Andreas Maier - The Room

This is how I imagine a day in the life of my uncle J: At around half four in the morning, he sets off in his camouflaged parka, with a hat in winter and in summer without, walking the eight minutes to the nearby Bad Nauheim train station, where there were still two counter clerks and the trains ran exactly on time. Coffee was drunk from porcelain cups and the kiosk wasn’t yet openly accessible, which meant you could only look at the porno mags if you asked the kiosk assistant for them. So no standing around shamefaced in the corner as they do nowadays, looking at the selection of bust and butt magazines like Anal and The Neighbour’s Wife , and even cock mags now too, because the sexes have gotten all mixed up, even in train station kiosks, despite the fact that everything tends to reach them last. Nowadays you have to know exactly what you want, whereas back then someone like my uncle still had a relatively narrow selection, albeit one that didn’t seem in the slightest bit narrow to him. Men would have confused him. Maybe it would be different today. But he died at just the right time, in that sense. In his day, there were still relatively clear divisions. For the most part, people lived ordered lives in which they went to work and listened to Heino or had a thirst-quenching beer at the inn or standing in front of the fridge at home, and the other thing was secret and only took place — if it took place at all — at the kiosk, where they would go twice a week, and the magazines cost money, after all, and then they had to be hidden away. Back then, those magazines were the means of escaping from oneself, from one’s inner, God-given nature — people would look at the pictures and live with them and from them, then return, unscathed, to the refuge of society and working life. There were still morals; everything else was pushed aside into a corner. Today, everything would have been too much for my uncle.

It’s possible that he had a good business relationship with the kiosk at the Bad Nauheim train station. He smoked a lot, R6s, and he would have bought them there for sure. Maybe the kiosk owner used to open up as early as half four because of the night shift and early shift workers. But maybe it wasn’t like that at all; maybe Uncle J just sat there with his little leather bag, reputable and washed amongst his colleagues, finally part of it, somebody, a commuter on his way to work, someone with stories to tell, stories about his work, about his superiors, his colleagues, stories about particularly heavy packages or particularly interesting deliveries or unusual happenings. Or maybe they were all in cahoots, talking about the women. Perhaps they had already realised, with utter clarity, what and who my uncle was, and they let him buy all kinds of things for them, paid for out of his pay check. And he bought them and paid for them in order to belong and feel accepted by his colleagues, at half past four in the morning in Bad Nauheim in the Wetterau.

My uncle was a great frequenter of inns, and whenever he went someone or other would suss him out. My uncle, mentally impaired at birth, was constantly boasting about his existence, or rather about his Boll existence, his existence as a Boll. He sat there in the inns and told stories about his father, the big company boss with a chauffeur and a dog. Of course he didn’t mention the fact that his father hit him, or rather used to hit him, with a leather belt. When he was talking about his father, a bad word never passed his lips. J probably thought everything that happened was normal, just part of the entirely normal, natural way of the world. He would talk about the company, the employees, the pay checks; he probably even told people where the cash was kept, the best way to get to the company premises and so on. But it would never have occurred to anyone in Friedberg or Bad Nauheim to break into the premises by the Usa; instead they would just have gotten to the money through my uncle, who for my family had always been an open sore, financially speaking, the Bolls’ open wound. And even though he was only ever giving away his own pay check, the family still didn’t want to see it wasted like that. They definitely would have preferred it if he hadn’t frequented the inns quite so much.

From time to time, he ran into Gerd Bornträger at the station in the mornings. I imagine that they met in the Köpi, a Königspilsner inn in Bad Nauheim. Bornträger was, of course, completely drunk when he made my uncle’s acquaintance and immediately managed to get a few beers out of him, followed by a few schnapps to wash them down. That’s how my uncle always met people. The drunks in our bars in the Wetterau are always trying to drink with you, beer and schnapps, with the aim of eventually losing count of the rounds or acting as though they’ve forgotten to bring their money along; heaven forbid they succeed. If they do, you’ll never get rid of them. They’ll follow you all the way to your front door, and even go inside with you if you’re not careful. But that wasn’t necessary with J in the Köpi, because he would get so completely sozzled that he didn’t even notice he was paying for someone else’s beers yet again. The truth was, he was always paying for someone else. Sometimes everyone in the bar would latch on to him, and when that happened he could easily end up paying for ten rounds in one go. That was only in the small inns of course, where almost everyone would be sitting around on benches and there were no more than eight to ten people to a round. That’s why they always used to try to lure him into those inns. But even though he may have been part of things there, I don’t think he was totally comfortable with it. If he was, he wouldn’t have kept going to Forsthaus Winterstein with all the hunters, who were more respectable. The landlady there would never have allowed my uncle to be taken advantage of like that. And it was always the place he spoke the most enthusiastically about. The Winterstein lodge and the Winterstein mountain were his favourite places, apart from his dark room at home or the establishments in Frankfurt which, although the only plausible explanation, are admittedly based on mere speculation.

Bornträger sometimes took the same train into Frankfurt for the early shift, because he worked at the Hauptbahnhof too, or at least that’s what he claimed. But my uncle never once saw him there during the day, not in the station and definitely not at the post depot, where J himself worked. (And he never saw him on the journey home either.) Another man who used to take the train regularly was Rudi Weber, whose father had worked as a stonemason in the quarry with my grandfather, J’s father. Weber worked the early shift at a firm in Frankfurt’s Gallus district. He was known as Rudi Junior, the son of stonemason Weber. He always greeted J politely, and sometimes the two of them would talk about their fathers. When J spoke about his father, the big company boss, it was with pride, a sense of belonging to something. Everything he said about his father and the company was communicated in a tone of the utmost seriousness. He would go into raptures when a piece of new machinery was ordered, describing it as the newest and biggest and best of its kind, of course. My uncle always thought in superlatives. Everything had to be re-thought into a superlative, including all the machines on the company premises. The other son, Rudi Junior, in his late thirties at the time just like my uncle, would then listen politely while Bornträger made fun of J (perhaps in much the same way as I did in the cellar, when J was sawing and filing) and winked at Rudi, in an attempt to get him to gang up on my uncle. I presume that Weber never reacted to this.

Bornträger: Hey, J, you know that new milling machine you told us about last week? How much did you say it cost, again? And what kind of machine is it anyway? What’s it called? Tell us something about it, won’t you?!