The Human Pool by Chris Petit Page A

you for the shock of discovering you are old, none of the gradual advances of age—wattle, white hair, pouches, and sagging—readies you for the moment when you look in the mirror and see nothing of the person you once were. I use an electric razor now as it avoids the need to look at myself. Pants I might once have worn with a sense of irony I now put on without thinking—with elasticised waists and comfortable pleats.
    Where to begin? I find myself asking, not for the first time. And how to define what this might be about, given the prompts of book and obituary, without frightening anybody—because it will almost certainly turn out to be about human behaviour at its worst. The old, having less to lose, can give the young a run for their money any day when it comes to bad behaviour.
    So here’s me, back in Germany as a tourist. A cliché American, minus the wife most of them still have. Retired. Kids scattered, on Prozac, grandchildren on Ritalin.
    Germany then, Year Zero, flattened; Germany now, the homogenisation of the economic miracle.
    An old man with a bad stomach, in a cheap hotel. A fly on an upturned water glass. We are all old men now, and whatever outrage we did was done so long ago that it is beyond the reach of apology. Maybe.

Vaughan
    FRANKFURT
    STRASSE’S RESTAURANT OF CHOICE was a bierkeller basement with rough whitewashed walls, Goldilocks furniture, the city’s largest gingham reserve, and a staff of zaftig middle-aged waitresses in white peasant blouses with puffy sleeves. I got there early and waited at the bar. It was pure cartoon tourist-board, all loud jollity, oom-pah muzak and foaming steins. Everyone looked like regulars, all elderly to old, no women apart from staff. I wondered if it was a haunt of geriatric gays.
    When my man arrived there was no mistaking Siegfried’s warning. Loosely translated, Strasse was a fat mess. With his restricted speed there was plenty of time to study him. He was at least eighty and looked like he’d had a stroke, his movement reduced to a stick-shuffle. He appeared surprised when I introduced myself, and I had to remind him who I was and why I was there. His delayed greeting involved a tremulous double handshake, held too long, while he inspected me with pale eyes, confused still but angry and alert. He smelled of brandy and sickness. Whatever medication he was on gave him the physique of a big baby, but his eyes were full of history. Among the ruined looks you could see traces of a handsome man. He still had a full head of iron-filings hair, incongruously dyed boot-polish black, and an imperious beak. Under a smart old hacking jacket he wore soft convalescent clothes.
    The waitresses made a fuss over him, helping him to what he called his table, in an alcove, away from other diners. We had just sat down when we were joined by another man, around Strasse’s age, but rangier and fitter. He dressed like an American but spoke German, and looked like he had once been tough. Big reunion. They hadn’t seen each other in a long while. The other man gave me a hostile glance, and Strasse offered an embarrassed explanation that he had double-booked dinner. His forgetfulness pained him. I offered to leave. The American looked relieved, but Strasse’s sense of protocol won out. He told the other man in German I could just follow that they would land me with the bill. The American, introduced as Joe Hoover, remained uncharmed by my presence.
    Strasse insisted on ordering pork knuckles and sauerkraut, and we drank heavily thanks to his indiscriminate ordering of steins of lager, punctuated with rounds of schnapps, and a metallic-tasting white wine served in green goblets which made it look even more acidic than it was.
    Hoover sat there looking glum, making pellets of his bread. When I asked why he was in Frankfurt, he gave me a sardonic look and said, ‘I wish I knew.’
    It turned out his wife had died not so long ago,