Most of the time he would wear these greyish-brown polo-shirts, sometimes with yellow stitching; pale, fusty colours which for me are now inextricably linked to his silage-like stench — even today, when I see items of clothing in these colours, most of which tend to be worn by older people, I can still smell my uncle. He would start to sweat into his shirt as he tackled the first few packages of the day, and even today I can’t begin to imagine how the smell must have developed there at the postal depot during the course of the day, because it had to have been even worse than it was at home with us. After all, he only came home once he was done lugging the parcels around, once the smell had already started to subside.
As long as he lived, Uncle J never once told us anything about his work colleagues at the Frankfurt post depot, so I don’t know whether he had any acquaintances there. Perhaps at that time it was mostly Italians, Turks or Tunisians working there anyway, because Germany was still welcoming migrant workers with open arms then, at the end of the sixties. Given that I don’t know anything for sure, I can only imagine how he might have made some friends there, against the odds, how he might have been able to say certain sentences to some person or another, supposedly of an expert nature and exclusively consisting of superlatives as per usual, and maybe they even had their first beer of the day together, let’s say after an hour, at around six in the morning, the first beer, the first fraternisation, the first communal sit down of the day, their gazes fixed on the mountain of parcels they had to distribute, the Spaniards, the Greeks, the Italians, the Germans and my uncle J from the Wetterau, all there so that these parcels could reach their recipients, in Oldenburg, in Münster, in Wölfersheim. I’m sure that kind of work leads the person doing it to think they’re the central hub of the whole world, that nothing would function without them, because someone who leads and facilitates the transportation of goods also facilitates civilisation itself, or, as they would have said at the postal depot: The packages simply have to reach their destination. You might say, then, that my uncle was serving as the central hub and distribution centre of the entire world, which must have been important to him, and maybe he really did walk around the depot with a certain sense of pride, that is until he received his next order, which would be followed by the next hiss (it’s always me), and then the next beer.
People still used to drink at work back then, whereas today drinking has completely disappeared from the workplace. In actual fact there’s been a drinking ban for ages, since back before there was even a smoking ban; it’s just that the drinking ban was never publicised. When I was a kid, every bin man was guzzling from first thing in the morning, the postmen were pretty much always drunk, the city workers already stank of beer by the time they started their shift, and the couriers at the trade associations drank schnapps, in addition to the beer, between trips. Even in 1984, when I started working for Oberhessischen Energy, everyone was boozing away a mere hour after we clocked on. Except they didn’t see it as boozing, more a hearty kind of breakfast. Beer was a source of nourishment; it made you stronger, that’s what they thought. Even my mother was fond of these hearty breakfasts in the mornings; when the cleaning woman came (an immigrant from Serbia, still known as Yugoslavia back then), they would clean for a while and then have breakfast together, something my mother had probably been looking forward to the whole week long. There they would sit in our kitchen at ten in the morning, while my father was off in Frankfurt earning the family’s keep at the Henninger brewery, and they would heave the Henninger bottles onto the table and pour Slivowitz down their necks. There would be paprika sausage to go with it, along with pickled onions and the like, and after half an hour they would have these happy, red faces that stayed with them for the rest of the day. Until just recently, that kind of thing was completely normal in our country. Once upon a time, this country drank. Now, any bin man would be fired on the spot if he had already imbibed three litres of beer by nine in the morning. In repeats of Firma Hesselbach, a TV series from the early 1960s, back in my uncle’s day, they’re all drinking beer whenever they want, even first thing in the morning. And the people were red and happy, and it was their life, and sometimes they even died at home in their own beds, something which my uncle J didn’t experience. He died in hospital, on the second day. He didn’t suffer long, they told us, and ever since then my family has been convinced that they killed him there in the hospital, which isn’t improbable. My grandmother spent a lifetime caring for him, he spent several years vegetating in an apartment with his later girlfriend Rosl, and then he got to the hospital and was quickly disposed of. He must have spent a fair bit of time wired up in there, after which he supposedly died all of a sudden and the doctors claimed not to have noticed straight away. To be on the safe side they plugged him in one more time, gave him another burst of electricity, then probably just turned it up and left the room, leaving him to dance and thrash around alone, or that’s how it looked afterwards in any case.