Since that day two years have gone by. I now live in Boston. My enquiry into the mastiff affair remained incomplete after his death. What was it that moved him to reject the hand I offered? Was it my eye whose gaze brought me success with a number of people (so I have been told), but put off the more sensitive creature? Was it a certain casual movement of my hands as I walk, which has recently been catching my eye in shop windows? Since that mastiff’s attitude to me I have never ceased to wonder what kind of deformity (for that is what it must be) separates me from other people. Yes, for months I have even been coming to think that it may be due to deep-seated deformities within me, and the worst of it is that the wider I spread my enquiry, the greater the deviations from the norm that I find in myself; and then, as I add one thing to another, I begin to believe more and more firmly that I shall never discover the real reason; for it may perhaps in fact be my mind that is abnormal and thereby no longer capable of recognising revolting behaviour as such. Though I have no sympathy for such ludicrous phenomena as the Salvation Army with its cheap conversions, I am nevertheless bound to say that a profound change in my whole being, whether for better or for worse, can no longer be denied.
Hook to the Chin
After a big fight at the Berlin Sportpalast a group of men, four in all including me, were sitting, still in a relatively bloodthirsty frame of mind, over a few beers in a bar on the corner of Potsdamer Strasse and Bülowstrasse, and one of us, a professional boxer, told the instructive tale of the decline of Freddy Meinke, ‘The Hook’.
‘Freddy,’ said the man, squinting for all he was worth and leaning one elbow in a puddle of beer, ‘two years ago, Freddy had the chance of a lifetime. Freddy’s real name was Friedrich of course, but he had spent six months in the States – whatever happened there, he kept it dark, nothing could get him to talk about it – and all he had brought back apart from a few unknown names on his fight record and two or three dollar bills, which he would now and then quite absent-mindedly take out of his trouser pocket, was the name Freddy.
‘He boxed under this nickname of Freddy for a few months in second rate towns like Cologne and out in the sticks and then suddenly he acquired a new nickname, “Freddy the Hook”, and an excellent reputation.
‘When we got our first look at him here, we had quite a laugh at the preliminaries he went in for: having his picture taken in what can only be described as ladies’ knickers, in lilac. He was the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in a ring. He strutted around as if he was on the stage. But then he k.o’d his man in the first round, and he did it with a right hook that was really something. You know, of course, that he was a bantamweight? They don’t usually pack much punch at that weight, and on top of that Freddy was a rather puny figure just to look at. But then suddenly he would move as fast as a propeller and he would go in with the power of fifty horses, until finally the whole man was just one big hook to the jaw.
‘When we were sitting together afterwards, patting him on the back fit to break his shoulder, he said it was only a matter of pulling yourself together. You could only get really tough if you knew for sure that you had yourself totally under control. He himself had to feel from the outset that he was not hitting a man, but hitting right through him, so his hand could not be stopped by a little thing like a chin. He said one or two more things along these lines, and anyway it was good for him to believe them, as indeed we had seen. He had had a thumping success that night and was heading straight for a crack at the championship.
‘The date, when we heard it, seemed to us all to be a bit early; scarcely eight weeks later. Freddy floated gaily on in his lucky streak; he trained hard. Among other things he even took on me as a sparring partner. He seemed to have taken a lease on all the pace there was around, and my extra thirty pounds were just what he needed to test that unnaturally big punch. All the same he was a disappointment in training. This was probably because he didn’t ‘pull himself together’, and of course you can’t go around for eight weeks hitting right through people. So it did not really mean very much. What was more important was the razzmatazz he went in for. It was none of my business if he wanted to buy a motorbike on hire-purchase and choose that moment to learn to ride it. I thought to myself, he could just as well have let that wait. But when he also acquired a fiancée, with a firm engagement and full-scale domesticity on the horizon, even a walnut bedstead and bookshelves for all I knew, the whole works in other words, then there was no doubt he had gone too far. A man who gets involved in a big deal like an engagement at a time when his existence is hanging by a single thread has got himself in a spot where a hell of a lot, maybe even his entire happiness, depends on something that hasn’t happened yet. A man in that position simply can’t afford to lose. But I tell you men, it is a bad deal when too much depends on one thing. You should go into a championship fight like a salesman going into his shop. If he sells something, okay. If he doesn’t sell anything then there is always the owner, let him have the sleepless nights. Well, the fight was on September 12th.
‘Freddy completed his training on the 10th, and on the 12th at 7 o’clock we were sitting here in this bar, Freddy, me, and his manager, Fats Kampe. You know him, over there where the man with the toothpick is sitting. The balloon was to go up in an hour. It was a mistake, of course, to come in here. You can see how stale and smoky the joint is, but that was what Freddy wanted, and he had no time for people who have to be on the look-out for every little March breeze for fear of their lungs. To cut a long story short, we were sitting here in a fug you couldn’t have cut with a power-saw, and Kampe and I ordered beers, and that was the start, in the fifteen minutes we had left, of a very rum business, though I was the only one to notice it. Freddy decided he fancied a glass of beer.
‘In fact he called the waiter. But Kampe stepped in and said firmly that that was sheer madness just before the fight; he would do better to eat hobnails than drink beer.
‘Freddy muttered “nonsense”, but he let the waiter go away. As far as Kampe was concerned that was the end of the matter, but not for Freddy. Kampe went through everything he knew about Freddy’s opponent, the good things as well as the bad. Freddy read an evening paper. I had the feeling that behind the small ads his mind was still on that beer, or more precisely on his wish for that beer.
‘Right after that he stood up and sauntered over to the bar unnoticed by Kampe. He stood there for a while, not trying to push his way in, he even let one or two other people by, and once he let a waiter through. Then, with a rather stupid look on his face, he took a few cigarettes and stuck them in his waistcoat pocket.
‘When he came back to the table, he seemed to have changed somehow, and he toyed with the cigarettes in his waistcoat pocket and looked somewhat irritable. He sat down again behind his Achtuhr-Abendblatt. Then I began to run down the beer without taking any notice of what Kampe was saying. I still remember telling him it was a tepid, sickly brew, that you could actually taste the horse-shit it must have been made of, and must be good for a nice little dose of typhus. Freddy grinned.
‘I think he had pretty well finished struggling with himself. It was quite unbearable for him to sit here without a drink just because something depended on his not having an off night, and at the same time still to want some of that typhus-bilge inside him, and yet be too weak to go ahead and do what he so illogically wanted, and to be annoyed at his own unreasonableness. He was probably also seeing the girl with her engagement face, along with the walnut beds and bookcases, and he stood up and paid.
‘We didn’t say a word in the taxi to the Sportpalast.’
When the boxer reached this point in his story he noticed his elbow in the puddle of beer, and dried it with his handkerchief. Although we were all pretty clear in our minds about the outcome of the fight, I nevertheless asked for the sake of completeness, ‘Yes, and –?’
‘He was knocked out in the second round. What else did you expect?’
‘Nothing, but why was it, do you think, that he w
as k.o’d?’
‘Quite simple. When we went out of the bar I knew Freddy had a low opinion of himself.’
‘That is pretty clear,’ I said, ‘but what, in your opinion, should a man in Freddy’s position have done?’
The man emptied his glass and said, ‘A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. In my opinion. You know, caution is the mother of the knock-out.’
Müller’s Natural Attitude
We had finished eating and were sitting over our cigars, going through our stock of conversational topics. Current affairs had been exhausted, so, just to be on the safe side, we addressed ourselves first to the decline of the theatre for the umpteenth time, and then plucking up courage we gradually came round to Müller. Müller, Müller the engineer, the arch-enemy, Müller was a ticklish subject because he could always put the cat among the pigeons, even when he wasn’t there.
He had repeatedly caused trouble of late, as we all knew to our cost, but Pucher was determined to raise an old, slightly bewhiskered story for discussion. He evidently needed to get it off his chest.
‘I once had a deal with Müller,’ he began. ‘It involved me in flying with him. We flew from Berlin to Cologne. Müller wanted to introduce me to a company there which would give my self-starter the once-over with a view to distributing it on a large scale. We were going into the business together. Müller would concentrate on the marketing side, since, as I’ve told you, he was bringing in the other company. Müller said he thought we suited each other all right, and he and I had known each other as long as we have all had the misfortune to know him.
‘So we were sitting in one of those nice steel affairs, which are of course actually made of tin. Müller was in a bad mood from the start, but for my benefit he blamed it on not being allowed to smoke on board. Yet he was the one who had insisted we should travel by plane and not by train.
‘We were supposed to talk the whole scheme over once more, but it was clear from the start that this wouldn’t be easy, because the noise of the propellers, three of them, was far too loud to let us talk in peace. Müller started off by bellowing across to me while they were warming up the engines, that is, while we were still on the ground, “You can’t hear a word. Sickening.” This from a man who had flown at least a dozen times.
‘When the plane took off he stopped bellowing and sat self-absorbed in his wicker seat, his eyes fixed on the horizon. I had never flown before and was wholly wrapped up in studying this new phenomenon. So I didn’t look round at Müller until we had reached an altitude of one or two hundred metres. And then it seemed to me – doubt me if you like – that Müller was scared.
‘No need to tell me. I know. Müller served at the front. Shock troops and all that. The only reason he wasn’t awarded the Iron Cross First Class was that he hadn’t an iota of discipline in his make-up. I know. But at that point Müller was afraid, and he made no effort to conceal it. He sat staring dejectedly through the little glass porthole at the pilot, and each time the plane dropped a few metres he clung for dear life to the arms of his seat, and he was the only passenger with his safety-belt fastened from the start. Yet we all know that these big steel jobs are as safe in the air as locomotives on the ground, and we also know that this is obvious after the first couple of hundred metres.
‘After about ten minutes Müller took his notebook out of his breast pocket, scribbled a few lines, breaking off now and then to check on the pilot up front, tore out the page and handed it to me.
‘“Do you think that in twenty years anyone will understand how grown men could set foot in these things? Just look at the sheet metal! Would you call it heroism or just stupidity?” Signed Müller.
‘When I looked up from his note he was sitting unmoved in his seat, looking out of the side window as if nothing had happened; then a few minutes later he pointed with a grin at the propeller on his side and bellowed over, “A din like an earthquake! Why doesn’t a swallow kick up a racket like that?”
‘And he shook his thick head as if he couldn’t understand why this hadn’t occurred to him right at the beginning. What he meant of course was that there had to be a serious structural fault to cause this noise, and he was probably thinking that in twenty years’ time planes would not make such an unnatural din. When we landed at Hanover and were stretching our legs and smoking a cigarette on the runway while they loaded the mail and dropped some passengers and took on others, he went on to say, “Anything that makes a noise like that has to have something wrong with it.”
‘Then he proceeded to explain to me that it was senseless for a thing that two men could easily move to need 240 horse power to move through the air, where there was no resistance at all. He trotted out more of the same, and just before we climbed back in he rounded off his deliberations with the remark that the whole principle was wrong.
‘As far as Essen he kept quite silent and contented himself with a single scornful laugh when we dropped a few metres. But in Essen, where we were on the ground for ten minutes, he told me quickly about a flight a remote acquaintance of his had been through in bad weather.
‘Right there on the tarmac the three passengers were told it was doubtful whether the flight could start, since the weather over the Taunus Mountains was bad. They’d already been delayed an hour, and one of them was rather edgy because he was in a hurry and couldn’t possibly be in time for an important business meeting if he had to take the train. Then the flight controller decided that the pilot should “give it a try”. The passengers climbed aboard with mixed feelings.
‘You have to remember that the sky above the airfield was quite blue. Just as it is here. The storm was only over the Taunus.
‘Well, the flight was quite smooth at first, but then they came to the Taunus. No trace of blue sky any more. The fog around them was thick and strangely white. Like wet bed sheets or something. And the plane kept jumping like a grasshopper. The man at the controls was “giving it a try” as those bunglers put it in their jargon, but don’t waste your breath, they are rank amateurs, the whole business has only been going on for a few years, did you ever hear of men flying around in hunks of tin? There is absolutely no need. Managed without it for a thousand years! So the pilot tried to break out of the storm zone, that is, he pulled up the nose of the old crate. He reached 1800 metres and when he got up there he found to his amazement that it was just the same as far down below, in other words rather bumpy, which I could have told him before he climbed.’
‘You weren’t there, though,’ I said, disgusted at the arrogant and scornful tone in which he was telling the story.
‘Well, my friend whom he took up with him could have told him. That is to say if he hadn’t been thrown from side to side like a badly stowed suitcase. For that was what was happening to him. The aeroplane suddenly slipped away, out of control, down to the right. About ten metres.
‘Then it picked up again, climbed a bit, then slipped away again, another ten metres just as before. My friend had put his elbow through the window the first time it slipped, so the hail could now come in at will. Hailstones, rain, everything there was out there now came in, and you can take my word for it, the people in the plane had had a basinful. They were more or less preparing slowly to meet their Maker. In a moment their whole lives flashed, etc. It was the most sensible thing for them to do. The pilot put an end to this state of affairs.
‘They were at 1800 metres, and when he saw that it was just as bad up above as down below, he decided to go back down since he felt more at home down below anyhow. He cut the engine and the aeroplane just somersaulted down, nose over tail, like a walking-stick. Just imagine! You have already been through plenty up there. You are reduced to the state of a suitcase, your entire life flashing in a trice before your inner eye, then suddenly the engines cut out, the seat under you rears up, your head falls forward and down and you streak uncontrollably downwards, possibly with a female passenger screaming in your ear.
‘The man brought it down from 1800 metres to 30
metres. Do you realise what that means? 30 metres is close enough to the ground to see every stone in the fields, and that is precisely what you do see, for the thing is flying upside-down and from your “seat” you look straight through the windscreen at the ground. The ground, on the other hand, rushes inexorably up at you. The two must meet soon. What is soon supposed to mean? Immediately, now, at this very moment, and it is only then, in the moment before that moment, that the engines pick up again, there is a jerk and the thing gathers itself up and opts for the horizontal in the nick of time.
‘Half an hour later they were back where they had started. Their “try” at flying over the Taunus could be called a failure.
‘“Yes, yes,” said Müller, pulling himself up to the entrance to the cabin by the chrome handles and casting a glance at the heavens, for we were flying on, “a thing like this is a real marvel.”
‘On the last leg of the flight Müller, now that he had unburdened himself, seemed to feel much more lighthearted. He had, as I’ve said, often flown before. We landed unscathed in Cologne. (Flying is, by the way, a really pleasant and comfortable mode of travel, and not at all dangerous.) And now for the unpleasant part of the story. I will keep it short.
‘We arrived at noon and were to dine with the men from the company in the evening. Then next morning we would fly back.
‘The afternoon we spent strolling around town, and Müller was quite breezy. Not another word did he say about his conduct that morning, which evidently required no apology in his opinion. Well, so what, I was prepared to forget it. But then a bombshell burst when I least expected it.
‘In the evening about nine o’clock, just as I was dressing for dinner, there was a knock and in came Müller in his travelling outfit, with his case in his hand. He placed the case on a chair beside my shoes, cast a look of disapproval at the disorder I had created in the room and said drily, “Well, my dear Pucher, there isn’t going to be any dinner.”