The Room

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My uncle J’s room is on the first floor, overlooking Uhlandstrasse, directly opposite the bathroom that he probably wasn’t even allowed to use. During most of the time I spent there with my grandmother when I was a child, he would be sleeping, and then the whole house would stink. If he was out, which meant lugging packages around in Frankfurt, the smell would linger on regardless. The house essentially reeked of J’s silage-like stench for years. It started back when I was eight or nine years old, because he still washed himself relatively often before that. Even today, my nostrils remind me of J whenever I go down into the cellar, his territory, at the Uhlandstrasse house. They built a bathroom down there especially for him, with a shower cubicle and toilet. The cellar was where he led his subsurface existence as a pretend craftsman. J had grown up surrounded by craftsmen, in a family of stonemasons. The business had around thirty employees and was based in Friedberg, three kilometres away. Uncle J spent a lot of time there as an adolescent, there was hammering and sawing and cutting and sanding, and immense cranes scattered all over the place, and technicians keeping the machines in good working order, laborers welding and milling, a blacksmith making the tools and ensuring everything was dimensionally correct — and my uncle, fascinated by it all, began to see himself as a craftsman too and set up a workshop in the Uhlandstrasse cellar, though it was nothing more than a fantasy workshop really, a make-believe workshop.

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