“What are you talking about?” I asked coldly.
She was silent for a moment. “The championships. It’ll happen. You mustn’t let yourself get discouraged.”
Although she really wasn’t old yet, her hair was already turning gray. She was a little plump, and she often smiled in an absentminded, sad sort of way. At this moment, in the kitchen, after midnight, I thought a number of things all at once: I thought that of course she was right, and I thought that I couldn’t talk about any of it with her, and I thought that in earlier times I would have been able to stay at home and live with her, freed from having to compete, safe from want, wrapped in her care, without anyone thinking it in any way peculiar. Only in the age of psychologists had this become frowned upon.
I fetched a cup for myself. In the room next door, where the record player was kept, piano music was playing softly. I poured myself some tea. Did everyone have to go out into the world? Could I really not live here, in this house, in this kitchen?
She shook her head, as if she’d read my mind. “Don’t give up,” she said. “That’s the whole trick.”
“But why not?”
She said nothing. I took my cup and went to bed.
On the other hand, a few months later I found myself in Sabine Wegner’s apartment. We were alone, her family had gone out, we wanted to work on our Latin. Sabine was fat. She was a sweet girl, clever and warmhearted, but everything about her was fat: her face, her calves, her body, her hands. And I, who had no idea yet what I myself would look like one day, looked down on her just as mockingly as everyone else. Her whole appearance said that she wasn’t a part of the game. She didn’t come into it.
We sat at the dining-room table and deciphered Tacitus. Sabine drank peppermint tea, I drank apple juice. Finally we got to the end and I stood up.
“But the news is about to come on,” she said.
We sat down on the sofa. Gorbachev and Reagan shook hands, Honecker yowled into a microphone, Tom Cruise sat in a cockpit, a woman stood in front of a bluish background and announced rain, and then the ads were already starting: a housewife waved a cloth and told a proud man with a tie and a briefcase that things had never been cleaner. Then I put my hand on Sabine’s neck.
In that first moment I thought it was some mistake. Why was I doing this, what was I thinking?
She sat there rigid. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that she didn’t even turn her head. Take your hand away, I thought, there’s still time. I leaned toward her. There was a roaring in my ears and my heart was thumping.
But she’s so fat, I thought.
And I thought: But she’s a girl.
Then she turned her head. Her eyes were strangely clouded. The large shadow made by her body. The sweetish smell of her perfume. My hand on her soft neck.
I felt dizzy. Really, I thought, she’s not that fat. And her face, so close it was distorted, wasn’t ugly. I saw that one of her eyelashes had fallen out and was lying on her cheekbone. I saw a little scratch on her temple. I saw that a tiny vein divided in the white of her right eye, and I saw the pores in her skin.
Her lips felt like cotton wool as she put them against mine. Uncertainly I put my hand on her hip and pressed down. Sabine pulled back, looked me in the face, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, and came back to me. We kissed a second time, her mouth opened a little, and I felt a small living thing that was her tongue. Her breasts rose and fell, my heart pounded, I couldn’t draw breath, but it seemed to be okay without oxygen. After a while she pulled her head back. I inhaled. She fumbled with my belt.
I stood up and let her pull down my pants. Then she took hold of my underpants, pulled, and was looking at my nakedness. The opening credits for some crime series were blaring from the TV. I looked at her breasts. They were round, and large and full under her blouse. I reached for them, she leaned forward to meet me. The door opened and in came her father, followed by her mother and her sister, followed by a dachshund, followed by my mother.
Nobody said a word. In silence they watched as I pulled up my underpants and my pants and buckled my belt. The dog grunted, lay down on the carpet, stuck its legs in the air, and waited for someone to scratch it. Getting dressed took longer than usual because of my trembling hands. The roaring in my ears was even louder than before, and the floor seemed to be a long way away. The dog heaved a pleading sigh, in vain. On TV a policeman with a mustache said something about ordering an arrest and the police force in Duisburg. I crossed the room, which seemed to be wobbling, picked up my Latin textbook, my notebook, dictionary, and fountain pen from the dining-room table, and went to the door. Sabine’s parents stepped aside to make room. Her sister giggled. My mother walked out ahead of me.
We went down the stairs.
“They were waiting for the bus,” she said. “I happened to drive by, and offered to bring them home. Then I thought I’d take you home.” She paused for a few seconds. “I’m sorry.”
She unlocked the car door and I got into the passenger seat. She carefully adjusted the rearview mirror and started the engine.
“I didn’t think …,” she said. “I mean. Because Sabine. I wouldn’t have imagined …! She’s not exactly … I mean, I wouldn’t have just …”
I said nothing.
“When I got to know your father …”
I waited. She never talked about Arthur. But either she realized it wasn’t the right moment, or she suddenly didn’t want to divulge whatever it was, in any case she didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t say another word before we got home.
Just give up—what was so bad about that? The thought was large and seductive. I came in second in the state championships, I qualified for the national championships, but I also knew along the way that the cube would never turn into a career. Against all my hopes, no government agency was interested in the services of cube experts, nor were the big firms looking for them, and even the creators of computer programs and games favored people with qualifications in math or business.
But I liked being in darkened spaces, I liked listening to Monteverdi, and I liked the smell of incense. I liked the windows in old churches, I liked the network of shadows in Gothic vaulting, I liked the depictions of Christ Pantocrator, the Savior swathed in gold as ruler of the world, I liked medieval woodcuts, I also liked the sweet gentle humanity of Raphael’s Madonnas. I was impressed by Augustine’s Confessions, I felt instructed by St. Thomas’s exercises in hairsplitting, I was drawn to humanity in general, and I really had no desire to sit out my days in an office. Besides which I had no talent for self-abuse. There had been a time when I did it regularly, filled with anger and disgust and convinced I was committing an aesthetic transgression, a sin against beauty rather than against any moral code. I saw myself as if at a distance: a red-faced young man, already a little plump, laying hands on himself frantically, eyes almost closed, and so I soon cured myself of it. It’s not something to admit in this age of psychologists, but the cube was actually more fun.
I’d get the thing with God worked out too. Or so I thought. It really couldn’t be that hard. All it required was a little effort.
Secretly I expected it all to happen at my baptism. But when the moment arrived, the church was in the middle of being renovated: the walls were almost hidden behind steel girders, plastic sheeting hung in front of the altar, and unfortunately the organ was also out of action. The water felt like water, the baptismal priest looked like an obstinate muddle-head, and standing next to my mother with her sad smile, my brother Ivan was obviously trying not to laugh.
And yet I was confident that faith would arrive of its own accord. So many intelligent people were believers. You just had to read more, attend Mass more often, pray more. You had to practice. As soon as I believed in God, everything would fall into place, and my life would belatedly become my destiny.
I celebrated my twenty-first birthday with my fellow students Finckenstein and Kalm in a smoke-filled college bar.
“Augusti
ne is a shrunken Aristotelian,” said Finckenstein. “He’s stuck in substance ontology, that’s why he’s been superseded!”
“Aristotle has never been superseded,” replied Kalm. “He’s the very essence of reason.”
You only ever have conversations like this when you’re a student. Finckenstein wore thick glasses, had very red cheeks, and was as meek as a child. Kalm was a sweet-natured fanatic, Thomist, and clever champion of the Inquisition. On the weekends he competed in rowing events, he was interested in model trains, and had—and this made him an object of secret envy among his colleagues—a girlfriend. In front of him lay Arthur Friedland’s book My Name Is No One. I pretended not to notice, and no one mentioned it. There was also nothing unusual about this, it was absolutely everywhere this year.
“Augustine’s theory of time goes back much further than the Aristotelian tradition,” I said. “Everyone quotes his remark that we know what time is as long as we don’t think about it. It’s beautiful, but as a theory of knowledge, it’s weak.”
“But the paradigm wasn’t the theory of knowledge,” said Kalm. “The paradigm was ontology.”
We fell silent in exhaustion. I put some money on the table and stood up.
“What’s bothering you, Friedland?”
“The passage of the years. The loss of time, the proximity of death and hell. You wouldn’t know, you’re only twenty.”
“So does hell exist?” asked Finckenstein. “What does ontology say?”
“It has to exist,” said Kalm. “But it could be empty.”
“And what happens there? Fire that hurts but does not consume, like in Dante?”
“Dante isn’t depicting hell,” said Kalm. “Dante’s depicting the truth of our existence. We really visit hell at night during those moments of truth we call nightmares. Whatever hell may be, sleep is the gateway through which it forces its entry. Everyone knows hell, because everyone is there every night. Eternal punishment is simply a dream from which there is no awakening.”
“Well then,” I said. “I’m off to sleep.”
Outside the tram had already arrived. I got in and it departed immediately, as if it had been waiting for me. I sat down.
“Excuse me,” said a thin voice. A man in rags with a straggly beard and two overflowing plastic bags was crouching in front of me. “Will you give?”
“Sorry?”
“Money,” he said. “As to the lowliest of my brothers. So to me, said the Lord.”
He held out a chapped palm. Naturally I reached into my jacket pocket, but at that same moment he knelt, then lay down on his back.
Baffled, I leaned forward. He smiled and rolled slowly, almost pleasurably, to and fro—from his left shoulder over onto his right, and then back again. I looked around. There were only a handful of people in the car, and they were all staring someplace else.
But it was my duty. Christianity demanded it. I stood up and bent over him.
“Do you need help?”
He put a hand around my ankle. His grip was astonishingly strong. The tram stopped, the doors opened, two women hastily got out, the car was now almost empty. He looked at me. His eyes were clear, sharp, and alert, not confused—more curious. A trickle of blood ran out of his nose and disappeared into the gray mat of his beard. The doors closed, the tram set off again. I tried to free my leg from his grip. But he didn’t let go.
No other fellow traveler looked my way. We were in the second car, and the driver seemed impossibly far away. The man’s free hand grabbed my other leg and hung on so tight that I could feel the fingernails. The tram stopped, the doors opened, more people got out, the tram waited for a few moments, then the doors closed, and on we went. I couldn’t get away, the man was stronger than he looked. He bared his teeth, looked questioningly into my face, and closed his eyes. I yanked on my right foot, but I couldn’t get free. He was breathing fast, and his beard quivered. He drew a sharp intake of breath, then spat. I felt something warm and soft run down my cheek. He hissed.
I kicked. He tried to straighten up, but I kicked again and he sank into the floor. My toes hurt. I grabbed one of the straps so as not to lose my balance and kicked a third time. One of his hands let go, but not the other one, a plastic bag fell over, and dozens of balls of paper rolled out: pages from newspapers, pages from books, pages from glossy magazines and advertising brochures. The other bag emitted a whimpering sound: something inside seemed to move. The tram stopped, the doors opened, I stepped on his wrist, he groaned, and then finally his left hand let go too. I leapt out and began to run.
I ran and ran. Only when I couldn’t keep going did I stop, panting, and check my watch. Ten minutes after midnight. My birthday was over.
“It wasn’t him,” said Ivan. “Definitely not.”
“Who knows.”
“It was not the devil! Even if that would suit you. You people are always looking for something to reinforce your faith. But it wasn’t him.”
We were sitting in the room that had once been Arthur’s library. The spines of books marched across the walls in rows, and the peaceful sound of a lawn mower could be heard outdoors.
“Faith isn’t that important,” I said.
“Oh.”
“The priest has the power to bind and to release. Regardless of what he himself thinks. He does not have to believe in the Sacrament for the Sacrament to exercise its power.”
“And you believe that?”
“I don’t have to believe it, it’s true regardless.”
Next year Ivan would be going to study at Oxford. Everyone knew that great things were in store for him, and nobody doubted that in ten years he’d be a famous painter. I had always felt insecure around him, always inferior, but Catholicism suddenly gave me a position, an attitude, and an argument for everything.
Ivan was getting ready to answer when the door flew open and in he came for the second time. Although I was prepared for it, the magic trick worked, and it took me a moment to get a grip on it.
“Please do not ever put this book in front of me again.” Eric threw an edition of My Name Is No One onto the table. “I won’t read it.”
“But it’s interesting,” said Ivan. “I’d really like to know what you …”
“Not interesting to me. For all I care, he can die. I don’t care what he writes.”
“Eric doesn’t mean it that way,” said Ivan. “It’s just that he’s theatrical sometimes.”
“And you?” Eric said to me. “Are you serious about all that? Praying, church, the seminary? Are you really serious? We’re Jews, you know, can you even do that?”
“We’re not Jews,” said Ivan.
“But our grandfather—”
“All the same,” said Ivan. “Unfortunately we’re neither one thing nor the other. You know that.”
“And Martin’s only doing it because he can’t find a girlfriend.”
I concentrated on breathing in and out calmly. I absolutely must not blush.
“I’m appalled by the banality of your mind,” said Ivan. “Martin is a serious person. I know it’s impossible for you to imagine, but he has faith and he wants to serve. You’ll never understand.”
Eric stared at me. “Seriously? The virgin, water into wine, the Resurrection? Really?”
“It’s a process.” I cleared my throat. “In matters of faith one is always a traveler. One never …”
“You just don’t want to work!”
I stood up. How did he always manage to make me furious so quickly? How did everything he said ring true, and yet ring true in such a fake way?
“Whenever all the praying gets to be too much for you, you’ll come crawling,” said Eric. “Then you’ll beg me to give you a job.”
“And what will you do then? When I come crawling?”
“Then I’ll give you a job, what else? You’re my brother.” He laughed and went out without saying goodbye.
“He’s been nervous lately,” said Ivan. “He’s not sleeping enough. Don’t take
him seriously.” He opened My Name Is No One, thumbed a few pages absentmindedly, and closed it again. “I also believed once that I’d encountered the devil. It was in the department store, I was ten. There was a woman at a bargain counter, she didn’t look in any way unusual, but I knew: If I stay here a few seconds longer, something dreadful is going to happen. Mama didn’t find me until an hour later, I was hiding behind a fridge in the electronics department, she was out of her mind with worry. I still believe I did the right thing. If she’d seen me …” He looked thoughtfully out the window. A gardener was trimming the hedge outside, the shears glinted in the sunlight. “But it’s all crazy. I was ten.” He looked at the table-tennis table, then at me, as if he’d forgotten for a moment that I was there. “And otherwise? Goals, plans? That’s what birthdays are for. Resolutions?”
“I’m training for the championships.”
“The cube again?”
“The cube.”
“Good luck. But more important …”
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
“Say it!”
“Well, somebody’s got to. As long as there’s time to do something to stop it. You should …”
“Yes?”
“Never mind.”
“Say it!”
“Go on a diet, my pious brother! There’s still time, but later it’ll just get harder. You really need to lose weight.”
Is My Name Is No One a merry experiment and thus the pure product of a playful spirit, or is it a malevolent attack on the soul of every person who reads it? No one knows for sure, maybe both are true.
The opening sets up an old-fashioned novella about a young man embarking on his life. All we know about his name is its first initial: F. The sentences are well constructed, the narrative has a powerful flow, the reader would be enjoying the text were it not for a persistent feeling of somehow being mocked. F is put to the test, he defends himself, fights, learns, wins, learns more, loses, and develops as he moves on, all in the grand old manner. But there is a sense that no sentence means merely what it says, that the story is observing its own progress, and that in truth the protagonist is not the central figure: the central figure is the reader, who is all too complicit in the unfolding of events.