Andreas Maier - The Room

My uncle comes back into the house as if from some momentous life experience, hesitates in the hallway for a moment, then heads briskly down into the cellar. He will work there for a little while. There are important things he wants to do down there, today of all days, even though he doesn’t have much time. This has only just occurred to him. The pilot in his workshop. Something needs to be tweaked. The finishing touches applied. But you still haven’t washed, says his mother. A nervous twitch in my uncle’s face as lava begins to flow into his temper once more. The dispute is heating up. Yet my grandmother would never come out and say that he’s dirty, that he stinks. When she approaches the topic of washing with my uncle, she depicts bodily ablutions as a mere act of common decency, without going into the details. Even today, I don’t know whether my uncle actually knew that he smelled. You can’t go to the cemetery if you haven’t washed yet, she would say. Or: You have to have a wash before you pick Ursel up! But when it came to why he should have washed before doing those things, perhaps he didn’t know. Go and have a wash, why don’t you, it’ll make you feel all fresh and new. My uncle had no choice but to give in, mumble in agreement and head off to perform his bodily ablutions without fully comprehending them. I can still remember how, in later years, my grandmother, whenever J was out of the house, would go down into the cellar and quickly and efficiently gather together his dirty washing into a neat package, which she would then immediately stuff into the washing machine, turn it on, and in the same breath open all the windows. But for now, in the year of the moon landing, the bathroom in the cellar doesn’t even exist yet (the brother-in-law will commission it to be built in the years to come), so only the small workshop is there, constructed from remnants and trash from the great Karl Boll masonry business in Friedberg in the Wetterau, at Mühlweg 12. And so J goes up to the first floor instead. Whether he took a shower in the bathroom or just had a quick wash in the sink in his dark room, I don’t know. But I do know that he comes down again after a short while, clean for the time being, hair neatly combed, wearing a new greyish-brown polo shirt and no less presentable than when he was a young man, back when he bore a certain resemblance to the young Glenn Gould. He is full of vigour now, in good spirits and looking forward to Forsthaus Winterstein, even though first he has to reluctantly listen to his mother repeat his instructions. Blumensiebert, cemetery, Ursel, shopping, hairdresser. She explains once more in which order it would be best he complete the errands in, and he just mumbles ja, ja in agreement.

And now he is by the garden fence again, opening the gate, climbing into the Variant, and as he drives out he sees his mother still standing at the kitchen window, waving goodbye to him. He waves back. Waving was always part of it for the two of them. Something to take along en route. Taking the wave along with him for the whole time he’s away. As if the waving could be seen at a great distance (this, after all, was the whole reason waving was invented in the first place). And so the connection between the two of them remains, just like that between the duck and her young on the Bad Nauheim pond.

Now he veers left onto Eleonorenring. He is completely alone now. After a hundred metres come the traffic lights, with two cars waiting, then three. Three cars wait at the light for permission to drive on, with people inside them, all looking at the red light and waiting. Everything has its process and its order; you just need to learn what it is. Earn the right. A complicated system. Now the light jumps to red and yellow. The three cars know that they will soon be able to continue. My uncle has learned everything precisely — he knows he has to wait until the yellow light joins the red one, and then it will change to green, and then he can drive on, having prepared to do so while the light was yellow. The yellow light is the waiting light: You can go soon, it says. It’s friendly, informal, everything on a first-name basis. Things always are when it comes to traffic. In your mind you’re on a first-name basis not just with the traffic lights but with the other drivers around you, too, and you’ll definitely be on a first-name basis if another driver runs into your car. If you want to drive to Friedberg, like my uncle does now, a right turn, then you have to flip the indicator upwards, because that means you want to turn right. Left is down, right is up. Advanced mathematics. My uncle is a highly-trained automobile pilot, driving in accordance with the lights and stepping on a pedal here and a pedal there and looking forwards and backwards, driving the two kilometre long stretch to Friedberg all on his own, to the left and right of which there are nothing but fields and from where you can see all of the Wetterau. In this, the year of the moon landing, there’s nothing between Bad Nauheim and Friedberg but the railway line, just countryside. There’s only one bus-stop between the two places, with a small shelter. But no one ever waits there. If someone was standing there, that would mean they had come from Schwalheim, that they had walked through the tunnel beneath the railway line and were on their way to Friedberg. But no one does it. No one makes use of the bus service (for the duration of my entire life, almost no one will stand there, no one ever wants to walk on foot from Schwalheim to the bus stop and onwards; everyone prefers to stay at home or to go by car, once they eventually had one that is). Up above, the sky with its multitude of colours and cloud formations, blue, yellow, grey or red, the Taunus to the right and corn and rapeseed in between, a few apple trees, a cat here and there, a deer here and there, a car here and there, lonely in the dusk with its lights switched on or approaching between the harvested fields in the shimmering late summer heat, like my uncle for example, although by now he has already reached Friedberg, having fetched the flowers from Blumensiebert as instructed and now parking up on the street in front of the cemetery. The cemetery didn’t have its own car park back then.

My uncle opens the gate to the cemetery and walks officiously along the outside wall to the place where we lie to rest. He puts the flowers down, goes to the water tap, takes a watering can, fills it, comes back to the grave and waters the plants, mumbling it’s always me all the while. There are flowers and hedges all around him; roses, lavender or tulips depending on the time of year. Lilies on the more luxuriant graves, predominantly the graves along the wall of the cemetery, the graves of dignitaries, which are tended to with more financial outlay than the others. Miniature temples, stelae, female statues of mourning with laurel wreaths in their hands, letting them hang downwards, one arm resting on the grave in a grief-stricken pose. These figures are, as my uncle notices, young and pretty, but unfortunately made from metal, so you can’t really… But perhaps just the once? Has he never touched them? They can’t be grabbed by the crotch, as the dress is made of metal, but it should be possible to place a hand on the bottom, because the iron garment falls softly there, clinging — it’s from the era of the dress reform movement, after all. Everything is there, and just as rounded as in real life, you can feel it. My uncle and Art Nouveau in the cemetery in Friedberg in the Wetterau. You can hear a chiffchaff in the trees, and a finch too, and pigeons. Nature and death all around him. Sometimes there will be a tree full of kinglets. My uncle once stood there, and now I sometimes stand there today, as his revenant. The kinglets from back then are dead too, but they’re still there, just like us. The kinglets are still there in the trees, albeit different ones, and below there is still a Boll, even if it’s just me and no longer the uncle. Everything is there, but no longer there. And now I’m laying it to rest with my words. Roses and lilies on the gravestone once more. And irises, depending on the time of year. Can my uncle smell them, the roses, the lilies and the irises? Will he run into Kallheinz (So, back home again already?)? He stands before the gravestone and reads the names. Melchior Boll, Ida Boll, August Boll, Karl Boll, Wilhelm Boll. There is only room for one more name on the gravestone, J notices now. Perhaps he notices it every time but forgets it again immediately afterwards; because assuming that the proper order is kept to, the last place belongs to his mother. Then it will say: Auguste Boll. His sister now has her own family and a completely different grave. His younger brother will soon have a family too. And he, J, where will he go? With his mother and the others? But his name won’t fit on the gravestone. Somewhere completely different, in the corner with the individual graves, the ones that are always so small, perhaps just with a wooden cross? And so Uncle J waters his family’s grave. He stands there grumbling, thinking bad thoughts or none at all, walks over to the tap another two times; it doesn’t occur to him to arrange the flowers or to take away the bunch of carnations that is now two weeks old. After all, he wasn’t instructed to do that. And the plastic vase, fallen over on the left hand side of the grave, prompts no reaction from him. He doesn’t notice it, for his task is to water the flowers. Silence. All around him, at an appropriate distance, the old Wetterau residents tend to the graves of their relatives, always turning up in pairs and struggling to lean down towards the Earth and the graves. Most moving slowly, some arguing as they go. Grave-tending is as much a part of being a pensioner as housekeeping, and both can lead to minor disagreements.