The Clown (10 page)

I put the cognac bottle away in the refrigerator for good.

I decided I might as well ring them all, one after the other, so I could get the Catholics out of the way. Somehow I was wide awake now and wasn’t even limping any more when I came back to the living room from the kitchen.

Even the clothes closet and the door to the broom closet in the hall were terra cotta.

I didn’t expect to get anywhere by phoning Kinkel—but I dialed his number just the same. He had always declared himself to be an enthusiastic admirer of my art—and anyone familiar with our profession knows that even the tiniest scrap of praise from a stagehand makes us nearly burst with pride. I had the urge to disturb the peace of Kinkel’s Christian
evening—and the idea at the back of my mind that he might tell me where Marie was. He was the brain of the group, had studied theology, then broken off his studies on account of a pretty woman, went in for law, had seven children and was said to be “one of our most capable social legislators.” Perhaps he really was, I couldn’t judge. Before I met him Marie had given me one of his pamphlets to read,
Ways to a New Order
, and after reading it, and liking it very much, I had imagined him as a tall, slight man with fair hair, and then when I saw him for the first time: a heavy-set, short chap with thick black hair, “bursting with vitality,” I couldn’t believe it was him. Maybe it was because he didn’t look the way I had imagined that I was so unjust toward him. Whenever Marie began to enthuse about Kinkel, old man Derkum had always talked about the Kinkel cocktails: mixtures of various ingredients: Marx plus Guardini, or Bloy plus Tolstoy. The first time we were invited there, things went wrong right from the start. We arrived much too early, and somewhere in the rear of the apartment Kinkel’s children were quarreling noisily, with much hissing, subdued by still further hissing, as to whose job it was to clear the supper table. Kinkel came in, smiling, still chewing, and tried desperately to hide his irritation at our premature appearance. Sommerwild came in too, not chewing, but grinning and rubbing his hands. Kinkel’s children shrieked atrociously in the background, an embarrassing contrast to Kinkel’s smile and Sommerwild’s grin, we could hear faces being slapped, a brutal sound, and behind closed doors, I knew, the shrieking went on worse than ever. I sat there beside Marie and out of sheer nervousness, thrown completely off balance by the row going on in the background, I smoked one cigarette after another, while Sommerwild chatted with Marie, that “forgiving, generous smile” never leaving his face. It was our first time back in Bonn since our flight. Marie was pale with emotion, also with awe and pride, and I understood very well what she was feeling. It was important to her to “become
reconciled with the Church,” and Sommerwild was so kind to her, and Kinkel and Sommerwild were people she looked up to in awe. She introduced me to Sommerwild, and when we sat down again Sommerwild said: “Are you related to the brown-coal Schniers?” I was annoyed. He knew quite well who I was related to. Almost everyone in Bonn knew Marie Derkum had run away with one of the brown-coal Schniers, “just before her graduation, too, and she was such a religious girl.” I ignored Sommerwild’s question, he laughed and said: “Sometimes I go hunting with your grandfather, and occasionally I play skat with your father at the Union Club in Bonn.” This annoyed me too. Surely he couldn’t be so stupid as to suppose I would be impressed by this nonsense about hunting and the Union Club, and he didn’t look to me the type of man who would say something just for the sake of talking. I finally opened my mouth and said: “Hunting? I always thought the Catholic clergy were forbidden to hunt.” An awkward silence followed, Marie blushed, Kinkel hunted irritably around the room for the corkscrew, his wife, who had just come into the room, shook some salted almonds onto a glass dish which already contained olives. Even Sommerwild blushed, and it didn’t suit him at all, his face was red enough in the first place. He said in a low yet slightly offended voice: “For a Protestant you are well informed.” And I said: “I am not a Protestant, but I am interested in certain things because Marie is interested in them.” And while Kinkel poured us all some wine, Sommerwild said: “There are certain rules, Schnier, but there are also exceptions. I come from a family in which the profession of head game warden was hereditary.” If he had said profession of game warden I would have understood, but his saying profession of head game warden annoyed me again, though I said nothing, just looked sour. Then they began again with their eye-language. Mrs. Kinkel said with her eyes to Sommerwild: Leave him alone, he’s so terribly young. And Sommerwild said with his eyes to her: Yes, young and pretty badly behaved, and Kinkel
as he filled my glass, the last one, said with his eyes to me: God, how young you are. Aloud he said to Marie: “How’s your father? Still the same?” Poor Marie was so pale and upset that she could only nod dumbly. Sommerwild said: “What would our nice devout old city be like without Mr. Derkum.” That annoyed me still further, for old man Derkum had told me that Sommerwild had tried to warn the Catholic schools kids, who still bought candy and pencils at his shop, against him. I said: “Without Mr. Derkum our nice devout old city would be even dirtier, at least he is not a hypocrite.” Kinkel looked at me in surprise, raised his glass and said: “Thank you, Mr. Schnier, you have given me my cue for a good toast: let’s drink to Martin Derkum’s health.” I said: “Yes, to
his
health with pleasure.” And Mrs. Kinkel spoke again with her eyes to her husband: He is not only young and badly behaved—he is also insolent. I have never understood how later on Kinkel could always refer to that “first evening with you” as the nicest. Shortly afterwards Fredebeul arrived, with his fiancée, Monika Silvs and a certain Von Severn of whom, before he came, it was said that “although he had just converted he was very close to the Socialist Party,” which was evidently regarded as a terrific sensation. I also met Fredebeul for the first time that evening, and there again the same thing happened as with almost all the others: in spite of everything they liked me, and in spite of everything I didn’t like any of them, except Fredebeul’s fiancée and Monika Silvs; I felt neither one way nor the other about Von Severn. He was a bore and seemed firmly determined to rest on the laurels he had acquired from the sensational fact that he was a convert
and
a member of the Socialist Party; he smiled, was friendly, and yet his rather prominent eyes always seemed to be saying: Look at me, it’s me! I didn’t find him bad at all. Fredebeul was very jovial with me, he talked for almost three quarters of an hour about Beckett and Ionesco, rattling off a lot of stuff which I could tell he had pieced together from his reading, and his smooth handsome face with the
surprisingly wide mouth radiated goodwill when I was stupid enough to acknowledge having read Beckett; everything he says seems so familiar to me, as if I had read it somewhere before. Kinkel beamed at him admiringly, and Sommerwild looked around, his eyes saying: We Catholics aren’t behind the times, are we, eh? All this was before prayers. It was Mrs. Kinkel who said: “I think, Odilo, we can say prayers. It looks as if Heribert is not coming today”—they all looked at Marie, then away again, much too quickly, but I didn’t understand why there was again such an awkward silence—it was only in Hanover in the hotel room that I suddenly realized Heribert is Züpfner’s Christian name. He did come later after all, after prayers, when they were in the midst of the topic for the evening, and I found it very sweet the way Marie went up to him as soon as he came in the room, looked at him, and gave a helpless little shrug before Züpfner greeted the others and sat down next to me with a smile. Sommerwild then told the story of the Catholic writer who lived for a long time with a divorced woman, and when he finally married her an eminent church dignitary said to him: “But my dear Besewitz, couldn’t you have just kept her on as a concubine?” They all laughed rather boisterously at this story, and Mrs. Kinkel almost obscenely. The only one who didn’t laugh was Züpfner, and I liked him for it. Marie didn’t laugh either. No doubt Sommerwild told his story to show me how generous and warm, how witty and colorful, the Catholic church is; that I was also living with Marie as my concubine, as it were, that they didn’t think of. I told them the tale of the workman who had lived quite near us; he was called Frehlingen, and in his little suburban house he had also lived with a divorced woman, and even supported her three children. One day the priest came to see Frehlingen and with a grave face and the use of certain threats he called upon him to “put an end to these immoral goings on,” and Frehlingen, who was a good Catholic, had actually sent the pretty woman and her three children away. I also told them how the woman
later went on the streets to support her children, and how Frehlingen took to drink because he had really loved her. Again there was the same awkward silence which occurred whenever I said anything, but Sommerwild laughed and said: “But Mr. Schnier, you can’t really compare the two cases, can you?” “Why not?” I said. “You can only say that because you know nothing about Besewitz,” he said angrily, “he is the most sensitive author worthy of being called a Christian.” And I got angry too and said: “Do you know how sensitive Frehlingen was—and what a Christian workman he was.” He merely looked at me and shook his head and raised his hands in despair. There was a pause, during which all one could hear was Monika Silvs clearing her throat, but as soon as Fredebeul is in the room no host need be afraid of a pause in the conversation. He immediately broke into the short silence, led the conversation back to the topic for the evening, and talked about the relative nature of poverty, for about an hour and a half, till he at last gave Kinkel a chance to tell the story about the man who between five hundred and three thousand marks a month had gone through sheer hell, and Züpfner asked me for a cigarette to hide his embarrassment behind the smoke.

I felt as bad as Marie did when we took the last train back to Cologne. We had scraped the money together for the trip because it had meant so much to Marie to accept the invitation. We felt physically sick too, we had not had enough to eat and had drunk more than we were used to. The journey seemed endless, and when we got out at Cologne West we had to walk home. We had no more money for fares.

At Kinkel’s someone answered the phone right away. “Alfred Kinkel speaking,” said a self-confident boy’s voice.

“This is Schnier,” I said, “might I speak to your father?”

“Schnier the theologian or Schnier the clown?”

“The clown,” I said.

“Oh dear,” he said, “I hope you’re not taking it too hard?”

“Hard?” I said wearily, “what am I not to take too hard?”

“What?” he said, “haven’t you read the paper?”

“Which one?” I asked.

“The Voice of Bonn,” he said.

“A panning?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, “I think it’s more of an obituary. Shall I get it for you and read it out?”

“No, thank you,” I said. This boy had a nice sadistic undertone to his voice.

“But you ought to have a look at it,” he said, “so as to learn from it.” My God, he had tutorial ambitions too.

“Who wrote it?” I said.

“Someone called Kostert, described as our correspondent in the Ruhr. Extremely well written, but pretty nasty.”

“Oh well,” I said, “he’s a Christian, after all.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No,” I said, “I suppose I can’t talk to your father?”

“He doesn’t want to be disturbed, but for you I’ll be glad to disturb him.” It was the first time sadism had ever been useful to me. “Thanks,” I said.

I heard him lay the receiver down on the table, go across the room, and again I heard that awful hissing in the background. It sounded as if a whole family of snakes had got into a quarrel: two male snakes and one female. I always find it embarrassing when my eyes or ears witness something not meant for my eyes or ears, and the mystical gift of being able to detect smells through the telephone is far from being a pleasure, it is a burden. In the Kinkels’ apartment it smelled of beef broth, as if they had cooked a whole ox. The hissing in the back-ground sounded ominous, as if the son was about to kill the father or the mother the son. I thought of Laocöon, and the fact that this hissing and abuse—I could even hear sounds of blows and scuffling, Ows and Ohs, cries of “you disgusting beast,” “you big bully”—was going on in the home of the man who had been called the “gray eminence of German
Catholicism,” did nothing to cheer me up. I also thought of that bastard Kostert in Bochum, who must have gone to the phone yesterday evening and phoned through his text, and yet this morning he had scratched at my door like a humble dog and pretended to be full of Christian brotherhood.

Evidently Kinkel was struggling literally hand and foot against having to come to the phone, and his wife—I was gradually able to decipher the sounds and movements in the background—was even more determined that he shouldn’t, while the son refused to tell me he had made a mistake, his father was out. Suddenly there was absolute silence, the silence of someone bleeding to death, really: it was a deathly silence. Then I heard dragging footsteps, heard someone lift the receiver from the table and was expecting the receiver to be replaced. I remember exactly where the phone is in Kinkel’s apartment. Precisely under the one of the three baroque madonnas which Kinkel always says is the least valuable. I would almost have preferred him to put back the receiver. I felt sorry for him, it must be terrible for him to speak to me now, and for myself I expected nothing from this conversation, neither money nor good advice. If he had sounded out of breath, my sympathy would have got the upper hand, but his voice was as booming and vigorous as ever. Someone once compared his voice to a whole body of trumpeters.

“Hullo, Schnier,” came booming out at me, “how delightful of you to call.”

“Hullo, Doctor,” I said, “I’m in a fix.”

The only malicious thing in what I said was the Doctor, for his title, like Father’s, is a brand-new honorary one.

“Schnier,” he said, “are we on such a footing that you feel you have to address me as Doctor?”