by Hans Keilson
Albrecht said nothing. His father’s words made him very angry; he could see that he hadn’t accomplished what he wanted, and he would never get an answer out of his father now. He didn’t dare to try again—the conversation had gone wrong, miserably wrong. Too bad; it had started off so promising.
When Albrecht picked up the newspaper to take it upstairs, a letter that had been sitting on top of it fell to the floor. He picked it up and read: “In reference to our letter of the third of this month, may we reiterate that your deadline of sixty days has already been exceeded by thirty days. Requesting your soonest possible resolution.… Yours sincerely…”
“What’s this?” Albrecht asked, looking straight at Father.
No answer.
“Someone wants money from you. How much?”
Pause.
“Go upstairs,” Father said suddenly.
Albrecht obeyed, without looking up.
That night Father thought of something, and asked, “Did you pay for your violin lesson today? I forgot to give you the money for it, you should remind me.”
“I paid,” the boy answered meekly.
“And the money?”
“I took it from my piggy bank.” He felt utterly ashamed.
“That’s ridiculous,” Father said, and he seemed amused by the situation, but a free and easy laugh was more than he could manage. “I’ll give you the money tomorrow.”
* * *
Another day: Where were his parents? Albrecht had spent the evening reading and practicing the violin as usual, then got tired and stopped. Where were his parents? After dinner they had stood up and left the table; since then they were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they had gone for a walk, but Albrecht hadn’t heard the door. He looked around the apartment. When he stepped into the kitchen, Mother was standing at the stove cooking tomorrow’s meal. She had been crying: her eyes were red and she looked miserable. Father was sitting in the corner, on the low kitchen bench, and seemed even shorter than he was. He had his elbows propped up on his knees and his face was covered with his hands, and he crouched there like that, sunk in thoughts. What kind of thoughts? —An unpleasant silence hung in the room.
“What’s wrong?” Albrecht asked in surprise. He looked back and forth between his parents; Father’s head stayed down and Mother bent farther over the stove. The steam rising up out of the pot enveloped her face and stung her eyes; now she had an excuse for her tears. “What’s wrong?” Albrecht said again.
Silence.
He shut the door and leaned against the frame to wait for an answer. Then Mother said straight-out that she couldn’t take it anymore, Father had been nagging her for days now, it couldn’t go on like this; he was saying such strange things, she couldn’t listen anymore.
“What in the world…?” Albrecht asked.
Father raised his head and now you could see how desperate his face looked. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot.
“… and then he says he’ll have to go peddling, that’s his word for it,” Mother said. She was crying. “A peddler! And he’s old now, can he do it? Over fifty, traveling all around the country, in all kinds of weather? But he likes it, he does! He gets a devilish pleasure out of saying how bleak and terrible everything is.”
“Yes, but why?” Albrecht asked. Why did Father like doing that, and why didn’t he stop when he knew it hurt Mother? What even made him think those things?
It had been another long slow period in the shop. They barely took in enough to cover their expenses, money was tight, and they all were gingerly waiting to see what the next day would bring. There were bad days, as there always are, but now there were too many of them, coming too often; you had to wait too long for a single good day. It took time to get used to this new state of affairs, especially if you had many, many years’ worth of memories and comparisons ready at hand, as Herr Seldersen did. Now he was hunkering down on the bench in the corner, depressed, careworn, trapped in his thoughts, unable to get out a single reasonable word.… He had to go peddling. The thought had seized him and wouldn’t let go … he had to go peddling. When, then? When it couldn’t go on, when it was over. Father had put into these words an event that had not yet happened—it was extraordinary, who gave him the right to do that? He himself, no one else. It would happen, he knew it; it was inevitable, there was no room for interpretation, he could no longer shake off the idea. This sent Mother into a frenzy. “Stop it!” she screamed, “you’re exaggerating! It’s not that bad.” —“I’m not exaggerating,” was his only response. Silence. They stayed mute, the words roamed the air between them, wounding them anew, again and again, Father in his corner and Mother at the stove, bent over the pot. That was how Albrecht saw them.
The next day, and for a long time afterward, he could not get the image out of his head: he had seen his father crying. It meant more to Albrecht than just a couple of tears—he had ideas of his own about masculinity, about how men are supposed to behave, and what about those ideas now? This was by no means the last of the discoveries he would make in this regard.
* * *
Fritz was a clown and knew all sorts of tricks that no one else could do. He only had to lift his upper arms slightly and his shoulder blades would jut out so much that they almost poked through his jacket, making a visible hump on his back. He would perform for the rows behind him while sitting motionless on his seat in school or standing up to answer a teacher’s question. Or his upper lip: this trick brought him even greater acclaim. He had a little piece of flesh hanging over his upper lip on the left, as though an injury from a soccer ball had healed badly, and he could make anyone in the world laugh by lifting up the overhanging flap and moving it around like a third lip that could move independently while the rest of his mouth kept its usual, normal shape, one lip evenly positioned on top of the other. Fritz had lots of friends and a good reputation among teachers and parents; he was a fun kid, always ready for anything, and a leader too. He was strong, and since he had so many special tricks and abilities he seemed twice as strong. Only his eyes were bad, but that had only recently been revealed, after he had spent a whole year at school sitting next to the window while the blackboard hung dark and dim in the corner. When the year was almost over, he showed up one morning in class with glasses—real black-framed horn-rimmed glasses. At first no one believed they were real: who could tell, maybe he was wearing them as a joke, just to try something new.
There were two other boys in the class who wore glasses. One was Kurt, the oldest, twenty-four years old, who had dropped out of school from a lower grade three years ago and had now come back as a grown man who knew something about life; he had worked hard, and had a good sense of why he was taking this step working toward a proper diploma. He wore glasses as a sign of his age, experience, and superiority. Even the teachers treated him with respect. The other was named Alfred, and he had worn glasses for as long as anyone could remember—was practically born with them, it seemed. He was slightly deformed and pale, wrinkled like an old man even though he was still young. He was always sitting behind a book. And now Fritz too—it was unbelievable, no one could wrap their minds around it.
What on earth are you going to do with your glasses on the field? they asked him. He had a reputation as an excellent player, but with his glasses on he was suddenly a lot less dangerous.
“Keep them on, of course, otherwise I can’t see,” Fritz said.
Hmm, they would have to just wait and see, maybe he would take them off later after all, when the joke got to be more trouble than it was worth. Meanwhile, they needed to see if the glasses were fake. He took them off and let his friends look through them: objects lurched farther away, got blurry, everything swam together, his friends’ eyes hurt and started to tear up, and they took off the glasses in a hurry. No doubt about it, they were real. And he could see with them, he kept them on all morning without his eyes ever hurting. From then on he wore the glasses all the time.
Even at home they made a fuss, his father c
alling him “Herr Professor” as a joke, for example—Fritz seemed quite proud of that. For him, the glasses meant more than they appeared to on the surface; he had had thoughts and plans for the future, but now they seemed meaningless, impossible. He had wanted to be a forest ranger when he graduated—now, that was a career. He would wear a green uniform and be on close terms with everything that lives and breathes. His house would be deep in the woods, no beaten track to his door, and when someone did come out to visit him they would sit together through the long evening, until their talk slowly fell silent, and then it would be time for Fritz to take his guest on a walk through his territory. All is quiet. Darkness hangs down from the branches like deep sadness. And if the guest flags with fatigue in the midst of this silent majesty—maybe he has come the long way from the city—if he trips over every root and shudders when a bat brushes his face, that would only make Fritz seem bigger and stronger: this is his domain. But those dreams were over. Time passed, Fritz wore glasses, he had grown older and seemed strangely pensive and sedate. Life had begun for him in earnest, in all its immensity. And he thought he had drunk its pain and bitterness down to the dregs.
He spent his time alone, mostly in his room up on the second floor, which you could reach up some stairs from the yard. There he could sit undisturbed. His parents slept in the next room, but the whole apartment was divided in pieces: downstairs, behind the store, was the kitchen, a large room where they ate together. There were tools strewn across the entire apartment, wires, screws, lightbulbs; there was always an apprentice or assistant coming in to fetch whatever he needed for his work. It was not a pleasant place to stay: someone was always passing through, no one ever tidied up, it was never comfortable and homey.
Fritz rarely saw his father, only at mealtimes during the day, and everything was hasty and hurried. His parents usually ate before him. When Herr Fiedler came home, he always asked his wife, “Where’s Fritz?”
“I haven’t seen him,” she answered. “He must be upstairs studying.”
“Studying,” Herr Fiedler repeated with satisfaction. That was as it should be. Without studying and exams, you couldn’t get ahead and move up in the world.
If you saw him you would think he was just a simple craftsman whose hard work and perseverance had brought him a decent life and a good income. But in his younger years, he had been a passionate fighter for liberation and for a just distribution of wealth. He had lost the fire in his belly during six months in jail, but his sacrifice did not seem to have been in vain: he did not need to feel ashamed of what he possessed; he had come by it fair and square through his own hard work, and when he sat down at the table in the inn with his friends at night—honorable citizens every one, who may have ventured a leap or two past the proper bounds once or twice, but who generally gave the eternal verities of society their due—he had every right to calmly raise his voice and venture a word or two of his own. He had had it hard and his son should have it easier—that’s why he was sending him to the academic high school.
One day, Fritz’s teacher, Dr. Selow, ran into Herr Fiedler on the street. They had already walked past each other when Dr. Selow turned around and caught up to Fritz’s father, who stopped and looked at him in amazement.
“Please come see me at school on Friday, Herr Fiedler,” Dr. Selow said. “I need to talk to you.”
“Of course. It must be something about Fritz? What’s the boy done now?”
“We’ll discuss it on Friday. Good day.” He was in a great hurry.
Herr Fiedler showed up at the principal’s office on Friday at the appointed time. Dr. Selow met him there and took him to a small room that was available for discussions like this one. Dr. Selow was in his early forties; he had served as an officer in the war and he still looked like a soldier.
“I have asked you to come and see me today,” Dr. Selow began, “to discuss Fritz.” He called him just “Fritz,” even though in the classroom and elsewhere he addressed him more formally, with his last name. But with the father he simply said “Fritz,” to create a friendlier environment.
Herr Fiedler sat there, with his hat on his thighs so that he couldn’t move his legs, and he felt like a schoolboy under questioning. Conversations like this one never went without a certain anxiety, and this was not the first time he had sat there. He had had to walk the road to school rather often already, usually after a letter arrived in a blue envelope with an official seal, so his wife, who opened the mail, was always fully informed too.
“What is it?” he asked. “Is something wrong with his work; is he lazy, not paying attention?”
Dr. Selow shook his head. No, no, it wasn’t about his schoolwork, he wanted to say that right up front. It was about Fritz in general, his personal situation.
That was strange, very strange: not specifically about school but in general.… Herr Fiedler was very surprised, he had already been through many such conversations but this one seemed different, exceptional, from the beginning. Fritz hadn’t done anything, and still Dr. Selow had asked him to come in to talk about his son.
He thought for a long time, then finally said, in a somewhat uncertain voice: “Yes, Dr. Selow, I’m afraid I can’t give you very much information. I hardly ever see Fritz at home face-to-face, you see. In the morning he’s at school, in the afternoon he’s out on the playing field, the rest of the time he sits in his room and studies, what else could he be doing up there? I can’t spend too much time worrying about him since I have my own work to do; I travel a lot, but my wife is home all day.”
Hmm, hmm. Dr. Selow realized that he wasn’t going to get anywhere on that tack. He had to try something else.
“Of course,” he said, “of course. I know that you’re busy and rarely at home during the day, but still … you must have some sense of how he is doing, and I’m sure you discuss him with your wife.… Has Fritz been acting unusual lately, or changed his typical habits?” Dr. Selow waited.
“Yes, he’s smoking a lot now,” Herr Fiedler answered hesitantly. He couldn’t think of anything else at the moment. This really was an interrogation. He grew more and more embarrassed and couldn’t see how it would end or where it was going. Suddenly he said, and seemed quite demoralized to say it: “You ask me about Fritz, Doctor, and I don’t know how to answer, even though I’m his father. But we’ve never had a relationship where I could say exactly what was going on with him, or vice versa. When I came back from the war, took off my uniform, and took up civilian life again, he crept around me for days and days with big eyes, without saying a word, as though he didn’t know who this person was who was moving into the house all of a sudden. I sometimes have the feeling that it’s no different today.”
Pause.
Then, after thinking for a moment: “You asked me to come and see you, Doctor; there must have been something you had in mind. You must have had a reason for wanting to talk to me, I’m sure of it. Please tell me what is going on.”
Dr. Selow shook his head. “Nothing, Herr Fiedler, I assure you, there’s nothing at this time. With young people there are so many outbursts and exaggerations, but for adults all you need is a wink, a subtle nod.…”
He was a clever man, this Dr. Selow. He knew every twist and turn of the tortuous paths where young people can go astray and eventually lose their way altogether, he knew all about the dangers and temptations they rashly, secretly longed for. He waited and, when the time came, did his best to help, cautiously and deliberately, without pushing too hard, and only at the proper moment.
“And what does this all have to do with my son Fritz?” Herr Fiedler interrupted. He was visibly agitated now and wanted to finally hear what this was all about.
Dr. Selow remained unruffled. He went on, more to himself than to Fritz’s father: “… but it’s also possible to make a mistake, in fact it’s all too easy to make mistakes. These boys who grew up while their fathers were out on the front lines, and who then got older and saw everything going under, along with the rest of u
s—sometimes they don’t know how to take it, it’s hard even for adults to keep afloat, you know.”
Pause.
“Your Fritz is big and strong, almost a grown man. He’s been my pupil since his first year here, and I’ve kept my eye on him all these years. I also know him outside of school, from trips, I have a very clear picture of him, believe me. Nowadays he sits in class so calm and quiet most of the time that I don’t want to call on him. He looks like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s bored and depressed. I often think that there must be something happening to be causing it. That is why I asked you to come in today, Herr Fiedler.”
Herr Fiedler was speechless. Everything this Dr. Selow noticed, and now what was the answer he wanted to hear? Now, if Herr Fiedler had cunningly given Dr. Selow a wink and trustingly touched him on the shoulder, the way men usually do when they talk to each other about certain things—if he’d said that there’s a woman involved, Dr. Selow, a woman, naturally, what else could it be, you understand, you yourself said he’s already a grown man—then that would have been just what Dr. Selow wanted to hear. A woman, naturally, Fritz was in love, Dr. Selow would know just what to do about that, he could have bided his time and then intervened, it wouldn’t have been the first time. But Herr Fiedler could not do that kindness for Dr. Selow, and things remained as they were.
Dr. Selow felt how tragic his role was, as a bearer of traditions in an era that had lost its guiding threads, or actually torn them apart on purpose. These traditions had lasted centuries, and had once seemed permanent and enduring, but had now, apparently, lost their validity. He taught what he called eternal truths, but they were illusions, disconnected from the world and from one another, and he taught them with the desperate intentions of someone not fully convinced. During this conversation, he brought up several more things he had noticed about Fritz recently: little observations, thoughts he later took back, but nothing tangible, God forbid! Everything with reservations. Anything he said might be mistaken, after all.