The Clown (4 page)

“Dr. Schnier’s residence.”

“May I speak to Mrs. Schnier?” I said.

“Who’s calling, please?”

“Hans Schnier,” I said, “son of the lady in question.” She swallowed, thought for a moment, and I felt along the four miles of telephone wires that she was hesitating. She smelled very nice, incidentally, just of soap, and a little fresh nail polish. Obviously she knew of my existence, but she had been given no positive instructions about me. Probably only dark rumors in her ear: outsider, a radical type.

“Would you please assure me,” she finally asked, “that this is not a joke?”

“You may rest assured,” I said, “if need be I am willing to give details of my mother’s distinguishing marks. A mole on the left side of her face under her mouth, a wart …”

She laughed and said: “All right!” and switched me through. Our telephone system is a complicated one. My father alone has three extensions: a red phone for the brown-coal, a black one for the stock exchange, and a private one, white. My mother has only two phones: a black one for the Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences, and a white one for private use. Although my mother has a private bank account running into six figures, the telephone bills (and of course her traveling expenses to Amsterdam and elsewhere) are charged to the Executive Committee. The maid had used the wrong switch, my mother answered the black telephone in her business voice: “Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences.”

I was speechless. If she had said: “Mrs. Schnier speaking,” I would probably have answered; “Hans here, how are you,
Mother?” Instead I said: “I am a delegate of the Executive Committee of Jewish Yankees, just passing through—may I please speak to your daughter?” I even startled myself. I heard my mother exclaim, then she sighed in a way which told me how old she has become. She said: “I suppose you can never forget that, can you?” I was almost in tears myself and said softly: “Forget? Ought I to, Mother?” She was silent, all I could hear was that old woman’s weeping that shocked me so much. I had not seen her for five years and she must be over sixty by now. For a moment I had really believed she could put me through to Henrietta. She is always saying that perhaps she has “a private line to heaven”; she says it archly, the way everyone these days talks about their private lines: a private line to the Party, to the university, to television, to the Ministry of the Interior.

I would have liked to hear Henrietta’s voice so much, even if she had only said “nothing” or for that matter “Oh shit.” From her lips it had not sounded vulgar at all. That time she said it to Schnitzler, when he spoke of her mystical gift, it had sounded as beautiful as snow (Schnitzler was a writer, one of the parasites who lived with us during the war, and whenever Henrietta went off into one of her trances he always spoke of a mystical gift, and she had simply said “Oh shit” when he began talking about it). She could have said something else: “Today I beat that stupid Peter again,” or something in French,
“La condition du Monsieur le Comte est parfaite.”
Sometimes she used to help me with my homework, and it always made us laugh how she was so good at other people’s homework and so bad at her own.

Instead all I heard was my mother’s old woman’s weeping, and I asked: “How’s Father?”

“Oh,” she said, “he’s an old man now—old and wise.”

“And Leo?”

“Oh, Le, he works very hard, very hard,” she said, “they say he has a future as a theologian.”

“My God,” I said, “Leo of all people with a future as a theologian.”

“Of course it was pretty hard on us when he converted,” said my mother, “but the spirit moveth where it listeth.”

By now she had her voice completely under control again, and for a moment I was tempted to ask her about Schnitzler, who is still constantly in and out of our house. He was a rather plump, well-groomed fellow, who at that time was always raving about the noble European spirit, about Germanic consciousness. Later on, out of curiosity, I once read one of his novels. “French Love Affair,” not as interesting as the title promised. Its highly original feature was the fact that the hero, a French lieutenant, a prisoner of war, was fair, and the heroine, a German girl from the Moselle, was dark. He winced every time Henrietta said—I believe it was twice altogether—“Oh shit,” and maintained that a mystical gift could very well go hand in hand with the “compulsion to hurl dirty words” (although in Henrietta’s case it was not the least compulsive and she did not “hurl” the word at all, she simply said it), and as proof he dragged out a five-volume work on
Christian Mystics
. Needless to say, there was a lot of grand stuff in his novel, in which “the names of French wines ring out like crystal goblets which lovers raise and touch in mutual adoration.” The novel ends with a secret wedding; however, this brought on the displeasure of the National Socialist Writers’ Association and he was suspended from writing for some ten months. The Americans welcomed him with open arms as a resistance fighter and gave him a job in their cultural information service, and today he is running all over Bonn telling all and sundry that he was banned under the Nazis. A hypocrite like that doesn’t even have to tell lies to be always on the right side of the fence. And yet he was the one who forced my mother to make us join up, me in the Hitler Youth and Henrietta in the BDM. “In this hour, dear lady, we simply all have to pull together, stand together, suffer together.” I can still see him standing in front of the fireplace, holding
one of Father’s cigars. “Certain injustices of which I have been the victim cannot obscure my clear and objective realization of the fact that the Führer”—his voice actually trembled—“the Führer already holds our salvation in his hands.” Spoken about a day and a half before the Americans took Bonn.

“What’s Schnitzler doing these days?”

“Oh he’s doing splendidly,” she said, “they can’t get along without him at the Foreign Office.” Naturally she has forgotten all that, it is surprising that the Jewish Yankees still arouse any memories at all in her. Now I wasn’t sorry any more that I had begun my conversation with her like that.

“And Grandfather, what’s he doing?” I asked.

“He is amazing,” she said, “indestructible. He will soon be ninety. I simply don’t know how he does it.”

“That’s easy,” I said, “these old boys are not bothered by either memories or conscience. Is he at home now?”

“No,” she said, “he’s gone to Ischia for six weeks.”

We were both silent, I was still not quite sure of my voice, whereas she was perfectly in command of hers when she asked me: “But the real reason for your call—I hear you’re having money troubles. You’ve had bad luck in your job, so they tell me.”

“Is that so?” I said. “You’re probably afraid I’ll ask you and Father for money, but you don’t have to worry about that, Mother. You wouldn’t give me any anyway. I shall take it up with my lawyer; you see, I need the money to go to America. Someone over there has offered me a chance. A Jewish Yankee, as a matter of fact, but I’ll do my best to see that racial differences don’t arise.” She was further from tears than ever. All I heard before I hung up was her saying something about principles. And she had smelled as she always smelled: of nothing. One of her convictions is: “A lady gives off no odor of any kind.” This is probably why my father has such a pretty mistress: no doubt she gives off no odor of any kind, but she looks as though she would smell nice.

I tucked all the cushions within reach behind my back, put up my sore leg, drew the phone closer, and wondered whether I shouldn’t go out to the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and bring in the bottle of cognac.

That “bad luck in your job” coming from my mother had sounded particularly spiteful, and she had made no attempt to conceal her gloating. It was probably naive of me to have supposed that no one here in Bonn knew of my debacles. If Mother knew about them, Father did too, and so did Leo, and through Leo Züpfner, the whole group and Marie. It would be a terrible blow for her, worse than for me. If I gave up drinking entirely again, I would soon be once more on the level which Zohnerer, my agent, called “nicely above average,” and that would be enough to carry me through the twenty-two years I still had to go till I reached the gutter. What Zohnerer always speaks so highly of is my “good background as a craftsman”; he has no idea of art anyway, with almost inspired simplicity he judges it entirely by its degree of success. But he does know
something about craftsmanship, and he is well aware that I can still play the music halls, keeping above the thirty-mark level, for another twenty years. With Marie it’s different. She will be distressed at my “artistic decline” and my poverty, which I myself don’t find so terrible at all. For the outsider—and everyone in this world is an outsider in relation to everyone else—something always seems worse or better than it does for the one directly concerned, whether that something is good luck or bad luck, an unhappy love affair or an “artistic decline.” I wouldn’t at all mind doing some honest slapstick or just plain clowning in stuffy halls to an audience of Catholic housewives or Protestant nurses. The only thing is, these denominational groups have an unfortunate idea of fees. Naturally one of these good ladies, the club president, thinks fifty marks is a nice sum, if he gets that twenty times a month he ought to be able to manage. But when I show her my make-up bill and tell her that in order to practice I need a hotel room somewhat larger than eight by ten, she probably thinks my mistress is as expensive as the Queen of Sheba. But when I then tell her I live almost exclusively on soft-boiled eggs, consomme, meatballs and tomatoes, she crosses herself and thinks I must be undernourished because I don’t have a “good hearty meal” every day. Then if I go on to tell her that my private vices consist of evening papers, cigarettes, and parchesi, she probably takes me for a liar. I gave up talking long ago to anyone about money or art. When these two things meet, something is always wrong: art is either under- or overpaid. In an English traveling circus I once saw a clown who was twenty times better than I am as a craftsman and ten times better as an artist, and who got less than ten marks a night: his name was James Ellis, he was in his late forties, and when I invited him for supper—we had ham omelet, salad, and apple pie—he was overcome with nausea: it was ten years since he had eaten so much all at once. Ever since I met James I have given up talking about money and art.

I take it as it comes and expect to end up in the gutter.
Marie has quite different ideas; she is always talking about a “message,” everything was a message, even what I was doing; she said I was so cheerful, so devout and chaste in my own way, and so on. It is ghastly what goes on in the minds of Catholics. They can’t even drink a good wine without somehow twisting and turning, they must at all costs be “aware” of how good the wine is, and why. As far as awareness is concerned, they are as bad as the Marxists. Marie was horrified when I bought a guitar a few months ago and said I would soon be singing songs to the guitar which I had composed myself. She thought this was “beneath” me, and I told her the only thing beneath the gutter was the canal, but she didn’t understand what I meant, and I hate explaining a metaphor. Either you understand it or you don’t. I am no exegete.

It might have been thought that my puppet strings had broken; on the contrary, I had them firmly in my grasp and saw myself lying there in Bochum on that club stage, drunk, my knee grazed, I heard the sympathetic murmuring in the hall and was ashamed of myself; I had not deserved that much sympathy, and I would rather have had a few catcalls; even the limp was not quite in keeping with the injury, although I actually had hurt myself. I wanted Marie back and had begun to fight, in my own way, simply for the sake of the thing which in her books was described as “desires of the flesh.”

I was twenty-one, she was nineteen, when one evening I simply went to her room to do the things with her that men and women do with one another. I had seen her that afternoon with Züpfner, they had been coming out of the Youth Club hand in hand, they were both smiling, and it gave me a pang. She did not belong to Züpfner, and this silly holding hands made me sick. Almost everybody in town knew Züpfner, mainly because of his father, who had been kicked out by the Nazis; he had been a schoolteacher and after the war he had refused to return right away to the same school as principal. Someone had even wanted to make him a Minister, but he had got very angry and said: “I am a teacher, and I want to be a teacher again.” He was a tall, quiet man who as a teacher I found a bit boring. He substituted once for our German teacher, and read us a poem, the one about the beautiful young Lilofee.

As far as school is concerned, my opinion means nothing. It was simply a mistake to keep me in school for longer than the law required; even that would have been too long. I have
never blamed the teachers for the school, only my parents. Actually this idea of “But he has to graduate” is something which should be taken up by the Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences. It is really a race matter: graduates and non-graduates, grade school teachers, high school teachers, academic types, non-academic types, all different races, that’s all. When Züpfner’s father had finished reading the poem he waited a few minutes and then asked with a smile: “Well, has anyone anything to say?” and I jumped up at once and said: “I think it is a wonderful poem.” The whole class burst out laughing at this, but not Züpfner’s father. He smiled, but not superciliously. I found him very nice, only a bit on the dry side. I didn’t know his son very well, but better than his father. Once I had been walking past the sports ground where he was playing football with his friends, and as I stood there looking on he called out to me: “Don’t you want to play?” and I at once said Yes and joined the team playing against Züpfner as left wing. After the game he said: “Won’t you come along?” I asked: “Where to?” and he said: “To our club evening,” and when I said: “But I’m not a Catholic,” he laughed, and the others laughed too; Züpfner said: “We sing—and I bet you like to sing.” “Yes,” I said, “but I’ve had enough of youth clubs, I was at boarding school for two years.” Although he laughed, he was offended. He said: “Well, if you feel like it, come and play football with us again.” I played football a few more times with his group, went with them to eat ice cream, and he never invited me again to come to the club evening. I also knew that Marie and her crowd had their evenings at the same youth club, I knew her well, very well, as I saw a lot of her father, and sometimes in the evening I went to the sports ground when she played volleyball with the other girls, and I watched them. Or to be more precise: her, and sometimes she waved to me in the middle of the game and smiled and I waved back and smiled too; we knew each other very well. At that time I often went to see her father,
and sometimes she would sit with us when her father tried to explain Hegel and Marx to me, but at home she never smiled at me. When I saw her that afternoon coming out of the club hand in hand with Züpfner, a pang went through me. I was in an awkward position. I had left school at twenty-one in Grade 10. The padres had been very nice, they had even had a goodbye party for me, with beer and sandwiches, cigarettes and chocolate for the non-smokers, and I had put on some of my turns for my classmates: Catholic sermon and Protestant sermon, workman with pay envelope; also some tricks and Chaplin imitations. I even made a farewell speech “on the Mistaken Assumption that Graduation is Essential to Eternal Bliss.” It was a terrific evening, but at home they were bitter and angry. My mother was just horrible to me. She advised my father to send me down into the pit, and my father kept on asking me what I wanted to be, and I said, “a clown.” He said: “You mean an actor—very well, perhaps I can send you to drama school.” “No,” I said, “not an actor but a clown—and schools are no use to me.” “But what have you got in mind?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said, “nothing. I’ll get out of here.” Those were two terrible months, because I couldn’t pluck up enough courage to really get out, and with every mouthful I ate my mother looked at me as if I were a criminal. And yet for years she had been feeding all kinds of stray hangers-on, but those were “artists and writers”; Schnitzler, that corny fellow, and Gruber, who wasn’t bad at all. He was a fat, taciturn, dirty poet who lived with us for six months and never wrote a single line. When he came down to breakfast in the morning, my mother always looked at him as if she were expecting to see signs of his nightly struggle with the demon. It was almost indecent, the way she looked at him. One day he vanished without trace, and we children were amazed and scared when we discovered a whole pile of dog-eared mystery stories in his room, and a few scraps of paper on his desk on which was written the one word, “Nothing,” on one piece it was written twice, “Nothing, nothing.” For
people like that my mother even went down to the basement and brought up an extra chunk of ham. I believe if I had begun to buy some giant easels and had painted some stupid stuff on enormous canvases, she would have been able to reconcile herself to my existence. Then she could have said, “Our Hans is an artist, he will find his own path. He is still struggling.” But like this I was nothing but a rather elderly tenth grader, and the only thing she knew about him was that he was “quite good at some kind of tricks.” Naturally I refused to pay for that bit of food with “examples of my talent,” so I spent hours with old man Derkum, Marie’s father, whom I helped a bit in the shop and who gave me cigarettes, although he was not very well off. I only spent two months at home like that, but they seemed an eternity, much longer than the war. I only saw Marie occasionally, she was busy preparing for graduation and was studying with her friends. Sometimes old man Derkum caught me not listening to him at all but staring at the kitchen door, then he would shake his head and say, “She’ll be late today,” and I would blush.