The Boxer

by Jurek Becker

  “I already told you, we don’t have any rooms,” the old man said irritably. “Try somewhere else.”

  Then a middle-aged woman, clearly his daughter, appeared behind him. “Do come in a moment,” she said to Aron, as if till then he had been reluctant. Suddenly the old man had nothing more to say. He shrugged and retreated to the depths of the house. The woman sat with Aron in the kitchen.

  To Aron, the kitchen, tiled in blue and white, felt like the beginning of a holiday; there were some dried fish and a blazing hearth in spite of the heat. The woman said she actually did rent rooms, almost everyone here rents rooms, only this year she had already given her word to a family from Berlin. In ten days the ladies and gentlemen were due to arrive. On the other hand, she said, in recent times, as the gentleman would surely know, things have changed — she had no precise idea what the situation was like in Berlin. Only one thing tempted her to let him have the rooms, she said, namely that the family in question had not yet sent any confirmation about their agreement. Maybe they were just being careless, but then again, maybe not. Something might have happened to make the family change their plans, in which case she would be stuck with her vacant rooms. “At least they could have written,” she said.

  Aron asked her permission to see the rooms, and when the woman hesitated he added, “With no commitment.”

  She led him up a steep staircase to exactly the two rooms he was looking for. An open view of the sea, a small balcony, everything was clean and neat, above all, two rooms.

  “I come from Berlin myself and I know what the situation is like there,” Aron said. “You can’t imagine. I think it’s likely your guests won’t be coming. Just in case, you should write a letter saying that you could no longer wait for news from them and that you have rented the rooms to someone else for four weeks. That’s fair, no one can accuse you of anything. Otherwise you might get stuck with your rooms. Who travels in times like these? I’ll pay you seven hundred marks for four weeks.”

  The woman didn’t let him see how good she thought his offer was. She was silent and pushed chairs into place and tugged at the bed linen. Aron went out on the balcony and gazed at the sea for a while. Then he turned around and said, “Or shall we say eight hundred?”

  The old man fetched a handcart from the shed. Aron went back to the train station with the cart. “I thought you had already forgotten us,” Irma said.

  “You’ll be amazed,” Aron said. He piled the luggage onto the cart, with Mark on top. It was a pleasant holiday, without fights and without heart attacks. And, best of all, Aron says, when they went back to Berlin there was no trace of the ruckus. The streets looked just as they had before, no sign of violence, a miracle.

  Encouraged by their experience, the following year they went on another holiday to the town of Ilsenburg, and the year after that a third trip to Sotschi on the Black Sea. Of the latter two trips, not much stuck in his memory, Aron says. As for comfort, neither one could compare with their trip to Binz. Perhaps just this much about Ilsenburg, that Mark, as far as he, Aron, could tell, had his first love affair. At this point he was fifteen years old, the girl was sixteen, the daughter of a baker who stuttered. Throughout the holiday Mark hid with her; Irma found it wrong. She said, “At his age already,” until one day the baker came and asked Aron to please keep his son away from Veronika. “There you go,” Irma whispered, but Aron didn’t do anything about it; anyway their departure was imminent.

  Later, Aron reports, Mark had so many girlfriends that he, Aron, eventually lost both track of them and his interest in the matter. He only followed this first one with a watchful eye because, beyond his general paternal feelings, he wanted to make sure that Mark, like himself, had survived ghetto, camp, and illness in all things, including his manliness. Apparently he had.

  In the winter of 1955 Arno broke up with Irma. I shouldn’t take this as a decisive event, Aron says, he mentions it only for the sake of completeness. It was simply one of the minor occurrences of which there were thousands in the course of his life. The first morning after the separation he did not feel the slightest regret — at most the apartment felt a little empty. Presumably Mark was the one who was most affected, because he was very attached to Irma, even loved her; after all, she had replaced his mother for years. Her way of fostering this affection had been patience, a patience that he, Aron, often found impressive, he was the first to admit. But patience is worthless if there’s no purpose behind it, no purpose other than that of being patient. And buying a child’s affection in this way is both easy and insignificant.

  Irma was one of those people who always refused to see problems. If I’m not mistaken, she spent her whole life trying to find out what other people wanted. And when she found out what it was, she would immediately help, regardless of whether itwas right or wrong. Don’t picture that as being particularly pleasant.”

  “Like a handyman,” I say.

  “A born handyman. After a while the smallest objection onher part led to a fight; one simply wasn’t used to her objecting.”

  “Did she leave on her own accord, or did you send her away?”

  “I can’t answer that in one sentence. One day it occurred to me that I couldn’t care less whether she stayed or left. And then I said to myself, If I don’t care anyway, then it’s better if she leaves. Irma wasn’t old, but she wasn’t that young anymore either. I was afraid that one day we would have no alternative but to live together forever, purelyout of habit. So I wanted her to leave.”

  “Couldn’t you have left?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Okay, I’m sorry, that was nonsense. So did you send her away?”

  “You can’t say I sent her away.”

  After a night at the movies they had sat at the table and drunk a whole bottle of wine when Irma shifted close to Aron and asked him, shyly, if he had ever seriously thought about the future course of their life together. At first he felt hot, then cold, Aron says; he had never heard an important, or even notable, suggestion from her till then, and now suddenly this. He asked her why in the world they should marry.

  “Then tell me why we shouldn’t marry,” Irmasaid.

  Aron explained that nothing spoke for or against it, and if one lives in a situation that is just as good or as bad as the other, then one could logically avoid the effort implied by change.

  In any other case, Irma would have been satisfied with his answers — not this time. She brought up the fact that other people got married too, that getting married wasn’t a custom she had invented; even for Mark it would be an advantage to live in an official relationship. And not least, she said, as a wife she would have a sense of security that was missing in this precarious life.

  “We are leading a precarious life?” Aron asked.

  “Nothing is decided,” she said. “We can break up whenever we like.”

  “Can’t we break up even if we’re married?” he asked.

  “Not so easily.”

  “And you see that as an advantage?”

  Irma smiled helplessly and said, “You always have to twist the words in my mouth.”

  Aron realized the significant difference between his and Irma’s expectations: what he considered to be the end of all change, the irrevocably last station in his life, she thought was temporary. Apparently she was full of desires, which he had neither the will nor the strength to fulfill; she needed an energetic man, an agile one, he wasn’t like that. He told her he was tired because of the movie and the wine, and they went to bed.

  Soon after she was lying next to him and started to busy herself. He presumed that the kisses were supposed to put him in a compliant mood, and in fact a few minutes later she picked up her flag again. “If marrying is so irrelevant to you,” she said, “and so important for me, why won’t you do me the favor?”

  “Please don’t start that all over again,” Aron said.

  But Irma didn’t stop. She pressured him with a stubbornness he had never noticed in her befor
e; it was almost unbearable, he says. She hardlyformulated any thoughts of her own, she only uttered words and expressions that he had heard or read dozens of times. She was forever playing a role, in his mind a miserable one. Would I perhaps be willing to marry a woman who reproached me for not having understood that the soul of a woman could blossom fully only in marriage? A tirade of sayings: “life as a couple,”“sacrificing the best years of my life,”“to be able to depend on one’s partner for better or for worse,” and more of the same. Several times he asked her to stop, but in vain; in the end all she knew how to do was to start crying. She shouted that he was too cowardly to get married, he was also too cowardly to tell her the real reason for his refusal, he didn’t love her, she didn’t deserve it. Then he said, “Finally we got to the point, I don’t love you.”

  Irma immediately stopped crying, turned on the light, and posed the insane question: “How long have you known?”

  “Since right now,” he said, “let’s go back to sleep.”

  The following afternoon, while Mark was at school, she behaved normally, but Aron found that her friendliness was affected. He figured that she regretted having opened yesterday’s topic and having forced his confession. He felt relieved that Irma now knew where she stood; yesterday’s conversation had clarified the situation. Now he hoped once and for all to be spared such sieges. She wouldn’t provoke such a thrashing a second time, only a long silence would bring back the old ease.

  But Irma was too proud or too dumb to be silent for long. After her housework was done, she started over from the beginning. She asked, “Were you being serious last night?”

  “Yes,” Aron said.

  She nodded, as if that was the answer she were expecting. She then asked him to list all her flaws, openly and without mercy, she said; perhaps she could discard one or another. He found this funny and touching. He said, “Dear child, how can you say something like that? Do you think a man can tell a woman she should behave in this way or that, then love her?”

  Irma raised her hand as if she had immediately recognized the simplemindedness of her request. She asked, to change the subject, if Aron thought that, in the future, marriage between them would be out of the question.

  “I can’t say that either,” he said. “I’m only asking you for the last time to cut it out.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  Her question, Aron says, sounded like the abrupt end of all modesty. He sat there in silence and thought, Irma would never become his wife, like Lydia had once been and Paula playfully could have become. He was angry that she should torment him with her foolish questions instead of demanding that he explain why he had lived with her for so long without loving her. That would bother anybody. But not Irma apparently; she was intent only on arranging a wedding, why, he still did not understand. Stubborn and nonsensical, she tried to change their current situation without realizing he would not be pushed in the direction she wanted. Aron went shopping.

  When he came back, Irma asked him, as if no word had been spoken on the matter: “Please tell me, Arno, why are you so afraid of marriage? Did you have a bad experience?”

  To this he said, “I won’t be angry if you leave.”

  After a frightful second, she stood up and left the room. To cry undisturbed outside, Aron thought, but she came back with two empty suitcases and started packing. She was astonishingly composed, after all those years, he found. Her face betrayed nothing but concentration; she didn’t want to forget anything. Aron watched her for a couple of minutes, then he asked if he could help her. She ignored the question, so he went out. He didn’t want to give the impression that he was sitting there only to make sure she didn’t take something that wasn’t hers. When he went back to the room a while later, she had filled only one suitcase; all the cupboard doors and the drawers were open. He said, “Mark will be back in two hours. You’ll say good-bye?”

  Again she said nothing. Aron took a porcelain figurine from the closet, one he knew Irma liked particularly, and held it out to her. She ignored it. (The figurine still stands in his living room — two large black dogs fight while a very small brown one brightly holds a bone in his mouth. Aron says that if he hadn’t offered the figurine to Irma, she would have taken it for sure.) Once she finished packing, she leafed through the common photo album and took out two photographs. In one of them Mark was wearing his boxing outfit; in the other he was with her on the beach by the Black Sea. She laid the pictures on top; then she closed the second suitcase and was finished. Aron knew that it made no sense to ask her, in her condition, if she wanted to drink a cup of tea with him. Suddenly he felt sorry for her.

  “I only want to tell you one more thing,” she said. “Think carefully about why I stayed by your side all these years.”

  “Well, why?” he asked.

  “Think about it.”

  It was an outright demand to consider the worst reasons, the most disadvantageous for Aron, as the right ones. Nevertheless he was thankful that she spared him the list; even in anger she couldn’t overcome what remained of her modesty. He said, “Fine, I’ll think about it. Do you have enough money?”

  “Thank you very much.”

  He took three thousand marks from his little box, he cannot explain why that precise sum. At the time, he says, he thought that three thousand marks were appropriate; there wasn’t a fixed rate. He opened the second suitcase, put the money on top of the photographs, and closed it again; she wouldn’t have taken it, he thought, in her hand. In the corridor he asked where she was thinking of going. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I don’t want to pursue you. Just in case you forgot something.”

  “I didn’t forget anything, Aron,” she said. Those were her last words; she probably went to her parents’.

  Aron stood baffled, staring at the slammed door. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out how she knew the secret of his name; she had never used it before. Perhaps he had slipped up once without noticing — there were no documents in the apartment. In any case, he says, the last day with Irma had been the most eventful of their life together, and her very last word had been the most significant.

  Since, with the passage of time, the house threatened to fall to pieces, Aron hired an elderly lady from the neighborhood to come three mornings a week to guarantee a minimum of order — an arrangement worked out with the help of the neighborhood grocer.

  All of a sudden, the focus of the stories shifts to Mark; all the other people have disappeared. From this point on, Mark represents Aron’s only connection to the outside world. Mark is described to me as a boy who didn’t feel the need to communicate. Aron declares that while Mark’s relationship with him was open it was not overly friendly. He often felt that Mark was struggling with problems he knew nothing about, and his occasional declarations that he was always available if his advice was needed never prompted Mark to discard his reserve.

  Mark’s career as a boxer was long over. Training took up so much time that two years later Mark lost all interest; his schoolmates didn’t dare challenge him anymore. Instead he immersed himself in his studies; Aron wouldn’t have been upset if Mark had studied less, because he considered him bright enough to get passing grades without working too hard. To rein in his eagerness to learn, Aron gave Mark theater tickets or money for other distractions, but he soon realized that for Mark the issue wasn’t being the best; the subjects actually interested him. In which case, Aron says, any further attempt to hold him back would have been a sin, like an attempt to thwart his thirst for knowledge. He asked Mark how he could help him with his studies, Mark should call on him at any time. At first Mark didn’t know how, then he gave him a piece of paper with titles of books and names of authors. Aron became the client of several bookstores and antiques shops in remote corners of the city; // was a pleasure.

  * * *

  What kinds of books did he read?”

  “I can’t remember, there were so many. The Bible was one.”

  “Where are they now?�
��

  “Sold.”

  “Sold? After Mark read the books he sold them?”

  “Not him, me. Just three years ago — they took up so much space. I put an ad in the paper and sold them all.”

  The closer graduation came, the more Aron was interested in which subject Mark wanted to study at the university. Aron would have liked him to become a doctor or a jurist, yet he knew he could not influence Mark’s decisions. The possibility of influence, he says, had slipped from his fingers at one point; the need for advice had to be matured, but at this stage both of them decided their personal affairs on their own. To an outsider that may have looked like independence, Aron says, except that his own independence was purely theoretical: since he had virtually no personal affairs, there was nothing to decide.

  “Maybe I won’t study at all,” Mark once said.

  “Not at all?”

  “We’ll see.”

  He probably didn’t realize how much he frightened his father with that statement. From then on, Aron refrained from any further prying; he wanted to avoid an escalation of Mark’s aversion to the university out of defiance.

  Thus he started his own investigation. Without telling Mark, he went to the university and asked how soon before one intended to enroll the application had to be submitted. He also wanted to know how good the chances were for applicants to be accepted in each of the various departments. He discovered that chances looked good for lawyers, less so for doctors. The employee at the admissions office smiled at the efforts of a solicitous father. He said, “If you want to be on the safe side, you should choose something like teaching.”