The Clown (19 page)

I thought of all the people who had helped us, while at home they sat huddled over their stinking millions, had cast me out and gloated over their moral reasons.

My father was still pacing up and down behind his chair and moving his lips as he counted. I was on the point of telling him I didn’t want his money, but somehow, so it seemed to me, I had a right to get something from him, and with one solitary mark in my pocket I didn’t want to indulge in heroics which I would be sorry for later. I really did need some money, urgently, and he hadn’t given me a pfennig since I had left home. Leo had given us his entire pocket money, Anna sometimes sent us a loaf of home-made white bread, and later on even Grandfather sent us money now and again, “crossed” non-negotiable checks for fifteen, twenty marks, and once, for some reason which I never discovered, twenty-two marks. We always had a terrible time with these checks: our landlady had no bank account, nor did Heinrich, he knew no more about non-negotiable checks than we did. The first check he simply paid into the welfare account of his parish, had the bank explain to him the purpose and nature of a crossed check, then he went to his priest and asked him for a cash check for fifteen marks—but the priest nearly exploded with anger. He told Heinrich he couldn’t give him a cash check because he would have to state what it was for, and a welfare account was a ticklish thing, it was always inspected, and if he wrote: “check to accommodate Chaplain Behlen, equal in value to private check,” he would get into trouble, for after all a parish welfare was not a place for exchanging crossed checks “of dubious origin.” He would only be able to declare the crossed check as a donation for a definite purpose, as direct support from Schnier for Schnier, and pay me the corresponding amount in cash as an allowance from the welfare. That could be done, although it was not really quite proper. It took altogether ten days for us to actually get the fifteen marks, for of course Heinrich had a thousand other things to do, he couldn’t devote himself exclusively to the cashing of my crossed check. I got a shock every time after that when I received a crossed check from Grandfather. It was maddening, it was money and yet it was
not money, and it was never what we really needed: ready money. Finally Heinrich opened a bank account himself so he could give us cash checks for the non-negotiable checks, but he was often away for three or four days, once he was away on vacation for three weeks when the check for twenty-two marks arrived, and I finally got hold of the only person in Cologne I had known as a boy, Edgar Wieneken, who held some kind of official position—cultural adviser with the Socialist Party, I think. I found his address in the phone book, but didn’t have a nickel to call him up, and walked from Cologne-Ehrenfeld to Cologne-Kalk, found he wasn’t home, waited till eleven at night at the front door because his landlady refused to let me into his room. He lived near a very large and very dark church in the Engels-strasse (I still don’t know whether he felt obliged to live in the Engels-strasse because he belonged to the Socialist Party). I was completely worn out, dead tired, hungry, was out of cigarettes, and knew Marie was sitting at home worrying. And Cologne-Kalk, the Engels-strasse, the chemical factory close by—the surroundings were not salutary for victims of melancholia. I finally went into a bakery and asked the woman behind the counter if I could have a roll. She was young, but nothing to look at. I waited till the shop was empty for a moment, went in quickly and said without wishing her good evening: “Could you spare me a roll?” I was afraid someone might come in—she looked at me, her thin, sullen mouth first got even thinner, then became rounder and fuller, then without a word she put three rolls and a piece of cake into a bag and gave it to me. I don’t believe I even said thank you as I took the bag and quickly went out of the shop. I sat down on the doorstep of the house where Edgar lived, ate the rolls and the cake and from time to time felt for the crossed check for twenty-two marks in my pocket. Twenty-two marks was an odd figure, I racked my brains as to how it could have been arrived at, maybe it was the remains of some account, maybe it was even supposed to be a joke, probably it was simply
accidental, but the strange thing was that the figure 22 as well as the words twenty-two were on the check, and Grandfather must surely have had something in mind when he wrote them. I never discovered what it was. Later I found out I had only waited an hour and a half for Edgar in Kalk in the Engels-strasse: it seemed like an eternity of gloom: the dark house fronts, the vapors from the chemical factory. Edgar was glad to see me again. He beamed, patted me on the shoulder, took me up to his room where a large photo of Brecht was hanging on the wall, beneath it a guitar and a lot of pocket books on a home-made shelf. I heard him scolding his landlady outside because she had not let me in, then he came back with some schnapps, told me gleefully he had just won a battle in the theater committee against the “scruffy bastards of the CDU” and asked me to tell him everything that had happened to me since we had last met. As boys we had been friends for years. His father was in charge of a swimming pool, later grounds supervisor at the stadium near our house. I asked him to forego the story of my life, brought him up to date briefly on my situation, and asked if he wouldn’t cash the check for me. He was terribly nice, understood completely, at once gave me thirty marks in cash, didn’t want to accept the check at all, but I implored him to take it. I believe I almost wept as I begged him please to take the check. He took it, a bit offended, and I invited him to come and see us and watch me practicing. He came with me as far as the streetcar stop by the Kalk post office, but when I saw a free taxi on the other side of the square I ran across, got in, and just caught sight of Edgar’s large face, startled, hurt, pale. It was the first time I had indulged in a taxi, and if ever a man deserved a taxi it was me that evening. I couldn’t have borne to go trundling right across Cologne by streetcar and having to wait another hour before I saw Marie again. The taxi cost nearly eight marks. I gave the driver a fifty pfennig tip and ran upstairs in our boarding house. Marie fell on my neck in tears, and I was crying too. We had both been so frightened,
had been separated for ages, we were too desperate to kiss, we just whispered over and over again that we would never, never be separated again, “until death do us part,” whispered Marie. Then Marie “got ready,” as she called it, made up her face, put on some lipstick, and we went to one of the booths on the Venlo-strasse, we each had two portions of goulash, bought ourselves a bottle of red wine and went home.

Edgar never quite forgave me for taking that taxi. Afterwards we saw him quite often, and he even helped us out again with money when Marie had the miscarriage. Nor did he ever mention the taxi, but a feeling of suspicion remained with him which has never been erased.

“For God’s sake,” said my father loudly and at a new pitch which I had never heard him use before, “speak up clearly and open your eyes. You’re not going to fool me with that trick again.”

I opened my eyes and looked at him. He was angry.

“Have I been talking?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “you’ve been mumbling to yourself, but the only word I understood was now and again stinking millions.”

“That’s all you can understand and all you’re meant to understand.”

“And crossed check I understood,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” I said, “come on, sit down again and tell me what you have had in mind—as monthly support for a year.”

I went over to him, took him gently by the shoulder and pressed him down into his chair. He got up at once and we stood face to face.

“I have been thinking the matter over very carefully,” he said quietly, “if you will not agree to my terms of a sound, supervised training but want to work here.… I would say—well, I thought two hundred marks a month would do.” I was certain he had meant to say two hundred and fifty or three hundred but at the last moment had said two hundred. He seemed
shocked at the look on my face, he said more rapidly than was appropriate to his well-groomed exterior: “Genneholm was saying that asceticism was the basis of pantomime.” I still said nothing. I just looked at him, with “empty eyes,” like one of Kleist’s marionettes. I was not even furious, only amazed, in a way which made what I had taken such pains to learn, to have empty eyes, my natural expression. He was upset, there were tiny beads of sweat on his upper lip. My first reaction was still neither rage nor bitterness nor even hatred; my empty eyes slowly filled with pity.

“Dad,” I said gently, “two hundred marks is not nearly as little as you seem to believe. It’s quite a nice sum, I won’t argue with you about that, but I wonder if you know that ascet
cism is a luxury, anyway the asceticism Genneholm has in mind; what he means is diet and not asceticism, plenty of lean meat and salad—the cheapest form of asceticism is starvation, but a starving clown—oh well, it’s better than a drunk one.” I stepped back, it embarrassed me to stand so close to him that I could watch the beads of sweat on his lips getting bigger.

“Listen,” I said, “let’s stop discussing money and talk about something else, as befits gentlemen.”

“But I really want to help you,” he said desperately, “I’ll be glad to let you have three hundred.”

“I don’t want to hear any more about money now,” I said, “I just wanted to tell you what was the most extraordinary experience of our childhood.”

“What was it then?” he asked and looked at me as if he were expecting a death sentence. He was probably thinking I would bring up the subject of his mistress, for whom he had built a villa in Godesberg.

“Don’t get excited,” I said, “you’ll be surprised; the most extraordinary experience of our childhood was when we realized we never got enough grub at home.”

He winced at the word grub, swallowed, then, with a bitter little laugh, asked: “You mean you never really had enough
to eat?” “Exactly,” I said quietly, “we never really had enough to eat, not at home anyway. To this day I don’t know whether it was a matter of stinginess or principle, I would prefer to believe it was stinginess—but I wonder if you know what a child feels when he has spent the whole afternoon riding a bike, playing football, swimming in the Rhine?”

“I imagine he has an appetite,” he said coolly.

“No,” I said, “he is hungry. Damn it, all we knew as children was that we were rich, very rich—but of all this money we had nothing—not even enough to eat.”

“Did you children ever lack for anything?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s what I’m telling you: food—and pocket money too. Do you know what I was always hungry for as a child?”

“For heaven’s sake,” he said uneasily, “what?”

“Potatoes,” I said. “But in those days Mother was already crazy about keeping slim—you know how she was always ahead of the times—and our place was always crawling with silly fools who all had different diet theories, unfortunately the potato didn’t feature in a single one of those diet theories. Sometimes the maids in the kitchen would cook themselves some, when you and Mother were out: potatoes in their jackets with butter, salt and onions, and sometimes they would wake us up and let us come down in our pajamas and eat as many potatoes as we liked on condition we never said a single word about it. Generally we went to Wienekens on Fridays, they always had potato salad then, and Mrs. Wieneken piled our plates up extra high. And then at home there was always too little bread in the bread basket, a measly piddling affair our bread was, that damned crisp-bread, or a few slices which “for health reasons” were stale—when I went to Wienekens and Edgar had just been to get some bread, his mother would hold the loaf firmly against her chest with her left hand and with her right hand cut off fresh slices which we caught in our hands and spread with jam.”

My father nodded wearily, I held out the cigarettes to him, he took one, I lit it for him. I felt sorry for him. It must be terrible for a father to have his first real talk with a son who is almost twenty-eight. “There were hundreds of other things too,” I said, “liquorice, for instance, and balloons, Mother regarded balloons as pure extravagance. She was right. They are pure extravagance—but we couldn’t possibly have been extravagant enough to blow all your stinking millions skyhigh in the form of balloons. And those cheap candies Mother had such clever and intimidating theories about, proving that they were absolute poison. But then, instead of giving us non-poisonous ones, she didn’t give us any at all. At school they all wondered,” I said softly, “why I was the only one who never grumbled about the food, ate it all up and found the meals wonderful.”

“Well, then,” he said feebly, “it had its good side after all.” It did not sound very convincing and certainly not very happy, his remark.

“Oh,” I said, “I have no doubts whatever as to the theoretical and educational value of an upbringing like that—but that’s the point, it was all theory, education, psychology, chemistry—and a deadly grimness. At Wienekens I always knew when they had money, on Fridays, at Schniewinds and Holleraths, too, you could tell when there was money on the first or fifteenth of the month—there was always something extra, everyone got an extrathick slice of sausage, or some cake, and on Friday mornings Mrs. Wieneken always went to the hairdresser because in the late afternoon—well, you might say a sacrifice was offered up to Venus.”