He, darkly: "Nothing is ended, everything returns, guilt, atonement, more guilt."
I, with my last strength: "Oskar has atoned, spare him the drum. I"ll hold anything you say, anything but a drum."
I wept when the Muse Ulla bent over me. Blinded with tears, I could not prevent her from kissing me, I could not prevent the Muse from giving me that terrible kiss. All of you who have ever been kissed by the Muse will surely understand that Oskar, once branded by that kiss, was condemned to take back the drum he had rejected years before, the drum he had buried in the sand of Saspe Cemetery.
But I did not drum. I merely posed -- but that was plenty -- and was painted as Jesus the drummer boy, sitting on the nude left thigh of the Madonna 49.
It was thus that Maria saw me on a poster advertising an art show. Unbeknownst to me, she attended the exhibition and looked at the picture; she must have stood there long and cloud-gathering, for when she spoke of it, she struck me with my son Kurt"s school ruler. She, who for some months had been holding down a well-paid job in a luxury delicatessen store, first as a salesgirl, then, thanks to her obvious ability, as cashier, was now an established citizen of West Germany and no longer a black marketing refugee from the East. Thus it was with a certain conviction that she was able to call me a pig, a pimp, a degenerate. She went so far as to shout that she wanted no more of the filthy money I made with my filthy occupations, nor of me either for that matter.
Though Maria soon took back this last remark and only two weeks later was again accepting a considerable share of my modeling fees in return for my board and lodging, I nevertheless decided to stop living with her, her sister Guste, and my son Kurt. My first idea was to go far away, to Hamburg or perhaps to the seash.o.r.e, but Maria, who had no objection to my moving, persuaded me, with her sister Guste"s support, to look for a room not too far away from herself and Kurt, in any case in Dusseldorf.
The Hedgehog
It was only as a subtenant that Oskar learned the art of drumming back the past. It wasn"t just the room; the Hedgehog, the coffin warehouse in the court, and Mr. Munzer helped -- not to mention Sister Dorothea.
Do you know Parsifal? I don"t know it very well either. All that has stuck with me is the story about the three drops of blood in the snow. There is truth in that story, because it fits me like a glove. It is probably the story of everyone who has an idea.
I was still a servant of the arts; I let myself be painted in blue, green, and earth tones; I let myself be sketched in charcoal and put in front of backgrounds; in collaboration with the Muse Ulla, I inspired a whole winter semester at the Academy and the following summer semester as well, but already the snow had fallen which was to receive those three drops of blood, the sight of which transfixed me as it had transfixed Parsifal the fool, about whom Oskar the fool knows so little that it costs him no effort at all to identify himself with this same Parsifal.
My image is clumsy but clear enough, I think: the snow is the uniform of a nurse; the red cross, which most nurses, including Sister Dorothea, wear in the middle of the brooch that holds their collar together, was for me the three drops of blood. There I sat and couldn"t take my eyes off it.
But before I could sit in the erstwhile bathroom of the Zeidler apartment, I had to go room-hunting. The winter semester was drawing to a close; some of the students, those who were not planning to return after Easter vacation, would be giving up their rooms. My a.s.sociate, the Muse Ulla, was helpful; she took me to the students" housing office, where they gave me several addresses and a recommendation from the Academy.
Before looking up the addresses, I went to see Korneff the stonecutter at his shop in Bittweg. It was a long time since I had seen him. I was drawn by my fondness for him, but I was also in search of work during the vacation period; I had a few hours of private posing with or without Ulla, but that could hardly be expected to keep me for the next six weeks, and moreover if I was to take a room, I would have to raise the rent.
I found Korneff unchanged -- one boil that had not yet come to a head and two that were nearly healed -- over a block of Belgian granite that he had roughed out and was now engaged in polishing. We spoke a while; I began to play suggestively with the lettering chisels and looked round for stones that were already cut and polished, waiting for an inscription. Two stones, one of sh.e.l.l lime, the other of Silesian marble, looked as if Korneff had sold them and they were waiting for an expert cutter of inscriptions. I congratulated Korneff on his success in weathering the hard times after the currency reform. Yet even at the time we had drawn comfort from the thought that a currency reform, however vigorous, vital, and optimistic, cannot deter people from dying and ordering tombstones.
Our prediction had been confirmed. Once more people were dying and buying. In addition, moreover, the currency reform had brought new business: butchers were having their fronts and sometimes even the insides of their shops faced with fancy marble; certain banks and department stores were obliged, in order to recapture their old prestige, to have their damaged sandstone and tufa facades repaired and redecorated.
I complimented Korneff on his industry and asked him if he was able to handle all the work. At first he replied evasively, then he admitted that he had sometimes wished he had four hands, and finally he made me a proposition: I could cut inscriptions for him on a half-time basis; he would pay forty-five pfennigs a letter for hollow lettering in limestone, fifty-five in granite and diorite, while for raised lettering he was prepared to pay sixty and seventy-five.
I started right in on a piece of sh.e.l.l lime. Quickly recovering my knack, I cut out: Aloys Kufer, September 3, 1887 -- June 10, 1946. I had the thirty-four letters and figures done in just three hours and received fifteen marks and thirty pfennigs on leaving.
This was more than a third of the monthly rent I had decided I could afford. I was determined to pay no more than forty, for Oskar still felt in duty bound to help with the upkeep of the household in Bilk.
The people in the Housing Office had been kind enough to give me four addresses. My first choice was: Zeidler, Julicher-Stra.s.se 7, because it was near the Academy.
Early in May, a warm, misty day typical of spring in the lower Rhineland, I started out, provided with sufficient cash. Maria had ironed my suit, I looked presentable. Crumbling stucco facade, in front of it a dusty chestnut tree. As Julicher-Stra.s.se was half in ruins, it would be unrealistic to speak of the house next door or across the street. To the left, a mound of rubble overgrown with gra.s.s and dandelions, here and there disclosing part of a rusty T-girder, suggested the previous existence of a four-story building. To the right a partly damaged house had been repaired as far as the third floor. But the builders had apparently run out of funds; the facade of polished, black Swedish granite was cracked in many places and in urgent need of repair. The inscription "Schornemann, Undertaker" lacked several letters, I don"t remember which. Fortunately, the two palm branches incised in the mirror-smooth granite were still intact and helped to give the shop a certain air of piety and respectability.
This enterprise had been in existence for seventy-five years. Its coffin warehouse was in the court, across from my window, and I often found it worth looking at. In good weather I watched as the workmen rolled a coffin or two out of the shed and set them up on sawhorses, to refresh their polish. All of these last dwelling places, as I noted with pleasure, were tapered at the foot end in the old familiar way.
It was Zeidler in person who opened at my ring. Short, squat, breathless, and hedgehoggy, he stood in the doorway; he had on thick gla.s.ses and the lower half of his face was hidden beneath a dense shaving lather. He held his shaving brush against his cheek, appeared to be an alcoholic, and sounded like a Westphalian.
"If you don"t like the room, don"t shilly-shally. I"m shaving and after that I"ve got to wash my feet."
Clearly Zeidler didn"t stand on ceremony. I took a look at the room. Of course I didn"t like it; it was a decommissioned bathroom, half in turquoise tile, half in wallpaper with a convulsive sort of pattern. However, I kept my feelings to myself. Disregarding Zeidler"s drying lather and unwashed feet, I asked if the bathtub could be taken out, especially as it had no drainpipe in the first place.
Smiling, Zeidler shook his grey hedgehog"s head, and tried in vain to whip up a lather. That was his reply. Thereupon I expressed my willingness to take the room with bathtub for forty marks a month.
We returned to the dimly lighted, tubular corridor, disclosing several partly gla.s.sed doors, painted in various colors, and I asked who else lived in the flat.
"Wife and roomers."
I tapped on a frosted-gla.s.s door, hardly a step from the entrance to the flat.
"A nurse," said Zeidler. "But it"s no skin off your nose. You"ll never see her. She only comes here to sleep and sometimes she doesn"t."
I am not going to tell you that Oskar trembled at the word "nurse". He nodded his head, not daring to ask about the other roomers, but noted the situation of his room with bathtub; it was on the right-hand side, at the end of the hall.
Zeidler tapped me on the lapel: "You can cook in your room if you"ve got an alcohol stove. You can use the kitchen off and on too, for all I care, if the stove isn"t too high for you."
That was his first allusion to Oskar"s stature. He gave my recommendation from the Academy a cursory glance; it was signed by Professor Reuser, the director, and seemed to impress him favorably. I agreed to all his do"s and don"ts, impressed it on my mind that the kitchen was next to my room on the left, and promised to have my laundry done outside; he was afraid the steam would be bad for the bathroom wallpaper. It was a promise I could make with a clear conscience; Maria had agreed to do my washing.
At this point I should have left, announcing that I was going to get my baggage and fill out the police registration forms. But Oskar did nothing of the sort. He couldn"t bear to leave that apartment. For no reason at all, he asked his future landlord to show him the toilet. With his thumb mine host pointed to a plywood door reminiscent of the war and postwar years. When something in Oskar"s movements suggested a desire to use it -- the toilet, that is -- Zeidler, his face itching with crumbling shaving soap, turned on the light.
Once within, I was vexed, for Oskar didn"t have to go. However, I waited stubbornly for Oskar to make a little water. In view of my insufficient bladder pressure and also because the wooden seat was too close, I had to be very careful not to wet the seat or the tile floor. Even so, I had to daub a few drops off the worn-down seat with my handkerchief and efface a few unfortunate traces on the tiles with the soles of my shoes.
Zeidler had not taken advantage of my absence to wash the hardened soap from his face. He had preferred to wait in the hallway, perhaps because he had sensed the joker in me. "Aren"t you the funny guy! Using the toilet before you"ve even signed your lease."
He approached me with a cold crusty shaving brush, surely planning some silly joke. But he did nothing, just opened the door for me. While Oskar slipped out backward into the stairway, keeping an eye on the Hedgehog as I pa.s.sed him, observed that the toilet door was situated between the kitchen door and the frosted-gla.s.s door behind which a trained nurse sometimes, not always, spent her nights.
When late that afternoon Oskar, with his baggage including the new drum given him by Raskolnikov, the painter of madonnas, returned brandishing the registration form, a freshly shaved Hedgehog, who had meanwhile no doubt washed his feet, led me into the living room.
The living room smelled of cold cigar smoke. Of cigars that had been lighted several times. There was also a smell of carpets, valuable carpets perhaps, which lay in several layers all over the room. It also smelled of old calendars. But I didn"t see any calendars, so it must have been the carpets. Strange to say, the comfortable, leather-upholstered chairs had in themselves no smell. This came as a disappointment to me, for Oskar, who had never sat in a leather chair, had so vivid a notion of what leather upholstery must smell like that he suspected this leather of being artificial.
In one of these smooth, unsmelling, and, as I later ascertained, genuine leather chairs, sat Mrs. Zeidler. She had on a grey tailored suit, which fitted her only very approximately. Her skirt had slipped up over her knees, revealing three fingers" breadths of slip. Since she made no move to arrange her clothing and, it seemed to Oskar, had been crying, I did not dare to greet her or to introduce myself in words. My bow was a silent one; in its last stages, it turned back to Zeidler, who had introduced his wife with a motion of his thumb and a slight cough.
The room was large and square. The shadow of the chestnut tree in front of the house made it seem larger and smaller. I left my suitcase and drum near the door and, holding my registration form, approached Zeidler, who was standing near the windows, Oskar did not hear his own steps, for he walked on four carpets -- I counted them later -- four superimposed carpets of decreasing size which, with their fringed or unfringed edges of different colors, added up to a strange color pattern. The bottommost carpet was reddish-brown and began near the walls; the next, approximately green, was largely hidden by furniture, the heavy sideboard, the china closet filled entirely with liqueur gla.s.ses, dozens of them, and the s.p.a.cious marriage bed. The third carpet was of a blue design and ran from corner to corner. The fourth, a solid claret-color, supported the extensible dining table covered with protective oilcloth, and four leather-upholstered chairs with evenly s.p.a.ced bra.s.s rivets.
Since there were more rugs, hardly intended for that purpose, hanging on the walls, and still others rolled up in the corners, Oskar a.s.sumed that the Hedgehog had traded in carpets before the currency reform and been stuck with them afterwards.
The only picture was a gla.s.s-covered likeness of Bismarck, hanging on the outer wall between two seemingly oriental rugs. The Hedgehog sat in a leather chair beneath the Iron Chancellor, to whom he showed a certain family resemblance. He took the form from my hand, studied both sides of the official doc.u.ment alertly, critically, and impatiently. His wife asked him in a whisper if anything was wrong. Her question threw him into a fit of rage which made him look still more like the Chancellor. The chair spewed him out. Standing on four carpets, he held the form out to one side and filled himself and his waistcoat with air. With one bound he was on the first and second carpets, looking down on his wife, who had meanwhile taken up her needlework, and pouring forth words on the order of: WhoaskedyouI"dliketoknow? n.o.body"sgoingtodoanytalkingaroundherebutmeme! Shutthatmouthofyoursandkeepitshut!
Since Mrs. Zeidler kept her peace and attended unfl.u.s.tered to her sewing, the problem for the Hedgehog, as he treated the carpets, was to let his fury rise and fall with an air of plausibility. A single step took him to the china closet, which he opened with such violence as to call forth a general tinkling. Carefully, each outstretched finger a precision mechanism, he picked up eight liqueur gla.s.ses, removed them undamaged from the case, tiptoed -- like a host planning to divert himself and seven guests with an exercise in dexterity -- toward the green tiled stove, and then, suddenly throwing all caution to the winds, hurled his fragile freight at the cold, cast-iron stove door.
The most amazing part of it was that during this performance, which required a certain accuracy of aim, the Hedgehog kept a bespectacled eye on his wife, who had risen and was trying to thread a needle by the right-hand window. Scarcely a second after his annihilation of the gla.s.ses, she carried this delicate operation, which required a steady hand, to a successful conclusion. Then she went back to her chair and sat down, and again her skirt slipped up disclosing three fingers" breadths of pink slip. With a malevolent though submissive look, the Hedgehog had followed his wife"s movement to the window, her threading of the needle, her return to the chair. No sooner had she resumed her seat than he reached behind the stove, took up dustpan and brush, swept up the fragments, and poured them into a newspaper, which was already half full of shattered liqueur gla.s.ses. There would not have been room for a third outburst.
If the reader should suppose that Oskar recognized his old gla.s.s-shattering self in the gla.s.s-shattering Hedgehog, I can only say that the reader is not entirely mistaken; I too once tended to transform my rage into shattered gla.s.s -- but never in those days did anyone see me resort to dustpan and brush!
Having removed the traces of his wrath, Zeidler sat down again. Once more Oskar handed him the registration form that the Hedgehog had been obliged to drop in order to have both hands free for the liqueur gla.s.ses.
Zeidler signed the form and gave me to understand that he expected order to reign in his flat, where would we be if everyone did as he pleased, he was in a position to know, he had been a salesman for fifteen years, sold hair clippers, was I familiar with this article?
Oskar made certain movements from which Zeidler could infer that I was adequately informed on the subject of hair clippers. Zeidler"s well-clipped brush suggested confidence in his merchandise, hence effectiveness as a salesman. After he had explained his work schedule -- a week on the road, two days at home -- he lost interest in Oskar. More hedgehoggy than ever, he sat rocking himself in the squeaky light-brown leather, his eyegla.s.ses sparkled, and with or without reason he muttered: jajajajaja. It was time for me to go.
First Oskar took leave of Mrs. Zeidler. Her hand was cold, boneless, but dry. The Hedgehog from his chair waved me toward the door where Oskar"s baggage stood. I already had my hands full when his voice came to me: "What you got there, tied to your suitcase?"
"That"s my drum."
"You expect to play it here?"
"Not necessarily. There was a time when I played quite a lot."
"Go ahead as far as I care. I"m never home anyway."
"It is very unlikely that I shall ever drum again."
"And what made you stay so little?"
"An unfortunate accident hampered my growth."
"Well, I only hope you don"t give us any trouble, fits and that kind of thing."
"The state of my health has improved steadily in the last few years. See how nimble I am." Thereupon Oskar, for the benefit of the Zeidlers, did a few flips and semi-acrobatic exercises he had learned in his theatrical period. Mrs. Zeidler t.i.ttered while Mr. Zeidler a.s.sumed the look of a Hedgehog on the point of slapping his thighs. Then I was in the hallway. Past the nurse"s frosted-gla.s.s door, the toilet door, and the kitchen door, I carried my belongings, including drum, to my room.
This was in the beginning of May. From that day on I was tempted, possessed, overwhelmed by the mystery of the trained nurse. My feeling for nurses is a kind of sickness. Perhaps it is incurable, for even today, with all that far behind me, I contradict Bruno my keeper when he says that only men can be proper nurses, that a patient"s desire to be cared for by lady nurses is just one more symptom of his disease. Whereas, still according to Bruno, your male nurse takes conscientious care of his patient and sometimes cures him, his female counterpart, woman that she is, beguiles the patient, sometimes into recovery, sometimes into a death pleasantly seasoned with eroticism.
So speaks Bruno my keeper. Perhaps he is right, but I should be very reluctant to admit it. One who has been brought back to life every two or three years by lady nurses cannot help being grateful; he is not going to allow any grumpy old male nurse, however likable, to sully my image of my beloved lady nurses, especially as his one and only motive is professional jealousy.
It began with my fall down the cellar steps on the occasion of my third birthday. I think she was called Sister Lotte and came from Praust. Dr. Hollatz" Sister Inge was with me for several years. After the defense of the Polish Post Office, I fell into the hands of several nurses at once. I remember only one of them by name: Sister Erni or Berni. Nameless nurses in Luneburg, then at the University Clinic in Hanover. Then the nurses at the City Hospital in Dusseldorf, first and foremost Sister Gertrude. And then, without my having to go to any hospital, She came. In the best of health, Oskar succ.u.mbed to a nurse who was a roomer in the Zeidler flat. From that day on my world was full of nurses.
When I went to work in the early morning, to cut inscriptions at Korneff"s, my streetcar stop was named: Marien-Hospital. Outside the brick gateway and in the flower-choked grounds, nurses came and went, on their way to and from work. I often found myself riding in the same trailer car, on the same platform with several of these exhausted, or at least weary-looking nurses. At first I breathed in their scent with repugnance, soon I sought it out, stationed myself as near as possible to their uniforms.
Then Bittweg. In good weather I worked outside amid the display of tombstones and saw them pa.s.sing arm in arm, two by two, four by four, on their hour off, compelling Oskar to look up from his granite, to neglect his work, for every upward look cost me twenty pfennigs.
Movie posters: the Germans have always been addicted to films about nurses. Maria Sch.e.l.l lured me to the movies. She wore a nurse"s uniform, laughed and wept; her days were full of self-sacrifice; smiling and still wearing her nurse"s cap, she played somber music. Later on, in a fit of despair, she came very close to tearing her nightgown. But after her attempted suicide, she sacrificed her love -- Borsche as the doctor -- remained true to her profession, and retained her cap and Red Cross pin. While Oskar"s conscious mind laughed and wove an endless chain of obscenities into the film, Oskar"s eyes wept tears, I wandered about half-blind in a desert of white-clad anonymous lady Samaritans, searching for Sister Dorothea, who -- and that was all I knew about her -- rented the room behind the frosted-gla.s.s door in the Zeidler flat.
Sometimes I heard her steps as she came home from night duty. I also heard her toward nine o"clock at night, after the day shift. Oskar did not always remain seated in his chair when he heard her in the hall. Quite often he played with his doork.n.o.b. Who could have resisted? Who does not look up at the pa.s.sage of something which is pa.s.sing perhaps for him? Who can sit still in his chair when every nearby sound seems to serve the sole purpose of making him jump up?
Still worse is the silence. We have seen the power of silence in connection with the female figurehead, wooden, silent, and pa.s.sive. There lay the first museum attendant in his blood. And everyone said Niobe had killed him. The director looked for a new attendant, for the museum had to be kept open. When the second attendant was dead, everyone screamed that Niobe had killed him. The museum director had difficulty in finding a third attendant -- or was it already the eleventh he was looking for? One day, in any case, this attendant it had been so hard to find was dead. And everyone screamed: Niobe, Niobe of the green paint and amber eyes; wooden Niobe, naked, unbreathing, unsweating, untrembling, suffering neither heat nor cold; Niobe, wormless because, what with her historical value, she had been sprayed against worms. A witch was burned on her account, the woodcarver"s hand was cut off, ships sank, but she floated, she survived. Niobe was wooden but fireproof, Niobe killed and remained valuable. Schoolboys, students, an elderly priest, and a bevy of museum attendants all fell prey to her silence. My friend Herbert Truczinski jumped her and died; but Niobe, still dry, only increased in silence.
When the nurse left her room, the hallway, and the Hedgehog"s apartment early in the morning, at about six o"clock, it became very still, though when present she had never made any noise. Unable to stand the silence, Oskar had to coax a squeak or two from his bed, move a chair, or roll an apple in the direction of the bathtub.
Toward eight o"clock a rustling. That was the postman dropping letters and postcards through the slit in the outer door. Not only Oskar, but Mrs. Zeidler as well had been waiting for that sound. She was a secretary at the offices of the Mannesmann Company and didn"t go to work until nine o"clock. She let me go first; it was Oskar who first looked into the rustling. I moved quietly though I knew she could hear me just the same, and left my room door open in order not to have to switch on the light. I picked up all the mail at once. Regularly once a week there was a letter from Maria, giving a complete account of herself, the child, and her sister Guste. Having secreted it in my pajama pocket, I would look quickly through the rest of the mail. Everything addressed to the Zeidlers or to a certain Mr. Munzer who lived at the end of the hallway, I would replace on the floor. As for Sister Dorothea"s mail, I would turn it over, smell it, feel it, and examine the return address.
Sister Dorothea received more mail than I, but not very much. Her full name was Dorothea Kongetter; but I called her only Sister Dorothea and occasionally forgot her last name -- what, indeed, does a trained nurse need a last name for? She received letters from her mother in Hildesheim. There were also postcards from all over West Germany, most of them with pictures of ivy-covered hospitals, written by nurses she had known at training school, obviously in reply to Sister Dorothea"s halting efforts to keep up with her old friends.
Nearly all these communications, as Oskar soon found out, were quite rapid and unrevealing. Nevertheless, they threw some light on Sister Dorothea"s past; she had worked at the Vinzent-Hospital in Cologne, at a private clinic in Aachen, and in Hildesheim, where her mother was still living. It could be inferred either that she was from Lower Saxony or that like Oskar she was a refugee from the East and had settled there after the war. I also found out that Sister Dorothea was working nearby, at the Marien-Hospital, that she had a close friend by the name of Beata, for the postcards were full of references to, and regards for, this Sister Beata.
The existence of a girl friend gave me wild ideas. I composed letters to Beata, in one I asked her to intercede for me, in the next I said nothing about Dorothea, my idea being to approach Beata first and switch to Dorothea later on. I drafted five or six letters and even addressed one or two; several times I started for the mailbox, but none was ever sent.
Yet perhaps, in my madness, I would actually have mailed one of these pleas to Sister Beata had I not -- one Monday it was, the day Maria started up with Mr. Stenzel, her boss, an occurrence that left me surprisingly cold -- found on the floor, below the letter slot, the missive which transformed my pa.s.sion from love to jealous love.
The name and address printed on the envelope told me that the letter had been written by a Dr. Erich Werner at the Marien-Hospital. On Tuesday a second letter came. Thursday brought a third. What shall I say of my state of mind on that Thursday? Oskar tottered back to his room, fell on one of the kitchen chairs which helped to turn my bathroom into a place of residence, and drew Maria"s weekly letter from his pajama pocket -- in spite of her love affair Maria continued to write punctually, neatly, and exhaustively. Oskar even tore open the envelope and gazed at the letter with sightless eyes; he heard Mrs. Zeidler in the hall, calling Mr. Munzer, who did not answer. But Munzer must have been in, for Mrs. Zeidler opened his room door, handed in the mail, and kept on talking to him.
Mrs. Zeidler was still talking but I could no longer hear her. I surrendered myself to the madness of the wallpaper, the vertical, horizontal, diagonal madness, the curved madness, reproduced a thousandfold; I saw myself as Matzerath, eating the alarmingly nutritious bread of cuckolds; and no shame or scruple deterred me from representing my Jan Bronski as a seducer in Satanic make-up, clad by turns in the traditional overcoat with velvet collar, in Dr. Hollatz" white smock, and in the equally white smock of Dr. Werner, in every case seducing, corrupting, desecrating, insulting, scourging, and torturing, in short, doing everything a seducer has to do if he is to be plausible.
Today I can smile when I recall the idea which then turned Oskar as yellow and mad as the wallpaper: I decided to study medicine. I would graduate in no time. I would become a doctor, at the Marien-Hospital, of course. I would expose Dr. Werner, demonstrate his incompetence, nay more, prove that his criminal negligence had been responsible for the death of a patient in the course of a larynx operation. It would turn out that this Mr. Werner had never attended medical school. He had picked up a smattering of medicine while working as an orderly in a field hospital during the war. Off to jail with the charlatan. And Oskar, despite his youth, becomes head physician. A new Professor Sauerbruch, with Sister Dorothea at his side, followed by a white-clad retinue, strides down resounding corridors, visits his patients, decides at the last minute to operate. How fortunate that this film was never made!
In the Clothes Cupboard
It should not be supposed that Oskar"s whole life was taken up with nurses. After all, I had my professional occupations. I had to give up cutting inscriptions, the summer semester at the Academy had begun. Once again Ulla and I received good money for sitting still while art students, employing methods old or new, subjected us to their vision or blindness. There were many who destroyed our objective existence, rejected and negated us, covering paper and canvas with lines, rectangles, spirals, producing wallpaper designs which had everything in them but Oskar and Ulla, or mystery and tension if you will, and giving these absurdities high-sounding t.i.tles such as: "Plaited Upward," "Hymn above Time", "Red in New s.p.a.ces".
This manner was particularly favored by the younger students who had not yet learned to draw. We fared better at the hands of my old friends from the studios of Kuchen and Maruhn, not to mention the prize students Ziege and Raskolnikov.
In her earthly existence the Muse Ulla revealed a marked taste for applied art. Lankes had left her but in her enthusiasm for the new wallpaper designs she soon forgot him and convinced herself that the decorative abstractions of a middle-aged painter named Meitel were sweet, amusing, cute, fantastic, terrific, and even chic. Meitel had a special fondness for forms suggesting sugary-syrupy Easter eggs, but that is hardly worth mentioning; since then she has found many other occasions to become engaged and at the present moment -- as she informed me when she came to see me the day before yesterday, with candy for me and Bruno -- is on the point of entering upon a serious and lasting relationship, as she has always put it.
At the beginning of the semester, Ulla wanted to pose only for the "new trends" -- a flea that Meiter, her Easter egg painter, had put in her ear; his engagement present to her had been a vocabulary which she tried out in conversations with me. She spoke of relationships, constellations, accents, perspectives, granular structures, processes of fusion, phenomena of erosion. She, whose daily fare consisted exclusively of bananas and tomato juice, spoke of proto-cells, color atoms which in their dynamic flat trajectories found their natural positions in their fields of forces, but did not stop there; no, they went on and on ... This was the tone of her conversation with me during our rest periods or when we went out for an occasional cup of coffee in Ratinger-Stra.s.se. Even when her engagement to the dynamic painter of Easter eggs had ceased to be, even when after a brief episode with a Lesbian she took up with one of Kuchen"s students and returned to the objective world, she retained this vocabulary which so strained her little face that two sharp, rather fanatical creases formed on either side of her mouth.
Here I must admit that it was not entirely Raskolnikov"s idea to dress the Muse Ulla as a nurse and paint her with Oskar. After the "Madonna 49" he put us into "The Abduction of Europa" -- I was the bull. And immediately after the rather controversial "Abduction" came "Fool Heals Nurse".
It was a little word of mine that fired Raskolnikov"s imagination. Somber, red-haired, and crafty, he cleaned his brushes and brooded; staring fixedly at Ulla, he began to speak of guilt and atonement. At this I advised him to picture me as guilt, Ulla as atonement; my guilt, I said, was patent; as for Atonement, why not dress her as a nurse?
If this excellent picture later bore another, misleadingly different t.i.tle, it was Raskolnikov"s doing. I myself should have called it "Temptation", because my right, painted hand was gripping and turning a doork.n.o.b, opening the door to a room where The Nurse is standing. Or it might have been called "The Doork.n.o.b", for if I were asked to think up a new name for temptation, I should recommend the word "doork.n.o.b", because what are these protuberances put on doors for if not to tempt us, because the doork.n.o.b on the frosted-gla.s.s door of Sister Dorothea"s room was to me temptation itself whenever I knew that Hedgehog Zeidler was on the road. Sister Dorothea at the hospital, and Mrs. Zeidler in the office at Mannesmann"s.
Oskar would emerge from his room with the drainless bathtub, cross the hallway, approach the nurse"s room, and grip the doork.n.o.b.
Until about the middle of June -- and I made the experiment almost every day -- the door had resisted my temptation. I was beginning to think that Sister Dorothea"s work had just made her too orderly in her ways, that I might as well give up hope of her ever neglecting to lock it. And that is why, when one day the door opened under my pressure, my dull-witted, mechanical reaction was to close it again.
For several minutes Oskar stood there in a very tight skin, a prey to so many thoughts of the most divergent origins that his heart had difficulty in imposing any sort of arrangement upon them.
It was only after I had transferred my thoughts to another context -- Maria and her lover, I thought; Maria has a lover, lover gives her a coffee pot, lover and Maria go to the Apollo on Sat.u.r.day night, Maria addresses lover as Mr. So-and-So during working hours, he is her boss, owner of the store where she works -- only after I had thus considered Maria and her lover from various angles, that I managed to create a little order in my poor brain. . . and opened the frosted-gla.s.s door.
I had already figured out that the room must be windowless, for never had the upper, dimly transparent part of the door revealed the slightest trace of daylight. Reaching to the right, exactly as in my own room, I found the switch. The forty-watt bulb was quite sufficient for this cubbyhole which hardly deserved to be called a room. I was rather distressed to find myself face to face with my bust in the mirror. Though his reverse image had nothing to tell him, Oskar did not move away; he was too fascinated by the objects on the dressing table in front of the mirror.
There were blue-black spots in the white enamel of the washbasin. The table top in which the washbasin was sunk almost to the rim also had blemishes. The left corner was missing and the missing piece lay on the table top under the mirror, showing the mirror its veins. Traces of peeling glue on the broken edge bore witness to a bungled attempt to repair the damage. My stonecutter"s fingers itched. I thought of Korneff"s homemade marble cement, which transformed even the most dilapidated marble into enduring slabs fit to adorn the facades of large butcher stores.
Once these familiar thoughts had diverted me from my cruelly distorted image in the mirror, I was able to give the smell that had struck me the moment I came in a name.
It was vinegar. Later, and again only a few weeks ago, I justified that acrid smell by the a.s.sumption that Sister Dorothea must have washed her hair the day before and had put vinegar in the rinse water. However, there was no vinegar bottle on the dressing table. Nor did I detect vinegar in any of the containers otherwise labeled; moreover, I have often said to myself, would Sister Dorothea be likely to heat water in the Zeidler kitchen, for which she would have required Zeidler"s permission, and go through the bother of washing her hair in her room, when the hospital is full of the best showers and bathrooms? Yet possibly the head nurse or the hospital management had forbidden the nurses to use certain sanitary installations in the hospital; perhaps Sister Dorothea actually was obliged to wash her hair in this enamel bowl, in front of this deceitful mirror.
Though there was no vinegar bottle on the table, there were plenty of other bottles and jars on the clammy marble. A package of cotton and a half-empty package of sanitary napkins discouraged Oskar from investigating the contents of the little jars. But I am still of the opinion that they contained nothing but routine cosmetics or harmless medicinal ointments.
Sister Dorothea had left her comb in her brush. It cost me a struggle to pull it out and take a good look at it. How fortunate that I did so, for in that instant Oskar made his important discovery; the nurse"s hair was blonde, perhaps ashblonde, but one cannot be too suspicious of conclusions drawn from the dead hair that comes out in a comb. Suffice it to say that Sister Dorothea had blonde hair.
In addition, the alarmingly abundant contents of the comb told me that Sister Dorothea suffered from falling hair, an ailment that must have distressed her. It"s the fault of her nurse"s caps, I said to myself; but I did not condemn them, for how can a hospital be run properly without nurses" caps?