The Clown (9 page)

It was evening, in a hotel room in Hanover, in one of those expensive hotels where, when you order a cup of coffee, you only get three quarters of a cup of coffee. They are so sophisticated in those hotels that a full cup of coffee is considered vulgar, and the waiters know much better what is sophisticated than the sophisticated people who play the part of guests there. I always feel in these hotels as if I am in an ultra-expensive and ultraboring boarding school, and this evening I was dead tired: three performances one after the other. In the early afternoon to some kind of steel shareholders, later in the afternoon to some graduate teachers, and in the evening in a vaudeville theater where the applause was so weak that I could already sense
my approaching downfall. When I ordered some beer sent up to my room in this stupid hotel, the head waiter said in an icy voice on the phone: “Certainly, sir,” as if I had asked for liquid manure, and they brought me the beer in a silver tankard. I was tired, all I wanted to do was drink some beer, play a little parchesi, have a bath, read the evening papers and fall asleep beside Marie: my right hand on her breast and my face so close to her head that the smell of her hair would become part of my sleep. The feeble applause still sounded in my ears. It would have been almost more humane if they had all turned their thumbs down. This tired, blasé contempt for my performance was as flat as the beer in the stupid silver tankard. I was simply incapable of carrying on an ideological discussion.

“It’s the principle of the thing, Hans,” she said, not quite as loud, and she didn’t even notice that “thing” has a special meaning for us; she had apparently forgotten. She walked up and down by the foot of the bed and every time she gesticulated she jabbed the air so precisely with her cigarette that the little smoke clouds looked like full stops. She had meanwhile learned how to smoke, in her pale green pullover she looked beautiful: her white skin, her hair darker than it used to be, I saw for the first time tendons in her neck. I said: “Have a heart, let me have a good night’s sleep first, tomorrow at breakfast we’ll talk over everything again, especially the thing you’re worried about,” but she noticed nothing, turned round, stood in front of the bed, and I could see from her mouth that her behavior was caused by motives she did not admit to herself. When she drew on her cigarette, I saw a few little lines round her mouth I had never seen before. She shook her head as she looked at me, sighed, turned round again and walked up and down.

“I don’t quite understand,” I said wearily, “first we quarrel about my signature to this blackmail form—then about the civil wedding—now I have agreed to both, and you are angrier than ever.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is too quick for me, and I feel you are avoiding the issue. What do you really want?” “You,” I said, and I don’t know of anything nicer you can say to a woman.

“Come here,” I said, “lie down beside me and bring the ashtray, we can talk much better like that.” I could no longer say the word “thing” in her presence. She shook her head, put the ashtray beside me on the bed, went over to the window and looked out. I was afraid.

“There’s something about this conversation I don’t like—it doesn’t sound like you!”

“What does it sound like then?” she asked quietly, and I was deceived by her voice which had suddenly become so gentle again.

“It reminds me of Bonn,” I said, “of the group, of Sommerwild and Züpfner—and all that crowd.”

“Perhaps,” she said, without turning round, “your ears imagine they have heard what your eyes have seen.”

“I don’t understand,” I said wearily, “what do you mean.”

“Oh,” she said, “as if you didn’t know that there’s a Catholic Congress going on here now.”

“I saw the posters,” I said.

“And that Heribert and Prelate Sommerwild might be here, didn’t that occur to you?”

I hadn’t known Züpfner’s first name was Heribert. When she said the name I realized she could only mean him. I thought once again of them holding hands. I had already noticed that in Hanover there were more Catholic priests and nuns about than the town seemed to call for, but it had not occurred to me that Marie might be meeting someone here, and even if she were—after all, when I had a few free days we had sometimes gone to Bonn, and she had been able to enjoy the whole “group” to her heart’s content.

“Here in the hotel?” I asked wearily.

“Yes,” she said.

“Why didn’t you let me meet them?”

“You were hardly here,” she said, “on the road for a whole week—Brunswick, Hildesheim, Celle …”

“But now I’m free,” I said, “phone them, and we’ll have a drink downstairs in the bar.”

“They’ve gone,” she said, “they left this afternoon.”

“I’m glad,” I said, “you were able to breathe ‘Catholic air’ so long and so plentifully, even if it was imported.” That was her expression, not mine. Sometimes she had said she had to breathe Catholic air again.

“Why are you angry?” she asked; she was still standing facing the street, had lighted another cigarette, and this was another strange thing about her: this feverish smoking, it was as strange to me as the way she spoke to me. At this moment she could have been anybody, any pretty girl, not very intelligent, who was looking for any excuse to leave.

“I’m not angry,” I said, “you know I’m not. Tell me you know.”

She didn’t say anything, but she nodded, and I could see enough of her face to know she was holding back the tears. Why? She ought to have cried, loud and long. Then I could have got up, put my arm around her and kissed her. I didn’t. I had no desire to, and to do it out of mere routine or duty didn’t appeal to me. I stayed lying on the bed. I thought of Züpfner and Sommer-wild, and that for three days she had been chatting with them without telling me a thing about it. For certain they had talked about me. Züpfner was a member of the Executive Committee. I hesitated too long, a minute, half a minute or two, I don’t know. When I got up and went over to her she shook her head, pushed my hands away from her shoulder and began talking again, about her metaphysical horror and about principles of order, and I felt I had been married to her for twenty years. Her voice took on a disciplinary note, I was too tired to follow her arguments, they flew past my ears. I interrupted her and told her about my failure at the vaudeville theater, the first in three years. We stood side by side at the window,
looking down onto the street below where taxis kept driving by taking the Catholic committee members to the station: nuns, priests and solemn-looking laymen. In one group I recognized Schnitzler, he was holding the taxi door open for a very distinguished-looking elderly nun. When he was living with us he had been a Protestant. Either he must have converted or be here as a Protestant observer. He was capable of anything. Down below suitcases were being carried and tips pressed into the hands of hotel staff. I was so tired and confused that everything swam before my eyes: taxis and nuns, lights and suitcases, and all the time that horrible feeble applause was ringing in my ears. Marie had long since broken off her monologue about principles of order, she had stopped smoking too, and when I moved away from the window she followed me, grasped me by the shoulder and kissed both my eyes. “You are so sweet,” she said, “so sweet and so tired,” but when I wanted to put my arms round her she said softly: “Please, please, don’t,” and I made the mistake of really letting her go. I threw myself fully dressed on the bed, fell asleep at once, and when I woke in the morning I was not surprised to find Marie had gone. I found the note on the table “I must take the path that I must take.” She was nearly twenty-five, and she ought to have been able to think of something better than that. I was not offended, it just seemed a little inadequate. I sat down at once and wrote her a long letter, after breakfast I wrote her another one, I wrote her every day and sent all the letters to Fredebeul’s address in Bonn, but I never got an answer.

It was a long time before anyone at the Fredebeuls came to the phone; the constant ringing got on my nerves, I imagined Mrs. Fredebeul asleep, then being woken up by the ringing, then falling asleep again, then being woken up again, and I suffered all the agony that this call was causing her ears. I was just about to hang up but told myself this was an emergency and let it go on ringing. The idea of waking Fredebeul himself out of a deep sleep would not have bothered me in the least: the fellow doesn’t deserve undisturbed sleep; he is pathologically ambitious, probably always has his hand poised on the telephone ready to call someone up or take calls from government department heads, editors, executive committees and the party. I like his wife very much. She was still a schoolgirl when he took her for the first time to a group meeting, and the way she sat there, following the theological-sociological discussions with her beautiful eyes, quite upset me. I could see she would much rather have gone dancing or to a movie. Sommerwild, in whose home this meeting was taking place, kept asking me: Is
it too warm for you, Schnier, and I said: No, sir, although the sweat was pouring off my forehead and cheeks. Finally I went out onto Sommerwild’s balcony because I couldn’t stand all that talking any more. She was the one who had started off this whole palaver by saying—à propos of nothing, by the way, as actually they were discussing the size and extent of provincialism—she thought some things Gottfried Benn had written were “quite nice really.” Whereupon Fredebeul, who was supposed to be her fiancé, went scarlet, for Kinkel gave him one of his famous speaking looks: “How come? Haven’t you straightened her out about this yet?” So he straightened her out himself and chipped away at the poor girl, using the whole Western world as a chisel. There was practically nothing left of the nice girl, the chips flew, and I was annoyed at Fredebeul for being such a coward and not intervening because with Kinkel he was “committed” to a certain ideological line, I have no idea whether left or right, at any rate they have their line, and Kinkel felt morally obliged to straighten out Fredebeul’s fiancée. Sommerwild didn’t lift a finger either, though he represented the opposite line from Kinkel’s and Fredebeul’s, I can’t remember which: if Kinkel and Fredebeul are left, Sommerwild is right, or vice versa. Marie had gone a bit pale too, but she is impressed by erudition—I have never been able to talk her out of it—and Kinkel’s erudition impressed the future Mrs. Fredebeul too: with almost lascivious sighs she submitted to the torrent of information: from the Church Fathers to Brecht, it poured down like a tropical storm, and when I came back refreshed from the balcony they were all sitting there totally exhausted, drinking punch—and all because the poor child had said she thought some of Benn’s writings were “quite nice really.”

Now she already has two children by Fredebeul, is barely twenty-two, and while the phone was still ringing in their apartment I imagined her somewhere busy with baby bottles, talcum powder, diapers and cold cream, utterly helpless and confused, and I thought of the mountains of dirty diapers and
the unwashed, greasy dishes in her kitchen. Once when the conversation became too exhausting for me I had helped her make some toast, cut sandwiches and put on the coffee, chores of which I can only say that they are less repellent to me than certain forms of conversation.

A very hesitant voice said: “Yes?” and I could tell from the voice that the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom looked more hopeless than ever. I could hardly smell anything this time: only that she must be holding a cigarette.

“Schnier speaking,” I said, and I expected an exclamation of pleasure, such as she always gives when I call her up. Oh, you’re in Bonn—how nice—or something like that, but there was an embarrassed silence, then she said feebly: “Oh, that’s nice.” I didn’t know what to say. Formerly she always used to say: “When are you coming to give us a show again?” Not a word. I was embarrassed, not for my sake, more for hers, for me it was only depressing, for her it was embarrassing. “The letters,” I finally said with an effort, “the letters I sent to Marie care of your address?”

“They’re lying here,” she said, “returned unopened.”

“Where did you forward them to?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “my husband took care of that.”

“But you must have seen on the letters that came back what address he wrote on them?”

“Are you cross-examining me?”

“Oh no,” I said mildly, “no, no, I simply thought in all modesty that perhaps I had a right to know what happened to my letters.”

“Which you, without asking us, sent here.”

“Dear Mrs. Fredebeul,” I said, “please, do be human now.”

She laughed, faintly but audibly, but said nothing.

“What I mean is,” I said, “there is a point at which human beings, even if for ideological reasons—become human.”

“Does that mean that up to now I have behaved inhumanly?”

“Yes,” I said. She laughed again, very faintly, but still audibly.

“I am very unhappy about this whole thing,” she said finally, “but more than that I can’t say. You have disappointed us all terribly.”

“As a clown?” I asked.

“That too,” she said, “but not only that.”

“I suppose your husband isn’t home?”

“No,” she said, “he won’t be back for a few days. He is on an election campaign in the Eifel Mountains.”

“What?” I exclaimed; that was news indeed, “surely not for the CDU?”

“Why not,” she said in a voice that made it clear she would like to hang up.

“Oh all right,” I said, “is it asking too much if I ask you to send me my letters.”

“Where to?”

“To Bonn—to my address here in Bonn.”

“You’re in Bonn?” she asked, and it sounded as if she was suppressing a “For Heaven’s sake.”

“Goodbye,” I said, “and thank you for so much humanity.” I was sorry to be so angry with her, I was fed up. I went into the kitchen, took the cognac out of the icebox and had a long drink from it. It didn’t help. I had another, that didn’t help either. Mrs. Fredebeul was the last person from whom I would have expected a brush-off like that. I had been prepared for a long sermon about marriage, with reproaches about my behavior toward Marie; she could be dogmatic in a nice, consistent way, but usually when I was in Bonn and phoned her she would ask me laughingly to help her again in the kitchen and with the children. I must have been mistaken about her, or perhaps she was pregnant again and in a bad mood. I didn’t have the nerve to phone again and maybe find out what was the matter with her. She had always been so nice to me. The only way I could account for it was that Fredebeul had given her “strict instructions” how to treat me. I have often noticed
how wives are loyal to their husbands to the point of absolute madness. Mrs. Fredebeul was no doubt too young to know how deeply her unnatural coldness would hurt me, and I really couldn’t expect her to realize that Fredebeul is little more than an opportunist, full of hot air, intent on becoming a success at all costs and prepared to “drop” his own grandmother if she got in his way. No doubt he had said, “Write Schnier off,” and so she simply wrote me off. She was under his thumb, and as long as he had believed I was useful in some way, she had been allowed to follow her natural instincts and be nice to me, now contrary to her instincts she had to be unkind to me. But maybe I was doing them an injustice, and they were both merely following the dictates of their conscience. If Marie was married to Züpfner, it was no doubt sinful to arrange a contact between us—that Züpfner was
the
man in the Executive Committee and could be useful to Fredebeul didn’t interfere with their conscience. Doubtless they must do what was right and proper even when it was to their advantage. I was less shocked at Fredebeul than at his wife. I had never had any illusions about him, and not even the fact that he was now on an election tour on behalf of the Christian Democratic Union could surprise me.