We lived on a modest scale, yet modesty did not become our guiding principle. We had more than enough worries and debts. The rent, food, clothing, books, heating, electricity. The only thing that kept us going was a temporary lightheartedness which, of course, we only achieved temporarily. Somehow, after all, money had also to be found for movies, for cigarettes, for the indispensable coffee: something we didn’t always, but did sometimes, achieve. We discovered pawnshops.
It wasn’t all as carefree as it may sound. The more modest the scale, the less did modesty become our guiding principle. I gratefully remember the devotion of my older brothers and sisters, who must have made life easier for me, the youngest, by letting me have a little something from time to time. What scared me most during that period was my father’s cough. He was of slight build (between the ages of twenty and eighty-five his weight varied by only two or three pounds; only after the age of eighty-five did he start to lose weight). He was moderate in his habits but liked to smoke, never inhaled, and he refused to do without (or at least entirely without!) his “Lundi”—those thin, pungent cigarillos packed in round cans. He was sad in these circumstances, and also powerless against conditions, and I sometimes think that we children never paid enough attention to his sadness.
His cough drowned out even the roar of streetcar Number 16, and we could hear his cough from far away. But the place where I was most worried by his cough was crowded St. Severin’s Church on Sundays. We never went to Mass en bloc, always individually, rarely did two or three of us youngsters sit together in one pew, so we waited, each in his own seat, full of nervous tension, for our father’s cough, knowing it would start up, increase almost to the point of suffocation, and then, as my father left the church, subside. He would then probably stand outside and smoke a “Lundi” for his cough.
Now the same age as my father was then, I find that I (and I am not the only one) have apparently inherited his cough. There are some people in our household who, as I park outside amid heavy traffic, recognize me through the noise of all those cars by my cough. I hardly ever have to ring the bell or use my key: someone is opening the front door before I do either.
My cough must be on a wavelength that penetrates not only traffic noises and screeching brakes but even police sirens, yet I don’t believe that my cough can be called “penetrating.” It consists of variations on differing forms of hoarseness, usually denotes embarrassment, is seldom a sign of a cold; and there are some people who know that it is more than a cough—and less. A granddaughter, for example, who is a year old, apparently regards it as a form of speech or address; she imitates it, coughing dialogues develop between us of an ironically amused nature, dialogues in which we apparently both have something to communicate. I am reminded of Beuys, who once made a speech consisting only of harrumphings and little coughs—and a very clever speech it was, by the way.
Perhaps one should establish harrumphing schools, at least consider harrumphing as a school subject; anyway, rid it of its silly admonitory function—to stop someone from making that tactless remark, for instance. L’art pour l’art as applied to coughing and harrumphing.
It might also be worth considering whether clever heads shouldn’t invent the harrumphing letter-to-the-editor.
RENDEZVOUS WITH MARGRET OR: HAPPY ENDING
The journey there was pleasant: the Rhine still under early-morning mist; weeping willows, barges, sirens, the trip taking precisely as long as I needed for my breakfast. Coffee and rolls acceptable, eggs fried; no baggage, just cigarettes, newspaper, matches, return ticket, ballpoint pen, wallet, and handkerchief, and the certainty of seeing Margret again. After so many years, after several abortive meetings, after knowing her for more than forty years, I had been surprised and stirred by something I had never seen before: her handwriting, strong yet graceful, and the words, written on the death announcement with surprising firmness: “do come—it would give me so much pleasure to see you again.” The small “d” in “do” made me suspect that she had never come to terms with the capital “D”; we all have a letter or two that we stumble over.
On arrival I got rid of my largest piece of baggage, the newspaper. I left it behind in the dining car and reached the cemetery in good time after my own fashion: too late for the Largo, the De Profundis, and the incense in the chapel, too late also to join the cortège. I was just in time to see the acolytes taking off their vestments and bundling them under their arms as they walked away. The taller one unscrewed the processional cross into three sections, packing it away in a case obviously designed for that purpose, and as they got into the waiting taxi they all lit cigarettes: priest, driver, and acolytes. The driver offered the priest a light, the younger acolyte did the same for the older one, and at that point one of them must have made a joke: I saw them all laugh, saw the older acolyte coughing with laughter and cigarette smoke, and I had to laugh too, when I thought of the sacristy cupboards where in another five minutes they would be putting away their paraphernalia: oak, baroque, three hundred years old, the pride of the parish of St. Francis Xavier, which in 1925 had been renamed St. Peter Canisius; and it wasn’t I, it was the deceased who had just been buried, on whose coffin clods of earth were still falling, he who had saved the day in 1945 by his inspired recollection of the depth of those cupboards where, behind the neat piles of altar linen and various sacred utensils, we had hidden cigarettes and coffee stolen from the Americans when they left their Jeeps unattended or invited us in groups to a kind of Werewolf-reeducation. It was he, not I, who, with the corrupt cunning of the European, had correctly sized up the Americans’ naïve awe of ecclesiastical institutions, and for years I had wondered why, instead of claiming credit for this inspiration, he had always ascribed it to me. Much later, long after I had left home, it dawned on me that a story of that kind would have done no service to his respectability, whereas it “fitted” me, although I never really had that idea nor ever would have.
I approached the Zerhoff family grave with circumspection, avoiding the paths on which I would have encountered men with and without top hats, ladies with and without Persian lamb coats, former schoolmates and knights of Catholic orders, schoolmates as knights of Catholic orders. I walked along the familiar path between the rows of graves to our own family grave, where the last burial—my father’s—had taken place five years ago; it had been insinuated that he had died brokenhearted because neither of his two sons had begotten a male heir in any woman’s womb; well, he had no female heir either. The burial plot was well cared for, the lease paid; the gravel was truly snow-white, the beds of pansies heartshaped, the pansies in turn—nine or eleven to a bed—planted in the shape of a heart. The names of Mother, Father, and Josef on the lectern-shaped marble gravestones; above Josef’s name, the inevitable iron cross; the gravestones of long-dead ancestors overgrown with ivy and, rising above all the graves, the simple, classicistic, vaguely Puritan cross, to which had later been added a scroll proclaiming in neo-Gothic script: “Love never endeth.” A gravestone was ready for me, too, the last bearer of the name; the dash after my name and birth date, that graphic “to,” had something ominous about it. Who would continue to pay the (not inconsiderable) lease when my earthly days were done? Margret, probably. She was a woman in good health, well off, childless, a tea drinker, a moderate smoker, and in the melody of her handwriting, particularly in the small “d,” I could perceive a long life for her.
I stood behind the tamarisk hedge, now grown quite dense, that separated the Zerhoff burial plot from ours, and then I saw her: she seemed more attractive than ever, more so than the girl of fifteen with whom I had lain in the grass, more so than the woman of twenty, thirty, and thirty-five with whom I had had those embarrassing and abortive reunions, the last one fifteen years ago in Sinzig when she turned on her heel outside the hotel room and drove away; she hadn’t even allowed me to take her to the station. She must be close to fifty now, her thick, rather coarse blond hair had turned an attractive gray, and black suited her.
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As children we had often had to come out here on summer evenings to water the flowers: my brother Josef, Margret, myself, and her brother Franzi, into whose grave the last members of the cortège were just then throwing their flowers or their shovelfuls of earth; the familiar drumming of earth on wood, the impact of the bunches of mimosa like the alighting of a bird. Often we had spent our streetcar money on ice cream, setting out on the long homeward journey on foot and, in the summer heat, soon regretting our recklessness, but invariably Josef had produced some hidden “reserves” and paid our fares home, and on the streetcar, relieved and tired, we would argue about whether he had paid for our ice cream or our fares.
I still had to fight back my tears when I thought of Josef, and I still didn’t know, after thirty-four years I didn’t know, whether it was his death or his last wish that brought tears to my eyes. At the very end of the platform, beyond the station roof, before the arrival of the leave train, we had once again discussed ways and means of not returning to the front, fever, accident, medical certificates—and in the end it was Margret who broke the taboo and spoke of—what do they call it?—“desertion,” and Father had stamped his foot in rage and said, “There is no such thing as desertion in our family!” and Josef had laughed and said, “Where to? Am I supposed to swim across the Channel or to Sweden, or across Lake Constance to Switzerland—and Vladivostok, you know, is a pretty long way off,” and he was already standing on the steps, the stationmaster had blown his whistle, when he leaned down once more and said clearly, more to me than to my father, “Please, no priests at my grave, no mumbo jumbo at any memorial service.” He was nineteen, had given up the study of theology, and Margret was at that time considered almost his fiancée. We never saw him again. We winced, I more than my father, Margret less, as if whipped by his last words; and of course, when the news of his death arrived, I reminded Father of Josef’s last wish, not repeating his words, I was too scared to do that, but simply saying, “You know what he asked for, what his last wish was.” But Father had waved me away and, I need hardly say, not done as Josef had asked. They had indeed had their memorial service, with incense, Latin, and catafalque; in solemn pomp they had executed their precise choreography, in their black, gold-embroidered brocade robes, and they had even rounded up a choir of theology students who sang something in Greek. The Eastern Churches were already becoming very fashionable. I have never entered a church since, except as an acolyte and in my later capacity as salesman of devotional supplies; and when Franzi Zerhoff and I had assisted at solemn requiems, they had sometimes reminded me, in their heavy, gold-embroidered brocade robes, of Soviet marshals with their bulky gold shoulder pieces and their chests covered with about a hundred and fifty decorations. Always plenty of Latin, male choir in red-and-white sashes, top hats trembling in their hands, and the air trembling with the vehemence of their chest tones.
Margret’s mouth was surprisingly small and still not hard under her austere nose; she was slimmer, only her wrists revealed traces of plumpness. There she stood, dignified, erect, shaking hands, nodding, yet she had kept that swift, ephemeral, springy quality. The gray around her head reminded me of the whitish-gray dust in her hair when we staggered out of the burning house and lay down in the garden on the grass, came together on that June night after saying goodbye to Josef, when so many values and so much that was valuable had been destroyed; and I thought of the dust in her kisses, in her tears, of our irresponsible laughter when Father also came staggering out of the house and saw us lying there, and how our dust-powdered faces screwed up with laughter when he twisted the key to his safe in the air as if it, the air, contained his securities and all that notarized stuff; and of course he didn’t know, none of us knew, that in this so charmingly conventional war degrees of heat would build up that venerable safes could not withstand. And in the end, when later they were poking through the debris, he had found nothing but ashes in his molten safe, and it had been Margret, not I (who was of course familiar with such sayings), who told him, “Memento, quia pulvis es et …,” but she did not complete the sentence. For a time we were inseparable, but we never came together again, not even with a kiss, not even with a handclasp.
Margret turned toward me and, in a kind of bitter joy, her woman’s face changed to the face of that girl who, with me, had scorned accepted values on that June night—or had I then embraced the Margret of today, had I at last caught up with her, she with me? Had Josef’s curse at last truly united us? I thought of him, of the whiplash with which he had changed the course of my life, and I realized here, at last, that that was what he had wanted: to change the course of my life, away from gold brocade, male choirs, family graves, real and potential knights of Catholic orders. Perhaps that was the only thing he had learned in that gloriously conventional war, and today, here, facing Margret, I had no reason to bear a grudge against him on that score. I bore no grudge against anyone, not even against my father, who later became very silent, almost humble, and who always looked so expectantly at me when Margret came over from next door. We used to go to the movies, to the theater, for walks, we had long discussions—but we never got as far as even a handclasp, even a flicker of memory. I carried on as an acolyte, regarding it as a job (tips and free meals); I got into the black market, finished high school, left home, and, via the black market, ended up in the devotional-supplies business when I was asked to get hold of a Leonardo da Vinci print for a Moselle vintner’s first communion in exchange for butter, and did so. I had a few affairs, and I imagine Margret did, too.
I was standing close enough to be able to read the word “Blackbird,” from Margret’s lips. I nodded, withdrew, and headed for the “Blackbird,” where funeral receptions have been held since time immemorial. I only had to go back to the exit, cross the street, and walk for five minutes through Douglas firs. At the “Blackbird” they were already busy cutting up limp rolls, spreading them with butter, adding slices of sausage or cheese, and decorating them with mayonnaise. I wondered whether Aunt Marga was still alive, she had always insisted on having blood sausage with onion rings, as greedily as if she were starving, although everyone knew that not even she had any idea of the extent of her fortune. The coffee machine was steaming, brandy snifters were being placed on trays, freshly opened bottles beside them (Margret was sure to have firmly insisted on a price “by the bottle”), bottles of mineral water were being snapped open, flowers stuck in little vases. Still the same old, old-fashioned routine.
I recognized the priest, who had arrived without the acolytes and was sitting in a corner smoking a cigar with a contented, off-duty expression. He nodded at me. Not because he recognized me, we had never met. He looked like a nice fellow, I sat down at his table and asked him about the special carrying case for the collapsible cross: in my days as an acolyte we used to have to lug the whole cross around, and it had always been a problem getting it into a car without smashing a window or knocking top hats off heads. And I knew of a few rural communities where the old processional cross was still in use. He told me the name of the company, I jotted it down on my return ticket, then we both speculated as to why people continued to put up with those limp rolls. I told him that even as children we had called those sandwiches “Blackbird pasteboard with mayonnaise,” whether we were present as mourners or acolytes or—as frequently happened—as mourning acolytes. They were behind the times, there should be “Hawaiian Toast” or something, and sherry, not brandy, and not Persian lamb coats but mink, and instead of the lousy coffee—why did it always have to be so lousy everywhere?—they should have ordered mocha, which did sometimes turn out like reasonably good coffee.
I glanced at my return ticket, where I had noted the trains: 14:22, 15:17, then none till 17:03; it was now just on eleven, and if I wanted to take Margret along, if I wanted, after thirty-four years, to touch her hair that evening, I supposed I would have to stay on a while and run the risk of encountering a former schoolmate or two among the red-and-white sashes, maybe even among
the Catholic knights: one of them was sure to shout the opening lines of The Odyssey—in Greek, of course—into my ear, to prove that his classical education had not failed to leave its mark on him. Another, although we had graduated from high school more than thirty years ago and not seen each other since, taking it for granted that I would fully agree, would start moaning about modern times, about his spoiled brats, the Socialists, the general moral decline, and how he was working himself to death in his practice while his third or fourth apartment building was costing him more and more due to this damned inflation. I was prepared to endure this; I knew this kind of talk from funerals I had attended not as a mourner but professionally: I also have an agency for gravestones, and my top hat counts as professional clothing and is tax-deductible. It couldn’t take all that long: if we missed the 14:22 we would certainly catch the 15:17.
I was in luck, it was Bertholdi who sat down beside me. I recalled that in eight years of school I hadn’t exchanged so much as forty words with him. There had been simply no occasion to do so, and I had reason to regret this now. He was a very nice fellow, without that bitter-sour expression that seems inevitable with successful as well as unsuccessful men at the start of the last third of their lives. Bertholdi asked how my business was going, and when I told him that I had been selling devotional supplies for some years now, he remarked that it must be hard going in this post-Vatican Council era. I agreed that business had taken a beating, but I could also report a certain upswing, and when he mentioned “Lefebvre?” I nodded but also shook my head. His shrewd question could be answered only partially in the affirmative: there was also, I said, independently of the person he had named, a return to the traditional that expressed itself in top hats, bridal trains, elaborate celebrations of first communions, confirmations, and weddings, and in its wake helped the sale of modern devotional supplies, well-crafted icon copies, for instance, in fact anything smacking of the Eastern Churches.