We’ll not make that mistake again, Kâzim. Now we’ve escaped from that holy terror, I feel quite shaky. It was just really bad luck that he had to come by at that moment.
Herr Imhof is ill. His soul’s rotting. I explained it to him. ‘Herr Imhof,’ I said, ‘if you continue the way you’re going, there will soon be a smell from your throat. Don’t you realise your soul’s rotting? When something rots, it ferments. If something ferments, vapours arise, poisonous gas rises into your head, and that’s what gives you your headaches.’
I explain it to him, but he just goes into a rage. Throws a cushion at me.
‘At the age of eighty-eight, one really shouldn’t be throwing things around,’ I say.
Seeing someone rotting away is the most pitiful, distressing thing imaginable.
What do you think, Kâzim, maybe it will just take a minor event, something unlikely, to get Herr Imhof and Frau Jacobs together again? Maybe Frau Jacobs just needs to get stuck in the lift?
Imagine the scene: Frau Jacobs pressing the alarm – and such is her grief and misery, she’s wailing and hammering the lift door with her free hand.
‘What’s that?’ Herr Imhof – on the second floor – asks, holding his hand to his ear.
‘Lift No. 1 is stuck,’ the caretaker explains.
‘Judging by the voice, it’s Frau Jacobs,’ the head of administration says.
‘What can we do to help?’ Herr Imhof asks, concerned.
The caretaker shrugs his shoulders. ‘The operator company is sending out a mechanic. We’ll just have to wait.’
‘Wait?’ Herr Imhof cries. ‘And what if the lovely Julia goes and suffocates on us?’
His face shows a determination of which no one would have thought him capable any more. The framed photo of the Home around 1920 has already been snatched from the wall, and the frame shoved into the bi-parting door, to prise it open. Major Imhof is back in the militia.
The head of administration opens her eyes and discovers in the inconspicuous resident of Room 303 a sprightly man with hidden talents.
‘What are you doing?’ she stammers.
Herr Imhof looks down the shaft to the cage, in which Frau Jacobs has spent the last fifteen minutes, straining her arthritic arm and learning to pray in a standing position.
‘For goodness sake!’ the head of administration shouts. Herr Imhof takes a firm hold of the elevator rope and slowly lowers himself down the lift shaft in the direction of Frau Jacobs.
The caretaker chooses this moment to alert the head of admin, now paralysed with fear, to the fact that something’s not right in this Home: on numerous occasions already, he’s found empty wine bottles in the kitchen storeroom.
Smoking is forbidden in the lift, and Herr Imhof makes an unfriendly remark regarding the ‘diktat of the Management’, as he calls it. Frau Jacobs, despite the awful situation she’s in, manages to smile a little.
‘I’m so afraid,’ she says, embarrassed, and discreetly wiping the sweat from her brow.
‘They’ll soon get us out again.’ Herr Imhof says, the implicite being: she needn’t be afraid, he’ll look after her. While abseiling down, he’s lost a shoe, lacquered himself in grease from head to toe, and cut his index finger.
‘Oh – you’re bleeding!’ Frau Jacobs says.
Herr Imhof hints that pain doesn’t bother him. Today’s the day for which he waited in vain back in the army.
To distract herself, Frau Jacobs tells him about the formal supper she attended at the home of acquaintances last night. Herr Imhof listens, interested, then asks, ‘What were you wearing?’
Frau Jacobs has to fight back the tears. ‘Do you know,’ she reported to Lydia later, ‘how long it’s been since anyone asked me what I was wearing?’
The damaged door on the second floor delays the Schindler mechanic’s rescue attempts by thirty minutes. Once Lift No. 1 is roadworthy again, and Frau Jacobs and Herr Imhof walk out of the cage, everyone – all those with hands to clap, and vocal chords up to cheering – acclaims them, from the head of administration to the new arrival on the fourth floor; from sociable walker Zbinden to lone wolf Ziegler. Tender arms are thrown round Herr Imhof’s neck – and he faints.
‘Loss of blood,’ Britta and Lydia surmise, bedding the veteran down on a lounger. And a few months later, the entire Home assembles outside St Peter’s on Kalcheggweg. Both nearly ninety, Herr Imhof and Frau Imhof-Jacobs are, so Lukas Zbinden holds off until the last possible moment before buying them a wedding gift.
But I hope in vain. All that happens, and will continue to happen, is that Frau Jacobs and Herr Imhof walk past each other, their eyes fixed on something else. In the Dining Room, they ignore each other, dramatically. Frau Jacobs puts on her reading glasses and memorises the list of main courses, while Herr Imhof entertains the table with his tales of air combat in the clouds over England, such that you have to feel ashamed with – what’s-her-name-again? – around. The intern. An Asian name. It’s refusing to come to me.
That people are so lonely. And yet they’re all living on top of each other, as never before. Do you hear people complain, Kâzim? A pupil says to me, ‘No one bothers about me, no one treasures me, no one notices me. Not a single person loves me!’
I reply, ‘Don’t speak nonsense. Your parents love you.’
‘What – them? A fight is all it’ll take, and I’m off.’
‘And your friends?’
‘They’re colleagues, no more than that.’
It’s not just young people that can suffer this kind of loneliness, would you agree? Orphaned grammar-school pupils, alone in bed with a comic. A husband and wife can live together, and be desperately lonely, alongside each other. The husband has no idea what moves his wife. The wife has no idea what moves her husband. And then the dams burst. The husband who merely exists alongside his wife starts collecting Personal Development certificates. The fifteen-year-old with frightened eyes seeks comfort in a holiday job. Am I right? The spirits punish us humans if we don’t keep up with all the many things we have to do. And if we do keep up, they punish us for not giving ourselves more to do. Men die early, don’t live long enough to see the birth of their children’s children.
And behind all this fussing: a distress that knows no bounds. Even the hours we have for ourselves should be spent productively, they say. It’s absolutely not the case that everyone who moans about too much work getting to him feels better if the work stops getting to him.
The manager of the Home sits down with a sigh, and says, ‘Oh, if only I could switch the phone off! It never stops: people are always wanting things from me.’
Frau Wyttenbach says, ‘Be glad your phone still rings occasionally. I’d be happy if mine did. Have you come to a decision regarding the Gandhi matter?’
‘If I feel like seeing Stefanie, it’s Christine who comes,’ Frau Rieter says, ‘and if I feel like seeing Christine, Stefanie comes.’
‘No one’s interested in my opinion any more,’ Herr Probst says. ‘At first, I thought it would be wonderful to have peace for once, and to pass on all responsibility for business matters. Now, though, if I visit the firm, someone offers me a drink, and that’s it. I might just as well not bother.’
‘Never a free moment,’ the manager says, getting up with a sigh. Truly a rising star in the world of care for the elderly.
Before they went out to hunt, cave dwellers would draw images of antelopes and bears on the walls – to lure the animals. Am I speaking to you, Kâzim, to lure my family here? And yet I shouldn’t complain. Other elderly people here grow lonely because they’ve no relations and are all on their own, or because their very busy children as good as never drop by. Frau Felber has grandchildren of every age between minus-three-months and twenty-four. Do you know what she has to do to ‘see’ them, though? She goes up to the attic and looks across the roofs until she spots the buildings she reckons they live in. To cheer her up, I sometimes join Frau Felber when she hunts for bargains at the half-pri
ce rails, in boutiques. She no longer thinks to buy presents for others, just herself. I’ve encouraged the Management here to send written warnings to anyone who doesn’t visit their parents once a fortnight, at least.
Do you hear the people, Kâzim? ‘I’m so lonely. No one gives me their love.’
I can’t listen to them. ‘And you?’ I say. ‘Show me the person who will announce: I’ll give people my love!’
When the typist arrives at the beginning of her fixed hours – just to give you an example – Herr Hügli is usually outside the office already, waiting to look through the previous day’s scrap. He robs the envelopes of the stamps, to send to his semi-baked great-grandchildren.
Or take Frau Dürig. Her three-year-old great-grandchildren cuddle up as close as possible to her, lay their heads on her scrawny chest, and tell her stories that, with her twenty-per-cent hearing, she can barely follow. But while her great-grandchildren are speaking, she pets them and hugs them as tenderly as she once hugged her beloved husband. On one occasion, when I spoke to her about it, she said, ‘Yes, Tobias and Noah remind me of my husband. I feel especially close to him when the children are with me.’
Have I already mentioned my grandfather to you, Kâzim? The key to many things that were to happen to me. He’d charge up to my brother and me, put his arms round our waists, and lift us, both at once. We’d kick our legs in the air, our clogs would clatter to the ground. He’d put us down again, hold his hand out, boom, ‘Give me twenty!’ and start to guffaw.
When Rudolf Minger was elected to government and welcomed back to Schüpfen – where he was living at the time – with drums beating and trumpets sounding, Matthäus and I really wanted to be there to see it. Grandfather laughed at us. ‘Why do you want to see him, old farmer that he is?’
‘But he’s now a Federal Councillor,’ Matthäus fought back.
Grandfather guffawed again. ‘What are you thinking? Do you think Federal Councillors are special or what? That they can put their trousers on without putting first one leg in, then the other, like everyone else?’
‘He’s helping the poor!’
‘Oh, Matthäus,’ – but on the day Minger was welcomed back, Grandfather was waiting for us on the village’s main street. Balloons. Garlands. An ox on the spit. We thought we’d arrived early, but the crowd was so large already, it looked as if we’d get nowhere near the station. Matthäus and I could have sat down and cried.
Except: Grandfather, with his brown bowler that made him look so suave, wasn’t put off so easily. ‘Both of you take my hands, and stay close at all times.’ Then – with a loud, official-sounding voice – he started shouting, ‘Step aside, please! Please make way!’
The people really did step aside and let us through. When we reached the station, Grandfather headed straight for the first policeman he saw. The tone he spoke in made him sound as if he were, at the very least, an artillery major. ‘These two lads are Dr Duvalier-Delacroix’s sons. Dr Duvalier-Delacroix is part of the entourage of Federal Councillor Minger. We need to get to the platform!’
That’s torn it, I thought, but the policeman pushed his way through the crowd ahead of us, shouting repeatedly, ‘Step to the side, please! Out of the way!’
He escorted us right up to the platform, where a brass band and women in traditional costume and men in their Sunday best were awaiting the Federal Councillor. The policeman pointed to a white mark on the ground. ‘That, roughly, is where Minger’s car will stop.’
‘May I have your name?’ Grandfather asked.
‘Raaflaub,’ the policeman said. ‘Constable Raaflaub.’
‘Thank you, Constable Raaflaub,’ Grandfather said, lifting Matthäus and me onto his shoulders. ‘I won’t forget you.’
I reckon no other children inhaled the tobacco smoke from so close up as my brother and I did when the train finally arrived, Federal Councillor Minger got out of the first-class compartment, cheroot between his lips, and – before he turned to the crowd, beaming and waving – nodded to his wife that he wanted to keep the ticket collector’s copy of the railway timetable until such time as the latter paid him the nineteen francs he’d lost to him, fair and square, in the card game they’d played between Berne and Schüpfen.
Believe it or not, Kâzim, I hate annoying people – other than my son – with speeches. But I can get angry sometimes and ask, ‘What the hell do you give life? Day in, day out, you help yourself to the earth, the air, the beauty of this world. – And what do you give back?’
One day, Grandfather tells us to follow him. He’s wearing a black suit and the brown bowler, and has a sophisticated walking stick with a silver handle. Side by side, we do his usual walk. First, down to the pond, where Matthäus and I are up to our necks in water, and churn up the mud at the bottom with both feet until Grandfather pulls us out, telling us stories about boys who drowned here. It’s along the cool forest path next and, finally, through the gloomy quarry. We tell him about the pranks we’ve played, how the Tour de Suisse is going, the highs and lows of life in our Scout Group, and hang on Grandfather’s every word as he tells us about the adventures of David Livingstone in Africa and Dr Barnardo’s work among the children in the slums of London. We reach a clearing near Grächwil and Grandfather explains, ‘Here, they’ll soon be erecting electric pylons.’
We’ve taken our shoes off and are carrying them, tied together, over our shoulders. When we reach Grächwil, Grandfather stops at a mound overgrown with grass, looks at it for a long time and says, ‘The men doing army refresher courses used to have their firing range here.’ He blinks at us, quickly, from the side. ‘My pupils occasionally dig up bullets.’
‘I want to be just like you when I grow up,’ my brother says. ‘I want to be a teacher.’
And with a cheerful voice, Grandfather replies, ‘Being a teacher isn’t a profession. It’s a cross to bear. If you really want to be a teacher, train first to be an animal tamer. Maybe, with enough willpower and mastery of the art of seduction, you’ll succeed in making a herd out of a horde.’
On the way back, Grandfather spots the sorry state of our shoes and takes a banknote from his wallet that he puts in Matthäus’ hand. ‘I want you to buy proper shoes with that.’
And before we can object, he shouts, ‘Right now!’ and we rush into the Agricultural Cooperative and buy high black shoes that get stone-hard when it’s wet.
Who is it that drives you to become interested in the things that, one day, really interest you, Kâzim? Rudolf Minger’s memorial, in Schüpfen, is a plain concrete wall, with cows grazing beside it. My grandfather’s tomb is decorated with hydrangea and geraniums, and there have been no weeds in the pots – ever – for five decades now.
Isn’t it odd – I know, for example, as good as nothing about the experiences my son had with his grandparents, about his childhood and youth, when I wasn’t there. There is a great silence between us.
When Markus turned twenty, we went on holiday as a family for the last time. Ibiza: warmth, sun and the cheap peseta. Emilie went to bed early, and in the Bagatelle, a night club decked out with bamboo and fishing nets, Markus hugged two slightly perspiring blondes called Pam. Our Fonda at the pier had a back entrance that was open all night. Markus and I got to test how sober we were when we climbed the steep stairs to our rooms.
‘Being a father is one of the nicest things in life,’ I raved, on the staircase. ‘The miracle of it never ceases for me – seeing how you’ve changed from a helpless infant into a strong man who can turn the heads of English girls. It’s staggering.’
‘Mm,’ he replied.
‘What do you mean, “mm”?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What do you mean, “nothing”?’
In the morning, the steamer from the mainland was due. Emilie and I watched the preparations for it as Markus slept off his hangover. An old man was sweeping the harbour with a broom. A dog fell into the water. We were sitting in a harbour café. Around us: mothers with daughters wearin
g ribbons; priests; officers in pyjamas; skinny hung-over models; and local hippies waiting for money.
‘We should, at some point, have proper conversations!’
‘What do you want to speak to Markus about?’ asked Emilie.
Late in the afternoon – Markus was still horizontal – Emilie and I walked into the centre of the island, to look at the sea one last time. Larks rose, a cuckoo called, bright green lizards raced from stone to stone. Old women were sitting in the field, watching the pig or family goat. Girls with straw hats hung their babies up in a tree and started scything the grass. We had something to eat in a village – bread and fried eggs – and when we were finished, the man who had served us helped Emilie put her rucksack back on. ‘Why are you walking?’ he asked. ‘Are you German?’
‘No.’
‘So why then?’ he repeated, uncomprehending.
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