The maid returns. Key in the lock, open the door, close the door, key in the lock. Light on in the hall, off, on in the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, close it, light off in the kitchen. In the hall a gentle knock at the door. “Good night, Madam.” “Good night. Has Marie been a good girl?” “Yes, very.” Light off in the hall, footsteps going upstairs. (“She was sitting there all alone in the dark listening to church music.”)
With those hands that washed out the sheets, that I warmed in my armpits, you touch everything: record player, record, lever, button, cup, bread, child’s hair, child’s bedclothes, the tennis racket. “Why don’t you play tennis any more, I wonder?” Shrug of the shoulders. Don’t feel like it, just don’t feel like it. Tennis is so good for wives of politicians and prominent Catholics. No, no, the two terms are not quite that identical yet. It keeps you slim, supple and attractive. “And F. loves playing tennis with you. Don’t you like him?” Yes, of course. There is something so sincere about him. Indeed there is, they say he got to be Minister with sheer “B.S. and push.” Everyone says he is a scoundrel, a schemer, and yet his affection for Heribert is sincere: the corrupt and the brutal sometimes take to the conscientious and the incorruptible. How touchingly scrupulous it was, the way Heribert went about building his house: no special credits, no “assistance” from party and church friends with connections in the building trade. It was only because he wanted a “hillside lot” that he had to pay a bonus, which he considered actually corrupt. But it was precisely this hillside lot that proved to be troublesome.
Anyone who builds on a hillside has the choice of a garden sloping up or a garden sloping down. Heribert chose to have it slope down—this turns out to be a disadvantage when little Marie starts to play ball, the ball is forever rolling down toward the neighbor’s hedge, sometimes through it and into the rock garden, snaps off twigs, flowers, rolls over delicate, costly mosses, and necessitates awkward scenes of apology. “How can you possibly be cross with such an adorable little girl?” You can’t. Silvery voices gaily pretend unconcern, mouths strained by slimming diets, tired throats with tense muscles, give out gaiety, where only a good row with sharp words flying would relieve the situation. Everything swallowed, covered up with false neighborly gaiety, till some time later on quiet summer evenings behind closed doors and drawn blinds fine china is thrown at embryo ghosts. “I wanted to have it—it was you who didn’t.” Fine china does not sound fine when it is thrown against the kitchen wall. Ambulance sirens scream up the hill. Snapped-off crocus, damaged moss, a child’s hand rolls a child’s ball into the rock garden, screaming sirens announce the undeclared war. Oh if only we had chosen a garden sloping up.
The phone ringing made me jump. I lifted the receiver, flushed, I had forgotten Monika Silvs. She said, “Hullo, Hans?” I said: “Yes,” still didn’t know why she was calling. It was only when she said: “You will be disappointed” that I remembered the mazurka. I couldn’t go back now, couldn’t say “I’d rather not,” we had to go through with this terrible mazurka. I heard Monika put the receiver down on the piano, begin to play, she played extremely well, the tone was superb, but while she played I began to cry from sheer wretchedness. I should not have attempted to repeat that moment: when I came home from being with Marie, and Leo was playing the mazurka in the music room. You can’t repeat moments or communicate them. That autumn evening, in our garden, when Edgar Wieneken did the hundred meters in 10.1. I clocked him myself, measured the distance for him myself, and he ran it that evening in 10.1. He was in top form, in just the right mood for it—but of course nobody believed us. It was our mistake to speak of it at all and so try to perpetuate the moment. We ought to have been content to know he really ran 10.1. Afterwards, of course, he kept running his usual 10.9 and 11.0 and nobody believed us, they laughed at us. It is bad enough to talk about such moments, to try and repeat them is suicide. It was a kind of suicide I was committing when I listened on the phone now to Monika playing the mazurka. There are certain ritual moments which contain their own repetition: the way Mrs. Wieneken cut the loaf—but I had tried to repeat this moment with Marie too by once asking her to cut the loaf the way Mrs. Wieneken had. The kitchen in a workman’s home is not a hotel room, Marie was not Mrs. Wieneken—the knife slipped, she cut her left arm, this experience made us ill for three weeks. This is what sentimentality can lead to. One should leave moments alone, never repeat them.
I was so miserable I couldn’t even cry any more when Monika came to the end of the mazurka. She must have sensed it. When she came to the phone all she said, in a low voice, was: “There, you see.” I said: “I am to blame—not you—forgive me.”
I felt as if I were lying drunk and stinking in the gutter, covered with vomit, my mouth full of foul curses, and as if I had told someone to photograph me and had sent Monika the picture. “May I call you again?” I asked quietly. “In a few days perhaps. I only have one explanation for my terrible behavior, I feel so utterly miserable I can’t even describe it.” I heard nothing, only her breathing, for a few moments, then she said: “I’m going away, for two weeks.”
“Where to?” I asked.
“Into retreat,” she said, “and to do a bit of painting.”
“When are you coming over here,” I asked, “to make me a mushroom omelette and one of your decorative salads?”
“I can’t come,” she said, “not now.”
“Later on?” I asked.
“I’ll come,” she said; I could hear her crying, then she hung up.
20
I thought I ought to have a bath, I felt so dirty, and I thought I must stink the way Lazarus stank—but I was perfectly clean and didn’t smell. I crept into the kitchen, turned off the gas under the beans, under the kettle, went back to the living room, raised the cognac bottle to my lips: it didn’t help. Even the phone ringing didn’t arouse me from my stupor. I lifted the receiver, said: “Yes?” and Sabina Emonds said: “Hans, what on earth are you up to?” I was silent, and she said: “Sending telegrams, it seems so dramatic. Are things that bad?”
“Bad enough,” I said limply.
“I had been for a walk with the children,” she said, “and Karl is away for a week, at camp with his class—and I had to get someone to stay with the kids before I could phone.” She sounded as if she was in a hurry, and a bit short-tempered too, the way she always sounds. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her for money. Ever since his marriage Karl has been figuring out his minimum living expenses very carefully; he had three children when I had that row with him, the fourth was on the way, but I hadn’t the nerve to ask Sabina if it had arrived yet. The air in the apartment was always full of this by now more or less unchecked irritability, wherever you looked you saw his damned notebooks in which he calculated how he could make ends meet, and when I was alone with him Karl always became “frank” in a revolting kind of way and embarked on one of his man-to-man talks, about conceiving a child, and he would start accusing the Catholic church (to me, of all people!), and there always came a point when he looked at me like a whining dog, and usually at that moment Sabina would come in, give him a bitter look because she was pregnant again. To my mind there is hardly anything more painful than a woman looking bitterly at her husband because she is pregnant. They ended up huddling there side by side crying their eyes out because they really did care for each other. In the background the noise of the children, chamberpots blissfully overturned, sopping washcloths thrown against brand-new wallpaper, while Karl is always talking about “discipline, discipline” and “complete and unconditional obedience,” and I had no alternative but to go into the nursery and do a few tricks for the children to quiet them down, but it never did quiet them down, they would squeal with delight, try to imitate me, and in the end we would all be sitting around, a child on each lap, the children would be allowed to sip from our wine glasses. Karl and Sabina would start talking about the books and calendars where you can look up the times when it is impossible for a woman to conceive. A
nd then they are forever having babies, and it never struck them that this conversation must be specially agonizing for Marie and me, seeing how we weren’t able to have children. Then when Karl was drunk he would start despatching curses to Rome, heaping maledictions on cardinals’ heads and popes’ minds, and the fantastic thing about it was that I would start defending the Pope. Marie knew far more about it and explained to Karl and Sabina that Rome couldn’t do otherwise in these matters. Finally they would exchange sly looks, as if to say: Oh you two—obviously you have some very tricky way of avoiding children, and it usually ended up by one of the overtired kids snatching the wine glass from Marie, me, Karl or Sabina and spilling the wine over the exam papers which Karl always has stacked up on his desk. Needless to say it was embarrassing for Karl, who was constantly preaching to his boys about discipline and order, to have to return their exam papers with wine stains on them. There were slaps and tears, and with an “Oh-you-men-look” in our direction Sabina would go out into the kitchen with Marie to make some coffee, and no doubt they had their woman-to-woman talk then, something which embarrasses Marie as much as man-to-man talks do me. When I was alone again with Karl he would start talking about money again, in a reproachful tone of voice, as much as to say: I talk about it with you because you’re a nice guy, but of course you really don’t know a thing about it.
I sighed and said: “Sabina, I am utterly ruined, professionally, spiritually, physically, financially.… I am …”
“If you’re really hungry,” she said, “I hope you know where a bowl of soup is always waiting for you on the stove.” I was silent, I was touched, it sounded so honest and simple. “Are you listening?” she said.
“I’m listening,” I said, “and I’ll come round tomorrow lunchtime at latest and have my bowl of soup. And if you need anyone again to look after the kids, I—I,” I couldn’t go on. I could hardly offer now to do something for money which I had always done in the past for them for nothing, and I remembered that stupid business with the egg I had given Gregor. Sabina laughed and said: “Come on, out with it.” I said: “What I mean is, if you and Karl could recommend me to your friends, I do have a phone—and I’ll do it as cheaply as anyone else.”
She was silent, and I could tell she was shocked. “Hans,” she said, “I can’t talk much longer, but please tell me—what happened?” Apparently she was the only person in Bonn who hadn’t read Kostert’s review, and I realized she had no means of knowing what had gone on between Marie and me. After all, she knew none of the group.
“Sabina,” I said, “Marie has left me—and married someone called Züpfner.”
“Oh no,” she exclaimed, “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true,” I said.
She was silent, and I heard someone banging against the door of the phone booth. Some idiot, no doubt, who wanted to tell his skat friends how he could have won a heart trump hand without the three top trumps.
“You ought to have married her,” said Sabina in a low voice, “I mean—oh, you know what I mean.”
“I know,” I said, “I wanted to, but then it turned out you have to have that damned certificate from the Marriage License Bureau and that I had to guarantee in writing—in writing, mind you—that I would have the children brought up as Catholics.”
“But surely that wasn’t the only reason, was it?” she asked. The banging on the door of the phone booth got louder.
“I don’t know,” I said, “that’s certainly how it began—but there are probably a lot of other things too which I don’t understand. You’d better hang up, Sabina dear, or that agitated German citizen at the door will murder you. The place is swarming with fiends.” “You must promise me you’ll come,” she said, “and remember: your soup will be waiting for you on the stove all day.” I heard her voice grow faint, she whispered: “How unfair, how unfair,” but in her confusion she had evidently just put the receiver down on the shelf where the phone book always lies instead of on the hook. I heard the fellow say: “Well, it’s about time,” but Sabina seemed to have gone. I shouted into the phone: “Help, help,” in a shrill, piercing voice, the fellow swallowed the bait, picked up the receiver and said: “Is there something I can do for you?” His voice sounded respectable, composed, very masculine, and I could smell that he had been eating something sour, like marinated herring. “Hullo, hullo,” he said, and I said: “Are you a German, as a matter of principle I will speak only to true Germans.”
“A very good principle too,” he said, “what is the trouble?”
“I am concerned about the CDU,” I said, “I trust you invariably vote CDU?”
“I should hope so,” he said indignantly, and I said: “Then I can stop worrying,” and hung up.
21
I really should have insulted the fellow, I should have asked him whether he raped his own wife, whether he had won no-trumps with two aces, and whether he had already had the mandatory two-hour chat about the war with his colleagues at the Ministry. His voice had been that of the masterful husband, the true German, and his “Well, it’s about time” had sounded like “Shoulder arms!” Sabina Emonds’ voice had made me feel somewhat better, she had sounded a bit short-tempered and harassed, but I knew she really did think Marie had behaved badly and that the bowl of soup would always be waiting for me on the stove. She was a very good cook, and when she was not pregnant and handing out her “Oh-you-men-looks” right and left she was a cheerful soul, and Catholic in a much nicer way than Karl, who had retained his strange seminarist’s ideas on the Sextum. Sabina’s reproachful glances were actually directed at the entire male sex, but they took on a specially somber tone, almost thunderous, when she looked at Karl, the originator of her condition. Usually I had tried to distract Sabina, I would do one of my turns, this made her laugh, she would laugh long and hard, till the tears came, then she generally got trapped by her tears, and there was no more laughter in them.… And Marie would have to take her out and comfort her, while Karl sat beside me looking glum and guilty, till in desperation he would start correcting papers. Sometimes I would give him a hand by marking the mistakes with a red ballpoint, but he never trusted me, looked through everything again and was furious every time because I hadn’t overlooked anything and had marked the mistakes quite correctly. He simply couldn’t imagine that I would carry out a job like that fairly and the way he would do it himself. Karl’s problem is only a problem of money. If Karl Emonds had a seven-room apartment, the feeling of irritation, of pressure, would probably disappear. I had once had an argument with Kinkel over his conception of “subsistence level.” Kinkel was supposed to be one of the cleverest experts in this field, and I believe it was he who worked out that the subsistence level for a single person in a city, not including rent, was eighty-four marks, later increased to eighty-six. I didn’t even bother to point out that he himself, to judge by the disgusting story he had told us, apparently regarded thirty-five times that sum as his subsistence level. Such objections are considered too personal and in poor taste, but what’s really in poor taste is that a man like that should tell other people what their subsistence level is. The eighty-six marks even included an amount for cultural needs: movies probably, or newspapers, and when I asked Kinkel if they expected the person in question to see a good film for that money, a film of educational value—he lost his temper, and when I asked him what was meant by the item “Replacement of Underwear,” whether the Ministry specially hired a kind old man to run all over Bonn and wear out his underpants and report to them how long he took to wear out his underpants—his wife said I was being dangerously subjective, and I told her I could see the point of Communists setting up plans, with test meals, maximum lifetime of handkerchiefs, and all that nonsense, seeing that Communists did not have the hypocritical alibi of a “spiritual nature,” but that Christians like her husband should lend themselves to such presumptuous madness seemed to me fantastic—so then she said I was an out-and-out materialist and had no sense of sacrifice, suffering,
fate, the nobility of poverty. With Karl Emonds I never have the impression of sacrifice, suffering, fate, the nobility of poverty. He has quite a good income, and all that was to be seen of fate and nobility was a constant irritation, because he could calculate that he would never be able to afford a big enough apartment. When I realized that of all people Karl Emonds was the only one I could approach for money my situation became clear to me. I didn’t have a single pfennig.
22
I also knew I would never do any of those things: go to Rome and talk to the Pope, or pinch cigarettes and cigars, stuff my pockets with peanuts, at Mother’s At Home tomorrow afternoon. I no longer even had the strength to believe in it, the way I had believed in sawing through the wood with Leo. All attempts to retie the puppet strings and pull myself up by them would fail. The time would even come when I would ask Kinkel for a loan, and Sommerwild, and even that sadist Fredebeul, who would probably hold up a five-mark piece and make me jump for it. I would be glad when Monika Silvs asked me over for coffee, not because it was Monika Silvs but because of the free coffee. I would give that silly Bella Brosen another call, butter her up a bit and tell her I wasn’t going to bother about the amount, that any amount, never mind how small, would be welcome, then—one day I would go to Sommerwild and prove to him “convincingly” that I was repentant, had seen the light, was ripe for conversion, and then the worst thing of all would happen: Sommerwild would stage a reconciliation with Marie and Züpfner, but if I became a Catholic my father would probably never do another thing for me. Apparently this was for him the worst of all. I had to think it out: my choice was not rouge et noir, but dark brown or black: brown coal or church. I would become what they had all been expecting of me for so long: a man, mature, no longer subjective but objective and ready to sit down to a brisk game of skat at the Union Club. I still had a few chances left: Leo, Heinrich, Behlen, Grandfather, Zohnerer, who might build me up into a schmaltzy guitar player, I would sing: “When the wind plays in your hair, I know that you’ll be mine.” I had sung it to Marie once, and she had put her hands over her ears and said it was ghastly. Finally I would do the very last thing of all: go to the Communists and perform all those turns which they could so nicely classify as anti-capitalist. I actually had gone there once and had met with some cultural Joes in Erfurt. They put on quite a welcome for me at the station, with huge bouquets of flowers, and afterwards at the hotel there was brook trout, caviar, strawberry parfait, and vast quantities of champagne. Then they asked us what we would like to see of Erfurt. I said I would like very much to see the place where Luther defended his doctor’s dissertation, and Marie said she had heard there was a Catholic theological faculty in Erfurt and that she was interested in the religious life. They obviously didn’t like that but couldn’t do anything about it, and it all became very embarrassing: for the cultural Joes, for the theologians, and for us. The theologians must have thought we had something to do with those donkeys, and none of them spoke frankly with Marie, not even when she discussed matters of doctrine with a professor. Somehow or other he realized that Marie was not properly married to me. In the presence of the functionaries he asked her: “But you really are a Catholic, aren’t you?” and she went scarlet and said: “Yes, even though I am living in sin I’m still a Catholic.” It got really terrible when we realized that even the functionaries didn’t like our not being married, and on our way back to the hotel for coffee one of the functionaries said there were certain manifestations of petty-bourgeois anarchy which he didn’t approve of at all. Then they asked me which turns I was going to perform, in Leipzig and Rostock, whether I couldn’t do the “Cardinal,” “Arrival in Bonn” and “Board Meeting.” How they ever found out about the Cardinal we never discovered, for I had rehearsed this number just for myself and the only person I showed it to was Marie, and she had asked me not to do it in public seeing that Cardinals wore the red of martyrs, and I told them no, I would first have to study living conditions here, for the whole point of comedy was to present people in abstract form with situations taken from their own reality, not from that of others, and in their country Bonn, Boards of Directors and Cardinals obviously didn’t exist. They became uneasy, one of them turned pale and said they had thought it would be quite different, and I said so had I. It was appalling. I told them I could look around a bit if they liked and do a turn such as “Session of the Zone Committee” or “The Cultural Council Meets,” or “The Party Conference Elects its Presidium”—or “Erfurt, City of Flowers”; unfortunately it so happened that around the station Erfurt looked like anything but a city of flowers—but then the boss got up and said they couldn’t possibly permit any propaganda against the working class. By this time he was no longer pale, he was white in the face—a few of the others at least had the guts to grin. I replied that I didn’t see that it would be propaganda against the working class if I did a quickly rehearsed number such as “The Party Conference Elects its Presidium,” and I made the stupid mistake of saying Barty Gonference, that infuriated the white-faced fanatic, he banged on the table, so violently that the whipped cream slipped off my cake onto the plate, and said, “We have been mistaken in you, very much mistaken,” and I said, in that case I could leave, and he said, “Yes—by all means, by the next train.” I added that I could call the number “Board Meeting” simply “Session of the Zone Committee” as presumably there too the only matters they decided on would be the ones which had been decided in advance. Then they got thoroughly unpleasant, left the room, didn’t even pay for our coffee. Marie was in tears, I was ready to hit someone over the head, and when we went across to the station to get the next train back there wasn’t a porter in sight, and we had to carry our own bags, which I loathe. Outside the station we were lucky enough to run into one of the young theologians Marie had been talking to that morning. He flushed when he saw us, but he took the heavy suitcase from the tearful Marie, and Marie kept whispering to him that he must please not get himself into trouble.