Chapter Twenty
Gently I get rid of Roth, the former postman. During the war this little fellow made deliveries in our section of the city. He was a sensitive man and took it very much to heart in those days that he was so often the unwilling bearer of ill tidings. In all the years of peace people had eagerly looked forward to his arrival with the mail, but during the war he became increasingly a figure of fear. He brought army draft notices and the dreaded official envelopes containing the announcement: “Fallen on the field of honor.” The longer the war lasted the more he brought, and his appearance became the signal for lamentation, curses, and tears. Then one day he had to deliver one of the dreaded envelopes to himself, and a week later a second. That was too much for him. He grew silent and went quietly mad; the Post Office Department had to pension him off. That meant, for him as for so many other during the inflation, being condemned to death by slow starvation. However, a few friends looked after the lonely old man, and a couple of years after the war he began to go out again. But his mind remains confused. He thinks he is still a postman and goes about in his old visored cap, bringing people fresh news; but now, after the tidings of disaster, he wants to bring only good news. He collects old envelopes and post cards wherever he can find them and delivers them as messages from Russian prison camps. Men believed dead are still alive, he announces. They have not been killed. Soon they will come home.
I look at the card he has thrust upon me. It is a very ancient printed notice, advertising the Prussian lottery—an empty joke in these days of the inflation. Roth must have fished it out of the wastebasket somewhere; it is addressed to a butcher named Sack, who has been dead for years. “Many thanks,” I say. “This is wonderful news!”
Roth nods. “They’ll soon be back from Russia, our soldiers.”
“Yes, of course.”
“They will all come home. It will just take time. Russia is so big.”
“Your sons too, I hope.”
Roth’s faded eyes light up. “Yes, mine too. I’ve already had word.”
“Once again, many thanks,” I say.
Roth smiles without looking at me and moves on. At first the Post Office Department tried to keep him from his rounds and even asked that he be imprisoned; but the townspeople opposed this, and now he is left in peace. In one of the rightist inns, to be sure, some of the regular patrons recently hit on the idea of sending Roth around to their political enemies with scurrilous letters—and to unmarried women with salacious messages. They thought it a side-splitting notion. Heinrich Kroll, too, considered it robust, earthy humor. Among his equals in the inn Heinrich is, by the way, a quite different man; he is even considered a wit.
Roth has naturally long since forgotten which houses have suffered bereavement. He distributes his cards at random and, although one of the nationalistic beer drinkers went with him to point out from a distance the houses for which the abusive letters were intended, now and again mistakes occurred. So it was that a letter addressed to Lisa was delivered to Vicar Bodendiek. It contained an invitation to sexual intercourse, in exchange for a payment of ten million marks, at one o’clock in the morning in the bushes behind St. Mary’s. Bodendiek crept up upon the observers like an Indian, suddenly appeared among them, seized two of them, knocked their heads together, without asking questions, and gave a fleeing third such a mighty kick that he shot into the air and barely succeeded in getting away. Only then did Bodendiek, that expert collector of penitents, put his questions to the two captives, re-enforcing them by blows on the ear with his huge peasant fist. The confessions were quickly forthcoming and since both captives were Catholic, he asked for their names and ordered them to appear next day either at confession or at the police station. Naturally they preferred confession. Bodendiek gave them the ego te absolvo and in doing so followed the procedure the cathedral pastor had used with me—he ordered them not to drink for a week and then to appear at confession again. Since both feared excommunication, they turned up again, and Bodendiek mercilessly ordered them to come each ensuing week and not to drink. Thus he made them into abstemious, ill-tempered, first-class Christians. He never discovered that the third sinner was Major Wolkenstein, who, as a result of the kick he received, had to undergo treatment for his prostate, and, in consequence, became more belligerent politically and finally joined the Nazis.
The doors of Knopfs house are open. The sewing machines are humming. This morning bolts of black cloth were brought home, and now mother and daughters are at work on their mourning weeds. The sergeant major is not yet dead, but the doctor has said it can only be a matter of hours or, at most, days. He has given Knopf up. Since the family would consider it a serious blow to their reputation to enter the presence of death in bright clothes, hasty preparations are under way. At the moment Knopf draws his final breath, the family will be provided with black garments, a widow’s veil for Frau Knopf, thick black stockings for all four, and black hats as well. Bourgeois respectability will have its due.
Georg’s bald head floats toward me like half a cheese above the window sill. He is accompanied by Weeping Oskar.
“How’s the dollar doing?” I ask as they enter.
“Exactly one billion at twelve o’clock,” Georg replies. “We can celebrate it as a jubilee if you like.”
“So we can. And when are we going broke?”
“When we have sold out. What will you have to drink, Herr Fuchs?”
“Whatever you have. Too bad there’s no vodka in Werdenbrück!”
“Vodka? Were you in Russia during the war?”
“And how! I was commandant of a cemetery there, as a matter of fact. What fine days those were!”
We stare at Oskar questioningly. “Fine days?” I ask. “You say that when you’re so sensitive you can weep on request?”
“They were fine days,” Weeping Oskar announces firmly, sniffing at his schnaps as though he thought we intended to poison him. “Lots to eat and drink, agreeable duties far behind the front—what more can you ask? A fellow gets used to death fast enough, the way you do to a contagious disease.”
Oskar sips his schnaps in a dandified fashion. We are a little confused by the profundity of his philosophy. “Some people get used to death the way you do to a fourth man in a game of skat,” I say. “Liebermann, the gravedigger, for instance. For him a job in the cemetery is like working in a garden. But an artist like you!”
Oskar smiles in a superior way. “There’s a tremendous difference! Liebermann lacks true metaphysical sensitivity. Awareness of eternal death and recurrence.”
Georg and I look at each other in amazement. Are we to consider Weeping Oskar a poet manqué? “Do you have that all the time?” I ask. “This awareness of death and recurrence?”
“More or less. At least unconsciously. Don’t you have it; gentlemen?”
“We have it rather sporadically,” I reply. “Principally before meals.”
“One day word came that His Majesty was going to visit us,” Oskar says dreamily. “God, what excitement! Fortunately there were two other cemeteries nearby and we could trade.”
“Trade what?” Georg asks. “Tombstones? Or flowers?”
“Oh, all that was taken care of. True Prussian efficiency, you know. No, corpses.”
“Corpses?”
“Corpses, of course! Not because they were corpses, of course, but for what they had once been. It goes without saying that every cemetery had lots of privates as well as lance corporals, noncoms, vice sergeant majors, and lieutenants—but trouble began when it came to higher commissioned officers. My colleague at the nearest cemetery, for example, had three majors; I had none. But to make up for that I had two lieutenant colonels and one colonel. I traded him one of my lieutenant colonels for two majors. I got a fat goose out of the deal besides; my colleague felt it was such a disgrace not to have any lieutenant colonels. He didn’t see how he could meet His Majesty without a single dead lieutenant colonel.”