Now the brother-in-law is standing in the hallway, the sister carrying me in her arms. And my uncle comes in and sees us right away. His sister greets him in a friendly manner, but she doesn’t have much time and needs to tend to me; perhaps I need to be taken somewhere, to a check-up, perhaps I have a tooth coming through that needs to be looked at. Or she needs to go shopping for something and has me with her. And now, today of all days, J’s mother needs to go to the hairdresser because of some engagement she has that afternoon. And she has to go shopping too. Or perhaps she has to tend to something at the cemetery in Friedberg. Flowers need to be fetched from Blumensiebert, and the watering can needs to be taken, to water the flowers around the grave, for they didn’t make it there yesterday, nor the day before yesterday, nor the day before that (after all, with the business and three children, they have a lot on their hands), and so J is the only one who can do it today, as his mother has to go to the hairdresser’s and his sister really needs to get back to work or go to the dentist and so on.
So the brother-in-law says: J, pop over to Friedberg to Blumensiebert, could you, take the flowers to the cemetery and tend to the grave, and pick up your sister from work, and then you can give your mother a lift to the hairdresser, she has an appointment at half past five. It’s not like you have anything else to do, and you’ve got the whole afternoon free. Sometimes, J makes the mistake of mumbling that he was in fact planning to go to Forsthaus Winterstein. But you go to Forsthaus Winterstein often enough, you can’t go every day, and if you really have to then you can go later. Do you really have to go there so often? the brother-in-law asks, a question which not even J’s own father had asked. The brother-in-law has no interest whatsoever in Forsthaus Winterstein and such things. He wouldn’t have time for it anyway and is about to head off again now, and already the little scene in the hallway is being wound up, the brother-in-law and sister leave, and J stands there with his back hunched. His eyebrows pull together into a frown, his eyes narrow into slits, and out of his mouth escapes the well-known hiss, so filled with hate it’s as though he’s about to pick up the nearest knife and run from the house to kill, massacre and painstakingly slaughter everyone in the Wetterau, cutting them all up into equally sized pieces. Now he goes to his mother, my grandmother, who as usual is in the kitchen preparing some food, perhaps pot roast for the weekend or coffee for J, or maybe she’s preserving or bottling something. As long as no one else overhears, he can complain to his mother (my grandmother). He really wanted to go to Forsthaus Winterstein, he says, the hunters have been there all week, and he’d been looking forward to it so much, since the weekend even, and he hadn’t been able to go to Forsthaus Winterstein the day before either, because he had to wash the car and pick up his sister from the beautician, and there was always something he had to do when he wanted to go to Winterstein, and he was always the one who had to do it, because he was always the one that had to do everything. I could explode with anger, he says, stamping on the floor. I heard him say that many times, and remember thinking that there was a strange contradiction between the degree of his anger and the eloquence of the phrase: I could explode with anger. And he always meant it, I believe, in a completely literal sense. The brother-in-law comes and says what’s going to happen, he always comes and says what’s going to happen, but I’ve been looking forward to this all week, and I already said yesterday and the day before yesterday that I wanted to go to Forsthaus Winterstein today, that I really wanted to. His mother calms him down by saying that he can just go to Forsthaus Winterstein two hours later than planned, and that he can stay later to make up for it, so it isn’t that bad after all. At that moment, J realises that it isn’t that bad after all, and that in all likelihood he wouldn’t have set off until around six or half six anyway (he wanted to go to Frauenwald first, just briefly, for a quick jaunt around the ski meadows, maybe see a hare or even a deer, which he could then transform into the ‘umpteenth’ stag). J sits down, lets his apron-clad mother pour him a coffee and place a slice of Madeira cake in front of him, then says, waving the fork around and looking at her like a philosopher who has just had some great insight: If I pick Ursel up at five, then I can be up at Frauenwald around quarter past six and on the Winterstein by half seven, eight at the latest. Excellent, so that’s all sorted then, says his mother, you’ll have a good two hours in the Forsthaus. Then I can stay there at least two hours, says J. Enthusiastic and cheerful all of a sudden, he says that he hadn’t wanted to stay longer than that anyway, because tomorrow he needs to get up at three to go to Frankfurt. In that case, says his mother (my grandmother, and I’m not there because I’m in my mother’s arms in the company car that belongs to my father, on the way to the dentist in Frankfurt and perhaps to the business too and to the building site of the house, and I can’t even talk yet, I haven’t even uttered a single sentence in my life by this point, and yet it’s impossible to imagine any of this happening in any other way), then in that case you should have a lie down now, and in an hour’s time drive to Friedberg to Blumensiebert, go to the cemetery, then pick up Ursel, take her home, then pick me up and drop me off at the hairdresser. After all, Ursel has done so much for you, and her husband does so much for us, we should be happy, because where would we be without Ursel’s husband, now that all the men are dead? And J drinks his coffee and eats the Madeira cake and has forgotten about everything already (just a moment ago he was a patriarch, and now he’s J. Boll again).
J stirs a spoonful of refined sugar into his coffee with condensed milk, which is a very similar colour to his shirts and his Variant, then stirs in a second spoonful, as heaped as he can make it, carefully guiding the spoon from the sugar bowl to the coffee cup, then a third, and to finish off another two, until the coffee is transformed into a kind of syrup, like it always is when Uncle J drinks it. His mother is standing at the stove. She was always in an apron back then, just like all the female inhabitants of the Wetterau. Only when Elvis was there did she briefly lay the apron aside, but afterwards she put it back on, and there it stayed until the ‘90s. Most of her aprons had an intricate pattern, often a flowery one and mostly blue, grey and lilac, so stains from the housework didn’t show up. But the aprons were washed every day anyway. My mother, too, had an extensive selection of aprons at her disposal. She would wear one even when she popped over to see a neighbour. Each morning, a gathering of apron-clad women would assemble in the streets, each in front of their own front door or at the neighbour’s garden gate, soon huddling into little groups of three or four. There would be one of these groups every twenty metres or so. My grandmother always wore an apron in the house in Uhlandstrasse, just as Aunt Lenchen always wore an apron when she came from Friedberg to help out in the house, and Däschinger the seamstress wore an apron, and the cleaning lady wore an apron, and this apron-clad army would make its way through the house, ensuring discipline and order. They didn’t leave a single spot untouched, tending to every last nook and cranny, as well as to my uncle’s stench. The upper arms protruding from their aprons were always bare and, on the older women, fat and fleshy. Whenever I saw them I was always reminded of the joints of meat on display at Blum’s Butchers, or of the loaves of bread at the bakery, except that the latter were fresh, in contrast to the arms, which were already in a state of decomposition and had orange-peel skin. By the end of her life, my grandmother’s arms were so thin that she could barely lift the pans in the kitchen anymore, and yet she would still wear aprons, albeit three sizes smaller. But right now she is standing there at the stove, still comparatively healthy and lively, and Uncle J is solemnly telling her stories about his working day. A shipment arrived from Chile. He says the word with a sense of awe, as if it were something very important. Chiii — le! Emphasising the i. The word an exclamation of excitement in itself. The big wide world, and my uncle there and part of it all, a central hub even. Or maybe it was from Lisbon, which he murmurs in awe. A package from Liiiis-bon direct to Friedberg-Ockstadt. What could it be? Something from Lisbon, a city that everyone knows, to Ockstadt in Kirschendorf, a place that only we Wetterauers know! What could it be? It must be something, says my grandmother, it has to be something. Yes, says my uncle thoughtfully, waving his spoon around and staring out of the window at the street. There are no cars out there, because the traffic jams are yet to come, and the literary quarter where the house is located is still peaceful; hardly anyone ever drives through. And so they talk, and later, after the third cup of milky coffee and therefore the fifteenth spoonful of sugar, J climbs up the stairs and into his room, the first door on the left. As soon as he’s in there (the shutters in his room are closed), the door closes.