The Room

5

J arrives in a town which is in gentle decline. The Tsar came here once and disembarked in the same train station, and they built his very own Tsar spa for him which no one else was allowed to enter (although today it’s a sightseeing destination). Unfortunately, just a few years later the Tsar was dead, shot in Russia. Even today, people in Bad Nauheim talk about him as if they knew him personally, as if they had been next-door neighbours, like my uncle and Elvis Presley. They talk of how the Tsar’s son would ride through the spa gardens on his bicycle, dressed completely in white… how the Tsar and his family would be driven along the promenade in their regal carriage… such a nice, friendly man, although you couldn’t get anywhere near him, he was a Tsar after all, always flanked by bodyguards… And which cafés did he go to? Did he go to Mirwald (Was it already there back then?), did he go to Café Müller on Aliceplatz (Weren’t there pictures of him on the wall there?), or did he stay away from cafés? Did he drink cider? Perhaps he had an official taster drink the cider first, or one of his bodyguards, in order to make sure it wasn’t an attack on the bodily integrity of the Tsar… And then they would subject the bodyguard to close inspection, observing what happened, what the cider did to him. No adverse effects yet? Then quickly pour another glass (half a pint) down him. Keep watching! There he sits, the bodyguard, the Russian, in Bad Nauheim in the Wetterau (it had already been a spa town for over half a century by then), perhaps on a chair or just a wooden stool, or maybe he had to stand and pay attention to what was happening inside him, because he doesn’t know what it is, after all, this cider, maybe a Bad Nauheim resident concocted it in order to kill them all, the entire Tsar family, and maybe all the Bad Nauheimers have made a pact and are acting as if they always drink this cider, whereas in actual fact it’s poison. And now he’s jumping up to his feet, the bodyguard, his hand already at the waistband of his trousers, and running away, where are the water closets here? He runs off, so quickly. And the Tsar will be advised to never drink cider in his life. But just a few years later he’s dead anyway, and in Bad Nauheim they mourn him; it was only just recently that he was walking around here, after all, through the gardens. The poor Tsar. No one knew him. Everyone speaks of him. A public figure. What would Bad Nauheim be without its public figures? Like the depressive Sissi, who no one was allowed to photograph — she was so old by then that she had forbidden all photography. She lived in Burgallee, on the spot where today there’s a four-storey concrete building. So there my uncle stands at the train station where the Tsar once stood, looking out across the courtyard and its two mineral springs to the Johannisberg, just like the Tsar once did. The right-hand side of the Johannisberg is adjoined by the Frauenwald forest, where my uncle loves going. The Winterstein rises up to the left — maybe the broadcasting tower was already on it in ’69. Whenever my uncle turns on the TV, it fascinates him to know that the picture is being broadcast from the Winterstein. He even enjoys the service interruptions, because that’s when the test picture appears, and he can imagine them starting to work away up there in an industrious and expert manner so that service can be duly restored to the broadcasting area. But there is one thing on the Winterstein that is even more important than this, even more important than the telecommunicative, expert, uninterrupted supply of programmes from ARD and ZDF to the entire broadcasting area from afternoon to late evening, and that is Forsthaus Winterstein, half way up the mountain and not visible from down here at the station. In winter, the only thing you can see from here in the courtyard is spray and steam, because both the springs are hot ones. One rises up to a greater height than the other. Without these two springs (Does my uncle know this?), nothing would have become of Bad Nauheim, without them Empress Sissi would never have come, without them Einstein would never have taken part in congresses here, without the two springs the Tsar would never have come to Bad Nauheim with his family, nor would Hans Albers, the American army would never have built the radio station here, Bad Nauheim would never have been occupied by them, for that matter, and Elvis Presley would never have stumbled out of the train, roaring drunk, three kilometres away in Friedberg before taking up residence first in a hotel suite in Bad Nauheim, then in an apartment directly opposite my uncle’s bedroom. Bad Nauheim would have just been Nauheim, without the ‘Bad’ prefix, which it could only possess as a spa town. And yet all of them would have lived their lives regardless, somehow, they would still have come into the world and departed it again, and if Bad Nauheim hadn’t been a spa town back then, perhaps those forceps would never have been placed on my uncle’s head. His world would have been a different one. Now, at the end of the ’60s, hardly anyone famous ever comes here anymore. Most of the guests walk around in casual grey-beige tones. In my uncle’s day, Bad Nauheim’s public image was defined by spa guests with health insurance. The spa guests sit around on benches, sometimes for half the day even — Bad Nauheim is littered with benches. Sitting down is the primary occupation of the spa guest. Even the courtyard is constructed like one great big seat; you can sit there in the shade of the art nouveau arcade and watch the fountains as they fount. Walk over to the mineral springs, get a glass of fizzy water (Not too much! Measure it precisely! Otherwise you might fall over!), then sit down in the spa water enclosure and either just lounge around or listen to the spa orchestra as they play Hungarian melodies, like they did in the Tsar’s day, except now with an electronic bass and a smaller ensemble. Maybe there are even percussion instruments. But only played with a wire brush, so as not to be too loud. Just a gentle background beat, music you can doze off to. If only the water didn’t taste so horrible. But that’s all part of the spa experience. And to make up for it, you get to go to the Deutsche Haus in the evening and drink cider. A cider and a shot of Wacholder juniper gin for sure, then another shot with the innkeeper, and finally another shot to toast the beautiful town of Bad Nauheim. Every evening is free of supervision or treatments, and you regularly drink yourself under the table. But before that, as a spa guest, you take one more trip to the graduation tower. There, you meet your spa neighbours or your new spa best friend or a new spa guest. Settle down in front of the graduation tower and take a deep breath. The air is saline. Two hours a day, preferably more. And anyone who has ticked everything off their to-do list feels all the more calm and content for it as they make their way to the local dance establishment or to have a cider or — if they’re not in a sociable mood — back to one of the many spa bed and breakfasts, like the one where my grandmother, Uncle J’s mother, used to work back in the early days, for her mother had one named Pension Augusta right in front of the spa gardens, and the Tsar used to drive past whenever he was heading off in his carriage. Or perhaps the guests might go into the common room and watch TV. Is there another moon landing today? And so my uncle stands there in the train station of the town which, at that time, is occupied and owned by an army of sandal-wearing spa guests. They socialise even at the station, heading there to fetch cigarettes or perhaps a magazine, because by late in the evening most of them will be alone, their wives in Düsseldorf or Nuremberg or Moers, but there’s room service in almost every B&B, and they quickly catch on to the fact that they have to keep things (in other words, life) a secret even there, for none of them have a dark room like my uncle’s. They come to Bad Nauheim, and soon they are longing for life again, from the magazines to their new spa best friends and dance establishments, regardless of in what order.

Having exuded a noticeable smell for hours now, my uncle heads off on his eight-minute journey home with a certain sense of importance. He feels this sense of importance because he has been to work, a completely normal working day, he earns his money just like everyone else and is practically a civil servant, he could almost wear a uniform, and if he were to go to the postal depot in Bad Nauheim he would feel like he’s amongst colleagues, and would long to talk shop with them (which, admittedly, the postal workers in Bad Nauheim would never have understood, not realising that he worked in a postal depot too). And also because, for today, he has earned what is about to come, in other words his evening off, in an orderly and exemplary and proper fashion. And his mother will be content (He wasn’t in the Kaiserstrasse district, after all! Or maybe he was, but just very briefly, in and out in a matter of moments, and no one knows about that anyway, even he has already forgotten about it, as if it never happened. And did it really?). Isn’t that how his father came back from work too? Proud, that’s the way to come home from work, with your head held high. The day’s work is done. Just like the mountain rescue team coming home from the mountain. And now he’s heading home. They’re expecting him. He who works has someone waiting for him at home. He strides towards Uhlandstrasse, all manner of things on his mind, imagining his life to be successful and normal and exemplary and, just like every day as he makes his way home from his shift, enamoured by the fact that he’s making his way home from his shift. All the way from Frankfurt, where thousands stream past him on a daily basis, unoccupied, and yet he has his job and his function. Everything needs to work properly, and it does. Everything in its place, including him. The time back before the family sent him to Frankfurt, that’s long forgotten now. Uncle J, an individual with a function and purpose, just like anyone else. That’s what I imagine him to be thinking as he strides home.

My uncle opens the front door in Uhlandstrasse like a family man returning from the workplace. The man is in the house. The only one now, for the big company boss, Wilhelm Boll, has been dead for two years. This is how J comes home. As if everything, at least once, could have been good and proper for him: He, the man in the house, and later he’ll get the Variant out of the garage (preferably at least half an hour before he needs it, because then it will be ready), and then he’ll drive to Forsthaus Winterstein to sit with the men, drink beer and listen to their stories, as if he were part of it all.

As if, just the once, everything could have been good and proper.

Except, unfortunately, there wasn’t just the matter of the forceps; there was the small matter of other people too.

His brother-in-law is there. With J’s younger sister, his wife. His brother-in-law, the lawyer. His brother-in-law has been there a lot recently, since J’s father died. They’re everywhere now, and already have three children (of which I am one). It wasn’t that long ago that none of them were there, and now they’re suddenly there and part of everything. It wasn’t that long ago that it was just the sister, and now there are five. They’ve multiplied by five. They are a family in their own right now. At a specific point in the family tree, a new family sprouted out, and they are now the proper family. Because suddenly, in the blink of an eye, there are hardly any Bolls left. J’s grandfather Karl died two years ago, followed just a few months later by his father, Wilhelm, which makes it two Bolls less. And now his sister has a different name. Which, in a way, makes it three less. So now the only ones who remain are his mother and younger brother. For the first time in his life, J starts to get an idea of what the future means. Before, everything was essentially always the same: there was the family, the father Wilhelm, the grandfather Karl, the house, the room and the business, where his father had always been the boss and his grandfather the senior boss. And he was always there and amongst it all, sometimes in the house in Bad Nauheim, sometimes in the business. After all, he’s only been going to Frankfurt since his father died and his brother-in-law started having the final say, his brother-in-law and his sister. The brother-in-law procured the job in Frankfurt for him almost as soon as his father died. At long last, even J had to have a respectable role somewhere. And with his brother-in-law’s extensive contacts, one was found. His father would never have managed to do that. Finding work in Frankfurt — before the brother-in-law, the family’s horizons hadn’t stretched far enough for that kind of thing. Almost as soon as the brother-in-law came on to the scene, everything changed. In fact, there’s so much to organise that he’s there almost every day now. Documents to be read, files to be opened, letters to be read. Things have to be kept in order, with the family estate too, because someone has to do it after all. His sister is managing the gravestone business now, she’s the boss. And the brother-in-law takes care of everything else. They’re already building a house. There’s never been anyone like him in the family before. Where would they be without the brother-in-law? And now that J has finished his working day and come home, the brother-in-law is here, and J goes automatically into a kind of bowed-head posture, like he always does when he sees his brother-in-law. Much like he did when his father addressed him. Every time J sees his brother-in-law, he expects to receive an order. For ever since the brother-in-law has been part of the family, there’s always something to do. The father and the grandfather have to be replaced, and the brother-in-law is delegating their tasks. He has a business-like air about him most of the time, because he always has something in mind: the next task. After all, he has to lead the whole family now. It came about in a natural way and developed as such: he is now the head of the family, albeit tacitly. And, technically speaking, he doesn’t order people to do things. It’s just that he’s always right, with everything he says and delegates, for he sees things clearly and knows how things need to be done. Life consists of tasks (not of Forsthaus Winterstein), particularly when you have a family of five and another family to maintain, namely that of his mother-in-law. If that’s the case, you must have the next goal in mind at all times. There’s no other way! And what a family he comes from! J has seen the building in Frankfurt, the Financial Governing Authority building, and it’s one of the biggest and most modern buildings he ever saw in his life. He has never seen anything like it, the immense hallways and stairways leading every which way, like a kind of centre of the world where everything is regulated and in order and kept in motion and where everything works, because everyone is in their place and everyone knows it. And somewhere in the middle of this immense building sits the boss of all it all, the Chief Finance President. The first president J has ever met. The Chief Finance President first came to the Wetterau and Bad Nauheim ten years ago, at the end of the fifties, all the way to the Uhlandstrasse residence, in order to support his son’s courtship of the daughter of the Karl Boll stonemasonry family. A tall man with a company car. The car had four standards, the like of which no one in the Uhlandstrasse house had ever seen before. The Chief Finance President (my grandfather on my father’s side) worked closely with the American military administration. I still remember the photos, from a time when J, in his late twenties, must have felt like he had died and gone to heaven, for they pictured him side by side with high-ranking US military men who were dripping with medals, in Bad Nauheim and in the midst of the homeland which was now part of the big wide world, and they had given back the house in Uhlandstrasse — it had been seized, and the family had only been able to move back from Friedberg into the restored, restituted house a few years before. There he sits, J, a scrawny sight with his huge ears and black-as-night eyebrows, the same greasy side parting that he always had as a child, and now he’s a child once more amongst all the Americans, and in awe and permitted to be part of it. All of a sudden this Chief Finance President has opened up their world in a way they could never have imagined possible, and while just moments ago they were still occupied and expelled, now they are sitting cosily around the table with the highest-ranking members of the regional American military administration, under whose supervision the whole country — and everything for that matter — was re-built. Some of them are even carrying weapons. They drive up in Jeeps, they have bodyguards. Real-life, genuine bodyguards clad in bulletproof vests. Bodyguards at the front door of Uhlandstrasse 18! The centre of the world. Or perhaps it’s the Chief Finance President’s birthday and they all go to Frankfurt am Main, the sister, the little brother, the mother and the father, and sit in a huge auditorium, and then there are even more, even higher-ranking American military personnel, and my uncle amongst them all. The photographs are stowed away in the bookcase in the living room at Uhlandstrasse, neatly pasted into albums and solemnly labeled—with General Smith, Grillparzerstrasse, 25.4.59; with General Miller, High Commander of so and so, garden at Grillparzerstrasse, 18. May 1959—with white chalk handwriting against black or dark brown mounting paper. My uncle is pictured in many of them. It was an important time. Usually, as I already mentioned, he never liked Americans.

Now the brother-in-law is standing in the hallway, the sister carrying me in her arms. And my uncle comes in and sees us right away. His sister greets him in a friendly manner, but she doesn’t have much time and needs to tend to me; perhaps I need to be taken somewhere, to a check-up, perhaps I have a tooth coming through that needs to be looked at. Or she needs to go shopping for something and has me with her. And now, today of all days, J’s mother needs to go to the hairdresser because of some engagement she has that afternoon. And she has to go shopping too. Or perhaps she has to tend to something at the cemetery in Friedberg. Flowers need to be fetched from Blumensiebert, and the watering can needs to be taken, to water the flowers around the grave, for they didn’t make it there yesterday, nor the day before yesterday, nor the day before that (after all, with the business and three children, they have a lot on their hands), and so J is the only one who can do it today, as his mother has to go to the hairdresser’s and his sister really needs to get back to work or go to the dentist and so on.

So the brother-in-law says: J, pop over to Friedberg to Blumensiebert, could you, take the flowers to the cemetery and tend to the grave, and pick up your sister from work, and then you can give your mother a lift to the hairdresser, she has an appointment at half past five. It’s not like you have anything else to do, and you’ve got the whole afternoon free. Sometimes, J makes the mistake of mumbling that he was in fact planning to go to Forsthaus Winterstein. But you go to Forsthaus Winterstein often enough, you can’t go every day, and if you really have to then you can go later. Do you really have to go there so often? the brother-in-law asks, a question which not even J’s own father had asked. The brother-in-law has no interest whatsoever in Forsthaus Winterstein and such things. He wouldn’t have time for it anyway and is about to head off again now, and already the little scene in the hallway is being wound up, the brother-in-law and sister leave, and J stands there with his back hunched. His eyebrows pull together into a frown, his eyes narrow into slits, and out of his mouth escapes the well-known hiss, so filled with hate it’s as though he’s about to pick up the nearest knife and run from the house to kill, massacre and painstakingly slaughter everyone in the Wetterau, cutting them all up into equally sized pieces. Now he goes to his mother, my grandmother, who as usual is in the kitchen preparing some food, perhaps pot roast for the weekend or coffee for J, or maybe she’s preserving or bottling something. As long as no one else overhears, he can complain to his mother (my grandmother). He really wanted to go to Forsthaus Winterstein, he says, the hunters have been there all week, and he’d been looking forward to it so much, since the weekend even, and he hadn’t been able to go to Forsthaus Winterstein the day before either, because he had to wash the car and pick up his sister from the beautician, and there was always something he had to do when he wanted to go to Winterstein, and he was always the one who had to do it, because he was always the one that had to do everything. I could explode with anger, he says, stamping on the floor. I heard him say that many times, and remember thinking that there was a strange contradiction between the degree of his anger and the eloquence of the phrase: I could explode with anger. And he always meant it, I believe, in a completely literal sense. The brother-in-law comes and says what’s going to happen, he always comes and says what’s going to happen, but I’ve been looking forward to this all week, and I already said yesterday and the day before yesterday that I wanted to go to Forsthaus Winterstein today, that I really wanted to. His mother calms him down by saying that he can just go to Forsthaus Winterstein two hours later than planned, and that he can stay later to make up for it, so it isn’t that bad after all. At that moment, J realises that it isn’t that bad after all, and that in all likelihood he wouldn’t have set off until around six or half six anyway (he wanted to go to Frauenwald first, just briefly, for a quick jaunt around the ski meadows, maybe see a hare or even a deer, which he could then transform into the ‘umpteenth’ stag). J sits down, lets his apron-clad mother pour him a coffee and place a slice of Madeira cake in front of him, then says, waving the fork around and looking at her like a philosopher who has just had some great insight: If I pick Ursel up at five, then I can be up at Frauenwald around quarter past six and on the Winterstein by half seven, eight at the latest. Excellent, so that’s all sorted then, says his mother, you’ll have a good two hours in the Forsthaus. Then I can stay there at least two hours, says J. Enthusiastic and cheerful all of a sudden, he says that he hadn’t wanted to stay longer than that anyway, because tomorrow he needs to get up at three to go to Frankfurt. In that case, says his mother (my grandmother, and I’m not there because I’m in my mother’s arms in the company car that belongs to my father, on the way to the dentist in Frankfurt and perhaps to the business too and to the building site of the house, and I can’t even talk yet, I haven’t even uttered a single sentence in my life by this point, and yet it’s impossible to imagine any of this happening in any other way), then in that case you should have a lie down now, and in an hour’s time drive to Friedberg to Blumensiebert, go to the cemetery, then pick up Ursel, take her home, then pick me up and drop me off at the hairdresser. After all, Ursel has done so much for you, and her husband does so much for us, we should be happy, because where would we be without Ursel’s husband, now that all the men are dead? And J drinks his coffee and eats the Madeira cake and has forgotten about everything already (just a moment ago he was a patriarch, and now he’s J. Boll again).

J stirs a spoonful of refined sugar into his coffee with condensed milk, which is a very similar colour to his shirts and his Variant, then stirs in a second spoonful, as heaped as he can make it, carefully guiding the spoon from the sugar bowl to the coffee cup, then a third, and to finish off another two, until the coffee is transformed into a kind of syrup, like it always is when Uncle J drinks it. His mother is standing at the stove. She was always in an apron back then, just like all the female inhabitants of the Wetterau. Only when Elvis was there did she briefly lay the apron aside, but afterwards she put it back on, and there it stayed until the ‘90s. Most of her aprons had an intricate pattern, often a flowery one and mostly blue, grey and lilac, so stains from the housework didn’t show up. But the aprons were washed every day anyway. My mother, too, had an extensive selection of aprons at her disposal. She would wear one even when she popped over to see a neighbour. Each morning, a gathering of apron-clad women would assemble in the streets, each in front of their own front door or at the neighbour’s garden gate, soon huddling into little groups of three or four. There would be one of these groups every twenty metres or so. My grandmother always wore an apron in the house in Uhlandstrasse, just as Aunt Lenchen always wore an apron when she came from Friedberg to help out in the house, and Däschinger the seamstress wore an apron, and the cleaning lady wore an apron, and this apron-clad army would make its way through the house, ensuring discipline and order. They didn’t leave a single spot untouched, tending to every last nook and cranny, as well as to my uncle’s stench. The upper arms protruding from their aprons were always bare and, on the older women, fat and fleshy. Whenever I saw them I was always reminded of the joints of meat on display at Blum’s Butchers, or of the loaves of bread at the bakery, except that the latter were fresh, in contrast to the arms, which were already in a state of decomposition and had orange-peel skin. By the end of her life, my grandmother’s arms were so thin that she could barely lift the pans in the kitchen anymore, and yet she would still wear aprons, albeit three sizes smaller. But right now she is standing there at the stove, still comparatively healthy and lively, and Uncle J is solemnly telling her stories about his working day. A shipment arrived from Chile. He says the word with a sense of awe, as if it were something very important. Chiii — le! Emphasising the i. The word an exclamation of excitement in itself. The big wide world, and my uncle there and part of it all, a central hub even. Or maybe it was from Lisbon, which he murmurs in awe. A package from Liiiis-bon direct to Friedberg-Ockstadt. What could it be? Something from Lisbon, a city that everyone knows, to Ockstadt in Kirschendorf, a place that only we Wetterauers know! What could it be? It must be something, says my grandmother, it has to be something. Yes, says my uncle thoughtfully, waving his spoon around and staring out of the window at the street. There are no cars out there, because the traffic jams are yet to come, and the literary quarter where the house is located is still peaceful; hardly anyone ever drives through. And so they talk, and later, after the third cup of milky coffee and therefore the fifteenth spoonful of sugar, J climbs up the stairs and into his room, the first door on the left. As soon as he’s in there (the shutters in his room are closed), the door closes.

Uncle J, in his room.