But we’re not at that point of the story yet. J is still in Frankfurt, at the post depot, somewhere between his twelfth and fifteenth beer. There can be no doubt that he would have carried out his work properly. J always hated whatever he was ordered to do, but his respect for his employers was almost as great as the respect he had for his mother. He never escaped it. He was always filled with respect. He had this ability to impose a kind of Wehrmacht system onto everything. Or maybe it was a hunting system. But you could just as easily look at it the other way around, that perhaps he was looking for something resembling his mother in the things around him, something just as great and unbreachable, and perhaps he found it in the Wehrmacht (as well as in the mountain and its rescue operations, movie mothers and dirndl-clad women), or in Rommel, or the tank in Russia he may have dreamed of in much the same way as someone might dream of a Porsche Cabriolet nowadays. In the end — is it acceptable to say that? — my uncle’s concept of happiness, which was still tied up with the collective after all, with people and the people, to the very last moment and in mortal peril, was the opposite of hedonism, it was a desire for sacrifice, the kind that children have and which otherwise is perhaps only found in the BDSM scene, where everyone has their longings, to put it mildly, and if my uncle had ended up amongst them, then who knows what might have happened; by the end they might have had him by the scruff of his neck and taken full control of his bank account. After all, people only ever wanted one thing from him: his money.
Maybe he was enjoying the summer light that would stream through the glass of the Hauptbahnhof in July, in August and at midday in September, or at least I hope he was, drinking his umpteenth beer, no longer keeping track and without any chance of being rescued from everything, but maybe without any sense of despair, as he wouldn’t have felt it in any case, just as he didn’t feel pain. Nor is it improbable that they were already on a break and heading into the red light district around the station, dreaming away amongst everything on display in God’s paradise, the thing they had been created for, here in Frankfurt am Main, regardless of where they were from. There are two possibilities; either they were all sitting on a bench together, beers in hand, cigarettes clasped between their fingers, engaged in respectable conversations and dialogues of decorum and conformity, even or perhaps specifically amongst and with the foreign workers, who had their pride too, even at the post depot, even though they probably had never wanted to be there, just as they presumably had never wanted to go to Germany, but that was how it had all turned out nonetheless. The Spaniards and Italians talked about their families and so did my uncle, although he predominantly talked about the great family business and the great father, the company boss (thirty employees! except J wasn’t one of them). Or, the other possibility was that they already had plans, had already taken the next step, fully acknowledging their insatiable lust for life, which seemed to be re-born each and every day, and that they had only one thought on their minds: to head straight for the Kaiserstrasse and get rid of it in whatever way possible, no matter whether it was in front of the screen or with something in the hand. You can picture them like that, too: the bell rings to announce their break and they’re off at once, hands already hovering by their trouser buttons. And so they were always close to happiness when they were in Frankfurt, and only recovered once they were back home with their families and children, the ones they were doing all of this for, the ones they were earning money for every day in the package distribution department of the postal depot at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof.