Homo Faber

  ‘Come on,’ I said.

  Herbert stood there, still experiencing.

  ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘are you any relation of a Joachim Hencke, who once studied in Zurich?’

  It just slipped out as we stood there, our hands in our pockets and our coat-collars turned up; we were on the point of climbing up into the cabin.

  ‘Joachim?’ he said. ‘That’s my brother.’

  ‘No!’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘of course – I told you I was going to visit my brother in Guatemala.’

  We had to laugh.

  ‘It’s a small world!’

  We spent the nights in the cabin, shivering in an overcoat and rugs; the crew made tea, as long as the water lasted.

  ‘How is he?’ I inquired. ‘I haven’t heard anything of him for twenty years.’

  ‘He’s all right,’ replied Herbert, ‘he’s all right…’

  ‘We were very good friends in those days,’ I said.

  What I heard was the usual story: marriage, a child (which I didn’t quite catch, obviously, otherwise I shouldn’t have asked again later on), then the war, a prison camp, return to Düsseldorf and so on; it shook me to think how time passes, how we grow older.

  ‘We’re worried,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s the only white man down there,’ he said, ‘and we’ve had no news for two months.’

  He told me about it.

  Most of the passengers were already asleep, we had to whisper, the main light in the cabin had been turned off long ago, and, to save current, we had been asked to switch off the little lights over the seats; it was dark; only the brightness of the sand outside, the wings in the moonlight, gleaming, cold.

  ‘Why should there have been an uprising?’

  I calmed him down.

  ‘Why an uprising?’ I said. ‘Perhaps his letters simply went astray…’

  Someone asked us to keep quiet.

  Forty-two passengers in a Super-Constellation that wasn’t flying, but standing in the desert, an aeroplane with rugs around the engines (to keep the sand out) and with rugs around every wheel, the passengers exactly as though they were flying, sleeping in their seats with their heads to one side and most of them with their mouths open, but all in deathly silence, outside the four polished propeller-crosses, the white moonlight on the wings, everything motionless – it was a funny sight.

  Someone was talking in his sleep.

  When I woke up in the morning, looked out of the little window and saw the sand, the nearness of the sand, I took fright for a second, unnecessarily.

  Herbert was reading a paperback again.

  I took out my calendar. 3 April, assemble turbines at Caracas!

  For breakfast there was fruit juice with two biscuits and further assurances that food was on the way, also drinks, there was nothing to worry about. It would have been better if they had said nothing; as it was, of course, we waited all day long for the sound of engines.

  Another day of maddening heat.

  It was even hotter in the cabin.

  All we heard was the wind, the occasional whistle of sand mice, which we didn’t see, the scuffle of a lizard, and especially a perpetual wind that didn’t lift the sand, but simply blew it along the ground, so that our footsteps were again and again obliterated; again and again it looked as though no one had been here, no company of forty-two passengers and five members of the crew.

  I wished I could shave.

  There was absolutely nothing to film.

  I don’t feel comfortable when unshaven; not on account of other people, but on my own account. Not being shaved gives me the feeling I’m some sort of plant and I keep involuntarily feeling my chin. I took out my shaver and tried every possible way of getting it to work. Of course it was no use: you can’t use an electric razor without any electric current, I knew that – that was what put me so much on edge, the fact that in the desert there is no current, no telephone, no power points, nothing.

  Once, around noon, we heard engines.

  Everyone, except Herbert and me, was standing outside in the broiling sun, watching the purple sky over the yellow sand and the grey thistles and the red mountains; it was only a thin hum, an ordinary DC-7 glittering up there at a great altitude, white as snow in the reflected light, heading for Mexico City, where we ought to have landed yesterday at about this time.

  Our spirits dropped lower than ever.

  Fortunately, we had our chess.

  Many passengers followed our example, taking off everything but their shoes and their underpants; it was harder for the ladies, some of them sat with tucked up skirts and brassières, blue or white or pink, with their blouses wound round their heads like turbans.

  A lot of people complained of headaches.

  Somebody had to vomit.

  Herbert and I were sitting apart from the rest again, in the shade of the tailplane, which, like the wings, was dazzling with the sunlight reflected off the sand, so that even in the shadow it was like sitting under a searchlight. As usual while playing chess, we spoke little. At one point I asked:

  ‘Isn’t Joachim married any more, then?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Divorced?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘We used to play a lot of chess in the old days.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  His monosyllables irritated me.

  ‘Who did he marry?’

  I asked simply to pass the time, not being allowed to smoke made me edgy, I had an unlit cigarette in my mouth; it was taking Herbert so long to make up his mind, although he must have seen his position was hopeless; I was a knight up and therefore well ahead; then, after a long silence and quite casually, as casually as I had asked my questions, he mentioned Hanna’s name.

  ‘…Hanna Landsberg, from Munich, half Jewish.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘It’s your move,’ he said.

  I hid my feelings, I believe. I inadvertently lit my cigarette, which was strictly forbidden, so I quickly put it out again. I pretended to be thinking over my next move, and lost piece after piece.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he laughed.

  We didn’t finish the game, I gave up and turned the board around in order to set the men up again. I didn’t even dare to ask whether Hanna was still alive. We played for hours without uttering a word, every now and then shifting our Coca-Cola crate so as to stay in the shade. This meant forever sitting down on sand that a moment ago had been baking in the sun. We were sweating as though in a Turkish bath, bent over my leather pocket chess set, which was unfortunately getting discoloured by our dripping sweat.

  There was nothing left to drink.

  Why I didn’t ask whether Hanna was still alive, I don’t know – perhaps for fear he would tell me Hanna had been sent to Theresienstadt.

  I worked out her present age.

  I couldn’t picture her.

  Towards evening, just before dusk, the promised aircraft arrived, a sports plane; it circled around for a long time before it finally ventured to drop the parachute – three sacks and two boxes that had to be collected from within a radius of three hundred yards – we were saved. CARTA BLANCA, CERVEZA MEXICANA, a good beer, even Herbert, the German, had to admit as we stood with our beer tins in the desert, a social gathering in brassières and underpants with another sunset, which I took on coloured film.

  I dreamed of Hanna.

  Hanna as a nurse on horseback.

  On the third day the first helicopter came, to fetch at least the Argentinian mama and her two children, thank goodness, and to take mail; it waited an hour for mail.

  Herbert immediately wrote to Düsseldorf.

  Everyone sat writing.

  You pretty well had to write, if only to stop kind people from asking whether you had no wife, no mother, no children – I took out my Baby Hermes (it’s still full of sand) and slipped in a sheet of paper with a carbon copy, since I thought I
was going to write to Williams. I typed the date and pushed the carriage over to begin the letter.

  ‘My dear…’

  So I wrote to Ivy. I had long felt a desire to make a clean breast of it. At last I had time and peace, the peace of a whole desert.

  ‘My dear…’

  It didn’t take long to tell her I was sitting in the desert, sixty miles from the world of normal transport. That it was hot, fine weather, not the slightest injury and so on, and a few descriptive details to add local colour – Coca-Cola crate, underpants, meeting with a fellow chess enthusiast – all this didn’t fill a letter. What else? Beer at last. What else? I couldn’t even ask her to get films for me and I knew that Ivy, like every woman, really only wanted to know what I felt – or thought, if I didn’t feel anything. I knew what this was, all right: I hadn’t married Hanna, whom I loved, so why should I marry Ivy? But it was damned difficult to put this into words without hurting her feelings, for she didn’t know anything about Hanna and was a nice kid, but the sort of American woman who thinks she has to marry every man she goes to bed with. At the same time, Ivy was thoroughly married, I didn’t know how many times altogether, but her present husband, a Washington official, had no intention of getting a divorce; for he loved Ivy. I don’t know whether he had any idea why Ivy regularly flew to New York. She used to say she was going to the psychiatrist, and as a matter of fact she did that too. Anyhow, no one ever knocked at my door, and I couldn’t see why Ivy, who in other ways had a modern outlook, was so insistent about making a marriage of it; anyway, we had done nothing but row lately, it seemed to me, row about every little thing. We rowed about whether it should be a Studebaker or a Nash! I only had to think of it – and suddenly my fingers typed by themselves; in fact now I had to keep looking at my watch to be sure of having my letter finished by the time the helicopter took off.

  Its engine was already running.

  I didn’t want the Studebaker, that was Ivy’s idea; the colour especially (tomato-red in her opinion, raspberry-red in mine) was her taste, not mine, she wasn’t much interested in the technical qualities of the car. Ivy was a model, she chose her clothes according to the colour of the car, I think, and the colour of the car according to her lipstick or the other way around, I’m not sure which it was. I only knew her eternal reproach – that I had no taste at all and that I wouldn’t marry her. And yet she was a good kid, as I said. But she was horrified that I should want to sell her Studebaker and considered it typical of me that I didn’t give a moment’s thought to her wardrobe, for I was an egotist, a brute, a barbarian where taste was concerned, a monster as regards women. I knew her reproaches and was fed up with them. I had told her often enough that I definitely wouldn’t get married, or anyhow I had made it pretty clear, and in the end I definitely told her so, it was at the airport, when we had to wait three hours for this Super-Constellation. Ivy actually cried, and therefore listened to what I was saying. But perhaps Ivy needed it in black and white. If we had been burnt to death when we made this forced landing she would have been able to live without me! I told her sufficiently plainly (fortunately with a carbon copy), so I thought, to save us from another meeting.

  The helicopter was ready to take off.

  I had no time to read through my letter, but only to put it in an envelope, gum it up and hand it in – and watch the helicopter take off.

  We were slowly growing beards.

  I longed for electric current.

  The situation was gradually getting tedious, in fact it was scandalous that the forty-two passengers and five crew members should not have been liberated long ago from this desert; after all, most of us were travelling on urgent business.

  In the end I did ask:

  ‘Tell me, is she still alive?’

  ‘Who?’ he asked.

  ‘Hanna – his wife.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he said and thought about the best way of countering my opening gambit, whistling all the time, which got on my nerves at the best of times, whistling under his breath without any tune, an involuntary hissing sound like an outlet valve – I had to repeat my question.

  ‘Where does she live now?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘But she is alive still?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I suppose so.’ He repeated everything like his own echo. ‘I suppose so.’

  Our game of chess was more important to him.

  ‘Perhaps it’s too late anyhow,’ he said later. ‘Perhaps it’s too late anyhow.’

  He was referring to the chess.

  ‘Did she have a chance to emigrate?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she did.’

  ‘1938,’ he said, ‘at the last moment.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Paris,’ he said. ‘Then probably somewhere else, for we were in Paris ourselves a few years later. I never enjoyed myself so much in my life! That was before I went to the Caucasus. Sous les toits de Paris!’

  There wasn’t much more to be got out of him.

  ‘I think I’ve had it,’ he said, ‘unless I exchange man for man.’

  We were playing with less and less enthusiasm.

  As we learned later, eight U.S. Army helicopters were waiting at the Mexican frontier for permission to pick us up.

  I cleaned my Baby Hermes.

  Herbert read.

  There was nothing to do but wait.

  *

  As regards Hanna:

  I couldn’t possibly have married Hanna; at that time – 1933 to 1935 – I was an assistant lecturer at the Swiss College of Technology, Zurich, working on my dissertation (on the significance of the so-called Maxwell’s demon) and earning 300 francs a month, marriage was out of the question on economic grounds, apart from anything else. Nor did Hanna ever reproach me for not marrying her. I was quite ready to do so. It was really Hanna herself who didn’t want to marry at that time.

  *

  My decision to change route on an official trip and make a private detour via Guatemala, merely to see an old friend of my youth again, was reached on the airfield at Mexico City and at the very last moment. I was already standing at the barrier, shaking hands all over again and asking Herbert to give his brother my best wishes, if he remembered me at all, when the usual announcement came over the loudspeaker: ATTENTION PLEASE, ATTENTION PLEASE (it was another Super-Constellation), WILL ALL PASSENGERS FOR PANAMA – CARACAS – PERNAMBUCO… I just couldn’t face the prospect of climbing into another aeroplane, fastening another safety belt. Herbert said:

  ‘It’s time you got moving.’

  I am generally considered extremely conscientious over professional matters, perhaps excessively so, anyhow I have never before postponed an official trip for a passing whim, let alone changed my route. An hour later I was flying with Herbert.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s sporting of you.’

  I don’t know what it was really.

  ‘Now the turbines are waiting for me for a change,’ I said. ‘I’ve waited for them often enough, now they can wait for me.’

  Of course, that was no way to look at it.

  As soon as we reached Campeche the heat greeted us with slimy sunshine and sticky air, the stench of slime rotting in the sun, and when you wiped the sweat from your face it was as though you yourself stank of fish. I said nothing. In the end you stop wiping the sweat away and sit there with your eyes closed, breathing with your mouth shut, resting your head against a wall and sticking your legs out in front of you. Herbert was quite sure the train went every Tuesday, he had it in black and white in a Düsseldorf guidebook – but after waiting five hours we suddenly discovered it was not Tuesday, but Monday.

  I didn’t say a word.

  At least there was a shower in the hotel, and a towel that smelled of camphor as is usual in this part of the world; when I went to take a shower, beetles as long as my finger fell from the mouldy curtain – I tried to d
rown them, but they kept climbing up out of the plug-hole again, until I squashed them under my heel so that I could finally have my shower.

  I dreamed of those beetles.

  I had made up my mind to leave Herbert and fly back the following afternoon, friendship or no friendship…

  I felt my stomach again.

  I was lying stark naked.

  It stank all night long.

  Herbert also lay stark naked.

  In spite of everything, Campeche is a town, a human settlement with electric current so that you can shave, and telephones; but there were zopilotes perched on every wire, waiting in rows for a dog to die of hunger, a donkey to collapse, a horse to be slaughtered, then they would come flapping down… We arrived just as they were tugging a long tangle of entrails this way and that, a whole pack of blackish-purple birds with bloody guts in their beaks, they wouldn’t fly away, even when a car came along; they dragged the carcass off somewhere else, without rising into the air, just hopping and scurrying, and all this right in the middle of the market place.

  Herbert bought a pineapple.

  As I said, I had made up my mind to fly back to Mexico City. I was in despair. I have no idea why I didn’t do so.