My uncle opens the gate to the cemetery and walks officiously along the outside wall to the place where we lie to rest. He puts the flowers down, goes to the water tap, takes a watering can, fills it, comes back to the grave and waters the plants, mumbling it’s always me all the while. There are flowers and hedges all around him; roses, lavender or tulips depending on the time of year. Lilies on the more luxuriant graves, predominantly the graves along the wall of the cemetery, the graves of dignitaries, which are tended to with more financial outlay than the others. Miniature temples, stelae, female statues of mourning with laurel wreaths in their hands, letting them hang downwards, one arm resting on the grave in a grief-stricken pose. These figures are, as my uncle notices, young and pretty, but unfortunately made from metal, so you can’t really . . . But perhaps just the once? Has he never touched them? They can’t be grabbed by the crotch, as the dress is made of metal, but it should be possible to place a hand on the bottom, because the iron garment falls softly there, clinging—it’s from the era of the dress reform movement, after all. Everything is there, and just as rounded as in real life, you can feel it. My uncle and Art Nouveau in the cemetery in Friedberg in the Wetterau. You can hear a chiffchaff in the trees, and a finch too, and pigeons. Nature and death all around him. Sometimes there will be a tree full of kinglets. My uncle once stood there, and now I sometimes stand there today, as his revenant. The kinglets from back then are dead too, but they’re still there, just like us. The kinglets are still there in the trees, albeit different ones, and below there is still a Boll, even if it’s just me and no longer the uncle. Everything is there, but no longer there. And now I’m laying it to rest with my words. Roses and lilies on the gravestone once more. And irises, depending on the time of year. Can my uncle smell them, the roses, the lilies and the irises? Will he run into Kallheinz (So, back home again already?)? He stands before the gravestone and reads the names. Melchior Boll, Ida Boll, August Boll, Karl Boll, Wilhelm Boll. There is only room for one more name on the gravestone, J notices now. Perhaps he notices it every time but forgets it again immediately afterwards; because assuming that the proper order is kept to, the last place belongs to his mother. Then it will say: Auguste Boll. His sister now has her own family and a completely different grave. His younger brother will soon have a family too. And he, J, where will he go? With his mother and the others? But his name won’t fit on the gravestone. Somewhere completely different, in the corner with the individual graves, the ones that are always so small, perhaps just with a wooden cross? And so Uncle J waters his family’s grave. He stands there grumbling, thinking bad thoughts or none at all, walks over to the tap another two times; it doesn’t occur to him to arrange the flowers or to take away the bunch of carnations that is now two weeks old. After all, he wasn’t instructed to do that. And the plastic vase, fallen over on the left hand side of the grave, prompts no reaction from him. He doesn’t notice it, for his task is to water the flowers. Silence. All around him, at an appropriate distance, the old Wetterau residents tend to the graves of their relatives, always turning up in pairs and struggling to lean down towards the Earth and the graves. Most moving slowly, some arguing as they go. Grave-tending is as much a part of being a pensioner as housekeeping, and both can lead to minor disagreements.
He: Where’s the watering can now?
She: By the stream.
He: But we were just by the stream.
She: So why didn’t you bring it?
He: I was carrying the flowers.
She: Fine, so why didn’t you say something!
Et cetera.
You can’t actually hear their words, but you can see them gesticulating. It’s almost as though the cemetery is transforming, on the quiet, into a living room from the Kernstadt or Barbara neighbourhoods (the cemetery lies between the two). They are dressed for housework, too. Today’s task: Tend to the grave. The women usually wear their aprons. As the men bend over, the seats of their trousers always look so vast, their knees angled away from one another, will they ever make it back up? The women keep their knees together and stretch their behinds up towards the sky, almost as though, right at the very end, they are once again the flowers they may have been fifty years ago. A flower that wants to see the sky. Growing up towards the sky once more. And, at that very moment, they are cultivating their dead. Every day, the Friedberg Cemetery Association gathers in the Friedberg cemetery to cultivate the Friedberg graves, both privately and in pairs, and immediately after they will sit in their allotments by the Usa with a bottle of beer. That’s the afternoon outing: first to the cemetery, then to the allotment, and in the evening perhaps a trip to the Mann in die Dunkel or the Schillerlinde or the Hanauer Hof or the Goldenen Fass or the Licher Eck on Kaiserstrasse. That’s how almost every life drew to its end back then, as I remember, and today they still stand around in pairs in the cemetery (while I am always alone), except now it’s the descendants of the ones who used to come. My uncle doesn’t notice them; he has his errand to attend to. He’s just emptying the third watering can. Everything is quiet and still, the only sound coming from the birds and the trickling water. Herr Boll, someone says. J looks around and sees Rudi Weber and his sister approaching. The sister was the one who spoke.
Hello there, Rudi, says J. Good afternoon, he says to the sister.
Rudi Weber: So, are you tending your family’s grave?
I am, yes, says J.
Aye, says Rudi, we’ve neglected ours for the last two weeks. And if you don’t tend to it for two weeks, everything looks so bad you might as well start from scratch.
Well, yes, says J matter-of-factly.
So how are you, Herr Boll?, asks the sister.
Yes, good, says J.
And your mother?
Good, thank you, says J.
And your sister?
Well, yes, good, says J.
I admire your sister, the way she’s managed everything so well. Just imagine, Rudi, she’s heading up the business now, the masonry.
Yes, I know, says Rudi Weber.
She: How many children does she have now?
J: Three.
She: And now they’re building on the land, I saw.
J: Well, yes.
She: What does her husband do again?
Rudi Weber: He’s a lawyer.
J confirms this: A lawyer, from a distinguished family of civil servants. A very distinguished Frankfurt family. The father-in-law is a governor in Frankfurt.
She: A governor?
J: Yes, Governor . . . governor . . . of everything. A really big building, the Financial Governing Authority. Perhaps the biggest administration building in the whole of Hessen!
She: And he goes and marries a woman from Friedberg, imagine that.
Yes, says J.
She: And will you be going to the inn today?
He still hopes to, says J, to Forsthaus Winterstein, the hunters have been there all week, hunting on the Winterstein, a big hunt, a whole troop of hunters. He wanted to go yesterday, he says, and he wanted to go the day before that. In fact, he’s been wanting to go to Forsthaus Winterstein for days now.
Right then, we won’t hold you up, says Rudi. Or is there something we can help you with?
And while Weber’s sister starts up again about J’s sister, who, as she says, used to be such a pretty girl when they were at school, with this intensely black hair, but back then there was this other girl too, and she used to wonder what would become of her, but then she got sent off to boarding school, if her memory served her correctly. Where was it again . . . in the Rhineland? In Bensheim, J corrects her . . . so while the conversation picks up again in such a manner, Rudi Weber peruses the state of the Boll family grave, trims a few branches back with his shears, removes the withered and worn carnations, tucks the vase of flowers behind the gravestone, tidies the shrubbery and returns the fallen plastic vase to the neighbouring grave. Rudi Weber has an eye for order, and ideally he would have liked to sweep the gravestone too, bu
t unfortunately he doesn’t have a broom to hand, so he resolves to return later (he needs to come back to the cemetery anyway because his sister forgot the pansies) and give the Boll grave a sweep, just this once, because if J is at the cemetery today then that means J’s sister will be coming by in the next week for sure, and Blumensiebert himself rarely comes to the cemetery, for sweeping graves isn’t really Blumensiebert’s strong point, as Weber knows from experience. And if his sister sees the family grave in such a state, she won’t be happy for sure. Rudi Weber has always regarded J. Boll to be one of those people who don’t have things easy, for one reason or another, and who need a helping hand here and there in order to get along in life. It’s not his fault, after all. He often thinks that, considering his disability, J is doing pretty well. He’s even able to help the family out a little bit, and besides, it’s not like you need to point out to him what a complete idiot he is, a complete idiot with a driving license (and a Variant). So they stand there at the grave for another two, three minutes and gaze silently at the gravestone, the names, and the quotation engraved on it.
Awaiting the Resurrection
Then they part ways, and while J heads towards the stream to secure the watering can with a bicycle lock, Weber shrugs his shoulders, as if wanting to apologise to his sister, and gestures behind J’s back (tapping his finger on his temple), in order to demonstrate in the clear and proper manner that of course he knows J is an idiot, and that this is the reason why he behaves the way he does towards him. And while the sister comments that J’s family should really have enough money to tend to the grave themselves—especially the new husband, if he comes from such a distinguished background—and that for this reason there was really no need to clean up after them, the two siblings disappear into the afternoon sunlight amongst the linden and chestnut trees, the roses and the black marble gravestones from our stonemasonry . . .
7
Now J drives along the following route: from the cemetery, fifty metres along Schmidtstrasse, turning right into Gebrüder-Lang-Strasse, then right again after a hundred metres into Untere Liebfrauenstrasse, where, after another hundred metres, Mühlweg and our property can be found. First the apple trees, then the spot where the stables were, which is now the foundation pit (where I grew up), then the business, one building after the other, glazed in part, everything behind a big black wall with white joints. In the centre, the administrative building, an old mill, the Falk mill. A mill without a wheel, for the river that used to flow through here has long since been diverted and now bypasses its old river bed, and our company grounds too. Wetterau people always had to avoid things, always and above all themselves. In front of the mill is the big entrance gate, through which the workers bustle in and out and the transporters drive in and out, although not as frequently as in Wilhelm Boll’s day, for business is no longer booming in the year of the moon landing. As always, my uncle would have loved to drive the Variant through the main gate (just like his father always used to drive his own car through it), but the Variant always just gets in the way on the company grounds, so he resists and parks it out on the street. He stands on the pavement for a while, looking at the foundation pit of my parents’ house. The biggest house in the whole of the Barbara neighbourhood. A house of Uncle J superlatives. He believes that to be the case even though there’s nothing to see yet (but it ends up being so big that, in fact, I did grow up in an Uncle J superlativism). The workers are working, in part—they’re all drinking beer right now—and J’s sister is standing with them and matter-of-factly giving them the necessary and proper instructions, almost like a foreman. How does she know how to do that? Then J strolls into the main building and is greeted by everyone in a respectful and friendly manner. They all know that he’s the son of the late boss, and they all treat him with respect. J used to come here years ago, too, as a young man, back when the majority of them hadn’t yet realised that he was an idiot. For the staff, the boss’s family was effectively one and the same thing as the boss himself, even though some of them were quick to realise that the boss wasn’t on good terms with his son, and that, on top of this, the son was unusual (a way to avoid saying that he wasn’t entirely normal). They tried to include him in things a bit, explaining the machines to him, sometimes pressing a tool into his hand, sometimes letting him ride along in a truck across the yard or allowing him to watch when they were welding (with a welding mask over his face). But all of that was a long time ago. Today, J was no longer a child, or even a young man, and they didn’t let him ride in the truck anymore . . . Today, J was on the same management level as the sister in their eyes, even though they all knew by now what he was. To offend him would have meant offending the whole company. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to do such a thing.
And so my uncle steps onto the company grounds in the second year after the death of his father, my grandfather, and the whole world is surprisingly in order. He is almost a boss. The brother of the director. He goes into the mill to Frau Smoke, the secretary, and waits for his sister. Here too, he is treated with respect. Frau Smoke says: Herr Boll, can I get you a coffee? My uncle isn’t used to being treated like this. Two factors needed to align for this to happen: first, that Wilhelm Boll is now dead, and second, that J is now dropping by the company premises in Mühlweg on a regular basis again, because the Variant has been put at his disposal and he always has errands to run with it, including the ones for his sister. The authority that Wilhelm Boll once had in the company has been passed down to his successors, first and foremost to the sister of course, who is now in charge of things, but also to J and the younger brother, who likewise has recently been greeted on the premises as if he’s management. Frau Smoke brings my uncle a coffee, lights up a cigarette for herself, and my uncle lights up a cigarette too. The cigarettes are in a small wooden box on the table and, officially speaking, are part of the office equipment and therefore appear in the bookkeeping. My uncle sits there and waits, in an old room, timber all around him, linoleum floors and filing cabinets, painted grey and made of steel, with roller shutters. The mill is several centuries old and now being used as an office. It must have already been ancient even back then, and it wouldn’t hold out for much longer—five years later the company itself didn’t exist anymore, and another few years after that not even the mill was there. Maybe I’m there in the office too, already back from the dentist and handed over into Frau Smoke’s care temporarily. I remember Frau Smoke (who was always smoking, that’s what killed her in the end) just as vividly as the office itself. I always enjoyed the time I spent with Frau Smoke. I liked going to the company full-stop as a child, back when I was five or six, whenever I wasn’t with my great-grandmother Else, the mother of J’s father, or in Uhlandstrasse with my grandmother. I couldn’t handle being around my siblings at home, after all, whereas at the company I would mostly be left to my own devices. Often, while Frau Smoke was smoking, I would sit on a chair and look at all the accounting books and the typewriter and the ballpoint pens and pencils and sharpeners and rubbers and the sponge that was used to moisten stamps—that ancient type of office that doesn’t exist anywhere anymore, it looked like Firma Hesselbach from TV. Sitting in Frau Smoke’s office meant sitting in a cloud of smoke, and if I did indeed happen to be present that day, the one I’m describing and inventing here, the day in the life of my uncle back when I was two, then I would have been sitting in double or triple the quantity of smoke, because both Frau Smoke and my uncle were smoking, and if one of the workers came in, then he would of course join in and smoke too. The office was small, stuffed with things, everything more or less askew, and the roof of the building was bowing in and would soon collapse, and perhaps even as a child it already seemed to me as though we were sitting in our own past. Did they dream of the future in that office? Were they eagerly awaiting the newest technical innovations there too? From the moon landing onwards, the word computer kept being mentioned, despite the fact that, to date, they hadn’t yet encountered even the first cal
culator. Frau Smoke was the Mistress of the Filing Cabinets. They were still writing everything with carbon paper back then, the filing cabinets smelt of tobacco, Frau Smoke ate wurst sandwiches from greaseproof paper and from time to time an onion, and she would make her cigarettes vanish into an ashtray, the lid of which would open at the push of a button, then pivot around before closing again. Nothing in that office was electrical except the light and the fridge, which was there for the beer of course. There was always a crate of beer in the cellar of the mill, as supplies. This building, which had not dated in four hundred years, would age quickly in the years following the moon landing, and then soon fall apart. But for now it still housed the office of the Karl Boll stonemasonry and was in the middle of its lifespan. Karl Boll, J’s grandfather and my great-grandfather, who had led the company since 1930, had died only recently. J’s father and grandfather both died in the same summer, at the end of which I arrived, the last member of the new family. My grandfather had been sitting in the mill as senior partner only a short while ago, smoking his cigars in active retirement, and now he was a photograph, hanging where he had once sat and smoked, adorned with the black mourning ribbon of Summer ’67. The letters of his name on the gravestone were still white and fresh. There he sits in the photo of the company’s centenary celebrations, already a geriatric and a dignitary. For me, the office that Frau Smoke worked in is the oldest piece of the world that I know. Without realising it, I lived in a completely different era there. In that office, I lived in an era which pre-dated the war I had never heard of, I lived in the era of the Weimar Republic and the era of the German Empire too, despite the fact that Frau Smoke was already driving to work in an Audi 100. Every day, she drove the seven kilometres to the office from Nieder-Mörlen, the same distance that my great-grandmother Else used to walk on foot to visit her relatives. Today, if Frau Smoke were still alive (which, as I already mentioned, is not the case), she would take the bypass. Frau Smoke, with her deep, smoker’s voice.
The Room Page 11