Meanwhile Georg had managed to sit his father down again and carefully take off the pyjama trousers he wore over his linen underwear, as well as his socks. At the sight of the not particularly clean underwear, Georg began to reproach himself for neglecting his father. There was no doubt it was his responsibility to oversee the regular changing of his father’s underwear. How to arrange his father’s future was something he and his fiancée hadn’t yet explicitly discussed, because they’d tacitly assumed that his father would stay on alone in the old apartment. But now he quickly and firmly decided that he would take his father with him into his new household. On closer inspection, it almost seemed as if the care Georg would then arrange might already be too late.
He carried his father to bed. A horrible sensation came over him when he realized, as he took the few paces across the room, that his father was playing with the watch chain hanging from Georg’s chest. He held on to it so tightly that at first Georg couldn’t put him down.
But as soon as he was in bed everything seemed fine. He got under the covers himself and then pulled the blanket up past his shoulders. He looked up at Georg with a not unfriendly expression.
“Isn’t that right, you’re already starting to remember him?” asked Georg, nodding at him encouragingly.
“Am I properly covered up?” asked his father, as if he couldn’t check whether his feet were sticking out.
“So you’re very happy in bed,” said Georg, and rearranged the blanket into a better position.
“Am I properly covered up?” his father asked again, seeming to pay especially close attention to the answer.
“Just rest easy, you’re properly covered up.”
“No!” his father shouted almost before Georg had finished speaking, threw back the blanket with such force that it unfurled itself in mid-air, and stood upright on the bed. He lightly held on to the ceiling with one hand. “You wanted to cover me up, I know that, sunshine, but I’m not buried yet. And even if this is the last of my strength, it’s enough for you, too much for you. Of course I know your friend. He would have been a son after my own heart. That’s why you’ve strung him along all these years. Why else? Do you really think I never wept for him? That’s why you lock yourself in your office, you’re not to be disturbed, the boss is busy—just so you can send your lying little letters to Russia. But luckily no one needs to teach a father how to see through his son. Now that you think you’ve done him down, done him so far down you can sit your arse on him and he won’t even move, my little lord of a son has decided he will marry!”
Georg gazed up at this terrible vision of his father. The fate of his friend in St Petersburg, whom his father suddenly knew so well, struck him as never before. He saw him lost in the Russian expanses. He saw him at the door of his empty, looted shop. Among the wreckage of the shelves, the shredded goods, the broken gas fittings, he was only just still standing. Why did he have to move so far away!
“But look at me!” cried his father, and Georg, almost losing his mind, ran over to the bed to grab on to something, but faltered halfway there.
“Because she lifted up her skirt,” his father began to warble, “because she lifted up her skirt like this, that horrible tramp.” And to demonstrate what he meant, he lifted his nightshirt so high that you could see the scar from his war years on his thigh. “Because she lifted up her skirt like this and this and this, you threw yourself at her, and so that you can gratify yourself without any interruptions, you’ve disgraced Mother’s memory, betrayed your friend and tried to stick your father in bed so he can’t move a muscle. But can he still move or can’t he?”
He stood totally unsupported and kicked his legs. He beamed with insight.
Georg stood in a corner, as far as possible from his father. A long time ago he’d resolved to observe everything that happened completely and precisely, so that he couldn’t be taken by surprise if something came at him from behind or dropped on him from above. Now he remembered that long-forgotten resolution and promptly forgot it again, just as you can unwittingly pull a short thread out of the eye of a needle.
“But your friend hasn’t been betrayed!” his father cried, waving a finger back and forth to reinforce what he was saying. “I’ve been his representative here on the ground.”
“Clown!” Georg couldn’t stop himself from shouting; he recognized the damage at once and, too late, his eyes fixed, bit into his tongue so hard he flinched in pain.
“Yes, I’ve been clowning! Clowning! Good word! What other consolation is there for a widowed old father? Well—and for the moment let’s say you’re still my living son—what else is left for me, in my back room, hounded by disloyal staff, old to the marrow? While my son merrily swans around, closing deals that I prepared, falling over himself with smugness, and parading about in front of his own father with the reserved expression of an honourable gentleman! Do you think I didn’t love you—I, the one you came from?”
‘Now he’ll bend forward,’ thought Georg, ‘if only he’d fall and shatter into pieces!’ This phrase whistled through his head.
His father bent forward, but didn’t fall. Since Georg didn’t come closer, as he’d expected he would, he lifted himself up again.
“Stay where you are, I don’t need you! You think you’ve still got the strength to come over to me and that you’re just holding yourself back because that’s what you choose to do. How wrong you are! I’m still the stronger of us by far. If I’d been on my own I might have had to give way, but Mother passed on her strength to me, I’ve made a lovely alliance with your friend, I’ve got your clients here in my pocket!”
‘Even in his shroud he’s got pockets!’ Georg said to himself, and thought that this observation would make it impossible for his father to exist. Only for an instant did he hold that thought, then as always he forgot it entirely.
“Just try coming to see me with your fiancée on your arm! I’ll swat her aside like you can hardly imagine!”
Georg frowned as if doubting that were true. His father just nodded towards Georg’s corner, asserting what he’d said.
“I found it so funny today when you came to ask whether you should write to your friend about your engagement! He already knows everything, you stupid boy, he knows everything! I’ve been writing to him, because you forgot to take my writing things away. That’s why he hasn’t come for years, he knows everything a hundred times better than you do yourself, he scrunches up your letters unread in his left hand while he holds up mine in his right!”
He swung his arm over his head in enthusiasm. “He knows everything a thousand times better!”
“Ten thousand times!” said Georg, to deride his father, but as he said the words, they came out sounding deadly earnest.
“For years I’ve been waiting for you to come to me with this question! Do you think I care about anything else? Do you think I read the paper? There!” And he tossed Georg a page from a newspaper that had somehow been carried with him into bed. An old paper with a name that Georg didn’t even recognize.
“How long you hesitated before you were finally ready! Your mother had to die, she didn’t live to see the happy day, your friend has been falling apart out there in Russia, even three years ago he was so sick it was all but over, and me, well, you can see what condition I’m in. You’ve still got eyes for that!”
“You ambushed me!” shouted Georg.
His father said pityingly: “You probably wanted to say that earlier. Now it doesn’t make sense any more.”