The Room

7

Now J drives along the following route: from the cemetery, fifty metres along Schmidtstrasse, turning right into Gebrüder-Lang-Strasse, then right again after a hundred metres into Untere Liebfrauenstrasse, where, after another hundred metres, Mühlweg and our property can be found. First the apple trees, then the spot where the stables were, which is now the foundation pit (where I grew up), then the business, one building after the other, glazed in part, everything behind a big black wall with white joints. In the centre, the administrative building, an old mill, the Falk mill. A mill without a wheel, for the river that used to flow through here has long since been diverted and now bypasses its old river bed, and our company grounds too. Wetterau people always had to avoid things, always and above all themselves. In front of the mill is the big entrance gate, through which the workers bustle in and out and the transporters drive in and out, although not as frequently as in Wilhelm Boll’s day, for business is no longer booming in the year of the moon landing. As always, my uncle would have loved to drive the Variant through the main gate (just like his father always used to drive his own car through it), but the Variant always just gets in the way on the company grounds, so he resists and parks it out on the street. He stands on the pavement for a while, looking at the foundation pit of my parents’ house. The biggest house in the whole of the Barbara neighbourhood. A house of Uncle J superlatives. He believes that to be the case even though there’s nothing to see yet (but it ends up being so big that, in fact, I did grow up in an Uncle J superlativism). The workers are working, in part — they’re all drinking beer right now — and J’s sister is standing with them and matter-of-factly giving them the necessary and proper instructions, almost like a foreman. How does she know how to do that? Then J strolls into the main building and is greeted by everyone in a respectful and friendly manner. They all know that he’s the son of the late boss, and they all treat him with respect. J used to come here years ago, too, as a young man, back when the majority of them hadn’t yet realised that he was an idiot. For the staff, the boss’s family was effectively one and the same thing as the boss himself, even though some of them were quick to realise that the boss wasn’t on good terms with his son, and that, on top of this, the son was unusual (a way to avoid saying that he wasn’t entirely normal). They tried to include him in things a bit, explaining the machines to him, sometimes pressing a tool into his hand, sometimes letting him ride along in a truck across the yard or allowing him to watch when they were welding (with a welding mask over his face). But all of that was a long time ago. Today, J was no longer a child, or even a young man, and they didn’t let him ride in the truck anymore… Today, J was on the same management level as the sister in their eyes, even though they all knew by now what he was. To offend him would have meant offending the whole company. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to do such a thing.

And so my uncle steps onto the company grounds in the second year after the death of his father, my grandfather, and the whole world is surprisingly in order. He is almost a boss. The brother of the director. He goes into the mill to Frau Smoke, the secretary, and waits for his sister. Here too, he is treated with respect. Frau Smoke says: Herr Boll, can I get you a coffee? My uncle isn’t used to being treated like this. Two factors needed to align for this to happen: first, that Wilhelm Boll is now dead, and second, that J is now dropping by the company premises in Mühlweg on a regular basis again, because the Variant has been put at his disposal and he always has errands to run with it, including the ones for his sister. The authority that Wilhelm Boll once had in the company has been passed down to his successors, first and foremost to the sister of course, who is now in charge of things, but also to J and the younger brother, who likewise has recently been greeted on the premises as if he’s management. Frau Smoke brings my uncle a coffee, lights up a cigarette for herself, and my uncle lights up a cigarette too. The cigarettes are in a small wooden box on the table and, officially speaking, are part of the office equipment and therefore appear in the bookkeeping. My uncle sits there and waits, in an old room, timber all around him, linoleum floors and filing cabinets, painted grey and made of steel, with roller shutters. The mill is several centuries old and now being used as an office. It must have already been ancient even back then, and it wouldn’t hold out for much longer — five years later the company itself didn’t exist anymore, and another few years after that not even the mill was there. Maybe I’m there in the office too, already back from the dentist and handed over into Frau Smoke’s care temporarily. I remember Frau Smoke (who was always smoking, that’s what killed her in the end) just as vividly as the office itself. I always enjoyed the time I spent with Frau Smoke. I liked going to the company full-stop as a child, back when I was five or six, whenever I wasn’t with my great-grandmother Else, the mother of J’s father, or in Uhlandstrasse with my grandmother. I couldn’t handle being around my siblings at home, after all, whereas at the company I would mostly be left to my own devices. Often, while Frau Smoke was smoking, I would sit on a chair and look at all the accounting books and the typewriter and the ballpoint pens and pencils and sharpeners and rubbers and the sponge that was used to moisten stamps — that ancient type of office that doesn’t exist anywhere anymore, it looked like Firma Hesselbach from TV. Sitting in Frau Smoke’s office meant sitting in a cloud of smoke, and if I did indeed happen to be present that day, the one I’m describing and inventing here, the day in the life of my uncle back when I was two, then I would have been sitting in double or triple the quantity of smoke, because both Frau Smoke and my uncle were smoking, and if one of the workers came in, then he would of course join in and smoke too. The office was small, stuffed with things, everything more or less askew, and the roof of the building was bowing in and would soon collapse, and perhaps even as a child it already seemed to me as though we were sitting in our own past. Did they dream of the future in that office? Were they eagerly awaiting the newest technical innovations there too? From the moon landing onwards, the word computer kept being mentioned, despite the fact that, to date, they hadn’t yet encountered even the first calculator. Frau Smoke was the Mistress of the Filing Cabinets. They were still writing everything with carbon paper back then, the filing cabinets smelt of tobacco, Frau Smoke ate wurst sandwiches from greaseproof paper and from time to time an onion, and she would make her cigarettes vanish into an ashtray, the lid of which would open at the push of a button, then pivot around before closing again. Nothing in that office was electrical except the light and the fridge, which was there for the beer of course. There was always a crate of beer in the cellar of the mill, as supplies. This building, which had not dated in four hundred years, would age quickly in the years following the moon landing, and then soon fall apart. But for now it still housed the office of the Karl Boll stonemasonry and was in the middle of its lifespan. Karl Boll, J’s grandfather and my great-grandfather, who had led the company since 1930, had died only recently. J’s father and grandfather both died in the same summer, at the end of which I arrived, the last member of the new family. My grandfather had been sitting in the mill as senior partner only a short while ago, smoking his cigars in active retirement, and now he was a photograph, hanging where he had once sat and smoked, adorned with the black mourning ribbon of Summer ’67. The letters of his name on the gravestone were still white and fresh. There he sits in the photo of the company’s centenary celebrations, already a geriatric and a dignitary. For me, the office that Frau Smoke worked in is the oldest piece of the world that I know. Without realising it, I lived in a completely different era there. In that office, I lived in an era which pre-dated the war I had never heard of, I lived in the era of the Weimar Republic and the era of the German Empire too, despite the fact that Frau Smoke was already driving to work in an Audi 100. Every day, she drove the seven kilometres to the office from Nieder-Mörlen, the same distance that my great-grandmother Else used to walk on foot to visit her relatives. Today, if Frau Smoke were still alive (which, as I already mentioned, is not the case), she would take the bypass. Frau Smoke, with her deep, smoker’s voice.

His fingers yellow and brown, my uncle sits there in his grey-brown shirt, smoking and staring out to the street, at his Nazi-brown Variant, while Frau Smoke coughs. By the seventies, she will be coughing more and more, and soon after that she will be dead. Now his sister comes. She still needs to go to the butcher’s and then to Edeka. If I am there, she probably tells me I need to stay a little longer and that my great-grandmother will pick me up later (whether I’m old enough to understand what she’s saying to me, I don’t know). So I stay there in the cloud of smoke with Frau Smoke, who is just lighting up a new cigarette, and my uncle and my mother rush off, for she needs to be back home soon to look after my siblings, the evening meal needs to be prepared and so on and so forth. My mother strides across the company grounds, being bid a polite farewell by everyone and acknowledging them with an embarrassed smile, because until recently she could never have imagined suddenly being the head of such a big company. She is probably wearing a light, brightly-coloured coat, and I imagine a neck scarf too, the coat around knee-length, her hair combed back softly. She is thirty-four years old. She walks quickly over the street, heading left towards Blum’s Butchers on the corner, and my uncle gets into the car and drives after her.

Blum’s Butchers is on the ground floor of a small residential building with three steps leading up to it. My uncle stops the car so that Ursel can ‘hop’ right in when she’s finished. Tiled walls, the space itself empty apart from a small counter on the right hand side, and behind it the meat and sausages hang over the grinding machine. Through the big window pane, my uncle sees young Frau Blum and Ursel engaged in sales talk. The young Frau Blum picks up the Cervelat sausage, then the beer sausage, three hundred grams of cold cuts perhaps, and packs everything into greaseproof paper. My mother in her coat — she rushed into the butcher’s like a buffet of wind — and the young Frau Blum in an apron, as always. Now the mince. Half pork, half beef. We always have meatballs on Saturdays, and perhaps today is Friday, so that means she’s procuring them for the next day. After she pays, they carry on talking. Now they’re laughing even, silent behind the windowpane as my mother puts her big purse back in her handbag, which she then tucks under her arm in order to be able to pick up the package of meat with both hands. She stands there for a while longer with the package of meat in her hands, there are still things to talk about, so why did my uncle have to rush so much? Maybe she’ll stay there for another half hour, and then old Frau Blum will end up coming down in her apron too, or Frau Siebert from Blumensiebert or Frau Jakumeit, and they’ll discuss neighbourly matters until there is nothing left to be said, talking into the evening and into the night while my uncle sits in the Variant, and inside the butcher’s everyone is laughing and cheerful and happy, and he can’t go to Forsthaus Winterstein, so he takes out a machine gun, gets out of the car, shoots, kills and massacres everyone in the butcher’s and then runs onto the street and shoots the passers-by and ideally everyone on Mühlweg too, until there’s a mountain of five hundred corpses lying there, and then he gets into his Variant and drives to Forsthaus Winterstein and orders a beer in the orderly and proper manner and at least one Doppelkorn maize schnapps. But neither Frau Siebert nor Frau Jakumeit nor old Frau Blum come, and my mother has already left the shop by now, holding on tightly to the rail that runs along the three steps and looking carefully down at the ground, step by step, for she is wearing heels and it would be easy to trip. There is still a smile on her face. Now Ursel ‘hops’ into the car and continues with the conversation she started in Blum’s. Oh, that Frau Blum, she says. Her brother has a moped now, and the dachshund is always running after him. He only needs the moped for driving to the inn, though. And the dachshund is always running along behind him, just like Pluto whenever Grandpa Karl goes to the Goldenen Fass, oh, turn off here for a moment so we can go to Edeka. My uncle turns into Gebrüder-Lang-Strasse. Wait here for a moment, she says, I won’t be long. At which she disappears into Edeka. She’s always in a hurry, but she always gets held up, and of course she has to converse with lots of people around here, for everyone knows her now, the director of the stonemasonry in the Barbara neighbourhood. A place of long-standing tradition. As he waits, my uncle grips the steering wheel as if he’s still driving and stares through the windscreen of the Variant from beneath his charcoal-black eyebrows, perhaps at that moment fifteen-year-old Elke Schuster is walking by, wearing a very short skirt or maybe even a miniskirt, in keeping with the fashion of the time, and she has breasts too. Everything goes empty and silent in my uncle’s mind and his eyes protrude from his head at a considerable distance. But perhaps fifteen-year-old Elke Schuster is not walking past at that moment after all, and instead my uncle is just staring into space with both hands on the steering wheel — what else is he supposed to do? After a few minutes, my mother comes out of Edeka with a shopping bag and enthuses about the increased selection, you can buy almost anything at Edeka now, you don’t need to go anywhere else. Before you had to go to Kissler on Kaiserstrasse or into the old town to Mörler bakery, she says, but the bread counter in Edeka is so good now that I can always get what I need, so now we can drive straight to Nauheim. Have you been to the cemetery? Yes, says J. She: Did you water the flowers? Yes, says J. Good, she says, then I don’t need to do it. God, is it that late already? Mother still needs to go to the hairdresser. Oh, wait a moment, drive back into town again, could you, I need to pick up the bedding from the launderette, it won’t take a moment.

So my uncle drives up to the railway embankment and from there into the town, to Kaiserstrasse. The traffic becomes heavier by the time they reach the church, it’s the end of the working day and people are flocking to Kaiserstrasse, there’s time now, the work having been done, and the errands need to be run by six, for after that everything will be closed. It seems like the whole of Friedberg is heading to Kaiserstrasse in their automobiles, or at least that’s how it seems to the Friedbergers who are currently driving to Kaiserstrasse in their automobiles. J has to stop by the time he reaches the church — the cars are queuing thirty metres from the crossing, something which is unheard of, there are eight or ten cars ahead of him! He’s never experienced this before. Where have they all come from, are they all Friedbergers? His sister, who is in a hurry, is probably asking herself the same thing. My uncle has been wanting to go to Forsthaus Winterstein for hours, but his sister is peeved too and sees it as a form of personal insult that, at this very moment, all of Friedberg wants to go to Kaiserstrasse for whatever reason, and yet all she wants to do is pick up the bedding she dropped off the day before yesterday. Please ensure they really are ready for the day after tomorrow, she had said in the launderette, and the woman replied, The day after tomorrow for sure. The former Miss Boll, now the manager of a company, has perfected the art of asserting herself. You have to, after all. Otherwise you perish. Even in the launderette, or perhaps specifically in the launderette. By the day after tomorrow, even though my mother didn’t need the bedding until the following week. The launderette woman, for her part, had the bedding ready an hour after it was dropped off.

They’re by the church, the Church of Our Dear Lady, but they can’t go any further; ahead of them are automobiles from 1969 and behind them the church with its rust-red, partly blackened weathered bricks, Gothic arches, pinnacles and crockets from the Middle Ages. They sit there in the traffic and can’t go any further, but why? This is completely new to them. To my mother, being held up at the church for even thirty seconds while trying to reach Kaiserstrasse by car is unheard of. Ahead of them, perhaps, is Herr Berger. Herr Berger works for the company, so why is he already away from work and in town? Next to Herr Berger (who is driving) is Frau Berger. Ursel, the manager, sees Herr Berger, but why does he have to have a car, why is he driving on Kaiserstrasse now, of all times? For that matter, why does everyone always seem to be on their way to somewhere recently and always in your way? And everyone gives each other these aggressive, almost hateful, looks. From one car to the next they glare at each other with hatred, as if the other person didn’t belong here, and why can’t they just stay at home? After an almost unbearable thirty seconds, the traffic starts to move again, and all the people in all the cars are asking themselves how things are supposed to go on from here, now that they can’t even drive to Kaiserstrasse anymore because suddenly everyone is driving to Kaiserstrasse. It clearly isn’t even possible to drive into town anymore.

And now they finally turn into Kaiserstrasse, and cars from all kinds of places are driving all around them, for whoever wants to drive from Usingen to Frankfurt drives through Friedberg, whoever wants to drive from Bad Nauheim to Wöllstadt drives through Friedberg, whoever wants to drive from Rödgen to Dorheim drives through Friedberg — unless, that is, they drive through Schwalheim — and whoever wants to drive from Butzbach to Bad Vilbel drives through Friedberg, whoever wants to drive from Ober-Mörlen to Jagdhaus Ossenheim drives through Friedberg, whoever wants to drive from Florstadt to Forsthaus Winterstein drives through Friedberg, and all the sugar cane transporters drive through Friedberg. In short, the whole of the Wetterau has been driving through Friedberg of late, and when they do, they always drive along Kaiserstrasse. It’s impossible to drive along Kaiserstrasse now, they all say, the people who are driving along it right at this moment, and they have no clue that this is only the beginning, for it’s only 1969. My uncle is just passing the Bindernagel bookshop now. Old Herr Doktor Herrmann, the owner of the Bindernagel bookshop, is standing in front of the door beneath the building’s slated facade, looking at the traffic and wondering what will become of it all. As my uncle drives past in his Variant, Herr Usinger comes out of the Bindernagel bookshop too, and my mother says, There’s Herr Usinger, but J doesn’t know Herr Usinger, nor anything about him. Friedberg’s poet. Widely renowned. Laden with prizes. Herr Usinger lives in the castle. Herr Usinger has a veritable stack of books under his arm. Large horn-rimmed spectacles and snow-white hair. At home in his little timber-framed house in the castle, he writes poems about cosmic connections. Jupiter, Saturn, galaxies and energetic, cosmic universal rays. He is also the vice president of a renowned academy. Calculated almost from this very day, he has another thirteen years to live. The poet of cosmic poems stands there, in the year of the moon landing, in the doorway of the Bindernagel bookshop in Friedberg in the Wetterau next to old Doktor Herrmann and looks at the traffic, and perhaps this really is the day when the Friedbergers who are on Kaiserstrasse notice the traffic for the first time. Suddenly it’s there, the traffic, whereas yesterday it wasn’t, previously not having existed in the Friedbergers’ world, lying beneath the threshold of perception, and now suddenly it’s there, and everyone stops and stares silently for a moment, even old Herr Rausch and young Herr Rausch from the Schillerlinde come out to stand in front of the inn door to look at the traffic (while inside they are sitting with their ciders, all having come on foot). At that moment, Herr Schifbenger comes out of Café Schifbenger to join them, present at this historic moment too, and says to the young Rausch: Erwin, what’s going on here, where have all of these automobiles come from? Indeed, all the local tradesmen and shop keepers, and in particular the residents of Kaiserstrasse, come to their front doors or windows and look at the traffic and say to themselves, Now we really have traffic, and yet just a moment ago there was just the empty, centuries-old Kaiserstrasse. Even the Dunkel landlord comes out of his inn and looks at the traffic with an awestruck expression. At that moment, all the people in Friedberg on the Kaiserstrasse are saying to themselves, Something’s there! It’s there now. And it might never go away again. At that moment, Herr Usinger is composing a few lines of poetry in his head about the traffic incident, thinking of words like planetoid and satellites, atomism and protons. Herr Herrmann, on the other hand, is asking himself how the businesses on Kaiserstrasse will manage to survive if everyone who used to be on foot or riding their bicycle or catching the train is suddenly driving instead. Moments ago there was merely a street, and now, suddenly and all at once and from one day to the next, it’s obvious to all concerned that this is no longer just a street frequented by locals, but one with actual traffic. What kind of traffic is this anyway? my mother is asking herself in the Variant, even though she studied political economics and should have known very well that the car would soon be everywhere in our country and thereafter a German export all over the world, like the blessing of the Lord forevermore and to the final amen. But either she didn’t know or didn’t want to know, just like all the others who didn’t know either, gazing in amazement at the Kaiserstrasse as if a moon rocket had just landed in front of them and little men in white spacesuits were about to step out and stare at them, the Wetterauers, through their mirrored visors. And for the first time, due to logical steps which are few in number but very general, a thought begins to establish itself in their minds, collectively and unexpectedly and independently from one another, one which all the inhabitants and all the traders on Kaiserstrasse in Friedberg in the Wetterau have at exactly the same moment. Even old Herr Doktor Herrmann thinks it, as does old Herr Rausch, and Herr Lenhardt thinks it too as he comes out of the second Friedberg book shop, the Scriba bookshop, wrinkling his brow, as do Herr Schifbenger and Dunkelwirt and everyone in their cars, including my mother on the passenger seat of my uncle J’s Variant. All of a sudden, as if they had pre-planned it, they realise that something has to done. There needs to be something like a bypass. And so on this day, for the first time, the word bypass appears in their minds simultaneously. Just like the clouds in the Wetterau blue, they suddenly see the word before them as if it were written in the skies. They all stagger a step backwards and gaze at a specific point in the skies, as if by command, hundreds of them along the whole length of the Kaiserstrasse, perhaps the point where they suppose the dear Lord to be, as if he had just revealed something to them. Perhaps, for just a moment, he has even revealed himself. A moment of truth, and suddenly they can see. At this moment, all the Wetterauers on the Kaiserstrasse stop in their tracks, staring mesmerized at a non-existent point in the Wetterau sky.

A few seconds later my uncle drives on, and the curious build-up of traffic that was hitherto unknown dissipates again, all the cars jolting forwards and streaming north and south and into smaller side streets too, and after just a few seconds there’s nothing left of what there was moments before. Instead, like there always used to be, there is just one automobile on the Kaiserstrasse, or even two here and there, But what happened just now? they ask themselves on the Kaiserstrasse in bewilderment. Hmm, mumbles the Dunkel landlord, giving the Kaiserstrasse one last thoughtful glance before going back in to pull pints. As he does so, he wonders whether he should tell the Dunkel guests on the other side of the bar about what he just experienced, but at the same moment realises that he lacks the words to do so, and that in any case it can’t be told, because he himself can’t even grasp what just happened, and what’s more, he doesn’t even know for sure if anything did, in fact, happen. Old Herr Doktor Herrmann bids farewell to Usinger the poet, propping his hands against his sides, a little more hunched now and with two new wrinkles next to his nose that he didn’t have before, then goes back into his bookshop at exactly the same time as Herr Lenhardt steps into his shop fifty metres away. The two Rausch men go back into the Linde, where three schnitzels are waiting in the dumbwaiter — to be brought to the table by old Herr Rausch, while Erwin, the son, folds serviettes. Herr Schifbenger goes off to drink a coffee in his competitor’s establishment. Gradually, all the Friedbergers disappear back into their houses and behind their windows, and my uncle is already on his way back to Bad Nauheim with my mother and the Variant, the Kaiserstrasse is quiet again, undisturbed and peaceful like it always used to be. The only one left is Usinger the poet, who can be seen disappearing through the gate of the great castle in his old tail coat with the stack of books under his arm, as if he came from a completely different era and had just been painted into the scene by Carl Spitzweg under the title: The Cosmological Poet Disappears into his Castle.