The Boxer (25 page)

Mark immediately fetched an atlas; they ran their fingers along the coast and called out names to each other, some places they’d vaguely heard of. Their only guide was how enticing the names sounded. Heringsdorf was briefly in the conversation, yet Mark resisted, Ahrenshoop provoked laughter, Zinnowitz, agreement reigned at Binz.

Halfway through the month something happened that jeopardized their travel plans. One morning Aron came across a crowd. He didn’t understand why people were shouting, but he saw they were highly excited and, it appeared to him, close to getting violent. They were so agitated that he didn’t dare ask them why they were so wrought up. He wanted to get away as quickly as possible. The people were chanting in chorus, he says, down with some law or other; he had no idea what their words meant and what was behind it.
Can you assure me that pogroms don’t start like this?
Aron ran to the school as fast as his heart would allow; he wrenched open several classroom doors until he found Mark. Without asking the teacher, he took him by the hand and guided him through side streets to their apartment. To Irma he said, “You’re staying home too.”

The door was locked; through the window the city looked the same as always, the street was quiet. For three days no one left the apartment; they listened to the radio until they
had no other recourse
but to send Irma out to buy groceries. One news reporter spoke of unfortunate misdemeanors and called for people to remain calm and levelheaded; another man reported a revolt of the people and encouraged further resistance. When Irma came back from the store, she said she had seen some tanks.

Aron said, “That’s very good, tanks are good news.”

To Irma’s surprised question about what he meant, he replied that it was important to reestablish order and he could not imagine a more effective means to that end than tanks.

“You’re against the demonstrators?” Irma asked.

“I’m against situations like this.”

Aside from the defeat of the fascists, he says, he never witnessed a significant change that wasn’t tied to a disadvantage for him. This is why, above all, he was concerned with maintaining the status quo.
If life is to be at least bearable, people like me have to fight against change
. (What he means by “fight,” I think, is the locked door. And I notice that he often exchanges the unambiguous word “I” with “people like me” or similar expressions, as if he feels that his own will can be attributed to an entire group.)

Mark desperately wanted to go down into the streets; he was interested in the tanks Irma had talked about. Aron had to hide the key in his pocket. Disappointed, Mark stood at the window for hours on end, staring down at the empty street. He stopped pouting only when Aron promised to go to the sea as soon as order was restored. And then they just up and left, even before one of the two reporters announced on the radio that it was all over now, everything was under control. The next time she went out shopping, Irma, with Aron’s consent, made a tentative trip to the train station and didn’t notice anything suspicious. She had bought tickets for a train that left so early in the morning they met no one on their way to the station. Still, that mile and a half walk felt like a dangerous foray into enemy territory.

On the train the tension eased; as soon as they were out of the city they traveled
cheerfully
. They had the entire compartment to themselves. Aron was proud of his bold idea. They had escaped a dangerous situation unscathed, and from a distance, he says, every danger seems to be only half the size it really is. “In these times, hardly anyone comes up with such an idea,” he said.

Irma praised his sangfroid but insisted that it was too early to celebrate; unpleasant surprises could be awaiting them at their destination. No one could say whether or not an uprising was taking place there too. In the last few days she had listened carefully to both the speakers, and neither mentioned the name Binz. “And besides,” she said, “I’m curious to see where we’ll end up staying.”

When they reached Binz the following afternoon, there was no sign of unrest. The small train station was so sleepy that one might have thought,
We are in a place from before the war
Aron left Mark, Irma, and the luggage in the restaurant at the station and went looking for a room. But first he checked for any signs of unrest; nothing was settled yet, he could still go back and find another seaside resort. However, either all traces had been removed or there had never been
differences of opinion
in this happy little town. No overturned cars, no broken windows, no words on the walls, readable or covered up, and from the station to the beach, Aron says, not a policeman in sight.

The search soon turned into a pleasant walk. The air tasted of salt, the houses were white and pretty. In health resorts, Aron declares, all the houses look the same. And then the sea, the sight of the sea. Aron wondered why the sight of a gray expanse of water — salt water, nothing else — could move him so. Only an hour later Mark and Irma would be expecting him back at the station — he had to get cracking. The best houses are on the beach, he told himself, the less good ones can wait. He went to the most beautiful — not the biggest, the most beautiful. There was the name of a woman in gold letters on the wall.

He tugged on the bell. On the lot next door he noticed there were five bedraggled wicker beach chairs. He had to ring several times before a suspicious old man opened the door. Aron said he was looking for a room to rent for a couple of weeks. He could tell immediately, he says, that the man was poor; only the poor display such a morose kind of mistrust. The old man, who smelled like cheap cigars, said he had no rooms to rent. He’d started to close the door when Aron said quickly, “I can pay more than you probably think.”

“I already told you, we don’t have any rooms,” the old man said irritably. “Try somewhere else.”

Then a middle-aged woman,
clearly
his daughter, appeared behind him. “Do come in a moment,” she said to Aron, as if till then he had been reluctant. Suddenly the old man had nothing more to say. He shrugged and retreated to the depths of the house. The woman sat with Aron in the kitchen.

To Aron, the kitchen, tiled in blue and white, felt like the beginning of a holiday; there were some dried fish and a blazing hearth in spite of the heat. The woman said she actually did rent rooms, almost everyone here rents rooms, only this year she had already given her word to a family from Berlin. In ten days the ladies and gentlemen were due to arrive. On the other hand, she said, in recent times, as the gentleman would surely know, things have changed — she had no precise idea what the situation was like in Berlin. Only one thing tempted her to let him have the rooms, she said, namely that the family in question had not yet sent any confirmation about their agreement. Maybe they were just being careless, but then again, maybe not. Something might have happened to make the family change their plans, in which case she would be stuck with her vacant rooms. “At least they could have written,” she said.

Aron asked her permission to see the rooms, and when the woman hesitated he added, “With no commitment.”

She led him up a steep staircase to exactly the two rooms he was looking for. An open view of the sea, a small balcony, everything was clean and neat, above all, two rooms.

“I come from Berlin myself and I know what the situation is like there,” Aron said. “You can’t imagine. I think it’s likely your guests won’t be coming. Just in case, you should write a letter saying that you could no longer wait for news from them and that you have rented the rooms to someone else for four weeks. That’s fair, no one can accuse you of anything. Otherwise you might get stuck with your rooms. Who travels in times like these? I’ll pay you seven hundred marks for four weeks.”

The woman didn’t let him see how good she thought his offer was. She was silent and pushed chairs into place and tugged at the bed linen. Aron went out on the balcony and gazed at the sea for a while. Then he turned around and said, “Or shall we say eight hundred?”

The old man fetched a handcart from the shed. Aron went back to the train station with the cart. “I thought you had already forgotten us,” Irma said.

“You’ll be amazed,” Aron said. He piled the luggage onto the cart, with Mark on top. It was a pleasant holiday, without fights and without heart attacks. And, best of all, Aron says, when they went back to Berlin there was no trace of the ruckus. The streets looked just as they had before, no sign of violence, a miracle.

Encouraged by their experience, the following year they went on another holiday to the town of Ilsenburg, and the year after that a third trip to Sotschi on the Black Sea. Of the latter two trips, not much stuck in his memory, Aron says. As for comfort, neither one could compare with their trip to Binz. Perhaps just this much about Ilsenburg, that Mark, as far as he, Aron, could tell, had his first love affair. At this point he was fifteen years old, the girl was sixteen, the daughter of a baker who stuttered. Throughout the holiday
Mark hid with her;
Irma found it wrong. She said, “At his age already,” until one day the baker came and asked Aron to please keep his son away from Veronika. “There you go,” Irma whispered, but Aron didn’t do anything about it; anyway their departure was imminent.

Later, Aron reports, Mark had so many girlfriends that he, Aron, eventually lost both track of them and his interest in the matter. He only followed this first one with a watchful eye because, beyond his general paternal feelings, he wanted to make sure that Mark, like himself, had survived ghetto, camp, and illness in all things,
including his manliness
. Apparently he had.

I
n the winter of 1955 Arno broke up with Irma. I shouldn’t take this as a decisive event, Aron says, he mentions it only for the sake of completeness. It was simply one of the minor occurrences of which there were thousands in the course of his life. The first morning after the separation he did not feel the slightest regret — at most the apartment felt a little empty. Presumably Mark was the one who was most affected, because he was very attached to Irma, even loved her; after all, she had replaced his mother for years. Her way of fostering this affection had been patience, a patience that he, Aron, often found impressive, he was the first to admit. But patience is worthless if there’s no purpose behind it, no purpose other than that of being patient. And buying a child’s affection in this way is both easy and insignificant.

I
rma was one of those people who always refused to see problems. If I’m not mistaken, she spent her whole life trying to find out what other people wanted. And when she found out what it was, she would immediately help, regardless of whether itwas right or wrong. Don’t picture that as being particularly pleasant.”

“Like a handyman,” I say.

“A born handyman. After a while the smallest objection onher part led to a fight; one simply wasn’t used to her objecting.”

“Did she leave on her own accord, or did you send her away?”

“I can’t answer that in one sentence. One day it occurred to me that I couldn’t care less whether she stayed or left. And then I said to myself, If I don’t care anyway, then it’s better if she leaves. Irma wasn’t old, but she wasn’t that young anymore either. I was afraid that one day we would have no alternative but to live together forever, purelyout of habit. So I wanted her to leave.”

“Couldn’t you have left?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Okay, I’m sorry, that was nonsense. So did you send her away?”

“You can’t say I sent her away.”

A
fter a night at the movies they had sat at the table and drunk a whole bottle of wine when Irma shifted close to Aron and asked him, shyly, if he had ever seriously thought about the future course of their life together. At first he felt hot, then cold, Aron says; he had never heard an important, or even notable, suggestion from her till then, and now suddenly this. He asked her why in the world they should marry.

“Then tell me why we shouldn’t marry,” Irmasaid.

Aron explained that nothing spoke for or against it, and if one lives in a situation that is just as good or as bad as the other, then one could logically avoid the effort implied by change.

In any other case, Irma would have been satisfied with his answers — not this time. She brought up the fact that other people got married too, that getting married wasn’t a custom she had invented; even for Mark it would be an advantage to live in an official relationship. And not least, she said, as a wife she would have a sense of security that was missing in this precarious life.

“We are leading a precarious life?” Aron asked.

“Nothing is decided,” she said. “We can break up whenever we like.”

“Can’t we break up even if we’re married?” he asked.

“Not so easily.”

“And you see that as an advantage?”

Irma smiled helplessly and said, “You always have to twist the words in my mouth.”

Aron realized the significant difference between his and Irma’s expectations: what he considered to be the end of all change, the irrevocably last station in his life, she thought was temporary. Apparently she was
full of desires
, which he had neither the will nor the strength to fulfill; she needed an energetic man, an agile one, he wasn’t like that. He told her he was tired because of the movie and the wine, and they went to bed.

Soon after she was lying next to him and started to
busy herself
. He presumed that the kisses were supposed to put him in a compliant mood, and
in fact
a few minutes later she picked up her flag again. “If marrying is so irrelevant to you,” she said, “and so important for me, why won’t you do me the favor?”

“Please don’t start that all over again,” Aron said.

But Irma didn’t stop. She pressured him with a stubbornness he had never noticed in her before; it was almost unbearable, he says. She hardlyformulated any thoughts of her own, she only uttered words and expressions that he had heard or read dozens of times. She was forever playing a role, in his mind a miserable one. Would I perhaps be willing to marry a woman who reproached me for not having understood that the soul of a woman could blossom fully only in marriage? A tirade of sayings: “life as a couple,”“sacrificing the best years of my life,”“to be able to depend on one’s partner for better or for worse,” and more of the same. Several times he asked her to stop, but in vain; in the end all she knew how to do was to start crying. She shouted that he was too cowardly to get married, he was also too cowardly to tell her the real reason for his refusal, he didn’t love her, she didn’t deserve it. Then he said, “Finally we got to the point, I don’t love you.”