The Clown (26 page)

It was only now that I realized I had been the one to offer Pope John and Züpfner as a source of comfort in her religious doubts. I had been scrupulously fair in my attitude toward Catholicism, that was just where I had gone wrong, but to me Marie was Catholic in such a natural way that I wanted to help her retain that naturalness. I woke her up when she overslept so she could get to church on time. How often had I paid for a taxi to get her there on time, I phoned around for her, when we were in Protestant areas, to try and find a Holy Mass, and she always said she found that “particularly” sweet, but then I was supposed to sign that damned paper, guarantee
in writing
that I would have the children brought up as Catholics. We had often talked about our children. I had looked forward very much to having children, had talked to my children, held them in my arms, beaten up raw eggs in milk for them, the only thing that worried me was that we would be living in hotels, and in hotels it is usually only the children of millionaires or kings who are treated well. The first thing children—at least the sons—of non-kings and non-millionaires get shouted at them is: “This isn’t your home,” a triple insinuation since it assumes that you behave like a pig at home, that you only enjoy yourself when you are behaving like a pig, and that in no circumstances are you supposed to enjoy yourself as a child. For girls there is always a good chance of being regarded as “sweet” and being nicely treated, but boys always start off by being shouted at if their parents aren’t around. For Germans, every boy is a naughty child, the always unspoken adjective naughty is simply merged with the noun. If anyone should ever hit on the idea of testing the vocabulary most parents use when talking to their children, he would find that it makes the
vocabulary of the comic strip look like a complete dictionary. It won’t be long before German parents speak only in Kalick-language to their children: Oh, how sweet, and Oh, how awful; now and again they will decide to make use of such variations as “Don’t argue” or “That’s none of your business.” I have even discussed with Marie how we would dress our children, she was all for “jaunty, light-colored raincoats,” I preferred parkas, since it seemed to me that a child couldn’t very well play in a puddle in a jaunty, light-colored raincoat, while a parka was ideal for playing in puddles, she—I always thought first of a girl—would be warmly dressed but with bare legs, and when she threw stones into the puddle the water need not necessarily splash her coat, it might only splash her legs, and when she scooped out the puddle with an empty can and the dirty water happened to run out of the side of the can, it wasn’t bound to go on the coat, in any case the chances were that it would only dirty her legs. Marie felt she would be more careful just because she was wearing a light-colored raincoat, the question of whether our children would actually be allowed to play in puddles was never completely clarified. Marie would just smile, be evasive and say: let’s wait and see.

If she was to have children with Züpfner she wouldn’t be able to dress them in either parkas or jaunty, light-colored raincoats, she would have to let her children run around without coats, for we had gone thoroughly into the matter of coats of all kinds. We had also discussed long and short pants, underwear, socks, shoes—she would have to let her children run naked through the streets of Bonn if she didn’t want to feel like a whore or a traitor. I also had no idea what she could give her children to eat: we had gone into all the various types of food, of feeding methods, we had agreed we didn’t want stuffed children, children who are forever getting porridge or milk stuffed or poured into them. I did not want my children to be forced to eat, it had disgusted me to watch Sabina Emonds stuffing food into her two oldest children, especially the eldest, whom
Karl had unaccountably named Edeltrud. I had even had an argument with Marie over the tiresome matter of eggs, she was not in favor of eggs, and when we argued about it she said they were rich people’s food, then she had blushed and I had had to comfort her. I was used to being treated and regarded differently from other people merely because I am one of the brown-coal Schniers, and it only happened to Marie twice that she made a silly remark about it: the first day, when I came downstairs to her in the kitchen, and the time we talked about eggs. It’s an awful thing to have wealthy parents, especially awful, of course, when one has never benefited from the wealth. At home we very seldom had eggs, my mother regarded eggs as being “distinctly harmful.” In Edgar Wieneken’s case it was embarrassing the other way round, he was always brought in and introduced as a child of the working class; there were even some priests who, when they introduced him, used to say: “A genuine child of the working class,” it sounded as if they had said: Look, he has no horns and looks quite intelligent. It is a racial matter that Mother’s executive committee ought to look into one day. The only people who behaved naturally to me over this were the Wienekens and Marie’s father. They didn’t hold it against me, my being one of the brown-coal Schniers, nor did they make any special fuss of me because of it.

I suddenly realized I was still standing on the balcony looking out over Bonn. I was hanging on to the railing, my knee was hurting like mad, but the coin I had thrown down worried me. I would have liked to get it back, but I couldn’t go down into the street now, Leo was bound to arrive any minute. They couldn’t sit forever over their plums, whipped cream and grace. I couldn’t spot the coin down there on the street: it was quite a long way down, and it is only in fairy tales that coins glint clearly enough to be found. It was the first time I ever regretted anything to do with money: this discarded mark, twelve cigarettes, two streetcar rides, a wiener. Without remorse, but with a certain wistfulness, I thought of all the express and first-class surcharges we had paid for grandmothers from Lower Saxony, wistfully, the way you think of the kisses you gave to a girl who married someone else. There was not much to be hoped for from Leo, he has strange ideas about money, rather like a nun’s ideas about “married life.”

Nothing glinted down there on the street, through everything was well lit up, there was no fairy coin to be seen: just
cars, streetcar, bus and citizens of Bonn. I hoped the mark had stayed on the roof of the streetcar and that someone at the depot would find it.

Of course I could throw myself on the bosom of the Protestant church. Only: when I thought of bosom I shivered. I could have thrown myself on Luther’s breast, but “bosom of the Protestant church”—no. If I was going to be a hypocrite I wanted to be a successful hypocrite and get as much fun out of it as possible. I would enjoy pretending to be a Catholic, I would “keep to myself” entirely for six months, then start going to Sommerwild’s evening sermons, till I began to warm with catholons like a festering wound with germs. But this would mean giving up my last chance of getting into Father’s good books and of being able to sign non-negotiable checks in a brown-coal office. Perhaps my mother would find a place for me on her executive committee and give me a chance to present my race theories. I would go to America and lecture to women’s clubs as a living example of the remorse of German youth. The only thing was, I had nothing to be remorseful about, nothing whatever, and so I would have to pretend remorse. I could also tell them about the time I threw ashes from the tennis court into Herbert Kalick’s face, and how I was locked up in the shed and afterwards had stood before the court: before Kalick, Brühl, Lövenich. But the moment I told them that, it would be hypocrisy. I could not describe those moments and hang them around my neck like a decoration. Everyone carries the decorations of his heroic moments around his neck and on his chest. To cling to the past is hypocrisy, because no one knows those moments: how Henrietta in her blue hat had sat in the streetcar and gone off to defend the sacred German soil against the Jewish Yankees near Leverkusen.

No, the safest hypocrisy, and the one I would enjoy the most, was to “gamble on the Catholic card.” There every number was a winner.

I glanced once more over the roofs of the University to
the trees in the park: that was where Marie would be living, over there on the slopes between Bonn and Godesberg. Good. It was better to be near her. It would be too easy for her if she were able to think I was always on the move. She should always have to reckon with the possibility of running into me and blush with shame every time she realized how unchaste and adulterous her life was, and when I met her with her children, and they were wearing raincoats, parkas, or loden coats; her children would all of a sudden seem to her naked.

They are whispering in the city, Madam, that you let your children run around naked. That’s going too far. And have you forgotten one little word, Madam, at a crucial point when you say you only love one man—you ought to have said which man. They also whisper that you are smiling at the sullen resentment harbored by everyone here against the one they call
Der Alte
. You think that in a distorted kind of way they all resemble him. After all—you think—they all regard themselves as indispensable as he does, after all, they all read mystery stories. Naturally the jackets of these books do not go with the tastefully decorated homes. The Danes have forgotten to extend their designs to the jackets of mystery stories. The Finns will be clever enough to do this and adapt their jackets to go with chairs, sofas, glasses, and pots. Even at Blothert’s there are mystery stories lying around that hadn’t been hidden carefully enough the evening we went over the house.

Always in the dark, Madam, in movies and churches, in dark living rooms listening to church music, avoiding the bright light of the tennis courts. Such a lot of whispering. The thirty or forty-minute confessions in the cathedral. Ill-concealed indignation on the faces of those waiting their turn. Heavens above, how on earth can she have so much to confess: she has the handsomest, nicest, most reasonable husband. A really nice man. An adorable little daughter, two cars.

The exasperated impatience in there behind the grill, the
endless whispering back and forth about love, marriage, duty, love, and finally the question: “Not even religious doubts—then what is your trouble, my daughter?”

You can’t put it into words, can’t even think it, the thing I know. What you need is a clown—official description—comedian, no church affiliation.

I hobbled from the balcony to the bathroom to put on my make-up. It had been a mistake to face Father standing, sitting, without my make-up, but his visit was the last thing I could have expected. Leo had always been so keen to see my true opinion, my true face, my true self. Now he was going to see it. He was always afraid of my “masks,” of my clowning, of what he called my “flippancy,” when I wore no make-up. My make-up box hadn’t arrived yet from Bochum. The moment I opened the white cabinet on the bathroom wall, I realized it was too late. I ought to have remembered the fatal sentimentality inherent in objects. Marie’s tubes and jars, bottles and lipsticks: there was nothing left in the cabinet, and the fact of there being so unmistakably
nothing
left of her was as bad as if I had found one of her tubes or jars. All gone. Perhaps Monika Silvs had been merciful enough to pack it all up and put it away. I looked at myself in the mirror: my eyes were utterly empty, for the first time I didn’t need to empty them by looking at myself for half an hour and doing facial exercises. It was the face of a suicide, and when I began to put on my make-up my face was the face of a corpse. I smeared Vaseline over my face and ripped open a half-dried tube of white make-up, squeezed out what was left and painted myself completely white: not a stroke of black, not a spot of red, all white, even my eyebrows painted over; my hair above it looked like a wig, my unpainted mouth dark, almost blue, my eyes, pale blue like a stony sky, as empty as a Cardinal’s who will not admit to himself that he has long since lost his faith. I was not even afraid of myself. With this face I could become a success, I could even be hypocritical about the thing which in all its helplessness, in
its stupidity, relatively speaking appealed most to me: the thing Edgar Wieneken believed in. This thing at least would have no taste, in its tastelessness it was the most honest of all the dishonest things, the least of the lesser evils. So in addition to the black, dark brown and blue there was another alternative, which it would be too euphemistic and too optimistic to call red, it was gray with a soft shimmer of sunrise. A sad color for a sad thing, where perhaps there was even room for a clown who was guilty of the worst of all clown sins: that of arousing pity. But the trouble was: Edgar was the last person I could betray, the last person I could pretend to. I was the only witness to the fact that he really had run the hundred meters in 10.1, and he was one of the few people who had always taken me as I was, to whom I had always appeared as I was. And the only faith he had was faith in certain people—the others believed in more than people: in God, in abstract money, in things like nation and Germany. Not Edgar. It had been bad enough for him that time I took the taxi. I was sorry now, I ought to have explained it to him, there was no one else to whom I owed any explanations. I left the mirror; I liked what I saw in it too much, I didn’t think for an instant that it was me I was looking at. That was no longer a clown, it was a corpse acting a corpse.

I hobbled across to our bedroom, which I hadn’t gone into yet for fear of Marie’s clothes. I had bought most of them myself, even discussed the alterations with the dressmakers. She can wear almost any color except red and black, she can even wear gray without looking mousy, pink suits her very well, and green. I could probably make my living in the world of women’s fashions, but for someone who is monogamous and not a pansy it would be too much of a torture. Most husbands just give their wives crossed checks and advise them to bow to the “dictates of fashion.” If purple happens to be the fashion, all these women who are fed with crossed checks wear purple, and when all the women at a party who “take pride
in their appearance” run around in purple, the whole thing looks like a convocation of laboriously animated female bishops. There are very few women who can wear purple. Marie looked very nice in purple. While I was still at home the sack dress suddenly became fashionable, and all the poor old hens who had been told by their husbands to dress “smartly” ran around at our At Homes in sacks. I felt so sorry for some of the women—especially the tall, stout wife of one of the innumerable presidents—that I wanted to go up to her and hang something—a tablecloth or a curtain—around her like a mantle of mercy. Her fool of a husband noticed nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, he would have sent his wife shopping in a pink nightgown if some pansy had decreed it was the fashion. The next day he gave a lecture to a hundred and fifty Protestant clergymen on the word “know” in marriage. Probably he didn’t even realize his wife has much too knobbly knees to be able to wear short dresses.