The Clown (24 page)
Her hands, which she uses to open the front door, to straighten the covers on little Marie’s bed upstairs, plug in the toaster downstairs in the kitchen, put the kettle on, take a cigarette out of the pack. This time she finds the maid’s message on the refrigerator instead of the kitchen table. “Gone to movies. Back at ten.” in the living room on the TV set, Züpfner’s message. “Urgent call from F. Love and kisses, Heribert.” Refrigerator instead of kitchen table, love and kisses instead of love. In the kitchen, while you are spreading lots of butter, lots of liver sausage on slices of toast, and putting three spoons of cocoa in the cup instead of two, you are aware for the first time of what a slimming diet does to your nerves, do you remember the way Mrs. Blothert exclaimed, when you took the second piece of cake: “But that’s a total of over fifteen hundred calories, can you afford it?” The way the butcher looks at your waistline, a look that silently says: “No, you can’t afford it.” O Holy of Holies, Ca-ca-ca-, Thou -binet and -tholon! “Oh yes, you’re beginning to put on weight.” They are whispering it in the city, the city of whispers. Why this restlessness, this desire to be alone in the dark, in movies and churches, now in the dark living room with cocoa and toast. How did you reply to the young chap at the dance who shot out the question: “Tell me quickly what it is you love, Madam, quickly!” You will have told him the truth: “Children, confessionals, movies, Gregorian chant and clowns.” “And not men, Madam?” “Oh, yes, one” you will have said. “Not men as such, they’re stupid.” “May I print that?” “Oh no, for goodness’ sake, don’t.” If she could say one, why didn’t she say which one? If you love one man, surely you can only mean your own, the one you are married to.
The maid returns. Key in the lock, open the door, close the door, key in the lock. Light on in the hall, off, on in the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, close it, light off in the kitchen. In the hall a gentle knock at the door. “Good night, Madam.” “Good night. Has Marie been a good girl?” “Yes, very.” Light off in the hall, footsteps going upstairs. (“She was sitting there all alone in the dark listening to church music.”)
With those hands that washed out the sheets, that I warmed in my armpits, you touch everything: record player, record, lever, button, cup, bread, child’s hair, child’s bedclothes, the tennis racket. “Why don’t you play tennis any more, I wonder?” Shrug of the shoulders. Don’t feel like it, just don’t feel like it. Tennis is so good for wives of politicians and prominent Catholics. No, no, the two terms are not quite that identical yet. It keeps you slim, supple and attractive. “And F. loves playing tennis with you. Don’t you like him?” Yes, of course. There is something so sincere about him. Indeed there is, they say he got to be Minister with sheer “B.S. and push.” Everyone says he is a scoundrel, a schemer, and yet his affection for Heribert is sincere: the corrupt and the brutal sometimes take to the conscientious and the incorruptible. How touchingly scrupulous it was, the way Heribert went about building his house: no special credits, no “assistance” from party and church friends with connections in the building trade. It was only because he wanted a “hillside lot” that he had to pay a bonus, which he considered actually corrupt. But it was precisely this hillside lot that proved to be troublesome.
Anyone who builds on a hillside has the choice of a garden sloping up or a garden sloping down. Heribert chose to have it slope down—this turns out to be a disadvantage when little Marie starts to play ball, the ball is forever rolling down toward the neighbor’s hedge, sometimes through it and into the rock garden, snaps off twigs, flowers, rolls over delicate, costly mosses, and necessitates awkward scenes of apology. “How can you possibly be cross with such an adorable
little girl?” You can’t. Silvery voices gaily pretend unconcern, mouths strained by slimming diets, tired throats with tense muscles, give out gaiety, where only a good row with sharp words flying would relieve the situation. Everything swallowed, covered up with false neighborly gaiety, till some time later on quiet summer evenings behind closed doors and drawn blinds fine china is thrown at embryo ghosts. “I wanted to have it—it was you who didn’t.” Fine china does not sound fine when it is thrown against the kitchen wall. Ambulance sirens scream up the hill. Snapped-off crocus, damaged moss, a child’s hand rolls a child’s ball into the rock garden, screaming sirens announce the undeclared war. Oh if only we had chosen a garden sloping up.
The phone ringing made me jump. I lifted the receiver, flushed, I had forgotten Monika Silvs. She said, “Hullo, Hans?” I said: “Yes,” still didn’t know why she was calling. It was only when she said: “You will be disappointed” that I remembered the mazurka. I couldn’t go back now, couldn’t say “I’d rather not,” we had to go through with this terrible mazurka. I heard Monika put the receiver down on the piano, begin to play, she played extremely well, the tone was superb, but while she played I began to cry from sheer wretchedness. I should not have attempted to repeat that moment: when I came home from being with Marie, and Leo was playing the mazurka in the music room. You can’t repeat moments or communicate them. That autumn evening, in our garden, when Edgar Wieneken did the hundred meters in 10.1. I clocked him myself, measured the distance for him myself, and he ran it that evening in 10.1. He was in top form, in just the right mood for it—but of course nobody believed us. It was our mistake to speak of it at all and so try to perpetuate the moment. We ought to have been content to know he really ran 10.1. Afterwards, of course, he kept running his usual 10.9 and 11.0 and nobody believed us, they laughed at us. It is bad enough to talk about such
moments, to try and repeat them is suicide. It was a kind of suicide I was committing when I listened on the phone now to Monika playing the mazurka. There are certain ritual moments which contain their own repetition: the way Mrs. Wieneken cut the loaf—but I had tried to repeat this moment with Marie too by once asking her to cut the loaf the way Mrs. Wieneken had. The kitchen in a workman’s home is not a hotel room, Marie was not Mrs. Wieneken—the knife slipped, she cut her left arm, this experience made us ill for three weeks. This is what sentimentality can lead to. One should leave moments alone, never repeat them.
I was so miserable I couldn’t even cry any more when Monika came to the end of the mazurka. She must have sensed it. When she came to the phone all she said, in a low voice, was: “There, you see.” I said: “I am to blame—not you—forgive me.”
I felt as if I were lying drunk and stinking in the gutter, covered with vomit, my mouth full of foul curses, and as if I had told someone to photograph me and had sent Monika the picture. “May I call you again?” I asked quietly. “In a few days perhaps. I only have one explanation for my terrible behavior, I feel so utterly miserable I can’t even describe it.” I heard nothing, only her breathing, for a few moments, then she said: “I’m going away, for two weeks.”
“Where to?” I asked.
“Into retreat,” she said, “and to do a bit of painting.”
“When are you coming over here,” I asked, “to make me a mushroom omelette and one of your decorative salads?”
“I can’t come,” she said, “not now.”
“Later on?” I asked.
“I’ll come,” she said; I could hear her crying, then she hung up.
I thought I ought to have a bath, I felt so dirty, and I thought I must stink the way Lazarus stank—but I was perfectly clean and didn’t smell. I crept into the kitchen, turned off the gas under the beans, under the kettle, went back to the living room, raised the cognac bottle to my lips: it didn’t help. Even the phone ringing didn’t arouse me from my stupor. I lifted the receiver, said: “Yes?” and Sabina Emonds said: “Hans, what on earth are you up to?” I was silent, and she said: “Sending telegrams, it seems so dramatic. Are things that bad?”
“Bad enough,” I said limply.
“I had been for a walk with the children,” she said, “and Karl is away for a week, at camp with his class—and I had to get someone to stay with the kids before I could phone.” She sounded as if she was in a hurry, and a bit short-tempered too, the way she always sounds. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her for money. Ever since his marriage Karl has been figuring out his minimum living expenses very carefully; he had three children when I had that row with him, the fourth was on the
way, but I hadn’t the nerve to ask Sabina if it had arrived yet. The air in the apartment was always full of this by now more or less unchecked irritability, wherever you looked you saw his damned notebooks in which he calculated how he could make ends meet, and when I was alone with him Karl always became “frank” in a revolting kind of way and embarked on one of his man-to-man talks, about conceiving a child, and he would start accusing the Catholic church (to me, of all people!), and there always came a point when he looked at me like a whining dog, and usually at that moment Sabina would come in, give him a bitter look because she was pregnant again. To my mind there is hardly anything more painful than a woman looking bitterly at her husband because she is pregnant. They ended up huddling there side by side crying their eyes out because they really did care for each other. In the background the noise of the children, chamberpots blissfully overturned, sopping washcloths thrown against brand-new wallpaper, while Karl is always talking about “discipline, discipline” and “complete and unconditional obedience,” and I had no alternative but to go into the nursery and do a few tricks for the children to quiet them down, but it never did quiet them down, they would squeal with delight, try to imitate me, and in the end we would all be sitting around, a child on each lap, the children would be allowed to sip from our wine glasses. Karl and Sabina would start talking about the books and calendars where you can look up the times when it is impossible for a woman to conceive. And then they are forever having babies, and it never struck them that this conversation must be specially agonizing for Marie and me, seeing how we weren’t able to have children. Then when Karl was drunk he would start despatching curses to Rome, heaping maledictions on cardinals’ heads and popes’ minds, and the fantastic thing about it was that I would start defending the Pope. Marie knew far more about it and explained to Karl and Sabina that Rome couldn’t do otherwise in these matters. Finally they would exchange sly looks, as
if to say: Oh you two—obviously you have some very tricky way of avoiding children, and it usually ended up by one of the overtired kids snatching the wine glass from Marie, me, Karl or Sabina and spilling the wine over the exam papers which Karl always has stacked up on his desk. Needless to say it was embarrassing for Karl, who was constantly preaching to his boys about discipline and order, to have to return their exam papers with wine stains on them. There were slaps and tears, and with an “Oh-you-men-look” in our direction Sabina would go out into the kitchen with Marie to make some coffee, and no doubt they had their woman-to-woman talk then, something which embarrasses Marie as much as man-to-man talks do me. When I was alone again with Karl he would start talking about money again, in a reproachful tone of voice, as much as to say: I talk about it with you because you’re a nice guy, but of course you really don’t know a thing about it.
I sighed and said: “Sabina, I am utterly ruined, professionally, spiritually, physically, financially.… I am …”
“If you’re really hungry,” she said, “I hope you know where a bowl of soup is always waiting for you on the stove.” I was silent, I was touched, it sounded so honest and simple. “Are you listening?” she said.
“I’m listening,” I said, “and I’ll come round tomorrow lunchtime at latest and have my bowl of soup. And if you need anyone again to look after the kids, I—I,” I couldn’t go on. I could hardly offer now to do something for money which I had always done in the past for them for nothing, and I remembered that stupid business with the egg I had given Gregor. Sabina laughed and said: “Come on, out with it.” I said: “What I mean is, if you and Karl could recommend me to your friends, I do have a phone—and I’ll do it as cheaply as anyone else.”
She was silent, and I could tell she was shocked. “Hans,” she said, “I can’t talk much longer, but please tell me—what happened?” Apparently she was the only person in Bonn who hadn’t read Kostert’s review, and I realized she had no means
of knowing what had gone on between Marie and me. After all, she knew none of the group.
“Sabina,” I said, “Marie has left me—and married someone called Züpfner.”
“Oh no,” she exclaimed, “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true,” I said.
She was silent, and I heard someone banging against the door of the phone booth. Some idiot, no doubt, who wanted to tell his skat friends how he could have won a heart trump hand without the three top trumps.
“You ought to have married her,” said Sabina in a low voice, “I mean—oh, you know what I mean.”
“I know,” I said, “I wanted to, but then it turned out you have to have that damned certificate from the Marriage License Bureau and that I had to guarantee in writing—in writing, mind you—that I would have the children brought up as Catholics.”
“But surely that wasn’t the only reason, was it?” she asked. The banging on the door of the phone booth got louder.
“I don’t know,” I said, “that’s certainly how it began—but there are probably a lot of other things too which I don’t understand. You’d better hang up, Sabina dear, or that agitated German citizen at the door will murder you. The place is swarming with fiends.” “You must promise me you’ll come,” she said, “and remember: your soup will be waiting for you on the stove all day.” I heard her voice grow faint, she whispered: “How unfair, how unfair,” but in her confusion she had evidently just put the receiver down on the shelf where the phone book always lies instead of on the hook. I heard the fellow say: “Well, it’s about time,” but Sabina seemed to have gone. I shouted into the phone: “Help, help,” in a shrill, piercing voice, the fellow swallowed the bait, picked up the receiver and said: “Is there something I can do for you?” His voice sounded respectable, composed, very masculine, and I could smell that he had been eating something sour, like marinated
herring. “Hullo, hullo,” he said, and I said: “Are you a German, as a matter of principle I will speak only to true Germans.”