Epitaph for a Working ManO (11 page)

Who said you had to be happy? Happiness is a luxury. Joy, too, is something you seldom need to have. You can manage without. The strange idea that I might be happy one day! When, exactly? Tomorrow morning? In a dozen years? The megalomaniac idea that I might achieve happiness. I never will. And I don't want it as a gift either.

*

I moved out nevertheless. Moved away. Not very far, only to Riederen. At the moment, since half the watchmaking factories have closed, there are a lot of vacant flats there and the rents are cheaper by a quarter than elsewhere.

A one-room flat in a block on the main road, third floor. My money will last me half a year.

The gravestone will cost about two thousand francs: I've already set the money aside.

I hadn't realised. After the last bills for the old people's home and the other bills – for the cremation, the wreath, the death notice in the paper – had all been paid, there were still more than nine thousand francs left in my father's savings book. I had always thought his old age pension together with the bit of money he earned on the side had barely been enough for him to make ends meet.

Sophie managed everything for me. With her secretarial efficiency, during office hours.

I moved out on the second of May. On the first of May I had taken part in the parade in town.

Wanting to stand on my own feet again. Perhaps it was only that.

*

Her affair with Fritschi? No, that's definitely not what it was.

Sophie had never stopped being nice to me, even when the balance in my bank account kept going down and down. She behaved as though there was simply no other way to behave in such a situation.

She stood up for me against Fritschi. He'd dropped some remarks about me a couple of times. He'd misjudged her there! Being her boss did not give him the right to talk disparagingly about me. And being her lover gave him even less right. She defended me: why shouldn't a man be a house husband? If it had been a woman – a typesetter, married, with or without a child – who after losing her job hadn't immediately found a new one – except as a cleaner, a saleswoman at a newspaper kiosk, or a shop assistant – and had decided to stay at home for the time being, nobody would have had any objections, everyone would have thought it normal. Go on, back to the kitchen, back to your vacuum cleaner; go on, back! Someone like Fritschi wouldn't have thought there was anything special about it, he'd probably even have applauded. So why turn up your nose when the same thing happens to a man? – She, Sophie, had been annoyed. Her boss really wasn't so efficient that he could afford to make fun of others. He was a man of action, okay, and there was a certain flair about him, true enough. But without the help of the people working in his department, the dear man of action would generally be completely lost.

With the exception of Sophie, no one helped me.

For a while I thought it might be because she had a bad conscience. But why should Sophie have had a bad conscience as far as I was concerned!

By the way, the two of them always met in Bern, I know now, somewhere in the Kramgasse. An old student friend of Fritschi's has his office there. A pied-à-terre for the engineer. Above a certain income bracket it's the done thing, apparently. “We didn't bother anyone there,” said Sophie. “At the most it bothered us, having to play hide-and seek.”

*

On the Säli Bridge a feeling of relief. It was an afternoon in April. Rain. Wind. In the middle of the bridge it occurred to me: today I would have taken the bus out to Breitmoos. But that isn't necessary any more now.

Him sitting at the window. Sitting at the table. The way he used to sweep the dead flies on to the floor with the side of his hand. The yellow light in the room.

No, not just relief. But that too.

*

He hadn't shown me anything, even less proved anything. And yet it had become visible: the malady was there and there would be no turn for the better. You could rebel against it but that would be hopeless. And hopelessness was part of it, was more a part of it than anything else.

*

At the end of May I went back to the outer Brühl district again. Just over an hour by moped from Riederen. The wheat stood knee-high, lush green. Rows of potato stalks. I intended to go to the Löwen for a drink, and to pay Naef a visit.

I did neither. I drove on to Lake Turben. No one was bathing there yet.

*

He never importuned you, particularly not with good advice. Aggressive occasionally, but without ever trying to tell you what to do. Thus basically good-natured.

*

The way he came limping along under the apple trees, Sophie at his side.

*

Without belly fat, the exit is easier. It had been a hunger strike in the end. His astonishment at how weak he'd become.

*

On the way to the cinema: Bresson's
Un condamné à mort s'est échappé
, a film rarely shown, so I had rushed off to see it. Some teenagers came walking toward me; they had parked their mopeds out on the ring road and now, hand-in-hand or in groups, they emerged from the alley and crossed the square. Galaxy-Disco in the Jura Hall: I remembered reading the advertisement. They sauntered toward me in their neat trousers, casual blazers, T-shirts, raspberry pink, pistachio green, garish rape-flower yellow, in the flower of youth. And I was on my way to see an old film, grey on grey, that I'd first seen more than twenty years ago. There would be scarcely a dozen people in the cinema, whereas the young people here – in rape-flower yellow or pale pastel, in loose jackets, tapered trousers with wide waistbands – were flocking in droves to the disco, where they would fling their arms and legs around. And under the chestnut trees in front of the hall there would be the usual smooching during and after. They were already allowed to, and for me it was already over, over and done with and amen to that. Was it envy? Was it regret? Regret for what? Envy of what? I couldn't have said. What were they already allowed to do? What was I no longer allowed to do? How did that relate to having a right or no longer having it? I was alarmed at how furious I suddenly felt with those little fashion freaks as they sauntered along on their way to their Saturday evening pleasures.

*

Estermann brought me the toolbox. Sophie had given him my address in Riederen, and late one afternoon he was standing at my door with the box. The box had belonged to Haller, now it was mine. I didn't have any beer in the house so I offered him a cup of tea. He spoke volubly and very loud. He had just wanted to hand over the toolbox, he told me repeatedly.

There was not much inside. A couple of iron tools, the mallet, some bush-hammer inserts, a square, a mason's pencil. After Estermann had gone I slammed the lid of the box shut and sat down on top of it for a while. The fountains came to mind. And Father's disappointment that I hadn't made it to the trade fair in Tägern at the end of October. But what did I care about Estermann's fountains!

*

I'm not looking for a job as long as the money lasts. I eat potatoes, porridge and apples, drink milk. In that way the money should last until the autumn.

Once a week I go out for a meal: Saturday lunch at the Co-op restaurant, among retired men and women. Mushroom vol-au-vents with rice and vegetables. I give the cream cake a miss.

*

Last Tuesday Sophie came by, unannounced. We sat on stools in the tiny kitchen. The noise from the main street drifted in through the window. We said little, out of embarrassment, maybe.

Erhard von Büren was born near Solothurn, Switzerland, in 1940. After a PhD in Psychology and German philology from Zurich University (
Zur Bedeutung der Psychologie im Werk Robert Musils
. Atlantis, Zürich) and study stays in France he worked as a teacher in advanced teacher training. He lives in Solothurn, Switzerland.

He has had three novels published in Switzerland:
Abdankung. Ein Bericht
(Zytglogge Verlag, Bern 1989),
Wespenzeit
(Rotpunktverlag, Zürich 2000),
Ein langer blauer Montag
(verlag die brotsuppe, Biel/Bienne 2013).
Epitaph for a Working Man
, the translation of his first novel, is the first of his books to be published in English.

Erhard von Büren has won various literary awards including the Canton of Solothurn Prize for Literature in 2007.

www.erhard-von-büren.ch

Helen Wallimann was born in 1941 in the UK. After her MA from Edinburgh University she worked in publishing in Munich, Paris and London. From 1973 to 2001 she was employed as a teacher of French and English at the Kantonsschule Solothurn. She taught English at Chinese universities for two years

Literary translations that have been published in book form include:
Legends from the Swiss Alps
. MCCM Creations, Hong Kong 2009 (translated from German);
Leung Ping-kwan, The Visible and the Invisible
. Poems. MCCM Creations, Hong Kong 2012 (translated from Chinese).