The Glory of Life

by Michael Kumpfmüller

  When Judith sleeps late, Dora likes to walk round the low-ceilinged rooms. She liked the house from the first. It belonged to an aunt of Judith’s who died in February, it is small and old-fashioned, and everything smells of wood and Judith’s aunt, who had been an actress in her youth, and retired to this isolated place in her early fifties. There are photographs of her before she was twenty, a very pretty girl in the bloom of her youth, a little like Judith, in costume as Ophelia, the faded handwriting on the backs of the photos says. In later life she put on weight. She had missed the right time to marry and have children, and at the turn of the century was living something like the life of a smallholder in Döberitz; she kept cows for several years, had chickens in a henhouse, geese, two goats, and until the day of her death a cellar full of preserved fruit and vegetables, smoked ham, schnapps, and a shed where she stored potatoes.

  Judith has told Dora that she herself doesn’t cook, and lives on nothing but sandwiches out here in the country, but since Dora told her what a loaf of bread costs in the little village shop, they have lived, in practice, almost entirely on what they can find in the store cupboards. They eat simple potato dishes, sometimes grated raw potato made into a pancake and served with apple sauce; or potato purée with browned butter; and in the evening clear soup with beaten egg in it, because Judith can buy eggs cheaply from a local farmer.

  For a few days she is in high spirits. Everything here is new; she has Judith, she has the letters, and can go for long walks if for once it doesn’t rain. The two young women had hardly known one another before, Dora realises. When Judith came to the People’s Home months ago, she seemed rather stuck-up, but now they have really made friends, and tell each other secrets. Judith had a relationship with a married man shortly before taking refuge in Döberitz. She knew all along that nothing would come of it, but he had courted her assiduously, taken her out to meals, to the theatre, lavished every attention on her in the first few weeks, when she kept him waiting for her response, feeling that she owed that to herself.

  She met him in one of his seminars. He approached her with the kind of look that instantly told her what he wanted. Judith, he liked the name, although he said later that he doesn’t like what’s Jewish about her. Do you think I look Jewish? I know my name is Jewish, but otherwise? All the same, he stuck to his point. At first, says Judith, she only laughed and asked what exactly was so Jewish about her, and of course he couldn’t think of anything at all to say. He could sense it, he said. Apparently my whole nature is Jewish, the way I move, the way I talk, the fact that I’m not shy. Not on our first night, and increasingly not after it. Jews, he said, are Germany’s misfortune, and as a historian he said he knew what he was talking about. All that on their first night. Judith doesn’t feel good about it; she was stupid, she ought to have known.

  Dora doesn’t have much experience of people who are against Jews. A malicious remark dropped in the street, a conversation overheard in a restaurant. Once a boy spat on the street in front of her. He was less than ten years old. She went after him and read him a lecture. Poor Judith. But Judith doesn’t consider herself poor; she has drawn her own conclusions and would like to go to Palestine when she has finished her studies. Perhaps it’s nonsense to study first – why would they need German lawyers there in Palestine, and a Jewish woman lawyer into the bargain? They need people to cultivate the fields, they need gardeners and farmers, women to bear children, Jewish children with curly dark hair. Now she laughs because she can’t imagine that. What about you? she asks Dora, who can’t imagine it either. She hasn’t thought about it yet, but now that she does, the idea is as wonderful as it is hard to grasp.

  Judith has taken a day off. The weather is still really warm, for once, so they set off for the River Havel after breakfast and plunge straight into the water. Judith says that last summer all the country boys here were laying siege to her; you’d have thought they’d never seen a naked girl before in their lives. This time, however, they are on their own, with only dragonflies and the last of the midges for company, and various birds in the sky – oh look, a red kite, says Judith, who of course knows the names of all the birds, and dreams of having a man like the doctor herself.

  You’re so lucky, says Judith. And you’re beautiful too, a little curvier than me, without my bony bits. It is not unpleasant to have Judith looking at her when she says, oh, I like this bit of you, and this one too, when they are brushing their hair together as if they were sisters.

  She takes his letters to bed with her in the evening, and puts them under her pillow; he says such wonderful things in them. He very often dreams of his new room, he says, of their first evening when he will pick her up in the air and carry her away, something that he could never do in real life, but it’s child’s play in his dream. And anyway you’re surprisingly light, I could pick you up with one hand – you’re very small, lying there in my hand with your eyes closed as if you were asleep, but you’re not asleep at all, far from it.

  He hasn’t yet said anything about when he will leave that place Schelesen. Only this morning, when she woke up, she was thinking it would be in a few days’ time, she could count them – but then a letter arrives at midday telling her that he can’t think of travelling at the moment. Only now does she feel what a strain all this waiting is for her. She begins to cry, but not for very long, because she soon realises that she doesn’t believe she has any reason to cry. He is ill, he always has a high temperature. At the moment Berlin seems beyond his reach, he writes. If I had you here with me it would be no distance at all, but to me on my own, in the melancholy mood of these last few days, well, the voyage of Columbus is nothing to it. It will have to wait another week at least; that is the message. He has been begging his sister like a child, he says, but Ottla has always said: Not for another week.

  She is sometimes afraid now. It is not a pleasant idea that she hardly knows him, that they may be mistaken about each other; in the first few days and weeks in Berlin it could turn out that the whole thing has been a great mistake. That’s if she doesn’t take care, she thinks, with some incredulity, because she can’t tell where these faint-hearted ideas come from, it’s as if they were not her own thoughts at all but something slowly encroaching on her mind, and then gradually disappearing again.

  It is still summer, but the very end of summer already seen in the light of the new season, with the brightness of the rushes down by the bathing place and the rustling of the birch trees. She tries to tell herself that such ideas are normal. Judith says they are normal, too. He is forty, he has lived fifteen years longer than Dora. He is an unhappy man, he told her so on the landing-stage. She remembers exactly how surprised she was that he was happy after all – from the first moment when I saw you in the kitchen.

  11

  For a few days he doesn’t believe in it, as if he had to lose that belief and only then everything would be possible. He has written to Max and Robert, saying that he has gained a little weight. Not a word about Dora; instead, he expresses himself very vaguely about his prospects of going to Berlin, saying that in the first exhilaration of being at the Home in Müritz he probably overestimated himself.

  His greatest joy just now is in the children, little Helene on his lap at breakfast, carrying her round the garden and talking to her, always saying the same things: what a delicate little girl she is, but a little girl gets tired, so soon she must go to sleep. Ottla looks exhausted, and sometimes loses patience when two-year-old Vera insists on her rights; so he often feels anxious about Vera, who is already talking, who began talking all of a sudden, it seems to him, as if the words had been stored up inside her for a long time and now, late this summer, they are gradually being set free. The doctor does not know much about children, he has had too little to do with them, although Ottla claims that children love him, perhaps because he himself is still a child in some ways.

  At midday he goes swimming with Ottla and the children; the weather is unbearably hot, about thirty degrees. For t
he first time in weeks he does not have a high temperature, so he goes straight into the water, and swims for a long time, length after length in the clear understanding of what he is doing, as if he will never see the swimming pool again, as if this is the last time he will ever go swimming.

  Ottla’s husband Pepo is seldom there. He usually visits only at the weekend, surprised to find that this is supposed to be his life, that he has two daughters and a young wife who hardly sleeps at night and is grateful for every hour that he spends with her. This time he stays only for a night, blaming the work of his legal chambers at length, while his tirades make it perfectly clear that the work is just his excuse. He greets the children, has an absent-minded kiss to spare for Ottla, a nod for the doctor, runs his fingers through little Helene’s hair and asks about Vera, who ran away at once when he arrived. Is this to be his life? Anyone can tell from looking at him that he doesn’t think so. Ottla is more or less blind to that fact, she is sorry for him, keeps jumping up to bring him something or other, and tries to tell him that Helene smiled several times yesterday and then, at four in the morning, cried for two hours for no reason.

  Oh dear, says Pepo, whose night had also been cut short; he was sitting up over some papers until half an hour after midnight. I’m not really here at all, he says, when Ottla has gone to change the children’s nappies, and furthermore he hates it here in the country, the silence, the damn wasps. He and the doctor do not have much to say; maybe because Pepo guesses that the doctor sees through him, not without sympathy, as if his brother-in-law has suffered a misfortune that in other circumstances might have happened to him.

  The doctor knows that he will never have children of his own. In the years with F. he thought about it at length, and decided against the idea. Or did life make that decision for him? I either write or I have a wife and children, he thought; either you keep yourself to yourself or you lead the kind of life led by his father and his sisters. He would have been able to father children. He went to see a doctor and had it confirmed; that was not the problem. The problem was his fear of never finding the right wife, the way that he first attracted women and then drove them away by making them afraid of his fear, and how he suspected that they would get in the way of his writing. Yet it is a long time since he wrote anything, he has written nothing for many weeks apart from his letters to Dora and a few notes to friends who are moving further and further away from him.

  Her handwriting is getting smaller. Sometimes he can hardly read it, as if she were writing in a moving vehicle, or late at night in the dark, without a light on, when her mind is dulled with longing. She can’t take it any more, she writes. I ought not to say so to you, but it’s the truth; I can’t take it much longer. I’m getting ugly without you, I quarrel with Judith, who is impatient with me because I’m so fidgety here without you like this. I keep stumbling, I cut myself when I’m using a knife, I forget your name, your birthday, your kisses. Please come, she writes.

  The doctor sits alone in the garden, and he can understand her complaints. She has every right to feel as she does, perhaps not only the right but the duty to do so. It is also a warning, a cry reminding him that the miracle is not invulnerable.

  He will leave in two days’ time. Ottla doesn’t want to stay any longer either. Pepo is in the city, but will come to fetch her and they will all leave together.

  Thinking of their parents, Ottla advises him to tell what amounts to a white lie. They are sitting out in the garden; it is not particularly warm, but they have half an hour while the children are asleep. He is to say that he is leaving for a few days, taking little luggage with him, and perhaps they will accept that. Are you glad? She doesn’t think he looks glad. He is afraid. He is glad, but he is also afraid, especially of the city; he doesn’t feel able to cope with it in this time of crisis. He can’t remember Dora’s features clearly any more, the shape of her nose. He does remember her mouth, her eyes, her voice from a distance when she says she is nearly out of her mind – it has almost killed me, she says, and I don’t even know exactly where this damned place Schelesen is.

  For the fourth time this summer he packs his things. If it weren’t for the travelling, he wouldn’t much mind the packing. Even the travelling would be nothing to speak of, but this time he is not going on just any journey, this time it will decide the course of his life.

  The doctor knows that until the last moment he will have doubts. On the night before he will get onto the train, a little lethargically because he will hardly have slept, he spends the time until morning composing a telegram to the Berlin landlady cancelling the agreements, and then throws the text away again. He can imagine it all, the look in his mother’s eyes, his father shaking his head. All the same, he will get up in the morning and leave them. He will take his baggage and go, he will not reply to questions and reservations about his plan, he will go to the station. For the very reason that he can see the battles ahead, and he hopes that, in the end, he will win them.

  12

  The air beside the river under the trees is already autumnal and cool. She shivers without a jacket, but nonetheless she felt drawn here once again, alone, without Judith, who is studying from morning till night and dreams of next summer, when it is to be hoped that they will all meet here; Dora with the doctor and Judith with goodness knows whom, perhaps by then she will have a steady relationship with a man.

  Dora merely stands there for a while, thinking of him, feeling his last message in the pocket of her skirt: the telegram that actually says he is coming. It is late morning, he has probably been sitting alone in a compartment of the train for some time, although he wrote that he was travelling with Ottla. That is all she thinks. The main thing is that he is on his way. She notices that she is beginning to feel glad, in a new, thoughtful way, as if after an examination that she has only just managed to pass. For the last few days she has hardly sensed his presence, but now he is near her again. Last night she dreamed that he was in a rail accident. She went looking for him on the edge of an embankment where several lifeless figures were lying under blankets, as if they were cold, but he was not among them.

  She sits at the kitchen window, imagining how he will tell them, how he will greet them as they look at him. If they love him, she thinks, they are bound to guess that he is going to leave them in the evening when they are sitting at the table, when he begins lying to them. If she were with him, it would all be much easier, she thinks. Or would it, on the contrary, be much more difficult?

  Judith says: My God, he’s forty, they’ll survive. Didn’t you say he was forty?

  It is her last evening but one. Judith has got a bottle of wine and seems relaxed. She has underestimated the amount of study she must get through, and in addition she would rather Dora didn’t leave, and keeps talking about next summer: they must see each other in Berlin – if your doctor allows it. Will you be living with him? From the first? Curiously enough, they hadn’t discussed it, and Dora doesn’t know; they have only one room, and it may be difficult living with someone at such close quarters day after day, although there is nothing she would like better.

  On the Saturday night she can hardly sleep. Sometimes she imagines the telegram in which he calls it all off, sometimes she has not the slightest doubt. Unfortunately she has financial worries too. Judith has said that of course she will pay for Dora’s ticket, don’t be silly, it’s only money, and her parents have any amount of money.

  On Sunday morning at breakfast she thinks she knows he is on the way to Berlin. He has said he will let her know as soon as he is there, some time in the evening. Judith has to keep reminding her of that. Evening comes on, twilight is falling, no trace of any message. Why don’t you phone him? Dora hasn’t thought of that. She could call him, there is a telephone number; Hans sent it to her weeks ago. Only a few sentences, that would reassure her.

  Unfortunately, he has told her how much he hates telephones.

  It wasn’t a matter of the details, she only has to hear his voice, hi
s breathing, far away at the other end of the line, a humming of some sort telling her that they are connected, just that fact.

  On the last day but one, Hans is suddenly at the door. Dora is hanging out washing in the garden behind the house, so she doesn’t notice him at once, not until she bends down for a moment and sees someone in the meadow. It really is Hans, who wrote days ago to say he would fetch her, and because she never answered he has simply turned up. Hans? Well, all right, she says. Wait. I’ll be ready in a minute. There is a troubled expression on his face as he watches her hanging out a last pair of stockings; he is wearing a stained pair of trousers and a shirt that is not very clean.

  At once Dora knows she must now explain that the doctor is coming to fetch her, and they must discuss what is to be done about his old things in Berlin, but she doesn’t want to start the conversation here in the garden. She suggests a little walk, and takes him past the church towards the river, into an area that she herself doesn’t know. Hans doesn’t say much. He trots along beside her, asks how she is, and has nothing against her suggestion that they sit down on a tree trunk on the bank, where they talk at last, not for very long, almost like a couple, as if she owes him that. She thanks him for the room, and says the doctor is very grateful too; he has been in Berlin since yesterday. She explains what has happened, says she is sorry, but the plan is such and such, he will surely have guessed most of it long ago. You’re going to live with him, says Hans, to which she replies: That’s what I would like. Because he is very important to me.

  When they get back it is nearly evening. Hans has told her at length about his work at the harbour, which is only temporary, but better than nothing. He helps to unload freights, moving heavy crates, sacks and barrels. When he goes to collect his wages in the evening he has to hurry if he is to get anything for the money, because by next morning it will be just worthless paper. Over the meal they talk for some time about Berlin. Judith has bought all kinds of things for their goodbye supper, and they sit over it until two in the morning.