Billiards at Half-Past Nine (15 page)

Slowly I slid along the cold marble balustrade toward the three offended ones, and put my empty cognac glass back on the tray. Would they retreat from the leper? They did not give way before me. Were they expecting some sort of humble gambit on my part? ‘May I introduce myself? I’m Faehmel.’ Good God, didn’t everyone have to make a start somewhere? Hadn’t Grumpeter, as a young Swiss, milked cows for the Count of Telm and spread cow manure over the fragrant earth, before he discovered his architectural vocation? Leprosy, too, was curable, curable on the shores of Lago Maggiore, in the Monusio Gardens. Even the leprosy of respectable building contractors, was it not curable? Contractors who bought up Romanesque churches to tear down for salvage, together with their respective contents, their pews and ancient madonnas, and who then, with these same respective contents, decorated the salons of the newly rich and the landed gentry; who sold confessional boxes in which humble peasants had whispered their sins for three hundred years for use in a whore’s parlor. In hunting lodges, in Bad Ems, leprosy was indeed curable.

The deadly earnest faces of the offended ones stiffened as the committee-room door opened. An indistinct dark form took on shape and color. Members of the jury were stepping into the hall. Hubrich, professor of the history of art at the Theological Faculty. Only over my dead body. In this light, and in his black robe, he looked like a city councillor in a Rembrandt painting. Hubrich went to the tray, took a glass of cognac. I heard him heave a heavy sigh. Sweeping past the three offended gentlemen, who tried to crowd up to him, he moved away toward the end of the hall. The severity of his priestly garb was tempered by a white scarf. The blond locks falling like a child’s over his collar heightened the impression which Hubrich deliberately tried to create. That is, of looking like an artist. He could be imagined with his wood-carver’s burin bent over a block of wood, or with a delicate paintbrush dipped in gilt, humbly at work painting the hair of a madonna, or prophets’ beards, or adding a droll twist to the tail of Tobias’ little doggy. Softly Hubrich’s feet glided over the linoleum. Wearily he nodded to the three offended ones, and then proceeded through the gloom of the hall toward Rembrandt and Van Dyck. On these narrow shoulders rested the responsibility for churches, hospitals and homes in which for many centuries to come nuns and widows, orphans and charity patients, fallen women and the mentally defective would all have to suffer the kitchen stink of generations long gone. Gloomy halls and cheerless facades which heavy mosaics made even more cheerless than the architect’s design had contemplated. There he went, the preceptor and
arbiter architecturae ecclesiasticae
, a man who, with pathetic zeal and the conceit of blind conviction, had been pleading the cause of Neo-Gothic for forty years. When still a schoolboy, trotting home through the desolate suburbs of his industrial home town, taking with him his schoolboy honors, and en route observing the smoking chimney stacks and the blackened house fronts, he must have made up his mind then and there to make people happy, and
leave a mark behind on this earth. This he would do, a reddish mark, of brick façades growing ever sadder with the passage of the years, in their niches morose saints staring at the future with implacable dejection.

Meeser was dutifully holding out the tray now to the second member of the jury, cognac for Krohl. Jovial, claret-colored face. A cigar-smoker. Meat-gorger who’d stayed slim. Irreplaceable master builder of St. Severin’s. Pigeon droppings, engine steam, chemically poisoned clouds from the eastern suburbs, biting wet winds from the western suburbs, southern sun, northern cold, all natural and industrial atmospheric forces guaranteed him and his successors a lifetime in office. Being forty-five years old, he still had twenty more years for the things he really loved: eating, drinking, cigars, horses and women, the special kind you run into near stables, or on fox hunts—hard-limbed Amazons with a mannish smell. I had studied my adversary. Krohl hid his absolute indifference toward architectural problems behind an exquisite, almost Chinese politeness, an air of piety picked up from bishops. Krohl’s movements brought to mind memorial dedications. He also knew a couple of very good jokes, which he gave different inflections, always in a certain order of succession. And since he had learned Handke’s
Handbook of Architecture
by heart as a twenty-two-year-old, and at that time decided to make the most of this effort the rest of his life, when he needed a few architectural references he always cited ‘the immortal Handke.’ At plan-judging sessions he pleaded shamelessly for the project whose author had given him the biggest bribe, but switched to the favorite as soon as he saw his man had no chance. For he preferred saying ‘Ja’ to ‘Nein,’ on the grounds that a Ja has only two letters whereas a Nein has four, and beyond this the terrific disadvantage of not being pronounceable with tongue and palate alone, but of requiring a displacement backward almost to the roots of the nose. Moreover, a Nein had to be uttered with an expression of firmness, whereas a Ja required
no such effort. So then, Krohl sighed, too, and likewise shook his head, avoided the three aggrieved ones, and went to the corner of the corridor where the Nazarenes were.

For a second only the table with the green felt top was visible in the rectangle of light made by the frame of the door, and on it a carafe, ash trays and clouds of blue smoke from Krohl’s cigar above. Stillness within, not even a whisper audible. Death sentences hung in the air. For Hubrich it was a question of honor or shame, and the latter he had vowed as a dogged fifth-former never to have come on his head. A question of the dreadful humiliation of having to admit to the Archbishop that he had failed. ‘Well, how about the corpse, Hubrich?’ that humorous prince of the church would say. ‘Where shall we bury you?’ As for Krohl, for him it was a matter of a villa on Lake Como promised to him by Brehmockel.

A murmur arose among the rows of attendants and Meeser hissed for silence. Schwebringer came out the door, a small man, as slightly built as myself, and not only supposed to be incorruptible, but actually so. He had on threadbare breeches, darned stockings. His close-cropped head was darkish, a smile in his Corinthian eyes. Schwebringer represented Money; he controlled the funds which had built the Nation. He stood for the industrialists and the king, also for the shopkeeper’s assistant who had contributed a ten-pfennig piece and the little old lady who had given thirty pfennigs. Schwebringer would make credit available, check over the bills, with a sour look on his face okay advances. He was a convert and the baroque was his secret architectural passion. He loved hovering angels, gilded choir stalls, curved prayer stools, whitely lacquered pulpits, incense and the singing of boy choirs. Schwebringer was power. Bank syndicates belonged to him as surely as the railroad crossing gate to its tender. He regulated rates of exchange, ran steel mills. With his hard, dark Corinthian eyes he looked as if he had tried all the laxatives on the market without finding one that worked, as if he were waiting for someone to
come along and invent a true and really helpful means of jarring his bowels loose. He took the cognac without leaving a tip on the tray. There he stood, only a couple of steps away, for all the world like a professional cyclist down on his luck, with his breeches, his darned stockings. Then suddenly he glanced my way, smiled, put down his empty cognac glass, and went to the Dutch corner, whither Hubrich had also vanished. Nor did he, Schwebringer, deign to say a word to the three aggrieved ones.

Whispering became audible in the committee room; the Abbot was evidently talking to Gralduke. But only the green-topped table, the ash trays, the carafe were visible. Conflict hung in the air. The panel of judges seemed to be still at odds.

Gralduke came out, took two glasses from Meeser’s tray, stood there hesitantly a second and looked in Krohl’s direction. Gralduke was large, of powerful build, correct in manner, as one might have told from the bags under his eyes. Gralduke represented the Law. He kept watch over the juristic correctness of the judgmental proceedings, took charge of protocol. Gralduke had almost become a monk. For two years he had sung Gregorian liturgies and still liked them. But he had returned to the world to marry a girl who was as pretty as a picture, by whom he had five daughters, all pretty as pictures. Now he lorded it as provincial governor. He had had preserves of land established, fields, meadows and woodlots released, in laborious detail, from land registry office complications, and had had to disencumber miserable little ponds of special fishing rights, realize on mortgages, set banks and insurance people’s minds at rest.

Slowly the meeting in the committee room resumed. A wave of the Abbot’s slender hand commanded Meeser’s presence, whereupon Meeser disappeared for half a minute, reappeared, raised his voice and called down the corridor, ‘I’m instructed to tell the gentlemen of the panel that the recess is
over.’ First to come from the Dutch corner was Schwebringer, all by himself. Quickly he went into the room. Hubrich was the last, looking pale, stricken to death, shaking his head as he went by the three aggrieved ones. Meeser shut the door after him, looked at his tray, at the freshly emptied cognac glasses, scornfully jingled his poor take in tips. I went up to him and threw him a thaler on the tray. It rang hard and loud and the three aggrieved ones looked up with a start. Meeser grinned, put his finger to his cap in thanks and whispered, ‘And you’re only a sexton’s son, and he off his rocker at that!’

For a long time now there had been no sound of hackney carriages going by.
La Traviata
had started. The attendants, forming a lane, stood stiffly by, amid legionaries and matrons, and broken temple columns. An uproar broke like a wave of heat into the cold evening. Newspapermen had run by the first attendant and already the second was helplessly raising an arm, while the third looked toward Meeser, who was hissing a command to be quiet. A young reporter who had whisked past Meeser came up to me, wiped his nose on his sleeve and said, ‘All yours! It’s in the bag!’ Two dignified art magazine editors, bearded, black-hatted and all hollowed out by the pathos of soulful verse, waited in the background and held the less worthy masses in check, that is, a bespectacled girl and a haggard socialist. Until the Abbot quickly opened the door, came to me breathlessly like a young man, put his arms around me, while a voice cried, ‘Faehmel, Faehmel!’

Noise from below could be heard in the office. Ten minutes after the window ledge had stopped trembling, laughing working girls left through the big gate, bearing proud sensuousness into the evening hours of after-work. Into the warm fall day, with the grass by the cemetery wall sweetly smelling. Today Gretz had not sold his wild boar, dark and dry its bloody snout. Over there, kaleidoscopically framed, the roof garden: the white table, the green wooden bench, the pergola with the
tired nasturtiums. Would Joseph’s children, Ruth’s children, come and go there, reading
Love and Intrigue?
Had he ever seen Robert over there, ever? Never. That one either stuck in his room working or practiced in the garden. A roof garden was too small for his kind of sport: rounders, the hundred-meter dash.

I was always a little afraid of him, always looking for the unexpected with him, and I wasn’t even surprised when the man with the sloping shoulders came to pick him up. If I’d only known the name of the youngster who threw Robert’s little messages into our letter box. I never found out what it was, and even Johanna was never able to get it out of Droescher. The memorial they will set up for me really should go to the boy. I never did get around to showing Nettlinger the door or forbidding that Vacano to go to Otto’s room. They brought the
Host of the Beast
into my house, they changed the boy I loved into a stranger, the same little fellow I used to take to the construction jobs with me and up on the scaffolding. Taxi? Taxi? Was it the year 1936 taxi, the one I took Johanna in to The Anchor at the Upper Harbor? Or the 1942 taxi, when I took her to the asylum? Or the 1951 one, that I rode in with Joseph to Kisslingen, to show him the building site where he, my grandson, Robert’s and Edith’s son, was to work for me? The Abbey destroyed, a desolate heap of stone and dust and mortar. Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein would certainly have exulted over the sight. But I did not exult when I first saw the piles of ruins in the year 1945. I walked around reflecting more calmly, plain to see, than they had expected. Had they anticipated tears? Indignation? ‘We’ll find out who did it!’ ‘Why?’ I asked, ‘let them go their way in peace.’ I would have given two hundred abbeys if I could have had Edith back, Otto, or the anonymous young fellow who threw the little notes into our letter box and had to pay so dearly for it. And even if the exchange had not been accepted, I at least was glad to have paid the price: a heap of stones, the ‘work of
my youth.’ I offered it up for Otto and Edith, for the young fellow and the carpenter’s apprentice, even though I knew it would do them no good. For they were dead. Did this pile of ruins belong to the
unforeseen
that I had longed for so keenly? The monks were amazed at my smiles, and I by their indignation.

“The taxi? Coming right away, Leonore. Think over my invitation. Seven o’clock at the Cafe Kroner, birthday celebration. There won’t be any champagne. I hate champagne. Take the flowers down at the porter’s place along with you when you go, the boxes of cigars and the congratulatory telegrams. And, my child, don’t forget to spit on my monument.”

It was election placards that were being printed in overtime. Stacks of them blocked the corridor, the stairway, and were piled up right to his door, each bundle with an identifying sample stuck on the outside of it. All of them smiled at him, well-dressed samples indeed, the worsted of their suits recognizable even on the placards. Bourgeois earnestness and bourgeois smiles besought confidence and trust. Young ones and old ones, yet to him the young seemed more frightful than the old. He declined with a little nod the doorman’s invitation to come in and look over the beautiful flowers that had come for him, to open the telegrams and the presents. He got into the taxi, the driver holding the door open for him, and quietly said, “To Denklingen, please, the hospital.”