My mother Laura

Laura is coming. Laura is my mother. Ever since I can remember, we children called her Laura. It’s a round sort of name, and one that suits her. It almost doesn’t feel like a name to me anymore. If I ever had another mother, I would call her Laura as well.

Laura is big and stout. My father, we children. and all our friends would have been sad if Laura had ever lost a pound of her majestic, soothing fat. We were all fortified by our belief in Laura’s immutability.

Laura has delicate joints and small hands and feet. She has a beautiful, calm face and dark, lustrous straight hair. Laura would never have had her hair marcelled or waved. It’s not in her nature to take measures.

The most beautiful aspects of Laura are her eyes and her voice. She has very large eyes that look like pools of dark golden varnish, and heavy lids with long lashes. Usually these eyes are half-closed, and it’s a great surprise whenever she decides to open them wide. Her voice is soft and purring and unexcited.

I can’t remember ever having seen her agitated or cross. Laura is a genius of sleep. She loves to spend her life, as much as possible, recumbent. As soon as some embarrassment, annoyance, or problem is brought to her, Laura goes to sleep, breathing calmly, with a serene smile.

Laura is lazy. Many women are justly praised for their industry. The thought of Laura industrious would be frightful indeed if it weren’t frankly impossible.

It’s possible that I owe my life to Laura’s indolence. I am convinced that it’s chiefly out of indolence that Laura had one child after another. I have four brothers and three sisters, not including half-siblings. In any case, I owe my charmed infancy to Laura’s indolence.

Laura was eighteen when she married my father. For any other woman, my father would have been the most difficult husband imaginable. He was unable to ruffle Laura’s calm. He needed her the way the vineyard needs the sun. My parents’ marriage was unusual but happy.

My father was a painter. He was known in his time, maybe he will one day become famous. He was crazy about painting, really obsessed with it. It killed him that he wasn’t a second Rembrandt. Laura let him rage and wail. Most women are inclined to soothe their husbands at great length, when soothing is the last thing they need.

Our income, as you might imagine, was irregular. In her dealings with creditors and bailiffs, Laura manifested antique greatness. A colleague of my father’s was once heard to say that with a wife like that it must be a pleasure for a man to have debts.

I can remember one bailiff in Munich who made the most hard-boiled debtors tremble. Not Laura. “Markus,” she said softly and slowly to my father, “they can’t lock us up or take our children away, and they’re not allowed to beat us or cut up your painting, so why don’t you just go up to your studio.”

“Your calm drives me wild,” my father yelled back. Laura closed her eyes and, smiling, fell asleep.

She received the bailiff lying on the sofa. We children were formed up into a picturesque group on the hearthrug. The bailiff said, oh, I don’t know, something or other. With a charming smile my three-year-old sister Nina offered him a sweet. Laura batted her eyelids open and said mildly, “We would have liked to give you something as well”—I can remember the bailiff retreating in polite confusion after that.

A landlord in Stuttgart was not so gentle. The approach he tried was crude. “Come back when you’ve calmed down a little,” Laura said and irrevocably went to sleep.

In Berlin one day my brother Toni’s teacher turned up at Laura’s. He was in a terrible state because he had something awful to say to her. Finally, he managed to spit it out: he had caught Toni telling lies, and not just once. “Lord,” said Laura, “we all have to lie on occasion, and Toni I’m sure will do too, so he might as well get some practice at it now. I hope he’s got a good memory; perhaps you should make sure he knows when he’s lying because otherwise it’s easy to get confused.” The teacher looked baffled; Laura ended the interview by falling asleep.

My father would fall in love from time to time. We lived with it the way that in other families they lived with the father having allergies. As long as the girl or woman in question staved him off, my father would be difficult and tense. His work suffered. Since the objects of passion were usually regular visitors, we were all at pains to wrap them in cotton wool and charm them. When my father got his way, the whole family for a few days would experience cloudless happiness. We had the most delightful nannies who felt terrible towards Laura and tried desperately and in all sorts of ways to make themselves pleasant and useful in the household. Some of them stuck around long after my father had deserted them. As soon as his passion had ebbed away, the abandoned creature was given into Laura’s care. There were periods during which Laura had three or four girls in her care. We got to see the agreeable side of them, cooking, cleaning, knitting, and lamenting the fickleness of men in general and in particular.

Laura kept a feeling of honest gratitude towards the girls. When a lady once intimated to her that her husband had never been unfaithful to her, Laura said without the least irony, “Oh, you poor thing, how can you stand it?”

Often father’s brother, Uncle Kuno, would help out. He was a solid man who could hang on to his money. He never got around to marrying because he was so completely absorbed by our family.

Sometimes there was only enough lunch for three people, and then Laura would farm us out to other families. “I don’t want my children to starve,” she would declare, and send us each somewhere else. “Stay there whether they want you or not, make yourselves agreeable and tell them someone’s collecting you in the evening.”

Occasionally, it would transpire that some of us would spend several weeks or months with relatives or acquaintances in the country or abroad. Usually the other families would try and give us a strict upbringing, and we were always happy to be back with Laura, where we weren’t threatened with any pedagogical measures. I was keenly envied by my classmates at school because my mother would sign the most horrifying report card without even looking at it. Once I appeared with seven other small boys, who all wanted Laura to sign theirs for them. Laura was sorry she couldn’t oblige. “I twice had to repeat classes and my marks were always terrible, especially in conduct,” she told the fascinated lads. Laura was incredibly popular with my friends and the friends of my siblings. Her room was often full of children, like a youth protest. The children didn’t bother her. When she had enough of them, she went to sleep. The wildest din wasn’t enough to keep her awake.

When I was ten, my father died of a lung infection. I happened to be staying with a great-aunt in Amsterdam, so I don’t know if Laura cried. I think, at the deepest level of her being, she went on living with him.

Uncle Kuno took over the management of the household. He moved the whole family to Bonn, where he had a chair in botany.

He was very lucky that we boys had innate housewifely talents. Leberecht had a swift and charming way of laying the table and an inspired technique for washing up. At the age of thirteen, Matthäus attached buttons for the whole family, and could bake bread and cake. My fourteen-year-old brother Luitpold and I had mastered electrical appliances, could run the coal-burning stove perfectly, and bottled fruit and vegetables. By the time I was eleven I outperformed Luitpold in this last discipline, and during bottling season was loaned out to sympathetic families to whom we felt indebted. Toni cleaned windows, made beds, and invented vegetarian dishes that no one liked. He had read a book about the meat trade in Chicago that had turned him off meat. He was crazy about animals. In Toni’s presence, no one would have dared squash a bug.

Unlike us boys, the girls were perfectly useless in the household. Before little Nina could walk, she used to crawl around in Father’s studio. She could draw before she could write. In Bonn she practically died from missing him so. Apart from crying, drawing, and painting, there was nothing she could do.

Aloisia was fifteen at the time and already so beautiful that she had no other occupation than to allow herself to be stared at adoringly and delightedly by the family. “Come here, Aloisia, I want to look at you for five minutes,” said Laura, and Aloisia let herself be looked at. “Thank you, Aloisia,” said Laura, before she went to sleep.

Oh, how Laura enjoyed her sleep. She lived in it, it made her happy. I wonder: does she still have such strong and joyful sleep? Laura mustn’t change.

It was Laura who made it possible for Aloisia to accept her beauty the way a bird might accept its ability to fly. It doesn’t suffer from it, it’s not proud of it. We all accepted ourselves with our gifts and our shortcomings, remote from any wish for change.

Once, when I was once bottling greengages with Luitpold, I suddenly felt a slicing yearning for my father, his thin ash-blond hair, his venerable pipe, his irascibility and absentmindedness. I longed for his violent tenderness and was gripped by the sort of mute perplexity I sometimes saw him in. I crushed a large round greengage in my hand and felt the corners of my mouth quiver. Luitpold looked at me. “He drew a squirrel for me once,” he said. “Let’s both cry.” We cried for a few minutes, and then we went back to bottling greengages.

We drew a distinction between quasi relatives and real relatives. Uncle Kuno was a real relative. He had Father’s soft hair, his nursery blue eyes, and his broad rumpled brow. You only realized how different he was from Father after you’d noticed how similar he was.

“What made you give the children their names, Laura?” Uncle Kuno asked once. “Nina, Toni, Ferdinand—they’re just about all right. But why Aloisia and Leberecht?”

We got our names from the respective officials to whom our father reported our births. Other parents spend months racking their brains as to what name to give their little darlings in spe. They spend days and nights working on a name that they might have come upon in half an hour. My parents exercised themselves as little as possible over their future darlings; they gave themselves time till they were there. Each new birth would plunge my father into a sea of guilt and made him prepared to offer Laura any conceivable sacrifice, even the walk to the registrar’s office. Officialdom affected him the way some women are affected by mice; even getting him to buy a stamp at a post office counter was torture. I inherited this morbid trait of his.

“Remind me, what are we calling him, Laura?” he would ask hurriedly as he was leaving the house. He was anxious to have the torment behind him and be back home with her. Laura suggested names she happened to think of. “Why not something different for a change, Markus? I’m thinking Lisbon, Coco, Mazurka, Pampas, New Moon.”

My father was all ready to fulfill her wish. But by the time he was at the registrar’s, either he had forgotten her suggestions or else the official’s reaction was frosty and disdainful. He suggested names to Father that he liked, and Father straightaway gratefully agreed, just so he could get away from the oppressive atmosphere as quickly as possible. Once back home, he would have forgotten again. It was sometimes weeks before someone took the necessary research upon himself and the family learned the name of their newest addition.

Today I am quite glad I am not called New Moon or Tobacco. An unconventional name is nothing but trouble.

My sister Elfriede, the minister’s wife, was always an alien in our family. She continually criticized us and did all she could to try and improve us. Even today she likes to appear good and noble. There may be something laudable about such an ambition, but since people usually strive to be or to seem what they are not, it tends to provoke suspicion and unease. When Laura heard Elfriede’s footfall, she straightaway fell asleep.

Even physically, Elfriede was unlike the rest of us. We were all dark, nimble, and sinewy as squirrels. Elfriede was lardy, Gouda blond, and slothful. Perhaps she was swapped as a baby. A mother other than Laura would probably have checked, but it’s not in Laura’s nature to take any unnecessary steps. She is not one of those women who, when offered something by a shopkeeper, asks, And is it fresh? Laura understands there are no shopkeepers who would say, Actually, no, it’s stale.

Similarly, no maternity unit would admit that they make mistakes over the labeling of babies. And of course, Laura has so many of her own children that she can quite easily accommodate a stray.

Elfriede generally felt happiest when staying with those relatives the rest of us liked least. I was once put with her in the house of three great-aunts. I was afraid of them because they made it their business to give me an upbringing, and for all their efforts, I continued to do everything all wrong. Elfriede had no trouble at all, she was exemplary in every way, and continually about some charitable good works. At school she was the one who pinned up the maps, dragged the stuffed animals into the room for art class, and carried the form mistress’s books.

I was nine years old when for the first and only time in my life, the possession of a sum of money drove me to despair, because I was unable to spend it.

Elfriede and I had brought our piggy banks with us from home. My piggy bank contained a lot of coppers, but also a twenty-mark note folded up small that a generous uncle had given me because I had asked for an airplane for Christmas.

When our piggy banks were full, to my chagrin they were taken away from us by our aunts, so that we could buy something useful with them later.

I saw myself faced with the perverse obligation of having to steal my own money. Secretly, with a hairpin, I managed to fiddle the twenty-mark note out of the piggy bank.

That afternoon, I persuaded Elfriede to come out and spend the money with me. I wasn’t completely convinced of her trustworthiness, but our common exile had brought her closer to me and I relaxed my vigilance towards her. A vague instinct told me not to confess my grand auto theft, and I told her a preposterous story about a school inspector who had driven up in a glass coach and given me the money. I was told to spend it with my sister. It was foolish of me to allow Elfriede to take part in my adventure. Perhaps I thought it made me more secure if I had her participation. Perhaps, conversely, it was the added danger of including her. Perhaps I was driven by a devil to entangle this perennial good girl in a web of sin and drag the lofty creature down into the mire. Perhaps I only took Elfriede because there were no other children on hand.

Elfriede was a year older than me, but the possession of the twenty marks briefly gave me seniority.

First, I led her to a lemonade stand, where there were bottles of red, yellow, and green drinks. We sampled them all. Elfriede’s moral resistance was broken, and my sense of enterprise drew her with me.

The seals on these soda bottles were round balls of glass. I had often made the attempt to remove one from its bottle. There was nothing I desired more than one of these glass balls. In my lemonade intoxication I bought an extra bottle to take with us. With thumping heart and the feeling of a murderer disposing of a body, I smashed the bottle against the curb. At last I was left with the glass ball in my fingers. I no longer know what miracle I hoped for from its possession. Probably none. The little ball was enough of a miracle. I had freed it from its glass prison, and violently done to death a glass body for its sake. It had cost me some resistance, because everything was alive where I was concerned. I thought I hurt a sheet of paper if I tore it in half.

The magic of the ball was joined by the magic of money. I had feared my twenty marks wouldn’t be enough for the orgy at the lemonade stand. I had poked it nervously in the direction of the lemonade man, only to be given an over whelming mass of notes and coins in change.

I went with Elfriede to an ice cream van. We were living high on the hog and knew no restraint. How many times I had dreamed of eating all the ice cream I wanted. Elfriede even outdid me in her performance. She ate stolidly and knew neither distraction nor excitement.

I paid with a note and was given change. Once again, my money had increased. I bought licorice sticks, raspberry drops, twenty gummy bears, and rolls of mints. My money knew no diminishment. On the contrary. My trouser pockets were bursting with small coins. Elfriede was getting floppy and teary, and I had the grim feeling I was cursed.

On a fairground, Elfriede and I found a carousel. After five rides, Elfriede promptly vomited. She wanted to go home. That wasn’t possible. First, the money had to be gone. I saw no possibility of hiding it at home. Discreetly I tried to lose a few coins. Elfriede noticed, and retrieved them in spite of her poor condition. “It’s wrong to throw away money,” she justly inveighed, “let’s give it to the aunts.” I wasn’t happy with that. Desperately, I thought how I could get through the remaining money. Nothing came to mind. I must have had an inadequate imagination, and what I did have was lamed by Elfriede’s presence. If I’d had proper, legitimate access to the money, I might have bought myself goldfish, roller skates, tortoises, or a canary. But as it was, these things were all impossible.

I proposed giving the money to a beggar. At that time there were beggars everywhere. But now that I was looking for one, I couldn’t find one. For half an hour I dragged Elfriede through the town on a vain search.

I thought about going into a café, but didn’t dare, for fear of maybe being arrested. I bought ten packets of burnt almonds from an automat. Those ten coins didn’t seem to weigh much. Besides, I was now obliged to choke down a whole heap of burnt almonds. Elfriede offered little by way of support. We should have been home long ago. Our lateness meant we were in for the third degree.

I toyed with the notion of burying my awful riches under a tree, but there was no suitable tree and I had no shovel. Elfriede wouldn’t allow me to drop the money in a deserted passageway or letterbox somewhere. I obeyed her, because I still hoped she would stay mum when we got home.

As a last resort, I thought I would give the money to the greengrocer woman in our street. I didn’t have any feeling that I was doing the woman a kindness. I just thought she might take the curse off me, because she’d always been nice to me in the past.

I emptied my pockets out onto her counter and hurried away with no explanation, feeling guilty. Outside, Elfriede was just choking on a burnt almond which she had accidentally gulped down unchewed.

Half an hour later, and Elfriede had given our aunts a flawless account of my crimes—at least those that were known to her—and spilled tears of remorse for her own culpable involvement in them. Since I was no longer in a position to tell what was true and what was a lie, I said nothing. My great-aunts seemed not to believe the story of the school inspector in the glass coach.

In the end, the greengrocer woman turned up, asking what she was supposed to supply in return for the money that I had left with her. She assumed I had come to her on the instruction of my aunts.

Too late it occurred to me that I could have used the money to buy myself a ticket home to Laura.

Money never forgave me for my offensive behavior. It has avoided me and still to this day claims not to know me. I never again had too much of it, and very often not enough. And that’s not always pleasant.

Money is more demanding than the most demanding mistress. It doesn’t like to be treated as the means to an end, it wants to be loved for itself, it demands loyalty and devotion, otherwise it will up and leave.

Love, even love of money, demands talent. I will never come to money. I must reconcile myself to the fact, just as I must reconcile myself to the fact that I can’t bite through a horseshoe, compose Beethoven’s Ninth, or perform brain surgery.

A year after my father’s death, Laura married Uncle Kuno. It would have been bothersome for Laura to wait for some stranger. Uncle Kuno loved Laura, and he was stuck with our family as it was. Uncle Kuno doesn’t exactly have the makings of a millionaire, but unlike my father he knows how to deal with money.

I always made a bad impression when I said I never had the orientation towards any particular trade or profession. I might have liked to be a rodeo rider, but unfortunately I didn’t have the qualifications.

I have no aptitude for business. I don’t think I could even go bankrupt successfully. As an official I’d be about as much use as a brick playing a bouillon cube. Occasionally I am left speechless with admiration for those individuals who go to an office every morning to spend eight hours there doing something that leaves them as figures of horror to their fellow humans.

Nor do I feel drawn to any of the punitive professions. Among these I would include customs and excise officials, detectives, bailiffs, various types of comptroller, tax inspectors, electricity account managers, dogcatchers, policemen in red-light districts. I’m sure all these are necessary, honorable, and deserving professions. It’s just that I don’t have the degree of moral determination to exercise a profession whose essence is the continual persecution of a certain well-defined portion of the population. I can’t imagine closing a bar humming with joie de vivre just because last orders have come and gone, or, as a customs inspector, pulling a contraband diamond from the ear of a nice lady. I don’t want to cuff anyone or disconnect their gas. The afflicted parties always make such a helpless tragic impression.

Nor am I any better suited for the academic professions. Physics and chemistry are bottomless mysteries where I am concerned. The law is depressing. If I were a schoolteacher I would bring children up the wrong way (away from the generality) and as a doctor I would show my patients that I had no confidence in my diagnoses.

It would be a simple matter if you could just do a job you knew you could do. For instance, I’m a good electrician, though I have no professional training. I have done lots of things in the course of my life, usually without official sanction.

Among other things I’ve been a pub chef, a tailor, car mechanic, actor and prompter in a traveling theater group, swimming teacher, ice-cream salesman, long-distance lorry driver, gardener’s assistant. I can sew and darn, wash and iron clothes, speak several languages fluently and wrong, design rock gardens, resole shoes, fix broken wireless sets, wave ladies’ hair, milk cows, repair fishing nets, breed canaries, and drive more or less anything, from a bus to a motor launch. It’s amazing how many aptitudes a man can find in himself if given time to think. I don’t suppose I’ll ever really be on my uppers. Brazenness has got a lot going for it.

My happiest time was as a bookseller in the old center of Cologne.

My brother Luitpold was studying law, and I was studying German. We were both studying to humor Uncle Kuno. Today Luitpold has a small carpentry business in Sigmaringen and is happily married to Lucca the Flying Fish, a former trapeze artiste.

I was really only studying on the side; my main occupation was working as a car mechanic. Medieval German wasn’t going to help me with the demands of the modern era, and knowledge of the Merseburg charms probably wouldn’t get me a piece of bread anywhere at all. An accumulation of specialisms is a luxury a man can only afford under quite specific financial conditions.

I had a friend who was crazy about Chinese porcelain. Put him in a social gathering and he would talk for hours about the Ming dynasty, and was respected as a highly cultivated fellow. Then once he ran out of money, people turned away in boredom the moment he opened his mouth, all except for a vegetable seller in the market who was three parts deaf and in better days had been going out with my friend’s erstwhile cook. His knowledge of all those Mings wasn’t even enough to get him a hot lunch or a marriage to a well-situated elderly widow. For women who have their own pad and a solid income there’s no such thing as a shortage of men. Now my Ming friend is leading a sorry existence as a salesman in a tacky antique shop, and he suffers from low self-esteem because he is unable to make use of his valuable knowledge.

At the time we were both students, it was Luitpold who was the first to befriend Uncle Hollerbach. Uncle Hollerbach owned a bookshop with a philately section in the old town of Cologne. The entire building that housed it wasn’t much bigger than a birdcage, and the shop window was the size of a hand towel. That anyone could actually live from what this hidden mini-enterprise threw off sometimes appeared to me as a biblical miracle. But then there are a lot of people of whom I am quite unable to say whether and how they live. Sometimes I don’t even understand myself.

My brother Toni always maintained that people who work hard contribute to their own impoverishment. If his theory is correct, that might explain Uncle Hollerbach’s comparative wealth. Because he wasn’t a hard worker; he drank.

At the same time every afternoon he calmly shut up shop and walked with firm purposeful stride to a dingy, thinly visited pub on the corner. There he would sit on the same wooden bench at the same wobbly table and was served by the same colorless waiter. Silently the waiter would bring him a glass of gin, silently Uncle Hollerbach took it. Between his seventh and eighth gins, Uncle Hollerbach would drink a beer against the thirst, this too brought him by the silent waiter. Even after fifteen gins Uncle Hollerbach was no more loquacious. His posture was upright and alert, his movements few and calm. Why did he drink, if not to change? Everyone who drinks does so to change himself or his outlook, which comes to the same thing. What was going on in Uncle Hollerbach?

I got to know Uncle Hollerbach through Luitpold. He was Luitpold’s discovery. Uncle Hollerbach was no misanthrope, he liked to have someone sit with him silently keeping pace with him. Luitpold is a mild-mannered and cooperative person with a sense of the requirements of other souls. He was and still is a good drinker. Unfortunately, he has one quirk. Quirks are things that take getting used to by others, and that mustn’t be sprung on them. Otherwise, it is possible for someone with a quirk to affect others like an earthquake.

Luitpold was always quiet and reticent. If there was drinking to be done, he helped to do it. He happily carried drunks from bar to bar or bar to home. He had the innocent strength of a gorilla. In a drinking situation, he seemed like a monument to peace. He didn’t sing, he didn’t row, he was never overtaken by some urgent communicativeness or lachrymose sentimentality, he didn’t start telling off-color jokes or pester ladies with his bibulous adhesiveness. The more astonishing, then, this particular quirk. When, unnoticed by those around him, he had reached a specific degree of intoxication, he swiftly and silently removed all his clothes. No matter where he was—on the street, at home, in a professor’s sitting room, on the terrace of a wine bar or in a poky pub. As soon as someone told him to get dressed, he would look sad, but obey. The following day he suffered agonies of remorse and found his behavior so monstrous and unlike himself that he was unshakably convinced such a thing would never happen to him again, whereupon he serenely sought out the danger at the next opportunity.

He had been out drinking three times with Uncle Hollerbach in cordial silence without this quirk having overtaken him. He had kept up with Uncle Hollerbach and was on the way to drinking himself into the other man’s affections. The fourth time, a slight inner imbalance had lowered his resistance to alcohol, and then, as through autohypnosis, he had started to strip. He had forced Uncle to abandon his noble silence and display a vulgar chattiness. “Get dressed,” Uncle had said, and got the colorless waiter to order a taxi. He had had to go looking for a missing shoe of Luitpold’s, had left the pub ten minutes earlier than usual, and was four gins short of his quantum. All these details were brought to my attention later by the colorless waiter, who, while happy to serve Uncle in silence, preferred as a rule to make use of his God-given gift of speech. Luitpold had just the merest notion of having stripped and so ravaged and disgraced Uncle’s carefully ordered life. Luitpold’s morning-after moods could reach a pitch where he would allow himself to be put to death as a serial killer with the feeling it was no more than he deserved. The courage to beard Uncle once more could only have come to him in that same state of unconscious drunkenness that had the inappropriate consequences.

Of course, I find Luitpold exaggerated in his sense of his excesses. But the man has a tender nature and is a shy, reticent individual, and that can’t be changed. It was with great trouble I kept him from going to a psychoanalyst to have his quirk investigated. A professional would have felt it incumbent upon himself to turn up such deep psychic chasms in Luitpold that my poor brother would never have recovered. I think at worst Luitpold will be a subconscious sun-worshipper, or he will have felt an irresistible urge to go to bed, regardless of time and place. If one let him be, one would probably find him with hands folded sitting on his pile of clothes, mumbling a child’s prayer before lapsing into gentle slumber.

Luitpold begged me to go to Uncle Hollerbach and see if he had perhaps had the pub torn down and dropped in the Rhine piece by piece. There are ways he is inclined to overestimate himself.

But there stood the pub, perfectly intact, where it had always stood, and there sat Uncle Hollerbach, quietly sipping gin in the place Luitpold told me was his. He had a round belly, flyaway grey hair, and a large red face with a Caesar nose, a resolute chin, bushy eyebrows, and a mariner’s twinkling blue eyes. In introducing myself, I wasn’t entirely able to avoid the medium of speech. With a gesture of welcome he had me sit down, and with a light majestic nod ordered me a glass of gin.

From that day forth I was Uncle Hollerbach’s drinking companion. I have no oddities, drunk or sober. When drunk, I adjust to my surroundings. If there is singing, I sing along. If a pretty girl indicates she might like to be embraced, I embrace her. If a party feels called upon to reveal the ultimate mysteries of life in the course of sweeping philosophical discussions, I reveal too. If someone can do nothing but bewail his misery and the misery of the world, I have tears set aside for that purpose. My personality does not seek to dominate. At the most, I might manage to withdraw from a context if it displeases me.

At first, I tried to assert myself in Uncle Hollerbach’s presence by speaking. I interpreted his sparse sign language as encouragement, while his blue gaze directed at me indicated that I had his attention. From the quivering of his brows, a slight pushing forth of his lower lip I inferred agreement and replies. I told him about my fellow students and my studies, of the fair and unfair treatment I got from the mechanic, of uncouth customers and my charming punctilious way of dealing with them. I talked with wisdom and resignation about the political situation and intimated that I was probably the only man alive who could see and understand it all. I spoke illuminatingly about Dante, Dostoevsky, Gide, and Tolstoy. I held forth on the prostitution of the fourth estate and the vanity and selfishness of our leading politicians. I showed myself to be the man who first understood that passion for a woman doesn’t last. That striving for political power is not the same as love of the people. That the earth is so despoiled that the moon might as well fall on top of it and squash it flat.

There was more, and I didn’t scruple to say it. I spoke up for murderers, check forgers, pimps, landscape painters, sadists, stamp collectors, pacifists, materialists, race fixers, freestyle wrestlers, cannibals, vegetarians, naked dancers, allotment gardeners, Muslims, Calvinists, sybarites, hermits, anarchists. I defended everything that was under attack and laid into everything that to my mind got a free pass. I understood everything and forgave nothing, because I had nothing to forgive, since no freestyle wrestler, pacifist, sadist, hermit, vegetarian, or anyone else had done the least thing to harm me.

Gradually the torrent of my speech dwindled into a river, my river of speech into a brook, my brook of speech into a trickle. And finally, one evening, that trickle ceased, my tongue was dry, and my spirit gave in to a need for thought. It dawned on me that I had said nothing that was really worth saying, that I had talked for the sake of talking, and that my speech had been nothing but foolishness. I had strutted like a peacock before Uncle Hollerbach, all the while supposing I’d been showing him the rare insights of an exceptional intellect. Uncle’s stony silence had prevailed. I too was silent, without forcing myself and without boring myself. I saw that the words of the brain are not like the words of the mouth. My ideas had tumbled out of me like unripe fruit. Now I accorded them some quiet and time to recover, during the hours I passed with Uncle Hollerbach.

From the very first moment, I had felt drawn to Uncle. I found him more mysterious and alluring than any woman. At that time almost any female would draw my eye, but I was far more curious about Uncle Hollerbach. What was going on in him? Was anything? Or was he just living in dullness? Was he happy or unhappy? Why did he drink? Was there anything in this world that he loved? What tied him to life? Was he good? Did he have it in him to be bad? Was he wise or foolish? Had he had rare spiritual experiences? What was he like as a child? Could he remember anything? What can one learn from a person who doesn’t speak? To me speech was the only conduit between one person and another. Well, now I saw that there were many other ways of communication. For the thing that Uncle Hollerbach wished to communicate, he didn’t need words.

Even during the time of my loquaciousness I hadn’t dared ask Uncle Hollerbach any questions, in spite of my burning curiosity. After he had vanquished me with his silence, I gradually lost my curiosity, even as Uncle Hollerbach lost none of his magic. I took him as he was and felt at peace. It was a new and wonderful experience for me to be with a person I wanted nothing from and who didn’t make me want anything either. Most people, myself included, want others to want something of them, regardless of whether they want to give anything or not. One is supposed to turn to them for advice, clever ideas, childhood memories, exclusive confidences, love, absolution of one sort or another, sympathy, all the various services of the heart and brain. They are afraid of being the sort of person people want nothing from. The German language supposes it is being harsh when it says of someone, “I wanted nothing to do with him.” Uncle Hollerbach saved me from unthinkingly falling for the expression. He was precisely someone no one wanted anything to do with. He wanted to be that. I wanted nothing from him either. But I was happy in his company and listened happily to the pure sound of our wanting-nothing-to-do-with-one-another.

I was away from Cologne when Uncle Hollerbach died. One day I learned that he had died and that I had inherited his little shop and contents. At the time I was a long-distance lorry driver on the Munich–Berlin route, and I was in love with the wife of a scrap merchant. I can dimly remember she wanted to divorce him because he beat her and that I was somehow titillated by the idea of the delicate blond woman in the middle of so much bulky scrap metal.

I left the scrap merchant’s wife without the least compunction and emotionally accepted Uncle Hollerbach’s inheritance. I tried to live as Uncle had done, in silence, as a hermit. And yet I forgot the lesson of his lifetime, and I left the poor deceased no peace, but bothered him endlessly, prying into his former life and fitting it out with my fantasies. I barely stopped short of brazenly summoning his voice to spiritualist sessions. I am uncomfortable with belief in the occult, but it is not for me to deny such a thing to the believer. I am mystified where blameless cultivated ladies and gentlemen get the neck to summon the ghosts of the indifferent dead. To summon them! Give Beethoven a table-turning and ask him if the price of potatoes is going up.

If I die before her, I’m sure my fiancée Luise would have me summoned. I can feel the very idea of it making me purple with rage. Even alive, I dislike being summoned by her. Should she dare to do so after my death, I’m sure my spirit would meet her with some earthy invective. Why don’t the occultists understand that if that’s what they wanted, then spirits would come of their own accord? To my mind, a séance is a display of boorishness, and the more people believe in them, the worse it is. Even the grieving and pining of a loving consort provides scant justification. Who knows if a person in the Beyond even wants to be loved anyway? It’s a terrible thing that women like Luise ride roughshod over others’ wishes, imagining that the mere fact of loving them gives them all possible rights. Beyond that, many individuals are of the opinion they can make God a little pliant by loving Him with passionate humility and offering Him sacrifices. They never stop to ask themselves whether God is even in the mood for love and sacrifice, and doesn’t rather find them a pain in the neck.

I expect the reason the Devil is so frisky is because he isn’t being love-bombed the whole time. If only people weren’t so convinced that their love was a general blessing. It’s a fine thing to love. It’s a gift to be allowed to love. If it should come to pass that a human being fills me with love, then I hope I will be able to feel gratitude above all things, whether or not they reciprocate and love me.

I wasn’t an occultist and I never summoned Uncle Hollerbach’s spirit. But I sensed its presence in the moldy furniture, the dusty shelves, the yellowed books, and the gin bottles that I emptied in memory of the noble departed. I bought three geranium plants and bred carrier pigeons in the little courtyard. It was a gentle life, and especially charming to me because I took it to be a sort of holiday, purely temporary. And it did in effect soon pass.

When I was released from POW camp, it was principally for the sake of the little shop that I made my way to Cologne, even though I knew the shop no longer existed. I had no other reason to go to Cologne. I had no reason to go anywhere else either, mind.

I’m not from Cologne, I’m not even from the Rhineland. If someone asks me, “And where do you hail from?” I never know how to answer. My mother was born in Brazil, grew up in Holland, and married in Germany. My father came from Brandenburg, grew up in Cologne and Koblenz, studied in France, and later lived all over the place. And me? I was born in the middle of Lake Constance. I don’t like to admit as much, especially not in any official context, because it makes such a frivolous impression. Even if well-disposed listeners will understand that I’m not responsible for the arrangements made by my parents—they do somehow give me some of the blame. I spent my childhood in ten cities spread out over three countries. Such feelings as local patriotism or campanilismo never had a chance with me. At the moment I feel homesick for the South of France, tomorrow I might have a hankering to be by the North Sea, and the day after it could be Munich or Brussels.

Soon Laura will be here. She’s still the most anchoring thing in my life. Just now she’s in Austria, where Uncle Kuno has been in charge of a botanical garden for many years. In the autumn he’s going to Bonn to resume his professorship. That way I’ll get to see the city of our new fairy-tale government princes.^* I failed to exercise my ballot this time. I thought all the parties were so outstanding that I couldn’t decide to vote for any of them. As a nonvoter I of course represent a horrid antisocial element to all of them, whereas if I’d voted, it could only have been for parties not of my choosing.

Before going on to Bonn, Laura and Uncle Kuno will spend a few days in Cologne. Nina and Aloisia, Toni and Luitpold are coming too. Johanna will throw a huge party for everyone. She loves throwing parties, especially ones that end up involving the police and fire brigade and go down in the memories of those present as unforgettable catastrophes.

My brothers Matthäus and Leberecht won’t be there. Mathäus is a farm laborer in the South of France. He is a sun-worshipper. “Germany has no climate,” he always says. “God knows what it has instead. For eight months it has a kind of winter, and for four months something that isn’t summer.” Mathäus is far and away the cleverest of us and probably the one we looked to to make something of his life, in a bourgeois sense. But it so happens he loves the sun and would rather be a beggar under radiant blue skies than a minister-president or millionaire in some cool, foggy country.

Leberecht is no beggar. He has a luxuriant imagination and a strong literary gift. There was a time when he felt under obligation to his talent and turned out novels and stories. Our whole family was excited and lived by his successes. We thought we had finally managed to produce someone with ambition. We encouraged him in any way we could. But one day Leberecht was fed up with writing, and said he’d had it up to here with it. He claimed that writing was the most loathsome profession there was. In order to keep his head above water, he had to write all the time, even when he had no ideas and wasn’t in the mood. That was as disgusting to him as having to sleep with a woman he had no feelings for. He could never be anywhere in peace and think about something nice without straightaway being pursued by the feeling he had to put it down on paper and make some money from it. Nor was he stupid and obsessed enough either—unfortunately—to think of his work as something unique and irreplaceable. In a nutshell, Leberecht decided it was better to live an adventure than write one. He was for several years a sailor and is currently a night porter in Brazil.

He is happy and is able to live. My sister Elfriede, the minister’s wife, counts him as a disgrace to the family. After the war, the “disgrace” kept his European relatives above water by sending them coffee. Even Elfriede began to view Leberecht as perhaps the most precious of the Timpe clan. The most celebrated German writer could never have engendered such pride in us as this obscure night porter in distant Brazil. Leberecht’s Brazilian life was the only thing that gained me respect and credit with my fiancée Luise, with my parents-in-law, my landlady Frau Stabhorn, and even with my brilliantly successful spiv of a cousin, Magnesius. With ten pounds of coffee before the currency reform I was a highly desirable little nabob of the ruins who would never starve, and who was even in a position to feed others. Those were great, proud days for me, when Leberecht had sent me a package of coffee. I even got sick with emotion and gratitude and had to rest up in bed. But since I knew that Leberecht wasn’t a rich man, and always from when he was a boy gave away more than he had, and had others to provide for in addition to me, I wrote to tell him I could get by on my own. Suddenly I didn’t like the way almost everyone here had the feeling that people abroad were wallowing in excess and ought to contribute here. Now, following the currency reform, there are endless people who can afford all the coffee, cigarettes, meat, and butter they want. They would be rather stunned to be told by some struggler that they ought to hand over some of their coffee and cigarettes.

I think my brother Toni is the happiest and serenest of us all. Even as a boy, he loved animals and wouldn’t eat meat. His vegetarianism remained tolerable even for committed carnivores and didn’t turn him into a bigot. Toni is a gentle creature. Admittedly, like many gentle creatures, he is inclined to be stubborn. He married a mild little wife and owns a flower shop in Starnberg. In his garden he keeps tame squirrels, crows, starlings, rabbits, and bees. I expect he buys honey for the bees and lies down in the sun in summer to feed the mosquitoes, and bakes apple pies for the ravens so they don’t eat earthworms. At any rate, I would think Toni’s existence is more or less the way he always wanted it to be.

Luitpold is a furniture maker in Sigmaringen. I think he’s gone broke five times. In spite of the most alarming circumstances, he’s always managed to stay afloat. Luitpold represents the type of good fellow who in nineteenth-century novels gets into trouble by issuing bonds for unreliable friends, allowing bills to fall due, paying allowances to children who were not his, and opening his heart and his wallet to impoverished widows. By the rules of our rough new world he is classified as a noble idiot.

Maybe my sisters, Nina and Aloisia, will come as well.

I am almost a little apprehensive about so much reunion. I hardly dare look forward to it in any pure way. I feel a little embarrassed in advance when I imagine so many possibilities for guilt, suppressed emotion, desperate getting over strangeness. I expect the others will be just as nervous. All except Laura, of course. It’s a good thing Laura’s coming.

^* In May 1949 Bonn was made the capital of West Germany, ahead of Frankfurt.