People still smoked back then. It was the golden era of the filter cigarette in Germany. They probably smoked like chimneys at the post depot. They had cigarettes in their mouths when they were lugging packages around, cigarettes in their mouths when they were filling in forms, cigarettes in their mouths when they were on a break. All of them had yellow fingers. I remember my uncle’s yellow fingers very clearly; they were the first yellow fingers I ever saw in my life. That came along with the silage-like stench: the stench of cigarettes. The filter cigarette was a medium of communication—that was what had made it so successful. Because people by themselves weren’t enough; there had to be something else, and that something was the filter cigarette. It broke the ice. It was a dry schnapps. At the height of his smoking, my uncle went through three packets a day, like many people did back then. It was the filter that made mass cigarette smoking possible. It made everything so simple. Part of the image of day-to-day life in Germany was the country engulfed in a cloud of smoke. To this day, I still believe that every one of these filter cigarettes prevented someone somewhere from becoming depressed. Hence the swaying sensation that kicks in with the first drag. There’s always something there with you, it rescues you. My uncle, rescued. He was never alone at the post depot in Frankfurt; he always had his cigarettes and could light one up at any time. And how he coughed! A long, raw cough that became wet at the end, almost slimy. You could hear the phlegm churning around in his throat, and his eyes would stick out in this strange way, as if they wanted to burst out of him. As if, just once, they wanted to take a look at him, the uncle, from the outside, instead of always looking out of him from the inside. He smoked far too much, everyone knew that, but he was still comparatively young and didn’t have any pains; he didn’t know what pain was, remember. For him, pain was a foreign word. He had a blind spot where pain was concerned, one might say, he couldn’t see it in the slightest. In later years, my uncle almost lost his legs, never even having felt the complete blockage in his blood vessels. It was diagnosed by chance, entirely by accident. Just like he was once diagnosed with a ruptured appendix by chance, after he fell down the stairs and was taken off to the doctor. Neither of those afflictions, the fall nor the rupture, caused him any pain. Hotplates didn’t hurt him either; it was only the smell of burning that made him realise what he had just done for the umpteenth time. Even the beatings at school didn’t cause him any actual pain, only injuries. He bled, he was peppered with blue flecks, and they loved kicking him in the side when he was down on the ground, but none of it caused any pain. It didn’t even make him sad. The only thing that made him sad was that it made the others sad—his siblings, his mother—when he bled or burnt himself. For his family had already realised that there was much more at stake here than merely protecting him from getting beaten. It was a question of survival.
He wouldn’t even have noticed if his schoolmates had killed him, nor would they. They could have easily killed him by accident, for he had no pain threshold to reach its limit before things went too far. They listened out to see whether he screamed or groaned, even just briefly, so they could gauge how hard they were hitting and kicking. But my uncle didn’t scream or groan. If any beatings took place after his time in the Rhineland, nothing has ever been mentioned about it in the family. I imagine he probably pulled through his time at the postal depot in Frankfurt without such problems too.
And now the last workplace beer has been drunk, probably with a cocked arm and a sigh of pleasure, and it’s getting on for two in the afternoon, and Uncle J clocks off from his shift in the proper manner and has three quarters of an hour to spare before the train to Bad Nauheim, before the rest of his day begins, to be filled with all kinds of wonderful things that he’s probably already imagining to himself. The Frauenwald forest with its wildlife and deer stands and Forsthaus Winterstein. His digestive system has probably already processed the beer, for it was only sustenance after all, they were working hard hauling the packages around. Maybe there’s just a hint of intoxication now, a light shroud over everything. And so into the last three quarters of an hour and maybe off to the train station forecourt, one last cigarette with his workmates while staring off into nothingness or into the distance like the Marlboro man (depending on how you interpret the Marlboro man’s gaze). It made them feel secure, their depression lifted. Then my uncle sets off, heading across Kaiserstrasse to Theaterplatz once more. I always picture him walking there, the aged child. Hunched over slightly, his shoulders raised, or rather his head sunk down between them, hands in his pockets, wearing a kind of chapka in winter but with artificial padding instead of fur—it seems to me that he always wore the same thing throughout his entire life. Most of the time you would see him from behind, not the front, while he stood before things like shop windows, construction site machinery or trams, while he stared through windowpanes at displays or the instruments of coveted automobiles, always the latest and newest. The admiration always moved in one direction only, through and out of his eyes. If a Harley-Davidson drove past, he would admire it (despite the fact that it was American). If a Porsche drove past, he would admire it. He was allowed to have his VW Variant, at least. It was another sanctuary of his. He had this Driving-It-Into-The-Garage ceremony: the automobile would stay in the courtyard and wouldn’t be driven into the garage right away, for my uncle liked to prolong the anticipation and make the whole thing more intense. First he would go into the house, first he would drink another beer, all the while turning over the imminent, important act in his mind: that the automobile still needed to be driven into the garage, for the evening, for the night, because the automobile had to go into the garage. As if it were his little moon rocket, or his very own tank in Russia (you have to look after such things, they need to go into the garage at night, even nowadays, just like a child needs to go to bed). Who knows, perhaps J would have liked to have put a uniform on for Driving-It-Into-The-Garage, one specially made for the occasion. In any case, he felt ennobled by the act, and would always announce it so that everyone in the house knew: The Variant was about to be driven into the garage. And once it was in there, the world was in order. The day could continue and the celebration had been celebrated.
There were significantly more varieties of automobiles being driven around in Frankfurt than in Bad Nauheim in the Wetterau, especially at the end of the sixties. Many models didn’t even make it out to the countryside at all, and around the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof where J worked, the cars were always the biggest and most expensive and swankiest, for obvious reasons, which meant that my uncle could stare his eyes clean out of his head and admire them to his heart’s content. He would stop in his tracks and stare at the limousines as they drove past, right up until the objects of his desire had disappeared around the corner or into the distance and were no longer visible. Besides the Catholic religion he had been raised in, my uncle was also a devotee of the Faster-Higher-Further religion, which was almost universal at the time. It applied to automobiles and weapons and space rockets, and of course to buildings too, particularly building sites, because buildings that were in the process of being built were even more fascinating than those that were already there. He discussed building construction in much the same tone as others would talk about a pregnancy. Look how fast it’s growing! And how hard they’re all working! And look at the equipment they have! And how many floors there will be! I mean, try to imagine for a moment the austerity of the era in which my uncle lived in Frankfurt. There was nothing there then, nothing but the Henninger Tower—although that did have a revolving restaurant. Then, later, there was the TV tower, but other than that Frankfurt was almost completely flat. The high rise buildings came much later, and J was still around to see some of them. He was still around to see the Messeturm too. He certainly spent lots of time there, and so close to the train station! Just a ten minute walk and you could be standing at the construction site of a building which you knew would later be the tallest in the whole of Europe. My uncle, standing there at th
e perimeter fence, knew it too. Not a big building, not just any old building, but the biggest. The immense excavation work, the scaffolding, the foundations, everything just a hole at first (full of foreign workers, but with a German foreman), everyone in their place, everyone knowing what they had to do, from early in the morning on the construction site of Europe’s highest tower, which for now is still only a hole. Off towards the back stands the foreman, his blueprints unrolled, gesturing here and there with his outstretched arm, standing like a general, perhaps much like Uncle J’s father in the family business, or like Rommel in the desert. Then the foundations are laid (a thousand bars peeping out of the concrete, everything to plan), and then it goes quicker and quicker, floor by floor, and my uncle has to visit more and more frequently, so as not to miss anything—everything is important and of great significance, then you can say that you were there, at the biggest, most important construction site in Europe, you can tell people about it at home, in the Wetterau, in Forsthaus Winterstein. And by now the tower can be seen from a distance, although it’s just a stump, and the foreman is still standing up there with his blueprints and pointing here and there (my uncle can’t see him anymore, but he imagines the foreman, nothing would work without him after all). And then you can see the tower from the train, on the journey from the Wetterau to Frankfurt am Main, already half the height it will eventually be, but my uncle is a pensioner by then and no longer travelling into Frankfurt but staying at home instead, no longer allowed to smoke because of his legs (now only drinking beer), but if you were to drive the now run-down Variant towards the Forsthaus you would be able to see the Messeturm even from the Wetterau. Sometimes my uncle stops and gets out, standing there in front of his Variant in his snug winter coat, hands in his pockets. There it is in the distance, really tiny, the tallest building in Europe. The Messeturm, and my uncle there too! Albeit only looking at it from the Wetterau. It’s almost impossible to imagine a happier life. And yet, just a few years later, the tower was no longer the tallest building in Europe. But my uncle probably didn’t pick up on that, and if he were standing there today, en route to the Forsthaus, and staring over towards Frankfurt, he would probably get disorientated, unable to tell all the towers apart, the Hessian San Gimignano beyond the expansive fields of the Wetterau, lying there in the distance, small and almost quaint. It’s too much to contemplate how he would have reacted if he had lived to see the bypass, the whole of Wetterau a building site, one big excavation zone; as they demolished his home around him—and perhaps that would have made him love it even more—he could have stood wherever he wanted and he would still have been on a building site. A home not just with a forest and birds and hunting lodges but with a huge building site to go and stand on too, with lots of workers and heavy machinery at every turn. He once brought my mother this wooden plaque as a present, a slice of tree trunk with an inscription written on it using a wire-nib burner (it actually looked really brutal, the kind of burn-mark that’s left behind after you brand a pig; you hear the hiss, and then you’re branded and can never be rid of it again):
Dehaam is dehaam!
That’s our local dialect for: Home is home. If only my Uncle had lived long enough: first to see the building site, and then to drive in the Variant over the new bypass, straight from Nieder-Mörlen to Wöllstadt. He would have been one of the first to drive along the new road on the very first day of its opening, or perhaps the day afterwards (out of respect—he was of a lower rank, after all). But he couldn’t have done, really, for in his final years, after Grandmother’s death, he didn’t even have the car anymore. The Variant ended up in the scrap yard.
The Variant had been half of his life, and even today I can’t picture my uncle without it. I’m still utterly convinced, just as I was back then, that the VW Variant made my uncle J a happy man. To this day, the two are inextricably linked in my mind, the man who was filled with longing and the car that was laden with longing, and whenever I see an old Variant (there are still a few of them around), I think of J, and whenever I think of J, the Variant always comes to mind. A mental association that will last an eternity. He always sat hunched forwards, his head close to the windscreen, in summer and in winter, regardless of the visibility conditions, whether it was foggy or the sky was clear. He sat hunched forwards in the Variant, just like he was always hunched forwards. His head would appear strangely large when you looked in through the wound-down side window, or when he looked out (the window had to be open, otherwise he would have suffocated). That car was smoked in for a whole quarter of a century. Old fixtures, getting older year by year. The gear stick would be impossible to imagine today. It was a long, scrawny metal spoke with a knob so small it was as if it had been designed for a child’s hand, and it jutted out into the car’s interior at an angle. The little crank with a rubber grip that was used to wind down the window and even the padding on the inside door, which was some kind of man-made fibre—all of it always stank of J and his life. The upholstery was clean, but it still managed to be sticky. It was grey, just like the whole of my uncle’s existence, grey with a touch of off-brown. My uncle’s ears and eyebrows seemed to echo the shape of the Variant (the car had aerodynamic fenders, as aerodynamic as they could have been back then), as if my uncle had been constructed (by the Volkswagen factory itself) for the sole purpose of sitting in the Variant. When I was a kid that’s how it was; it was impossible to imagine a Variant without my uncle in it, the two were identical, and if I heard that my grandmother and uncle were coming over, it meant that the Variant was coming, and my uncle in the driver’s seat. By then it was already an unbelievably archaic tin can, but my uncle treated it with care, at the behest of the rest of the family, so it lasted almost his whole life. After all, it was the only car he had. The Variant was washed once a week, and driven ceremoniously to the car wash from the seventies onwards, but J was capable of grumbling even about that errand, and as time went on he would neglect it more and more, until my father, his brother-in-law, would speak up. Look at the state of that car, he would say, you’re perfectly capable of driving it into the forest and to the inn, but not capable of cleaning it. Without that car, getting to Forsthaus Winterstein would not have been so easy for my uncle. It had a tendency to snort when you started it up, and afterwards, while it was running, the snort would turn into a deep, insubstantial roar. The car looked bizarrely small too, or at least that’s how it seems in retrospect. Sometimes I see the same model in the window display of Feigenspan, the Bad Nauheim toy shop. There it is in the display, the Nazi-brown Variant shrunk down to six or seven centimetres and packed into a little plastic box (without the accompanying aromas). Nestled in amongst fifty other miniature models, but still—without a hint of doubt—my uncle’s automobile. Perhaps nowadays my mother occasionally stands in front of the window display at Fiegenspan, in itself a sign of times long gone, sees the Variant, and for a moment her family and all its repercussions come back to her.
But let’s go back, my uncle is still young, there isn’t yet a Messeturm, Frankfurt is still close to the ground and the planning phase for the B3a only ten years old (by the end it will be forty), and my uncle has just finished his working day in Frankfurt and is setting off from the Hauptbahnhof towards Theaterplatz, between the rows of old buildings he has no interest in. His longing was never backwards-looking, or only insofar as, by all accounts, the past was greater than the present. He stood in front of the window displays of electronics shops in the same way he stood in front of pictures of women—the same attentive gaze, the same close study. After all, none of the Wetterau people could see him here. And now he’s being spoken to by a woman who is standing on some steps, and behind her is a door, beyond which—as my uncle suspects or already knows—paradise lies. She calls my uncle my boy, probably hitting the nail on the head, because that’s what he looks like at this moment. What to do? If he gets home late, he’ll have to lie. He’ll have to say that he had a particularly hard and heavy load of packages, or that the train
was delayed. But he’s not good at lying—everyone knows straight away when he’s doing it, so he always gets angry when he tells a lie, because even in the very moment when he tries to do it, everyone already knows it’s a lie. And so the dear Lord took even the burden of lying from his shoulders. A human being who didn’t succeed in telling one single lie; perhaps he never lied even when he was a child and lacked the practice as a result. He was always so proud and happy whenever his mother was proud and happy on his account; there were no chasms of any kind in his mind, apart from the beatings his father gave him, and even on the three kilometre walk that he had to walk every day when his father was still alive, from Bad Nauheim to the family business in Friedberg and back, because his father wouldn’t take him along in the car, he still felt like the son of the big company boss, even though he was on the countryside paths amongst the balsam and geraniums and chicory and not amongst the stones and the machines. It was easy to lash out at him, and as a result it took him a long time to lose his belief in the order of things. His secrets started only later, the same ones that probably led him through the Kaiserstrasse district towards Theaterplatz. How to choose? Here, paradise. There, at home, the law. The woman on the steps is around forty-five years old and J knows her, any time you pass by she’s sure to be standing there; the window panes are painted red so no one can see in, and in the doorway there’s a yellowed poster with a woman on it—you can see everything, everything you are supposed to see and want to see. The yellowed tinge of the poster is very similar to that of Silberwald hunting films with their belling stags. In the sixties, even the present had a yellowed tinge. As did the territories of his longing, Heimat and nature films and the Kaiserstrasse district. Nowadays, my uncle would spend the whole night watching porn ads, which are nature programmes too, in their own way, but they didn’t exist back then; back then there were only the old newsreel theatres at the train stations, which had become seedy and run-down, a whole world just for him (and the Wetterauers). The woman on the step is looking at him keenly now. Her gaze moves up and down (Does she know J?). They’re almost business partners now. She’s taking him seriously. This is the kind of customer to be taken seriously, says her expression (which she intends for him to see). He wants to be served properly, and has a right to be. The customer has the say because the customer pays. My uncle stands there and stares down at the ground, but perhaps the switch has already been flipped, automatic processes are underway. Go in now and do everything at once, he’s hardly able to wait a moment longer, in there and on top and out of him, he can picture it clearly, his eyes bulging again as if they want to get out of him too, and the woman says, There you go, my boy, as my uncle J heads for the steps where the woman is and to the door behind her, behind which a labyrinth of stairs and floors and rooms will open up, the pre-war walk-up, the Frankfurt architecture of happiness from a bygone era. (Today, they’re refurbished apartments for families and lawyers.) Now he has lost track of time, forgotten about the train he needs to catch back to the Wetterau, he didn’t even make it to Theaterplatz, and he’s already taking his next step over to the building, it’s probably obvious that he’s heading towards there, maybe the woman too has noticed that a deal is being closed, almost; just one more gesture, one more signal and he’ll be a customer, and then the rest of the pleasure will come of its own accord. Maybe she just said there you go, my boy to be on the safe side, as a last act of persuasion, presenting him with the facts as if the closure of the deal was already a reality, as if he were already inside. An empty expression lingers on my uncle’s face, perhaps the very last recollection of home and the law before the great Nothingness turns into paradise for a brief moment and fifty marks. Then my uncle sees that there’s another doorway five metres further on. Another woman is standing in it and looking; she hasn’t yet seen him, but he could just as easily go in there. He knows this woman too, for she also stands there most of the time. She’s a little younger, with a husky voice. Smiles and looks him up and down just like the other woman did. It’s likely that no one noticed he was about to walk over to the steps, so that means he can go another five metres further on, another five metres without breaking any laws, everything is still fine, a world which is completely normal, presentable, in order. But now he is almost right in front of the other woman. She raises her eyebrows and laughs, for my uncle is running along the pavement like a little boy, hands in his pockets, not even daring to look up. Don’t turn around now; just go in quickly, even if the sixty-year-old mother is waiting at home with the meatballs which he has forgotten for the moment. Is he inside now? J? No, he stands around and sees yet another house fifteen metres further on. Lots of men are filing in and out. The place is well-known—J often hears about it at work. Fifteen metres is almost a world, a life. Behind him, on the roof of the immense train station, the big clock hangs there, watching him. He still has time to go back, to the Wetterau, without any problems. It’s almost as though the clock is calling him. He is torn, back and forth, between two worlds. On the one hand, I can’t imagine my uncle walking even a hundred metres into the neighbourhood around the station without immediately being drawn to his destiny, but on the other, I can’t imagine him casting off the obedience to the law that the forceps and the dear Lord—or rather the attending doctor—gave him, for that would require imagining my uncle as someone who consists of two contradictory parts. But that was probably precisely how it was. And even if his life only ever consisted of one part at any one time, in actual fact it still consisted of two—for one was always there to suppress the other. In my uncle, therefore, you could alternately see either the triumph of nature over the law or the triumph of the law over nature. In reality, though, he was positioned between the two, and presumably at the complete mercy of both, and that’s why the former Frankfurt Kaiserstrasse district offered the best opportunity to get to the heart of the matter. Germany, the land of secrets. My uncle, the man of secrets.
The Room Page 5