The Room by Andreas Maier

Author:Andreas Maier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9891267-6-2
Publisher: Frisch & Co. Electronic Books Inc.
Published: 2014-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

5

J arrives in a town which is in gentle decline. The Tsar came here once and disembarked in the same train station, and they built his very own Tsar spa for him which no one else was allowed to enter (although today it’s a sightseeing destination). Unfortunately, just a few years later the Tsar was dead, shot in Russia. Even today, people in Bad Nauheim talk about him as if they knew him personally, as if they had been next-door neighbours, like my uncle and Elvis Presley. They talk of how the Tsar’s son would ride through the spa gardens on his bicycle, dressed completely in white . . . how the Tsar and his family would be driven along the promenade in their regal carriage . . . such a nice, friendly man, although you couldn’t get anywhere near him, he was a Tsar after all, always flanked by bodyguards . . . And which cafés did he go to? Did he go to Mirwald (Was it already there back then?), did he go to Café Müller on Aliceplatz (Weren’t there pictures of him on the wall there?), or did he stay away from cafés? Did he drink cider? Perhaps he had an official taster drink the cider first, or one of his bodyguards, in order to make sure it wasn’t an attack on the bodily integrity of the Tsar . . . And then they would subject the bodyguard to close inspection, observing what happened, what the cider did to him. No adverse effects yet? Then quickly pour another glass (half a pint) down him. Keep watching! There he sits, the bodyguard, the Russian, in Bad Nauheim in the Wetterau (it had already been a spa town for over half a century by then), perhaps on a chair or just a wooden stool, or maybe he had to stand and pay attention to what was happening inside him, because he doesn’t know what it is, after all, this cider, maybe a Bad Nauheim resident concocted it in order to kill them all, the entire Tsar family, and maybe all the Bad Nauheimers have made a pact and are acting as if they always drink this cider, whereas in actual fact it’s poison. And now he’s jumping up to his feet, the bodyguard, his hand already at the waistband of his trousers, and running away, where are the water closets here? He runs off, so quickly. And the Tsar will be advised to never drink cider in his life. But just a few years later he’s dead anyway, and in Bad Nauheim they mourn him; it was only just recently that he was walking around here, after all, through the gardens. The poor Tsar. No one knew him. Everyone speaks of him. A public figure. What would Bad Nauheim be without its public figures? Like the depressive Sissi, who no one was allowed to photograph—she was so old by then that she had forbidden all photography. She lived in Burgallee, on the spot where today there’s a four-storey concrete building.

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