I
know a professor from the days before he was one. He used to have terribly
crooked teeth. Any knackered Albanian bone-mare would have felt kinship with him.
Even the sorriest nag of the Bourbaki cavalry would have ceded him right-of-way
at the food trough with the thought: “this poor guy’s worse off; just look
at that snaggle-toothed picket fence”.
When
I first knew him he used to love to make fun of others. He’d grin crookedly
and rub his hands against each other, like a fly cleaning herself. One day he
realized that others loved to make fun of him with almost equal enthusiasm. This
galled him and he retreated from the circles of marry makers. “Oh, you know”
he would say, listlessly flapping a wrist, and went on to become a professor. If
anyone asks him about that nowadays, the former smirk appears, he chafes his
hands the way he used to, then he freezes, raises his left hand to his mouth –
an unnecessary precaution as he had his teeth straightened – and says: “Oh,
you know, I like it quite well. My life would be genuinely happy were it
not for the envy which I, of course, do not feed. Other than that, a
professorial title is something one would never wish to go without. Once
you’ve become a professor nothing can go wrong in life. I mean, can you
imagine the advantage over, say, people who don’t know why they’re alive?
How disquieting it must be to get up in the morning without knowing why! The
renter upstairs gets up and takes a shower, the downstairs neighbor gets up and
turns the radio on, so you get up too and …. With the best of intentions I
can’t imagine what someone like that does afterwards. As a professor I, on the other hand, know all the time what
comes next. I freshen up, get dressed and go to the university where beautiful
young people stand around waiting for me. I appear, they sit down at their
little desks. I don’t want to go into too much detail. What I pass on to those
young people would take too much space. Simply put: I explain to them how life
works! In a nutshell it might sound too generic, but basically this is it. I get
embarrassed describing my daily life to you. Let’s leave it.
There’s a flag pole in front of my house. For national holidays I raise The Colors. In the evenings I sink into my featherbed, after drinking red wine. These are habits which have served others before me. I prefer not to have to live experiences, but to inherit them. Things go very smoothly as long as you keep the routine. The hardest part of my job is to always be right. When I read a book I ponder which part proves I’m right. I make note of it. The rest, I forget. When I lie in the grass in my back yard and look up at the sky, I figure out how the sky justifies my life. A tomcat who often crosses over from the neighbor’s yard does not validate me in anything. I keep calling the neighbor and urge him to keep the cat in his yard. As soon as I put down the phone the beast sits in our garden again, staring at me. I say “our” garden: I have a wife and children of my own. The children go to school and play the harmonium. At first glance this may seem strange but harmony has been writ large in our family, for generations. Without harmony we would only be half human. My wife is a foot shorter than I which, in conjunction, makes us harmonious. She, too, wanted to make something of her life; I forget what it was. Now she is my wife. On the way to becoming that, she sometimes looked at me like a drowning person. It wasn’t me whom she felt herself drown in, but life itself which, to her mind, had treated her inordinately shabby. For a while I feared she might collapse, she looked rattled, disheveled, flea-bitten. Mornings her hair stood on edge and her eyes bugged out of her head. Somewhere along the line she resigned herself to her fate, the role of being my wife. Since then, life has been smooth. She dresses like my wife, and her eyes have lost their feverish sheen; they retreated restfully back into their socket and now drain off such irritants as hope or doubt. You should never speak negatively, not even about the past, and thus, back to the present. I enjoy my children. They ask me questions I know the answer to. In Switzerland professors earn more than in Germany. Not enough for big leaps, in either country. That’s why professors hobble, generally. Had I not become a professor I wouldn’t know what to do with myself now, try as I might. A friend of mine from the old days didn’t become a professor. I sometimes run into him at odd hours, like a quarter to eleven in the morning, just because he doesn’t know what to do with himself other than go for walks. When we meet, unexpectedly, we exchange suspicious glances. One who never becomes a professor or anything else useful exudes an icy air of senselessness when you meet him during working hours. Everyone builds a nest, pads it, tests, and improves on it, picks at seeds, but we don’t know what or how to sing. Could my life have gone another way? Children of one’s own, the university, those drive away the clouds which sometimes collect around the what-would-have-could-have-been topics. I think, if you didn’t have a wife, children, a university to call your own, you’d feel terribly marginal. Even now my wife’s face sometimes crumples, particularly during semester break. The things that bleed out from behind that ruin I’d rather not name. It is horrible. Quick, back to my children whose faces do not yet possess the capability of crumpling. How meaningful it is, to have brought children into this world!
Translation:
MAGDALENA ZSCHOKKE
