by Jurek Becker
One day, out of context, Mark said, “Mathematics.”
“Mathematics?” Aron asked. “What about mathematics?”
“I will study mathematics,” Mark said.
He was very confused, Aron says; until that moment he had never for an instant thought of mathematics — so, very confused, but no longer afraid. A few minutes later, after the word had been repeated several times, mathematics actually didn’t sound bad. Mark declared he had decided for mathematics because he wanted to have a job in which the accuracy of the results could be determined by precise formulas and weren’t dependent on other people’s opinions.
Did you often talk about politics?” I ask.
“Almost never,” Aron says. “What made you think of that?”
“Because the reason he gave you for wanting to study math is a political one,” I say.
“How did you arrive at that idea?” Aron shakes his head. “What he said was that you can argue about taste but not about numbers. You think that’s politics?”
Aron mentions something odd — on Mark’s high school diploma there were an abundance of As, except in the subject of mathematics, where the teachers had graded his performance with a B. Aron feared that this might make it difficult for Mark to be accepted as a math major. He took him to task for not having made an effort to shine in the very subject most important to him. Did he think this B was some sort of a joke?
“Stop grumbling,” Mark said. “I did my best, it just wasn’t good enough.”
“I don’t believe you,” Aron said.
His worries proved unfounded; after a couple of nervous days the notice came to the house that nothing stood in the way of Mark’s enrollment. At which point Aron, wanting to make a little speech, said, “Sit down and listen to me.” He wanted to talk to Mark about how serious life was, as he would now find out for himself, about the end of his salad days, which he must not look back on with regret. Serious work, he wanted to say, above all when crowned with success, can bring great joy. And he didn’t want to forget to mention that, as Mark must know by now, one was responsible for one’s own progress. Yet after afew words Mark patted him on the back paternallyand said, “It’s okay, Papa, I already know that.”
At first Aron was angry but, he says, he found Mark’s interruption understandable — young people have their own idea of how to be polite — and soon after he even considered it a sign of character. With this remark, Mark had spared them a lecture that would have naturally sounded wooden and shallow. Mark wasn’t the kind of person who pretended to be interested when he really wasn’t.
Halfway through the holidays, Mark asked Aron for three hundred marks. He wanted to go camping with his friends. Where? That would be decided along the way. Aron gave him the money, and Mark disappeared for almost four weeks. The unfamiliar solitude made no difference to Aron; he was only worried about Mark. For the first time since the end of the war Mark was out of his sight; once he got a postcard from Mecklenburg: “Everything’s fine, Mark.”
During those four weeks Aron often had to dwell on something inevitable, the day when Mark would leave home. Mark had hinted at nothing of the kind, but life hinted at it; students everywhere lived away from their parents, and not just for lack of space. Aron dreaded that moment but resolved not to stand in the way if ever Mark should express such a wish. He decided, however, to refrain from doing anything that would encourage this desire. Therefore, no deciding for him; no prying as far as possible; no pestering over trivialities; tolerance.
When Mark returned from his trip unscathed, the days resumed their normal rhythm. Neither then, nor in the following period of time, did Mark indicate in any way that he wanted an apartment of his own. Now and then he would bring girls home; Aron didn’t make any comments beyond the usual ones that men tend to exchange. As far as he could judge, the girls were decent in every respect. However, the nightly visits were clearly not to his liking; it was all he could do to keep his mouth shut. Otherwise Mark solemnly studied mathematics.
Our work is delayed by Aron’s illness. He’s sick for six months, so seriously in fact that I am afraid he won’t make it.
We sit as usual at the living room table, and he tells me student stories that I would have gladly skipped; he interrupts himself in the middle of a sentence. He stands up and goes out without saying a word. I’m worried that my face didn’t look attentive enough for his taste. I wait for a good ten minutes, until I have a feeling something’s amiss. He’s not in the kitchen; the bathroom door is locked from the inside. I knock and call out his name, but he doesn’t reply, so for the first time in my life I break down a door. As I head toward it I can’t help thinking how crazy this is, ridiculous. Aron is lying motionless on the tile floor, and I panic. I pull at him, try to lift him up — I can’t — how will I get him to my car? I think, With help from the neighbors. The first neighbor I find is more levelheaded than I am; he calls an emergency doctor. Together we carry Aron to the bed and moisten his forehead; he looks incredibly pale. The doctor answers me: “No, he’s not dead.”
For days I receive only general information from the hospital — his condition is stable — they won’t let me see him. Finally I succeed in bribing a nurse with chocolate and pleas; she takes me secretly to Aron’s room. She whispers that I must not get too close to him and must be very quiet, he’s still not responsive. He’s in a transparent oxygen tent, if that’s the right term for it; dark blood drips from a container into a tube fixed to his arm.
“Listen,” I say excitedly to the doctor, “for days now people here have been behaving as if his condition was a state secret. He has no one to take care of him. Has anyone besides me asked about him?”
The doctor doesn’t even look at me, he looks for something on his untidy desk.
“Will you please tell me what’s the matter with Aron Blank?” I ask.
“Don’t shout like that,” the doctor says. He takes out a file and leafs through it; he’s making me wait longer than necessary. Finally I learn why Aron was lying on the tile floor so deathly pale. His stomach is consumed by ulcers; one had burst and this led to internal bleeding. He would have been operated on a long time ago, if it weren’t for his heart condition. They couldn’t wait much longer. The doctor said he was constantly receiving blood transfusions, but an open stomach is like a barrel full of holes. For the moment the operation was delayed; they were giving him medicines to strengthen the heart and increase the circulation. He says, “If you insist, we’ll proceed as if he were twenty and operate right away”
“What are his chances?” I ask.
“Very poor,” says the doctor.
At home, the question torments me — which worries me more, Aron’s state or the danger that he will not be able to finish his story? I listen to loud music, I leaf through books; it’s useless, the question won’t leave me. Of course I have to come to the conclusion that Aron is important, far more important, incomparably more important. I tell myself — what’s in a couple of stupid notebooks. I toy with the idea of throwing all my notes into the fire; for a moment it appears to me that this would be convincing proof of my sincerity. I know that in complicated situations like this I have the tendency to go out of my mind. My final answer is: I care about both Aron and his story I hope that’s the truth, the end.
He is operated on and, against all odds, survives. When I am officially allowed into his room, he’s pleased by my visit — for the first time since we met. He says, “There you are.”
“I brought you something,” I say and place a portable radio on his bedside table. He thanks me but hardly glances at it; he looks at me searchingly and asks me what he looks like.
“Very thin.”
“Everyone is amazed I’m still alive.”
“To tell you the truth, so am I.”
We have only a couple of minutes. The sight of Aron — gray and scrawny and unshaven — is overwhelming; he asked the question for a good reason. This is more or less what he must have looked l
ike, I suspect, when he came out of the camp. We talk about the most trivial things; that is, I do most of the talking, I can see with what difficulty he speaks. The nurse will knock soon, and I don’t want to spend these few moments in silence.
From one visit to the next he seems livelier; the only problem is that he doesn’t gain any weight. He stays away from the subject of his illness, I don’t bring it up either, I wonder if we can’t proceed with our interviews. We would have something to talk about and our work would progress; I wait for this suggestion from him daily. Once he smiles for no reason until I ask him why he’s smiling. He replies, “You must have been really afraid.”
“Of course I was afraid,” I say. “You think that’s funny?”
“Yes,” he says. “You were afraid that the story would bite the dust right before the end.”
I say, “Idiot.” Luckily he doesn’t insist.
Once he asks me, “How long have we known each other?”
“Let me calculate,” I say. “It must be over a year and a half.”
“It occurs to me that I know nothing about you,” he says.
“Thank God,” I say.
“Why do we always sit in my apartment?” he asks. “Am I a cripple? Why didn’t you ever invite me to your place?”
Embarrassed, I say, “I would have done it long ago, if I had known you would have liked to come.”
“Aha,” he says.
Once we have a little argument because I refuse to smuggle cognac into the hospital. He calls me camp guard. In my presence he says angrily to the doctor, “He’s such a responsible person. He won’t even bring me a drop of liquor.”
Six months later he weighs a hundred pounds.
INlow and then Mark would not come home at night. Aron had to stop worrying about an accident every time; a twenty-year-old young man had every right to spend his nights as he saw fit. Most important, there was no indication that Mark’s studies were affected — the results of his midterm exams were good. Mark showed them to Aron without being asked, perhaps with a little pride, but not primarily out of pride, Aron thinks, rather because he knew how much it pleased his father.
Although it didn’t bother Aron anymore if Mark stayed out all night, it worried him that he wouldn’t have been able to change things if it had disturbed him. He assumed that Mark would be surprised if Aron questioned him, as if his requests were breaking the rule of being mutually discreet. Luckily, Aron says, this never happened; he himself found it inappropriate to ask Mark to stay home at night.
Only lately, he says, and unfortunately not at the time, did he recognize a serious mistake he made with Mark, possibly a decisive one. At the time he thought only how Mark should be to fulfill his, Aron’s, wishes, but he never posed the question the other way around. In other words, he had always taken for granted that Mark was happy rather than verifying what conditions his happiness was tied to. Meanwhile, he had come to understand how disastrous it was for parents to believe that they alone can determine what makes their children happy. Of course, it’s a completely different matter when parents try to influence their children’s idea of happiness; no one wants to deny them that right. But the certainty with which most parents think that their own desires are good enough for their children is arrogant and shortsighted.
Even today he doesn’t know what Mark’s needs were, but doubtless they were different from what he assumed. It now appears criminally thoughtless of him to have been so dead sure Mark was happy as long as there was food on the table and clothes in the closet and the place was warm. He could hate himself a thousand times, but he couldn’t turn back time. In his naïveté, he had always cooked Mark’s favorite dishes and was happy when Mark said he liked them. His conversations with Mark were incredibly sparse, the kinds of exchanges one normally writes on postcards to superficial acquaintances. For example, he never succeeded in getting Mark to ask him for advice, not once. Whenever they did talk he was simply happy they were talking at all. He thought their conversations were proof there was give-and-take between them. And that thought calmed him down; courtesy has its limits after all, and children’s courtesy toward their parents is especially limited. He couldn’t expect Mark to sacrifice half his day for sentimental reasons, no matter how gladly he would have accepted such a sacrifice.
Once he decided to take Mark to task, when Mark hadn’t come home for three days and three nights in a row. He couldn’t stand it any longer, to be constantly tortured by someone who, and this thought was the worst, didn’t have a clue he was the instigator of such suffering. He intended to ask for a little more consideration, if not for his age and health, at least for his feelings as a father. He wanted to ask Mark if he thought that love between parents and children went in only one direction.
So what did you tell him in the end?”
“Nothing.”
“But why?”
“I’m tired,” says Aron. He shuffles into the kitchen. I hear him putting water on to boil. He calls out across the corridor, “Do you want some tea?”
It’s half past four; I know him well enough to know that he won’t go on with his story today. I follow him into the kitchen. I say, “We still have half the day. If you’ve got nothing better to do, we could go to my place for a while.”
“To your apartment?”
“Yes. I also have tea at home.”
Aron smiles and shakes his head a couple of times, as if he were astonished at the transparency of my attempt to fool him. Then he dedicates himself to making tea; he warms the teapot, takes a sieve and tea — English — from the shelf. I ask, “So, what do you say?”
“You could have waited a bit longer to make the invitation,” he said.
“Longer? Why?” I say. “We’ve known each other for two years now, surely I should be allowed to invite you to my apartment?”
“Stop pretending you’re dumber than you really are,” he says. “You know exactly what I mean.”
He means the time since our conversation in the hospital, the time since his question, why hadn’t I ever invited him to my place, the time since my flimsy answer — of course I know. Does he want me to hold off with my invitation until he forgets our conversation in the hospital? I can’t change the order of our conversations in retrospect, I would have gladly invited him much earlier. I say, “I’ll even bring you back home.”
Aron is busy with the tea now, the water is boiling.
He looks at me briefly, irritated; his look says we would be well along on another subject if only I had a grain of tact. He says, “It’s all right. You’ve invited me and I don’t want to come. Do you want to drag me to your apartment by force perhaps? No one expects you to, don’t worry.”
Damned‘Mark didn’t come home, not on the fourth day and not on the fifth. Aron’s only consolation was the thought that the police would have informed him long before if anything had happened to him. He knew nothing about Mark’s friends and acquaintances, he had no addresses, the only way to find out was to go to the university. He couldn’t bring himself to go there — that, he says, could easily have ended in embarrassment, not so much for him as for Mark. Because if Mark had been missing only from home but was regularly attending his lectures, then a distraught old man in the middle of merry students would only have made his son look ridiculous — who knows what their sense of honor is. Or let’s assume, says Aron, that Mark preferred a bench in the lecture hall to a girl’s bed; days later she sees him and asks, Where have you been? And he lies out of necessity, he was at home in bed with a fever. Then I come along and turn him into a liar. And, in all fairness, there’s a third point, he says; he felt like the man in the old joke. Do I know the joke about the man who lost his wallet? Well, a man loses his wallet with all his money and his papers. He turns the house upside down, he turns his clothes inside out and can’t find it. His wife asks him why he looks everywhere except the right pocket of his brown coat. The man says, “It’s very simple. If the wallet isn’t there either, then I’ve definitely
lost it.”
On the sixth afternoon the doorbell rang. Mark had the key, of course; a young man stood at the door and asked for Mark.
“Are you a friend of his?” Aron asked.
To say friend is too much, said the young man; he had been instructed to come by his seminar group. Since Mark hadn’t appeared at the lectures for a week, they assumed he must be sick; the young man wanted to pay a visit. Aron asked him in; the young man with his briefcase reminded him of the meter reader for the electricity company, the right pocket of the brown coat was empty. The young man asked, “You’re his father?”
“Yes.”
“He isn’t home?”
“No.”
The young man looked interested and asked when Mark was expected to return. Aron considered whether it still made sense to stall for time; then he shrugged and then he fainted. He remembers that the helpless young man stood over him and asked if he felt better.
“He hasn’t been home either,” said Aron.
The young man said several times that he hadn’t thought it was possible until Aron inquired what he meant by that. The young man looked amazed and asked, “Well, do you know where else he could be?”
“No,” said Aron.
“So there.”
Aron asked the young man to keep his conjectures to himself a trifle longer, if he didn’t mind; the young man replied that it didn’t depend on him. Aron warned him against rash conclusions; he said, “And what if he suddenly reappears?”
“Then we’ll all be delighted,” said the young man.
For a couple of days Aron postponed certainty with excuses. He buried himself in the hope that Mark would suddenly show up at the door and explain his absence with an incredible story Aron couldn’t possibly foresee. But his strength waned and also the idea, he says, of waiting like an idiot for a miracle to happen — then he’s simply gone. Even the anger that follows initial mourning passed. At first, he was so angry with Mark he could have smashed furniture, he says; this was the most outrageous lack of consideration imaginable.