Boys & Murderers Page 2

  Being the only boy was not to my advantage. I believe it was no coincidence that the benefactor chose this particular shared living arrangement for boys and old men. In fact, I am convinced that his aim in taking in boys was to combine benevolence with the practical goal of obtaining cheap labor. I can vouch for the fact that my labor was amply exploited. Early in the morning I had to brush the clothes and polish the shoes of the old men, Herr Mayer and his wife, whom I almost never saw; and for Stasinka, the maid, I had to fetch coal from the cellar, chop wood, carry water and run errands before going to school, already exhausted. And so I often regretted not having a second boy with me to shoulder half my burdens. I found it especially irksome to wait on the old men. Mayer and his wife I saw as higher beings. Mayer had been placed over me as my master, and I was happy to oblige Stasinka, the maid. But the old men: they were my own kind! They were no better than I! Why should I polish their shoes and brush their clothes, these filthy old men I despised?

  With only four of us living in the house, one of the rooms was empty. We slept in the other two, Jelinek and Klein in one, old Rebinger and I in the other. I say old Rebinger even though Jelinek and Klein were also old: Rebinger was especially old. Every night I feared and hoped he would die. But he did not die. He was still alive when I left the hospice and looked just as he had always looked as long as I could remember.

  With these people, in this house, I spent the days of my youth, except for the hours in school and the brief spells playing on the street with other boys. I was not an especially good pupil. I was a poor child, and worse still, I was from the hospice. That means a great deal in a small town where the teachers socialize with the families of children from respectable houses, giving private lessons and sharing numerous ties of a material and social nature. When I knew something, when I did my lesson well, there was never much fuss made, as there was over others. When I did something badly, as was more often the case, I was rebuked, at times – this the teacher dared only with very poor children – even beaten. What was more, my mother’s sudden disappearance had given me the reputation of moral inferiority, and my schoolmates teased me about it, even circulating several mocking rhymes about me which followed me until I left the school. For all the inanity of these rhymes, they wounded me so deeply that I remember them to this day, though I have gone through things which should have shaken me more deeply and which I have forgotten all the same:

  I run to my mother love,

  For she is my flesh and blood,

  Have you seen my mother here?

  Oh, I must find my mother dear.

  Now just imagine, what a fright,

  My mother stole away at night.

  The very tune to which they sang this mocking rhyme still rings in my ears.

  In the breaks between lessons my classmates took their breakfasts out of their satchels as I stood and watched them wide-eyed. I adopted the habit of asking them for some of their breakfast, and sometimes this actually obtained me a piece of bread and butter. Usually, though, I got nothing, and was only laughed at.

  And so school was not a pleasant change from Rebinger, Klein and Jelinek either. On the contrary, I hated going to school, even though it allowed me to escape the hospice for a few hours. For I felt that the three old men at home took kindly to me. They knew how important I was to them, how necessary. They would take care not to get on my bad side. Of course they disgusted me; I despised them, I hated them, I would have beaten them if I had had the strength. But at home that was just what I took pride in. There at school I was despised, mocked. Here in the hospice I was a necessary if insignificant member of society.

  The only one of the old men for whom I could not help feeling a certain admiration was Jelinek. Every morning at ten Jelinek went to have his brunch at the inn. It cost eight kreuzers, as he always declared importantly. Long before ten we all began to feel a great agitation. Only Jelinek played it cool. All of us felt: any moment now Jelinek, hospice inmate like ourselves, would utterly humiliate us once again, and we waited with bated breath. Never in all their hospice days did Rebinger or Klein enjoy the good fortune of going “brunching.” The inn where Jelinek went for brunch was nothing fancy, of course, but there, all the same, he was the guest, master, customer. Jelinek savored these moments before leaving us. He paced the hall slowly. Klein and Rebinger feigned supreme indifference. But Rebinger’s jaw trembled with rage, and the spittle trickled from his toothless mouth and onto his jacket. Klein fiddled so furiously with the umbrella he was repairing – he had been an umbrella-maker, and sometimes people still asked him for minor repairs – that he almost broke the spokes. “Well, off we go, then,” Jelinek would say shortly before ten with inimitable composure, and walk off with slow, dignified steps.

  And then Rebinger and Jelinek gave vent to their rage. I think they took Jelinek’s brunch as an affront to their dignity. They started telling stories, they outdid each other in describing revelries of their own against which Jelinek’s inn, his eight-kreuzer brunch, the whole town paled in comparison.

  Jelinek could afford it. Jelinek was in business. I always pictured that as something terribly mysterious, though Jelinek’s business was certainly quite lacking in mystery. It consisted of his going from house to house to buy old bottles for a few hellers and then selling them to a dealer for a small profit. To me, Jelinek was like a wholesale merchant whose ships sail the ocean, laden with merchandise. Next to him, the occupation at which I watched Klein every day – his broken umbrellas – seemed pathetic and insignificant.

  Jelinek, with his drooping gray moustache, his shrill yet hoarse, perpetually screeching voice, was the only one of my fellow occupants I felt some respect for. Klein was nearly blind, his weary eyes peering through bent spectacles. He never shaved. And he was always fiddling with an umbrella gripped between his knees. I sometimes felt sorry for Klein, going so far as to silently slide him some object his hands were groping for, something that had fallen to the ground or that he had mislaid. His patient placidity disarmed my hatred, which at times did not even spare Jelinek.

  Toward Rebinger my heart was hard, relentless, unforgiving. His body, quaking ceaselessly from his knees to the tips of his fingers, his red, lashless lids, the watery eyes, his toothless mouth, in constant motion, a thin unbroken thread of spittle trickling from one corner, his continuous harebrained stammering, his whole human helplessness made me his enemy. I was a child and chained to this old man who soiled his bed at night and whose expiring life, with death closing in, seemed to fight a nightly battle one step away from me. Was I born an evil child, that this old man in his affliction touched nothing in my soul and that being chained to the agonies of this trembling body, this extinguished soul, was a harder fate for me, I believe, than a prisoner’s eternal dungeon?

  Behind the hospice was a dirty little courtyard with steps leading up to a garden. One of the peculiarities of this house was that it was almost impossible to go from one part to the other, one room to the other, without taking stairs. The garden was small. A few trees grew there, in the middle an old nut-tree with a wooden bench beneath it. It bordered on other courtyards and gardens, separated from them by a tumbledown wall about the height of a man. In the far corner of the garden, past the nut-tree, was a well with a bucket hanging over it; when the wheel was turned, the bucket descended into the well on a creaking chain. The water used in the house was drawn from this well.

  In the afternoons Rebinger would sit on the bench under the nut-tree. His hands propped on his rough-hewn cane, he mumbled to himself. And when Stasinka came past, a bucket in each hand, Stasinka, the maid, her lusterless eyes gazing dully ahead of her, her sturdy feet in wooden clogs, shuffling, he would nod at her. His eyes were fixed on her fat heavy breasts, which wobbled at every step. I turned the wheel for Stasinka. And I saw Rebinger’s eyes and Stasinka’s chest and felt that Rebinger knew something unknown to me.

  Without a word of thanks Stasinka went back the way she had come. Rebinger gazed after her,
his sunken lips twisting in lecherous laughter. And the spittle trickled onto his dirty jacket.

  For years I lived with Stasinka under one roof, and there is no doubt that I spoke to her a great deal. But strange though it may sound: however precisely I remember each movement of hers, her gaze, her gait, her body, however vividly her smell seems to fill my nostrils when I think of her today, I barely remember her voice. It is as if I never heard her speak, never laugh. In my memory Stasinka is dumb. I hear her breath, expelled through her nose with a snort, I see her fat colorless face, I see the very pattern of her dress, but I do not hear her say a word.

  I might have been eight years old or a little older when Stasinka entered service in the hospice. I do not believe that Stasinka excited me in any way from the start. That must have happened little by little. When I think it over, I find that I might – might, I say – have passed her by in complete indifference if it hadn’t been for Rebinger. Rebinger opened my eyes, and to this day I vividly recall the moment it happened.

  I was in the garden, furtively gleaning half-rotten apples from the ground. Rebinger sat on his bench, squinting into the sun. Then Stasinka came across the garden with her buckets, heading for the well. I was a few feet away from Rebinger, and I saw his lips move, saw him tremblingly thrust his stick against the ground and make as if to rise.

  “Oh, you fat kalleh, you,” he said, pausing after each word as if to muster strength for the next. “you fat kalleh!”

  I dropped the bitten apple to the ground. I saw Rebinger’s contorted face and followed his eyes’ staring gaze. Astonished, as if for the first time, I saw the maid. Rebinger’s slurred words echoed in my ears: kalleh, you! I had never heard the word before. I knew nothing and everything. Something new broke in upon me when I saw her for what she was: Stasinka! the fat kalleh. I had never seen a woman but hard at work, never once in motherly tenderness. Now I was confounded by the upwelling of a dormant, untouched spring within me. I threw up my arms and fled.

  I feel that the first impression of the awakening senses must be indelible. That each is forever enslaved by the first woman he meets, if only in a love which religion and morals have divested of passion, like the love for a mother. My passion toward Stasinka never faded, though Stasinka remained dull and lusterless, while I was to behold life’s pinnacles.

  The first consequences of the encounter in the garden were a seductive fear of Stasinka’s presence and flaring hostility toward Rebinger. I sat awake in bed, my face contorted by fright, listening lustfully to the eruptions of his nightly pains. No doubt I would have let him choke to death on his coughs without calling for help. In vague foreboding I felt that Rebinger, that babbling, benighted old man, had wrenched my life from its path and delivered it up to guilt and destruction. Hatred and evil within me thrived on Rebinger’s suffering.

  Though Stasinka’s presence, the sight of her, alarmed me to the depths of my soul and made my limbs tremble with the fear of something threatening and unknown to me, my dreams were filled with the yearning to see her. By day I lurked in the dark corridor so that her smell, her dress would brush me when she left the kitchen. I sat by the well and waited for her to come fetch water. When Rebinger sat on the bench under the tree I hid in the bushes and kept my eyes riveted to his face. I could not have stood before him unconcealed; my hatred would have turned murderer. All I had to do was jump up, and his throat would have cracked between my unyielding fingers, had not leaves and branches risen as a barrier between him and me. I fled into hiding from myself.

  When she came I turned the wheel, trembling. She did not look at me. Her animal eyes gazed vacantly at the rolling chain. She went without thanking me.

  But some power over me forced me pitilessly into her presence. Silently I began to do her chores for her. She stood or sat by, expelling her heavy breath through her nose, and acquiesced. But I glanced anxiously from the wood I was chopping to her full, pendulous breasts, slowly rising and falling.

  I began earning my first kreuzers then. I did so by fetching newspapers from the post office on Sundays and delivering them to the subscribers; in our town the post was not delivered on Sundays. I earned about twenty to thirty kreuzers a week this way. I bought sweets with the money, a colorful ribbon, a shiny comb, and laid them next to Stasinka, who took my presents without a word.

  Over time I had managed to gain admittance to the kitchen, which actually belonged to Herr Mayer’s apartment. In the evening, when the Mayers had gone to sleep, I quietly opened the kitchen door and went inside. Stasinka stood there washing the dishes or preparing the next morning’s chores. I went up and took the work out of her hands.

  More time passed like that, a long time, it seems. And I grew up in the hospice with three old men and a maid.

  The moment when, at fourteen, I had to leave the hospice cannot have been far when another incident imprinted itself on my memory with particular vividness.

  It happened one evening in the kitchen. The little petroleum lantern burned on the kitchen table. Stasinka and I crouched on the floor, sorting lentils from a big washbasin. Stasinka sat very close to me. I did not dare to stir my arms or feet, barely to move my hands. Only my fingers, like alien apparatuses, picked the bad lentils from the basin. Stasinka’s presence was like a physical burden weighing heavily on me and her and all things.

  I felt her breath on my ear and cheek. My nostrils drew in the warm smell of her body. Like a big weary animal she crouched in the fullness of her sluggish flesh, her eyes lightless, her big hands next to mine in the basin.

  My feet began to tremble. I felt as if my body were losing its hold and falling. But I was terrified of moving even a hair’s breadth closer to Stasinka, as if then something monstrous, crushing would inevitably overtake me and destroy me.

  I teetered. With a shudder, the resisting muscles’ cramp relaxed. I felt my shoulder draw close to hers, felt it as if I were covering a tremendous distance. Now my body touched hers.

  But Stasinka pushed me away from her. And her hand hovered calmly over the lentils again.

  At that, desire erupted within me. Boyish shyness fled. Animal, passion, blood cried out in me. I was free. I was ready to be master. For a few fractions of a second my hands groped helplessly at my head, then stretched out. I jumped up. Reached for Stasinka’s full, fat, rising and falling breasts.

  Stasinka rose without a word. She put her hands around me and lifted me like a light load. She opened the door. She drove her heavy fist into my ribs and dropped me to the ground at the threshold. Then she calmly closed the door behind her.

  And I lay there writhing in the first raptures of love.

  In my last months at the hospice I stopped helping Stasinka with her chores. I watched her and shadowed her. I no longer wanted to serve Stasinka. I wanted to be stronger than she.

  I stood outside the kitchen door at night and listened to her peaceful, sated sleep. I pressed my ear to the door and eavesdropped on her human functions, shaking with forcibly restrained desires. I followed her into the cellar and waited for the hour when I could grab her, grab Stasinka by her fat breasts. But I feared the lusterless gaze of her dumb being.

  And so the last days of my suffering in the hospice passed, convulsed by unfulfilled desires. I had already left school, and the day drew near when I would have to take leave of my childhood, go out into the world, alone, fending for myself, and see how I’d manage.

  I did not find it hard to leave. All the more so as I was to remain in our town for the time being and my departure was not a final farewell. I could go to the hospice every day after work if the spirit moved me. But I felt nothing whatsoever for the house and its occupants, not even a sense of gratitude. I was glad to leave the house of my unhappy childhood, the old men and Herr Mayer, glad that I would no longer have to see the picture of my benefactor before me, and my soul was filled with images of a happy future in which, suffering no longer, I was master, raised above others.

  Yet while I left, Stasinka the mai
d remained. I would no longer be able to sneak after her on her errands through the house, and outside the house her presence would no longer surround me. But one day, I knew, I would come back and stand before Stasinka as a master with power put into his hands, power over gold, over people, and I would laughingly wrestle her to the ground before me.

  Two days before my departure, I was called to the trustee of the house, a respected member of the community. He made me a speech of which I understood little, distracted by the richly appointed room – or so it seemed to me – in which I was received. All I remember is that he admonished me to be remindful of the benefactor and his good deed in my future life and that, it strikes me now, he tried to reassure himself more than me about setting me out into the world helpless and alone, expounding that due to the seed the hospice had planted in my heart I would never lose my way in the life struggle ahead of me. For all his concern, he released me with a gift of ten guldens, established by the benefactor for boys leaving the hospice, and never worried about my fate again.

  On the morning of my departure I got up as always, and as always I brushed the clothes and polished the shoes of Klein, Jelinek and Rebinger, and Herr and Frau Mayer. Then I said farewell to Herr and Frau Mayer. Herr Mayer said a few words to me, wishing me the best of luck and holding my hand all the while. I felt that he was the only one who was reluctant to let me go off into the unknown, and that he was now trying in vain to say something kind to me. Somehow I must vaguely have sensed his kindness, and with it the fact that I was, after all, losing a home, albeit a poor and joyless one, for I began to sob. And Herr Mayer kissed me on the forehead.

  Then I went into the hall where the old men were sitting, wrapped my jacket in newspaper, gathered my meager possessions, shook hands with the old men and went. In the courtyard I stood below the kitchen window and cried: