'Oh, don't pay any attention to a thorny old rose like me. My roots are too deep in the ground to understand the modern forms of expression you young people come up with. Not bad for a beginner.' She coughed a few times. 'But I would just suggest spending more time in the garden, looking at real leaves, getting outside to meet real people. Too much time in that little room, crammed with all your canvases and God knows what or whom, and you've forgotten what real life looks like.'
Alone again, I laid my head on the banister, unable to go up and face Elsa after the truth had been spoken so bluntly. Pimmi's words kept cutting into me. My paintings: sores, scabs. Maybe that's what they were — nothing more than sickening old bandages from all the places I'd bled.
Madeleine startled me at the top of the stairs.
'Didn't know you had so much talent,' she called down. I watched in disbelief as she descended towards me with a smile so full of admiration there was something almost religious about it. 'If you ever need me to pose . . . I've already done that for loads of artists before, sat on their cubes, naked as a jaybird in the cold — those fellows can never afford heat. I only do it if I like the work . . . and I like what you do. A lot.'
For the first time I saw who was hiding behind the moth-like eyelashes, rough hide and feathers. I saw a human being with petty hopes, nonsensical dreams like anyone else's. She was also seeing me in a new light, the flattering light of the artist, and this, so soon after Pimmichen's criticism, had its full effect — I found myself unable to speak, move a muscle, breathe, and the more I didn't, the more there was something all-encompassing, replete, even congested about the moment, though neither of us was doing anything but standing there, arms at our sides. Either of us only needed to snatch at that tiny creature hovering above our heads unseen, the invisible unsaid thing it transported with its tiny transparent wings, which we couldn't quite understand but somehow felt was the regenerator of fleeting hopes, a momentary rejection of death, our vulnerability on earth, a squaring up to all the mysteries we'd never solve, plans we'd never accomplish, universal dreams never to come true. Lifting an arm up to catch it was lifting a fist to defy heaven, grant ourselves that sweet savage force of our consummate, absolute beings, that soft, fuzzy, ambrosial moment that was ours to squeeze at that precise moment — to feel wriggling, alive, soft fuzzy buzzing, vibrant — in our tight-with-life fists before we felt its sting and let it all go.
I went upstairs for the night.
xix
For a long time I had needed my lesser arm to balance the tray, but by then I'd become adept and could balance it on the good one, while the other stayed waiter-style behind my back. I'd learned how to turn the doorknob with my foot and push it open without my knee knocking the tray so that the napkin absorbed more of the tea than Pimmi or Elsa did.
'Breakfast . . .' I announced in my customary singsong.
Pimmichen's head had drooped over the edge of the bed, an arch of pearly teeth sticking partway out of her mouth so that it looked as if her jaw was broken; drool was hanging in a string down to the floor.
'Grandma!' I dropped the tray, part of me taking fearful note that she didn't react to the shatter. I undid the neck button of her nightgown and prised her dental apparatus out of her mouth.
My shaking revived her: her eyes opened, if only to bewildered slits.
'I'm here. Right by you. Everything is okay.'
She looked slightly left of me, her gums working away. 'Wilhelm? Wilhelm?'
'No, it's Johannes. Pimmichen? Do you hear me?'
'Oh, oh.'
'Breathe deep. Just like that . . .'
After what seemed impossibly long to someone young and agitated like me, she made an effort to speak. I had to move my ear closer to make out what she was saying, for there seemed to be more throat-clearing and sighing than words. 'Dearest . . . don't get your hopes up high; do something else for a job. I was wrong to encourage you. I'm afraid you won't have anything left if you continue painting for too long.' She held on to my sleeve so I'd stay bent to hear her until she'd finished. 'You need a job, with other employees — a paid job, to learn some skills. Do something useful. Make an income. Get out. I've been selfish, may God forgive me. I wanted you by my side; I was lonely with no other family. But you have your father to take care of now, so you must get a job. You must forget all the rest.' She let go, tumbled back. I was in a state of confusion, hurt and nettled.
'You're not going anywhere, Grandma.'
'They're up there singing, hands joined in a ring — your grandfather, mother, sister. I must leave this old shell of mine behind. Rest your ear on it after I go and you'll hear I always loved you.'
'You have a few more years in you.'
'I saw a shadow. It won't be long.'
'A what? Sorry?' I asked.
'A shadow. It opened my door, was standing right there in the frame of the door, looking straight at me. There's no mistaking. Death's wings are flapping.'
'A shadow?'
'In the middle of the night. A form. It opened the door, looked at me and left. It was an annunciation, time to say my last prayers.'
'How can you see a shadow at night?'
'I did. You left the light on in the library, Johannes, so I could see the outline well. It came to me.'
'I didn't leave any light on,' I said. 'I check around the whole house before going upstairs. It would still be on if I had. Unless you got up and turned it off?'
'Then that you-know-what did.'
'She's never read a book in her life — why would she be in the library?'
'In that case it wasn't our light, it was the Lord's. My, my. Adieu.' She touched my cheek and closed her eyes.
'You're being a lunatic.'
'Shh, don't distract me. My soul must rise.'
'I assure you, you're confusing your angel with someone else.'
'The day I confuse a whachamacallit for an angel, I'm already dead.'
'It wasn't an angel or a shadow, I tell you.'
'Help me go in peace.'
'You're not going anywhere.'
'Be strong, sweet one.'
'It wasn't what you think, Pimmi.'
'Call it what you like. A materialised presence. A form.'
'I call it her!'
'She, he — no matter . . . Death is genderless.'
'She! It's very definitely a she!'
'I told you, it's not her,' she whispered.
'I don't mean Madeleine. I mean . . .'
Very slowly my grandmother opened one eye. 'Who?'
'She came down to get a book. I wouldn't get her one before I went to bed. Damn her! She knows she's not allowed down here!'
'Who on earth are you talking about?'
'Elsa.'
'Elsa?'
'Her name is Elsa, not Edeltraud.'
She clasped her hands together in dismay. 'Johannes, you're not well. You must promise me to seek help.'
'Listen, Grandmother . . .'
'Listen you, young man. This has gone too far. You have become sick. I don't mean your body — it's fine, it has healed, nothing's wrong with you in that sense. I mean you've come down with some ailment in your mind, a mental trauma.'
'Remember the girl who used to play violin with Ute?'
'No, and I don't want to hear any more nonsense.'
'Mutter and Vater hid her during the war. Didn't you know?' Pimmichen looked at me in dread and confusion, not knowing whether or not to believe me, or not wanting to. 'Well, she's still upstairs. I never told her we lost the war.'
My grandmother was in a state of shock, at either the truth or my confession of it, thus linking her to my lie. She scanned my features, fear in her eyes.
'You're not well. If what you say were true, how could she have stayed alive all these years? On air and dust?'
'Mutter took care of her, Vater helped when he could, and I've cared for her ever since.'
She managed with a few jerks and ungainly grimaces to sit up, clinging to me for s
upport. 'All these years?'
'Yes.'
'Johannes, the Gestapo would have found her out — they knew about your parents. Where would you be hiding this little girl?'
'She's not a little girl any more. She's a woman.'
My grandmother wiped her watery eyes. 'She doesn't exist. She never became a woman.'
'You heard her in the guest room — you fell down the stairs.'
'Do not invent what is not. Those were pigeons nesting — you left the window open. Pigeons. I remember well . . .' She waved her liver-spotted hands in front of her face as if hundreds of pigeons were diving at her.
'She's alive.'
'In your memory.'
'In this house. As alive as you and I.'
'You're ill; you must be careful what you say. And more so what you do. You could get yourself into trouble, get locked up for life opening your mouth like that!'
'Who would imprison me? I'm a hero for safeguarding her still. I'm just holding out longer than others, just in case. The world's not to be trusted.'
'It's your guilt speaking, Johannes. Maybe you wish you had helped that little girl. You're feeling guilt because of abstention — all you didn't do.'
Pimmi spent the next moments trying to talk me out of what was and had been. It was crazy: I almost began to doubt myself. The real situation, the truth, hit me as unreal — that the war had ever happened; that Austria was occupied; that my father had shrunk to a marionette whose strings were pulled by a prostitute, in our own house, a puppet stand; that the man who had won my childhood admiration had committed suicide, as had his mistress, in an aura of theatricality the day after pronouncing their wedding vows. I imagined Eva Braun swallowing poison as the Führer shot himself, Martin Bormann running out of the bunker crying, 'Hitler named me new master of the Reich! Hitler named me new master of the Reich!', running enraptured into the ruins of Berlin, never to be seen again. It was all too crazy. My own life did not feel real; how could Elsa's? Yes, her existence, too, struck me as unreal. Those years were absurd; everyone's sense of reality had shifted as much as the walls.
***
I took one slow step up. I took another one, just as slow. I felt the weight of my leg. The solidness of wood under my foot. The realness of the wooden banister. The doorknob was hard; the door was heavy, thus permanent. A smell of paint and turpentine came from behind it. I pushed it open. Opened my eyes. And looked. And there, at the pinnacle of her imagined success, she lay, unconscious, a thick faded-green stain about her mouth. Her arms were extended tragically, one thrown behind her head, the other to the side, clutching an empty paint tube. She was not real, none of this had ever happened; it couldn't have. I stood there counting, but she didn't disappear. I pushed her with my foot and she rolled over on her back. She, too, was solid, heavy, real. Green paint bubbled out of her mouth.
I took her up in my arms. God knows what I did then. I slapped her face, pressed her stomach, tried to pick her up by her feet. There was more green on the floor, then came orange, yellow, blue. We were soon slipping in it. With the sliding of my feet, it turned into one dark, chaotic mess, and so did she — in fact, she began to look as if she were made of clay.
At that moment I had the choice. The question of her existence was mine. She was as much mine as if I'd shaped her myself, squeezed form out of a formless mass, pressed my fingers into her head to make two eyes, my thumb to make her mouth. I could roll her back into a ball or I could complete her, fashion her individual traits.
I couldn't leave her. I stayed with her twenty-four hours a day, from Friday until Monday, purging, curing, nurturing her. By Monday morning she could move again of her own will, not just mine. She opened her eyes briskly — the clay figure come to life — said nothing, arrogantly watched her foot twitch from side to side. She was no longer fighting for life, she was fighting for strength.
Because I'd left her as little as possible during this time, the room was filthy. The paint smeared on the bedspread, walls, lightshade had dried; food and drink receptacles had accumulated, and whatever had been or was still in them left its corresponding stain on the furniture. She played with her rapt little foot until she got what she wanted — she knocked a milk bottle off the chest at the end of her bed, along with a candle I placed there to reduce the smells that had accumulated. I offered her what hadn't spilt, some of which she swallowed before dropping the bottle. More milk and a dribble of hardened white wax could have been added to the inventory of stains.
After Elsa dozed off, I tried to get myself together, recall what had to be done. I had to clean up, attend to the bills, write some administrative letters, see to my father's medication, find out if my grandmother needed anything on my way to the post office . . . Pimmichen! Since Friday, I'd taken her nothing, not even a glass of water.
I rushed down. Madeleine was smoking in bed, her legs propped up on the sofa cushions she'd moved there, caressing my father's head on her stomach. She didn't acknowledge my intrusion outside a queer expression it brought to her face, self-satisfied, even amused about something as she puffed away. I'd forgotten it wasn't my grandmother's room any more and raced back up. My parents' door was half shut, and all was still. I went closer, fear trading places with hope, hope trading places with fear: it seemed my impression wavered with each step. Her wrinkled, plastery face was serene, her hands clasped in prayer. The million sundries of her life were captured in a sole and final sculpture.
***
My grandmother didn't have the burial she'd dreamt of, either in terms of her garb (her wedding gown was no longer of a becoming fit), or in the number of people present. Her elder brother, Eggert, had passed away ages ago when I was little and her younger, Wolfgang, was a missionary priest in South Africa whom we'd heard from only twice in ten years. I found some old acquaintances listed in the back pages of her diary but was reluctant to contact them, fearing that once they knew I was alone, they might take to calling in unexpectedly to see how I was faring. One of them might offer a son or grandson to move in with me to combat my solitude, or ask if a member of their family could rent a room; after all, why would I want to live in such a house all by myself?
Alone, I was faced with the organisation of a funeral that proved as expensive as cruel. Should the coffin be lined or unlined? Noble wood or common, which would resist the natural elements less? Handles of bronze or a cheaper industrial metal? I wish I could've made rational decisions, told myself that my grandmother was dead, so what difference would it make to her? Nonetheless, economic considerations made me heavy-hearted, as if they were proof that I didn't care about my own grandmother, and the undertaker was used to turning this to his advantage.
St Anna-Kapelle was far out in the seventeenth district, an area of woods, vineyards and bird sanctuaries. Only the hunched-over priest, my father, Dr Gregor and I were present. Gladiolus wreaths bedecked Pimmichen's coffin, and Johann Sebastian Bach's Slumber Now, Ye Eyes So Weary was being performed, as she'd wished, even if by a baritone and organist of homey talent. It wasn't quite the seven thousand pipes she'd wanted, but neither was it a two-octave harmonium. Despite his age, the priest swung the thurible as actively as any acolyte and, having dipped the aspergillum in Holy Water, thrust it about enough to sprinkle the living. Unfortunately, he spoke mostly in Latin so his sermon sounded rather impersonal.
A group of American tourists entered the church, most likely the visiting family of an occupier. I could understand their loud whispers better than the Latin as they walked down the aisles admiring the wood carvings ('those cute little guys they cut into the pews') and tapestries ('that fabulous old fabric they still have'). I heard one of the motherly-looking women remark, 'Oh look over there, someone's getting their funeral done!') My father twisted himself each way a finger pointed.
Outside, the diggers shovelled away. To them, it was just another manual job. My grandmother's name and year of birth had long been inscribed on my grandfather's granite monument, promising him company on a date
which had been left blank. In the summer sun, I reflected on the final declaration of their togetherness:
Hans Georg Betzler, 1867–1934
Leonore Maria Luise Betzler, née von Rostendorff-Ecken, 1860–1948
I thought to myself, how beautiful for a couple to be buried in a common grave. It gave the illusion of a happiness so complete it granted them eternal oblivion to the rest of the world.
After these two incidents, Pimmichen's death and Elsa's near death, I tricked my father into believing Madeleine was calling him from the cellar, after which I locked him in. With him safely out of the way, I had a bone to pick with her concerning the neglect that had led to my grandmother's death.
Her excuses were prepared in advance. 'I had your father to take care of — you didn't think I was obliged to take care of the whole family? It was her time anyway. What were you planning to do: wait around until she mummified? Maybe I did hear her calling out for an aspirin once or twice. I thought you must have given it to her because I didn't hear her after. You really think one aspirin would've made her immortal? I did have mercy! She has her peace now, and so does everyone else!'
To make a long story short, I ended up carrying her outside, biting, smacking, kicking, clawing. Among her threats: 'I'll be back with your father and you'll be the one kicked out! Don't forget, you're not a minor any more, we don't have to put you up! We'll marry and the house will be mine! I'll have no pity for you!' She tore off her boots, pulled them up over her arms like long black gloves and set to breaking the entrance window to get back in but I dissuaded her by standing on the inside, wielding the neck of a Schnapps bottle, compliments of another old friend of hers. (I'd broken the bottom jagged in front of her, after having downed a few good gulps.) Her last appeal was to my conscience: 'You're sending your baby brother or sister out on the streets, you bastard!'
By then, my father was in a frame of mind that justified my committing him to an institution. Altogether uncourageously, I left the house for as long as it took for the psychiatric team to tote him off. Dr Gregor was truly an ace. I gave him the last bottle of wine my father hadn't broken from Pimbo's dusty pre-war collection.
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