The Clown

  “Who is speaking, please?”

  “Schnier,” I said. This was evidently beyond his powers of comprehension. He was silent for a long time, I began to cough again, pulled myself together and said: “I will spell it: School, Charles, Henry, Norman, Ida, Emil, Richard.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said finally, and he sounded as if he felt as desperate as I did. Maybe they had put a nice old pipe-smoking professor in charge of the phone, and I hastily scraped together a few Latin words and said humbly; “Sum frater leonis.” I felt I was taking an unfair advantage, I thought of all the people who perhaps felt the urge now and again to speak to someone there and who had never learned a word of Latin.

  Strangely enough he tittered and said: Frater tuus est in refectorio—at dinner,” he said, raising his voice slightly, “the students are having dinner and they must not be disturbed at mealtimes.”

  “The matter is very urgent,” I said.

  “A death in the family?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “but almost.”

  “A serious accident then?”

  “No,” I said, “an internal accident.”

  “Oh,” he said, and his voice sounded somewhat milder, “internal hemorrhage.”

  “No,” I said, “spiritual. A purely spiritual matter.” Obviously this was a foreign word for him, he maintained an icy silence.

  “My God,” I said, “after all a man consists of body and soul.”

  His rumblings seemed to express doubts as to this statement, between two puffs of his pipe he muttered: “St. Augustine—Bonaventura—Cusanus—you are quite wrong.”

  “Soul,” I said obstinately, “please tell Mr. Schnier that his brother’s soul is in danger and ask him to phone me as soon as he’s finished dinner.”

  “Soul,” he said coldly, “brother, danger.” He might just as well have said: Muck, manure, milkman. To me the whole thing seemed quite funny: after all, the students were being trained there as future spiritual advisers, and he must have come across the word soul somewhere. “The matter is of the utmost urgency,” I said.

  He merely went “Hm, hm,” he seemed quite unable to understand that something connected with soul could be urgent.

  “I’ll give him the message,” he said, “what was that about school?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “nothing at all. The matter has nothing to do with school. I merely used the word to spell my name.”

  “I suppose you think they still teach children spelling in school. Do you seriously believe that?” He became so animated that I assumed he had finally hit on his favorite topic. “The methods are much too mild these days,” he shouted, “much too mild.”

  “Indeed they are,” I said, “they ought to use the strap much more in school.”

  “Yes, oughtn’t they?” he exclaimed eagerly.

  “Yes,” I said, “especially the teachers, they ought to be strapped much more often. You won’t forget, will you, to give my brother the message?”

  “I’ve made a note of it,” he said, “urgent spiritual matter. To do with school. Listen, my young friend, may I as doubtless the older of us give you some well-meant advice?”

  “By all means,” I said.

  “Stay away from St. Augustine: skillfully formulated subjectivity is not theology, not by a long shot, and it’s harmful to young souls. Nothing but journalism with a few dialectical features. You won’t take offense at this advice?”

  “No,” I said, “I shall immediately go and throw my St. Augustine into the fire.”

  “That’s right,” he said almost jubilantly, “into the fire with him. God bless you.” I was on the point of saying Thank you, but it didn’t seem appropriate, so I merely hung up and wiped the sweat off my face. I am very sensitive to smells, and the intensely strong smell of cabbage had mobilized my vegetative nervous system. I also thought about the methods of ecclesiastical authorities: of course it was nice to make an old man feel he was still useful, but I couldn’t see why they would give such a crotchety deaf old fellow the job of answering the phone. The cabbage smell was something I remembered from boarding school. A padre there had once explained to us that cabbage was supposed to suppress sensuality. I find the idea of suppressing mine or anyone else’s sensuality disgusting. Evidently they think day and night of nothing but “desires of the flesh,” and somewhere in the kitchen a nun sits drawing up the menu, then she talks it over with the principal, and they sit opposite each other and don’t talk about it but think with each item on the menu: this one inhibits, that one encourages sensuality. To me a scene like that seems a clear case of obscenity, just like those confounded football games that went on for hours at school; we knew it was supposed to make us tired so we wouldn’t start thinking about girls, that made football disgusting to my mind, and when I think that my brother Leo has to eat cabbage so as to suppress his sensuality, I want to go to that place and sprinkle hydrochloric acid over all the cabbage. What those boys have in store for them is hard enough without cabbage: it must be terribly hard to proclaim these extraordinary things every day: resurrection of the body and eternal life. To dig away in the vineyard of the Lord and see precious little visible result. Heinrich Behlen, who was so kind to us when Marie had the miscarriage, explained it all to me once. He always spoke of himself to me “as an unskilled laborer in the vineyard of the Lord, with regard to outlook as well as wages.”

  When we left the hospital at five I walked home with him since we had no money for the streetcar, and as he stood there at the front door and pulled his keyring out of his pocket there seemed to be no difference between him and a workman coming home from night shift, tired, unshaven, and I knew it must be terrible for him: to read mass now, with all the secrets Marie always used to tell me about. When Heinrich unlocked the door, his housekeeper was standing there in the hall, a grumpy old woman in loose slippers, the skin of her bare legs quite yellow, and not even a nun, or his mother or sister; she hissed at him: “What’s the meaning of this? What’s the meaning of this?” This shabby, musty bachelor atmosphere; damn it all, I’m not surprised some Catholic parents are afraid to send their daughters to a priest at his home, and I’m not surprised these poor devils sometimes lose their heads.

  I almost phoned the deaf old pipe-smoker at Leo’s college again: I would have liked to talk to him about carnal desire. I was afraid to call up someone I knew: this stranger would probably be more understanding. I would have liked to ask him whether my conception of Catholicism was correct. For me there were only four Catholics in the world: Pope John, Alec Guinness, Marie, and Gregory, an old negro boxer who had once nearly become world champion and who was now eking out a meagre living as a strong man in vaudeville. Now and again I would run into him during a tour of engagements. He was very devout, a real churchgoer, was a member of the Third Order and always wore his scapular on his huge boxer’s chest. Most people thought he was mentally deficient because he hardly ever uttered a word and apart from pickles and bread hardly ate a thing; and yet he was so strong that he could carry me and Marie on his hands across the room like dolls. There were a few more Catholics with a fairly high degree of probability: Karl Emonds and Heinrich Behlen, and Züpfner too. As for Marie, I was already beginning to have my doubts: her “metaphysical horror” was something I didn’t understand, and now if she went and did all those things with Züpfner which I had done with her, then she was doing those things which in her books are described unmistakably as adultery and fornication. Her metaphysical horror was concerned simply and solely with my refusal to be married at a registry office, to have our children brought up as Catholics. We didn’t have any children yet, but we talked all the time about how we would dress them, how we would talk to them, how we would bring them up, and we agreed on all points except the Catholic upbringing. I was willing to have them baptized. Marie said I must put it in writing, otherwise we could not be married in church. When I consented to the church wedding, it turned out we also had to go through a civil cer
emony—and then I lost patience and said we ought to wait a while after all, a year didn’t make much difference now, and she cried and said I just didn’t understand what it meant to her to live in this state and with no prospect of having our children brought up as Christians. It was terrible, because it turned out that on this point we had been talking at cross purposes for five years. I really hadn’t known one has to have a civil wedding before one can be married in church. Of course I ought to have known, as an adult citizen and a “fully responsible male person,” but I simply did not, just as I didn’t know till recently that white wine is served cold and red wine warmed. I knew, of course, that such things as marriage license offices existed and that certain marriage ceremonies took place and documents were issued there, but I thought that was something for people who didn’t go to church and for those who as it were wanted to give the state a little treat. I got really angry when I found out you have to go there before you can get married in church, and when Marie then started in about my giving a written guarantee that our children would be brought up as Catholics, we began quarreling. That seemed like blackmail to me, and I didn’t like it at all that Marie was so completely in agreement with this demand for a written guarantee. After all, she could have the children baptized and bring them up as she saw fit.

  She wasn’t feeling well that evening, she was pale and tired, spoke rather loudly to me, and when I finally said, Yes, all right, I would do everything, even sign those things, she got mad and said: “You’re just agreeing now out of laziness and not because you are convinced of the justness of abstract principles of order,” and I said, Yes, it was true I was doing it out of laziness and because I wanted to have her by me my whole life long, and I would even go over properly to the Catholic church if that was necessary in order to keep her. I even got quite dramatic and said an expression like “abstract principles of order” reminded me of a torture chamber. She took it as an insult that, in order to keep her, I even wanted to become a Catholic. And I had thought I was paying her an almost exaggerated compliment. She said it was no longer a question of her and me, but of “order.”

  It was evening, in a hotel room in Hanover, in one of those expensive hotels where, when you order a cup of coffee, you only get three quarters of a cup of coffee. They are so sophisticated in those hotels that a full cup of coffee is considered vulgar, and the waiters know much better what is sophisticated than the sophisticated people who play the part of guests there. I always feel in these hotels as if I am in an ultra-expensive and ultraboring boarding school, and this evening I was dead tired: three performances one after the other. In the early afternoon to some kind of steel shareholders, later in the afternoon to some graduate teachers, and in the evening in a vaudeville theater where the applause was so weak that I could already sense my approaching downfall. When I ordered some beer sent up to my room in this stupid hotel, the head waiter said in an icy voice on the phone: “Certainly, sir,” as if I had asked for liquid manure, and they brought me the beer in a silver tankard. I was tired, all I wanted to do was drink some beer, play a little parchesi, have a bath, read the evening papers and fall asleep beside Marie: my right hand on her breast and my face so close to her head that the smell of her hair would become part of my sleep. The feeble applause still sounded in my ears. It would have been almost more humane if they had all turned their thumbs down. This tired, blasé contempt for my performance was as flat as the beer in the stupid silver tankard. I was simply incapable of carrying on an ideological discussion.

  “It’s the principle of the thing, Hans,” she said, not quite as loud, and she didn’t even notice that “thing” has a special meaning for us; she had apparently forgotten. She walked up and down by the foot of the bed and every time she gesticulated she jabbed the air so precisely with her cigarette that the little smoke clouds looked like full stops. She had meanwhile learned how to smoke, in her pale green pullover she looked beautiful: her white skin, her hair darker than it used to be, I saw for the first time tendons in her neck. I said: “Have a heart, let me have a good night’s sleep first, tomorrow at breakfast we’ll talk over everything again, especially the thing you’re worried about,” but she noticed nothing, turned round, stood in front of the bed, and I could see from her mouth that her behavior was caused by motives she did not admit to herself. When she drew on her cigarette, I saw a few little lines round her mouth I had never seen before. She shook her head as she looked at me, sighed, turned round again and walked up and down.

  “I don’t quite understand,” I said wearily, “first we quarrel about my signature to this blackmail form—then about the civil wedding—now I have agreed to both, and you are angrier than ever.”

  “Yes,” she said, “it is too quick for me, and I feel you are avoiding the issue. What do you really want?” “You,” I said, and I don’t know of anything nicer you can say to a woman.

  “Come here,” I said, “lie down beside me and bring the ashtray, we can talk much better like that.” I could no longer say the word “thing” in her presence. She shook her head, put the ashtray beside me on the bed, went over to the window and looked out. I was afraid.

  “There’s something about this conversation I don’t like—it doesn’t sound like you!”

  “What does it sound like then?” she asked quietly, and I was deceived by her voice which had suddenly become so gentle again.

  “It reminds me of Bonn,” I said, “of the group, of Sommerwild and Züpfner—and all that crowd.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, without turning round, “your ears imagine they have heard what your eyes have seen.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said wearily, “what do you mean.”

  “Oh,” she said, “as if you didn’t know that there’s a Catholic Congress going on here now.”

  “I saw the posters,” I said.

  “And that Heribert and Prelate Sommerwild might be here, didn’t that occur to you?”

  I hadn’t known Züpfner’s first name was Heribert. When she said the name I realized she could only mean him. I thought once again of them holding hands. I had already noticed that in Hanover there were more Catholic priests and nuns about than the town seemed to call for, but it had not occurred to me that Marie might be meeting someone here, and even if she were—after all, when I had a few free days we had sometimes gone to Bonn, and she had been able to enjoy the whole “group” to her heart’s content.

  “Here in the hotel?” I asked wearily.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you let me meet them?”

  “You were hardly here,” she said, “on the road for a whole week—Brunswick, Hildesheim, Celle …”

  “But now I’m free,” I said, “phone them, and we’ll have a drink downstairs in the bar.”

  “They’ve gone,” she said, “they left this afternoon.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, “you were able to breathe ‘Catholic air’ so long and so plentifully, even if it was imported.” That was her expression, not mine. Sometimes she had said she had to breathe Catholic air again.

  “Why are you angry?” she asked; she was still standing facing the street, had lighted another cigarette, and this was another strange thing about her: this feverish smoking, it was as strange to me as the way she spoke to me. At this moment she could have been anybody, any pretty girl, not very intelligent, who was looking for any excuse to leave.

  “I’m not angry,” I said, “you know I’m not. Tell me you know.”

  She didn’t say anything, but she nodded, and I could see enough of her face to know she was holding back the tears. Why? She ought to have cried, loud and long. Then I could have got up, put my arm around her and kissed her. I didn’t. I had no desire to, and to do it out of mere routine or duty didn’t appeal to me. I stayed lying on the bed. I thought of Züpfner and Sommer-wild, and that for three days she had been chatting with them without telling me a thing about it. For certain they had talked about me. Züpfner was a member of the E
xecutive Committee. I hesitated too long, a minute, half a minute or two, I don’t know. When I got up and went over to her she shook her head, pushed my hands away from her shoulder and began talking again, about her metaphysical horror and about principles of order, and I felt I had been married to her for twenty years. Her voice took on a disciplinary note, I was too tired to follow her arguments, they flew past my ears. I interrupted her and told her about my failure at the vaudeville theater, the first in three years. We stood side by side at the window, looking down onto the street below where taxis kept driving by taking the Catholic committee members to the station: nuns, priests and solemn-looking laymen. In one group I recognized Schnitzler, he was holding the taxi door open for a very distinguished-looking elderly nun. When he was living with us he had been a Protestant. Either he must have converted or be here as a Protestant observer. He was capable of anything. Down below suitcases were being carried and tips pressed into the hands of hotel staff. I was so tired and confused that everything swam before my eyes: taxis and nuns, lights and suitcases, and all the time that horrible feeble applause was ringing in my ears. Marie had long since broken off her monologue about principles of order, she had stopped smoking too, and when I moved away from the window she followed me, grasped me by the shoulder and kissed both my eyes. “You are so sweet,” she said, “so sweet and so tired,” but when I wanted to put my arms round her she said softly: “Please, please, don’t,” and I made the mistake of really letting her go. I threw myself fully dressed on the bed, fell asleep at once, and when I woke in the morning I was not surprised to find Marie had gone. I found the note on the table “I must take the path that I must take.” She was nearly twenty-five, and she ought to have been able to think of something better than that. I was not offended, it just seemed a little inadequate. I sat down at once and wrote her a long letter, after breakfast I wrote her another one, I wrote her every day and sent all the letters to Fredebeul’s address in Bonn, but I never got an answer.