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  In 1976, for reasons still unclear to me, I was sent off to a Catholic-Humanist boys’ boarding school in the Lower Rhine region. Contact with this institution, where I would spend the following nine years, was obtained via my mother’s favoured orthopaedist, whose own highly gifted son had boarded there. For the first two years I lived in the so-called juniorate, a two-storey complex outside the gates of the old monastery that was surrounded by a trench. The juniorate was a separate structure overseen by a number of nuns, who attempted to outdo one another in meanness and viciousness and who were pedagogically completely clueless. The rules we lived under lacked any foundation, but after a time they revealed a harrowing, inward-looking logic that was only intelligible within our little world. Laws prevailed that couldn’t be communicated on the outside, but to us children they soon seemed like laws of nature. Our whole upbringing was designed to make us humble, to strip away our dignity and beliefs. I remember that during the advent season we had to put our meagre pocket money in small, colourful money boxes made of cardboard that we kept in our allotted wooden lockers. The lockers, which were built on one side of a long corridor, were checked by the nuns at night while we lay in the eight-bed dormitories. Those among us who hadn’t folded their underwear properly or had put too little money in the cardboard crib were summoned the next day for an examination of conscience. Each of these nuns was trying, we soon understood, to win a merciless internal competition and pressured their own group for especially high contributions. Examinations of conscience with Sister Aleidis usually ended with us acquiescing to a punishment – we were sent to sweep or locked in a dark broom cupboard. We were actually only released from the conversation when we asked for this punishment and entered the cupboard (which incidentally never had to be locked) of our own freewill. When I finally reached year eight and was allowed to cross the trench into the old monastery I was a browbeaten, distracted boy. The educational goal of the first two years had been achieved. It was around the same time that my brother Stefan, who I barely saw even though he, too, lived in the boarding school, first got caught smoking. I first heard about it on a weekend visit home.

  My brother Stefan was fifteen and had already exhibited behavioural problems during his years at the Herder High School in Cologne. The safety officer of the Cologne Transport Office had caught him stealing one of the little red emergency hammers installed next to the windows on the tram so passengers are able to get themselves free in case of a fire. He incurred a penalty as well as an incomparable scolding from my father. Maybe it was this discipline problem that made my parents finally decide to give him away, his brothers along with him. I don’t know what Stefan wanted to do with the hammer. When the letter from the police landed on his desk, my father was utterly indignant, the indicated facts had touched the fire inspector and fire protection expert in a sensitive place. It seemed to me at the time as if his coarse insults, the only ever spoken (or rather roared) – but never physical – chastisements lasted weeks and months. Maybe they really did. Every time we had fresh hope that we were finally out of the woods we were hit with yet another wave of fury, the next fit of rage. We sat in silence in the dining nook spooning our soup with heads bent, profoundly frightened, avoiding any eye contact. My mother gave not a word of defence for her eldest son, who cowered beside me crying with quivering legs, not trusting himself to wipe his fogged up glasses, while my father talked himself into a rage for the hundredth time until, with a crimson red head and swollen veins, he could only roar hammer, hammer, while repeatedly smacking the palm of his hand on the oak table. The crockery rattled, spit flew, and with every strike I hoped that now, now his head would finally burst, burst with anger. (The literal meanings that underlie the most common phrases and idioms affect us more immediately in childhood than later on when we’ve become accustomed to them and have practically forgotten their significance).

  Stefan lived in House Quadrum at the boarding school, which wasn’t actually a separate, free-standing building but rather a wing of the fifteenth-century Augustinian cloister. The windows of the rooms on the third floor looked out onto the cloister yard – the quad – which had served as a transitory space and the final resting place for the resident priests for over half a millennium. The head priest of the boarding school, while quietly wandering along the mossy path reading the breviary, fancied that he heard a bird singing one afternoon, so contrary to habit looked up and discovered my brother sitting on the roof smoking with two or three of his friends. The boys were immediately and sternly ordered to their rooms, their parents were contacted, warnings and reprimands were handed down, the sentence set – the usual, completely normal boarding school routine. They could have let the matter rest, after six months no one would have spoken of it again. But things turned out differently, maybe because the subject of fire hazards came up in the conversation with the priest. My father’s reaction was off the scale. The priest, a clever, wiry, almost austere mountain climber, who lost his life a little time later in a fall near Zermatt, must have accused my brother, and by extension my father, of attempted or at least negligent arson; an accusation that shook my father to his core. The roof of a centuries’ old cloister is clearly not a suitable place to smoke. Nothing burns easier than a roof truss insulated with straw and clay that’s been drying out for over five hundred years. Running the risk of being caught by approaching teachers, the teenagers could have easily had the idea to hide their lit cigarettes under the tiles.

  Our parents picked us up in the Range Rover for a weekend visit home and drove us to the house in Flanders. That weekend must have been so depressing, so awful that I’ve completely wiped the memory from my mind. But I remember the return journey on the Sunday as if it were yesterday. We’d packed the car, cleaned the house from top to bottom and had driven a few kilometres when my father, having once again worked himself up into a choleric fit, stopped in the middle of one of those long, unending Dutch highways lined with leaning poplars and turned off the engine. He swivelled round and screamed at my brother, who had dissolved into tears long before this: If I ever catch you smoking up there again I’ll bring you down from the roof with a pickaxe, I’ll ram a pickaxe in your arsehole and pull you down, I’ll rip you open and kill you.

  My father clearly associated this scene on the roof with mountain climbing, a jump that was presumably triggered by the priest’s pastime. It’s also possible that my father had seen some mountain film or other during his youth, Leni Riefenstahl or Luis Trenker. He clearly meant an ice pick, which I didn’t understand at the time. We were sailors, not mountaineers. In spite of this, this sentence shocked me in a way that embedded it verbatim into my memory, so that thirty years later I can vouch for its faithful reproduction. The vehemence with which this sentence and those that followed it were delivered during this twenty-minute hate speech where the matter of this ice pick being rammed up my brother’s arsehole was extended upon deeply affected and evidently, as I believe today, badly traumatized me. Though it wasn’t directed at me, I have never again endured such physical fear in my life, I’ve never again felt so trapped and at another’s mercy and that my whole existence was under threat than I did then. It makes it even more remarkable that I started smoking in secret shortly after this, at least potentially exposing myself to the threatened punishment. Maybe I sensed that my brother hadn’t so much breached the smoking ban as gone against my father’s fire prevention rules. Perhaps I also felt that it would be harder for him to get to me; having been given away to boarding school with relative ease at the tender age of ten, I had become completely withdrawn within the first few years. The first cigarette that I ever smoked for its own sake was a Van Nelle Halfzware rolled by a school friend we called Rosi.

  In spite of my chronic-spasmodic bronchitis, my father had little interest for my attempt at conquering my addiction later on, especially in the period after I’d finished my exams and temporarily lived back in his catchment area in Cologne. He would have sensed how hopeless my situation was.
I was the third son returned from boarding school as a heavy smoker. Perhaps he recognized that he simply had no influence over my life. After all, I hadn’t been in his care since I was ten and he barely knew anything about me and knew nothing about day-to-day life at the boarding school, about my interests, my experiences and desires. I don’t think he’d really thought through the decision to stick us in a boarding school. There wasn’t really anything to think through. The damage was unforeseeable. On a rare weekend visit home when I was twelve or thirteen I remember being accused of being uncomfortable around strangers. I can only try to imagine how I behaved at that time: I avoided eye contact with adults, I was distant, nervous, enmeshed in my own, inner world. I tried to come to terms with myself, which I only managed from one day to the next, from one hour to the next. Nothing was easy. Nothing was obvious. I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin. I blushed if someone nearby said the word blush. Why are you so jumpy? my father asked when he laid eyes on me on our next visit home, three weeks after the incident in the car, and I knew, even though I’d never heard the word before, what he meant. Are you surprised? I retorted and looked at the toes of my shoes. Are you really surprised? I would have liked to have got back on the train and travelled back to the Lower Rhine to slip back into my coffin – that’s what we called the small, hard crate beds – and hide under the beige-brown patchwork quilt. Many years later my father left a message on my answering machine where he accidently called me ‘Sir’ instead of ‘son’. Now we’re both uncomfortable around strangers, I thought at the time, now you know how I feel.

  There was only one reason why my father didn’t meddle in my life: I was a hopeless case, he considered himself unable to help me and left me in peace with my cigarettes. Even if it sounds otherwise: I was eternally grateful at the time. Actually, there is another explanation: his sons, he would like to have thought, should be capable of developing the same willpower that he mustered up fifteen years previously. We were young men after all, his flesh and blood. He had done it without help, now it was our turn to prove ourselves. This explanation becomes even more probable if I recall what happened when my father got to know his second wife. She had two very pretty blonde daughters, who were more or less my age, maybe seventeen and nineteen years old. Both smoked and my father would always comment on this in his jovial way – he showed his best side during this period – because he didn’t like it. It doesn’t suit you, my father would say. Women who smoke don’t make suitable Aryan wives and mothers, I added in my head.

  One evening when the family were all together my father suggested to the girls that he would pay them not to smoke. For every smoking-free day he would offer them five Deutschmarks. I still remember how astonished my brothers and I were, how we looked at each other in disbelief. I got sixty marks pocket money a month at that time and suffered from a constant, urgent lack of funds, not least because of my cigarette consumption. I had to use this money to buy clothes, books and the train fare from the boarding school. And here we sat, five practically grown-up chain-smoking children between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two filling the whole living room with so much smoke that the newly built oak-veneered bookcase containing our dead mother’s books – her psychogramme – sank into a haze, while my father, whose considerable nicotine emissions had rushed into my blood and my brain since earliest childhood, offered his girlfriend’s beautiful daughters a deal (after his third bottle of Kölsch) worth a hundred and fifty marks a month which included no penalties for breach of contract. The obligation was one-sided, they could have taken the winnings as long as it suited them. Even if they were to opt out they would have still won on the basis that the payment evidently hadn’t sufficed to keep them, who were after all German women of child-bearing age, away from the terrible cigarettes, and they could have renegotiated a new, better agreement. They were in a position to raise their exorbitant price even further, all for the good of the master race. They could have blackmailed my father, who was interested in their success as a man of the people – an almost personal interest – and also because he wished to make a good impression on their mother. It should be noted in the interest of fairness that they didn’t accept the deal. The younger of the two later gave up of her own accord and didn’t make a claim from my father. The eldest is still fighting her addiction today, twenty-five years later. With an average interest rate of 4 per cent her remuneration payment from the contract has totted up to €38,293.41. Then there’s the cost of the cigarettes. I would have quit then and there. I would have quit for three marks, but ultimately the proportion of men needed for the procreation of the Volk is far lower.

  I still remember how my brothers and I smoked especially heavily that evening with great fuss and over-the-top gestures to try and secure ourselves a comparable contract. We thrust the packets about ostentatiously, lit each other’s cigarettes from across the table and incessantly slew smoke rings. I even staged a coughing fit, one of my infamous spasmodic bronchial spasms while my brothers clapped me on the back, but my father didn’t notice any of it.

  My friends and I used to smoke near a pond behind the boarding school buildings that was choked by reeds and described in the school prospectus as a lake. An overturned dinghy hull with no rigging to speak of connoted navigability. Sailing, horse riding, mountaineering, gliding – these were but a few of the many hobbies available to pupils according to the prospectus. Unfortunately, I never saw the mythical glider – the Gratiaplena – and not once in nine years did one of our guardians take the trouble to explain how we could take up the advertized pursuits. To go riding, we speculated, you’d have to bring your own horse, or win the goodwill of an especially unpleasant Latin teacher who lived next to the stables who considered every applicant with medieval suspicion because he wanted to protect the virtue of his horse-loving daughter. Mountaineering also didn’t work out, it was always the others that got to go to the cabins in Zermatt. These holiday trips were out of the question for my brothers and me as we were already tied to the house and sailboat in Flanders. We were sailors, not mountain climbers, our father had decided. The priest’s fatal fall cemented his decision, safety was an absolute priority in our family. (My father had a four-tonne sailboat built out of steel at great financial cost that could barely move but which was considered to be unsinkable and guaranteed to be inflammable). As I was shut out from these pastimes and I was useless at team sports, I spent many years doing nothing but reading and smoking. Between the ages of thirteen and nineteen I read and smoked absolutely everything that I could get hold of. The extent of my own boredom and mental underload back then first became apparent not too long ago when I realized that I’d read Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry, a downright long-winded coming-of-age novel, in the 1855 and then again in the 1879 edition – a total of one thousand seven hundred pages filled with reflections on Goethe, antique and contemporary art, convention, religion, metaphysics and history. Keller leaves out absolutely nothing to do with what moved the bourgeois soul of the time, while the plot could have been summarized in three pages.

  I had the time, a lot of time, to read Keller and Stifter, to secretly watch the Latin teacher’s daughter out riding and to go to the pond with my friends where we smoked our hearts out. Most of the time when a teacher or a prefect got too close we managed to flick the cigarettes into the brackish water where they were guaranteed not to start a fire. We held our cigarettes, I’ve just remembered, between thumb and index finger and smoked them in the hollow of our hands right to the end until our fingertips would burn and I now wonder if we were protecting our precious, thin cigarettes rolled with Mascotte papers from the wind – the flame would stoke up and the pleasure of smoking was diminished – or from the eyes of those in charge. (Those of you who take pleasure from the subtle observations of smoking and are interested in the ways of holding a cigarette in certain communicative situations, I would recommend reading J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. In these sublime stories there is copious amounts of smoking and every
mention of a cigarette, a drag, a stance or hand movement associated with smoking has a specific function in the plot. In a few words Salinger sketches how a man on the telephone forms a peak with his cigarette ash, how a shaking, traumatized soldier plucks a pack from his shirt pocket.)

  We rarely crossed paths with teachers or prefects when we undertook our smoking walks during break times, afternoon free periods and on dark winter evenings. But time and time again we would bump into other packs of smokers, kindred spirits, transgressive youths in long, coarse woollen coats with popped collars, who we could make out far off in the distance in spite of the early falling darkness. I get flashbacks to this time when I’m in New York – where smoking’s now criminalized in a similar way that it was back in the episcopal reformatory – and I pass by an office building and see the few, conspiratorial smokers huddled close together.

  I’d really like to give these people, who must all have a melancholic temperament to be standing out in draughty gullies, a sign to show that I was once one of them, that I understand them. Sometimes I give them an instinctive nod to bring home my solidarity and probably only end up coming across a bit strange.

  I root around in my memory for my earliest experiences of smoking and what comes to me first isn’t cigarette brands or my accomplices, but the places where I smoked: the small lake; a hut next to the indoor swimming pool that was reserved two mornings a week for the nuns to exercise in; a cellar in the three-winged House Stern, a bench below Heinrich-Böll-Platz in Cologne where you’d be shaken by every crawling train crossing the Hohenzollern Bridge towards the Central Station; a sheltered corner behind an American high school; a room with a view of the powerful volcano Mount St. Helen’s (that was still puffing smoke back then); a bar in the Dutch border town of Siebengewald; the Mansard house in Flanders; the inner courtyard of a villa in La Jolla, California; the harbour in Alexandria, spoiled by the gigantic concrete blocks leftover from wartime; the Zócalo in the old town of Acapulco; the German Department’s reference library at Bonn University.