Billiards At Half-Past Nine Part 5

He had not been surprised to see Old Wobbly and Nettlinger going up to Otto's room, or Otto meeting them in the hall, and it had horrified him when it occurred to him that they were both more familiar to him than his own brother. Even murderers were not murderers all the time, not at every hour of the day and night. Murderers, like railroad men, checked in and out of work, went home, relaxed. These two were a jovial pair, clapped him on the shoulder, and Nettlinger had said, 'Come on, now, wasn't I the one who let you get away?' They'd sent Ferdi to his death, and Groll, and Schrella's father and the boy who'd brought the messages, dispatched them to where you vanished without a trace. But now-let's forget it, boy! Don't spoil the game. No hard feelings. Sergeant in the Engineers, demolition expert, married, an apartment, book of discount stamps, two kids. 'You needn't ever worry about your wife, nothing will happen to her as long as I'm around.'

'Well,' his mother had said, 'have you talked with Otto? No use? I knew it, but you have to keep trying, again and again. Come here, quietly, I want to tell you something. I think he has a curse on him, bewitched, if you prefer to say it that way, and there's only one way to set him free. I've got to get a gun, get a gun. "Mine is the vengeance," saith the Lord, but why shouldn't I be the Lord's instrument?'

She had gone to the window and taken her brother's walking stick from the corner between the window and curtain, the brother who had died forty-three years before. She had raised the stick to her shoulder like a gun and aimed, taking a bead on Old Wobbly and Nettlinger. They were riding by outside, one on a white horse, the other on a bay. The moving stick had precisely indicated the tempo of the pa.s.sing horses, as if timed by a stopwatch. They came round the corner by the hotel, into Modest Street and rode along to the Modest Gate, which presently cut off the view. Then she had lowered the stick. 'I have two and a half minutes,' that is, take a deep breath, aim, squeeze. Her dream's fabric was tear-proof, nowhere could the finespun lie be rent. She put the walking stick back into the corner.

"I'm going to do it, Robert, I shall be the instrument of the Lord. I've got patience, time doesn't touch me at all. You shouldn't use powder and wadding, but powder and lead. I'll have revenge for the word, the last ever to leave my son's innocent lips: 'Hindenburg.' The Word he bequeathed to this earth, I must wipe it out. Do we bring children into the world to die at the age of seven whispering 'Hindenburg!'? I'd thrown the bits of torn-up poem down into the street, and he was such an obedient little fellow he begged me to write a copy for him, but I refused, I didn't want that madness to cross his lips. In his delirium he tried to put the lines together, and I put my hands over my ears, but listened to him just the same through my fingers. 'If G.o.d you need, let out a yell.' I tried to force him out of the fever, to shake him awake, and get him to look me in the eye and feel my hands and hear my voice, but he went right on: 'As long as German woods stand high / As long as German banners fly / As long as German tongue remains / So long will live that name of names!' It almost killed me, the way he still put emphasis on the 'that' in his fever. I gathered all his toys together, and took yours, too, leaving you to howl, and I piled all of them on the blankets in front of him. But he never came back to me, and he never looked at me again, Heinrich, Heinrich. I screamed and prayed and whispered, but he kept on staring into fever-land, where there was only a single line ready waiting for him: 'Hindenburg! On to the fight!' He started to say it, and the last word I heard from his mouth was 'Hindenburg.'

I have to have revenge for the mouth of my seven-year-old son, Robert, don't you understand? Revenge on those who go riding past our house to the Hindenburg monument. s.h.i.+ny wreaths, with gold bows, and black and violet ones, will be carried behind them. Always I've thought, won't he ever die? Will we have to have him dished up to us on postage stamps for all eternity, that ancient Beast whose name was the very last word my son ever uttered to me. Are you now going to get me a gun?

I'll take you at your word. It needn't be today, or tomorrow, just sometime soon. I've learned to be patient. Don't you remember your brother Heinrich? When he died you were getting on for two. We had a dog called Brom at the time-have you forgotten?-he was so old and wise that he turned the pain you two caused him not into meanness, but into sadness. You two held on to his tail and had him drag both of you through the room. Have you forgotten? You threw the flowers you should have laid on Heinrich's grave out of the carriage window; we'd left you in front of the cemetery, and later you were allowed to hold the reins from up on the coachman's box. They were made of cracked black leather. You see, Robert, you do remember. Dog, reins, brother-and soldiers, soldiers, endless soldiers too many to count. Have you forgotten? They came up Modest Street and swung round in front of the hotel and then down to the railroad station, dragging their cannon behind them. Father held your arm, and said, 'The war's over.'

A billion marks for a chocolate bar, then two billion for a single candy drop, a cannon for half a loaf of bread, a horse for an apple. Always more. And then not even a half-groschen for the cheapest bar of soap. Nothing good could come of it, Robert, and they didn't want it to. They kept coming in through the Modest Gate, and turning, all tired out, toward the station. Steadily, steadily, they carried the great Beast's name before them: Hindenburg. He made sure there was order, down to his last breath. Is he really dead, Robert? I can't believe it, 'Chiseled in stone, in bronze indite. Hindenburg!' He looked like national unity itself, with his buffalo-cheeks on the stamps. I tell you, he'll have us back at the same old stand, he'll show us what political reason leads to, and money reason-a horse for an apple, and a billion marks for a piece of candy, then not even half a groschen for a cake of soap, and always everything in an orderly fas.h.i.+on. I've seen and heard how they carried his name around in front of them. Dumb as the earth, deaf as a tree, and making sure all the time there was order. Respectable, respectable; honor and loyalty, iron and steel, money and a distressed agriculture. Careful, my boy, in the misty fields and the rustling forests, careful, that's where they'll be consecrating the Host of the Beast.

Don't think I'm crazy, I know exactly where we are. In Denklingen. You can see the road out there, between the trees running along the blue wall, to where the yellow buses crawl by like beetles. They brought me here because I let your children go hungry, after the last lamb had been killed by the fluttering birds. It's war, you can tell time by the promotions. You were a second lieutenant when you went away, and after two years a first lieutenant. Are you a captain yet? This time you won't do it in less than four years; then you'll be a major. Forgive me if I laugh. Don't carry the thing too far, with your formulas in your head, don't lose patience and don't accept any favors. We aren't going to eat a crumb more than we get on the ration cards. Edith is agreeable to that. Eat what everybody eats, wear what everybody wears, read what everybody reads. Don't take the extra b.u.t.ter, the extra clothes, the extra poem which dishes up the Beast in a more elegant fas.h.i.+on. Their right hand is full of bribes, bribe money in a variety of coins. I didn't want to have your children take any favors, either, so they might have the taste of truth on their lips, but they took me away from them. It's called a sanatorium; you're allowed to be crazy here without being beaten. They don't splash cold water over your body and they won't put you in a straitjacket without your relatives' consent. I do hope you won't let them put me in one. I can even go out when I want, for I'm harmless, completely harmless, son. But I don't want to go out, I don't want to know what time it is, or have to feel every day that his secret laughter has been killed and that the hidden spring within the hidden wheels has snapped. All at once, you know, he began to take himself seriously. Became pompous, I tell you. Whole mountains of stone went up, entire forests of lumber were cut down and concrete, concrete, you could have filled Lake Boden with it all. They try and forget themselves in building things, it's like opium. You'd never believe all the things an architect like that can put together in forty years-I used to brush the mortar spots off his pants and plaster splashes from his hat, and he used to lay his head on my lap and smoke his cigar. And we chanted our 'Do you remember?' litany, remember 1907, 1914, 1921, 1935-and the answer was always a building-or a death. 'Remember how Mother died, how Father died, and Johanna and Heinrich. Remember how I built St. Anthony's, St. Servatius', St. Boniface's and St. Modestus', the viaduct between Heiligenfeld and Blessenfeld, the monastery for the White Friars, the Brown Friars, convalescent homes for the Sisters of Mercy,' and every answer rang in my ears like a 'Lord have mercy on us'! Building after building, death after death. He began to chase after his own legend, imprisoned in a liturgy of self. Breakfast every morning in the Cafe Kroner, when he would rather have been eating breakfast with us, coffee half milk, rolls and b.u.t.ter. He didn't at all like soft-boiled eggs and toast and that disgusting paprika cheese, but he began to believe he did. I was frightened. He began to get angry when he didn't get a big a.s.signment, where before he'd simply been glad when he got one. Do you understand? It's a complicated mathematics, as you move toward the fifties and sixties, with the choice of either emptying your bladder on your own monument or gazing up at it in awe. No more twinkling eyes. You were eighteen, then, and Otto was sixteen. And I was scared. I'd stood up there in the pergola like a sharp-eyed watchful bird, had carried you both in my arms, first as babies at my breast, then as children, then held your hands, or you'd stood beside me, already taller than I was, and I watched how time went marching by below. Time boiled up, struck and we were paying a billion marks for a single piece of candy and then didn't have three pfennigs for a roll. The savior's name, I didn't even want to hear it, but they hoisted the Beast onto their shoulders regardless, stuck him in stamps on their letters and repeated the litany: respectable, respectable; honor and loyalty, beaten yet not beaten. Order. Dumb as the earth, deaf as a tree, and down there in Father's office Josephine drew him across her damp sponge and stuck him, in all colors, on the letters. And your father, my little David, slept through it all. He didn't wake up until you'd disappeared, when he saw how a package of money could cost a life. One's own money, wrapped in newspaper and pa.s.sed from hand to hand. When his other son had suddenly become the husk of a son. Loyalty, honor and respectability-then he saw it. I warned him about Gretz, but he said, 'He's harmless.' 'Of course,' I said, 'but you'll see what harmless people are capable of. Gretz is the kind who'd betray his own mother.' And my own clairvoyance frightened me when Gretz actually did betray his own mother. He did, Robert, he betrayed his own mother to the police. Just because the old woman kept on saying, 'It's a sin and a shame.' She didn't say any more than that, just that one phrase, until one day her son said, 'I can't stand it any more, it's against my principles.' They dragged the old woman away and stuck her in an old people's home, and certified her insane, to save her life, but as it turned out this precisely caused her death. They gave her an injection. Didn't you know the old woman? She used to throw the empty mushroom baskets over the wall to you, and you took them apart and used the reeds to build huts. When it had been raining a long while they turned a dirty brown, then you let them dry and I let you burn them. Have you forgotten that now? The old woman whom Gretz betrayed, his own mother? Of course, he still stands behind the counter, fondling his flaps of calf liver. They came to fetch Edith, too, but I wouldn't let them have her; I ground my teeth and screamed at them and they gave in. I kept Edith until the fluttering bird killed her. I tried to keep him off, too; I heard his rus.h.i.+ng wings as he dived down and I knew he was bringing death. He smashed his way in through the hall windows, triumphantly. I held up my hands to ward him off, but he flew between them. Forgive me, I couldn't save the lamb, and remember, Robert, you promised to get me a gun. Don't forget. Watch out when you climb ladders, my boy. Come here, let me kiss you, and forgive me for laughing. How clever the barbers are these days!"

He climbed bolt upright up the ladder, treading into the gray infinity between the rungs, while David climbed down to him from above. A slight man. All his life long he could have worn the same suits he'd bought for himself when he was young. Watch out! Why do you two have to stop up there half-way up, why can't you at least sit down on the rungs, if you have to talk to each other, instead of standing up straight like that. Were they really putting their arms around each other, did the son really have his arm around his father's shoulders, the father's around his son's?

Coffee, Huperts, strong and hot with a lot of sugar; he likes it strong and sweet in the afternoon, my lord and master, and weak in the mornings. He's coming out of that gray infinity into which the upright and unbending one is disappearing, with his long strides. My husband and my son are brave, coming here to see me in this dungeon of the d.a.m.ned. My son twice a week, my husband only once. He brings Sat.u.r.day with him, he carries a diary in his eyes. With him I cannot hope to say it's the barber makes him look like that. He's eighty; it's his birthday today, and it will be solemnly celebrated in the Cafe Kroner. Without champagne. He always did hate it and I never knew why.

Once upon a time you dreamt of having a tremendous party on your birthday. Seven times seven grandchildren, great-grandchildren, too, and daughters-in-law and great-nephews and great-nieces by marriage. You've always felt a little like Abraham, founder of a mighty clan; you used to picture yourself with your twenty-ninth great-grandchild in your arms when you were dreaming of the future.

Increase and multiply. It will be a sad feast. Only one son, then the blond grandson and the dark-haired granddaughter Edith gave you; and the mother of the clan in dungeon with a curse on it, accessible only by infinitely long ladders with giant rungs.

"Come in, and welcome, old David, still with your young man's waistline. But spare me the diary in your eyes. I'm sailing along on the little diary page, marked May 31, 1942. Have pity on me, beloved, don't burn my little paper boat made of that folded diary page, don't spill me into the sea of sixteen years forever gone. Do you still remember? Victory is won, not given. Woe to all those who don't take the Host of the Beast. And of course you know that sacraments have the terrible quality of not being subject to the finite. And so they hungered, and the bread was not multiplied for them, nor the fish, and the Host of the Lamb did not still their hunger, while that of the Beast offered nourishment in plenty. They'd never learned how to reckon: a billion marks for a piece of candy, a horse for an apple, and then not even three pfennigs for a roll. And everything always in order, everything always respectable, honorable, loyal. Give it up, David, why carry the world around on your back? Be merciful, get the diary out of your eyes and let the other fellow make history. The Cafe Kroner is a safer bet for you. Some day a monument-a little bronze one-will show you with a roll of drawings in your hand, small, slender and smiling, something between a bohemian and a young rabbi, with that indefinable country air. You've seen where political reason leads-would you want to take my political unreason away from me?

You called down to me from your studio window: 'Don't worry, I'll love you, there'll be none of those dreadful things your school friends tell you about, the things that are supposed to happen on wedding nights. Don't believe a word of what those fools tell you, we'll laugh when it gets to that point, truly, I promise you, only you've got to wait a little, a couple of weeks, a month at the most, until I can buy the bunch of flowers, hire the carriage and ride up to call at your house. We'll travel, see the world, and you'll give me children, five, six, seven, and they'll give me grandchildren, five times, six times, seven times seven. You'll never notice that I'm a working man. I'll spare you the manly sweat and the muscle-bound, uniformed seriousness. Everything comes easy to me, I've learned it, I've studied a little, got my sweating over and done with. I'm no artist, don't fool yourself about that. I won't be able to give you the demonic, sham or genuine, in any shape or fas.h.i.+on, and what your school friends make into hair-raising stories will never happen to us in the bedroom, but out in the open air, so you can see the sky over you and have gra.s.s and leaves falling on your face, and smell the autumn evening, and not feel you're doing some disgusting gymnastic exercise that you have to go through. You will smell the autumn gra.s.s; we'll stretch out on the sand by the riverbank, between the willows, just above the high-tide mark. Bull-rushes, a couple of old shoe-polish cans, a cork, a rosary bead dropped overboard by a barge-woman, a message in a lemonade bottle. In the air the smell from s.h.i.+ps' funnels, the rattle of anchor chains. We won't make all blood and seriousness. Though naturally there'll be some blood and seriousness.'

And the cork I picked up with my naked toes and offered you as a souvenir. I picked it up and gave it to you, because you'd spared me the bedroom, the gloomy chamber of horrors hinted at in novels, schoolgirl gossip and nunnish warnings. Willow boughs hung down to my forehead, silvery-green leaves about my eyes, which were dark and s.h.i.+ning. The steamers hooted; they called to me that I wasn't a virgin any more. Twilight, an autumn evening, anchor chains long since let down, seamen and barge-women coming ash.o.r.e over swaying gangplanks, and I already longing for what a few hours before I'd feared. Though a few tears came into my eyes when I thought how I wasn't living up to my ancestors, who would have been ashamed to turn duty into pleasure. You stuck willow leaves on my brow and on the tear-stains, down by the riverbank, where my feet stirred the reeds, moved the bottles with their holidaymakers' greetings to local inhabitants. Where did all those shoe-polish cans come from; were they for the s.h.i.+ny boots of seamen ready to go ash.o.r.e, for the barge-women's black shopping bags, and, yes, surely for the s.h.i.+ny-peaked caps glimmering in the twilight as we sat in Trischler's cafe, later on, on the red chairs? I was amazed at the loveliness of that young woman's hands, the one who brought us fried fish and lettuce so green it hurt my eyes. And wine. That young woman's hands, the same one who, twenty-eight years later, bathed my son's mutilated back with wine. You ought not to have yelled at Trischler when he called up and told us about Robert's accident. High tide, high tide, I was always tempted to throw myself in and let myself be carried out to the gray horizon. Come in, welcome, but don't kiss me; don't burn my little boat. Here's some coffee, sweet and hot, afternoon coffee, strong and black, and here are some cigars. Sixty-centers, Huperts got them for me. Change the focus of your eyes, old man, I'm not blind, just crazy and perfectly well able to read the date on the calendar down the hall. It's September 6, 1958. Blind I'm not and I know I can't put down your appearance to the barber's skill. Get in the game, lengthen the focus of your eyes, and don't tell me the same stories over and over about your stunning blond grandson with his mother's heart and his father's brains who's representing you in the reconstruction of the Abbey. Has he graduated yet? Is he going to study statics? Is he taking his on-the-job training? Forgive me if I laugh. I never could take building seriously. Concentrated baked dust, dust transformed into a building. An optical illusion, fata morgana, doomed to be reduced to rubble. Victory is won, not given. I read it in the paper this morning before they took me away. 'A wave of jubilation arose-they drank in the words, full of trusting faith-and over and over again the enthusiastic rejoicing welled up.' Do you want me to read it for you in the local paper?

I promised Edith, the lamb, that your flock of grandchildren-not seven times seven, but two times one, one times two-would have no privileges. They would never take the Host of the Beast, and never learn that poem for school.

Praise every blow that fate doth strike, Since pain makes kindred souls alike.

You read too many newspapers with a national circulation; you let them serve up the Host of the Beast sweet or sour, baked or fried, in G.o.d only knows what kind of sauce. You read too many fancy newspapers; here, in the local sheet you can have the real, genuine muck of every day, unadulterated and unalloyed, and as well-meant as ever you could wish. The other ones, your national newspapers, are not well-intentioned at all, they're nothing but cowards, but here, everything's meant well. No privileges, if you please, no coddling. Look here, this bit is aimed at me: 'Mothers of the Fallen ... And though you are the people's holy ones / Your souls cry out to your lost sons....' I'm one of the people's holy ones, and my soul cries out, my son has been killed: Otto Faehmel. Respectable, respectable. Honor and Loyalty. He denounced us to the police, and suddenly was the mere husk of a son. No special consideration, no privileges. They did go easy on the Abbot, naturally; he did have a taste of their sacrament, of respectability, orderliness and honor. They celebrated it, monks with flaming torches, up there on the hill with a view of the lovely Kissa Valley. A new age began, an age of sacrifice, of pain, and so once again they had their pfennigs for rolls of bread and their half-groschen for cakes of soap. The Abbot was astonished at Robert's refusal to take part in the celebration. They rode up the hill on big horses steaming from the effort, and lit their fires. Solstice time. They let Otto light the bonfire; he shoved the flaming torch in among the twigs, singing, with the selfsame voice that had sung the rorate coeli so wonderfully, singing what I want to keep away from my grandson's lips. How weary these old bones-aren't yours trembly yet, old man?

Come, put your head in my lap, light yourself a cigar, here's the coffee right by your hand. Close your eyes, shutters down, all done, diary obliterated. We'll say our do-you-remember prayer and remember the years when we lived out there in Blessenfeld, where the evenings smelled of people taking their leisure, stuffing themselves at fish-fries, at sugared-doughnut shops and ice cream carts. Blessed are those who are allowed to eat with their fingers; I never could as long as I lived at home. You used to let me. The hurdy-gurdies droned away and the merry-go-rounds squealed round and round and I smelled and heard and felt that only the transient has permanence. You got me out of that dreadful house where they all had huddled for four hundred years, trying in vain to free themselves. When they sat down in the garden to drink wine, I used to sit up there in the roof garden, during the summer evenings. Evenings for men, evenings for women, and in the women's shrill laughter I could hear what I heard in their husbands' raucous laughter: despair. When the wine loosened their tongues and freed them of tabus, when the smell of the summer night let them out of their prisons of hypocrisy, it all came out into the open. They were neither rich enough nor poor enough to find out that only the transient is permanent. And I longed for the ephemeral, though I'd been brought up for permanent things, marriage, loyalty, honor, the bedroom where only duty lay, not pleasure. Seriousness, buildings, dust changed into structures, and in my ears a sound like the call-note of the murmuring river at high tide: whywhywhy? I didn't want any part of their despair, or to feed on gloomy legacy handed down from generation to generation. I longed for the airy white Host of the Lamb and tried, during the mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, to beat the ancient heritage of power and darkness out of my breast. I laid my prayerbook down in the hall when I came home from Ma.s.s, getting there just in time to receive Father's morning kiss. Then his rumbling ba.s.s went away across the courtyard to the office. I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and I could see the hard, waiting look in my mother's eyes. She had been thrown to the wolves. Should I, then, be spared the same fate? The wolves were growing up, into beer-drinkers wearing peaked caps, both the attractive and the less attractive ones. I looked at their hands and their eyes and had the awful curse laid on me of knowing how they'd look at forty, at sixty, with purple veins in their skin and never smelling of good times after work. Men, responsibility. Obeying the law, imparting a sense of history to children, counting money and resolved on political reason, all were doomed to partake of the Host of the Beast, like my brothers. They were young in years only, and only one thing-death-promised them glory, would give them greatness and enfold them in veils of myth. Time was nothing but a means of bringing them closer to death. They sniffed out its trail, liked what they smelt. For they smelled of it themselves; it lurked in the eyes of the men to whom I would be thrown. Wearers of caps, guarders of the law. One thing only was forbidden: to want to live and play. Do you understand me, old man? Play was a deadly sin. Not sport, they put up with that, it kept you lively, made you graceful, pretty, and stimulated their wolfish appet.i.te. Dolls' houses: good, they were all for housewifely and motherly instincts. Dancing: that was good, too, part of the marriage market. But if I wanted to dance just to please myself, up in my room in my petticoat, that was a sin, because it wasn't a duty. I could let the wearers of caps paw me as much as they wanted at a dance, in the hallway shadow, or after a picnic in the country, or in forest shadow put up with their less ambitious caresses. After all, we're not prudes. And I prayed for him, the one who would set me free and save me from death in the wolves' lair. I prayed for that while I put the white Sacrament to my lips and saw you over there at your studio window. If you only knew how I loved you, if you had any idea, you'd never open your eyes like that and greet me with your diary look and want to tell me how my grandchildren have grown since then, how they ask for me and haven't forgotten me. No, I don't want to see them. I know they love me and I know there's one way to give the murderers the slip-be certified insane. But what if I'd gone the way Gretz' mother did? What then? It was a stroke of luck with me, pure luck in a world where a gesture can cost a life, and being certified insane can save you or kill you. I don't as yet want to give back the years I've swallowed; I don't want to see Joseph as a twenty-two-year-old with mortar spots on his pants' legs and plaster stains on his jacket, a stunning young man swinging his folding rule with a roll of drawings under his arm. I don't want to see nineteen-year-old Edith reading her Love and Intrigue. Shut your eyes, old David, snap your diary shut-and there, there's your coffee.

I really am scared, believe me, I'm not lying. Let my little boat go sailing on, don't be a wanton boy and sink it. It's a wicked world and the pure in heart are so few. Robert humors me, too, and obediently goes to each station as I send him. From 1917 to 1942-not one step farther; he goes in his upright and unbending German way. I know how homesick he was and how unhappy, playing billiards and boning over formulas in a foreign land; he had come back not just for Edith's sake. He's a German, reads Holderlin and has never let the Host of the Beast touch his lips. But he's no lamb. He's a shepherd. I only wish I knew just what he did in the war. But he never talks about it. An architect who's never built a house, never had a smitch of plaster stain on his pants' legs. No, impeccable and correct, an architect of the writing desk, with no enthusiasm for housewarming parties. But what has happened to the other son, Otto? Killed at Kiev. He came from our own flesh and blood, yet where did he come from, where did he go? Was he really like your father? Did you ever see Otto with a girl? I do so wish I knew something about him. I know he liked beer, didn't like sour pickles, and I know how his hands moved when he combed his hair or put on his overcoat. He denounced us to the police and joined the army-even before he'd finished school-and wrote us postcards of deadly irony: 'I'm well, hope you are too, need 3.' Otto never once came home on leave. Where did he go? What detective could supply that information? I know his regimental number, his field post office number and his successive ranks: first lieutenant, major, lieutenant-colonel Faehmel. And the final blow in figures again, a date: Killed, 12.1.1942. With my own eyes I saw him knock down people in the street because they didn't salute the flag. He raised his hands and knocked them down, and would have knocked me down, too, if I hadn't turned quickly into the other street. How did he ever get into our house? I can't even cling to the foolish hope he might have been the wrong baby. He was born right in our own house fourteen days after Heinrich died, up in the bedroom on a gloomy October day in 1917. He looked like your father.

Quiet, old man, don't talk, don't open your eyes, don't show your eighty years. Memento quia pulvis es et in pulverem revertis, as we are quite clearly told. Dust the mortar leaves behind, dust of mortgage papers, of deeds of houses and estates. Then a statue in a peaceful suburb where children as they play will ask, 'Who was that man?'

As a young mother, radiant and gay, I walked through Blessenfeld Park, and I knew then that the peevish old pensioners scolding the children for being noisy were only scolding someone who some day would also sit where they were, and in turn scold other noisy children, who in their turn would soon enough be irritable pensioners. I had two children of my own, one for each hand, four and six years old, then six and eight, then eight and ten, while the carefully painted signs were hung out in the garden, 25, 50, 75, 100. The black numbers on the white enameled metal always made me think of the numbers of streetcar stops. In the evening, your head on my lap and the coffee cup within easy reach-we were waiting for happiness. But in vain. And in the railroad cars, the hotels, we never found it either. A stranger went walking about in our house, bearing our name, drinking our milk, eating our bread and using our money, to buy chocolate in kindergarten, later schoolbooks.

Take me back to the riverbank, so my naked feet can play at the high-tide mark, play to the steamers' hooting and the smell of smoke, back to the cafe where the woman serves the guests with lovely hands; be quiet, old man, don't cry, I'm just living in inner emigration, and you've got a son and two grandchildren, perhaps they'll present you with great-grandchildren soon. It is not up to me to come back to you again, and fold myself a new paper boat every day from a diary page, and sail blithely on till midnight-September 6, 1958, that's the future, the German future; I read it myself in the local paper: 'A View of the German Future, 1958: The twenty-one-year-old Sgt. Morgner has become the thirty-six-year-old Farmer Morgner. He stands on the bank of the Volga. Work done, he smokes a well-earned pipe, one of his blond children in his arms, lost in contemplation of his wife milking the last cow. German milk on the banks of the Volga....'

You don't want to hear any more! Good, then leave me alone with the future. I don't want to know how it is as the present. Aren't they standing on the banks of the Volga? Don't cry, old man, pay the ransom and I'll come back from the bewitched castle. Got to get a gun, get a gun.

Careful when you climb up that ladder. Take the cigar out of your mouth, you're not thirty any more, you might have a dizzy spell. Family party in the Cafe Kroner tonight? I may be there. Happy birthday. Forgive me if I laugh. Johanna would have been forty-eight and Heinrich forty-seven. They took their future with them. Don't weep, old man, you wanted to play the game. Careful when you climb the ladder."

6.

The black and yellow bus stopped at the road leading into the village, swung toward Doderingen from the highway, and Robert saw his father emerge from the cloud of dust left in the wake of the bus. The old man came into the light as if out of a great damp of fog, spry as ever, undaunted by the sweltering afternoon. He turned into the main street and went along by The Swan. At the front steps, young village idlers gathered and stared at him. Fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, probably the very ones who had lain in wait for Hugo when he came out of school, and beaten him up in m.u.f.fled side streets and dark stable stalls, and called him Holy Lamb.

The old man walked on past the mayor's office, and past the war memorial, where tired box-trees, out of sour earth, were offering up their leaves in memory of the dead of three wars. He stopped at the cemetery wall, took out his handkerchief, dabbed at his forehead, folded the handkerchief again, smoothed his coat and went on, and Robert saw the modish curve described at every step by his right trouser leg, its dark blue inner lining visible a fleeting instant before his foot landed back on the ground, to rise again in that modish curve. Robert glanced at the station clock-twenty to four; the train wasn't due till ten past four. Half an hour. As far as he could remember, he had never before been alone with his father that long. He had hoped the visit to the sanatorium would last longer, and relieve him of the necessity for a father-son conversation. The Denklingen station bar was the least appropriate place of all for a meeting for which his father had been hoping perhaps for twenty or thirty years. A conversation with a mature son, no longer a child to be held by the hand, brought along on trips to the seash.o.r.e, offered cake and ice cream. Good-night kisses, good-morning kisses, questions about homework and words of worldly wisdom, honesty the best policy, trust in the Lord. Recipient of pocket money. Smiling pride in ribbons and medals won, in good report cards. Self-conscious discussions of architecture. Excursions to St. Anthony's Abbey. Not a word when he had to flee, not a word when he reappeared. Oppressive meals had been eaten, in company with Otto, who made even talk of the weather impossible. Meat carved with silver knives, gravy ladled out with silver spoons. Mother stiff as a rabbit facing a snake and the old man staring out of the window, crumbling bread and vacantly raising a spoon to his mouth, and Edith's hands trembling, while Otto, only one to do justice to the food, contemptuously took the largest morsels of meat. Father's one-time favorite, Otto, always ready for trips and excursions and extravagances, a happy child with a happy future. Now and then he had said cheerfully, 'You can always throw me out.' No one had said a word. After meals Robert had gone over to the studio with Father, had sat there drawing and playing around with formulas in the great empty room where draughting boards for five architects were still set up. Empty. While the old man wearily put on his smock, rummaged among rolls of drawings and again and again stopped in front of the plan of St. Anthony's. Later on he had gone out for a walk, to have a coffee and visit old colleagues and old enemies. In houses where he had been a welcome guest for forty years, the Ice Age had broken out, in some houses because of one son, in others because of the other. And yet the old man had a cheerful disposition, born to lead a gay life and drink wine and coffee, and regard every pretty girl he saw in a railway carriage as a prospective daughter-in-law. He would often go out for hours walking with Edith, as she pushed the baby carriage. He had little to do and had been happy when he could inspect a hospital he'd built, plan annexes for it, or ride out to St. Anthony's and see to the repairs on a wall. He felt Robert resented him, Robert that he was resented.

But now he had grown up. He himself was the father of grown-up children, a man who had suffered the blows of fate, through the death of his wife. Who had emigrated and come back home; who had been to war, been betrayed and tortured. Independent, with a fully recognizable position: 'Dr. Robert Faehmel. Architectural Estimates. Closed Afternoons.' Finally able to play an equal part in conversation.

"Another beer, sir?" the proprietor asked from the bar; he sponged beer froth off the nickeled dramboard, took two plates with meat b.a.l.l.s and mustard from under the refrigerated gla.s.s shelf and carried them over to the young couple sitting in the corner, tired and hot after their walk in the country.

"Yes, please," said Robert, "another beer." He pushed the curtain aside. His father turned down to the right, pa.s.sed by the cemetery gate, crossed the road and stopped at the stationmaster's garden, glancing at the violet-colored asters, just come into bloom. He was clearly hesitating.

"No," Robert said toward the counter, "two beers, please, and ten Virginia cigarettes."

The American officer had sat at that table where the young couple was sitting now, his close-cropped blond hair heightening the impression of youth, his blue eyes radiating confidence, confidence in a future wherein everything would be explainable. It was scaled down into squares, whose scale was the only question remaining to be clarified-1 : 1 or 1 : 3,000,000? On the table, beneath the officer's fingers toying with a slender pencil, had lain an ordinance survey map of the Kisslingen region.

The table had not changed during these thirteen years. The initials J.D., carved by an idle schoolboy were still there, on the table leg to the right where now the young man sc.r.a.ped his dusty sandals. Nor had the tablecloths changed, red-and-white check ones, or the chairs of clear beechwood, built to last. They had survived two world wars and accommodated the b.u.t.tocks of waiting peasants for seventy years. Only new addition was the refrigerated gla.s.s shelf on top of the bar, where crisp meat b.a.l.l.s, cold cuts and deviled eggs were waiting for the hungry or the bored.

"Here you are, sir, two beers and ten cigarettes."

"Thank you."

Not even the pictures on the wall had changed. A bird's-eye view of St. Anthony's Abbey, evidently taken from Cossack's Hill, with a trusty plate camera and a black cloth. There they were, the cloister garth and refectory, the mighty church, the farm buildings. Beside it hung a faded color print. Sweethearts at the field's edge. Ears of grain, cornflowers, a mud-yellow country road dried by the sun. The village beauty had her boy friend's head in her lap, and was tickling his ear with a blade of gra.s.s.

'You misunderstand me, Captain. What we'd all like to know is, why you did it. Are you listening? We know about the scorched-earth policy-leave nothing but rubble and dead bodies behind for the enemy, isn't that so? But I don't believe you did it to carry out that order. You are-pardon me-too intelligent for that. But then why, why did you blow up the Abbey? In its way it was an historical and artistic monument of the first rank. Now that the fighting here is over and, as our prisoner, you'll hardly have an opportunity to tell the other side what our intentions were, I may as well tell you that our commanding officer would have agreed to postpone the advance for two or even three days, rather than harm the Abbey in any way. Why then did you blow the Abbey sky-high, when it so obviously made no sense whatever, either tactically or strategically? You didn't slow down our advance, you hurried it up. Smoke?'

'Yes. Thank you.'

The cigarette, a Virginia, had tasted strong and spicy.

'I hope you understand what I'm getting at. Please, do say something. I see we're practically the same age, you're twenty-nine, I'm twenty-seven. Can't you understand that I should like to know your motives? Or are you afraid of consequences of letting the truth be known-of what we might do, or your own people?'

But even if he had said why, it wouldn't have been why any more. In black and white, on the record, it would have been least true: that he had waited through five years of war for that moment, the moment when the Abbey would be his booty, lying there like a gift of G.o.d. He had wanted to erect a monument of dust and rubble for those who had not been historical monuments and whom no one had thought to spare. Edith, killed by a piece of shrapnel; Ferdi, would-be a.s.sa.s.sin condemned by process of law; the boy who had pushed the tiny slips of paper with his messages into the letter box; Schrella's father, who had disappeared; Schrella himself, who had to live so far away from the land where Holderlin had lived; Groll, the waiter in The Anchor; and the many others who had gone marching off, singing How weary, weary these old bones. No one would be called to account for them, no one had taught them any better. Dynamite, a few formulas, that had been his chance to erect monuments. And a demolition squad whose precision work had made it famous: Schrit, Hochbret, Kanders. 'We know perfectly well you could not take your superior officer seriously-General Otto Kosters; our army psychiatrists have unanimously-and if you only knew how hard it is to achieve unanimity among American army psychiatrists-they have unanimously certified him insane and not responsible for his actions. Therefore, that responsibility falls on you, Captain, since you are quite clearly not insane, and also, let me tell you in confidence, deeply incriminated by your own comrades' depositions. I don't want to question you about your political convictions. I've already heard too many protestations of innocence and frankly they bore me. I've already told my men that in this fair land we'll find only five or six, or at the outside nine, guilty ones and will have to ask ourselves just against whom we fought this war: against a lot of downright sensible, nice, intelligent, even cultivated people-please answer my question! Why, why did you do it?'

Now the young girl was sitting in the American officer's place, eating her meat ball, sipping her beer and giggling. On the horizon he could see the slender, dark gray tower of St. Severin's, undamaged.

Ought he to have said he found the respect for artistic and historical monuments no less touching than the mistake of expecting beasts, instead of nice, understanding people? A monument for Edith and Ferdi, for Schrella and his father, for Groll and the boy who'd pushed his bits of paper into the letter box, for Anton the Pole who had raised his hand against Vacano and been murdered as a result, and for the many others who had sung How weary, weary these old bones, and never been taught any better. A monument for the lambs no one had fed.

If she were going to catch the train, his daughter should now be walking past the portals of St. Severin's to the station, with her green beret on her dark hair, in her pink sweater, flushed and happy at meeting father, brother and grandfather for afternoon coffee at St. Anthony's, before the great birthday party that evening.

Father was standing outside in the shade, in front of the board, studying the times of departure. His narrow face was ruddy, an amiable old man, kind and generous, one who had never tasted the Host of the Beast, who had not grown bitter with age. Did he know who had blown up the Abbey? Would he ever find out? And how could he ever explain it to his son Joseph? Better to be silent than to put these thoughts and feelings on record, for a.n.a.lysis by the psychologists.

He had not been able to explain it to the friendly young man either who had looked at him, shaking his head, pus.h.i.+ng the opened pack of cigarettes across the table. He took the pack, said thank you and stuck it in his pocket, then plucked the Iron Cross from his chest, and pushed it across the table to the young man. The red-and-white check tablecloth crimped up, and he smoothed it as the young man flushed.

'No, no,' said Robert, 'forgive my clumsiness; I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I feel I should offer you this as a souvenir, a souvenir of the man who blew up St. Anthony's Abbey and got this medal for it. Who blew it up in spite of knowing the general was mad, and in spite of knowing its demolition had no tactical or strategical importance whatsoever. I shall be glad to keep these cigarettes-may I ask you to consider that we have, as contemporaries, merely exchanged gifts?'

Perhaps he had done it because he remembered the half-dozen monks who had celebrated the solstice by riding up Cossack's Hill and, as the fire raged up, started intoning How weary, weary these old bones. Otto had lit the fire and he himself had stood nearby, with his little blond curly-headed son Joseph in his arms, the child clapping his little hands with joy at the flames. And Edith beside him had pressed his right hand. Perhaps because he had not even found Otto a stranger, in this world where a lift of a hand might cost a life. The village youths from Doderingen, Schlackringen, Kisslingen and Denklingen had gathered round the solstice fire; the heated faces of the young men and women had shone wildly in the flames that Otto had been allowed to light, and all of them had sung, the pious monks, digging their spurs into the flanks of their pious farm horses, intoning along with the rest: How weary, weary these old bones. They had gone back down the hill with torches in their hands, chanting. Should he tell the young man he'd done it because they hadn't obeyed the injunction, Shepherd my Lambs, and that he felt no trace of regret. Aloud, he said, 'Perhaps it was for the fun of it, just a game.'

'Funny kind of fun you have here, funny kind of game. After all, you're an architect.'

'No. I do stress and strain estimates.'

'Well, there's hardly any difference.'

'Demolition,' he said, 'is merely stress and strain in reverse. They're complementary, so to speak.'

'I'm sorry,' said the young man, 'I was always weak in math.'

'And I always found it a pure delight.'

'I'm beginning to take a personal interest in your case. When you refer to your love of mathematics, do you mean you took a certain professional interest in the demolition?'

'Perhaps. Naturally an a.n.a.lyst is highly interested in knowing which forces are required to undo the laws of statics. You must admit it was a perfect demolition.'

'But do you seriously maintain that this so-to-speak abstract interest played some part in it?'

'Yes.'

'I don't think I can avoid a political investigation after all. I must point out to you it will be senseless to make false statements. We have all the doc.u.ments needed to check on what you say.'

It had been only then that it occurred to him that his own father had built the Abbey thirty-five years before; they had been told it and had it confirmed for them so often that it seemed no longer true. And he had feared the young man would discover this fact, and then believe he had hit on the explanation: Oedipus complex. Perhaps it was better to say he had done it because they had not shepherded the lambs, thus providing tangible reasons to judge him crazy. But he had merely gazed through the window at St. Severin's slender tower, as at a prey which had got away, while the young man asked him questions, all of which he was able to answer without hesitation with a no.

The young girl pushed her empty plate away from her, took the young man's plate and, holding both forks poised an instant in her right hand, with her left hand put his plate on hers. And then, on the top plate, the two forks. After which she put her right hand, free now, on the young man's forearm and smiled into his eyes.

'So you didn't belong to any organization? You read Holderlin? Good. I may have to have you brought in once more tomorrow morning.'

Firm in compa.s.sion the eternal heart.

When his father walked into the bar, Robert flushed, went up to the old man, took the heavy hat out of his hand and said, "I forgot to congratulate you on your birthday, Father. Forgive me. I've ordered a beer for you. I hope it's still fresh enough, if not...."

"Thank you," said his father, "thanks for the birthday wishes, and the beer will do; I don't like it too cold." The old man put his hand on Robert's arm, and Robert, blus.h.i.+ng, remembered the intimate gesture they had exchanged on the street in front of the sanatorium. There, he had suddenly felt a need to put his arm round his father's shoulders, and his father had returned the gesture while they made their arrangement to meet at Denklingen station.

"Come on," said Robert, "let's sit down; we still have twenty-five minutes."

They raised their gla.s.ses, nodded to each other, and drank.

"Cigar, Father?"

"No thank you. By the way, did you know the train schedules have hardly changed in fifty years? Even the announcement board with its enamel plates is still the same. On some of them the enamel is only chipped a little bit."

"The chairs and tables and the pictures on the wall," said Robert, "are all the same as they used to be, when we used to walk over here from Kisslingen on summer evenings and wait for the train."

"Yes," said his father, "nothing has changed. Did you call up Ruth? Will she be coming? It's so long since I've seen her."

"Yes, she's coming. I expect she's already sitting in the train."

"We can be in Kisslingen shortly after half-past four, have some coffee and cake, and easily get back home by seven. You are coming to the party?"

"Of course, Father, did you think we wouldn't?"

"No, but I was wondering whether to let it go, cancel it-but perhaps it's better not to, for the children's sake; and I've made so many preparations for today."

The old man lowered his eyes to the red-and-white check tablecloth, and drew circles on it with his beer gla.s.s; Robert marveled at the smooth skin on his hands, child's hands which had kept their innocence. His father raised his eyes again and looked Robert in the face.

"I was thinking of Ruth and Joseph. You know Joseph has a girl, don't you?"

"No."

The old man looked down again and let the beer gla.s.s go on circling.

"I'd always hoped my two properties out here might be something like a second home to you, but you all always preferred living in the city, even Edith-it seems Joseph is the first who might fulfill my dream. Strange you all still think he takes after Edith and not after us. And yet he looks so like Heinrich it sometimes scares me, when I see your son; Heinrich, as he might have been-do you remember him?"

Our dog was called Brom; and I held the coach-horse reins, made of black leather. All cracked. Got to get a gun, get a gun. Hindenburg.

"Yes, I remember him."

"He gave me back the farmhouse I made him a present of. Whom am I going to give it to now? Joseph or Ruth? You? Would you like it? Own cows and meadows, milk separators and beet-cutting machines? Tractors and hay tedders? Shall I deed it to the monastery? I bought both properties with my first fee; I was twenty-nine when I built the Abbey, and you can't imagine what it means to a young man to get such an a.s.signment. A sensation. That's not only why I travel out there so often, to remember the future which meanwhile has long since become the past. I always thought of becoming sort of a farmer in my old age. But I haven't, only an old fool playing blind man's buff with his wife. We take turns closing our eyes, changing old times like the slides in that apparatus that throws pictures on the wall. If you please, let's have 1928. Two fine sons holding mother's hand, one thirteen, the other eleven. Father close by, cigar in mouth, smiling. In the background, the Eiffel Tower-or is it the Engelsburg or the Brandenburg Gate perhaps-pick your own backdrop; maybe the breakers at Ostend, or St. Severin's tower, or the lemonade stalls in Blessenfeld Park? No, of course it's St. Anthony's Abbey, you'll find it in the snapshot alb.u.m, at all seasons, only the fas.h.i.+ons change. Your mother in a large hat or a small one, with short or long hair, in a full skirt or a tight one, and her children three and five, five and seven years old; then there appears a stranger young and blonde, with one child in her arms and another held by the hand, the children one and three years old. Do you know, I loved Edith more than I could have loved a daughter. I could never believe she'd ever really had a mother and father-and a brother. She was an emissary of the Lord and while she lived with us I could think and pray His name again without blus.h.i.+ng-what message did she bring you? Revenge for the lambs? I hope you carried out the mission loyally, without the false considerations I always had, without keeping your superiority feelings fresh in a refrigerator of irony, as I always did. Did she really have that brother? Is he alive? Does he exist?"

Drawing circles with his beer gla.s.s, he stared at the red-and-white check tablecloth, very slightly raised his head.

"Tell me, does he really exist? He was your friend, wasn't he. I saw him once. I was standing at the bedroom window and I saw him walk across the courtyard to your room. I've never forgotten him, and often thought about him, even though I can hardly have seen him for more than ten or twenty seconds. He scared me, like a dark angel. Does he really exist?"

"Yes."

"Is he alive?"

"Yes. You are afraid of him?"

"Yes. Of you too. Didn't you know? I don't want to know what mission Edith gave you, only, did you carry it out?"

"Yes."

"Good. You're surprised I was scared of you-and still am, a little. I laughed at your childish plots, but the laughter stuck in my throat when I read they had killed that boy. He might have been Edith's brother, but later on I knew it had been almost human to kill a boy who after all had thrown a bomb and scorched a gym teacher's feet-but the boy who pushed your slips of paper through our letter box, the Pole who raised his hand against the gym teacher, even an uncalled-for glance, certain kind of hair, certain shape of nose were enough, and the time came when it took even less. The father's or grandmother's birth certificate was enough. I'd lived on my laughter through the years, but that nourishment ran out, no new batch available, Robert. So I opened the refrigerator door and let my irony turn sour, then threw it out like the disgusting left-overs of something which once might have been worth something. I had thought I loved and understood your mother, but really it wasn't till then that I really understood and loved her, and understood you others, too, and loved you. Later only I quite saw it all; I was well set up when the war ended, building commissioner for the entire district. Peace, I thought, all over, a new life-when one day the British commanding officer came to apologize to me, so to speak, for having bombed the Honorius Church and destroyed the twelfth-century crucifixion group. He didn't apologize for Edith, only for a twelfth-century crucifixion panel. 'Sorry.' I laughed again for the first time in ten years, but it wasn't good laughter, Robert-and I resigned my office. Building commissioner? What for? When I would have given all the crucifixions down the centuries to see Edith's smile once again and feel her hand on my arm? What did the Lord's pictures mean to me, compared to His emissary's real smile? As for the boy who brought your sc.r.a.ps of paper-I never saw his face or learned his name-I would have given St. Severin's and known it would have been a ridiculous price to pay, like giving a medal to someone who's saved a life. Have you ever seen Edith's smile again, or the smile of that carpenter's apprentice? Just a hint of it? Robert, Robert!"

He let go of the beer gla.s.s and set his arms on the table.

"Have you ever seen it?" He murmured the question, head bent low.

"I've seen it," said Robert, "on the face of a hotel boy called Hugo-I'll show him to you."

"I'll give that boy the farm Heinrich couldn't take. Write me his name and address on the coaster. All the most important messages are sent on beer mats. And let me know as soon as you hear anything of Edith's brother. Is he alive?"