Billiards At Half-Past Nine Part 3

"No, Leonore, that one was in 1935. A Franciscan convent. Modern? Of course I've built modern things, too."

The view framed by the big studio window had always seemed like a kaleidoscope to him. The sky changed color, the trees in the courtyard went from gray to black to green, the flowers in the roof gardens bloomed and turned sere. Children played on the leaded sheet-metal roofs, grew up, had children themselves, whereupon their parents became grandparents. Only the profile of the roofs remained constant, that and the bridge, the mountains visible on the horizon on clear days. That is, remained constant until the second war altered the line of the roofs, tearing out gaps through which on sunny days the silvery Rhine could be seen, on days of overcast the gray Rhine, and beyond, in the Old Harbor, the drawbridge. But now these gaps had long since been filled in, and again children played on the metaled roofs, and his granddaughter crossed the Kilbs' roof, schoolbooks in her hand, as fifty years before his wife had done. Or had his wife, Johanna, gone there on sunny afternoons to read Schiller's Love and Intrigue?

The phone rang and it was pleasant to have Leonore take up the receiver and listen to her voice as she answered the unknown caller. "The Cafe Kroner? I'll ask His Excellency."

"Wants to know how many people to expect this evening? Birthday party?" Would the fingers of one hand be enough to count them off? "Let me see. Two grandchildren, one son, myself-and you. May I have that pleasure, Leonore?"

Five of them, then. The fingers of one hand were enough.

"No, no champagne. Everything just the way it was ordered. Thank you, Leonore."

She probably thinks I'm a little dotty, but if I am, it's nothing new. I saw everything before it happened, knew exactly what I wanted, knew I'd get it. Only thing I never knew, and still can't figure out to this day, is why I did it. Was it for money, fame, or simply because it amused me? What was it I was looking for, that Friday morning fifty-one years ago, September sixth, 1907, when I walked out of that railroad station over there? From the moment I set foot in the city I had my moves all figured out, an exact daily routine, the steps of a complicated dance all down to a tee-myself soloist and ballet master all in one. Cast and decor were there for the asking, not costing a penny.

I had only ten minutes left to dance my first routine. That is, walk across the station square, out by the Prince Heinrich Hotel, kitty-corner across Modest Street and into the Cafe Kroner. It was on my twenty-ninth birthday that I came to the city. A September morning. Cab horses were standing guard over their sleeping drivers. Hotel boys in the violet uniform of the Prince. Heinrich were lugging suitcases in the wake of guests on the way to the railroad station. On bank buildings substantial iron gratings were being pushed up for the day, to land with a solid sound in their storage racks. Pigeons, news vendors. Uhlans, a troop of them, riding by the Prince Heinrich, with the captain waving at a woman in a rose-red hat, standing veiled on the balcony. She blew him a kiss. Hooves clattering on the cobbles, pennants and plumes fluttering in the morning wind, organ music coming out of the big open door of St. Severin's.

I was excited, took a street map out of my coat pocket, unfolded it and looked at the red semicircle I'd drawn around the railroad station. Five black crosses indicated the cathedral and the four adjacent churches. I looked up and tried to locate the four church spires through the morning haze. The fifth, St. Severin's, was no trouble. There it was in front of me; its enormous shadow made me s.h.i.+ver a little. I looked down at the map again. Right. A yellow cross indicated the house where I'd rented a studio and a living room for six months, paid in advance, 7 Modest Street, between St. Severin's and the Modest Gate. It had to be over there to the right, where a group of priests were just crossing the street. The semicircle I'd drawn around the station had a radius of one kilometer. Somewhere inside that red line lived the woman I would marry. I'd never met her, didn't know her name. All I knew was that I would take her out of one of those patrician houses my father had told me about. He'd served three years here, in the Uhlans, soaking up hatred, hatred for horses and officers. A sentiment I deferred to, without sharing it. I was always glad my father didn't live to see me become an officer myself-lieutenant in the Engineer Corps Reserves. I burst out laughing that morning fifty-one years ago. I laughed and laughed. I knew I'd take a wife from one of those houses, that she would be called Brodem or Cusenius, Kilb or Ferve. She would be twenty years old and now, right this very minute, she would be leaving morning Ma.s.s on her way home to put her prayerbook back in the hall closet. She would arrive at just the right moment to be kissed on the forehead by her father, on the way, rumbling ba.s.s and all, through the hall and out to the office. For breakfast she would eat bread and honey, drink one cup of coffee. 'No, no, Mother, no egg, please.' Then she would read off the dates of coming galas to her mother. Might she go to the University Ball? She might.

By the University Ball at the latest, on the sixth of January, I would know the one I wished to make my own, would dance with her. I would be good to her, love her, and she would bear me children, five, six, seven of them. They would marry and present me with grandchildren, five times, six, seven times seven. I saw my troop of grandchildren, and myself, an eighty-year-old patriarch, lording it over the clan I proposed to found. At birthday celebrations, funerals, weddings and silver weddings, christenings. Infants would be handed over to be held in my old arms. There would be great-grandchildren for me to love as I had loved the pretty young things my sons had married. These, meanwhile, I would invite to breakfast, give candy and flowers, paintings and eau de cologne. I could see it all as I stood there, ready to begin the dance.

I stared at the porter as he wheeled off my luggage in his cart to the house at 7 Modest Street, the padlocked hamper with my linen and my drawings, the little leather valise containing papers, doc.u.ments and my money. My money-four hundred gold coins, net proceeds of twelve years' work, spent in country builders' field offices, working in the draughting rooms of second-rate architects, at workers' housing developments, industrial plants, churches, schools, clubhouses sketched out, planned, built. Money which represented construction estimates plowed through backwards and forwards, to the very last dry specification-'and the sacristy paneling shall be made of the best clear walnut, the best-grade hardware used.'

I know I laughed as I stood there, yet to this day for the life of me I don't really know why or what made me do it. But I can say I wasn't laughing out of pure joy in being young and alive. There was mockery and derision in it, even malice, yet just how much of each I've never been able to tell. I was thinking of the hard benches I'd sat on during evening cla.s.ses, when I went to learn arithmetic, mathematics, drawing, the manual arts, and how I'd struggled to learn dancing and swimming. I laughed thinking of myself as a lieutenant in the Engineer Reserves, stationed with the 8th Battalion in Coblenz. At how I used to sit, in the city, at the famous Elbow of the Rhine, where two rivers come together, and there found the Mosel just as dirty as the greater stream. I had lived in twenty-three furnished rooms; I'd seduced landlords' daughters and been seduced by them myself. I saw myself slipping barefoot through moldy-smelling hallways to exchange caresses, including that supreme tenderness which again and again turned out to be a fraud. Lavender water and hair let down. Horrible living rooms where fruit never intended to be eaten grew old in bowls of greenish gla.s.s, where hard words such as brute, honor, innocence came my way and never a whiff of lavender water. Shuddering, I saw what the future had in store for me, saw it, not in the face of the ravished one, but in her mother's face. Truth of it was, I was not a brute; I had never promised a soul I'd marry her; and I didn't want to spend my life in living rooms where fruit never intended to be eaten grew old in green gla.s.s bowls.

Always more drawing. When I came back from night school I calculated and drew from half-past nine till midnight. Angels and trees, cloud shapes, churches and chapels, Gothic ones, Roman ones, Romanesque, Rococo and Early Victorian-and modern ones besides, if you please. I drew long-haired maidens with soulful faces hovering above doorways, their long hair sweeping down either side the door like a curtain, with the part in the hair drawn sharp, precisely in the middle above the doorway. And the landlords' daughters, during these laborious evening hours, brought me weak tea or weak lemonade, inviting me to intimacies which they thought of as daring. Meanwhile I drew on, especially detail, since I knew that this was what they-who were they, anyway, the 'they'?-would be most likely to go for: door handles, ornamental gratings, Agni Dei, pelicans, anchors and crosses entwined with hissing snakes rising up to strike but all in vain.

I always remembered the trick my last boss, Domgreve, had pulled, pulled only too often. His gimmick was to drop his rosary beads at the critical moment after we'd looked over the site. The pious peasants had proudly shown us the field intended for the new church, and afterwards the deacons, upright and bashful, in the back room of some village pub had announced their intention of going along with the project. It was at this juncture the rosary would somehow be drawn out with cigarettes, coin or watch, providentially dropped and picked up with an air of simulated confusion. That, at least, was something I could never laugh at.

"No, Leonore, that A on the folders and drawings and estimates doesn't mean a.s.signment, it means St. Anthony. St. Anthony's Abbey."

With a deft touch and a soft step she imposed order, the kind of organization he had always loved and had never been able to maintain. It had been too much, too many jobs, too much money.

I'm a little crazy now, and I was crazy then, in the railroad station square, fingering the loose coins in my coat pocket to see how much I had, checking on my drawing pad, the green box with my pencils in it, testing the set of my flowing velvet four-in-hand, feeling around the rim of my black artist's hat, and letting my hands move farther down, over the tails of my suit, the only good one to my name, left me by Uncle Marsil who'd died of consumption as a young teacher. By then Uncle Marsil's gravestone was already covered with moss, out there in Mees, where, when he was twenty years old, he beat time with his baton in the choir loft, drummed the rule of three into farm kids' heads and, in the dusk of evening, went out walking on the moors, dreaming of young girls' lips, of bread and wine and the fame he hoped to win with his neatly turned verses. Dreams dreamed on moorland paths, two years of dreaming, until blood gushed from his mouth and carried him off to the far sh.o.r.e, leaving behind a copybook filled with verses, a black suit for his G.o.dson, two gold coins. And, on the greenish curtain of the schoolroom, a bloodstain which his successor's wife could not take out. Also, a song, sung at their hungry teacher's grave by children's voices: 'Watchman, whither has the swallow flown?'

I took another look back at the station, at the ad by the turnstile gate to the trains, put there so recruits reporting for duty couldn't help but see it. It said 'I recommend to military personnel my genuine, long-established Standard Underwear, designed by Professor Gustav Jaeger. Also, my genuine Pallas Underwear, patented in all civilized countries, and my genuine Reform Underwear, designed by Dr. Lahmann.'

It was time to start the dance.

I walked across the streetcar tracks, past the Prince Heinrich Hotel, across Modest Street, hesitated a second in front of the Cafe Kroner. In the door gla.s.s, backed with taut green silk, I saw my own reflection. I was a slightly built young fellow, almost a shrimp, a cross between a young rabbi and a bohemian, hair black, clothes black, with a vaguely countrified look. I had another laugh, and went in. The waiters were just starting to put vases of white carnations on the tables, to straighten out menus bound in green leather. There they were, the waiters, in green ap.r.o.ns and short black jackets, with white s.h.i.+rts and white ties. Two young girls, one blonde and rosy, the other brunette and pale, were arranging cakes on the buffet, making little piles of biscuits, renewing the cream dressings and polis.h.i.+ng the silver cake knives bright. Not a guest in sight, and inside all clean as a hospital before the superintendent makes his rounds. Light as a feather, a solo dancer, I threaded my way through the waiters' ballet. Here all was training and drill, fine, very fine. I liked the way the waiters flitted from table to table, the way they set down saltcellar and flower vase with an air, gave the menu a nudge to achieve what was obviously a special angle in respect of the saltcellar. The ash trays were snow-white porcelain with gold rims. Good. I liked that. All a delightful surprise. The city, so different from the holes I'd been stuck in up to now.

I went to the farthest left-hand corner, threw my hat on a chair, put down drawing pad and pencil box beside it, and sat down. The waiters were coming back from the kitchen, soundlessly pus.h.i.+ng tea wagons ahead of them, distributing bottles of condiment, hanging up newspaper holders. I opened my drawing pad and read-for the hundredth time!-the newspaper clipping I'd stuck inside the cover: 'Open Compet.i.tion: Construction of a Benedictine Abbey, to be located in the Kissa Valley, between the hamlets of Stehlinger's Grotto and Goerlinger's Lodge, at a distance of approximately two kilometers from the village of Kisslingen. All architects who consider themselves competent may partic.i.p.ate. Entry forms obtainable from Dr. Kilb, solicitor, 7 Modest Street. Fee, 50 marks. Deadline for delivery of plans: noon, Monday, September 30, 1907.'

I went climbing about among heaps of mortar, piles of brand-new bricks which I checked to see how well they had been fired in the kiln. I climbed mountains of quarried basalt that I intended to use for framing doors and windows. The cuffs of my pants were muddy, my vest all splattered with lime. I lost my temper in the construction sheds and said violent things. Those mosaic stones I needed for the Agnus Dei over the main entrance, why hadn't they been delivered yet? Terrible arguments, scandal. Credits cut off then granted again. By Thursday afternoon master mechanics already were getting lined up outside my office, though their pay checks weren't due till Friday. At night, exhausted, I climbed aboard the overheated local in Kisslingen, sank back on the cus.h.i.+oned seats of the second-cla.s.s compartment and was hauled through the darkness past miserable little beet-villages. Meanwhile the trainman, half asleep on his feet, called out the stations: Denklingen, Doderingen, Kohlbingen, Schaklingen. On the platforms mountains of beets were piled, ready for loading, gray in the dark like mountains of skulls. On we went, past beet-villages, beet-villages. At the station I fell into a cab and then, once I got home, fell again into my wife's arms, to be kissed, to have my work-strained eyes tenderly stroked, to have her run her fingers over the mortar stains decorating my sleeves. Over coffee, my head in her lap, I smoked the cigar I'd been longing for-a sixty-center-and told her all about the masons and their swearing. Not really bad when you got to know them. A little rough, maybe, a little on the Red side, but I knew how to get along with them. What you had to do was set them up with a case of beer now and then, kid along a little with them in their own lingo. And never grouse about anything to their face or they'd dump a whole load of mortar all over your feet, the way they did to the Archbishop's clerk of works, or maybe let a plank slip from way up on the scaffolding, the way they did to that government architect. The big beam smashed to smithereens right in front of him. 'Dearest, don't you suppose I know it's me who's dependent on them, not they on me? That goes wherever anything's being built, here or anywhere else. Of course they're Red, why shouldn't they be? The main thing is, can they swing a trowel and help me meet my deadline. When I take the commissioners up on the scaffolding, a friendly wink works wonders.'

'Good morning, sir. Breakfast?'

'Yes, please,' I said, but shook my head when the waiter started to give me the menu. Instead I raised my pencil and ticked off the items I wanted in the air, as if I'd eaten that kind of breakfast all my life.

'A pot of coffee, one with three cups, please. Toast, two slices of rye bread, with b.u.t.ter, marmalade, one boiled egg and paprika cheese.'

'Paprika cheese?'

'That's right, cream cheese with paprika.'

'Very good, sir.'

Without a sound he glided, the green ghost of a waiter, over the green carpet past green-covered tables to the kitchen counter, and the first ritual of my little performance promptly evolved. The supers were well rehea.r.s.ed and I was a good director. 'Paprika cheese?' the cook inquired from behind the kitchen counter. 'That's right,' the waiter said, 'cream cheese with paprika.' 'Ask the gentleman how much paprika he wants on his cheese.'

When the waiter came back I'd begun to draw the front of the railroad station. I was just sketching in the window frames with firm strokes. He stood there, waiting, until I raised my head, took my pencil off the paper and put on a look of surprise.

'Permit me to ask, sir, how much paprika do you want on how much cheese?'

'A thimbleful of paprika thoroughly worked into forty-five grams of cheese. And listen, waiter, I'll be eating breakfast here tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the day after that, in three weeks, three months, three years-you hear? And it will always be at the same time, around nine.'

'Very good, sir.'

That was how I wanted it, and that's how it worked out. Exactly. Later on many a time it used to scare me, the way my plans worked out so perfectly. Why, it wasn't more than a couple of days before I was 'the gentleman with the paprika cheese.' A week later it was 'the young artist who always comes to breakfast about nine.' And after three weeks it was 'Herr Faehmel, that young architect working on a big a.s.signment.'

"Yes, yes, child, all that stuff has to do with St. Anthony's Abbey. The Abbey goes on for years, Leonore, decades, right up to the present. Repairs, additions, then, after 1945, reconstruction from the old plans. St. Anthony's is going to take up a whole shelf. Yes, you're right, we could use a ventilator around here. It certainly is hot today. No thank you, I don't want to sit down."

The kaleidoscopic window was framing the blue afternoon sky of September 6, 1958, and the outline of the rooftops, all gaps filled in. Teapots on gay tables in the roof gardens. Women on deck chairs, lazily sprawled in the sun. And the station below, swarming with returning vacationers. Could that be why his granddaughter, Ruth, had failed to show up? Had she gone off on a trip herself, putting aside Love and Intrigue? Carefully he dabbed at his brow with his handkerchief; heat or cold never had made much difference to him. Over there in the right-hand corner of the kaleidoscopic window the bronze Hohenzollern kings on their bronze steeds kept right on riding toward the west, as they had been doing for eight-and-forty years. Including that one there, his erstwhile commander-in-chief. You could see the fateful vanity of him, in the very way he held his head.

That pedestal-there was no monument on it then-I laughed as I drew it in the Cafe Kroner, while the waiter was serving me my paprika cheese. Point is, I've always felt sure about the future, so sure that to me the present has always seemed like the past fulfilled. So then, was this my first, my very first, breakfast in the Cafe Kroner? Or was it the three-thousandth? Only one thing could keep me from breakfast at nine every day at the Cafe Kroner-a Higher Power. In this case in the form of my commander-in-chief, when he called me to the colors, that fool you see down there still riding toward the west on his bronze warhorse. Paprika cheese? How about it? Was this the first time I was eating it, this peculiar reddish-white spread that didn't taste half as bad as it looked, which I'd invented, in order to add the important personal note to my planned Cafe Kroner breakfasts, aboard the Northern Express as it roared toward the city? Or was I pasting it onto my rye bread for the thirtieth time, while the waiter takes away the egg cup and pushes the marmalade over the tabletop? Out of my coat pocket I took the one and only instrument I could depend on, when taken by visions so sudden and precise, to remind me, in my maze of fantasy, of place, day and hour-my pocket diary. It was Friday, September 6, 1907. And this breakfast was indeed my first. Until today I had in fact never drunk real coffee, only the subst.i.tute kind made from malt. I'd never eaten an egg for breakfast, only oatmeal, brown bread and b.u.t.ter and a slice of sour pickle. But now the myth I had it in mind to propagate was about to take shape. Indeed, it was already on the way toward its goal when the cook's 'Paprika cheese?' echoed my order. What was this goal? The Public. All I had to do now was wait there, simply stick around until ten o'clock, half-past ten, drinking cognac with a bottle of mineral water until the cafe slowly filled up, sit there with my drawing pad on my knee, a cigar in my mouth and pencil in hand, drawing, drawing, while bankers with their worthy clients went by me to the conference room, followed by waiters carrying bottles of wine on green trays. While clerics came in with confraters from foreign parts, fresh from a round of sightseeing at St. Severin's and praising the city's beauties in broken Latin, English or Italian. While government officials gave notice of their high rank by taking time out for a ten-thirty office break to drink a kirsch and mocha. Then there were the ladies who came in from the produce market with cabbages and carrots, peas and plums in woven leather bags, showing off their housewifely training, proving how clever they were at squeezing bargains out of weary peasant women, then gobbling up a hundred times their savings in cakes and coffee, brandis.h.i.+ng their coffee spoons like swords, getting indignant about the cavalry captain who-'on duty, too, did you ever ...!'-had blown a kiss to a certain cheap flirt of a creature on a balcony, the same captain, by the way-'oh, I can prove it, you can just bet on that!'-who'd left at half-past four that morning by the service entrance. A cavalry captain at the service entrance! For shame!

I looked them all over, my supporting cast, listened to what they were saying. I sketched rows of chairs, rows of tables and the ballet of the waiters, at twenty to eleven called for my check. It proved less than I'd expected. I'd made up my mind to make my debut 'generous, but not extravagant.' I'd read it somewhere, and figured it was a good formula. By the time I'd taken leave of the waiter and his bowing and sc.r.a.ping, and tipped him an extra fifty pfennigs for helping advance my legend, I suddenly felt tired. As I was leaving the cafe they gave me the once-over, not dreaming it was I who was the soloist in their little ballet. I walked the gauntlet straight as a ramrod, my step elastic, and gave them a real eyeful: an artist in a big black hat, a small, slightly built fellow about twenty-five years old to all appearances, with a vaguely countrified air, but full of confidence. Then another groschen for the boy holding the door open for my pa.s.sage.

From there to here, 7 Modest Street, it was only a minute and a half. Apprentices, trucks, nuns. Life in the street. Up and down, down and up, like pistons in a s.h.i.+p's engines the presses went. Edification was being printed on white paper. The doorman tipped his cap. 'You're the architect, sir? Your luggage is upstairs already.' A tip pa.s.sed into a reddened hand. 'Always at your service, lieutenant, sir.' A grin. 'That's right, two gentlemen have been here already. They want the lieutenant to join the local Reserve Officers Club.'

Once again the future unfolded before my eyes, more clearly than the present, while the present, at the very instant of its consummation, sank back into the somber void whence it had come. In my mind's eye I saw the shabby doorman surrounded by newspaper people and imagined the headlines: 'Young Architect Wins Open Compet.i.tion against Celebrities of Profession.' Eagerly the doorman would give the journalists their news: 'Him? Gentlemen, nothing but work, work, work. Eight in the morning goes to Low Ma.s.s at St. Severin's, breakfast in the Cafe Kroner till ten-thirty, from ten-thirty till five stays up there in his studio, won't see a soul. Yes, he lives up there on pea soup-go ahead and laugh-cooks it himself. He has his old mother send the peas and pork, even the onions. From five to six, a walk around town. Six-thirty to seven-thirty, billiards in the Prince Heinrich or the Reserve Officers Club. Girls? None that I know of. Friday nights, gentlemen, eight till ten, choir practice with the Germania Glee Club.' The Cafe Kroner waiters, they would also make a killing on news tips. Paprika cheese? Very interesting! Draws even at breakfast, got drawing on the brain.

Later on, I often used to think back on the time I arrived. Again I heard the hooves clattering on the cobblestones, saw the bellboys lugging suitcases, saw the veiled lady in the rose-red hat, read the sign: 'Recommended for Military Personnel,' c.o.c.ked an ear to hear my own laughter again. For whom was it intended, my laughter, what was it made of? For whom? I used to see them every morning when I crossed over here after Ma.s.s to pick up my mail and the newspaper: the troop of Uhlans, riding by to the cavalry practice-field at the north end of the city. Every morning I thought of my father's hatred for horses and officers, as the clattering hooves disappeared into the distance, on their way to ride to attack and to kick up more dust in patrol formation. The bugle calls brought tears to the eyes of veterans standing at the roadside, but I could think only of my father. The riders' hearts, and the doorman's, too, beat faster. Girls with dusters in their hands stiffened into living statues and let the morning breeze cool b.r.e.a.s.t.s just made to comfort weary heads. Meanwhile the doorman handed me Mother's parcel: peas, pork, onions and G.o.d bless you my boy. No, my heart did not beat faster to see the company riding away.

I wrote letters begging my mother not to come. I didn't want her included among my supers. She should come later, later, when the play was in production, the game really under way. She was small, slight and dark like myself, and she lived between cemetery and church. Her face and manner, as a matter of fact, would have fitted into the play only too well. She never wanted money, got along on one gold coin a month for soup and bread, with a groschen left over for the collection plate on Sunday and a penny weekdays. Come later, I wrote her, but it was already too late. She was buried next to Father, Charlotte, Mauritius. She never saw the Heinrich Faehmel, 7 Modest Street, whose address she wrote each week. I was afraid of the wisdom in her gaze, of the unexpected things she might say. Which is it going to be, money or honor, serve G.o.d or man? I was afraid of her catechistic questions, which answered themselves, merely by putting a period after them instead of the question mark. Just why I felt like that about her, I couldn't have said. When I went to church it wasn't really out of hypocrisy, not part of my act although she would have regarded it as such. My performance began in the Cafe Kroner and ended at ten-thirty, then resumed at five in the afternoon and wound up for good at ten P.M. It was easier to think of Father, while the Uhlans were finally dropping out of sight beyond the Modest Gate, when organ grinders were hobbling to the city outskirts to get there early enough to play for lonesome housewives and servant girls. Oh, breaking heart at break of day! Late in the afternoon they hobbled back to the city, this time to make a few pennies from people on their way home from work in melancholy mood. Annemarie, Rosemarie, etc. Meanwhile, over there Gretz was hanging up the wild boar outside his shop. Fresh, dark red boar blood dripped onto the asphalt. Pheasants and partridges hung round the boar, and rabbits. Delicate plumage and humble rabbit fur garlanded the mighty boar. Every morning Gretz hung up his dead animals, always with their wounds staring the public in the face, rabbit guts, gaping pigeon b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the boar's scoopedout belly between raw flanks. Blood, the public had to see it. This while Frau Gretz' pink hands arranged flaps of liver between little heaps of mushrooms, and piled up caviar on cubes of ice to glitter in front of giant hams. Lobsters, violet as hard-fired brick, crawled blindly, helplessly about, feeling their way in the shallow pound, waiting to be plucked forth by housewives' skillful hands, on the seventh, the ninth, the tenth of September, 1907. Only on Sundays, the eighth, fifteenth and twenty-second of September was Gretz' shopfront free of blood. And only during those years when a Higher Power was at work did I lose sight of Gretz' beasts. I saw them without fail for fifty-one years-see them right now, when, on this Sat.u.r.day afternoon, the housewives' skillful hands come feeling for something special for the Sunday dinner.

"Yes, Leonore, you've read it right: First fee, 150,000 marks. No date? Must have been in 1908. Yes, I'm sure, August, 1908. You've never eaten wild boar? You haven't missed much, if you'll trust my taste. Never did like it. How about making some more coffee, wash down the dust. And buy some cakes, if you want. Nonsense, it won't make you fat, don't pay any attention to that hocus-pocus. Yes, that was 1913, a little house for Herr Kolger, the waiter at the Cafe Kroner. No, no fee for that."

How many breakfasts in the Cafe Kroner? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Never added them up, went there every day, take away the days I was balked by the Higher Power.

Remember watching the Higher Power come in. Over there on the roof of No. 8, hidden behind the pergola, I looked down into the street, and saw them marching toward the station, no end to them, singing the 'Watch on the Rhine' and shouting the name of that idiot you see still riding his bronze steed toward the west. They wore flowers in their caps, on their top hats and derbies, flowers in their b.u.t.tonholes, and they carried Professor Gustav Jaeger's Standard Underwear in little packages under their arms. The noise they made surged up to me in waves. Why, even the wh.o.r.es down in the Kraemerzeile district had sent their pimps off to the recruiting station with particularly fine, warm underwear tucked under their arms. I tried to share the feelings of the ones down below, but no use. I felt empty and alone, a real stinker, not an atom of enthusiasm in me, and not knowing why. I'd simply never put my mind to such matters. I thought of my Engineer's uniform, smelling of mothb.a.l.l.s. It still fitted me, though I'd had it made when I was twenty and meantime had grown to be thirty-six. All I hoped was I wouldn't have to put it on again. I wanted to keep on being the star, not become one of the supers. They'd gone off their rockers down there, singing their way to the station. The ones who didn't have to go were the ones being pitied. They felt victimized, not being able to go along. As for me, I was ready to be victimized in such manner, wouldn't mind it at all. Down below inside the house my mother-in-law was weeping, both her sons having ridden away with the very first contingent to the freight yard, where they were loading up the horses. Proud Uhlans, for whose sake my mother-in-law was shedding prideful tears. There I stood, behind the pergola, the wistaria still in bloom, and from down below heard my four-year-old son, singing 'Get your gun, on the run....' What I should have done was go down and give him a good licking, in front of my proud mother-in-law. But I let him sing and play with the Uhlan helmet his uncle had given him. I let him trail his sword behind him and shout, 'Frenchy dead! Englishman dead! Roos.h.i.+an dead!' I let myself be told by the garrison commandant, his voice low and nearly breaking, 'I deeply regret, Faehmel, we can't get along without you here, not yet; I'm sorry you can't do your bit out there. But the home front needs people, too, people just like you.'

Barracks, fortifications, military hospitals-I built them all. Nights, in my lieutenant's uniform, I inspected the guard at the bridge. Elderly storekeepers with a corporal's rating, banker privates, they saluted me diligently when I climbed the bridge steps, my flashlight revealing obscene drawings which youngsters had scratched into the red sandstone on their way home from a swim. The bridge steps smelled strong of p.u.b.erty. There was a sign hanging somewhere, 'Michaelis, Coal, c.o.ke, Briquettes,' with a finger pointing toward the place where Michaelis' wares might be obtained. I savored my irony, my superiority, when Sergeant Gretz reported to me: 'Bridge guard, one sergeant, six men. Nothing unusual to report.' This information I acknowledged with what I fancied to be a comicopera salute, and said, 'At ease.' Then I wrote my name in the guard book, went home, hung sword and helmet in the closet, went into the living room to Johanna, laid my head in her lap, smoked my cigar and said not a word while she did the same. All she did was take the pate de foie gras back to Gretz, and when the Abbot of St. Anthony's sent us bread and honey and b.u.t.ter, parcel it out among the poor. I kept my mouth shut, went on having breakfast in the Cafe Kroner, the two thousand four hundredth with paprika cheese. I still gave the waiter a fifty-pfennig tip, though he didn't want to take it, insisted on paying me a fee for the house I'd designed for him.

It was Johanna who said right out what I'd been privately thinking. She wouldn't drink any champagne when we were invited to the garrison commandant's, wouldn't eat the jugged hare and refused every dance. She said it out loud: 'That fool of a Kaiser.' You'd have thought the Ice Age had come, there in the Wilhelmskuhle Casino. Then she said it once again, in the silence: 'That fool of a Kaiser.' They were all there, generals, colonels and majors, together with their wives, and me, of course, just promoted to first lieutenant and commissioned to build the fortifications. A young officer-candidate had the presence of mind to start the orchestra playing a waltz. I took Johanna's arm and led her to the coach outside. Wonderful autumn evening. Gray columns of men marching out toward the suburban railroad station. Nothing out of the way to report.

Now a military tribunal. No one dared repeat what Johanna had said. Blasphemies of that nature were not even put into the record. His Majesty-a fool of a Kaiser. It was something no one would have dared put down on paper. With them it was always 'What your wife said'; on my side, 'What my wife said.' I didn't say what I should have, that is, that I agreed with her one hundred per cent. Instead I said, 'Pregnant, gentlemen, in two months she'll be having it. Lost two brothers, Captain Kilb of the Horse Guards and Cadet Kilb, both killed on the same day. A little daughter, too, lost her in 1909.' All along I knew I should have been saying, 'I agree with my wife, absolutely.' I knew that irony wasn't enough, and never would be.

"No, Leonore, don't unwrap that little package. What's inside has only sentimental value. Not much weight, but precious: one cork. Thanks for the coffee. Put the cup on the windowsill, please. I can see it's no use waiting for my granddaughter-usually does her homework out in the roof garden about this time of day. I'm forgetting her vacation's not over yet. Look, from up here you can see right into your own office. I can just see you at your desk, your pretty hair."

Why did the cup suddenly tremble and clink, as if from the pounding of the presses? Was the lunch hour over? Were they working overtime, printing edification on white paper even on Sat.u.r.day afternoons?

I felt that same trembling countless mornings when, propped on my elbows, I looked down into the street at that blonde head of hair pa.s.sing by, its perfume familiar to me from morning Ma.s.s. In time the strong plain soap she used would deaden its brightness. Respectability was being used as a subst.i.tute for perfume. I used to follow behind her, after Ma.s.s, when she went past Gretz' shop at a quarter to nine and so into the house at No. 8. It was a yellow house, with a rather weathered sign at the door, with 'Dr. Kilb, Attorney-at-Law' in white letters on black wood. I watched her when I waited in the doorman's room for my newspaper. The light would fall on her, on her delicate face wrinkled with a frown of dedication to justice as she opened the office door, threw open the shutters, twirled the safe combination and opened the steel doors which seemed too heavy for her. Then she checked the contents of the safe and while she was doing this I could look right across Modest Street, it was so narrow, into the safe, and read, neatly printed on a card on the top safe drawer: 'St. Anthony Project.' Three large packages lay inside, protected by seals that looked like wounds. Only three of them, and every child knew the senders' names: Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein. Brehmockel, builder of thirty-seven Neo-Gothic churches, seventeen chapels and twenty-one monasteries and hospitals; Grumpeter, builder of only thirty-three Neo-Romanesque churches, twelve chapels and eighteen hospitals; and of course the third packet from Wollersein, who had built only nineteen churches, two chapels and four hospitals, but who, on the other hand, had a real cathedral to his credit. 'Read what's in the Guardian today?' the doorman asked, and above his calloused thumb I read the line it was pointing at: 'Deadline for St. Anthony's Project Today / Have Our Young Architects No Spirit?' I laughed, rolled up my newspaper and went to breakfast in the Cafe Kroner. The waiter said 'Breakfast as usual for Herr Faehmel' through the kitchen counter opening, and it sounded like a liturgy, old as the hills, a rite performed for centuries. The usual buzz of voices around ten-thirty-housewives, priests, bankers. Out with my drawing pad and its lambs, serpents and pelicans. A fifty-pfennig tip for the waiter, ten-pfennig for the busboy. A grin from the doorman as I slipped his morning cigar into his hand and took my mail in return. Upstairs, I stood leaning here at the window, feeling the vibration of the presses in my elbows, watching the apprentice at the window down below in Kilb's office wielding a white folding rule. I opened the letter the doorman had given me. '... we are in a position to offer you the post of chief draughtsman immediately. If you so wish, you will be treated as a member of the family. A friendly reception by local society can be guaranteed. There would be no lack of social occasions....' In this manner architects' delightful daughters were intimated, cozy picnics at the forest edge suggested, young men wearing round peasant hats tapping beer barrels, young women unpacking and handing around sandwiches. On freshly mown lawns a little dance might be ventured, while the mothers, anxiously tallying their daughters' years and charmed by the grace of it all, clapped their hands in time. Then off for a stroll through the woods, arm in arm, whereupon the young ladies would make sure to trip over the roots. As wooded distances imperceptibly lengthened, opportunities would offer for a kiss, on the wrist, the cheek, the shoulder. Then, wending our way homeward, through pleasant meadows in the dusk, the deer, no less, as if summoned for that very purpose, would peek out of the forest and come to the meadow's rim. And then, when songs had begun to ring out, and spread from coach to coach, time would be ripe for an interchange of whispers declaring that Amor had done his work. So homeward, the coaches carrying aching hearts, wounded souls.

To this proposal I wrote a civil answer: 'I shall be delighted to consider your kind offer again as soon as I have completed the private studies which will be detaining me some time longer in this city....' I sealed the envelope, stuck on the stamp, went back to the windowsill and looked down into Modest Street. The folding rule, brandished by Kilb's office boy, flashed like a dagger. Two employees from the hotel were loading the boar onto a handcart. I would sample wild boar meat that evening, at the Germania Glee Club's stag party. I would have to listen to their jokes, and of course they would fail to note that I was laughing at them, not at what they said. Their jokes were as repulsive to me as their sauces, and up here at my window I laughed my laugh, as yet still not knowing whether it sprang from hatred or contempt. One thing only I knew: it was not a laugh of joy.

Gretz' young servant girl had placed white baskets full of mushrooms beside the boar. The cook in the Prince Heinrich was already weighing out the spices, kitchen help were grinding the knives, worried extra waiters were standing at home in front of their mirrors straightening their ties as they tried them on and asking their wives-the smell from worn trousers being pressed filling the kitchen-'Do you suppose I'll have to kiss the Bishop's ring if I have the lousy luck to wait on him?' Down below the apprentice was still wielding the folding rule. Eleven-fifteen. I brushed my black suit, made sure my velvet bow was knotted straight, put on my hat, drew out my pocket diary, no larger than a flat matchbox, and looked within: September 30, 1907, 11:30, Kilb's, deliver design. Ask for receipt.

Careful now! How often I'd rehea.r.s.ed it all-down the stairs, across the street, down the corridor, into the reception room.

'I'd like to speak to the attorney personally.'

'What is it you want to see him about?'

'I'd like to submit a design. The St. Anthony Open Compet.i.tion.'

Only the apprentice would look surprised, hold the folding rule still, look round and then, abashed, turn his face back to the street and to his legal forms, mindful of the office rule: 'Discretion, discretion!' In this office shabbiness was style. Portraits of legally learned ancestors hung on the walls, inkwells were eighty years old, the folding rule a hundred and fifty. Prodigious transactions were consummated here in silence. Here entire city districts changed hands, and marriage contracts were signed and sealed, contracts in which the bride's annual clothes allowance was larger than what a probate clerk would earn in five years. Here, too, however, the honest cobbler's 2000-mark mortgage was officially witnessed, here the doddering old pensioner deposited his will, leaving his bedside table to a favorite grandchild. The legal affairs of widows and orphans, of workers and millionaires were settled here in strictest confidence, in view of the proverb on the wall: 'Their right hand is full of bribes.' No reason, then, to look up when a young artist wearing a worn suit handed down to him by his uncle delivered a package, rolls of drawings wrapped in foolscap, or when he erroneously imagined the attorney himself should give the matter his personal attention. The head clerk sealed the package, the rolls of drawings, pressed the Kilbian emblem, a lamb with blood flowing from its breast, onto the hot sealing wax, while the blonde girl clerk of righteous aspect wrote out the receipt: 'Monday, September 30, 1907, 11:35 A.M. Herr Faehmel, architect, delivered into our custody....' Had not a glimmer of recognition pa.s.sed over her pale, friendly face as she held the receipt out to me? I was delighted by this unforeseen response, because it proved to me that time after all was something real. See, then, this day, this minute did truly exist. But it had not been me who had proved it, by my actually having gone downstairs from my studio, by having crossed the street, entered the corridor and the reception room. Nor had it been proved by the blood-red wound left by the seal. It had been proved by the blonde clerk's unexpected smile of kindness. She surveyed my worn suit and then, as I took the receipt from her hand, she whispered, 'Good luck, Herr Faehmel.' These were to be the only words within the past four and a half weeks which branded time, which reminded me that there were signs of reality in this game I had set in motion. Time, this incident revealed, was subject to outside intervention, and not entirely governed out of the privacy of my dreams, a world in which the future seemed like the present, the present like something that had happened centuries past, and that which had been became that which was yet to come. Time was more than a childhood thing, to which I could run for refuge as, when a little boy, I had run to my father's arms. My father, he had grown silent, years heaped up around him like layers of leaden stillness. Organ stops pulled out, High Ma.s.ses accompanied by song, for first-cla.s.s funerals song at length, rather less for second-cla.s.s, no song at all for third-cla.s.s ones. And now silence. So still that merely thinking about him oppressed my heart. He had milked cows, cut hay, threshed grain, until the chaff stuck like an insect cloud to his sweat-drenched face. He had waved the baton for the youth club, the union club, the rifle club and the Saint Cecilia Club. He never opened his mouth, never complained. He merely sang in church, cut beets, cooked potatoes for the pigs, played the organ, put on his black sacristan's coat, over that his white robe. No one in the village noticed that he never spoke, for whenever they saw him he was busy doing something. Two of his four children died of consumption and two lived on: Charlotte and myself. My mother was a gentle woman, the kind who love flowers and pretty curtains, who sing songs at their ironing and tell stories by the fireside in the evening. As for Father, he drudged on, built beds, filled sacks with straw and killed chickens, until Charlotte died. Now the Ma.s.s of the Angels, church all in white. The priest sang, but the sacristan did not respond, did not pull out the stops, made no organ chords. The priest chanted on alone. Still mute, the procession formed in front of the church to move off to the cemetery. Troubled, the priest asked, 'But Faehmel, my dear, good Faehmel, why didn't you sing?' For the first time ever I heard my father give voice to an emphatic utterance, and was startled to hear how hoa.r.s.e it sounded, the same voice that could sing so softly in the organ loft. He said it low, with a growly undertone: 'No singing for third-cla.s.s funerals.' Haze over the Lower Rhine, damp fog wraiths coiling and dancing across the beetfields, crows in the willows cawing like Mardi Gras rattles as the troubled priest read the graveside liturgy. Never again did Father conduct for the youth club, the union club, the rifle club, never again for the Saint Cecilia Club, and it was as if, with that first sentence I ever heard him utter-I was then sixteen, Charlotte died at twelve-it was as if with that first sentence he had found his voice. Now he talked more, about horses and officers, which he hated, and he said menacingly, 'Bad luck to you all, if you give me a first-cla.s.s funeral.'

'Yes,' the blonde said to me again, 'I wish you the best.' Maybe I should have turned back the receipt then and there, asked for the sealed package, the rolls of drawings, and gone home. To marry the mayor's daughter or the contractor's daughter, build fire stations, little schools, churches and chapels, and dance with the hostess at country housewarmings while my wife danced with the host. Why challenge Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein, great names of church architecture? Why bother? I felt no ambition, money did not tempt me. I would never need to go hungry. I could always play skat with the priest, the pharmacist, the innkeeper, the mayor, go hunting wild boar, build 'something modern' for newly rich peasants-but the apprentice had already rushed from his windowsill to the office door and was holding it open for me. 'Thank you,' I said, went out through the entrance hall, crossed the street, climbed upstairs to the studio and leaned on the sill there, which was trembling from the pounding of the presses. That was on September 30, 1907, around 11:45 A.M.

"You're right, Leonore, the presses are a nuisance. How many cups they've smashed on me, when I wasn't careful. Go slow, child, take it easy. If you keep on working like that you'll have more sorted out in a week than I would in fifty years. No, thanks, no cake for me. You don't mind if I call you child, do you? No need to blush at flattery from an old man like me. I'm a monument, Leonore, and monuments will never harm you. Old fool that I am, I still go to the Cafe Kroner every morning and eat my paprika cheese, even though I've long since stopped liking it. I owe it to my contemporaries not to ruin my legend. I'll found an orphanage, a school, perhaps, provide for scholars.h.i.+ps, and somewhere, someday, they'll cast me in bronze and unveil me. You've got to be there, Leonore, and have a good laugh. You can laugh so prettily, did you know? I can't any more, lost the knack of it. Yet I used to think a laugh was a useful weapon. It wasn't, really, just small deception of sorts. If you think you'd like it, I'll take you with me to the University Ball and introduce you as my niece. You'll drink champagne and dance and meet a young man who'll be good to you and love you. I'll set you up with a nice little dowry ... yes, take a real good look at that up there, the overall view of St. Anthony's, two by three meters it is. Been hanging here in the studio for fifty-one years. It was hanging up there when the roof was blown in, which accounts for those mould stains you see on it. My first big a.s.signment, a colossal job; barely thirty, then, I had 'arrived.' "

And in 1917 I couldn't summon the nerve to do what Johanna did in my stead. When Heinrich was standing up there on the roof by the pergola, she tore that poem he had to learn by heart out of his hand. He was reciting it in his serious child's voice: 'Said Peter, guardian of Heaven's gate,

I'll put the case to higher fate,

And see, within a trice was back:

Bluecher, sir, luck's a thing you do not lack!

It's leave for you, with time no bar.

(And saying this, flung Heaven's gate ajar.)

Take off, old warrior, give 'em h.e.l.l,

And if G.o.d you need, let out a yell.'

At the time Robert wasn't yet two, and Otto not even born. I was on leave and for a long time had known clearly what I'd only sensed before: that irony wasn't enough, and never would be, that it was only an opiate for a few privileged ones, that I should be doing what Johanna did. I, in my captain's uniform, should have spoken to the boy. But I merely listened, as he went on reciting: 'And General Bluecher came below

To lead to victory, blow on blow;

With Hindenburg let's march along,

With Prussia's savior, fortress strong.

As long as German woods stand high,

As long as German banners fly,