Billiards at Half-Past Nine (28 page)

Seven more minutes till the next No. 11 leaves. Here’s No. 17 Gruffel Street, redecorated; a car parked in front, green, and a bicycle, red, and two scooters, dirty. He had pressed that bell eighteen thousand times, on the pale, yellowish brass button which his thumb could still feel. Where Schrella once had been, there now was Tressel. Where Schmitz had been, was Humann now. New names. One alone had remained—Fruhl, lending cups of sugar, cups of flour, cups of vinegar and eggcupsful of salad oil, how many cups, how many egg cups, and at what high interest. Mrs. Fruhl would always fill the cups and egg cups half full only, making a mark at the door frame, where she had written in S, F, V, O, only rubbing out that mark with her thumb when she had received full cups and full egg cups
in return. Then she’d whispered, ‘My God, what fatheads!’—whispered it through the doorways, in shops and to her friends when they gathered to air their old-wives’ gynecology, over eggnogs and potato salad. She’d taken the
Host of the Beast
very early and had forced her husband and her daughter to swallow it as well, and in the hall she sang,
How weary, weary these old bones
. Nothing, not a bit of feeling, only the skin of his thumb touching that pale yellow brass button felt something resembling emotion.

“Are you looking for someone?”

“Yes,” he said, “the Schrellas; don’t they live here any more?”

“No,” the girl said, “I’d know if they lived here.”

She was rosy-cheeked and delightful, balancing on her little swaying scooter and propping herself up against the wall of the building.

“No, they never lived here.” Off she went, scampering wildly across the sidewalk, and across the gutter, shouting, “Anyone here know the Schrellas?” He trembled for fear someone would call out yes, and he should have to go over and greet them, and exchange memories: Yes, Ferdi, they got him … your father, they got him … and Edith, what a fine marriage … but the little red-cheeked girl was racing round without success, swerving boldly on her dirty scooter and shouting, from group to group, into open windows, “Anyone here know the Schrellas?” She came back, her face flushed, turned smartly and stopped in front of him. “No sir, no one here knows them.”

“Thank you,” he said, smiling. “Would you like a groschen?”

“Yes”; she rushed gaily away to the lemonade stall.

“I’ve sinned, I’ve sinned greatly,” he softly muttered to himself as he walked back to the terminus; “I’ve had wood-rufflemonade from Gruffel Street with chicken from the Prince Heinrich. I’ve left undisturbed the memories and not thawed out the frost-flowers. I didn’t want to see recognition light up in Erika Progulske’s eyes, or hear Ferdi’s name from her lips. The only memory celebrated was in the skin at the end of my
thumb, when it recognized the pale, yellow, brass bell-push.”

It was like running the gauntlet, the eyes so clearly watching him, from the edge of the street, from windows and doorways, while they took the summer sun after the day’s work. Would anybody recognize his spectacles or his walk, or the close set of his eyes; would anyone recognize the much-mocked student of Hölderlin, beneath his foreign overcoat, he at whom they had shouted their song of derision, ‘Schrella, Schrella, Schrella, he’s a poem-reading fella.’

He anxiously wiped the sweat away, took his hat off and stopped, looking back from the corner down Gruffel Street. No one had followed him. A couple of young fellows were sitting on their motorcycles, bending slightly forward and whispering love-talk to the girls standing beside them. Here and there on a window ledge beer bottles caught the afternoon sun. There, across the street, was the house where the angel had been born and raised. The brass doorbell might still be there, where Ferdi’s thumb had pressed it fifteen thousand times. The front of the building was green, and there was a gleaming array in the chemist’s shop window, with toothpaste advertisements, exactly underneath the window from which Ferdi had so often leaned down.

There was the path through the park, the path from which Robert had drawn Edith into the bushes one evening in July, twenty-three years before. Now there were retired men sitting bent over on the benches, swapping jokes and sniffing different brands of tobacco, peevishly observing that the children playing round them were being badly brought up. And shorttempered mothers were calling a bitter fate down upon their disobedient brood, invoking a terrible future:
The atom’ll come and get you
. And young people were coming back from confession, as yet undecided whether to abandon their state of grace on the spot or wait until the next morning.

One more minute still remained before the next No. 11 left. The rusty tracks had been running for thirty years now
toward an empty future. Now Ferdi’s sister was pouring green lemonade into a clean glass. The motorman was ringing for his passengers. The weary conductor stubbed out his cigarette, straightened his leather satchel, got in behind his cabin and rang the bell, and far back where the rusty rails ended an old woman began breaking into a run.

“To Central Station,” said Schrella, “with a Harbor transfer.”

“Forty-five pfennigs.”

Less substantial buildings, more substantial houses, very substantial houses. Transfer, yes, it was No. 16 that still went to the harbor.

Building material, coal dumps, loading ramps. And from the ramp of the old weighhouse he could read it: “Michaelis, Coal, Coke, Briquettes.”

A couple more minutes, around a corner, and he’d be able to complete his remembering. Mrs. Trischler’s hands would have withstood time, like the old man’s eyes and Alois’ photo on the wall. Beer bottles, bundles of onions, tomatoes, bread and tobacco; ships at anchor, swaying gangways down which rolls of sailcloth were carried; giant pupa-shaped vessels would be ready to sail on down the Rhine to the North Sea fog.

Silence lay on the place. Fresh piles of coal were heaped up behind Michaelis’ fence, and there were mountains of bright red bricks in the construction-materials yard; nightwatchmen’s shuffling feet behind fences and sheds only made the silence greater.

Schrella smiled, leaned over the rusty railing, turned, and got a start. He had not known about the new bridge, nor had Nettlinger told him about it. It swung out, wide, over the old harbor basin, and the dark green pillars stood exactly where Trischler’s house had been. Shadows from the bridge were cast out in front where the old tughouse had stood, and the huge, open steel gates rising up out of the water framed blue nothingness.

Father had preferred most of all working in Trischler’s
tavern, serving the seamen and their wives in the beer garden during the long summer evenings, while Alois, Edith and he went fishing in the old harbor basin. Eternity of a child’s timescale, infinity otherwise encountered only in verse. On the other side of the river the bells of St. Severin’s had chimed, chiming peace and confidence into the evening, while Edith traced the bobfly’s jerky motion in the air, her hips, her arms and her entire body dancing to the bobbing rhythm; and the fish had not even bitten once.

Father had served yellow beer with white foam, radiating more mildness than doggedness in his face, smilingly refusing every tip because
all men are brothers
. He called it out in the summer evening: brother, brother. Smiles appeared on the seamen’s thoughtful faces, and pretty women with confidence in their eyes shook their heads at so much childlike pathos, but clapped their applause nonetheless, brothers and sisters.

Schrella came slowly down from the balustrade and walked along by the harbor basin, where rusty boats and pontoons awaited the junk dealer. He plunged deep into the greenish shadow under the bridge and saw, in the middle of the water, industrious cranes loading bits of the old bridge onto barges, where the groaning scrap iron was crushed beneath the weight of more scrap iron descending on it. He came on the pretentious stairs going up onto the bridge, and felt, walking up them, how the wide steps enforced a solemn pace. With ghostly confidence the neat and empty autobahn rose up toward the river and the bridge, where the signboards stopped confidence short with their giant skull and crossbones, black on white. The way west was barred by signboards reading DEATH, DEATH, while across the endless expanse of shining beet leaves an empty road led out to the east.

Schrella walked on, slipping through between DEATH and the skull and crossbones, past the construction workers’ huts, and pacified a nightwatchman who had raised his arms angrily, only to drop them again, appeased by Schrella’s smile.
Schrella walked on farther, to the edge of the old bridge where rusty reinforcement rods, with lumps of concrete still dangling from them, testified by their fifteen years of unbroken survival to the quality of German steel. Behind the empty steel gates, over on the other side of the water, the autobahn resumed its way again, past the golf course and into the endless expanse of glimmering beet leaves.

The Cafe Bellevue. The promenade. On the right, the playing fields, rounders, rounders. The ball that Robert hit, and then the balls they had struck with their cues in Dutch drinking places, red-green, white-green, the monotonous music of the balls sounded almost Gregorian, and the figures formed by the balls were like some strict poetry, endlessly conjured up to the power of three on the green felt. Never a taste of the
Host of the Beast
, always blindly putting up with the injury inflicted;
Feed my lambs
on suburban fields, where rounders was played, in streets like Gruffel Street and Modest Street, in English suburban streets and behind prison walls.
Feed my lambs
wherever you can find them, even when they haven’t anything better to do than read Hölderlin or Trakl, nothing better for fifteen years than write on blackboards ‘I bind, I bound, I have bound, I shall bind, I had bound, I shall have bound,’ while Nettlinger’s children played badminton on well-kept lawns—‘The English are really best at that’—while his pretty wife, well-groomed, well-groomed, very well-groomed, called to him from the terrace, where he reclined in his pretty deck chair, ‘Would you like a drop of gin in your lemonade?’ and he called back, ‘Yes, a good, big one!’ and his wife, letting out a little giggle of delight at such a witty man, poured him a good big drop of gin in his lemonade and went outside and sat down beside him, in the second deck chair, no less pretty than the first, and passed expert judgment on her oldest daughter’s movement at play. Just a shade too thin perhaps, a shade too bony, the pretty face a shade too serious. And now she laid the racket down, exhausted, and went to sit at
Daddy’s feet, at Mummy’s feet, by the edge of the lawn—‘Now don’t go and catch cold, darling’—and asked, oh so seriously, ‘Daddy, tell me, what does it mean, exactly, democracy?’ And that was the perfect moment for Daddy to grow solemn, and set down his glass of lemonade, and take the cigar out of his mouth—‘Ernst-Rudolf, that makes five today’—and explain to her, ‘Democracy.…’ No, no, I’ll not be asking you officially or privately to clarify my legal status. I
don’t take anything for it
, I swore the childish oath in the Cafe Zons; I swore to uphold the nobility of defenselessness. Let my legal position remain unclear. Perhaps Robert has clarified it already with dynamite. Wonder whether Robert’s learned to laugh in the meanwhile, or at least to smile. Always serious, never got over Ferdi’s death. He froze his thoughts of vengeance into formulas and carried them about, lightest of luggage, in his brain, carried them with him for six years, exact formulas, through the sergeants’ mess and the officers’ mess, without laughing once, whereas Ferdi when they arrested him smiled, that angel from the suburbs, from the hovels of a Gruffel Street. And only a square inch or so of skin on the tip of his thumb had consecrated his memory. A gym teacher’s scorched feet. The last lamb killed by a piece of shrapnel. Father
was not seen again
, not even
shot while attempting to escape
. And never again a trace of the ball that Robert hit.

Schrella flicked his cigarette butt into the river, stood up and began sauntering back, slipped through once more between DEATH and the crossbones, nodded to the apprehensive nightwatchman, and then with a last glance back at the Cafe Bellevue went down along the neat and empty autobahn toward the horizon where the beet leaves were glimmering in the summer light. Streetcar No. 16 ought to cross the highway somewhere. One ticket to the station, forty-five pfennigs, including one transfer. He thought longingly of a room in a hotel. He loved the casual aspect of being “at home” in that
way, the anonymity of shabby rooms, interchangeable one with another. The icicles of memory would never thaw in rooms like that. Stateless and homeless and in the morning an indifferent breakfast served by a sleepy waiter, his cuffs not quite clean, his shirt front showing no sign of the ardor which Mother had bestowed on such articles. And if the waiter were over sixty, might one not dare ask: ‘Did you once have a colleague called Schrella?’

Farther on, along the empty, tidy road, through the glimmering beet-leaf sea, for luggage only his hands in his pockets and his small change strewn along the way, for Hänsel and Gretel. Postcards formed the only bearable contact with that life which still went on, after Edith and Father and Ferdi had died. ‘Dear Robert, I am well, hoping you are the same. Regards to the niece I have never met, to my nephew and your father.’ Twenty-four words, too many words. Compress the text: ‘Am well, hope you are too, regards to Ruth, Joseph, your father.’ Twelve words. Say the same using half as many. Why now come back, shake hands and go a whole week without conjugating: I bind, I bound, I have bound; and find Nettlinger unchanged and Gruffel Street unchanged? Mrs. Trischler’s hands were missing.

A sky of beet leaves, as if grown over with silvery-green plumage. Down below, the No. 16 was rocking through an underpass. Forty-five pfennigs. Everything more expensive. Nettlinger would doubtless not yet have reached the end of his elucidation of democracy, his voice grown mellow in the late afternoon light, when his daughter would have gone and got the rug from the living-room couch—Yugoslav, or Danish or Finnish, lovely colors, in any case—and laid it over her father’s shoulders and kneeled down again, to listen devotedly while in the kitchen her mother … ‘Yes, please do stay out there, my dears, it’s such a lovely afternoon and so quiet and peaceful …’ was preparing tasty finger sandwiches and mixing a colorful salad.