The Room Read online

  It’s possible that he had a good business relationship with the kiosk at the Bad Nauheim train station. He smoked a lot, R6s, and he would have bought them there for sure. Maybe the kiosk owner used to open up as early as half four because of the night shift and early shift workers. But maybe it wasn’t like that at all; maybe Uncle J just sat there with his little leather bag, reputable and washed amongst his colleagues, finally part of it, somebody, a commuter on his way to work, someone with stories to tell, stories about his work, about his superiors, his colleagues, stories about particularly heavy packages or particularly interesting deliveries or unusual happenings. Or maybe they were all in cahoots, talking about the women. Perhaps they had already realised, with utter clarity, what and who my uncle was, and they let him buy all kinds of things for them, paid for out of his pay check. And he bought them and paid for them in order to belong and feel accepted by his colleagues, at half past four in the morning in Bad Nauheim in the Wetterau.

  My uncle was a great frequenter of inns, and whenever he went someone or other would suss him out. My uncle, mentally impaired at birth, was constantly boasting about his existence, or rather about his Boll existence, his existence as a Boll. He sat there in the inns and told stories about his father, the big company boss with a chauffeur and a dog. Of course he didn’t mention the fact that his father hit him, or rather used to hit him, with a leather belt. When he was talking about his father, a bad word never passed his lips. J probably thought everything that happened was normal, just part of the entirely normal, natural way of the world. He would talk about the company, the employees, the pay checks; he probably even told people where the cash was kept, the best way to get to the company premises and so on. But it would never have occurred to anyone in Friedberg or Bad Nauheim to break into the premises by the Usa; instead they would just have gotten to the money through my uncle, who for my family had always been an open sore, financially speaking, the Bolls’ open wound. And even though he was only ever giving away his own pay check, the family still didn’t want to see it wasted like that. They definitely would have preferred it if he hadn’t frequented the inns quite so much.

  From time to time, he ran into Gerd Bornträger at the station in the mornings. I imagine that they met in the Köpi, a Königspilsner inn in Bad Nauheim. Bornträger was, of course, completely drunk when he made my uncle’s acquaintance and immediately managed to get a few beers out of him, followed by a few schnapps to wash them down. That’s how my uncle always met people. The drunks in our bars in the Wetterau are always trying to drink with you, beer and schnapps, with the aim of eventually losing count of the rounds or acting as though they’ve forgotten to bring their money along; heaven forbid they succeed. If they do, you’ll never get rid of them. They’ll follow you all the way to your front door, and even go inside with you if you’re not careful. But that wasn’t necessary with J in the Köpi, because he would get so completely sozzled that he didn’t even notice he was paying for someone else’s beers yet again. The truth was, he was always paying for someone else. Sometimes everyone in the bar would latch on to him, and when that happened he could easily end up paying for ten rounds in one go. That was only in the small inns of course, where almost everyone would be sitting around on benches and there were no more than eight to ten people to a round. That’s why they always used to try to lure him into those inns. But even though he may have been part of things there, I don’t think he was totally comfortable with it. If he was, he wouldn’t have kept going to Forsthaus Winterstein with all the hunters, who were more respectable. The landlady there would never have allowed my uncle to be taken advantage of like that. And it was always the place he spoke the most enthusiastically about. The Winterstein lodge and the Winterstein mountain were his favourite places, apart from his dark room at home or the establishments in Frankfurt which, although the only plausible explanation, are admittedly based on mere speculation.

  Bornträger sometimes took the same train into Frankfurt for the early shift, because he worked at the Hauptbahnhof too, or at least that’s what he claimed. But my uncle never once saw him there during the day, not in the station and definitely not at the post depot, where J himself worked. (And he never saw him on the journey home either.) Another man who used to take the train regularly was Rudi Weber, whose father had worked as a stonemason in the quarry with my grandfather, J’s father. Weber worked the early shift at a firm in Frankfurt’s Gallus district. He was known as Rudi Junior, the son of stonemason Weber. He always greeted J politely, and sometimes the two of them would talk about their fathers. When J spoke about his father, the big company boss, it was with pride, a sense of belonging to something. Everything he said about his father and the company was communicated in a tone of the utmost seriousness. He would go into raptures when a piece of new machinery was ordered, describing it as the newest and biggest and best of its kind, of course. My uncle always thought in superlatives. Everything had to be re-thought into a superlative, including all the machines on the company premises. The other son, Rudi Junior, in his late thirties at the time just like my uncle, would then listen politely while Bornträger made fun of J (perhaps in much the same way as I did in the cellar, when J was sawing and filing) and winked at Rudi, in an attempt to get him to gang up on my uncle. I presume that Weber never reacted to this.

  Bornträger: Hey, J, you know that new milling machine you told us about last week? How much did you say it cost, again? And what kind of machine is it anyway? What’s it called? Tell us something about it, won’t you?!

  J lifts his hand in a ponderous manner, squints and says: Oh-hoh! That machine, that machine is the best there is (Oh-hoh!—that was his way of expressing excitement). It’s a new invention, by a really famous manufacturer. A really famous make—I even used it myself.

  B: What did you do with it?

  J: I know the machine inside and out. I know every manoeuvre.

  B: What, you mean your father let you loose on it? I don’t believe that for a second, ha-ha-ha, you can’t even insert a dowel pin. Craftsman my ass, ha-ha-ha! You don’t even know what it’s called, this machine!

  It’s not hard to imagine Bornträger giving Weber an encouraging slap on the thigh as he says this, and yet the latter would never react, only stare over at the window with a strained expression. He felt sorry for J. Bornträger, on the other hand, had perhaps realised that my uncle was one of the happiest people in the world—completely unaware that he was being mocked, he would just gaze up like a dog being presented with a bone. That’s why Bornträger would mischeviously question my uncle in great detail about the things that excited him, the things he thought he understood (like machines, for example), but about which, in reality, he knew nothing at all. J would then offer up completely meaningless explanations that were always about the Biggest and Best and Newest of things, a kind of Wetterau Genius Language for trained engineers, admittedly devoid of any meaning but nonetheless containing some general terms that he had overheard. My uncle knew and could say words like hoisting crane, milling machine and disk sander, but when he uttered them he sounded as clueless as an inexperienced teenage boy talking about women. A language of longing in Engineer Speak. I can picture the sadness and helplessness in my uncle’s brown-black eyes when, in an attempt to satisfy Bornträger, he escalates to superlatives; Bornträger would continue to pull my uncle’s leg regardless. J often used to have this sad and helpless air about him in the cellar too, but I’ve always been convinced that he was never aware of this helplessness and sadness, that it didn’t even exist for him. Perhaps in much the same way as he was sometimes in pain but completely unaware of it—J was completely analgic from birth. In some ways, this had been helpful to him during his life: as a boy he had been pummelled day after day by children who went on to become respectable Bad Nauheim citizens and are still seen as such. But back then they would kick my uncle in the side as he lay on the ground, which in their view was where he belonged. Due to his scrawny legs and big ears, his la
nk hair and crazed expression, my uncle cut a conspicuous figure. This, along with the fact that he liked to ask questions and tag along with anyone and everyone, meant that he became easy prey, shuttling back and forth between his father, who loathed him, and his schoolmates, who would drag him along by his jug-like ears, stretching them all the more. Yet today his peers sit in the Bad Nauheim church and spend Christmas and Easter with their families, knowing all the while that they could stand by my uncle’s grave and confess to God: Yes, I kicked him too.

  I have never found out whether Bornträger had been in school with J back then. After his first few years there, they bundled J off to a special school in the Rhineland, a long way away, with the aim of keeping him alive and as unscathed as possible. A Wetterau boy who they had to take out of the Wetterau for years on end so he could make it through and survive the Wetterau, yet he didn’t survive it, just like none of us will survive it. Back then, my uncle sat in the train staring out at a landscape that was still his landscape. Those were his fields out there, his Winterstein. There were no cars driving between Friedberg and Bad Nauheim before five in the morning, and the word bypass didn’t yet officially exist; in those days, the dictionary listed bypath directly after bygone. That was back when we still spoke dialect, before anyone else understood us. My uncle’s language doesn’t even exist now. He used to speak it on the train, be teased in it by Bornträger. All of this is no more than forty years ago. My uncle always travelled along the same route. Bad Nauheim, past Schwalheim, then over the Rosenthal viaduct, the so-called ‘twenty-four halls’ near which I grew up and which provided the backdrop for my childhood, like the famous railway bridge on the poster for Once Upon a Time in America did for the kids in the movie. Some of the stones used to construct the Rosenthal viaduct came from our quarry, my mother told me, although I have no way of verifying that. But she should know, because she ran the business for seven years; from 1967, the year when I was born, to when it was liquidated in 1974 and the last-remaining workers left the premises.

  On his journey into Frankfurt, my uncle regularly travelled past the premises of the family business in Friedberg, so close that he could practically have spat on my father’s head, although he would never have done such a thing, given how in awe of his father he was. That was my uncle; he felt longing for some things and awe for others. In later years he saw my family home there, where the apple orchard used to be. He could see everything from up there in the train: the business getting smaller and smaller, more and more sections of it being cut away, the present becoming the past and not the future everyone had hoped for. Looking back, it had always been in decline. The business had blossomed during the Weimar Republic, and even the Third Reich had been bearable—from a Boll perspective at least. Apart from the fact that dead soldiers didn’t get individual gravestones. A dead Friedberg soldier never brought us much profit. If his mother died, on the other hand, that was good business. All the Marie Baumanns and Sophie Breitenfelders got individual gravestones. But those dead soldiers, after they had been sent off to war, were stowed away in just the same way they had been during the war itself—still living then but doomed to die—barracked, piled up and lined up, except that the communal barrack roof later became a communal memorial plate, the soldiers awaiting their communal resurrection in eternal camaraderie in the cemetery of Friedberg in the Wetterau.

  We Await the Second Coming

  But then everything fell to ruin, and globalisation took care of the rest. Now people here are buried beneath stones that come from around the world. Wetterau residents now lay to rest beneath imported gravestones. It started with stones from the Far East. Our cemetery was globalised before the term globalised even existed, and we became Friedberg’s first victims of globalisation, just twenty-eight years after the last war. Travelling through Friedberg by train, my uncle passed by the Hanauer Hof too, a brewery inn next to the cemetery where almost all of us now lie. The Hanauer Hof is where we drank to the dead after they were buried, usually with a schnapps and several pints of cider to chase it down. Although my uncle didn’t just go to the Hanauer Hof for the wakes, of course. And we went there for his too, after my uncle’s burial. Until the seventies there was a big factory behind the Hanauer Hof; it smelled of iron and electricity and an early phase of industrialisation, and its machinery was visible to passersby, all of it standing around in the open and unguarded on the land and spilling over into the town, and people like my uncle would stand there in awe in front of this machinery, gazing with the goggled eyes of child-like excitement. Today there are five supermarkets there, and Friedberg people no longer stand there in awe, staring with child-like excitement, but instead rush around between them comparing prices like lunatics. A senior-citizen Schnitzel-hunt between Tegut and Aldi and Norma, with a hardware store in between, although even that’s gone now.

  Then my uncle reaches the fields of Bruchenbrücken—when Hessian TV started to travel the provinces for the AIDA series, shining the spotlight on the everyday life of local villages, this was one of the first locations they filmed—and then on to Ober-Wöllstadt, Nieder-Wöllstadt, Okarben, Großkarben, Dortelweil. Any kid around here can list the names on this route like others can the 1974 national football team. Bad Vilbel, Bonames, the station which has since lost its name and is now called Frankfurter Berg, and further and further on to Frankfurt, which by that time had already expanded and swallowed Ginnheim and Rödelheim and Eschersheim and everything else, before finally, after twenty-seven minutes, my uncle J gets out in Frankfurt. Because that was back then, when the trains still ran to schedule. Back then, the era of the great ‘still’.

  The train station was pretty run down at the end of the sixties and early seventies; for there wasn’t yet much emphasis on cleanliness in public spaces in general. Paradise used to surround the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, a paradise much like the one on the internet today. Except that there wasn’t yet online access to one’s bank account back then. So my uncle could only ever have been fleeced of the contents of his wallet, which wouldn’t even have included an EC-card, for they didn’t yet exist. Back then, if you didn’t pay in cash you paid by cheque, but I’m sure my uncle didn’t own any cheques. Presumably he didn’t even have his own bank account. And if he did, then I imagine he wouldn’t have had access to it. He was our family’s never-healing wound, from which everything was intent on seeping out.Especially at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, where you could still go to real women and not just to the women on the screens in the booths like today, although admittedly they’re cheaper (and today there’s a brothel restriction zone around the station). But then again I don’t know anything about what my uncle did there in Frankfurt, I can only surmise. And it’s only just gone five in the morning, so presumably he hasn’t even had his first beer of the day yet. There in Frankfurt he’s alone, no longer amongst the family or the people of Bad Nauheim, where everyone knew everyone and everything was seen by everyone. In Frankfurt, people didn’t see you as a Wetterauer. That’s why people from the Wetterau liked going there. Frankfurt had everything you could dream of, whereas in Bad Nauheim there was just the train station kiosk and not a video to be seen. Even in the eighties, shortly before commercial television was introduced, Mercedes-Benz drivers would pull up alongside me at night and ask where they could go to watch a movie in Friedberg in the Wetterau, and whether I might like to come along. Then, after looking me up and down, they would ask whether, if I did go with them, the movie was absolutely necessary. Back then, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I always seemed to be a feasible alternative for men who wanted to find women. To them, the transition was clearly a negligible and easy one. Rather a sixteen-year-old Wetterau boy than a forty-year-old Wetterau woman, and certainly better to have one in the hand than one on the screen. But presumably they couldn’t find a film showing anywhere in the Wetterau and would drive on to Frankfurt after all, where there was everything, all around the clock, and where no one knew them. There were rows and rows of old buildings around
the Hauptbahnhof, all of which had five or six stories, so it always involved climbing a lot of stairs, and this stair-climbing ultimately became the accepted term for the whole thing, a pars pro toto for the escape to paradise around Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. A trip to Frankfurt was always referred to by us as ‘climbing the stairs’. And when I say ‘us’, I mean the Wetterauers, not me—I was still too young back then. Most of the time, the ones chasing after me were men. But there were also a number of blonde women who were no longer that young—and in fact quite old and therefore fake blonde—who definitely wanted to have something in the hand and not on the screen. I was expected to provide what they wanted. And it was completely normal and inconceivable that it would be any other way. Such figures of longing, and I fell beneath them.