to your At Home days,” I said. He flushed. I had gone a few times to their At Homes, like any other guest, without going to see them privately, as it were. I had had cocktails and olives, a cup of tea, and as I left I had put cigarettes in my pocket, so blatantly that the servants saw and turned aside
in embarrassment.

“Oh,” was all my father said. He turned in his chair. What he really wanted to do was get up and stand by the window. Now he just looked down and said: “I would prefer you to choose the sensible way which Genneholm suggests. I don’t care for financing something uncertain. Haven’t you saved any money? Surely you must have made quite a nice bit these last few years.”

“I haven’t saved a single pfennig,” I said, “I possess one solitary mark.” I took the mark out of my pocket and showed it to him. He actually leaned over and looked at it as if it were a strange insect.

“I find it hard to believe you,” he said, “I certainly didn’t bring you up to be a spendthrift. About how much would you need a month, what had you in mind?”

My heart was hammering. I hadn’t thought he would want to give me such direct help. I considered. Not too little and not too much, and still I had to have enough, but I had no idea, not the faintest, how much I would need. Electricity, phone, and of course somehow or other I had to live. I was sweating with anxiety. “First of all,” I said, “I need a thick rubber mat, as big as this room, twenty by fifteen, you could get that cheaper for me from your Rhenish Rubber Company.”

“Fine,” he said with a smile, “I’ll even make you a present of it. Twenty by fifteen—but Genneholm feels you shouldn’t fritter yourself away on acrobatics.”

“I won’t, Dad,” I said, “aside from the mat I suppose I would need a thousand marks a month.”

“A thousand marks,” he said. He got up, his dismay was genuine, his lips quivered.

“All right then,” I said, “how much did you think?” I had no idea how much money he really had. A thousand marks for a year—I could calculate that much—was twelve thousand marks, and a sum like that wouldn’t kill him. He really was a millionaire, Marie’s father had carefully explained it to me
and worked it all out once when I was there. I didn’t remember exactly. He had shares and “a finger in the pie” all over the place. Even in this bath stuff factory.

He paced up and down behind his chair, silently, moving his lips as if he were counting. Maybe he really was but it took a very long time.

I remembered again how shabbily they had behaved when I left Bonn with Marie. Father had written me that for moral reasons he refused me all support and that he expected me to “go to work” to support myself “and that unfortunate, respectable girl whom you have seduced,” and that, as I knew, he had always thought highly of old Mr. Derkum, both as a political opponent and a man, and it was a scandal.

We lived in a boarding house in Cologne-Ehrenfeld. The seven hundred marks which Marie’s mother had left her were gone in a month, and I thought we had managed very economically and sensibly.

We lived close to the Ehrenfeld station, the window of our room looked out on the red-brick wall of the station embankment, brown-coal trains rumbled into the city full, came out empty, a comforting sight, a stirring sound, it always reminded me of the stable financial situation at home. The view from the bathroom out onto galvanized tubs and washing lines, sometimes when it was dark the sound of a falling can or a bagful of garbage which someone had furtively thrown from a window into the yard. I often lay in the bath and sang liturgical songs, till the landlady first forbade me to sing—“People think I have a renegade pastor for a lodger”—and then cut off my bath credit. In her opinion I took too many baths, she found them unnecessary. Sometimes she raked around with a poker in the parcels of garbage that had been thrown into the yard, to determine the despatcher from the contents: onion skin, coffee grounds, chop bones, gave her material for involved combinations, which she supplemented by means of information casually obtained in the butcher shops and grocery stores,
never with any success. The garbage never admitted of conclusive deductions as to individuality. Threats which she sent up into the laundry-hung sky were formulated in such a way that everyone took them personally: “No one can put anything over on me, I know what’s what.” In the morning we always lay by the window and watched for the postman, who sometimes brought us parcels from Marie’s friends, Leo, Anna, at very irregular intervals checks from Grandfather, but from my parents only demands that I “take my fate in hand and overcome my misfortune by my own efforts.”

Later on my mother wrote that she had “cast me out.” She is capable of such vile taste that at times it borders on idiocy, for she took the expression from a novel by Schnitzler called
The Divided Heart
. In this novel a girl is “cast out” by her parents because she refuses to bear a child which has been fathered by a “noble but weak artist,” an actor, I think. Mother quoted a sentence word for word from Chapter 8 of the novel “My conscience compels me to cast you out.” She considered this a suitable quotation. In any case, she “cast me out.” I am sure she only did it because it was a way of avoiding conflict in her conscience as well as her bank account. At home they expected me to start a heroic career: go into a factory or take a construction job in order to support my mistress, and they were all disappointed when I didn’t.

Even Leo and Anna made no bones about their disappointment. In their mind’s eye they already saw me setting off at daybreak with sandwiches and Thermos, blowing a kiss up to Marie’s window, saw me coming home in the evening “tired but contented,” reading the paper and watching Marie knitting. But I made no effort whatever to turn this vision into living reality. I stayed with Marie, and Marie much preferred it when I stayed with her. I felt I was an “artist” (much more than I ever did later), and we made our childish ideas of Bohemian life come true: with Chianti bottles and unbleached cotton curtains and gaily colored raffia. The memory of that
year still moves me to tears. When Marie went to our landlady at the end of the week to ask for a postponement of the rent, the landlady always began to argue and ask why I didn’t go out to work. And Marie would say with her wonderful pathos: “My husband is an artist, you see, an artist.” Once I heard her call out from the dirty staircase into the landlady’s open room: “Yes, an artist,” and the landlady called back in her hoarse voice: “What, an artist? And he’s your husband too? The Marriage License Bureau must have been pleased about that.” What annoyed her most was that we nearly always stayed in bed till ten or eleven. She hadn’t enough imagination to realize that this was the easiest way for us to save a meal and current for the little electric radiator, and she didn’t know that I usually couldn’t go and practice in the little parish hall till close to noon, because in the mornings there was always something going on there: Child Care, Communion instruction, cooking lessons, or a Catholic building co-op’s counseling service.

We lived near the church where Heinrich Behlen was chaplain, and he had got me this little hall with a stage as a place to practice, also the room in the boarding house. In those days a lot of Catholics were very kind to us. The woman who gave the cooking lessons in the church house always let us have the leftovers, usually just soup and pudding, sometimes meat as well, and when Marie helped her tidy up she would occasionally stuff a package of butter or a bag of sugar into Marie’s pocket. Sometimes she stayed behind when I started my practicing, laughing herself sick, and made some coffee in the afternoon. Even when she found out we were not married she was still nice. I had the feeling she never expected artists to be “properly married.” Some days, when it was cold, we went over there earlier. Marie joined in the cooking lessons, and I sat in the cloakroom beside an electric radiator and read. Through the thin wall I heard the giggling in the hall, then serious talks on calories, vitamins, weights and measures, yet on the whole it all sounded very cheerful. On the days when there was Child
Care, we were not allowed to turn up till it was all over. The young woman doctor in charge was very firm, in a friendly way, and was terribly scared of the dust I stirred up when I hopped around on the stage. Later she maintained that the dust was still hanging in the air next day and was dangerous for the babies, and she saw to it that I was not allowed to use the stage for twenty-four hours before she had her consulting hours. Heinrich Behlen even got into trouble over it with his pastor, who had no idea I practiced there every day and who told Heinrich “not to carry brotherly love too far.” Sometimes I also went to church with Marie. It was so nice and warm there, I always sat over the heating duct; it was absolutely quiet too, the street noises outside seemed infinitely far away, and in a comforting way the church was empty: only seven or eight people, and at times I had the sensation of being one of this quiet sad gathering of survivors of something which in all its impotence had a majestic quality. Apart from Marie and me, nothing but old women. And the undramatic way in which Heinrich Behlen conducted the service suited the dark, ugly church so well. Once I even helped him out when his altar boy didn’t turn up, at the end of the Mass when the book is carried from right to left. I simply noticed that Heinrich suddenly faltered, lost the rhythm, and I quickly ran over, brought the book from the right, genuflected when I reached the center of the altar, and carried it to the left. I would have felt I was being discourteous had I not helped Heinrich in his dilemma. Marie went scarlet, Heinrich smiled. We had known each other a long time, he had been captain of the football team at school, older than I was. Generally we waited for Heinrich outside by the sacristy after Mass, he would invite us for breakfast, buy eggs, ham, coffee and cigarettes at the grocer’s on credit, and he was always as happy as a kid when his housekeeper was sick.