The Boxer

by Jurek Becker

  Not so rich after all, Aron opened a bank account.

  Where?”

  “In a bank in West Berlin. Where else?”

  He sent the account number to Baltimore via telegram; the money arrived one long month later. Except for a few thousand right at the beginning, he says, he didn’t touch it for years, only much later, when Mark and Irma began to have expensive tastes. And, he had to confess, he did too. For example, Irma and Mark wanted to travel, but until that moment the money had remained untouched; it paid interest and had a reassuring effect. Aron didn’t want their lives to change because of a sudden external event, and in a way that would make the neighbors jealous. He had his way. Mark didn’t know anything about the inheritance; only Irma was informed, and Aron soon regretted this. She suddenly discovered shortcomings that could be avoided, in her opinion, by using the money, but that was exactly what Aron didn’t want. They argued; Irma used statements like “You only live once” or “You can’t take it with you” until Aron threatened he had better things to do than argue endlessly with her. After that she no longer mentioned the money, maybe even found her peace, out of necessity or otherwise. Aron says, So much about London.

  Then his first heart attack. He was diagnosed as having angina pectoris, severe chest pains. Aron describes having trouble breathing and the unpleasant feeling when you think of nothing but what little life you have left. He describes the fear, even if the doctor says that in theory one can live to be a hundred with that kind of damage — but without drinking.

  What does survival mean? Till then, daily walks weren’t undertaken for a reason, and therefore they used to be a pleasure. Now they simply had the effect of reminding him, with every step, of being deathly ill, a ridiculous attempt to walk away from the end.

  No excitement. But how, Aron asks, does one not get excited? No excitement implies that in the past he had done his best to get excited as often as possible. Besides, the intention not to get excited is the most exciting of all; one swallows hard and keeps all one’s anger pent up so that no one notices. There’s an enormous difference between inner calm and forced self-control, and as far as he is concerned, he says, self-control is a thousand times more exciting than letting go.

  Or the recommendation that he get more sleep than before. Until then he went to bed only when he was in a state of complete exhaustion, in a state that guaranteed falling asleep immediately or virtually. This meant an average of four to five hours sleep a night. The doctor demanded eight, which meant that Aron had to go to bed hours earlier than usual, and those hours were unbearable, not to mention his having to forgo pleasure with Irma. To help him sleep, he took sleeping pills or a slug of cognac, which certainly wasn’t part of the doctor’s plan, but the doctor’s orders were right for the textbook model, who only looked like Aron physically.

  A cure, he says, that bored him to death: three months in a home for the victims of fascism. Aron resigned from his post with the Russians, gave Mark and Irma sufficient money and the most pressing instructions for the time he was gone, and left. The prospect, he says, of hanging around for months with cases like him, with other camp-ruins, was more than he could bear. All they did from noon till night was keep telling each other how horrible everything was.

  Wait minute,” I say. “Why did you resign from the Russians?”

  “Weren’t you listening?” Aron asks.

  I say, “You only said that you got sick and went to get cured. You could have continued working as an interpreter after that.”

  “No, I couldn’t,” Aron says. “The strokes didn’t stop afterward; they haven’t to this day. You know that.”

  “I do, but you couldn’t have known it beforehand. Why did you resign before you left for the health resort?”

  In a flash Aron’s face darkens, yet in a flash it’s bright again. He tilts his head to one side, he suddenly looks cunning, he says, “For once, let me ask a question too. Why didn’t you ask me the same thing when I resigned from Tennenbaum?”

  “Because the reasons were clear, you spoke about it in detail.”

  “You’re cheating, my friend, that’s only a half-truth. You didn’t ask about Tennenbaum because you agreed with my resigning. Now you’re asking because you disagree with my resigning. For the sake of your story, you had hoped that something good would come out of my job with the Russians —- Aron finally gets his act together — how should I know what goes on in your head? And now you’re disappointed because my job with the Russians was nothing more than an episode.”

  “You may be right,” I say, “at least partially.”

  “Partially is good,” Aron says. “If you really want to hear my reasons again, I can easily repeat them. Listen carefully: first, it was a badly paid job. Second, I didn’t find it interesting. Third, I got sick. Is that enough to justify my resignation?”

  While he was recuperating, he read a lot, more than ever before. There was little else to do, aside from the daily examinations, the meals dispensed in accurate doses, and the controlled walks. Since he hadn’t brought along any books, he was directed to the sanatorium’s library. The librarian, who he realized was dissatisfied with the selection, gave him advice. With her help, Aron looked for what he thought would most likely correspond to his taste, primarily books by Russians of the previous century. He names Gogol, Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Goncharov. Since reading was an occupation born, as it were, outof necessity, he says, he started it with some reservations. Yet these reservationssoon eased into real pleasure. A pleasure that wasn’t in fact as breathtaking and unique as one hears now and then with connection to literature, but the books undoubtedly helped him make it through three months in which otherwise nothing happened. Reading, he proceeds, was but a brief experience for him anyway; in reading he was looking for distraction rather than stimulation. The lasting effect of impressions, which everybody talks about, was true only as they related to his own experiences and to people he had known, they never came from books. He did not think books were superfluous, dispensable accessories; on the contrary, he thought of himself as pro- rather than anti-book. But one should beware of overestimating their importance, expecting more from books than they are able to give, living more through books thanthrough life. He wouldn’t want to withhold this opinion, he says, especially from someone like me.

  Bedtime was prescribed every night at eight; the lights were turned off at the central switch. Aron almost despaired trying to cope with the time between going to bed and falling asleep. To that, a further difficulty must be added: darkness. At home he always left the light on until morning. They wouldn’t give him sleeping pills. Having decided that darkness was the biggest problem of all, he found some candles so he could read in bed until he fell asleep. Then a nurse discovered this major violation of the house rules. She confiscated the candle he had lit, found some others in the night table along with some matches, cigarettes, and a tin box filled with cigarette ashes. “Really! How irresponsible,” she said, and reported him to the head of the sanatorium.

  Aron was called before the director and confessed to everything. The director gave him a long lecture — what would have happened if an unexpected draft had blown the curtain into the flame? The whole sanatorium could have burned down, not to mention the damage to Aron’s heart caused by his smoking and reading at night. “Really, Mr. Blank, if you can’t be more disciplined, we have to expect the worst.”

  By “the worst” he meant the interruption of the cure. Aron promised improvement; he lay there in the dark and developed a new method. He thought intensively about the plot of the book he was reading. He made conjectures about how it would continue or tried to imagine how he himself would have handled the situation of the written people, and he did that until he ran out of thoughts. Learning this method, he says, was probably the greatest gain of the entire cure. He still uses it every evening; it doesn’t necessarily have to be books he thinks about. He simply thinks about something complicated; with time he developed a kna
ck for knowing which subjects were more likely to make him fall asleep and which were less prone to.

  Aron didn’t befriend any of the hundred or so patients; in any case he noticed that most of them, like him, were not interested in human contact. Contrary to his expectations, they were completely self-absorbed, intent on mitigating their own suffering, he says, and it was very quiet. Except for the few who already knew one another from the earlier days, no groups seemed to form; any type of approach was considered invasive. It was a small population of introverts.

  One man interested Aron, but only briefly. They sat at the same table in the dining room a couple of times. It turned out coincidentally that the man had known Ostwald. He had spent two years with Ostwald in a concentration camp — no question about it, with the jurist Ostwald in the very same barrack. Aron hoped the man would tell him something about Ostwald, yet he was wrong. Having identified Ostwald, the man said no more. Even when Aron forced himself to ask the man for a little more information, he remained taciturn; he said he didn’t like to talk about these things. Aron didn’t pressure him any further; perhaps it was better that way, the man certainly had his own problems and his own methods. Aron didn’t tell him that Ostwald had committed suicide. From then on they sat at different tables. The distance between them, Aron found, had only grown with the few words they had exchanged.

  Twice a month was visitors’ day. So Irma and Mark came six times altogether; Irma made herself pretty for every visit and never wore the same dress twice. Aron liked her more and more with each visit. He was often worried about whether Irma was as faithful as he was. External circumstances forced him to chastity — there were only old men and strict nurses in the sanatorium — whereas Irma lived in the city. He was not jealous of her, Aron says, on any other occasion during their time together, only for a couple of seconds in that sanatorium. He would have preferred to bite his tongue than to ask her a question involving trust; the question would have sounded like a sign of dependence, and that, he says, would definitely have been going too far.

  The last visit brought Aron a new preoccupation. After greeting him, Irma sent Mark out of the room and said, “Please don’t get upset, Arno. Yesterday a man came to me and complained about Mark. Apparently Mark hit his son.”

  “Have you already talked to Mark about this?”

  “No, I wanted to tell you first.”

  Aron called Mark in and asked him why he thought he had been sent to boxing school — he should think carefully before answering. Mark said innocently, “To learn how to box.”

  “Why did you learn how to box?”

  “So that I can box?”

  Aron grabbed Mark’s arm gruffly, he says, and pulled him close. “Listen carefully, young man. I didn’t want to make a thug out of you, but someone who can defend himself from thugs. There’s a tremendous difference. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you do,” Aron said. “You hit a boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “He got on my nerves.”

  “Is that all?”

  Mark was scared and close to tears, because of the unusual anger in Aron’s voice or because of the tight grip on his arm. Mark said that the boy had drawn a naked man and a naked woman on the blackboard in their classroom and when the teacher asked who had been the dirty slob, the boy had blamed it on him. Mark said, “That was why after school I gave him a lick or two.”

  “Were you punished?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I was reprimanded.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the teacher it wasn’t you?”

  “I did tell him. But he didn’t believe me.”

  “And the others?” Aron asked. “Didn’t anyone see who had really drawn the pictures?”

  “Yes,” Mark said. “But they didn’t speak up.”

  Aron let go of his arm, tormented by a new problem. Mark’s answers only led to the conclusion that his fellow students didn’t like him, perhaps were even hostile to him. Why else would they keep quiet when they knew better, when he was unjustly accused? Given all that, Aron told himself, it was only an advantage to have some boxing skills. Mark’s revenge was obviously not to be forgiven, but he deserved a modicum of understanding for having lost his head. Aron said, “When I come home we’ll discuss this further.”

  Weeks later, when Aron had been home for a while, Irma made a discovery while cleaning. She called Aron to Mark’s desk and showed him drawings of naked men and women. Aron was about to say “So what?” and ask her if it wasn’t normal, or at least not unusual, for children of Mark’s age to make such drawings; then he grasped the connection. The other children had remained silent not because they couldn’t stand Mark, he told himself, but because the other boy had told the teacher the truth. And Mark had not hit the boy for having wrongfully accused him but for having betrayed him. Mark had expected the boy to show solidarity; he had not, thus the beating. At this point, the only positive aspect was that there was no real reason for worrying that Mark stood alone against the other children in his class.

  He knew, Aron says, that boxing was only an emergency solution, a precaution in case of need. Because experience shows that sympathy provides a more effective protection than strength, he wanted to advise Mark once again, and for the future, not to risk other people’s sympathy through thoughtless outbursts of anger. On the other hand, he remembered from his own childhood how much easier it was for the strong ones to find friends; the weak ones, he says, had much less choice. The best thing was to be both popular and strong.

  When Mark came home from the gym that evening, Aron took him to task about the pictures. Mark confessed everything; it was very embarrassing for him that his father had found the drawings. Aron said, “But that’s not what this is about, it’s about boxing. If you hit other children again for such a small thing, not only will I take you out of boxing school but you’ll have to deal with me. I want a popular son, not a feared one.”

  Aron had to set about reorganizing his life, his future as a retired person. Till then, when important changes had taken place — working for Tennenbaum or as an interpreter — he’d never felt they were definite. It was always a temporary arrangement, recognized as such from the start. By contrast, something definite was beginning now, a life without duties, a condition almost of unrestraint. He had known from the first, he says, that his main enemy would be boredom, and that’s how it was. With the years this enemy proved to be overpowering.

  Aron made an effort to discover his true interests. At first, he assumed that he’d simply be able to follow his passions, to say the least, but he couldn’t find them.

  Everybody has passions,” I say. “Ask anyone, if you want, no one has enough time. Everyone would like to do something but doesn’t get around to it. That’s exactly why most people like the idea of retiring; it means they have more free time.”

  “Until the time came,” Aron says, “I used to think just like you. But then I had to recognize that either the people you’re talking about are mistaken or I’m not normal. I was scared to death because I couldn’t find anything that I would have liked to spend my time doing. And I did try. For a couple of months I even started collecting coins.

  “I sit there,” Aron says, “and boredom gobbles me up. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here now.

  “No,” he says, “everything was financially in order. The pension, while not impressive, was enough for our needs. People like me get paid more than most retired people do; my past is worth more. Besides, don’t forget that I still had some money.”

  * * *

  Mark often came home late in the evening; as well as his school and boxing lessons he got together with friends who were forever changing. He seldom brought these friends home, and when he did Aron always had the impression that the boy in question was not good company for his son. Yet he never mentioned this to Mark. On the one hand, he told himself, the fact
that he changed friends constantly only proved that Mark was still testing them and hadn’t yet found a friend that met his expectations. On the other hand, he says, he remained silent because he knew enough people who, by imposing unduly high expectations on their friends, painted themselves into a corner of solitude.

  Irma only had to take care of the cleaning because Aron took up the cooking out of boredom; in the evening they often went to the movies. Irma spent half the day at the piano and practiced with an endurance that Aron felt was almost pathological. At first, he thought, Why not, if she likes it? But soon the incessant tinkling got on his nerves. Sometimes she would repeat single complicated parts for hours on end. He asked her, Why go through all the trouble, if she was not planning to give concerts?

  “I’d like to start giving lessons again,” Irma said.

  “Where?”

  “Here, of course. I don’t have another apartment.”

  “Out of the question,” Aron said. “I don’t have another apartment either.”

  Because they were together all the time now, they began to fight. The problem was that Irma, who Aron admits was a quiet and by no means a know-it-all woman, was only boring. She never tried to back up her point of view with solid arguments. After a discussion she would retreat, hurt, to the kitchen or to the other room; in bed she turned to the other side. However, she bore the tension for no longer than three days; then Aron could be certain that her attempts at conciliation would begin, as was the case this time. When three days later she started to caress him, he admitted to being unjust. He said he could not expect her to lead the same inactive life he did and, if she still wanted to, she could bring her piano students to the house.

  “Oh, Arno,” she cried.

  “But be merciful and don’t take too many,” he said.

  “There must be silence for at least a couple of hours a day.”

  She prattled away thankfully. She didn’t know if she would find students in the first place; she wanted to ask around in the neighborhood and put an ad in the papers; it was definitely not for the money, even if a couple of extra marks couldn’t hurt; he would not regret giving his consent.