The Boxer

by Jurek Becker

Mark didn’t answer. Aron repeated the question a couple of times and became impatient; then Mark started crying. Aron caressed him and in consolation told him a funny story about when he himself had been beaten like that as a young boy. He had come home in such a state that his own mother didn’t recognize him; when she opened the door, she thought it was one of his friends, and she said her son was still outside playing. Yet Mark’s condition was so pitiful that when he heard the punch line he didn’t even change his expression; he looked as if he was ready to start crying at any moment. Aron said they wouldn’t talk about that stupid story anymore. Tomorrow, “tomorrow will be a better day than today; now try to get some sleep.”

  Irma knew nothing more than he did. Aron sat there for hours; all he could conclude was that what had happened was an act of anti-Semitism, a minipogrom. In any case, it would not go unpunished. The only question was what kind of retaliation would be more expeditious. In that instant, at the moment when his anger was at its peak, he tended toward the idea of finding the name of the culprit, or culprits, and taking revenge in a way that was appropriate. However, one had to take into account that the culprits were children; that was clear even without Mark’s confession. Children of Mark’s age; therefore the real question was who had instigated them.

  Aron went to the other room several times during the night; Mark was sleeping soundly as usual. Aron wanted to wake him up and get the name out of him, with or without tears. Only the thought that for Mark being awake meant being in pain restrained him.

  Why was he actually beaten?” I ask.

  “Didn’t I just tell you?”

  “You didn’t mention any proof. Did Mark confirm your suspicions later?”

  “If you had seen the state he was in, you also would have realized immediately that it wasn’t one of the usual fights between boys. I know how children fight. If one child has proven he’s the strongest, he stops — that’s how it goes with children. Mark looked as if he had been manhandled by someone who hated him. It wasn’t a fight among children, it was an attack.”

  “And everything was so clear it didn’t require any questioning? It never occurred to you that you were making something up that had nothing to do with Mark, only with yourself?”

  “No,” Aron says, “that never occurred to me.”

  He fills his glass and explains that he has been beaten often enough in his life. He has had so many opportunities to look into the faces of thugs that in this case he can permit himself to judge. He says, “Anything else?”

  The following day brought no greater clarification. Mark didn’t go to school and Aron stayed home from work; he sent Irma to the nearest telephone with an excuse for the Soviet headquarters — a sudden indisposition. Mark categorically refused to confess the names. Aron tried being nice and then tough. Why do you want to protect your tormentor, he asked, prevent him from being punished? To no avail. Gradually the reasons for Mark’s silence interested him more than the name itself; perhaps it was a terrible threat. Some thugs, he says, prolong their victims’ suffering by threatening them. In which case the presumed threat didn’t need to be terrible in and of itself, it only needed to stay in Mark’s frightened thoughts; not everyone has the same concept of terror.

  From then on, Aron tried to eliminate all traces of impatience and anger from his questions and mix in sweetness and a little coaxing. He says he already knew at the time that trust wasn’t something that falls straight from heaven, that could be forced on request or even obtained through extortion. It had to be built millimeter by millimeter, often with an arduous attention for detail

  Around noon he had reached his new goal. He did not know who had hit his son, but he discovered why Mark withheld the name so doggedly. He was afraid of losing the only respect he still had after the thrashing — at least he wanted to be a good loser. He imagined the catastrophic consequences if his father went into the schoolyard, grabbed the boy in question, and beat him in full view of the others.

  “You needn’t be afraid,” Aron said. “I’ll do it so thoroughly that he won’t ever hurt you again.”

  Naturally, that wasn’t a very good argument. Mark believed that, yes, an act of revenge would provide a certain protection from future attacks, but the price for that would be overall isolation, and that was a price he didn’t want to pay. Aron asked him if he really wanted to take the risk of being confronted with such attacks from time to time, by the same person or someone else. Because if the others noticed that there was no reprisal, the attacks would just go on. “Revenge isn’t useful only for others,” Aron said. “Don’t you want him to be beaten like you were?”

  “Yes,” Mark said, “I tried. But he’s too strong.”

  “Now, tell me his name,” Aron said.

  Mark shook his head, amazed that the whole interrogation seemed to be starting all over again. In the end, Aron promised not to go to school, or to the boy’s home; he didn’t want to do anything at all, he said, only know the name, with the intention of forgetting it again, eventually. “If we both know it,” he said, “you’ll feel better.”

  Mark demanded that he swear on his honor. Aron had no choice, he wanted to know the name. The boy was called Winfried Schmidt.

  When shortly thereafter Aron left the room, Mark, with more than a trace of suspicion, asked where he was going. For a little walk, Aron replied; he didn’t know exactly where, but definitely not to the school. He never saw this boy, Aron tells me, this Winfried Schmidt, Mark and he never mentioned him again, yet to this day he can’t forget that name, ridiculous. He then walked aimlessly; the nice weather and fresh air made his anger easier to bear, it never occurred to him to break his word to Mark. Then, unintentionally, he saw the school, an empty yard with trees. Aron didn’t have the school schedule memorized and therefore didn’t know whether or not classes were over. It didn’t seem to make any sense just to stand there and wait in case he might decide to break his word after all. Still, he stood there for a good fifteen minutes, out of laziness, he says. A man, perhaps a teacher on his way home, came out of the school building and looked at him suspiciously. Aron moved on.

  The more time passed, the hazier, he says, were his thoughts. He hardly knew what he was looking for anymore; its easy to say “a way out. “ He knew only that Mark had been beaten up and that he had to make sure it would never happen again. The ideal, he says, would have been to convince them once and for all, convince them that it was inhuman to hit people, that they damaged not only the victims but their own souls as well. The convincing should go on until a new relationship had been established, however long it took. But what kind of a guarantee was that? The risk would be yours and yours alone; all you could do was act toward them the same way you expected them to act toward you. But who can guarantee that you will convince them before they beat you to death? And where do you find the patience? And who would protect you from relapses? And from misunderstanding?

  He resolved not to go home before he found a reliable solution to protect Mark. His first thought was to take him out of the school and send him to a different one, but all things considered that wasn’t a solution. What had happened could reoccur anywhere. The idea of going with him everywhere he went was completely unrealistic. Mark had to learn to defend himself from this kind of attack; that was it, only effective self-defense would make him independent. I had to arm him.

  Aron remembered the resolution he had made and eventually forgotten months before — of being a role model for Mark. A role model for all situations in life — but, aside from a couple of pathetic attempts, he hadn’t done much. That would change now. Aron recognized the chance to turn his past good intentions into deeds and at the same time help Mark in a situation of need. How had he reacted to fights as a schoolboy? Specific images did not come to mind; there had certainly been fights now and then. Aron had forgotten them, but being able to remember them was irrelevant. What was clear was that, at the time, he definitely had not been the hero he wanted Mark to become thanks to tales f
rom an invented past.

  He sat by the bed and said, “Did I ever tell you that I was a boxer a long time ago? No? Strange,” Aron said, “I was sure you knew. Well then, listen: it all began when I was as old as you are now, perhaps a couple of months older. I got along with everyone at school, but on our street lived this one guy who made our lives miserable. He was the one who always decided what game we would play, and he decided who could join in and who couldn’t, and if somebody didn’t want to do as he said, then he gave them a punch or two; he was the strongest kid in our crowd. And one of us had to be his servant. He would simply say: “Today, you!” and point at someone who would be his servant all day. His name, by the way, was Werner. You can imagine how much we wanted to get rid of him, but no one could do anything, he was so incredibly strong. The only thing you could do, if you wanted to go outside to play, would be first to look out the window to see if he was on the street and, if he was, you would stay in your room and get bored. That was almost just as bad. He hit me more than once, and if my mother asked me why I was crying I lied to her, because I was afraid that if I told her who it was I’d get more of the same from him the next day.”

  Mark winced with compassion; he was a talented listener. The fact that almost all the stories he had ever heard tended to have a happy ending did not spoil the suspense. He waited impatiently for the climax, the inevitable change in favor of the good guys; yet Aron felt he hadn’t done a thorough enough job on Werner, whose meanness, he found, could easily bear a few more brushstrokes.

  “One day he threw a rock through a window, a huge shop window, and ran away. Because I happened to be standing nearby, I ran away too. Only I had been recognized, not him. When I got home the shop owner was already sitting with my father and telling him that I had thrown the rock through his window. Just imagine: I was so afraid of Werner that I simply couldn’t tell on him and took the blame myself. I got the punishment that he deserved, and when later on I told him the whole story, so that he would praise me for my silence, do you know what he did? He laughed at me and said, ‘Well, you were stupid enough to get caught.’“

  “Did it go on like that forever?” Mark asked, at the end of his patience now.

  “No, not forever,” Aron said. “It lasted only as long as I kept waiting and hoping for a miracle, hoping that the torture would end of its own accord. Listen to what happened next. Once I read in the paper about a boxing match; rather, I read about how a famous boxer, whose name I can’t remember any longer, was preparing for a world championship. How he practiced for weeks, how he ran alone through the woods, lifted weights, punched a bag full of sand for hours — all this only so that he could win this one match. It impressed me so much that I decided to become a boxer too and train for my match against Werner. I went to my father and asked him to enroll me in a boxing school. At first he refused, because it cost money; he said I should play soccer instead. But how could soccer help against Werner? I didn’t give up and begged for so long that I finally was allowed to learn how to box.”

  A list of the difficulties of training followed, a description of what it took to learn a craft, because boxing, Aron claims, is nothing more than a craft and therefore, up to a certain level, talent has nothing to do with it. In fact, he says, he’d been interested in boxing as a young man, if only as a spectator — now and then he had watched boxing matches. The atmosphere in the hall where the matches were held had been a welcome change in his overly monotonous life.

  It wasn’t hard for Aron to spice up his career with technical terms. Mark lay there amazed and heard upper-cut, left hook clinch, straight right, sidestep. Aron didn’t forget to mention, among the many details, what inspired him in his eagerness to train, what gave him new strength when the next complicated trick was on the syllabus: the thought of Werner, the hope of overpowering that monster. But, he explained, Mark mustn’t think that the whole thing had been nothing but hardship. To learn how to box, aside from the immense effort, was to learn a versatile game, a game that is hard to explain, one should simply try it out.

  “Then the time finally came. I had never let anyone in on what I was doing. I behaved the same way I always had so that Werner wouldn’t notice. I didn’t want to start a fight, I had simply decided that I wouldn’t put up with his shenanigans anymore. But in all honesty I was sort of waiting for an opportunity. And it came soon enough. Again he pointed at me and ordered — Today, you! You remember, that’s how he chose a slave. So I said, ‘Get yourself someone who’s more stupid than I am. I don’t want to be your slave, not today or any other day.’“

  “And what did he do?”

  “He looked at me as if he hadn’t heard me properly. The others were also really shocked. One little guy whispered in my ear, ‘Are you crazy? He’ll make mincemeat out of you.’ Werner walked toward me slowly and rolled up his sleeves. So I said to him, ‘Why are you rolling up your sleeves? It’s not that warm today’ That’s when he finally raised his arm. I was waiting for the right moment, just as I had practiced a thousand times, and bang, I gave him a good punch on the nose.”

  At this point Mark could no longer hide his feelings.

  He clapped with delight and turned a somersault in bed; then he sat still again. The story had to go a little further; he really wanted to hear the happy ending. How Werner was flustered, how young Arno didn’t even take advantage of his astonishment — didn’t need to — when Werner attacked for the second time. A little step to one side and he hit the air — the famous sidestep. Blind with rage, Werner stormed after him and ran into a hail of punches. The horror of the others was soon transformed into cries of joy when they realized that rebellion led not to complete catastrophe, only to catastrophe for Werner. He didn’t even see the hook and the straight punch coming, they flew at him that fast. When his nose was bleeding and his head buzzing because of all the uppercuts, he finally understood that his coarse hands were useless against a real boxer, only his legs could save him. So he started to run as if the very devil was after him, and from then on peace reigned in the street; the monster didn’t show his face again.

  Mark would have liked to have heard another couple of stories like that. He asked, “Did you box later?”

  Once in a while, Aron said. His trainer had advised him to keep training, refine his skills, in time he too might become a champion, but he wasn’t interested in championships. His purpose had been fulfilled, and no one could take from him what he had learned while he was training. He had felt prepared for any attack by loudmouths and tormentors, that was enough. A boxer, he said, isn’t a man who boxes all the time, he’s someone who knows how to box. Unfortunately, however, boxers often box just because they are boxers; thafs the whole problem.

  Aron succeeded far more easily than he had expected. It was one small step from Mark’s enthusiasm to his desire for heroic acts of his own. Children are predictable, Aron says, especially one’s own. That evening Mark asked if there were any boxing schools in the city. Aron looked skeptical and said, maybe there were some, but he wasn’t sure, he would have to find out. He was convinced that to keep Mark’s desire alive an immediate acceptance would be less effective than an indication that it might not be all that easy; naturally there were difficulties he hoped to overcome, only not right away.

  Every evening after that, as soon as Aron got home, Mark asked him first thing: “Did you find one?” And Aron said he had looked, but to no avail; he would keep on looking. There was a dangerous moment, he says thoughtfully, when expectation could turn into resignation; one had to be careful. “Guess what,” he finally told Mark a week later. “I found a place, we’ll go tomorrow.”

  The next afternoon they went to a boxing union. Aron had trouble getting permission to leave the headquarters hours before closing time. Fascinated, Mark watched the children train. A friendly man walked up to them, waved at Aron, looked Mark up and down, and asked, “Do you know how to box?”

  Mark shook his head, so the man said, “Of course, I can tell by y
our black eye. But we’ll take care of that.”

  From that day on Mark went to the gym twice a week — first with Aron, then by himself — and did his best to learn the new craft. After each lesson he showed off his progress at home. Aron stresses that it had nothing to do with his own ambition; it didn’t fill him with pride in any way that his son could box better every day — it only reassured him.

  There’s a letter from America,” Irma said.

  It was leaning against a vase on the table; the name of the sender meant nothing to Aron, he recognized only the word Baltimore. Mark waited for the stamps and Irma for sensational news. They thought it was taking him too long to open the envelope.

  “Leave me alone.”

  The contents were in English; only a name caught his eye in the incomprehensible text: Samuel London. And, a few lines later, a sum: 50,000. Aron came to a conclusion that, should it prove to be accurate, would be excellent news. He dedicated almost an hour to London, his first father-in-law. He had only a vague memory of London’s daughter Linda, Aron’s first wife, but he saw London distinctly, the textile factory behind him. To Irma, Aron said, “If I’m not mistaken, we’ve inherited a lot of money.”

  On the other hand, the same letter meant that old London must have died. Aron felt no pain, only a sense of regret that didn’t overwhelm him. So much pain lay between London and that day, he says, that he could easily get over such a loss, especially if it was connected to a handsome profit.

  Aron took the letter to the headquarters. He wasn’t the only interpreter there; there was an English one too. Aron took him aside and showed him the letter. Five minutes later his suspicion was confirmed: London was definitely dead and had left him fifty thousand dollars. The legacy had not been challenged by the other heirs and was therefore readily available. The notary who had written the letter wanted to know where he should transfer the money. The English interpreter said, “You’re a rich man now.”