Billiards at Half-Past Nine (2 page)

She never got over being surprised by the pleasure he showed when his son came to pay him a visit. Again and again, at the office, he would open the window and look down the street as far as the Modest Gate. He had flowers sent to the house, engaged a housekeeper for the length of the visit. The little scar on the bridge of his nose turned red with excitement, the gloomy back part of the house teemed with cleaning women as daily they brought out empty wine bottles and left them in the hall for the rubbish man. More and more bottles accumulated, first in rows of five, then of ten, until the whole length of the back entry was taken up by a stiff, dark green forest stockade of bottles, the tips of which she counted, blushing at her nosiness. Two hundred and ten bottles emptied between
the beginning of May and the last of August. More than one bottle a day.

Yet he never smelled of alcohol, his hands never shook. The stiff, dark green forest became unreal. Had she actually seen it? Or was it only a dream? Schrit, Hochbret or Kanders certainly she had never seen, each being buried as he was in his own little hideout far away from the others.

Only twice had any one of them caught another making a mistake. Once was when Schrit had miscalculated the foundation for the municipal swimming pool—this detected by Hochbret. It had been all very upsetting, but Faehmel had merely asked her to identify the notes penciled in red on the margin of the drawing as belonging respectively to Schrit and Hochbret. For the first time it dawned on her that Faehmel really knew his business. Half an hour he sat at his desk with slide rule, reference tables and sharpened pencils, then said, “Hochbret is right. The swimming pool would have caved in after three months.” Meanwhile not a word of blame for Schrit, of praise for Hochbret. Just this once—as he signed the revised estimate—he laughed, and his laugh was as eerie as his politeness.

The second mistake had been made by Hochbret, when he worked out a statics analysis for the Wilhelmskuhle railway overpass. That time the error was discovered by Kanders. Once again she watched Faehmel—for the second time in four years—sit down at his desk and calculate. Once again she had to identify Hochbret’s and Kanders’ red-penciled notes. It was this incident that gave him the idea of prescribing different colored pencils for his different associates: Kanders red, Hochbret green, Schrit yellow.

Slowly, a piece of chocolate melting in her mouth, she wrote, “Weekend house for film actress,” then, “Annex for Co-operative Welfare Society” as a second piece dissolved. At least clients did have names and addresses to tell them apart
by, and the enclosed drawings likewise made her feel she was involved in something real. Building stone and sheets of plastic, iron girders, glass bricks and bags of cement, all of these could be visualized, whereas Kanders, Schrit and Hochbret, though she wrote their addresses every day, could not. They sent in their totals and estimates without comment. “Why letters?” Faehmel had said. “We’re not in the business here of collecting confessions, are we?”

Sometimes she took down the encyclopedia from the bookshelf and looked up the places to which her daily envelopes were addressed. “Schilgenauel, pop. 87, of which 83 Rom. Cath., famous 12
^th
cent. parish church w. Schilgenauel altar.” Kanders lived there. And his insurance card revealed the following information: “Age 37, bachelor, Rom. Cath.” Schrit lived way up north, in “Gludum, pop. 1988, of which 1812 Prot., 176 Rom. Cath., pickle factories, mission school.” Schrit was “48, married, Prot., 2 children, of which 1 over 18.” She didn’t need to look up Hochbret’s home town. He lived in Blessenfeld, out in the suburbs, only a thirty-five-minute bus ride away. The crazy idea often popped into her head of looking up Hochbret, of making sure he was real by hearing his voice, seeing him in the flesh, feeling his handshake. But his youth—he was just thirty-two—and the fact he was a bachelor held her back. Although the encyclopedia described Kanders’ and Schrit’s home towns with the exactness of an identification card, and although she knew Blessenfeld very well, still all three of them remained beyond her power to visualize, even when she made out their monthly insurance premiums, filled in postal orders for them, sent them schedules and periodicals. They remained as unreal as that Mr. Schrella, named on the red card, to whom Faehmel was always available, though in four years not once had Schrella ever asked to see him.

She let the red card, cause of his first rudeness to her, lie on the desk. What was the name of that gentleman, the one who had come into the office about ten and urgently, urgently,
very urgently asked to speak with Faehmel? A big, gray-haired man with a rather ruddy face, he smelled of exquisite expense-account meals and wore a suit reeking of class. He had combined power, dignity and masterful charm in an utterly irresistible way. His title, vaguely, smilingly murmured, had something to do with minister—ministerial councillor, director, manager—something like that. When she’d said she hadn’t any idea where Faehmel was at the moment, suddenly, shooting out a hand, laying it on her shoulder, he said, “Come on now, sweetie, out with it. Where can I find him?” And she had given in to him, not knowing just how it happened. She gave away the deep-down secret, the scent of which had so keenly led her on: “Prince Heinrich Hotel.” Whereupon he had murmured something about being an old school friend, about an urgent, a very pressing matter, something about defense, weapons. Behind him he left the aroma of a cigar which, when he smelled it an hour later, set Faehmel’s father excitedly sniffing.

“Good heavens, good heavens, what a weed that must have been, what a weed!” The old man snuffed along the walls, poked his nose down close to the desk, put on his hat and a couple of minutes later was back with the tobacconist whose customer he’d been for the past fifty years. The two of them stood for a bit in the doorway sniffing, then dashed about the office like agitated dogs. The tobacconist crawled under the desk where a whole cloud of cigar smoke had lingered intact. He clapped his hands, gave a triumphant laugh and said, “Yes, Your Excellency, it was a Partagas Eminentes.”

“And you can get them for me?”

“Absolutely. I keep them in stock.”

“God help you if the aroma isn’t exactly the same!”

Once more the tobacconist sniffed and said, “Partagas Eminentes, I’ll bet my neck on it, Excellency. Four marks apiece. Would you like some?”

“One, my dear Kolbe, just one. My grandfather earned four marks a week, and I respect the dead. I have my sentimentalities,
as you know. Good Lord, my son has smoked twenty thousand cigarettes in here, and that weed knocks them all for a loop!”

She felt highly honored, having the old fellow smoke his cigar in her company, leaning back in his son’s easy chair. The chair was too big for him, and so she eased a cushion behind his back, then listened, while she went on with that most impeccable of occupations, sticking on stamps. Slowly she drew the backs of a green, red, blue Heuss across the sponge, and stuck them neatly on at the upper right-hand corner of envelopes that would travel to Schilgenauel, Gludum and Blessenfeld. Just so, while the old boy gave himself up to a pleasure it seemed he must have been vainly seeking for the past fifty years.

“Good heavens,” he said, “at last I know what a good cigar is. Had to wait all this time for it, dear child, until my eightieth birthday. No, no, don’t make any fuss, don’t get excited. Of course I’m eighty today! Wasn’t it you who ordered flowers for me from my son? Beautiful, thank you. We’ll get to my birthday later, all right? You have a cordial invitation to my party tonight at the Cafe Kroner. But tell me something, my dear Leonore, why in all the fifty years—fifty-one, to be precise—I’ve been a customer there didn’t anyone try to sell me a cigar like this? Am I stingy, perhaps? Never have been. You know I haven’t. Used to smoke ten-cent cigars when I was young, then twenty-centers when I was earning a little more money, and then sixty-centers, year after year. Tell me, dear girl, what do you suppose they’re like, people who walk around with a dollar corona stuck in their mouth? Fellows who pop in and out of offices with it as if it were a nickel stogey? I wonder what they’re like, people who smoke up three times my grandfather’s weekly wage between breakfast and lunch. Mmm, making an old codger like me go dry in the mouth and crawl round his son’s office like a beagle in a hedge. How’s that? One of Robert’s schoolmates? Ministerial councillor, you say, director, manager? Even a cabinet minister! Then I must certainly know the chap. Defense department? Weapons?”

Suddenly mist came into his eyes. A trap door slammed shut. The old man was drifting back in time, sinking back into the first, the third, the sixth decade of his life. He was burying one of his children again. Which one could it be? Johanna? Heinrich? Over whose white coffin was he scattering a handful of earth, strewing flowers? Were the tears in his eyes the tears of 1942, when he got the news of Otto’s death? Was he weeping at the asylum door behind which his wife had vanished? The tears, while his cigar, forgotten on the ash tray, went up in delicate wreaths of smoke, were from 1902. He was burying his sister Charlotte, for whom he had saved and saved, gold coin by coin, so that things might go better for her. The coffin slid down, held by creaking ropes, while the school-children sang, ‘Watchman, whither has the swallow flown?’ Chirpy children’s voices intruded into the perfectly appointed office; the aged voice sang back over half a century. Now only that October morning in 1902 was real. Fog on the Lower Rhine. Damp fog, coiling in sarabande across the wet beet-fields, the crows in the willow trees scrawking like Mardi Gras noisemakers. While Leonore drew a red Heuss over the damp sponge. Thirty years before she was born peasant children had sung, ‘Watchman, whither has the swallow flown?’ Now a green Heuss, drawn across the little sponge. Careful. Letters to Hochbret went at local rates.

When this mood came over him, the old man had a blind look. She would have liked then and there to rush off to the florist’s and buy him a lovely bouquet. But she was afraid to leave him alone. He stretched out his hands; cautiously she pushed the ash tray toward him. He took up his cigar, put it in his mouth, looked at Leonore, and gently said, “You mustn’t think I’m crazy, child.”

Yes, she was fond of him. Regularly, on her afternoons off, he came to the office to pick her up, so she could take pity on his carelessly kept books, over there on the other side of the street, high above the printing works, where he lived in
a “studio” dating back to his salad days. There he kept documents checked and approved by income tax officials whose modest gravestones had already toppled over before she had learned to write. Credits in English pounds, dollar holdings, plantation shares in El Salvador. Up there she rummaged through account settlements, deciphered handwritten statements from banks long since failed, read old wills bequeathing legacies to children by now outlived forty years. ‘And to my son Heinrich exclusively I leave the two estates of Stehlinger’s Grotto and Goerlinger’s Lodge, having noted in his nature that air of repose, I may even say that delight in seeing things grow, which I take to be the prerequisite of a farmer’s life.…’

“Here,” the old man cried, brandishing his cigar, “right here in this very office, I dictated a will to my father-in-law the night before I had to leave for the army. While I was dictating it the youngster was sleeping up there. Next morning he came with me to the station, kissed me on the cheek with his soft child’s lips. He was only seven then. But none of them, Leonore, not one ever got what I gave. It all came back to me, properties and bank accounts, dividends and rents. I was never able to give anything away. It took my wife to do that. People actually got what she gave away. And nights, when I lay beside her, I often used to hear her muttering—long and soft, hours on end, like water purling from her mouth—
‘whywhywhy?’
 ”

Again the old man wept. He was in uniform this time, a captain in the Engineer Reserves, Privy Councillor Heinrich Faehmel, home on compassionate leave to bury his son, age seven. The Kilbian vault closed round the white coffin. Damp, gloomy masonry, yet bright as the sun’s rays the golden figures marking the year of his death. 1917. Robert, dressed in black velvet, waited out in the carriage.

Leonore let the stamp fall, a violet one, not trusting herself to stick it on Schrit’s letter. The carriage horses were snorting outside the cemetery gate, while Robert Faehmel, age two, was allowed to hold the reins. Black leather cracked at the edges
and the figures, 1917, freshly gilt, shining brighter than sunshine.…

“What’s he up to? What does he do with himself, my son, the only one I have left, Leonore? What does he do in the Prince Heinrich Hotel every morning from nine-thirty to eleven? I remember how we used to let him watch the way they tied the nosebags onto the horses. What’s he up to? Can you tell me that, Leonore?”

Hesitantly she picked up the violet stamp and softly said, “I don’t know what he does there, I really don’t.”

The old fellow put the cigar in his mouth and leaned back in the armchair, smiling—as if nothing at all had passed between them. “What do you say, Leonore, to working for me regularly afternoons? I’ll come and pick you up. We can have lunch together at noon, then from two to four or five, if you want, you can help get me straightened out up there. What do you say to that, my dear?”

She nodded, said “Yes.” She still didn’t trust herself to draw the violet Heuss across the sponge and stick it on Schrit’s letter. Someone in the post office would take the letter out of the box and the machine would stamp “Sept. 6, 1958, 1
P.M.
” on it. And there sat the old man, come to the end of his seventies, starting his eighties.

“Yes, yes,” she said.

“Then it’s a date?”

“Yes.”

She looked into his thin face, the face in which for years she had vainly sought a likeness to his son. Politeness, it seemed, was the only trait common to the Faehmels. But with the old man it was more ceremonious, decorative, the courtesy of the old school, almost a
grandezza
. Nothing mathematical in it like the politeness of his son, who made a point of dryness and only by the glimmer in his gray eyes indicated he might be capable of more warmth.