Self's punishment Read Online Free PDF Page B

if a Mannheim football team had won the German championship. I put on my straw hat and walked to the Rose Garden. A band calling itself Just For Fun was playing golden oldies. The basins of the terraced fountains were empty, and the young folk were dancing in them. I fox-trotted a few steps – gravel and joints crunched.
    The next morning in my letterbox I found a bulk mail delivery from the Rhineland Chemical Works that contained a perfectly worded statement on the incident. ‘RCW protects life,’ I discovered, also that a current focus of research was the conservation of the German woodlands. Yes, well then. The delivery included a small plastic cube with a healthy fir-seed suspended in it. How cute. I showed the object to my tomcat and put it on the mantelpiece above the fireplace.
    Out on my stroll around the neighbourhood I picked up my week’s provision of Sweet Afton, bought a warm meatloaf sandwich, with mustard, from the butcher on the marketplace, visited my Turk with the good olives, watched the Green Party members at their info-stand on Parade-Platz fruitlessly trying to disturb the harmony between the RCW and the population of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen. Among the bystanders I noticed Officer Herzog being supplied with fliers.
    In the afternoon I sat in Luisenpark. It costs something, just like Tivoli. So at the beginning of the year, for the first time, I’d acquired a year’s pass. I wanted to get my money’s worth out of it. When I wasn’t watching pensioners feeding the ducks I read Keller’s
Green Henry
. Frau Buchendorff ’s first name had led me to the Judith in the book.
    At five o’clock I went home. Sewing a button onto my dinner jacket took me a good half-hour with my dodgy arm. I took a taxi from the Wasserturm to the RCW restaurant. There was a banner stretched over the entrance with Chinese characters on it. On three masts flew the flags of the People’s Republic of China, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the RCW, flapping in the wind. To the right and left of the entrance were two Rhineland maidens in folk costume, looking about as authentic as Barbie dolls dressed as Munich beer-maids. The procession of cars was in full swing. It all looked so upright and dignified.

9
    Groping the décolleté of the economy
    Schmalz was standing in the foyer.
    ‘How’s your little son doing?’
    ‘Good, thank you. I would like to talk and thank you later. I’m tied up now.’
    I went up the stairs and through the open double-doors into the large reception room. People were clustered in small groups, the waitresses and waiters were serving champagne, orange juice, champagne with orange juice, Campari with orange juice, and Campari with soda. I ambled around a bit. It was like any other reception before the speeches were given and the buffet is opened. I sought familiar faces and found the red-haired girl with the freckles. We smiled at each other. Firner drew me into a circle and introduced me to three Chinese men whose names were made up of various combinations of San, Yin, and Kim, as well as Herr Oelmüller, head of the computer centre. Oelmüller was trying to explain computerized data protection in Germany to the Chinese. I don’t know what they found so funny about that but in any event they laughed like the Hollywood Chinese in a Pearl S. Buck adaptation.
    Then came the speeches. Korten was brilliant. He covered everything from Confucius to Goethe, left out the Boxer Uprising and the Cultural Revolution, and touched on the former RCW branch in Tsingtao solely to weave in the compliment to the Chinese that the last head of branch there had learned a new process for the production of ultramarine from the Chinese.
    The Chinese delegation leader replied no less elegantly. He recounted his university years in Karlsruhe, took his hat off to German culture and the economy, from Böll to Schleyer, spoke technical jargon I didn’t understand, and closed with Goethe’s ‘The Orient and Occident