5

Blue sky, a whitewashed wall, alongside which the poplars, like ladder rungs, led down and away to the outer yard, where a sanatorium attendant was shoveling leaf mold into the compost pit. The wall was too high, the rungs too far apart. He would need four or five steps to cover each intervening space. Watch out! Why did the yellow bus have to travel so close to the wall, creeping along like a beetle? Today it had brought only one passenger—him. But was it really he? Who? If only he could climb the poplar ladder, go hand over hand from rung to rung. But no. Always upright and unbending, never lowering himself, that was the way it had to be with him. Only when he knelt in a pew, or at a starting line, did he abandon his upright stance. Was it he? Or who?

On the trees in the garden, in Blessenfeld Park, there had been neatly painted signs, saying: 25, 50, 75, 100. He had knelt at the starting line, to himself muttered, ‘On your mark … get set … go!’ Then sprinted off, slowed down, went back and read off the time from his stopwatch. Again he knelt down at the starting line, murmured the starting signal to himself, dashed away, this time lengthening out the trial stretch just a little. Often it was a long time before he even got past the 25-meter mark, still longer before he reached the 50 and eventually ran the entire course right to the 100 mark. Then he entered his time in his notebook: 11:2. It was like a fugue, precise, exciting, yet marred by intervals of intense boredom, yawning eternities on summer afternoons in the garden, or in the Blessenfeld Park. Start, return, start, a minimal increase, then back to the starting point once more. And when he had sat down beside her, to evaluate and comment on the figures in his notebook, and reflect on his system, it had been at once exciting and a bore. His training had smelled of fanaticism. The strong, slender boy’s body gave off the serious sweaty smell of those who know nothing as yet of love. Her brothers, Bruno and Friedrich, had smelled like that, too, when they got off their bikes, heads full of times and distances, and went into the garden to try and relax their fanatical leg muscles by means of fanatical compensating exercises. Father had also smelled like that when he swelled out his chest at choir practice, when breathing had become a kind of sport in itself, and singing had lost all its pleasure. Bourgeois earnestness, mustache-framed, had taken its place. Seriously they had sung and seriously had ridden their bicycles, and their leg muscles, chest muscles, mouth muscles, all had been serious. On their cramped legs, cramped cheeks, hideous purple blotches had appeared. They’d stood for hours on end on cold fall nights to shoot hares hiding among the cabbage stalks. And only at dawn, at long last, had the hares taken pity on straining human muscles and taken off zigzag through a hail of shot. Whywhywhy? Where was he now, the one who carried that secret laughter inside him, hidden spring in hidden clockwork, which lightened the unbearable pressure, eased the strain? He, the only one who had never partaken of the Host of the Beast? Laughter behind the pergola, Love and Intrigue; she was leaning over the parapet, watching him come out by the printery gate, and go, light of step, toward the Cafe Kroner. He carried that secret laughter inside him like a spring. Was he her quarry, or she his?

Careful, careful! Why always so upright, so unbending? One false step and you’ll topple into blue infinity, or be dashed to pieces on the concrete walls of the compost pit. Dead leaves won’t cushion the impact, the granite side of the steps won’t be any pillow. Was it he? Who, then? Huperts, the sanatorium attendant, was standing meekly at the door. Would the visitor like tea, coffee, wine or cognac? Let me think; Friedrich would have come on horseback. He would never have come by the yellow bus, crawling alongside the wall like a beetle. And Bruno, he’d always had his stick with him, when he came. He beat time with it, till time was dead, chopped up time, slashed it into bits. Or snipped it into pieces with his playing cards, which he flung in the face of time like blades, night after night, day after day. Friedrich would have come on horseback, Bruno never without his stick. No cognac for Friedrich, no wine for Bruno now. They were dead, those foolish Uhlans, had ridden into machine-gun fire at Erby le Huette, believing they could fulfill bourgeois virtue through bourgeois vice, meet the obligations of piety with obscenities. Actually, naked dancers on clubhouse tables did not offend respectable ancestors as much as one might have thought, these ancestors having been in fact much less respectable than they looked in their gallery portraits. Cognac and wine struck off the list of drinks forever, my dear Huperts. Then, how about beer? Otto’s gait was not so elastic. His was a marching step, drumming en-em-y, en-em-y on the hallway tiles and en-em-y on the pavement, all the way down Modest Street. He, Otto, had gone over to the Beast very early. Or had his brother, when he was dying, passed on the name ‘Hindenburg’ to Otto? Fourteen days after Heinrich’s death, Otto had been born, to die at Kiev. No use fooling myself any more, Huperts. Bruno and Friedrich, Otto and Edith, Johanna and Heinrich, all dead.

Nor will my visitor be wanting coffee, either, Huperts. He is no longer the one whose secret laugh I could hear in his every step. He’s older. For him, tea, fresh and strong, Huperts, with milk but no sugar, for my upright and unbending son, Robert, the one who always fed on secrets. Even now he’s carrying one around with him, locked in his breast. They beat and furrowed his back, but he didn’t bend, didn’t give up his secret, didn’t give my cousin George away, the one who’d mixed gunpowder for him in the Huns’ apothecary. He swung himself down between the two ladders and like Icarus hung poised with outstretched arms at the doorway. He’d never land in the compost pit or be smashed to smithereens on the granite. Tea, my dear Huperts, fresh and strong, with milk but no sugar. And cigarettes, please, for my archangel. He brings me somber messages that smack of blood, messages of rebellion and revenge. They’ve killed the blond boy. He ran the hundred meters in 10:9. Whenever I saw him, and I saw him only twice, he was laughing. He mended the little lock on my jewel box for me with his clever hands, something the carpenters and locksmiths had been trying to do, but couldn’t, for forty years. He just picked the thing up and it worked again. He was no archangel, just an angel, name was Ferdi. He was blond and fool enough to think he could use firecrackers against the ones who’d eaten the Host of the Beast. He didn’t drink tea or wine, beer, coffee or cognac, just put his mouth to the water tap and laughed. If he were still alive, he’d get me a gun. Either he or that other one, a dark angel that one, the one who didn’t know how to laugh, Edith’s brother. They called him Schrella, he was the kind you never call by his given name. Ferdi would have done it. He’d have ransomed me out of this crazy-house where they’ve stuck me, done it, he would have, with a gun. But here I am, doomed and damned. It takes giant ladders to reach the world. My son, see, is climbing down one to me.

“Good afternoon, Robert, you do like tea, don’t you. Don’t flinch when I kiss you on the cheek. You look like a man, a man of forty; you’re getting gray at the temples and you’re wearing narrow trousers and a sky-blue waistcoat. Isn’t that too conspicuous? But perhaps it’s good to go around disguised as a middle-aged gentleman. You look like the kind of office boss people would like to hear cough, just once anyway, but who’s too refined to permit himself such a thing as cough. Forgive me if I laugh. How clever the barbers are today. That gray hair looks real, and the stubble on your chin like a man’s who has to shave twice a day but does it only once. Clever. Only the red scar hasn’t changed. They’ll know by that, anyway. But maybe there’s a remedy for that, too?

No, you needn’t worry, they didn’t touch me, they left the whip hanging on the wall, just asked, ‘When did you see him last?’ And I told the truth: ‘In the morning, when he went to catch the streetcar to go to school.’

‘But he never arrived at school.’

I didn’t say a word.

‘Has he tried to get in touch with you at all?’

The truth again. ‘No.’

You’d left too plain a trail, Robert. A woman from the barracks district near Baggerloch brought me a book with your name and home address on it. Ovid, gray-green hard cover with chicken muck on it. And your school text was found five kilometers away. The box-office girl from a movie house brought it to me, with one page missing. She came into the office pretending to be a client and Joseph showed her in to me.

A week later they asked me again: ‘Have you been in touch with him at all?’ And I said, ‘No.’ Later on, the one who’d been to the house so often, Nettlinger, he came, too. He said, ‘For your own sake, tell the truth.’ But I had; only now I knew you had gotten away from them.

Nothing from you for months on end, son. Then Edith came, and said, ‘I’m expecting a child.’ I was terrified when she said, ‘The Lord has blessed me.’ Her voice filled me with fear. Forgive me, but I’ve never liked mystics. The girl was pregnant and alone. Father under arrest, brother disappeared, you gone, and on top of that they had held her in custody and questioned her for fourteen days. No, they didn’t lay a hand on her. How easily the few lambs had been scattered, and now only one, Edith, remained. I took her in. Children, the Lord was certainly pleased with your foolishness. But you might at least have killed him with your homemade bomb; now he’s become chief of police. God preserve us from martyrs who live to tell the tale. Gym teacher, chief of police; goes riding through the city on his big white horse, leads the beggar raids personally. Why didn’t you at least kill him? With a bullet through the head. Firecrackers don’t kill, my boy. You should have come to me. Death’s made of metal. Copper cartridges, lead, cast iron, shrapnel—they bring death, whining and wailing, raining on the roof at night and rattling on the pergola. Fluttering like wild birds: the wild geese rush through the night, and dive down on the lambs. Edith is dead. I had her certified insane. Three authorities wrote out their opinions in elegantly unreadable writing on white parchment with an impressive letterhead. That saved Edith from them. Forgive me for laughing. Such a lamb she was. Her first child at seventeen, the second at nineteen and always so know-it-all. The Lord has done this, the Lord has done that, the Lord has given, the Lord has taken away. The Lord, the Lord! She never realized the Lord is our brother, and that among brothers you can laugh sometimes and feel at ease, even if you can’t among Lords and Masters. As for myself, I had not realized that wild geese preyed on lambs; I’d always thought they were peaceful, plant-eating birds. Edith lay there as if our family coat-of-arms had come alive, a lamb with the blood flowing out of her breast. Though in her case there were no martyrs or cardinals, hermits, knights or saints standing around in adoration. And there she was, dead. Try and smile, my boy. I tried to myself, but couldn’t manage it, least of all with Heinrich. He played with you and hung sabres on you and put helmets on your head, and made you into a Franceman or Rooshian or Englandman, and sang—that quiet boy—got to get a gun, get a gun. And when he was dying he whispered that horrible password to me, that Beast’s name, ‘Hindenburg.’ He wanted to learn that poem by heart, he was such an obedient little boy, but I tore up the piece of paper and scattered the pieces like snowflakes into Modest Street.

But drink your tea, Robert, it’ll get cold. Here are the cigarettes, come closer. I must talk very softly. No one must hear us, Father least of all. He’s a child, he has no idea how bad the world is, and few the pure in heart. He’s one of them. A quiet man, no blemishes on his pure heart. Listen, you can save me. I’ve got to get a gun, get a gun and you must get one for me. I could easily shoot him from the roof garden. There are three hundred and fifty holes in the pergola. I can take a long, careful aim as he turns the corner at the Prince Heinrich Hotel on his white horse. You have to take a deep breath, I’ve read all about it, aim and squeeze the trigger. I’ve tried it out with Bruno’s cane. When he turns the corner I’ll have two and a half minutes, but whether I’ll be able to fire the other bullet, too, I don’t know. There’ll be a lot of confusion when he falls off his horse, and I won’t be calm enough to take a deep breath, aim and squeeze the trigger a second time. I’ve got to make up my mind, the gym teacher or that Nettlinger. He ate my bread and drank my tea and Father always called him “a bright boy.” Now just see what a bright boy he turned out to be. He ripped the lambs to shreds and beat you and Schrella with barbed-wire whips. Ferdi paid too high a price for what he got out of it, burning a gym teacher’s feet and breaking a dresser mirror. Not powder and wadding, my boy, powder and metal.…

Here, son, drink your tea, then. Don’t you like it? Are the cigarettes too stale? Forgive me, I never had much to do with them. You look so handsome like that, with gray at your temples and fortyish, like a born attorney. It makes me laugh, just to think you could ever look like that. How smart the barbers are today.

Don’t be so serious. It’ll pass, we’ll take trips out to Kisslingen again. Grandparents, children, grandchildren, the whole tribe, and your son will try to catch trout with his hands. We’ll eat the brothers’ wonderful bread and drink their wine and listen to Vespers: Rorate coeli desuper et nubes plurant justum. Advent. Snow on the mountains, ice on the brooks. Choose your season, boy. But Advent will please Edith the most. She has the smell of Advent about her, she hasn’t realized that meantime the Lord has come, as a brother. The brothers’ singing will gladden her adventist heart, and gladden that dim church your father built, St. Anthony’s in the Kissa Valley, between two farmsteads, Stehlinger’s Grotto and Goerlinger’s Place.

I wasn’t quite twenty-two when the Abbey was consecrated, I’d only finished reading Love and Intrigue a little while before. I still had a little girlish laughter left in my throat. In my green velvet dress from Hermine Horuschka’s I looked like a girl just come from her dancing class. No longer a girl, not quite a woman, like someone who’d been seduced, rather than married, in my white collar and black hat. I was with child already, and always on the verge of tears. The Cardinal whispered to me, ‘You should have stayed at home, dear lady, I do hope you’ll be able to last it out.’ I did last it out, I wanted to be there. When they opened the church doors and began the consecration rites, I was frightened. My little David, your father, had turned awfully pale, and I thought, now he’s lost his laugh. They’re killing it with all their ceremony. He’s too small and too young for this; hasn’t got enough mannish seriousness in his muscles. I knew I looked sweet with my green dress and my dark eyes and my snow-white collar. I’d made up my mind always to remember it was all a game. And I had to laugh, thinking how the German teacher had said, ‘I’ll test you and see if you can get an A.’ But I didn’t get an A, for I was thinking about him all the time. I called him David, the little man with the sling, the sad eyes and the laugh hidden deep inside. I loved him, every day waited for the moment when he’d appear at the big studio window, and I used to watch him when he left the printery door. I sneaked into choir practice at the Glee Club and watched him, to see if his chest expanded and contracted like the others in that show-offy, manly way, and could see by his face he wasn’t one of them. I had Bruno smuggle me into the Prince Heinrich when the Reserve Officers Club met for billiards, and watched him, the way he crooked and uncrooked his arm, struck the ball and sent white-green, red-green flying, and found out about that deeply hidden laugh. No, he never put the Host of the Beast to his lips. I was afraid he wasn’t going to pass the last, the very last and hardest test of all, the Dress Inspection they gave on that fool of a Kaiser’s birthday in January, a march to the monument on the bridge, parade past the hotel where the general would be standing on the balcony. How would he look, marching past down there, decked out with history, heavy with destiny, while the trumpets and drums were sounding and the bugles blowing for the charge? I was afraid and worried he might look ridiculous. Ridiculous was the one thing I didn’t want him to be. They should never laugh at him, always he at them. And I did see him do the goose-step. Heavens, you should have seen him. As if with every step he was stepping on a Kaiser’s head.

Later on I often saw him in uniform. You could tell time by the promotions: two years, first lieutenant; two more years, captain. I took his sword and humbled it. I used it to scrape muck from behind the moldings, rust off the iron benches in the garden, dug holes for my plants with it. It was too awkward for peeling potatoes.

Swords should be flung down and trampled on, and so should privileges, my boy. It’s all they’re good for, corruption that they are. Their right hand is full of bribes. Eat what everybody eats, read what everybody reads, wear the clothes everybody wears, then you’ll come nearest to the truth. Noblesse oblige, obliges you to eat sawdust when everyone else is eating it, to read patriotic rubbish in the local paper instead of magazines for cultivated people. No, don’t touch any of it, Robert—Gretz’ patés, or the Abbot’s butter and honey, his pieces of gold and his jugged hare, whywhywhy, when others haven’t any. Let the unprivileged eat their honey and butter in peace, it doesn’t corrupt their stomach and brain. But not you, Robert; you must eat this dirt-poor bread. Tears of truth will well up in your eyes; wear shabby clothes, and be free.

I’ve used privilege only once, one single time; you must forgive me for it. I couldn’t bear it any longer. I had to go to Droescher to get amnesty for you. It was just too much for us—Father, myself, Edith and your son just born. We found your messages in the letter box, tiny little bits of paper no bigger than cough-drop wrappings. The first came four months after you’d disappeared: ‘Don’t worry, I’m studying hard in Amsterdam. Love to Mother. Robert.’ The second came seven days later: ‘I need money. Wrap it in a newspaper and give it to a man called Groll, waiter in The Anchor at the Upper Harbor. Love to Mother, Robert.’

We took the money there. The waiter named Groll served us beer and lemonade without saying a word, took the package and wouldn’t take a tip, all without a word. He didn’t seem to see us or even hear our questions.

We stuck your little messages in a notebook. For a long time none came and then they came more often. ‘Received money all right: 2, 4 and 6. Love to Mother. Robert.’ Then all at once Otto wasn’t Otto any more. A terrible miracle had happened. He was Otto, yet he wasn’t, any more. He brought Nettlinger and the gym teacher home with him. Otto. I understood what it means when they say there was only a husk of a man left. Otto now was only the husk of the real Otto, and the husk had suddenly taken on a new content. He’d not merely tasted the Host of the Beast, he’d been inoculated with it. They’d sucked out his old blood and pumped new in. There was murder in his eyes, and fearfully I hid the slips of paper.

For months on end no notes came. I crawled over the tiles in the hallway, examining every crack, every inch of the cold floor, took the moldings away and scraped out the dirt, fearing the little balls of paper might have fallen behind them, or have been blown there by the wind. During the night I unscrewed the letter box from the wall and took it to pieces. Nothing. Otto came in, pushed me against the wall when he opened the door, stepped on my fingers and laughed. Months on end I found nothing. I used to stand the whole night long behind the bedroom curtains, waiting for dawn, watching the street and the front door, running downstairs when I saw the newspaper boy. Nothing. I looked through the paper bags with rolls from the baker’s in them. I was very careful when I poured the milk into a saucepan, when I took off labels. Nothing. And in the evening we went to The Anchor, pushed our way past uniforms to the farthermost corner where Groll was the waiter, but he kept mum, didn’t seem to recognize us. Only after we’d sat there for months waiting night after night did he write on the edge of a beer coaster: ‘Careful. I don’t know a thing.’ Then he spilled beer on it, smudged it all into one big inkstain and brought fresh beer for which he wouldn’t take any money. Groll, the waiter in The Anchor. He was young, had a narrow face.

We didn’t know, of course, that the boy who had put the little slips of paper into our letter box had long since been arrested, that we were being watched, and that Groll had not been picked up yet only because they were hoping he might begin to talk to us. Who, at the time, understood the higher mathematics of their murderousness? Groll, the boy with the slips of paper, both of them gone, vanished, and you, Robert, you won’t get me a gun and release me from this dungeon of the damned.

We gave up going to The Anchor. No news for five months. I couldn’t stand it any longer, for the first time in my life used privilege and went to Droescher, Dr. Emil, Council President. I’d been to school with his sister and to dancing school with him. We’d gone on picnics together, loaded barrels of beer onto the coaches, unpacked ham sandwiches at the forest edge, danced country waltzes on the new-mown lawns, and my father had arranged for his father to be elected to the University League, although Droescher’s father had never been to the university. All a lot of nonsense, Robert, don’t take any stock in that sort of thing when anything serious is at stake. I used to call Droescher ‘Em,’ short for Emil; it was thought chic at the time. And now, thirty years later, I had myself announced to him. I’d put on my gray suit, and wore a violet veil over my gray hat, and black laced shoes. He ushered me in from the waiting room himself, kissed my hand and said, ‘Oh, Johanna, call me Em just once again.’ And I said, ‘Em, I’ve got to know where the boy is. I’m sure you people know.’ Robert, it was as if the Ice Age had set in. I saw right away he knew all about it, and could feel how he was becoming formal, quite sharp. His lips, thickened by his passion for red wine, became thin with fear. He took a quick look around, shook his head and whispered to me, ‘What your son did was a terrible thing. But on top of that it was politically stupid.’ And I said, ‘I can tell from looking at you what being politically clever leads to.’ I was on the point of leaving, but he stopped me, and said, ‘My God, should we all hang ourselves?’ And I said, ‘All of you, yes.’ ‘Do be reasonable,’ he said. ‘Things like this are the police commissioner’s business. And you know what he did to him.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know what he did to him. Nothing. That’s the pity—nothing. All he ever did was win for him every game of rounders for five years on end.’ At this the coward bit his lips and said, ‘Sports—let me see—you can always do something about sports.’

At that stage, Robert, we didn’t have any idea that merely raising your hand could cost you your life. Vacano had a Polish prisoner of war sentenced to death because the prisoner lifted his hand to him—just lifted his hand—hadn’t actually struck him.

And then one morning I found a slip of paper on my breakfast tray from Otto. ‘I need money, too—12—you can give it to me in cash.’ I went over to the studio and took 12,000 marks from the safe—they were there all ready, in case we got any more messages from you—and threw Otto the wad onto the breakfast table. I was thinking of going to Amsterdam and telling you not to send any more messages, they might cost someone his life. But now you’re here at last. I’d have gone mad if they hadn’t pardoned you. Stay here. Does it really matter where you live, in a world where just raising your hand once may cost you your life? You know the conditions Droescher was given when he negotiated for you: no political activity, and into the army immediately after your examinations. I’ve already arranged for you to repeat your finals and Klaehm the statistician will coach you and save you as many semesters as he can. Must you really study? Very well, as you wish. Statistics? Why that? Very well, do as you want. Edith’s glad. Will you go up to her? Go ahead! Quickly, now, don’t you want to see your son? I’ve given her your room. She’s waiting for you. Go on, now.

He went upstairs in the sanatorium, past brown cupboards and through silent corridors, up under the roof where a loft housed the hot water tank. It smelled of cigarettes up here, smoked by attendants on the sly, of damp bed linen, hung up to dry on the tank. The silence was oppressive. It came up the stairwell as through a chimney. He peered through the skylight down the poplar-lined drive leading to the bus stop. Neat flower beds, the greenhouse, the marble fountain, and, to the right of the wall, the chapel. It looked like an idyll, smelled like one, was one. Cows were grazing inside the electrified fence, pigs which themselves would become slops emptied out of guggly pails into the trough grunted in the garbage. The highway outside the sanatorium walls seemed to run off into an infinity of silence.

How many times had he stood at this station in the loft, to which again and again she sent him so that her rememberings might be precisely retraced and fulfilled. Now he was standing there as the twenty-two-year-old Robert, come back home and resolved on silence. He had had to go and greet Edith and their son, Joseph. Edith and Joseph; both had been strangers to him, mother and son; and they both had felt embarrassed, when he entered the room, Edith more so than he. Had they ever called each other by their first names, he and Edith?

When they’d gone that time to Schrella’s after the game of rounders, she’d set food on the table, potatoes and some indefinable gravy, and green salad. Later she’d poured some weak tea for him, and those days he’d hated weak tea, had had his ideas about the woman he would marry, and one of them was that she would know how to make a good cup of tea. Quite obviously Edith didn’t, yet he had known he would pull her into the bushes when they came out of the Cafe Zons and went through Blessenfeld Park on the way home. She was blonde, she seemed only sixteen, yet had no teenage giggliness about her. There was no false expectation of happiness in her eyes, eyes which let him into her nature at once. When she said grace at table, ‘Lord, Lord,’ he’d thought, ‘we should be eating with our fingers.’ He’d felt stupid, holding a fork in his hand, and the spoon felt strange. For the first time he’d understood what eating was: to appease hunger, no more. Only kings and beggars ate with their fingers. They hadn’t said a word to each other as they walked down Gruffel Street, through Blessenfeld and the park into the Cafe Zons. And he had been afraid, holding her hand and swearing never to put the Host of the Beast to his lips. What foolishness. Yet he had been afraid, as if he were taking part in some solemn consecration. As they walked back again through the park, he’d taken Edith’s hand, held her back, let Schrella go on ahead, had watched Schrella’s dark gray silhouette disappear into the evening sky as he was drawing Edith into the bushes. She had offered no resistance and had not laughed as the ancient knowledge of how the thing should be done flowed into his hands, filled his mouth and arms. All he had remembered of it was her blonde hair, shining from the summer rain, a wreath of silvery raindrops on her eyebrows, like the skeleton of some delicate sea creature found on a rust-colored shore, the lines around her mouth puckering the skin into little cloud shapes as she whispered against his chest, ‘They’ll kill you, Robert!’ So, they had used each other’s first names, then, there in the park among the bushes, and again the following afternoon in that hotel of assignation. He had pulled Edith along by the wrist, holding her close to him, had gone through the city like a blind man, following a divining rod, instinctively finding the way and the right building. In a package under his arm he had carried the gunpowder for Ferdi, whom he would meet that same evening. He had found out she could even smile, looking into the mirror, the cheapest one the woman who ran the place had been able to find in the dime store, smile as she, too, discovered her own ancient knowledge. And he knew, even then, that the package on the windowsill contained a folly which had to be committed, since reason led to nothing in a world where lifting your hand to someone could cost you your life. Edith’s smile had done wonders for her face, little used to smiling as it was. When they’d gone downstairs and into the woman’s flat, he’d been amazed at how little she’d charged for the room. He had paid one mark, fifty, and the woman had refused the fifty-pfennig tip he’d tried to give her. ‘Oh no, sir, no, I don’t take tips, I’m an independent woman.’

So he had called her by her first name, she who sat in his room at home, with the child in her lap. Joseph. He had taken the child from her lap and held him a minute, awkwardly, then laid him on the bed. And again the ancient knowledge had flowed into him, into his hands, mouth, arms. She had never learned how to make tea, not even later on, when they were living in their own apartment—doll’s furniture—after he’d come back from the university or was home on leave, a noncom in the Engineers. Meanwhile he had got himself trained as a demolition expert, later trained demolition squads himself, implanting formulas which contained exactly what he wanted: dust and rubble and revenge for Ferdi Progulske, for the waiter called Groll and the boy who had slipped his messages into the letter box. Edith. Edith with her mesh shopping bag and book of discount stamps, Edith leafing through the cook book, giving the child his bottle, settling little Ruth at her breast. Young father, young mother. She had come to meet him at the barracks gate with the baby carriage, and they had strolled along by the riverbank, across rounders fields and football fields, at high water and low water, had sat on stiles while Joseph played in the sand by the river, and Ruth made her first attempts to walk. For two years he had played the husband game. But he had never thought of himself as a husband, even when he had hung his coat and hat in the closet more than seven hundred times, had taken off his jacket and sat down at the table with Joseph on his lap while Edith was saying grace … ‘Lord.…’ Main thing had been, no privileges, no extravagances. Dr. Robert Faehmel, sergeant in the Engineers, mathematically gifted, eating pea soup while the neighbors were listening to the Host of the Beast as it was being broadcast over the radio. Off duty until reveille, then back to the barracks with the first streetcar, after Edith’s kiss at the door and the curious sensation of having done her wrong again, a little blonde standing there in her red dressing gown, holding Joseph’s hand, with Ruth in the baby carriage. No political activity, they’d said. Had he ever been politically active? And now his youthful folly had been pardoned. He had become one of the most talented officer-candidates. He had been fascinated by thickheadedness, because thickheads retained routine method. He had drummed demolition formulas into their brains, sowed dust and ruin. ‘No mail from Alfred?’ He had never known at first whom she was referring to, had forgotten her name had been Schrella,too. Time could be read off in promotions: half a year, lance corporal; half a year, corporal; half a year, sergeant; and still another half-year, lieutenant. And presently the dull gray completely joyless hordes had moved out and to the station. No flowers, no laughing on the way, no smile from the Kaiser for them. They had had none of the bravado of peace too long diked up. An irritable mass, but apathetically submissive. And so he and Edith had abandoned the doll’s house in which they had played at marriage, and at the station had renewed their vow never to worship the Beast.

Was it the damp bed linen or the dampness of the walls that made him shiver? Now he was permitted to leave the station at which his mother had posted him. Caption: ‘Edith, Joseph.’ He trod out his cigarette on the floor, went downstairs, hesitantly worked the door handle, and suddenly remembered his mother, as she had looked standing at the telephone. Smiling, she had signed him to be silent as she said into the mouthpiece, ‘I’m so very glad, Father, you can marry the two of them on Sunday. We’ve got the papers here and the civil marriage will be taken care of tomorrow.’ Had he really heard the priestly voice reply, or had it been a dream? ‘Yes, my dear Mrs. Faehmel, I shall be very glad when this embarrassment is out of the way.’

Edith had not worn a white dress and had refused to leave Joseph at home. She had held Joseph in her arms while the priest asked for the two yeses, and the organ played. And he hadn’t worn black. No point in getting all dressed up. No champagne. Father hated champagne. And the bride’s father, whom he had seen only once, had disappeared without a trace; also no sign of the bride’s brother. Been wanted for attempted murder, even though he would have nothing to do with the package of gunpowder, and actually had tried to prevent the affair.

His mother had hung up the receiver, come toward him and had laid her hands on his shoulders, saying, ‘Isn’t the little boy sweet! You must adopt him immediately after the marriage, and I’ve remembered him in my will. Here, have some more tea. I know you must have drunk good tea in Holland. Don’t be afraid, Edith will be a good wife, and soon you’ll have passed your exams. I’ll furnish an apartment for you, and don’t forget you can always smile to yourself when you have to go into the army. Keep quiet, and remember this: in a world where raising your hand to someone can cost you your life, there’s no more room for such feelings. I’ll fix up an apartment for you. Father will be glad. He’s gone out to St. Anthony’s—as if he’ll find any solace there. How weary these old bones, my boy. They’ve killed your father’s secret laugh, the spring has snapped. It wasn’t made to stand this sort of tension. There’s no use in your using fine words like tyrant any more. Father just got to the point where he couldn’t bear being penned up in his studio, and what’s left of the old Otto was giving him nightmares. You should see what you can do about making up with Otto. Please, please try. Go now, please.’

Attempts to smooth things over with Otto. He’d made many such moves, climbing stairs, knocking on doors. That thickset young man had not even seemed like a stranger to him, the eyes had not even looked at him with a stranger’s regard. Behind that pale, wide forehead had been the will to power in its simplest form, power over timid schoolmates, over passersby who had failed to salute the flag. Power which could have been a touching thing, had it been confined to suburban sports centers or street corners and made a matter of three marks won at a boxing match, of a gaily dressed girl taken to the movies by the winner and kissed in a doorway. But there had been nothing moving about Otto as there had been at times about Nettlinger. Otto’s power had not been used to win boxing bouts or brightly dressed girls. In his brain power had become a formula, stripped of utility and freed of instinct, almost hateless, and exercised automatically, blow by blow.

‘Brother’ was a great word, a mighty word, echoing Hölderlin. Yet even death, it had seemed, was not enough to invest the word ‘brother’ with meaning when the death had been Otto’s death. Not even the news of Otto’s death had brought reconciliation. Killed at Kiev! What a ring it might have had—a ring of tragedy, of greatness and brotherliness. It could have been as moving, taking his age into account, as a grave-stone inscription: Killed at Kiev, Aged Twenty-Five. But it had had no ring to it, and to no avail his attempts to effect a reconciliation after the event, as before. You two are brothers, after all, he had been told. And so they were, according to the registry office and the midwife’s deposition. Had they really been strangers, perhaps he might have been able to feel the emotion and grandeur of it, but strangers they had not been. He had seen Otto eating and drinking, tea, coffee, beer. But Otto had not eaten the same bread as he had, drunk the milk or coffee he had drunk. And worse still with the words they had exchanged. When Otto said ‘bread,’ it had sounded less familiar to his ears than the expression ‘du pain,’ when he had heard it the first time not knowing it stood for bread. They were sons of the same mother and father, had been born in the same house and grown up in it together. There they had eaten, drunk and wept, breathed the same air and taken the same way to school, and laughed and played together. He had called Otto ‘Junior,’ had felt his brother’s arm around his neck, felt for him in his fear of mathematics, helped him, boned with him day after day to dispel the fear, had managed it, too, really had succeeded in taking away his brother’s fear. Now, suddenly, after he had been away for two years, only the husk of Otto was left. Not even strange any more. Not even the pathos of the word. It just didn’t go, it didn’t fit, sounded wrong when he thought of Otto, and for the first time he’d understood Edith’s phrase about taking the Host of the Beast. Otto would have handed his own mother over to the hangman, if the hangman had wanted her.

When, on one of his conciliatory missions, he had actually climbed the stairs, opened Otto’s door and gone in, Otto had turned round and said, ‘What’s the use?’ Otto had been right. What was the use? They were not even strangers, knew each other perfectly, knew how one disliked oranges, how the other preferred beer to milk, how one smoked little cigars rather than cigarettes, how the other put his bookmark in his prayer-book.

He had not been surprised to see Old Wobbly and Nettlinger going up to Otto’s room, or Otto meeting them in the hall, and it had horrified him when it occurred to him that they were both more familiar to him than his own brother. Even murderers were not murderers all the time, not at every hour of the day and night. Murderers, like railroad men, checked in and out of work, went home, relaxed. These two were a jovial pair, clapped him on the shoulder, and Nettlinger had said, ‘Come on, now, wasn’t I the one who let you get away?’ They’d sent Ferdi to his death, and Groll, and Schrella’s father and the boy who’d brought the messages, dispatched them to where you vanished without a trace. But now—let’s forget it, boy! Don’t spoil the game. No hard feelings. Sergeant in the Engineers, demolition expert, married, an apartment, book of discount stamps, two kids. ‘You needn’t ever worry about your wife, nothing will happen to her as long as I’m around.’

‘Well,’ his mother had said, ‘have you talked with Otto? No use? I knew it, but you have to keep trying, again and again. Come here, quietly, I want to tell you something. I think he has a curse on him, bewitched, if you prefer to say it that way, and there’s only one way to set him free. I’ve got to get a gun, get a gun. “Mine is the vengeance,” saith the Lord, but why shouldn’t I be the Lord’s instrument?’

She had gone to the window and taken her brother’s walking stick from the corner between the window and curtain, the brother who had died forty-three years before. She had raised the stick to her shoulder like a gun and aimed, taking a bead on Old Wobbly and Nettlinger. They were riding by outside, one on a white horse, the other on a bay. The moving stick had precisely indicated the tempo of the passing horses, as if timed by a stopwatch. They came round the corner by the hotel, into Modest Street and rode along to the Modest Gate, which presently cut off the view. Then she had lowered the stick. ‘I have two and a half minutes,’ that is, take a deep breath, aim, squeeze. Her dream’s fabric was tear-proof, nowhere could the finespun lie be rent. She put the walking stick back into the corner.

“I’m going to do it, Robert, I shall be the instrument of the Lord. I’ve got patience, time doesn’t touch me at all. You shouldn’t use powder and wadding, but powder and lead. I’ll have revenge for the word, the last ever to leave my son’s innocent lips: ‘Hindenburg.’ The Word he bequeathed to this earth, I must wipe it out. Do we bring children into the world to die at the age of seven whispering ‘Hindenburg!’? I’d thrown the bits of torn-up poem down into the street, and he was such an obedient little fellow he begged me to write a copy for him, but I refused, I didn’t want that madness to cross his lips. In his delirium he tried to put the lines together, and I put my hands over my ears, but listened to him just the same through my fingers. ‘If God you need, let out a yell.’ I tried to force him out of the fever, to shake him awake, and get him to look me in the eye and feel my hands and hear my voice, but he went right on: ‘As long as German woods stand high / As long as German banners fly / As long as German tongue remains / So long will live that name of names!’ It almost killed me, the way he still put emphasis on the ‘that’ in his fever. I gathered all his toys together, and took yours, too, leaving you to howl, and I piled all of them on the blankets in front of him. But he never came back to me, and he never looked at me again, Heinrich, Heinrich. I screamed and prayed and whispered, but he kept on staring into fever-land, where there was only a single line ready waiting for him: ‘Hindenburg! On to the fight!’ He started to say it, and the last word I heard from his mouth was ‘Hindenburg.’

I have to have revenge for the mouth of my seven-year-old son, Robert, don’t you understand? Revenge on those who go riding past our house to the Hindenburg monument. Shiny wreaths, with gold bows, and black and violet ones, will be carried behind them. Always I’ve thought, won’t he ever die? Will we have to have him dished up to us on postage stamps for all eternity, that ancient Beast whose name was the very last word my son ever uttered to me. Are you now going to get me a gun?

I’ll take you at your word. It needn’t be today, or tomorrow, just sometime soon. I’ve learned to be patient. Don’t you remember your brother Heinrich? When he died you were getting on for two. We had a dog called Brom at the time—have you forgotten?—he was so old and wise that he turned the pain you two caused him not into meanness, but into sadness. You two held on to his tail and had him drag both of you through the room. Have you forgotten? You threw the flowers you should have laid on Heinrich’s grave out of the carriage window; we’d left you in front of the cemetery, and later you were allowed to hold the reins from up on the coachman’s box. They were made of cracked black leather. You see, Robert, you do remember. Dog, reins, brother—and soldiers, soldiers, endless soldiers too many to count. Have you forgotten? They came up Modest Street and swung round in front of the hotel and then down to the railroad station, dragging their cannon behind them. Father held your arm, and said, ‘The war’s over.’

A billion marks for a chocolate bar, then two billion for a single candy drop, a cannon for half a loaf of bread, a horse for an apple. Always more. And then not even a half-groschen for the cheapest bar of soap. Nothing good could come of it, Robert, and they didn’t want it to. They kept coming in through the Modest Gate, and turning, all tired out, toward the station. Steadily, steadily, they carried the great Beast’s name before them: Hindenburg. He made sure there was order, down to his last breath. Is he really dead, Robert? I can’t believe it, ‘Chiseled in stone, in bronze indite. Hindenburg!’ He looked like national unity itself, with his buffalo-cheeks on the stamps. I tell you, he’ll have us back at the same old stand, he’ll show us what political reason leads to, and money reason—a horse for an apple, and a billion marks for a piece of candy, then not even half a groschen for a cake of soap, and always everything in an orderly fashion. I’ve seen and heard how they carried his name around in front of them. Dumb as the earth, deaf as a tree, and making sure all the time there was order. Respectable, respectable; honor and loyalty, iron and steel, money and a distressed agriculture. Careful, my boy, in the misty fields and the rustling forests, careful, that’s where they’ll be consecrating the Host of the Beast.

Don’t think I’m crazy, I know exactly where we are. In Denklingen. You can see the road out there, between the trees running along the blue wall, to where the yellow buses crawl by like beetles. They brought me here because I let your children go hungry, after the last lamb had been killed by the fluttering birds. It’s war, you can tell time by the promotions. You were a second lieutenant when you went away, and after two years a first lieutenant. Are you a captain yet? This time you won’t do it in less than four years; then you’ll be a major. Forgive me if I laugh. Don’t carry the thing too far, with your formulas in your head, don’t lose patience and don’t accept any favors. We aren’t going to eat a crumb more than we get on the ration cards. Edith is agreeable to that. Eat what everybody eats, wear what everybody wears, read what everybody reads. Don’t take the extra butter, the extra clothes, the extra poem which dishes up the Beast in a more elegant fashion. Their right hand is full of bribes, bribe money in a variety of coins. I didn’t want to have your children take any favors, either, so they might have the taste of truth on their lips, but they took me away from them. It’s called a sanatorium; you’re allowed to be crazy here without being beaten. They don’t splash cold water over your body and they won’t put you in a straitjacket without your relatives’ consent. I do hope you won’t let them put me in one. I can even go out when I want, for I’m harmless, completely harmless, son. But I don’t want to go out, I don’t want to know what time it is, or have to feel every day that his secret laughter has been killed and that the hidden spring within the hidden wheels has snapped. All at once, you know, he began to take himself seriously. Became pompous, I tell you. Whole mountains of stone went up, entire forests of lumber were cut down and concrete, concrete, you could have filled Lake Boden with it all. They try and forget themselves in building things, it’s like opium. You’d never believe all the things an architect like that can put together in forty years—I used to brush the mortar spots off his pants and plaster splashes from his hat, and he used to lay his head on my lap and smoke his cigar. And we chanted our ‘Do you remember?’ litany, remember 1907, 1914, 1921, 1935—and the answer was always a building—or a death. ‘Remember how Mother died, how Father died, and Johanna and Heinrich. Remember how I built St. Anthony’s, St. Servatius’, St. Boniface’s and St. Modestus’, the viaduct between Heiligenfeld and Blessenfeld, the monastery for the White Friars, the Brown Friars, convalescent homes for the Sisters of Mercy,’ and every answer rang in my ears like a ‘Lord have mercy on us’! Building after building, death after death. He began to chase after his own legend, imprisoned in a liturgy of self. Breakfast every morning in the Cafe Kroner, when he would rather have been eating breakfast with us, coffee half milk, rolls and butter. He didn’t at all like soft-boiled eggs and toast and that disgusting paprika cheese, but he began to believe he did. I was frightened. He began to get angry when he didn’t get a big assignment, where before he’d simply been glad when he got one. Do you understand? It’s a complicated mathematics, as you move toward the fifties and sixties, with the choice of either emptying your bladder on your own monument or gazing up at it in awe. No more twinkling eyes. You were eighteen, then, and Otto was sixteen. And I was scared. I’d stood up there in the pergola like a sharp-eyed watchful bird, had carried you both in my arms, first as babies at my breast, then as children, then held your hands, or you’d stood beside me, already taller than I was, and I watched how time went marching by below. Time boiled up, struck and we were paying a billion marks for a single piece of candy and then didn’t have three pfennigs for a roll. The savior’s name, I didn’t even want to hear it, but they hoisted the Beast onto their shoulders regardless, stuck him in stamps on their letters and repeated the litany: respectable, respectable; honor and loyalty, beaten yet not beaten. Order. Dumb as the earth, deaf as a tree, and down there in Father’s office Josephine drew him across her damp sponge and stuck him, in all colors, on the letters. And your father, my little David, slept through it all. He didn’t wake up until you’d disappeared, when he saw how a package of money could cost a life. One’s own money, wrapped in newspaper and passed from hand to hand. When his other son had suddenly become the husk of a son. Loyalty, honor and respectability—then he saw it. I warned him about Gretz, but he said, ‘He’s harmless.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but you’ll see what harmless people are capable of. Gretz is the kind who’d betray his own mother.’ And my own clairvoyance frightened me when Gretz actually did betray his own mother. He did, Robert, he betrayed his own mother to the police. Just because the old woman kept on saying, ‘It’s a sin and a shame.’ She didn’t say any more than that, just that one phrase, until one day her son said, ‘I can’t stand it any more, it’s against my principles.’ They dragged the old woman away and stuck her in an old people’s home, and certified her insane, to save her life, but as it turned out this precisely caused her death. They gave her an injection. Didn’t you know the old woman? She used to throw the empty mushroom baskets over the wall to you, and you took them apart and used the reeds to build huts. When it had been raining a long while they turned a dirty brown, then you let them dry and I let you burn them. Have you forgotten that now? The old woman whom Gretz betrayed, his own mother? Of course, he still stands behind the counter, fondling his flaps of calf liver. They came to fetch Edith, too, but I wouldn’t let them have her; I ground my teeth and screamed at them and they gave in. I kept Edith until the fluttering bird killed her. I tried to keep him off, too; I heard his rushing wings as he dived down and I knew he was bringing death. He smashed his way in through the hall windows, triumphantly. I held up my hands to ward him off, but he flew between them. Forgive me, I couldn’t save the lamb, and remember, Robert, you promised to get me a gun. Don’t forget. Watch out when you climb ladders, my boy. Come here, let me kiss you, and forgive me for laughing. How clever the barbers are these days!”

He climbed bolt upright up the ladder, treading into the gray infinity between the rungs, while David climbed down to him from above. A slight man. All his life long he could have worn the same suits he’d bought for himself when he was young. Watch out! Why do you two have to stop up there half-way up, why can’t you at least sit down on the rungs, if you have to talk to each other, instead of standing up straight like that. Were they really putting their arms around each other, did the son really have his arm around his father’s shoulders, the father’s around his son’s?

Coffee, Huperts, strong and hot with a lot of sugar; he likes it strong and sweet in the afternoon, my lord and master, and weak in the mornings. He’s coming out of that gray infinity into which the upright and unbending one is disappearing, with his long strides. My husband and my son are brave, coming here to see me in this dungeon of the damned. My son twice a week, my husband only once. He brings Saturday with him, he carries a diary in his eyes. With him I cannot hope to say it’s the barber makes him look like that. He’s eighty; it’s his birthday today, and it will be solemnly celebrated in the Café Kroner. Without champagne. He always did hate it and I never knew why.

Once upon a time you dreamt of having a tremendous party on your birthday. Seven times seven grandchildren, great-grandchildren, too, and daughters-in-law and great-nephews and great-nieces by marriage. You’ve always felt a little like Abraham, founder of a mighty clan; you used to picture yourself with your twenty-ninth great-grandchild in your arms when you were dreaming of the future.

Increase and multiply. It will be a sad feast. Only one son, then the blond grandson and the dark-haired granddaughter Edith gave you; and the mother of the clan in dungeon with a curse on it, accessible only by infinitely long ladders with giant rungs.

“Come in, and welcome, old David, still with your young man’s waistline. But spare me the diary in your eyes. I’m sailing along on the little diary page, marked May 31, 1942. Have pity on me, beloved, don’t burn my little paper boat made of that folded diary page, don’t spill me into the sea of sixteen years forever gone. Do you still remember? Victory is won, not given. Woe to all those who don’t take the Host of the Beast. And of course you know that sacraments have the terrible quality of not being subject to the finite. And so they hungered, and the bread was not multiplied for them, nor the fish, and the Host of the Lamb did not still their hunger, while that of the Beast offered nourishment in plenty. They’d never learned how to reckon: a billion marks for a piece of candy, a horse for an apple, and then not even three pfennigs for a roll. And everything always in order, everything always respectable, honorable, loyal. Give it up, David, why carry the world around on your back? Be merciful, get the diary out of your eyes and let the other fellow make history. The Cafe Kroner is a safer bet for you. Some day a monument—a little bronze one—will show you with a roll of drawings in your hand, small, slender and smiling, something between a bohemian and a young rabbi, with that indefinable country air. You’ve seen where political reason leads—would you want to take my political unreason away from me?

You called down to me from your studio window: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll love you, there’ll be none of those dreadful things your school friends tell you about, the things that are supposed to happen on wedding nights. Don’t believe a word of what those fools tell you, we’ll laugh when it gets to that point, truly, I promise you, only you’ve got to wait a little, a couple of weeks, a month at the most, until I can buy the bunch of flowers, hire the carriage and ride up to call at your house. We’ll travel, see the world, and you’ll give me children, five, six, seven, and they’ll give me grandchildren, five times, six times, seven times seven. You’ll never notice that I’m a working man. I’ll spare you the manly sweat and the muscle-bound, uniformed seriousness. Everything comes easy to me, I’ve learned it, I’ve studied a little, got my sweating over and done with. I’m no artist, don’t fool yourself about that. I won’t be able to give you the demonic, sham or genuine, in any shape or fashion, and what your school friends make into hair-raising stories will never happen to us in the bedroom, but out in the open air, so you can see the sky over you and have grass and leaves falling on your face, and smell the autumn evening, and not feel you’re doing some disgusting gymnastic exercise that you have to go through. You will smell the autumn grass; we’ll stretch out on the sand by the riverbank, between the willows, just above the high-tide mark. Bull-rushes, a couple of old shoe-polish cans, a cork, a rosary bead dropped overboard by a barge-woman, a message in a lemonade bottle. In the air the smell from ships’ funnels, the rattle of anchor chains. We won’t make all blood and seriousness. Though naturally there’ll be some blood and seriousness.’

And the cork I picked up with my naked toes and offered you as a souvenir. I picked it up and gave it to you, because you’d spared me the bedroom, the gloomy chamber of horrors hinted at in novels, schoolgirl gossip and nunnish warnings. Willow boughs hung down to my forehead, silvery-green leaves about my eyes, which were dark and shining. The steamers hooted; they called to me that I wasn’t a virgin any more. Twilight, an autumn evening, anchor chains long since let down, seamen and barge-women coming ashore over swaying gangplanks, and I already longing for what a few hours before I’d feared. Though a few tears came into my eyes when I thought how I wasn’t living up to my ancestors, who would have been ashamed to turn duty into pleasure. You stuck willow leaves on my brow and on the tear-stains, down by the riverbank, where my feet stirred the reeds, moved the bottles with their holidaymakers’ greetings to local inhabitants. Where did all those shoe-polish cans come from; were they for the shiny boots of seamen ready to go ashore, for the barge-women’s black shopping bags, and, yes, surely for the shiny-peaked caps glimmering in the twilight as we sat in Trischler’s cafe, later on, on the red chairs? I was amazed at the loveliness of that young woman’s hands, the one who brought us fried fish and lettuce so green it hurt my eyes. And wine. That young woman’s hands, the same one who, twenty-eight years later, bathed my son’s mutilated back with wine. You ought not to have yelled at Trischler when he called up and told us about Robert’s accident. High tide, high tide, I was always tempted to throw myself in and let myself be carried out to the gray horizon. Come in, welcome, but don’t kiss me; don’t burn my little boat. Here’s some coffee, sweet and hot, afternoon coffee, strong and black, and here are some cigars. Sixty-centers, Huperts got them for me. Change the focus of your eyes, old man, I’m not blind, just crazy and perfectly well able to read the date on the calendar down the hall. It’s September 6, 1958. Blind I’m not and I know I can’t put down your appearance to the barber’s skill. Get in the game, lengthen the focus of your eyes, and don’t tell me the same stories over and over about your stunning blond grandson with his mother’s heart and his father’s brains who’s representing you in the reconstruction of the Abbey. Has he graduated yet? Is he going to study statics? Is he taking his on-the-job training? Forgive me if I laugh. I never could take building seriously. Concentrated baked dust, dust transformed into a building. An optical illusion, fata morgana, doomed to be reduced to rubble. Victory is won, not given. I read it in the paper this morning before they took me away. ‘A wave of jubilation arose—they drank in the words, full of trusting faith—and over and over again the enthusiastic rejoicing welled up.’ Do you want me to read it for you in the local paper?

I promised Edith, the lamb, that your flock of grandchildren—not seven times seven, but two times one, one times two—would have no privileges. They would never take the Host of the Beast, and never learn that poem for school.

Praise every blow that fate doth strike,

Since pain makes kindred souls alike.

You read too many newspapers with a national circulation; you let them serve up the Host of the Beast sweet or sour, baked or fried, in God only knows what kind of sauce. You read too many fancy newspapers; here, in the local sheet you can have the real, genuine muck of every day, unadulterated and unalloyed, and as well-meant as ever you could wish. The other ones, your national newspapers, are not well-intentioned at all, they’re nothing but cowards, but here, everything’s meant well. No privileges, if you please, no coddling. Look here, this bit is aimed at me: ‘Mothers of the Fallen … And though you are the people’s holy ones / Your souls cry out to your lost sons.…’ I’m one of the people’s holy ones, and my soul cries out, my son has been killed: Otto Faehmel. Respectable, respectable. Honor and Loyalty. He denounced us to the police, and suddenly was the mere husk of a son. No special consideration, no privileges. They did go easy on the Abbot, naturally; he did have a taste of their sacrament, of respectability, orderliness and honor. They celebrated it, monks with flaming torches, up there on the hill with a view of the lovely Kissa Valley. A new age began, an age of sacrifice, of pain, and so once again they had their pfennigs for rolls of bread and their half-groschen for cakes of soap. The Abbot was astonished at Robert’s refusal to take part in the celebration. They rode up the hill on big horses steaming from the effort, and lit their fires. Solstice time. They let Otto light the bonfire; he shoved the flaming torch in among the twigs, singing, with the selfsame voice that had sung the rorate coeli so wonderfully, singing what I want to keep away from my grandson’s lips. How weary these old bones—aren’t yours trembly yet, old man?

Come, put your head in my lap, light yourself a cigar, here’s the coffee right by your hand. Close your eyes, shutters down, all done, diary obliterated. We’ll say our do-you-remember prayer and remember the years when we lived out there in Blessenfeld, where the evenings smelled of people taking their leisure, stuffing themselves at fish-fries, at sugared-doughnut shops and ice cream carts. Blessed are those who are allowed to eat with their fingers; I never could as long as I lived at home. You used to let me. The hurdy-gurdies droned away and the merry-go-rounds squealed round and round and I smelled and heard and felt that only the transient has permanence. You got me out of that dreadful house where they all had huddled for four hundred years, trying in vain to free themselves. When they sat down in the garden to drink wine, I used to sit up there in the roof garden, during the summer evenings. Evenings for men, evenings for women, and in the women’s shrill laughter I could hear what I heard in their husbands’ raucous laughter: despair. When the wine loosened their tongues and freed them of tabus, when the smell of the summer night let them out of their prisons of hypocrisy, it all came out into the open. They were neither rich enough nor poor enough to find out that only the transient is permanent. And I longed for the ephemeral, though I’d been brought up for permanent things, marriage, loyalty, honor, the bedroom where only duty lay, not pleasure. Seriousness, buildings, dust changed into structures, and in my ears a sound like the call-note of the murmuring river at high tide: whywhywhy? I didn’t want any part of their despair, or to feed on gloomy legacy handed down from generation to generation. I longed for the airy white Host of the Lamb and tried, during the mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, to beat the ancient heritage of power and darkness out of my breast. I laid my prayerbook down in the hall when I came home from Mass, getting there just in time to receive Father’s morning kiss. Then his rumbling bass went away across the courtyard to the office. I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and I could see the hard, waiting look in my mother’s eyes. She had been thrown to the wolves. Should I, then, be spared the same fate? The wolves were growing up, into beer-drinkers wearing peaked caps, both the attractive and the less attractive ones. I looked at their hands and their eyes and had the awful curse laid on me of knowing how they’d look at forty, at sixty, with purple veins in their skin and never smelling of good times after work. Men, responsibility. Obeying the law, imparting a sense of history to children, counting money and resolved on political reason, all were doomed to partake of the Host of the Beast, like my brothers. They were young in years only, and only one thing—death—promised them glory, would give them greatness and enfold them in veils of myth. Time was nothing but a means of bringing them closer to death. They sniffed out its trail, liked what they smelt. For they smelled of it themselves; it lurked in the eyes of the men to whom I would be thrown. Wearers of caps, guarders of the law. One thing only was forbidden: to want to live and play. Do you understand me, old man? Play was a deadly sin. Not sport, they put up with that, it kept you lively, made you graceful, pretty, and stimulated their wolfish appetite. Dolls’ houses: good, they were all for housewifely and motherly instincts. Dancing: that was good, too, part of the marriage market. But if I wanted to dance just to please myself, up in my room in my petticoat, that was a sin, because it wasn’t a duty. I could let the wearers of caps paw me as much as they wanted at a dance, in the hallway shadow, or after a picnic in the country, or in forest shadow put up with their less ambitious caresses. After all, we’re not prudes. And I prayed for him, the one who would set me free and save me from death in the wolves’ lair. I prayed for that while I put the white Sacrament to my lips and saw you over there at your studio window. If you only knew how I loved you, if you had any idea, you’d never open your eyes like that and greet me with your diary look and want to tell me how my grandchildren have grown since then, how they ask for me and haven’t forgotten me. No, I don’t want to see them. I know they love me and I know there’s one way to give the murderers the slip—be certified insane. But what if I’d gone the way Gretz’ mother did? What then? It was a stroke of luck with me, pure luck in a world where a gesture can cost a life, and being certified insane can save you or kill you. I don’t as yet want to give back the years I’ve swallowed; I don’t want to see Joseph as a twenty-two-year-old with mortar spots on his pants’ legs and plaster stains on his jacket, a stunning young man swinging his folding rule with a roll of drawings under his arm. I don’t want to see nineteen-year-old Edith reading her Love and Intrigue. Shut your eyes, old David, snap your diary shut—and there, there’s your coffee.

I really am scared, believe me, I’m not lying. Let my little boat go sailing on, don’t be a wanton boy and sink it. It’s a wicked world and the pure in heart are so few. Robert humors me, too, and obediently goes to each station as I send him. From 1917 to 1942—not one step farther; he goes in his upright and unbending German way. I know how homesick he was and how unhappy, playing billiards and boning over formulas in a foreign land; he had come back not just for Edith’s sake. He’s a German, reads Hölderlin and has never let the Host of the Beast touch his lips. But he’s no lamb. He’s a shepherd. I only wish I knew just what he did in the war. But he never talks about it. An architect who’s never built a house, never had a smitch of plaster stain on his pants’ legs. No, impeccable and correct, an architect of the writing desk, with no enthusiasm for housewarming parties. But what has happened to the other son, Otto? Killed at Kiev. He came from our own flesh and blood, yet where did he come from, where did he go? Was he really like your father? Did you ever see Otto with a girl? I do so wish I knew something about him. I know he liked beer, didn’t like sour pickles, and I know how his hands moved when he combed his hair or put on his overcoat. He denounced us to the police and joined the army—even before he’d finished school—and wrote us postcards of deadly irony: ‘I’m well, hope you are too, need 3.’ Otto never once came home on leave. Where did he go? What detective could supply that information? I know his regimental number, his field post office number and his successive ranks: first lieutenant, major, lieutenant-colonel Faehmel. And the final blow in figures again, a date: Killed, 12.1.1942. With my own eyes I saw him knock down people in the street because they didn’t salute the flag. He raised his hands and knocked them down, and would have knocked me down, too, if I hadn’t turned quickly into the other street. How did he ever get into our house? I can’t even cling to the foolish hope he might have been the wrong baby. He was born right in our own house fourteen days after Heinrich died, up in the bedroom on a gloomy October day in 1917. He looked like your father.

Quiet, old man, don’t talk, don’t open your eyes, don’t show your eighty years. Memento quia pulvis es et in pulverem revertis, as we are quite clearly told. Dust the mortar leaves behind, dust of mortgage papers, of deeds of houses and estates. Then a statue in a peaceful suburb where children as they play will ask, ‘Who was that man?’

As a young mother, radiant and gay, I walked through Blessenfeld Park, and I knew then that the peevish old pensioners scolding the children for being noisy were only scolding someone who some day would also sit where they were, and in turn scold other noisy children, who in their turn would soon enough be irritable pensioners. I had two children of my own, one for each hand, four and six years old, then six and eight, then eight and ten, while the carefully painted signs were hung out in the garden, 25, 50, 75, 100. The black numbers on the white enameled metal always made me think of the numbers of streetcar stops. In the evening, your head on my lap and the coffee cup within easy reach—we were waiting for happiness. But in vain. And in the railroad cars, the hotels, we never found it either. A stranger went walking about in our house, bearing our name, drinking our milk, eating our bread and using our money, to buy chocolate in kindergarten, later schoolbooks.

Take me back to the riverbank, so my naked feet can play at the high-tide mark, play to the steamers’ hooting and the smell of smoke, back to the cafe where the woman serves the guests with lovely hands; be quiet, old man, don’t cry, I’m just living in inner emigration, and you’ve got a son and two grandchildren, perhaps they’ll present you with great-grandchildren soon. It is not up to me to come back to you again, and fold myself a new paper boat every day from a diary page, and sail blithely on till midnight—September 6, 1958, that’s the future, the German future; I read it myself in the local paper:

‘A View of the German Future, 1958: The twenty-one-year-old Sgt. Morgner has become the thirty-six-year-old Farmer Morgner. He stands on the bank of the Volga. Work done, he smokes a well-earned pipe, one of his blond children in his arms, lost in contemplation of his wife milking the last cow. German milk on the banks of the Volga.…’

You don’t want to hear any more! Good, then leave me alone with the future. I don’t want to know how it is as the present. Aren’t they standing on the banks of the Volga? Don’t cry, old man, pay the ransom and I’ll come back from the bewitched castle. Got to get a gun, get a gun.

Careful when you climb up that ladder. Take the cigar out of your mouth, you’re not thirty any more, you might have a dizzy spell. Family party in the Cafe Kroner tonight? I may be there. Happy birthday. Forgive me if I laugh. Johanna would have been forty-eight and Heinrich forty-seven. They took their future with them. Don’t weep, old man, you wanted to play the game. Careful when you climb the ladder.”