Billiards at Half-Past Nine (26 page)

“Forgive me,” he said, “I really won’t do it again,” and he turned off the autobahn and drove along between pleasant fields, by the edge of the quiet woods.

XYZ, they were the same letters he had detected on the neat blueprints of postcard size which his father played with in the evenings, like playing cards. Publisher’s House at edge of forest—XxX; Annex for Co-operative Welfare Society—YxY; Teacher’s house on riverbank—just Y. Between the feet of St. John and St. Peter.

He drove slowly on between fields where the fat beets were already pressing their way up beneath great, green leaves. Behind the stubble fields and meadows they could already see Cossack’s Hill.

“Why won’t you tell me?” asked Marianne.

“Because I don’t understand it myself yet, because I can’t yet believe it’s true. Perhaps it’s only a ridiculous dream. Maybe I’ll be able to explain it to you later, but maybe never.”

“But don’t you want to be an architect?”

“No.”

“Is that why you drove up to the signboards like that?”

“Perhaps,” he said.

“I’ve always hated people who don’t know what money is,” said Marianne, “people who drive around like crazy in cars, up to signboards with DEATH written on them, who upset people without any reason at all and spoil their well-earned walk after work.”

“I had a reason for driving like crazy up to the signboard.” He slowed down, stopped at a sandy path on the edge of Cossack’s Hill, and parked the car under low-hanging pine branches.

“What do you want here?” she asked.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s walk a bit more.”

“It’ll be too late,” she said, “your grandfather’s sure to come on the four-thirty train. It’s four-twenty already.”

Joseph got out and walked a few paces up the hill, held one hand in front of his eyes and looked toward Denklingen.

“Yes,” he called out, “I can see the train coming from Doderingen, the same old puff-puff as when I was a child, and the same time too. Come on, they’ll wait a quarter of an hour, all right.”

He went back to the car, drew Marianne from her seat and up the sandy path. They sat down in a clearing. Joseph pointed to the plain, following the train with his finger as it went through beet fields and between meadows and fields of stubble up to Kisslingen.

“You can’t imagine,” he said, “how well I know those villages. How often we came out on that train. After Mother died we were almost always in Stehlingen or Goerlingen, and I went to school in Kisslingen. In the evening we ran to the train to meet Grandfather coming from the city, to that train there; look, now it’s leaving Denklingen. Funny, I always had the feeling we were poor. While Mother was alive and Grandmother lived with us we had less to eat than the other children we
knew, and I was never allowed to wear good clothes, only cut-down things—and we had to look on while she gave away the good things to strangers, and the bread and butter and honey from the Abbey and the estates; we had to eat imitation honey.”

“Didn’t you hate your grandmother?”

“No, and I don’t know myself why I didn’t hate her for such foolishness. Perhaps because Grandfather took us to his studio with him, and gave us good things on the sly. He took us to the Cafe Kroner too, and fed us up to the neck. He used to say, ‘It’s a big thing that Mother and Grandmother are doing, very big—but I don’t know whether you’re big enough yet for that kind of bigness.’ ”

“Did he really say that?”

“Yes,” Joseph laughed. “When Mother died and Grandmother was taken away we were alone with Grandfather, and then we had enough to eat. We were almost always in Stehlingen during the last years of the war. I heard them blow up the Abbey one night. We were in Stehlingen, crouching in the kitchen, and the farmers from the neighborhood were cursing the German general who had given the demolition order, and they were murmuring to themselves,
whywhywhy
. Father came to visit me a few days later, in an American car escorted by an American officer, and was allowed to stay with us for three hours. He brought us chocolate, and it scared us, that sticky, dark-brown stuff; we’d never eaten it before and would only eat it then after Mrs. Kloschgrabe, the caretaker’s wife, had tasted it first. Father brought coffee for Mrs. Kloschgrabe, and she said to him, ‘You needn’t worry, Doctor, we are looking after the children as if they were our own,’ and she said, ‘What a shame they blew up the Abbey like that, so near to the end of the war,’ and he said, ‘Yes, it’s a shame, but perhaps it was God’s will,’ and Mrs. Kloschgrabe said, ‘There are some who do the Devil’s will as well,’ and Father laughed, and the American officer laughed, too. Father was kind to us, and for the first time I saw him cry, when he had to leave us
again; I hadn’t believed he could cry. He’d never said much or showed his feelings. Even when he had to go back from leave and we went to the station with him, he never cried. We all cried, Mother and Grandmother, Grandfather and us, but he, never—there,” said Joseph, pointing to the streamer of smoke from the train, “they’ve just got to Kisslingen.”

“Now he’s going to go into the Abbey and find out what you ought to have told him yourself.”

I wiped away the letters chalked between St. John and St. Peter’s feet, and the little X in the guest-house cellar. He would never find it, and never find out, never find out from me.

“For three days,” he said, “the front was spread out between Denklingen and the city, and in the evenings we prayed with Mrs. Kloschgrabe for Grandfather’s safety. Then one evening he came back from the city, pale and sad as I’d never seen him before, and walked through the rubble of the Abbey with us, mumbling what the peasants were mumbling, what Grandmother had always muttered in the air-raid shelter,
whywhywhy
.”

“How happy he must be that you’re helping to rebuild the Abbey.”

“Yes,” said Joseph, “but I can’t prolong that happiness. And don’t ask me why.”

He kissed her, drew her hair behind her ears and with outspread fingers combed out the pine needles and the grains of sand.

“Soon Father came out of prison and took us into the city, even though Grandfather protested and said it would be better for us not to grow up among the rubble, but Father said, ‘I can’t live in the country, and I want the children with me now, I hardly know them.’ We didn’t know him either and at first we were scared of him, and we sensed that Grandfather was scared of him, too. We were living at the time in Grandfather’s studio, for our house was unlivable, and there was a huge plan of the
city hanging on the studio wall. All that had been destroyed was marked on it in heavy black chalk, and when we did our homework at Grandfather’s draughting table we often listened when Father and Grandfather and other men were standing in front of the map. They often used to quarrel, for Father always said, ‘Away with it—blow it up,’ and drew an X over the black spot, and the others would say, ‘For God’s sake, we can’t do that,’ and Father said, ‘Do it, before people come back into the city—there’s no one living there now so you needn’t worry, tear it all down.’ And the others said, ‘But there are the remains of a lintel from the sixteenth century, and there’s still part of a chapel from the twelfth,’ and Father threw his black chalk down and said, ‘All right, do as you wish, but let me tell you, you’ll regret it—do as you wish, but then do it without me.’ And they said, ‘But my dear Faehmel, you’re our best demolition expert, you can’t leave us in the lurch,’ and Father said, ‘But I am leaving you in the lurch if I have to worry about every chicken-run from the time of the Romans. Walls are walls as far as I’m concerned, and believe you me there are good ones and bad ones. Away with all the rubbish. Blow it up and make some breathing space.’ When they’d gone, Grandfather laughed and said, ‘My God, you really ought to understand their feelings,’ and Father laughed. ‘I do understand their feelings, but I don’t respect them.’ And then he said, ‘Come on, children, we’re going to buy some chocolate,’ and he took us to the black market, bought cigarettes for himself and chocolate for us, and we crept into gloomy, half-destroyed doorways with him, and climbed up stairways, because he also wanted to buy cigars for Grandfather. He always bought, but never sold. When we got bread or butter from Stehlingen or Goerlingen we always had to take his share to school with us, and he let us give it to anyone we wanted; and once we bought some butter we had given away, bought it back on the black market. Mrs. Kloschgrabe’s note was still on it; she had written, ‘Sorry, only a kilo for you this week.’ But Father only laughed and said, ‘Oh well, people
need money for cigarettes too.’ The Mayor came again and Father said to him, ‘I’ve found some fourteenth-century fingernail dirt in the rubble of the Franciscan Monastery. Don’t laugh. It’s demonstrably fourteenth-century since it’s mixed with some fiber, the remains of a woolen yarn
demonstrably
produced only in our city during the fourteenth century. An absolutely unique historical relic, Mr. Mayor.’ And the Mayor said, ‘Really Mr. Faehmel, you’re going too far,’ and Father said, ‘I’ll go farther, Mr. Mayor.’ Ruth laughed; she was sitting beside me scribbling her sums in her exercise book; she laughed aloud, and Father came over to her, kissed her on the forehead and said, ‘Yes, it is a joke, sweetheart,’ and I was jealous because he’d never yet kissed me on the forehead. We loved him, Marianne, but we were still a little scared of him, when he stood there with his black chalk in front of the city plan and said, ‘Blow it up—get rid of it.’ He was always strict where my homework was concerned. He used to say to me, ‘There are only two possibilities: either know nothing or everything. Your mother knew nothing, I don’t think she even finished elementary school, and yet I would never have married anyone else, so make up your own mind.’ We loved him, Marianne, and when I realize he can’t have been much more than thirty at the time, I can’t believe it, for I always looked on him as being much older, even though he didn’t look old at all. He even joked at times, which he doesn’t do any more today. When we all crawled out of bed in the mornings he would already be standing at the window, shaving, and used to call to us, ‘The war’s over, kids,’ although the war had been over at least four or five years by then.”

“We ought to go now,” said Marianne, “we can’t keep them waiting such a time.”

“Don’t worry, let them wait,” he said. “I still want to know all about what they did to you, little lamb. I hardly know anything about you.”

“Little lamb?” she said. “What made you say that?”

“It just came to me,” he said. “Tell me what they did to you. It always makes me laugh when I hear the Doderingen accent in your voice. It doesn’t go with you, and all I know is that you went to school there but that you weren’t born there, and that you help Mrs. Kloschgrabe with the baking and cooking and ironing.”

She drew his head down onto her lap, covered his eyes and said, “To me? Do you really want to know what they did to me? They threw bombs at me and didn’t hit me, although the bombs were so big and I so small. The people in the air-raid shelter put tidbits in my mouth and the bombs fell and didn’t hit me; I only heard how they exploded, and the shrapnel whizzed through the night like fluttering birds, and someone in the air-raid shelter sang, ‘The wild geese rush through the night.’ My father was big, very dark and handsome; he wore a brown uniform with a lot of gold on it, and a kind of sword at his belt that glittered silver. He fired a bullet into his mouth, and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anyone who’s fired a bullet into his mouth? No, I suppose not. Then thank God you’ve been spared the sight. He lay there on the carpet, the blood flowing over the Turkish colors, over the Smyrna pattern—genuine Smyrna, my dear. My mother, however, she was big and blonde and wore a blue uniform with a smart little hat, but no sword at her hip. And I had a small brother, much smaller than I was, and blond, and my small brother dangled in the doorway with a rope round his neck, and I laughed, and went on laughing while my mother put a rope noose round my neck too, murmuring to herself,
He ordered me to
, but then a man came in, without any uniform or gold braid or sword; he only had a pistol in his hand which he pointed at my mother, and wrenched me out of her hands, while I cried because I had the noose round my neck already and wanted to play the game they had let my little brother play up there, the
He ordered me to
game, but the man put his hand over my mouth, dragged me downstairs, took the noose off my neck
and lifted me into a truck.…”

Joseph tried to take her hands away from his eyes, but she held them fast and asked, “Don’t you want to hear any more?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then you must let me hold your eyes shut and you can give me a cigarette.”

“Here in the woods?”

“Yes, here in the woods.”

“Take one out of my shirt pocket.”

He felt her unbuttoning his shirt pocket and taking out the cigarettes and matches, while her right hand held his eyes shut.

“I’m giving you one too,” she said, “here in the woods. At that time I was exactly five years old and so sweet that they even pampered me in the truck, sticking tidbits in my mouth and washing me with nice soap when the truck stopped. And they fired on us with cannon and machine guns but they didn’t hit us. We drove for a long time, I don’t know how long but certainly for two weeks; and when we stopped, the man who had interrupted the
He ordered me to
game took me with him, rolled me in a blanket and laid me down beside him, in the hay and in the straw and sometimes in a bed, and said, ‘Call me Father, go on,’ but I couldn’t say Father, I had always called the man in the fine uniform Daddy, but I learned to say ‘Father.’ I said it to the man who had interrupted the game, for thirteen years. I got a bed, a blanket and a mother; she was strict and loved me, and I lived nine years in a nice neat house. When I went to school the priest said, ‘Look what we’ve got here, we’ve got a real natural genuine little heathen-child,’ and all the other children, none of whom were heathens, laughed and the priest said, ‘But we’ll very soon make a little child of Christ out of our little heathen-child, out of our good little lamb.’ And so they made me into a little child of Christ. And the little lamb was good and happy, played ring-around-the-rosy and hopscotch and later on played skip-rope and basketball and loved her parents very much. Then one day in school a few
tears were shed, a few speeches were made and some allusion to
a new threshold of life
, and little lamb was apprenticed to a dressmaker and learned to use needle and thread very well, and learned from her mother how to polish and bake and cook, and everyone in the village said, ‘She’ll marry a prince one day, she won’t settle for less than a prince,’ but one day a very large and very black car drove into the village, and the bearded man at the wheel stopped in the village square and from inside the car asked them, ‘Can you tell me where the Schmitzes live, please?’ and they said, ‘There’s a whole lot of Schmitzes here, which ones do you mean?’ and the man said, ‘The ones that have the adopted child,’ and they said, ‘Yes, that’s the Edward Schmitzes, they live back there, look, just behind the smithy, the house with the box tree in front of it.’ And the man said, ‘Thank you,’ and the car drove on, but they followed him since it was only fifty steps at the most from the village square to Edward Schmitz’s. I was sitting in the kitchen cleaning lettuce; I loved doing that, cutting off the leaves, throwing the bad ones away and the good ones into the colander, where they lay so green and fresh, and Mother was saying to me, ‘You mustn’t let it upset you, Marianne, boys are that way—when they get to thirteen or fourteen, or sometimes even at twelve, they start behaving like that, it’s nature, and nature isn’t easy to control.’ And I said, ‘I’m not upset about that.’ ‘About what, then?’ my mother asked. I said, ‘I was thinking about my brother, the way he hung there, and I laughed without knowing at all how frightful it was—and he hadn’t even been baptized.’ And before my mother could answer me, the door opened—we hadn’t heard any knocking—and I recognized her straightaway. She was still big and blonde and wore a smart little hat, only she wasn’t wearing the blue uniform any more. She came up to me at once, opening her arms and saying, ‘You must be my Marianne—can’t you feel it in your blood?’ I held the knife still for a moment, then trimmed clean the next lettuce leaf and said, ‘No, I can’t feel it in my blood.’ ‘I’m your mother,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s my mother, there. My name is Marianne Schmitz.’ I paused a moment, then said,
‘He ordered me to—
and you tied the noose round my neck, Madam.’ That was something I’d learned from the dressmaker—address women like that with ‘Madam.’