Even though J had a disability ID and was classified as such at the pension office, he still went to work at the post depot; he was pressured into it, although comparatively late in his life—otherwise he would have just stayed at home or spent all his time in the inns, with the women or with a beer, or just the latter, and so now he was contributing to the family income, if only trivially, and the payout he could expect from his pension was increasing. My uncle was, like everyone else, a regular expense in the family’s financial housekeeping. And he had cost them money from the very beginning but hadn’t brought any in for a long time. They had let things go on like that for three decades, but with the arrival of my father—a revenue officer and then lawyer—the modern age was ushered into the Boll family, meaning that they started to think in terms of social security and pension contributions. And so Uncle J was now a postal employee; maybe he even thought he was a postal officer, looking at himself in the mirror with all the more pride, despite not having the uniform he would surely have loved to have. His work consisted of lugging parcels around, and afterwards his colleagues showered, but not him. He went back home unwashed. But for now we’re still at the start of his shift. I guess they didn’t even have work overalls in the postal depot back then, just their own personal laundry items which they would then carry home in sacks to wash, while my uncle carried his home on his body. Presumably he spent the whole time muttering while he was lugging parcels around in the depot, because that was what he always did when he was supposed to be doing something. He accepted every task with a servile bow, only to immediately lapse into muttering and hissing. He did it around us at home too, especially on those occasions when he had been looking forward to doing something else instead. When he arrived home, the first thing he always did was go to the fridge. He would open the cupboard above the fridge where the Henninger beer tankards were kept, take one out, open the fridge, take a beer out, open the bottle and pour. (Our entire family lived off the Henninger workers’ brew; we were supplied with four crates of it a week.) Still standing by the fridge, he would drink down half a tankard, accompanied by a sound of pleasure that sounded more repulsive than anything else in the world. By that point, my mother’s calls would normally start up. J, she would cry, fetch a few bottles of beer up from the cellar for dinner will you! And bring up some water too! If she was standing in the kitchen, he would bow and run off, his face taut with anger. But if she was calling out from the dining room, where perhaps she was setting the table and therefore unable to see her brother as he stood there in the kitchen by the cupboard with the beer tankards, then his face would twist into an expression of sheer hatred. Sometimes I saw it by accident. He would indignantly repeat my mother’s words under his breath. J, do this, J do that, he would hiss, building up into sentences like: I’m always the one who has to fetch the beer from the cellar, I’m always the one who has to get the water from the cellar, I’m always having to do this, always having to do that! He could certainly say I, my uncle, that was for sure. Those hissed I-filled sentences would accompany him all the way down to the cellar, and if he happened to pass by me on his way down (which would only have happened back when I was a kid—because later I would flee to the cemetery or some other place, in order to get some fresh air and take some deep breaths until he was gone again), then he would simply keep hissing, looking at me out of the corner of his eye like an animal that knew it was being hunted, or like a dog that had just been caught in the act, whatever that act might be. I always dreaded these encounters. Sometimes, though, I would be standing in the utility room and hear him hissing away from down the corridor. He would climb down the steps into the cellar as he hissed, before coming back up a minute later to unload his cargo in the kitchen. Then he would pick up the half-empty beer tankard and hiss into it until the hissing transitioned into drinking, only to be interrupted again by my mother: J, there are four new crates of beer out in the garage, bring them down into the cellar while you’re at it won’t you! Looking back now, it seems to me that J was constantly being asked to either get something from the cellar or take something down to the cellar. He never actually went up to my mother, his sister, and said to her face: I’m always the one who has to go down to the cellar! But he would hiss it, and in her presence too. He didn’t think anyone could understand him when he was hissing like that, but we always did. And so he moved through the house like a permanent threat, even though he was always very peaceable with everyone, apart from us kids, and even though it never came to the ultimate explosion of violence we were expecting each and every day. I assume he was much the same when he was making his way around the postal depot at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, and I’m sure they were constantly giving him jobs to do just like my mother did, and that he would carry them out amidst his muttering, because he didn’t have any other choice, for only the complete eradication of everyone around him would have freed him from it all, and that was something he preferred not to risk.
Most of the time he would wear these greyish-brown polo-shirts, sometimes with yellow stitching; pale, fusty colours which for me are now inextricably linked to his silage-like stench—even today, when I see items of clothing in these colours, most of which tend to be worn by older people, I can still smell my uncle. He would start to sweat into his shirt as he tackled the first few packages of the day, and even today I can’t begin to imagine how the smell must have developed there at the postal depot during the course of the day, because it had to have been even worse than it was at home with us. After all, he only came home once he was done lugging the parcels around, once the smell had already started to subside.
As long as he lived, Uncle J never once told us anything about his work colleagues at the Frankfurt post depot, so I don’t know whether he had any acquaintances there. Perhaps at that time it was mostly Italians, Turks or Tunisians working there anyway, because Germany was still welcoming migrant workers with open arms then, at the end of the sixties. Given that I don’t know anything for sure, I can only imagine how he might have made some friends there, against the odds, how he might have been able to say certain sentences to some person or another, supposedly of an expert nature and exclusively consisting of superlatives as per usual, and maybe they even had their first beer of the day together, let’s say after an hour, at around six in the morning, the first beer, the first fraternisation, the first communal sit down of the day, their gazes fixed on the mountain of parcels they had to distribute, the Spaniards, the Greeks, the Italians, the Germans and my uncle J from the Wetterau, all there so that these parcels could reach their recipients, in Oldenburg, in Münster, in Wölfersheim. I’m sure that kind of work leads the person doing it to think they’re the central hub of the whole world, that nothing would function without them, because someone who leads and facilitates the transportation of goods also facilitates civilisation itself, or, as they would have said at the postal depot: The packages simply have to reach their destination. You might say, then, that my uncle was serving as the central hub and distribution centre of the entire world, which must have been important to him, and maybe he really did walk around the depot with a certain sense of pride, that is until he received his next order, which would be followed by the next hiss (it’s always me), and then the next beer.
People still used to drink at work back then, whereas today drinking has completely disappeared from the workplace. In actual fact there’s been a drinking ban for ages, since back before there was even a smoking ban; it’s just that the drinking ban was never publicised. When I was a kid, every bin man was guzzling from first thing in the morning, the postmen were pretty much always drunk, the city workers already stank of beer by the time they started their shift, and the couriers at the trade associations drank schnapps, in addition to the beer, between trips. Even in 1984, when I started working for Oberhessischen Energy, everyone was boozing away a mere hour after we clocked on. Except they didn’t see it as boozing, more a hearty kind of breakfast. Beer was a source of nourishment; it made you stro
nger, that’s what they thought. Even my mother was fond of these hearty breakfasts in the mornings; when the cleaning woman came (an immigrant from Serbia, still known as Yugoslavia back then), they would clean for a while and then have breakfast together, something my mother had probably been looking forward to the whole week long. There they would sit in our kitchen at ten in the morning, while my father was off in Frankfurt earning the family’s keep at the Henninger brewery, and they would heave the Henninger bottles onto the table and pour Slivowitz down their necks. There would be paprika sausage to go with it, along with pickled onions and the like, and after half an hour they would have these happy, red faces that stayed with them for the rest of the day. Until just recently, that kind of thing was completely normal in our country. Once upon a time, this country drank. Now, any bin man would be fired on the spot if he had already imbibed three litres of beer by nine in the morning. In repeats of Firma Hesselbach, a TV series from the early 1960s, back in my uncle’s day, they’re all drinking beer whenever they want, even first thing in the morning. And the people were red and happy, and it was their life, and sometimes they even died at home in their own beds, something which my uncle J didn’t experience. He died in hospital, on the second day. He didn’t suffer long, they told us, and ever since then my family has been convinced that they killed him there in the hospital, which isn’t improbable. My grandmother spent a lifetime caring for him, he spent several years vegetating in an apartment with his later girlfriend Rosl, and then he got to the hospital and was quickly disposed of. He must have spent a fair bit of time wired up in there, after which he supposedly died all of a sudden and the doctors claimed not to have noticed straight away. To be on the safe side they plugged him in one more time, gave him another burst of electricity, then probably just turned it up and left the room, leaving him to dance and thrash around alone, or that’s how it looked afterwards in any case.
But he has no idea of what is to come back then, as he drinks the fifth and sixth and maybe even seventh beer of his working morning in Frankfurt am Main. After all, what idea did anyone have of the future, the future they thought was directly ahead of them or perhaps even already there? It hadn’t been that long since the war and the uniforms of the brownshirts, the colour of which wasn’t dissimilar to the polo shirts worn by my hunting fanatic of an uncle, and even J’s car was that Nazi-brown colour, and now here they were sitting with the Greeks and the Italians and the Spaniards on a bench in the train station, drinking beer and smoking in an atmosphere of workplace collegiality. They unpack their lunch boxes, like the ones I used to be sent off to school with in the beginning. I still remember my uncle’s lunch boxes, I can picture them very clearly, including what my grandmother used to pack in there for him each evening, because of course she wouldn’t get up at three in the morning when he had an early shift, J had to get himself up then, get himself dressed and off to the station. She would put sausage sandwiches in there for him, tucked into a corner of the lunchbox according to a very specific spatial principle, and in the remaining space there would be an egg, a gherkin or an onion, all garnished with a serviette. When I was at school, I used to be given packed lunches too; going off to school or work was like embarking on a journey, you had to be well-prepared, you couldn’t have an energy slump in the midst of it all, you had to have something with you to keep your strength up, and since it wasn’t possible to buy things on the go back then, people always took everything with them. You couldn’t get take-away coffee anywhere, everyone used thermos flasks instead. There would be one in every bag, and my uncle J had one of these flasks too, filled with milky coffee. A land of thermos flasks. A little piece of home with you at all times.
My uncle took his coffee with sugar. He would add five teaspoons of sugar to an average cup of ground coffee (I always watched, aghast); so if you add it up, he must have shoveled around twenty-five to thirty teaspoons of refined sugar into every thermos. My uncle didn’t live a healthy life, that’s for sure, but then again it wasn’t really the fashion to live healthily back then—you could pretty much choose the way you would die, and usually it was the way you had lived. He smoked almost constantly, consumed vast amounts of sugar, and probably drank around four to five litres of beer a day. But he went to the forest too, he loved the forest air just as much as the air at the inn, and would go on long walks. He loved driving his car, the car he was allowed to have just like he was allowed to have a driving license, neither of which would have been permitted today. My uncle and his car, they were inseparable. He drove it into the Usa once, the river here, while his mother was next to him in the passenger seat. The car had to be hauled out of the Usa afterwards, and J stood by and watched. It was a VW Type 3 Variant, and it smelled like my uncle. Presented with the choice of either walking the three kilometres from the Uhlandstrasse house to my parents’ place in Friedberg (or vice versa) or getting into J’s car, I would have chosen to walk every time. Looking back now, it seems like everything about him was brown, everything Nazi-coloured, and yet they hadn’t even let him into the Hitler Youth, nor had he been a Luftwaffe assistant, and his only social interaction as a child and teenager had consisted of getting beaten up. He may have been fourteen by the time the war came to an end, but he was still an idiot, and would continue being one for the rest of his life, something which was already clear to everyone else. What’s more, my uncle J was one of those people who tend to idolise the very people who torment them. They develop an intense attachment to their torturers and tag along at their heels. My mother says that she and her brother were constantly having to escort my uncle, the oldest of all of them, whenever they could. But it wasn’t always possible, and if there was no other member of the Boll family around, he was told to walk home, or to wherever one of his siblings was, as quickly as he could. That was what they tried to drum into him. But presumably he always dawdled around instead, and day after day he would end up getting beaten as a result. His must have been a very bloody childhood, and he looked set to begin a bloody adolescence until they sent him off to the Rhineland, where he had some peace and even met Konrad Adenauer, whose rose garden he walked past every morning during what were probably his most idyllic years, my uncle in the Rhineland, the mentally-impaired Wetterau boy, the poor thing, and the Chancellor said hello to him politely, with no idea of who he was saying hello to.
My uncle was also fond of stopping to stare at the window display of Waffensteinökel in Friedberg. Waffensteinökel, on Friedberg’s Kaiserstrasse, was where the greyish-brown or yellowy-brown polo shirts would be put on display, very popular with hunters in the post-war years, through the seventies, and even today. They were a kind of camouflage colour, fit for use anywhere from the German forests to the African desert. Rommel, the Desert Fox, was probably another of my uncle’s heroes. The hunting and mountain climbing and those German war films were probably his real home, a time when everyone was great and he, in hindsight, still had a future ahead of him and could maybe even dream of a high-ranking position in the army or his own tank in Russia. The handguns at Waffensteinökel held a particular appeal for my uncle. He would study the different makes—he knew their specifications, or at least he thought he did—and get that Heino gleam in his eyes, and for a moment there in front of the window display at Waffensteinökel, it was like he was under a spell, perhaps like the state of rapture others experience when they hear Hölderlin’s poetry, because of the sheer beauty of the sound and depth of the words. Or like when a Russian reads Pushkin. He would go into a similar state, standing there in front of Waffensteinökel. Hitler and his Reich; he hadn’t been part of it, hadn’t been allowed access to it, and this turned into a longing that lasted his whole life, poorly assuaged by the hunting, the Bad Nauheim forest, the birds and the colour brown. After all, back then they had the tank and military magazines alongside the smutty ones, even if they didn’t yet have high-resolution photographs with a price tag and glossy finish to match. It was a longing, and it was a life, and it was the truth, li
ke everything. My uncle, the animal, as many thought back then. My uncle, the creature of longing, as I think now.
We kids were always trying to provoke his rage, and he regularly lashed out at us to varying degrees. Whenever my parents were off in Austria or Italy searching for the holiday home they wanted to buy, he and my grandmother would come to stay with us. I say ‘come to stay’ even though he wasn’t actually allowed to sleep there with us and had to go back to the Uhlandstrasse house for that, but he was around a lot nonetheless, and sometimes even by himself. One time he was watching TV, a mountain climbing film starring Luis Trenker. He loved mountain climbing films and Heimat films in general, he never watched American films . . . although I only realised that later. When others were being transported to the streets of San Francisco, he was still in the hunting lodges of Silberwald, still watching films in which a quarter of the total length consisted of stags running up and down spectacular mountain meadows, the footage already aged and yellowed.
I remember my brother calling out to me once, saying that J was watching another one of his mountain climbing films. We knew that J always went into that entranced state when he was watching a Luis Trenker mountain climbing film, his ‘Hölderlin State’ via other means. He thought he knew his stuff when it came to mountain climbing, superlatively, and mountain rescue too, for the mountain rescuers were his heroes. My uncle sat there alone in the living room, gazing fixedly at the Luis Trenker film, hunched forwards into an almost military position of attention, ready for action, as if he too were part of the mountain rescue effort, sitting in the mountain rescue hut at base camp at that very moment, perhaps drinking a robust, hearty Schnapps with his mountain rescue colleagues, all of them with their gazes fixed on the mountain, and in front of him on the living room table was a glass tankard of Henninger with the bottle next to it, half empty. We spied on our spellbound uncle and his alpine ecstasy through the crack in the door for a while, already giggling away (as far as I know he never even saw the mountains in his Rhineland or Wetterau worlds, apart from the Vordertaunus that is), then my brother, twelve years old at the time, would creep into the living room in anticipation of what was about to unfold. In all seriousness and with a straight face, my brother then asked J what he was watching. J explained the film to him, his eyes gleaming. He was a die-hard fan of Luis Trenker. Luis Trenker may have been Italian, but he was from the South Tirol, so for my uncle that practically made him German. Not like someone who might have worked at the post depot with him, not like those dark-haired Spaniards or Italians, even though Luis Trenker did in actual fact have dark hair (so did my uncle, as it happens). Luis Trenker, always alone on the mountain, in stormy weather, in hail, alone in the forest, yet just five minutes later running over the yellow-tinged meadows with the belling stags, and his mother always waiting at home (J had a mother too), and somewhere the girl in the dirndl dress would be waiting too (J didn’t have one of those, even though his later bed-fellow was called Rosl, a name which might as well have been plucked straight from one of those old black-and-white Heimat films). And by then the mountain rescue team was on its way, and Uncle J explained to my brother who, how and where, and precisely in which meadow and for what purpose on which mountain ridge they were on their way, and that they had encountered stormy weather . . . and that in this stormy weather they couldn’t even bivouac—he said the word bivouac with particular emphasis, stretching out his index finger and wagging it back and forth emphatically. On the screen was a film set, an artificial rock face with snowdrifts in front of it, and the same shot of the valley kept being repeated again and again. Whenever the rock face was shown in close-up, my uncle would cry out, Look!, the rock face, a really dangerous rock face, perhaps the most dangerous and most difficult one in existence. Once the mountain rescue team came into the shot, climbing the rock face in their attempt to rescue whomever was stranded in the storm, unable to even bivouac, and once night had fallen in the studio and the floodlights had been turned down, Uncle J’s gaze would start to gleam and an ever increasing tension would seize his body. Then I came into the room too, sitting down without a word as far as possible from J. He stared at the screen, his gaze fixed on the important happenings on the mountain. The happenings were Uncle J’s happenings too, as he sat there in our living room. My parents were away, so my grandmother and J had been appointed to look after us. It must have been at a time when he didn’t stink as much as he did later, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to handle being there in the living room with him. Nor, I imagine, in the house in general. His mother must have forced him to carry out his bodily ablutions; presumably he had gone muttering and hissing down to the shower in his realm, the cellar. A team of five!, J called out. On the mountain, the team of five, without the ability to bivouac, and behind them the speedy rescue party, mobile and agile, the mountain rescue team. The team of five was shown on the rock face, while someone from above blew down something that was supposed to look like snow. We found all of this hilarious, even though it wasn’t supposed to be. There they were, the despairing faces, and then the mountain rescue team, making their way further up and up. These were real mountaineers! Why, asked my brother, don’t they go in by helicopter? Why doesn’t the mountain rescue team rescue by helicopter? The film was set in the fifties or sixties, after all, and back then they were already conducting helicopter rescues, my brother knew that much. In a storm like this incredibly dangerous storm, it would be too dangerous for the mountain rescue team to fly so close to the rock face, said my uncle, dreaming himself into every syllable of his sentence as he said it. In Friedberg in the Wetterau, people could say things like that, he could say words like those as he sat there in front of the television, captured by its spell: storm . . . incredibly dangerous . . . rock face . . . mountain rescue . . . And so he sat there in the Wetterau, talking about the mountain, blissfully happy. Why is it too dangerous?, asked my brother. It’s a rock face, said my uncle in his expert tone of voice, a really steep rock face, and with the strong wind (see, look how the snowflakes are swirling around!), you can’t steer the helicopter in those conditions, he said, as if he knew all about it. And then another sentence burst out of him, that the mountain rescue team were the real heroes of the modern era. Even his poetry leaned towards the superlative. They were great men, the mountain rescuers, and my uncle understood them, sitting there in front of our television and gazing into it, awestruck by the mountain and its rescue team. My uncle always wanted to, always had to belong, even here. And he walked into a trap with this longing to belong, as if things could be the same for him as they (perhaps) were for others (the mountain rescuers?). He is probably longing to be on the mountain at this very moment, as he sits there in our living room. Not in the five-man team, but following quickly on their heels, scrambling along in a technically perfect and self-sacrificial manner, heroically grand and oblivious to everyone around him, self-sacrificial like the Wehrmacht had been, for they had only failed in Russia because of the winter, after all—unfortunately they hadn’t had a mountain rescue team—and my uncle could talk about them too, about the JU-52 aviators who had fearlessly fetched the soldiers from the cauldron right in the nick of time. He loved twists like that, he lived and radiated them: total self-sacrifice, right until the very last moment. I’m sure he had fantasies of being an aviator hero, a heroic captain, a tank hero, and Rommel for sure, just like he fantasised about being a stonemason and idolised the crane driver on the company grounds almost as much as he did at the Friedberg policemen—who wore uniforms and had weapons, after all—and as much as the hunters up in Forsthaus Winterstein or in Jagdhaus Ossenheim, where J went all the time. Why are the mountain rescuers the heroes of the modern era?, asked my brother, and any person other than my uncle, a man brought into the world by the forceps of fate, would have realised at that moment just what this would lead to after a mere few minutes, namely in him going into a rage and pursuing us to the furthest reaches of the garden fence to beat us for having cheated him out o
f his film and his mountain rescue. But my uncle, not suspecting a thing, answered just like he always did, with the innocence of a child, without any suspicion. The mountain rescuers are heroes because they rescue people who have fallen victim to a mountain emergency, putting themselves (at this point his voice would become hushed and solemn) in mortal peril. My brother: So the mountain rescuers have to go onto the mountain because some people are stuck there? My uncle: They go and get them, putting themselves in mortal peril. (All the while he was talking, he would stare intently at the screen and the events unfolding on it.) My brother: So if the mountain rescuers are putting themselves in danger because others are putting themselves in danger for no reason at all, why don’t they just forbid them from putting themselves in danger in the first place? My uncle hesitated and wrinkled his forehead. My brother: If people would just ban this crappy mountain climbing business, then there wouldn’t be any need for mountain rescuers, it’s just stupid. Why do people climb mountains anyway, and who pays for the mountain rescue? It’s really dumb, no one needs to do that kind of thing. Already beaten by this point, my uncle could only exclaim: You have no idea! You don’t know a thing about mountain rescue! And he was about to receive the finishing blow. My uncle had stumbled into a severe storm on his mountain, and I too joined in the effort to bring him down. Aha, we asked, but what do you know about mountain rescue? For that matter, what do you know about mountain climbing in general? Or even just about mountains? All you know is the Winterstein. We emphasised the you just like he did his I whenever he had to go down to the cellar to fetch something. (The Winterstein is right on our doorstep, three hundred metres above the level of the town, and it’s a gentle ascent, so there’s no need for mountain rescue; there’s just an inn and a military road built for the tanks.) In short, merciless as we were, we dragged our uncle away from his rock face and back to the reality of his own existence, we robbed him of everything, even the mountain rescue, because we had long since realised what our uncle was and because the concoction of choleric temperament and enthusiasm, when it exploded, for us was no less spectacular than the annual New Year’s fireworks, although to be honest we didn’t even like those anymore and found them boring in comparison. My uncle stood there in the living room, lifting his hand in a threatening fashion, as if about to deliver someone a blow to the ear, red all over, trembling and looking at us with equal quantities of aggression and helplessness, the poor man, and it was our fault, and I had joined in again. J would never have done such a thing back when he was a child, he would never have tormented someone like that. And now that he was an adult, not even we children took him seriously; we didn’t even take him seriously as someone entrusted with looking after us. His adulthood was perhaps the only thing he had left after surviving the Wetterau and the return from his emigration to the Rhineland, but we didn’t even let him have that, and yet I was only seven years old. My brother was already active in a political youth group back then, something connected to the first political party he joined, maybe he was even a junior member already, and he could already debate well at twelve years of age, he had his rhetoric, even though he probably couldn’t actually defeat anyone yet, but when it came to annihilating my uncle he was already perfectly capable (and so was I). We tore him to pieces during his Luis Trenker films just like my grandfather tore the roast duck to pieces at Christmas, and it was just as festive an occasion for us, an expert tearing-to-pieces of the uncle. We were able to do it in all kinds of contexts, for it was easy to see how the dynamite he was made of could easily be ignited. If he was standing out in the garden with us, talking superlatively about the garden which his brother-in-law had just put in, even then my brother would find something to pick on, so to speak, using his words to rob my uncle of his superlative garden. Back then, I wondered whether that might be what people learned to do in the Party. It only occurred to me later that my uncle may have loved our garden just as much as I did, or indeed that he may have loved any of the same things that I did, from the robins and the nightingales to the badger and the women or maybe even all people, in so far as they came into question. That he too, to put it simply, had a life and had been put into this life by God, like everything, from the badger to the mountain rescue to the barrier that stopped him from leaping on his own mother. But by the time it occurred to me it was too late, as is usually the case, and he died soon after. Shortly before his death he was, I believe, legally incapacitated by my family, to safeguard his portion of the inheritance and out of their fear that he might marry Rosl. In the end, he gave what he had to his passion. Rosl spent the last year of her life compulsively buying pots and pans, and these too needed to be paid for and dealt with by us after her death, an apartment full of pots and pans, ordered in catalogues from all over Germany, another passion, and one which remained unquenchable until her last breath. Rosl died in bed next to my uncle, side by side with him. Death came at four in the morning, the doctors said. My uncle hadn’t even realised. He noticed only at around eight, when, clueless as ever, he called his sister: Rosl is dead.
The Room Page 3