Georg Letham (28 page)

What is the individual? March was lucky to be taken seriously as one, so seriously that he got a new name, no, two new names. For as soon as I saw his relentless sentimental smile, I named him not just Gummi, but also Bear, “Gummi Bear.” His warm heart was never anything but a gummi bear. Step on a gummi bear, lick it fondly–it will always be what it is.

“Sweetheart, you bore me,” I would say to him when, at night, he would resume his life story. I was tired, I had been saddled with duties. I had been released from the job of cleaning the water tub, but if a criminal suffering from typhus in the sick bay was pining for an enema, I was the one the guard called.

Thus my glorious achievements as a physician were being borne in mind. Was that not what I had wanted? It was thought that an old doctor like me was best suited for these delightful tasks. The guards, officially appointed and much too lavishly paid for their work, were so lethargic that they even fell asleep on their watch. For the heat was blistering. Even under the open sky, it was oppressive enough to take one's breath away. But all the more so where we were, down below or in the sick bay, that little room in which men lived cheek by jowl like rats! The less said the better!

When I returned from my charitable work one night, I felt an unexpected breath of fresh air. A gentle salt breeze caressed my brow. What a turn of events, by the grace of God! Gummi Bear, who had not been sleeping well because of the goings-on inside him, never mind the heat outside him, looked at me with swimming eyes. Suddenly I felt something wet and salty on my upper lip. What was there to cry about? But no! It was real, lovely, salty seawater, the porthole above my head had been smashed while I was gone. I had the marvelous godsend of a fresh breeze.

A thorough investigation. Who had broken the unopenable window? A tribunal loomed.

What would the punishment be? Who was going to be punished? How would it be possible to punish that miserable ship's passenger more than he was being punished already? Easy! Near the engine room there were some little rooms almost hermetically sealed by iron doors, true hellholes, outlet ducts standing on end, not much broader than an average man. If someone needed to be disciplined, he could be shut up in one of these and allowed to stew in his own juices. The stokers were relieved every three hours, and a Gummi Bear was roasted for forty-eight.

How had Gummi Bear carried out his crime? With the crank of his gramophone. Oh, that gramophone, what a marvel of technology! The most beautiful melodies in its innards. A poignant keepsake from the life before. And a tool now too, so that I, the bosom friend, might bask in fresh air.

Fine! Gummi Bear went to the steam room. That was his reward for his good deed!

But what won't love do for love! After forty-eight hellish hours, he staggered back, covered with dirt and almost blind from being in the
dark so long, to all outward appearances hardly a man anymore. But in his heart more joyous than ever! Gummi Bear was despairing and joyous at once, submissive yet gifted with extraordinary energy, male and female–a mixture of contradictory psychological traits that an experimenter might find stimulating. “Poor little nipper,” I said to him as I loyally returned to him the things he had left in my keeping, the gramophone and the rest of his possessions, “you poor dear pet!” And Gummi Bear smiled beatifically.

The ship was rolling wildly. There was no way to replace the smashed pane of the porthole during the voyage. The cool fresh air was a balm that would sustain me for the entire trip, but, since the battle with red dog that I had so ingloriously lost, I had the greatest respect for sea-water. But why else did one have a Gummi Bear? When seas were heavy he stuffed
his
precious bag into the opening, letting the harsh, caustic seawater get into anything it wanted to. At least I would be protected and would lie tenderly in his arms. Yes, in his arms, I suppose that was what he wanted, but he would never have that. I swore that I would protect myself from
this
love.

I suspected that it was this love that had brought him here. No longer did I want him to keep his mouth shut, I wanted to hear his story. And once he had recounted the saga of what his brimming little heart had driven him to, then I was going to look at him, full of love, pucker up for a kiss, and say to him as tenderly as a wily anarchist and enemy of love can: No! You expect me to do
that
?!

Or was it better not to let him get that far? I wasn't going to be assaulted by
him
. I emphasized the word
him
, not
I
! Other men had been assaulted by other men here in this Cargo Hold 3 of the
Mimosa
, for I had seen it, and the others had seen it, and the guards had seen
it, and there were cries and moans and murmurs and all the silly panting and sobbing eruptions of a sensuality repressed for months among these brute hearts, and the good Gummi Bear had tried to cover my eyes so that I would not see these abominations. Did he have four hands, to cover my ears too? Why worry about the eyes and ears? The soul! What did that mean to me!

The next morning the brigadier general glanced my way. He made no response to my meek and plaintive greeting, but looked away as I stared at him. Oh, Herr Brigadier General,
I'm
the one who should be disconcerted!

He was the king of the ship, but, like all kings, he was lonely in his exalted position. Even the ship's commander was many ranks below him, the commandant of our group was at the lowest of the officer grades, while Carolus twiddled his thumbs at the top.

I did not push myself forward. I bided my time. A single word from him was precious. Short of that, I hung on to what I had, this “loving heart,” this March, who flattered me. I had no idea how it was that I, no longer young, no longer handsome, had “bewitched” this poor devil, to use his word, but it was so good to be pampered, to have the choice bits of food slipped to me, to be taken care of like a child! It touched me when he offered to start up the gramophone, which as yet had made no sound, for me. One of the convicts, Suleiman, the two-and-a-half-hundredweight man, the copper-faced colossus, his mouth protruding pinkly and fleshily beneath his bold, hawklike nose and taking up almost all of the lower part of his brutal face, a monster of a man who despite his baseness (rape and murder, child abuse) was not without a certain oriental majesty and cynical authority, had offered him a good sum of money for the machine. To no effect. Then more. People are children.
Not to be taken seriously. Gummi Bear was no different from “Sultan Suleiman,” the colossus, the rich man. All impulse, nothing more. Why should I struggle against the love of Gummi Bear? Let's have it! Open up! Tell it, go on! Sing your song!

Gummi Bear's ambition was to be, not a gummi bear, but a diamond. His proud bearing on the dock, his reserve, lately again maintained with particular desperation, through which an irrepressible passionate nature always shone–it was unfailing. A criminal? No. But a dangerous child? Yes, he was that. His story was much less romantic than he thought. For he was one of the “loving hearts,” and when he pitied others (such as me), he was pitying himself. When he lied to others (such as me), he was lying to himself.

He told the story of his betrothal. The girl is the daughter of a big shot (a high-ranking municipal official); he calls her sometimes by her first name, sometimes, as though inadvertently and then immediately correcting himself, Countess. The third party is the cadet, though in fact he is not an aspirant to high military rank but a prospective senior clerk or bank official who would still be attending business school now if he were still alive.
Quod non
.

Gummi Bear could not lie for any length of time.

Everything else is true. March's feeling is true. Gummi Bear's motive is true. The tragic outcome is true. The two pieces of the phonograph record entitled “Under the Bridges,” on which the brother and sister, Louis and Lilli, solemnly scrawled their names as children, each on one fragment, are true. And he, March, who at first professed to be the son, the only son, of a manufacturer, an industrial magnate, eventually
turned out to be just one of the brood of a pharmacist perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy. During periods when business was bad, March's father managed the books for a cinema owner or labored fruitlessly to concoct new shoe-polish compounds or herbal teas. But when the needs of the family became still greater, he also dealt in narcotics, at first obtaining real drugs and reselling them at high prices, but then substituting chalk and perpetrating such a clumsy fraud that informers turned him in. The informers did not have the clearest consciences themselves, the matter was dropped, the druggist could be punished only for violating the pricing regulations for pharmaceuticals; of course he hadn't been distributing narcotics.

And this is the way he always squeaks by.

In this atmosphere young March grows up. His father, at a relatively advanced age, has acquired a taste of his own for these narcotics; wised up now, he no longer sells them to others at predatory rates, but uses them himself. Haltingly the son recounted the stunts his morphine-addicted father had pulled, the great expense not spared by his mother, brave, competent, healthy, and entirely devoted to her sick spouse, in her effort to break the rapidly aging man of his craving.

Success at last. Rejoicing in the bosom of his family over the return of the prodigal father. But in the sanatorium where the pharmacist goes for withdrawal treatment, he meets a young woman, a star of stage and screen, falls passionately in love with her. He absconds again, this time for good, from the family, for which March, the oldest son, is now responsible.

March becomes a minor official, an organized, hardworking person aspiring to better things. Ten years of work, of scrimping and saving. Domestic tranquillity. Amen. After these ten difficult years his mother
remarries, his brothers and sisters are working, a younger brother apprenticed to a watchmaker, a younger sister engaged to be married. Thank goodness–and March breathes again.

He is no shining light as a city official, but well thought of, welcome everywhere, a respectable, unassertive, retiring person who is already mentally in the bosom of his family at the close of working hours and who thinks only of providing security for them and giving them nice surprises from time to time. He does not yet feel very attracted to women. He has his mother, his sisters, after all. Fatherly feelings have awakened in him toward his younger brother, who is very delicate, perhaps conceived during his father's morphine phase.

So young March's life is taken up with his family. The passions, whatever they might be, have no chance to develop, the only perceptible abnormality is a childish vanity, clothes, underthings, personal hygiene; also a concern for a higher profile, a striving for greater prominence in society. And then a certain natural adulation and worshipfulness, a mental genuflection before male persons of high position, such as a young clergyman of lordly blood who left his “castle” to travel as a missionary to Africa, returned with a case of malaria, and replaced the priest of the parish in which the good March lives with his family. The abbé has nothing of the lord about him. He has a lean, expressionless face, the skin seemingly clinging to the bones, cold hands damp with sweat and limp to the touch, and his tonsure covers not only the occiput but the whole of his angular skull, for, despite his youth, this aristocratic Christ has not a single hair left.

This abbé is March's first love. March has not realized that he loves men more than he loves women. But he feels it. He sorrows over the abbé's somber indifference, he suffers from the emptiness and tedium
of his bureaucratic existence. A change presents itself, no voyage to Africa to proselytize black children, only a regular promotion from Grade 6a to Grade 6b and, along with it, a move to a small provincial town in the north of the country. So good-bye to mother, stepfather, sisters, brothers, and the rest of the family, up and away! After his last confession, the handsome, shy youth, profoundly agitated, presses the hand of the brave reverend, who looks with astonishment into March's wide eyes, continues with his stiff, dry sermon, and wipes his hand with a rough handkerchief, whether because it is sweating excessively or because the handshake of a bourgeois, featherbrained civil servant disturbs his train of thought, or simply because he is preoccupied. Nothing more happens. If only the lordly abbé, with his knowledge of human nature and love of mankind, had earnestly taken the official to task on the spot (fond handshakes between confessor and confessant are definitely not done), poor March's aberrant tendencies might have been corrected in time and he might have attained salvation. As it is, however, a calamity will have to happen in order for the youthful March, so blind to this vital point, to understand the gift that Mother Nature has thoughtfully bestowed upon him.

And this may also explain the desire cherished by the poor frog, his fond wish to tell
me
everything–because now, much too late, he knew himself and because he felt a new passion stirring within him and because he wanted to protect himself and also (I can only hope, my friend!) myself from the effects of his wild temperament. But I can see you, little one! I do have some knowledge of human nature, even if I am no lover of mankind! I see you for what you are!

Wild temperament? You? Nothing but a misunderstanding. Children are not criminals, certainly. But to give free rein to everything in their
dim little brains, that would be dangerous. The embrace reflex does not interest me. I am not a female frog. Prevention is the best defense. That way it can go no further.