A Perfect Waiter

by Alain Claude Sulzer

  Isolated snowflakes were falling on that bright, sunny winter’s morning. As fine and firm as grains of dust, they drifted slowly down onto a world inhabited by people ignorant of the misery of those who, high above their heads, were facing the dismal prospect of a day on which all was past redemption. Jakob stood in front of Klinger looking pale and exhausted, staring at the floor with his arms hanging limp at his sides. But Klinger looked past him at a window in the building opposite, where a young man was leaning perilously far out and doing something to a flagpole, although no flag could be seen.

  He didn’t mind what the others thought about his firing Jakob, who had been in his employ for so long, at this seemingly inappropriate juncture. Unlike Frau Moser, Jakob wasn’t an indispensable member of the household. He would simply not be there anymore, and it wasn’t until much later that Klinger found time to be surprised that no one had ever asked him why he’d let Jakob go. Neither his wife nor his daughter ever inquired the reason, which implied that they already knew it.

  He told Jakob to pack his things and leave the same day, the sooner the better. Then he handed him an envelope containing three months’ salary. Jakob would make out, he was experienced and knew plenty of people. He left the apartment at noon. Nobody saw him off or bade him farewell, and he himself considered it superfluous to shake hands with anyone. Besides, the others were too busy restoring order where Maximilian’s death had wrought disorder to give any thought to him.

  That evening, however, Marianne Klinger informed her husband that Jakob had kept watch over their son all night. She had found him seated beside the bed, wide awake, when she went into Maxi’s room at half-past seven. Until he became aware of her presence he appeared to be communing with the dead youth. “I got the feeling they had a language of their own,” she said. That had been the last time Jakob’s name was mentioned in Klinger’s presence until the day Erneste called him and requested an interview.

  Jakob’s suitcase was a small one, and he was in no hurry. There was plenty of time before he left to pack his few possessions: two pairs of trousers, two jackets, two pairs of shoes, underwear and socks, toilet things and writing materials, papers and money. Erneste sat on the bed with his knees drawn up and watched him packing. He wanted to memorize his every movement, knowing that he would subsist on the recollection for a long time to come. The little suitcase was lying open on the bed. Erneste could easily have touched it with his toes, but he did nothing of the kind. Mute and motionless, he looked on while Jakob, pausing for thought occasionally, went back and forth between the bed and the wardrobe, fetching various things that had accumulated in the last few months. All those tokens of his presence disappeared into the suitcase until nothing was left—until he might never have existed. Jakob had stripped to his underpants. The room beneath the eaves was already sweltering. It wasn’t eight o’clock yet, and the steamer for Interlaken didn’t leave until eleven. He was about to embark on the longest journey he’d ever made.

  Lying on the chair beside the washbasin were the clothes he would wear today, the day of his departure: a pair of white, lightweight slacks, a white cotton shirt, fawn socks and brown oxfords—all of them purchased on a recent trip to Interlaken like his smart leather suitcase, which he was packing with a care Erneste found surprising. The money for the suitcase and the new clothes had been provided by Klinger, who had sent Jakob to Schaufelberger’s department store with a blank check and instructions to get himself a decent outfit. Klinger had laid down no rules about his wardrobe, so he could wear whatever he chose.

  Jakob had asked Erneste to accompany him on his shopping trip to Interlaken, and although Erneste was under no illusions about its purpose, he had agreed. And that was how, for the space of half a day, their old, unconstrained relationship, which chimed so well with the glorious weather, had returned like some long familiar friend.

  Two young men strolling along the promenade … Two young men sitting in the Café Schuh … Erneste and Jakob said not a word about what lay ahead, not a word about their parting in three days’ time, not a word about the journey to Marseille and the voyage to America, not a word about Klinger and what would be lost beyond recall. For as long as their excursion to cosmopolitan little Interlaken lasted, the immediate future didn’t exist, nor did the next day or the day after that. They made their way along the lakeside promenade and through Interlaken’s shopping streets, walking so close together that their shoulders, arms and hands brushed again and again, at first by chance but later, perhaps, intentionally. Neither recoiled at the other’s touch. It was as natural as breathing, as walking itself. Erneste would have walked beside Jakob for years on end—on through Interlaken and other places on this and the other side of the world he knew. He shut his eyes while walking, and, in the dappled reddish gloom transfixed by the shafts of bright sunlight that impinged on his retinas, those years at Jakob’s side passed in a flash, serene and untroubled. Just as they were strolling through the town side by side, so they could have journeyed together down the years.

  It was a dream, and Erneste managed to sustain it until they boarded the little steamer that took them back to Giessbach late that afternoon—for far longer, at any rate, than he had hoped at the start of their brief day’s journey into the past. During the return trip across the lake, however, anguish overcame him with a ferocity that undid all his recent experiences: walking together, shopping at Schaufelberger’s, regaling themselves in the Café Schuh with Black Forest gâteau and coffee followed by a shandy apiece. Now, even Jakob seemed to have ceased to exist. He was already as remote as if he had been ousted from Erneste’s world at a stroke, even though, when Erneste opened his eyes, Jakob was still sitting there beside him, engrossed in thoughts to which he no longer had access. He couldn’t help fearing that those thoughts had ceased to be of him and were now of Klinger. For all that, however, Jakob had accomplished what he’d probably had in mind when asking Erneste to keep him company: a kind of reconciliation. To all appearances, therefore, it was as if Erneste hadn’t taken his infidelity amiss—as if he accepted it as a part of his character and an indispensable step into the future.

  He would have liked to ask Jakob a simple question, but he didn’t. It was far too late for simple questions like those that had haunted him for days. The question he dared not ask, because he dreaded a rebuff, was whether he could come with him to America. He, Erneste, at Jakob’s side in America … There must surely be a place for him in Klinger’s household, or, if not there, with one of the many other German families that were emigrating to America and had jobs to offer.

  But he didn’t ask, neither on the trip back to Giessbach, nor during the night that followed, nor during the very last night they spent together, when neither of them refused the other. Even as they were responding to each other with every fiber of their bodies, the words refused to be uttered by Erneste’s inner voice, which kept urging him to ask Jakob if he could accompany him as the valet of a valet or secretary or lover, or whatever function or disguise Jakob was adopting in order to go away with Klinger. The opportunity didn’t arise. He couldn’t speak of it, and the simple, gnawing question lodged deep inside him, where it found the noxious sustenance on which it would feed for decades to come.

  At last, when Jakob had stowed everything away in his suitcase, he went and stood at the washbasin with his back to Erneste. He bent and sluiced his face under the faucet, moistened his hair and sleeked it down. Taking the washcloth, he soaped it and swabbed his neck, shoulders, armpits and chest. He soaped it again and swabbed his stomach and back, insofar as he could reach it. Then he slid his underpants down over his thighs with his left hand, spreading his thighs a little to prevent them from slipping off, and used his right hand to soap his buttocks and genitals. Having wrung out the washcloth, he proceeded to wipe off the soap and dried himself carefully on a towel. He was smiling when he turned to face Erneste once more and started to get dressed.

  If Erneste could have suited himself he would have stolen
away after that, but he couldn’t; he had to fulfill his promise to help Jakob with the baggage. Together, they conveyed the wardrobe trunk and the other pieces of luggage from the four rooms occupied by the Klingers and Frau Moser down to the lobby and from there, with the aid of a baggage cart, to the cable car.

  The steamer left at eleven. While Klinger, his wife and two children looked back at the landing stage as if trying to preserve a vivid recollection of the place in Europe where they had spent a considerable period, possibly for the last time, Jakob gazed ahead at the mirror-smooth surface of the lake. Erneste was thus spared a final look into his eyes.

  Muffled up in his heavy overcoat, he stared out across the lake. Just in front of him two swans were slowly swimming in circles, half submerging and surfacing in turn, and when they shook their heads the spray flew from their white necks, which looked as if they were covered with fur, not feathers. It was cold and windy, but the snow had stopped.

  He had never paused there before in all the years he had lived and worked in this town and walked along the lakeshore almost daily, but now he came to a halt and looked out across the water. He sat down on a bench and stared straight ahead, but the far shore could not be seen, having vanished into the mist. In the middle of the lake, still just visible, was a little white steamer with white smoke rising from its black smokestack.

  How many hours, days and weeks had gone by since then? He didn’t bother to count. It didn’t matter how much time had passed since that Sunday in October when Julius Klinger had called on him to tell him about Jakob, the lover of three men and of many more whose names they fortunately hadn’t known—Jakob, who had died far away in a place to which Erneste would never travel and from which his last news of Jakob had come: cries for help that had swiftly faded because they were voiceless and incorporeal, just lines of writing on flimsy paper, a reverberation from the soundbox of some indeterminate instrument.

  Klinger had eventually risen and stepped forward as if intending to kiss him, but Erneste had evaded him. No, no, it would have been too ridiculous to be kissed by that old man. It wasn’t hostility, just old age, that made him recoil. He felt no hostility, for what had happened had happened long ago, at a time on which the curtain had now descended. At this moment it was as invisible as the far shore, as unfamiliar as the instrument from which Jakob’s voice was issuing like a whisper. He had to be prepared for the mist soon to clear, disclosing the view once more, but more time would have passed by then.

  A Note on the Author and Translator

  Alain Claude Sulzer was born in Basel in 1953. His first novel was published in 1983 and he has since written four further books, including numerous short stories, and the novels Annas Maske (2001) and Privatstunden (2007). A Perfect Waiter (Ein Perfekter Kellner, 2004) is his first novel to be translated into English. He lives in Alsace.

  John Brownjohn is one of Britain’s leading translators from German and has won critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, notably for “My Wounded Heart”: The Life of Lilli Jahn 1900—44 by Martin Doerry. Among his awards are the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Thomas Brussig’s Heroes Like Us and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Marcel Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes.

  First published in Great Britain 2008

  This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Edition Epoca AG Zurich 2004

  Copyright © 2004 by Alain Claude Sulzer

  English translation copyright © 2008 by John Brownjohn

  The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

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  eISBN: 978-1-4088-5636-9

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