The Clown Read Online Free PDF

much, even if she had only said “nothing” or for that matter “Oh shit.” From her lips it had not sounded vulgar at all. That time she said it to Schnitzler, when he spoke of her mystical gift, it had sounded as beautiful as snow (Schnitzler was a writer, one of the parasites who lived with us during the war, and whenever Henrietta went off into one of her trances he always spoke of a mystical gift, and she had simply said “Oh shit” when he began talking about it). She could have said something else: “Today I beat that stupid Peter again,” or something in French,
“La condition du Monsieur le Comte est parfaite.”
Sometimes she used to help me with my homework, and it always made us laugh how she was so good at other people’s homework and so bad at her own.
    Instead all I heard was my mother’s old woman’s weeping, and I asked: “How’s Father?”
    “Oh,” she said, “he’s an old man now—old and wise.”
    “And Leo?”
    “Oh, Le, he works very hard, very hard,” she said, “they say he has a future as a theologian.”
    “My God,” I said, “Leo of all people with a future as a theologian.”
    “Of course it was pretty hard on us when he converted,” said my mother, “but the spirit moveth where it listeth.”
    By now she had her voice completely under control again, and for a moment I was tempted to ask her about Schnitzler, who is still constantly in and out of our house. He was a rather plump, well-groomed fellow, who at that time was always raving about the noble European spirit, about Germanic consciousness. Later on, out of curiosity, I once read one of his novels. “French Love Affair,” not as interesting as the title promised. Its highly original feature was the fact that the hero, a French lieutenant, a prisoner of war, was fair, and the heroine, a German girl from the Moselle, was dark. He winced every time Henrietta said—I believe it was twice altogether—“Oh shit,” and maintained that a mystical gift could very well go hand in hand with the “compulsion to hurl dirty words” (although in Henrietta’s case it was not the least compulsive and she did not “hurl” the word at all, she simply said it), and as proof he dragged out a five-volume work on
Christian Mystics
. Needless to say, there was a lot of grand stuff in his novel, in which “the names of French wines ring out like crystal goblets which lovers raise and touch in mutual adoration.” The novel ends with a secret wedding; however, this brought on the displeasure of the National Socialist Writers’ Association and he was suspended from writing for some ten months. The Americans welcomed him with open arms as a resistance fighter and gave him a job in their cultural information service, and today he is running all over Bonn telling all and sundry that he was banned under the Nazis. A hypocrite like that doesn’t even have to tell lies to be always on the right side of the fence. And yet he was the one who forced my mother to make us join up, me in the Hitler Youth and Henrietta in the BDM. “In this hour, dear lady, we simply all have to pull together, stand together, suffer together.” I can still see him standing in front of the fireplace, holdingone of Father’s cigars. “Certain injustices of which I have been the victim cannot obscure my clear and objective realization of the fact that the Führer”—his voice actually trembled—“the Führer already holds our salvation in his hands.” Spoken about a day and a half before the Americans took Bonn.
    “What’s Schnitzler doing these days?”
    “Oh he’s doing splendidly,” she said, “they can’t get along without him at the Foreign Office.” Naturally she has forgotten all that, it is surprising that the Jewish Yankees still arouse any memories at all in her. Now I wasn’t sorry any more that I had begun my conversation with her like that.
    “And Grandfather, what’s he doing?” I asked.
    “He is amazing,” she said,