The Clown (8 page)
I heard the “One moment, please” only five times, then a girl answered, and I asked her about these “places where they train Catholic priests”; I told her I had looked under Catholic seminaries, found nothing, she laughed and said these “places”—she said the quotations marks very nicely—were called colleges, and she gave me the numbers of both. The girl’s voice on the phone had made one feel a bit better. It had sounded so natural, not prim, not coy, and typically Rhineland. I even managed to get through to the telegraph office and send off a wire to Karl Emonds.
I have never been able to understand why everyone who would like to be thought intelligent tries so hard to express this compulsory hatred for Bonn. Bonn has always had certain charms, drowsy charms, just as there are women of whom I can imagine that their drowsiness has charms. Of course Bonn cannot stand up to exaggeration, and people have exaggerated this town. A town which cannot stand up to exaggeration cannot be described: a rare quality, after all. Besides, everyone knows the climate of Bonn is a climate for retired people, there is some connection between atmospheric pressure and blood pressure. The thing that doesn’t suit Bonn at all is this defensive irritability: I had plenty of opportunity at home to talk to government officials, deputies, generals—my mother is a great one for parties—and they are all in a state of irritated, sometimes almost tearful defensiveness. They all smile at Bonn with such martyred irony. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. If a woman whose charm lay in her drowsiness suddenly began to dance a wild can-can, you would assume she had been doped—but to dope a whole town, this is beyond them. A dear old aunt can teach you how to knit sweaters, crochet little doilies, and serve sherry—but I wouldn’t expect her
to make a witty and knowledgeable two-hour speech on homosexuality or to suddenly start talking like a floozy. False hopes, false modesty, false speculation on the unnatural. It wouldn’t surprise me if even the papal nuncio began complaining about the shortage of floozies. At one of our parties at home I met a politician who was on a committee for the suppression of prostitution and complained to me in a whisper about the shortage of floozies in Bonn. Bonn used really not to be so bad with all its narrow streets, book-stores, fraternities, little bakeries with a back room where you could have a cup of coffee.
Before trying to call Leo I hobbled out onto the balcony to look out over my native town. It is really a pretty town: the cathedral, the roofs of what used to be the Elector’s Palace, the Beethoven Monument, the Little Market and the park. It is Bonn’s destiny that nobody believes in its destiny. Up there on my balcony I drew in great breaths of the Bonn air, which strangely enough made me feel better: as a change of air, Bonn can work wonders, for a few hours.
I left the balcony, went back into the room and without hesitation dialed the number of the place where Leo was a student. I was nervous. Since Leo has become a Catholic I have not seen him. He informed me of his conversion in his childishly correct manner: “My dear brother,” he wrote, “This is to inform you that after mature consideration I have reached the decision to join the Catholic church and to prepare myself for the priesthood. Doubtless we will soon have an opportunity to discuss this decisive change in my life personally. Your affectionate brother Leo.” Even the old-fashioned way he tries desperately to avoid beginning the letter with “I,” instead of I am writing to inform you, saying This is to inform you—that was typically Leo. None of the polish he brings to his piano-playing. This way of doing everything in a businesslike manner increases my depression. If he goes on like this one day he will be a noble, white-haired prelate. On this point—style of letter-writing—Father and Leo are equally at sea: they write
about everything as if they were dealing in coal.
It was a long time before someone at this place deigned to come to the phone, and I was just in the mood to start berating this ecclesiastical sloppiness with harsh words, said “Oh shit,” then someone lifted the receiver at the other end and a surprisingly hoarse voice said: “Yes?” I was disappointed. I had been expecting a gentle nun’s voice, smelling of weak coffee and dry cake, instead: a croaking old man, and it smelled of pipe tobacco and cabbage, so penetratingly that I began to cough.
“Excuse me,” I said at last, “may I speak to Leo Schnier, a theology student?”
“Who is speaking, please?”
“Schnier,” I said. This was evidently beyond his powers of comprehension. He was silent for a long time, I began to cough again, pulled myself together and said: “I will spell it: School, Charles, Henry, Norman, Ida, Emil, Richard.”
“What are you talking about?” he said finally, and he sounded as if he felt as desperate as I did. Maybe they had put a nice old pipe-smoking professor in charge of the phone, and I hastily scraped together a few Latin words and said humbly;
“Sum frater leonis.”
I felt I was taking an unfair advantage, I thought of all the people who perhaps felt the urge now and again to speak to someone there and who had never learned a word of Latin.
Strangely enough he tittered and said:
Frater tuus est in refectorio
—at dinner,” he said, raising his voice slightly, “the students are having dinner and they must not be disturbed at mealtimes.”
“The matter is very urgent,” I said.
“A death in the family?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “but almost.”
“A serious accident then?”
“No,” I said, “an internal accident.”
“Oh,” he said, and his voice sounded somewhat milder, “internal hemorrhage.”
“No,” I said, “spiritual. A purely spiritual matter.” Obviously this was a foreign word for him, he maintained an icy silence.
“My God,” I said, “after all a man consists of body and soul.”
His rumblings seemed to express doubts as to this statement, between two puffs of his pipe he muttered: “St. Augustine—Bonaventura—Cusanus—you are quite wrong.”
“Soul,” I said obstinately, “please tell Mr. Schnier that his brother’s soul is in danger and ask him to phone me as soon as he’s finished dinner.”
“Soul,” he said coldly, “brother, danger.” He might just as well have said: Muck, manure, milkman. To me the whole thing seemed quite funny: after all, the students were being trained there as future spiritual advisers, and he must have come across the word soul somewhere. “The matter is of the utmost urgency,” I said.
He merely went “Hm, hm,” he seemed quite unable to understand that something connected with soul could be urgent.
“I’ll give him the message,” he said, “what was that about school?”
“Nothing,” I said, “nothing at all. The matter has nothing to do with school. I merely used the word to spell my name.”
“I suppose you think they still teach children spelling in school. Do you seriously believe that?” He became so animated that I assumed he had finally hit on his favorite topic. “The methods are much too mild these days,” he shouted, “much too mild.”
“Indeed they are,” I said, “they ought to use the strap much more in school.”
“Yes, oughtn’t they?” he exclaimed eagerly.
“Yes,” I said, “especially the teachers, they ought to be strapped much more often. You won’t forget, will you, to give my brother the message?”
“I’ve made a note of it,” he said, “urgent spiritual matter.
To do with school. Listen, my young friend, may I as doubtless the older of us give you some well-meant advice?”
“By all means,” I said.
“Stay away from St. Augustine: skillfully formulated subjectivity is not theology, not by a long shot, and it’s harmful to young souls. Nothing but journalism with a few dialectical features. You won’t take offense at this advice?”
“No,” I said, “I shall immediately go and throw my St. Augustine into the fire.”
“That’s right,” he said almost jubilantly, “into the fire with him. God bless you.” I was on the point of saying Thank you, but it didn’t seem appropriate, so I merely hung up and wiped the sweat off my face. I am very sensitive to smells, and the intensely strong smell of cabbage had mobilized my vegetative nervous system. I also thought about the methods of ecclesiastical authorities: of course it was nice to make an old man feel he was still useful, but I couldn’t see why they would give such a crotchety deaf old fellow the job of answering the phone. The cabbage smell was something I remembered from boarding school. A padre there had once explained to us that cabbage was supposed to suppress sensuality. I find the idea of suppressing mine or anyone else’s sensuality disgusting. Evidently they think day and night of nothing but “desires of the flesh,” and somewhere in the kitchen a nun sits drawing up the menu, then she talks it over with the principal, and they sit opposite each other and don’t talk about it but think with each item on the menu: this one inhibits, that one encourages sensuality. To me a scene like that seems a clear case of obscenity, just like those confounded football games that went on for hours at school; we knew it was supposed to make us tired so we wouldn’t start thinking about girls, that made football disgusting to my mind, and when I think that my brother Leo has to eat cabbage so as to suppress his sensuality, I want to go to that place and sprinkle hydrochloric acid over all the cabbage. What those boys have in store for them is hard enough without
cabbage: it must be terribly hard to proclaim these extraordinary things every day: resurrection of the body and eternal life. To dig away in the vineyard of the Lord and see precious little visible result. Heinrich Behlen, who was so kind to us when Marie had the miscarriage, explained it all to me once. He always spoke of himself to me “as an unskilled laborer in the vineyard of the Lord, with regard to outlook as well as wages.”
When we left the hospital at five I walked home with him since we had no money for the streetcar, and as he stood there at the front door and pulled his keyring out of his pocket there seemed to be no difference between him and a workman coming home from night shift, tired, unshaven, and I knew it must be terrible for him: to read mass now, with all the secrets Marie always used to tell me about. When Heinrich unlocked the door, his housekeeper was standing there in the hall, a grumpy old woman in loose slippers, the skin of her bare legs quite yellow, and not even a nun, or his mother or sister; she hissed at him: “What’s the meaning of this? What’s the meaning of this?” This shabby, musty bachelor atmosphere; damn it all, I’m not surprised some Catholic parents are afraid to send their daughters to a priest at his home, and I’m not surprised these poor devils sometimes lose their heads.
I almost phoned the deaf old pipe-smoker at Leo’s college again: I would have liked to talk to him about carnal desire. I was afraid to call up someone I knew: this stranger would probably be more understanding. I would have liked to ask him whether my conception of Catholicism was correct. For me there were only four Catholics in the world: Pope John, Alec Guinness, Marie, and Gregory, an old negro boxer who had once nearly become world champion and who was now eking out a meagre living as a strong man in vaudeville. Now and again I would run into him during a tour of engagements. He was very devout, a real churchgoer, was a member of the Third Order and always wore his scapular on his huge boxer’s chest. Most people thought he was mentally deficient because
he hardly ever uttered a word and apart from pickles and bread hardly ate a thing; and yet he was so strong that he could carry me and Marie on his hands across the room like dolls. There were a few more Catholics with a fairly high degree of probability: Karl Emonds and Heinrich Behlen, and Züpfner too. As for Marie, I was already beginning to have my doubts: her “metaphysical horror” was something I didn’t understand, and now if she went and did all those things with Züpfner which I had done with her, then she was doing those things which in her books are described unmistakably as adultery and fornication. Her metaphysical horror was concerned simply and solely with my refusal to be married at a registry office, to have our children brought up as Catholics. We didn’t have any children yet, but we talked all the time about how we would dress them, how we would talk to them, how we would bring them up, and we agreed on all points except the Catholic upbringing. I was willing to have them baptized. Marie said I must put it in writing, otherwise we could not be married in church. When I consented to the church wedding, it turned out we also had to go through a civil ceremony—and then I lost patience and said we ought to wait a while after all, a year didn’t make much difference now, and she cried and said I just didn’t understand what it meant to her to live in this state and with no prospect of having our children brought up as Christians. It was terrible, because it turned out that on this point we had been talking at cross purposes for five years. I really hadn’t known one has to have a civil wedding before one can be married in church. Of course I ought to have known, as an adult citizen and a “fully responsible male person,” but I simply did not, just as I didn’t know till recently that white wine is served cold and red wine warmed. I knew, of course, that such things as marriage license offices existed and that certain marriage ceremonies took place and documents were issued there, but I thought that was something for people who didn’t go to church and for those who as it were wanted to give the state a little treat. I
got really angry when I found out you have to go there before you can get married in church, and when Marie then started in about my giving a written guarantee that our children would be brought up as Catholics, we began quarreling. That seemed like blackmail to me, and I didn’t like it at all that Marie was so completely in agreement with this demand for a written guarantee. After all, she could have the children baptized and bring them up as she saw fit.
She wasn’t feeling well that evening, she was pale and tired, spoke rather loudly to me, and when I finally said, Yes, all right, I would do everything, even sign those things, she got mad and said: “You’re just agreeing now out of laziness and not because you are convinced of the justness of abstract principles of order,” and I said, Yes, it was true I was doing it out of laziness and because I wanted to have her by me my whole life long, and I would even go over properly to the Catholic church if that was necessary in order to keep her. I even got quite dramatic and said an expression like “abstract principles of order” reminded me of a torture chamber. She took it as an insult that, in order to keep her, I even wanted to become a Catholic. And I had thought I was paying her an almost exaggerated compliment. She said it was no longer a question of her and me, but of “order.”