Yes, I know, says Rudi Weber.
She: How many children does she have now?
J: Three.
She: And now they’re building on the land, I saw.
J: Well, yes.
She: What does her husband do again?
Rudi Weber: He’s a lawyer.
J confirms this: A lawyer, from a distinguished family of civil servants. A very distinguished Frankfurt family. The father-in-law is a governor in Frankfurt.
She: A governor?
J: Yes, Governor… governor… of everything. A really big building, the Financial Governing Authority. Perhaps the biggest administration building in the whole of Hessen!
She: And he goes and marries a woman from Friedberg, imagine that.
Yes, says J.
She: And will you be going to the inn today?
He still hopes to, says J, to Forsthaus Winterstein, the hunters have been there all week, hunting on the Winterstein, a big hunt, a whole troop of hunters. He wanted to go yesterday, he says, and he wanted to go the day before that. In fact, he’s been wanting to go to Forsthaus Winterstein for days now.
Right then, we won’t hold you up, says Rudi. Or is there something we can help you with?
And while Weber’s sister starts up again about J’s sister, who, as she says, used to be such a pretty girl when they were at school, with this intensely black hair, but back then there was this other girl too, and she used to wonder what would become of her, but then she got sent off to boarding school, if her memory served her correctly. Where was it again… in the Rhineland? In Bensheim, J corrects her… so while the conversation picks up again in such a manner, Rudi Weber peruses the state of the Boll family grave, trims a few branches back with his shears, removes the withered and worn carnations, tucks the vase of flowers behind the gravestone, tidies the shrubbery and returns the fallen plastic vase to the neighbouring grave. Rudi Weber has an eye for order, and ideally he would have liked to sweep the gravestone too, but unfortunately he doesn’t have a broom to hand, so he resolves to return later (he needs to come back to the cemetery anyway because his sister forgot the pansies) and give the Boll grave a sweep, just this once, because if J is at the cemetery today then that means J’s sister will be coming by in the next week for sure, and Blumensiebert himself rarely comes to the cemetery, for sweeping graves isn’t really Blumensiebert’s strong point, as Weber knows from experience. And if his sister sees the family grave in such a state, she won’t be happy for sure. Rudi Weber has always regarded J. Boll to be one of those people who don’t have things easy, for one reason or another, and who need a helping hand here and there in order to get along in life. It’s not his fault, after all. He often thinks that, considering his disability, J is doing pretty well. He’s even able to help the family out a little bit, and besides, it’s not like you need to point out to him what a complete idiot he is, a complete idiot with a driving license (and a Variant). So they stand there at the grave for another two, three minutes and gaze silently at the gravestone, the names, and the quotation engraved on it.
Awaiting the Resurrection
Then they part ways, and while J heads towards the stream to secure the watering can with a bicycle lock, Weber shrugs his shoulders, as if wanting to apologise to his sister, and gestures behind J’s back (tapping his finger on his temple), in order to demonstrate in the clear and proper manner that of course he knows J is an idiot, and that this is the reason why he behaves the way he does towards him. And while the sister comments that J’s family should really have enough money to tend to the grave themselves — especially the new husband, if he comes from such a distinguished background — and that for this reason there was really no need to clean up after them, the two siblings disappear into the afternoon sunlight amongst the linden and chestnut trees, the roses and the black marble gravestones from our stonemasonry…
7
Now J drives along the following route: from the cemetery, fifty metres along Schmidtstrasse, turning right into Gebrüder-Lang-Strasse, then right again after a hundred metres into Untere Liebfrauenstrasse, where, after another hundred metres, Mühlweg and our property can be found. First the apple trees, then the spot where the stables were, which is now the foundation pit (where I grew up), then the business, one building after the other, glazed in part, everything behind a big black wall with white joints. In the centre, the administrative building, an old mill, the Falk mill. A mill without a wheel, for the river that used to flow through here has long since been diverted and now bypasses its old river bed, and our company grounds too. Wetterau people always had to avoid things, always and above all themselves. In front of the mill is the big entrance gate, through which the workers bustle in and out and the transporters drive in and out, although not as frequently as in Wilhelm Boll’s day, for business is no longer booming in the year of the moon landing. As always, my uncle would have loved to drive the Variant through the main gate (just like his father always used to drive his own car through it), but the Variant always just gets in the way on the company grounds, so he resists and parks it out on the street. He stands on the pavement for a while, looking at the foundation pit of my parents’ house. The biggest house in the whole of the Barbara neighbourhood. A house of Uncle J superlatives. He believes that to be the case even though there’s nothing to see yet (but it ends up being so big that, in fact, I did grow up in an Uncle J superlativism). The workers are working, in part — they’re all drinking beer right now — and J’s sister is standing with them and matter-of-factly giving them the necessary and proper instructions, almost like a foreman. How does she know how to do that? Then J strolls into the main building and is greeted by everyone in a respectful and friendly manner. They all know that he’s the son of the late boss, and they all treat him with respect. J used to come here years ago, too, as a young man, back when the majority of them hadn’t yet realised that he was an idiot. For the staff, the boss’s family was effectively one and the same thing as the boss himself, even though some of them were quick to realise that the boss wasn’t on good terms with his son, and that, on top of this, the son was unusual (a way to avoid saying that he wasn’t entirely normal). They tried to include him in things a bit, explaining the machines to him, sometimes pressing a tool into his hand, sometimes letting him ride along in a truck across the yard or allowing him to watch when they were welding (with a welding mask over his face). But all of that was a long time ago. Today, J was no longer a child, or even a young man, and they didn’t let him ride in the truck anymore… Today, J was on the same management level as the sister in their eyes, even though they all knew by now what he was. To offend him would have meant offending the whole company. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to do such a thing.
And so my uncle steps onto the company grounds in the second year after the death of his father, my grandfather, and the whole world is surprisingly in order. He is almost a boss. The brother of the director. He goes into the mill to Frau Smoke, the secretary, and waits for his sister. Here too, he is treated with respect. Frau Smoke says: Herr Boll, can I get you a coffee? My uncle isn’t used to being treated like this. Two factors needed to align for this to happen: first, that Wilhelm Boll is now dead, and second, that J is now dropping by the company premises in Mühlweg on a regular basis again, because the Variant has been put at his disposal and he always has errands to run with it, including the ones for his sister. The authority that Wilhelm Boll once had in the company has been passed down to his successors, first and foremost to the sister of course, who is now in charge of things, but also to J and the younger brother, who likewise has recently been greeted on the premises as if he’s management. Frau Smoke brings my uncle a coffee, lights up a cigarette for herself, and my uncle lights up a cigarette too. The cigarettes are in a small wooden box on the table and, officially speaking, are part of the office equipment and therefore appear in the bookkeeping. My uncle sits there and waits, in an old room, timber all around him, linoleum floors and filing cabinets, painted grey and made of steel, with roller shutters. The mill is several centuries old and now being used as an office. It must have already been ancient even back then, and it wouldn’t hold out for much longer — five years later the company itself didn’t exist anymore, and another few years after that not even the mill was there. Maybe I’m there in the office too, already back from the dentist and handed over into Frau Smoke’s care temporarily. I remember Frau Smoke (who was always smoking, that’s what killed her in the end) just as vividly as the office itself. I always enjoyed the time I spent with Frau Smoke. I liked going to the company full-stop as a child, back when I was five or six, whenever I wasn’t with my great-grandmother Else, the mother of J’s father, or in Uhlandstrasse with my grandmother. I couldn’t handle being around my siblings at home, after all, whereas at the company I would mostly be left to my own devices. Often, while Frau Smoke was smoking, I would sit on a chair and look at all the accounting books and the typewriter and the ballpoint pens and pencils and sharpeners and rubbers and the sponge that was used to moisten stamps — that ancient type of office that doesn’t exist anywhere anymore, it looked like Firma Hesselbach from TV. Sitting in Frau Smoke’s office meant sitting in a cloud of smoke, and if I did indeed happen to be present that day, the one I’m describing and inventing here, the day in the life of my uncle back when I was two, then I would have been sitting in double or triple the quantity of smoke, because both Frau Smoke and my uncle were smoking, and if one of the workers came in, then he would of course join in and smoke too. The office was small, stuffed with things, everything more or less askew, and the roof of the building was bowing in and would soon collapse, and perhaps even as a child it already seemed to me as though we were sitting in our own past. Did they dream of the future in that office? Were they eagerly awaiting the newest technical innovations there too? From the moon landing onwards, the word computer kept being mentioned, despite the fact that, to date, they hadn’t yet encountered even the first calculator. Frau Smoke was the Mistress of the Filing Cabinets. They were still writing everything with carbon paper back then, the filing cabinets smelt of tobacco, Frau Smoke ate wurst sandwiches from greaseproof paper and from time to time an onion, and she would make her cigarettes vanish into an ashtray, the lid of which would open at the push of a button, then pivot around before closing again. Nothing in that office was electrical except the light and the fridge, which was there for the beer of course. There was always a crate of beer in the cellar of the mill, as supplies. This building, which had not dated in four hundred years, would age quickly in the years following the moon landing, and then soon fall apart. But for now it still housed the office of the Karl Boll stonemasonry and was in the middle of its lifespan. Karl Boll, J’s grandfather and my great-grandfather, who had led the company since 1930, had died only recently. J’s father and grandfather both died in the same summer, at the end of which I arrived, the last member of the new family. My grandfather had been sitting in the mill as senior partner only a short while ago, smoking his cigars in active retirement, and now he was a photograph, hanging where he had once sat and smoked, adorned with the black mourning ribbon of Summer ’67. The letters of his name on the gravestone were still white and fresh. There he sits in the photo of the company’s centenary celebrations, already a geriatric and a dignitary. For me, the office that Frau Smoke worked in is the oldest piece of the world that I know. Without realising it, I lived in a completely different era there. In that office, I lived in an era which pre-dated the war I had never heard of, I lived in the era of the Weimar Republic and the era of the German Empire too, despite the fact that Frau Smoke was already driving to work in an Audi 100. Every day, she drove the seven kilometres to the office from Nieder-Mörlen, the same distance that my great-grandmother Else used to walk on foot to visit her relatives. Today, if Frau Smoke were still alive (which, as I already mentioned, is not the case), she would take the bypass. Frau Smoke, with her deep, smoker’s voice.