This quotation is not from any of the articles in Tassilo Huber’s collection on the onset of the new barbarism, although only its style would mark it out from those modern studies. I copied it from an heirloom, a yellowing paper that I have kept for years in my collection of educational memorabilia. It comes from a teachers’ journal published in Rhineland-Westphalia and is dated 22 June 1906.
I had intended, as something of a joke, to duplicate this gloomy account of the condition of society, and hand it out to the staff before the meeting that was to deal with the battle of the school fence and the disciplinary measures to be taken. I could also have added to my flyer the five reasons for the decadence of modern youth as succinctly analysed by the writer of this piece, a school headmaster, not last week but almost a century ago. They were the break-up of the family unit, inadequate living conditions, alcoholism, loss of religious faith and unrestricted freedom of the press. I was going to mention the source and the date of my material only on the other side of the flyer.
But then I refrained after all; more likely my little joke would just have made the situation worse. Brauckmann had already gone public with his demand to have all nine combatants, without exception, excluded from the school on the grounds that they were all lying through their teeth. Poor Christian humbly approached me later, asking if I thought it would be a good idea for him to visit Rudi Ballensiefen at home, although Rudi was already back in training for his football club, and apologize to both him and his parents, maybe also bringing Rudi a present. I told him he’d do better to stay put in school learning his lines as Mercutio.
It was not exactly easy, however, to get that idiot out of trouble, along with a few of the others whom I felt sorry for. I can’t deny that Natascha Schmidtlein, who is not only plump but also bone idle, had already prejudiced her teachers against her so much that most of them secretly thought it served her right to be called Fatso by the boy who started the trouble. A certain amount of resentment came though in the discussion, anyway; it was chiefly Natascha’s teachers who claimed that Christian Berkhan had no conceivable reason for threatening to smash in the faces of the four students sitting on the bench, certainly not for hitting little Rudi Ballensiefen so hard on the head.
At the beginning of the meeting only Elke Lampert was on my side (she’s been feeling better since her husband showed her a succinct letter dumping his lover, which he then posted before Elke’s eyes). Initially she confined herself to the sensible and moderate comment that while this outbreak of violence was certainly both regrettable and disturbing, there was no need to make a great song and dance about it. That wouldn’t do anything to improve the atmosphere in the school, said Elke. However, when our maths and physics teacher Philippovich, who is known to think poorly of the intelligence of the female sex, was the first to say roundly that Christian Berkhan had run amok for no reason at all, Elke got into her stride.
She protested indignantly against any attempt to make light of the injury to Natascha’s feelings. It wasn’t unknown, she said, for such obscene aggression to be tolerantly regarded as a trifling offence and played down. But anyone thus inclined might stop to think what lasting hurt that remark, which was of course going the rounds of the whole school, had inflicted on Natascha Schmidtlein. And perhaps we all ought to ask ourselves whether there wasn’t a positive side to it when a boy like Christian wouldn’t let malicious abuse of Natascha pass, not of course that Elke meant to excuse his part in the fracas.
I thought her plea was well phrased, although I have some doubts whether Natascha’s well-upholstered nature had suffered very much from the insult. At an appropriate point I put forward another argument, which I would have done better to discuss with Christian first. I said that from my own observation I could see he was still feeling pain in the genital area, and if he hadn’t said so explicitly, his reticence was certainly thanks to his usual inclination to settle quarrels peacefully, even if that meant that he came off worst. At least the second part of my argument was perfectly true.
The tribunal came to a satisfactory conclusion. The meeting decided that the evidence hadn’t shown clearly whether one or another of the participants in the fray was particularly to blame. On these grounds the principal gave all nine involved a stern warning. I quoted the final passage of our conclusions in Christian’s German lesson, raising my voice: any repetition of the incident would lead to the instant exclusion of the guilty parties from school, without any right to appeal. That skunk Oliver Zacher grinned all over his face, and I sent him out of the room for ten minutes to try working out what was so funny about this announcement.
After the meeting, when my colleague Brauckmann congratulated me with a nasty smile on the great success of my lessons on peacekeeping, I said well, he knew me. Of course my colleagues are keeping a close eye on my series of lessons on the Georgian civil war. I’ve no objection. I just have to make sure that it furthers the ability of my students to think creatively, more so than the material that it replaces on the timetable.
At first I had considered opening the four lessons with a digression on the mythical phase of the history of Georgia, since it was possible that the Argonauts’ adventurous voyage to the land of Colchis might stimulate the students’ imagination and arouse their interest. However, I had my first doubts when I looked up Gustav Schwab’s book The Finest Legends of Classical Antiquity and read his preface, written in 1837.
Of course it didn’t surprise me that the good Stuttgart schoolmaster wanted his work to serve a useful purpose in the education of young people in our fatherland, and therefore made sure that “everything offensive” was removed from his retelling of the violent deeds of the heroes. And it amuses me that he finds himself in some difficulty because certain subjects “contrary to our higher concepts of morality, and even in antiquity recognized as unnatural (for instance in the Oedipus legend)… cannot be ignored”. But I’m rather afraid that Pastor Schwab’s efforts to bowdlerize such scandalous stories so as “to cause young people neither to pursue unedifying ideas nor to indulge their curiosity” are a waste of time today.
My bright sparks here don’t need to indulge any curiosity; they know the facts. If I were to teach them about Oedipus and ask how they would describe his character, some wit would probably whisper audibly to his neighbours, “Motherfucker!” Perhaps one or two of the more sensitive might be impressed by the story of how the Argonauts’ sails began to flutter as if in a storm when the great eagle few over them on the way to torment Prometheus. But the fact that the Colchians hung up their dead heroes to dry in the air, while they buried the women “so that the earth would have its part in them” would certainly be greeted by merriment. “Only the dead women, Herr Kestner?” “Didn’t they have any better fertilizers?”
No, I shall probably start by giving them two texts, a speech made by President Gamsakhurdia and one made by President Shevardnadze. Their exactly identical arguments are the best way to convey the absurdity of the civil war: each of the presidents accuses the other of planning to hand over the fatherland to the Russians, and making a pact with the KGB to that end.
The KGB, incidentally, and not just according to these sources, seems still to play a considerable or at least an ominous part in events in the Republic of Georgia.
Yes, and the Georgians still cut their enemies’ throats as they did in King David’s time!
But no, really, on the basis of what little I know, isn’t it equally possible that our guest brought gloves because an elegant man always sports such accessories on special occasions at home in Georgia, so Ninoshvili thinks they’re de rigueur in Germany too? And perhaps he carries that flick knife around with him just because he’s read that you have to expect to be attacked at any time on our streets in Germany. What do I really know about the man, after all?
Chapter 22
It may have been meant as an act of reparation, but anyway Tassilo Huber has fixed it for me and Julia to be invited to an evening reception in the Town Hall. I didn’
t feel particularly keen to attend this social event—it was being held to welcome the new Town Clerk—but Julia seemed interested, and so did Ninoshvili as soon as he heard about it.
Julia asked me in private if I’d call Herr Huber and ask him for an invitation for David as well. It would give our guest a chance of getting to know people who might be useful for his project, she said. So I phoned Tassilo Huber. “By all means,” he said. “And there’s a woman on my Party committee who runs an aid programme for Georgia, she’d be very interested to talk to your guest.”
The three of us took a taxi to the Town Hall. I sat in the front passenger seat, which Ninoshvili had left for me, while he opened the door to the back seat for Julia and got in beside her. He was wearing his dark-blue suit, a white shirt and a striped dark-blue tie, but not the black gloves. He looked very handsome.
In the turmoil of people talking at the top of their voices, Tass introduced me to the head of the education authority, a gaunt-faced bore who tried to make conversation by asking me about our school sports hall, which needs renovation. I haven’t seen the inside of the sports hall for years, but I did my best for the school by describing the deficiencies I’d sometimes heard mentioned at staff meetings, just as if I had come to the Town Hall straight from a depressing survey of the place. The head of the education authority showed no understanding and indeed no interest, although he had raised the subject in the first place. He seemed to find me as tedious as I found him.
Meanwhile Tass had led Ninoshvili further on. Julia followed them after giving the head of the education authority a friendly nod, to which he responded with a little bow. While I was still occupied with the holes in the flooring of the sports hall and the danger to life and limb they represented, I saw Ninoshvili and Julia in conversation with a curly-haired young woman who kept nodding and frowning earnestly while Ninoshvili talked to her. Another rather older woman in a black trouser suit joined them, and Ninoshvili bowed to her as if to kiss her right hand.
I concluded my report on the state of the sports hall, thinking that I might get rid of the head of the education authority by preserving a dogged silence. But he didn’t seem to know any of the many other guests at the reception, and remained rooted to the spot, now and then casting a fleeting glance around but then turning his hollow eyes on me again and murmuring, “Ah, yes,” as he sipped at his glass. I wondered how he would react if I asked him, “Why don’t you just go home?” But before I could bring myself to try it, the Mayor began his speech.
He stepped up to a microphone, his chain of office hanging around him; a man of about forty-five with a crew cut and rimless glasses followed him, placed himself on the Mayor’s right and two steps behind him, and folded his hands in front of him. The Mayor tried out the microphone a couple of times and then began, “Your Eminence, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen.”
I couldn’t see Julia and Ninoshvili any more in the crowd turning towards the microphone in a semi-circular formation. The Mayor’s voice was soothing; I felt myself becoming drowsy, closed my eyes, managed to open them again with an effort but let my eyelids sink once more. I fell into a doze in which tiny yellow points of light appeared on the reddish background of my closed lids, moving gently like candle flames seen burning in the distance by night.
The smell of the candles reached my nostrils as well, I breathed it in, assessed it. It wasn’t the smell of church, of the cool cross-vaulting there. Or of the graveyard and the moist breath of All Saints’ Day. No. Christmas time. It wasn’t just the candles I could smell. Gingerbread, spice biscuits, oranges. The resin and needles of a Christmas tree. The fresh paint of my new toy. Still in my pyjamas, I crawled under the tree early in the morning on the first day of Christmas and brought out the red omnibus that I had put there after the present-giving on Christmas Eve, in case anyone carelessly trod on it.
I woke up as the people around me began laughing and clapping. The new Town Clerk was at the microphone now. He had probably just cracked a little joke. “It’s clear to me that as an outsider, I shall have to consider myself on probation among you at first. I’ve been told that it took even the Archbishop twenty-five years before he could say, without fear of contradiction, that he was a citizen of this place.”
Once this speech too was over, and the noise and chattering broke out again, I nodded to the head of the education authority, who was clearly about to ask me for my first impressions of the new Town Clerk, moved a few steps away and looked for Julia and Ninoshvili. I couldn’t see them. But unexpectedly Herr Hochgeschurz came up to me, carrying a glass of beer. “Good evening, Herr Kestner,” he said, offering me his fat hand. After he had drunk some beer, he smiled and asked, “How are you?”
I said I was all right. Herr Hochgeschurz nodded, reached for a tray being carried past by a waiter, and helped himself to another beer. Having taken a sip of this one, he asked, “Have you actually met Herr Schumann?” No, I said, I hadn’t yet had that pleasure. The agent raised his chin and jerked it sideways. “That’s him. The young man in the bow tie.”
Herr Gero Schumann looked even more stylish than I had imagined him. As well as his dark-red bow tie he wore a dark red blazer with gold-coloured buttons and black trousers. His fair hair was cut short and neatly parted in the middle, he had pale-blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. He was engaged in lively conversation with two ladies, both of rather mature age but elegantly dressed. Herr Schumann burst into laughter and threw his head back; the ladies, also laughing, showed their gleaming crowned teeth.
Herr Hochgeschurz said, “You might not believe it, but he gets on particularly well with women of that age.”
“Well, why not?” I said.
I saw Julia and Ninoshvili behind Herr Schumann and his motherly admirers. They were talking to a bald man who seemed to be explaining something to Ninoshvili; he kept prodding his forefinger in the direction of the Georgian’s chest. Ninoshvili was listening attentively, his face turned slightly away, and nodding at every third word.
Herr Hochgeschurz followed the direction of my glance as he breathed in audibly through his broad nose. I asked the agent, “Do you know the gentleman standing there with my wife?”
“The bald man?”
“That’s right.”
“He’s head of the Political Asylum Authority.”
I tried to preserve my composure by draining my glass, almost choked, beckoned to the waiter and took a beer. Hochgeschurz told the waiter, “Just a moment, please,” emptied his own glass and took a new one. He drank and wiped the foam from his upper lip. Then he asked, “Is the gentleman from Georgia your guest?”
I had a presentiment that Hochgeschurz had not met me in this large and confused crowd purely by chance. “Yes,” I said. “Do you know him?”
“Herr Huber introduced me to him in passing.” The agent was breathing heavily and looked at Ninoshvili, the head of the asylum authority and Julia, who was speaking now and turning to the bald man. As I raised my glass again, Herr Hochgeschurz added, “But I met him again the day before yesterday.”
I looked at him over the rim of my glass. “In the courthouse,” he said. “Your wife had brought him to a trial with her. He spent all morning listening in the public gallery.” Hochgeschurz smiled. “He seemed fascinated by the proceedings.” After a couple of noisy breaths, he asked, “A lawyer himself, is he?”
“No.” I think I can be sure of that at least. David Ninoshvili may be all kinds of things, but as far as I’m aware he’s not a lawyer. And God knows what he was doing in that courthouse.
On that very day, the day before yesterday, he had told me in front of Julia before I left the house that he had an appointment with a publisher’s commissioning editor that morning.
Chapter 23
The trial was nothing to do with agents. The proceedings had involved a nineteen-year-old hairdresser who had refused to dance with the driver of a beer-and-spirits truck in the Blue Moon disco. Thereupon the truck driver and two of his friends h
ad pushed the hairdresser up against the bar and indecently groped her. She had freed herself by throwing her whisky-and-coke into the truck driver’s face, and the glass had broken and cut her rejected suitor’s upper lip. The three men had caught up with the hairdresser as she tried to get away through the back entrance, and one of them, a man of twenty-two living on benefits, had grabbed her long blonde hair and slammed her face several times against the drinks dispenser in the passage leading to the Gents and the Ladies.
The trial had lasted from nine in the morning until lunchtime, because there were a number of witnesses giving evidence, including the barman and the attendant in the Ladies, the crews of two police patrol cars and a couple of civilians who had helped to overpower the twenty-two-year-old when he tried to resist arrest. Julia, who was appearing for the defence, had argued that the hairdresser should have known and did in fact know that the Blue Moon was a place of disrepute where sexual molestation was more or less the norm. She at least got her client spared a custodial sentence, although he was fined to the amount of twenty times his daily wages plus compensatory damages.
I would probably never have heard about this real-life drama if I hadn’t asked Julia, as if casually, when we had come home from Town Hall and gone to bed, why Ninoshvili had gone to the courthouse with her. She lowered her book and looked at me.
“Where did you hear about that?”
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