The Room

6

They always told me he was sleeping. Whenever I came to to the Uhlandstrasse house, I was told to keep the noise down because Uncle J had worked the late shift (or the early shift, as the case may be). That was my presence in this house as a child: I would be dropped off by my mother, handed over to my grandmother, and there was always this third person there, but one who never made an appearance: my uncle J. He was there, and yet he wasn’t. I spent hours in that house, still freshly ventilated back then, constantly filled with the fear that, at some point, my horrendous uncle would come down the stairs. Then I would have to sit with him in the kitchen, and my grandmother would end up going to Schade & Füllgrabe, and I would have to go down to the cellar with my uncle. He always appeared out of nowhere, and then my existence for the next few hours was completely different to how it had been in the hours before. When my uncle wasn’t there, I was free to move through the Uhlandstrasse house as I pleased. It was my favourite place and I would look forward to being dropped off there; I could be alone, my siblings weren’t there, I liked the rooms, I liked the kitchen, I could roam around for hours on end looking at all the objects, which always seemed important, especially the photographs of the old, long-since-deceased Bolls. There were a great number of them on the bureau. An unknown man in uniform in front of an unknown landscape, perhaps in Russia, or perhaps at home in the Reich, you couldn’t tell from the landscape, and the man in the uniform was deceased too. Or the picture of the young girl with thick blonde pigtails, staring vivaciously into the camera and considerably older in the picture than I was at the time. Throughout my entire childhood, I could never really believe that this little girl was one and the same person as the Aunt Lenchen I knew. Her husband was one of the first to die in the war, on the second day of the conflict, the 2nd of September, a day after my birthday and yet twenty-eight years before my birth, for I was born on the first of that month, the same day the War began. Aunt Lenchen’s photo (not in the Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform, but in a white blouse, a portrait from the chest up) was something from another world, a world they had all sealed off, each in their own way, disposing of all the regalia of the time. The abbreviation BDM was never even uttered when I was a child. Just that one photo was allowed to remain, the man in uniform, the dead man. I’m sure that they must have explained to me back then who he was, but either I never understood or was never able to remember, perhaps because I never read his name on one of our gravestones. Even my grandfather Wilhelm, J’s father, was a complete stranger to me, looming out of an ancient past in black-and-white, even though he had been dead only as long as I had been alive. We could almost have reached our hands out towards one another. We could almost have looked into each other’s eyes, we, the artistic ones. My grandfather has always been dead for the same number of years I have been alive. I presume that the man in the Wehrmacht uniform was Aunt Lenchen’s husband, but I’ll never find out because the photo doesn’t exist anymore, like almost all the photos on the bureau and the cabinet and my grandmother’s little glass table (next to the desk). When I was four or five years old I would run through my grandmother’s house, alone and happy, never realising that I was moving through a house that was predominantly defined by the dead. After all, my grandmother, as I realised much later, became a widow only when I was born. To me it seemed as though the present was separated from the past in the photos by at least a thousand years, as if by some displacement of time that was comprehensible only in a mythical sense. The house was populated by these little black-and-white photographic spectres, which to me had just as great a presence in the rooms downstairs as their actual inhabitants, those who had the rights to the house and its rooms and everything in them. And everything was always quiet; the only thing I ever heard in this house was the cooing of the pigeons and the low-pitched clang of the bells from the Bad Nauheim Dankeskirche, the first music I ever knew. It would be another thirty years before the noise-reducing double-glazing was installed. Looking back, I realise now that the house used to be a museum to me, with my grandmother as the museum’s custodian. Until her death, nothing changed in the living room, nor in the dining room, and my grandfather’s bureau in particular was never touched, just continually dusted and cleaned and polished, either by my grandmother in her apron or by Aunt Lenchen in her apron (presumably she dusted the effigy of her own youth, too) or by one of the various cleaning ladies, still German in the beginning and also apron-clad, but from the eighties onwards predominantly Yugoslavian and no longer apron-clad. After my grandmother’s death, everything was cleared out at once, everything disappeared, even the furniture was removed. It wasn’t until seven years after my grandmother’s death that I began the reconstruction work. Where had all the things been taken to? The tiny, bronze-cast Viking ship that kept me entertained throughout my entire childhood? The black stone shelf (made from diabaso, like our gravestones) above the heater in the living room alcove. Three objects used to stand on it, all of which were equally important to me; it was a cosmos, headed up by a Viking ship that’s no longer there. The ship is there only in my mind now, still immense like a real Viking ship; the sofa upholstery was the North Sea across which it sailed. Next to the ship, a metal elephant with a hollow stomach that you could peer into when you turned it around; the ship and the elephant had always belonged together. The third object was a bowl made of light-green stone, which I also used to play with on the sofa. When I was little, everything had to have its place and order, these objects had been where they were for as long as I could remember, and every time I came to the house they were where they were supposed to be. Like with my uncle, but on a miniature scale. He always needed things to be in order too, just like I did when I was four or five. And his equivalent of my Viking ship, the ship of my childhood, was the Wehrmacht tank and the mountain rescue, and unlike me he stayed that way for his whole life, as it wasn’t long before I was no longer interested in the moon landings, nor the Carrera racetracks with their remote control and speedometers. But these three objects are still a world in themselves, and all of them are gone and no longer in their place and no longer in order, just like my uncle is gone too. And now, here in his room, I have to try to put everything back in its place using my own words.

Almost as soon as my grandmother died, the house took on a new function. Nothing remained, only the house itself. When I stepped inside it for the first time again seven years later, in 1999, I was shocked. To be honest, shocked almost to death. Ever since that day, this house has defined my life. This house, this place, the street, the Wetterau, and above all the room I am writing this in now. And I was a child and ran through the house and fell in love with it, with this hybrid of death and life, a house which, even back then, predominantly consisted of memories of those who had once lived in it. The house in Uhlandstrasse had been there before my parents came, before the house in Mühlweg. It was as though it had been transported from another world into the present. A house of silence, not a house of life. I ran though the house, up the stairs, to the bookcase where I was always reading the travel stories from my grandmother’s Reader’s Digest volumes. I was a day-dreamer when I was a child; my uncle wasn’t the only one. He dreamed of mountain rescue, while I dreamed of the big wide world in the Reader’s Digest volumes. As long as everything was in order and intact, everything was okay. I ran upstairs, selected a volume and settled down with it on the sofa (it was around the time when my grandmother started giving me brandy chocolates and egg liquor, when I was five or six). I lived freely in this house and was happy in this bottomless melancholy (at home, I couldn’t bear to even be in the same room as one of my siblings anymore), but then the door opened upstairs, my uncle came out of his room and everything changed.

But for now, in this day in the life of my uncle J, I’m still only two years old and not even present. As he comes out of his room, Uncle J is in an indecisive mood. Ahead of him lie the errands he will carry out with reluctance, as well as the activities he is looking forward to. In these circumstances he tended to be like a simmering volcano, one that could temporarily cool down then heat up again depending on how things were going. For example, he would come downstairs and solemnly set about the task of driving the Variant out of the garage, for the errand of picking up Ursel. He’s in a good mood. The car, the world, everything is in order. A life. Then his mother reminds him that he hasn’t yet taken a shower. The volcano begins to simmer (his eyes narrow again, barely visible under his eyebrows now, a change which can happen from one second to the next). A dispute arises, one that ends with a compromise: He will shower after he’s driven the Variant out of the garage. In the absence of a uniform, J pulls on his jacket, and he would have liked to ceremoniously take the car key down from his own, specially-made key shelf, but the key was merely on the key chain attached to his trouser pocket, so this particular ceremony had to be omitted. J opens the door, closes it firmly, looks around. The driveway, the garage, the gate to the yard, everything is still in its place. Before opening the garage, he walks over to the gate, because the gate needs to be opened first, for some reason. By the time he opens it, the volcano has been entirely extinguished and only joy remains, but then his mother opens the kitchen window and asks why he opened the gate, because he’s not leaving yet, after all. I know, says J, but I want to drive the car out. Her: But you don’t need to open the gate to do that. J slouches over, starting to grumble now, gesturing with his hands as if he was in the process of beating someone to death, and shuts the gate again. His bad mood lingers until he reaches the garage door. It’s not a particularly big garage, but it is extraordinarily long, with enough room for two cars to be parked one behind the other. There has only ever been one parked in there, though, for Uncle J didn’t get the Variant until after his father’s death. In the moment when J puts the key into the lock of the wooden garage door, he transforms once again. He is opening up his kingdom. Only moments ago, the Variant was standing in a darkness that was alleviated only by the small side windows that face the garden. Alone since yesterday, but now suddenly surrounded by light, it stares, parked backwards in the garage, with its SA coloured bonnet and circular lights, out at the driveway and Uhlandstrasse. My uncle could get in now and start the engine. But instead he prefers to light up a quick cigarette first. And to walk around the Variant and look at the garden tools towards the back of the garage. He sees all of this as his realm, even though it exists only by the grace of others, his sister’s new family. J would never have gotten the car at all if it hadn’t been for his brother-in-law. The car wasn’t bought specifically for him, but rather for my grandmother’s house-keeping errands, making J into the family servant and chauffeur, although as far as I’m aware he never realised that. The garage, the car, he regarded it all as his own, and yet in essence he led a life of service, remunerated not with money but the car. But because he didn’t realise this, it didn’t detract from his happiness. Nor did he realise why he was never allowed to just go straight to the Forsthaus, but instead always had to do this or that first. The real purpose of the Variant was J’s errand-running, not to get him to Forsthaus Winterstein — I believe he would have walked there if he really had to, even though it would have taken him three hours there and back. His father may not have driven him from the masonry to Bad Nauheim all those year ago, but now at least he was able to drive himself to Forsthaus Winterstein, albeit at a price.

The garden tools at the back of the garage, the scythe, the garden shears, everything polished to perfection by an expert shear polisher, the best shear polisher far and wide. And the lawnmower was the newest model on the market. Everything of the best quality. Even the Variant was almost new, or so they had told him (after all, they knew what he was like). He hadn’t chosen the colour himself, but no one could have picked a better one for him. It was as if they had been made for each other, two kindred spirits. Uncle J and his Variant VW Type 3. The Variant model was even used by firemen. Not by the police though, unfortunately. But it was still a vehicle used for official purposes. Whenever a fire service Variant drove past my uncle in his Variant, he would get this serious and official expression on his face, an expression of official duty. He, too, was on duty. That made him and his car almost the same as the fire service Variant with the fireman in it. Swiftly on the scene! After admiring the garden tools as if it were the first time he had ever seen them, running his finger over this or that blade (which, as someone who couldn’t feel pain, he had been strictly forbidden from doing by his mother; but he only ever ran his fingers over them lightly — he couldn’t feel a thing, including how sharp they were, so he obeyed the law and just touched them gently), he opens the car door and gets in. Like others get into a space rocket or a Messerschmidt. And now he’s inside. Time to check all the instruments! All the instruments are still there. The speedometer is there. The tachometer is there. The gear stick, everything in its place. Don’t touch the steering wheel just yet! Check the rear-view mirror. Are the doors properly closed? Doors are closed! Check the clock too, synchronize with the time on his wristwatch. Time all fine, synchronisation complete. Everything in order and faultless and ready to start, all the safety precautions completed and verified and passed. Gearstick in neutral, engage the clutch, ignition. IGNITION! It’s almost like a countdown. The Variant clears its throat, emitting a rhythmic noise which sounds like a phlegm-filled cough, then starts to vibrate, chokes, oscillates and begins to cough once more, huskily this time, then splutters into a state of readiness and runs at last. Ignition successful. Uncle J grabs the steering wheel of his VW Variant. A pilot. After glancing at each of the mirrors, he rolls the Variant forward over the threshold of the garage, in preparation for the rest of the day, the front of the bonnet outside now, my uncle passing the doorframe, level with the steps, another two metres, then he stops, releases the clutch and pulls up the handbrake. The Variant is now in the driveway. It has travelled a distance of five metres. There’s nothing J enjoys more than the sound of the engine, the sound of his life (later, at the end of his life, his cough sounded just like the car engine). My uncle now presumably does what I so often saw him do later, something avid motorcyclists or people with cabriolets do. In other words, he gets out and lets the engine run for a while. He paces around the car, gazing at it, then walks behind it and closes the garage door in a ponderous and official manner. The car door, meanwhile, is still open. There he stands, connected in a mysterious, almost mythical way with the Variant, J here at the garage door, and over there, five metres away, the car with the engine running. It’s running because of him. Waiting for him. It belongs to him. His engine. And oh — how she runs! Waiting to see what will happen next. She will wait there for him until he gets back in. His engine, practically a living thing. And he stands a short distance away, feeling… no, much more than an avid motorist, he was an absolutely smitten one. They belong together, completely, despite being momentarily separated, him here and the Variant there. The engine running just for him, until he turns it off. Which he will do, in just a moment. But not just yet. First, for example, he lifts up the windscreen wipers and inspects them closely. And the hubcaps: Are they positioned correctly and securely? He circles the car one more time. Then he gets back in, sits up straight, adjusts the neck of his polo shirt, looks over at the neighbour who is looking over at him, and turns the engine off. It’s in the driveway now, fully prepared for everything that is to come, and from now until the time when he actually sets off, he can rest assured that she is outside, ready and waiting, everything in order and perfect, everything as it should be.

My uncle comes back into the house as if from some momentous life experience, hesitates in the hallway for a moment, then heads briskly down into the cellar. He will work there for a little while. There are important things he wants to do down there, today of all days, even though he doesn’t have much time. This has only just occurred to him. The pilot in his workshop. Something needs to be tweaked. The finishing touches applied. But you still haven’t washed, says his mother. A nervous twitch in my uncle’s face as lava begins to flow into his temper once more. The dispute is heating up. Yet my grandmother would never come out and say that he’s dirty, that he stinks. When she approaches the topic of washing with my uncle, she depicts bodily ablutions as a mere act of common decency, without going into the details. Even today, I don’t know whether my uncle actually knew that he smelled. You can’t go to the cemetery if you haven’t washed yet, she would say. Or: You have to have a wash before you pick Ursel up! But when it came to why he should have washed before doing those things, perhaps he didn’t know. Go and have a wash, why don’t you, it’ll make you feel all fresh and new. My uncle had no choice but to give in, mumble in agreement and head off to perform his bodily ablutions without fully comprehending them. I can still remember how, in later years, my grandmother, whenever J was out of the house, would go down into the cellar and quickly and efficiently gather together his dirty washing into a neat package, which she would then immediately stuff into the washing machine, turn it on, and in the same breath open all the windows. But for now, in the year of the moon landing, the bathroom in the cellar doesn’t even exist yet (the brother-in-law will commission it to be built in the years to come), so only the small workshop is there, constructed from remnants and trash from the great Karl Boll masonry business in Friedberg in the Wetterau, at Mühlweg 12. And so J goes up to the first floor instead. Whether he took a shower in the bathroom or just had a quick wash in the sink in his dark room, I don’t know. But I do know that he comes down again after a short while, clean for the time being, hair neatly combed, wearing a new greyish-brown polo shirt and no less presentable than when he was a young man, back when he bore a certain resemblance to the young Glenn Gould. He is full of vigour now, in good spirits and looking forward to Forsthaus Winterstein, even though first he has to reluctantly listen to his mother repeat his instructions. Blumensiebert, cemetery, Ursel, shopping, hairdresser. She explains once more in which order it would be best he complete the errands in, and he just mumbles ja, ja in agreement.

And now he is by the garden fence again, opening the gate, climbing into the Variant, and as he drives out he sees his mother still standing at the kitchen window, waving goodbye to him. He waves back. Waving was always part of it for the two of them. Something to take along en route. Taking the wave along with him for the whole time he’s away. As if the waving could be seen at a great distance (this, after all, was the whole reason waving was invented in the first place). And so the connection between the two of them remains, just like that between the duck and her young on the Bad Nauheim pond.

Now he veers left onto Eleonorenring. He is completely alone now. After a hundred metres come the traffic lights, with two cars waiting, then three. Three cars wait at the light for permission to drive on, with people inside them, all looking at the red light and waiting. Everything has its process and its order; you just need to learn what it is. Earn the right. A complicated system. Now the light jumps to red and yellow. The three cars know that they will soon be able to continue. My uncle has learned everything precisely — he knows he has to wait until the yellow light joins the red one, and then it will change to green, and then he can drive on, having prepared to do so while the light was yellow. The yellow light is the waiting light: You can go soon, it says. It’s friendly, informal, everything on a first-name basis. Things always are when it comes to traffic. In your mind you’re on a first-name basis not just with the traffic lights but with the other drivers around you, too, and you’ll definitely be on a first-name basis if another driver runs into your car. If you want to drive to Friedberg, like my uncle does now, a right turn, then you have to flip the indicator upwards, because that means you want to turn right. Left is down, right is up. Advanced mathematics. My uncle is a highly-trained automobile pilot, driving in accordance with the lights and stepping on a pedal here and a pedal there and looking forwards and backwards, driving the two kilometre long stretch to Friedberg all on his own, to the left and right of which there are nothing but fields and from where you can see all of the Wetterau. In this, the year of the moon landing, there’s nothing between Bad Nauheim and Friedberg but the railway line, just countryside. There’s only one bus-stop between the two places, with a small shelter. But no one ever waits there. If someone was standing there, that would mean they had come from Schwalheim, that they had walked through the tunnel beneath the railway line and were on their way to Friedberg. But no one does it. No one makes use of the bus service (for the duration of my entire life, almost no one will stand there, no one ever wants to walk on foot from Schwalheim to the bus stop and onwards; everyone prefers to stay at home or to go by car, once they eventually had one that is). Up above, the sky with its multitude of colours and cloud formations, blue, yellow, grey or red, the Taunus to the right and corn and rapeseed in between, a few apple trees, a cat here and there, a deer here and there, a car here and there, lonely in the dusk with its lights switched on or approaching between the harvested fields in the shimmering late summer heat, like my uncle for example, although by now he has already reached Friedberg, having fetched the flowers from Blumensiebert as instructed and now parking up on the street in front of the cemetery. The cemetery didn’t have its own car park back then.

My uncle opens the gate to the cemetery and walks officiously along the outside wall to the place where we lie to rest. He puts the flowers down, goes to the water tap, takes a watering can, fills it, comes back to the grave and waters the plants, mumbling it’s always me all the while. There are flowers and hedges all around him; roses, lavender or tulips depending on the time of year. Lilies on the more luxuriant graves, predominantly the graves along the wall of the cemetery, the graves of dignitaries, which are tended to with more financial outlay than the others. Miniature temples, stelae, female statues of mourning with laurel wreaths in their hands, letting them hang downwards, one arm resting on the grave in a grief-stricken pose. These figures are, as my uncle notices, young and pretty, but unfortunately made from metal, so you can’t really… But perhaps just the once? Has he never touched them? They can’t be grabbed by the crotch, as the dress is made of metal, but it should be possible to place a hand on the bottom, because the iron garment falls softly there, clinging — it’s from the era of the dress reform movement, after all. Everything is there, and just as rounded as in real life, you can feel it. My uncle and Art Nouveau in the cemetery in Friedberg in the Wetterau. You can hear a chiffchaff in the trees, and a finch too, and pigeons. Nature and death all around him. Sometimes there will be a tree full of kinglets. My uncle once stood there, and now I sometimes stand there today, as his revenant. The kinglets from back then are dead too, but they’re still there, just like us. The kinglets are still there in the trees, albeit different ones, and below there is still a Boll, even if it’s just me and no longer the uncle. Everything is there, but no longer there. And now I’m laying it to rest with my words. Roses and lilies on the gravestone once more. And irises, depending on the time of year. Can my uncle smell them, the roses, the lilies and the irises? Will he run into Kallheinz (So, back home again already?)? He stands before the gravestone and reads the names. Melchior Boll, Ida Boll, August Boll, Karl Boll, Wilhelm Boll. There is only room for one more name on the gravestone, J notices now. Perhaps he notices it every time but forgets it again immediately afterwards; because assuming that the proper order is kept to, the last place belongs to his mother. Then it will say: Auguste Boll. His sister now has her own family and a completely different grave. His younger brother will soon have a family too. And he, J, where will he go? With his mother and the others? But his name won’t fit on the gravestone. Somewhere completely different, in the corner with the individual graves, the ones that are always so small, perhaps just with a wooden cross? And so Uncle J waters his family’s grave. He stands there grumbling, thinking bad thoughts or none at all, walks over to the tap another two times; it doesn’t occur to him to arrange the flowers or to take away the bunch of carnations that is now two weeks old. After all, he wasn’t instructed to do that. And the plastic vase, fallen over on the left hand side of the grave, prompts no reaction from him. He doesn’t notice it, for his task is to water the flowers. Silence. All around him, at an appropriate distance, the old Wetterau residents tend to the graves of their relatives, always turning up in pairs and struggling to lean down towards the Earth and the graves. Most moving slowly, some arguing as they go. Grave-tending is as much a part of being a pensioner as housekeeping, and both can lead to minor disagreements.

He: Where’s the watering can now?

She: By the stream.

He: But we were just by the stream.

She: So why didn’t you bring it?

He: I was carrying the flowers.

She: Fine, so why didn’t you say something!

Et cetera.

You can’t actually hear their words, but you can see them gesticulating. It’s almost as though the cemetery is transforming, on the quiet, into a living room from the Kernstadt or Barbara neighbourhoods (the cemetery lies between the two). They are dressed for housework, too. Today’s task: Tend to the grave. The women usually wear their aprons. As the men bend over, the seats of their trousers always look so vast, their knees angled away from one another, will they ever make it back up? The women keep their knees together and stretch their behinds up towards the sky, almost as though, right at the very end, they are once again the flowers they may have been fifty years ago. A flower that wants to see the sky. Growing up towards the sky once more. And, at that very moment, they are cultivating their dead. Every day, the Friedberg Cemetery Association gathers in the Friedberg cemetery to cultivate the Friedberg graves, both privately and in pairs, and immediately after they will sit in their allotments by the Usa with a bottle of beer. That’s the afternoon outing: first to the cemetery, then to the allotment, and in the evening perhaps a trip to the Mann in die Dunkel or the Schillerlinde or the Hanauer Hof or the Goldenen Fass or the Licher Eck on Kaiserstrasse. That’s how almost every life drew to its end back then, as I remember, and today they still stand around in pairs in the cemetery (while I am always alone), except now it’s the descendants of the ones who used to come. My uncle doesn’t notice them; he has his errand to attend to. He’s just emptying the third watering can. Everything is quiet and still, the only sound coming from the birds and the trickling water. Herr Boll, someone says. J looks around and sees Rudi Weber and his sister approaching. The sister was the one who spoke.

Hello there, Rudi, says J. Good afternoon, he says to the sister.

Rudi Weber: So, are you tending your family’s grave?

I am, yes, says J.

Aye, says Rudi, we’ve neglected ours for the last two weeks. And if you don’t tend to it for two weeks, everything looks so bad you might as well start from scratch.

Well, yes, says J matter-of-factly.

So how are you, Herr Boll? asks the sister.

Yes, good, says J.

And your mother?

Good, thank you, says J.

And your sister?

Well, yes, good, says J.

I admire your sister, the way she’s managed everything so well. Just imagine, Rudi, she’s heading up the business now, the masonry.

Yes, I know, says Rudi Weber.

She: How many children does she have now?

J: Three.

She: And now they’re building on the land, I saw.

J: Well, yes.

She: What does her husband do again?

Rudi Weber: He’s a lawyer.

J confirms this: A lawyer, from a distinguished family of civil servants. A very distinguished Frankfurt family. The father-in-law is a governor in Frankfurt.

She: A governor?

J: Yes, Governor… governor… of everything. A really big building, the Financial Governing Authority. Perhaps the biggest administration building in the whole of Hessen!

She: And he goes and marries a woman from Friedberg, imagine that.

Yes, says J.

She: And will you be going to the inn today?

He still hopes to, says J, to Forsthaus Winterstein, the hunters have been there all week, hunting on the Winterstein, a big hunt, a whole troop of hunters. He wanted to go yesterday, he says, and he wanted to go the day before that. In fact, he’s been wanting to go to Forsthaus Winterstein for days now.

Right then, we won’t hold you up, says Rudi. Or is there something we can help you with?

And while Weber’s sister starts up again about J’s sister, who, as she says, used to be such a pretty girl when they were at school, with this intensely black hair, but back then there was this other girl too, and she used to wonder what would become of her, but then she got sent off to boarding school, if her memory served her correctly. Where was it again… in the Rhineland? In Bensheim, J corrects her… so while the conversation picks up again in such a manner, Rudi Weber peruses the state of the Boll family grave, trims a few branches back with his shears, removes the withered and worn carnations, tucks the vase of flowers behind the gravestone, tidies the shrubbery and returns the fallen plastic vase to the neighbouring grave. Rudi Weber has an eye for order, and ideally he would have liked to sweep the gravestone too, but unfortunately he doesn’t have a broom to hand, so he resolves to return later (he needs to come back to the cemetery anyway because his sister forgot the pansies) and give the Boll grave a sweep, just this once, because if J is at the cemetery today then that means J’s sister will be coming by in the next week for sure, and Blumensiebert himself rarely comes to the cemetery, for sweeping graves isn’t really Blumensiebert’s strong point, as Weber knows from experience. And if his sister sees the family grave in such a state, she won’t be happy for sure. Rudi Weber has always regarded J. Boll to be one of those people who don’t have things easy, for one reason or another, and who need a helping hand here and there in order to get along in life. It’s not his fault, after all. He often thinks that, considering his disability, J is doing pretty well. He’s even able to help the family out a little bit, and besides, it’s not like you need to point out to him what a complete idiot he is, a complete idiot with a driving license (and a Variant). So they stand there at the grave for another two, three minutes and gaze silently at the gravestone, the names, and the quotation engraved on it.

Awaiting the Resurrection

Then they part ways, and while J heads towards the stream to secure the watering can with a bicycle lock, Weber shrugs his shoulders, as if wanting to apologise to his sister, and gestures behind J’s back (tapping his finger on his temple), in order to demonstrate in the clear and proper manner that of course he knows J is an idiot, and that this is the reason why he behaves the way he does towards him. And while the sister comments that J’s family should really have enough money to tend to the grave themselves — especially the new husband, if he comes from such a distinguished background — and that for this reason there was really no need to clean up after them, the two siblings disappear into the afternoon sunlight amongst the linden and chestnut trees, the roses and the black marble gravestones from our stonemasonry…