And now the small aeroplane is gone too, and the train is approaching Karben, and Wöllstadt, and making its way on and on with my uncle in it, my uncle who won’t go to the airport today, nor see the big airliners, nor watch the transmission of the current moon landing flight, but he’s looking forward to what’s to come regardless, his time-off and the forest and the beer, and perhaps to eating something hearty later on, after his early dinner at home with his mother. Supper at the inn to round off the day. In Wöllstadt, a police car with its blue lights flashing drives past the window of the train (which is rolling slowly over a level crossing). My uncle observes all of this very closely, noting that everything has its importance and its function and is the way it is supposed to be: the train tracks, the signal at the crossing, the police car, he observes it all and pays attention to everything, in much the same way as others might gaze at a model railway, where everything has its particular significance, where everything you see is part of a plan and is the way it is supposed to be and always stays in order. Two trains could collide head-on there and no one would die. This is how my uncle travels through the Wetterau, as if it was his very own model railway world, and he doesn’t even need the model because for him the original itself is a model, and the same goes for the police car and its flashing blue lights. It’s one of those details that there is a great deal of effort behind — it doesn’t have to be there after all, the police car (with the flashing lights as a special feature), but it is, as if it had been especially selected from a catalogue (Fleischmann? Märklin?). And my uncle says to himself that it’s a very good thing it’s there, driving along outside right now. As if it was doing it just to please him. A world which is complete. With many details to be marveled at, all of them lovingly prepared, just like the way my uncle files his screws in the cellar, lovingly, with great care. Even the pistols in the policemen’s holsters (with small plates showing the brand name and exact cartridges to boot), and the holsters themselves are interesting details, worthy of observation and close study. J would have loved to have a holster like that, even just the holster by itself. He would have practically been a policeman with that holster. Perhaps that’s how it was: perhaps, for my uncle, being in the world was like standing in front of a big model railway. He must have spent most of his time living in an idyll. My uncle’s idyll, the kind that could only have existed in his forceps head. A few years later, my brother made a big model railway down in our basement, almost the whole of the Wetterau to scale. My uncle, on the other hand, stood before reality like a child even as an adult. As soon as he saw a police car with the flashing blue lights on, he would get all worked up. For him, the police must have represented a display of splendour, like the army, like the Wehrmacht, like the military parades he watched with such excitement on TV, where everything was about uniform and parade dress, cavalry and tank displays and the like, the monopoly of flashing lights. It probably didn’t even occur to my uncle to question where they were on their way to, the policemen there in Wöllstadt, because the only important thing was that they were driving and that they were policemen and that they had turned on the flashing lights, and this in itself made the world good and wonderful. My uncle, as I picture it (and I can’t picture it any other way, for I later experienced this with him many times), sees the police, and all is well with the world.
He’s arriving in Friedberg now. Passes over the big tunnel, the sugar refinery, the Hanauer Hof, he sees the Adolfsturm, the castle, the hill the castle is perched on, the old houses lining the railway embankment (where the new Friedberg car park is now, and even that has aged considerably in the last twenty years), and as the train curves around the bend, he sees the Karl Boll stonemasonry and is close enough to spit on his father’s head once again. If his father were still alive, that is, but he died in ’67, two years before the inauguration of the Boeing 747, when the much-longed for future became the present and people were finally able to get to wherever they wanted to go. The Boeing 747 was mankind’s dream. By then my grandfather, his father, was already beneath one of his own gravestones. No one from the family was left to engrave his name, because he was the last of the Boll stonemasons, so his name was engraved by the last-remaining workers instead.
My grandfather never lived to see the Boeing 747, and yet he still lived. He lived a whole life without the Boeing 747.
Now J’s sister is down there leading the business, so J could have spat on her head from up there too, although he would never have done so. After everything his sister had done for him! Now she is married and has three children and a lawyer husband and, as a result, even more authority than before. Now they are building their big house down there; J can see it, the foundations are being laid, the concrete is being poured, the apple trees are already gone and so are the stalls, no more chickens, no more having to slaughter the chickens yourself. Soon there will be a flower garden, the husband will subscribe to My Garden magazine and drive his company car out of the garage (which hasn’t yet been built) every morning and back into it every evening. The rest of the day will be spent in Frankfurt, where he spends every day. Besides which, since the death of the stonemason, he has been keeping everything in order for the whole family, including their entire estate. J has to get used to this now, the fact that there is another person commanding respect, the brother-in-law. He’s the boss now really. But by now the company grounds are out of sight and the train is making its way across fields again, and from the left-hand side window you can see far across the land all the way to Ockstadt (Are the cherries ripe, or is it already autumn?) and to the Taunus, to Rosbach, all small still, this is before the sudden increase in population. They are still closer to the war and the past than they are to us, to the future. Only twenty-four years have passed since that era, the time that would never come again, because suddenly no one wanted it. A lot of things still look like they did back then, though. Until recently, even the business looked almost the same as it did back then. Only when his sister gets married does the future begin in earnest (in just five years’ time the business won’t even exist anymore, and today there are rows of white houses with red-tiled roofs there, like in the model railway catalogue, and now almost all of the Wetterau looks like that). But Ockstadt is still small in the distance for now, and Rosbach can hardly be made out, and in between there are fields or a few trees, and far beyond, although you’d have to lean out of the train window to see, the pig pasture with the apple trees would come into view, in the middle of the landscape between Friedberg and Ockstadt, shiny red apples which the Ockstadt residents will shake down when September draws to an end. Or perhaps it’s spring, and the apple trees are just beginning to bloom white and pink. And now my uncle’s train arrives, punctual to the minute, in the spa town of Bad Nauheim, which once played host to the Tsar and Einstein and Empress Sissi, and where my uncle was practically Elvis Presley’s next-door neighbour for many years, just two houses down, and Heino was here too, and now the rest of my uncle’s day begins. A long evening off after his early afternoon finish.
5
J arrives in a town which is in gentle decline. The Tsar came here once and disembarked in the same train station, and they built his very own Tsar spa for him which no one else was allowed to enter (although today it’s a sightseeing destination). Unfortunately, just a few years later the Tsar was dead, shot in Russia. Even today, people in Bad Nauheim talk about him as if they knew him personally, as if they had been next-door neighbours, like my uncle and Elvis Presley. They talk of how the Tsar’s son would ride through the spa gardens on his bicycle, dressed completely in white… how the Tsar and his family would be driven along the promenade in their regal carriage… such a nice, friendly man, although you couldn’t get anywhere near him, he was a Tsar after all, always flanked by bodyguards… And which cafés did he go to? Did he go to Mirwald (Was it already there back then?), did he go to Café Müller on Aliceplatz (Weren’t there pictures of him on the wall there?), or did he stay away from cafés? Did he drink cider? Perhaps he had an official taster drink the cider first, or one of his bodyguards, in order to make sure it wasn’t an attack on the bodily integrity of the Tsar… And then they would subject the bodyguard to close inspection, observing what happened, what the cider did to him. No adverse effects yet? Then quickly pour another glass (half a pint) down him. Keep watching! There he sits, the bodyguard, the Russian, in Bad Nauheim in the Wetterau (it had already been a spa town for over half a century by then), perhaps on a chair or just a wooden stool, or maybe he had to stand and pay attention to what was happening inside him, because he doesn’t know what it is, after all, this cider, maybe a Bad Nauheim resident concocted it in order to kill them all, the entire Tsar family, and maybe all the Bad Nauheimers have made a pact and are acting as if they always drink this cider, whereas in actual fact it’s poison. And now he’s jumping up to his feet, the bodyguard, his hand already at the waistband of his trousers, and running away, where are the water closets here? He runs off, so quickly. And the Tsar will be advised to never drink cider in his life. But just a few years later he’s dead anyway, and in Bad Nauheim they mourn him; it was only just recently that he was walking around here, after all, through the gardens. The poor Tsar. No one knew him. Everyone speaks of him. A public figure. What would Bad Nauheim be without its public figures? Like the depressive Sissi, who no one was allowed to photograph — she was so old by then that she had forbidden all photography. She lived in Burgallee, on the spot where today there’s a four-storey concrete building. So there my uncle stands at the train station where the Tsar once stood, looking out across the courtyard and its two mineral springs to the Johannisberg, just like the Tsar once did. The right-hand side of the Johannisberg is adjoined by the Frauenwald forest, where my uncle loves going. The Winterstein rises up to the left — maybe the broadcasting tower was already on it in ’69. Whenever my uncle turns on the TV, it fascinates him to know that the picture is being broadcast from the Winterstein. He even enjoys the service interruptions, because that’s when the test picture appears, and he can imagine them starting to work away up there in an industrious and expert manner so that service can be duly restored to the broadcasting area. But there is one thing on the Winterstein that is even more important than this, even more important than the telecommunicative, expert, uninterrupted supply of programmes from ARD and ZDF to the entire broadcasting area from afternoon to late evening, and that is Forsthaus Winterstein, half way up the mountain and not visible from down here at the station. In winter, the only thing you can see from here in the courtyard is spray and steam, because both the springs are hot ones. One rises up to a greater height than the other. Without these two springs (Does my uncle know this?), nothing would have become of Bad Nauheim, without them Empress Sissi would never have come, without them Einstein would never have taken part in congresses here, without the two springs the Tsar would never have come to Bad Nauheim with his family, nor would Hans Albers, the American army would never have built the radio station here, Bad Nauheim would never have been occupied by them, for that matter, and Elvis Presley would never have stumbled out of the train, roaring drunk, three kilometres away in Friedberg before taking up residence first in a hotel suite in Bad Nauheim, then in an apartment directly opposite my uncle’s bedroom. Bad Nauheim would have just been Nauheim, without the ‘Bad’ prefix, which it could only possess as a spa town. And yet all of them would have lived their lives regardless, somehow, they would still have come into the world and departed it again, and if Bad Nauheim hadn’t been a spa town back then, perhaps those forceps would never have been placed on my uncle’s head. His world would have been a different one. Now, at the end of the ’60s, hardly anyone famous ever comes here anymore. Most of the guests walk around in casual grey-beige tones. In my uncle’s day, Bad Nauheim’s public image was defined by spa guests with health insurance. The spa guests sit around on benches, sometimes for half the day even — Bad Nauheim is littered with benches. Sitting down is the primary occupation of the spa guest. Even the courtyard is constructed like one great big seat; you can sit there in the shade of the art nouveau arcade and watch the fountains as they fount. Walk over to the mineral springs, get a glass of fizzy water (Not too much! Measure it precisely! Otherwise you might fall over!), then sit down in the spa water enclosure and either just lounge around or listen to the spa orchestra as they play Hungarian melodies, like they did in the Tsar’s day, except now with an electronic bass and a smaller ensemble. Maybe there are even percussion instruments. But only played with a wire brush, so as not to be too loud. Just a gentle background beat, music you can doze off to. If only the water didn’t taste so horrible. But that’s all part of the spa experience. And to make up for it, you get to go to the Deutsche Haus in the evening and drink cider. A cider and a shot of Wacholder juniper gin for sure, then another shot with the innkeeper, and finally another shot to toast the beautiful town of Bad Nauheim. Every evening is free of supervision or treatments, and you regularly drink yourself under the table. But before that, as a spa guest, you take one more trip to the graduation tower. There, you meet your spa neighbours or your new spa best friend or a new spa guest. Settle down in front of the graduation tower and take a deep breath. The air is saline. Two hours a day, preferably more. And anyone who has ticked everything off their to-do list feels all the more calm and content for it as they make their way to the local dance establishment or to have a cider or — if they’re not in a sociable mood — back to one of the many spa bed and breakfasts, like the one where my grandmother, Uncle J’s mother, used to work back in the early days, for her mother had one named Pension Augusta right in front of the spa gardens, and the Tsar used to drive past whenever he was heading off in his carriage. Or perhaps the guests might go into the common room and watch TV. Is there another moon landing today? And so my uncle stands there in the train station of the town which, at that time, is occupied and owned by an army of sandal-wearing spa guests. They socialise even at the station, heading there to fetch cigarettes or perhaps a magazine, because by late in the evening most of them will be alone, their wives in Düsseldorf or Nuremberg or Moers, but there’s room service in almost every B&B, and they quickly catch on to the fact that they have to keep things (in other words, life) a secret even there, for none of them have a dark room like my uncle’s. They come to Bad Nauheim, and soon they are longing for life again, from the magazines to their new spa best friends and dance establishments, regardless of in what order.