The Clown (15 page)

“Entirely of her own free will, I suppose?”

“Yes,” he said, “entirely of her own free will, although conceivably in a conflict between the natural and the supernatural.”

“And where does the supernatural come in?” I said.

“Schnier,” he said impatiently, “in spite of everything I believe you are a good clown—but you know nothing about theology.”

“I know this much,” I said, “that you Catholics are as hard on an unbeliever like me as the Jews are on the Christians, and the Christians on the heathen. All I ever hear is: law,
theology—and when you come right down to it, this is all on account of a stupid bit of paper which the state—the state, mind you—has to issue.”

“You are confusing motive and cause,” he said, “I understand what you mean, Schnier,” he said, “I understand.”

“You don’t understand anything,” I said, “and the result will be double adultery. The one Marie commits when she marries your Heribert, and the second one she commits when one day she goes off with me again. I suppose I am not sufficiently sensitive and not enough of an artist, above all not enough of a Christian, for a prelate to say to me: Schnier, if only you had just kept her on as a concubine.”

“You misunderstand the theological essence of the difference between your case and the one we were arguing about that evening.”

“What difference?” I asked, “I suppose you mean that Besewitz is more sensitive—and a kind of faith dynamo for your lot?”

“No,” he actually laughed. “No. The difference is one of ecclesiastical law. B. lived with a divorced woman whom he couldn’t possibly have married in church, while you—well, Miss Derkum was not divorced and there was nothing to stop your getting married.”

“I was prepared to sign,” I said, “even to convert.”

“Prepared in a contemptible way.”

“Am I supposed to pretend to feelings, to a faith, that I don’t have? If you insist on justice and law—purely formal things—why do you accuse me of lacking certain feelings?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything.”

I was silent. He was right, I realized, and it hurt. Marie had left, and of course they had welcomed her with open arms, but if she had wanted to stay with me, no one could have forced her to leave.

“Hullo, Schnier,” said Sommerwild. “Are you still there?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m still here.” I had pictured my phone
conversation with him quite differently. Waking him at two thirty in the morning, insulting and threatening him.

“What can I do for you?” he asked gently.

“Nothing,” I said, “if you will tell me that those secret conferences in the hotel in Hanover were aimed simply and solely at encouraging Marie to be faithful to me—then I’ll believe you.”

“You evidently fail to realize, Schnier,” he said, “that Miss Derkum’s relationship to you had reached a crisis.”

“And you people have to get into the act right away,” I said, “and show her a legal and ecclesiastical loophole allowing her to leave me. I always thought the Catholic church was against divorce.”

“For God’s sake, Schnier,” he shouted, “you can’t expect me as a Catholic priest to encourage a woman to persist in concubinage.”

“Why not?” I said. “You are driving her into fornication and adultery—if as a priest you can be a party to that, go ahead.”

“Your anti-clerical outlook surprises me. I have only come across that in Catholics.”

“I am not in the least anticlerical, don’t kid yourself, I am merely anti-Sommerwild, because you have been unjust and you’re two-faced.”

“Good God,” he said, “in what way?”

“To listen to your sermons, anyone would imagine your heart is as big as a barn, but then you go around whispering and conniving in hotel lobbies. While I am earning my daily bread by the sweat of my brow, you are having consultations with my wife without listening to my side. Unjust and two-faced, but what else can you expect from an esthete?”

“Carry on,” he said, “abuse me, malign me, I can understand you so well.”

“You don’t understand a thing, you have made Marie swallow some damned synthetic stuff. I happen to prefer pure
drinks: I’d rather have pure applejack than synthetic cognac.” “Please,” he said, “do go on—you really sound as if you were emotionally involved.”

“I am involved, Prelate, emotionally and physically, because it concerns Marie.”

“The day will come when you realize you have done me an injustice, Schnier. Over this as in everything—” his voice became almost tearful, “and as for my synthetic stuff, maybe you forget that many people are thirsty, just plain thirsty, and that they might prefer something synthetic to drink rather than nothing at all.”

“But in your Holy Scriptures there is this business about pure, clear water—why don’t you pour out some of that?”

“Possibly,” he said, his voice shaking, “because—to keep to your metaphor—I am at the end of a long chain of people who are drawing water from a well, I may be the hundredth or thousandth in line and the water is not quite so fresh any more—and besides, Schnier, are you listening?”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“You can love a woman without living with her.”

“Is that so?” I said, “I suppose now you’re going to talk about the Virgin Mary.”

“Don’t mock, Schnier,” he said, “it doesn’t suit you.”

“I am not mocking,” I said, “I am quite capable of respecting something I don’t understand. I simply regard it as a fatal mistake to offer the Virgin Mary as a model to a young girl who does not intend entering a convent. I even gave a lecture about it once.”

“Did you?” he said, “where?”

“Right here in Bonn,” I said, “to some girls. To Marie’s group. I came over from Cologne on one of their club evenings, I did a bit of clowning for the girls and talked to them about the Virgin Mary. Ask Monika Silvs. Naturally I couldn’t talk to the girls about what you call desires of the flesh! Are you still listening?”

“I am listening,” he said, “and I am amazed. You are becoming very drastic, Schnier.”

“Damn it all,” I said, “the procedure which leads to the conception of a child is a fairly drastic affair—if you prefer we can talk about the stork. Everything which is said, preached and taught about this drastic business is pretense. In your heart of hearts you people regard it as something obscene which is permissible in marriage as a form of self-defense against nature—or you kid yourselves and separate the physical from that other part of it—but it is precisely that other part of it which complicates matters. Not even the wife who merely tolerates her lord and master is merely a body—and not even the filthiest drunk who goes to a whore is merely a body, neither is the whore. You all treat this thing like a Christmas cracker—and it’s dynamite.”

“Schnier,” he said in a subdued voice, “I am astonished at how much thought you have given the matter.”

“Astonished,” I shouted, “you ought to be astonished at the thoughtless bastards who regard their wives simply as legal property. Ask Monika Silvs what I told the girls about it. Ever since I found out that I am a member of the male sex I have given more thought to this than almost anything else—and that astonishes you?”

“You have simply no idea whatever of
justice
and
law
. These things—however complicated they may be—have somehow to be governed by regulations.”

“Yes,” I said, “and I’ve had a dose of your regulations. You shove nature onto a track which you call adultery—and when nature intervenes in marriage, you get scared. Confessed, forgiven, sinned—etc. All governed by regulations.”

He laughed. His laugh sounded unpleasant. “Schnier,” he said, “I see now what’s the matter with you. You are obviously as monogamous as a donkey.”

“You don’t even know anything about zoology,” I said, “let alone
homo sapiens
. Donkeys are not in the least monogamous,
although they look pious. Donkeys are completely promiscuous. Crows are monogamous, stickle-backs, jackdaws and sometimes rhinoceroses.”

“But not Marie, evidently,” he said. He must have realized how this brief sentence wounded me, for he went on softly: “Sorry, Schnier, I would have gladly spared you that, do you believe me?”

I was silent. I spat out the burning cigarette butt onto the carpet, watched the glow spread, burning small black holes. “Schnier,” he called imploringly, “at least believe me when I say I don’t like telling you.”

“Does it matter,” I said, “what I believe? but all right—I believe you.”

“You were just talking so much about nature,” he said, “you ought to have followed your nature, gone after Marie and fought for her.”

“Fought,” I said, “where does that word come in your damned marriage laws.”

“What you had with Miss Derkum was not a marriage.”

“All right,” I said, “so it wasn’t. Not a marriage. I tried to telephone her almost every day, and I wrote to her every day.”

“I know,” he said, “I know. Now it’s too late.”

“So now the only thing left is open adultery,” I said.

“You’re incapable of that,” he said, “I know you better than you think, and you can rant and threaten me as much as you like, I tell you, the terrible thing about you is that you are an innocent, I might almost say, a pure person. Can I help you … I mean …” He was silent. “You mean with money,” I asked.

“That too,” he said, “but I meant in your job.”

“I might take you up on that,” I said, “on both things, money and the job. Where is she?”

I heard him breathing, and in the silence I smelled something for the first time: a mild shaving lotion, a little red wine, a cigar too, but faint. “They have gone to Rome,” he said.

“Honeymoon, eh?” I asked hoarsely.

“That’s what it’s called,” he said.

“To make the whoring complete,” I said. I hung up, without thanking him or saying goodbye. I looked down at the little black spots the cigarette had burned in the carpet, but I was too tired to tread on them and put them out properly. I felt cold, and my knee hurt. I had stayed in the bath too long. Marie had not wanted to go to Rome with me. She had blushed when I suggested it, she said Italy yes, but not Rome, and when I asked her, why not, she said: Don’t you really know. No, I said, and she did not tell me. I would like to have gone with her to Rome to see the Pope. I believe I would have even stood for hours in St. Peter’s Square, clapped and shouted Evviva when he appeared at the window. When I told Marie this she got quite furious. She said she found it “somehow perverse,” that an agnostic like me would want to cheer the Holy Father. She was really jealous. I have often noticed that with Catholics: they guard their treasures … the sacraments, the Pope—like misers. Besides, they are the most conceited lot of people I know. They give themselves airs about everything: about what is strong in their church, about what is weak in it, and they expect everyone whom they regard as halfway intelligent to convert soon. Perhaps the reason Marie didn’t want to go to Rome with me was because there she would have to be especially ashamed of living in sin with me. In many respects she was naive, and she really wasn’t very intelligent. It was mean of her to go there now with Züpfner. They would be sure to have an audience, and the poor Pope, who would address her as My daughter and Züpfner as My good son, would have no idea that an unchaste and adulterous couple were kneeling in front of him. Perhaps she had gone to Rome with Züpfner because there was nothing there to remind her of me. We had been together in Naples, Venice and Florence, in Paris and in London, and in a lot of German cities. In Rome she could be safe from memories, and she certainly had plenty of “Catholic
air” there. I decided to phone Sommerwild again and tell him I thought it particularly despicable of him to make fun of my monogamous disposition. But nearly all educated Catholics have this mean streak, either they huddle behind their protective wall of dogmas, tossing off principles knocked together out of dogmas, but when one seriously confronts them with their “unshakable truths” they smile and refer to “human nature.” If necessary they assume a sarcastic smile, as if they had just come from the Pope and he had presented them with a little bit of his infallibility. In any case, when you start to seriously discuss the monstrous truths they so calmly proclaim, you are either a “Protestant” or have no sense of humor. If you talk seriously to them about marriage they bring up their Henry VIII, they have been firing with this cannon for the last three hundred years, they want to show how severe their church is, but when they want to show how softhearted it is, what a big heart it has, they trot out their Besewitz anecdotes, tell jokes about bishops, but only when they are with “the initiated,” by which they mean—whether they are Left or Right wing is of no consequence any more—“educated and intelligent people.” That time when I challenged Sommerwild to tell the bishop’s story about Besewitz from the pulpit, he became very angry. When it is a case of man and wife they only fire from the pulpit with their main cannon: Henry VIII. A kingdom for a marriage! Justice! Law! Dogma!

I was feeling sick, for a number of reasons, physically because I had had nothing but cognac and cigarettes since that wretched breakfast in Bochum—spiritually, because I was imagining Züpfner in a hotel in Rome watching Marie get dressed. He would probably also poke around in her underwear. These neatly parted, intelligent, righteous and educated Catholics need compassionate women. Marie was not the right one for Züpfner. A man like that, always impeccably dressed, fashionably enough not to be old-fashioned, but not so fashionably as to seem dandified; and a man who washes
thoroughly in cold water every morning and cleans his teeth as vigorously as if he was out to break a record—for a man like that Marie is not intelligent enough, and she is also much too energetic getting up in the morning. He is the type who, before he is conducted into the audience chamber to the Pope, would give his shoes one more quick wipe with his handkerchief. I felt sorry for the Pope too, before whom the two would kneel. He would smile benignly, and sincerely rejoice over this handsome, pleasant-looking Catholic German couple—and once again he would be deceived. He couldn’t dream he was dispensing his blessing over two adulterers.