Billiards at Half-Past Nine (11 page)

I looked them all over, my supporting cast, listened to what they were saying. I sketched rows of chairs, rows of tables and the ballet of the waiters, at twenty to eleven called for my check. It proved less than I’d expected. I’d made up my mind to make my debut ‘generous, but not extravagant.’ I’d read it somewhere, and figured it was a good formula. By the time I’d taken leave of the waiter and his bowing and scraping, and tipped him an extra fifty pfennigs for helping advance my
legend, I suddenly felt tired. As I was leaving the cafe they gave me the once-over, not dreaming it was I who was the soloist in their little ballet. I walked the gauntlet straight as a ramrod, my step elastic, and gave them a real eyeful: an artist in a big black hat, a small, slightly built fellow about twenty-five years old to all appearances, with a vaguely countrified air, but full of confidence. Then another groschen for the boy holding the door open for my passage.

From there to here, 7 Modest Street, it was only a minute and a half. Apprentices, trucks, nuns. Life in the street. Up and down, down and up, like pistons in a ship’s engines the presses went. Edification was being printed on white paper. The doorman tipped his cap. ‘You’re the architect, sir? Your luggage is upstairs already.’ A tip passed into a reddened hand. ‘Always at your service, lieutenant, sir.’ A grin. ‘That’s right, two gentlemen have been here already. They want the lieutenant to join the local Reserve Officers Club.’

Once again the future unfolded before my eyes, more clearly than the present, while the present, at the very instant of its consummation, sank back into the somber void whence it had come. In my mind’s eye I saw the shabby doorman surrounded by newspaper people and imagined the headlines: ‘Young Architect Wins Open Competition against Celebrities of Profession.’ Eagerly the doorman would give the journalists their news: ‘Him? Gentlemen, nothing but work, work, work. Eight in the morning goes to Low Mass at St. Severin’s, breakfast in the Cafe Kroner till ten-thirty, from ten-thirty till five stays up there in his studio, won’t see a soul. Yes, he lives up there on pea soup—go ahead and laugh—cooks it himself. He has his old mother send the peas and pork, even the onions. From five to six, a walk around town. Six-thirty to seven-thirty, billiards in the Prince Heinrich or the Reserve Officers Club. Girls? None that I know of. Friday nights, gentlemen, eight till ten, choir practice with the Germania Glee Club.’ The Cafe Kroner waiters, they would also make a killing on news tips.
Paprika cheese? Very interesting! Draws even at breakfast, got drawing on the brain.

Later on, I often used to think back on the time I arrived. Again I heard the hooves clattering on the cobblestones, saw the bellboys lugging suitcases, saw the veiled lady in the rose-red hat, read the sign: ‘Recommended for Military Personnel,’ cocked an ear to hear my own laughter again. For whom was it intended, my laughter, what was it made of? For whom? I used to see them every morning when I crossed over here after Mass to pick up my mail and the newspaper: the troop of Uhlans, riding by to the cavalry practice-field at the north end of the city. Every morning I thought of my father’s hatred for horses and officers, as the clattering hooves disappeared into the distance, on their way to ride to attack and to kick up more dust in patrol formation. The bugle calls brought tears to the eyes of veterans standing at the roadside, but I could think only of my father. The riders’ hearts, and the doorman’s, too, beat faster. Girls with dusters in their hands stiffened into living statues and let the morning breeze cool breasts just made to comfort weary heads. Meanwhile the doorman handed me Mother’s parcel: peas, pork, onions and God bless you my boy. No, my heart did not beat faster to see the company riding away.

I wrote letters begging my mother not to come. I didn’t want her included among my supers. She should come later, later, when the play was in production, the game really under way. She was small, slight and dark like myself, and she lived between cemetery and church. Her face and manner, as a matter of fact, would have fitted into the play only too well. She never wanted money, got along on one gold coin a month for soup and bread, with a groschen left over for the collection plate on Sunday and a penny weekdays. Come later, I wrote her, but it was already too late. She was buried next to Father, Charlotte, Mauritius. She never saw the Heinrich Faehmel, 7 Modest Street, whose address she wrote each week. I was afraid of the wisdom in her gaze, of the unexpected things she might
say. Which is it going to be, money or honor, serve God or man? I was afraid of her catechistic questions, which answered themselves, merely by putting a period after them instead of the question mark. Just why I felt like that about her, I couldn’t have said. When I went to church it wasn’t really out of hypocrisy, not part of my act although she would have regarded it as such. My performance began in the Cafe Kroner and ended at ten-thirty, then resumed at five in the afternoon and wound up for good at ten
P.M
. It was easier to think of Father, while the Uhlans were finally dropping out of sight beyond the Modest Gate, when organ grinders were hobbling to the city outskirts to get there early enough to play for lonesome housewives and servant girls.
Oh, breaking heart at break of day!
Late in the afternoon they hobbled back to the city, this time to make a few pennies from people on their way home from work in melancholy mood.
Annemarie, Rosemarie
, etc. Meanwhile, over there Gretz was hanging up the wild boar outside his shop. Fresh, dark red boar blood dripped onto the asphalt. Pheasants and partridges hung round the boar, and rabbits. Delicate plumage and humble rabbit fur garlanded the mighty boar. Every morning Gretz hung up his dead animals, always with their wounds staring the public in the face, rabbit guts, gaping pigeon breasts, the boar’s scoopedout belly between raw flanks. Blood, the public had to see it. This while Frau Gretz’ pink hands arranged flaps of liver between little heaps of mushrooms, and piled up caviar on cubes of ice to glitter in front of giant hams. Lobsters, violet as hard-fired brick, crawled blindly, helplessly about, feeling their way in the shallow pound, waiting to be plucked forth by housewives’ skillful hands, on the seventh, the ninth, the tenth of September, 1907. Only on Sundays, the eighth, fifteenth and twenty-second of September was Gretz’ shopfront free of blood. And only during those years when a
Higher Power
was at work did I lose sight of Gretz’ beasts. I saw them without fail for fifty-one years—see them right now, when, on this Saturday afternoon,
the housewives’ skillful hands come feeling for something special for the Sunday dinner.

“Yes, Leonore, you’ve read it right: First fee, 150,000 marks. No date? Must have been in 1908. Yes, I’m sure, August, 1908. You’ve never eaten wild boar? You haven’t missed much, if you’ll trust my taste. Never did like it. How about making some more coffee, wash down the dust. And buy some cakes, if you want. Nonsense, it won’t make you fat, don’t pay any attention to that hocus-pocus. Yes, that was 1913, a little house for Herr Kolger, the waiter at the Cafe Kroner. No, no fee for that.”

How many breakfasts in the Cafe Kroner? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Never added them up, went there every day, take away the days I was balked by the
Higher Power
.

Remember watching the
Higher Power
come in. Over there on the roof of No. 8, hidden behind the pergola, I looked down into the street, and saw them marching toward the station, no end to them, singing the ‘Watch on the Rhine’ and shouting the name of that idiot you see still riding his bronze steed toward the west. They wore flowers in their caps, on their top hats and derbies, flowers in their buttonholes, and they carried Professor Gustav Jaeger’s Standard Underwear in little packages under their arms. The noise they made surged up to me in waves. Why, even the whores down in the Kraemerzeile district had sent their pimps off to the recruiting station with particularly fine, warm underwear tucked under their arms. I tried to share the feelings of the ones down below, but no use. I felt empty and alone, a real stinker, not an atom of enthusiasm in me, and not knowing why. I’d simply never put my mind to such matters. I thought of my Engineer’s uniform, smelling of mothballs. It still fitted me, though I’d had it made when I was twenty and meantime had grown to be thirty-six. All I hoped was I wouldn’t have to put it on again. I wanted to keep on being the star, not become one of the supers. They’d gone off their rockers down there, singing their way to the station.
The ones who didn’t have to go were the ones being pitied. They felt victimized, not being able to go along. As for me, I was ready to be victimized in such manner, wouldn’t mind it at all. Down below inside the house my mother-in-law was weeping, both her sons having ridden away with the very first contingent to the freight yard, where they were loading up the horses. Proud Uhlans, for whose sake my mother-in-law was shedding prideful tears. There I stood, behind the pergola, the wistaria still in bloom, and from down below heard my four-year-old son, singing ‘Get your gun, on the run.…’ What I should have done was go down and give him a good licking, in front of my proud mother-in-law. But I let him sing and play with the Uhlan helmet his uncle had given him. I let him trail his sword behind him and shout, ‘Frenchy dead! Englishman dead! Rooshian dead!’ I let myself be told by the garrison commandant, his voice low and nearly breaking, ‘I deeply regret, Faehmel, we can’t get along without you here, not yet; I’m sorry you can’t do your bit out there. But the home front needs people, too, people just like you.’

Barracks, fortifications, military hospitals—I built them all. Nights, in my lieutenant’s uniform, I inspected the guard at the bridge. Elderly storekeepers with a corporal’s rating, banker privates, they saluted me diligently when I climbed the bridge steps, my flashlight revealing obscene drawings which youngsters had scratched into the red sandstone on their way home from a swim. The bridge steps smelled strong of puberty. There was a sign hanging somewhere, ‘Michaelis, Coal, Coke, Briquettes,’ with a finger pointing toward the place where Michaelis’ wares might be obtained. I savored my irony, my superiority, when Sergeant Gretz reported to me: ‘Bridge guard, one sergeant, six men. Nothing unusual to report.’ This information I acknowledged with what I fancied to be a comicopera salute, and said, ‘At ease.’ Then I wrote my name in the guard book, went home, hung sword and helmet in the closet, went into the living room to Johanna, laid my head in her lap,
smoked my cigar and said not a word while she did the same. All she did was take the paté de foie gras back to Gretz, and when the Abbot of St. Anthony’s sent us bread and honey and butter, parcel it out among the poor. I kept my mouth shut, went on having breakfast in the Cafe Kroner, the two thousand four hundredth with paprika cheese. I still gave the waiter a fifty-pfennig tip, though he didn’t want to take it, insisted on paying me a fee for the house I’d designed for him.

It was Johanna who said right out what I’d been privately thinking. She wouldn’t drink any champagne when we were invited to the garrison commandant’s, wouldn’t eat the jugged hare and refused every dance. She said it out loud: ‘That fool of a Kaiser.’ You’d have thought the Ice Age had come, there in the Wilhelmskuhle Casino. Then she said it once again, in the silence: ‘That fool of a Kaiser.’ They were all there, generals, colonels and majors, together with their wives, and me, of course, just promoted to first lieutenant and commissioned to build the fortifications. A young officer-candidate had the presence of mind to start the orchestra playing a waltz. I took Johanna’s arm and led her to the coach outside. Wonderful autumn evening. Gray columns of men marching out toward the suburban railroad station. Nothing out of the way to report.

Now a military tribunal. No one dared repeat what Johanna had said. Blasphemies of that nature were not even put into the record. His Majesty—a fool of a Kaiser. It was something no one would have dared put down on paper. With them it was always ‘What your wife said’; on my side, ‘What my wife said.’ I didn’t say what I should have, that is, that I agreed with her one hundred per cent. Instead I said, ‘Pregnant, gentlemen, in two months she’ll be having it. Lost two brothers, Captain Kilb of the Horse Guards and Cadet Kilb, both killed on the same day. A little daughter, too, lost her in 1909.’ All along I knew I should have been saying, ‘I agree with my
wife, absolutely.’ I knew that irony wasn’t enough, and never would be.

“No, Leonore, don’t unwrap that little package. What’s inside has only sentimental value. Not much weight, but precious: one cork. Thanks for the coffee. Put the cup on the windowsill, please. I can see it’s no use waiting for my granddaughter—usually does her homework out in the roof garden about this time of day. I’m forgetting her vacation’s not over yet. Look, from up here you can see right into your own office. I can just see you at your desk, your pretty hair.”

Why did the cup suddenly tremble and clink, as if from the pounding of the presses? Was the lunch hour over? Were they working overtime, printing edification on white paper even on Saturday afternoons?

I felt that same trembling countless mornings when, propped on my elbows, I looked down into the street at that blonde head of hair passing by, its perfume familiar to me from morning Mass. In time the strong plain soap she used would deaden its brightness. Respectability was being used as a substitute for perfume. I used to follow behind her, after Mass, when she went past Gretz’ shop at a quarter to nine and so into the house at No. 8. It was a yellow house, with a rather weathered sign at the door, with ‘Dr. Kilb, Attorney-at-Law’ in white letters on black wood. I watched her when I waited in the doorman’s room for my newspaper. The light would fall on her, on her delicate face wrinkled with a frown of dedication to justice as she opened the office door, threw open the shutters, twirled the safe combination and opened the steel doors which seemed too heavy for her. Then she checked the contents of the safe and while she was doing this I could look right across Modest Street, it was so narrow, into the safe, and read, neatly printed on a card on the top safe drawer: ‘St. Anthony Project.’ Three large packages lay inside, protected by seals that looked like wounds. Only three of them, and every child knew the senders’
names: Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein. Brehmockel, builder of thirty-seven Neo-Gothic churches, seventeen chapels and twenty-one monasteries and hospitals; Grumpeter, builder of only thirty-three Neo-Romanesque churches, twelve chapels and eighteen hospitals; and of course the third packet from Wollersein, who had built only nineteen churches, two chapels and four hospitals, but who, on the other hand, had a real cathedral to his credit. ‘Read what’s in the
Guardian
today?’ the doorman asked, and above his calloused thumb I read the line it was pointing at: ‘Deadline for St. Anthony’s Project Today / Have Our Young Architects No Spirit?’ I laughed, rolled up my newspaper and went to breakfast in the Cafe Kroner. The waiter said ‘Breakfast as usual for Herr Faehmel’ through the kitchen counter opening, and it sounded like a liturgy, old as the hills, a rite performed for centuries. The usual buzz of voices around ten-thirty—housewives, priests, bankers. Out with my drawing pad and its lambs, serpents and pelicans. A fifty-pfennig tip for the waiter, ten-pfennig for the busboy. A grin from the doorman as I slipped his morning cigar into his hand and took my mail in return. Upstairs, I stood leaning here at the window, feeling the vibration of the presses in my elbows, watching the apprentice at the window down below in Kilb’s office wielding a white folding rule. I opened the letter the doorman had given me. ‘… we are in a position to offer you the post of chief draughtsman immediately. If you so wish, you will be treated as a member of the family. A friendly reception by local society can be guaranteed. There would be no lack of social occasions.…’ In this manner architects’ delightful daughters were intimated, cozy picnics at the forest edge suggested, young men wearing round peasant hats tapping beer barrels, young women unpacking and handing around sandwiches. On freshly mown lawns a little dance might be ventured, while the mothers, anxiously tallying their daughters’ years and charmed by the grace of it all, clapped their hands in time. Then off for a stroll through the
woods, arm in arm, whereupon the young ladies would make sure to trip over the roots. As wooded distances imperceptibly lengthened, opportunities would offer for a kiss, on the wrist, the cheek, the shoulder. Then, wending our way homeward, through pleasant meadows in the dusk, the deer, no less, as if summoned for that very purpose, would peek out of the forest and come to the meadow’s rim. And then, when songs had begun to ring out, and spread from coach to coach, time would be ripe for an interchange of whispers declaring that Amor had done his work. So homeward, the coaches carrying aching hearts, wounded souls.