Epitaph for a Working ManO (5 page)

We were sitting on the bench at the bus stop. I remarked that that was a very long time ago.

He looked across to the poplars.

“You're right,” he said, “but sometimes it comes to my mind. At that point I took your grandmother's side. It was a mistake.”

He was still looking over to the poplars although there was nothing to be seen there, except for those poplars, their tops bending slightly in the wind.

“The two women,” he continued, “my mother and your mother, Regula, didn't get on. From the very beginning, as a matter of fact. Things like that happen. There's nothing much you can do about it. And besides, the flat was too small. We trod on each other's toes. – But you know all about that.”

That was a very long time ago, I said again.

“No, no, what's true is true: old people shouldn't stand in the way of the young. Perhaps if we'd had a big house it might have worked – like those fat farmers out in the Brühl district: as soon as they get doddery they simply move next door into a little house of their own and spend their final years weaving straw and manure into neat stacks for their children – the preservation of historical monuments, so to speak.”

He sniffed loudly. “No no,” he started off anew, “I should have realised. Two women in the same household – it just can't work. And I should also have realised, I should have realised early enough, that when all's said and done it's the woman one's married to that's the more important of the two. Regula, your mother, was right. In fact she was often right. Unfortunately I never admitted that she was right. But what's to be done? What's past is past.”

After a moment of silence, hesitatingly as though embarrassed, he asked: “How is she by the way? You must have seen her recently.”

*

There's a photograph of her in one of the two cardboard boxes. Among the pictures of stone walls, stone steps, lintels, mended fountains. An old photograph showing a young woman. A summer dress, pale-coloured shoes, a handbag on her arm.

*

The divorce had been difficult for him to stomach; he'd started drinking. For a year he'd lived in a shack up in the Späti quarry, together with a couple of Italians. During the winter the Italians were away and he lived there on his own. His wife had always got on his nerves. Now he missed her.

*

“We'll take a break now,” the radiologist had said at the last consultation. “I'll let Dr Lätt know what's been done. If anything turns up he'll take care of it. Come and see me again in October. We'll see then what needs to be done next.”

That was in mid-August.

Instead of meeting him at the hospital I started going out to Breitmoos again. I had enough time. Apart from looking for a job and a bit of cooking and cleaning there was nothing else I had to do.

He pointed toward the window with his head. Out in the garden two women and the manager were busying themselves among the runner beans.

“A great year for runner beans. Baskets full. We have them three times a week, if not more. In the morning our famous porridge, in the evening beans, runner beans with bacon.”

“But he always puts his bacon on my plate,” said Naef.

“Well, after all, you like bacon more than I do,” said Father.

And we looked out into the garden again. White headscarves bobbed up and down among the greenery. The old women fumbled busily among the leaves. The manager, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, wiped his forehead.

“Yes, you just sweat a bit!” said Father.

Before that fellow came – he raised his chin in the manager's direction – he himself always used to help with jobs like that. But that was over now. He wouldn't help that office clerk.

“The only thing Haller does now is act as a morning porter,” confirmed Naef. “Every day between six and half past he opens the back door to the staff who live out.”

“That's right,” said Father. “It's the only thing I still do for this children's home here. And I only do that because I suffer from senile early-morning awakening.”

Both of them laughed.

“And in your place,” Father continued, turning to Naef, “I wouldn't do anything else either. Not for that clerk out there nor for anyone else.”

He told me that, every afternoon, Naef helped prepare vegetables in the kitchen.

Naef defended himself: “Oh, it's nothing.”

“That's what you always say,” said Father, “and afterwards you get that pain in your back again. Oh no, let them peel the strings from their beans themselves. If our gentleman boss thinks he has to employ such a lot of staff, we should leave the work to them.”

*

Naef has an artificial leg; he can't walk without a crutch. Even with the crutch he finds walking difficult.

His artificial leg didn't fit well, he said. It hurt him most of the time. He wore it as little as possible. And it always took him a quarter of an hour to put it on.

A friendly face. Never grumpy. When Father grumbled or made sarcastic remarks he just laughed his quiet little laugh.

I never ever heard Father make sarcastic remarks about Naef. Never a sharp comment. With Naef he was always courteous, friendly, complicitous.

The two of them had been sharing the same room for the past eight years. For the last two years, they had been joined by Schertenleib.

*

Schertenleib seldom joined in the conversation. He sat in his chair or lay on his bed, a heavy, bloated man. Occasionally a few words would rumble out of his mouth. “Warm today, isn't it?” “It's still the north wind.” “Lots of plums this year! I'll be blowed, such a lot of plums this year!”

Sometimes he'd burst out laughing when Father said something crude. At best, this would be met with a look of scorn. Schertenleib didn't notice, he was half blind – or three quarters blind.

He was a great sweet-eater. It always took him a long time to get each sweet out of its wrapping. Once he finally had it in his mouth his hands would lie still for a while.

He kept his provision of confectionery – sweets, biscuits, chocolates – in the drawer of his night table. The floor between his bed and the night table was usually covered in crumbs.

“He never stops stuffing himself,” said Father. “And you should see him when he's been given a bottle of wine! The bottle's empty within half an hour. Guzzle and gorge, that's what he's best at. It's his full-time job. Apart from that, he's as lazy as sin. He doesn't even shave himself. They have to come and shave him with an electric razor every other day, and he just sits there without moving, like a great big lump of putty. If he can unwrap his sweets by himself he must be able to shave himself, don't you think? Even if he was completely blind, he'd be able to. I bet he's partly pretending. If he's as blind as he says, then I'm lame and I want to be pushed to the dining room in a wheelchair. The only time old fatso moves is when he happens to be angry: then he waves his white stick around in the air and knocks the coffee cups off the table. It's best to keep out of his way when he's angry. Because the beast's still strong. I wouldn't like to get a blow on the shin from him.”

The looks Father shot at Schertenleib – it was a December afternoon – as, scattering crumbs, smacking his lips, the man gobbled up two boxes of chocolate wafers one after the other and drank up a bottle of red wine, all things he'd just received from a visiting relative. Outside, the bleak, grey winter countryside. Indoors, the growing merriment on the face in dark glasses. The venomous glances Father darted at that broad, rosy face; not mockery and scorn any longer but envy, the envy of someone who'd lost all appetite for someone whose appetite was still fully intact.

*

“Ours is the only room you can smoke in. They're not allowed to smoke in any of the other bedrooms, are they, Naef?”

Naef concurred.

“In fact it's not really allowed here either,” said Father, “but we do it all the same.”

They nodded to each other, Father grimly, Naef amiably.

“When I moved in here there were two ashtrays on the window-sill.” Father raised his hand and – a sardonic expression on his face, mimicking regret – let it drop on the table again. “Wasn't that an invitation? It wasn't us who'd put the ashtrays there, they were there already. Who cares who it was left them there? They're there now and we use them.”

Naef: “If they'd really wanted to stop people smoking they could have removed the ashtrays.”

“That's exactly what they wanted to do later on,” said Father, “but we objected. Oh yes, we objected all right!”

Again they both nodded, Father with grim satisfaction, Naef with mild satisfaction.

“We only got into trouble once. That was after they'd installed the new fire warning system in all the rooms. In the very first week after the installation the alarm went off. I can still hear the racket. They ran around all over the home, they tore all the doors open, they went quite mad. All the time we were sitting here in our room, puffing away, cool as a cucumber.”

He grinned.

“Do you remember, Naef?”

Naef remembered.

“The smoke in here – Naef's pipe, my Virginias. We aired the room a bit, and then everything was okay again. We got told off, but what did we care? And the next day the electrician came and adjusted the gadget on the ceiling. Since then we haven't had any trouble. We can smoke as much as we like and as long as we like.”

*

The old people's home in Breitmoos. Naef: “They could call it ‘Seaview'.” Father: “Why not ‘Cataract'? Or ‘Sclerosis'? Or ‘Doddery'?”

Breitmoos: broad marsh. Nearby, Lake Turben. “Lake” is a bit of an exaggeration, but on the other hand “pond” would be an understatement. There are even said to have been pile dwellings here, long before Gutenberg. But it was Gutenberg who first made pile dwellings known. Thus everything is connected. Not closely connected, but loosely so. The lake dwellers as ancestors of the Swiss confederates. Now the lake is polluted with fertilizers, the fish population is dwindling, algae are growing. Everything is connected.

Naef: “No, the house isn't built on marshland, not as bad as that, in fact we're quite a bit higher up.”

A chain of hills right through Breitmoos: a terminal moraine from the year dot.

Father: “That means that right here, you could open a gravel pit in place of the home and the Löwen.”

“A gravel pit?” asked Naef doubtfully.

“You're right,” said Father. “What's beneath us must be something firmer. Probably conglomerate.”

*

Whenever the weather was fine the old people would be sitting outside in front of the house. They turned their heads toward me as I came up the last bit of road on my moped, watched me prop it up on its stand, close the petrol tap, take off my helmet and hang it on the handlebars. Their shrivelled faces followed me as I came up to the house. I greeted them; they nodded back.

Their chatter drifted up into the room through the open window.

“If only one could just switch off their simple-minded chit-chat,” said Father.

Why not let them talk, I answered. Ten years from now and perhaps he'd be babbling too.

“I'd rather die,” he said. “Besides, those people out there are hardly older than me,” he added. “It's not age that counts. I bet that even when they were young all they talked was nonsense. You don't have to be old to sit in the sun and talk drivel. What do you say, Naef?”

Naef answered diplomatically: “People talk as well as they can.”

“That's exactly what I mean.”

Schertenleib, on his bed, burst out laughing. Father made a face.

Outside they started to sing the old folk song:
Hab' oft im Kreise der Lieben…

“Oh no, not that!” growled Father.

*

“Oh, her…,” they said almost as one man, without even looking over to the front of the building. Father, tapping his temple with his forefinger, “Sometimes she does her dusting for hours on end. Never takes a break.”

Again the arm with the duster came out of the window; waved around a little; then disappeared back into the dark inside.

“Probably someone gave her too much chocolate. You know, she even dusts bars of chocolate once she's really got started.”

Naef smiled and shook his head.

“Really, we have lots of fun here,” said Father. “I often say that this isn't an old people's home, it's a children's home.”

Did the woman with the duster bother him, I asked.

“Bother me? No, not at all. How could she bother me? Does she bother you, Naef?

Naef said no.

“You see!” said Father.

*

Another time there was a man doing exercises out on one of the balconies in the new wing. Holding on to the railing with both hands he slowly went into a crouch, slowly straightened up, then crouched down again, slowly. A red tracksuit, a gaunt figure, white hair. Like a film in slow motion he went into a crouch, straightened up – nothing else, the same thing over and over again.

“He's an athlete,” commented Father. “Does exercises out on his balcony every day – unless there's a hailstorm or a snowstorm. Haven't you really ever seen him before? We call him our head gymnast, don't we, Naef?”

*

“A single ticket to the terminus. There are times when they carry out one dead person a week. February, April, that's when they croak out here. A common flu, and already you're lying over in the new wing in the boxroom next to the showers. Into the little wooden box and off with you. When it's summertime, like now, things are better of course. No dying in the summer. Summer's not the right time to go. That's when all those old sticks come back to life, start toddling around the house again, babble nonsense on the benches below our window, blah blah blah, chittery chat.”

*

“Today I was just about to start shaving when I stepped on a piece of shit. There it was lying on the tiles. Unfortunately I hadn't seen it in time. Jäggi had been to the lav just before me. Jäggi often misses the bowl. He steps in his shit and messes it all over the floor. Sometimes there are streaks right out to the corridor. Perhaps he can't help it. But I have my doubts about that. He probably does it on purpose. As I said, this is a children's home. There are people here who have to wear nappies like babies again.”

*

“Oh yes, the food is excellent, as always. This week spinach seems to be on the books – alternating with chard. That's to say it isn't actually spinach, it's chard leaves. Chard stalks in white sauce – that's all right by me. But the leaves? In other places they're fed to the pigs, but here they dish them up as spinach. Let them dish up whatever they like! It doesn't make much difference whether the green pap is spinach or chard, I don't like it whatever it is. Particularly without fried eggs. Fried eggs and spinach, they belong together, at least that's what I always thought. But the people in the kitchen don't agree. Can't be done, says the office clerk's wife, it's impossible to do fried eggs for sixty people. She must know. So they serve processed cheese with our so-called spinach instead. And yet they have the best-equipped kitchen for miles around. Budmiger, at least, would have given his eye-teeth for a kitchen like that over in the Löwen. The best-equipped kitchen for miles around, that's what I say, bought with the blessing of the most far-sighted supervisory committee for miles around. Tut, tut, with a kitchen like that even I could manage to cook fried eggs for sixty people! But the office clerk's wife counts her little frying pans and decides it's impossible. And dishes up processed cheese instead. Have you ever heard of such a thing? We've not only heard of it, we've eaten it. Guaranteed to be healthy. Steaming fresh cowpat-green pap, processed cheese, sickly white on the edge of the plate, plus crumbly boiled potatoes. Spinach is said to contain iron, and iron makes you strong, that's what they say, so it's just the right thing for the rusty old scrapheaps that we are. On the other hand I don't know if there's iron in chard, and I don't want to know either. And then – probably to make up for the rest – once a week, usually on Sundays, there's the famous roast. Did I say roast? More like dried Grisons beef. Nice and dark all round the edges. They don't save on oven heat. You should see those old codgers chewing and chewing on their Sunday roast; they even praise the stuff, tough as it is. But behind the cook's back they grumble about the grub. To her face not a word, in fact they even compliment her: quite delicious, really delicious. It's not surprising they think it good, after all that chard, and the chard leaves and the processed cheese. Bumsuckers, that's what they are! It's a children's home, as I said – or a madhouse, you can take your pick.”