Billiards at Half-Past Nine (17 page)

Later on I often saw him in uniform. You could tell time by the promotions: two years, first lieutenant; two more years, captain. I took his sword and humbled it. I used it to scrape muck from behind the moldings, rust off the iron benches in the garden, dug holes for my plants with it. It was too awkward for peeling potatoes.

Swords should be flung down and trampled on, and so should privileges, my boy. It’s all they’re good for, corruption that they are.
Their right hand is full of bribes
. Eat what everybody eats, read what everybody reads, wear the clothes everybody wears, then you’ll come nearest to the truth. Noblesse oblige, obliges you to eat sawdust when everyone else
is eating it, to read patriotic rubbish in the local paper instead of magazines for cultivated people. No, don’t touch any of it, Robert—Gretz’ patés, or the Abbot’s butter and honey, his pieces of gold and his jugged hare,
whywhywhy
, when others haven’t any. Let the unprivileged eat their honey and butter in peace, it doesn’t corrupt their stomach and brain. But not you, Robert; you must eat this dirt-poor bread. Tears of truth will well up in your eyes; wear shabby clothes, and be free.

I’ve used privilege only once, one single time; you must forgive me for it. I couldn’t bear it any longer. I had to go to Droescher to get amnesty for you. It was just too much for us—Father, myself, Edith and your son just born. We found your messages in the letter box, tiny little bits of paper no bigger than cough-drop wrappings. The first came four months after you’d disappeared: ‘Don’t worry, I’m studying hard in Amsterdam. Love to Mother. Robert.’ The second came seven days later: ‘I need money. Wrap it in a newspaper and give it to a man called Groll, waiter in The Anchor at the Upper Harbor. Love to Mother, Robert.’

We took the money there. The waiter named Groll served us beer and lemonade without saying a word, took the package and wouldn’t take a tip, all without a word. He didn’t seem to see us or even hear our questions.

We stuck your little messages in a notebook. For a long time none came and then they came more often. ‘Received money all right: 2, 4 and 6. Love to Mother. Robert.’ Then all at once Otto wasn’t Otto any more. A terrible miracle had happened. He was Otto, yet he wasn’t, any more. He brought Nettlinger and the gym teacher home with him. Otto. I understood what it means when they say there was only a husk of a man left. Otto now was only the husk of the real Otto, and the husk had suddenly taken on a new content. He’d not merely tasted the
Host of the Beast
, he’d been inoculated with it. They’d sucked out his old blood and pumped new in. There was murder in his eyes, and fearfully I hid the slips of paper.

For months on end no notes came. I crawled over the tiles in the hallway, examining every crack, every inch of the cold floor, took the moldings away and scraped out the dirt, fearing the little balls of paper might have fallen behind them, or have been blown there by the wind. During the night I unscrewed the letter box from the wall and took it to pieces. Nothing. Otto came in, pushed me against the wall when he opened the door, stepped on my fingers and laughed. Months on end I found nothing. I used to stand the whole night long behind the bedroom curtains, waiting for dawn, watching the street and the front door, running downstairs when I saw the newspaper boy. Nothing. I looked through the paper bags with rolls from the baker’s in them. I was very careful when I poured the milk into a saucepan, when I took off labels. Nothing. And in the evening we went to The Anchor, pushed our way past uniforms to the farthermost corner where Groll was the waiter, but he kept mum, didn’t seem to recognize us. Only after we’d sat there for months waiting night after night did he write on the edge of a beer coaster: ‘Careful. I don’t know a thing.’ Then he spilled beer on it, smudged it all into one big inkstain and brought fresh beer for which he wouldn’t take any money. Groll, the waiter in The Anchor. He was young, had a narrow face.

We didn’t know, of course, that the boy who had put the little slips of paper into our letter box had long since been arrested, that we were being watched, and that Groll had not been picked up yet only because they were hoping he might begin to talk to us. Who, at the time, understood the higher mathematics of their murderousness? Groll, the boy with the slips of paper, both of them gone, vanished, and you, Robert, you won’t get me a gun and release me from this dungeon of the damned.

We gave up going to The Anchor. No news for five months. I couldn’t stand it any longer, for the first time in my life used privilege and went to Droescher, Dr. Emil, Council President. I’d
been to school with his sister and to dancing school with him. We’d gone on picnics together, loaded barrels of beer onto the coaches, unpacked ham sandwiches at the forest edge, danced country waltzes on the new-mown lawns, and my father had arranged for his father to be elected to the University League, although Droescher’s father had never been to the university. All a lot of nonsense, Robert, don’t take any stock in that sort of thing when anything serious is at stake. I used to call Droescher ‘Em,’ short for Emil; it was thought chic at the time. And now, thirty years later, I had myself announced to him. I’d put on my gray suit, and wore a violet veil over my gray hat, and black laced shoes. He ushered me in from the waiting room himself, kissed my hand and said, ‘Oh, Johanna, call me Em just once again.’ And I said, ‘Em, I’ve got to know where the boy is. I’m sure you people know.’ Robert, it was as if the Ice Age had set in. I saw right away he knew all about it, and could feel how he was becoming formal, quite sharp. His lips, thickened by his passion for red wine, became thin with fear. He took a quick look around, shook his head and whispered to me, ‘What your son did was a terrible thing. But on top of that it was politically stupid.’ And I said, ‘I can tell from looking at you what being politically clever leads to.’ I was on the point of leaving, but he stopped me, and said, ‘My God, should we all hang ourselves?’ And I said, ‘All of
you
, yes.’ ‘Do be reasonable,’ he said. ‘Things like this are the police commissioner’s business. And you know what he did to him.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know what he did to him. Nothing. That’s the pity—nothing. All he ever did was win for him every game of rounders for five years on end.’ At this the coward bit his lips and said, ‘Sports—let me see—you can always do something about sports.’

At that stage, Robert, we didn’t have any idea that merely raising your hand could cost you your life. Vacano had a Polish prisoner of war sentenced to death because the prisoner lifted his hand to him—just lifted his hand—hadn’t actually struck him.

And then one morning I found a slip of paper on my breakfast tray from Otto. ‘I need money, too—12—you can give it to me in cash.’ I went over to the studio and took 12,000 marks from the safe—they were there all ready, in case we got any more messages from you—and threw Otto the wad onto the breakfast table. I was thinking of going to Amsterdam and telling you not to send any more messages, they might cost someone his life. But now you’re here at last. I’d have gone mad if they hadn’t pardoned you. Stay here. Does it really matter where you live, in a world where just raising your hand once may cost you your life? You know the conditions Droescher was given when he negotiated for you: no political activity, and into the army immediately after your examinations. I’ve already arranged for you to repeat your finals and Klaehm the statistician will coach you and save you as many semesters as he can. Must you really study? Very well, as you wish. Statistics? Why that? Very well, do as you want. Edith’s glad. Will you go up to her? Go ahead! Quickly, now, don’t you want to see your son? I’ve given her your room. She’s waiting for you. Go on, now.

He went upstairs in the sanatorium, past brown cupboards and through silent corridors, up under the roof where a loft housed the hot water tank. It smelled of cigarettes up here, smoked by attendants on the sly, of damp bed linen, hung up to dry on the tank. The silence was oppressive. It came up the stairwell as through a chimney. He peered through the skylight down the poplar-lined drive leading to the bus stop. Neat flower beds, the greenhouse, the marble fountain, and, to the right of the wall, the chapel. It looked like an idyll, smelled like one, was one. Cows were grazing inside the electrified fence, pigs which themselves would become slops emptied out of guggly pails into the trough grunted in the garbage. The highway outside the sanatorium walls seemed to run off into an infinity of silence.

How many times had he stood at this station in the loft, to which again and again she sent him so that her rememberings might be precisely retraced and fulfilled. Now he was standing there as the twenty-two-year-old Robert, come back home and resolved on silence. He had had to go and greet Edith and their son, Joseph. Edith and Joseph; both had been strangers to him, mother and son; and they both had felt embarrassed, when he entered the room, Edith more so than he. Had they ever called each other by their first names, he and Edith?

When they’d gone that time to Schrella’s after the game of rounders, she’d set food on the table, potatoes and some indefinable gravy, and green salad. Later she’d poured some weak tea for him, and those days he’d hated weak tea, had had his ideas about the woman he would marry, and one of them was that she would know how to make a good cup of tea. Quite obviously Edith didn’t, yet he had known he would pull her into the bushes when they came out of the Cafe Zons and went through Blessenfeld Park on the way home. She was blonde, she seemed only sixteen, yet had no teenage giggliness about her. There was no false expectation of happiness in her eyes, eyes which let him into her nature at once. When she said grace at table, ‘Lord, Lord,’ he’d thought, ‘we should be eating with our fingers.’ He’d felt stupid, holding a fork in his hand, and the spoon felt strange. For the first time he’d understood what eating was: to appease hunger, no more. Only kings and beggars ate with their fingers. They hadn’t said a word to each other as they walked down Gruffel Street, through Blessenfeld and the park into the Cafe Zons. And he had been afraid, holding her hand and swearing never to put the
Host of the Beast
to his lips. What foolishness. Yet he had been afraid, as if he were taking part in some solemn consecration. As they walked back again through the park, he’d taken Edith’s hand, held her back, let Schrella go on ahead, had watched Schrella’s dark gray silhouette disappear into the evening sky as he was drawing Edith into the bushes. She had offered no resistance and
had not laughed as the ancient knowledge of how the thing should be done flowed into his hands, filled his mouth and arms. All he had remembered of it was her blonde hair, shining from the summer rain, a wreath of silvery raindrops on her eyebrows, like the skeleton of some delicate sea creature found on a rust-colored shore, the lines around her mouth puckering the skin into little cloud shapes as she whispered against his chest, ‘They’ll kill you, Robert!’ So, they had used each other’s first names, then, there in the park among the bushes, and again the following afternoon in that hotel of assignation. He had pulled Edith along by the wrist, holding her close to him, had gone through the city like a blind man, following a divining rod, instinctively finding the way and the right building. In a package under his arm he had carried the gunpowder for Ferdi, whom he would meet that same evening. He had found out she could even smile, looking into the mirror, the cheapest one the woman who ran the place had been able to find in the dime store, smile as she, too, discovered her own ancient knowledge. And he knew, even then, that the package on the windowsill contained a folly which had to be committed, since reason led to nothing in a world where lifting your hand to someone could cost you your life. Edith’s smile had done wonders for her face, little used to smiling as it was. When they’d gone downstairs and into the woman’s flat, he’d been amazed at how little she’d charged for the room. He had paid one mark, fifty, and the woman had refused the fifty-pfennig tip he’d tried to give her. ‘Oh no, sir, no, I don’t take tips, I’m an independent woman.’

So he
had
called her by her first name, she who sat in his room at home, with the child in her lap. Joseph. He had taken the child from her lap and held him a minute, awkwardly, then laid him on the bed. And again the ancient knowledge had flowed into him, into his hands, mouth, arms. She had never learned how to make tea, not even later on, when they were living in their own apartment—doll’s furniture—after he’d come
back from the university or was home on leave, a noncom in the Engineers. Meanwhile he had got himself trained as a demolition expert, later trained demolition squads himself, implanting formulas which contained exactly what he wanted: dust and rubble and revenge for Ferdi Progulske, for the waiter called Groll and the boy who had slipped his messages into the letter box. Edith. Edith with her mesh shopping bag and book of discount stamps, Edith leafing through the cook book, giving the child his bottle, settling little Ruth at her breast. Young father, young mother. She had come to meet him at the barracks gate with the baby carriage, and they had strolled along by the riverbank, across rounders fields and football fields, at high water and low water, had sat on stiles while Joseph played in the sand by the river, and Ruth made her first attempts to walk. For two years he had played the husband game. But he had never thought of himself as a husband, even when he had hung his coat and hat in the closet more than seven hundred times, had taken off his jacket and sat down at the table with Joseph on his lap while Edith was saying grace … ‘Lord.…’ Main thing had been, no privileges, no extravagances. Dr. Robert Faehmel, sergeant in the Engineers, mathematically gifted, eating pea soup while the neighbors were listening to the
Host of the Beast
as it was being broadcast over the radio. Off duty until reveille, then back to the barracks with the first streetcar, after Edith’s kiss at the door and the curious sensation of having done her wrong again, a little blonde standing there in her red dressing gown, holding Joseph’s hand, with Ruth in the baby carriage. No political activity, they’d said. Had he ever been politically active? And now his youthful folly had been pardoned. He had become one of the most talented officer-candidates. He had been fascinated by thickheadedness, because thickheads retained routine method. He had drummed demolition formulas into their brains, sowed dust and ruin. ‘No mail from Alfred?’ He had never known at first whom she was referring to, had forgotten her name had been Schrella,
too. Time could be read off in promotions: half a year, lance corporal; half a year, corporal; half a year, sergeant; and still another half-year, lieutenant. And presently the dull gray completely joyless hordes had moved out and to the station. No flowers, no laughing on the way, no smile from the Kaiser for them. They had had none of the bravado of peace too long diked up. An irritable mass, but apathetically submissive. And so he and Edith had abandoned the doll’s house in which they had played at marriage, and at the station had renewed their vow never to worship the Beast.