by Jurek Becker
I point out to Aron that Mark wasn’t just born that day; not only had Paula known for some time that he existed, but she had met Aron because of Mark in the first place.
“That’s true,” Aron says, “but you can’t compare the time before to the time at this point. Before, Mark wasn’t a real child; he was nothing more than a problem to solve. A reason to write letters and make phone calls. Our personal relationship aside, it was her job to take care of him. Mark became a real person for her only now, with our first visit to him. There lies the boy, and she walks in with his father. Isn’t that different?”
They arrived at a most unfortunate moment. The previous night, Mark had come down with a fever. No cause for concern, a doctor reassured them, but he advised against a visit; the excitement, which is often caused by visitors, should be avoided at all cost. They stood in the corridor. Aron wanted to see him at least for fifteen minutes. Then a nurse passed by, hurriedly pushing a bed on wheels ahead of her. A child was lying on the bed, motionless; the doctor ran after them. This, Aron says, was like an alarm signal, like a thick red line under an imminent danger. He gave up the idea of introducing Paula to his son that day after all; he gave the nurse a little package and asked her to say hello to Mark from the two of them.
“May I take a quick look in the room?” Paula asked the nurse. “I won’t say a word and I’ll leave right away.”
The nurse gave her permission without Aron having to intervene; he didn’t go with Paula into the room. The doctor’s warning still ringing in his ears, he thought that the sight of Paula could hardly excite Mark, for him she was just another woman. He waited by the door and was happy that Paula had expressed that wish. A little while later she came back out and said, “He didn’t even see me, they’re all fast asleep.”
And when they were outside, on the way back to the station, she said, “He’s a handsome boy after all.”
Aron says it sounded as if he had previously claimed the opposite. In any case, she had seen Mark even though she could easily have avoided it. The motives that Aron had attributed to her before, and that had appeared to be so plausible on the way there, no longer seemed valid.
Toward the end of our afternoon I ask Aron if he remembers the address of the Hessischen Weinstuben. “Of course,” he answers.
I then ask if the building is in West Berlin, and he replies, “No, it’s on our side.”
After that I ask if he would agree to drive there with me once — right now if he’d like.
“What for?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Out of pure curiosity. After all these years, wouldn’t you like to have a drink there again?”
“No.”
“You’re a spoilsport.”
A couple of days later he says that as far as he’s concerned we can visit the Weinstuben, if I haven’t changed my mind in the meantime. I call a taxi, Aron gives the driver the address.
The bar is now called Balkan. When we’re inside, Aron’s eyes dart restlessly from one side of the room to the other — a lot must have changed. He looks at me only when the waiter puts on the table the two glasses of cognac I had ordered.
“Do you know how many years it’s been?” he says. “Twenty-eight.”
I ask myself if emotion will take over now, because often when I see old people remembering things long past I find that they are moved, no matter whether their memories are pleasant or unpleasant. Perhaps they belong to each other, perhaps remembering is a form of emotion — not for Aron apparently. He takes in the room with one last glance, then he’s finished, as if a curtain has been drawn over his thoughts, or as if he has decided to consider any further memories superfluous. He drinks his cognac and orders another. “And now what?” he asks.
“Have things changed much?”
“Everything’s changed,” he says. “You can’t recognize anything. Did you bring me here to find out how much it has changed?”
“Of course not.”
“Why did you then?”
I don’t know what he’s getting at; the waiter comes to my aid by bringing more cognac. Aron drinks and then says, smiling, “If you thought that something extraordinary would happen to me while I’m here, you were dead wrong.”
“That’s not what I thought.”
“Then it’s okay”
“Where was the room where you’d always meet?”
“Over there,” Aron says. “Pay now, I don’t like it here.”
We walk leisurely to the next taxi stand; Aron makes fun of me. He says that if someone hears the story of Spartacus, or the story of gladiator fights, he can understand that this person would like to visit the Coliseum; the grandeur of the story justifies such a wish. However, what brought me to the Hessischen Weinstuben wasn’t clear even to me.
I talk my way out of it; I never claimed to know why I wanted to go there.
Mark made his first attempts to walk, initially in the corridor, then in the snow in front of the home. The muscles in his legs, which had become as thin as birch twigs because of his constant lying in bed, needed to be strengthened. Aron attentively registered Mark’s progress.
He felt that his frequent presence was necessary especially now, not so much to oversee Mark’s training — for that he trusted the personnel — but he thought Mark required treatment of a different kind.
* * *
of what kind?”
“I was convinced that the years in the camp had damaged his mind too. That is, I was convinced, it was totally clear — everyone could see. He was seven, and you had to talk to him as if he were four. Not to mention that he couldn’t read or write. His vocabulary was ridiculously small and his knowledge was small and his interests were small. Who should have taken care of that if not me?”
“Did you give him lessons?”
“Lessons?” Aron said. “I sat down and talked to him.”
first he spoke to the doctor, not to strengthen his determination but because he wanted to make sure Mark’s physical condition would allow for daily conversations without causing him too much strain. The doctor had no doubt. He said, “I’m an internist, not a pedagogue, but what you’re planning to do sounds sensible.”
Aron decided to look for a room in the neighborhood. He found that the three hours it took him each time to get back and forth were better spent by Mark’s bedside. He asked the Stationmaster if he knew someone with a small room to spare, without any particular amenities and for a good price. The Stationmaster asked Aron to wait for a moment, he wanted to talk to his wife; then he came back and said he knew someone, in fact, himself. “We came to an agreement about your bicycle, why not on this, too?” Aron could have a room right there in the train station, a pretty one, if he would consider a pound of real coffee appropriate monthly rent.
Aron was pleased by the quick resolution of his search and accepted. But he used the room only at the very beginning. On the one hand, his work suffered while he was away His duties had increased in scope; Tennenbaum’s business affairs were improving steadily. Still, he would immediately have given up the job if doing so had been useful for Mark. On the other hand, and above all, the few nights he spent in the attic room depressed him terribly; he suffered from an insomnia that fatigue couldn’t overcome. He would lie awake and hear the trains pass below him and yearn for Paula. He saw pictures and heard noises that he had forgotten in bed next to her; now they returned in full clarity and volume. That was too high a price to save three hours a day.
One of the conversations with Mark as an example.
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
“Still, pull the blanket higher, we don’t need you to get the flu now. What did you eat for breakfast?”
“Bread and jam and butter and an egg.”
“Very good, and what did you drink?”
“Milk and cod-liver oil. But they forced me.”
“They have to, you won’t get healthy without codliver oil. Do you want to know what cod-liver oil is good for?
”
“No. It tastes bad and the others don’t have to drink any.”
“Because they don’t have it. Do you know how hard it is to get cod-liver oil these days?”
“The others will also get healthy again.”
“But not as fast as you.”
“That’s not true. Just yesterday they released Hermann. He didn’t drink any cod-liver oil.”
“Then he wasn’t that sick. Should I tell you where cod-liver oil comes from? It’s a really crazy story, you’ll be surprised.”
“All right.”
“But let’s take a little walk. Lean on me and I’ll tell you. Up to the tree over there and back.”
They set off, and Aron began the story. “The biggest fish on earth are called whales. They are so big that all the rivers are too small for them. They would constantly hit against the shore. That is why the whales live in the sea.”
“How big are they?”
“At least a hundred feet long. That is from here to the wall and as tall as a house.”
“And where do they live?”
“In the ocean. Have you already heard that word?”
“No. But my legs hurt.”
“That’s all right, we’re almost halfway there. And now listen to what an ocean is.”
Quite by chance, in one of the children’s books Aron had given him there was a picture of a whale.
However, Aron told himself that the explanation of wonders, like whales and oceans, would not suffice in the long run; they were just a small part of the big picture. More urgently, Mark needed a goal and a role model, because he must become healthy from the inside out, he must want to be healthy, and Aron decided that he must find a way to stimulate this wish.
The issue of the goal was hardly a problem; he is still convinced today that no goal is more senseless than that which lies in a nebulous distance. To give Mark courage, he says, the only goal that could work was: get healthy so that you can come home. Aron portrayed the near future as colorful, told him of visits to the zoo, of ice-cream parlors and cinemas, intentionally inflating the time dedicated to pleasures. But he also spoke of school, which awaited him; he described it as a fun kind of institution, the only one that could open the door to the greatest happiness, namely the joy of knowing.
On the other hand, the role model was more of a problem for Aron. For a long time he wavered. Which circle of people should he choose from? It must be a man. An imposing figure, but one that didn’t exceed Mark’s imagination — there was no one like that in Mark’s entourage. Two candidates, from which Aron had to choose, elbowed themselves clearly into the foreground. One was a made-up person called Anatol. Aron could easily credit him with all sorts of characteristics and merits that he felt were desirable, according to his educational purpose. Courageous like Anatol, he could say, friendly like Anatol, clever like Anatol. Anatol had been an old acquaintance he lost track of during the war. The second candidate was Aron himself, and in the end the choice fell on him, though he realized that it was more convenient for role models to dwell in remote places, where their true nature could not easily be verified. Mark, however, would be able to keep an eye on him constantly, especially when he would come home from the sanatorium. This was clear to Aron — he knew what he was letting himself in for. Yet the risk was smaller than I may think at first, because it wasn’t actually he who was the candidate, but the man that he could have been once upon a time. And this man was naturally far beyond Mark’s reach.
In short, Aron decided that all the talent, all the skills he would otherwise have bestowed on an Anatol looked just as good on him. Furthermore, he was convinced that the constant presence of a role model could only be an advantage and would have a positive effect on Mark. (He expressly emphasizes that it wasn’t vanity that made him come to this decision, though he concedes that, in a way unknown to him at the time, vanity may have played a small part. First and foremost, however, his starting point had been cool calculation.)
The first story he told, in his new job as role model, concerned how he had overcome a terrible illness when he was a boy of barely thirteen, with tenacity and great energy. How he had followed to the letter both the doctor’s and his parents’ instructions, understanding the urgency and not in fear of punishment. How he had told himself that this was only about him, about nobody else, because it wasn’t other people’s health that was at stake. It was his own time that he frittered away in bed, denied of all pleasure — visits to the zoo, ice-cream parlors, and cinemas. Aron didn’t expect to change Mark with a flick of the wrist, he rather hoped for gradual changes. So his joy was all the greater when during his following visit the nurses told him that lately his son swallowed his cod-liver oil without grumbling. He doubted that his old acquaintance Anatol would have been capable of producing such surprisingly speedy results.
* * *
One afternoon in February, Aron remembers exactly, he was working on the books when Paula came home. This was surprising — she usually appeared two hours later; Aron immediately knew that something was wrong. She sat down at the table with her coat on and didn’t kiss him as she usually did in greeting. He waited patiently for a word of explanation, yet Paula was silent, like someone who doesn’t know where to start. “What happened?” he asked.
Paula remained silent; he thought that the premature return home had something to do with her health. The mysterious pills came to mind; he stood up to get a glass of water. At that she finally said, “Stay here, I’ve resigned.”
Not an alarming novelty, Aron found, rather pleasant in fact, even though Paula, according to her face and posture, seemed to think differently. “No harm done,” he would have liked to have said and taken her chin in his hand, yet she was silent again in such a peculiarly embarrassed way that he preferred to sigh as a sign of solidarity. Financial problems absolutely did not arise, he told himself, the only problem they could face now was: what would Paula do with all her free time? She would have more time for him, time, too, for Mark, whose arrival was imminent; she would follow her passions or discover new ones; in the worst case she would be a little bored. Perhaps she would finally warm up to the idea of a family, of being a housewife and a stepmother; her momentary mood would soon vanish into a bright picture of the future. A daring thought shot through Aron’s head: to have a child with Paula. “At least take your coat off,” he said.
Paula went out and didn’t come back; he found her in the kitchen, where she was making coffee. He sat next to her and asked, “Why did you resign? What kind of trouble was there? Come on, tell me.”
“There was no trouble,” she said, “only joy.”
“Then why do you look so upset?”
“Rescue found Walter.”
I hardly know anything about this Walter. I asked her ten, twenty times, but she acted as if she couldn’t hear me. She was in a state similar to that of a woman I had seen before the war in a vaudeville show — a magician had hypnotized her. She began to pack, her packing went on till evening, she forgot half her things and took half of mine, all I could understand was what she let slip.”
Aron, downing another cognac, wanders from the subject; he talks about the vaudeville show and the hypnotized woman. I see that the memory of Paula’s last day affects him. Perhaps he regrets having mentioned this part of the story; he could have said, One day Paula didn’t come home for reasons unknown to me.
“So what did you find out?” I ask.
“Yes, what did I find out?” Aron says and works his face into a funny grimace, as if this question forces him into extreme concentration. “This Walter was a man she had known for a long time, that’s for sure. Her boyfriend or fiancé, certainly not her husband. They had lost track of each other during the war, just like Anatol and me. After the war she had started looking for him. That’s why she went to Rescue in the first place; she wanted to be right there at the source. With time she had given up hope but kept her job anyway. Then I came along and she must have decided to start a n
ew life, that’s all. And then this damned Rescue has to find her Walter.”
The first days after Paula left were unbearable. All duties became tedious — at first just the books, then the messenger who delivered the bundled accounts, and then Tennenbaum himself, with his cold gaze. Aron’s mood led to an unjustified abuse of Kenik. Even the trips to Mark’s home were suddenly more problematic; he went less than before, and when he went he stayed only briefly. The bed was his preferred haunt — open the door to no one, do nothing, think of nothing, but how does one do that, think of nothing? Again, out of bed, Aron clung to the conviction that no person is irreplaceable, so Paula couldn’t be either. Hundreds of Paulas, he told himself, were running around. Thousands, in a city like this. Aron moved through the city and looked for them, in an angry action of self-defense. Until the evening when he found a poor woman whose willingness, he says, and poverty, must have ben one and the same. He took her home with him. But it took only a couple of minutes before he noticed the differences between this woman and Paula; Aron paid the full price and sent her away. He paid the full price out of a sense of justice, he says, because she was not to blame for his change of heart.
He went to the Hessischen Weinstuben, to get drunk. He could have done it at home too, but he felt that in his state it would be better if he stayedamong people.
People greeted him and treated him with respect; his role in Tennenbaum’s business was well known. Someone told him that his friend Kenik was sick and bedridden for a while, kidney problems.
Aron sat in the backroom, which was reserved for Tennenbaum’s men, but he soon felt irritated by the curious looks and pointless questions. In fact, the whole backroom looked silly to him; this sitting around was nothing more than the ostentation of belonging to a clan. He went back to the front room, the common bar, where people played billiards and where the ordinary customers would stay. The people from the backroom thought he was an eccentric and shrugged.