But this time he hesitates in the street, until someone smacks him on the shoulder from behind, a work colleague with the remains of an onion sandwich in his hand, a man who’s on his way to somewhere that is home, the sandwich in one hand and a cigarette in the other, the sandwich from his wife at home, the cigarette from Marlboro. A brief exchange of words, a glance back at the clock, and the switch is flipped once more. Uncle J’s nature jumps back to the other side, and J the Wetterau man paces swiftly back to the train station. Everything is good and in order, the world is still in one piece. And so it should be, for nothing has happened. He journeys home cheerful and in good spirits, happy that everything—including him—has its place in the system. A presentable existence at all times—anything to the contrary just isn’t possible, because of his mother . . . and also because of his reverence for his father, in memoriam. Even the sister, who is managing the stonemasonry business and everything else now, even she deserves a reputable older brother who contributes to the family income, at the postal depot in Frankfurt, practically a civil servant, the position which was arranged for him by the lawyer. Does J realise that he has just been tempted? Or is he already accustomed to temptation, to temptation and fulfillment, like a cigarette that’s within reach and ready at any moment? No one will know; after all, no one was there. Not even me. My uncle in Frankfurt, alone, wandering around. But now he’s safe and rescued and heading back to the station, returning from the working day, clocking off for a well-earned rest, home to greet his mother and then head off into the forest, almost like a fairytale. Or perhaps he didn’t run into his work colleague after all, nor stand in front of the other house, nor in front of the second woman, but instead followed the first and is now her boy, inside now, about to be treated in a business-like way, because as soon as he crosses the threshold to paradise everything immediately becomes functional and formal, like a doctor’s surgery, except with completely different furnishings and completely different colours. Here, red dominates, mixed with a lush green, the colours just as exaggeratedly sensual as they were intentionally sterile at the doctor’s back then; the first doctor’s surgeries I went to were mostly white, like a waiting room for heaven. Uncle J is being handed around now, for even though he is technically a customer who pays and has the say, he’s not the Master of Proceedings anymore, partly because, throughout his entire life, he was always completely incapable of making the kind of impression that demands respect from people. He was incapable of exuding any sense of dominance; instead, it was always the exact opposite. Everyone always did what they wanted with him, even here, even if it may have been what he wanted anyway. It was inevitable, really, that a man who could be destroyed even by my brother and me, even if it was a matter of mountain rescue in the TV room in the Wetterau, would be passed around in that Frankfurt building like in a hospital, shuffled from one pointless examination to the next, the most important thing being that they get money out of him. He must have been entirely deflated by the time he got to the waiting room. For, even here, he suddenly found himself back in the context of authority, like at home, like on the grounds of the stonemasonry business, like in the postal depot at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. He didn’t have a say anywhere. Take a seat in the waiting room, they say at the doctor’s, take a seat over there, they say in Kaiserstrasse, on the chair over there! Because they instantly recognised just how hopeless a human being he was, and knew that they could treat him however they wanted, that he was harmless and unlikely to react in any way. A loser. He will never say, I want her and her; they’ll show him the last piece of trash they have and he should consider himself lucky that he can even get anything for his money. And pecunia non olet, not even his. In fact, the only thing about him that doesn’t stink is his money. So they sit my uncle down on a bench or chair or at the bar, and maybe they’ll forget about him for a while, because he won’t do anything about it, he’ll just wait. He waits as though he’s standing around again. Anyone (man or woman) who passes by, he stares at fawningly, trying to see if they’re looking at him, if they’ve noticed him. But they haven’t. Maybe it’s winter and he has his chapka in his hand. What would happen if he ran into someone he knew now? I imagine he would be very friendly, acting as if he had simply run into the acquaintance in question on the street in Bad Nauheim. Without any sense of shame, probably. The way I envisage it, this whole process was merely technical for my uncle, in the broadest sense of the word. He probably only felt shame around his mother and his family. If he had run into someone while he was waiting there, hat in hand, he wouldn’t have taken it to be the catalyst for the beginning of a sleazy familiarity. He would have said, Grüß dich, Wolfgang, or Grüß dich, Kallheinz, and promptly told them the latest news from Forsthaus Winterstein, or about his latest walk in the forest, where perhaps he had yet again seen the biggest stag he had ever encountered in his life, presumably the biggest stag in the whole of the Usatal, for that matter. They wouldn’t even have mentioned the women, whom all of this ultimately revolved around (although, did it really?), and of course Wolfgang or Kallheinz would have gotten their turns more quickly than my uncle, who by now has already missed the first train and is still waiting. Now he buys an expensive beer, twelve marks, because that’s what he’s supposed to do. Even when the ladies of the establishment continue to walk past him—nude, business-like and always attending to someone else—he still searches for a crumb of attention, not looking offended, just a little sad, with puppy dog eyes. He doesn’t even look at their breasts and backsides, he doesn’t look them up and down, he’s not dominant enough to do that, not even here. After all, you need a certain degree of confidence to do that. No, he is subordinated here, just like at home. Although at least he can smoke. Then a call resounds out. Hey, you! As I imagine it, my uncle looks up.
3
Sometimes I think that, at least in certain respects, J had no powers of recollection. He remembered some things, of course. If not, he wouldn’t have been able to learn anything. He passed his driving test, though it was very different back then. In the cellar, he knew which screwdriver to pick up for which screw (even if nothing constructive followed from this, only the sham which I already mentioned). And of course he spoke often and at length about what he had experienced the day before in Forsthaus Winterstein or in Jagdhaus Ossenheim or in the Goldenen Fass or Schillerlinde—in other words, about who had been there and what they had said. But it seems to me that, in certain spheres of my uncle’s experience, his ‘memory’ was completely suppressed. Especially when something bad happened to him. Like when we tormented him in the TV room, working him up into a frenzy (this was a word I always heard used in connection with my uncle. You’ve worked him up into a frenzy again, Grandmother would say.), and he would lose control and run after us, intent on lashing out. But once the frenzy was extinguished, it wasn’t just that it seemed like it had never happened—he was as gullible around us as he had been in the beginning. He would trust us again, make the same mistakes, and so it would start all over again, as if the last time had never existed. I imagine it was the same with his father and the leather belt, and that must be one of the reasons why Uncle J, throughout his whole life, never had a bad word to say about his father. He beat J and despised him, or so I’ve been told, but in the moment that the beating took place, it was as if it hadn’t, as if it hadn’t been registered, and nothing would remain but a sneaking fear, a certain caution forevermore. For J, this was probably just respect. At school, things must have been particularly bad. He was as thin as a line of pencil, his legs barely had any shape, his arms were like sticks and the damaged head perched on top of his body was much too big, yet he would stand with gullibility and devotion next to people who had been kicking him the day before, as if their lives were at stake, whereas in actual fact it was his. He always latched on to his oppressors, unfortunately—they had power over him, and he was full of respect for any form of power, in awe of it; power was natural authority, and to subordinate oneself to it was as a matt
er of order, discipline, a way of fulfilling one’s role, as a lower-ranking member of society, as it were, a position he always assumed. The schoolyard was a Wehrmacht system in miniature. Oh how he worshipped and idolised them, authority figures! This loyalty only made his schoolmates lash out more, of course. Here was someone who willingly offered himself up as a victim, every day, and the more they beat and kicked him, the more loyal he became. This was new to them. It was too much. And so they had no choice but to keep beating him. Perhaps they didn’t do it consciously, perhaps they just couldn’t resist this oh-so-weak character, perhaps his weakness spurred them on. Their beatings were almost automatic. He would be there again the next day, after all, trotting along behind them like a dog. Perhaps they could have been used as case studies, for research into what it means to torment living things (my uncle, in this context, but it could just as easily have been a worm) and to take pleasure in doing so. But at least he had his siblings. His sister, in particular, could become a real termagant when it came to exacting revenge for her older brother, and would indulge in beatings and kickings of her own, something which won her a great deal of respect at school (later, she took over his inheritance, authorised by a notary with the agreement of my father). As far as J’s schoolmates were concerned, it of course meant that they would then seek their revenge on him as soon as she was gone. The next day, they would beat him twice as hard. But he forgot about even that quickly. Eventually, he was carted off to the Rhineland in an attempt to save him from his peers. After the beatings, it was always as if someone had reset a part of his being to its original state, before guilt or violence, when there were just the forceps and his mother, the two primordial motifs in his life. Whether he was hitting us in a frenzy or being beaten by his father or the Bad Nauheimers decades before, not feeling anything except the ongoing humiliation, immediately afterwards he would once again be like a child in whose world nothing bad had yet happened. When I was a teenager, I always imagined that was how someone on a killing spree would be: feeling like everything is normal immediately after the act, or rather forgetting everything instantaneously, innocent as a new-born baby, except now there’s a mountain of corpses in the background that they can’t quite understand. In my uncle’s case, the mountain of corpses would have been us, the family, and perhaps the whole of Bad Nauheim, maybe even all of the Wetterau if he had possessed an adequate weapon. And afterwards he would stand there in front of the mountain of corpses, waiting once again, waiting for someone to tell him what happens next. Admittedly, my uncle was one of the very few people without a natural tendency towards sadism. The urge to torture people for entertainment and pleasure—I just didn’t get that vibe from him. If Pupil X was lying on the ground and there was an opportunity, amidst all the commotion, to give him a final kick in the side without any chance of being called to account, then J wouldn’t have done it. He wouldn’t have had any inclination to do so, it would have seemed just as foreign to him as a Wagner opera or a complicated arithmetic problem. It simply wasn’t something that fit into his world. It was far preferable to be saving someone on a mountain. Or on the high seas. Or his comrades in Russia (the comrade could get into the tank with him and J would reach his lines safely and bravely; then rapport, praise and high accolades, even medals). Nor can I imagine him dissecting insects or songbirds for fun, or, as was the rage in our neighbourhood back then, throwing guinea pigs against the wall to see what happened . . . a veritable sport amongst children in the early 1970s, when guinea pigs were in fashion. Almost all the guinea pigs in my neighbourhood had death sentences, that is if there were children in the families that owned them. But there always were—children were the only reason why anyone ever bought guinea pigs in the first place. If the parents went out for dinner, to the first Italian restaurant in Friedberg or the first Yugoslavian place or perhaps even just to the Schillerlinde or the Goldenen Fass, then back at home the guinea pigs would be flying against the wall. You couldn’t tell what had happened by looking at them afterwards, they were just dead. The parents took the sudden expiration of the guinea pigs to be a kind of natural, spontaneous death, as if the guinea pig had a limited shelf-life, one attributable to the breed. As if they had to be constantly prepared for its inevitable death, on standby to buy a new one. Almost every time I went to the house of one of my neighbours or fellow pupils, there would be a new guinea pig. In other houses, rabbits perished instead. A neighbour’s son would pick them up by the tail (maybe even by the hind legs, I can’t remember exactly), swing them around through the air and fling them against the garage wall. Blood tended to flow with this method, for the wall was roughly plastered, and while he was swinging it around, the rabbit would collide with the plaster, whether this was intentional or not. Afterwards, they would simply wash the wall down. And that’s without even mentioning the dozens of pet birds which were swept away by the children in my neighbourhood; in other words, by human beings. There seemed to be a kind of generational treaty between the parents and the children, as if the point of having pets was so that children could practice something they would need to do later as adults. It was a massacre, like in the civil war, or perhaps a kind of substitute for it, as if violence was an inevitable component of being human, which they maybe believed even if they didn’t say it. No, my uncle only ever got aggressive and lashed out when he was reacting to something; it had to be preceded by some external stimulant. It was predominantly during the second half of his life that he had a tendency to lash out when he was tormented too much, but by then it was only us tormenting him, us kids, for the Bad Nauheimers were no longer laying into him. And in just the same way as he swiftly erased the beatings from his memory, both those he received and those he distributed, he also forgot with equal swiftness, I imagine, everything he did which contravened the law. For this reason, I never picture my uncle as someone who spent lengthy minutes of his life plagued by a guilty conscience, regardless of what he may have done. It was his nature that had made him that way. Of course he knew about rules and moral codes, like the codes of decorum that he always linked with his mother; in other words, that one should always be orderly and respectable and not bring any shame upon the family. But because he was so helpless, he inevitably foundered, again and again. Admittedly he did it in his own way, not in the normal way, because my uncle was nothing like normal people, whether you see the thing with the forceps as good fortune or misfortune. Others always sought allies in their dirty dealings and made an outlet for themselves by becoming smutty. My uncle wasn’t one for smutty fraternisation, not even at the inn. I don’t think that kind of thing even existed in his world. And if it did, it would only have been yet another way of trying to belong. He couldn’t tell jokes either. In actual fact, the only thing he could ever talk about was his enthusiasm for things. And that’s why I see my uncle as someone who, as he heads home from Frankfurt, has been reset to zero and is looking forward to the forest and the beer that will follow it, an orderly daily routine, the way it’s supposed to be, and his mother should know because then she’ll be content and reassured. Now he stands there like a child, in the train which arrived and departed punctually, a child completely at ease, knowing that he’s done everything right with regard to his closest care-giver, the one he’s eternally connected to, his mother; J here in the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, she in the kitchen in Bad Nauheim, and yet no further away from each other than a duckling from its mother on the expansive Bad Nauheim pond, constantly within hearing range. The ducks don’t need to see each other, because they can call out. In this way, a duckling is constantly under supervision and feels secure and protected by its mother, and that’s how it was with my uncle too—his mother was always present in his mind, and he wanted to always be proper and decent before her. Even though he may have often done the exact opposite. From what I know of him, this was his only happiness, his only true happiness, right up until his mother’s death: obeying her, a woman who wanted nothing more from him than that he stay respectable and not put anyon
e to shame and, above all, look after himself. Presumably, she would have preferred to never let him out of the house, out of fear for what might happen to him. Because, of course, she knew him very well, it’s just that not everything was spoken aloud. Some things never were, not until the death of all concerned, and the fact that they took these things with them to the grave unsaid, this was probably the only choice they had.
The Room Page 6