A Perfect Waiter

by Alain Claude Sulzer

  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 t
urned 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.”

  “So why now?”

  “Because you called me. Because Jakob is also dead now. I’d almost forgotten him. Perhaps, too, because death is now closer to me than anything else. There’s no real explanation.”

  “I’m still alive.”

  “And you can bear to hear the truth. You are, as I already said, a perfect waiter.”

  “Yes, that’s been my lifelong ambition. I wanted Jakob to be one too. He didn’t quite manage it, unfortunately.”

  “Who knows?”

  Erneste started to get up. He gripped the arms of his chair with both hands but sensed the other man’s eyes upon him and sat back again. “No, hear me out,” Klinger said. It was impossible to evade or interrupt him.

  “My son’s farewell letter was brutally brief. It dealt with his existence ever since that day in Giessbach when Jakob came into our lives—yes, not only into my life but, as I gathered from his letter that night, into his as well. Two or three days earlier he had learned what he believed to be the full truth about Jakob’s false, double life, a life based on a lie in which I had a substantial share. When his eyes were accidentally opened to what was going on between Jakob and me behind his back—he didn’t say how or where or by whom—he felt that suicide was the only way out. I don’t know if he overheard us together. It’s also possible that other people gossiped about us. Then again, his own mother may have blurted out the truth in an unguarded moment. I used to think my wife naive, but now I’m not so sure she didn’t know.”

  Erneste listened to the old man in silence. All it needed was another few words and his life would appear in a different light, a lackluster light that robbed everything of color and transformed his nostalgia for Jakob into the undignified whimpering of a dog that dreads its master’s blows as much as it craves them. He could have risen with finality and brought Klinger’s account to an end. He could have shaken off his lethargy and turned on the light, but he continued to sit and stare at the shadowy figure in front of him, which seemed to increase in size the more quietly it spoke and the faster the words escaped its lips, for Klinger was speaking faster now. The shadow seated in front of Erneste seemed to be engulfing everything around it, not least his own past and the still intact part of the picture he entertained of it.

  “It was important to him to make me feel responsible for the act of self-destruction he would commit immediately after writing his letter. Only responsible? No, culpable. I should undoubtedly have felt guilty even if he hadn’t accused me, because unlike him, Jakob and I were free agents. He was a captive. I wanted something from Jakob and got it, just as Jakob wanted something from me and got it. In many respects, and despite our interdependence, we were free—in a word, adults. But my son believed in love and exclusivity. He believed in Jakob.

  “ ‘Double life’ and ‘living a lie’—those were the two phrases that recurred in his farewell letter, an unmistakable echo of Ibsen, whose plays he had devoured as a youngster. He accused me of leading a double life in which he had no place. He hurled the same charge at his mother—at all of us, whom he regarded as members and beneficiaries of a conspiracy. He could neither go nor stay, he wrote—he couldn’t move. Now that he’d seen through the lie into which we’d coerced him without his knowledge, he was finished, crushed, stifled. He had loved in secret and believed himself to be similarly loved in return, so how was he now, in retrospect, to evaluate that relationship? He’d deceived himself, he wrote, because he’d been deceived. He wondered what hold I must have had over Jakob to persuade him to give me his unconditional obedience, but he didn’t ask me that question. He died believing that I’d had to put pressure on Jakob—that he’d had to give himself to me against his will. How greatly he loved him, and how little he knew him! He lacked the courage to raise the subject with Jakob. He was a coward like me—he couldn’t discuss it with me either. He must have been utterly desperate during the few days before his suicide. If he’d tried to speak to me, I would have been able to enlighten him. But perhaps he wouldn’t have believed me, and who knows, I might have denied the whole thing. After all, wasn’t I jealous? Jealous and vain? A coward? I learned from Maxi’s letter that Jakob had seduced him back in Giessbach. At the age of seventeen, guileless but not guiltless, Maxi had been unresistingly seduced at the same time as Jakob seduced and enslaved me—at the same time as you and he were sharing a room together. A room and a bed, perhaps an ideal conception of love.”

  So Jakob had been nimbly moving from one to the other, from father to son and from him to still others, bewitching and tempting them all.

  “When Maxi made the unbearable discovery that his own father had been deceiving him with the person he loved most, the person who was, as he put it, his ‘hold on life’, his world promptly collapsed. He believed I knew about his tendencies—he thought I’d employed Jakob and taken him with us for his sake. And then, quite suddenly, it transpired that I hadn’t employed Jakob to enable Maxi to lead a carefree existence, but in my own interests—‘as ever’, he wrote. The fact is, it would never have occurred to me that Jakob’s relationship with my son was other than that of a servant. I’d stolen his lover, and he couldn’t live with that thought. Yes, I understand him.”

  Klinger seemed to have reached the end of his account, the end of a story in which Erneste had had no part except in one respect: the “ideal conception of love” of which Klinger had spoken, but which had really been no more than an abortive attempt to be loved. But Erneste hadn’t killed himself—he’d never even contemplated it.

  All he could see of Klinger’s eyes were the whites. The irises, eyelids and lashes had merged with the background in front of which he was sitting, slightly hunched but defiant, as if he might jump up at any moment. Erneste could only surmise th
at Klinger was watching him. The man was clearly unrelieved that he had recounted and explained everything worth knowing, all that he had thought of again and again over the years. The light was still on in the house across the street. Erneste’s neighbor hadn’t turned it off, so it probably stayed on the whole time. He could see the light even though he was sitting with his back to the window. The light in the apartment opposite was reflected in a mirror on the wall behind Klinger.

  Jakob’s love for Erneste had been only of brief duration, but that was possibly the best that could be said for it, because Jakob had probably meant what he said while it lasted. Et alors voilà qu’un soir il est parti, le Postillon de Longjumeau. And then, from one day to the next, the handsome young postilion had left.

  Klinger had been hard hit by his son’s suicide. His unexpected insight into Maximilian’s life had dealt him a blow which only a counterblow could parry. He prepared to deliver it within hours despite knowing that he himself would be its target. The reasons for Maxi’s death were enough to warrant throwing Jakob out. He had to get rid of him. Whether he would succeed in effacing him from his memory was temporarily unimportant. Time would tell.

  He sent for him before breakfast—even before he had seen anyone else. Jakob was looking wretched, and he looked more wretched still when Klinger gave him notice. He denied nothing and uttered no word of protest, neither disputed his responsibility for Maximilian’s death nor tried to change Klinger’s mind—which might have been easier than it seemed to him at the time. Klinger imagined that he could punish Jakob for his son’s death by committing an arbitrary act. If he couldn’t invest that death with meaning, he could at least repay one injustice with another. Later he realized how petty and unreasonable he had been, but that was later, not then. Then, when there was nothing more to be done, he wanted to take effective action of some kind. If he could do nothing else, he could punish himself, and he didn’t regret having done so, either then or later.