A Perfect Waiter (21 page)

Klinger glanced at his watch: half-past ten. He looked out the window—it was snowing even harder—and resumed his aimless tour of the apartment. It was time to bring the day to an end, but the futility with which the seconds were ticking away deterred him. He was in no hurry. Did this soothing silence conceal some disruptive element? If so, he couldn't place it. In an hour or so he would ask Jakob to bring him a cup of tea in bed. What would or would not happen then, time would tell.

Marianne Klinger had retired to bed and would not emerge from her room until morning. Her room was a desert island. No palm trees grew there, just memories of
days gone by—a vast and luxuriant store of memories kept alive by the innumerable souvenirs with which she surrounded herself, having long led a life of her own. It was twenty to eleven and still snowing when Klinger turned out the light in his study, which adjoined his bedroom, which in turn adjoined Jakob's. All three rooms had communicating doors, so Jakob was always available if he needed him. He left his study, which contained his desk and Jakob's smaller, uncluttered desk with its big American typewriter. Klinger's Adler had been left behind in Germany.

While his daughter was playing solitaire and Jakob busying himself with something in the kitchen, Klinger ambled through the spacious apartment, which was on the ninth floor of an eighteen-story building. The third time he passed Maximilian's room he felt tempted to knock on his door. It was so quiet in there, the boy had probably fallen asleep over his law books. If he really was asleep, Klinger reflected, he wouldn't hear the door open. But he abandoned the idea. Not wanting to disturb his son, he strolled on from room to room. The lighting was the way he liked it: subdued, never bright, and shed by at least one standard or table lamp in every room. His daughter glanced up from her solitaire as he passed the library again. She gave him a cursory nod, smiled, and quickly put down two cards. She looked so grown-up, so old, so remote. Didn't she have a girlfriend, a boyfriend? Eleven o'clock now. He was in the drawing room. He opened the door of the
grandfather clock that had accompanied him for years and wound it up as he did every night. He sat down, waiting, listening. Yes, all was quiet. Too quiet? Exactly how many paces away were his son, his daughter, his wife, Jakob? He would never know, nor did it seem important at that moment.

The tranquil silence was abruptly punctured by the sound of a door crashing back against a wall. Then he heard hurried footsteps making for the drawing room—making for him, beyond a doubt, and since he recognized those footsteps he wasn't surprised when Jakob appeared in the doorway.

Jakob paused on the threshold, his expression as unequivocal as the sound of his uncharacteristically hurried footsteps had been alarming: something had happened that shouldn't have happened. “Maxi,” he said softly, as if the others mustn't hear what he had to say. “Maxi…” He said it one more time, then his voice failed him, and Klinger, who couldn't know what had happened, sensed that this was no time for questions, so he didn't ask any. He jumped up and followed Jakob along the passage. Jakob hurried on ahead, and Klinger realized that he was on the verge of losing his composure without knowing why. He would know why very soon, but he wouldn't lose his composure after all.

He followed Jakob into Maxi's room. The nameless fear that had gripped him proved to be justified. His son lay stretched out on the bed only a few feet away, his face a yellowish, waxen shade. That wasn't a normal
complexion, it was the color of death. What business had he in Maximilian's room if Maximilian couldn't call him? The light was on. Turned on by whom? Maxi was wearing a dark suit Klinger had never seen before, a new one, perhaps, with his bare feet protruding from the trousers. No socks or shoes. He was wearing a jacket and trousers, a white shirt, a dark-blue tie, a gold stickpin with a green stone. Jacket and trousers, shirt, tie, stickpin.

Jacket and trousers, shirt, tie, stickpin. Dark-blue and gold, and peeking out of the trouser legs his bare feet, almost a boy's feet, yellowish like his face and even more naked in appearance. He looked as if he had climbed out of his body after death, as if he had bent down and rearranged his limbs—possibly even raised the drooping corners of his mouth to make death look less terrible. He hadn't succeeded, though, because he himself was death, he himself looked terrible irrespective of the expression on his face. He had forgotten to do up the zipper on his trousers and was wearing no underpants. Abashed and dismayed, Klinger averted his gaze. His dead son was wearing no underpants. Why not, if he hadn't left anything else to chance? Klinger felt he had glimpsed the flesh of Maxi's penis. It might have been his imagination, a deceptive trick of the light, but he didn't want to see it, nor did he have to see it for long, because Jakob proceeded to do what he, the boy's father, should have done. The action that should have come quite naturally to Maxi's father came quite
naturally to his manservant and lover. It was Jakob, not he, who bent over Maxi. Carefully, as if afraid of hurting the dead youth, the hand Klinger had so often held in his pulled up the zipper and concealed his son's dead flesh from his gaze, the piece of flesh whose function it was to give pleasure and create life. Klinger was overcome by a nausea such as he had never experienced before and would never experience again, a feeling that he, who believed himself capable of describing anything and everything, although he had not yet done so, would never be able to describe. He had no power over the destinies of the living. If they died they stayed dead, and there was nothing—no eraser or stroke of the pen—that could undo the death of a real person. A simple truth: his son was dead, but he hadn't died a natural death. The objects that had been nearest him at the last—the bottle of gin, the sleeping tablets—were eloquent enough. He had communed with those objects and they had communed with him, but now that he had fallen silent they were communing with themselves alone. Curiously enough, although Julius Klinger was forever finding new words for the unendurable, the proper emotions eluded him. He couldn't understand what had happened.

It looked as if Maximilian had tried to fold his hands in death. At the same time, however, it looked as if someone else had tried to wrench his folded hands apart, and the latter attempt had been more successful than the former, so only his fingertips were touching.
What a sight: his own son, dead in New York. Twenty-two years old. Three years younger than Jakob, thirty-one years younger than himself. What was the significance of the bare feet? Why wasn't he wearing any socks? Why the dark suit, the clean shirt, the tie, but no shoes? What would that have signified in a book, in one of his own novels? It wasn't hard to guess what had happened or imagine what lay in store for himself and his family. Klinger could see it all quite clearly. It was now up to him to knock on his wife's bedroom door, to wake her up, to forewarn her of “something terrible” and conduct her to her dead son's room, her beloved and only son's room. He would of course do this in the end. For the moment, though, he stood motionless some three feet from the end of the bed, staring at his son's bare feet. And while he was wondering why Jakob was bending over Maximilian and putting his left hand behind the boy's head and raising it as if he meant to kiss him, he saw out of the corner of his eye that there was an envelope tucked between the pages of the law book lying on the bedside table. Without thinking, he plucked it out and slipped it into his pocket. Jakob noticed nothing. Later he found that the envelope had not been addressed, but the deceased was his son, so this last letter belonged to him.

And so, while he was wondering what Jakob was doing and why, Klinger, who had still not touched his own, only son, appropriated the envelope because he suspected that its contents presented a threat to himself and his family's
peace of mind. Although only a suspicion, it was no less compelling than a certainty. Perhaps the letter said something that presented far more of a threat to him than Maximilian's death—an abominable thought, he reflected, thinking of himself. He was going through a tunnel and could see no light at the end, but he knew that he would get there someday. Not now, not tomorrow, but someday. All who traversed a tunnel reached the light in the end. The light or freedom.

Watching his lover and his son, Klinger saw Jakob close Maxi's eyes with his thumb and middle finger. He was watching a scene in which he had no allotted role. Only now did he grasp what had happened—what had happened a long time ago—and he was overcome by an incongruous emotion: jealousy.

He had never noticed anything.
He
had created this situation, not Jakob, not his son. What can a dead man do? Call something to us? Send us away? Was this the cathartic effect of dramatic intensity? Instead of summoning his wife he remained silent; instead of telling Jakob not to touch his son he said nothing. He was observing the scene of a lost battle; that was all he could do. He was condemned to be a war reporter, a painter of battle scenes. He did what a storyteller does: he looked around, noted details and instinctively memorized them. They would come in useful someday, but only when he could rearrange the decor. The bed on the left, the wardrobe on the right—and Jakob banished from the room.

The overhead light illuminated the scene with a merciless clarity appropriate to the dead youth and the objects that had facilitated his death. On the bedside table reposed an empty bottle of mineral water and a large tumbler, on the floor lay an overturned bottle of gin. The liquid spilled on the carpet had been absorbed, as witness the dark, damp patch and the faint scent of juniper that lingered in the air. Some sleeping tablets had fallen to the floor and dissolved in the moisture, forming fluffy white dots on the rug beside Maximilian's bed. They were the redundant tablets that had escaped from his fingers. No one would ever know what his last thoughts had been. All else was scrupulously neat and tidy.

“A doctor,” Klinger whispered. “It's too late,” Jakob said quietly. “Too late, he's dead.”

“But why?” said Klinger. Jakob stared at him in bewilderment. “Why?”

Although Klinger had had a vague feeling that someone, somewhere in the background, was waiting for a sign from him, he'd ignored it because all his attention was focused on what was
not
moving. But now, when he heard a rustle and seemed to sense a draft on the back of his neck, he realized that it was his daughter who had been standing behind him, possibly for several seconds. She had continued to sit over her cards, listening, until she couldn't stand it anymore. Unwilling to wait until she was called and incapable of concentrating on her solitary game any longer, she had listened intently to the strange
sounds coming from her brother's room. Now she had materialized behind her father and was shouting so loudly—shouting Maximilian's name in such a loud, anguished voice—that Klinger involuntarily turned and did something he had never done before: he hit her. He gave her such a slap that she reeled back into the doorway. He promptly regretted it, though he felt relieved and didn't apologize, composure being at odds with the situation. Needless to say, Josefa's cries alerted her mother.

Five people had crowded into Maximilian's room by the time Frau Moser entered it fifteen minutes later. The boy's body was obscured by the others, so she couldn't see it at first and took a few moments to fathom the situation. All she gathered, from the silence that lay heavy on all present, was that something momentous had occurred.

While the sky outside grew steadily darker, Klinger described in a flat, unemotional voice how he had been granted the dubious pleasure of learning “the whole truth” that same night. The living-room light wasn't on, so he was visible only in silhouette, but Erneste didn't get up and turn on the ceiling light, which had a yellowish mock alabaster bowl. He needed the darkness. He didn't want to see Klinger, but he wanted to hear what had happened. His mouth was parched and he was trembling, his back
and thighs bathed in sweat. He felt he hadn't washed for days. The air smelled of flowers although he never kept flowers in his apartment, and it wasn't Klinger that smelled of them.

When the doctor, a Viennese refugee, had filled out the death certificate and given Marianne Klinger a sedative before leaving, Klinger abandoned the others and shut himself up in his study. There, in the room where he wrote his books and dictated his letters and appeals, he sat down at his desk and tore open the envelope containing his son's bequest to him, a letter dashed off in a frenzy. He read and reread it, scanning the hurried lines again and again.

“I didn't read the letter once or twice that night, but twenty or thirty times. I skimmed it at first, then let every word eat its way into me, consume me, over and over again. I've no idea what the others thought—whether they wondered why I wasn't with them and why I didn't offer them any consolation or support. They may have believed I wanted to spare them the sight of my grief, when my only wish was not to confront them with the truth. I simply suppressed it because, if it had become known, my reputation would have suffered. No, I never had any intention of revealing the truth about me and my son, either then or later.”