Everything was readily promised.
Graff turned once more and asked, looking at him steadily:
“How did you know?”
The answer came with a glance at the two men:
“They were in the office—earlier. You yourself had hardly gone. I hurried over here immediately and arrived just in time.”
And, returning his gaze:
“After all, we must support one another as much as possible—in such a case.”
The officers came between them.
Outside Graff and the two officers climbed into a waiting cab.
Strange—the usually so empty street was all at once no longer so empty. Faces showed at the windows of the house. At the entrance of the neighboring house a couple of women stood and gossiped with curious glances at the men riding off.
9
In Hermann Graff’s memory the time that then came was blotted out. If he tried to remember—but he hardly tried—it failed. Not people and things, but only shadows could he pick out of it. And only one thing did he still know: that many, many hours of many days in a narrow and lightless room he had walked back and forth, from one wall to the other, back and forth, back and forth—from one wall to the other.
From the days, alike in each and everything, only one stood out. It, too, only like an oppressive dream.
Before this day, his thoughts had constantly turned on one point:
I will see him again! It is all only a misunderstanding of these petty and stupid bureaucrats. At the first question it will be cleared up. When asked, Gunther would perhaps say, “Yes, we were fond of one another.” To all the others, however, keep silent, the way he himself had kept silent and would continue to keep silent. For that was the wonder of love: to be one in such an hour, unconquerable, in unshakeable trust! It must take place here too—the great wonder of love!
The day arrived. A gray February day, dull and frosty. A large, almost empty room with many unoccupied benches at this early hour of the morning. Behind a raised table, black figures, with cold, ill-humored or bored faces.
After the opening speeches back and forth, the public was to be excluded. Two old people, a man and a woman who had probably only come here to warm themselves, shuffled out.
Leafing through the files. Bending over here and there.
Then, questions, questions, questions.
Where was he? He did have to come?!
Questions . . . questions . . . questions . . .
He kept silent.
“Accused, will you not answer?”
He kept silent.
Finally the door in the background opened and there came in—a guard at his side—came in with forehead lowered, in a gray smock, with dragging steps, his head shaved completely bald and sunk deep onto his breast—came in—
It was—it could not be—he? He—Gunther?!
It was certainly—for God’s sake—not Gunther?!!
He wanted to jump up, go to him, take this lowered face, of which he was able to see nothing, in his hands, and see with his own eyes that he was deceived.
But he remained in his place. A feeling of numbness held him fast in the chair in which he was sitting.
He only stared unremittingly at the small, sunken-in figure.
He stared thus during the whole proceeding. He never took his eye from the one who was standing there (and who was supposed to be Gunther).
Questions . . . questions . . . questions . . .
He himself continued his silence to all of them.
But the one who stood there and never raised his head a single time, nodded. Nodded and nodded. Nodded to everything stupidly. At times, severely rebuked, came a light, almost inaudible “yes” as an answer.
Questions . . . questions—more shameless than anything he had ever heard in the Adonis Lounge from the boy prostitutes there—struck his ear. He did not understand them. He only felt: they were shameless—shameless and absurd.
He did not answer a single one.
But he—the one standing there motionless—nodded to them too! (If he had been asked if his “friend”—oh, this sneering, ambiguous emphasis!—if he had been asked if his friend had tried to murder him, he would have nodded and said “yes”.)
Then came the examination of witnesses.
There was only one witness there—his landlady.
She incriminated the accused more gravely than a hundred others could have done. She stood there in her dark dress, the very bones of morality. Her black eyes sparkled in her pale and haggard face.
She knew everything. She knew about the daily visits in the fall. About the whistles. The secret coming and going. She knew all about Christmas: how the boy had been in his rooms a whole day and two nights. She knew about the troubled conduct of her renter before and after, about his irregular times of returning home. She knew—
“If you don’t want to believe me, I have witnesses. The whole house found fault with this.”
Oh, they believed her. They believed everything and more.
She could take her seat again.
Someone stood up and spoke.
Another stood up and spoke.
Graff heard him speak but heard not a word.
He only stared at the small figure who stood there and still nodded, even now, when he was no longer being questioned; who even now did not look up a single time; who—was supposed to be his Gunther and yet could not possibly be!
Again and again he wanted to dash to him, rouse him:
“Gunther, do wake up! Just think about what you’re doing!
Don’t be afraid of these strange people! I am here, I, your friend, I, Hermann!”
He did not do it.
It was not these barriers, not the idols in robes and judges’ caps that prevented him from doing it.
Something else held him back and hindered him. Something still entirely incomprehensible.
Finally the verdict was pronounced.
The judges, embittered over the stubborn attitude of the accused (who even here never took his eyes off the boy he had sex with); over his evident and complete lack of consciousness of guilt and of remorse; his more than contemptible silence; his declining of any defense; and above all deeply wounded in their consciousness of authority, pronounced it.
Two months.
The boy was led out. As he had come, so he went: his bald head shoved between his slender, sunken shoulders, with dragging steps in his heavy shoes.
The convicted man did not take his eyes from him until the door closed behind him.
Then he looked straight ahead.
Where was he? What did they want from him? What had just happened?
The one who had just now stood there and nodded, always only nodded, who had vanished behind the door—that boy had been a stranger. A strange boy with whom he had never had anything in common, whom he had never known, whom he had never loved—a stranger, an entirely strange boy.
10
And again, there came a time of which he later knew nothing except that, in a narrow room, he had walked back and forth from one wall to another—back and forth, many, many hours of many days, until he became tired. Then he paced again from the beginning, back and forth, until he was so tired that he collapsed onto the iron bed.
What did he think about? Probably nothing.
The guard came and asked. Requests? No, he had no requests. Complaints? He complained about nothing.
A young institutional doctor came, sent to examine the state of mind of this peculiar prisoner.
He came and asked questions. He was looked at in astonishment.
Sick? No, he was not sick. Nothing was the matter with him.
What indeed was supposed to be the matter with him?
The hours passed. The days passed. The weeks. One month. A second.
*
He did not count them—not the days, the weeks, the months.
Only when he was told that the day of his release was near did he seem to wake up.
/> His thoughts returned. Not to the past—that lay behind him, like something that never was. (It must indeed be dead, what had been.)
They went to the future.
What should he do? Where should he go?
He thought without uneasiness about the future. Only hope makes one uneasy.
*
After the death of his father a year and a half ago now, there had arrived, among the trite condolences of his relatives and his few acquaintances, a curious letter. It came from a distant relative of his mother. He vaguely remembered having seen her once in his childhood, when his mother was still living. The image was vague, as was the memory of his mother herself.
He had almost forgotten the contents of the letter. He remembered only that, in contrast to the others, it was concerned not with one who had died, but rather with him, to whom it was addressed. A passage must have remained in his memory, however, since it now surfaced again (for the first time).
It ran something like this:
“You are now entirely alone in the world. I do not know, dear Hermann, if you have friends who understand you, so entirely and correctly. But if you should ever have need of such a friend, then remember that an old woman, who has reflected on many things, about which most people pass over without a thought”—and so on.
He had not understood these sentences. What should this old woman be to him, of whom he had only heard that she had lived in an unhappy marriage with her husband (a well-known scholar in his field)? What should the friendship of this old woman be to him, which she was proposing?
But he began to see the letter in another light—now, when its ending again occurred to him:
“Come to me whenever you would like to and want to. You are always welcome. Come and hear then what another voice, a voice from the grave, has to say to you through me, when no other voice speaks to you any longer.”
This concluding sentence had sounded all the more to him like something from a novel, and he had answered the letter only briefly, even if not unkindly, without touching on the invitation it contained.
Now he saw it, too, in a different light. What other voice could be meant, but that of her dead husband?
He recalled once more the little bit that he had also heard about him. Veiled allusions (doubly carefully uttered before his child’s ears). Then the significant silence after them.
“In case your path takes you through Munich”—thus had she indeed written. (The address of the suburb and the name of the house were still clear to him.)
Now, when he did want to go out of the country with the rest of his money—to some inexpensive place down there in the south—why should he not take a route through Munich?
Whatever the voice had to say to him—it was at least a voice in this silence around him.
11
Around noon on a day in April he was released.
It was spring again. Almost a year had gone by since he had arrived in Berlin.
But this year’s spring did not, as the previous year’s had done, coax winter away with a sweet smile. Instead it turned up unruly, with cold rain showers and icy winds, and struggled with winter for the new place.
Today, too, it swept unpleasantly through the streets.
The first thing that Hermann Graff did after his release was to send a telegram from the nearest office: “May I come?”
Thereupon he rode to his bank and withdrew the entire remainder of his money, not much more than a thousand marks. The next hours were spent on the most necessary purchases, among them a suitcase. This was deposited along with his small handbag at the Anhalt Train Station. Then he ate somewhere.
There was nothing more to do but wait for the answer to his urgent telegram.
He walked slowly to the Tiergarten.
Now I should probably look up the friendly person who stood so selflessly by my side on the last day, he thought. But he was unable to do it. He suspected a world in which he did not belong and with which he had nothing in common. A small world of its own—full of various connections, special and particular interests, and endless idle gossip. His things could stay where they were until he needed them, until he knew how his future would be shaped. Perhaps he would yet return to Berlin one day.
No, he did not want to see him. Not today. He sat down on an empty bench by the small lake under the still completely bare trees. The water before him was black and dirty; the last chunks of ice were disintegrating, and yellowed leaves from the previous fall bordered its shore.
Was it the same place where he had sat a year ago, on the first day and one hour before it happened—unsuspecting of everything that this year was to bring him? He could no longer say.
But as he sat there, his thoughts went far away from this spot and from Berlin.
They went—without his knowing why—suddenly back to his first years of puberty.
In the park of his hometown they had played—on an early spring day like this one—he and his schoolmates. Police and robbers. He and one from his class—pursued robbers—had to hide behind some bushes. As they crouched there, breathless and in the indescribable expectation of the game, but safe for the moment, close by one another, the other boy kissed him several times on the mouth with intense passion—as if beside himself. But then their pursuers were already audible and they had to separate.
He had been so surprised that he was at first not clear about what had happened. This schoolmate was neither his friend nor were they bound by special and common interests (except the school).
He was a good-looking boy, not tall for his age, slim and clean. Never again were they alone together even for a moment. Rather, the other boy appeared to avoid him from then on. And of course they never talked about the event.
Why had he at this particular hour so vividly thought about this small and fleeting experience? He did not know. But it seemed to him all at once almost inconceivably beautiful.
A cool wind swept over the deserted paths of the park and over to his spot. But only when he saw how the powerless rays of the first sun struggled with the clouds in the gray sky, unable to break through, did he feel that it was too cold to sit here any longer. As he stood up, his sleeve brushed the nearest shrub and he saw on it the first, tender, yellow buds. Lightly and cautiously he passed his hand over them.
In the hall of the train station he then still had to wait for a long time. The reply could hardly be there before seven o’clock and he did not want to ask for it earlier.
He sat in a corner of the thoroughly heated, high room and observed the faces of the people around him—something he usually never did.
He looked at them, the men and the women—the old and the young, the fresh and the tired, the lively and the indifferent, without listening to what they were saying. He saw only the faces, as if he wanted to find what might lie hidden behind them. And he read unfriendliness and trust, bitterness and ill will, slyness and greed, dull resignation and all sorts of cares. He found many other things behind them. But what he sought, he did not find: understanding of life. It was for him as if they all were beyond help, fixed forever in the narrow circle of their respective lives, incapable of seeing, to say nothing of understanding, anything beyond—in the narrow circle from which there was no salvation to any kind of freedom of thought and of action. And they were—almost all—so loud!
There was not one among these faces, not even one, to whom he would have been able to speak.
He no longer looked. It was hopeless. There was no understanding among the people of today beyond the entirely commonplace. And even there their lives were only quarrels and bickering; kicking and being kicked.
At seven o’clock he walked over to the post office to which he had asked the reply to be sent.
It was there: “Anytime.”
A half hour later the express train left for Munich.
12
The next morning he was sitting across from her in the comfortable living room of her home in the quiet suburb, high above the Isar
and in a spacious garden.
She was a tall woman, still beautiful, with thick, gray hair and intelligent, brown eyes that never left him when he spoke.
*
Here are only isolated fragments of their conversations during the eight days he spent under her roof, which they carried out on long walks in the meadows above the river; and evenings, opposite one another at the fireplace.
*
“Now that I’m here, I will tell you everything,” he began directly, on the first evening.
“I do know so much already,” she gave as answer.
He looked at her.
“Not only the superficial facts of your—well, your bad luck . . .”
He thought he had not heard correctly.
“It was in the newspaper. I always look out for these cases particularly. But that is all so detached. What is not in the newspapers? And to what end—to be read today, forgotten tomorrow.
“Yes,” she continued, standing up. “I know much more about you than you believe.” She led him to a picture on the wall, and he looked into serious features and clear, kindly eyes.
He heard her firm voice: “He, too, found in this love the happiness and unhappiness of his life, suffered under it, and found pleasure in it. And he taught me to understand and respect this love.”
He, shaken, kept silent, and she continued after a pause:
“He was a good friend to his young friends, you can believe me, Hermann. Not all, certainly, but many felt and knew it, loved him in return, and revered and mourn him.”
*
When they were again sitting opposite one another:
“And I heard that you two were unhappily married?”
She laughed, with the bright laughter with which she must have charmed men earlier:
“It was no unhappy marriage. It was no marriage at all. It was—a happy friendship.”
She continued:
“It may be that I loved him once—I mean, loved him as we women love men. At any rate I did not want to lose him, when I realized the impossibility of this love. Not I him, nor he me. Thus we agreed to remain friends and together. Then—later—I loved him with an entirely different love.”
“That was possible?”
“Yes, it was possible. Because we mutually allowed one another perfect freedom. He was free, I was free. Thus we lived many years, until we both became old.
The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse Page 27