by H. G. Adler
What So-and-So might imagine lay behind such obscure sentences was anyone’s guess. But I let them stand, though Peter didn’t like them at all.
How keenly and inwardly free I felt in approaching these and other problems, and without any fear of insurmountable difficulties, and thus I thought at times that it would probably be more reasonable, given my talents and my research plans, to try to spend a longer time in a foreign country without decamping there too quickly. This was why I had not taken on too much, mainly because of a dearth of possibilities. To explain myself more precisely:
You must know that I am a bit isolated. I say that without any squeamish self-pity, but it’s true and carries with it advantages with which I would think you could empathize. There are still people outside who know me, or should know me. Unfortunately, I have had no success in coming into contact with them so far.
You are the first one I have written. That explains why I am going at it in such a circuitous manner. Can you understand that? You know, it’s hard to keep your sense of balance when you have been alone for so long. I don’t want to overwhelm you, and certainly I don’t want to ask of you something that is not possible, but perhaps you indeed still have time for me, even if in today’s world, after such a hard battle to get a sustainable situation, you cannot help me. Please understand that I certainly don’t need that at all, and you should certainly not misunderstand me; I am only asking for friendly advice in order that I can form an idea of how things are on the outside—what I should aim for if I wish to get ahead without expecting too much, such as perhaps giving a lecture in my field, and to build contacts who could be useful to my further studies.
I am still interested in the same things as always (having learned too much already, my friend!). I have prepared reams of notes for a long work, and already a first draft of some of it. I have done all of this in the years …
What years? What have I done? He will not understand what I’m trying to get at. I crossed out the sentences.
You must know that I have not sat idle. The old ideas that mean most to me in regard to the sociology of oppressed people, which always met with your approval, have naturally deepened over the course of time. They have ripened through some of my own experiences and intensive consideration. If, as one heard expressed everywhere in the first excitement over the new peace, they are serious about founding a new and more just order on earth, which many voices support in the postwar years, then one should recognize that my far-reaching plans at this moment are not at all inappropriate.
Please, say what you wish! Point me toward where most people’s interests lie today on the outside, how I might get started, how to rise up out of the depths, and, most of all, how to begin to be seen again. Perhaps you grasp what I mean. I don’t want to go on and on about it, and I trust your capacity to empathize. I trust that you won’t keep me waiting too long once this letter has reached you?
And here’s another request: Tell me as much about yourself as possible—I really need to know. All of it interests me. I even feel a bit lonely here and am hungry for news from old friends. Unfortunately, I also can’t keep from sharing with you, as I had wished, that things in this country right now seem a bit forlorn, if not hopeless. Too much is missing that one used to love—meaning some are no longer among us. But you shouldn’t be concerned about that. I can say to you with a bit of pleasure something that you’ll recall from when we used to translate the Latin authors: “Unhappiness and misery are the natural run of things when a country is consumed by war.” That’s the way it is. Old men of our circle who stayed behind here are, for the most part, no longer alive, some young men also having parted from us. Also, Franziska is gone. But, really, no more of such sad matters.
I’m taking good care of myself; I don’t let myself go and have not given up on life. And so it goes on. If you could see how I’m sitting here by an open window in the almost-summer-like foliage that still looks out unchanged at the wonderful vineyard, you would smile and shake your head and say, “That’s Arthur, just like I always knew him.”
Oh, there’s so much I could tell you, but it’s probably better if I close now. Not only concern for you demands it; one shouldn’t make the censor put so many holes through a letter.
Be well, my dear So-and-So, and write back soon! I will wait impatiently, but I know as well that the mails here don’t always run on time and things can be delayed.
Always yours,
Arthur
So, roughly, if I have rightly recalled the first draft, that’s how I wrote my first letter to someone outside the country after the war. That took me many days, because I kept discovering problems in my crimped, prim sentences, and I kept polishing them, though none seemed to improve. I only wanted something to come from my hand that at least could be answered, that was not too disturbing, while I also couldn’t stand for it to be stilted, and it had to at least be softened. I tried as best I could to patch back together what had been torn apart. When I was satisfied with the letter (meaning I wasn’t satisfied at all, but I could at least live with it), I wrote it out at Peter’s urging on several pieces of paper, though not trusting myself to send the letter off on its own, for I could not at all determine whether I had said the right things. I suffered from a stifling uncertainty, even fear, that something harmful or otherwise inappropriate had slipped into my words. My condition was bad on many different levels, and denied me awareness of any understandable relation between my feelings and my words. I especially felt that in my lines there was nothing that really spoke to my situation. I wanted to avoid that, because I was afraid—so I thought—to shamefully expose myself and to evoke unwelcome impressions of myself in So-and-So.
Consumed by such doubts I turned to Peter and subjected myself, more indulgently than I should have, to his judgment, he being someone who was often afflicted with cleverness. He was indeed good-natured, sincere, agreeable, but also a small, even narrow-minded soul. He also led a life that often bothered me. He was inclined to random lies and little dishonesties, though these things were probably also harmless and even forgivable. Sometimes it had nothing to do with anything bad but was, rather, just a meaningless fib shared while bragging, for which one couldn’t get at all mad at Peter. And yet if he was really annoying, Anna—who through Hermann was distantly related to him—had to talk to him and straighten him out, not holding back any reproaches, eventually getting to his more forgiving nature and engaging it. I granted him no real power over me, for I guarded myself against it, but I still surrendered too much of myself to him. His certainty, which felt good to me, must have replaced or stood in for mine, as he had a hold on me, causing my strength and will to fail, he fighting with the authorities on my behalf, helping me to find my way, clearing away anything uncomfortable, and I can attest that it would have been hard to survive the postwar years even halfway well without him. Peter was stateless, which at that time was a rare piece of luck for him, just as his family background served him as well after the war as before the years of occupation, because through his father he is still a part of the people persecuted and oppressed in the name of victory, while through his mother, on the other side, he is part of another people in whose name many similar, yet more intense, nasty things were done earlier. Thus Peter has escaped many dangers, having successfully held his own during all the confusion of the war, but now having to free his bride from prison and to find the most convenient means of getting her across the border and home. His luck or his cleverness often helped the much less endangered Anna and also was of use to me.
Sometimes it feels wrong to have relied and counted on Peter so much, although I condemned his shenanigans. They were outrageous, but I couldn’t do without him. What Anna did for me, what I let her do, was worth so much more to me, though I didn’t tell her about many of the woes that I suffered, for I didn’t want to overburden her. But Peter always took care of things, I have to admit, for he was tireless. Nothing that I asked of him was too much. Very often it was me who
lacked the ego, the kind of versatile, practical approach necessary for all situations, and a stand-in for the man I was not. Peter also served as a stand-in rooster among the hens he strutted about with, and which he even occasionally offered to me, though when he told his stories about his girls I found it disgusting. Since I shared a room with him, it was sometimes hard not to know, but Peter, who spared me with a quiet smile, always had a solution. Once he went out with his most recent choice, letting me know the time that I should stay clear of the room, sometimes putting me up with friends of his for the night. I went along with it all and was ashamed, the more so as his bride, whom he several times visited on the sly during lucrative ventures, had asked me, when she said goodbye before crossing the border and returning home, to keep an eye on Peter and make sure that he “didn’t stray,” as she described his hardly loyal ways. That’s why I spoke to him in good conscience and pretended to be his guardian in carrying out the most pitiable role I’d ever taken on. If he was in a good mood, he listened to me and acted as if he agreed with everything I said, but when I finished talking he shook my hand trustingly and too strongly and presented me with a broad smile spreading across his entire face. Thereby I became helpless, without anything with which to respond. He undermined my ethos and forced me, without ever verbally agreeing, to look on at his activities with patient good will and leave him alone for at least a week.
That was the guy, sixteen years younger than me, who controlled me and turned me into a willing witness to his strange way of life. It was as if I didn’t exist. What Johanna experienced later and had to endure, since there was nothing else left for her to do if she didn’t want to leave me, this I had given over to Peter consciously. I handed over to him what I was not, in order that I could be, and therefore my gratitude to him remains intact, even if I never wish to see his face again. Most likely, I will be spared that. It points, however, to a great difference between my relationship with him back then and the way I am with Johanna. Johanna makes it possible for me to exist, if only through her. Because she takes on my weight, carries me along, and lends me at least the shadow of an existence. It was different with Peter, who really lived for me. He didn’t at all worry if I could be something but, rather, he was simply me. It was all for me, and this resulted in an abysmal dependency, because everything he did for me was more than just done in my stead; it was I in the midst of his being. I couldn’t answer for it, because there was no answering for it, especially as I had no chance to determine it, except in very limited ways, even though he used me as justification for his behavior.
I don’t know how a relationship such as that between me and Peter could otherwise occur. A friendship, if that means a high measure of affection and trust, never existed between us. Back then, my desperate state on the first evening set everything in motion, which then evolved within a few days to almost the closest of relations that I had ever had with another person. I still see Peter approaching as I lay on the pavement in my misery, until he stood there before me and reached out his hand. He pulled me up, he being strong enough to do so, me at his mercy, entrusting myself to the guidance of a stranger who had charge of me and my things as long as I was in his country. He occupied me, but he didn’t control me. Do I still know how it was? It was indeed so: he held me with a strength inside of which I was weak, where everything quivered away incapacitated, but my frailty, this state I had come to feel at home in, this Peter hadn’t seized at all. That was what separated me from him and prevented his helpful grasp from becoming too unbearable. That’s how Peter could do a great deal for me, and yet not everything. That also explains how my relationship with him could so quickly and easily dissolve, as if it never existed. All it took was for me to leave the country. If Peter had not helped me so much, I would still be stuck there today, provided I was still alive, wasting away among my senseless days in the museum.
Three years after my departure, which involved almost insurmountable difficulties in order to get away from there, Peter also left the city and country as part of an adventurous escape. Certainly it all went much more peacefully than my well-regulated departure. Because of what had happened to me in the war, I had forfeited all my papers, most of which could be replaced only through a lot of running around and even some clever bribery. Peter took care of it all. Passes were filled out and granted, with random stipulations that prevented me from entering any civilized country simply because of my mother tongue. Peter knew how to get around anything, for he wheedled, swindled, and juggled questionable documents until at last I had a passport, without which I never would have been issued a visa to the country I wished to travel to. Also, Peter was the one who taught me what to do in order to get hold of the coveted visa. Without him I would have had to keep hiking, just as on the mountain trip with Anna, hiking over the border, at peril because of my frailty, from one non-country to another, leaving almost everything behind—my writing and the squalid memories on which my heart hung. How easy it would have been to remain stuck there and fall into the hands of the border patrol. Alas, that anxious dream that still haunts me today, caught in the border’s meshes until squeezed of breath … Always the desire to escape and the anxiety before the escape, the pressure to escape and the impossibility of escape! Then the need to shoo away doubt that you existed, that you were alive and could make something of yourself …
Peter had spared me the hardest decision. Can it be that he only delayed it and burdened me with it forever? I will never decide, for it’s long been decided. It could also be that Peter simply made it easier for me by rendering me stateless, handling it all selflessly. Or not? Did he not want me to stay? No, such ideas meant nothing to him. So I really believe he did it out of selflessness, for he got nothing out of it by acting for me. It must have been clear to him that with my departure he relinquished me and all rights to me. He did it. He wanted to use me, not to annihilate me. It was his most touching act, to sacrifice me; it was a genuine surrender. That’s why it would be unjust of me to lay out his shortcomings. When amid Johanna’s protection I maintain his memory, I wish only to be grateful to him, no matter how difficult things are. It would be deplorable to point to his weakness in order to avenge myself for having abased myself before him. Peter, can you hear? Would you like a letter from me so that you can better recall?
Dear Peter, I have long held off writing you a letter and am only now doing so because Johanna also agrees that I have to overcome such hesitancy. But now it’s a moot point, because I will not write to you in the way I should have then, except for a few stupid lines after my arrival here, which you never answered, followed by the printed notice, which I went ahead with against the wishes of Johanna, in order to announce my marriage to all the world. You acknowledged such news somewhat frivolously with witty good wishes. I was angry with you. No, I won’t write to you, although I am in fact doing so, for you are no longer alive for me and have no effect upon me. I’m pleased to learn, as Anna shared with me, that you have married a girl, even if it’s not the former bride whom you left behind at home, and that you are living a prosperous life in New Zealand, while, hopefully, in between you have also become more mature. Publicity people with thousands of lurid ideas, such as yourself, are certainly in demand over there. If that isn’t at all the case, I still know that it’s no doubt easy for you to sell your talents as advantageous to others, such that they are proud to take advice from you. And so things are excellent for you.
You no longer have me, that’s true, but be comforted—oh, you are already comforted—because that’s no loss. With Johanna, who best helps me to see what I can expect, I have found great good fortune, even if she is not blessed with those qualities which will bring our union certain supreme material success. Johanna has two children, to whom she is the best of mothers. She does only what she can, though she would be the first to admit that she cannot do all the things you could do. Some months before our boy was born she had to give up her job, and since then she has mainly busied herself with taking
care of the house, while I am always with her. Two do-nothings—that’s not your style. Your wife no doubt makes a tidy sum, true? I would hardly recognize you! With us, it’s different. I can’t speak about such matters with Johanna, for she’s very sensitive; and she has every right to feel hurt. Nor is it exactly true that we’re do-nothings, certainly not Johanna, for she never quits. Children are work, and a husband like me doubles the load. So I remain a do-nothing who sits and looks on as time passes, watching it go by.
I love most to sit at my desk and pretend to seem very busy, the walls protecting me as I look furtively out the window. It’s a broad window, with five panes, that looks quite posh, it almost seeming a treasure. From there nothing in the street escapes me. I see many people, children who frivolously don’t pay attention to the cars racing by, kicking their balls from one sidewalk across to another and then suddenly jumping into the roadway without thinking. I also look across at the windows opposite, where birdcages hang, the yellow companions flitting around inside the bars and belting out their song with powerful throats. I look into the windows and at the street full of faces that have long since become familiar, such that I could tell you at any time just what kind of mood each one is in. This lingering and gazing is my main occupation, nothing very productive, but it suits me well. The people who know me have a keen sense of how deplorably and dissolutely I pass the time, and they judge me and feel sorry for poor Johanna, who is touched by such sympathy. She is mainly of the view that my observations are valuable. She praises my efforts and the days well spent and protests when I’m criticized. May her sincere belief in me always remain! She maintains that it’s not my fault that I’ve been denied the proper attention and support, and she’s angry about it, for hardly anyone notices. My knowledge and capability lie fallow, and I am unjustly denied the kind of engagement I deserve. Clearly, Johanna cannot come to terms with it all.