“Here’s your cognac, Doctor.”
“Thanks, Hugo.”
He liked Faehmel. Faehmel came every morning at half-past nine, gave him a reprieve till eleven, had already endowed him with a sense of eternity. Had it not always been like this? Had he not been standing at this same whitely lacquered door for centuries, hands folded behind his back, watching the quiet game, listening to words that sent him now sixty years back, now twenty ahead, then ten back again, only suddenly to fling him into the calendar-card reality outside the billiard room? White-green, red-green, red-white, always inside billiard cushions enclosing no more than two square meters of green felt. It was all clean, dry, precise. Between half-past nine and eleven. Downstairs to fetch the double cognac twice, maybe three times. Time here ceased to be a dimension making things measurable. Time was blotted out by that green rectangle of blotting paper. In vain hours chimed, hands moved in vain, in vain ran away from each other in senseless haste. When Faehmel showed up it was drop everything—and just at the one time when there was most to do, old guests leaving, new ones arriving. Yet he had to stand there until St. Severin’s struck eleven. But when—when would that be? Airless rooms, timeless clocks, and he submerged here, moving swiftly under oceans, reality not penetrating, its nose pressed against glass outside, as against shop or aquarium window, dimensions lost, except flatness, the flatness of children’s cutouts. Here people’s clothes were provisionally draped upon their bodies, so many paper dolls. Helplessly they kicked against time’s walls, thicker than centuries made of glass. St. Severin’s shadow was far away, farther still the railroad station, the trains not real, through, freight, express, fast and slow, with them carrying trunks to customs stations. Only the three billiard balls, rolling over green blotting paper, forming ever-new figurations, were real. Infinity in a thousand formulas, all contained within two square meters. He struck them forth, his cue a wand, while his voice lost itself in eons of time.
“Is there any more to the story, Doctor?”
“You want to hear it?”
“I’d like to.”
Faehmel laughed, sipped at his glass of cognac, lit himself a fresh cigarette, took up the cue and played the red ball. Red-white rolled over the table’s green.
“A week after that, Hugo.…”
“After what?”
Again Faehmel laughed. “After that rounders game, that fourteenth of July in 1935 they scratched into the plaster above the locker—a week after that, I was glad that Schrella had reminded me of the road leading to Trischler’s house. I was standing at the railing of the old weighhouse in the Lower Harbor. From there I had a good view of the road. It went past woodyards, coalyards, ran down to a place where building materials were sold, from there went to the basin, closed off by a rusty iron fence and now used only as a ship-breaking yard for condemned vessels. The last time I’d been there was seven years before, with Schrella, when we went to visit Trischler. But it could have been fifty. I was thirteen when I first went there. In the evening long trains of barges lay moored at the embankment. Barge-women with their market baskets walked ashore up swaying gangplanks. The women had red faces and a steady eye. Men came after the women, out to get beer or a newspaper. Trischler’s mother, all in a flutter, looked over her wares—tomatoes and cabbages and bunches of silvery onions hanging on the wall. Outside a drover was giving his dog short, sharp commands, getting them to drive the sheep into a pen. Across the river—on the side where we are now, Hugo—the gaslamps were being turned on, yellowish light filling the white globes. A great line of them ran north, propagating infinity. Trischler’s father snapped on the lights in his beer garden, and Schrella’s father, a napkin over his arm, came down to the two-boat house out back, where we—Trischler, young Schrella and I—were chipping ice and throwing it over the beer cases.
But now, seven years later, Hugo, on this twenty-first of July in 1935, the paint had peeled off all the fences, and the only new thing in sight was the door at Michaelis’ coalyard. On the other side of the fence a big pile of briquettes lay crumbling apart. At every turn in the road I looked back to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I was exhausted, I could feel the wounds on my back. The pain began to throb like a pulse. For ten minutes there hadn’t been a soul on the road. I looked along the narrow stretch of clear, ruffled water joining the Lower to the Upper Harbor. Not a boat in sight. I looked up at the sky. Not a plane, either, and I thought, you must take yourself pretty seriously if you think they’ll send planes out looking for you.
You see, I’d done it, Hugo, I’d gone with Schrella to the little Cafe Zons on Boisserée Street, where the Lambs had their meetings. I’d mumbled the password to the proprietor: ‘Feed my lambs.’ And I had sworn to a young girl called Edith, and I looked right into her eyes as I did it, that I would never make oblation to the Host of the Beast. In that same dark back room I had made a speech, in it using unlamblike words smacking of blood and rioting and revenge, revenge for Ferdi Progulske whom they’d executed only that morning. The ones sitting around the table listening themselves looked as if they had just had their heads chopped off. They were frightened, they realized that a boy’s seriousness is as serious as an adult’s. Fear lay on them, and the knowledge that Ferdi was really dead. He was seventeen years old, a hundred-meter runner, a carpenter’s apprentice. I’d only seen him four times all told, twice in the Cafe Zons and twice in my own house, yet I’d never forget him as long as I lived. Ferdi had sneaked into Old Wobbly’s apartment and thrown a bomb at Wobbly’s feet as he came out of the bedroom. Old Wobbly got out of it with burns on his feet, a shattered bureau mirror and a smell of cordite in the place. Madness, Hugo, adolescent high-mindedness. You hear? Are you really listening?”
“I hear, all right.”
“I’d read Hölderlin: Firm in compassion the eternal heart. But Ferdi only read Karl May, who seemed to preach the same high-mindedness. All foolishness, paid for under the executioner’s ax in the gray of the morning, while church bells were tolling for matins and baker boys counted warm rolls into their string bags, and here in the Prince Heinrich Hotel the first guests were having breakfast served, while the birds were twittering, milkmaids stealing in and out of quiet doorways on rubber-soled shoes leaving bottles of milk on clean coco mats. Meanwhile men from newspaper promotion departments were racing around the city plastering billboards with red-bordered bulletins, saying: ‘Execution! The Apprentice, Ferdinand Progulske …!’ So all early risers could read them, the streetcar motormen, the school kids, the teachers and everyone else hurrying to catch the morning trolley, sandwiches in their pockets, and carrying the local paper, as yet unfolded, with a headline announcing ‘An Example Set.’ And for me to read, too, Hugo, as I was getting into No. 7, right out in front of here at the corner.
Ferdi’s voice on the phone—had I heard it yesterday or the day before? ‘You’ll be at the Cafe Zons as we agreed?’ A pause. ‘Are you coming, or aren’t you?’ ‘I’ll be there.’ Enders even tried to catch hold of my sleeve and pull me into the streetcar that morning when the news broke, but I pulled loose and waited until the streetcar had disappeared around the corner. Then I went to the trolley stop on the other side of the street, where you still catch No. 16, and rode through peaceful suburbs to the Rhine, then away from the Rhine again until the car finally swung into the loop at the end of the line between gravel pits and army barracks. By rights, I thought at the time, it should be winter. Winter, cold, rainy, sky overcast—that would make it more bearable. But it was not. For hours I wandered around among prosy allotment gardens, looking at peas and apricots, tomatoes and cabbages, listening to the clink of beer bottles and the ice cream man’s bell. There he stood at a crossing, dipping ice cream into crumbly cones. How can they do it, I thought, how can they eat ice cream, drink beer, sample apricots while Ferdi.… Around noontime I fed my sandwiches to some morose chickens scratching out geometric figures in the muck of a junkyard. Out of a window came a woman’s voice, saying, ‘Did you read
about that kid, the one they.…’ And a man’s voice answered, ‘Shut up, goddamn it, I know all about it.…’ I threw my sandwiches to the chickens, continued on and got lost down among railroad cuts and culverts. Finally I reached another terminus somewhere and rode through a series of strange suburbs. I got off and turned my pockets inside out. Black gunpowder trickled onto the gray pavement. I started to run, past more railroad embankments, storage dumps, garden plots, houses. Finally, a movie theater, where the woman in the box office was just pushing up her window. Three o’clock? Three exactly. Fifty pfennigs. I was the only one in the audience. Heat hung over the corrugated iron roof. Love, blood, a betrayed lover drew his dagger. I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until the movie-goers for the six o’clock show came barging into the theater. I staggered outside. Where was my school bag? Back inside the movie? By the gravel pit, where I’d sat for a long while watching the trucks being piled full, so high the load spilled over? Or was it back at that other place, where I had thrown my bread to the sullen fowl? Ferdi’s voice on the phone, was it yesterday or the day before? ‘You’ll be at the Cafe Zons as we agreed?’ Pause. ‘Will you be there or won’t you?’ ‘I’ll be there.’
A rendezvous with a headless boy. A piece of folly already precious to me, the price of it having been so high. Meanwhile I had had my turn with Nettlinger. He’d lain in wait for me in front of the Cafe Zons. They took me to Williams’ Pit and beat me with the barbed-wire whip. The barbs tore up my back. Through the rusty window bars I could see the banking where I had played as a child. Time and again our ball had rolled downhill on us, and time and again I had climbed down helter-skelter to bring it back, always having a quick, scared look at the rusty bars, sensing something evil behind the dirty windowpanes. Nettlinger laid on.
In the cell I tried to take my shirt off, but shirt and skin were all chewed up together, so that when I pulled at my collar or sleeve, it felt as if I were pulling my skin over my head.
There were other bad moments, too. When I stood at the weighhouse railing, at the end of my tether, the pain was greater than the pride I took in my wounds. My head sank to the railing, my mouth pressed to it, and the bitterness of the weather-pitted iron felt good in my mouth. Another minute and I would be at Trischler’s house, and then I would know whether they had got there first and were waiting for me. I got a terrible start. A workman with his lunch box under his arm came up the street and disappeared into the place where building materials were sold. As I went down the steps I held to the handrail so hard that my sliding hand peeled off flakes of rust. The rhythms of the riveting hammers that had sounded so cheerful seven years before were gone, nothing left but a weary echo of them now. One old man with a sledge hammer, working from a raft, breaking up a ferry boat. Nuts and bolts rattled into a box. When the ferry timbers fell, the thud they made told just how badly rotted they were. The old man kept tapping at the boat’s engine and listening to the sound as if he were sounding the heart of someone very dear to him. He bent down deep into the bilge of the boat and fished out all sorts of parts: screws, the engine head, injection nozzles, cylinders. He held them up to have a look at them, sniffed them before throwing them into the box with the nuts and bolts. At the stern of the boat was an old winch, hanging on it the remains of an old cable, rusty rotten as an old stocking.
With me memories of people and events have always been linked memories of movement, which stick in my mind as patterns. The way I leaned over the railing, lifting my head, letting it fall, lifting it, letting it fall lower to watch the street—the memory attached to this movement brought words and colors, images and moods back into my consciousness. I didn’t remember how Ferdi had looked, but instead how he’d lit a match, how he’d raised his head a little when he said, yes yes, no no. I remembered how Schrella wrinkled his forehead, the way he moved his shoulders, Father’s walk, Mother’s gestures, the way Grandmother moved her hand when she brushed the hair away from her brow.… And the old man down below, the one I could see from the top of the banking, and who just then was knocking punky wood loose from a big screw—that was Trischler’s father. For the hand was making movements no other hand but his could make. I’d watched the same hand opening boxes, renailing them shut. Stuff smuggled across the frontier in dark ships’ holds. Rum and raisins, chocolate and cigarettes. In the tow-boat house in back of the beer garden I’d seen that hand make movements peculiar to it and none other. The old man looked up, blinked at me, and said, ‘Hey, sonny, that road up there doesn’t go anywhere.’
‘It goes to your house,’ I said.
‘Anybody who comes to my house comes by water, even the police. Even my son comes by boat, when he comes at all, which isn’t often.’
‘Are the police there now?’
‘What do you want to know that for, sonny?’
‘Because they’re looking for me.’
‘Been stealing?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I just refused the Host of the Beast.’
Ships, I was thinking, ships with dark holds, and captains with a lot of practice fooling customs men. I won’t take up much room, no more than a rolled-up carpet. I would get across the border stowed in a rolled-up sail.
‘Come down here,’ said Trischler. ‘They can see you up there from the other side of the river.’
I turned around and let myself slowly slide down the embankment toward Trischler, grabbing at bunches of grass as I went.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ the old man said. ‘I know your face, but I’ve forgotten your name.’
‘Faehmel,’ I said.
‘Of course. They’re after you, it came over on the early morning news. I might have known it when they described you. Red scar on the bridge of the nose. That was when we rowed across at high tide and ran into the bridge piles when I misfigured the current. You banged your head on the iron gunwale.’
‘Yes, and I wasn’t allowed to come over here again.’
‘But you did come again.’
‘Not for long—until I got on the outs with Alois.’
‘Come on. And duck when we go under the swing bridge or you’ll get a dent in your head—and they won’t be letting you come here again. How did you get away from them?’
‘Nettlinger came into my cell at sun-up. He took me out the back way, where the underground passages lead to the railroad cut, by Williams’ Pit. He said, “Get lost, start running. All I can give you is an hour’s lead; after that I’ll have to report it to the police. As it is I’ve had to go right around the city to make it here.” ’
‘So that’s it,’ the old man said. ‘That’s what you get when you start throwing bombs! You would go and take an oath and—anyway, yesterday I packed up one of your boys and shipped him across the frontier.’
‘Yesterday?’ I asked. ‘Who was it?’
‘Schrella,’ he said. ‘He holed up here and I had to make him leave on the Anna Katharina.’
‘Alois always wanted to be mate and steer the Anna Katharina!’
‘He is mate on the Katharina. Come on, now.’
I began to stagger as we went toward Trischler’s house along the slant-topped wall at the foot of the embankment. I got to my feet, fell again, again got up, and doing this jerked skin and shirt apart, stuck them together, pulled them apart, over and over, and the pain, like thorns being stuck in my back again and again, made me half lose consciousness. Movements, colors, smells from a thousand memories became all mixed up, piled one on top of the other. All sorts of numbers floated through my mind, changing color, taking on different angles and directions, generated out of me by the pain.
High tide, I thought, high tide, as again a desire came over me to throw myself in and be carried away to the gray horizon.
In my dreamlike state I was troubled by the question whether a barbed-wire whip could be hidden in a lunch box. Movements remembered changed into lines, which joined into figures, green, black and red ones, representing, like a cardiogram, a particular person’s rhythms. The way Alois Trischler
jerked his line to set the hook when we were fishing in the Old Harbor, the way he cast his lure out into the water, the way his arm traveled as he held his rod against the pull of the current, thus indicating its speed. Also, the way Nettlinger raised his arm to throw the ball into Schrella’s face, the trembling of his lips, the twitching of his nostrils, these changed into a gray design like a dead spider. Like so much information coming over a teletype from somewhere I couldn’t place, people unfolded out of my memory, so many stigmata. Edith, the Edith of that evening after the rounders game when I went home with Schrella. Edith’s face out in the park at Blessenfeld, when she lay under me on the grass, all wet from the summer rain. Raindrops glistened on her blond hair, rolled along her eyebrows, a garland of silver drops on Edith’s face which rose and fell with her breathing. This garland was fixed in my memory in a form suggesting the skeleton of some sea creature found on a rust-colored beach, its constituent drops multiplied into countless little clouds of the same size. Then there was the line of her mouth as she said to me, ‘They’ll kill you.’ That was Edith.
I was tormented in the dream by having lost my school bag—I had always been meticulous about everything—and I found myself tearing my gray-green copy of Ovid from a scrawny chicken’s beak. I haggled with the usherette in the movie house over the Hölderlin poem she had ripped out of my anthology because she found it so beautiful: Firm in compassion the eternal heart.
When I came to it was suppertime, with Frau Trischler bringing in the meal, milk, an egg, bread, an apple. Her hands became young when she bathed my flayed back in wine. Pain flamed through me when she squeezed wine from the sponge and let it flow into the furrows on my back. Afterwards she poured oil over me, and I asked her where she had learned to do it like that.
‘It tells you how in the Bible,’ she said. ‘And I’ve done it once before, on your friend Schrella! Alois will be here the day after tomorrow and leave Ruhrort Sunday for Rotterdam. You needn’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘They’ll get you through. On the river people know each other, as if they lived on the same street. More milk, young man?’
Billiards at Half-Past Nine Page 6