by Peter Nadas
The neighborhood was familiar; he knew where to find a telephone booth. There was nobody around; he met no one.
First he called information, but he had nothing with which to jot down the number of police headquarters and nothing to write on, therefore with his nail he carved it, as a kind of reminder, into the yellow lacquered cover of the telephone book. Neither the 4 nor the 8 came out right; he hesitated for a moment and then punched in another number anyway. To be done with it quickly.
And as usually happened, he did not take into account the very thing he should have really taken into account.
Namely that his aunt could see him from her window.
Driven by the irritation of the long wait, she had been pacing helplessly for at least a half hour and happened to stop by the window exactly when Döhring, headed for the telephone booth, appeared on the other side of the street. In her surprise, her head knocked against the windowpane, leaving behind a tiny trace of her deep-red rouge. She did not understand why he was coming from that direction; if he was coming from the train station, he should have been coming from exactly the opposite direction. Besides, the entrance to her house was not on the park side. And if after such a long delay he was finally here, why in the world was he going into the phone booth. She saw him disappear into the booth but could see nothing else; the angle of her sight line from the third floor was too sharp for that. Remaining by the window, she waited a few seconds for the phone to ring.
Very rarely could anyone afford to make her wait so long.
And when nothing happened, when the redeeming ring did not come, she slowly strolled back to the beautifully set table which by now had become irrelevant.
She controlled herself, but her high heels trod furiously across the floor.
Absentmindedly she sipped the cooled-off tea. One must keep oneself busy at all times. As if she had long forgotten that there were things with which she too could be insulted.
Deadly silence reigned in the room. She held the teacup with both hands, did not put it back on the saucer, did not want to hear the muffled clink just now. All the doors stood wide open; one could see across all the rooms. The tall windows locked out the wind’s noise perfectly, but on the opposite wall the dim wintry shadows of branches kept swinging back and forth.
In those years, well-to-do people had long since heaved out of their apartments the objects accumulated during previous decades. Only pared-down spaces remained. To which the immeasurable wartime destruction must have also contributed, the ruined German cities. Empty walls painted blinding white, glittering wood-plank or parquet floors, a few sources of illumination that emitted harsh clinical beams of light, a few accidentally left-behind pieces of furniture. All the aunt had left in her huge dining room were the long bare table and the unupholstered, unadorned chairs. The newfangled bleakness was certainly not just the fashion. As if people were no longer living in space but in time. As if they were no longer attached deeply or intimately to anything, neither to places nor to objects. A person flew from place to place, had some business everywhere, but it was time that set the pace and the standards; one slept in hotels, had more and more flats and vacation homes at places where one had neither lived nor vacationed.
When she was not giving a dinner party or did not sleep in her apartment, the aunt really did not have much to do here. The rooms retained only their names; their functions practically ceased to exist. For example, between the aunt’s so-called study and so-called dining room there was a pièce de dégagement, a kind of transition room, the erstwhile smoking room, in which she left nothing but an antique Chinese rug on the floor. True, a colossal baroque chandelier hung from the ceiling; the two objects were suited neither to each other nor to the rather small room, and they had no real purpose, yet their effect was not embarrassing. They got along well with each other, gazing at each other from an unbridgeable distance; they had nothing to do with each other; they had differing worldviews. And such an effect was perfectly suited to the style of the age.
Since the aunt had always lived by herself, it must not have seemed unusual when she was finally left alone in the empty flat.
Her steady boyfriend left her a few days after her fortieth birthday, but even before then she had not lived with him here or anywhere else in a common residence. At most, they shared their bed for a few hours, occasionally, whimsically, on weekends. Since then, the aunt has had no partner, as they say, though from time to time she slept with one of her co-workers or her agent in Paris, a habit they kept up for many years. Her deeper and more clandestine passion was not ladies’ fashion, or men’s, but collecting pictures.
She collected the work of only a few painters, exclusively the pictures of living painters.
Whoever died ceased to exist for her because the excitements of the moment were gone along with the dead. And she didn’t collect oil paintings, only temperas, gouaches, tint drawings, and watercolors, nothing else, not even pencil drawings or etchings. In her apartment, she left virtually no visible signs of this passion, which was defined by her sophisticated business sense. Although a few notable oil paintings adorned the apartment, of the works she so passionately collected she would hang only one for herself, and not necessarily the most important one. She would carefully change the chosen picture according to the state of her emotions, but to uninitiated eyes the changes could not have been conspicuous because, independently of their creators, the paintings quite closely resembled one another. She stored her collection in the humidity-controlled safe of a bank in Düsseldorf, and only her lawyer and the agent in charge of preparing her purchases knew this. Her agent was a Parisian, or rather a Belgian Fleming who lived in Paris, because the market was best seen from there, though the aunt dreamed of having agents also in Tokyo and New York. But for that, she needed to be richer or, who knows, maybe a bit more daring.
The cold tea clung in stripes to the inside of the cup. When the telephone on the dining table finally came to life, she let it ring for a long time. She slowly put down the cup; the silver bracelet clanked gently on her wrist.
It must have been a good ten years ago that she decided to dress only in black and wear, summer or winter, only silver. To go with this scheme, she painted her lips and nails a thick, excessively dark red, and gathered and almost completely concealed her hair with a kerchief tightly wrapped around her head. She always looked as if she were preparing to put on makeup. She had hundreds of kerchiefs in all shades of black and white. With their help, she bared her attractively symmetrical face, which reminded one of some extraordinary fruit, and her cambered, smooth, radiant forehead. She wore these black or white kerchiefs wrapped around her head, from under which her dark but obviously dyed hair peeked out a little, like some ornament or label advertising her proud personality. Her fingers were covered with rings, her wrists and arms with silver bracelets up to the elbows. She had a deep, penetrating, throaty voice, used to giving orders, but when speaking to her nephew or her agent in Paris, a handsome bald little man, she made an effort to restrain the power in her voice.
But whatever she tried to do, her personality overrode everything.
With these two people, however, she always behaved more cautiously than with others; she never risked anything, always speaking to them as if she were afraid of even momentary misunderstandings.
Döhring, she said quietly and firmly, while walking back to the window, carrying the telephone.
And this is the other Döhring, replied the young man at the other end of the line.
His aunt kept quiet, thinking she had better wait before saying anything.
It rang for so long I thought you’d never pick up, added the young man.
Why wouldn’t I pick it up, the aunt asked, cool and measured; she asked what happened.
I was just about to hang up, the young man said excitedly. I thought you might have gone out.
Where would I have gone, replied the aunt—and now the irritation was clear in her voice—after waiting for you for an
hour and a half.
I only said that, the young man explained, stammering, because you didn’t pick up for so long.
Perhaps we should stop talking about when I picked up the phone or when I didn’t, and talk instead about what’s going on. I am waiting patiently for your explanation.
Nothing special, answered the young man indignantly. All that happened was that I fell asleep. I’m very sorry I’ve made you wait so long.
Well, that’s nice, said the aunt, a little shocked.
So you fell asleep, she added slowly, as if trying to gain time in which to understand the situation.
You probably didn’t go to bed on time.
As a matter of fact, she could not have said what it was she didn’t understand, but there was something. Mainly she didn’t know what to make of the young man’s unusually dull, unclear intonations, his agitated or forced overtones. While looking out the window to keep an eye on the telephone booth, she again leaned her forehead against the glass. There is a train from Berlin almost every hour. If he had fallen asleep why hadn’t he called her earlier, and how could he have arrived after such a delay from exactly the opposite direction.
She sensed the confused pulsing of madness in the telephone line. And a few sentences sufficed for some of the madness to stick to her.
She had to protest.
Outside, the bare, shiny branches were flying back and forth; while the windows kept out the noise of the cheerless wintry wind, the telephone line transmitted it. It was like a static that could drive one mad. It’s possible he had fallen asleep, but then he’d fallen asleep somewhere else, he’d arrived from somewhere else and not by train at all; someone must have given him a lift and dropped him off at the corner of Insel Street.
He must have some reason to be vague.
Nothing is inconceivable in the busy life of a young man. Except that her nephew had no busy life, he had no kind of life at all.
This is what made everything so worrisome. It was impossible to understand what had been happening with him, or rather what things had not been happening with him.
Carlino, said the aunt, her voice full of anxiety, before her nephew could reply. I do understand a lot, I do accept almost everything, I’m not curious about anything, but please tell me now from where exactly have you come.
You don’t have to give me a full accounting, but I’m interested, if you don’t mind.
The young man, whose full name was Carl Maria Döhring and whom only his aunt addressed with the Italianized diminutive, was concentrating at the moment only on how to cut short the conversation as quickly as possible. And how not to forget the telephone number he had carved with his nail into the yellow cover of the telephone book, and lo, the carving was visibly, slowly and dangerously fading. In his inattention, he unfortunately misunderstood the question.
He answered, of course Berlin, where else would he be, but he sincerely hoped he’d be able to catch the next train.
The next train, asked the nonplussed aunt, who in her surprise let out a shout, what next train, which the young man interpreted at the other end of the line as his aunt’s being familiar with the railway’s entire departure timetable, and he realized the deception was out of the bag.
Provided, he said quickly, hoping to fight his way out of the entanglement, that we immediately put an end to this conversation.
He’d called only to ask her indulgence.
He’d really like to catch the next train, he must run.
He won’t be able to stop by at her place, but the moment he gets home in Pfeilen, he’ll call her.
He hopes to find a way to meet somehow during the holidays.
The aunt replied quietly and solemnly, that he knew perfectly well she would be spending the holidays in Paris, but she was willing to wait patiently and see how her nephew’s comedy would play out. Then, as if she herself had said something very funny, with her mouth open wide she laughed into the telephone. She wanted him to know she was on to him, she knew what was at the bottom of it: a woman. She knew how to laugh with gusto. But unguarded laughter created complete confusion between them. Carlino did not understand what his aunt did not understand, or what more he should tell her to make her understand and accept what she hadn’t yet, not to mention that her saucy laughter irritated and offended him, hitting him at one of his most sensitive points.
He had nobody. He has never had anybody. He has never even been close to having anybody, ever.
But the aunt could not comprehend why her nephew stuck to this impossibility, why he needed to; and if he is already here in the Hofgarten, what does it matter what woman he’s involved with, why does he have to go on lying, why all the fuss.
She did not understand any of it, but of course, she was the more indulgent one.
Carlino, my dear, there are so many things in heaven and on earth that I should understand, and honestly I do try, she shouted softly, still laughing a bit, but if I understand correctly, she continued haltingly, then pouncing on him with all the power of her voice, you are in two places at the same time.
What two places, what do you mean, Döhring asked irritably, and it seemed to his aunt that, judging by his voice, he really did not understand her. I don’t understand you, he said, I have to get going right away.
That’s great, the aunt answered, and she no longer saw any further reason to restrain her voice. While you are making a phone call from a booth under my window, you are also going to catch your train in Berlin.
Very interesting indeed.
What a numbskull you are. You think it’s that easy to fool your aunt.
But to her stentorian good mood she received a quick and determined reply she’d never have expected.
Because Döhring finally realized how carelessly he had been behaving. Which meant that once again he was the weaker one, the loser, the dolt who could never gain the upper hand with anyone. And he began to shout so desperately at the other end of the line, bellowing, really, that his aunt yanked her forehead back from the windowpane and the receiver away from her ear.
He shouted that if she really wanted to know what had happened then he would tell it to her now, no problem. Yesterday he killed somebody.
Yes, he thought to himself at the same time, I lent a hand to my Creator in his daily devastation. He regretted that he did not dare say this aloud.
He found it delightful that here he was, standing in the telephone booth while outside the wind was blowing furiously, and shouting across the world at least one third of his confession that could be made public.
Of course he’d denied it, he yelled, because he thought he’d get away with it. But he wouldn’t, because he didn’t want to get away with it.
One can’t get away with everything.
He was horrified at this sentence, and he shuddered, though not as he had the day before; not his bones, not his flesh, but the roots of his hair, his hair follicles, the entire surface of his skin very finely turned into a field of goose bumps.
He’d never try to get away with it. Yes, exactly, he was going back to Berlin. He’d retract his first confession. And he’d shit on the Christmas holidays. He wouldn’t wait that long. And it wasn’t only that his skin was shivering, but the shivering itself, both fear and pleasure, had done something profound to him.
I can’t wait any longer, I can’t bear it, he shouted, and felt that the mysterious something had, incomprehensibly and quite unexpectedly, reached his spinal cord, and in his underpants his prick was standing erect.
Which humiliated him to the depth of his soul, because it was all a reaction to his aunt’s voice and her shocking behavior. Not only her laughter, but that entire seductive and flirtatious game, assumed or hoped to be innocent, which they had been playing since his earliest childhood and which made him shout so frantically.
Döhring lived in his aunt’s Berlin apartment; she financed his studies. A wounded animal bellows like this when ready, of course, for both defense and attack, and knows neither gra
titude nor obligation.
That is also how the aunt at the other end of the line perceived the shouting: as a call for help.
The whole family can go to hell, Döhring yelled, beside himself, as if shouting that his aunt could go to hell, along with her money, apartment, and art collection.
Time has come to confess your crimes.
In time, they will all know what happened to him.
As so often in dangerous situations, these strange sentences—which could not be related to anything, which in the first seconds were completely senseless and even acoustically incomprehensible because too fast, too loud, and too divergent—called forth from the aunt a response quite the opposite of what might have been expected at that moment. It might be assumed that she did not comprehend the meaning of the sentences, since she did not become frightened and helpless; rather, she did not take them at face value, did not believe them because she could not believe her nephew capable of killing anyone, that’s why she wasn’t interested in knowing whom he had killed.
No one.
The uttered sentences did not interest her, yet she fathomed and understood everything, and she knew what she had to do. She comprehended the emotional content of the sentence and, instinctively, immediately, she too began to shout.
She had the stronger voice.