Beneath the Wheel (9 page)

Hans kept silent. This Heilner fellow certainly was a strange one. A romantic, a poet. As everyone knew, he worked hardly at all and still he knew quite a bit, he knew how to give good answers, and at the same time despised his learning.

“We're reading Homer,” he went on in the same mocking tone, “as though the
Odyssey
were a cookbook. Two verses an hour and then the whole thing is masticated word by word and inspected until you're ready to throw up. But at the end of the hour the professor will say: ‘Notice how nicely the poet has turned this phrase! This has afforded you an insight into the secret of poetic creativity!' Just like a little icing around the aorists and particles so you won't choke on them completely. I don't have any use for that kind of Homer. Anyway, what does all this old Greek stuff matter to us? If one of us ever tried to live a little like a Greek, he'd be out on his tail. And our room is called ‘Hellas'! Pure mockery! Why isn't it called ‘wastepaper basket' or ‘monkey cage' or ‘sweatshop'? All this classical stuff is a big fake.”

He spat into the air.

“Were you working on a poem before?” Hans now asked.

“Yes.”

“About what?”

“Here, about the pond and fall.”

“Can I see it?”

“No, it's not finished.”

“But when it's finished?”

“Sure, if you want to.”

The two got up and slowly walked back to the monastery.

“There, have you actually noticed how beautiful that is?” Heilner said as they passed the Paradise. “Halls, bow windows, cloisters, refectories, gothic and romanesque, all of it rich with artistry and made with an artist's hand. And who is all this magic for? For a few dozen boys who are poor and are supposed to become pastors. The state seems to be swimming in it.”

Hans thought about nothing but Heilner for the rest of the afternoon. What an odd fellow! Hans' worries and desires simply did not exist for him. He had thoughts and words of his own, he lived a richer and freer life, suffered strange ailments and seemed to despise everything around him. He understood the beauty of the ancient columns and walls. And he practiced the mysterious and unusual art of mirroring his soul in verse and of constructing a semblance of life for himself out of his imagination. He was quick and untamable and had more fun in a day than Hans in an entire year. He was melancholy and seemed to relish his own sadness like an unusual condition, alien and delicious.

That very evening Heilner treated the entire room to a performance of his checkered and striking personality. One of their companions, a show-off and mean-spirited fellow by the name of Otto Wenger, picked a quarrel with him. For a short while Heilner stayed calm, witty and superior, then he let his impulse carry him away and he gave Wenger a slap in the face. At once the two became passionately and inextricably entangled, drifted and tumbled like a rudderless ship in fits and jerks and half-circles through Hellas, along walls, over chairs, across the floor, neither saying a word, gasping, fuming and foaming at the mouth. The roommates watched this with critical expressions, avoiding the tangle of arms and legs, salvaging their legs, desks and lamps, awaiting the outcome eagerly and with high expectations. After several minutes Heilner rose, not without some effort, freed himself and just stood there breathing heavily. He looked mutilated, his eyes were red, his collar torn and he had a hole in his pants knee. His opponent was about to renew his onslaught but Heilner just crossed his arms and said haughtily: “I won't go on—if you want, go ahead, hit me.” Otto Wenger left cursing. Heilner leaned against his desk, fiddled with his lamp, plunged his hands in his pants pockets and seemed to fall into a reflective far-off mood. Suddenly tears broke from his eyes, one after the other, more and more. This was unheard of. For crying was beyond doubt considered the most despicable thing an academy student could do. And Heilner did nothing to try to conceal it. He did not leave the room, he simply stood there, his face pale from the exertion, looking at the lamp; he did not wipe his tears, did not even take his hands out of his pockets. The others stood around him, curiosity and malice in their faces until Hartner planted himself in front of him and said: “Hey, Heilner, aren't you ashamed of yourself?”

The tearful Heilner slowly looked around, like someone who has just awakened from a deep sleep.

“Feel ashamed—in front of you?” Then he said loud and derisively: “No, my friend.”

He wiped his face, smiled angrily, blew out his lamp and left the room.

Hans Giebenrath had not moved from his desk during the entire incident and only glanced in astonishment at Heilner. Fifteen minutes later, he dared to go look for him. He saw him sitting in the dark chilly dormitory hall in one of the deep window embrasures, immobile, gazing out into the cloister. From the back his shoulders and his narrow, sharply chiseled head looked unusually serious and unboyish. He did not move as Hans stepped up to him. After a while he asked hoarsely, without facing Hans: “What's up?”

“It's me,” said Hans timidly.

“What do you want?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, in that case, why don't you leave?”

Hans was hurt and was about to do just that. Heilner held him back.

“Don't go,” he said with a lightness that did not sound convincing. “I didn't mean it like that.”

Now they faced each other and at this moment each took his first serious look at the other and tried to imagine that these boyishly smooth features concealed a particular personality and a soul of its very own.

Hermann Heilner slowly extended his arm, took Hans by the shoulder and drew him to him until their faces almost touched. Then Hans was startled to feel the other's lips touch his.

His heart was seized by an unaccustomed tremor. This being together in the dark dormitory and this sudden kiss was something frightening, something new, perhaps something dangerous; it occurred to him how dreadful it would be if he were caught, for he realized how much more ridiculous and shameful kissing would seem to the others than crying. There was nothing he could say, but the blood rose to his head and he wanted to run away.

An adult witnessing this little scene might have derived a quiet joy from it, from the tenderly inept shyness and the earnestness of these two narrow faces, both of them handsome, promising, boyish yet marked half with childish grace and half with shy yet attractive adolescent defiance.

The young students had now grown accustomed to one another. They each had formed some picture of the others and numerous friendships had been struck. There were couples who learned Hebrew verbs together or painted, went for walks or read Schiller. There were students who were bad in math but good in Latin who had paired up with students good in math but bad in Latin so as to enjoy the fruits of cooperation. But there were also friendships whose basis was a kind of contract and sharing of tangible goods. Thus the much-envied owner of the whole ham had found his better half in the person of a gardener's son from Stammheim whose closet floor was piled high with apples. Once while eating his ham he asked the gardener's son for an apple, offering him a slice of ham in exchange. They promptly sat down together, and their careful conversation revealed that there were many more hams where this came from and the apple owner too could draw freely on his father's supply. In that fashion a solid friendship came into being, one which outlasted many a more idealistic and impetuous pact.

There were only a few boys who remained single, and among them was Lucius, whose acquisitive devotion to the art of music was still in full bloom at that time.

There also were some badly matched pairs. Hermann Heilner and Hans Giebenrath, the lightheaded and the conscientious, the poet and the grind, were regarded as possibly the most ill-matched. Although both were considered to be two of the brightest and most gifted students, Heilner enjoyed the half-mocking reputation of being a genius while Hans bore the stigma of being a model boy. Still, since everyone else was preoccupied with his own friendship, these two were left pretty much to themselves.

Despite these personal interests and experiences, their schoolwork did not receive short shrift. On the contrary, school was rather the main part alongside which Lucius' music, Heilner's poetry and all pacts, transactions and occasional fights played a minor and diversionary role. Especially Hebrew kept all of them on their toes. The peculiar ancient language of Jehovah, an uncouth, withered and yet secretly living tree, took on an alien, gnarled and puzzling form before the boys' eyes, catching their attention through unusual linkages and astonishing them with remarkably colored and fragrant blossoms. In its branches, hollows and roots lived friendly or gruesome thousand-year-old ghosts: phantastically fearsome dragons, lovely naïve girls and wrinkled sages next to handsome boys and calm-eyed girls or quarrelsome women. What had sounded remote and dreamlike in the Lutheran Bible was now lent blood in its true and coarse character, as well as a voice and an old, cumbersome but tenacious and ominous life. That at least was the way it appeared to Heilner, who cursed the entire Pentateuch on the hour and still found more life and spirit in it than many a patient drudge who knew the entire vocabulary and pronounced everything correctly.

In addition there was the New Testament where everything was more delicate, bright and intimate and whose language, though less ancient and profound and rich, was filled with an eager and imaginative young spirit.

And there was the
Odyssey
whose vigorously sonorous, measured numbers gave an intimation of a vanished, clearly articulated and joyous life. Next to this the historians Xenophon and Livy disappeared or rather stood, as lesser luminaries, to the side, modest and almost pale in comparison.

With some astonishment Hans discovered how different all things looked to his friend than to him. Nothing was abstract for Heilner, nothing he could not have imagined and colored with his fantasy. When this was impossible he turned away, bored. Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth.

The friendship between the two was an unusual one. For Heilner it was a delightful luxury, a convenience or merely a quirk, whereas Hans cherished it like a proudly guarded treasure, but a treasure that could become a burden. Until recently Hans had always done his homework in the evening. Now Hermann, tired of studying, would come over to his desk, pull away his books and demand his attention. It got so bad that Hans, much as he liked his friend, actually trembled at his coming and would work hurriedly and with redoubled effort during the regularly scheduled study hours. The situation became even more difficult when Heilner began to oppose his industry with theoretical arguments.

“That's hackwork,” he would announce. “You're not doing any of this work voluntarily but only because you're afraid of the teachers or of your old man. What do you get from being first or second in class? I'm twentieth, and just as smart as any of you grinds.”

Hans was equally horrified to discover how Heilner treated his books. One day Hans had left his atlas in the lecture hall and since he wanted to prepare himself for an upcoming geography lesson he borrowed Heilner's. With disgust he noted that entire pages had been dirtied with pencil markings. The west coast of the Iberian peninsula had been reshaped to form a grotesque profile with a nose reaching from Porto to Lisbon, the area around Cape Finisterre stylized into a curly coiffure while Cape St. Vincent formed the nicely twirled point of a beard. It was the same from page to page; the white backs of the maps were covered with caricatures and epigrams, nor was there a lack of ink spots. Hans was in the habit of treating his books like sacred objects, like jewels, and he considered such derring-do as both a sacrilege and a heroic if criminal deed.

At times it seemed as if Hans were merely a convenient plaything for his friend—let's say a kind of housecat—and Hans himself felt that occasionally. Yet Heilner was truly attached to him because he needed him. He had to have someone who would listen quietly and eagerly when he delivered his revolutionary speeches about school and life in general. And he also needed someone to console him, someone in whose lap he could rest his head when he was depressed. Like all such people, the young poet suffered from attacks of irrational and slightly coquettish melancholy whose causes were many, having to do with the painful transition from childhood to adolescence, with an excess of premonitions, energy and desires which, however, did not lack a goal, and also with the incomprehensible dark drives of early manhood. He had a pathological need to be pitied and fondled. Before he had come to school he had been his mother's pet and now, as long as he was not ready for womanly love, his accommodating friend had to fulfill the role of comforter.

In the evening he often came deeply depressed to Hans, abducted him from his work and asked him to go with him to the dormitory. There, in the cold hall or in the spacious, darkening oratory they walked up and down or sat shivering in an alcove. Heilner then would hold forth with any number of plaintive grievances in the manner of romantic youths who have read Heine and become enraptured with a somewhat childish sorrow. This impressed Hans, though he could not quite understand it, and even infected him on occasions. The sensitive
bel esprit
was particularly vulnerable to these attacks during inclement weather; his moaning and groaning would reach its apogee usually on evenings when the rain clouds of a late fall evening darkened the sky, with the moon slinking through gloomy rifts. Then he would luxuriate in Ossianic moods and dissolve in melancholy which poured over the innocent Hans in the form of sighs, speeches and verse.

Oppressed and pained by these agonizing scenes, Hans would plunge into his work during the remaining hours, work which became more and more difficult for him. The return of his old headaches did not surprise him particularly; but that he experienced more and more inactive, listless hours and had to force himself to do the most rudimentary things worried him deeply.