The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse (33 page)

This man was now suddenly standing before him and saying in an undertone:

“I heard that you would go away. Could I perhaps be helpful in some kind of way and might I be?”

Graff, with the last of his things to be packed in his hand, looked at his colleague. There was nothing but an evident, friendly sympathy in his good-natured but somewhat simple face.

What did this person know?—and from where? There were people who always knew everything and he looked just like one.

He considered for a moment.

Then he said quickly:

“Yes. If you will be so kind”—he took a bill from his wal-let—”and settle my account with my landlady. She lives there down the hall and I would like to have nothing more to do with her.”

The newcomer disappeared and was soon back, laying down the receipt and the rest of the money. Everything was settled.

They left. Graff, with only a small handbag containing the most necessary things in his hand, led the way; the officers and the stranger followed.

On the stairs the latter gripped his hand with a sympathetic pressure:

“I do know everything,” he whispered softly. “Just don’t lose courage. Everything is not as bad as it seems.”

It was not possible for Graff in this moment to find a word of thanks. He could not even return the pressure of this hand, so soft and boneless did it lie in his.

He said only what just now occurred to him:

“If I may trouble you further, to have my things up there stored with a shipper until—until I return, and may I ask you to keep the receipt until—”

And he continued:

“At the office, too, you could excuse me tomorrow . . . for a time . . . no, probably better, forever.”

Everything was readily promised.

Graff turned once more and asked, looking at him steadily:

“How did you know?”

The answer came with a glance at the two men:

“They were in the office—earlier. You yourself had hardly gone. I hurried over here immediately and arrived just in time.”

And, returning his gaze:

“After all, we must support one another as much as possible—in such a case.”

The officers came between them.

Outside Graff and the two officers climbed into a waiting cab.

Strange—the usually so empty street was all at once no longer so empty. Faces showed at the windows of the house. At the entrance of the neighboring house a couple of women stood and gossiped with curious glances at the men riding off.

9

In Hermann Graff’s memory the time that then came was blotted out. If he tried to remember—but he hardly tried—it failed. Not people and things, but only shadows could he pick out of it. And only one thing did he still know: that many, many hours of many days in a narrow and lightless room he had walked back and forth, from one wall to the other, back and forth, back and forth—from one wall to the other.

From the days, alike in each and everything, only one stood out. It, too, only like an oppressive dream.

Before this day, his thoughts had constantly turned on one point:

I will see him again! It is all only a misunderstanding of these petty and stupid bureaucrats. At the first question it will be cleared up. When asked, Gunther would perhaps say, “Yes, we were fond of one another.” To all the others, however, keep silent, the way he himself had kept silent and would continue to keep silent. For that was the wonder of love: to be one in such an hour, unconquerable, in unshakeable trust! It must take place here too—the great wonder of love!

The day arrived. A gray February day, dull and frosty. A large, almost empty room with many unoccupied benches at this early hour of the morning. Behind a raised table, black figures, with cold, ill-humored or bored faces.

After the opening speeches back and forth, the public was to be excluded. Two old people, a man and a woman who had probably only come here to warm themselves, shuffled out.

Leafing through the files. Bending over here and there.

Then, questions, questions, questions.

Where was he? He did have to come?!

Questions . . . questions . . . questions . . .

He kept silent.

“Accused,
will
you not answer?”

He kept silent.

Finally the door in the background opened and there came in—a guard at his side—came in with forehead lowered, in a gray smock, with dragging steps, his head shaved completely bald and sunk deep onto his breast—came in—

It was—it could not be—he? He—Gunther?!

It was certainly—for God’s sake—not Gunther?!!

He wanted to jump up, go to him, take this lowered face, of which he was able to see nothing, in his hands, and see with his own eyes that he was deceived.

But he remained in his place. A feeling of numbness held him fast in the chair in which he was sitting.

He only stared unremittingly at the small, sunken-in figure.

He stared thus during the whole proceeding. He never took his eye from the one who was standing there (and who was supposed to be Gunther).

Questions . . . questions . . . questions . . .

He himself continued his silence to all of them.

But the one who stood there and never raised his head a single time, nodded. Nodded and nodded. Nodded to everything stupidly. At times, severely rebuked, came a light, almost inaudible “yes” as an answer.

Questions . . . questions—more shameless than anything he had ever heard in the Adonis Lounge from the boy prostitutes there—struck his ear. He did not understand them. He only felt: they were shameless—shameless and absurd.

He did not answer a single one.

But he—the one standing there motionless—nodded to them too! (If he had been asked if his “friend”—oh, this sneering, ambiguous emphasis!—if he had been asked if his friend had tried to murder him, he would have nodded and said “yes”.)

Then came the examination of witnesses.

There was only one witness there—his landlady.

She incriminated the accused more gravely than a hundred others could have done. She stood there in her dark dress, the very bones of morality. Her black eyes sparkled in her pale and haggard face.

She knew everything. She knew about the daily visits in the fall. About the whistles. The secret coming and going. She knew all about Christmas: how the boy had been in his rooms a whole day and two nights. She knew about the troubled conduct of her renter before and after, about his irregular times of returning home. She knew—

“If you don’t want to believe me, I have witnesses. The whole house found fault with this.”

Oh, they believed her. They believed everything and more.

She could take her seat again.

Someone stood up and spoke.

Another stood up and spoke.

Graff heard him speak but heard not a word.

He only stared at the small figure who stood there and still nodded, even now, when he was no longer being questioned; who even now did not look up a single time; who—was supposed to be his Gunther and yet could not possibly be!

Again and again he wanted to dash to him, rouse him:

“Gunther, do wake up! Just think about what you’re doing!

Don’t be afraid of these strange people! I am here, I, your friend, I, Hermann!”

He did not do it.

It was not these barriers, not the idols in robes and judges’ caps that prevented him from doing it.

Something else held him back and hindered him. Something still entirely incomprehensible.

Finally the verdict was pronounced.

The judges, embittered over the stubborn attitude of the accused (who even here never took his eyes off the boy he had sex with); over his evident and complete lack of consciousness of guilt and of remorse; his more than contemptible silence; his declining of any defense; and above all deeply wounded in their consciousness of authority, pronounced it.

Two months.

The boy was led out. As he had come, so he went: his bald head shoved between his slender, sunken shoulders, with dragging steps in his heavy shoes.

The convicted man did not take his eyes from him until the door closed behind him.

Then he looked straight ahead.

Where was he? What did they want from him? What had just happened?

The one who had just now stood there and nodded, always only nodded, who had vanished behind the door—that boy had been a stranger. A strange boy with whom he had never had anything in common, whom he had never known, whom he had never loved—a stranger, an entirely strange boy.

10

And again, there came a time of which he later knew nothing except that, in a narrow room, he had walked back and forth from one wall to another—back and forth, many, many hours of many days, until he became tired. Then he paced again from the beginning, back and forth, until he was so tired that he collapsed onto the iron bed.

What did he think about? Probably nothing.

The guard came and asked. Requests? No, he had no requests. Complaints? He complained about nothing.

A young institutional doctor came, sent to examine the state of mind of this peculiar prisoner.

He came and asked questions. He was looked at in astonishment.

Sick? No, he was not sick. Nothing was the matter with him.

What indeed was supposed to be the matter with him?

The hours passed. The days passed. The weeks. One month. A second.

*

He did not count them—not the days, the weeks, the months.

Only when he was told that the day of his release was near did he seem to wake up.

His thoughts returned. Not to the past—that lay behind him, like something that never was. (It must indeed be dead, what had been.)

They went to the future.

What should he do? Where should he go?

He thought without uneasiness about the future. Only hope makes one uneasy.

*

After the death of his father a year and a half ago now, there had arrived, among the trite condolences of his relatives and his few acquaintances, a curious letter. It came from a distant relative of his mother. He vaguely remembered having seen her once in his childhood, when his mother was still living. The image was vague, as was the memory of his mother herself.

He had almost forgotten the contents of the letter. He remembered only that, in contrast to the others, it was concerned not with one who had died, but rather with him, to whom it was addressed. A passage must have remained in his memory, however, since it now surfaced again (for the first time).

It ran something like this:

“You are now entirely alone in the world. I do not know, dear Hermann, if you have friends who understand you, so entirely and correctly. But if you should ever have need of such a friend, then remember that an old woman, who has reflected on many things, about which most people pass over without a thought”—and so on.

He had not understood these sentences. What should this old woman be to him, of whom he had only heard that she had lived in an unhappy marriage with her husband (a well-known scholar in his field)? What should the friendship of this old woman be to him, which she was proposing?

But he began to see the letter in another light—now, when its ending again occurred to him:

“Come to me whenever you would like to and want to. You are always welcome. Come and hear then what another voice, a voice from the grave, has to say to you through me, when no other voice speaks to you any longer.”

This concluding sentence had sounded all the more to him like something from a novel, and he had answered the letter only briefly, even if not unkindly, without touching on the invitation it contained.

Now he saw it, too, in a different light. What other voice could be meant, but that of her dead husband?

He recalled once more the little bit that he had also heard about him. Veiled allusions (doubly carefully uttered before his child’s ears). Then the significant silence after them.

“In case your path takes you through Munich”—thus had she indeed written. (The address of the suburb and the name of the house were still clear to him.)

Now, when he did want to go out of the country with the rest of his money—to some inexpensive place down there in the south—why should he not take a route through Munich?

Whatever the voice had to say to him—it was at least a voice in this silence around him.

11

Around noon on a day in April he was released.

It was spring again. Almost a year had gone by since he had arrived in Berlin.

But this year’s spring did not, as the previous year’s had done, coax winter away with a sweet smile. Instead it turned up unruly, with cold rain showers and icy winds, and struggled with winter for the new place.

Today, too, it swept unpleasantly through the streets.