New Lives (78 page)

“Friends are what's important, and so you see, Titus, that's why I'd like you to use your influence on Bernadette. She's doesn't exactly have it easy. But don't say a word of this to my husband, if you please. Rudolf is a problem all to himself.”

Titus was dazed. Wasn't she confiding to him something that not even Rudolf Böhme was allowed to know?

Before Rudolf Böhme could step out onto the terrace, Titus stood up and walked toward him, grabbed the hand dangling like a little flag at his side, and looked into eyes closed in deep concentration.

Titus followed the Böhmes' example and scraped butter over his toast and then added dollops of
jam
from glasses that bore no labels. He tried all of them, without ever taking his eye off Rudolf Böhme, who, so it appeared, had never once really looked at him, although his thick lips had never stopped speaking at him the whole time.

Titus marshaled all his powers of attention, every ounce of them, so that he could respond to Rudolf Böhme's words, and now marched bravely ahead, like a soldier in a war of liberation who refuses to be disconcerted by explosions all around him. But at the same time Titus was completely elsewhere. He drank one cup of
tea with milk
after the other and praised each serving of
jam,
although to him it tasted bitter, not sweet at all. And was once again amazed how little was accomplished by will and reason, while pure chance, or whatever you wanted to call this twist of fate, opened doors for him like in a fairy tale.

Finally Rudolf Böhme led him through the house and showed him his collection of paintings. And Titus remarked that this was the real collection of “New Masters,” not the one in the Albertinum—a statement that Rudolf Böhme repeated to his wife when the three of them sat down in the kitchen for
Hawaii toast.
Titus stayed until ten and as he rode home at last, he was carrying three books Rudolf Böhme had lent him. That night he threw up. It was his oversensitive stomach, his mother said. He evidently couldn't go see the Böhmes without getting sick.

He didn't see Bernadette again until school started. He avoided her as long as he could, since he felt like a freshman in her presence. He could spot her from afar by the way she tossed her head back and forth. She greeted him then in the cafeteria line, introduced him to a girlfriend as her partner at the Graduation Ball, and asked them both to step in line in front of her.

Each time they crossed paths at school, Bernadette seemed surprised to see him.

To Titus it was as if ever since the ball time had been running in reverse, that he was getting younger, not more mature. And everything he had dreamed of suddenly lay behind him in the fairy-tale world of the past.

He had told Gunda Lapin all about it. He talked on and on without interruption. Why had he suddenly felt certain that everything would change now? How had the change he wanted to describe come about?

“My, you're thirsty,” Gunda Lapin had said. No sooner would she fill his glass than he would empty it again. But this time it was only water.

Titus stared at the open page of his diary. He read the day, the date, the time, and the name Gunda Lapin. He finished the sentence he had begun with the words “wasn't wearing a bra.” He also completed the top-line entry by noting: “1:16 a.m.” Then Titus closed his diary.

3

Titus had wanted to be a half hour or forty-five minutes late—that way people would ask about him as they sat around the table at Martin's birthday party and someone would hold a spot open for him. He couldn't say himself how it had turned into an hour and a half. He was sorry for wasting so much of the time he could have spent at the Böhmes' villa. And now, instead of assuming the role of the mysterious latecomer, he was kicking himself.

He still had the path's cracked yellow stones ahead of him, when Bernadette opened the front door and came out to meet him. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse. Her arms were crossed. They shook hands without saying a word. Her arm had goose bumps all the way to her shoulder.

Titus took in the smell of the house. When he tried to describe it to himself—nuts, fresh laundry, furniture polish, cigarettes, perfume, browned crust, pineapple—there were too many things to keep track of all at once.

“They're all crowded in the kitchen,” Bernadette said, and handed him a hanger. A plate of cake in hand, she started up the stairs.

“No big deal,” Martin said, laying Titus's present on the windowsill. “No big deal at all.” They had just sat down to eat. Bernadette's mother's handshake lasted a long time. Joachim was there, and also the Holy Cross boy he had emerged from the park with the day before. Titus didn't know the three girls. There was coffee and
tea with milk,
petits fours and a homemade plum cake with whipped cream. Joachim's presence disconcerted him, as if his friend prevented him from being the person he had been here before.

Bernadette's mother soon found a spot beside Titus and inquired about his mother and grandfather, whether he had made it nicely through the first weeks in his new school. What he would have liked best was to stay in the kitchen with her.

In Martin's room they were talking about a teacher Titus didn't know, and Joachim then held a lecture on sentimentality in the music of Heinrich Schutz.

The sun was so low that its light struck the clouds from beneath and alongside, lending them a sharp, dark outline. When he finally noticed the two figures out on the lawn, they were too far away.

He recognized Bernadette only from the way she tossed her head. They were holding hands. He almost groaned aloud from the pain the sight of the couple caused him. They had walked across the lawn and were now close to the bushes lining the property on the left. Titus pressed his brow to the windowpane, but they had vanished.

He heard his name. “Like spilled syrup,” he said calmly. The light was switched off, the others came to the window. Titus didn't turn around or make room for them either. To the south the sky was green, but blurred then toward the edges, where it turned lilac and then flowed into pastel and then darker blue.

“My senses were reeling,” Martin sang, “it went black before my eyes, black and lilac and green.” Martin turned the light on and put the Manfred Krug record on. Titus kept a lookout from the corner of one eye, but all he saw was his reflection. Martin, Joachim, and the other guy sang along, even though their voices didn't fit this kind of music. But they had found something to help pass the time until supper. Even Joachim, who normally couldn't do anything but whisper “tonic, dominant, subdominant,” until a cut of the Stones or T. Rex was over, growled along in his change-of-voice tenor.

In today's German class, the second class of the day, they had discussed Gorky's
Mother
and literary heroes in general. Their German teacher had called David and Goliath literary heroes too. “As long as she doesn't mess around with the New Testament,” Joachim had said during the next break, “she can collect all the literary heroes she wants.” To which Titus had responded that people with character were pretty rare in the New Testament.

What had he meant by that?

“When one of the two thieves at the crucifixion suddenly converts—that doesn't sound right to me. The other one,” Titus had said, “the one who goes on mocking, is a lot more natural, a much better character.”

“Why?”

“He doesn't get anything out of continuing to play the heavy.”

“He spits at someone who's worse off than he is.”

And when Titus didn't reply, Joachim had laid into him: “The other one knows he's done wrong, but Jesus is innocent. He knows the difference. What do you think makes him better?”

But Titus hadn't had a response to that question either.

“Who told you the other one is better?”

“Nobody,” Titus had answered, “nobody,” and then suddenly added, “I'm supposed to give a short report on the Bundeswehr as the aggressor, on Monday.”

Joachim had looked at him as if expecting something more, but then finally said, “Well just go ahead and give it, give your nice little report.”

The girls were sitting huddled together on Martin's bed. The three singers appeared to be occupied with themselves and the record jacket.

The colors had faded from the sky, all that was left was a bright streak, like a crack of light before a door closes.

Why had he been so sure that he had seen Bernadette outside? It might have been her mother and father. Wasn't Bernadette in the next room, eating cake? Yes, he was now convinced he hadn't seen anything out there among the circular flower beds. That took a weight off his shoulders, left him happy.

         

[Letter of May 24, 1990]

He turned around. They were still singing the same song. “It was at the dance, just yesterday, I saw you in a trance…” Was that about him and Bernadette?

Titus sat down with the girls on the bed. He would have loved to bounce around the way they were doing, would have bounced better than any of those three. But he couldn't sing, although he did know the words. “My senses were reeling, it went black before my eyes, black and lilac and green, then I saw gulls, swans, and cranes fly by…”

He had never been able to express himself as an instrument of music, whereas these three, though they had surely never spoken about it with one another, did so with self-confidence and conviction. Titus tried at least to be a good audience, and applauded the trio, who showed no signs of quitting now and were so loud that they didn't hear the gong calling them to supper. Marcus, Bernadette's little brother, had made place cards, and Bernadette had turned the napkins into three-tined crowns. Rudolf Böhme lit candles and distributed the candelabra about the room, a task that complemented his short steps. Once the dogs of darkness had been driven from every corner, as Rudolf Böhme put it, he greeted everyone, closed the kitchen door himself, and took up a position behind his chair. “My dear Martin…” he began.

Titus smiled. He looked first at Martin and then at the others, one by one. But evidently no one except him thought a speech in honor of the birthday boy was overdoing things.

Titus now fixed his gaze with earnestness on Rudolf Böhme, who spoke with chin held high, eyelids closed, and lashes quivering as if he were dreaming, while his fingers groped along the edge of the table as if finishing the job of smoothing out the tablecloth. By candlelight the siblings revealed their resemblance to one another, and to their mother even more, as if they were all wearing the same wigs. Bernadette had glanced up at the same moment her father mentioned Titus by name.

The speech ended with laughter, because when they reached for their glasses for the toast Rudolf Böhme proposed, they found them empty, and Rudolf Böhme interrupted himself by declaring he knew something was missing.

No sooner had they begun to eat than the ketchup bottle was empty, but for some reason it kept moving around the table, a bit of utter foolishness that reached its high point when finally Rudolf Böhme looked up and innocently asked for the ketchup—and after several futile attempts remarked that evidently they were out of ketchup.

Bernadette sat leaning back in her chair, staring at the rest of her toast. She hadn't joined in the ketchup prank, which was why Titus tried not to laugh too hard.

Martin and Joachim kept on joking around with each other, bringing the rest of the table to silence. As he searched for a question he could pose to Rudolf Böhme, Titus made every effort to put down his knife and fork with as little clatter as possible. He watched Rudolf Böhme bend deep over his plate each time he removed a bite from his fork. The motions of his lips and tongue, as well as the way he gave each mouthful a long, thorough chew, suggested to Titus a kind of reverse speech, as if Rudolf Böhme were now incorporating into his body the words, sentences, and thoughts he would later write or speak.

“What are you working on at the moment, if I may inquire?” Joachim asked.

“He means you, Papa,” Bernadette remarked.

“Or would you prefer not to talk about it?”

Titus used the pause to take a deep breath, in and out.

“I'm translating,” Rudolf Böhme said as he continued to chew. “I'm pretending I know how. I'm working on it with your Brockmann, Boris Brockmann. He's tremendous, really tremendous, a real translator in fact. I just add the poetical touch afterward.”

With the help of some melted cheese, Rudolf Böhme dabbed up the last toast crumbs.

Boris Brockmann, who would be their Latin and Greek teacher from the tenth grade on, looked like Bertolt Brecht and dressed like him too. Titus never ran into him except if he used the corridor on the top floor of the main building. Seated half on the radiator and half on the windowsill, Brockmann always seemed to be waiting for someone to greet him so he could say his own “Good morning!” with such earnestness and precise articulation that Titus actually heard the original good wish contained in the stock phrase.

“Someone should write a big book about translation,” Rudolf Böhme said, “from Humboldt to today. If you take a closer look, you soon realize that ultimately translation doesn't exist. And suddenly you're caught in a trap.” He meticulously wiped his lips.

“Which is why it always sounds so funny, and quite rightly so, when you ask, ‘So what's the author trying to tell us?'” Rudolf Böhme laughed softly to himself, while his tongue brushed across his teeth. “Here's the original, so translate it, and everyone thinks that's just as it should be. What's the problem, if you can arrange them prettily together on the bookshelf? But what does original mean then, there's an original only because someone sits down to grapple with it, otherwise there wouldn't even be an original.”

Subjective idealism, Titus thought.

“But if the original isn't the original,” Martin asked, “what is it?”