Billiards at Half-Past Nine (5 page)

“Get back to the reception desk at once, Kuhlgamme, I’ll take care of this matter myself. Step aside. Or else.”

Only over my dead body, and just look, it’s ten to eleven already. In ten minutes he’ll be coming down the staircase anyway. If you had any sense we could have skipped the whole production. But even ten minutes—only over my dead body. You’ve never learned what honor is because you’ve never known dishonor. Here I take my stand, Jochen, corrupt and jam-packed with rottenness from head to toe. But only over my dead body will you ever get into that billiard room.

For some time now he had given up playing according to the rules, trying for runs, racking up points. Now gently, now hard he played the ball, seemingly at random, and each time, as it caromed off the other two, for him brought forth a new geometric pattern from the green void, making a starry heaven. Cue ball kissing white ball over green felt, red ball over green felt, bringing tracks into being at once to be extinguished. Delicate clicks defined the rhythm of the figure formed, five times, six times, when the struck ball caromed off the cushion or the other balls. Only a few tones, light or dark, emerged from the monotone. And the swirl of lines was all angularly bound by geometric law and physics. Energy of the blow imparted to the ball by cue, plus a little friction, question of degree, the brain taking note of it, and behold, impulse was converted into momentary figures. No abiding forms, nothing lasting, all fleeting, force expended in a mere rolling of spheres. Often he played for as long as a half-hour with only one ball, white over the green surface, a solitary star in the sky. Light, faint music
without melody, painting without likeness. Hardly any color. Mere formula.

The pale youth guarding the door leaned against the white lacquered wood, hands behind his back, legs crossed, wearing the violet uniform of the Prince Heinrich.

“No stories today, Doctor?”

He looked up, put down his cue, took a cigarette, lit it and looked off down into the street, now in the shadow of St. Severin’s. Apprentices, trucks, nuns. Life in the street. Across the courtyard gray autumn light came reflected almost silver from the violet drapes of the dining room. Framed in these velvety hangings guests were eating belated breakfast. Even their soft-boiled eggs looked ominous in that light. Respectable matronly faces took on a depraved look. Frock-coated waiters with knowing eyes looked like so many Beelzebubs, emissaries from Asmodeus, though actually they were nothing but harmless members of the waiters’ guild, who went home after work and diligently read the lead article in the union paper. Yet now they seemed to be concealing cloven hooves inside cleverly constructed orthopedic shoes. Were not elegant little horns growing out of their white, red, yellow foreheads? The sugar in the gilt bowls had lost its sugary look. Wine was not wine, bread not bread, both aglow like ingredients of some secret vice. A celebration was in progress here, and the godhead’s name was not to be uttered, only thought.

“Stories? What stories, boy?”

His memories had never hinged on words and pictures, only on movement. Father was Father’s gait, the spritely curve described, each step, by his right trouser leg, for a brief instant exposing the dark blue inner lining of the cuff, this while Father was on his way mornings past Gretz’ shop to the Cafe Kroner to eat breakfast. Mother, she was the complicated humble gesture described by her hands when she folded them over her breast, the sign she was about to say some foolishness. How bad the world was, how few the pure in heart. Her hands
wrote it in the air before she put it into words. Otto, he was marching legs, when he went out through the hall in jackboots, and off down the street. Hostility, -tility, -tility went the ring of his heels on the flags, heels which before had marched to a different beat of brother, brother, brother. Grandmother: a gesture she had made for seventy years, mimicked many times daily by his daughter as he watched. A movement centuries old, a heritage running in the family that never failed to startle him. His daughter, Ruth, had never seen her great-grandmother. Where, then, had she got that gesture? Unaware, she brushed her hair back from her brow as her great-grandmother had done.

And he saw himself, playing rounders, bending over the bats to pick out his own, saw how he rolled the ball back and forth in his left hand, back and forth until he had the heft of it just right to toss in the air at the critical moment exactly where he wanted it, just high enough to give him time to get both hands set on the bat handle and lash at the ball with all his might, sending it flying to the farthest outfield.

He saw himself in riverside fields, in the park, in the garden, bending down, straightening up, hitting the ball. All was timing. The others were fools who did not know you could figure how long it took for the ball to fall when you tossed it up to knock out a fly, or that with the same stopwatch you could also find out how long it took to get your grip set on the bat. And that everything else was only a question of coordination and practice, whole afternoons spent practicing in the fields, the park, the garden. They did not know there were formulas you could use, scales on which to weigh the balls. Just a little physics, a little mathematics and practice. But they turned their backs on both these subjects, on which the whole business hinged. They had no use for training, cheated their way through, at school for weeks at a time learned boneless maxims by rote, foundered in nebulous nonsense, even misconceived the poet Hölderlin. Even a word like ‘plummet,’ when they said it, became pulpy nonsense. Something as clear
as ‘plummet.’ A line, a piece of lead, you threw it into the water, felt when the line hit bottom, drew out the line, by it measured the water’s depth. Yet when they said ‘plummet’ it sounded like bad organ music. They could neither play rounders nor read Hölderlin.
Firm in compassion the eternal heart
.

They were talking it up in the field, to distract him at the plate, hollering, ‘Come on, Faehmel, let’s get going!’ The outfielders were roaming the outfield, two of them playing very deep where he usually hit the ball, long flies much dreaded by the opposition. Mostly they landed right out in the street, where, on this Saturday in the summer of 1935, steaming chest-nut horses were coming out the brewery gate. Beyond, the railway embankment, where a shunting engine was puffing up silly white clouds into the afternoon sky. From the right, near the bridge, came the hissing of shipyard arc-welders, as sweating workmen, toiling overtime, welded together a Strength-through-Joy river steamer. Bluish, silvery sparks hissed and riveting hammers—tak, tak, tak—kept time. In nearby municipal garden plots newly erected scarecrows in vain were trying to scare off invading sparrows, and pale old fellows on Old Age, no tobacco for their pipes, waited longingly for the first of the month. And it was only the memory of his body’s movements at that time, nothing else, which brought back images, words and colors. All hidden behind formulas was ‘Get going, Faehmel, get going!’ He had taken the ball and was letting it lie just right in the cup of his hand, lightly held between fingers and palm, so as to have it meet the least possible resistance when tossed into the air. He had his bat ready in his other hand, longest one of all (no one bothered with the laws of leverage), fat of the bat covered with adhesive tape. Quickly he glanced at his wristwatch. Three minutes and fifteen seconds until the athletic instructor would whistle the end of the game—and still no answer to the question why the Prince Otto Gymnasium outfit had raised no objection about having the coach of Ludwig College, his side, umpire
the decisive game. His name was Bernhard Vacano, but they called him Old Wobbly. He had a melancholy air, a plumpish sort with a platonic liking for little boys. He was also very fond of cream puffs and sweetishly dreamy movies in which strong blond youths swam across rivers, then lay in meadows, blade of grass in their mouth, waiting for adventures. Most of all Old Wobbly liked his plaster reproduction of the head of Antinous, which, at home among his rubber plants and shelves of physical culture books, he fondled, on the excuse of dusting it. Old Wobbly, who called his favorites ‘junior’ and the others ‘bums.’

‘Okay there, bum, come out of your trance,’ he said, running sweat, belly wobbling, whistle in his mouth.

But there were still three minutes and three seconds to the final whistle, thirteen seconds too many. If he took his cut at the ball now, the next man would come to bat, and Schrella, waiting at base, would have to run again, giving the fielders another chance to throw the ball as hard as they could, as he sped for the next base, into his face, at his legs, into the small of his back. Three times he had seen how they pulled it. Someone from the other side would hit Schrella, whereupon Nettlinger, who actually played on his and Schrella’s side, tagged the opposing player by simply throwing the ball back to him. Then again the player caught Schrella, making him double up with pain. And again Nettlinger, in retrieving the ball, simply threw it to the opposing player, who this time hit Schrella in the face with it—while Old Wobbly stood by, whistled time when Schrella was hit, whistled again when Nettlinger simply tossed the ball to the opposing fielder, whistled again when Schrella tried to limp out of the way. It all went very fast, balls flying back and forth. Had he, waiting at the plate, been the only one to see it? Not one among all the spectators, tensely waiting with their little colored pennants and caps for the end of the game? Two minutes and fifty seconds before the game was over, score 34–29, Prince Otto. Could it be this, this that he alone had seen, that was the reason they had accepted Old
Wobbly, his side’s athletic coach, as umpire?

‘Come on, bum, the game’s over in two minutes.’

‘Correction, please. Two minutes, fifty seconds left.’ Saying this, he tossed the ball high into the air, took a lightning grip and leaned into it as it came down. He could feel it from the weight of the blow, the elastic give of the wood—another one of his fabulous hits. He looked to see the ball take off, couldn’t find it, heard the ‘ah’ of the crowd, a great ‘ah’ spreading out like a cloud, growing louder. He saw Schrella making it slowly home, bent and hobbling, a smear of blood near his nose. The scorers counted: seven, eight, nine. With maddening slowness the rest of the opposing team came trooping in past Old Wobbly, who was fit to be tied. The game was won, clearly won, even though he had forgotten to run around the bases and score yet another, tenth point. The Ottonians were still out looking for the winning ball, out beyond the street, crawling about in the grass near the brewery wall. Anger was plainly audible in Old Wobbly’s final shrill on the whistle. The final score was announced: 37–34, Ludwig College. The ‘ah’ swelled into a great ‘hoo-ray,’ surged on over the field, while he was taking his bat, digging the handle into the ground, raising the handle a little, lowering it again until he seemed to have hit on the right angle. Then he brought his foot down on the bat’s weakest point, where the handle tapered. Schoolchildren gathered round him, wondering, dumbstruck. Something big was happening, they sensed. Faehmel’s famous bat was being smashed. Where the wood split the splinters were dead white. Already the kids were scrambling for souvenirs, fighting like little fiends for bits of wood, snatching scraps of adhesive tape from each others’ fingers. Shocked, he stared into the heated, foolish faces, into wondering eyes shining with excitement, and felt the cheap bitterness of fame, on a summer evening on July 14, 1935, at the edge of the suburbs, on the trampled playing field across which Old Wobbly, that moment, was chasing out the sixth form of Ludwig’s to collect the little out-of-bounds
markers. Far beyond the street, by the brewery wall, blue and yellow jerseys were still visible. Ottonians were still looking for the ball. Presently they came straggling back across the street, drew up in a double row in the middle of the diamond, and waited for him, the team captain, to lead the game-ending cheer. Slowly he walked over to the two lines. Schrella and Nettlinger were in the same row, next to each other. Nothing seemed to have happened between them, nothing at all. Behind him the younger school kids were still wrestling over the souvenirs. He walked to his place, the spectators’ admiration physically nauseating to him, and three times called out ‘Hip, hip, hurrah!’ Like beaten dogs the Ottonians slunk back to search for the missing ball. Not to find it would be an irredeemable disgrace.

“And yet I knew, Hugo, how much Nettlinger had his mind set on winning. Win no matter what it costs, he said, yet that’s what he did, risked our losing the game just so somebody on the other side could peg Schrella again and again with the ball. And Old Wobbly must have been in cahoots with him. I was the only one who saw through it. The only one.”

He had been afraid, going to the dressing room, afraid of Schrella and of what Schrella would say to him. The air had suddenly grown cool. Evening mist was rising from the fields, coming from the river and flowing, like layered wadding, around the building where the dressing room was located. Why, why had they done that to Schrella, and why did they trip him up on the steps during recess? He had struck his head on the steel edge of the steps, driving the steel bow of his spectacles into an ear lobe. Old Wobbly had come out of the classroom with the first-aid kit far too leisurely. Nettlinger, scorn on his face, had held the adhesive plaster taut so Wobbly could snip a piece off. On the way home they ganged up on Schrella, dragged him from one doorway to the next, beat him up among ash cans and parked baby carriages, and finally pushed him down some steps leading to a dark cellar, where
he had lain a long while with his arm broken, amid the smell of cabbages and sprouting potatoes, staring at dusty preserving jars, until a boy sent down to get apples had discovered him and alerted the occupants of the house. Only a few hadn’t joined in—Enders, Drischka, Schweugel and Holten.

He had once been friends with Schrella, years before this. They’d always gone to visit Trischler together, who lived down at the Lower Harbor. Trischler’s father ran a bar and Schrella’s father worked for him as a waiter. They played on the old barges and abandoned pontoons, and fished off the boats.