The Boxer (8 page)

A
ron‘s last thoughts during the drive, when it was already dark, with Clifford moaning softly in the background, circled around Paula. If she would still be there, and if not, if she would come back, if perhaps the feared farewell letter would be lying there. He even started thinking if he could do something to
keep Paula
, but he did not know what.

Paula was there. She was lying on the bed reading a book in English when Aron walked into the room. (The book, one of only a few keepsakes, is still in Aron’s possession. It is entitled
Erewhon, or Over the Range
and is written by Samuel Butler.) She said, “Is it all right that I’m still here?”

From then on she lived with Aron. Little by little she brought everything she needed from her own apartment, which she didn’t give up and which Aron never saw. Primarily she brought clothes, but also tableware, some vases because it was summertime, a number of canned goods, a night table, so that soon there was no reason for her to go home anymore. Aron didn’t think about their living together, he explains, he virtually avoided the subject. The knowledge of being in love was enough, and he had no further thoughts about Paula’s motives. She must, like him, have been in love, what else? He excluded pity; he strongly believes that he would have known if it was pity. Yet days later, coming back to Paula’s reasons, he actually can’t imagine that a woman like her could have been in love with him. Therefore, he absolutely could not think of any reason why Paula had lived with him, even though, naturally, there must have been one; it’s logical, nothing happens without a reason.

Soon their relationship became marriagelike. They respected each other’s habits and posed no demands they assumed might be arduous or tiresome. Aron reports that his main occupation during those first days was finding out Paula’s habits. He wanted to avoid any accidents that might arise from not knowing these habits, and Paula,
judging from their success
, must have made a similar effort.

As for her past, Paula was discreet. Unlike with Alois Weber, Aron would have liked to hear a long history from her, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Only when he posed concrete questions, never on her own initiative, did she offer information about herself. In these instances, her tone wasn’t unfriendly, but her replies were always brief and never went beyond the specifics of the question. From this he concluded that she answered unwillingly, that she said things only so as not to appear curt, which is why he soon stopped questioning her. Once he asked her if she had spent the war in a camp, whereupon she answered, “No, in England.” Nothing else, not even later, even though she must have realized from his question that he was interested in more detailed information. So he knew almost nothing about her past.

Aron’s knowledge of contemporary Paula was extensive, even if one must take into consideration that ignoring her past inevitably led to a certain superficiality. But the attainment of this knowledge, Aron emphasizes, was delightful. He soon found out, he says, that Paula was primarily a theoretical person. She preferred to talk about problems concerning humanity, the century, or
science
, and talked about the basics of living together only when it was unavoidable. If Aron asked her what she wanted for dinner, he could be certain that she would name the first dish that came into her mind, and that was that. But if he brought the conversation around to the closing of vacant lots, he had to be careful or she would be late for work.

He thought she suffered from an illness. He came to this conclusion because, as long as she lived with him, she took a pill every morning and every night, but she said nothing about this either. She didn’t keep it a secret; sometimes she would already be in bed while Aron was still up and she would call out, “Will you bring me a glass of water for the pill?” She simply didn’t talk about it. The name that Aron read on the bottle revealed nothing; he wrote it on a piece of paper and intended, if the opportunity presented itself, to ask a doctor what the pills were for or against, but he forgot about it.

He found that Paula exaggerated hygiene. After the smallest household task she would wash her hands, she spent hours in the bathroom daily, the best discovery for her were the bottles of bath oils. Twice a week she would change the sheets, the towels daily, and it often happened that when Aron would have liked to have her with him she’d be standing in the bathroom doing the washing. The corridor was always full of laundry hung up to dry. This obsession of hers, as Aron calls it, wasn’t an issue, however; even when it bothered him he stuck with his intention of accepting Paula with all her characteristics.

I
don’t just mean in this specific case,” I say, “but don’t you think it’s false tolerance when one resolves not to criticize someone under any circumstance?”

“Our relationship,” Aron says, “had nothing to do with tolerance. I didn’t want to disturb her, just like I didn’t want to be disturbed by her.”

“But she did disturb you?”

“Do you think I didn’t disturb her? Trust me, the person who never disturbs anyone hasn’t been born yet. Not disturbing means to disturb as little as possible.”

I hadn’t asked my question randomly; for a long time I had been looking for a pretext to involve him in a discussion about tolerance. Since we first met, I have suspected more and more that Aron’s solitude lies essentially in the fact that, in his world, tolerance and lack of criticism are considered one and the same. But the privilege to be left alone, not to be bothered, in the long run, is a horrible disadvantage, because it means nothing more than exclusion fromthe community. The most honest intentions can be behind it, but that doesn’tchange the result. Yet suddenly I doubt if it makes sense to discuss this in detailwith someone who is the victim of such a delusion.

I
n erotic matters, a field that is not irrelevant when considering the prospect of living together for an extended period of time, Aron says, Paula had been a great experience for him, a revelation. Not because she was particularly refined, nor because of the extent of her demands. She had never made any, thus there had been no cause for his fear that their age difference, the real extent of which only he knew, could lead to complications. He was much more amazed, and at the same time delighted, at how much she attracted him, not only during the first days. And this meant far more to him than any other comfort in that otherwise bleak time. It also helped him enormously in getting over the difficult loss of his wife, Lydia, about which and of whom he never said a word to Paula.

An even greater quirk than the excessive hygiene was, in his eyes, Paula’s passion for astrology. She owned several books on astrology, among them a thick one with the horoscopes of famous people. She didn’t read it from start to finish, simply because she already knew all their horoscopes; rather she would dip into it now and then. The possibility that constellations could influence people’s destinies fascinated her, or at least it preoccupied her constantly, and it wasn’t easy for him, Aron, always to keep a straight face when she talked about it. Still, he doesn’t think she went so far as to come to any conclusions about her own behavior based on the position of celestial bodies. She never said, “Today Jupiter and Uranus are so-and-so aligned, therefore today I’ll do this and that or I won’t do this and that.” And she didn’t think that way either. Her preoccupation with astrology was predominantly theoretical; her pleasure in it was Greek to him. Once he asked her, “Do you believe it or not?” She replied, “It’s so mysterious.”

A finishing touch to her personality: Aron relates that Paula was — he can’t find a more appropriate word — a fanatic flower lover. To my question if he isn’t exaggerating the details now, he says no, that characteristic trait absolutely belongs to Paula and I shouldn’t always think exclusively of
getting on
with the story. The number of vases she had brought from her apartment had been, in his opinion, incredible. Thirteen pieces in all, and he couldn’t remember that a vase ever stood empty in the room, not from the first day of his return.

U
sually she would leave the apartment at half past eight in the morning and come back in the evening, around half past six. Aron was alone the whole day, except for Sundays.

One afternoon, when he was getting his monthly aid from the department in the center of the city (the first clue regarding his income), he met an acquaintance who had survived the same camp he had, a certain Abraham Kenik. Kenik came up to him in the waiting room and said, “Is it really you, Aron?” They had last seen each other the day the camp was liberated. “What brings you to Berlin?” Kenik asked.

“Where else should I be?”

“How should I know? Home?”

“You’ll laugh,” Aron said. “This is my home.”

“Right, you are at home here. By the way, Aron, why do I never see you?”

“Where should you see me?”

“Didn’t anybody tell you where we meet?”

“Who’s we?”

“Our people. Those of us who survived. At least a few of us.”

“No, where do you meet?”

“We have a bar. That is, it’s not ours, I don’t even know who it belongs to, definitely a goy. Do you have pen and paper?”

Kenik jotted down the address on a piece of paper; the bar was called Hessischen Weinstuben. Aron stuck the paper in his pocket and asked, “What do you do there?”

“What do we do? We drink, eat, play billiards, play cards, talk about business, what else?”

“About what business?”

“Come join us,” Kenik said, trying to sound enticing. He was called, picked up his aid money, and on his way out said, “Do come, I’m there almost every day.”

For several days Aron disregarded the paper in his pocket, did not actually throw it away, yet he didn’t think he’d ever need the address. No sensible reason occurred to him why he should go to the Hessischen Weinstuben and meet Kenik there. Besides, he didn’t feel like it. The other survivors,
what kind of a relationship is that?
What should he talk to them about? At best about the old times, but he didn’t care about that, he couldn’t care less. Aron imagined that they had erected a sort of new ghetto, without external obligation, and he didn’t want to take part in it. The only attraction was that, as Kenik had mentioned, there was something to drink. Probably there was liquor in sufficient quantity, yet even that prospect didn’t compare with the disadvantages that had risen so clearly in his mind.

Then at breakfast Paula said, “Arno, I have to tell you something.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t like you.”

“Already?”

“I’m serious, Arno,” she said. “I don’t like the way you squander your time. You live like an old woman, like our housekeeper. You go shopping, stand patiently in line, you cook — what kind of a life is that? Are you waiting for something? I mean, you should get some kind of job.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do. I’m not talking about money, you know that. I just think that it can’t go on like this. As if you were an old man.”

“And what do you suggest?”

“If you want,” Paula said, “I can look around for a job for you. These days there’s more than enough work to go around. All we have to do is discuss what would be a proper job for you. Should we do that?”

“No.”

Aron felt that Paula was right. He refused her offer mainly because it was exclusively his problem. Before long, though, he was thankful that she had drawn his attention so clearly to an unsatisfactory state before he got used to it and took it for granted. Paula realized how uncomfortable the topic was for him, so she let it lie, remaining silent. He had thought, Aron says, Lydia wouldn’t have let off so easily.

T
he following day he went to the Hessischen Weinstuben. The bar was in a noticeably unscathed quarter; the name was on a large sign across the entrance and window, in letters that looked like they were shaped out of green tendrils of vine. In the middle of the room was a billiard table, surrounded by players. Aron checked to see if among them there was a face that he remembered. One of the players asked him, “Are you looking for someone?”

“A certain Kenik.”

“If he’s here then he’s over in that room,” the player said.

Aron was unhappy with this beginning; he had come halfheartedly as it was, definitely not because of Kenik. Now it was as if he were there only because he wanted to see Kenik. He saw no face he recognized. The player said, “What’s the matter, don’t you want to go and see if he’s there?”

Aron stepped into the room. It said “Private” on the door, and he immediately saw that this was actually the bar that Kenik had told him about — full of smoke, protected from hostile looks, and reserved for the initiated. The survivors were sitting at perhaps fifteen tables. Still looking for a face he knew, Aron heard his name being called loudly. Kenik came toward him with outstretched arms. “There you are at last!” Kenik cried.

He pulled Aron to a table, where three men he didn’t know were seated, pushed him onto a chair, and introduced him, effusively. While Kenik had gone to fetch drinks, the three men asked Aron about his background. They named the camp where they had spent the war and wanted to know the name of his, as if all the important details about the past were given in this manner. Kenik put drinks on the table and said, “Don’t be angry with me, I’m really happy.”

“Why should I be angry?”

“He saved my life once,” Kenik said to the others and started telling them the story.

“Don’t exaggerate.”

The truth is that during their fourth month together at the camp, while working in the quarry, Kenik had collapsed and didn’t move. Aron, whoaccidentally had been working near him, dragged him behind a pile of stones. Not because of the shade, rather to get him out of sight of the
supervisory staff
, who were always on edge and who often used their right ofimmediate execution of prisoners in cases of feigned inability to work. They first got to know each other, Aron says, behind that pile of rocks. He spoke encouragingly to Kenik. He didn’t impute Kenik’s collapse to physical exhaustion, but interpreted it as the manifestation of widespread demoralization — Kenik had had enough. Aron let him lie there; he had to go on working, he didn’t want to take on any unnecessary risks. Miraculously, at the end of the workday Kenik still hadn’t been discovered. Aron went back to him, stood him on his feet, and helped him back to the barracks. That’s all it was, he says, a glorious rescue. By the next morning Kenik was his normal self again.