Andreas Maier - The Room

He: Where’s the watering can now?

She: By the stream.

He: But we were just by the stream.

She: So why didn’t you bring it?

He: I was carrying the flowers.

She: Fine, so why didn’t you say something!

Et cetera.

You can’t actually hear their words, but you can see them gesticulating. It’s almost as though the cemetery is transforming, on the quiet, into a living room from the Kernstadt or Barbara neighbourhoods (the cemetery lies between the two). They are dressed for housework, too. Today’s task: Tend to the grave. The women usually wear their aprons. As the men bend over, the seats of their trousers always look so vast, their knees angled away from one another, will they ever make it back up? The women keep their knees together and stretch their behinds up towards the sky, almost as though, right at the very end, they are once again the flowers they may have been fifty years ago. A flower that wants to see the sky. Growing up towards the sky once more. And, at that very moment, they are cultivating their dead. Every day, the Friedberg Cemetery Association gathers in the Friedberg cemetery to cultivate the Friedberg graves, both privately and in pairs, and immediately after they will sit in their allotments by the Usa with a bottle of beer. That’s the afternoon outing: first to the cemetery, then to the allotment, and in the evening perhaps a trip to the Mann in die Dunkel or the Schillerlinde or the Hanauer Hof or the Goldenen Fass or the Licher Eck on Kaiserstrasse. That’s how almost every life drew to its end back then, as I remember, and today they still stand around in pairs in the cemetery (while I am always alone), except now it’s the descendants of the ones who used to come. My uncle doesn’t notice them; he has his errand to attend to. He’s just emptying the third watering can. Everything is quiet and still, the only sound coming from the birds and the trickling water. Herr Boll, someone says. J looks around and sees Rudi Weber and his sister approaching. The sister was the one who spoke.

Hello there, Rudi, says J. Good afternoon, he says to the sister.

Rudi Weber: So, are you tending your family’s grave?

I am, yes, says J.

Aye, says Rudi, we’ve neglected ours for the last two weeks. And if you don’t tend to it for two weeks, everything looks so bad you might as well start from scratch.

Well, yes, says J matter-of-factly.

So how are you, Herr Boll? asks the sister.

Yes, good, says J.

And your mother?

Good, thank you, says J.

And your sister?

Well, yes, good, says J.

I admire your sister, the way she’s managed everything so well. Just imagine, Rudi, she’s heading up the business now, the masonry.

Yes, I know, says Rudi Weber.

She: How many children does she have now?

J: Three.

She: And now they’re building on the land, I saw.

J: Well, yes.

She: What does her husband do again?

Rudi Weber: He’s a lawyer.

J confirms this: A lawyer, from a distinguished family of civil servants. A very distinguished Frankfurt family. The father-in-law is a governor in Frankfurt.

She: A governor?

J: Yes, Governor… governor… of everything. A really big building, the Financial Governing Authority. Perhaps the biggest administration building in the whole of Hessen!

She: And he goes and marries a woman from Friedberg, imagine that.

Yes, says J.

She: And will you be going to the inn today?

He still hopes to, says J, to Forsthaus Winterstein, the hunters have been there all week, hunting on the Winterstein, a big hunt, a whole troop of hunters. He wanted to go yesterday, he says, and he wanted to go the day before that. In fact, he’s been wanting to go to Forsthaus Winterstein for days now.

Right then, we won’t hold you up, says Rudi. Or is there something we can help you with?

And while Weber’s sister starts up again about J’s sister, who, as she says, used to be such a pretty girl when they were at school, with this intensely black hair, but back then there was this other girl too, and she used to wonder what would become of her, but then she got sent off to boarding school, if her memory served her correctly. Where was it again… in the Rhineland? In Bensheim, J corrects her… so while the conversation picks up again in such a manner, Rudi Weber peruses the state of the Boll family grave, trims a few branches back with his shears, removes the withered and worn carnations, tucks the vase of flowers behind the gravestone, tidies the shrubbery and returns the fallen plastic vase to the neighbouring grave. Rudi Weber has an eye for order, and ideally he would have liked to sweep the gravestone too, but unfortunately he doesn’t have a broom to hand, so he resolves to return later (he needs to come back to the cemetery anyway because his sister forgot the pansies) and give the Boll grave a sweep, just this once, because if J is at the cemetery today then that means J’s sister will be coming by in the next week for sure, and Blumensiebert himself rarely comes to the cemetery, for sweeping graves isn’t really Blumensiebert’s strong point, as Weber knows from experience. And if his sister sees the family grave in such a state, she won’t be happy for sure. Rudi Weber has always regarded J. Boll to be one of those people who don’t have things easy, for one reason or another, and who need a helping hand here and there in order to get along in life. It’s not his fault, after all. He often thinks that, considering his disability, J is doing pretty well. He’s even able to help the family out a little bit, and besides, it’s not like you need to point out to him what a complete idiot he is, a complete idiot with a driving license (and a Variant). So they stand there at the grave for another two, three minutes and gaze silently at the gravestone, the names, and the quotation engraved on it.

Awaiting the Resurrection

Then they part ways, and while J heads towards the stream to secure the watering can with a bicycle lock, Weber shrugs his shoulders, as if wanting to apologise to his sister, and gestures behind J’s back (tapping his finger on his temple), in order to demonstrate in the clear and proper manner that of course he knows J is an idiot, and that this is the reason why he behaves the way he does towards him. And while the sister comments that J’s family should really have enough money to tend to the grave themselves — especially the new husband, if he comes from such a distinguished background — and that for this reason there was really no need to clean up after them, the two siblings disappear into the afternoon sunlight amongst the linden and chestnut trees, the roses and the black marble gravestones from our stonemasonry…

Now J drives along the following route: from the cemetery, fifty metres along Schmidtstrasse, turning right into Gebrüder-Lang-Strasse, then right again after a hundred metres into Untere Liebfrauenstrasse, where, after another hundred metres, Mühlweg and our property can be found. First the apple trees, then the spot where the stables were, which is now the foundation pit (where I grew up), then the business, one building after the other, glazed in part, everything behind a big black wall with white joints. In the centre, the administrative building, an old mill, the Falk mill. A mill without a wheel, for the river that used to flow through here has long since been diverted and now bypasses its old river bed, and our company grounds too. Wetterau people always had to avoid things, always and above all themselves. In front of the mill is the big entrance gate, through which the workers bustle in and out and the transporters drive in and out, although not as frequently as in Wilhelm Boll’s day, for business is no longer booming in the year of the moon landing. As always, my uncle would have loved to drive the Variant through the main gate (just like his father always used to drive his own car through it), but the Variant always just gets in the way on the company grounds, so he resists and parks it out on the street. He stands on the pavement for a while, looking at the foundation pit of my parents’ house. The biggest house in the whole of the Barbara neighbourhood. A house of Uncle J superlatives. He believes that to be the case even though there’s nothing to see yet (but it ends up being so big that, in fact, I did grow up in an Uncle J superlativism). The workers are working, in part — they’re all drinking beer right now — and J’s sister is standing with them and matter-of-factly giving them the necessary and proper instructions, almost like a foreman. How does she know how to do that? Then J strolls into the main building and is greeted by everyone in a respectful and friendly manner. They all know that he’s the son of the late boss, and they all treat him with respect. J used to come here years ago, too, as a young man, back when the majority of them hadn’t yet realised that he was an idiot. For the staff, the boss’s family was effectively one and the same thing as the boss himself, even though some of them were quick to realise that the boss wasn’t on good terms with his son, and that, on top of this, the son was unusual (a way to avoid saying that he wasn’t entirely normal). They tried to include him in things a bit, explaining the machines to him, sometimes pressing a tool into his hand, sometimes letting him ride along in a truck across the yard or allowing him to watch when they were welding (with a welding mask over his face). But all of that was a long time ago. Today, J was no longer a child, or even a young man, and they didn’t let him ride in the truck anymore… Today, J was on the same management level as the sister in their eyes, even though they all knew by now what he was. To offend him would have meant offending the whole company. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to do such a thing.