Epitaph for a Working ManO (7 page)

“Or having physiotherapy.”

“What's that?” he asked.

“Didn't you have something like that done to your leg when you were in hospital?”

He looked at me, not quite sure. He stuck out his chin. “You mean making you move your broken ankle, that kind of thing? Yes, they did that. At least, as long as I was in the hospital. Now I remember. I should have gone on with it. But what does it matter? I've had enough exercise all my life. And I learned to walk again, didn't I? The health insurance doesn't need to pay for you to learn to walk, does it?”

After a moment he came back to the man who had hobbled past. “His name's Adam. He's got three or four farms. One of them's a pig farm now. Another specialises in chickens. But his main business is dealing in animal feeds. It's so profitable that he could easily have bought up a few more farms. – If he'd seen me he'd probably have offered me a lift home. I've done jobs for him. Last autumn, the ground-floor window-sills. Now those on the first floor should be done. But he'd have to have scaffolding put up for me. With broad, comfortable planks. I could climb on to it from the balcony. Because, you see, I'm not capable of clambering around on ladders any more. Each time he sees me he asks me when I'm coming. If he put up scaffolding I could get it done before winter sets in. Otherwise it'll have to wait until next year.”

We lapsed into silence.

“If only they were all like him,” he started up again. “Last autumn, when I was working on the window-sills, I used to have lunch there. It wasn't bad, I must say. In any case, there was always enough drink.”

A prominent Christian Democrat from the Brühl district. And Haller, an old Socialist. But anyone who offered him decent food and drink found favour with Father, whatever his politics. – However, it had seemed to me that, as he hobbled past, the wealthy farmer and feed merchant had caught sight of his journeyman stonemason at the table in the entrance hall, and that he had made a real effort to look the other way. Well, be that as it may, we drank another cup of tea before it was time to go for the bus.

*

How lively he was, chatting to the two women! For once they were not old acquaintances of his but distant acquaintances of mine. Mrs Köppel, an office colleague of Sophie's but from another department; Maria Annaheim, a colleague of mine years ago when I was working as a compositor for Arn plc.

A friend had just had a baby, said Mrs Köppel.

Having a baby wasn't an illness, said Father. It was nice for him to meet people here who had no ailments themselves and who weren't visiting people afflicted with ailments. And what was the child's name? Claudia, I see, not Claudio. So it must be a girl. And how much had it weighed at birth? Could it scream loudly? Was it being breast-fed? Or were they giving it a bottle?

Mrs Köppel was happy to supply him with all the information.

Father listened, smiling, and asked further questions.

Mrs Köppel turned to me and asked if I'd heard that the Rex Cinema was closing. Then she explained to Father that she and I only ever saw each other at the cinema. The decent films were shown at the Rex. A pity that would be over now.

He'd always liked going to the cinema, said Father. He'd gone to the Rex when tickets were only sixty centimes in the front row – they'd called it the pain-in-the-neck row. It was true that you had a pain in the neck afterwards, especially after the double bills, and double bills were particularly popular. The Rex had originally been built and used as a variety theatre, a music hall. He remembered that in those days someone used to accompany the films – flickering, wobbly films they were – on a piano out in front beside the stage.

“And here you have both: cinema and music hall.” He pointed to the entrance hall. “At any rate I myself come here purely for the entertainment,” he said. “You have a comfortable seat. There's always something to see. Legs In Plaster meets Bandaged Eyes on a date, an amusing comedy. The only thing that's missing is the piano. But just wait, it would be easy to hang loudspeakers from the ceiling. Non-stop pop music, musical requests for the patients. It could still be done.”

He groped in his left-hand pocket, then in the one on the right. “Where've you got to then?”

Mrs Köppel asked him what he was looking for.

“Cigarettes for a chain-smoker,” he said.

She offered him one of hers.

“No thanks, they must be somewhere here, I had them a moment ago. Where on earth did I put them?” He started emptying his pockets, laid everything out before him on the table: the cover of a diary with photographs inside, bus timetables, pencil stubs, buttons, the card from the hospital, a couple of crumpled bus tickets. “Look, I kept them too! It's about time I sorted everything out.”

It was like a game. The two women joined in. They advised him where else to look. He laid everything out with military precision. He wasn't bothered; at other times when he'd groped through all his pockets unable to find his watch or his matches or the bus timetable he'd been different: impatient, irritable. Now he made fun of himself, said he had a head like a sieve. Finally the blue and white packet of Virginia cigarettes turned up in the back pocket of his trousers.

I asked Maria Annaheim if she was working shifts at the moment, seeing that she was here in the middle of the afternoon. “Holidays,” she said. She didn't waste words.

She should have been called Ingrid, Istrid or Irene. A beanpole, at least ten centimetres taller than me. She'd gone through all the modernisations at Arn plc, filmsetting, monitor, computer. So not a beanpole but a versatile woman. I hadn't known that she and Mrs Köppel were friends.

The two of them had come to the hospital by car. Since it was raining hard now, the car was a long way away in the car park, and they didn't have umbrellas, I offered to see them to the car with my umbrella. One after the other, my former colleague first.

“May I? – Otherwise I'll get wet,” she said as she took my arm at the door. A blustery wind blew sheets of water across the tarmac. When we reached the car she curtsied, then kissed me on both cheeks. “Make hay while the sun shines! Don't look so startled.”

She drew up her long legs into the car. A brief wave of the hand.

Distant acquaintances.

I returned to the hospital entrance to collect Mrs Köppel. Despite the rain she didn't take my arm, and despite the opportunity there was no kiss from her.

A sequel? To be continued? Forget it.

*

What else happened during that third round of radiotherapy?

Once, Father came to the hospital with a plastic bag full of apples. “I gathered them up in Budmiger's orchard,” he said. “Most of them are wormy. No one picks them, they're just left to rot. But they're still good enough for stewed apples or compote. Belle de Boskoop, the best for applesauce.”

Another time he brought walnuts. He'd gone out at six in the morning. There were a couple of walnut trees along the path to the wood. He didn't know who they belonged to. He just picked up all the nuts that were lying in the grass. It was nice to get up early when everything was dark, foggy, wet. I should spread the walnuts out on the balcony on a piece of newspaper. They had to be completely dry.

*

The sun shone yellow through the window-panes. He was sitting in his usual place by the window. All three were in the room. “Oh, it's you,” he said.

“How are you?” I asked – the usual question.

“I've got rheumatism again,” he said. “I thought you might come today, today or tomorrow.”

I gave him Sophie's regards – the usual greetings.

“Give her my regards too,” he said.

They were very busy at the office at the moment, I said.

“I've got a lot to do, too,” he said. “But as long as my shoulder's no better it'll have to wait.”

Had he informed Lätt, I asked.

Certainly not!

Flies fidgeted around on the window-pane. He grabbed a newspaper and took a swipe. One was hit. With his hand he swept it down behind the night table.

“The last ones are coming into the house, now that it's getting cold outside.”

After a pause:

“I nearly always get it if I've been sitting too long by the window – rheumatism, in my shoulder, sometimes in my hip. The draught here, windows on two sides, and they don't close properly.”

I nodded; he nodded back.

“Yes, that's how it is. And it's not too warm up from the floor either. I watched them make this floor: cement, linoleum on top, one, two, done. They save money wherever they can. The ones who build it aren't the ones who'll have to live in it. And old bones like us are used to sciatica, aren't they?”

He grinned; I grinned back.

“But old Haller sits by the window in spite of the draught because he likes sitting here. Because there's something to see from here. Over there, every five minutes a passing car. And precisely eight times a day the bus, four times from Breiten, four times from Turben. Occasionally I miss it. Splendid entertainment, don't you think? Or am I wrong?”

Grinning, pursing his lips knowingly.

“A good lookout spot, I'll say that! Like the Bahnhofstrasse down town.”

The garden, fruit trees, roofs, the line of hills, the forest. The stillness in the room. Flies lethargic on the bedspread.

*

He should have been told the truth.

It didn't happen often, but it did happen. She didn't come home till two o'clock in the morning. And then she was in a bad mood at breakfast.

“Who has to go to work with a headache, you or me?”

I shouldn't have said anything. The moment was ill-chosen.

After Sophie left I went out myself. Through the thick fog down to the river. Why not move out of the flat, rent a room? I had enough savings to last a couple of months. And I'd be able to look for a job somewhere else. Leave town, get a change of air. Go to Zurich, Bern or Basel. Or to another small town like this one. Anywhere, so long as it was somewhere else.

Pack up and leave. Then she'd have no one to get up before her in the morning and make her coffee, set the jam and butter on the table, make her toast; no one to clear the table, make the bed, do the vacuuming, the shopping, decide what to cook for lunch; no one to do the washing-up, polish the chrome; no one to take care not to miss our day for the communal washing-machine; no one to put out the rubbish bags on Tuesdays and Fridays; no one to heat up the leftovers from lunch and wait for her to tell him something interesting from the office.

Pack up and leave.

But why? And what for? What business of mine was her affair anyway? Why not be a simple spectator: scenes from married life? Then I wouldn't need to watch so much television or go to the cinema so often. Perhaps it was nothing but play-acting anyway.

Or pay no attention. It wasn't as if the affair was conspicuous. Fritschi wasn't interested in attracting attention, and that was all right with Sophie.

So, come back down to earth. It was the beginning of November, the world was getting frostier. An out-of-work typesetter leaves his wife who's done nothing to harm him except continue to work for her boss after office hours. Ridiculous. She has no trouble adapting. She'll manage to wrap him around her little finger too.

A clever person. She knows exactly what she wants. And usually gets it.

No, she never nagged, or hardly ever. She behaved quite magnanimously. It was she who advised me to stop going to the employment office. “In any case it won't be long before your benefits come to an end,” she'd said. “You may as well stop going of your own accord. Always having to prove you're running around and searching and doing your best! Look around, take your time. There's no hurry. Something's bound to turn up sooner or later. In the meantime, look at it from the good side.” After all, she earned enough, she added. State-employed, crisis-proof.

That's true. She's the secretary of her beloved boss. And just one rung above him there's an executive councillor, the head of the cantonal Police and Military Department, an indispensable department, police and arsenals will always be needed.

But it was depressing all the same.

What, exactly? That policemen were in greater demand than typesetters? Sophie more in demand than I was? That days were getting shorter, winter approaching?

I walked the irritation out of my system.

And arrived home on time, that day too. I did the shopping at the Co-op, cooked lunch: black pudding and liver sausage, potatoes, apple compote. So it must have been a Tuesday. At the Co-op they only sell black pudding on Tuesdays. By a quarter past twelve the steaming dishes were standing on the kitchen table.

*

A discreet woman. She didn't tell me much. Probably she meant well. What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over. One of those useless proverbs. I can hardly believe she thought I didn't care at all.

Just to pick out one example, a thorny issue: where did the two of them sleep when they slept with each other? She had never said that they only went out together for meals. – So where? Of course that hadn't been a problem on Elba. In a two-star hotel smelling of disinfectant or in a three-star hotel smelling of lavender. But here in town? Surely not at Fritschi's home. Definitely not. And what about here in our house? Not as far as I knew. And if so, it couldn't have been very often. As a house husband I was always at home. A fact that considerably complicated matters.

Infidelities. A single girl with a married man, a bachelor with a married woman, they hardly give rise to organisational complications. He goes to her place or she goes to his: in one place at least there's a bed available which is not a double bed with twin mattresses. With Fritschi's wife a housewife, me a house husband, things were not made easy for the two of them. In fact they were to be pitied.

In the boss's office after work? In that wing of the cantonal administration building? Picturing the official façade with the rooms behind it, and imagining the use those rooms would be put to other than storing files made me want to laugh. Besides, Sophie always came home punctually after work.

June, July, August, September: relapses into teenage behaviour in the car? In Fritschi's Ford Sierra? It didn't necessarily have to be an Alfa Romeo with five doors and a reclining seat.

I never managed to stop myself imagining things. I didn't actually do any imagining, the pictures just came.

At times it was pathetic. But what could I do? Take my infantry rifle out of the cupboard, go out on the balcony, and shoot at the gulls and pigeons over the Aare? It would have been as spectacular as it was pointless. And anyway, all that doesn't belong here, not the hotel room or the reclining seat, not the striptease or the comic strips. A discreet person. She didn't tell me anything. But I had plenty of time for daydreams. Black and white; incubus, succubus.

On my moped rides to Breitmoos, especially, things passed through my mind, grey on grey. In the long run I didn't stand a chance. I was not of the same calibre as Mr Fritschi. Sophie wouldn't have embarked on an affair without good reason. What would have happened if Fritschi hadn't had a wife, a woman from the Valais, an unwavering Catholic? Some time after the summer holidays she'd noticed. Or was it precisely the Valaisan woman who made the affair attractive for Sophie? The competition? A rival? Sophie had always been a tad crazy in her easygoing way.

Should she have given me a full report? At least she'd never tried to pull the wool over my eyes. And as for the details, run-of-the-mill or spicy, she really couldn't know what kind of things would interest a husband. And then I'd have had to admit that I was interested. And admitting that was quite another matter.

I only asked once, after she'd come back from her holiday: how had Fritschi managed to keep his wife from knowing. He'd thought something up, she said. He'd compiled a scenario with cover addresses in Livorno and Portoferraio, with detours, with regular telephone calls to the Upper Valais where his wife and children were spending the holidays at her parents' place. I didn't quite understand all the complicated cautionary measures. But they must have worked. At least as long as the holidays lasted.

What if Fritschi had been single, or divorced? Sophie would certainly have left me. She wasn't afflicted with passivity like me. See the situation as it was, as it is. It was only thanks to Fritschi's being married that she stayed on. Otherwise, obviously, she'd simply have gone.

Incurably irritable, irascible, and irremediable. What else? We've already had inoperable. Marooned, written off. – Don't exaggerate. If we'd had a baby I'd be changing nappies. And as a house husband you don't go off the rails either.

Apparently Mrs Fritschi had resigned herself to it. She had made only one condition: nothing was to happen in her own flat. Even when she was away on holiday with the children.

If deceived husbands and wives are in the know, there's no need for alibis. Did I want to be in the know?

*

We still slept with each other occasionally. But if I had reason to think she'd recently had a tête-à-tête with her Fritschi I avoided bodily contact. I didn't mind her smooching with strangers. But the very idea of coming into contact with Fritschi's slime revolted me. An idiotic reaction, I know. Considering we're all quintessentially zoological creatures.

Had I been warned? No, not really. We don't have the same temperament, I should have known that.

*

Finally I did take my rifle out of the cupboard. On official orders and not in the least because I wanted to. Military service, a two-week refresher course. In this country you never get away from the military. All the more annoying this time, since I was out of a job and would not qualify for compensatory payment. Only soldiers' pay, and that would be meagre.

Anyhow, I had enough time for military service now, plenty of time. I'd already spent a lot of time on the preparations. Unpacking and gathering together all the things I'd hastily stowed away two years earlier. Checking again and again to make sure I had everything. A couple of studs had fallen out of the spiked shoes: I had to take them to the shoemaker's. There was a triangular tear in the front of one of the shirts: I had to buy a new one.

And I needed some more woollen socks, some spare shoelaces, steel wool to clean the mess tin, a pair of insoles, and all the other things you suddenly feel you must have before you set out on a journey. What would be best to wear under a camouflage suit on warm late autumn days with an approaching cold front promising snowfalls on the Jura heights followed by nasty wet weather? Should I pack two or even three pairs of long johns? Or would it be better to take my jersey pyjamas in addition to my tracksuit? Preparations had to be made with military foresight and precision. Or was it just housewifely fastidiousness?

A mobilisation exercise, that's what it said in the call-up.

Provisions sufficient for two days were to be taken along. The only thing the troops would be supplied with in those first two days was hot water.

*

On Sunday afternoon I went to see Father again. Nothing new. I told him that I would be away for the following two weeks.

*

Monday morning found me standing much too early in front of the station. I looked around for uniformed shoulders bearing the same number as mine. Sorting out the sheep into their respective flocks.

In the end there were five of us on the platform. We addressed each other informally as “du.” As soon as you're in the army you're on first-name terms.

What time we had to be there and where we had to go. Where and when was the last time. We reminisced. We reminded each other of the refresher course in Langnau, of the ones in Melchnau, Stans, the Entlebuch. No, he hadn't been in Stans, one of them said, he'd had that one deferred. And how many refresher courses had we been on so far? This was the last one; the first; the second. In any case it was all nonsense, but you got over it. It wasn't too bad, really – on the contrary, just like holidays, honestly. (I preferred not to tell them that I had holidays enough.) One of them explained that he'd be getting a whole day's leave; his firm had made the application, he himself had only had to put his signature to it. (Well, the Haller household could manage without me.) They listed the provisions their wives had packed for them for the first two days. (I had had to see to that myself.)

In Rislisberg we changed on to the narrow-gauge train; in Egglen we took the postbus. Each time, a few more soldiers got on.

Schwänglen. The usual guiding-in points. I didn't have to report for duty until a quarter to eleven, so I went to the Bären. Others had also arrived before the time marked on their call-up papers and were sitting there with their white coffee or coffee with kirsch, their beer or grog or mint tea. Civilians dressed up in field grey.

Everything proceeded in the usual way. Pocket ammunition; deposit your military service book; collect gaiters, winter things, your camouflage suit, search for the right size trousers. Gas-mask equipment, individual first-aid kit, trench-digging tools, sleeping-bag. The sergeant allocated the duties. I was assigned guard duty, in front of the gym, left side. A quick change into battle dress. The hurrying had started; soon it would be the waiting.

And the strange smell of the issued clothes was familiar from previous occasions. And the helmet on my head. And the view down over the village, rooftops in the thinning mist. For the first half hour you didn't freeze. The automatic rifle at the ready hanging from the strap over your shoulder: just like in the Lebanon, like on TV. I could feel my shoes pinching the tops of my feet.

At one o'clock I was sent down to the village. First Lieutenant Simmen would pick me and a few others up at the shopping centre. Drivers were standing around. I ate gendarme sausages and bread. As soon as the shop opened we withdrew into the warmth behind the sliding doors.

At half past two the First Lieutenant came. He was in charge of the command platoon. I had been assigned to him as a traffic controller.

I was not to let any vehicle pass unless it was civilian. Any military persons were to be stopped, including those wearing the white armbands that marked them out as exercise referees.

So I stood there.

Whenever a motor vehicle approached I stepped out into the road holding up my hand like a traffic policeman: “Where are you going? Regimental command? Driving prohibited. You have to go on foot. A hundred metres, then turn left. Put your vehicle under cover.” Sergeants, majors, captains squeezed themselves out of their Pinzgauers and Jeeps.

I stood there for one hour, two hours, three hours. As long as I was standing there at the crossroads I knew what I had to do.

Dusk was already falling when I was relieved.

The platoon command had been installed on the stage of the theatre at the Sternen. Tables had been pushed together, a field telephone set up; in the back, along the wall under the heavens, rucksacks, holdalls
,
guns. In front of the curtain, down in the auditorium, two rows of mattresses.

Simmen's relief schedule. My spells on duty were in the evening from seven to nine, in the middle of the night from one to three, then from seven to nine in the morning and from one to three in the afternoon. On Monday and Tuesday the troops would be supplied with nothing but tea, soup, cocoa. On Tuesday we thought: on Wednesday we'll be breaking up, they'll transfer us to the Central Plateau or deeper into the Jura region. On Wednesday we thought: Thursday at the latest. But we stayed put. Positional warfare. We had to hold two passes.