behind the constantly closed doors of the parental bedroom—was obviously less alien to him than rage. Their eldest sons were born in the same year, the last year of a world war. The first came in January, the second in December. [he, with eyes sparkling] ‘From sheer pleasure. What else do you do when you’re young?’ [she, shrugging her shoulders] ‘We’d read somewhere that it couldn’t do any harm, provided I breast-fed. After our second, though, we went about things more carefully.’
At the right moment she seized her chance of revenge, with identical weapons. They would be out, or playing cards with friends, or staying behind after a theatrical reception, anyway: he would have one too many and start playing the comedian. Telling bluer and bluer jokes, although always the same ones, and always to the same people—a caricature of his daily routine behind the counter. Except that here, after delivering the punchline, he was bold enough to wink broadly at the prettiest woman in the room, not counting my mother.
She would say increasingly insistently that it was time to go home. He would reply with mounting assertiveness that this was his very last pint. Finally she had to take the wheel of their car and when they got home shake him awake from his intoxication. And she did so only because she did not want neighbours or customers to see her other half in this obvious state. Otherwise she would gladly have left him sitting there in his Vauxhall Cresta, his head lolling back, snoring and smacking his lips with his mouth open.
He would spend the rest of the night downstairs, on the sofa. The next night the same. And the next night again. All that time she scarcely deigned to speak a word to him. It was not clear what stung her the most: that he had put on airs or that he had defied her, in the presence of everyone, I ask you. She let him work alone for hours ‘in that shop of his’. When it really became too busy, with a surge at midday or toward dusk, caused by impatient housewives and irritable workers from the surrounding mills—the queue of waiting customers was starting to cough and shuffle like a theatre audience during an overlong scene change—he would come nervously and remorsefully into the living room to request her to come to his aid. ‘The people don’t understand what’s happening. They’re asking for you.’
Without answering she would go on ostentatiously filing her nails, plucking her eyebrows, hunting through the obituary notices in her paper for the tenth time. For a full quarter of an hour she let him and his customers stew in their own juice. Only then did she make her entrance behind the counter. With a frozen smile and a voice of stone.
After three days’ penance she was finally prepared to listen to him. An audience was nothing compared to this. She: arms folded, thin-lipped, a look to kill, thawing out more slowly than a freezer cabinet. He: humbly begging, pleading, arguing for forgiveness, naturally promising that it wouldn’t happen again, speaking more words than he usually did in a day. All in all a grotesque exhibition, no longer bearing any relationship to his misdemeanour, disproportionate revenge in the family arena.
And perhaps also a part of the foreplay. It was an early night that evening, and not only for the children.
Apart from this rare ritual—he getting merry too quickly, she having difficulty in forgiving him—and apart from their daily squabbling about trivialities, I never had to witness neurotic scenes from a marriage. Plates remained unbroken, glasses intact, voices spared. Coming to blows was completely out of the question. She wouldn’t have tolerated it, and it would never have occurred to him. He made us laugh when occasionally, quite frequently at her instigation, he did dish out a pedagogical slap, which we deserved because we, as a family of seven packed into our far too small house, had again got up to monkey business. We saw him as the monkey.
In order to control his rage and still convert it into that one warning slap, he had to call on all his strength, running counter to his true nature, which was so strangely pacific. He could phlegmatically chop the heads off poultry, he casually broke the neck of a rabbit held upside down with the side of an extended hand, he skinned and quartered a dead hare while the customers waited, without interrupting his comments on the rather poor spring weather. In the abattoir too nothing upset him—the last squeals of pigs or the rattling of the chains with which a dying bull was hoisted aloft, ready to be ripped open from throat to crotch. But now he had to force himself. He had to assert his physical authority over a mischievous adolescent, one of his own children.
He raised his tightening shoulders until his neck threatened to disappear into them, held his trembling head half backward, opened his eyes wide, frowned and especially he pushed his tongue so hard against his bottom lip that the lip protruded forward, revealing his pink tongue behind the lower lip—all actions we performed when we wanted to imitate a monkey. Except that we also bent our knees and, scratching our armpits with our hands, wobbled and limped around producing jungle noises.
A chimpanzee. That’s what our father reminded us of at the height of his anger. And his anger was already not very credible. The vicious smack that followed could never quite erase our hilarity.
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