The Clown (2 page)
“Now listen carefully, Kostert,” I said, “I’ll make you a deal—take a taxi, drive to the station, get me a first-class ticket to Bonn, buy me a bottle of schnapps, come to the hotel, pay my bill—including tips—and leave an envelope here containing enough money for me to pay for a taxi to the station. Furthermore, undertake on your Christian conscience to pay for sending my luggage to Bonn. O.K.?”
He did some mental arithmetic, cleared his throat, and said: “But my idea was to give you fifty marks.”
“All right,” I said, “take the streetcar then—that way the whole thing will cost you less than fifty marks. How about that?”
He did some more mental arithmetic and said: “Couldn’t
you take your luggage with you in the taxi?”
“No I couldn’t,” I said, “I’ve hurt my knee and can’t be bothered.” Evidently his Christian conscience began to make itself felt. “Mr. Schnier,” he said in a mild voice, “I’m sorry I—” “Never mind, Kostert,” I said, “I am ever so glad I can save the Christian cause between fifty-four and fifty-six marks.” I pressed down the hook and put the receiver down by the phone. He was the type who would have called back and spent half an hour relieving his conscience—it was much better to leave him to pick around in it by himself. I felt sick. I forgot to say that not only do I suffer from depression and headaches but I also have another, almost mystical peculiarity: I can detect smells through the telephone, and Kostert gave off a sickly odor of violet cachous. I had to get up and clean my teeth. Then I gargled with some of the cognac that was left, laboriously removed my makeup, got into bed again, and thought of Marie, of Christians, of Catholics, and contemplated the future. I thought of the gutters I would lie in one day. For a clown approaching fifty there are only two alternatives: gutter or palace. I had no faith in the palace, and before reaching fifty I had somehow to get through another twenty-two years. The fact that Coblenz and Mainz had canceled was what Zohnerer would call the “Early Warning Stage,” but there was another quality to be taken into account which I forgot to mention: my laziness. There were gutters in Bonn too, and who said I was to wait till I was fifty?
I thought of Marie: of her voice and her breast, her hands and her hair, her movements and everything we had done with each other. Also of Züpfner, whom she wanted to marry. We had known each other quite well as boys—so well that when we met again as grown men we didn’t quite know whether to use first names or not—either way we felt embarrassed, and we never got over this embarrassment no matter how often we met. I couldn’t understand how Marie could have gone over to him of all people, but perhaps I never “understood” Marie.
I was furious when it was Kostert who aroused me from my thoughts. He scratched at the door like a dog and said: “Mr. Schnier, you must listen to me. Do you need a doctor?” “Leave me alone,” I called out, “shove the envelope under the door and go home.”
He pushed the envelope under the door, I got out of bed, picked it up, and opened it: it contained a second-class ticket from Bochum to Bonn, and the taxi fare had been calculated exactly: six marks fifty. I had hoped he would make it a round figure of ten marks, and I had already worked out how much I would get out of it if I turned in the first-class ticket and bought a second-class one. It would have been about five marks. “Everything all right?” he called from outside. “Yes,” I said, “and now get out, you lousy little Christian worm.” “Now wait a minute! You can’t—” he said, and I shouted, “Get out!” There was silence for a moment, then I heard him go downstairs. The children of this world are not only smarter, they are also more humane and more generous than the children of light. I took the streetcar to the station so as to save a bit for a drink and some cigarettes. The landlady charged me for a telegram I had sent the evening before to Monika Silvs in Bonn and which Kostert had refused to pay for, so anyway I wouldn’t have had enough money for a taxi to the station; I had sent the telegram before discovering that Coblenz had canceled: they had got in ahead of me, and that annoyed me a bit. It would have been better for me if I could have canceled and sent a wire saying “Unable to appear on account of serious knee injury.” Well, at least the telegram had gone off to Monika: “Please prepare flat for tomorrow. Regards. Hans.”
In Bonn the routine was always different from anywhere else; I have never performed there, it is my home, and the taxi I called never took me to a hotel but to my apartment. I should say: us, Marie and me. There was no doorman in the building whom I could mistake for a station official, and yet this apartment, where I spend only three or four weeks a year, is more unfamiliar to me than any hotel. I had to stop myself from hailing a taxi outside the station in Bonn: this gesture was so well rehearsed that it almost led me to make a fool of myself. I had one solitary mark left in my pocket. I stood for a moment on the steps and made sure I had my keys to the building, to my apartment, to my desk; in my desk I would find: my bicycle keys. For some time now I have been considering a pantomime of keys: I have a vision of a whole bunch of keys made of ice which melt away during the performance.
No money for a taxi, and for the first time in my life I could have really used one: my knee was swollen, and I hobbled painfully across the station square to the Poststrasse; it was only two minutes from the station to our apartment, they
seemed endless. I leaned against a cigarette vending machine and glanced across to the building in which my grandfather had presented me with an apartment; tasteful units dovetailed nicely into one another, the balconies painted in discreet colors; five floors, five different colors for the balconies; on the fifth floor, where the balconies are all painted terra cotta, is my apartment.
Was I acting out one of my numbers? Inserting the key in the front door, noticing without surprise that it did not melt, opening the elevator door, pressing number five: a gentle hum bore me aloft; looking through the narrow pane of glass in the elevator onto the sections dividing each floor, and, beyond each section, out through the window on each floor: the back of a monument, the square, the church, floodlit; then a black section, a concrete ceiling, and again, in slightly altered perspective: the back of the monument, the square, the church, floodlit: three times, the fourth time only the square and the church. Inserting my key in the lock of my own front door, noticing without surprise that this one opened too.
Everything painted terra cotta in my apartment: doors, woodwork, built-in cupboards, a woman in a terra cotta housecoat on the black sofa would have matched nicely; no doubt it would be possible to get one, the only trouble is: I suffer not only from depression, headaches, laziness, and the mystical ability to detect smells through the telephone, the most terrible affliction of all is my disposition to monogamy; there is only one woman with whom I can do everything that men do with women: Marie, and since she left me I live as a monk is supposed to live; only—I am not a monk. I had wondered whether I ought to drive out to the country and ask one of the priests in my old school for advice, but all these jokers regard human beings as polygamous creatures (that’s why they defend monogamy so strenuously), I would be bound to seem like a freak to them, and their advice would be confined to a veiled reference to the domain in which, so they believe, love
is for sale. I am still prepared to be surprised by Protestants, as in the case of Kostert, for instance, who actually managed to astound me, but with Catholics nothing surprises me any more. I have always felt a great deal of sympathy and understanding for Catholicism, even when four years ago Marie took me for the first time to this “Group of Progressive Catholics”; she was anxious to produce some intelligent Catholics for my benefit, and of course she secretly hoped I would be converted one day (all Catholics have this ulterior motive). The very first moments in the group were terrible. I was then at a very difficult stage of learning to be a clown, I was not yet twenty-two and I rehearsed the whole day long. I had been looking forward very much to this evening, I was dead tired and was expecting some kind of cheerful get-together, with plenty of good wine, good food, perhaps dancing (we were very badly off and couldn’t afford either wine or good food); instead the wine was bad, and the whole evening was rather as I imagine a seminar on sociology under a boring professor. Not only was it exhausting, it was exhausting in an unnecessary and unnatural way. They started off by praying together, and all through this I didn’t know what to do with my hands and face; I feel one shouldn’t expose an unbeliever to a situation like that. Besides, they didn’t merely recite an Our Father or an Ave Marie (that would have been embarrassing enough, with my Protestant upbringing I have had more than enough of all kinds of private prayer), no, it was some text or other composed by Kinkel, very programmatic “and we beseech Thee to give us the power to do as much justice to the traditional as to the progressive,” and so on, and only then did they proceed to the “Subject for the Evening,” on “Poverty in the Society in which we live.” It was one of the most embarrassing evenings of my life. I simply cannot believe that religious discussions have to be that exhausting. I know: it is hard to believe in this religion. Resurrection of the body and eternal life. Marie often used to read me from the Bible. It must be difficult to believe
all that. Later on I even read Kierkegaard (useful reading for an aspiring clown), it was difficult, but not exhausting. I don’t know whether there are people who use designs by Picasso or Klee for embroidering tablecloths. It seemed to me that evening as if these progressive Catholics were busy crocheting themselves loincloths out of Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, Bonaventure and Pope Leo XIII, loincloths which of course failed to cover their nakedness, for—apart from me—there was no one there who wasn’t earning at least fifteen hundred marks a month. They were so embarrassed themselves that later on they became cynical and snobbish, except for Züpfner, who found the whole affair so ghastly that he asked me for a cigarette. It was the first cigarette he had ever smoked, and he puffed away at it unskillfully, I could see he was glad the smoke hid his face. I felt dreadful, for Marie’s sake, who sat there, pale and trembling, while Kinkel told the story of the man who earned five hundred marks a month, got along very well on it, then earned a thousand and found it got more difficult, then got into real trouble when he was earning two thousand, and finally, when he reached three thousand, he found that once again he could manage quite well, and from his experience devised the profound formula: “Up to five hundred a month one can manage quite well, but between five hundred and three thousand is utter misery.” Kinkel wasn’t even aware of the embarrassment he was causing: he rattled on in a kind of Olympian cheerfulness, smoking his fat cigar, raising his glass of wine to his lips, gobbling cheese sticks, until even Prelate Sommerwild, the group’s spiritual adviser, began to get fidgety and changed the subject. I believe he introduced the word “reaction” and Kinkel immediately swallowed the bait. He lost his temper and stopped in the middle of his discourse on the subject of a twelve-thousand-mark car being cheaper than one for four thousand five hundred, and even his wife, who embarrasses everyone with her mindless adoration of him, breathed a sigh of relief.
For the first time I felt more or less comfortable in this apartment; it was warm and clean, and as I hung up my coat and stood my guitar in the corner, I wondered whether an apartment was perhaps after all something more than a delusion. I have never been one for staying in one place, and never will be—and Marie is even less settled than I am, yet she seems bent on becoming so. She used to get restless when I was booked to appear for longer than a week in one place.
Once again Monika Silvs had been as kind as ever when we sent her a telegram; she had got the keys from the janitor, cleaned the place up, put flowers in the living room, filled up the refrigerator with all sorts of things. On the kitchen table was some freshly ground coffee, and beside it a bottle of cognac. Cigarettes, a lighted candle next to the flowers on the table in the living room. Monika can be terribly sentimental, and sometimes her good taste deserts her; the candle she had put on the table for me was one of those cheap decorated ones and would definitely not have passed the test of a “Catholic
Group for Matters of Taste,” but most probably she had been in a hurry and unable to find any other kind of candle, or hadn’t enough moeny to buy a more expensive, attractive one, and I was aware that it was on account of this awful candle that my affection for Monika Silvs was approaching the borderline set by my confounded inclination toward monogamy. The other Catholics in the group would never risk being sentimental or committing a breach of good taste, they would never expose themselves to criticism, anyway they would sooner do so in a matter of morals than in a matter of taste. I could even still smell Monika’s perfume in the apartment—it was much too sophisticated for her, some stuff called, I believe, Cuir de Russie.
I lit one of Monika’s cigarettes from Monika’s candle, got the cognac from the kitchen, the phone book from the hall, and lifted the receiver. Believe it or not, Monika had fixed that up for me too. The telephone was connected. The high-pitched buzzing seemed to me like the sound of an immense heart, at this moment I loved it more than the sound of the sea, more than the breath of storms or the growl of lions. Somewhere in that high-pitched buzzing were hidden Marie’s voice, Leo’s voice, Monika’s voice. I slowly replaced the receiver. It was the only weapon I had left, and I would soon be making use of it. I pulled up my right trouser leg and examined my grazed knee; the scratches were superficial, the swelling minor, I poured myself a large cognac, drank half of it and poured the rest over my sore knee, hobbled back into the kitchen and put the cognac away in the refrigerator. Only now did it occur to me that Kostert had never brought me the bottle I had insisted on. No doubt he felt that for disciplinary reasons it would be better not to bring me any and had thereby saved the Christian cause seven marks. I made up my mind to call him up and ask him to send me the money. The dirty dog ought not to get off so lightly, besides I needed the money. For five years I had been earning much more than I needed, and yet it was all gone.
Of course I could continue to make the rounds of the cheap music halls at the thirty to fifty mark level, as soon as my knee healed up properly; I didn’t really mind, in those low-class places the audience is really nicer than in the vaudeville theaters. But thirty to fifty marks a day is simply not enough, the hotel rooms are too small, you keep bumping into tables and chairs while you are practicing, and I don’t feel a bathroom is a luxury, or that, when you travel with five suitcases, a taxi is an extravagance.