The Room

by Andreas Maier

  Almost as soon as my grandmother died, the house took on a new function. Nothing remained, only the house itself. When I stepped inside it for the first time again seven years later, in 1999, I was shocked. To be honest, shocked almost to death. Ever since that day, this house has defined my life. This house, this place, the street, the Wetterau, and above all the room I am writing this in now. And I was a child and ran through the house and fell in love with it, with this hybrid of death and life, a house which, even back then, predominantly consisted of memories of those who had once lived in it. The house in Uhlandstrasse had been there before my parents came, before the house in Mühlweg. It was as though it had been transported from another world into the present. A house of silence, not a house of life. I ran though the house, up the stairs, to the bookcase where I was always reading the travel stories from my grandmother’s Reader’s Digest volumes. I was a day-dreamer when I was a child; my uncle wasn’t the only one. He dreamed of mountain rescue, while I dreamed of the big wide world in the Reader’s Digest volumes. As long as everything was in order and intact, everything was okay. I ran upstairs, selected a volume and settled down with it on the sofa (it was around the time when my grandmother started giving me brandy chocolates and egg liquor, when I was five or six). I lived freely in this house and was happy in this bottomless melancholy (at home, I couldn’t bear to even be in the same room as one of my siblings anymore), but then the door opened upstairs, my uncle came out of his room and everything changed.

  But for now, in this day in the life of my uncle J, I’m still only two years old and not even present. As he comes out of his room, Uncle J is in an indecisive mood. Ahead of him lie the errands he will carry out with reluctance, as well as the activities he is looking forward to. In these circumstances he tended to be like a simmering volcano, one that could temporarily cool down then heat up again depending on how things were going. For example, he would come downstairs and solemnly set about the task of driving the Variant out of the garage, for the errand of picking up Ursel. He’s in a good mood. The car, the world, everything is in order. A life. Then his mother reminds him that he hasn’t yet taken a shower. The volcano begins to simmer (his eyes narrow again, barely visible under his eyebrows now, a change which can happen from one second to the next). A dispute arises, one that ends with a compromise: He will shower after he’s driven the Variant out of the garage. In the absence of a uniform, J pulls on his jacket, and he would have liked to ceremoniously take the car key down from his own, specially-made key shelf, but the key was merely on the key chain attached to his trouser pocket, so this particular ceremony had to be omitted. J opens the door, closes it firmly, looks around. The driveway, the garage, the gate to the yard, everything is still in its place. Before opening the garage, he walks over to the gate, because the gate needs to be opened first, for some reason. By the time he opens it, the volcano has been entirely extinguished and only joy remains, but then his mother opens the kitchen window and asks why he opened the gate, because he’s not leaving yet, after all. I know, says J, but I want to drive the car out. Her: But you don’t need to open the gate to do that. J slouches over, starting to grumble now, gesturing with his hands as if he was in the process of beating someone to death, and shuts the gate again. His bad mood lingers until he reaches the garage door. It’s not a particularly big garage, but it is extraordinarily long, with enough room for two cars to be parked one behind the other. There has only ever been one parked in there, though, for Uncle J didn’t get the Variant until after his father’s death. In the moment when J puts the key into the lock of the wooden garage door, he transforms once again. He is opening up his kingdom. Only moments ago, the Variant was standing in a darkness that was alleviated only by the small side windows that face the garden. Alone since yesterday, but now suddenly surrounded by light, it stares, parked backwards in the garage, with its SA coloured bonnet and circular lights, out at the driveway and Uhlandstrasse. My uncle could get in now and start the engine. But instead he prefers to light up a quick cigarette first. And to walk around the Variant and look at the garden tools towards the back of the garage. He sees all of this as his realm, even though it exists only by the grace of others, his sister’s new family. J would never have gotten the car at all if it hadn’t been for his brother-in-law. The car wasn’t bought specifically for him, but rather for my grandmother’s house-keeping errands, making J into the family servant and chauffeur, although as far as I’m aware he never realised that. The garage, the car, he regarded it all as his own, and yet in essence he led a life of service, remunerated not with money but the car. But because he didn’t realise this, it didn’t detract from his happiness. Nor did he realise why he was never allowed to just go straight to the Forsthaus, but instead always had to do this or that first. The real purpose of the Variant was J’s errand-running, not to get him to Forsthaus Winterstein—I believe he would have walked there if he really had to, even though it would have taken him three hours there and back. His father may not have driven him from the masonry to Bad Nauheim all those year ago, but now at least he was able to drive himself to Forsthaus Winterstein, albeit at a price.

  The garden tools at the back of the garage, the scythe, the garden shears, everything polished to perfection by an expert shear polisher, the best shear polisher far and wide. And the lawnmower was the newest model on the market. Everything of the best quality. Even the Variant was almost new, or so they had told him (after all, they knew what he was like). He hadn’t chosen the colour himself, but no one could have picked a better one for him. It was as if they had been made for each other, two kindred spirits. Uncle J and his Variant VW Type 3. The Variant model was even used by firemen. Not by the police though, unfortunately. But it was still a vehicle used for official purposes. Whenever a fire service Variant drove past my uncle in his Variant, he would get this serious and official expression on his face, an expression of official duty. He, too, was on duty. That made him and his car almost the same as the fire service Variant with the fireman in it. Swiftly on the scene! After admiring the garden tools as if it were the first time he had ever seen them, running his finger over this or that blade (which, as someone who couldn’t feel pain, he had been strictly forbidden from doing by his mother; but he only ever ran his fingers over them lightly—he couldn’t feel a thing, including how sharp they were, so he obeyed the law and just touched them gently), he opens the car door and gets in. Like others get into a space rocket or a Messerschmidt. And now he’s inside. Time to check all the instruments! All the instruments are still there. The speedometer is there. The tachometer is there. The gear stick, everything in its place. Don’t touch the steering wheel just yet! Check the rear-view mirror. Are the doors properly closed? Doors are closed! Check the clock too, synchronize with the time on his wristwatch. Time all fine, synchronisation complete. Everything in order and faultless and ready to start, all the safety precautions completed and verified and passed. Gearstick in neutral, engage the clutch, ignition. IGNITION! It’s almost like a countdown. The Variant clears its throat, emitting a rhythmic noise which sounds like a phlegm-filled cough, then starts to vibrate, chokes, oscillates and begins to cough once more, huskily this time, then splutters into a state of readiness and runs at last. Ignition successful. Uncle J grabs the steering wheel of his VW Variant. A pilot. After glancing at each of the mirrors, he rolls the Variant forward over the threshold of the garage, in preparation for the rest of the day, the front of the bonnet outside now, my uncle passing the doorframe, level with the steps, another two metres, then he stops, releases the clutch and pulls up the handbrake. The Variant is now in the driveway. It has travelled a distance of five metres. There’s nothing J enjoys more than the sound of the engine, the sound of his life (later, at the end of his life, his cough sounded just like the car engine). My uncle now presumably does what I so often saw him do later, something avid motorcyclists or people with cabriolets do. In other words, he gets out and lets the engine run for a while. He paces a
round the car, gazing at it, then walks behind it and closes the garage door in a ponderous and official manner. The car door, meanwhile, is still open. There he stands, connected in a mysterious, almost mythical way with the Variant, J here at the garage door, and over there, five metres away, the car with the engine running. It’s running because of him. Waiting for him. It belongs to him. His engine. And oh—how she runs! Waiting to see what will happen next. She will wait there for him until he gets back in. His engine, practically a living thing. And he stands a short distance away, feeling . . . no, much more than an avid motorist, he was an absolutely smitten one. They belong together, completely, despite being momentarily separated, him here and the Variant there. The engine running just for him, until he turns it off. Which he will do, in just a moment. But not just yet. First, for example, he lifts up the windscreen wipers and inspects them closely. And the hubcaps: Are they positioned correctly and securely? He circles the car one more time. Then he gets back in, sits up straight, adjusts the neck of his polo shirt, looks over at the neighbour who is looking over at him, and turns the engine off. It’s in the driveway now, fully prepared for everything that is to come, and from now until the time when he actually sets off, he can rest assured that she is outside, ready and waiting, everything in order and perfect, everything as it should be.

  My uncle comes back into the house as if from some momentous life experience, hesitates in the hallway for a moment, then heads briskly down into the cellar. He will work there for a little while. There are important things he wants to do down there, today of all days, even though he doesn’t have much time. This has only just occurred to him. The pilot in his workshop. Something needs to be tweaked. The finishing touches applied. But you still haven’t washed, says his mother. A nervous twitch in my uncle’s face as lava begins to flow into his temper once more. The dispute is heating up. Yet my grandmother would never come out and say that he’s dirty, that he stinks. When she approaches the topic of washing with my uncle, she depicts bodily ablutions as a mere act of common decency, without going into the details. Even today, I don’t know whether my uncle actually knew that he smelled. You can’t go to the cemetery if you haven’t washed yet, she would say. Or: You have to have a wash before you pick Ursel up! But when it came to why he should have washed before doing those things, perhaps he didn’t know. Go and have a wash, why don’t you, it’ll make you feel all fresh and new. My uncle had no choice but to give in, mumble in agreement and head off to perform his bodily ablutions without fully comprehending them. I can still remember how, in later years, my grandmother, whenever J was out of the house, would go down into the cellar and quickly and efficiently gather together his dirty washing into a neat package, which she would then immediately stuff into the washing machine, turn it on, and in the same breath open all the windows. But for now, in the year of the moon landing, the bathroom in the cellar doesn’t even exist yet (the brother-in-law will commission it to be built in the years to come), so only the small workshop is there, constructed from remnants and trash from the great Karl Boll masonry business in Friedberg in the Wetterau, at Mühlweg 12. And so J goes up to the first floor instead. Whether he took a shower in the bathroom or just had a quick wash in the sink in his dark room, I don’t know. But I do know that he comes down again after a short while, clean for the time being, hair neatly combed, wearing a new greyish-brown polo shirt and no less presentable than when he was a young man, back when he bore a certain resemblance to the young Glenn Gould. He is full of vigour now, in good spirits and looking forward to Forsthaus Winterstein, even though first he has to reluctantly listen to his mother repeat his instructions. Blumensiebert, cemetery, Ursel, shopping, hairdresser. She explains once more in which order it would be best he complete the errands in, and he just mumbles ja, ja in agreement.

  And now he is by the garden fence again, opening the gate, climbing into the Variant, and as he drives out he sees his mother still standing at the kitchen window, waving goodbye to him. He waves back. Waving was always part of it for the two of them. Something to take along en route. Taking the wave along with him for the whole time he’s away. As if the waving could be seen at a great distance (this, after all, was the whole reason waving was invented in the first place). And so the connection between the two of them remains, just like that between the duck and her young on the Bad Nauheim pond.

  Now he veers left onto Eleonorenring. He is completely alone now. After a hundred metres come the traffic lights, with two cars waiting, then three. Three cars wait at the light for permission to drive on, with people inside them, all looking at the red light and waiting. Everything has its process and its order; you just need to learn what it is. Earn the right. A complicated system. Now the light jumps to red and yellow. The three cars know that they will soon be able to continue. My uncle has learned everything precisely—he knows he has to wait until the yellow light joins the red one, and then it will change to green, and then he can drive on, having prepared to do so while the light was yellow. The yellow light is the waiting light: You can go soon, it says. It’s friendly, informal, everything on a first-name basis. Things always are when it comes to traffic. In your mind you’re on a first-name basis not just with the traffic lights but with the other drivers around you, too, and you’ll definitely be on a first-name basis if another driver runs into your car. If you want to drive to Friedberg, like my uncle does now, a right turn, then you have to flip the indicator upwards, because that means you want to turn right. Left is down, right is up. Advanced mathematics. My uncle is a highly-trained automobile pilot, driving in accordance with the lights and stepping on a pedal here and a pedal there and looking forwards and backwards, driving the two kilometre long stretch to Friedberg all on his own, to the left and right of which there are nothing but fields and from where you can see all of the Wetterau. In this, the year of the moon landing, there’s nothing between Bad Nauheim and Friedberg but the railway line, just countryside. There’s only one bus-stop between the two places, with a small shelter. But no one ever waits there. If someone was standing there, that would mean they had come from Schwalheim, that they had walked through the tunnel beneath the railway line and were on their way to Friedberg. But no one does it. No one makes use of the bus service (for the duration of my entire life, almost no one will stand there, no one ever wants to walk on foot from Schwalheim to the bus stop and onwards; everyone prefers to stay at home or to go by car, once they eventually had one that is). Up above, the sky with its multitude of colours and cloud formations, blue, yellow, grey or red, the Taunus to the right and corn and rapeseed in between, a few apple trees, a cat here and there, a deer here and there, a car here and there, lonely in the dusk with its lights switched on or approaching between the harvested fields in the shimmering late summer heat, like my uncle for example, although by now he has already reached Friedberg, having fetched the flowers from Blumensiebert as instructed and now parking up on the street in front of the cemetery. The cemetery didn’t have its own car park back then.