Andreas Maier - The Room

Having exuded a noticeable smell for hours now, my uncle heads off on his eight-minute journey home with a certain sense of importance. He feels this sense of importance because he has been to work, a completely normal working day, he earns his money just like everyone else and is practically a civil servant, he could almost wear a uniform, and if he were to go to the postal depot in Bad Nauheim he would feel like he’s amongst colleagues, and would long to talk shop with them (which, admittedly, the postal workers in Bad Nauheim would never have understood, not realising that he worked in a postal depot too). And also because, for today, he has earned what is about to come, in other words his evening off, in an orderly and exemplary and proper fashion. And his mother will be content (He wasn’t in the Kaiserstrasse district, after all! Or maybe he was, but just very briefly, in and out in a matter of moments, and no one knows about that anyway, even he has already forgotten about it, as if it never happened. And did it really?). Isn’t that how his father came back from work too? Proud, that’s the way to come home from work, with your head held high. The day’s work is done. Just like the mountain rescue team coming home from the mountain. And now he’s heading home. They’re expecting him. He who works has someone waiting for him at home. He strides towards Uhlandstrasse, all manner of things on his mind, imagining his life to be successful and normal and exemplary and, just like every day as he makes his way home from his shift, enamoured by the fact that he’s making his way home from his shift. All the way from Frankfurt, where thousands stream past him on a daily basis, unoccupied, and yet he has his job and his function. Everything needs to work properly, and it does. Everything in its place, including him. The time back before the family sent him to Frankfurt, that’s long forgotten now. Uncle J, an individual with a function and purpose, just like anyone else. That’s what I imagine him to be thinking as he strides home.

My uncle opens the front door in Uhlandstrasse like a family man returning from the workplace. The man is in the house. The only one now, for the big company boss, Wilhelm Boll, has been dead for two years. This is how J comes home. As if everything, at least once, could have been good and proper for him: He, the man in the house, and later he’ll get the Variant out of the garage (preferably at least half an hour before he needs it, because then it will be ready), and then he’ll drive to Forsthaus Winterstein to sit with the men, drink beer and listen to their stories, as if he were part of it all.

As if, just the once, everything could have been good and proper.

Except, unfortunately, there wasn’t just the matter of the forceps; there was the small matter of other people too.

His brother-in-law is there. With J’s younger sister, his wife. His brother-in-law, the lawyer. His brother-in-law has been there a lot recently, since J’s father died. They’re everywhere now, and already have three children (of which I am one). It wasn’t that long ago that none of them were there, and now they’re suddenly there and part of everything. It wasn’t that long ago that it was just the sister, and now there are five. They’ve multiplied by five. They are a family in their own right now. At a specific point in the family tree, a new family sprouted out, and they are now the proper family. Because suddenly, in the blink of an eye, there are hardly any Bolls left. J’s grandfather Karl died two years ago, followed just a few months later by his father, Wilhelm, which makes it two Bolls less. And now his sister has a different name. Which, in a way, makes it three less. So now the only ones who remain are his mother and younger brother. For the first time in his life, J starts to get an idea of what the future means. Before, everything was essentially always the same: there was the family, the father Wilhelm, the grandfather Karl, the house, the room and the business, where his father had always been the boss and his grandfather the senior boss. And he was always there and amongst it all, sometimes in the house in Bad Nauheim, sometimes in the business. After all, he’s only been going to Frankfurt since his father died and his brother-in-law started having the final say, his brother-in-law and his sister. The brother-in-law procured the job in Frankfurt for him almost as soon as his father died. At long last, even J had to have a respectable role somewhere. And with his brother-in-law’s extensive contacts, one was found. His father would never have managed to do that. Finding work in Frankfurt — before the brother-in-law, the family’s horizons hadn’t stretched far enough for that kind of thing. Almost as soon as the brother-in-law came on to the scene, everything changed. In fact, there’s so much to organise that he’s there almost every day now. Documents to be read, files to be opened, letters to be read. Things have to be kept in order, with the family estate too, because someone has to do it after all. His sister is managing the gravestone business now, she’s the boss. And the brother-in-law takes care of everything else. They’re already building a house. There’s never been anyone like him in the family before. Where would they be without the brother-in-law? And now that J has finished his working day and come home, the brother-in-law is here, and J goes automatically into a kind of bowed-head posture, like he always does when he sees his brother-in-law. Much like he did when his father addressed him. Every time J sees his brother-in-law, he expects to receive an order. For ever since the brother-in-law has been part of the family, there’s always something to do. The father and the grandfather have to be replaced, and the brother-in-law is delegating their tasks. He has a business-like air about him most of the time, because he always has something in mind: the next task. After all, he has to lead the whole family now. It came about in a natural way and developed as such: he is now the head of the family, albeit tacitly. And, technically speaking, he doesn’t order people to do things. It’s just that he’s always right, with everything he says and delegates, for he sees things clearly and knows how things need to be done. Life consists of tasks (not of Forsthaus Winterstein), particularly when you have a family of five and another family to maintain, namely that of his mother-in-law. If that’s the case, you must have the next goal in mind at all times. There’s no other way! And what a family he comes from! J has seen the building in Frankfurt, the Financial Governing Authority building, and it’s one of the biggest and most modern buildings he ever saw in his life. He has never seen anything like it, the immense hallways and stairways leading every which way, like a kind of centre of the world where everything is regulated and in order and kept in motion and where everything works, because everyone is in their place and everyone knows it. And somewhere in the middle of this immense building sits the boss of all it all, the Chief Finance President. The first president J has ever met. The Chief Finance President first came to the Wetterau and Bad Nauheim ten years ago, at the end of the fifties, all the way to the Uhlandstrasse residence, in order to support his son’s courtship of the daughter of the Karl Boll stonemasonry family. A tall man with a company car. The car had four standards, the like of which no one in the Uhlandstrasse house had ever seen before. The Chief Finance President (my grandfather on my father’s side) worked closely with the American military administration. I still remember the photos, from a time when J, in his late twenties, must have felt like he had died and gone to heaven, for they pictured him side by side with high-ranking US military men who were dripping with medals, in Bad Nauheim and in the midst of the homeland which was now part of the big wide world, and they had given back the house in Uhlandstrasse — it had been seized, and the family had only been able to move back from Friedberg into the restored, restituted house a few years before. There he sits, J, a scrawny sight with his huge ears and black-as-night eyebrows, the same greasy side parting that he always had as a child, and now he’s a child once more amongst all the Americans, and in awe and permitted to be part of it. All of a sudden this Chief Finance President has opened up their world in a way they could never have imagined possible, and while just moments ago they were still occupied and expelled, now they are sitting cosily around the table with the highest-ranking members of the regional American military administration, under whose supervision the whole country — and everything for that matter — was re-built. Some of them are even carrying weapons. They drive up in Jeeps, they have bodyguards. Real-life, genuine bodyguards clad in bulletproof vests. Bodyguards at the front door of Uhlandstrasse 18! The centre of the world. Or perhaps it’s the Chief Finance President’s birthday and they all go to Frankfurt am Main, the sister, the little brother, the mother and the father, and sit in a huge auditorium, and then there are even more, even higher-ranking American military personnel, and my uncle amongst them all. The photographs are stowed away in the bookcase in the living room at Uhlandstrasse, neatly pasted into albums and solemnly labeled— with General Smith, Grillparzerstrasse, 25.4.59; with General Miller, High Commander of so and so, garden at Grillparzerstrasse, 18. May 1959 —with white chalk handwriting against black or dark brown mounting paper. My uncle is pictured in many of them. It was an important time. Usually, as I already mentioned, he never liked Americans.