Billiards At Half-Past Nine Part 2

She left a trail of dread behind her, the breath of disaster, throwing her room key on the desk, shrieking into the face of the boy replacing Jochen, "Hugo, where's Hugo?" When the boy shrugged his shoulders, she walked on to the revolving door, and the waiter who started it turning for her looked down at the floor. Then, the moment she was outside, she drew down her veil over her face.

"I don't wear it inside, boy. Let them see something for their money, and look at me for mine. But the people outside haven't earned it."

"Here's your cognac, Doctor."

"Thanks, Hugo."

He liked Faehmel. Faehmel came every morning at half-past nine, gave him a reprieve till eleven, had already endowed him with a sense of eternity. Had it not always been like this? Had he not been standing at this same whitely lacquered door for centuries, hands folded behind his back, watching the quiet game, listening to words that sent him now sixty years back, now twenty ahead, then ten back again, only suddenly to fling him into the calendar-card reality outside the billiard room? White-green, red-green, red-white, always inside billiard cus.h.i.+ons enclosing no more than two square meters of green felt. It was all clean, dry, precise. Between half-past nine and eleven. Downstairs to fetch the double cognac twice, maybe three times. Time here ceased to be a dimension making things measurable. Time was blotted out by that green rectangle of blotting paper. In vain hours chimed, hands moved in vain, in vain ran away from each other in senseless haste. When Faehmel showed up it was drop everything-and just at the one time when there was most to do, old guests leaving, new ones arriving. Yet he had to stand there until St. Severin's struck eleven. But when-when would that be? Airless rooms, timeless clocks, and he submerged here, moving swiftly under oceans, reality not penetrating, its nose pressed against gla.s.s outside, as against shop or aquarium window, dimensions lost, except flatness, the flatness of children's cutouts. Here people's clothes were provisionally draped upon their bodies, so many paper dolls. Helplessly they kicked against time's walls, thicker than centuries made of gla.s.s. St. Severin's shadow was far away, farther still the railroad station, the trains not real, through, freight, express, fast and slow, with them carrying trunks to customs stations. Only the three billiard b.a.l.l.s, rolling over green blotting paper, forming ever-new figurations, were real. Infinity in a thousand formulas, all contained within two square meters. He struck them forth, his cue a wand, while his voice lost itself in eons of time.

"Is there any more to the story, Doctor?"

"You want to hear it?"

"I'd like to."

Faehmel laughed, sipped at his gla.s.s of cognac, lit himself a fresh cigarette, took up the cue and played the red ball. Red-white rolled over the table's green.

"A week after that, Hugo...."

"After what?"

Again Faehmel laughed. "After that rounders game, that fourteenth of July in 1935 they scratched into the plaster above the locker-a week after that, I was glad that Schrella had reminded me of the road leading to Trischler's house. I was standing at the railing of the old weighhouse in the Lower Harbor. From there I had a good view of the road. It went past woodyards, coalyards, ran down to a place where building materials were sold, from there went to the basin, closed off by a rusty iron fence and now used only as a s.h.i.+p-breaking yard for condemned vessels. The last time I'd been there was seven years before, with Schrella, when we went to visit Trischler. But it could have been fifty. I was thirteen when I first went there. In the evening long trains of barges lay moored at the embankment. Barge-women with their market baskets walked ash.o.r.e up swaying gangplanks. The women had red faces and a steady eye. Men came after the women, out to get beer or a newspaper. Trischler's mother, all in a flutter, looked over her wares-tomatoes and cabbages and bunches of silvery onions hanging on the wall. Outside a drover was giving his dog short, sharp commands, getting them to drive the sheep into a pen. Across the river-on the side where we are now, Hugo-the gaslamps were being turned on, yellowish light filling the white globes. A great line of them ran north, propagating infinity. Trischler's father snapped on the lights in his beer garden, and Schrella's father, a napkin over his arm, came down to the two-boat house out back, where we-Trischler, young Schrella and I-were chipping ice and throwing it over the beer cases.

But now, seven years later, Hugo, on this twenty-first of July in 1935, the paint had peeled off all the fences, and the only new thing in sight was the door at Michaelis' coalyard. On the other side of the fence a big pile of briquettes lay crumbling apart. At every turn in the road I looked back to make sure I wasn't being followed. I was exhausted, I could feel the wounds on my back. The pain began to throb like a pulse. For ten minutes there hadn't been a soul on the road. I looked along the narrow stretch of clear, ruffled water joining the Lower to the Upper Harbor. Not a boat in sight. I looked up at the sky. Not a plane, either, and I thought, you must take yourself pretty seriously if you think they'll send planes out looking for you.

You see, I'd done it, Hugo, I'd gone with Schrella to the little Cafe Zons on Boisseree Street, where the Lambs had their meetings. I'd mumbled the pa.s.sword to the proprietor: 'Feed my lambs.' And I had sworn to a young girl called Edith, and I looked right into her eyes as I did it, that I would never make oblation to the Host of the Beast. In that same dark back room I had made a speech, in it using unlamblike words smacking of blood and rioting and revenge, revenge for Ferdi Progulske whom they'd executed only that morning. The ones sitting around the table listening themselves looked as if they had just had their heads chopped off. They were frightened, they realized that a boy's seriousness is as serious as an adult's. Fear lay on them, and the knowledge that Ferdi was really dead. He was seventeen years old, a hundred-meter runner, a carpenter's apprentice. I'd only seen him four times all told, twice in the Cafe Zons and twice in my own house, yet I'd never forget him as long as I lived. Ferdi had sneaked into Old Wobbly's apartment and thrown a bomb at Wobbly's feet as he came out of the bedroom. Old Wobbly got out of it with burns on his feet, a shattered bureau mirror and a smell of cordite in the place. Madness, Hugo, adolescent high-mindedness. You hear? Are you really listening?"

"I hear, all right."

"I'd read Holderlin: Firm in compa.s.sion the eternal heart. But Ferdi only read Karl May, who seemed to preach the same high-mindedness. All foolishness, paid for under the executioner's ax in the gray of the morning, while church bells were tolling for matins and baker boys counted warm rolls into their string bags, and here in the Prince Heinrich Hotel the first guests were having breakfast served, while the birds were twittering, milkmaids stealing in and out of quiet doorways on rubber-soled shoes leaving bottles of milk on clean coco mats. Meanwhile men from newspaper promotion departments were racing around the city plastering billboards with red-bordered bulletins, saying: 'Execution! The Apprentice, Ferdinand Progulske ...!' So all early risers could read them, the streetcar motormen, the school kids, the teachers and everyone else hurrying to catch the morning trolley, sandwiches in their pockets, and carrying the local paper, as yet unfolded, with a headline announcing 'An Example Set.' And for me to read, too, Hugo, as I was getting into No. 7, right out in front of here at the corner.

Ferdi's voice on the phone-had I heard it yesterday or the day before? 'You'll be at the Cafe Zons as we agreed?' A pause. 'Are you coming, or aren't you?' 'I'll be there.' Enders even tried to catch hold of my sleeve and pull me into the streetcar that morning when the news broke, but I pulled loose and waited until the streetcar had disappeared around the corner. Then I went to the trolley stop on the other side of the street, where you still catch No. 16, and rode through peaceful suburbs to the Rhine, then away from the Rhine again until the car finally swung into the loop at the end of the line between gravel pits and army barracks. By rights, I thought at the time, it should be winter. Winter, cold, rainy, sky overcast-that would make it more bearable. But it was not. For hours I wandered around among prosy allotment gardens, looking at peas and apricots, tomatoes and cabbages, listening to the clink of beer bottles and the ice cream man's bell. There he stood at a crossing, dipping ice cream into crumbly cones. How can they do it, I thought, how can they eat ice cream, drink beer, sample apricots while Ferdi.... Around noontime I fed my sandwiches to some morose chickens scratching out geometric figures in the muck of a junkyard. Out of a window came a woman's voice, saying, 'Did you read about that kid, the one they....' And a man's voice answered, 'Shut up, G.o.dd.a.m.n it, I know all about it....' I threw my sandwiches to the chickens, continued on and got lost down among railroad cuts and culverts. Finally I reached another terminus somewhere and rode through a series of strange suburbs. I got off and turned my pockets inside out. Black gunpowder trickled onto the gray pavement. I started to run, past more railroad embankments, storage dumps, garden plots, houses. Finally, a movie theater, where the woman in the box office was just pus.h.i.+ng up her window. Three o'clock? Three exactly. Fifty pfennigs. I was the only one in the audience. Heat hung over the corrugated iron roof. Love, blood, a betrayed lover drew his dagger. I fell asleep and didn't wake up until the movie-goers for the six o'clock show came barging into the theater. I staggered outside. Where was my school bag? Back inside the movie? By the gravel pit, where I'd sat for a long while watching the trucks being piled full, so high the load spilled over? Or was it back at that other place, where I had thrown my bread to the sullen fowl? Ferdi's voice on the phone, was it yesterday or the day before? 'You'll be at the Cafe Zons as we agreed?' Pause. 'Will you be there or won't you?' 'I'll be there.'

A rendezvous with a headless boy. A piece of folly already precious to me, the price of it having been so high. Meanwhile I had had my turn with Nettlinger. He'd lain in wait for me in front of the Cafe Zons. They took me to Williams' Pit and beat me with the barbed-wire whip. The barbs tore up my back. Through the rusty window bars I could see the banking where I had played as a child. Time and again our ball had rolled downhill on us, and time and again I had climbed down helter-skelter to bring it back, always having a quick, scared look at the rusty bars, sensing something evil behind the dirty windowpanes. Nettlinger laid on.

In the cell I tried to take my s.h.i.+rt off, but s.h.i.+rt and skin were all chewed up together, so that when I pulled at my collar or sleeve, it felt as if I were pulling my skin over my head.

There were other bad moments, too. When I stood at the weighhouse railing, at the end of my tether, the pain was greater than the pride I took in my wounds. My head sank to the railing, my mouth pressed to it, and the bitterness of the weather-pitted iron felt good in my mouth. Another minute and I would be at Trischler's house, and then I would know whether they had got there first and were waiting for me. I got a terrible start. A workman with his lunch box under his arm came up the street and disappeared into the place where building materials were sold. As I went down the steps I held to the handrail so hard that my sliding hand peeled off flakes of rust. The rhythms of the riveting hammers that had sounded so cheerful seven years before were gone, nothing left but a weary echo of them now. One old man with a sledge hammer, working from a raft, breaking up a ferry boat. Nuts and bolts rattled into a box. When the ferry timbers fell, the thud they made told just how badly rotted they were. The old man kept tapping at the boat's engine and listening to the sound as if he were sounding the heart of someone very dear to him. He bent down deep into the bilge of the boat and fished out all sorts of parts: screws, the engine head, injection nozzles, cylinders. He held them up to have a look at them, sniffed them before throwing them into the box with the nuts and bolts. At the stern of the boat was an old winch, hanging on it the remains of an old cable, rusty rotten as an old stocking.

With me memories of people and events have always been linked memories of movement, which stick in my mind as patterns. The way I leaned over the railing, lifting my head, letting it fall, lifting it, letting it fall lower to watch the street-the memory attached to this movement brought words and colors, images and moods back into my consciousness. I didn't remember how Ferdi had looked, but instead how he'd lit a match, how he'd raised his head a little when he said, yes yes, no no. I remembered how Schrella wrinkled his forehead, the way he moved his shoulders, Father's walk, Mother's gestures, the way Grandmother moved her hand when she brushed the hair away from her brow.... And the old man down below, the one I could see from the top of the banking, and who just then was knocking punky wood loose from a big screw-that was Trischler's father. For the hand was making movements no other hand but his could make. I'd watched the same hand opening boxes, renailing them shut. Stuff smuggled across the frontier in dark s.h.i.+ps' holds. Rum and raisins, chocolate and cigarettes. In the tow-boat house in back of the beer garden I'd seen that hand make movements peculiar to it and none other. The old man looked up, blinked at me, and said, 'Hey, sonny, that road up there doesn't go anywhere.'

'It goes to your house,' I said.

'Anybody who comes to my house comes by water, even the police. Even my son comes by boat, when he comes at all, which isn't often.'

'Are the police there now?'

'What do you want to know that for, sonny?'

'Because they're looking for me.'

'Been stealing?'

'No,' I said, 'I just refused the Host of the Beast.'

s.h.i.+ps, I was thinking, s.h.i.+ps with dark holds, and captains with a lot of practice fooling customs men. I won't take up much room, no more than a rolled-up carpet. I would get across the border stowed in a rolled-up sail.

'Come down here,' said Trischler. 'They can see you up there from the other side of the river.'

I turned around and let myself slowly slide down the embankment toward Trischler, grabbing at bunches of gra.s.s as I went.

'Oh, it's you,' the old man said. 'I know your face, but I've forgotten your name.'

'Faehmel,' I said.

'Of course. They're after you, it came over on the early morning news. I might have known it when they described you. Red scar on the bridge of the nose. That was when we rowed across at high tide and ran into the bridge piles when I misfigured the current. You banged your head on the iron gunwale.'

'Yes, and I wasn't allowed to come over here again.'

'But you did come again.'

'Not for long-until I got on the outs with Alois.'

'Come on. And duck when we go under the swing bridge or you'll get a dent in your head-and they won't be letting you come here again. How did you get away from them?'

'Nettlinger came into my cell at sun-up. He took me out the back way, where the underground pa.s.sages lead to the railroad cut, by Williams' Pit. He said, "Get lost, start running. All I can give you is an hour's lead; after that I'll have to report it to the police. As it is I've had to go right around the city to make it here." '

'So that's it,' the old man said. 'That's what you get when you start throwing bombs! You would go and take an oath and-anyway, yesterday I packed up one of your boys and s.h.i.+pped him across the frontier.'

'Yesterday?' I asked. 'Who was it?'

'Schrella,' he said. 'He holed up here and I had to make him leave on the Anna Katharina.'

'Alois always wanted to be mate and steer the Anna Katharina!'

'He is mate on the Katharina. Come on, now.'

I began to stagger as we went toward Trischler's house along the slant-topped wall at the foot of the embankment. I got to my feet, fell again, again got up, and doing this jerked skin and s.h.i.+rt apart, stuck them together, pulled them apart, over and over, and the pain, like thorns being stuck in my back again and again, made me half lose consciousness. Movements, colors, smells from a thousand memories became all mixed up, piled one on top of the other. All sorts of numbers floated through my mind, changing color, taking on different angles and directions, generated out of me by the pain.

High tide, I thought, high tide, as again a desire came over me to throw myself in and be carried away to the gray horizon.

In my dreamlike state I was troubled by the question whether a barbed-wire whip could be hidden in a lunch box. Movements remembered changed into lines, which joined into figures, green, black and red ones, representing, like a cardiogram, a particular person's rhythms. The way Alois Trischler jerked his line to set the hook when we were fis.h.i.+ng in the Old Harbor, the way he cast his lure out into the water, the way his arm traveled as he held his rod against the pull of the current, thus indicating its speed. Also, the way Nettlinger raised his arm to throw the ball into Schrella's face, the trembling of his lips, the twitching of his nostrils, these changed into a gray design like a dead spider. Like so much information coming over a teletype from somewhere I couldn't place, people unfolded out of my memory, so many stigmata. Edith, the Edith of that evening after the rounders game when I went home with Schrella. Edith's face out in the park at Blessenfeld, when she lay under me on the gra.s.s, all wet from the summer rain. Raindrops glistened on her blond hair, rolled along her eyebrows, a garland of silver drops on Edith's face which rose and fell with her breathing. This garland was fixed in my memory in a form suggesting the skeleton of some sea creature found on a rust-colored beach, its const.i.tuent drops multiplied into countless little clouds of the same size. Then there was the line of her mouth as she said to me, 'They'll kill you.' That was Edith.

I was tormented in the dream by having lost my school bag-I had always been meticulous about everything-and I found myself tearing my gray-green copy of Ovid from a scrawny chicken's beak. I haggled with the usherette in the movie house over the Holderlin poem she had ripped out of my anthology because she found it so beautiful: Firm in compa.s.sion the eternal heart.

When I came to it was suppertime, with Frau Trischler bringing in the meal, milk, an egg, bread, an apple. Her hands became young when she bathed my flayed back in wine. Pain flamed through me when she squeezed wine from the sponge and let it flow into the furrows on my back. Afterwards she poured oil over me, and I asked her where she had learned to do it like that.

'It tells you how in the Bible,' she said. 'And I've done it once before, on your friend Schrella! Alois will be here the day after tomorrow and leave Ruhrort Sunday for Rotterdam. You needn't be afraid,' she said. 'They'll get you through. On the river people know each other, as if they lived on the same street. More milk, young man?'

'No, thanks.'

'Don't worry. Monday or Tuesday you'll be in Rotterdam. Now what is it? What's the matter?'

Nothing. Nothing. The all-points bulletin was still out: red scar on bridge of nose. The father, the mother, Edith-I felt no desire to calculate the differential of their kindnesses, to count off the rosary of my pain. The river was bright and cheerful, with white excursion boats flying gaily colored pennants, freight carriers painted red, green and blue, carrying coal and wood back and forth, from here to there. On the other side of the river ran the green boulevard, the terrace outside the Cafe Bellevue was snow-white. Beyond, the tower of St. Severin's, the sharp red light running up the corner of the Prince Heinrich Hotel, and my parents' house only a hundred steps more. They would be sitting down to dinner now, a full-dress meal with my father presiding over it like a patriarch. Sat.u.r.day, celebrated with sabbatical formality. Was the red wine too cool? The white cool enough?

'More milk, young man?'

'No thanks, Frau Trischler, really....'

... The men on motorcycles went racing through the city from billboard to billboard with their red-bordered bulletins: 'Execution! The Student, Robert Faehmel....' Father would be saying a prayer at the supper table: He who has been scourged for us. Mother's hand would describe a pattern of humility at her breast, before saying: 'It's a wicked world, not many are pure in heart.' And Otto's resonant heels would be beating out brother, brother, on the floor of our house, on the flagstones outside, on down the street to the Modest Gate....

That hooting outside was the Stilte, the clear notes cutting into the evening sky, white lightning furrows in dark blue. Now I was stretched out on a tarpaulin, like someone being prepared for burial at sea. Alois lifted up one side of the canvas to wrap me in, and, woven white on gray, I could clearly read: 'Morrien. Ijmuiden.' Frau Trischler bent over me, weeping, and kissed me, and Alois slowly rolled me in as if I were a particularly valuable corpse, and took me up in his arms.

'Boy!' the old man called after me, 'don't forget us, boy!'

Evening breeze, the Stilte giving another hoot of friendly warning. The sheep were bleating in their pen, the ice cream man was shouting 'Ice cream, ice cream!' then stopped, which no doubt meant he was filling crumbly cones with vanilla ice cream. The plank swayed when Alois carried me aboard. A low voice asked, 'Is that him?' and Alois answered, in the same low way, 'It's him.' Leaving, he murmured to me, 'Remember, by Tuesday night you'll be in the harbor of Rotterdam.' Other arms carried me below decks down a companionway. It smelled below first of oil, then of coal, and finally of wood, the hooting now seemed far away, the Stilte shuddered, a deep rumbling sound grew stronger. I could feel we were moving, on down the Rhine, always farther away from St. Severin's."

St. Severin's shadow had drawn nearer. Already it filled the left-hand billiard room window, and was closing in on the one to the right. Pushed forward by the sun, time drew closer like a threat, filling up the great clock which would soon spew it out in terrible chimes. The billiard b.a.l.l.s rolled on, white-green, red-green. Years were cut into pieces, seconds, seconds drawn out into eternities by the clock's calm voice. If only he wouldn't have to fetch more cognac, antic.i.p.ate calendar and clock, put up with the sheep-lady and a thing like that should never have been born. Better just to hear the Feed my lambs saying again, hear about the woman who had lain in the gra.s.s in the summer rain, about the boats coming to anchor, the women walking up gangways, the ball that Robert hit, Robert who had never taken the Host of the Beast, who played on wordlessly, always making new patterns with cue and ball on two square meters of green table.

"How about you, Hugo?" he quietly said. "Aren't you going to tell me any stories today?"

"I don't know how long it went on, but it seemed forever to me. Every day, after school, they beat me up. Sometimes I stayed put until I was sure they'd all gone home to eat, until the cleaning woman arrived, down in the hallway where I was waiting, and asked me, 'Why are you still hanging around, boy? Your mother must be looking for you.'

But I was afraid, I even used to wait until the cleaning woman had gone, and get myself locked in the school. I didn't always get away with it; most of the time the cleaning woman threw me out before she locked up. But when I managed to get locked in, I was glad. Then I scrounged food in the desks and garbage pails which the cleaning woman had put out in the hall for the collector, plenty of sandwiches, apples and leftover cake. That way I was all alone in the school and they couldn't do anything to me. I hid in the teachers' clothes closet behind the cellar stairwell, because I was afraid they might look in through the window and find me. But it was a long time before they found out how I used to hide out in the school. I squatted there often for hours, waiting until it was nighttime and I could open a window and get out. Lots of times I would just stare and stare at the empty schoolyard. Can anything be emptier than a schoolyard, late in the afternoon? It was fun, until they discovered how I was getting myself locked in the school. I scrunched up there in the teachers' closet or underneath the window ledge and waited to see if I could feel something I only knew by name-hatred. I wanted to hate them real bad, Doctor, but I couldn't. I was just plain afraid. Some days I waited only till three or four o'clock, thinking they'd be all gone by then and I might run across the street quick, past Meid's stable, round the churchyard and then home, where I could lock myself in. But they took turns going home to eat-that was one thing they couldn't do, go without food-and when they jumped me I could smell what they'd been eating, even before they got real close, potatoes and gravy, roast meat, ham and cabbage. And while they were working me over I used to think, why did Christ die, anyway? What good did it ever do me? What do I care if they pray every morning, take Communion every Sunday and hang a big crucifix in the kitchen, over the tables where they eat their potatoes and gravy, roast meat, ham and cabbage? Nothing, that's how much I care. What's it all amount to, if they lie in wait every day and beat me up? It's been going on like this for five or six hundred years. Yet they're always shooting off about how old their church is, and they've been burying their ancestors in the churchyard for a thousand years, for a thousand years they've been praying and then eating potatoes and gravy, and ham and cabbage with the Crucifix on the wall. So what? You know what they used to holler at me when they were beating me up? G.o.d's little lamb. That was my nickname."

Red-green, white-green, from the billiard b.a.l.l.s new figurations emerged like so many signals. Then were swiftly scattered. Leaving naught behind. Music with no melody, painting without likeness, quadrilaterals, rectangles, rhombs, endlessly multiplied. Clicking billiard b.a.l.l.s caroming from green cus.h.i.+ons.

"And later I tried another way. I locked the door at home, piled furniture in front of it, whatever I could find, boxes, mattresses, odds and ends. Until they told the police, who came to get the boy who was playing hookey. They surrounded the house and hollered, 'Come out of there, you devil.' But I wouldn't come out and so they broke the door down, shoved the furniture to one side and then they had me. They took me off to school, to be thrashed again, pushed into the gutter again and again made fun of with that G.o.d's little lamb. Feed my lambs-but I was one lamb they didn't feed, if I ever was His to begin with. No use, Doctor. The wind blows, the snow falls, the trees turn green, the leaves fall-they go right on eating potatoes and gravy, ham and cabbage.

Then, of course, sometimes my mother was at home, drunk and dirty, smelling of death, giving off the stink of decay, screaming, 'whywhywhy!' She yelled it more times than all the Lord have mercy on us'es in all the priest's prayers put together. Used to drive me crazy when she hollered 'whywhywhy' like that for hours at a time. I ran away in the rain, a G.o.d's little lamb soaked to the skin, hungry, mud sticking to my shoes, all over me. I got plastered with wet mud from head to toe, hiding down there in the beetfields. But I'd rather be down in the mucky beet rows, letting the rain pour on me, than listen to that awful whywhywhy. Then, sooner or later, someone or other would take pity on me and bring me back home, or back to school, back to that hole called Denklingen. So then they walloped me again and called me G.o.d's little lamb, and my mother kept on with her whywhywhy rosary, so I ran away again, and again someone took pity on me, and this time they took me to a child-welfare center. No one knew me there, none of the kids and none of the grown-ups, but I hadn't been two days in the center before they were calling me G.o.d's little lamb the same as before, and I was afraid, even though they didn't beat me. They laughed at me, because there were so many words I didn't know. The word 'breakfast,' for instance. All I knew was 'eat'-whenever anything was there, whenever I found anything. But when I looked at the bulletin board and saw 'Breakfast: b.u.t.ter, 30 grams; bread, 200 grams; marmalade, 50 grams; coffee and milk,' I asked someone 'What's breakfast?' They all surrounded me, the grown-ups, too, laughing and saying, 'Don't you know what breakfast is? You've never had breakfast?' 'No,' I said. 'How about the Bible,' one of the grown-ups said, 'haven't you ever read the word breakfast there?' And then the other grown-up said to him, 'Are you sure the word breakfast's in the Bible?' 'No,' he said, 'but somewhere, in some reading or other, or at home, he must have heard the word breakfast at least once. After all, pretty soon he'll be thirteen, and savages aren't that bad, it just goes to show how poorly people speak today.' I didn't know, either, there'd been a war a little while before, and they asked me if I'd ever been in a cemetery where it said 'Fallen' on the gravestones, the way we Germans say it when we mean 'Killed in Battle.' I told them, yes, I'd seen 'Fallen.' Then what did I think 'Fallen' meant? I said I imagined that the people buried there had died from falling down. That made them laugh louder than they had at 'breakfast.' Then they gave us history lessons, from the earliest times on down, but soon I was fourteen, Doctor, and the hotel manager came to the center and we-all of the fourteen-year-olds-had to line up in the hall outside the rector's office, and the rector came out with the hotel manager. They walked past us, looking us over, and then both said, as if they had only one mouth between them, 'We're looking for some boys to go into hotel service. We need boys who will know how to serve.' But the only one they picked was me. I had to put my things in a box right away. Then I came up here with the manager, and in the car he said to me, 'All I hope is you never find out how much your looks are worth. You're the purest G.o.d's little lamb I ever laid eyes on, that's for a fact.' I was afraid, Doctor. I still am. I'm always thinking they're going to beat me."

"Do they beat you?"

"No, never. But what I'd like to know is what that war was like. I had to leave school before they could tell me about it. Do you know about the war?"

"Yes."

"Were you in it?"

"I was."

"What did you do?"

"I was a demolition expert, Hugo. That mean anything to you?"

"Demolition?"

"Blowing things up."

"Yes, I've seen them blowing up rocks in the quarry behind Denklingen."

"That's exactly what I did, Hugo, only I didn't blow up rocks, I blew up houses and churches. You're the first one I ever mentioned it to, except my wife, but she died a long time ago, so no one knows but you, not even my parents or my children. I'm an architect, as you know, and by rights I should be putting houses up. But I've never put any up, only blown them down. And the same goes for churches, too, which I used to draw on nice soft drawing paper when I was a boy, always dreaming that some day I'd build real ones like them. But I never did build any. When I went into the army, in my record they found a reference to a doctoral thesis I'd written on a problem in statics. Statics, Hugo, is the study of the equilibrium of forces, of stress and strain in supporting structures. Without statics you can't even build an African hut. And the opposite of statics is dynamics. Sounds like dynamite, the way it's used in demolition, and matter of fact it is tied in with dynamite. For the rest of the war I was all dynamite. I know a little something about statics, Hugo, and something about dynamics, too. But about dynamite I know a whole lot. I've read every book on it in existence from cover to cover. If you want to smash something, all you need is know where to place the charge and how strong it has to be. I happened to know that, boy, so I demolished. I blew up bridges and apartment blocks, churches and railroad bridges, villas and crossroads. They gave me medals for doing it. I was promoted from second lieutenant to first, from that to captain, and they gave me special leave and citations because I knew how to destroy things so well. By the end of the war I was attached to a general who had only one thought in his head: 'Field of fire.' Do you know what a field of fire is? You don't?"

Faehmel put the billiard cue to his shoulder like a rifle and aimed out through the window at St. Severin's tower.

"Look," he said. "If I wanted to fire at the bridge, over there behind St. Severin's, the church would be lying in my field of fire. So, St. Severin's would have to be demolished, here, now, right off the bat. And, believe me, Hugo, I'd have blown St. Severin's to smithereens, even though I knew my general was crazy as a two-cent watch, even though I knew that 'field of fire' was complete nonsense. Why was it nonsense? If you're up in the air, you understand, you don't need a field of fire. And even the simplest general must have realized somewhere along the line that the airplane had been invented. But my general was off his rocker and the only idea in his one-track mind was 'field of fire.' Therefore, I gave him a field of fire. I had a good team working with me, physicists and architects, and whatever stood in our way we demolished. Our last job was something really big, something colossal, an entire system of huge and very solid buildings. A church, stables, monks' cells, an administration block, a whole farmstead. An entire abbey, Hugo. It lay exactly between two armies, one German, the other American. I provided the German army with a field of fire, even though to tell the truth it needed one like a hole in the head. Out there ahead of me the walls went toppling down. The animals bellowed in the stables and the barns, the monks cursed me out. But nothing would stop me. I blew up the whole of St. Anthony's Abbey in Kissa Valley, just three days before the war ended. Very carefully and correctly. You know me, my boy-always just so!"

He lowered his cue, which he had been holding all along zeroed in on an imaginary target, returned it to a crooked finger and struck the cue ball. Whitely it rolled over green, and bounced in a wild zigzag from one green cus.h.i.+on to another.

St. Severin's m.u.f.fled bells gave out the time. But when, when did eleven strike?

"Boy, go and see what all that commotion is at the door."

He played another ball. Red-green. Letting the b.a.l.l.s come to rest, he put his cue down.

"The manager would like to know if you'd be so kind as to speak with a Dr. Nettlinger?"

"How about you? Would you speak with a Dr. Nettlinger?"

"No, I wouldn't."

"Show me how to get out of here without using that door."

"You can go through the dining room, Doctor, then you'll come out onto Modest Street."

"Goodbye, Hugo. See you tomorrow."

"Goodbye, Doctor."

They were setting the tables for lunch, a ballet of waiters, a ballet of busboys, pus.h.i.+ng tea wagons from table to table in a precisely determined order, laying out silver, changing vases of flowers. White carnations in slender vases were replaced by modest violets in round ones, marmalade dishes by wine gla.s.ses, round for red wine, slender for white. Only exception was the sheep-lady's milk, which in the crystal carafe looked gray.

Faehmel threaded his way among the tables with a light step. Pus.h.i.+ng aside the violet curtain, he went down the stairs and presently was standing across the way from the tower of St. Severin's.

4.

Leonore's step soothed him. Carefully she went about the studio, opened cupboard doors, lifted lids of chests, untied packages, unrolled drawings. She seldom came to the window where he was to disturb him, only if the doc.u.ment had no date, the plan no name. He had always liked order, but never lived up to it. Leonore, she would take care of that for him. She was laying out piles of plans and papers, letters and old accounts, on the floor of the big studio, according to date. After fifty years the floor, as she worked, still shook from the heavy stamping of the presses below. 1907, '08, '09, '10-the stacks of material were visibly getting bigger with the century's advance. 1909 was bigger than 1908, 1910 than 1909. Leonore was laying bare the curve of his life's activities, trained as she was in precision.

"Yes," he said, "just ask me whenever you want, child. That one? That's the hospital in Weidenhammer. Built it in 1924, dedicated in September." In her neat handwriting she wrote "1924a9" on the margin of the plan.

The stacks from the 1914a1918 war years were meager: three, four plans; a country house for the general, a hunting lodge for the lord mayor, a St. Sebastian chapel for the Rifle Club. Furlough a.s.signments, costing precious days. To get to see his children he had built castles for the generals free of charge.