The Clown Read Free Page B

mind to call him up and ask him to send me the money. The dirty dog ought not to get off so lightly, besides I needed the money. For five years I had been earning much more than I needed, and yet it was all gone.Of course I could continue to make the rounds of the cheap music halls at the thirty to fifty mark level, as soon as my knee healed up properly; I didn’t really mind, in those low-class places the audience is really nicer than in the vaudeville theaters. But thirty to fifty marks a day is simply not enough, the hotel rooms are too small, you keep bumping into tables and chairs while you are practicing, and I don’t feel a bathroom is a luxury, or that, when you travel with five suitcases, a taxi is an extravagance.
    I took the cognac out of the refrigerator again and had a drink from the bottle. I am not an alcoholic. Alcohol does me good, since Marie has gone. Besides, I wasn’t used nowadays to being short of money, and the fact that all I had left was one mark, with no prospect of being able to earn much more in the near future, bothered me. The only thing I could really sell would be the bike, but if I decided to do the cheap music halls the bike would come in very handy and would save me taxi and train fares. There was one condition attached to my possession of the apartment: I was not allowed to sell it or rent it. A typical rich man’s gift. There’s always a snag. I managed not to drink any more cognac, went into the living room and opened the phone book.

4
    I was born in Bonn and know a lot of people here: relatives, friends, former schoolmates. My parents live here, and my brother Leo, who became a Catholic with Züpfner as godfather, is studying at a Catholic seminary here. I would have to see my parents again if only to fix up about the money. But maybe I’ll hand that over to a lawyer. I haven’t made up my mind about this yet. Since the death of my sister Henrietta my parents no longer exist for me as such. Henrietta has been dead for seventeen years. She was sixteen when the war drew to a close, a lovely girl, with fair hair, the best tennis-player between Bonn and Remagen. In those days the girls were being told they ought to volunteer for anti-aircraft duty, and Henrietta did, in February 1945. Everything happened so fast and went so smoothly that I didn’t take it in. I came out of school, crossed the Kölnerstrasse, and saw Henrietta sitting in a streetcar which was just leaving for Bonn. She waved at me and laughed, and I laughed too. She had a small rucksack on her back, and she was wearing a pretty navy-blue hat andher heavy blue winter coat with the fur collar. I had never seen her in a hat before, she had always refused to wear one. The hat altered her very much. She looked like a young woman. I thought she must be going on an outing, though it was a strange time for outings. But in those days the schools were capable of anything. They even tried to teach us algebra in the airraid shelter, although we could already hear the artillery. Brühl, our teacher, sang “Songs of Devotion and Patriotism,” as he called them, in which he included “Behold the house of glory” and “Seest thou the dawn in eastern skies?” At night, when for once it was quiet for half an hour, all we could hear was the sound of marching feet: Italian prisoners of war (it had been explained to us in school why the Italians were no longer our allies and were now working for us as prisoners, but to this day I have never really understood why), Russian prisoners of war, women prisoners, German soldiers; marching feet all night long. Nobody knew just what was happening.
    Henrietta really looked as if she were off on a school outing. They were capable of anything. Sometimes when we were sitting in our classroom between airraid sirens the sound of real rifle shots came in through the open window, and when we turned in alarm to the window Brühl would ask us if we knew what it meant. By that time we knew: another