The Clown (3 page)

I took the cognac out of the refrigerator again and had a drink from the bottle. I am not an alcoholic. Alcohol does me good, since Marie has gone. Besides, I wasn’t used nowadays to being short of money, and the fact that all I had left was one mark, with no prospect of being able to earn much more in the near future, bothered me. The only thing I could really sell would be the bike, but if I decided to do the cheap music halls the bike would come in very handy and would save me taxi and train fares. There was one condition attached to my possession of the apartment: I was not allowed to sell it or rent it. A typical rich man’s gift. There’s always a snag. I managed not to drink any more cognac, went into the living room and opened the phone book.

I was born in Bonn and know a lot of people here: relatives, friends, former schoolmates. My parents live here, and my brother Leo, who became a Catholic with Züpfner as godfather, is studying at a Catholic seminary here. I would have to see my parents again if only to fix up about the money. But maybe I’ll hand that over to a lawyer. I haven’t made up my mind about this yet. Since the death of my sister Henrietta my parents no longer exist for me as such. Henrietta has been dead for seventeen years. She was sixteen when the war drew to a close, a lovely girl, with fair hair, the best tennis-player between Bonn and Remagen. In those days the girls were being told they ought to volunteer for anti-aircraft duty, and Henrietta did, in February 1945. Everything happened so fast and went so smoothly that I didn’t take it in. I came out of school, crossed the Kölnerstrasse, and saw Henrietta sitting in a streetcar which was just leaving for Bonn. She waved at me and laughed, and I laughed too. She had a small rucksack on her back, and she was wearing a pretty navy-blue hat and
her heavy blue winter coat with the fur collar. I had never seen her in a hat before, she had always refused to wear one. The hat altered her very much. She looked like a young woman. I thought she must be going on an outing, though it was a strange time for outings. But in those days the schools were capable of anything. They even tried to teach us algebra in the airraid shelter, although we could already hear the artillery. Brühl, our teacher, sang “Songs of Devotion and Patriotism,” as he called them, in which he included “Behold the house of glory” and “Seest thou the dawn in eastern skies?” At night, when for once it was quiet for half an hour, all we could hear was the sound of marching feet: Italian prisoners of war (it had been explained to us in school why the Italians were no longer our allies and were now working for us as prisoners, but to this day I have never really understood why), Russian prisoners of war, women prisoners, German soldiers; marching feet all night long. Nobody knew just what was happening.

Henrietta really looked as if she were off on a school outing. They were capable of anything. Sometimes when we were sitting in our classroom between airraid sirens the sound of real rifle shots came in through the open window, and when we turned in alarm to the window Brühl would ask us if we knew what it meant. By that time we knew: another deserter had been shot up there in the woods. “That’s what will happen to all those,” said Brühl, “who refuse to defend our sacred German soil from the Jewish Yankees.” (Not long ago I ran into him again; he is old now, and white-haired, a professor at a Teachers’ Training College, and is said to be a man with a “courageous political past,” because he never joined the Party.)

I waved once more in the direction of the streetcar which bore Henrietta away, and walked through the grounds to our house where my parents were already having dinner with Leo. We had thin soup, potatoes and gravy for our main course, and an apple for dessert. Not until we got to the dessert did I ask my mother where Henrietta’s school outing was going to.
She gave a little laugh and said: “Outing? Nonsense. She has gone to Bonn to volunteer for the Flak. Don’t peel your apple so thick. Look, son, watch me,” and she actually took the peel from my plate, snipped away at it, and put the results of her frugality, paper-thin slices of apple, into her mouth. I looked at Father. He was staring at his plate and said nothing. Leo was silent too, but when I turned to my mother again she said in her soft voice: “You do see, don’t you, that everyone must do his bit to drive the Jewish Yankees from our sacred German soil.” She looked across at me, I had a strange feeling, then she looked at Leo in the same way, and it seemed to me she was on the verge of sending us both off to the front to fight the Jewish Yankees. “Our sacred German soil,” she said, “and they have already advanced far into the Eifel Mountains.” I felt like laughing, but I burst into tears, threw down my fruit knife and ran upstairs to my room. I was afraid, I knew why too, but I couldn’t have put it into words, and it enraged me to think of that damned apple peel. I looked at the German soil in our garden covered with dirty snow, I looked toward the Rhine, across the weeping willows to the mountains on the other side of the river, and the whole landscape seemed crazy to me. I had seen a few of those “Jewish Yankees”: they were brought down by truck from the Venus Mountain to an assembly point in Bonn: they looked frozen, scared, and young. If the word Jew conveyed anything at all to me, then it was someone more like the Italians, who looked even more frozen than the Americans, much too tired to be scared. I kicked the chair beside my bed, and when it didn’t fall over I kicked it again. It finally toppled over and shattered the glass top of my bedside table. Henrietta with her navy-blue hat and rucksack. She never came back, to this day we don’t know where she is buried. When the war was over someone came and told us she had “fallen near Leverkusen.”

This concern for the sacred German soil is somehow comical when you realize that a good proportion of brown-coal
mining shares has been in the hands of our family for two generations. For seventy years the Schniers have been making money out of the scooping and digging the sacred German soil has had to submit to; villages, forests, castles fall in the path of the dredgers like the wall of Jericho.

It was not till some days later that I discovered who it was who might have claimed to be the originator of “Jewish Yankee”: Herbert Kalick, then fourteen years old, my Hitler Youth leader. My mother had generously put our grounds at his disposal so we could all be trained in the use of bazookas. My eight-year-old brother Leo was along, I saw him marching past the tennis court with a practice-bazooka on his shoulder, his face as serious as only a child’s can be. I stopped him and asked: “What are you doing?” And he answered in deadly earnest: “I’m going to join the Boys’ Brigade—aren’t you?” “Sure,” I said and went along with him, past the tennis court, to the firing range where Herbert Kalick was just telling the story of the boy who at the age of ten had been awarded the Iron Cross, somewhere in Silesia, where he had wiped out three Russian tanks with bazookas. When one of the boys asked the name of this hero, I said: “Superman.” Herbert Kalick’s face went yellow, and he shouted, “You dirty defeatist!” I bent down and threw a handful of cinders in Herbert’s face. They all went for me, only Leo remained neutral, he was crying, but he didn’t help me, and in my fear I yelled at Herbert: “You Nazi swine!” I had read these words somewhere, written on the barrier at the railway crossing. I didn’t really know what they meant, but I had a feeling they might be appropriate here. Herbert Kalick stopped the fight at once and turned official: he arrested me, and I was shut up in the firing-range shed among targets and wooden pointers, till Herbert had rounded up my parents, Brühl the teacher, and somebody from the Party. I howled with rage, trampled on the targets, and kept on shouting at the boys outside who were standing guard over me: “You Nazi swine!”

After an hour I was taken to our drawing room for a
hearing. Brühl was almost beside himself. He kept on repeating: “Ought to be wiped out—wiped out, that’s what they ought to be,” and I still don’t know whether he meant physically or, so to speak, morally. I must write to him care of the Teachers’ Training College and ask him to clarify this in the interests of historical accuracy. The chap from the Party, the deputy district leader, whose name was Lövenich, was quite reasonable. He kept saying: “Don’t forget, the boy is barely eleven,” and because he had an almost soothing effect on me I even answered his question as to where I had come across this dreadful expression: “I read it, on the railway barrier at the Annabergerstrasse.” “Didn’t someone say it to you?” he asked, “I mean, didn’t you actually hear it said?” “No,” I said. “The boy doesn’t know what he’s saying,” my father said, putting his hand on my shoulder. Brühl scowled at my father, than glanced nervously toward Herbert Kalick. Obviously he interpreted my father’s gesture as being far too strong an expression of sympathy. My mother, who was crying, said in her soft, stupid voice: “You can see he doesn’t know what he is doing, he doesn’t realize—if he did, I would have to turn my back on him.” “Go ahead, turn your back,” I said.

All this took place in our enormous drawing room with the heavy dark oak furniture, with Grandfather’s hunting trophies up there on the wide oak shelf, the beer mugs and the great bookcases with their leaded-glass doors. I heard the artillery off in the Eifel Mountains, hardly more than ten miles away, sometimes even a machine gun. Herbert Kalick, pale, fair-haired, with his fanatical face, behaving like a kind of prosecutor, kept on beating the sideboard with his knuckles and demanding: “We’ve got to be ruthless, ruthless.” I was sentenced to dig a tank trap in the garden under Herbert’s supervision, and that very afternoon, true to the Schnier tradition, I dug up the German soil, although—contrary to the Schnier tradition—with my own hands. I dug the trench clear across Grandfather’s favorite rosebed, aiming directly at the
copy of the Apollo of Belvedere, and I was looking forward to the moment when the marble statue would fall to my excavatory zeal. I rejoiced too soon: it was demolished by a small freckled boy called Georg. He blew up himself and the Apollo with a bazooka which he let off by mistake. Herbert Kalick’s comment on this accident was laconic: “What a good thing Georg was an orphan.”

In the phone book I looked up the numbers of all the people I would have to call; on the left I made a list of the names of all those I could ask for a loan: Karl Emonds, Heinrich Behlen, both old classmates of mine, one of them had been a theological student and was now a high school teacher, the other a chaplain, then Bella Brosen, my father’s mistress—on the right, a list of all the others, whom I would only ask for money as a last resort: my parents, Leo (whom I could ask for money but he never has any, he gives it all away), the group members: Kinkel, Fredebeul, Blothert, Sommerwild; and between these two columns: Monika Silvs, around whose name I drew a nice little loop. I had to send Karl Emonds a wire and ask him to call me. He doesn’t have a phone. I would have liked to call Monika first but I would have to call her last. Our relationship was at a stage where it would be both physically and metaphysically discourteous to slight her. Here I was in a terribly difficult position: a monogamist, I had been living a celibate life—against my will yet at the same time in accordance with my nature—ever since Marie had deserted me in “metaphysical horror,” as she called
it. To be quite honest, I had slipped in Bochum more or less on purpose, and had fallen onto my knee so that I could break off the tour and go to Bonn. I was suffering almost unbearably from what Marie’s religious books mistakenly referred to as “desires of the flesh.” I was much too fond of Monika to satisfy my desire for another woman with her. If these religious books were to say: Desire for a woman, that would be bad enough, but a good deal better than “desires of the flesh.” All I know of flesh is butchers’ shops, and even those are not entirely fleshly. When I imagine Marie doing with Züpfner this thing which she ought only to do with me, my depression becomes despair. I hesitated a long time before looking up Züpfner’s telephone number as well and writing it in the column of those who I didn’t intend to borrow from. Marie would give me money, right away, all she had, and she would come to me and stand by me, especially when she heard of the series of failures that had befallen me, but she wouldn’t come alone.

Six years is a long time, and she has no business in Züpfner’s house, nor at his breakfast table, nor in his bed. I was even prepared to fight for her, although the word fight has for me almost entirely physical connotations, in other words, a ridiculous idea: a brawl with Züpfner. Marie was not yet dead for me the way my mother is, so to speak, dead for me. I believe that the living are dead, and that the dead live, not the way Protestants and Catholics believe it. For me a boy like Georg, who blew himself up with a bazooka, awkward boy standing there on the grass in front of the Apollo, hear Herbert Kalick shouting: “Not like that, not like that—”; hear the explosion, a few screams, not very many, then Kalick’s comment: “What a good thing Georg was an orphan,” and half an hour later at supper, at the very table where they had sat to pronounce sentence on me, my mother said to Leo: “You’ll do better than that silly boy, won’t you!” Leo nodded, my father looked across at me, and found no comfort in the eyes of his ten-year-old son.

Meanwhile for years my mother has been president of the Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences; she goes to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, sometimes even to America, and lectures to American women’s clubs about the remorse of German youth, still in the same gentle, mild voice she probably used when saying goodbye to Henrietta. “Be a good girl, dear.” That voice I could hear over the phone any time, but Henrietta’s voice never again. She had had a surprisingly dark voice and light laughter. Once in the middle of a game of tennis she dropped her racket, she stood quite still on the tennis court and stared dreamily up at the sky; another time she dropped her spoon in the soup during dinner, my mother shrieked, complained of the stains on her dress and the tablecloth; Henrietta was not even listening, and when she came to she merely picked up the spoon from her soup plate, wiped it on her serviette, and went on eating. On a third occasion, when we were playing cards by the fire and she went off into a trance like this, my mother got really angry. She shouted: “Stop this ridiculous dreaming!” and Henrietta looked up and said quietly: “What’s the matter? I simply don’t want to play any more,” and threw the cards she was still holding into the fire. My mother picked the cards out of the fire, burning her fingers as she did so, and salvaged them all except for the seven of hearts, which was singed, and we could never play cards again without thinking of Henrietta, although my mother tried to behave “as if nothing had happened.” She is not spiteful at all, just incredibly stupid, and stingy. She would not allow us to buy a new pack of cards, and I assume the scorched seven of hearts is still in that pack and that my mother is quiet unconcerned when it turns up while she is playing patience. I would have like to phone Henrietta, but the theologians have not yet invented this kind of dialing. I looked up my parents’ number, which I always forget, in the phone book: Schnier, Alfons, Dr., Managing Director. The “Dr.” was something new—it must be an honorary degree. While
I was dialing the number I walked home in my mind’s eye, down Koblenzstrasse, turning into the Ebertallee, then to the left toward the Rhine. Barely half an hour’s walk. I heard the maid’s voice: