The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse (34 page)

The first thing that Hermann Graff did after his release was to send a telegram from the nearest office: “May I come?”

Thereupon he rode to his bank and withdrew the entire remainder of his money, not much more than a thousand marks. The next hours were spent on the most necessary purchases, among them a suitcase. This was deposited along with his small handbag at the Anhalt Train Station. Then he ate somewhere.

There was nothing more to do but wait for the answer to his urgent telegram.

He walked slowly to the Tiergarten.

Now I should probably look up the friendly person who stood so selflessly by my side on the last day, he thought. But he was unable to do it. He suspected a world in which he did not belong and with which he had nothing in common. A small world of its own—full of various connections, special and particular interests, and endless idle gossip. His things could stay where they were until he needed them, until he knew how his future would be shaped. Perhaps he would yet return to Berlin one day.

No, he did not want to see him. Not today. He sat down on an empty bench by the small lake under the still completely bare trees. The water before him was black and dirty; the last chunks of ice were disintegrating, and yellowed leaves from the previous fall bordered its shore.

Was it the same place where he had sat a year ago, on the first day and one hour before it happened—unsuspecting of everything that this year was to bring him? He could no longer say.

But as he sat there, his thoughts went far away from this spot and from Berlin.

They went—without his knowing why—suddenly back to his first years of puberty.

In the park of his hometown they had played—on an early spring day like this one—he and his schoolmates. Police and robbers. He and one from his class—pursued robbers—had to hide behind some bushes. As they crouched there, breathless and in the indescribable expectation of the game, but safe for the moment, close by one another, the other boy kissed him several times on the mouth with intense passion—as if beside himself. But then their pursuers were already audible and they had to separate.

He had been so surprised that he was at first not clear about what had happened. This schoolmate was neither his friend nor were they bound by special and common interests (except the school).

He was a good-looking boy, not tall for his age, slim and clean. Never again were they alone together even for a moment. Rather, the other boy appeared to avoid him from then on. And of course they never talked about the event.

Why had he at this particular hour so vividly thought about this small and fleeting experience? He did not know. But it seemed to him all at once almost inconceivably beautiful.

A cool wind swept over the deserted paths of the park and over to his spot. But only when he saw how the powerless rays of the first sun struggled with the clouds in the gray sky, unable to break through, did he feel that it was too cold to sit here any longer. As he stood up, his sleeve brushed the nearest shrub and he saw on it the first, tender, yellow buds. Lightly and cautiously he passed his hand over them.

In the hall of the train station he then still had to wait for a long time. The reply could hardly be there before seven o’clock and he did not want to ask for it earlier.

He sat in a corner of the thoroughly heated, high room and observed the faces of the people around him—something he usually never did.

He looked at them, the men and the women—the old and the young, the fresh and the tired, the lively and the indifferent, without listening to what they were saying. He saw only the faces, as if he wanted to find what might lie hidden behind them. And he read unfriendliness and trust, bitterness and ill will, slyness and greed, dull resignation and all sorts of cares. He found many other things behind them. But what he sought, he did not find: understanding of life. It was for him as if they all were beyond help, fixed forever in the narrow circle of their respective lives, incapable of seeing, to say nothing of understanding, anything beyond—in the narrow circle from which there was no salvation to any kind of freedom of thought and of action. And they were—almost all—
so loud!

There was not one among these faces, not even one, to whom he would have been able to speak.

He no longer looked. It was hopeless. There was no understanding among the people of today beyond the entirely commonplace. And even there their lives were only quarrels and bickering; kicking and being kicked.

At seven o’clock he walked over to the post office to which he had asked the reply to be sent.

It was there: “Anytime.”

A half hour later the express train left for Munich.

12

The next morning he was sitting across from her in the comfortable living room of her home in the quiet suburb, high above the Isar and in a spacious garden.

She was a tall woman, still beautiful, with thick, gray hair and intelligent, brown eyes that never left him when he spoke.

*

Here are only isolated fragments of their conversations during the eight days he spent under her roof, which they carried out on long walks in the meadows above the river; and evenings, opposite one another at the fireplace.

*

“Now that I’m here, I will tell you everything,” he began directly, on the first evening.

“I do know so much already,” she gave as answer.

He looked at her.

“Not only the superficial facts of your—well, your bad luck . . .”

He thought he had not heard correctly.

“It was in the newspaper. I always look out for these cases particularly. But that is all so detached. What is not in the newspapers? And to what end—to be read today, forgotten tomorrow.

“Yes,” she continued, standing up. “I know much more about you than you believe.” She led him to a picture on the wall, and he looked into serious features and clear, kindly eyes.

He heard her firm voice:
“He,
too, found in this love the happiness and unhappiness of his life, suffered under it, and found pleasure in it. And he taught me to understand and respect this love.”

He, shaken, kept silent, and she continued after a pause:

“He was a good friend to his young friends, you can believe me, Hermann. Not all, certainly, but many felt and knew it, loved him in return, and revered and mourn him.”

*

When they were again sitting opposite one another:

“And I heard that you two were unhappily married?”

She laughed, with the bright laughter with which she must have charmed men earlier:

“It was no unhappy marriage. It was no marriage at all. It was—a happy friendship.”

She continued:

“It may be that I loved him once—I mean, loved him as we women love men. At any rate I did not want to lose him, when I realized the impossibility of this love. Not I him, nor he me. Thus we agreed to remain friends and together. Then—later—I loved him with an entirely different love.”

“That was possible?”

“Yes, it was possible. Because we mutually allowed one another perfect freedom. He was free, I was free. Thus we lived many years, until we both became old.

“Outwardly our friendship passed as a marriage—as an unhappy marriage, as I hear not for the first time.”

She continued speaking:

“We were often together, but not always by any means. We traveled much, and then mostly separately. Precisely everything was based on that free agreement, which must be the basis of each relationship from person to person and—almost never is.

“We were happy, he and I, together or separated, and then each in our own way,” she began again. “At least happy at times. More can no human being ask of his destiny.

“We loved and were loved in return—each according to our nature. And we
never
offended against
thatf

“And how are you living now?” asked her spellbound listener.

“In the memory of him—and the others. And—if you want it—now also a bit for you, Hermann. But now to you!”

*

“From where and what did he know about me? He could not have heard about me?”

“No, but he saw you. When you were still a little chap, so small that you will hardly remember him. He saw you with your friend. He knew immediately. He had such a sharp eye.”

Walter! The name came to him (the first, unconscious love of his childhood years!).

“’Hermann is like me,’ he then immediately said to me. ‘He will have a hard life, for he will love with his heart. I saw it in his eyes. Let us make it easier for him, if we once can and may; what do you think?’ He is no longer able to do so.”

She reflected.

“He then added: ‘But only if he himself comes. Then he will be in need and distress, into which we all—at least once—come.’”

And she concluded in her own words:

“And so, Hermann, I come to what I have to say to you, in his name, and what I will right now say. I don’t know your relationships. But I know his will. ‘In our life,’ he often said to me, ‘in our difficult life, freedom from others, their judgment and actions, means more than usual. An external independence alone can make it bearable to some extent. Therefore he is to be my heir. If he comes. And if he does not come, then let it be another, someone deserving.’ Now you are here.”

He jumped up.

“No,” he cried excitedly, “no, I’ve not come for thatf

“I know,” she interrupted him, and gave him her hand.

“I know. But it was his wish, and so it’s mine.”

She again pointed to the picture and around the room:

“It is his work, the untiring work of his life.”

He still had an objection:

“But he himself had friends, young friends, who were closer to him than I—who must have meant much more to him?”

She ended the conversation:

“Be at ease. You are taking away from no one. He thought about all of those who later meant something to him. You are taking away from no one.”

Moved, he could only keep silent.

*

In the first days he avoided addressing her.

“I can’t say ‘Aunt’ to you,” he said in distress, “the word is repugnant to me.”

“Then say ‘Mother’ to me!”

She kissed him on the forehead.

*

“Tell me about my mother,” he begged.

“She had a refined and quiet disposition, and was at the same time an exceptionally clever woman. Her only comfort, to which she could flee, was her music. Her voice was not great, but sweet and pure. I could listen for hours when she sang. Then you came and were her everything. But you can no longer know that.”

“No,” he said, “she died too soon.”

“My old friend did not have it easy with your father,” he heard her say further.

My father! he thought bitterly.

*

They spoke further, going from the personal to the general, often and long about this love.

Again and again he asked, when he saw how much more she did know and understand than he:

“But from where do you know all this?”

And again and again came the answer:

“From him! From him, from whom I learned to understand. Not to forgive, for there is nothing here to forgive. But to understand!

“’It is a love, like every other,’ he said again and again. ‘But whoever cannot understand it as love, or will not, never understands it.’”

*

“But I am—as they indeed call it—guilty of ‘indecent assault!’” he laughed out loud.

But he immediately became serious again: “Either I am a criminal or the others are, who made this law and carry it out! There is no third—”

“There are few human beings—” was her answer, and to her lovely and clear eyes there came an expression of sharpness and hardness which he had not yet seen in them. “There are few human beings who have not become criminals against their fellow humans—not directly, but rather indirectly, in that they tolerate and advocate laws such as this one for example.

“And”—now her eyes flashed in anger—”and what are all the crimes in the world compared with the ones committed by those in gowns and vestments, robes and uniforms!”

He had propped his forehead in his hands and said slowly, “I heard and understood almost nothing of what was argued there on that day. For I expected a miracle, which was then not a miracle, but a disenchantment. But it seems to me that one of these men (as if excusing himself) said: ‘I don’t make the laws, I carry them out.’

“He carries out laws,” he ended thoughtfully, “which he considers unjust and convicts innocent people—daily and hourly. And can sleep peacefully.”

*

As she again spoke of him—and she did so often—he formed a picture of this uncommon man:

“At times, if he was speaking with the others, the ‘normal’ people—but he seldom spoke any more with them about it, for he was tired of the thoughtlessness and prejudice of their answers—at times he turned the tables and asked
them:
‘Tell me, what would you do if you had been born with this disposition?’ He never received, never ever, as he told me, a true and courageous answer. Indignant or lying evasions; pompous and cynical protestations; mostly, however, something we Germans dearly love, a dissertation, instead of a precise and honest answer. What indeed should they have said to him, if they wanted to be honest!