The Room

4

J still has the whole afternoon in front of him, not to mention the evening. He’s just reached Bad Vilbel. The Wetterau is already gleaming in the distance, perhaps it’s a sunny day. The Nidda to the left, people out for a stroll, none of them have anything to do and they are already walking along the riverbank by three o’clock in the afternoon. Sometimes, J sees a brown hare. When he does, he almost jumps out of his seat, wishing he had his binoculars with him, but they’re too big to bring along. Old-fashioned binoculars, like the ones made for hunters or the military, worn-out and already stinking of my uncle (they’re in the cupboard in Uhlandstrasse today, and even now they still stink of him). You can see kingfishers there too. Even though the train is a good fifteen metres away from the Nidda, it’s possible to spot a kingfisher flying along the river bank without any trouble. Perhaps my uncle is standing by the window and waiting for the brown hare or kingfisher to appear. Perhaps it’s the year of the moon landing, when he had recently returned to the Wetterau, his home. I was two years old at the time. Germany in 1969, a country before the traffic system collapsed for the first time. A country without bypass roads. Every now and again, a horse and cart still winds its way down the country road. A few years later, there will only be cars.

It wouldn’t be long before they had little else in mind than driving cars, even on the moon. The seventh man on the moon was a motorist. First they just wanted to get to the moon, full-stop, but almost as soon as they were there, they wanted to drive an automobile too, and it didn’t take them long before they brought one with them. If they really wanted to bring something from Earth, they could have brought a cross, or a small church, collapsible like their automobile or lunar rover, they could have brought a Madonna figurine or relic, or at least the branch of some tree. But instead they brought cameras, golf clubs and cars. That’s what they were like.

People never know what to do when they arrive somewhere, whether that somewhere is at home or on the moon. It’s always the same with humans; whenever they go to a place, they need to bring something with them, so they can cope. There were only twelve of them up there, remember, and yet they still couldn’t cope. By the third or fourth moon landing they needed a car, whereas the first time they had been happy just to step outside at all. In the beginning they were still on foot, like my great-grandmother Else in Wetterau, who walked from Friedberg to Nieder-Mörlen day after day, seven kilometres there and seven kilometres back. In the beginning it was a step for mankind, and just three years later (which was already the end of moon exploration, they didn’t go back after that) it was a thirty-five kilometre sightseeing tour with a golf programme attached. They had to—wanted to — play golf even up there (or down there, depending on how you look at it). These are the pictures that mankind marveled at: two white figures in the bleakest wasteland you could imagine. So much so that it could even have been a film studio somewhere (one without enough sand to build a proper mountain). Two lonely human beings in the middle of Somewhere, reliant upon a makeshift device, a kind of stopgap in order to bridge the great loneliness until Being-Back-At-Home (although what was home to them?). All the Apollo rockets were discarded straight afterwards, that was part of it. They launch, then become waste. That’s how human beings think, that’s the way they build things. They feel bad about the birds in the Gospels because they don’t live like the birds in the Gospels, and perhaps this guilt leads them to emulate the birds, desiring flight, and in doing so they alienate themselves from the birds in the Gospels even further; that’s how everything always goes with us, in circles and downhill. And yet every day has its own burden, its own struggle. Downwards, that’s the direction we always go, even when we’re going up to the moon. Human beings in the most desolate of all wastelands, and us worshipping it on TV. If my uncle had had a space suit on, if he’d been on the moon, for him it might even have been superior to a successful mission with his tank division in the Russian campaign. I say might, because I’m not totally sure. My uncle sat in front of the TV for every moon landing, and so did I. I had just turned five and still remember it now; that although the whole moon exploration thing had only just started, they were already saying it was over. For me, the last so-called mission (a word which, as a child, I was more familiar with in a religious context), the launch probably my fourth already, was a routine matter. Meanwhile, my brother built model versions of the lunar rovers and the Apollo rockets, all of which could be assembled and disassembled in stages and had detachable land buggies, towering a metre high in his bedroom. The launch on TV, then the reports about the flight’s status, and everyone was bored by the third or fourth landing, and no one wanted to watch anymore, no one understood why it was still being reported on nonstop. I was only five, and even I was bored — although, of course, only because everyone else was bored. And it was the same on the moon too. So they had to get a lunar buggy up there quick, in order to be able to cope, and on Earth too they soon needed something completely different to the moon and the people on it. The moon landing business didn’t last long. A decade spent striving for it, just three years actually doing it, and then everyone was bored already, and even my uncle was back to finding the old Luis Trenker mountain rescue films more exciting than the moon landing transmissions and their expert panel discussions on ARD and ZDF. Even he was switching over. Even the 1960s crime series Stahlnetz, summa summarum, held out longer than the Apollo sequels. The moon, interestingly, wasn’t presented in a romantic way in any of the transmissions, if I remember correctly (despite — as people always said — all the lovers beneath it), because the Earth was suddenly being cast romantically instead, because people were seeing it for the first time. They saw the Earth for the first time, and everyone thought it would change everything, that it would change them, the onlookers, and that it would change the world (because they were looking at it), but of course it didn’t change a single thing. After all, it was only photography. It was only media. In 1969, people (we) saw the Earth from a distance for the first time, and everyone was astounded and said it was progress and suddenly thought the world was beautiful, much in the same way as they thought Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. The Earth was suddenly telegenic, it could suddenly be photographed; the magazines wanted it, a motif at last, the Earth as a motif, and so blue, and so white, and so beautiful. My mentally-impaired-at-birth uncle J wasn’t like that. He saw the pictures of the blue Earth as progress and nothing more, not confusing it with the German forests and suchlike, more interested in the model of camera that had been used to photograph the Earth from space than he was in the Earth itself. For others, it suddenly possessed the beauty of a swan. But J didn’t get his appreciation for nature from the TV, even though he did watch nature programmes. For my uncle, the Apollo rockets were a kind of Super VW Variant, and the idea that all of this could have had anything to do with birdsong and fields and meadows (as it seemed later for the disciples of the Apollo-created concept of the blue planet) hadn’t occurred to him, nor would he have understood it if it had. There was no TV in Forsthaus Winterstein at the time of the moon landings. The stags and the hares and the foxes didn’t have a clue about any of it anyway.

My uncle is arriving back in the Wetterau now. As always when you have just passed Bad Vilbel and are heading through Dortelweil, there’s this feeling that everything has suddenly gotten a little lighter, the skies a touch more blue. This is the Wetterau Blue, suddenly there to greet you (but only the Wetterauers can see it, and it takes years, I think — I grew up there, remember). Arrival in the Wetterau. A motorway with a bypass attached. And in summer it will be twice as bright, because of the rapeseed, and then it will be the corn, growing in the fields and becoming more and more yellow, even golden by the end. Shortly before summer draws to an end, Wetterau becomes this intensely yellow landscape with an intensely blue sky above it, and remember that the towns weren’t that big back then — even Friedberg was only half as big when they were driving around on the moon, something that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, merely imagined: Up there, at this very moment, they’re driving around in a buggy, then they’ll leave it there and fly off again, discarding the entire rocket, then fly forevermore through the universe and further and further away from the Earth and the Wetterau, which can’t be seen on any of the photos of the blue planet, they would need to be much closer for that. It’s only at the foothills of Taunus that it starts to become green again, where the forest begins, my uncle’s heartland. It’s now the brightest moment of the day outside, the tractors are being driven across the field, and of course my uncle only has eyes for them. He sees a particularly big tractor with three farmers standing around it (another one is in the process of driving a trailer away), but now the train has passed the field already, so my uncle has to crane his neck to be able to keep the big agricultural engine in his sights, and before long it’s gone. Scale models of these engines used to be in all the toy stores, for practice, a Fendt, a John Deere. You could play at being a Wetterau farmer with these toys at any time, even once the days when there was a chance you would actually have become a Wetterau farmer were long gone. You could use the little toy combine harvester (although for a child it seems huge, as big as a house) to mow over the grass in your front garden and imagine that the corn was shooting out of the duct at the top, straight down into the trailer. There would be a model trailer in the front garden too. And a tractor. Perhaps with a plough fixed onto the back, which in actual fact is pretty pointless because the tractor is supposed to drive the trailer onto the field to fetch the corn, not pick it, but when you’re a child you always want to do everything at the same time, so all the technology has to be attached to one and the same tractor if possible, making it into a Super Tractor, and preferably including the immense Weed Extermination Spraying Machine too. Sometimes they could even fly, these tractors. Before model aeroplanes reached the Wetterau on a mass scale, model tractors had to serve for flying purposes, at times even with the trailer attached, and the spraying machine too (which is ten or twelve metres wide, and even wider still as a toy model — the spraying machine alone practically looks like an aeroplane in its own right). And of course there are a growing number of little matchbox cars alongside these in the front garden, because driving was getting more important, even for children, and would soon replace everything else, in the Wetterau and beyond, long before the first bypass came. Even toy guns (“Bang bang, you’re dead!”) would be left lying around once model cars arrived. Soon everyone was driving, even in make-believe. In my childhood, before there was a bypass, Wetterau kids would sit around at home practicing for the future with model car racing tracks with double loops, to see who was quicker; we were already competing on the streets even in our own bedrooms, and today they’re all driving for real, and in a few weeks it will be finished, the bypass. But for now it’s still 1969, and my uncle is on the train. A small plane is flying up above, possibly en route from the former airfield in Ockstadt. That was another one of my uncle’s favourite places, the airfield with its viewing platform and adjoining beer hut, once the gliding club had moved from Ockstadt to the edge of the Bad Nauheim forest behind Johannisberg. You can run around between the covered and uncovered aeroplanes for as long as you want there, you can even touch them. The only thing my uncle can’t do is fly them, but at least he can admire the people who do. Or the way they drink a beer afterwards and tell their stories. There are lots of gliders in Bad Nauheim, from all over the region. There’s this special process whereby they get pulled up by a machine, connected to a cord that is then decoupled, and my uncle can happily watch it for hours on end, a manoeuvre in the air, collaborative, practiced to perfection. You stand or sit and wait for both engines to start, your concentration intensifying, sheer suspense once both of them are in the air, and then comes the moment when the cord is released, and the excitement gets released too, for everything has gone to plan, and the glider glides away to who knows where, maybe to the Palatinate, maybe to Thüringen or even to France. Power gliders don’t do this manoeuvre with the two planes, they ascend on their own steam instead, which isn’t really as interesting, but then again they have engines of their own and are practically aeroplanes anyway. J admires them because they have propellers, almost like a Messerschmidt from the war, or a Focke-Wulf. And so the little aeroplane flies towards my uncle and greets him, my uncle in the train from Frankfurt to Bad Nauheim. Has he ever flown in his life? I doubt it. He probably wasn’t granted that particular joy. I don’t know if he ever even saw the airport in Frankfurt, but if he did it would have been a big day for him, without a doubt. His mother never travelled by plane. Where would she have flown to? The only journeys she ever made in her life were to Freiberg, to see her sister and Aunt Lenchen. And she always went by train, without J. So it’s likely that my uncle never got to see the airport. But maybe he did, maybe they trekked back and forth out of pity because he was so desperate to go to the airport’s viewing platform, where you could see the jets taking off and landing and driving around, the big planes, the biggest of all. So there they stand on the viewing platform, a Boll day out with the son-in-law and the entire family in tow, as was the norm back then, and J was happy and buying postcards of the aeroplanes as a reminder of their wonderful day — look, the Boeing 737! In actual fact, it’s impossible to imagine that my uncle wasn’t aware of the existence of these planes. (The Boeing 747 didn’t exist back then. It wasn’t introduced until 1969, immediately becoming the favourite of all scale-model-enthusiast kids, and of humanity in general.)

And now the small aeroplane is gone too, and the train is approaching Karben, and Wöllstadt, and making its way on and on with my uncle in it, my uncle who won’t go to the airport today, nor see the big airliners, nor watch the transmission of the current moon landing flight, but he’s looking forward to what’s to come regardless, his time-off and the forest and the beer, and perhaps to eating something hearty later on, after his early dinner at home with his mother. Supper at the inn to round off the day. In Wöllstadt, a police car with its blue lights flashing drives past the window of the train (which is rolling slowly over a level crossing). My uncle observes all of this very closely, noting that everything has its importance and its function and is the way it is supposed to be: the train tracks, the signal at the crossing, the police car, he observes it all and pays attention to everything, in much the same way as others might gaze at a model railway, where everything has its particular significance, where everything you see is part of a plan and is the way it is supposed to be and always stays in order. Two trains could collide head-on there and no one would die. This is how my uncle travels through the Wetterau, as if it was his very own model railway world, and he doesn’t even need the model because for him the original itself is a model, and the same goes for the police car and its flashing blue lights. It’s one of those details that there is a great deal of effort behind — it doesn’t have to be there after all, the police car (with the flashing lights as a special feature), but it is, as if it had been especially selected from a catalogue (Fleischmann? Märklin?). And my uncle says to himself that it’s a very good thing it’s there, driving along outside right now. As if it was doing it just to please him. A world which is complete. With many details to be marveled at, all of them lovingly prepared, just like the way my uncle files his screws in the cellar, lovingly, with great care. Even the pistols in the policemen’s holsters (with small plates showing the brand name and exact cartridges to boot), and the holsters themselves are interesting details, worthy of observation and close study. J would have loved to have a holster like that, even just the holster by itself. He would have practically been a policeman with that holster. Perhaps that’s how it was: perhaps, for my uncle, being in the world was like standing in front of a big model railway. He must have spent most of his time living in an idyll. My uncle’s idyll, the kind that could only have existed in his forceps head. A few years later, my brother made a big model railway down in our basement, almost the whole of the Wetterau to scale. My uncle, on the other hand, stood before reality like a child even as an adult. As soon as he saw a police car with the flashing blue lights on, he would get all worked up. For him, the police must have represented a display of splendour, like the army, like the Wehrmacht, like the military parades he watched with such excitement on TV, where everything was about uniform and parade dress, cavalry and tank displays and the like, the monopoly of flashing lights. It probably didn’t even occur to my uncle to question where they were on their way to, the policemen there in Wöllstadt, because the only important thing was that they were driving and that they were policemen and that they had turned on the flashing lights, and this in itself made the world good and wonderful. My uncle, as I picture it (and I can’t picture it any other way, for I later experienced this with him many times), sees the police, and all is well with the world.

He’s arriving in Friedberg now. Passes over the big tunnel, the sugar refinery, the Hanauer Hof, he sees the Adolfsturm, the castle, the hill the castle is perched on, the old houses lining the railway embankment (where the new Friedberg car park is now, and even that has aged considerably in the last twenty years), and as the train curves around the bend, he sees the Karl Boll stonemasonry and is close enough to spit on his father’s head once again. If his father were still alive, that is, but he died in ’67, two years before the inauguration of the Boeing 747, when the much-longed for future became the present and people were finally able to get to wherever they wanted to go. The Boeing 747 was mankind’s dream. By then my grandfather, his father, was already beneath one of his own gravestones. No one from the family was left to engrave his name, because he was the last of the Boll stonemasons, so his name was engraved by the last-remaining workers instead.

My grandfather never lived to see the Boeing 747, and yet he still lived. He lived a whole life without the Boeing 747.

Now J’s sister is down there leading the business, so J could have spat on her head from up there too, although he would never have done so. After everything his sister had done for him! Now she is married and has three children and a lawyer husband and, as a result, even more authority than before. Now they are building their big house down there; J can see it, the foundations are being laid, the concrete is being poured, the apple trees are already gone and so are the stalls, no more chickens, no more having to slaughter the chickens yourself. Soon there will be a flower garden, the husband will subscribe to My Garden magazine and drive his company car out of the garage (which hasn’t yet been built) every morning and back into it every evening. The rest of the day will be spent in Frankfurt, where he spends every day. Besides which, since the death of the stonemason, he has been keeping everything in order for the whole family, including their entire estate. J has to get used to this now, the fact that there is another person commanding respect, the brother-in-law. He’s the boss now really. But by now the company grounds are out of sight and the train is making its way across fields again, and from the left-hand side window you can see far across the land all the way to Ockstadt (Are the cherries ripe, or is it already autumn?) and to the Taunus, to Rosbach, all small still, this is before the sudden increase in population. They are still closer to the war and the past than they are to us, to the future. Only twenty-four years have passed since that era, the time that would never come again, because suddenly no one wanted it. A lot of things still look like they did back then, though. Until recently, even the business looked almost the same as it did back then. Only when his sister gets married does the future begin in earnest (in just five years’ time the business won’t even exist anymore, and today there are rows of white houses with red-tiled roofs there, like in the model railway catalogue, and now almost all of the Wetterau looks like that). But Ockstadt is still small in the distance for now, and Rosbach can hardly be made out, and in between there are fields or a few trees, and far beyond, although you’d have to lean out of the train window to see, the pig pasture with the apple trees would come into view, in the middle of the landscape between Friedberg and Ockstadt, shiny red apples which the Ockstadt residents will shake down when September draws to an end. Or perhaps it’s spring, and the apple trees are just beginning to bloom white and pink. And now my uncle’s train arrives, punctual to the minute, in the spa town of Bad Nauheim, which once played host to the Tsar and Einstein and Empress Sissi, and where my uncle was practically Elvis Presley’s next-door neighbour for many years, just two houses down, and Heino was here too, and now the rest of my uncle’s day begins. A long evening off after his early afternoon finish.