The Room

3

Sometimes I think that, at least in certain respects, J had no powers of recollection. He remembered some things, of course. If not, he wouldn’t have been able to learn anything. He passed his driving test, though it was very different back then. In the cellar, he knew which screwdriver to pick up for which screw (even if nothing constructive followed from this, only the sham which I already mentioned). And of course he spoke often and at length about what he had experienced the day before in Forsthaus Winterstein or in Jagdhaus Ossenheim or in the Goldenen Fass or Schillerlinde — in other words, about who had been there and what they had said. But it seems to me that, in certain spheres of my uncle’s experience, his ‘memory’ was completely suppressed. Especially when something bad happened to him. Like when we tormented him in the TV room, working him up into a frenzy (this was a word I always heard used in connection with my uncle. You’ve worked him up into a frenzy again, Grandmother would say.), and he would lose control and run after us, intent on lashing out. But once the frenzy was extinguished, it wasn’t just that it seemed like it had never happened — he was as gullible around us as he had been in the beginning. He would trust us again, make the same mistakes, and so it would start all over again, as if the last time had never existed. I imagine it was the same with his father and the leather belt, and that must be one of the reasons why Uncle J, throughout his whole life, never had a bad word to say about his father. He beat J and despised him, or so I’ve been told, but in the moment that the beating took place, it was as if it hadn’t, as if it hadn’t been registered, and nothing would remain but a sneaking fear, a certain caution forevermore. For J, this was probably just respect. At school, things must have been particularly bad. He was as thin as a line of pencil, his legs barely had any shape, his arms were like sticks and the damaged head perched on top of his body was much too big, yet he would stand with gullibility and devotion next to people who had been kicking him the day before, as if their lives were at stake, whereas in actual fact it was his. He always latched on to his oppressors, unfortunately — they had power over him, and he was full of respect for any form of power, in awe of it; power was natural authority, and to subordinate oneself to it was as a matter of order, discipline, a way of fulfilling one’s role, as a lower-ranking member of society, as it were, a position he always assumed. The schoolyard was a Wehrmacht system in miniature. Oh how he worshipped and idolised them, authority figures! This loyalty only made his schoolmates lash out more, of course. Here was someone who willingly offered himself up as a victim, every day, and the more they beat and kicked him, the more loyal he became. This was new to them. It was too much. And so they had no choice but to keep beating him. Perhaps they didn’t do it consciously, perhaps they just couldn’t resist this oh-so-weak character, perhaps his weakness spurred them on. Their beatings were almost automatic. He would be there again the next day, after all, trotting along behind them like a dog. Perhaps they could have been used as case studies, for research into what it means to torment living things (my uncle, in this context, but it could just as easily have been a worm) and to take pleasure in doing so. But at least he had his siblings. His sister, in particular, could become a real termagant when it came to exacting revenge for her older brother, and would indulge in beatings and kickings of her own, something which won her a great deal of respect at school (later, she took over his inheritance, authorised by a notary with the agreement of my father). As far as J’s schoolmates were concerned, it of course meant that they would then seek their revenge on him as soon as she was gone. The next day, they would beat him twice as hard. But he forgot about even that quickly. Eventually, he was carted off to the Rhineland in an attempt to save him from his peers. After the beatings, it was always as if someone had reset a part of his being to its original state, before guilt or violence, when there were just the forceps and his mother, the two primordial motifs in his life. Whether he was hitting us in a frenzy or being beaten by his father or the Bad Nauheimers decades before, not feeling anything except the ongoing humiliation, immediately afterwards he would once again be like a child in whose world nothing bad had yet happened. When I was a teenager, I always imagined that was how someone on a killing spree would be: feeling like everything is normal immediately after the act, or rather forgetting everything instantaneously, innocent as a new-born baby, except now there’s a mountain of corpses in the background that they can’t quite understand. In my uncle’s case, the mountain of corpses would have been us, the family, and perhaps the whole of Bad Nauheim, maybe even all of the Wetterau if he had possessed an adequate weapon. And afterwards he would stand there in front of the mountain of corpses, waiting once again, waiting for someone to tell him what happens next. Admittedly, my uncle was one of the very few people without a natural tendency towards sadism. The urge to torture people for entertainment and pleasure — I just didn’t get that vibe from him. If Pupil X was lying on the ground and there was an opportunity, amidst all the commotion, to give him a final kick in the side without any chance of being called to account, then J wouldn’t have done it. He wouldn’t have had any inclination to do so, it would have seemed just as foreign to him as a Wagner opera or a complicated arithmetic problem. It simply wasn’t something that fit into his world. It was far preferable to be saving someone on a mountain. Or on the high seas. Or his comrades in Russia (the comrade could get into the tank with him and J would reach his lines safely and bravely; then rapport, praise and high accolades, even medals). Nor can I imagine him dissecting insects or songbirds for fun, or, as was the rage in our neighbourhood back then, throwing guinea pigs against the wall to see what happened… a veritable sport amongst children in the early 1970s, when guinea pigs were in fashion. Almost all the guinea pigs in my neighbourhood had death sentences, that is if there were children in the families that owned them. But there always were — children were the only reason why anyone ever bought guinea pigs in the first place. If the parents went out for dinner, to the first Italian restaurant in Friedberg or the first Yugoslavian place or perhaps even just to the Schillerlinde or the Goldenen Fass, then back at home the guinea pigs would be flying against the wall. You couldn’t tell what had happened by looking at them afterwards, they were just dead. The parents took the sudden expiration of the guinea pigs to be a kind of natural, spontaneous death, as if the guinea pig had a limited shelf-life, one attributable to the breed. As if they had to be constantly prepared for its inevitable death, on standby to buy a new one. Almost every time I went to the house of one of my neighbours or fellow pupils, there would be a new guinea pig. In other houses, rabbits perished instead. A neighbour’s son would pick them up by the tail (maybe even by the hind legs, I can’t remember exactly), swing them around through the air and fling them against the garage wall. Blood tended to flow with this method, for the wall was roughly plastered, and while he was swinging it around, the rabbit would collide with the plaster, whether this was intentional or not. Afterwards, they would simply wash the wall down. And that’s without even mentioning the dozens of pet birds which were swept away by the children in my neighbourhood; in other words, by human beings. There seemed to be a kind of generational treaty between the parents and the children, as if the point of having pets was so that children could practice something they would need to do later as adults. It was a massacre, like in the civil war, or perhaps a kind of substitute for it, as if violence was an inevitable component of being human, which they maybe believed even if they didn’t say it. No, my uncle only ever got aggressive and lashed out when he was reacting to something; it had to be preceded by some external stimulant. It was predominantly during the second half of his life that he had a tendency to lash out when he was tormented too much, but by then it was only us tormenting him, us kids, for the Bad Nauheimers were no longer laying into him. And in just the same way as he swiftly erased the beatings from his memory, both those he received and those he distributed, he also forgot with equal swiftness, I imagine, everything he did which contravened the law. For this reason, I never picture my uncle as someone who spent lengthy minutes of his life plagued by a guilty conscience, regardless of what he may have done. It was his nature that had made him that way. Of course he knew about rules and moral codes, like the codes of decorum that he always linked with his mother; in other words, that one should always be orderly and respectable and not bring any shame upon the family. But because he was so helpless, he inevitably foundered, again and again. Admittedly he did it in his own way, not in the normal way, because my uncle was nothing like normal people, whether you see the thing with the forceps as good fortune or misfortune. Others always sought allies in their dirty dealings and made an outlet for themselves by becoming smutty. My uncle wasn’t one for smutty fraternisation, not even at the inn. I don’t think that kind of thing even existed in his world. And if it did, it would only have been yet another way of trying to belong. He couldn’t tell jokes either. In actual fact, the only thing he could ever talk about was his enthusiasm for things. And that’s why I see my uncle as someone who, as he heads home from Frankfurt, has been reset to zero and is looking forward to the forest and the beer that will follow it, an orderly daily routine, the way it’s supposed to be, and his mother should know because then she’ll be content and reassured. Now he stands there like a child, in the train which arrived and departed punctually, a child completely at ease, knowing that he’s done everything right with regard to his closest care-giver, the one he’s eternally connected to, his mother; J here in the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, she in the kitchen in Bad Nauheim, and yet no further away from each other than a duckling from its mother on the expansive Bad Nauheim pond, constantly within hearing range. The ducks don’t need to see each other, because they can call out. In this way, a duckling is constantly under supervision and feels secure and protected by its mother, and that’s how it was with my uncle too — his mother was always present in his mind, and he wanted to always be proper and decent before her. Even though he may have often done the exact opposite. From what I know of him, this was his only happiness, his only true happiness, right up until his mother’s death: obeying her, a woman who wanted nothing more from him than that he stay respectable and not put anyone to shame and, above all, look after himself. Presumably, she would have preferred to never let him out of the house, out of fear for what might happen to him. Because, of course, she knew him very well, it’s just that not everything was spoken aloud. Some things never were, not until the death of all concerned, and the fact that they took these things with them to the grave unsaid, this was probably the only choice they had.

Things must have been different with his father. After coming back from the Rhineland, J had to help out in the business, under his father’s supervision, a man who allegedly viewed him with disapproval. After completing his tasks, J would set off to walk the three kilometres home to neighbouring Bad Nauheim, taking the same path I have often taken during the last ten years in remembrance of him (or as his revenant), past the Kühlen Grund and then through the floodplain along the Usa, our river, right along to the allotment gardens in Nauheim. If someone wanted to take this route today, they wouldn’t be able to, because the main artery of the bypass runs there now. My uncle used to walk there (back when this there still existed) to get home, the home that my grandfather was driving towards in his car at the exact same time. I don’t know what model car he had, for it was long before my day. Back then, after the Rhineland, my uncle got taller and taller, seventeen or eighteen years old by then, but his legs were still so thin, as if they could barely hold him up and were about to snap. His ears jutted out from his head, as if they wanted to escape, in the same way his eyes did. And so he would walk his daily kilometres through the Wetterau countryside, across the meadows and the fields that the farmers had sewn, gradually becoming accustomed to it; he must have gotten his enthusiasm for nature from somewhere, after all, or had he simply been born with it? Perhaps it was his father’s alleged (I don’t know for sure, after all, I just heard about it) hate for him that led him to the Usa, the Wetterau and the forest, and from there perhaps to Heino and German music and Luis Trenker, mountain rescue, the Wehrmacht, heroic pilots and heroic generals and the great old days in general (which no one spoke of anymore by that point, something which J was only ever able to accept without really understanding). And because there were times in his younger days when he was excluded, presumably he found peace out there from many things, and ultimately from himself. In this respect, his father had even more of an influence on him than his mother, for his father gave him a world, the daily three kilometres, and with it perhaps the whole of the Wetterau right up to Forsthaus Winterstein, which J would escape to, just as I would later escape to the cemetery whenever J came to our house in Friedberg and I could no longer breathe, and as a result I spent every weekend learning the inscriptions on the gravestones off by heart. J’s mother, on the other hand, was always just the home and the law. And yet if there had only ever been her, he wouldn’t have had anything to flee from. Three kilometres, my uncle alone with himself every day, at seventeen, eighteen years of age, and maybe he saw his first kingfisher there, maybe it was where everything started for him, and in the inns he was allowed to drink beer, which he probably wasn’t allowed to do at the family business, on the crane, in the halls, in the driver’s cabins, and so in the inns he could still somehow be one of the Boll stonemasons. During these three kilometres (there was an inn along the route, Zum Kühlen Grund), he got to know the flowers and animals as well as the beer and the inn, perhaps as practically one and the same from the very beginning (he always preferred going to inns that you needed to go through a forest to reach). Later on, hunting became the sum of them both. A hunter goes into the forest, then to the forest inn. Perhaps the best possible combination for my uncle. Perhaps the best things in the world, hunting and the forest inn.