The Eighth Month
Father's Day
On Ascension Day, which is a holiday, we celebrate Father's Day. Innumerable men, gaunt ones, all bone and sinew, fat ones, who have cushioned themselves against everything, men with laughter lines, men with scars, shriveled men, foursquare men, men weighed down by their appendages, a whole nation of men, men and only men, are on their way to the open spaces: in festooned carriages, on bicycles decked with pennants, in club strength, in horse-drawn wagon-loads, in motor vehicles old and new.
From early morning, beer-tipsy hordes are on the move, crowding into subway and elevated trains. Double-decker buses are jam-packed with singing men. Swarms of teenagers on motorcycles: leather-jacketed, swathed in their noise. Here and there a resolute footslogging loner. Veterans of the last wars, frenzied half shifts from Borsig and Siemens, employees of the municipal waterworks, garbage men, truck drivers, post-office clerks, the management of Schering &
Co., whole shop committees, fans of the Hertha and Tasmania teams, bowling clubs, credit unions, skat clubs, stamp collectors, embittered pensioners, exhausted heads of families, young shop clerks, pimply apprentices — men, all men, wanting to be among themselves, without Ilsebills, without skirts or curlers, far from the breast and cunt, far from all knitting, the dishwashing, the hair in the soup; they want to go wild and to the country, to Tegel and Wannsee, to the Teufelsberg, Krumme Lanke, Britz, and Liibars, to the shores of the Griebnitzsee, Schlachtensee, Grunewaldsee, with bottles and sandwiches, cowbells and trumpets, in stripes and checks, to the woods, to sit under trees on moss or pine needles, or fat-assed on bandy-legged camp chairs, to let loose the monstrous inner pig, to be great and glorious, disumbilicated from Mama.
So when Ascension-Father's Day came around, Sibylle Miehlau also wanted to celebrate. Dead set on it! Her friends, whose names were Frankie, Siggie, and Maxie, called her Billy or Bill. All four considered themselves a different breed, though as I well know, all four could be quite different from different, for in the early fifties Sibylle and I had wanted to get married. Big plans, we were engaged. There are photographs of us on the Piazza San Marco, us at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, us atop the chalk cliffs of the isle of Riigen. Cheek to cheek. Hand in hand. We were just right for each other. In every situation. And our
child. .
Billy — I still say so — was a remarkable woman. She had her law degree. Men were crazy about her. She passed as a vamp and wore stiletto heels. She slept around. That's why nothing came of our projected marriage, which we regretted, for Sibylle had a domestic side, which later, when she decided to be different, was actively indulged. She took Maxie (with her duffel bag full of old junk) to live in her apartment, which, with its children's room and a double bed, was actually our apartment.
Maxie looked like a menstruating boy, flat and frail, while Sibylle had the proportions of an all-American pinup. Siggie and Frankie also lived together, but their relationship was flexible; they were both as restless as three-year-old
stallions and always looking around. For all their male affectations — always in trousers, their voices dropped to cellar pitch — they were four intelligent and normally high-strung girls, who fled to their own sex after too much experience with idiotic boys or boring men (like me). Now they wanted to be different, different at all costs. Though all of them would have done it with me. And on the whole Sibylle and I were great in bed. My sexual relations with the cool Siggie were perfectly normal, and as far as I know she never complained. And I took a shot at Maxie, too, when she started up with Billy. Only Frankie, who had the soul of an old wagoner, never appealed to me.
One day, in any case, all four of them began to act crazy. "No more of that stuff. It makes us sick. It's so crude; we won't take it any more. Our way of loving is entirely different. All you want is in and out and finished. Love 'em and leave 'em. That won't go down with us, not any more. Get someone else to service you. We just happen to be different. Well, all right, we didn't use to be, but we are now. What happened before doesn't count. Something we had to get behind us, definitely. A phase. But we can still be friends. Drop in now and then, for a schnapps or something."
They drank schnapps, all right, and beer straight out of the bottle. And there were two bottles of schnapps rattling around in an ice bucket and two cases of beer in Frankie's open (fifth-hand) three-wheeler, when all four of them, Siggie in the driver's seat, drove up Hundekehle and Clayallee, meaning to celebrate Ascension-Father's Day by the Grunewaldsee along with ten thousand, no, a hundred thousand men.
Billy was wearing a top hat, Frankie a derby. Siggie had put on her Hell's Angel cap. An oversized, shapeless fedora was pulled down over Maxie's ears, and she had to hold on to it in the wind. Figures in a film where hats defined roles. (Later they exchanged lids. And Billy's top hat was tragically abandoned.)
And the ten thousand men bound for the open spaces had also, according to their own roles, hatted themselves in peaked caps, straw hats (known as circular saws), paper hel-
mets, and genuine steel helmets, some spiked and dating from the First World War. And someone had covered his bald head with a small checked handkerchief, knotted at the corners.
All for the hell of it. Ordinarily they went bareheaded and seldom or never wore hats or caps. Now that she was through with being a vamp, Sibylle's curls had been hacked into a boyish bob. Frankie had always gone in for a man's haircut, died blue-black. Siggie's ash-blond hair hung down in a shoulder-length pageboy. One Sunday when there was nothing else to do, Billy had given Maxie a crew cut; it stood up crisp and stiff as a brush.
And true to the movie, Frankie smoked a pipe, Siggie chomped morosely on a cigar stub, Billy had a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from her lower lip, and Maxie chewed gum while all four rumbled toward the Grunewaldsee in a three-wheeler decorated with paper rosettes and surmounted by a yellow-and-blue garden umbrella. Wedged between an open Mercedes full of simpering fraternity students in full regalia and a one-horse carriage bearing three elderly gentlemen who never seemed to tire of singing "In Grune-wald, in Grunewald, they're auctioning off the woods. . "
High good humor. The weather was magnificent and promised to remain so. Midmorning, shortly after ten o'clock. The political situation tense, as usual. The Wall had been finished for a year. West Berlin was an island, but inhabitable. Real-estate prices were falling, but the economic situation wasn't too bad. Frankie, in particular, had nothing to complain about: lots of people were moving, the trucking business was thriving. And Billy's law office had plenty of divorces to handle. "Dumb clucks, they go right on hoping and they get the short end every time." In Sieg-linde's kennels, pedigreed shepherds were reproducing and little lap-and-lick dogs were selling like hot cakes; Sieglinde had studied law to the dry and bitter end, but then she'd lost interest. (Ten years were to pass before she would manage, in the course of a public trial, to make use of her hard-crammed legal knowledge: "I accuse.")
Typically of the times, they all worked for a living, except Maxie, who was still studying (at Billy's expense): ecstatic barefoot dancing and classical ballet. Anyway, they
were competent, full of life, and not without ambition. Doing men's work, though not to be confused with those lousy males who masturbate even when they're fucking. Or those silly females with their day and night creams, their permanent waves, their fourteen pairs of shoes, their artificial pearls, their slip covers, squeeze-out tears, porcelain collections, handbags full of junk, and mortal terror of getting fat. No, not just of pregnancy. Of hanging bosoms and spare tires. That scream before the mirror because wrinkles snicker, veins are blue, and Mother's tendency to a double chin is breaking through. The dread of becoming old, no longer desired, felt up, kneaded, clutched, invaded in every hole by a man's asparagus tip; because that's what it's all about — that worn-out chunk of feel-up flesh with a hole in the middle — extra big for somebody's hard-on. "So don't bother me with this soul-mate, partnership stuff!" cried Billy, when I ventured a word about Sunday.