Billiards At Half-Past Nine Part 4

As long as German tongue remains,

So long will live that name of names,

Chiseled in stone, in bronze indite.

For you, our hero, hearts beat bright-

Hindenburg! On to the fight!'

Johanna s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper out of the boy's hand, tore it up and threw the bits down into the street. They fell like snowflakes in front of Gretz' shop. No boar was hanging there in those days. The Higher Power reigned supreme.

It won't be enough for you to laugh, Leonore, when they unveil my statue. Spit on it, child-in my son Heinrich's name and for Otto, who was such a fine boy, and good, and because so fine and good, and so obedient, more of a stranger to me than anyone in this world. And spit on me for Edith's sake, the only truly gentle lamb of a person I ever saw. I loved her, mother of my grandchildren, my daughter-in-law, yet I couldn't help her, any more than I could help the carpenter's apprentice, whom I saw only twice, or the youngster I never saw at all who slipped messages from Robert-on bits of paper no bigger than penny candy wrappers-into our letter box, and for that crime was swallowed up in a concentration camp. Robert was always clever and cool and never ironic. Otto was different. He had a heart; yet suddenly he went over to the Beast and grew away from us. Yes, spit on my statue, Leonore, tell them I asked you to; I'll give it to you in writing, if you want, and have it notarized. You should have seen that apprentice; he made me understand the phrase: Angels came and ministered to him; they chopped off his head. You should have seen Edith and her brother, Schrella, whom I saw but once, the time Schrella came across our courtyard on his way up to see Robert. I was standing at my bedroom window and laid eyes on him for only a moment. But that was enough to make me afraid. You could see both disaster and salvation written on his face. Schrella-I never heard his Christian name-was like some holy sheriff, sticking invisible foreclosure notices on people's houses. I knew it might cost my son's life, still I let Schrella go across the courtyard, shoulders bent; the oldest of my two living sons, a gifted boy; Edith's brother foreclosed on him. Edith was different. She was so deep in the Bible she could make fun of it all, in a Biblical way. During the air raids she used to laugh with her children. She gave them Biblical names, Joseph and Ruth. Death held no terrors for her. But she never realized how much I mourned my dead children, Johanna and Heinrich. And she never knew that Otto, the stranger, died, too, the one dearest to me. He loved my studio and my drawings, used to drive with me to the building jobs and drink beer at housewarmings. He was the workmen's pet. He won't be coming to my birthday party tonight, Otto. How many guests have been invited? You can count the clan I founded on one hand: Robert, Joseph, Ruth, Johanna and of course myself. Leonore will sit in Johanna's place. But what shall I say to Joseph when he tells me, with boyish pride, how the reconstruction work at St. Anthony's is getting on? They'll be having a dedication at the end of October. The brothers are hoping to sing the Ma.s.s of the Advent in the new church. These old bones are getting shaky, Leonore. And they have not fed my lambs.

Yes, I ought to have given the receipt back, and broken the red seal and got rid of it; then I wouldn't have to be hanging around here waiting for my granddaughter, that pretty, pretty dark-haired nineteen-year-old. Same age now as Johanna was when I was standing here fifty-one years ago and saw her over there in the roof garden. I could make out the t.i.tle of her book, Love and Intrigue. Could it be my Johanna who still reads Love and Intrigue over there today? Can she really be gone? Might she not still be at lunch with Robert in The Lion? Did I run away from that confidential man-to-man talk among the reserve lieutenants, on the way giving the doorman his indispensable cigar, and come up here merely for the sake of being here? Merely to perch up here from ten-thirty to five? Just to climb upstairs past freshly printed piles of books and diocesan booklets? What were they printing then on Sat.u.r.day afternoons on white paper? Edification, or election posters for all the people committed to the Beast? No matter, the walls quaked, the stairs shook, the women brought out stack after stack of printed matter and piled them up until they reached as far as the studio door. Meanwhile I lay here in the studio, practicing the art of simply being here. I felt myself being pulled along as if by the suck of a dark wind tunnel which would hurl me out toward where I could not tell. I was pulled down into the vortex of a primeval bitterness, saturated with the ancient futility of all things. I saw the children I would have, the wine I would drink, the hospitals and churches I would build. And with it all I heard the sound of the clods of earth that would fall on my coffin, m.u.f.fled drum sounds d.o.g.g.i.ng me. I heard the women singing, the ones who fed the presses, the folders, the packers, some voices bright, others dark, sweet or rough. They were singing a simple song out of happiness for the afternoon break from work in prospect. But to me it sounded like a funeral dirge. It evoked love in the dance hall, poignant moments of ecstasy by the cemetery wall, the gra.s.s smelling of autumn. In it I divined the joys of young motherhood presaging the tears of mothers grown old, and the melancholy of the orphan home, where a brave young girl resolved on staying pure. Yet the selfsame fate would befall her, too, in the dance hall, poignant ecstasy by the cemetery wall, the gra.s.s smelling of autumn. The women sang on, their voices like a well-wheel always dipping into the same even water. They were singing a dirge for me, while clods of earth tumbled onto my coffin. From under lowered lids I looked at the walls of my studio, which I'd tapestried with drawings. Majestic, in the center, the pinkish photocopy, scale 1:200, of St. Anthony's Abbey. In the foreground the hamlet of Stehlinger's Grotto, with grazing cows, a freshly dug potato field, with smoke rising from a fire of burning vines. And then, in powerful basilican style, the Abbey itself, which I'd boldly modeled after the Romanesque cathedrals, with the cloister low, severe and somber, cells, refectory and library, figure of St. Anthony in the center of the cloister garth. Set off against the cloister the big quadrangle of farm buildings, granaries, barns, coach houses, own grist mill with bakery, a pretty residence for the steward, whose job it was also to take care of the visitors on pilgrimage. And there, under high trees, simple tables and chairs at which to eat a meal, with dry wine, cider or beer, before setting out on the journey back. On the horizon, another hamlet, Goerlinger's Place, was sketched in, with chapel, cemetery, four farms, grazing cows, and, to the right, rows of poplars marking the boundary of the tilled land where the working brothers would tend the vineyards, where cabbages and potatoes, vegetables and grain would grow, and where from the beehives delicious honey would be taken.

Delivered twenty minutes ago, against receipt: one design, with detailed drawings and a complete breakdown of costs. The numbers and positions had been marked in with a fine pen. I gazed at the plan as if the buildings were really there, as if I were seeing them through a window. There they were, the brothers, bent in toil, and the pilgrims, drinking cider. Meanwhile, down below, the women sang their dirge, longing for the time to quit work, voices bright and voices dark. I shut my eyes and sensed the cold that would close in around me fifty years later, by then a man of established position, surrounded by the swarm of life.

These four and a half weeks had been endlessly long. What I had done during that time had been like so much dreamwork foreordained. Now only the morning Ma.s.s remained, and the hours between ten-thirty and five. I longed for something unexpected, the kind of break that had come my way in the form of a brief smile and a 'Good luck, Herr Faehmel.' When I closed my eyes again time divided into bands like a spectrum: past, present, future. In fifty years my oldest grandson would be twenty-five and my sons as old as the solid citizens into whose hands I just delivered myself together with my design. I felt for the receipt. I had it, it was truly there. Tomorrow morning the jury would a.s.semble, and realize the situation had changed. Now there was a fourth plan to take into account. Already factions had been formed. Two for Grumpeter, two for Brehmockel and one, the youngest, smallest and yet most important of the five, the Abbot, for Wollersein. The Abbot liked Romanesque. The going would get hot, since the two most corruptible jury members would bear down hardest on the artistic angle. Adjournment. That young upstart has sabotaged our scheme. Now it had dawned on them, to their dismay, that the Abbot obviously liked my design. Again and again he had stood in front of the drawing, sipping at his wine. It was a total organic unity, fitted to the landscape, and the utilitarian quality of the farm-building close stood out clearly in contrast to the severe quadrangle of cloister and cloister garth. Fountain, pilgrim's hostel, he liked all of it. He smiled. In such a place he would feel first among equals. He was already seeing himself moving about in the plan, as if it were his own property, presiding in the refectory, sitting in the chancel, visiting the sick brothers, going over to the steward's to taste the wine, to let the grain trickle through his fingers. Bread for his religious and for the poor, from grain harvested in his own fields. Yes, there, as an afterthought, the young architect had added a little room for the beggars, right by the door, with benches outside for summer, inside for winter a table and stove. 'Gentlemen, there's no doubt in my mind. I vote without reservation for the what's his name? ... for the Faehmel design. And look at the cost, three hundred thousand marks less than the least expensive of the other three.' Dried sealing wax scattered in bits on the table, whereon the experts now banged their fists, initiating a great palaver. 'You've got to believe us, Father, they underestimate all the time. What will you do when he comes to us four weeks before the dedication and says he's run out of green stuff. In a project like this it's common to run over the estimate by half a million marks. Take our word on it, we've had plenty of experience. And what bank will go hock for a young man like him, absolutely unknown, no experience? What collateral has he got to show?' A great burst of laughter now beat on the young Abbot. 'Resources, according to his own declaration: eight thousand marks.' More palaver. The gentlemen took angry leave of each other. Not one had come to the Abbot's support. The hearing was adjourned for four weeks. Who had given the benefit of the deciding vote, per the statute, to this young country fellow with the close-cropped head? So that if a decision was made on the spot, rather than postponed for further reflection, it would have to be for him? And could not be against him?

Now the phones began to ring, perspiring messengers raced with special-delivery letters from Prime Minister to Archbishop, from Archbishop to the Theological Seminary, where the trusted consultant of the archiepiscopal see was all for Neo-Gothic. This gentleman, face lobster red, rushed to his waiting coach. Hooves clattered away over the cobblestones, wheels screeched around sharp curves. Now, tell me what's up? Faehmel? Never heard of him. His plan? Technically brilliant. And his estimates, Excellency, you've got to admit, convincing as far as we can see. But the style! Horrible! Over my dead body. Dead body? The Archbishop smiled. Artistic temperament, the professor, fiery fellow, too much feeling, too many flowing white locks. Dead body? Well, I wouldn't go quite that far.

Now inquiries in code flew from Grumpeter to Brehmockel, from Brehmockel to Wollersein. For a few days the celebrities, ordinarily sworn enemies, were as one. In cipher and cryptic phone calls they asked each other: 'Can cauliflower be had?' Which meant: 'Are abbots venal?' The crushing answer: 'Cauliflower cannot be had.'

For four and a half weeks I had buried myself from sight. How peaceful my grave. Slowly the earth slid down, fitted itself nicely round and over me. Bemused by the chant of the women at work, it was better simply to do nothing. But now, when they opened my grave, lifted my coffin lid, I would act, I would have to act. I would be flung back into time, where every day would have a name and every hour a duty. Then the game would be played for keeps. No more getting my pea soup in my little kitchen at two o'clock. Even now I had quit bothering to warm it and was eating it cold. I had never cared much about food, or money or fame for that matter. I loved the game. I liked my cigar and longed for a wife, my wife. Would it be the one I saw over there in the roof garden, dark-haired, slender, pretty? Johanna Kilb? Tomorrow she would know my name. Was I longing for just anyone, or just for her? I had had my fill and more of nothing but men's company. They had all come to seem absurd to me, the good fellows and the bad, the ones who told the dirty jokes and the ones who listened to them. Billiard players, reserve lieutenants, singers, doormen and waiters-I was sick of them all. And when, around five or six in late afternoon, I had a chance to look into the women's faces as they streamed out past me from work through the print-shop door, I was glad. I loved the sensuousness in their faces, ever putting them into debt to their mortality. I would have liked to take one of them out dancing and have lain with her in fragrant autumn gra.s.s by the cemetery wall, my receipt torn up, the great game abandoned. These girls laughed and sang, liked to eat and drink. They could weep real tears, unlike the false she-goats who had tried to entice me, when I'd been a gentleman-lodger, into intimacies they fancied were daring. But on this last day the routines and the properties of the play still belonged to me, the supporting actors were still subject to my command. I had no hankering for cold pea soup and was too lazy to warm it. I wanted to play it out to the very end, the game I'd planned on dull afternoons in provincial towns, after I'd had my fill of examining mortar, pa.s.sing expert judgment on stone, trueing up walls. Choosing the boredom of gloomy taverns in preference to the boredom of the office, there I began to sketch the Abbey on odd slips of paper.

From then on I was never free of the game. The drawings became bigger, my ideas more precise. Then, almost without noticing it, I suddenly found myself in the midst of the estimates. Calculation learned, drawing learned. If you please. I sent thirty gold marks to Kilb and the terms of the compet.i.tion in due course were sent to me. One Sunday afternoon I paid a visit to Kisslingen. Flourishing fields of wheat, dark green beetfields and a forest where, one day, the Abbey would stand. I persisted in the game, studied my compet.i.tors, Brehmockel, Grumpeter, Wollersein, whose names were mentioned by their fellow-architects with respectful hatred. I inspected their buildings, churches, hospitals, chapels, Wollersein's cathedral, and I sensed, I could smell it in those cheerless structures, that the future was mine for the taking, like a country waiting to be conquered. Terra incognita where gold lay buried, ready to be dug up by anyone who took the trouble to work out a little strategy. I held the future in the palm of my hand. All I had to do was close my fist around it. I suddenly saw time as a force that was being allowed to go by the board by default, while for a pittance I was letting bunglers and hypocrites exploit the skill in my hands and the mathematics in my brain. I bought paper, pencils, tables, handbooks. It was all a game, and it would cost me nothing but time. Meanwhile time was there for the asking. Sundays were days to reconnoitre, to look over the terrain, explore the streets. Modest Street: in No. 7, there was a studio for rent; across the street, in No. 8, there was the office of the attorney who'd keep the compet.i.tion entries in his safe. The frontiers were wide open. All I had to do was march in. And not until now, when I was already deep inside the country and half in possession of it with the enemy still asleep, had I made my declaration of war. I looked for the receipt again. Still there.

The day after tomorrow the first visitor was to cross my studio threshold; the Abbot, young, brown-eyed and levelheaded, not yet fully mature, but born to lead. 'How did you know that our Holy Father Benedict never intended that working brothers and contemplatives should be kept apart in the refectory?' He walked up and down, looking at the design again and again, and asked, 'Do you think you'll hold on to the end? You're sure you won't break down and prove those carpers right?' And, true enough, I was frightened by the challenge of my own design. It threatened to overwhelm me. I'd played the game, but never quite realized I might actually win. The mere reputation of having stood up to Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein, even if I had never won, would have been good enough for me. But actually to come out on top! I was panicky, but I said, 'Yes, I'll stick it out, Your Reverence.' He nodded, smiled and left.

About five I joined the throng of printery workers going home through the big gate, and went for my evening stroll, all according to plan. I saw veiled beauties on their way to rendezvous in carriages, lieutenants in the Cafe Fuhl drinking hard liquor to soft music. Every day I walked four kilometers, in one hour, always the same way at the same time. I meant to be seen, and seen at the same place at the same time, always. Shopgirls, bankers and jewelers, wh.o.r.es and cab drivers, store clerks, waiters and housewives, I intended that they should see me, and they did, from five to six, cigar in my mouth. Impudent, I know, but I'm an artist, pledged to nonconformity. A man like me is permitted to stand and listen to the organ-grinder, and make capital of the melancholy of the hours when work lets out. Permitted to frequent dream streets in the city of dreams. My supporting players had well-oiled joints. They were moved about by invisible threads, they opened their mouths when I cued them. Cold melody of billiard b.a.l.l.s in the Prince Heinrich, white-green, red-green. Manikins were crooking their arms to stroke with the cue, to guide gla.s.ses of beer to their mouths, chalk up points, play runs, and amiably clap me on the shoulder, and say, Oh yes, Oh no, brilliant, bad luck. As the case might be. Meanwhile I could hear the sound of clods of earth falling on my coffin. Already Edith's dying scream was lying in wait for me, and waiting, too, the blond carpenter's boy's last look at the prison walls, in the gray of dawn.

I drove with my wife and children out to the Kissa Valley, proudly showed them the work of my youth, visited the Abbot, grown older now, in his face detected the wear and tear of the years I could not see in my own. Coffee in the guest room, cakes baked with the brothers' own flour, plums they had picked themselves, and cream from their own cows. My sons were allowed to walk through the cloister while my wife and her giggling daughters had to wait outside. Four sons, three daughters, seven children who were to present me with seven times seven grandchildren. The Abbot smiled at me: 'What's more, we're more or less neighbors now.' Yes, I had bought the two farmsteads, Stehlinger's Grotto and Goerlinger's Place.

"What, Leonore, the Cafe Kroner again? No, I explicitly told them, no champagne. I hate champagne. Now, quit for the day, child, please. And will you order me a taxi, for two o'clock? It can wait down there by the big door and perhaps I can take you a little way. No, I'm not going through Blessenfeld. Yes, we can clean up that much more, if you want to."

He turned away from the kaleidoscopic window and glanced into the studio, where the great St. Anthony design was still hanging on the wall. The air was full of dust, raised, careful as she was, by the young woman's busy hands. a.s.siduously she was cleaning out the steel cabinets, now holding out to him a stack of banknotes which had become valueless thirty years ago, now, shaking her head, bringing out another package of bills grown worthless ten years back, and counting out the unfamiliar things, carefully, onto the drawing board: ten, twenty, eighty, a hundred-all told twelve hundred and twenty marks.

"Into the fire with them, Leonore. Or give them to the kids in the street. What good are they. Nothing but jumbo receipts for the swindle that started thirty-five years ago and cropped up again twenty-five years later. Money's never meant much to me, yet they all thought I was greedy for it. They were way off the mark there. When I started to play the big game it wasn't money I was after. And it wasn't until I'd made money and therefore become popular that it dawned on me I'd had the makings of popularity all along. I was efficient, friendly and simple, an artist and a reserve officer. I'd arrived, I was rich and yet was still the 'young man who'd come up from nothing,' something which I never denied. Yet it wasn't for money or fame that I worked out an algebra of the future and turned X, Y and Z into farmhouses, bank accounts, power. Which I gave away again and again, only to have them come back to me twofold. A slight and smiling David, I never lost, never gained a pound. My 1897 lieutenant's uniform would fit me even today. No matter, the unpredictable that I longed for came to pa.s.s, and when it came, it hit me hard: my wife's love and my daughter Johanna's death. She was a real Kilb, a year and a half old when she went. I looked into her child's eyes, as into my silent father's eyes. I saw age-old wisdom in their dark depths, which already seemed to know death. Scarlet fever blossomed out on her body like a frightful weed, spread to the hips, ran down to the feet. Fever seethed in her and death grew in her, white as snow, grew like a mould beneath the bloom of red, grew, and burst forth black at the nostrils. The unpredictable I'd yearned for came, and came like a curse and lay in wait in that dreadful house. Now dissension arose, fierce arguments with the pastor at St. Severin's, with my in-laws, my brothersand sisters-in-law, because I forbade all singing at the Requiem Ma.s.s. No matter, I wouldn't give in, I had my way. But I was filled with fear when I heard Johanna whispering 'Christ' during the Requiem."

I never uttered the name of Christ, and hardly dared think it, even though I knew all the time it had me in its power. Nothing had been able to kill the Word in me, the word 'Christ' that Johanna whispered. Not Domgreve's rosary, nor the sour virtues of husband-hunting landlords' daughters had been able to do it. Nor the trade in sixteenth-century confessionals, sold at private auctions for exorbitant prices, the profit from which Domgreve spent in Locarno on cheap sins. Nor yet the dismal moral failures of hypocritical priests-I myself had seen how they meanly seduced fallen girls. Not even my father's unspoken hardness had been able to do it, not even endless pa.s.sages through wind tunnels of primeval bitterness and futility when, on the future's icy seas, loneliness around me like a great lifebelt, I drew strength from my laugh. The Word lived on. I was David, the little man with the sling, and Daniel, the little man in the lion's den, and I was ready to accept the unpredictability I had longed for: Johanna's death on September 3, 1910. That day, too, the Uhlans rode over the cobbles. Milkmaids, baker boys, clerics with fluttering robes, all was as usual that morning, and the boar hung as usual in front of Gretz' shop. The shabby melancholy of the family doctor who'd been issuing birth and death certificates to the Kilbs for forty years, all as usual. There it was as always, the scuffed leather bag, in it the instruments he used to disguise his futility. He drew the covers up over the disfigured body, but I drew them down again. I wanted to see how Lazarus had looked, and to see the eyes so like my father's, eyes which the child had wanted to keep for only a year and a half. In the next bedroom Heinrich was crying. The bells of St. Severin's shattered time into shards as it tolled for nine o'clock Ma.s.s. Had she lived, little Johanna would now have been fifty years old.

"War bonds, Leonore? I didn't buy them. They were left to me by my father-in-law. Throw them into the fire along with the banknotes. Two medals? Yes, of course, I built siege trenches, I bored tunnels, set up artillery emplacements, faced barrages, dragged the wounded out of the field of fire. Second-cla.s.s, first-cla.s.s, bring them here, Leonore, let's have them. We'll throw them into the roof gutter. Let the muck in the gutter bury them. Otto found them once when he was rummaging around in the cabinets while I was at my drawing board. I saw the fateful gleam in his eyes too late. He'd seen them, and the respect he felt for me took on added dimension. Too late. But at least let's get rid of them now, so Joseph won't find them some day among the things I'll leave behind."

Only a faint tinkle as he let the medals slide down the sloping roof. The medals tipped over as they fell from the roof into the gutter, and lay with their dull side uppermost.

"Why so shocked, child? They're mine, and I can do what I want with them. Too late, and yet maybe not entirely. Let's hope it'll rain soon and the dirt will be washed down off the roof. A belated salute to my father's memory. Down with the honor of our fathers and our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers."

I felt strong enough for the task, though I was not. I read the algebra of the future in my formulas, which resolved themselves into forms. Abbots and archbishops, generals and waiters, all belonged to my cast, my team, all played on my side. I alone was the featured player, even when, Friday evenings with the choir at the Germania Glee Club, I was singing: 'What glitters there in forest sun?' I sang it well, I had learned it from Father. But suppressed laughter lurked in my baritone phrasings. The conductor, as he beat time with his baton, never suspected he was obeying my baton. Meanwhile I was invited to social functions of an obligatory nature, offered a.s.signments, laughingly slapped on the back. 'Sociability, young fellow, it's the spice of life.' Gray-haired members of the club sourly inquired about my background and my prospects. But all I did was sing, from seven-thirty to ten, and not a minute longer. The legend had to be ready before the scandal broke. Cauliflower cannot be had.

I roamed in thought up the Kissa Valley with my wife and children, and imagined how the youngsters would try to catch trout. We would stroll through vineyards and fields of wheat, through beetfields and patches of wooded land, drink beer and lemonade at Denklingen station. Yet in fact I knew I had handed in my design and received the receipt only an hour before. Loneliness still held me round like a giant lifebelt. I was still swimming in a sea of time, sinking with the swell into troughs, crossing oceans of past and present, pressing on, aways saved from going down by my solitude. Into the future's icy cold I went, taking my laughter with me for iron rations, subsistence which I partook of only sparingly. Coming out of this reverie, I rubbed my eyes, drank a gla.s.s of water, ate a slice of bread and walked to the window, with my cigar. And there she was, strolling in the roof garden, visible every so often through a gap in the pergola as she looked down over the ledge to the street, where she saw what I was seeing, too: apprentices, trucks, nuns, life in the thoroughfare. She was twenty, her name was Johanna and she was reading Love and Intrigue. I knew her father, the Glee Club's booming ba.s.s. His voice to me did not seem to go with his office air of dignity, it lacked the ring of discretion which was drummed into the apprentices. It was a voice that had in it the timbre of secret sins, the kind that give you the creeps. Was he already aware that I wanted to marry his only daughter? That we were exchanging a smile now and then on quiet afternoons? That I was already thinking ardent thoughts about her, as if we were legitimately engaged? She was pale, her hair was dark. I would have her wear dresses of willow green. Green would suit her well. I'd already picked out frocks and hats for her in Hermine Horuschka's shop window during my afternoon walks, when, come rain, wind or sun, I pa.s.sed the place at twenty to five. I would set her free from conventionality, the properness that was lacking in her father's voice. I'd buy her marvelous hats, large as cartwheels, made of rough green straw. I had no desire to be her lord and master. I wanted to love her and I would not wait much longer. Some Sunday morning, armed with flowers, I would drive up in a carriage around half-past eleven, when they had finished eating breakfast after High Ma.s.s and were drinking brandy in the smoking room. I've come to ask for your daughter's hand. Every afternoon, I let her see me, here at the studio window. I bowed, we exchanged a smile and I moved back again into shadow. And then moved forward again a little, to let her know she was still being watched. I couldn't bring myself to lurk up here like a spider in his net. I couldn't bear to see her without her seeing me; there were some things you just didn't do.

The next morning she would know who I was. Scandal. She would laugh, and a year later she'd be brushing dried mortar from my pants legs. She would still be doing it when I was forty, fifty, sixty. She would be a charming old lady at my side. I finally made my decision on September 30, 1907, at three-thirty in the afternoon.

"Yes, Leonore, pay it for me. Take the money out of the cash box over there, and give the girl two marks for herself, yes, two marks. A pullover and skirt from Hermine Horuschka for my granddaughter Ruth, expecting her back today. Green suits her well. What a pity girls today don't wear hats, I've always got such a kick out of buying hats. You've called for the taxi? Thank you, Leonore. Aren't you ready to quit yet? Well, whenever you want. Of course it's curiosity, too, a little, isn't it? Don't blush. Yes, I'd like another coffee. I should have found out when the holidays ended. But is Ruth back, do you think? My son hasn't said anything? He won't have forgotten the invitation to my birthday party, will he? I've left orders for the doorman downstairs to take flowers and telegrams, presents and cards, tip all the messengers two marks apiece and say I've left town. Pick out the prettiest bunch or two for yourself and take them home with you. And if you'd like, you're welcome to spend the afternoon here."

This time the freshly filled cup of coffee did not tremble. Apparently they had stopped printing edification or election posters on white paper. In the kaleidoscope the scene was as always. Kilb's roof garden across the way was deserted. The nasturtiums on the pergola were drooping. Outline of rooftops, with mountains in the background and, above, a brilliant sky. In this same kaleidoscope I saw my wife, later my children, and my parents-in-law, when, now and then, I went up to the studio, to peer over the shoulders of my hard-working young architectural a.s.sistants, to check their calculations, set their deadlines. Actual work meant no more to me than art. Others could do it just as well as I could, and I paid them well for it. I could never understand the fanatics who sacrificed themselves to what they called "art." I did what I could for them, gave them work, but as for understanding them, I never could. Though I pa.s.sed for an artist, and was admired as such, craftsmanship was all I knew. That villa I built for Gralduke, was it not daring, modern? It was, all right. Even my artistic colleagues admired and praised it. Yet I'd designed and built it without being conscious of art at all. Maybe they took it all too seriously because they knew so much about it. Yes they built horrible boxes which I knew, the minute I laid eyes on them, would be eyesores ten years later. Then every once in a while I'd roll up my sleeves and stand here in front of my drawing board and design an administration building for some public welfare society or other and make it so welfarish and public that I astonished the fools who took me for a money-grubbing, success-crazy hayseed. Why, even today I'm not ashamed of that administration building. Is that art? Perhaps I created the thing without knowing just what I was doing. Anyway, I never could take the word "art" seriously, any more than I did my three celebrated compet.i.tors, when they got so angry with me. Good G.o.d, why not make a little game of it? Do the Goliaths of the world always have to be so humorless? Well, they believed in art, and I didn't, and they felt their honor had been smirched by an upstart. As far as that goes, we all have to make a start somewhere, don't we? I just laughed in their faces. I'd jockeyed them into a position where I'd win even if I lost, and if I won, my victory would be a triumph.

I almost felt sorry for them as we climbed the museum steps. I made sure I walked in the ceremonial way to which these touchy gentlemen had been so long accustomed. It was the way you walked when you went up cathedral steps behind queens and bishops, the pace at which monuments are unveiled, a measured intensity, not too slow, not too fast, fraught with a self-conscious dignity that just naturally wasn't in me. If I'd had my way, I'd have raced up the stone steps like a puppy, past the statues of Roman legionaries, with their broken fasces, their swords and lances that might have been so many torches, past the statues of Caesars and the facsimiles of Roman children's graves, to the first floor and the committee room, between the Low Countries and the Nazarene exhibits. All bourgeois gravity. There should have been a ruffle of drums somewhere in the background. Altar steps and scaffold steps were climbed that way, and tribunal steps, when you're about to have a medal hung around your neck, or your death sentence p.r.o.nounced. An amateur theatrical idea of ceremonial solemnity. But the gentlemen walking with me were no amateurs, not Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein.

Museum attendants in full-dress uniform were standing self-consciously in front of the Rembrandts, the Van Dycks and Overbecks. And at the marble bal.u.s.trade, in the darkness of the hallway before the committee room, there stood Meeser, holding the silver tray with gla.s.ses of cognac ready to pour us a drink before we were told the jury's verdict. Meeser grinned at me. We hadn't agreed on any sign, but mightn't he do a little something along this line for me now? A nod, a shake of the head? Yes or no? But nothing was forthcoming. Brehmockel was whispering to Wollersein and Grumpeter had got to talking with Meeser. Now he pressed a silver coin into Meeser's thick hand, a hand which I'd hated even as a child. I'd served early Ma.s.s with him for a year. With him I'd listened to the mutterings of old peasant women in the background, stubbornly praying over their rosaries in response to the liturgy. Smell of hay, milk and stable warmth, while Meeser and I bowed our heads in unison, allowing the guilt of unspoken sins to beat at our b.r.e.a.s.t.s during the mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. And when the priest mounted the altar steps, Meeser's hand, the same hand now tightly clutching Wollersein's silver coin, would make an obscene gesture. And into this same hand were now entrusted the keys to the city museum, to Holbein and Hals, Lochner and Leibl.

None of them said a word to me. They left me leaning on the bal.u.s.trade, left me to the cold marble. I looked down into the inner courtyard where a bronze burgomaster, inflexibly self-important, held out his belly to the centuries, where a marble Maecenas held eyelids lowered over froggy eyes, in a vain attempt to appear profound. Empty the statues' eyes like the eyes of marble-cold Roman women whose voyeurist parties reflected the pa.s.sions of a dying culture. Meeser shuffled over to his friends, Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein, the three standing together in a huddle. The December sky was clear and cold above the courtyard. Outside, early evening drunks were bawling at each other, cabs were rolling toward the theaters, behind mignonette-green veils, gentle-faced women were looking forward to La Traviata. I stood there like a leper whose touch spells death, between Meeser and the three offended gentlemen, longing for my strict daily routine, where I alone was puppeteer, and alone decided what should exist, what should not, and the while propagated my legend. Here I was no longer running the show. Now all was becoming scandal, rumor. An abbot in my studio. Building contractors sending me hampers of food, gold watches in red velvet cases. One writing to me: '... and rest a.s.sured I would not refuse you my daughter's hand.' Their right hand is full of bribes.

I would accept none of these things, not as much as a single brick. I like the Abbot very much. Had I really, just for a fleeting instant, thought of using Domgreve's trick on him? I went red with shame at the very thought, for toying with the idea even for a second. I loved Kilb's daughter, Johanna, and I loved the Abbot. By rights I should have taken a cab to Johanna's house, got there about eleven-thirty, presented my bouquet of flowers and said, 'I've come to ask for your daughter's hand.' In which case Johanna would have come out and joined us, her eyes twinkling, and not merely breathing her yes of consent, but saying it right out. I was still taking my walk from five till six, still singing Fridays at the Glee Club, still playing billiards in the Reserve Officers Club, though the twinkle in Johanna's eyes (as I imagined it) encouraged me to draw more recklessly on my stores of laughter.

Slowly I slid along the cold marble bal.u.s.trade toward the three offended ones, and put my empty cognac gla.s.s back on the tray. Would they retreat from the leper? They did not give way before me. Were they expecting some sort of humble gambit on my part? 'May I introduce myself? I'm Faehmel.' Good G.o.d, didn't everyone have to make a start somewhere? Hadn't Grumpeter, as a young Swiss, milked cows for the Count of Telm and spread cow manure over the fragrant earth, before he discovered his architectural vocation? Leprosy, too, was curable, curable on the sh.o.r.es of Lago Maggiore, in the Monusio Gardens. Even the leprosy of respectable building contractors, was it not curable? Contractors who bought up Romanesque churches to tear down for salvage, together with their respective contents, their pews and ancient madonnas, and who then, with these same respective contents, decorated the salons of the newly rich and the landed gentry; who sold confessional boxes in which humble peasants had whispered their sins for three hundred years for use in a wh.o.r.e's parlor. In hunting lodges, in Bad Ems, leprosy was indeed curable.

The deadly earnest faces of the offended ones stiffened as the committee-room door opened. An indistinct dark form took on shape and color. Members of the jury were stepping into the hall. Hubrich, professor of the history of art at the Theological Faculty. Only over my dead body. In this light, and in his black robe, he looked like a city councillor in a Rembrandt painting. Hubrich went to the tray, took a gla.s.s of cognac. I heard him heave a heavy sigh. Sweeping past the three offended gentlemen, who tried to crowd up to him, he moved away toward the end of the hall. The severity of his priestly garb was tempered by a white scarf. The blond locks falling like a child's over his collar heightened the impression which Hubrich deliberately tried to create. That is, of looking like an artist. He could be imagined with his wood-carver's burin bent over a block of wood, or with a delicate paintbrush dipped in gilt, humbly at work painting the hair of a madonna, or prophets' beards, or adding a droll twist to the tail of Tobias' little doggy. Softly Hubrich's feet glided over the linoleum. Wearily he nodded to the three offended ones, and then proceeded through the gloom of the hall toward Rembrandt and Van Dyck. On these narrow shoulders rested the responsibility for churches, hospitals and homes in which for many centuries to come nuns and widows, orphans and charity patients, fallen women and the mentally defective would all have to suffer the kitchen stink of generations long gone. Gloomy halls and cheerless facades which heavy mosaics made even more cheerless than the architect's design had contemplated. There he went, the preceptor and arbiter architecturae ecclesiasticae, a man who, with pathetic zeal and the conceit of blind conviction, had been pleading the cause of Neo-Gothic for forty years. When still a schoolboy, trotting home through the desolate suburbs of his industrial home town, taking with him his schoolboy honors, and en route observing the smoking chimney stacks and the blackened house fronts, he must have made up his mind then and there to make people happy, and leave a mark behind on this earth. This he would do, a reddish mark, of brick facades growing ever sadder with the pa.s.sage of the years, in their niches morose saints staring at the future with implacable dejection.

Meeser was dutifully holding out the tray now to the second member of the jury, cognac for Krohl. Jovial, claret-colored face. A cigar-smoker. Meat-gorger who'd stayed slim. Irreplaceable master builder of St. Severin's. Pigeon droppings, engine steam, chemically poisoned clouds from the eastern suburbs, biting wet winds from the western suburbs, southern sun, northern cold, all natural and industrial atmospheric forces guaranteed him and his successors a lifetime in office. Being forty-five years old, he still had twenty more years for the things he really loved: eating, drinking, cigars, horses and women, the special kind you run into near stables, or on fox hunts-hard-limbed Amazons with a mannish smell. I had studied my adversary. Krohl hid his absolute indifference toward architectural problems behind an exquisite, almost Chinese politeness, an air of piety picked up from bishops. Krohl's movements brought to mind memorial dedications. He also knew a couple of very good jokes, which he gave different inflections, always in a certain order of succession. And since he had learned Handke's Handbook of Architecture by heart as a twenty-two-year-old, and at that time decided to make the most of this effort the rest of his life, when he needed a few architectural references he always cited 'the immortal Handke.' At plan-judging sessions he pleaded shamelessly for the project whose author had given him the biggest bribe, but switched to the favorite as soon as he saw his man had no chance. For he preferred saying 'Ja' to 'Nein,' on the grounds that a Ja has only two letters whereas a Nein has four, and beyond this the terrific disadvantage of not being p.r.o.nounceable with tongue and palate alone, but of requiring a displacement backward almost to the roots of the nose. Moreover, a Nein had to be uttered with an expression of firmness, whereas a Ja required no such effort. So then, Krohl sighed, too, and likewise shook his head, avoided the three aggrieved ones, and went to the corner of the corridor where the Nazarenes were.

For a second only the table with the green felt top was visible in the rectangle of light made by the frame of the door, and on it a carafe, ash trays and clouds of blue smoke from Krohl's cigar above. Stillness within, not even a whisper audible. Death sentences hung in the air. For Hubrich it was a question of honor or shame, and the latter he had vowed as a dogged fifth-former never to have come on his head. A question of the dreadful humiliation of having to admit to the Archbishop that he had failed. 'Well, how about the corpse, Hubrich?' that humorous prince of the church would say. 'Where shall we bury you?' As for Krohl, for him it was a matter of a villa on Lake Como promised to him by Brehmockel.

A murmur arose among the rows of attendants and Meeser hissed for silence. Schwebringer came out the door, a small man, as slightly built as myself, and not only supposed to be incorruptible, but actually so. He had on threadbare breeches, darned stockings. His close-cropped head was darkish, a smile in his Corinthian eyes. Schwebringer represented Money; he controlled the funds which had built the Nation. He stood for the industrialists and the king, also for the shopkeeper's a.s.sistant who had contributed a ten-pfennig piece and the little old lady who had given thirty pfennigs. Schwebringer would make credit available, check over the bills, with a sour look on his face okay advances. He was a convert and the baroque was his secret architectural pa.s.sion. He loved hovering angels, gilded choir stalls, curved prayer stools, whitely lacquered pulpits, incense and the singing of boy choirs. Schwebringer was power. Bank syndicates belonged to him as surely as the railroad crossing gate to its tender. He regulated rates of exchange, ran steel mills. With his hard, dark Corinthian eyes he looked as if he had tried all the laxatives on the market without finding one that worked, as if he were waiting for someone to come along and invent a true and really helpful means of jarring his bowels loose. He took the cognac without leaving a tip on the tray. There he stood, only a couple of steps away, for all the world like a professional cyclist down on his luck, with his breeches, his darned stockings. Then suddenly he glanced my way, smiled, put down his empty cognac gla.s.s, and went to the Dutch corner, whither Hubrich had also vanished. Nor did he, Schwebringer, deign to say a word to the three aggrieved ones.

Whispering became audible in the committee room; the Abbot was evidently talking to Gralduke. But only the green-topped table, the ash trays, the carafe were visible. Conflict hung in the air. The panel of judges seemed to be still at odds.

Gralduke came out, took two gla.s.ses from Meeser's tray, stood there hesitantly a second and looked in Krohl's direction. Gralduke was large, of powerful build, correct in manner, as one might have told from the bags under his eyes. Gralduke represented the Law. He kept watch over the juristic correctness of the judgmental proceedings, took charge of protocol. Gralduke had almost become a monk. For two years he had sung Gregorian liturgies and still liked them. But he had returned to the world to marry a girl who was as pretty as a picture, by whom he had five daughters, all pretty as pictures. Now he lorded it as provincial governor. He had had preserves of land established, fields, meadows and woodlots released, in laborious detail, from land registry office complications, and had had to disenc.u.mber miserable little ponds of special fishing rights, realize on mortgages, set banks and insurance people's minds at rest.

Slowly the meeting in the committee room resumed. A wave of the Abbot's slender hand commanded Meeser's presence, whereupon Meeser disappeared for half a minute, reappeared, raised his voice and called down the corridor, 'I'm instructed to tell the gentlemen of the panel that the recess is over.' First to come from the Dutch corner was Schwebringer, all by himself. Quickly he went into the room. Hubrich was the last, looking pale, stricken to death, shaking his head as he went by the three aggrieved ones. Meeser shut the door after him, looked at his tray, at the freshly emptied cognac gla.s.ses, scornfully jingled his poor take in tips. I went up to him and threw him a thaler on the tray. It rang hard and loud and the three aggrieved ones looked up with a start. Meeser grinned, put his finger to his cap in thanks and whispered, 'And you're only a s.e.xton's son, and he off his rocker at that!'

For a long time now there had been no sound of hackney carriages going by. La Traviata had started. The attendants, forming a lane, stood stiffly by, amid legionaries and matrons, and broken temple columns. An uproar broke like a wave of heat into the cold evening. Newspapermen had run by the first attendant and already the second was helplessly raising an arm, while the third looked toward Meeser, who was hissing a command to be quiet. A young reporter who had whisked past Meeser came up to me, wiped his nose on his sleeve and said, 'All yours! It's in the bag!' Two dignified art magazine editors, bearded, black-hatted and all hollowed out by the pathos of soulful verse, waited in the background and held the less worthy ma.s.ses in check, that is, a bespectacled girl and a haggard socialist. Until the Abbot quickly opened the door, came to me breathlessly like a young man, put his arms around me, while a voice cried, 'Faehmel, Faehmel!'

Noise from below could be heard in the office. Ten minutes after the window ledge had stopped trembling, laughing working girls left through the big gate, bearing proud sensuousness into the evening hours of after-work. Into the warm fall day, with the gra.s.s by the cemetery wall sweetly smelling. Today Gretz had not sold his wild boar, dark and dry its b.l.o.o.d.y snout. Over there, kaleidoscopically framed, the roof garden: the white table, the green wooden bench, the pergola with the tired nasturtiums. Would Joseph's children, Ruth's children, come and go there, reading Love and Intrigue? Had he ever seen Robert over there, ever? Never. That one either stuck in his room working or practiced in the garden. A roof garden was too small for his kind of sport: rounders, the hundred-meter dash.

I was always a little afraid of him, always looking for the unexpected with him, and I wasn't even surprised when the man with the sloping shoulders came to pick him up. If I'd only known the name of the youngster who threw Robert's little messages into our letter box. I never found out what it was, and even Johanna was never able to get it out of Droescher. The memorial they will set up for me really should go to the boy. I never did get around to showing Nettlinger the door or forbidding that Vacano to go to Otto's room. They brought the Host of the Beast into my house, they changed the boy I loved into a stranger, the same little fellow I used to take to the construction jobs with me and up on the scaffolding. Taxi? Taxi? Was it the year 1936 taxi, the one I took Johanna in to The Anchor at the Upper Harbor? Or the 1942 taxi, when I took her to the asylum? Or the 1951 one, that I rode in with Joseph to Kisslingen, to show him the building site where he, my grandson, Robert's and Edith's son, was to work for me? The Abbey destroyed, a desolate heap of stone and dust and mortar. Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein would certainly have exulted over the sight. But I did not exult when I first saw the piles of ruins in the year 1945. I walked around reflecting more calmly, plain to see, than they had expected. Had they antic.i.p.ated tears? Indignation? 'We'll find out who did it!' 'Why?' I asked, 'let them go their way in peace.' I would have given two hundred abbeys if I could have had Edith back, Otto, or the anonymous young fellow who threw the little notes into our letter box and had to pay so dearly for it. And even if the exchange had not been accepted, I at least was glad to have paid the price: a heap of stones, the 'work of my youth.' I offered it up for Otto and Edith, for the young fellow and the carpenter's apprentice, even though I knew it would do them no good. For they were dead. Did this pile of ruins belong to the unforeseen that I had longed for so keenly? The monks were amazed at my smiles, and I by their indignation.

"The taxi? Coming right away, Leonore. Think over my invitation. Seven o'clock at the Cafe Kroner, birthday celebration. There won't be any champagne. I hate champagne. Take the flowers down at the porter's place along with you when you go, the boxes of cigars and the congratulatory telegrams. And, my child, don't forget to spit on my monument."

It was election placards that were being printed in overtime. Stacks of them blocked the corridor, the stairway, and were piled up right to his door, each bundle with an identifying sample stuck on the outside of it. All of them smiled at him, well-dressed samples indeed, the worsted of their suits recognizable even on the placards. Bourgeois earnestness and bourgeois smiles besought confidence and trust. Young ones and old ones, yet to him the young seemed more frightful than the old. He declined with a little nod the doorman's invitation to come in and look over the beautiful flowers that had come for him, to open the telegrams and the presents. He got into the taxi, the driver holding the door open for him, and quietly said, "To Denklingen, please, the hospital."

5.

Blue sky, a whitewashed wall, alongside which the poplars, like ladder rungs, led down and away to the outer yard, where a sanatorium attendant was shoveling leaf mold into the compost pit. The wall was too high, the rungs too far apart. He would need four or five steps to cover each intervening s.p.a.ce. Watch out! Why did the yellow bus have to travel so close to the wall, creeping along like a beetle? Today it had brought only one pa.s.senger-him. But was it really he? Who? If only he could climb the poplar ladder, go hand over hand from rung to rung. But no. Always upright and unbending, never lowering himself, that was the way it had to be with him. Only when he knelt in a pew, or at a starting line, did he abandon his upright stance. Was it he? Or who?

On the trees in the garden, in Blessenfeld Park, there had been neatly painted signs, saying: 25, 50, 75, 100. He had knelt at the starting line, to himself muttered, 'On your mark ... get set ... go!' Then sprinted off, slowed down, went back and read off the time from his stopwatch. Again he knelt down at the starting line, murmured the starting signal to himself, dashed away, this time lengthening out the trial stretch just a little. Often it was a long time before he even got past the 25-meter mark, still longer before he reached the 50 and eventually ran the entire course right to the 100 mark. Then he entered his time in his notebook: 11:2. It was like a fugue, precise, exciting, yet marred by intervals of intense boredom, yawning eternities on summer afternoons in the garden, or in the Blessenfeld Park. Start, return, start, a minimal increase, then back to the starting point once more. And when he had sat down beside her, to evaluate and comment on the figures in his notebook, and reflect on his system, it had been at once exciting and a bore. His training had smelled of fanaticism. The strong, slender boy's body gave off the serious sweaty smell of those who know nothing as yet of love. Her brothers, Bruno and Friedrich, had smelled like that, too, when they got off their bikes, heads full of times and distances, and went into the garden to try and relax their fanatical leg muscles by means of fanatical compensating exercises. Father had also smelled like that when he swelled out his chest at choir practice, when breathing had become a kind of sport in itself, and singing had lost all its pleasure. Bourgeois earnestness, mustache-framed, had taken its place. Seriously they had sung and seriously had ridden their bicycles, and their leg muscles, chest muscles, mouth muscles, all had been serious. On their cramped legs, cramped cheeks, hideous purple blotches had appeared. They'd stood for hours on end on cold fall nights to shoot hares hiding among the cabbage stalks. And only at dawn, at long last, had the hares taken pity on straining human muscles and taken off zigzag through a hail of shot. Whywhywhy? Where was he now, the one who carried that secret laughter inside him, hidden spring in hidden clockwork, which lightened the unbearable pressure, eased the strain? He, the only one who had never partaken of the Host of the Beast? Laughter behind the pergola, Love and Intrigue; she was leaning over the parapet, watching him come out by the printery gate, and go, light of step, toward the Cafe Kroner. He carried that secret laughter inside him like a spring. Was he her quarry, or she his?

Careful, careful! Why always so upright, so unbending? One false step and you'll topple into blue infinity, or be dashed to pieces on the concrete walls of the compost pit. Dead leaves won't cushion the impact, the granite side of the steps won't be any pillow. Was it he? Who, then? Huperts, the sanatorium attendant, was standing meekly at the door. Would the visitor like tea, coffee, wine or cognac? Let me think; Friedrich would have come on horseback. He would never have come by the yellow bus, crawling alongside the wall like a beetle. And Bruno, he'd always had his stick with him, when he came. He beat time with it, till time was dead, chopped up time, slashed it into bits. Or snipped it into pieces with his playing cards, which he flung in the face of time like blades, night after night, day after day. Friedrich would have come on horseback, Bruno never without his stick. No cognac for Friedrich, no wine for Bruno now. They were dead, those foolish Uhlans, had ridden into machine-gun fire at Erby le Huette, believing they could fulfill bourgeois virtue through bourgeois vice, meet the obligations of piety with obscenities. Actually, naked dancers on clubhouse tables did not offend respectable ancestors as much as one might have thought, these ancestors having been in fact much less respectable than they looked in their gallery portraits. Cognac and wine struck off the list of drinks forever, my dear Huperts. Then, how about beer? Otto's gait was not so elastic. His was a marching step, drumming en-em-y, en-em-y on the hallway tiles and en-em-y on the pavement, all the way down Modest Street. He, Otto, had gone over to the Beast very early. Or had his brother, when he was dying, pa.s.sed on the name 'Hindenburg' to Otto? Fourteen days after Heinrich's death, Otto had been born, to die at Kiev. No use fooling myself any more, Huperts. Bruno and Friedrich, Otto and Edith, Johanna and Heinrich, all dead.

Nor will my visitor be wanting coffee, either, Huperts. He is no longer the one whose secret laugh I could hear in his every step. He's older. For him, tea, fresh and strong, Huperts, with milk but no sugar, for my upright and unbending son, Robert, the one who always fed on secrets. Even now he's carrying one around with him, locked in his breast. They beat and furrowed his back, but he didn't bend, didn't give up his secret, didn't give my cousin George away, the one who'd mixed gunpowder for him in the Huns' apothecary. He swung himself down between the two ladders and like Icarus hung poised with outstretched arms at the doorway. He'd never land in the compost pit or be smashed to smithereens on the granite. Tea, my dear Huperts, fresh and strong, with milk but no sugar. And cigarettes, please, for my archangel. He brings me somber messages that smack of blood, messages of rebellion and revenge. They've killed the blond boy. He ran the hundred meters in 10:9. Whenever I saw him, and I saw him only twice, he was laughing. He mended the little lock on my jewel box for me with his clever hands, something the carpenters and locksmiths had been trying to do, but couldn't, for forty years. He just picked the thing up and it worked again. He was no archangel, just an angel, name was Ferdi. He was blond and fool enough to think he could use firecrackers against the ones who'd eaten the Host of the Beast. He didn't drink tea or wine, beer, coffee or cognac, just put his mouth to the water tap and laughed. If he were still alive, he'd get me a gun. Either he or that other one, a dark angel that one, the one who didn't know how to laugh, Edith's brother. They called him Schrella, he was the kind you never call by his given name. Ferdi would have done it. He'd have ransomed me out of this crazy-house where they've stuck me, done it, he would have, with a gun. But here I am, doomed and d.a.m.ned. It takes giant ladders to reach the world. My son, see, is climbing down one to me.

"Good afternoon, Robert, you do like tea, don't you. Don't flinch when I kiss you on the cheek. You look like a man, a man of forty; you're getting gray at the temples and you're wearing narrow trousers and a sky-blue waistcoat. Isn't that too conspicuous? But perhaps it's good to go around disguised as a middle-aged gentleman. You look like the kind of office boss people would like to hear cough, just once anyway, but who's too refined to permit himself such a thing as cough. Forgive me if I laugh. How clever the barbers are today. That gray hair looks real, and the stubble on your chin like a man's who has to shave twice a day but does it only once. Clever. Only the red scar hasn't changed. They'll know by that, anyway. But maybe there's a remedy for that, too?

No, you needn't worry, they didn't touch me, they left the whip hanging on the wall, just asked, 'When did you see him last?' And I told the truth: 'In the morning, when he went to catch the streetcar to go to school.'

'But he never arrived at school.'

I didn't say a word.

'Has he tried to get in touch with you at all?'

The truth again. 'No.'

You'd left too plain a trail, Robert. A woman from the barracks district near Baggerloch brought me a book with your name and home address on it. Ovid, gray-green hard cover with chicken muck on it. And your school text was found five kilometers away. The box-office girl from a movie house brought it to me, with one page missing. She came into the office pretending to be a client and Joseph showed her in to me.

A week later they asked me again: 'Have you been in touch with him at all?' And I said, 'No.' Later on, the one who'd been to the house so often, Nettlinger, he came, too. He said, 'For your own sake, tell the truth.' But I had; only now I knew you had gotten away from them.

Nothing from you for months on end, son. Then Edith came, and said, 'I'm expecting a child.' I was terrified when she said, 'The Lord has blessed me.' Her voice filled me with fear. Forgive me, but I've never liked mystics. The girl was pregnant and alone. Father under arrest, brother disappeared, you gone, and on top of that they had held her in custody and questioned her for fourteen days. No, they didn't lay a hand on her. How easily the few lambs had been scattered, and now only one, Edith, remained. I took her in. Children, the Lord was certainly pleased with your foolishness. But you might at least have killed him with your homemade bomb; now he's become chief of police. G.o.d preserve us from martyrs who live to tell the tale. Gym teacher, chief of police; goes riding through the city on his big white horse, leads the beggar raids personally. Why didn't you at least kill him? With a bullet through the head. Firecrackers don't kill, my boy. You should have come to me. Death's made of metal. Copper cartridges, lead, cast iron, shrapnel-they bring death, whining and wailing, raining on the roof at night and rattling on the pergola. Fluttering like wild birds: the wild geese rush through the night, and dive down on the lambs. Edith is dead. I had her certified insane. Three authorities wrote out their opinions in elegantly unreadable writing on white parchment with an impressive letterhead. That saved Edith from them. Forgive me for laughing. Such a lamb she was. Her first child at seventeen, the second at nineteen and always so know-it-all. The Lord has done this, the Lord has done that, the Lord has given, the Lord has taken away. The Lord, the Lord! She never realized the Lord is our brother, and that among brothers you can laugh sometimes and feel at ease, even if you can't among Lords and Masters. As for myself, I had not realized that wild geese preyed on lambs; I'd always thought they were peaceful, plant-eating birds. Edith lay there as if our family coat-of-arms had come alive, a lamb with the blood flowing out of her breast. Though in her case there were no martyrs or cardinals, hermits, knights or saints standing around in adoration. And there she was, dead. Try and smile, my boy. I tried to myself, but couldn't manage it, least of all with Heinrich. He played with you and hung sabres on you and put helmets on your head, and made you into a Franceman or Rooshian or Englandman, and sang-that quiet boy-got to get a gun, get a gun. And when he was dying he whispered that horrible pa.s.sword to me, t