The Clown (20 page)

“What,” exclaimed my father, “you don’t mean.…” His color rose and he shook his head as he looked at me.

“Yes,” I said, “I do mean that. Every Friday afternoon the kids were sent to the movies. Before that they were allowed to go and eat ice creams so that they would be out of the house for at least three and a half hours, when their mother got back
from the hairdresser and their father came home with the pay envelope. You know, working class homes aren’t all that big.” “You mean to say,” said my father, “you mean to tell me that you all knew why the children were sent to the cinema?”

“Of course we didn’t know exactly,” I said, “and most of it occurred to me later on when I thought about it—and it wasn’t till much later that it dawned on me why Mrs. Wieneken always blushed so touchingly when we got back from the movies and had potato salad. Later on, when he took over the job at the stadium, it all changed—I suppose he was home more often. As a boy I merely noticed she was somehow embarrassed—and it wasn’t till afterwards that I understood why. But in a flat consisting of one big room and a kitchen, and with three children—I don’t suppose they had any alternative.”

My father was so shocked that I was afraid he would think it in poor taste to bring up the subject of money again. For him our meeting had an element of high tragedy, but he was beginning to rather enjoy this tragedy, to find it attractive in a way, on a level of noble suffering, and then it would be hard to get him back to the three hundred marks a month he had offered me. With money it was like with “desires of the flesh.” Nobody really talked about it, really thought about it, it was either—as Marie had said about the carnal desires of priests—“sublimated” or considered vulgar, never as the thing it was at the moment: food or a taxi, a packet of cigarettes or a room with bath.

My father was suffering, it was painful to watch. He turned toward the window, pulled out his handkerchief and dried a few tears. I had never seen that before: my father crying and actually using his handkerchief. Every morning two clean handkerchiefs were laid out for him, and every evening he would throw them into the laundry hamper in the bathroom, slightly crumpled but not noticeably soiled. There had been times when my mother, trying to be economical because soap was scarce, had long arguments with him as to whether
he couldn’t carry around the handkerchiefs for at least two or three days. “All you do is carry them around with you anyway, and they are never really dirty—and there is such a thing as an obligation toward the nation.” This was an allusion to the “war on waste.” But Father—the only occasion I can recall—had put his foot down and insisted on getting his two clean handkerchiefs every morning. I had never seen a droplet or a speck of dust, anything, on him which would require him to wipe his nose. Now he was standing at the window and not only drying his tears but even wiping something as vulgar as sweat from his upper lip. I went out into the kitchen because he was still crying, and I even heard a sob or two. There are not many people you want to have around when you are crying, and it seemed to me that your own son, who you hardly know, would be the last person you would choose for company. As for me, I only knew one person who I could be with when I cried, Marie, and I didn’t know whether Father’s mistress was the kind of person he could have around when he was crying. I had only seen her once, she seemed sweet and pretty, and stupid in a nice way, but I had heard a lot about her. Our relatives had described her to us as grasping, but in our family everyone was considered grasping who was shameless enough to point out that now and again you have to eat, drink, and buy shoes. Anyone who maintains that cigarettes, hot baths, flowers, and schnapps are necessities has every chance of going down in history as being “recklessly extravagant.” I imagine a mistress is quite expensive: she has to buy stockings, dresses, pay the rent and be constantly cheerful, which is only possible in a “stable financial situation,” as Father would have put it. After all, when he went to her after those deathly boring board meetings, she had to be cheerful, smell nice, have been to the hairdresser. I couldn’t imagine that she was grasping. Probably she was just expensive, and in our family that was the same as grasping. When Henkels the gardener, who sometimes helped out old Fuhrmann, suddenly pointed out
with remarkable modesty that the minimum rate for casual labor had, “for the last three years, as a matter of fact,” been higher than the wages he was getting from us, my mother gave a two-hour lecture in her shrill voice on the “grasping attitude of certain people.” Once she gave our postman a thirty-five cent tip at New Year’s and was indignant when next morning she found the thirty-five cents in the letterbox in an envelope on which the postman had written: “Madam, I haven’t the heart to rob you.” Of course she knew the right man in the Postmaster General’s office and she complained to him at once about that “grasping, impertinent man.”

In the kitchen I walked quickly around the coffee puddle, across the hall into the bathroom, pulled the stopper out of the bathtub, and it struck me that for the first time in years I had had a bath without singing at least the Litany of Loreto. I began quietly humming the Tantum Ergo while I rinsed off the remains of soapsuds from the sides of the emptying bathtub. I also tried it with the Litany of Loreto, I have always been fond of that Jewish girl Miriam and sometimes almost believed in her. But the Litany of Loreto was no help either, I suppose it really was too Catholic, and I was furious with Catholicism and the Catholics. I made up my mind to call up Heinrich Behlen and Karl Emonds. Since the terrible row Karl Emonds and I had had two years before, I hadn’t spoken to him at all—and we had never written. He had treated me very badly for a stupid reason: when I had had to look after his youngest son, Gregor, who was a year old, while Karl and Sabina went to the movies and Marie was spending the evening with the “group,” I had beaten up a raw egg in Gregor’s milk. Sabina had told me I was to warm up the milk at ten, put it in the bottle and give it to Gregor, and because the child seemed so pale and fretful (he didn’t even cry, he just whimpered pitifully), I thought a raw egg beaten up in the milk would do him good. While the milk was warming I carried him in my arms up and
down in the kitchen and talked to him “There now! What’s our little man going to have now, what are we going to give him then—a nice little egg” and so on, then broke the egg, beat it up in the mixer and poured it into Gregor’s milk. Karl’s other children were sound asleep, I was all alone in the kitchen with Gregor, and when I gave him the bottle it seemed to me he was thoroughly enjoying the egg in the milk. He smiled and fell asleep at once afterwards, without whimpering. When Karl came home from the movies he saw the egg shell in the kitchen, came into the living room where I was sitting with Sabina and said: “What a good idea, to make yourself an egg.” I said I hadn’t eaten the egg myself but had given it to Gregor—and a storm of abuse immediately broke loose. Sabina got positively hysterical and called me a “murderer,” Karl shouted at me: “You tramp—you lecher,” and that infuriated me so much that I called him a “frustrated pedagogue,” picked up my coat and left in a rage. He called out after me onto the landing: “You irresponsible bum,” and I shouted up to the landing: “You hysterical philistine, you miserable ass-whacker.” I am really fond of children, I can handle them quite well too, especially babies, I can’t imagine that an egg can be bad for a one-year-old child, but Karl calling me a “lecher” hurt me more than Sabina’s “murderer.” After all, one can make allowances and excuses for an overwrought mother, but Karl knew perfectly well I was not a lecher. Our relationship was strained in an idiotic kind of way because in his heart of hearts my “free mode of life” seemed “marvelous” to him, and in my heart of hearts I found his bourgeois existence attractive. I could never make him understand the almost deadly monotony of my life, the pedantic regularity of train journey, hotel, practice, performance, parchesi, and beer-drinking—and how the life he led, just because it was so bourgeois, appealed to me. And of course he, like everyone else, thought we had no children on purpose, Marie’s miscarriages looked “suspicious” to him; he didn’t know how badly we wanted children. In spite of all this
I had sent him a telegram asking him to call me, but I wasn’t going to ask him for a loan. By this time he had four children and had a hard time making ends meet.

I gave the bathtub one more rinse, went quietly out into the hall and glanced through the open living-room door. My father was standing by the table again and had stopped crying. With his red nose, his moist, furrowed cheeks, he looked like any old man, shivering, surprisingly vacant and almost stupid. I poured him a small cognac, took the glass over to him. He took it and drank. The surprisingly stupid expression on his face was still there, the way he emptied his glass, held it out to me mutely, with a helpless imploring look in his eyes, had something almost inane about it that I had never seen in him before. He looked like someone who has lost interest in everything, everything, except thrillers, one particular wine, and stupid jokes. The crumpled damp handkerchief he had simply laid on the table, and this faux pas—for him a terrible one—seemed deliberately disobedient—like a naughty child who has been told a thousand times one doesn’t put handkerchiefs on the table. I poured a little more cognac, he drank it and made a gesture which I could only interpret as “Please get me my coat.” I did not respond. Somehow or other I had to get him back on the subject of money. All I could think of was to take my mark out of my pocket and juggle a bit with the coin: I let it roll down my outstretched right arm—then back the same way. His amusement at this trick appeared somewhat forced. I threw the mark into the air, almost up to the ceiling, caught it again—but he merely repeated his gesture: “My coat, please.” I tossed the mark up again, caught it on the big toe of my right foot and held it high up, almost under his nose, but he only made a slight gesture of annoyance and emitted a growling “That’s enough now.” With a shrug I went into the hall, got his coat and hat from the closet. He was already standing beside me, I helped him, picked up his gloves, which had fallen out of his hat, and handed them to him. He was close to tears again,
made some funny little movements with his nose and lips and whispered: “Have you nothing nice to say to me?”

“Yes,” I said quietly, “it was nice of you to put your hand on my shoulder when those fools passed sentence on me—and it was especially nice of you to save Mrs. Wieneken’s life when that imbecile of a major wanted to have her shot.”

“Well, well,” he said, “I’d almost forgotten about all that.”

“The fact that you have forgotten it,” I said, “is especially nice—I haven’t.”

He looked at me and implored me dumbly not to say Henrietta’s name, although I had meant to ask him why he had not been nice enough to forbid her to go on the school anti-aircraft outing. I nodded, and he understood: I would not mention Henrietta. No doubt he sat there during the board meetings, doodling little men on a sheet of paper and sometimes an H, and another H, maybe sometimes even her whole name: Henrietta. He was not to blame, only stupid in a way which excluded tragedy or perhaps was the basis for it. I didn’t know. He was so distinguished and frail and silver-haired, he looked so kind and he hadn’t even sent me a pittance when I was in Cologne with Marie. What was it that made this kind man, my father, so hard and so strong, why did he talk on the TV screen about social obligations, about national consciousness, about Germany, about Christianity even, which he admitted he didn’t believe in, and, what was more, in such a way that you were forced to believe him? It could only be money, not the concrete kind you use to buy milk and take a taxi, keep a mistress and go to the movies—but money in the abstract. I was afraid of him, and he was afraid of me: we both knew we were not realists, and we both despised those who talked about “Realpolitik.” There was much more to it than those idiots would ever understand. I read it in his eyes: he couldn’t give his money to a clown who would do only one thing with it: spend it, the very opposite of what you were supposed to do with money. And I knew, even if he had given me a
million, I would have spent it, and to spend money was in his eyes synonymous with wasting it.

While I was waiting in the kitchen and bathroom to let him cry by himself, I had been hoping he would be so deeply moved that he would give me a large lump sum, without the ridiculous conditions, but now I read it in his eyes, he couldn’t. He was not a realist, and I wasn’t either, and we both knew that the others in all their triteness were realists, stupid as puppets which touch their collars a thousand times without ever discovering the string they are dangling on.

I nodded again, to reassure him completely: I would mention neither money nor Henrietta, but I thought about her in a way which didn’t seem right, I pictured her as she would be now: thirty-three, probably divorced from an industrialist. I couldn’t imagine her being involved in all that nonsense, flirting and parties and “holding fast to Christianity,” sitting around in committees and “being especially nice to the Socialists, otherwise they get even more complexes.” I could only picture her as being desperate, doing something the realists would find outrageous because they have no imagination. Pouring a cocktail down the collar of one of the innumerable presidents, or ploughing her car into the Mercedes of one of the head hypocrites. What else could she have done if she hadn’t been able to paint or make ashtrays on a potter’s wheel? She would be bound to feel it, as I felt it, wherever there was life, this invisible wall where money ceased to be there to be spent, where it became inviolate and dwelled in tabernacles in the form of figures and columns.

I stepped aside for my father. He began to sweat again and I felt sorry for him. I hurried back into the living room and picked up the dirty handkerchief from the table and put it in his coat pocket. My mother could become very unpleasant if she found something missing when she checked the laundry once a month, she would accuse the maids of theft or carelessness.