‘Just after half eleven.’
‘Mine must have stopped…’
‘Would you like a glass?’
Instead of answering, Fred tapped the watch face. The attendant yawned. ‘Not the latest model then?’
Fred looked up and stared briefly at the attendant without expression. Then he returned to his watch. The attendant raised his eyebrows. How sensitive these young folk today were in matters of fashion. He asked amiably: ‘So, a glass?’
‘One for you too.’
‘For me?’
Fred nodded, removed his watch and threw it in the bin. ‘This is a celebration.’
The attendant was about to shake his head when his gaze fell on Fred’s suitcase. He had run the kiosk opposite the prison gate long enough to know what small shabby suitcases meant around here. A juvenile prison, no real hard cases, none who thought about suddenly finding themselves on the other side of the wall years later. Many of them wanted to have a drink with him, and mostly he did them the favour. He shuffled to the back again and fetched two plastic cups.
‘Only for the toast though.’
Fred laughed. ‘Sure, and let’s see how often we toast.’
He tipped the first cup back in one and closed his eyes briefly. ‘What a feeling.’
Thereafter they drank in silence. Fred watched the street and the salesman watched him. Daft eyes, he thought, sort of goggle-eyes. On the other hand, none of the other youths had shown such a determined look while enjoying their first bottle on the outside. No curiosity, no uncertainty, nothing. It was as if he had trained for a boxing match for which the bell might sound at any minute.
Everything had indeed been worked out down to the last minute in Fred’s head:
Reunion with Annette and Nickel, then down to Clash, and later to Dance 2000 with some woman on his arm, and a discussion of Canada to follow the next morning. If prison did serve some purpose, then it was as a kind of advanced school for making plans, and Fred had qualified with flying colours.
A young couple turned into the street and approached rapidly. She was blonde and plump, he was tall and dark. Both carried something under their arm and they seemed to be in a hurry. Annette and Nickel, no doubt about it. Fred turned abruptly to the attendant and grabbed the bottle. ‘Let’s have one more.’ They mustn’t see that he was waiting.
‘Thanks, but not for me.’
The attendant drained his cup and threw it in the bin. When he looked up, he gave a start. The young man was staring at him again. This time his look reminded him of the crazies from the Knights of Saint John home out in the woods.
‘I have to get back to work.’
‘Let’s talk…’
Fred leaned forward and suddenly began to speak of a tramp who was known by everyone in Dieburg, and who kept cropping up in anecdotes which they told as jokes, even though no one had seen him for years. The nearer the couple came, the louder Fred talked and the wilder the story became. Then the couple had almost arrived at the kiosk and Fred turned round while in full flow, as if by chance, beaming at the trees as well as at the two young people…But they were the wrong ones. Loaded down with washing powder, cat litter and nappies, they glanced briefly at the kiosk and walked on.
Fred was struck dumb.
‘And then?’ asked the attendant, ‘what did he do with the ladder?’
‘With the ladder?’ Fred stared absently. The couple’s footsteps became quieter, until they disappeared into the next doorway.
‘What’s the time?’
‘Quarter to twelve.’
Fred drained the cup and poured some more, his gaze fixed on the corner from which the couple had emerged. The attendant waited a little, then he shrugged his shoulders, sat back on his chair and opened a magazine.
‘He hid it first,’ said Fred after a while , ‘then it became damp and rotten, and in the end he junked it. From which you can deduce once again,’ he was careful to grin casually, ‘that crime doesn’t pay… What do I owe you?’
The attendant named his price, and Fred took a roll of notes, bound by a rubber band, out of his pocket. He’d seen that on TV. He loosened the rubber band, placed a twenty mark note on the counter, snapped it back and nodded. ‘Keep the change. If you see two people waiting by the gate over there today, could you please inform them that Fred is celebrating at Clash tonight?’
The attendant said he’d try to keep an eye out. Fred picked up his suitcase, tapped his forehead, ‘Bye bye,’ and strolled down the street. A warm wind caressed his neck.
No, he wasn’t furious. A little irritated, but not furious. Maybe Annette and Nickel had missed their train. No reason to worry. We’ve all been late…
Fred was almost better at adapting to changed circumstances than at forging unshakeable plans.
Grandma Ranunkel’s small white house stood at the edge of the forest between an abandoned wadding factory and a tree nursery. The forest glowed bright green, and several branches grew above the roof and walls: a sign that the house had been uninhabited for some time. Unpruned branches were rare in Dieburg.
Once inside, Fred encountered stale, musty air. The rooms were dark and the electricity had been turned off. Fred felt his way through the living room. When he raised the blinds and opened the windows, he could see cheap fifties-style furniture beneath thick layers of dust. He stood still for a moment and looked around… Here again. But he remained unmoved by the sight of these familiar objects, or rather he didn’t allow himself to be moved. He was beginning a new life, and this house had no place in it. He would sell it. That too he had planned for a long time.
He went into the kitchen, looked in cupboards and drawers and rummaged through the dining room. Then he worked his way through the other rooms, until he found an open bottle of Dujardin in Grandma Ranunkel’s bedside table. He sat with the bottle at the open kitchen window and kept an eye out for Annette and Nickel coming down the street.
What if he had sent the postcards too late? Or if Annette and Nickel had moved house again?
He attacked the bottle until he was drunk. At about four, he left the house and went to the nearest phone booth.
As a precaution he had neither telephoned Annette and Nickel since his arrest, nor had they visited him in prison. He deduced from Annette’s few, deliberately trivial letters that she and Nickel had split up and that she had moved away.
Admittedly she had written down the new address, but the last letter had no return address and gave notice of a further move. From Nickel, the most nervous of them, he had only received postcards bearing no surname. Not a word about Dieburg, let alone Annette - the prison post inspectors must have taken Nickel’s postcards for the routine greetings of a distant relative.
Nevertheless: they had an agreement that he would send them a card as soon as he knew when he would be released and that they would collect him, and it didn’t matter how long ago this was, a deal was a deal, and it was up to Annette and Nickel to ensure he had their correct addresses…
Fred unfolded Annette’s letter with her Berlin telephone number. Suddenly he felt uneasy. He hung up and looked for a cigarette. He had waited four years for this moment, four years and eighteen days. If Annette wasn’t on the train or already in Dieburg, he would hear her voice now. Not the voice that had entertained him the whole time in the cell, that intimate voice that mostly told him what he wanted to hear, but her real voice - her voice four years on. The blood pounded in his temples. He smoked two cigarettes and tried to find the right form of words. Finally he dialled the number and held his breath. The phone rang briefly.
‘Zernikow,’ replied a woman. A television droned in the background.
Fred cleared his throat. ‘Hello, may I speak to Annette Schöller?’
‘What, who?’ she screamed over the noise of the TV.
‘Annette Schöller,’ repeated Fred.
‘Never heard of her. Who the Hell… hey, Jessica! Leave the bloody computer alone. I’ve told you a hundred times, that’s
not a toy, it’s your Dad’s, and he’ll belt you one if he finds out …Hello.’
‘Annette Schöller. She… she was probably the previous tenant.’
‘And? Does that mean I’ve won something?’
‘What? No, but…’
‘What then?’
Well, if you could give me the new address for…’
‘I know, I know: wee Annette. But previous tenants’ addresses aren’t my problem. Look in the phone book.’
‘Okay. But maybe you could tell me whether Annette’s post is being forwarded?’
‘You think I’m a postman?’
The woman hung up, and Fred pressed the phone cradle. For a moment he felt like he had those first days in prison, when everything seemed to rush by and the lads took the piss out of him at every opportunity. Strange attitude these Berliners.
Then he rang directory enquiries, but without success: Annette’s name was not listed. Next he called Nickel’s old Berlin number, but nobody answered.
He went back to Grandma Ranunkel’s house and stuck a note on the door: Am at Clash. Then he set off to visit a couple of old friends. But the answer was always the same: he or she had spent the last two or three years in Munich, or Frankfurt, or Hanover, or Berlin, or Tübingen…
3
Clash was once a smoke-filled drinking den with black walls, junk furniture, candles in empty beer bottles, a tiny dance floor and booming music. Fred had spent half his youth there: Clash had often been his living room and his bedroom for days on end, and it was there that he had done almost everything for the first time - at least those things for which there was a first time once walking and talking had been mastered.
For the last two years Clash had been called Coconut Beach, and it was a cross between a Greek taverna and a Caribbean holiday. There was white plaster on the walls, brown tiles on the floor and an imitation thirties fan rotated above the bamboo counter. Wicker chairs and tables were arranged in groups, and on the tables were cocktail menus and bowls containing dried banana flakes. Soft guitar music wafted from concealed speakers.
As he entered, Fred found himself hoping he had come to the wrong place. Walking slowly through the room, which was almost deserted at that early hour, he kept looking around in disbelief. A few beers with Schnapps chasers helped him to come to terms with the new decor, by dismissing it as garbage. Maybe this kind of elegant hula-hula establishment was fashionable in Grandma Ranunkel’s day, he reflected. He didn’t need to worry if he’d missed out on anything here. And the absence of Clash, well…he’d soon be saying goodbye to Dieburg forever.
It was now shortly after eleven and Fred drank whatever was going and felt magnificent. He sat at a table with two young women who knew him from the newspaper, and who spoke to him exactly as he imagined women would: in amazement. ‘Aren’t you the one who robbed the bank that time?’ Fred assented calmly.
The slightly shame-faced one with long dark hair, a centre parting and a pointed nose reminded him of Joan Baez. She wore a translucent, brightly embroidered dress which revealed her underwear. The other had a round, chubby face with an angular lacquered hairdo and was squeezed into a sailor’s outfit. She squealed enthusiastically at any and all jokes, whereupon she rearranged her bust and neckline.
Time and again Fred raised his glass, yelled at the half-empty room: ‘Hey Gerda, hasta la vista!’ and winked at the bar counter to the sound of squeals from his left. Gerda, who had worked at Clash in the old days, was hoping Fred would bugger off. Since his arrival the gags about sun tan lotion and sangria hadn’t stopped. Four years of prison excused some things, but no matter how hopelessly behind the times you were, you didn’t have to behave like a ticket tout. Beer and rye! Gerda shuddered. They only had rye in because of the construction workers who were building the aquarium.
Fred leaned over to Joan Baez. ‘I know about punch, but that thing…’ he pointed grinning at her Melon and Campari Sundream with rose petals and a sugared rim, ‘…goes under pudding in my book.’
There was more enthusiastic squealing. Joan Baez didn’t turn a hair. For the last hour she had wanted to learn something about prison and what it was like to be an inmate. Instead she had been forced to listen to teenage bragging and crude jokes.
‘Seems pretty daft to go out on the town and stuff yourself with fruit salad. It’s a bit like robbing a bank to steal the biros.’
The squealing turned into a minor hysterical outburst, until an agitated Joan Baez declared that it really wasn’t that funny. The sailor girl was briefly silent. In the perfumery where they both worked, Joan Baez was her boss. The irritated sailor straightened out her breasts, bringing a mildly idiotic expression to Fred’s features. Then she reached for her cocktail and disappeared behind a bush made of peppermint leaves and orange peel curlicues.
Fred looked amiably from one to the other. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that Annette and Nickel hadn’t collected him. Afterwards he would go with the girls to Dance 2000, and then… It was his first night of freedom. He took a slug of beer and waved at Gerda. Sweet Gerda. Pity for her that she had to work in such a dive.
Joan Baez leaned forward. ‘What sort of things do you learn in prison?’ It was the third time she had asked the question, and the sailor girl had to restrain herself behind the peppermint leaves.
Fred nodded. ‘Table football,’ and he shouted towards the bar, causing several guests to look around: ‘Hey Gerda, where the hell’s the table football?’
Gerda turned away.
Fred stared at her back, perplexed. Then he murmured: ‘It’s not easy for her,’ and raising his index finger he announced: ‘There was a bar football table here,’ as though that were akin to a genuine Rembrandt.
Groaning, Joan Baez raised her eyes to the ceiling.
‘But in those days I was just a decent midfielder and now I’m unbeatable. They called me Magic Hoffmann in the nick. I don’t shoot any more, just stroke the ball round. Like this...’ Fred performed a movement with both hands, as though he were letting two invisible ropes slip through his fingers.
‘Actually I meant an apprenticeship or a profession. That sort of thing.’
‘Oh that,’ said Fred, indicating his distaste. ‘I’m gong to Canada with some friends.’
‘Nice work! What’s the pay like?’
Immediately, the sailor girl emerged from behind the peppermint leaves and seized the opportunity to make up for her blunder. She worked herself up to such a frenzy of squealing in Joan Baez’s honour, that the whole room fell silent and the other customers turned to look at them delighted by such a jolly creature. Some seemed pleased that the laughter was clearly at Fred’s expense. His tasteless jokes were hard to take, and now his antediluvian gym shoes, his torn blue overalls and his village idiot’s hairdo were an offence to the cultured eye. These days, just about every refuse collector in Dieburg wore a pink or turquoise C&A leisure shirt to work. Fred looked into Joan Baez’s long pale face, which despite her youth was already marked by overtime and neon light, and wondered why she of all people was showing such an interest in the notion of a profession.
‘I worked in the woodwork shop,’ he said, ‘but now when I smell sawdust I feel ill. It’s like with cows and steaks: a tree is beautiful, a table too, everything in between is shit.’
Joan Baez looked at Fred’s heavy hands around the beerglass and laughed out of politeness. ‘These days you have to be prepared to compromise.’
‘These days?’
‘Unemployment.’ she said, and her stare suggested that the word finally signalled the end to the genial part of the evening.
‘Unemployment…’ Fred shrugged his shoulders, ‘means nothing to me.’
‘Is that right…?’ Joan Baez raised her eyebrows, ‘and if you’re out on the street with millions of others…?’
‘Where?’ Fred asked, turning to the window. Joan Baez and her colleague exchanged glances.
‘The way I see it is,’ he said after a pause in which he h
ad waited for even a mild squeal, ‘there are two types in the nick: those who graft all day, and those who lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. The only difference is that the former are less conscious of the time they’ve done, and the latter have more time to look forward to a soft mattress.’
‘And what’s that got to do with normal life?’
‘They all get out in the end,’ said Fred and winked cheerily at the sailor girl. But she looked across at her supervisor who was observing Fred, unmoved. Then Joan Baez laughed briefly and reached for her handbag. ‘We really must be going.’ Then she added waspishly: ‘We have work to do in the morning.’
At first Fred thought he had misunderstood, but he saw Joan Baez rise to her feet, straighten her dress and pick up her cardigan, and his mouth opened in astonishment. The sailor girl was also surprised, and pointed timidly at her half-full glass.
Joan Baez dismissed it. ‘This one’s surely on our friend Magic. A man who earns money by travelling to Canada. And if he runs short he can just rob another bank.’
This made sense to the sailor girl, and besides she found it very funny. After she had taken a rapid gulp of her drink, and as she grabbed her cigarettes, she opened her mouth and her squeal resounded through the room, almost causing Fred to black out. The sound only died away as the door slammed behind them.
Silence. Everyone was looking at Fred. He pressed himself into the armchair, clasped his hands round his arms and stared intently at the door. Then conversation was resumed, and soon the noise reached its former level.
Fred looked around carefully. Gradually his head cleared …what in the name of God had happened? Didn’t they just laugh? Did being out of a job somehow cramp your style with women these days? And they’d agreed to go to Dance 2000, cut loose, shake a leg, Rock’n’Roll…
Fred looked at his watch. Annette and Nickel wouldn’t turn up this late. Dance 2000 was a dead loss now. He couldn’t go alone, it just wouldn’t look right. He had to arrive in style, just like he’d planned: Magic Hoffmann, who could squeeze more enjoyment out of life than anyone else, in spite of four years in the nick…that’s exactly how it was…or would have been, only not today, or not exactly.
Magic Hoffmann Page 2