My uncle opens the front door in Uhlandstrasse like a family man returning from the workplace. The man is in the house. The only one now, for the big company boss, Wilhelm Boll, has been dead for two years. This is how J comes home. As if everything, at least once, could have been good and proper for him: He, the man in the house, and later he’ll get the Variant out of the garage (preferably at least half an hour before he needs it, because then it will be ready), and then he’ll drive to Forsthaus Winterstein to sit with the men, drink beer and listen to their stories, as if he were part of it all.
As if, just the once, everything could have been good and proper.
Except, unfortunately, there wasn’t just the matter of the forceps; there was the small matter of other people too.
His brother-in-law is there. With J’s younger sister, his wife. His brother-in-law, the lawyer. His brother-in-law has been there a lot recently, since J’s father died. They’re everywhere now, and already have three children (of which I am one). It wasn’t that long ago that none of them were there, and now they’re suddenly there and part of everything. It wasn’t that long ago that it was just the sister, and now there are five. They’ve multiplied by five. They are a family in their own right now. At a specific point in the family tree, a new family sprouted out, and they are now the proper family. Because suddenly, in the blink of an eye, there are hardly any Bolls left. J’s grandfather Karl died two years ago, followed just a few months later by his father, Wilhelm, which makes it two Bolls less. And now his sister has a different name. Which, in a way, makes it three less. So now the only ones who remain are his mother and younger brother. For the first time in his life, J starts to get an idea of what the future means. Before, everything was essentially always the same: there was the family, the father Wilhelm, the grandfather Karl, the house, the room and the business, where his father had always been the boss and his grandfather the senior boss. And he was always there and amongst it all, sometimes in the house in Bad Nauheim, sometimes in the business. After all, he’s only been going to Frankfurt since his father died and his brother-in-law started having the final say, his brother-in-law and his sister. The brother-in-law procured the job in Frankfurt for him almost as soon as his father died. At long last, even J had to have a respectable role somewhere. And with his brother-in-law’s extensive contacts, one was found. His father would never have managed to do that. Finding work in Frankfurt—before the brother-in-law, the family’s horizons hadn’t stretched far enough for that kind of thing. Almost as soon as the brother-in-law came on to the scene, everything changed. In fact, there’s so much to organise that he’s there almost every day now. Documents to be read, files to be opened, letters to be read. Things have to be kept in order, with the family estate too, because someone has to do it after all. His sister is managing the gravestone business now, she’s the boss. And the brother-in-law takes care of everything else. They’re already building a house. There’s never been anyone like him in the family before. Where would they be without the brother-in-law? And now that J has finished his working day and come home, the brother-in-law is here, and J goes automatically into a kind of bowed-head posture, like he always does when he sees his brother-in-law. Much like he did when his father addressed him. Every time J sees his brother-in-law, he expects to receive an order. For ever since the brother-in-law has been part of the family, there’s always something to do. The father and the grandfather have to be replaced, and the brother-in-law is delegating their tasks. He has a business-like air about him most of the time, because he always has something in mind: the next task. After all, he has to lead the whole family now. It came about in a natural way and developed as such: he is now the head of the family, albeit tacitly. And, technically speaking, he doesn’t order people to do things. It’s just that he’s always right, with everything he says and delegates, for he sees things clearly and knows how things need to be done. Life consists of tasks (not of Forsthaus Winterstein), particularly when you have a family of five and another family to maintain, namely that of his mother-in-law. If that’s the case, you must have the next goal in mind at all times. There’s no other way! And what a family he comes from! J has seen the building in Frankfurt, the Financial Governing Authority building, and it’s one of the biggest and most modern buildings he ever saw in his life. He has never seen anything like it, the immense hallways and stairways leading every which way, like a kind of centre of the world where everything is regulated and in order and kept in motion and where everything works, because everyone is in their place and everyone knows it. And somewhere in the middle of this immense building sits the boss of all it all, the Chief Finance President. The first president J has ever met. The Chief Finance President first came to the Wetterau and Bad Nauheim ten years ago, at the end of the fifties, all the way to the Uhlandstrasse residence, in order to support his son’s courtship of the daughter of the Karl Boll stonemasonry family. A tall man with a company car. The car had four standards, the like of which no one in the Uhlandstrasse house had ever seen before. The Chief Finance President (my grandfather on my father’s side) worked closely with the American military administration. I still remember the photos, from a time when J, in his late twenties, must have felt like he had died and gone to heaven, for they pictured him side by side with high-ranking US military men who were dripping with medals, in Bad Nauheim and in the midst of the homeland which was now part of the big wide world, and they had given back the house in Uhlandstrasse—it had been seized, and the family had only been able to move back from Friedberg into the restored, restituted house a few years before. There he sits, J, a scrawny sight with his huge ears and black-as-night eyebrows, the same greasy side parting that he always had as a child, and now he’s a child once more amongst all the Americans, and in awe and permitted to be part of it. All of a sudden this Chief Finance President has opened up their world in a way they could never have imagined possible, and while just moments ago they were still occupied and expelled, now they are sitting cosily around the table with the highest-ranking members of the regional American military administration, under whose supervision the whole country—and everything for that matter—was re-built. Some of them are even carrying weapons. They drive up in Jeeps, they have bodyguards. Real-life, genuine bodyguards clad in bulletproof vests. Bodyguards at the front door of Uhlandstrasse 18! The centre of the world. Or perhaps it’s the Chief Finance President’s birthday and they all go to Frankfurt am Main, the sister, the little brother, the mother and the father, and sit in a huge auditorium, and then there are even more, even higher-ranking American military personnel, and my uncle amongst them all. The photographs are stowed away in the bookcase in the living room at Uhlandstrasse, neatly pasted into albums and solemnly labeled—with General Smith, Grillparzerstrasse, 25.4.59; with General Miller, High Commander of so and so, garden at Grillparzerstrasse, 18. May 1959—with white chalk handwriting against black or dark brown mounting paper. My uncle is pictured in many of them. It was an important time. Usually, as I already mentioned, he never liked Americans.
Now the brother-in-law is standing in the hallway, the sister carrying me in her arms. And my uncle comes in and sees us right away. His sister greets him in a friendly manner, but she doesn’t have much time and needs to tend to me; perhaps I need to be taken somewhere, to a check-up, perhaps I have a tooth coming through that needs to be looked at. Or she needs to go shopping for something and has me with her. And now, today of all days, J’s mother needs to go to the hairdresser because of some engagement she has that afternoon. And she has to go shopping too. Or perhaps she has to tend to something at the cemetery in Friedberg. Flowers need to be fetched from Blumensiebert, and the watering can needs to be taken, to water the flowers around the grave, for they didn’t make it there yesterday, nor the day before yesterday, nor the day before that (after all, with the business and three children, they have a lot on their hands), and so J is the only one who can do it today, as his mother has to go to the hairdresser’
s and his sister really needs to get back to work or go to the dentist and so on.
So the brother-in-law says: J, pop over to Friedberg to Blumensiebert, could you, take the flowers to the cemetery and tend to the grave, and pick up your sister from work, and then you can give your mother a lift to the hairdresser, she has an appointment at half past five. It’s not like you have anything else to do, and you’ve got the whole afternoon free. Sometimes, J makes the mistake of mumbling that he was in fact planning to go to Forsthaus Winterstein. But you go to Forsthaus Winterstein often enough, you can’t go every day, and if you really have to then you can go later. Do you really have to go there so often? the brother-in-law asks, a question which not even J’s own father had asked. The brother-in-law has no interest whatsoever in Forsthaus Winterstein and such things. He wouldn’t have time for it anyway and is about to head off again now, and already the little scene in the hallway is being wound up, the brother-in-law and sister leave, and J stands there with his back hunched. His eyebrows pull together into a frown, his eyes narrow into slits, and out of his mouth escapes the well-known hiss, so filled with hate it’s as though he’s about to pick up the nearest knife and run from the house to kill, massacre and painstakingly slaughter everyone in the Wetterau, cutting them all up into equally sized pieces. Now he goes to his mother, my grandmother, who as usual is in the kitchen preparing some food, perhaps pot roast for the weekend or coffee for J, or maybe she’s preserving or bottling something. As long as no one else overhears, he can complain to his mother (my grandmother). He really wanted to go to Forsthaus Winterstein, he says, the hunters have been there all week, and he’d been looking forward to it so much, since the weekend even, and he hadn’t been able to go to Forsthaus Winterstein the day before either, because he had to wash the car and pick up his sister from the beautician, and there was always something he had to do when he wanted to go to Winterstein, and he was always the one who had to do it, because he was always the one that had to do everything. I could explode with anger, he says, stamping on the floor. I heard him say that many times, and remember thinking that there was a strange contradiction between the degree of his anger and the eloquence of the phrase: I could explode with anger. And he always meant it, I believe, in a completely literal sense. The brother-in-law comes and says what’s going to happen, he always comes and says what’s going to happen, but I’ve been looking forward to this all week, and I already said yesterday and the day before yesterday that I wanted to go to Forsthaus Winterstein today, that I really wanted to. His mother calms him down by saying that he can just go to Forsthaus Winterstein two hours later than planned, and that he can stay later to make up for it, so it isn’t that bad after all. At that moment, J realises that it isn’t that bad after all, and that in all likelihood he wouldn’t have set off until around six or half six anyway (he wanted to go to Frauenwald first, just briefly, for a quick jaunt around the ski meadows, maybe see a hare or even a deer, which he could then transform into the ‘umpteenth’ stag). J sits down, lets his apron-clad mother pour him a coffee and place a slice of Madeira cake in front of him, then says, waving the fork around and looking at her like a philosopher who has just had some great insight: If I pick Ursel up at five, then I can be up at Frauenwald around quarter past six and on the Winterstein by half seven, eight at the latest. Excellent, so that’s all sorted then, says his mother, you’ll have a good two hours in the Forsthaus. Then I can stay there at least two hours, says J. Enthusiastic and cheerful all of a sudden, he says that he hadn’t wanted to stay longer than that anyway, because tomorrow he needs to get up at three to go to Frankfurt. In that case, says his mother (my grandmother, and I’m not there because I’m in my mother’s arms in the company car that belongs to my father, on the way to the dentist in Frankfurt and perhaps to the business too and to the building site of the house, and I can’t even talk yet, I haven’t even uttered a single sentence in my life by this point, and yet it’s impossible to imagine any of this happening in any other way), then in that case you should have a lie down now, and in an hour’s time drive to Friedberg to Blumensiebert, go to the cemetery, then pick up Ursel, take her home, then pick me up and drop me off at the hairdresser. After all, Ursel has done so much for you, and her husband does so much for us, we should be happy, because where would we be without Ursel’s husband, now that all the men are dead? And J drinks his coffee and eats the Madeira cake and has forgotten about everything already (just a moment ago he was a patriarch, and now he’s J. Boll again).
J stirs a spoonful of refined sugar into his coffee with condensed milk, which is a very similar colour to his shirts and his Variant, then stirs in a second spoonful, as heaped as he can make it, carefully guiding the spoon from the sugar bowl to the coffee cup, then a third, and to finish off another two, until the coffee is transformed into a kind of syrup, like it always is when Uncle J drinks it. His mother is standing at the stove. She was always in an apron back then, just like all the female inhabitants of the Wetterau. Only when Elvis was there did she briefly lay the apron aside, but afterwards she put it back on, and there it stayed until the ‘90s. Most of her aprons had an intricate pattern, often a flowery one and mostly blue, grey and lilac, so stains from the housework didn’t show up. But the aprons were washed every day anyway. My mother, too, had an extensive selection of aprons at her disposal. She would wear one even when she popped over to see a neighbour. Each morning, a gathering of apron-clad women would assemble in the streets, each in front of their own front door or at the neighbour’s garden gate, soon huddling into little groups of three or four. There would be one of these groups every twenty metres or so. My grandmother always wore an apron in the house in Uhlandstrasse, just as Aunt Lenchen always wore an apron when she came from Friedberg to help out in the house, and Däschinger the seamstress wore an apron, and the cleaning lady wore an apron, and this apron-clad army would make its way through the house, ensuring discipline and order. They didn’t leave a single spot untouched, tending to every last nook and cranny, as well as to my uncle’s stench. The upper arms protruding from their aprons were always bare and, on the older women, fat and fleshy. Whenever I saw them I was always reminded of the joints of meat on display at Blum’s Butchers, or of the loaves of bread at the bakery, except that the latter were fresh, in contrast to the arms, which were already in a state of decomposition and had orange-peel skin. By the end of her life, my grandmother’s arms were so thin that she could barely lift the pans in the kitchen anymore, and yet she would still wear aprons, albeit three sizes smaller. But right now she is standing there at the stove, still comparatively healthy and lively, and Uncle J is solemnly telling her stories about his working day. A shipment arrived from Chile. He says the word with a sense of awe, as if it were something very important. Chiii—le! Emphasising the i. The word an exclamation of excitement in itself. The big wide world, and my uncle there and part of it all, a central hub even. Or maybe it was from Lisbon, which he murmurs in awe. A package from Liiiis-bon direct to Friedberg-Ockstadt. What could it be? Something from Lisbon, a city that everyone knows, to Ockstadt in Kirschendorf, a place that only we Wetterauers know! What could it be? It must be something, says my grandmother, it has to be something. Yes, says my uncle thoughtfully, waving his spoon around and staring out of the window at the street. There are no cars out there, because the traffic jams are yet to come, and the literary quarter where the house is located is still peaceful; hardly anyone ever drives through. And so they talk, and later, after the third cup of milky coffee and therefore the fifteenth spoonful of sugar, J climbs up the stairs and into his room, the first door on the left. As soon as he’s in there (the shutters in his room are closed), the door closes.
Uncle J, in his room.
6
They always told me he was sleeping. Whenever I came to to the Uhlandstrasse house, I was told to keep the noise down because Uncle J had worked the late shift (or the early shift, as the case may be). That was my presence in this house as a child
: I would be dropped off by my mother, handed over to my grandmother, and there was always this third person there, but one who never made an appearance: my uncle J. He was there, and yet he wasn’t. I spent hours in that house, still freshly ventilated back then, constantly filled with the fear that, at some point, my horrendous uncle would come down the stairs. Then I would have to sit with him in the kitchen, and my grandmother would end up going to Schade & Füllgrabe, and I would have to go down to the cellar with my uncle. He always appeared out of nowhere, and then my existence for the next few hours was completely different to how it had been in the hours before. When my uncle wasn’t there, I was free to move through the Uhlandstrasse house as I pleased. It was my favourite place and I would look forward to being dropped off there; I could be alone, my siblings weren’t there, I liked the rooms, I liked the kitchen, I could roam around for hours on end looking at all the objects, which always seemed important, especially the photographs of the old, long-since-deceased Bolls. There were a great number of them on the bureau. An unknown man in uniform in front of an unknown landscape, perhaps in Russia, or perhaps at home in the Reich, you couldn’t tell from the landscape, and the man in the uniform was deceased too. Or the picture of the young girl with thick blonde pigtails, staring vivaciously into the camera and considerably older in the picture than I was at the time. Throughout my entire childhood, I could never really believe that this little girl was one and the same person as the Aunt Lenchen I knew. Her husband was one of the first to die in the war, on the second day of the conflict, the 2nd of September, a day after my birthday and yet twenty-eight years before my birth, for I was born on the first of that month, the same day the War began. Aunt Lenchen’s photo (not in the Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform, but in a white blouse, a portrait from the chest up) was something from another world, a world they had all sealed off, each in their own way, disposing of all the regalia of the time. The abbreviation BDM was never even uttered when I was a child. Just that one photo was allowed to remain, the man in uniform, the dead man. I’m sure that they must have explained to me back then who he was, but either I never understood or was never able to remember, perhaps because I never read his name on one of our gravestones. Even my grandfather Wilhelm, J’s father, was a complete stranger to me, looming out of an ancient past in black-and-white, even though he had been dead only as long as I had been alive. We could almost have reached our hands out towards one another. We could almost have looked into each other’s eyes, we, the artistic ones. My grandfather has always been dead for the same number of years I have been alive. I presume that the man in the Wehrmacht uniform was Aunt Lenchen’s husband, but I’ll never find out because the photo doesn’t exist anymore, like almost all the photos on the bureau and the cabinet and my grandmother’s little glass table (next to the desk). When I was four or five years old I would run through my grandmother’s house, alone and happy, never realising that I was moving through a house that was predominantly defined by the dead. After all, my grandmother, as I realised much later, became a widow only when I was born. To me it seemed as though the present was separated from the past in the photos by at least a thousand years, as if by some displacement of time that was comprehensible only in a mythical sense. The house was populated by these little black-and-white photographic spectres, which to me had just as great a presence in the rooms downstairs as their actual inhabitants, those who had the rights to the house and its rooms and everything in them. And everything was always quiet; the only thing I ever heard in this house was the cooing of the pigeons and the low-pitched clang of the bells from the Bad Nauheim Dankeskirche, the first music I ever knew. It would be another thirty years before the noise-reducing double-glazing was installed. Looking back, I realise now that the house used to be a museum to me, with my grandmother as the museum’s custodian. Until her death, nothing changed in the living room, nor in the dining room, and my grandfather’s bureau in particular was never touched, just continually dusted and cleaned and polished, either by my grandmother in her apron or by Aunt Lenchen in her apron (presumably she dusted the effigy of her own youth, too) or by one of the various cleaning ladies, still German in the beginning and also apron-clad, but from the eighties onwards predominantly Yugoslavian and no longer apron-clad. After my grandmother’s death, everything was cleared out at once, everything disappeared, even the furniture was removed. It wasn’t until seven years after my grandmother’s death that I began the reconstruction work. Where had all the things been taken to? The tiny, bronze-cast Viking ship that kept me entertained throughout my entire childhood? The black stone shelf (made from diabaso, like our gravestones) above the heater in the living room alcove. Three objects used to stand on it, all of which were equally important to me; it was a cosmos, headed up by a Viking ship that’s no longer there. The ship is there only in my mind now, still immense like a real Viking ship; the sofa upholstery was the North Sea across which it sailed. Next to the ship, a metal elephant with a hollow stomach that you could peer into when you turned it around; the ship and the elephant had always belonged together. The third object was a bowl made of light-green stone, which I also used to play with on the sofa. When I was little, everything had to have its place and order, these objects had been where they were for as long as I could remember, and every time I came to the house they were where they were supposed to be. Like with my uncle, but on a miniature scale. He always needed things to be in order too, just like I did when I was four or five. And his equivalent of my Viking ship, the ship of my childhood, was the Wehrmacht tank and the mountain rescue, and unlike me he stayed that way for his whole life, as it wasn’t long before I was no longer interested in the moon landings, nor the Carrera racetracks with their remote control and speedometers. But these three objects are still a world in themselves, and all of them are gone and no longer in their place and no longer in order, just like my uncle is gone too. And now, here in his room, I have to try to put everything back in its place using my own words.
The Room Page 9