A Perfect Waiter (22 page)

“So why now?”

“Because you called me. Because Jakob is also dead now. I'd almost forgotten him. Perhaps, too, because
death is now closer to me than anything else. There's no real explanation.”

“I'm
still alive.”

“And you can bear to hear the truth. You are, as I already said, a perfect waiter.”

“Yes, that's been my lifelong ambition. I wanted Jakob to be one too. He didn't quite manage it, unfortunately.”

“Who knows?”

Erneste started to get up. He gripped the arms of his chair with both hands but sensed the other man's eyes upon him and sat back again. “No, hear me out,” Klinger said. It was impossible to evade or interrupt him.

“My son's farewell letter was brutally brief. It dealt with his existence ever since that day in Giessbach when Jakob came into our lives—yes, not only into my life but, as I gathered from his letter that night, into his as well. Two or three days earlier he had learned what he believed to be the full truth about Jakob's false, double life, a life based on a lie in which I had a substantial share. When his eyes were accidentally opened to what was going on between Jakob and me behind his back—he didn't say how or where or by whom—he felt that suicide was the only way out. I don't know if he overheard us together. It's also possible that other people gossiped about us. Then again, his own mother may have blurted out the truth in an unguarded moment. I used to think my wife naive, but now I'm not so sure she didn't know.”

Erneste listened to the old man in silence. All it needed was another few words and his life would appear in a different light, a lackluster light that robbed everything of color and transformed his nostalgia for Jakob into the undignified whimpering of a dog that dreads its master's blows as much as it craves them. He could have risen with finality and brought Klinger's account to an end. He could have shaken off his lethargy and turned on the light, but he continued to sit and stare at the shadowy figure in front of him, which seemed to increase in size the more quietly it spoke and the faster the words escaped its lips, for Klinger was speaking faster now. The shadow seated in front of Erneste seemed to be engulfing everything around it, not least his own past and the still intact part of the picture he entertained of it.

“It was important to him to make me feel responsible for the act of self-destruction he would commit immediately after writing his letter. Only responsible? No, culpable. I should undoubtedly have felt guilty even if he hadn't accused me, because unlike him, Jakob and I were free agents. He was a captive. I wanted something from Jakob and got it, just as Jakob wanted something from me and got it. In many respects, and despite our interdependence, we were free—in a word, adults. But my son believed in love and exclusivity. He believed in Jakob.

“ ‘Double life' and ‘living a lie'—those were the two phrases that recurred in his farewell letter, an unmistakable echo of Ibsen, whose plays he had devoured as a
youngster. He accused me of leading a double life in which he had no place. He hurled the same charge at his mother—at all of us, whom he regarded as members and beneficiaries of a conspiracy. He could neither go nor stay, he wrote—he couldn't move. Now that he'd seen through the lie into which we'd coerced him without his knowledge, he was finished, crushed, stifled. He had loved in secret and believed himself to be similarly loved in return, so how was he now, in retrospect, to evaluate that relationship? He'd deceived himself, he wrote, because he'd been deceived. He wondered what hold I must have had over Jakob to persuade him to give me his unconditional obedience, but he didn't ask
me
that question. He died believing that I'd had to put pressure on Jakob—that he'd
had
to give himself to me against his will. How greatly he loved him, and how little he knew him! He lacked the courage to raise the subject with Jakob. He was a coward like me—he couldn't discuss it with me either. He must have been utterly desperate during the few days before his suicide. If he'd tried to speak to me, I would have been able to enlighten him. But perhaps he wouldn't have believed me, and who knows, I might have denied the whole thing. After all, wasn't I jealous? Jealous and vain? A coward? I learned from Maxi's letter that Jakob had seduced him back in Giessbach. At the age of seventeen, guileless but not guiltless, Maxi had been unresistingly seduced at the same time as Jakob seduced and enslaved me—at the same time as you and he were sharing a
room together. A room and a bed, perhaps an ideal conception of love.”

So Jakob had been nimbly moving from one to the other, from father to son and from him to still others, bewitching and tempting them all.

“When Maxi made the unbearable discovery that his own father had been deceiving him with the person he loved most, the person who was, as he put it, his ‘hold on life', his world promptly collapsed. He believed I knew about his tendencies—he thought I'd employed Jakob and taken him with us for his sake. And then, quite suddenly, it transpired that I hadn't employed Jakob to enable Maxi to lead a carefree existence, but in my own interests—‘as ever', he wrote. The fact is, it would never have occurred to me that Jakob's relationship with my son was other than that of a servant. I'd stolen his lover, and he couldn't live with that thought. Yes, I understand him.”

Klinger seemed to have reached the end of his account, the end of a story in which Erneste had had no part except in one respect: the “ideal conception of love” of which Klinger had spoken, but which had really been no more than an abortive attempt to be loved. But Erneste hadn't killed himself—he'd never even contemplated it.

All he could see of Klinger's eyes were the whites. The irises, eyelids and lashes had merged with the background in front of which he was sitting, slightly hunched but defiant, as if he might jump up at any moment. Erneste could only surmise that Klinger was watching him. The
man was clearly unrelieved that he had recounted and explained everything worth knowing, all that he had thought of again and again over the years. The light was still on in the house across the street. Erneste's neighbor hadn't turned it off, so it probably stayed on the whole time. He could see the light even though he was sitting with his back to the window. The light in the apartment opposite was reflected in a mirror on the wall behind Klinger.

Jakob's love for Erneste had been only of brief duration, but that was possibly the best that could be said for it, because Jakob had probably meant what he said while it lasted.
Et alors voilà qu'un soir il est parti, le Postillon de Longjumeau
. And then, from one day to the next, the handsome young postilion had left.

Klinger had been hard hit by his son's suicide. His unexpected insight into Maximilian's life had dealt him a blow which only a counterblow could parry. He prepared to deliver it within hours despite knowing that he himself would be its target. The reasons for Maxi's death were enough to warrant throwing Jakob out. He had to get rid of him. Whether he would succeed in effacing him from his memory was temporarily unimportant. Time would tell.

He sent for him before breakfast—even before he had seen anyone else. Jakob was looking wretched, and he
looked more wretched still when Klinger gave him notice. He denied nothing and uttered no word of protest, neither disputed his responsibility for Maximilian's death nor tried to change Klinger's mind—which might have been easier than it seemed to him at the time. Klinger imagined that he could punish Jakob for his son's death by committing an arbitrary act. If he couldn't invest that death with meaning, he could at least repay one injustice with another. Later he realized how petty and unreasonable he had been, but that was later, not then. Then, when there was nothing more to be done, he wanted to take effective action of some kind. If he could do nothing else, he could punish himself, and he didn't regret having done so, either then or later.

Isolated snowflakes were falling on that bright, sunny winter's morning. As fine and firm as grains of dust, they drifted slowly down onto a world inhabited by people ignorant of the misery of those who, high above their heads, were facing the dismal prospect of a day on which all was past redemption. Jakob stood in front of Klinger looking pale and exhausted, staring at the floor with his arms hanging limp at his sides. But Klinger looked past him at a window in the building opposite, where a young man was leaning perilously far out and doing something to a flagpole, although no flag could be seen.

He didn't mind what the others thought about his firing Jakob, who had been in his employ for so long, at this seemingly inappropriate juncture. Unlike Frau Moser,
Jakob wasn't an indispensable member of the household. He would simply not be there anymore, and it wasn't until much later that Klinger found time to be surprised that no one had ever asked him why he'd let Jakob go. Neither his wife nor his daughter ever inquired the reason, which implied that they already knew it.

He told Jakob to pack his things and leave the same day, the sooner the better. Then he handed him an envelope containing three months' salary. Jakob would make out, he was experienced and knew plenty of people. He left the apartment at noon. Nobody saw him off or bade him farewell, and he himself considered it superfluous to shake hands with anyone. Besides, the others were too busy restoring order where Maximilian's death had wrought disorder to give any thought to him.

That evening, however, Marianne Klinger informed her husband that Jakob had kept watch over their son all night. She had found him seated beside the bed, wide awake, when she went into Maxi's room at half-past seven. Until he became aware of her presence he appeared to be communing with the dead youth. “I got the feeling they had a language of their own,” she said. That had been the last time Jakob's name was mentioned in Klinger's presence until the day Erneste called him and requested an interview.

Jakob's suitcase was a small one, and he was in no hurry. There was plenty of time before he left to pack his few possessions: two pairs of trousers, two jackets, two pairs of shoes, underwear and socks, toilet things and writing materials, papers and money. Erneste sat on the bed with his knees drawn up and watched him packing. He wanted to memorize his every movement, knowing that he would subsist on the recollection for a long time to come. The little suitcase was lying open on the bed. Erneste could easily have touched it with his toes, but he did nothing of the kind. Mute and motionless, he looked on while Jakob, pausing for thought occasionally, went back and forth between the bed and the wardrobe, fetching various things that had accumulated in the last few months. All those tokens of his presence disappeared into the suitcase until nothing was left—until he might never have existed. Jakob had stripped to his underpants. The room beneath the eaves was already sweltering. It wasn't eight o'clock yet, and the steamer for Interlaken didn't leave until eleven. He was about to embark on the longest journey he'd ever made.

Lying on the chair beside the washbasin were the clothes he would wear today, the day of his departure: a pair of white, lightweight slacks, a white cotton shirt, fawn socks and brown oxfords—all of them purchased on a recent trip to Interlaken like his smart leather suitcase, which he was packing with a care Erneste found surprising. The money for the suitcase and the new clothes had been provided by Klinger, who had sent Jakob to
Schaufelberger's department store with a blank check and instructions to get himself a decent outfit. Klinger had laid down no rules about his wardrobe, so he could wear whatever he chose.

Jakob had asked Erneste to accompany him on his shopping trip to Interlaken, and although Erneste was under no illusions about its purpose, he had agreed. And that was how, for the space of half a day, their old, unconstrained relationship, which chimed so well with the glorious weather, had returned like some long familiar friend.

Two young men strolling along the promenade … Two young men sitting in the Café Schuh … Erneste and Jakob said not a word about what lay ahead, not a word about their parting in three days' time, not a word about the journey to Marseille and the voyage to America, not a word about Klinger and what would be lost beyond recall. For as long as their excursion to cosmopolitan little Interlaken lasted, the immediate future didn't exist, nor did the next day or the day after that. They made their way along the lakeside promenade and through Interlaken's shopping streets, walking so close together that their shoulders, arms and hands brushed again and again, at first by chance but later, perhaps, intentionally. Neither recoiled at the other's touch. It was as natural as breathing, as walking itself. Erneste would have walked beside Jakob for years on end—on through Interlaken and other places on this and the other side of the world he knew. He shut his
eyes while walking, and, in the dappled reddish gloom transfixed by the shafts of bright sunlight that impinged on his retinas, those years at Jakob's side passed in a flash, serene and untroubled. Just as they were strolling through the town side by side, so they could have journeyed together down the years.