Billiards at Half-Past Nine Read Free Page A

earth, strewing flowers? Were the tears in his eyes the tears of 1942, when he got the news of Otto’s death? Was he weeping at the asylum door behind which his wife had vanished? The tears, while his cigar, forgotten on the ash tray, went up in delicate wreaths of smoke, were from 1902. He was burying his sister Charlotte, for whom he had saved and saved, gold coin by coin, so that things might go better for her. The coffin slid down, held by creaking ropes, while the school-children sang, ‘Watchman, whither has the swallow flown?’ Chirpy children’s voices intruded into the perfectly appointed office; the aged voice sang back over half a century. Now only that October morning in 1902 was real. Fog on the Lower Rhine. Damp fog, coiling in sarabande across the wet beet-fields, the crows in the willow trees scrawking like Mardi Gras noisemakers. While Leonore drew a red Heuss over the damp sponge. Thirty years before she was born peasant children had sung, ‘Watchman, whither has the swallow flown?’ Now a green Heuss, drawn across the little sponge. Careful. Letters to Hochbret went at local rates.
    When this mood came over him, the old man had a blind look. She would have liked then and there to rush off to the florist’s and buy him a lovely bouquet. But she was afraid to leave him alone. He stretched out his hands; cautiously she pushed the ash tray toward him. He took up his cigar, put it in his mouth, looked at Leonore, and gently said, “You mustn’t think I’m crazy, child.”
    Yes, she was fond of him. Regularly, on her afternoons off, he came to the office to pick her up, so she could take pity on his carelessly kept books, over there on the other side of the street, high above the printing works, where he lived ina “studio” dating back to his salad days. There he kept documents checked and approved by income tax officials whose modest gravestones had already toppled over before she had learned to write. Credits in English pounds, dollar holdings, plantation shares in El Salvador. Up there she rummaged through account settlements, deciphered handwritten statements from banks long since failed, read old wills bequeathing legacies to children by now outlived forty years. ‘And to my son Heinrich exclusively I leave the two estates of Stehlinger’s Grotto and Goerlinger’s Lodge, having noted in his nature that air of repose, I may even say that delight in seeing things grow, which I take to be the prerequisite of a farmer’s life.…’
    “Here,” the old man cried, brandishing his cigar, “right here in this very office, I dictated a will to my father-in-law the night before I had to leave for the army. While I was dictating it the youngster was sleeping up there. Next morning he came with me to the station, kissed me on the cheek with his soft child’s lips. He was only seven then. But none of them, Leonore, not one ever got what I gave. It all came back to me, properties and bank accounts, dividends and rents. I was never able to give anything away. It took my wife to do that. People actually got what she gave away. And nights, when I lay beside her, I often used to hear her muttering—long and soft, hours on end, like water purling from her mouth—
‘whywhywhy?’
 ”
    Again the old man wept. He was in uniform this time, a captain in the Engineer Reserves, Privy Councillor Heinrich Faehmel, home on compassionate leave to bury his son, age seven. The Kilbian vault closed round the white coffin. Damp, gloomy masonry, yet bright as the sun’s rays the golden figures marking the year of his death. 1917. Robert, dressed in black velvet, waited out in the carriage.
    Leonore let the stamp fall, a violet one, not trusting herself to stick it on Schrit’s letter. The carriage horses were snorting outside the cemetery gate, while Robert Faehmel, age two, was allowed to hold the reins. Black leather cracked at the edgesand the figures, 1917, freshly gilt, shining brighter than