Georg Letham (30 page)

March gathers the last of his strength. Late that afternoon he comes again before his petrified mother and tells her everything. His mother stands with her fists clenched in the pockets of her blue-and-white-striped apron and, aghast, keeps whispering to her son: Shh! Keep it down! So that the good dentist won't hear. Only now does she grasp what has happened. With a man! Why? A man! What for? Aren't there enough pretty young women? And you were engaged! You were
all set
! I was, March admits in his despair. He is helpless.

His mother goes through the cardboard box. If only the gold watch were still there, “at least”! Perhaps Papa, her ex-husband, was only playing a joke, perhaps he hid the watch there. Nothing. March says not another word, he gnaws his lower lip and wishes he could leave, he distractedly feels for the watch in his vest pocket, although on this unlucky day he could hardly be less interested in what time it is. His mother thinks. Couldn't they set the police after her grifter of an ex-husband? No, says March, that would be no help and would destroy his mother's (at bottom highly problematical) marital bliss and happy home. So, what then? his mother asks. In order to have something to say, March says offhandedly: I'm going to America.

His mother seizes upon this plan. She sees a way out. That very evening she finds the necessary money for her son by dint of the most fantastic exertions, she washes and darns the prodigal father's undershirts and socks overnight, stealthily fixes everything up, and the two of them scribble ten penciled calculations in the margins of the newspaper to make sure the money, lent without interest by the wife of a well-meaning relative of her husband (the dentist), will hold out to the other side of the ocean. It will have to, March says at last, his eyes drooping with fatigue.

He falls asleep. He dreams of his friend.

The next afternoon, of course, he is not at the port, where the ship bound for South America is ready for departure, but waiting for his Louis at the entrance to the business school. They greet one another briskly, as though there were nothing wrong. First March speaks ironically of his situation, mentioning casually that he is going to America. Just as casually, young Louis says, Wish I could go, I'd be there in a flash. At this unconsidered statement, the utterance of a silly boy, March takes hold of him. He lays his arm around his throat, his voice trembles, but he does not weep. He tells him that he has always known what a difference there was between Louis and his own family, a promise is a promise, loyalty is loyalty, love conquers all, words once spoken, and suchlike malarkey, he could kiss Louis's hand, etc.; he talks absolute nonsense. In the presence of his dear one, who would like to hurry home for lunch, he has no control over himself, he could never ever live without him. He calls on all the saints and everyone else in the calendar, imploring him to come along; Louis, the cadet, could have the steerage ticket, March would carry coal, wash dishes, find some money somewhere, hock his watch. But his watch is gone. The youth is abashed. Despite his arrogance, this doglike adoration touches him, as my wife's adoration once touched me, he smiles indulgently, the way one smiles at a handsome, blond-curled child when it first tries to walk. They arrange to meet that evening by a monument in the park. March is there, Louis is not. March waits all night. He is hungry. Better to curl up his toes and die than turn his Louis's travel money into bread and sausage. Father and sister must have put poor Louis in chains, or he would surely have been there long ago. Surely! March learns what despair is if he doesn't know already.

The next morning he makes a decision to visit the home of his precious boy. His frantic ringing brings his former fiancée to the door. She is terribly surprised to see him, she sees the cares, the hunger on the features she once loved, she lets him in, makes him some chamomile tea to steady him. Compose yourself, Herr March, take it easy! Confused about how formal to be. If only March knew something about people, were a bit of a diplomat! In some dark corner of her heart, Countess Lilli is still holding out for him. But he suspects some treachery, says Louis must be surrendered to him, or something bad will happen. Surrender? Who? Louis. Something bad? Yes, and he lifts his box and lets it drop, the heavy revolver in it making a thud as it lands. They're supposed to tremble before him, the idiot! Lilli loses patience at last. She does not want to indulge him a moment longer, but she controls herself, she puckers her healthy red lips to blow scornfully on the hot chamomile tea, then says that March should “take his time” but drink up, have a couple of cakes, and clear out once and for all. Not without Louis. Louis is at school. Impossible! Louis at school as on every other day? He wants to search the apartment, Lilli does not stand in his way, but when this witless tour reaches the hall by the front door, without hesitation she pushes him, not exactly gently, out the door and–locks it behind him.

March related all of this calmly. His eyes became fierce only when he mentioned the door locking behind him, and I understood what had happened later that evening. March had fallen to his knees, beseeching Louis to come with him–or to shoot him. When poor Louis had begun to cry, March–who only a second before had had no inkling of what was going to happen–had brought out the gun and pointed it at his loved one's chest, and before the youth could push the barrel away, the
old but still serviceable piece of junk had fired. Off went the first shot. Down went the poor love slave Louis. The second shot was aimed at March's own chest and failed. Obviously! Still more obviously, courage was lacking for a third. Sad, but true. Thus this chaste love story of a frog ended with twenty years of hard labor.

Who would dare to moralize to such a pure heart? Who would be so unfeeling as to look into the furrowed face of the good March, smile sardonically, and tell him that this sort of extravagant love always made him (me) sick. I don't dare. I don't have the courage for such an experiment.

I must try to escape the vicinity of this overly ardent heart in some other way.

I'll be an attendant in the sick bay. Better to be hedged about by the ill than by the overly ardent love of a loving heart. How will I get away? Would money help, even here? Perhaps through the intercession of a certain seasoned junior officer grown old in the colonial service, whose family troubles would give him reason to make the crooked straight and the straight crooked for a few pieces of gold. He has very quickly grasped suggestions to this effect. Only the cash is still lacking.

So how to come by some money? My brother abandoned me. My attorney coldly stuck to business. My father took to his heels. But if fate swiftly sent me a “loving heart” in the form of Gummi Bear? And if Gummi Bear has in his possession a treasure with which he has only to part in order to obtain as much money as I need to get away? And to get away from him most of all, from March?

Come, dear heart. Don't tell
me
about your feelings.

It's morning now, and you have slept better than I, who was almost
constantly awake. You pat my hand and return to your task of cementing the broken phonograph record. And what might clever hands not be capable of, what might a tube of fish glue not make whole again! When, at noon on the dot, we are led out on deck and into the atrociously scorching sun for our half-hour walk, you take your record along, carefully put it in a corner near a partly open cabin door; you happily pick it up on the way back to Cargo Hold 3, carrying it like a sacrament, a smile playing on your lips such as has not been seen in these holds, on this ship, for a long time, not even among the big guns and demigods, the ship's officers, the brigadier general.

When night falls (and night falls fast here in the tropics), you wind up your machine for the first time aboard the
Mimosa
, put the repaired record on the platter, and set the mechanism whirring. And the record plays. The music that comes out is not quite what it should be, for the halves are misaligned by one groove, so that the melody is limpingly disrupted every few beats in a highly amusing fashion. The crack runs straight through the center of the record. But what we hear is pretty much the same sweet tune, with the same syncopated rhythm, same saxophones, same drumrolls, and great delight is reflected in the faces of those in the audience, including the fat Suleiman, whose lips bulge lewdly like the inside of a luscious, dark red, overripe fruit, half rotten and beginning to ferment. The guards are gathering out beyond the bulkhead, too, and I am able to catch the junior officer's eye.

So now to business. The song is over, the convicts are waiting for more music and for their dinner. But I close the gramophone, pull March into a dark corner, I ask him in a low voice to be true to his word for my sake and sell the gramophone. Thus I am holding him to the boyish promise he so unconsideredly gave. He thinks. Thinking does
not come naturally to him. Nor does he trust me completely, for March is not stupid. But when was a thinking brain ever a match for a “loving heart”? He straightens, pulls me too out of my half-crouching position. He wants us to be standing together at the open porthole, the dangerous mouths of the steam pipes above our heads, wants us to be looking at the sea, the lightening, violet tropical sky, just blissfully in love, and the silky curls of his thickly growing beard brush my hair with a soft rustling sound. And how subtle are the unfortunate March's caresses and how chaste are they in all their sensuality. His frog hand slides between my chest and my shirt, which he himself did his best to wash last night. He whispers to me that he has been thinking about becoming a tutor or getting an office job “on the other side.” He has no trouble imagining everything. The bagnio is a fable. Yellow fever, malaria, and so forth, none of it exists for him. Nor do the thousand different kinds of misery, the fiendish climate, the milieu of criminals. I have said nothing about it–but he believes, he hopes, he loves.

Only one who has looked into my soul can have any idea how much these demonstrations of devotion horrify me. That they come from a man is not what is so terrible. Love knows no difference between natural and unnatural. But I can't now, I can't. He reminds me of something I hope to keep buried deep down, something that can never come back: he reminds me of my poor departed wife and her end. I can't be a brute, can't push him away, mistreat him, shudder in my own voluptuous fevers–I can't do it. Love and desire are finished for me, gone for good. I have to betray him, I have to break away, today. For he touches me, he affects me so deeply that perhaps something intolerable to me, something that can never be, may yet begin again. Not without reason have I been silent about my wife for so long.

If I loved him, I might push him away. But since I don't love him and can't love him, I leave him be. Get what you can! And when he turns away and looks raptly about, he encounters the lustful gaze of the Sultan. Let
him
have the gramophone, the keepsake, the memento of Louis! How generous March is. He doesn't have much. But he gives it all.

If only I could be like him! He lifts the gramophone from the bunk, unscrews the crank, opens the lid with his left hand while with his right hand keeping the box pressed against his heaving chest. You've bitten off too much, dear boy! The record that was just glued together with such care falls to the iron-plate floor of Cargo Hold 3 and shatters. No matter. Even the Sultan is magnanimous. There is no haggling over the price. The money in hard gold passes from the very unappetizing place where Suleiman has hidden it to March and immediately from March to me, and that very evening from me to the junior officer, and that night I am ordered to take charge of the care of convict 3334, a typhus patient. I pack my things and hope not to see March again before we land.

The sun is directly overhead in the cloudless sky. When I return from a short walk on the upper deck, the handle of the door to the sick bay is so hot that I need my handkerchief to touch it. Tar from between the planking is stuck to the soles of my shoes. Sleep is unthinkable during the day, even though the patient's condition is not as hopeless as it was when I came to the sick bay.

At night no one can sleep. Great schools of dolphins follow the ship, cavort in the moonlight, spray silvery water about. No land. But
it must be close, for we have been on board for over two weeks. The
Mimosa
made a stop to take on a herd of livestock, sheep, swine, oxen. A small animal has been slaughtered every day, a larger one every two days. The herd is now down to a few animals. The sheep are woefully thin. They sullenly grind the dry hay with their long teeth, rake their parched tongues over the bottom of their water tub, bleat tremulously and miserably. The two cows lie breathing heavily, their bellies swollen, and they will die of exhaustion if they are not slaughtered soon. They are held fast with ropes and chains to keep them from slipping off the deck when the ship rolls. No one pays any attention to them except the ship's cook, who comes on deck to feel disdainfully along their thin backbones, and the convict March, who feeds and waters them as best he can. Food and fresh water must be conserved. But even if there were plenty of fresh food and plenty of fresh cool water, the rocking of the ship and the torrid heat would make this voyage an unnatural torment for the animals. Tormented or not, they serve their purpose. Their lean, juiceless meat is better than nothing.

The night is hot and clear. A large sea turtle drifts past on the open sea, carrying a silver bird, a heron, on its woody brown back. The turtle is about two meters long. Deftly yet placidly it paddles forward with its long webbed feet, extending its tiny head, dipping it into the gentle deep blue swells, and bringing it up again. The ship's cook points out the animal to the officers, who still make attempts to hunt at night by the light of the (repaired) acetylene lamp. But as eagerly as they blast away, this quarry escapes them.