The Room

1

My uncle J’s room is on the first floor, overlooking Uhlandstrasse, directly opposite the bathroom that he probably wasn’t even allowed to use. During most of the time I spent there with my grandmother when I was a child, he would be sleeping, and then the whole house would stink. If he was out, which meant lugging packages around in Frankfurt, the smell would linger on regardless. The house essentially reeked of J’s silage-like stench for years. It started back when I was eight or nine years old, because he still washed himself relatively often before that. Even today, my nostrils remind me of J whenever I go down into the cellar, his territory, at the Uhlandstrasse house. They built a bathroom down there especially for him, with a shower cubicle and toilet. The cellar was where he led his subsurface existence as a pretend craftsman. J had grown up surrounded by craftsmen, in a family of stonemasons. The business had around thirty employees and was based in Friedberg, three kilometres away. Uncle J spent a lot of time there as an adolescent, there was hammering and sawing and cutting and sanding, and immense cranes scattered all over the place, and technicians keeping the machines in good working order, laborers welding and milling, a blacksmith making the tools and ensuring everything was dimensionally correct — and my uncle, fascinated by it all, began to see himself as a craftsman too and set up a workshop in the Uhlandstrasse cellar, though it was nothing more than a fantasy workshop really, a make-believe workshop. There are still boxes of screws hanging on the walls, and various tools lying around, even though most of them were cleared away twenty years ago after he moved out (J had to leave the house after the death of his mother, my grandmother, with whom he lived until the end of her life, by which time he was over sixty years old). There is still a bench clamp down there, and I remember how — back when J was still alive and still living in the Uhlandstrasse house and his mother was still there and the world was still in order for him, after a fashion, and not yet damaged or even completely destroyed — he used to clamp screws in it, select one of the many iron files with great care, check and adjust the position of the screw in the clamp according to some particular idea or craftsman’s system that he had dreamt up, then begin to file, while I, the child, could never resist asking why he was doing it, or in other words for what purpose he was filing the screw, if that was what he happened to be doing. J would then explain to me, in a despairing kind of rage, the roles of all the instruments he was using at that moment (“The bench clamp is for clamping screws — look, this is how you open it, and this is how you close it.”), but he never answered my actual questions — they didn’t seem to even exist for him. He noticed that something wasn’t quite right, though, and that enraged him. Over time, he grasped the fact that I didn’t buy his screw-filing story. There he stood, my uncle J, over forty years old back then, alongside me in the cellar, his territory, the workshop in which he was able to be what he never was and had never been allowed to become, and the child kept asking questions, and Uncle J just kept filing away with ever-increasing rage until eventually he collapsed into cursing, followed by complete and utter silence.

I remember how I always used to get the creeps when I went down into the cellar, knowing that, at least in part, it was my uncle’s realm. The laundry room was down there too, and a room for drying the washing, as well as the wine cellar, and J’s workshop was right next to the drying room, which meant you had to walk through the workshop (which strictly speaking was a room of around six or seven square metres), in order to get to the cool chamber where the wine was kept. This meant that the workshop was a publicly accessible space, unlike J’s bedroom on the first floor. Most of my encounters with J took place in the workshop. He rarely spent any time in the living room back then, at least not when someone else was also in my grandmother’s house. The workshop was his hobby, maybe even his life’s purpose — aside from the women, about whom everything I know is based on speculation. Speculation and, to be fair, a few pretty obvious clues. I have to admit that, to start with, I genuinely believed J was a craftsman, a wrought iron specialist. Perhaps, initially, I thought he was working on something in the cellar that was connected to the masonry business. Even later, once I had realised that J was purely and simply working ‘independently’ down there, I still assumed that he was actually making and creating something, or at the very least repairing something. There used to be small generators and engines and switches lying around too, and the mere fact that they were lying around made me think that J knew what they all were and how to put them to use. In reality, though, he would just take these things with him when they were thrown out by the company, take them to pieces at home, then stare vacantly at the remains without understanding them in the slightest — for when it came down to it, even if it wasn’t always apparent at first glance, Uncle J was an idiot.

He wasn’t even doing what obscure dilettante artists do, taking different materials and parts and leftover things intended for entirely different uses and making them into collages or strange apparatus or mobiles which, although functionless, represent an achievement for their creators, due to their size, the number of parts they consist of or their fantastical form. No, back then I soon came to believe — and am still firmly convinced to this day — that for J the workshop served one purpose only: to belong to the world upstairs, and in particular to the world of the masonry business three kilometres away. According to my mother, my uncle J was never accepted by his father, my grandfather, whatever the word ‘accepted’ might mean when used in reference to my uncle.

After all, in my case it went far beyond not accepting my uncle J; instead, with the way he looked and behaved, he was the epitome of horror to me when I was a child. And even though I eventually realised that my uncle was someone who still had one foot in paradise, it’s difficult for me to imagine how I ever managed to spend an entire half-hour in the cellar with him. Presumably I had to go down there whenever my grandmother went to do her shopping at Schade & Füllgrabe or to meet a friend. I can still remember how uneasy I used to feel there. Even though I would be hoping against hope that I could go back upstairs again soon, time and time again I would watch J’s filing and drilling and sanding, feel bewildered, and end up questioning him (it didn’t even occur to me to give it a rest). As a result, J would get increasingly wound up — all the while making strange hissing sounds and shaking a spanner or wrench about in his hand as if he wanted to beat first some inanimate object and then me — until eventually my grandmother would come down and rescue me.

The fact that it was unusual for a bathroom to have been installed in the cellar for my uncle didn’t even occur to me back then. As far as I was concerned, that place, the Uhlandstrasse house, didn’t have a history but had simply been there forever (after all, I thought I had been there forever too). And because it had been there forever, it didn’t need explanation, any more than the sun or gravity need explanation. In the first years of my life, too few changes took place to prompt me towards the idea that the world, particularly where human beings were concerned, was subject to constant change. I had no idea of how it changed from generation to generation. My existence back then was eternal, and every day was eternal too, because everything was already established. A question like “Why is there an entire bathroom in the cellar, with a shower, bath, and toilet?” would never have even entered my mind. In fact, the first time the bathroom provoked any kind of surprise in me was when I went back down to the cellar for the first time in over twenty years. The way it looked! It was a relatively bright, completely tiled basement room with a drain in the middle of the floor, a little window at head height, and no decoration or embellishment of any kind — it immediately made me think of a Gestapo cellar, or at least of something in an Aki Kauriskmäki film. When I was a child of three or four years of age, neither Gestapo cellars nor Aki Kauriskmäki films existed; there was just this total, unchangeable, irrevocable world in which everything was fixed apart from me, for I was able to move through it as I wished (or rather how I was supposed to), and even though this world only really consisted of two houses — my parent’s house and the house in Uhlandstrasse, which I myself would move into much later, in 1999, once everyone was dead — it was still the most universal world imaginable. And I barely expanded this world as my life went on, only adding the Wetterau as a concept, and that’s how it remained, from my uncle’s room over the cellar and everything else, to the Wetterau, my home. All the other towns and cities I’ve lived in, even Rome, are now part of the world which is the Wetterau.

To my way of thinking, my uncle wasn’t into boys; otherwise I’m sure he would have done something with me in the cellar. But then again, much like a child himself, maybe he was just too in awe of his mother, the mother who unquestioningly looked after — or tolerated — him well into her old age. Maybe it was this deep sense of awe for her that made him hold back from everything. But at some point he must have realised that sowing his wild oats with women would at least have been more normal than doing it with anyone else (or in other words, more socially acceptable and thus not subject to shame and punishment). Maybe that’s how women ended up becoming the focus of his attention, even though actually imagining it still baffles all of us. Is that why his bedroom door was always locked? I mean ‘locked’ in a metaphorical sense; maybe he never locked the door and instead relied on the fact that someone like me would never set foot in his hellhole, even if the door wasn’t locked. He probably had an unspoken agreement with Grandmother, his mother, that she wouldn’t snoop around in there, so that she wouldn’t risk finding what she didn’t want to find or knowing what she didn’t want to know. All I know is that the cleaning ladies had difficulties with him (that’s another one of those words: difficulties); he would approach them from behind while they were bending over, they said, always from behind, and even Aunt Lenchen had encounters of this kind with him, despite being ten years older and over seventy by the end. Even in later years, he would go up behind her and grab her around the bosom, following his inner nature as defined by God, even though it didn’t fit the context of either his life or Aunt Lenchen’s — they weren’t in the wild, after all. And that’s why, of course, there was an uproar whenever J complied with his inner nature and grabbed Aunt Lenchen around the bosom from behind, as if it belonged to him and he had the right to do so.

I never set foot in J’s bedroom. I doubt Aunt Lenchen ever did either. I presume that even J’s mother rarely set foot in there and only in genuine emergencies, perhaps because not even she was protected by the aforementioned awe that he held for her. He wouldn’t let anything touch his mother, but that wouldn’t necessarily have stopped him from touching her breasts. And so for her it was like having this billy goat as a son, still living under the same roof even though he was getting on in years himself, a billy goat who, although only on occasion, would jump around and onto people. His room was a kind of primal dark room in my consciousness. Even though I spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s house as a child, especially after the death of my great-grandmother Else, who took care of me in the first few years of my life, I can’t picture J’s room at all. I don’t know where the bed was, though there must have been one, and I don’t have a clue what else could have been in there. I simply can’t picture it. Venturing in there during the years of the stench would have been hell. I would have died of disgust. But I wasn’t scared of the room: given that setting foot in there was completely inconceivable, its existence, so to speak, fell completely under the threshold of my perception. It was there, and yet at the same time it wasn’t. Since J spent most of his time sleeping, it must have almost always been pitch black in there. Today, it’s my study. I’ve always written novels in there, but until now it had never occurred to me to write about my mentally-impaired-at-birth uncle J. About him and his room. About the house and the street. And about my family. And our gravestones. And the Wetterau, which is the whole world. The Wetterau, which for most people is named after an Autobahn service station, the A5 Wetterau service station, which is now being transformed into a bypass. When it comes to down to it, the Wetterau is a bypass with a service station attached. When I say that, people laugh. And yet it was once my home. My home, a road. And now I’m writing a bypass while they bulldoze my home into oblivion outside, and I’m starting with my uncle in his room. This is the beginning that everything else stems from. The room, the house, the place, the street, the towns, my life, the family, the Wetterau and everything else beyond it. My uncle, the only human being without guilt I have ever known. On his way into the real world, but with one foot still in paradise.

It wasn’t obvious straight away that my uncle had a disability (he had been delivered by forceps). He could speak without any difficulty, for example. Admittedly only in simple sentences, but then that could be said of everyone in the Wetterau. There were certain topics which always prompted him to speak up. J was constantly telling stories about the forest, about Forsthaus Winterstein, the gamekeeper’s lodge, and about the hunters. He could list all the deer antlers hanging on the walls in Jagdhaus Ossenheim, the hunting lodge. He knew his stuff, how stags were called according to the number of points on their antlers. J always wore a camouflage hunting parka too. Another thing he used to talk very enthusiastically about was the radio. Whenever something was being broadcast from a big city in Europe, he would stand there in front of the old box radio (a Telefunken), twiddle the tuning knob and pretend to be some technical pioneer, because my uncle remained a child throughout his whole life and was wildly enthusiastic about technical things — an enthusiasm which I held only at the very beginning of my life, and never to the same extent. At Christmas he would tune into Deutschlandfunk for the broadcast of the ringing of the bells of St. Stephen’s Dome in Vienna. Even as late as 1980, my uncle was standing in front of the radio listening to the bells of St. Stephen’s, like others had once stood in front of the television, over ten years before, for the moon landing. He would then call out in a reverent fashion, and as if we should all pay attention, The bells of St. Stephen’s Dome! We all humoured him by listening, but only ever for a few seconds. My uncle also liked standing in front of building sites and watching the machines and the workers. He never struck up a conversation with them, even though he would have loved to do so, to talk shop, as if he knew his stuff. He’d often seen these kinds of conversations on the premises of the family business: two or three workers standing around together and communicating entirely in vocabulary that was specific to the work or the machines or some technical process. To belong in this way was his life’s longing. Apparently he had been allowed to do a few odd jobs there when he was a boy, or so I hear. Filing, I assume, or running errands. I’ve been told that my grandfather even let him deliver pay packets. And yet allegedly, although I’m not sure at what point in time this was, my grandfather also beat him with a leather belt. My grandfather Wilhelm, the artistic man with the leather belt. That was always the first thing people said about my grandfather Wilhelm: Such an artistic man! He, the last artistic person in our family (he played the piano and studied architecture) and then I came along; I was seen as artistic too. Yes, that’s how they imagine artistic people to be — individuals like me or my grandfather (whom I never knew). Maybe the leather belt is even part of that for them, part of being artistic. My uncle wasn’t artistic, even though he loved folk music programmes very much, particularly Heino. Heino was someone who made my uncle happy, almost as happy as the dear Lord makes others. J’s eyes would light up when he listened to Heino, and his face would relax. My uncle spent most of the time with an expression of resentment on his face; after all, most of the time he was in a bad mood or about to have one of the choleric episodes which we children were so fond of provoking, despite the fact that they never ended well for us. But when he was standing in front of building sites or listening to Heino or watching folk music programmes, of which there weren’t many at the time, he was spellbound, in another world, just like when he was walking through the forest in his little hunting jacket. He would walk in this spellbound, alert way through the forest, like I did later. Uncle J is the only other person in our family who was able to identify different birds, that’s something we have in common. Maybe he wanted to belong there too: not to the wild animals, but to those who hunted them and knew them and were allowed to shoot them, unlike him. He was never allowed to hunt. Maybe J went to the forest in order to have some peace and quiet, from himself and from the probably eternally unwashed contents of his trousers, because in later years, as I already mentioned, he never showered, and always quickly contaminated everything with his stench. Although when I think about it now, what I was always told can’t be right. J must have washed now and again, even in later years, but not when he came back from his job at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, nor when he had slept in after his night shifts and came into the kitchen or living room, nor when he drove Oma to see us in Friedberg in his Nazi-brown VW. But he must have washed after that, before he went into the forest and then to the inn (or even when he just went straight to the inn).