by H. G. Adler
I opened the knapsack and didn’t look at Johanna in order that she not get mad the moment I violated the ironclad decision made earlier. Then I had the fruit in my hand, striped with yellow and red, cool and with a soft lovely glow, a wonderful orb with sunken poles at either end. I held it, covering only half of it with my hand as protection, though I didn’t intend to take a bite of the apple. Then I tried to glance at Johanna again. In her eyes there were tears, very clear and bright, though she wasn’t crying but instead the teardrops were involuntary. The pearls hung perpendicular from a hand toward the ground. Our glances met, the pearls and the apple both unacknowledged signs in our hands. The hands that were free reached out to each other, but the fingers didn’t grasp one another, only the backs of the hands lay against one another, betokening a bond: pearls, hands, apple.
Who knows how long we sat there? The coolness of the ground increased, the dampness rising; it was only a few days after New Year’s, there being no way to ignore the season, as we felt the frost coming on. Through leather and wool it pressed and deepened, but my foot no longer hurt, only immense stiffness filled my limbs, smoky puffs of breath blowing from our mouths in the intense chill of the air. Above us the clouds moved in again, long, sinuous strains racing over summit and hill alike, though the silver-blue sky peeked through here and there. It wasn’t long before the clouds lowered around us and wrapped us in thick veils and a dense enclosure soon surrounded by streams of sunlight. Nonetheless, we were bathed in light, the milky threads of cloud strongly lit through, though containing a brilliance of their own, the ridges and basins of the land soon retreating into darkness, here in the country of the Black Mountains, even the grass turning black, the lambs that slowly moved about below on the slopes now dark gray.
We had warm clothes on, but since we had been sitting for so long they no longer kept out the weather. If we didn’t want to freeze completely, we couldn’t stay any longer and finally had to get up, though each of us was too shy to make the first move or suggest that the other should, so we continued to sit there undecided. It could have begun raining, the air above getting more and more damp, while from the ground the dampness rose like quiet hidden flames. The apple in my left hand had turned into a frozen ball, my fingers around it so stiff that they hurt. Had the pearls in Johanna’s involuntary iron grip turned to frost? I grabbed her by the hand and pressed it gently, she closing her fingers tight with her thumb stretching over them. Through such vigorous rubbing we awoke from the numbness that endangered our souls, looking more intently at each other, our gazes no longer lost in a dream but also unwavering, consciously looking into the depths, such that we knew that we would be there for each other. For the first time, we beheld each other in our shared togetherness and our foregone separateness, it becoming clear what held us together and apart, us understanding what we would have to seek and what avoid, sensing the overpowering shudder of what had been passed on to us, the undiminished power of the deep inheritance and flooding surge of an ancient beginning, the break of a new day, the wish for children perhaps having overcome Johanna in that moment much as it did me, something which earlier I only rarely felt and never yet to such a degree.
I then could have said something, or even should have, since we had run the gamut of the superficial to the intimate that day and now understood each other so well; and yet I didn’t do it. I wasn’t sure if Johanna expected me to; perhaps she was also not sure if I expected something from her. Yet I had to do something; I had to betray the moment and decide something. Thus I started to stand, but no, I could not, for it was not so easy, my legs being too heavy, the joints stiff. I had to let go of Johanna and swing my arms in order to lift myself up, but after a couple of tries I could get only as far as my knees. Johanna sat there without saying a word and looked at me tenderly. It could have been that she felt for me and was surprised at me at the same time; the look she shot me was a double one, sincere and direct, but also unreadable and shifting. With strong strokes I rubbed my legs in order to get the blood moving. This helped, for I could finally stand and breathe deep. Then I helped Johanna, it being easy to do so, it really being presumptuous of me to think she needed my help, for she really didn’t.
“Do you like the pearls?” I asked softly, without hesitating.
“Can I keep them? Are they mine?”
I nodded. Johanna fiddled with the gold clasp, the three black pearls gleaming darkly. Soon the pearls were around her neck; for a moment I saw the lovely face of my mother before me, after which I thought of the mother of my dearest, and then of Franziska’s shadow. From the place where we had sat, I picked up the papers and some rubbish, burying it all under stone, lifted the knapsack, and stuck the box for the pearls into it, wondering for a moment whether I should make the apple disappear, but then thought better of it, closed tight the laces, and went over to Johanna. We were ready.
“I know the direction in which we need to head, Johanna, but I don’t know the way. Can you take the lead?”
“There is no way. We just walk on ahead. Downhill. It’s not far to Vaynor.”
We took the steepest path, making our way with powerful steps. Soon we were warm and took a more measured gait.
“Did Franziska wear the string of pearls?”
“Hardly, my dear. I don’t believe I ever saw them on her. She liked to wear amber most of all, sometimes turquoise, as well as large Bohemian garnets, which I no longer have.”
“Sweetheart, forgive me, but we had a marvelous day! We had the loveliest day we’ve had since we’ve known each other, and I am wearing Franziska’s barely worn pearls. Still, will you be so good and tell me something of Franziska?”
“Franziska … my darling, I had a dream about her. I’m almost not inclined to share it, for it could be wrong to do so, more of an image conjured by me than a true spirit. I don’t know if I should tell it.”
“Don’t be afraid! But, if that’s the way you feel, you don’t have to say anything. I don’t wish to interfere. The legacy is yours, it’s yours, and I respect that.”
“If that’s the case, Johanna, then I can tell you. I lay asleep in bed and believed that I had woken up. I was not in Vaynor, nor in the metropolis, nor actually back there. I was in no place I recognized. But I was somewhere far off, in an apartment that belonged to me. And then Franziska was there, quiet and radiant—everything about her was radiant, her clothes, her hands, and her face. But, above all, the face, and most of all the forehead above her eyebrows. That glowed the most, even more than her glowing hair and eyes, which indeed were open but looked as if they gazed through a veil. She came very close to me, pressing close to my bed. I thought that she wanted to sit down next to me, so I tried to sit up in order to show her how happy I was that she was there. But with sweeping, half-lifted arms she waved me off. Then I remained still and turned my head more strongly in her direction. She didn’t sit down, but instead got very close, standing next to the bed such that her clothes rubbed against it. I couldn’t touch Franziska but only behold her, my hands remaining under the blanket, and it being impossible to pull them out from there. She looked at me tenderly, very kindly, with a sympathetic and also animated sorrow. She was otherworldly, sad, and majestic, though she was also confident and not full of despair. I felt guilty before her, for she was not alive, she was just there, and I felt that anything alive had to feel guilty in the face of everything dead, the guilt of living in the face of the departed and the sublime, which we often call the eternal. I wanted to share my deepest feelings with Franziska, but I didn’t want to say it aloud, I just wanted to somehow share it. Nor could I speak. Somehow I shared it with her, without words and speech, as well as without looking at her or giving her any sign; the only way she could know was because she understood me, and because I felt nothing else but this. She gazed at me intimately, not all-consuming, yet intently. Then she said, ‘You mustn’t worry!’ I didn’t worry, or at least not any longer, but then an irrepressible sadness filled me to the core, for I
had left Franziska. I had left her without asking her permission, deeming it all right to be without her. That was a betrayal; I had become unfaithful. You need to know in order to understand, Johanna, that ever since the day the murderer’s hand separated us, separated us forever, as she was asphyxiated and her defiled noble body was burned to ashes, I never thought of or looked at another woman, even Anna, with so much as the slightest desire, until I saw you. Then it was obviously clear to me from the first moment, and that is why when we sat with Frau Saubermann and Herr Buxinger at the Haarburgers’ I was so bold as to speak to you despite all reason and my own will, reaching out to you in hardly a subtle fashion. Yet back to the dream. But wait. Before I go on with my story, I must tell you about a visitation that I experienced during my escape from over there and which was similar to my dream but also completely different. During that one, I spoke to Franziska and asked her, ‘Will you let me go?’ Or no, it was not during the journey but after, a few weeks later in the guesthouse, just before the first time I called you and visited you in the Office for Refugees. You already meant a great deal to me, for otherwise why would I have asked Franziska this question? But, nonetheless, it was different, as you will soon hear. She let me go; her voice was clearly audible, yet only her voice. I had not asked Franziska but simply posed the question. But it was Franziska’s voice, clearly, no mistaking it, that answered me, saying that she had let me go, whether I existed or not. Yet now, in this dream, it was different. I had left Franziska. It had to have been so, because I could do no different, but it was, in fact, my choice; I had done it on my own. I felt the hot demands of lust that lead to adultery. Franziska knew so, for alas, she knew everything. She observed me with resonant kindness, her gaze penetrating my skeleton and lifting it up. She spoke with a level yet muffled voice: ‘I have protected you. I am now leaving you. You are free, you are free. You will now follow your own path. May the blessing of grace attend your fortunes!’ I wanted to grab hold of her hands before she disappeared, a mixture of sorrow and shame and bitterness roiling inside me. But I could not grab hold, since my hands lay continually immobile under the blanket, nor could Franziska grab hold of mine, for she had withdrawn, the separation having been announced. She looked at me again in an incomparable way that I could only call benevolent, though I have never seen a look quite like it from anyone living or dead, even in a dream. Franziska moved her head slowly and gently, her eyes almost shut, as if to say ‘No.’ Then she lifted a hand and held it high above me, giving clearance, saying goodbye and blessing, all of it together, and then she walked away, adorned in exalted splendor. She didn’t walk toward any door but rather only to the opposite wall that had no door, and which appeared to retreat from Franziska for a while, as if the room were expanding. During this she often turned to look back at me, always with a loving, departing expression, and I knew that she was not of this earth, and that as soon as she reached the wall she would step through it. I bent my head strenuously in the direction she moved, but the wall was opaque glass and Franziska walked inside it. The divider remained transparent enough, such that she turned toward me more and more often and smiled abstractly in the direction of my bed and nodded as if to indicate something to me, as if I were still a part of her realm. She remained lit up, but in her passage through the wall the distance was more shadowy, otherworldly, thinner, and, to me, disembodied and blurry. Also, it was harder and harder to see through the wall, it becoming more and more hazy, the wall fading, giving off only a vague idea of itself, and all at once, with a last look and a hand raised high, the figure stepped through the wall while turning away and leaving with its back to me. There being nothing more to see, I was alone, abandoned, lying in the room in severe, heavy darkness, my gaze always directed toward the wall, which was hardly recognizable, although gradually it appeared to be closing in from the distance and returning to the dimensions of the middle-sized room that had been there at the start of the dream. Loneliness rose up sharply within me and closed about my throat, such that I grew anxious. I couldn’t see anything else, my eyes sank in a sea of tears, and as I torturously closed my eyelids in order to stop the burning stream, the thought of my mother occurred within me. Without looking at me, she sat sewing a shroud. I said a shroud, for I didn’t know whose it was, my father’s or mine. We were indeed both there, Father and I. I called out to Mother. She didn’t hear and continued sewing, a bloody band painfully adorning her neck. Then I called to Father, asking him to have Mother turn to me, but he refused. I insisted that he do so in a last attempt: ‘Father and Mother, I’m here, your only son, your other child, your only daughter having died many years ago in the days of limited sorrows, which now, in the days of endless loss, no longer exist.’ But neither reacted to my words. Then I held out an apple as an offering, an apple like this one in my hand. No one took it, and so I set it down. Father and Mother were buried in darkness. I had to find Franziska again, so I opened my eyes wide, the stream of tears having stopped, the sockets painfully dry as sand, but nothing visible, for Franziska was now behind the wall forever. With her departure I felt eased, but extremely unhappy about where I was. Then I thought of you, Johanna, but I didn’t know where you were. I was worried about you and me, and I wanted to look for you, but I had no idea where I might find you. And then I woke up. Next to me you lay in a deep slumber, no movement at all except your quiet, even breathing. Then I knew that our bond was still not complete, and yet that it could be completed, and so I lay closer to you, but without waking or disturbing you, and soon fell asleep. That’s why I brought the pearls along today. I wanted to give them to you the day we got married; that’s what I planned, but I couldn’t then, and then I waited and waited. Now it’s right, now at last.”
During the story of my dream Johanna had moved closer and closer to me, and now we walked arm in arm, which was the best thing to do, given the slippery path, in order to hold each other up. Johanna didn’t say a thing when I had finished; there was nothing more to say. Without saying a word, we headed toward our destination in order that we not arrive too late for dinner with our hosts. But this dream and my reporting of it to Johanna stayed with me, for its sacred truth felt salutary and manifested itself within me. Whether it’s still there within me today I don’t know. I cannot know for sure, yet in my powerlessness, which I acknowledge, I have been freed, or, to put it more precisely, I am more freed than before. The shadows that rise up within me and in my dreams have eased. Franziska, Father, and Mother, after many groundless attacks that have torn me to shreds, have released me from their hold. Nothing more of their fate is a part of me; it is as if I am my own person. It’s as if I exist. Enough, that’s enough.
I stood staggering before existence, but I was the one who staggered, and there is something there that relates existence and me to each other, perhaps never comfortably but reliably. Because Johanna is here. How far away can she be? Here she is. I can call to her, I can ask for her help. She’s alive, and here am I. Indebted to a forgiving protectoress and existing only through her. And the children, their happy chirping, their liveliness, their inviolateness, and whose earthly father I remain. Their friend, they who have someone stronger than they to thank, a guardian who prays for them and can pray. Their quick daily growth under the care of their mother. She takes care of them—Johanna speaks and sings and is sweet to them day after happy day. How wonderful it is that Anna can enjoy such lovely company for a day almost every week. The children love their aunt more than anyone but ourselves, and it’s best that she no longer lives so far away in the country, from which she rarely could visit. She now has a high-level position in a new home for the blind not so far away from us.
Whenever Anna is free she often comes by in the evening, spends the night with us, and then we have a lovely morning together and happily spend the whole day with one another. Now I hear the women and children. They appear to be done, and soon the call to breakfast will occur, Michael will be off to school, Eva to kindergarten. Without a doubt the boy will
insist that Anna take him, while I will have to settle for the honor of ambling along behind them with Eva. I had to hurry to get ready while Johanna worked to prepare breakfast, hurrying around with clanging cups and plates in the back room, then again to the kitchen, everything soon ready. How easy it was to accept all of her sweet care, the unfolding of little daily concerns being Johanna’s helpful contribution. Now I was ready and wanted to go across to the others and was already standing at their bedroom door. Then the doorbell rang, and it was certainly the mailman. Michael loved to greet him, so he quickly skipped through the hall to the front door. But this time I could tell that I had to be the one to open up, and so I hurried along beside the boy. When I opened the door, the world outside was bright and wide. The air that pressed against me was fresh, a clear autumn morning. Though it wasn’t his fault that he had often brought disappointing news, the mailman is a nice man with whom I’ve always been on good terms. But never before had he laughed with me with such relish. He must have known something—namely, that he was bringing good news.
“A registered letter, Herr Landau!”
He handed me the receipt to sign, along with his blackened, thick, nubby pencil, the kind that only mailmen carry on their appointed rounds. With a quick motion, I signed my name and was ready to accept my letter.
“The letter?” said the man, looking at me with a smirk. “It’s out there in the street.”
I then looked out at the street and recognized, to my horror, the hearse that the pallbearers had previously arrived in to take me to the crematorium. I wanted to say, “It’s a mistake, it’s a mistake,” and run off and slam the door behind me, but I didn’t move from the spot. I saw how the mailman bowed to me reverently before he went on his way. His behavior confused me, such that I didn’t even thank him. Then the pallbearers, Brian and Derek, jumped out from behind the hearse and opened it up such that I beheld a beautifully decorated coffin. I was not ready for such a warm welcome; who had gone to such efforts to take care of my meager existence? But I was pleasantly surprised, for the men in their handsome suits doffed their hats to me, which isn’t customary here, and approached respectfully, not even daring to pass through the open gate on the tiled path that led to the front door. They remained standing outside on the sidewalk and stood there politely and humbly as if waiting for a sign from me before they would even say a word. This good behavior pleased me, though the visit itself wasn’t that welcome, for I was not at all inclined to let myself in for such an unprofitable business just because of some insensible duty assigned to the pallbearers by someone, and which they wished to fulfill. The mailman was already gone and did not care about us. I saw him huddling in the Byrdwhistles’ doorway as I finally roused myself to do something.