Iron Gustav (48 page)

‘Do understand me, Herr Professor,' urged Heinz. ‘I'd like to have a real aim in life. Something I can devote myself to completely.'

Professor Degener nodded. ‘Certainly. Fine! Fine! By all means. But the point is, I know of nothing of that kind. Your schoolfellows asked the same thing when the arms-collecting came to an end. I was only able to tell them to wait and be patient.'

‘But …' began Heinz Hackendahl.

‘Quite right,' his teacher interrupted. ‘But youth has no patience for waiting. It wants to reap before it has sown. Very well – but your first task, Hackendahl, is to take honours in your final.'

‘But I can't do anything with it,' said Heinz despairingly. ‘My father has no money to let me go on studying.'

‘Idiot!' said the professor fondly. ‘You're to take honours for your own sake, not in order to be able to study – you should also be able to study with very average honours – but to demonstrate to yourself that you can achieve something. Tell me, my dear pupil, exactly what have you achieved in your life?'

‘Nothing,' said Heinz miserably.

‘Once again, idiot,' mocked the professor. ‘Lose five places, master Hackendahl! With your education you were still unable to achieve anything in life at all. But now you've got to pass your Abitur. That is your first task in life, master Hackendahl. And you're going to do it for me most excellently! I—'

‘I—'

‘Silence! Which of you students are so pursued by the Furies that you dare interrupt the flow of your teacher's words! I promise you
that, notwithstanding your achievements in the dead languages, I myself will fail you in Latin and Greek should you not be well grounded in other subjects.' He laughed scornfully. ‘You'll be flunked ignominiously, Hackendahl.'

Faced by so much determination, Heinz began to feel hot under the collar. He was at that moment vividly conscious of certain problems – problems which had also not remained hidden from his teachers. ‘If I fail,' he said with a certain defiance, ‘I'm done for. My father can't afford to send me to school for another year.'

‘All the more necessary for you to make a special effort,' said the professor dryly. ‘Surely you don't mean to founder in the first squall – always supposing this is the first …'

Professor Degener was silent. He had always been a man to call a spade a spade, and he would have deemed it unworthy to spare out of sentimentality the wounded feelings of this extremely undisciplined lad. These wounded feelings hardly resulted from a very noble battle – you only had to see the poor lad's sickly pale face and frightened eyes. Professor Degener displayed all his sympathy for youthful stupidity, but he was without a trace of sentimentality.

Nevertheless he did not press him too far, but continued encouragingly: ‘Task number one, then – your examination! And to judge from what you tell me, task number two seems already indicated, which is to do something for your parents. You're strong and healthy, you've had a good education – my dear boy, you will quite naturally and without any fuss get a job for the first time in your life and learn how difficult it is to earn the money which your father has provided for you every day for seventeen years.'

Heinz Hackendahl was silent. He had come as a penitent, dreaming of performing great deeds in atonement. He had thought of his fatherland in danger, had dreamed of sacrifices, of heroism … And now he was told: take your examination and earn a living. He was terribly disillusioned.

‘You don't like the tasks I set you?' asked the professor. ‘My dear Hackendahl, I see bad times ahead – even worse than those we have been through. Each one of us will find it difficult to establish order and cleanliness in his own little locality. I'm afraid no one will be free from obligations, but will most probably lack the strength to fulfil
them. I know very little of your personal circumstances, Hackendahl, but I should say there was quite a number of problems, even in the more restricted family circle, for an enterprising young man to solve.'

The teacher stopped talking and waited. But Heinz wanted to go on. He had big ideas in mind.

‘Hackendahl, be honest with yourself! I can read in your face that you know of plenty to be done. But these tasks are too small for you. You talk of Germany – but isn't it possible that you are not quite big enough for that – just at present? And then, dear fellow, just think. How can the body be healthy if its cells are sick? Make your cells healthy first, then we'll see …' He stretched out his hand to him over the table.

‘I expect to see you from now on daily in school, and actively taking part in your lessons. Then we'll speak again, Hackendahl, after you've passed your exams. After you've passed your exams, is that understood?'

And thus it was that Heinz Hackendahl returned to school. For a while, he had travelled widely and lived in an unhealthy, feverish atmosphere. However, he had eventually found the strength to escape the swamp, and now returned to school with his fellow pupils.

In the beginning he found it hard, just as he found the meagre food of Wexstrasse hard, after the luxurious fare in Dahlem. However, just as his body adjusted itself in a few days, his mind soon got used to performing the tasks given him, instead of trying to anticipate the wishes of an almost sadistic woman. Sometimes – in the breaks, sitting with the others on the benches, when they clattered the lids of their desks up and down, used their favourite, exaggerated, odd school jargon, and were generally quite rough, with slangy language and fisticuffs – he was overcome with the memory of how, as a young man about town, he had sat in a French fashion house, perched on a bar stool, and watched a beautiful woman doing her make-up.

Then,
with other eyes, he suddenly saw the immature, pale, ill-shaven, spotty faces, and listened with disgust to their dirty jokes, and smelled with equal horror the general atmosphere of hunger and unwashed bodies. Is it really worth it, he asked himself. Life could be so much easier.

But then, just at that moment, Professor Degener would enter the classroom, and he would recall the expression – although you fall in the mud, you don't have to remain lying in it. Or else he experienced a shudder at the thought of that easier life. Then he accused his enemy, Porzig, of once again cruelly leaving him behind with his history tables instead of helping him with them. ‘And, you miserable wretch, if you go on like this, you'll find that you and the whole class will be put to shame and flunk your Abitur. Then you'll be despised by everyone, and be ripe for the public noose and a grim squint up at the gallows!'

‘However thick the rope, there is always some hope!' Porzig whispered, with a shifty look, the opening lines of a Frank Wedekind poem from a popular anthology.

‘Of course that doesn't mean that all ropes break,' chimed in a couple of secret Norns.

Then, altogether in a choir, stamping their feet, and clattering their desk lids: ‘Other way round – most ropes stay sound.'

‘Have you gone mad, class?' shouted Professor Degener, entering the room like a flaming firebrand. ‘The whole First Year will go to church behind the Sixth Year – because you are more childish than those little milksops. Hackendahl, what are you grinning at? Only an idiot grins; a real person laughs. Everyone sit down! Häberlein, try and explain to us why Plato …'

Yes, Heinz Hackendahl had come home. Once again he was wearing his old school uniform – worn smooth, much repaired and much too small. Once again he was wearing ugly field-grey army undergarments and badly cut shirts. He completely neglected his manicure set, although he still cut and scrubbed his fingernails more often than in ‘olden times'.

He had feared that his comrades at school would make satirical remarks about his backwards metamorphosis from iridescent butterfly to colourless larva. However, with the amazing sensitivity of
adolescent lads – the most tactless of social groups – no one said a word about it. He once again belonged to them totally. He was one of them. They seemed completely to have forgotten that he hadn't participated in what had been one of their most important activities – collecting weapons. He took part in their heated disagreements as if he had never been away, and was listened to, and laughed and sworn at, like all the others.

They had many, daily and very heated disagreements, in almost every break. The National Assembly had met in Weimar. It had made Fritz Ebert President of the Reich, and chosen black, red and gold as the colours of the new German republic. But these were comparative trivialities, much as one could argue over them.

For them, the main question was: how would the war end? What would the peace look like? That was the question that stirred them. Many different things were said in the National Assembly, but very little was spoken about peace. Of course, it was said that Germany would never accept an enforced peace. There was also one deputy who announced that any hand would wither who signed a ‘slave' peace …

But even the rare strong language which came out of Weimar was also heard with suspicion by the youngsters. They had learned the Latin phrase ‘
Principiis obsta
', which in German means ‘Resistance from the start'. And they considered that, right from the beginning, no resistance had been offered. They considered that the government constantly protested, but, despite such protests, always did what it had just said was impossible. The youngsters heard the ‘No' loud and clear, but were totally sceptical, as were the whole people. ‘We don't trust them at all,' they said. ‘We've been lied to by those above us far too much in the last four years.'

The lads talked about all these things in the school breaks, and on the way to and from the dormitories. They talked about it in their school jargon, spicing their sentences with Latinisms, and were not shy of using expressions like ‘colossal' or ‘right as rain'. They had rough voices and often curly hair on their chins. If the war had continued, they would have gone to the Front. Now they were just youngsters, pupils, but their interest in what was going on was none the less.

Ten
years earlier a generation had immersed itself in Hofmannsthal's poetry, made fun of Eulenburg's
Rosenlieder
, and generally got hot under the collar over the question – airships or aeroplanes. But all within bounds. All very moderate. That was an overfed, aesthetic generation who tended to flirt with the idea of beauty and suicide. (The very word ‘suicide' was a bit too much for them; they called it
Freitod
– ‘free death'.)

The new generation, brought up in the critical hunger years, was of stronger metal. It proved the truth of the saying that the fruits of poor soil are healthier than those of rich soil. This new generation, which had only experienced the war at home, always felt it had been deprived of something in life. It was not content to be deprived any longer. It followed all events with alert senses and ever-wakeful mistrust.

Heinz Hackendahl joined them. He had returned to his comrades, to his generation. (Erich, although only four years older, was definitely from the pre-war generation.) Already after a very short while, Heinz found it miraculous that he had devoted time every day to the care of his fingernails. It was not long before he felt the strong aversion of youth to the painted women of the Tauentzienstrasse. His heart hardly missed a beat when he thought of Tinette. On the other hand, he sometimes thought for a long time about Irma.

Professor Degener had also shown acute insight into such matters, when he had asked Heinz Hackendahl to be patient, in that he would soon hardly be without tasks to perform. He was right: there was at that time no lack of things to do. Heinz Hackendahl took on his share.

One morning, towards the end of February – it so happened that there was no school that day, probably because of another strike, or a protest – Heinz was awakened by a prolonged ringing at the door. In any case, he was still in bed. His father was away driving the horse cab and his mother was queuing up outside some food shop, once again making her swollen legs worse. Diving into his trousers, he put
his coat on over his nightshirt and shuffled through the icy flat in his slippers. A woman stood outside and he had to look closer before he recognized her as his sister Eva – the once so pretty, fresh and rather provocative Eva. ‘You, Eva? Come in.'

She, too, hadn't recognized him at first, not so much because he had changed as because she herself seemed very excited and rather drunk. She was leaning against the wall. Her face, which had grown fat, trembled; her discoloured eyelids twitched. ‘Where's Mother?' she demanded. ‘I must speak to her at once.'

‘Mother is out shopping. Do come in, Eva.' He led her into their parents' bedroom – the only place where there was the slightest degree of warmth. She sat down on the bed and looked round … ‘Where's Mother?' she repeated anxiously. ‘I must speak to her at once.'

‘Mother has gone shopping,' he explained again. ‘Can I do anything, Eva?'

She seemed not to hear him. She was certainly drunk but her drunkenness was as nothing compared to her agitation; she was so excited that you wouldn't notice any more that she was drunk. ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?' she murmured to herself.

For a moment she laid her head on the pillow and closed her eyes, as if about to fall asleep from utter exhaustion; but she started up again, rose from the bed and, paying no attention to Heinz, wandered about the room, stood in front of the chest of drawers as if she was on her own, and pulled open the upper drawer. She took out some of the papers there, held them in her hand and scrutinized them as if trying to guess what they could possible mean.

‘Eva!' shouted Heinz from the oven. ‘Eva!'

She wheeled round. ‘You, Bubi? What is it? I wanted to speak with Mother …'

‘Mother's gone shopping, Eva,' he said for the third time. He approached her, gently took the papers out of her hand, put them back and said: ‘Do tell me what you want? Perhaps I could help.'