The Boxer (21 page)

“I can’t wait that long.” Tennenbaum sighed. “Too bad.”

When he left, the piano started again. Aron couldn’t get Ostwald’s name out of his head. Ah, he said, if only it had been Ostwald knocking at my door. He pictured a reunion in full detail, a curtain drawn over all discord; the lack of a friend made his longing for Ostwald strong and tenacious. Even if liquor had become more expensive, he told himself,
there was more than just liquor between us
. In the evening they could sit and talk, complain and sound out the situation. Mark could sleep or play or go out with Irma. He even yearned for that being together without saying a word; he claims Ostwald belonged to the category of people whose simple presence worked liked medicine for almost anything.

The following Sunday he went to Ostwald’s house. The worst thing that could happen was that Ostwald would refuse to take his proffered hand, justifying himself with random excuses. Aron had decided to say, “If I am to blame, I beg your pardon. If you’re to blame, let’s forget about it. Or do you have a better idea?” Ostwald’s answer would settle everything. But a stranger opened the door. Aron’s first thought —
his new friend;
he said he’d like to talk to Mr. Ostwald; the man led him to the living room. No trace of Ostwald. Aron had never been in that apartment. He looked around until the man asked, “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Has he disappeared?”

“No.”

Aron had the sensation, even before the man had answered, that something was wrong — he could feel it. The man introduced himself as Ostwald’s brother; his name was Andreas Ostwald. He inquired about Aron’s relationship with his brother; Aron explained reluctantly. He wanted to see Ostwald, or at least hear a sentence that would dissolve his fears, instead of the tedious questions. The man said, “Forgive me for wanting to know who I am talking to. My brother is dead.”

He heard the whole unimportant rest, Aron says, through a haze of tears; soon Andreas Ostwald was crying too. He lived there now and as the only living relative had inherited everything. A couple of miserable letters were in his possession; most of the things he knew about his brother came from strangers like the neighbors. He explained that since childhood his brother had been hardly accessible to him — complicated, eccentric, and with a tendency to get involved in incomprehensible activities — but he didn’t want to talk about old times now. The gentleman would surely find it hard to believe that he had last seen his brother in 1933, shortly before his arrest. After the war, only letters, and they were few and far between; he knew hardly anything about his brother’s life after the war; the letters were circumspect, impersonal, nothing more than signs of life. And the information the neighbors gave was full of gaps; the image that he had tried to piece together was incomplete. He knew vaguely about a job his brother had had in the judiciary, under the supervision of the English; then he understood there’d been some kind of trouble, nothing precise, that had led to his dismissal. He said he could imagine that his brother never avoided a fight; he had never been a compromising type. Still, the rumor that his brother’s only interest in life was alcohol was reliable. Several neighbors had independently confirmed that at a certain point he would come home dead drunk, unapproachable, night after night; nobody knew where he had been. It was his personal opinion, the brother said, that there, in that period of Ostwald’s life, lay the evil influence that, months later, led to his brother’s tragic death. In any case, one day, and again several neighbors commented on this, his brother had suddenly stopped drinking. People said that from one day to the next he started taking care of the way he looked — clothes, shaving, posture. He looked like someone who was starting afresh, with good intentions. In fact, he accepted a post as one of four lawyers in a firm near the Kurfürstendamm. Good salary, and even better prospects, according to his lawyer colleagues, said Andreas Ostwald; his brother could have grown old and happy in that post. No one had the slightest inkling that things might take such a turn, this suicide from out of the blue. Gas.

“Do you have any idea why?” Andreas Ostwald asked. “Can you fill in any of the gaps?”

“I appear only in the booze phase,” Aron said. “Not before and not after.”

Andreas Ostwald, Aron says, did not make a good impression on him. Later he even goes so far as to say he had found him unpleasant, in spite of the tears;
for those people it is customary to shed tears when a close relative dies
. Andreas seemed to be irritated by Aron’s words; perhaps he remembered the suspicion he had expressed in connection to his brother’s alcoholism. “Perhaps you can tell me why my brother drank?” he said.

“What did you do during the war?” Aron asked.

“I was a soldier.”

“He spent eleven years in the camps.”

“I know,” the brother said, surprised. “But what does that have to do with it?”

Aron stood up and went through all the rooms, looking for a picture of Ostwald, but found none. The brother asked him several times what he was looking for. Aron went home, the mourning lasted for weeks, Irma never knew.

All she saw was that he drank uncontrollably, day in and day out, that the stock of liquor was soon gone. Even when he was drunk, Aron betrayed nothing, as if Ostwald were a secret. From the very beginning, he says, his mourning was infected with violent rage. Such a stubborn idiot, he thought of Ostwald, such an irresponsible act. He destroys something that doesn’t belong to him, disappears to a place where he can’t be followed. Though he could sympathize with Ostwald’s foul moods, Aron thought, this was too much: What right does he have to put an end to the pleasure his presence gave others? How arrogant! What right does he have to destroy the hopes that he, Aron, held on to only for Ostwald’s sake? What right does he have to dissolve
so much
into nothing? (I must confess that not even Ostwald’s self-inflicted death made me like him any more than before. Of course, I believe Aron, that he was attached to Ostwald. Why else would he have told me about him? For me, this attachment is not all that interesting. Their relationship leaves me cold. Aron’s stories about Ostwald always contained an element of unfettered admiration I simply can’t relate to, because one can truly admire only someone one knows personally.)

A
short time later —-Aron was still in deep mourning — Irma looked so distraught when Aron came home from work, it was obvious that something terrible had happened. Her eyes looked unusually serious, and she didn’t greet him with her usual ceremony, a kiss and the question whether everything was all right. “What happened?”

“Go look at Mark.”

Aron rushed into the room. Mark lay on his bed, a wet cloth on his forehead. Aron took it off and saw that Mark had obviously been beaten. Scratches, a swollen face, red and blue bruises, one eye was closed and the other open only a crack, and Irma had already
cleaned him up
. “His chest and arms are also black and blue. Should I have called a doctor?” she asked quietly.

“Get out,” Aron said.

He sat on the bed, took Mark’s hand, and hoped his voice wouldn’t sound too shaky. “Who did this?” he asked.

Mark didn’t answer. Aron repeated the question a couple of times and became impatient; then Mark started crying. Aron caressed him and in consolation told him a funny story about when he himself had been beaten like that as a young boy. He had come home in such a state that his own mother didn’t recognize him; when she opened the door, she thought it was one of his friends, and she said her son was still outside playing. Yet Mark’s condition was so pitiful that when he heard the punch line he didn’t even change his expression; he looked as if he was ready to start crying at any moment. Aron said they wouldn’t talk about that stupid story anymore. Tomorrow, “tomorrow will be a better day than today; now try to get some sleep.”

Irma knew nothing more than he did. Aron sat there for hours; all he could conclude was that what had happened was an act of anti-Semitism, a
minipogrom
. In any case, it would not go unpunished. The only question was what kind of retaliation would be more expeditious. In that instant, at the moment when his anger was at its peak, he tended toward the idea of finding the name of the culprit, or culprits, and taking revenge in a way that was
appropriate
. However, one had to take into account that the culprits were children; that was clear even without Mark’s confession. Children of Mark’s age; therefore the real question was who had instigated them.

Aron went to the other room several times during the night; Mark was sleeping soundly as usual. Aron wanted to wake him up and get the name
out of him
, with or without tears. Only the thought that for Mark being awake meant being in pain restrained him.

W
hy was he actually beaten?” I ask.

“Didn’t I just tell you?”

“You didn’t mention any proof. Did Mark confirm your suspicions later?”

“If you had seen the state he was in, you also would have realized immediately that it wasn’t one of the usual fights between boys. I know how children fight. If one child has proven he’s the strongest, he stops — that’s how it goes with children. Mark looked as if he had been manhandled by someone who hated him. It wasn’t a fight among children, it was an attack.”

“And everything was so clear it didn’t require any questioning? It never occurred to you that you were making something up that had nothing to do with Mark, only with yourself?”

“No,” Aron says, “that never occurred to me.”

He fills his glass and explains that he has been beaten often enough in his life. He has had so many opportunities to look into the faces of thugs that in this case he can permit himself to judge. He says, “Anything else?”

T
he following day brought no greater clarification. Mark didn’t go to school and Aron stayed home from work; he sent Irma to the nearest telephone with an excuse for the Soviet headquarters — a sudden indisposition. Mark categorically refused to confess the names. Aron tried being nice and then tough. Why do you want to protect your tormentor, he asked, prevent him from being punished? To no avail. Gradually the reasons for Mark’s silence interested him more than the name itself; perhaps it was a terrible threat. Some thugs, he says, prolong their victims’ suffering by threatening them. In which case the presumed threat didn’t need to be terrible
in and of itself
, it only needed to stay in Mark’s frightened thoughts; not everyone has the same concept of terror.

From then on, Aron tried to eliminate all traces of impatience and anger from his questions and mix in sweetness and a little coaxing. He says he already knew at the time that trust wasn’t something that falls straight from heaven, that could be forced on request or even obtained through extortion. It had to be built millimeter by millimeter, often with an arduous
attention for detail

Around noon he had reached his new goal. He did not know who had hit his son, but he discovered why Mark withheld the name so doggedly. He was afraid of losing the only respect he still had after the thrashing — at least he wanted to be a
good loser
. He imagined the catastrophic consequences if his father went into the schoolyard, grabbed the boy in question, and beat him in full view of the others.

“You needn’t be afraid,” Aron said. “I’ll do it so thoroughly that he won’t ever hurt you again.”

Naturally, that wasn’t a very good argument. Mark believed that, yes, an act of revenge would provide a certain protection from future attacks, but the price for that would be overall isolation, and that was a price he didn’t want to pay. Aron asked him if he really wanted to take the risk of being confronted with such attacks from time to time, by the same person or someone else. Because if the others noticed that there was no reprisal, the attacks would just go on. “Revenge isn’t useful only for others,” Aron said. “Don’t you want him to be beaten like you were?”

“Yes,” Mark said, “I tried. But he’s too strong.”

“Now, tell me his name,” Aron said.

Mark shook his head, amazed that the whole interrogation seemed to be starting all over again.
In the end
, Aron promised not to go to school, or to the boy’s home; he didn’t want to do anything at all, he said, only know the name, with the intention of forgetting it again, eventually. “If we both know it,” he said, “you’ll feel better.”

Mark demanded that he swear on his honor. Aron had no choice, he wanted to know the name. The boy was called Winfried Schmidt.

When shortly thereafter Aron left the room, Mark, with more than a trace of suspicion, asked where he was going. For a little walk, Aron replied; he didn’t know exactly where, but definitely not to the school. He never saw this boy, Aron tells me, this Winfried Schmidt, Mark and he never mentioned him again, yet to this day he can’t forget that name,
ridiculous
. He then walked aimlessly; the nice weather and fresh air made his anger easier to bear, it never occurred to him to break his word to Mark. Then,
unintentionally
, he saw the school, an empty yard with trees. Aron didn’t have the school schedule memorized and therefore didn’t know whether or not classes were over. It didn’t seem to make any sense just to stand there and wait in case he might decide to break his word after all. Still, he stood there for a good fifteen minutes, out of laziness, he says. A man, perhaps a teacher on his way home, came out of the school building and looked at him suspiciously. Aron moved on.

The more time passed, the hazier, he says, were his thoughts. He hardly knew what he was looking for anymore;
its easy to say “a way out. “
He knew only that Mark had been beaten up and that he had to make sure it would never happen again. The ideal, he says, would have been to convince them once and for all, convince them that it was inhuman to hit people, that they damaged not only the victims but their own souls as well. The convincing should go on until a new relationship had been established, however long it took. But what kind of a guarantee was that? The risk would be yours and yours alone; all you could do was act toward them the same way you expected them to act toward you. But who can guarantee that you will convince them before they beat you to death? And where do you find the patience? And who would protect you from relapses? And from misunderstanding?