Billiards at Half-Past Nine (7 page)

He stared after her as she waited, her face a mask, for the waiter to open the dining room door. His heart was still pounding when he came out from behind the pillar, and went slowly down to the restaurant.

“A cognac for the Doctor upstairs, a double.”

“Your doctor’s just caused a hell of a stink.”

“What do you mean, stink?”

“I don’t know. I think someone wants to see him on the double—your doctor. Here, take your cognac and get lost. There must be seventeen women of all ages on your trail. Come on, scram, there’s another one coming down the stairs.”

She
looked as if she had drunk pure gall for breakfast, the one in the golden gown and golden shoes with lion-skin hat and muff. She evoked aversion whenever she appeared. Some superstitious guests screened their faces when they saw her coming in. Chambermaids gave notice because of her, waiters refused to serve her. But he, when she caught him, had to play canasta with her for hours on end. Her fingers were like chicken claws, the only human thing about her was the cigarette in her mouth. “Love, my boy, never known what it is. Not a soul who doesn’t make it clear to me that I disgust him. My mother used to curse me out seven times a day, scream her loathing in my face. My mother was young and pretty, my father young and good-looking, and so were my brothers and sisters. They’d have poisoned me if only they’d had the courage. They said,
a thing like that should never have been born
. We used to live in a yellow villa above the steel works. Thousands of workers left the mill at night, and women and girls, all of them laughing, were waiting for them. They’d all go down those dirty streets together, laughing. I can see, hear, feel and smell like any other human being. I can read, write, count and taste—yet you’re the first human being to stick it out with me more than half an hour, first one, you hear?”

She left a trail of dread behind her, the breath of disaster, throwing her room key on the desk, shrieking into the face of the boy replacing Jochen, “Hugo, where’s Hugo?” When the boy shrugged his shoulders, she walked on to the revolving door, and the waiter who started it turning for her looked down at the floor. Then, the moment she was outside, she drew down her veil over her face.

“I don’t wear it inside, boy. Let them see something for their money, and look at me for mine. But the people outside haven’t earned it.”

“Here’s your cognac, Doctor.”

“Thanks, Hugo.”

He liked Faehmel. Faehmel came every morning at half-past nine, gave him a reprieve till eleven, had already endowed him with a sense of eternity. Had it not always been like this? Had he not been standing at this same whitely lacquered door for centuries, hands folded behind his back, watching the quiet game, listening to words that sent him now sixty years back, now twenty ahead, then ten back again, only suddenly to fling him into the calendar-card reality outside the billiard room? White-green, red-green, red-white, always inside billiard cushions enclosing no more than two square meters of green felt. It was all clean, dry, precise. Between half-past nine and eleven. Downstairs to fetch the double cognac twice, maybe three times. Time here ceased to be a dimension making things measurable. Time was blotted out by that green rectangle of blotting paper. In vain hours chimed, hands moved in vain, in vain ran away from each other in senseless haste. When Faehmel showed up it was drop everything—and just at the one time when there was most to do, old guests leaving, new ones arriving. Yet he had to stand there until St. Severin’s struck eleven. But when—when would that be? Airless rooms, timeless clocks, and he submerged here, moving swiftly under oceans, reality not penetrating, its nose pressed against glass outside, as against shop or aquarium window, dimensions lost, except flatness, the flatness of children’s cutouts. Here people’s clothes were provisionally draped upon their bodies, so many paper dolls. Helplessly they kicked against time’s walls, thicker than centuries made of glass. St. Severin’s shadow was far away, farther still the railroad station, the trains not real, through, freight, express, fast and slow, with them carrying
trunks to customs stations. Only the three billiard balls, rolling over green blotting paper, forming ever-new figurations, were real. Infinity in a thousand formulas, all contained within two square meters. He struck them forth, his cue a wand, while his voice lost itself in eons of time.

“Is there any more to the story, Doctor?”

“You want to hear it?”

“I’d like to.”

Faehmel laughed, sipped at his glass of cognac, lit himself a fresh cigarette, took up the cue and played the red ball. Red-white rolled over the table’s green.

“A week after that, Hugo.…”

“After what?”

Again Faehmel laughed. “After that rounders game, that fourteenth of July in 1935 they scratched into the plaster above the locker—a week after that, I was glad that Schrella had reminded me of the road leading to Trischler’s house. I was standing at the railing of the old weighhouse in the Lower Harbor. From there I had a good view of the road. It went past woodyards, coalyards, ran down to a place where building materials were sold, from there went to the basin, closed off by a rusty iron fence and now used only as a ship-breaking yard for condemned vessels. The last time I’d been there was seven years before, with Schrella, when we went to visit Trischler. But it could have been fifty. I was thirteen when I first went there. In the evening long trains of barges lay moored at the embankment. Barge-women with their market baskets walked ashore up swaying gangplanks. The women had red faces and a steady eye. Men came after the women, out to get beer or a newspaper. Trischler’s mother, all in a flutter, looked over her wares—tomatoes and cabbages and bunches of silvery onions hanging on the wall. Outside a drover was giving his dog short, sharp commands, getting them to drive the sheep into a pen. Across the river—on the side where we are now, Hugo—the gaslamps were being turned on, yellowish light filling the white
globes. A great line of them ran north, propagating infinity. Trischler’s father snapped on the lights in his beer garden, and Schrella’s father, a napkin over his arm, came down to the two-boat house out back, where we—Trischler, young Schrella and I—were chipping ice and throwing it over the beer cases.

But now, seven years later, Hugo, on this twenty-first of July in 1935, the paint had peeled off all the fences, and the only new thing in sight was the door at Michaelis’ coalyard. On the other side of the fence a big pile of briquettes lay crumbling apart. At every turn in the road I looked back to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I was exhausted, I could feel the wounds on my back. The pain began to throb like a pulse. For ten minutes there hadn’t been a soul on the road. I looked along the narrow stretch of clear, ruffled water joining the Lower to the Upper Harbor. Not a boat in sight. I looked up at the sky. Not a plane, either, and I thought, you must take yourself pretty seriously if you think they’ll send planes out looking for you.

You see, I’d done it, Hugo, I’d gone with Schrella to the little Cafe Zons on Boisserée Street, where the Lambs had their meetings. I’d mumbled the password to the proprietor: ‘Feed my lambs.’ And I had sworn to a young girl called Edith, and I looked right into her eyes as I did it, that I would never make oblation to the
Host of the Beast
. In that same dark back room I had made a speech, in it using unlamblike words smacking of blood and rioting and revenge, revenge for Ferdi Progulske whom they’d executed only that morning. The ones sitting around the table listening themselves looked as if they had just had their heads chopped off. They were frightened, they realized that a boy’s seriousness is as serious as an adult’s. Fear lay on them, and the knowledge that Ferdi was really dead. He was seventeen years old, a hundred-meter runner, a carpenter’s apprentice. I’d only seen him four times all told, twice in the Cafe Zons and twice in my own house, yet I’d never forget him as long as I lived. Ferdi had sneaked into Old Wobbly’s
apartment and thrown a bomb at Wobbly’s feet as he came out of the bedroom. Old Wobbly got out of it with burns on his feet, a shattered bureau mirror and a smell of cordite in the place. Madness, Hugo, adolescent high-mindedness. You hear? Are you really listening?”

“I hear, all right.”

“I’d read Hölderlin:
Firm in compassion the eternal heart
. But Ferdi only read Karl May, who seemed to preach the same high-mindedness. All foolishness, paid for under the executioner’s ax in the gray of the morning, while church bells were tolling for matins and baker boys counted warm rolls into their string bags, and here in the Prince Heinrich Hotel the first guests were having breakfast served, while the birds were twittering, milkmaids stealing in and out of quiet doorways on rubber-soled shoes leaving bottles of milk on clean coco mats. Meanwhile men from newspaper promotion departments were racing around the city plastering billboards with red-bordered bulletins, saying: ‘Execution! The Apprentice, Ferdinand Progulske …!’ So all early risers could read them, the streetcar motormen, the school kids, the teachers and everyone else hurrying to catch the morning trolley, sandwiches in their pockets, and carrying the local paper, as yet unfolded, with a headline announcing ‘An Example Set.’ And for me to read, too, Hugo, as I was getting into No. 7, right out in front of here at the corner.

Ferdi’s voice on the phone—had I heard it yesterday or the day before? ‘You’ll be at the Cafe Zons as we agreed?’ A pause. ‘Are you coming, or aren’t you?’ ‘I’ll be there.’ Enders even tried to catch hold of my sleeve and pull me into the streetcar that morning when the news broke, but I pulled loose and waited until the streetcar had disappeared around the corner. Then I went to the trolley stop on the other side of the street, where you still catch No. 16, and rode through peaceful suburbs to the Rhine, then away from the Rhine again until the car finally swung into the loop at the end of the line between gravel pits
and army barracks. By rights, I thought at the time, it should be winter. Winter, cold, rainy, sky overcast—that would make it more bearable. But it was not. For hours I wandered around among prosy allotment gardens, looking at peas and apricots, tomatoes and cabbages, listening to the clink of beer bottles and the ice cream man’s bell. There he stood at a crossing, dipping ice cream into crumbly cones. How can they do it, I thought, how can they eat ice cream, drink beer, sample apricots while Ferdi.… Around noontime I fed my sandwiches to some morose chickens scratching out geometric figures in the muck of a junkyard. Out of a window came a woman’s voice, saying, ‘Did you read about that kid, the one they.…’ And a man’s voice answered, ‘Shut up, goddamn it, I know all about it.…’ I threw my sandwiches to the chickens, continued on and got lost down among railroad cuts and culverts. Finally I reached another terminus somewhere and rode through a series of strange suburbs. I got off and turned my pockets inside out. Black gunpowder trickled onto the gray pavement. I started to run, past more railroad embankments, storage dumps, garden plots, houses. Finally, a movie theater, where the woman in the box office was just pushing up her window. Three o’clock? Three exactly. Fifty pfennigs. I was the only one in the audience. Heat hung over the corrugated iron roof. Love, blood, a betrayed lover drew his dagger. I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until the movie-goers for the six o’clock show came barging into the theater. I staggered outside. Where was my school bag? Back inside the movie? By the gravel pit, where I’d sat for a long while watching the trucks being piled full, so high the load spilled over? Or was it back at that other place, where I had thrown my bread to the sullen fowl? Ferdi’s voice on the phone, was it yesterday or the day before? ‘You’ll be at the Cafe Zons as we agreed?’ Pause. ‘Will you be there or won’t you?’ ‘I’ll be there.’

A rendezvous with a headless boy. A piece of folly already precious to me, the price of it having been so high. Meanwhile
I had had my turn with Nettlinger. He’d lain in wait for me in front of the Cafe Zons. They took me to Williams’ Pit and beat me with the barbed-wire whip. The barbs tore up my back. Through the rusty window bars I could see the banking where I had played as a child. Time and again our ball had rolled downhill on us, and time and again I had climbed down helter-skelter to bring it back, always having a quick, scared look at the rusty bars, sensing something evil behind the dirty windowpanes. Nettlinger laid on.

In the cell I tried to take my shirt off, but shirt and skin were all chewed up together, so that when I pulled at my collar or sleeve, it felt as if I were pulling my skin over my head.

There were other bad moments, too. When I stood at the weighhouse railing, at the end of my tether, the pain was greater than the pride I took in my wounds. My head sank to the railing, my mouth pressed to it, and the bitterness of the weather-pitted iron felt good in my mouth. Another minute and I would be at Trischler’s house, and then I would know whether they had got there first and were waiting for me. I got a terrible start. A workman with his lunch box under his arm came up the street and disappeared into the place where building materials were sold. As I went down the steps I held to the handrail so hard that my sliding hand peeled off flakes of rust. The rhythms of the riveting hammers that had sounded so cheerful seven years before were gone, nothing left but a weary echo of them now. One old man with a sledge hammer, working from a raft, breaking up a ferry boat. Nuts and bolts rattled into a box. When the ferry timbers fell, the thud they made told just how badly rotted they were. The old man kept tapping at the boat’s engine and listening to the sound as if he were sounding the heart of someone very dear to him. He bent down deep into the bilge of the boat and fished out all sorts of parts: screws, the engine head, injection nozzles, cylinders. He held them up to have a look at them, sniffed them before throwing them into
the box with the nuts and bolts. At the stern of the boat was an old winch, hanging on it the remains of an old cable, rusty rotten as an old stocking.

With me memories of people and events have always been linked memories of movement, which stick in my mind as patterns. The way I leaned over the railing, lifting my head, letting it fall, lifting it, letting it fall lower to watch the street—the memory attached to this movement brought words and colors, images and moods back into my consciousness. I didn’t remember how Ferdi had looked, but instead how he’d lit a match, how he’d raised his head a little when he said, yes yes, no no. I remembered how Schrella wrinkled his forehead, the way he moved his shoulders, Father’s walk, Mother’s gestures, the way Grandmother moved her hand when she brushed the hair away from her brow.… And the old man down below, the one I could see from the top of the banking, and who just then was knocking punky wood loose from a big screw—that was Trischler’s father. For the hand was making movements no other hand but his could make. I’d watched the same hand opening boxes, renailing them shut. Stuff smuggled across the frontier in dark ships’ holds. Rum and raisins, chocolate and cigarettes. In the tow-boat house in back of the beer garden I’d seen that hand make movements peculiar to it and none other. The old man looked up, blinked at me, and said, ‘Hey, sonny, that road up there doesn’t go anywhere.’