We Await the Second Coming
But then everything fell to ruin, and globalisation took care of the rest. Now people here are buried beneath stones that come from around the world. Wetterau residents now lay to rest beneath imported gravestones. It started with stones from the Far East. Our cemetery was globalised before the term globalised even existed, and we became Friedberg’s first victims of globalisation, just twenty-eight years after the last war. Travelling through Friedberg by train, my uncle passed by the Hanauer Hof too, a brewery inn next to the cemetery where almost all of us now lie. The Hanauer Hof is where we drank to the dead after they were buried, usually with a schnapps and several pints of cider to chase it down. Although my uncle didn’t just go to the Hanauer Hof for the wakes, of course. And we went there for his too, after my uncle’s burial. Until the seventies there was a big factory behind the Hanauer Hof; it smelled of iron and electricity and an early phase of industrialisation, and its machinery was visible to passersby, all of it standing around in the open and unguarded on the land and spilling over into the town, and people like my uncle would stand there in awe in front of this machinery, gazing with the goggled eyes of child-like excitement. Today there are five supermarkets there, and Friedberg people no longer stand there in awe, staring with child-like excitement, but instead rush around between them comparing prices like lunatics. A senior-citizen Schnitzel-hunt between Tegut and Aldi and Norma, with a hardware store in between, although even that’s gone now.
Then my uncle reaches the fields of Bruchenbrücken — when Hessian TV started to travel the provinces for the AIDA series, shining the spotlight on the everyday life of local villages, this was one of the first locations they filmed — and then on to Ober-Wöllstadt, Nieder-Wöllstadt, Okarben, Großkarben, Dortelweil. Any kid around here can list the names on this route like others can the 1974 national football team. Bad Vilbel, Bonames, the station which has since lost its name and is now called Frankfurter Berg, and further and further on to Frankfurt, which by that time had already expanded and swallowed Ginnheim and Rödelheim and Eschersheim and everything else, before finally, after twenty-seven minutes, my uncle J gets out in Frankfurt. Because that was back then, when the trains still ran to schedule. Back then, the era of the great ‘still’.
The train station was pretty run down at the end of the sixties and early seventies; for there wasn’t yet much emphasis on cleanliness in public spaces in general. Paradise used to surround the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, a paradise much like the one on the internet today. Except that there wasn’t yet online access to one’s bank account back then. So my uncle could only ever have been fleeced of the contents of his wallet, which wouldn’t even have included an EC-card, for they didn’t yet exist. Back then, if you didn’t pay in cash you paid by cheque, but I’m sure my uncle didn’t own any cheques. Presumably he didn’t even have his own bank account. And if he did, then I imagine he wouldn’t have had access to it. He was our family’s never-healing wound, from which everything was intent on seeping out.Especially at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, where you could still go to real women and not just to the women on the screens in the booths like today, although admittedly they’re cheaper (and today there’s a brothel restriction zone around the station). But then again I don’t know anything about what my uncle did there in Frankfurt, I can only surmise. And it’s only just gone five in the morning, so presumably he hasn’t even had his first beer of the day yet. There in Frankfurt he’s alone, no longer amongst the family or the people of Bad Nauheim, where everyone knew everyone and everything was seen by everyone. In Frankfurt, people didn’t see you as a Wetterauer. That’s why people from the Wetterau liked going there. Frankfurt had everything you could dream of, whereas in Bad Nauheim there was just the train station kiosk and not a video to be seen. Even in the eighties, shortly before commercial television was introduced, Mercedes-Benz drivers would pull up alongside me at night and ask where they could go to watch a movie in Friedberg in the Wetterau, and whether I might like to come along. Then, after looking me up and down, they would ask whether, if I did go with them, the movie was absolutely necessary. Back then, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I always seemed to be a feasible alternative for men who wanted to find women. To them, the transition was clearly a negligible and easy one. Rather a sixteen-year-old Wetterau boy than a forty-year-old Wetterau woman, and certainly better to have one in the hand than one on the screen. But presumably they couldn’t find a film showing anywhere in the Wetterau and would drive on to Frankfurt after all, where there was everything, all around the clock, and where no one knew them. There were rows and rows of old buildings around the Hauptbahnhof, all of which had five or six stories, so it always involved climbing a lot of stairs, and this stair-climbing ultimately became the accepted term for the whole thing, a pars pro toto for the escape to paradise around Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. A trip to Frankfurt was always referred to by us as ‘climbing the stairs’. And when I say ‘us’, I mean the Wetterauers, not me — I was still too young back then. Most of the time, the ones chasing after me were men. But there were also a number of blonde women who were no longer that young — and in fact quite old and therefore fake blonde — who definitely wanted to have something in the hand and not on the screen. I was expected to provide what they wanted. And it was completely normal and inconceivable that it would be any other way. Such figures of longing, and I fell beneath them.
Even though J had a disability ID and was classified as such at the pension office, he still went to work at the post depot; he was pressured into it, although comparatively late in his life — otherwise he would have just stayed at home or spent all his time in the inns, with the women or with a beer, or just the latter, and so now he was contributing to the family income, if only trivially, and the payout he could expect from his pension was increasing. My uncle was, like everyone else, a regular expense in the family’s financial housekeeping. And he had cost them money from the very beginning but hadn’t brought any in for a long time. They had let things go on like that for three decades, but with the arrival of my father — a revenue officer and then lawyer — the modern age was ushered into the Boll family, meaning that they started to think in terms of social security and pension contributions. And so Uncle J was now a postal employee; maybe he even thought he was a postal officer, looking at himself in the mirror with all the more pride, despite not having the uniform he would surely have loved to have. His work consisted of lugging parcels around, and afterwards his colleagues showered, but not him. He went back home unwashed. But for now we’re still at the start of his shift. I guess they didn’t even have work overalls in the postal depot back then, just their own personal laundry items which they would then carry home in sacks to wash, while my uncle carried his home on his body. Presumably he spent the whole time muttering while he was lugging parcels around in the depot, because that was what he always did when he was supposed to be doing something. He accepted every task with a servile bow, only to immediately lapse into muttering and hissing. He did it around us at home too, especially on those occasions when he had been looking forward to doing something else instead. When he arrived home, the first thing he always did was go to the fridge. He would open the cupboard above the fridge where the Henninger beer tankards were kept, take one out, open the fridge, take a beer out, open the bottle and pour. (Our entire family lived off the Henninger workers’ brew; we were supplied with four crates of it a week.) Still standing by the fridge, he would drink down half a tankard, accompanied by a sound of pleasure that sounded more repulsive than anything else in the world. By that point, my mother’s calls would normally start up. J, she would cry, fetch a few bottles of beer up from the cellar for dinner will you! And bring up some water too! If she was standing in the kitchen, he would bow and run off, his face taut with anger. But if she was calling out from the dining room, where perhaps she was setting the table and therefore unable to see her brother as he stood there in the kitchen by the cupboard with the beer tankards, then his face would twist into an expression of sheer hatred. Sometimes I saw it by accident. He would indignantly repeat my mother’s words under his breath. J, do this, J do that, he would hiss, building up into sentences like: I’m always the one who has to fetch the beer from the cellar, I’m always the one who has to get the water from the cellar, I’m always having to do this, always having to do that! He could certainly say I, my uncle, that was for sure. Those hissed I-filled sentences would accompany him all the way down to the cellar, and if he happened to pass by me on his way down (which would only have happened back when I was a kid — because later I would flee to the cemetery or some other place, in order to get some fresh air and take some deep breaths until he was gone again), then he would simply keep hissing, looking at me out of the corner of his eye like an animal that knew it was being hunted, or like a dog that had just been caught in the act, whatever that act might be. I always dreaded these encounters. Sometimes, though, I would be standing in the utility room and hear him hissing away from down the corridor. He would climb down the steps into the cellar as he hissed, before coming back up a minute later to unload his cargo in the kitchen. Then he would pick up the half-empty beer tankard and hiss into it until the hissing transitioned into drinking, only to be interrupted again by my mother: J, there are four new crates of beer out in the garage, bring them down into the cellar while you’re at it won’t you! Looking back now, it seems to me that J was constantly being asked to either get something from the cellar or take something down to the cellar. He never actually went up to my mother, his sister, and said to her face: I’m always the one who has to go down to the cellar! But he would hiss it, and in her presence too. He didn’t think anyone could understand him when he was hissing like that, but we always did. And so he moved through the house like a permanent threat, even though he was always very peaceable with everyone, apart from us kids, and even though it never came to the ultimate explosion of violence we were expecting each and every day. I assume he was much the same when he was making his way around the postal depot at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, and I’m sure they were constantly giving him jobs to do just like my mother did, and that he would carry them out amidst his muttering, because he didn’t have any other choice, for only the complete eradication of everyone around him would have freed him from it all, and that was something he preferred not to risk.