A Perfect Waiter (10 page)

He'd been inspired to write to Jakob by a casual remark
from Julie the last time they'd met before she returned to Paris. “I really enjoy writing to Steve,” she'd told him over dinner at the restaurant. “Why don't I write to you more often? I wouldn't have to write to you in secret, after all. For that matter, why don't you ever write to me?” His cousin had fiddled continuously with her rings and bracelets as she spoke.

He should now have been concentrating on what mattered, but he couldn't. Not because the hour was so late, or because he'd split a bottle of wine with Julie, or because he was distracted by what was going on around him, but simply because he couldn't grasp the essentials. As soon as he thought he'd captured them they escaped. The essentials didn't exist, or only if they were surrounded by irrelevancies that would throw them into sharp relief like the men silhouetted against the light in the public toilet. Perhaps everything was irrelevant save death. The death of love signified the advent of death, the advent of love the demise of death.

He really wanted his letter to Jakob to convey the crux of the matter in a few words, a few irrefutable words that would negate any attempt at self-justification—indeed, defy all contradiction. As it was, the words proliferated until the letter he'd been beating his brains about since saying goodbye to Julie became more and more muddled. So far, the innumerable sentences they formed existed only in his head. Jakob, who was meant to read, understand, and be moved and reduced to silence by them, wouldn't understand a thing unless he could rein them
back on paper. And what a defeat that would be, given that the whole point was to bring home to Jakob, at long last, what he'd done to him. But he didn't want, either, to disguise the fact that he might have suffered all too willingly, and that he was partly responsible for the duration of his suffering because of the persistence with which he'd clung to it. He would write that too. He didn't want to complain, but he didn't want to deny the truth either. Jakob must be compelled to realize what a mistake he'd made by leaving him and going away with Klinger. He'd thought he'd hit the jackpot, but he'd drawn a blank in the end, just like Erneste. America had brought him no luck.

A few words would have to suffice. Erneste wanted their brevity to be a lethal weapon that would reduce Jakob to silence forever, not only the strange new Jakob in America, but the one inside his head. He wanted to liberate himself from that one most of all. Jakob must realize how serious he was and how little he knew of the torment he'd suppressed for decades—decades! But he would mention that torment only in passing. The more casual their tone, the more effective his words would be.

Just then Erneste was grabbed from behind and jerked backward. He lost his balance, conscious of the viselike pressure of an arm clamped around his throat. The steely embrace cut off his breath and circulation. A thick, colorless curtain came down and he passed out, but not before hearing a voice whisper two words in his ear: “Cocksucker, buttfucker.”

He was lying on the floor when he recovered consciousness. Unsurprised, he fought for breath as he lay there on his back. He could hear himself gasping, hear his own hoarse breathing. Then he was hit with some heavy object, some kind of cudgel, first in the chest, then in the stomach. He curled up on his side, but no sooner had he done so than someone kicked him in the ribs. So there was more than one of them. He heard shouts nearby, but not for long. They were scared of attracting the attention of outsiders and alerting the police. Erneste wasn't the only one they'd picked on for their night's entertainment. Two or three others had also failed to make a run for it in time. There were several assailants, three at least. They never came alone and were always armed with weapons of some kind.

What he had always dreaded had now come to pass: they had caught him. Now he was in it up to his neck. They would kick and beat him senseless.

Too engrossed in his own thoughts, which were unconnected with his personal safety, he hadn't been alert or quick enough. He hadn't heard them coming or detected their lurking presence. They wanted their fun and they were having it. They beat up on anyone in the park they could catch, and they would go on doing so for as long as they thought fit. They alone would determine the duration of this orgy of violence. They were young and strong and convinced of the unimpeachable nature of what they were doing.

They usually turned up on weekends, but today was
Thursday. Warm, viscous blood was oozing from his nose and mouth. How on earth could he appear for work with a swollen nose and split lips?

Another blow, a faint, crunching sound from beneath the skin, and he passed out again. That was his temporary salvation.

The next time he recovered consciousness he at once took in the fact that four men were standing over him. They were concentrating on him alone. “Pervert!” they growled. “Filthy queer!” Erneste felt as if he was lying with his head in a dog turd, but what did that matter in his predicament? Why worry about that, of all things?

There was a lot of raucous laughter. He didn't catch what else was said because a thick, soundproof wall had muffled every sound. Kicks were being delivered. Each of the men was at liberty to kick him as often and in as many places as he chose. It's always the same, he thought: first you have a good idea, then a bad one. Strangely enough, only his assailants seemed to be really with it; he himself could scarcely feel a thing.

Perhaps one of the many blows he'd sustained had rendered him insensitive to all the blows that followed. Perhaps that crucial blow had struck, severed and deactivated a special nerve essential to the experiencing of pain. His body felt alien to him. Although he was lying helpless on the floor, he took a long stride, and after that he found himself in another world, and every succeeding blow reinforced his position in that other world. Another blow, and another, or no blow at all—it didn't matter, he felt
none of them. One connected with his knee, another with his genitals, another with his head again. They had stamina, his assailants, you had to grant them that much. He couldn't see their faces. They continued to aim deliberate, almost desperate blows at him, a squirming figure that might or might not have been screaming as well—he couldn't hear—but seemed curiously absent. He was elsewhere, but he probably wouldn't die; the frontier he'd just crossed gave access to deserted terrain, a rendezvous for the insensitive. He was in a state of drunken dissolution, not a permanent condition but one that fortunately persisted. Then it went dark again. Jakob and the letter, Klinger and America, Julie and his own uninteresting existence—all had disappeared. Everything within him concentrated on remaining in that other world.

The noise had almost died down by the time he came to again. Guffawing, they unzipped their flies. What better way of demonstrating their superiority, what more effective display of contempt, than to wisecrack as they pissed on him? They must have been drinking beer, because it was two or three minutes before they strode out, one of them whistling a popular tune. They'd had an enjoyable Thursday night. Everything had gone the way they'd hoped, maybe even better.

A church clock struck once just as he tried to get to his feet. It had to be one o'clock or half-past. He was overcome by the pain he'd been spared until now.

His attempt to get up seemed to rend him in two. He
collapsed. He couldn't stand, couldn't walk, couldn't call for help. No sound escaped his lips, just a trickle of blood. He was doomed to pick up the thread they'd extracted from his body: he wasn't dead.

No morning newspaper would report what had happened here. He was alone, the others had gone, no one could help him, no one would tend him. He should go to the hospital, but he wouldn't. The urine was beginning to evaporate and leave a sticky film on his skin. Unable to suppress his nausea, he vomited, soiling his jacket and trousers. It was self-loathing that eventually lent him the strength to stand up. He had to. His clothes were sodden, torn and filthy like his inner self—there was no difference. His one thought was to get away from there, to get up, go home and wash, sluice off the filth they'd soiled him with. He was soiled. That wouldn't wash off so quickly, but he must make a start. He must wash, shower, soak in the bathtub, lie there until the stench of blood and urine and vomit had disappeared from this cramped world of his, until the scent of soap had displaced the stench of humiliation.

Back on his feet at last, he essayed a first few faltering steps. It might take him hours to reach home.

When he awoke the next morning he made up his mind to pay Klinger a visit. He wouldn't write to Jakob for the time being.

They said goodbye on the platform in Basel on October 15, 1935. Erneste's memory of that occasion was as vivid as his memory of their first meeting on the landing stage beside the Lake of Brienz. They shook hands and went their separate ways amid countless people hurrying from somewhere to somewhere else, and although they knew and had assured each other that they weren't saying goodbye forever, this parting would later prove to have set an almost casual seal on their mutual love, which wouldn't revive as Erneste hoped when they saw each other again, or only on his side. Their heyday was over.

Erneste was disheartened by what happened six months later, when they met by arrangement and shook hands again on the very same platform in Basel station, for Jakob's manner, when they confronted each other again after all those months, was cold and aloof. Erneste tried to persuade himself that it was only natural to feel a certain initial strangeness after a long separation, but he couldn't fail to notice that Jakob almost imperceptibly shrank away from him.

Although he clung for a while to the belief that their relationship would continue, that it could be revived or resurrected in some way, Jakob had quite simply changed. He was six months older, six months more mature. He had seen his family again and mingled with people whom he never mentioned, but who had exerted an influence on him. Nothing else could account for his transformation, within six months, into a reticent young man.

But that lay in the future. It was still October, and there was no doubt that Jakob, too, believed that their happiness would endure and their reunion be unconstrained. A handshake under the gaze of strangers before whom they observed the social conventions—that handshake was all they permitted themselves when saying goodbye in the fall of 1935. They refrained from any more intimate physical contact, for instance an embrace of the kind permissible between brothers. They might have been mistaken for brothers had they kissed each other on the cheek, but they didn't, afraid that even the most innocent gesture might give them away.

The season in Giessbach was over. The hotel got no sun during the winter, so it remained closed until the spring. The place was too bleak and inhospitable for guests at this time of year, but Herr Direktor Wagner and his wife, together with his secretary and the cellarman, a local from Brienz, remained on the premises to catch up on the paperwork that had been neglected during the summer months, ensure that the pipes didn't freeze up, and guard against pilfering. Where the rest of the staff were concerned,
the majority would not be back before the middle of March. Although there were countless hotels in Thun, Interlaken and Lucerne where they could probably have found work, most of them scattered to the four winds. The
saisonniers
, or seasonal workers, either went home to their families, where they spent the winter as prosperous citizens envied by their impoverished friends and relations, or sought work at luxury hotels far afield, where they usually performed menial and ill-paid jobs for which they were rewarded with good references. Glad of a brief escape from the uneventfulness of life in the country, they undoubtedly led an easier, freer existence in the towns. But when their thoughts harked back to Giessbach, as they often did after only a few days, they felt faintly nostalgic for the lake, the forest and the cascades, with the result that they were happy to return in spring to the place they had blithely left in the fall. All except for Erneste, who was anything but happy to have to leave Giessbach and the room he'd been sharing with Jakob.

Erneste went to Paris, as he had in previous years. He'd failed to convince Jakob how essential it was to continue their joint existence in an attic room at the Lutétia, the Meurisse, or some other Parisian hotel where he could easily have found his friend a job had he wanted one. But Jakob was homesick for Germany. He listened attentively but remained adamant, determined to go home and show off his new-found skills. Now that full employment prevailed in Germany, he said, he would be bound to find a well-paid job at the Domhotel or some other
establishment in Cologne. And so it turned out: he spent five months working in a senior position at the Savoy.

So Jakob went back to Germany, where his family and friends were impatient to see him again, or so he claimed. Although the only mail he'd received during his months at Giessbach were two postcards from his mother, which he showed Erneste without comment, he steadfastly insisted how essential it was for him to return to Cologne and be reunited with his mother, his family and friends—friends whom he'd never mentioned and who had never written to him. He'd heard and read so much about the improved conditions in Germany under the new regime, he wanted to see them for himself. Jakob had expressed this sudden interest in the changes back home after picking up one or two details from hotel guests and the newspapers. He had spoken of Hitler and Goebbels and the forthcoming Berlin Olympics, and Erneste had no reason to doubt that his interest was genuine.

Yet it had seemed to him that Jakob was speaking from behind a mask, telling lies in ignorance of what to conceal. This feeling might merely have been an expression of Erneste's deep but possibly quite unjustified concern, a symptom of the pain of separation. On the other hand, perhaps his impression really was well-founded.