Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics)

by Unknown

  I laid my head beside her body that slept on unawares, and took no part in all this. Then her bosom seemed to rise and fall more strenuously than before, and the walls of the room lapped up against this sleeping form like waves against a ship far out at sea. I would probably never have been able to bring myself to say goodbye; but if I were to slip away right now, I told myself, then I’d remain the little lost boat, past which a great sturdy ship would sail unnoticing. I kissed her sleeping form, she didn’t feel it. I whispered something in her ear, and maybe I did it so quietly that she wouldn’t hear it. Then I ridiculed myself and sneered at the very thought of the nightingale; but quietly nonetheless I got dressed. I think that I cried, but I really did leave. I felt giddy, light-hearted, even though I tried to tell myself that no decent human being would do such a thing; I remember that I was like a drunkard rebuking the pavement beneath his feet to reassure himself that he’s sober.

  Of course, I often thought of returning; at times I would have liked to cross half the world to get back to her, but I never did. She had become untouchable to me; in short – I don’t know if you understand – he who has committed an injustice and feels it down to the bone, can no longer set it right. I am not, by the way, asking for absolution. I just want to tell you my stories to find out if they ring true. For years I haven’t been able to tell them to anyone, and had I heard myself talking to myself, I would quite frankly have questioned my sanity.

  Please be assured, then, that my reason is still the equal of your enlightened mind.

  Two years later, I found myself in a tight spot, at the dead angle of a battle in the South Tyrol, a line that wound its way from the bloody trenches of the Cima di Vezzena to Lake Caldonazzo. There, like a wave of sunshine, the battle line dived deep into the valley, skirting two hills with beautiful names, and surfaced again on the other side, only to lose itself in the stillness of the mountains. It was October; the thinly manned trenches were covered with leaves, the lake shimmered a silent blue, the hills lay there like huge withered wreaths – like funeral wreaths, I often thought to myself without even a shudder of fear. Halting and divided, the valley spilt around them; but beyond the edge of our occupied zone, it fled such sweet diffusion and drove like the blast of a trombone: brown, broad and heroic out into the hostile distance.

  At night, we pushed ahead to an advanced position, so prone now in the valley that they could have wiped us out with an avalanche of stones from above; but instead, they slowly roasted us on steady artillery fire. The morning after such a night all our faces had a strange expression that took hours to wear off: our eyes were enlarged, and our heads tilted every way on the multitude of shoulders, like a lawn that had just been trampled on. Yet on every one of those nights I poked my head up over the edge of the trench many times, and cautiously turned to look back over my shoulder like a lover; and I saw the Brenta Mountains light blue, as if formed out of stiff-pleated glass, silhouetted against the night sky. And on such nights the stars were like silver foil cut-outs glimmering, fat as glazed biscuits; and the sky stayed blue all night; and the thin, virginal crescent moon lay on her back, now silvery, now golden, basking in the splendour. You must try to imagine just how beautiful it was; for such beauty exists only in the face of danger. And then sometimes I could stand it no longer and, giddy, with joy and longing, I crept out for a little night stroll around, all the way to the golden-green blackness of the trees, so enchantingly colourful and black, the like of which you’ve never seen.

  But things were different during the day; the atmosphere was so easy-going that you could have gone horseback riding around the main camp. It’s only when you have the time to sit back and think and to feel terror that you first learn the true meaning of danger. Every day claims its victims, a regular weekly average of so and so many out of a hundred, and already the divisional general staff officers are predicting the results as impersonally as an insurance company. You do it too, by the way. Instinctively you know the odds and feel insured, although not exactly under the best of terms. It is a function of the curious calm that you feel, living under constant crossfire. Let me add the following, though, so that you don’t paint a false picture of my circumstances. It does indeed happen that you suddenly feel driven to search for a particular familiar face, one that you remember seeing several days ago; but it’s not there any more. A face like that can upset you more than it should, and hang for a long time in the air like a candle’s afterglow. And so your fear of death has diminished, though you are far more susceptible to all sorts of strange upsets. It is as if the fear of one’s demise, which evidently lies on top of man for ever like a stone, were suddenly to have been rolled back, and in the uncertain proximity of death an unaccountable inner freedom blossoms forth.

  Once during that time an enemy plane appeared in the sky over our quiet encampment. This did not happen often, for the mountains with their narrow gaps between fortified peaks could only be hazarded at high altitudes. We stood at that very moment on the summit of one of those funereal hills, and all of a sudden a machine-gun barrage spotted the sky with little white clouds of shrapnel, like a nimble powder puff. It was a cheerful sight, almost endearing. And, to top it off, the sun shone through the tricoloured wings of the plane as it flew high overhead, as though through a stained-glass church window, or through coloured crêpe paper. The only missing ingredient was some music by Mozart. I couldn’t help thinking, by the way, that we stood around like a crowd of spectators at the races, placing our bets. And one of us even said: better take cover! But nobody, it seems, was in the mood to dive like a field mouse into a hole. At that instant I heard a distant ringing drawing closer to my ecstatically upturned face. Of course, it could also have happened the other way round – that I first heard the ringing and only then became conscious of the impending danger; but I knew immediately: it’s an aerial dart. These were pointed iron rods no thicker than a pencil lead that planes dropped from above in those days. And if they struck you in the skull, they came out through the soles of your feet, but they didn’t hit very often, and so were soon discarded. And though this was my first aerial dart – bombs and machine-gun fire sound altogether different – I knew right away what it was. I was excited, and a second later I already felt that strange, unlikely intuition: it’s going to strike!

  And do you know what it was like? Not like a frightening foreboding, but rather like an unexpected stroke of good luck! I was surprised at first that I should be the only one to hear its ringing. Then I thought the sound would disappear again. But it didn’t disappear. It came ever closer, and though still far away, it grew proportionally louder. Cautiously I looked at the other faces, but no one else was aware of its approach. And at that moment when I became convinced that I alone heard that subtle singing, something rose up out of me to meet it: a ray of life, equally infinite to that death ray descending from above. I’m not making this up, I’m trying to put it as plainly as I can. I believe I’ve held to a sober physical description so far, though I know of course that to a certain extent it’s as in a dream where it seems as though you’re speaking clearly, while the words come out all garbled.

  It lasted a long time, during which I alone heard the sound coming closer. It was a shrill, singing, solitary, high-pitched tone, like the ringing rim of a glass; but there was something unreal about it. You’ve never heard anything like it before, I said to myself. And this tone was directed at me; I stood in communion with it and had not the least little doubt that something decisive was about to happen to me. I had no thoughts of the kind that are supposed to come at death’s door – all my thoughts were, rather, focused on the future; I can only say that I was certain that in the next second I would feel God’s proximity close to my body – which, after all, is saying quite a bit for someone who hasn’t believed in God since the age of eight.

  Meanwhile, the sound from above became ever more tangible; it swelled and loomed dangerously close. I asked myself several times whether I should warn the others; but, let i
t strike me or another, I wouldn’t say a word! Maybe there was a devilish vanity in this illusion that high above the battlefield a voice sang just for me. Maybe God is nothing more than the vain illusion of us poor beggars who puff ourselves up and brag of rich relations up above. I don’t know. But the fact remains that the sky soon started ringing for the others too; I noticed traces of uneasiness flash across their faces, and I tell you – not one of them let slip a word either! I looked again at those faces: fellows, for whom nothing would have been more unlikely than to think such thoughts, stood there, without knowing it, like a group of disciples waiting for a message from on high. And suddenly the singing became an earthly sound, ten, a hundred feet above us, and it died. He – it – was here. Right here in our midst, but closer to me, something that had gone silent and been swallowed up by the earth, had exploded into an unreal hush.

  My heart beat quickly and quietly; I couldn’t have lost consciousness for even a second; not the least fraction of a second was missing from my life. But then I noticed everyone staring at me. I hadn’t budged an inch but my body had been violently thrust to the side, having executed a deep, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree bow. I felt as though I were just waking from a trance, and had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. No one spoke to me at first; then, finally, someone said: ‘An aerial dart!’ And everyone tried to find it, but it was buried deep in the ground. At that instant a hot rush of gratitude swept through me, and I believe that my whole body turned red. And if at that very moment someone had said that God had entered my body, I wouldn’t have laughed. But I wouldn’t have believed it either – not even that a splinter of His being was in me. And yet whenever I think back to that incident, I feel an overwhelming desire to experience something like it again even more vividly!

  I did, by the way, experience it one more time, but not more vividly – Atwo began his last story. He seemed to grow suddenly unsure of himself, but you could see that for that very reason he was dying to hear himself tell the story.

  It had to do with his mother, for whom Atwo felt no great love, though he claimed it wasn’t so. On a superficial level, we just weren’t suited to each other, he said, and that, after all, is only natural for an old woman who for decades has lived in the same small town, and a son who according to her way of thinking never amounted to much. She made me as uneasy as one would be in the presence of a mirror that imperceptibly distorts the width of one’s image; and I hurt her by not coming home for years. But every month she wrote me an anxious letter, asking many questions, and even though I hardly ever wrote back, there was still something extraordinary about it; and despite it all, I felt a strong tie to her, as the following incidents would soon prove.

  Decades ago, perhaps, the image of a little boy had inscribed itself indelibly in her imagination – a boy in whom she may have set God knows what aspirations. This image could not thereafter be erased by any means; and since that long-gone little boy happened to be me, her love clung to me, as though all the suns that have set since then were gathered somewhere, suspended between darkness and light. Here it is again: that strange vanity that is not vain. For I can assure you that I don’t like to dwell on myself, nor, as so many others do, stare smugly at photographs of the person they once were, or delight in memories of what they did in such and such a place at such and such a time; this sort of savings bank account of self is absolutely incomprehensible to me. I am neither particularly sentimental, nor do I live for the moment; but when something is over and done with, then I am also over and done with that something in myself. And when on some street I happen to remember having often walked that way before, or when I see the house I used to live in, then, even without thinking, I feel something like a shooting pain, an intense revulsion for myself, as though I had just been reminded of a terrible disgrace. The past drifts away as you change; and it seems to me that in whatever way you change, you wouldn’t do so if that fellow you left behind had been all that flawless. But for the very reason that I usually feel this way, it was wonderful to realize that there was a person who had for my entire life preserved this image of me, an image which most likely never bore me any likeness, which nonetheless was in a certain sense the mandate of my being and my deed to life.

  Can you understand me when I say that my mother was in this figurative capacity a veritable lioness, though in her real life she was locked in the persona of a manifestly limited woman? She was not bright, by our way of thinking; she could disregard nothing and come to no major conclusions about life; nor was she, when I think back to my childhood, what you’d call a good person: she was vehement and always on edge. And you can well imagine what comes from the combination of a passionate nature and limited horizons – but I would like to suggest that another kind of stature, another kind of character still exists side by side with the embodiment that human beings take on in their day-to-day existence, just as in fairy-tale times the gods took on the forms of snakes and fish.

  Not long after that incident with the aerial dart, I was taken prisoner during a battle in Russia. I consequently experienced a big change, and wasn’t so quick about getting back home, since this new life appealed to me for quite a while. I still admire the socialist system, but then one day I found that I could no longer mouth a few of the essential credos without a yawn, and so I eluded the perilous repercussions by escaping back to Germany, where individualism was just reaching its inflationary peak. I got involved in all sorts of dubious business ventures, in part out of necessity, in part simply for the pleasure of being back in a good old-fashioned country, where you can misbehave and not have to feel ashamed of yourself. Things weren’t going all that well for me then, and at times I’d say things were downright rotten. My parents weren’t doing so well either. And then my mother wrote to me several times: we can’t help you, son; but if the little you’ll one day inherit would be of any help, then I’d wish myself dead for your sake. This she wrote to me even though I hadn’t visited her in years, nor had I shown the least sign of affection. I have to admit, though, that I took this for a somewhat exaggerated manner of speaking, and paid it no heed, though I didn’t doubt the honesty of feeling couched in these sentimental words. But then an altogether extraordinary thing happened: my mother really did fall ill, and it appears as if she subsequently took along my father, who was very devoted to her.

  Atwo reflected – she died of an illness that she must have been carrying around in her without anyone knowing it. One might suppose that it was the confluence of numerous natural causes, and I fear that you’ll think badly of me if I don’t accept this explanation. But here again, the incidental circumstances proved remarkable. She definitely didn’t want to die; I know for a fact that she fought it off and railed against an early death. Her will to live, her convictions and her hopes were all set against it. Nor can it be said that a resolve of character overruled her inclinations of the moment; for if that were so, she could have thought of suicide or voluntary poverty long ago, which she by no means did. She was her own total sacrifice. But have you ever noticed that your body has a will of its own? I am convinced that the sum total of what we take to be our will, our feelings and thoughts – all that seems to control us – is allowed to do so only in a limited capacity; and that during serious illness and convalescence, in critical combat, and at all turning points of fate, there is a kind of primal resolve of the entire body that holds the final sway and speaks the ultimate truth.

  But be that as it may; I assure you that my mother’s illness immediately gave me the impression of something self-willed. Call it my imagination, but the fact still remains that the moment I heard the news of my mother’s illness, a striking and complete change came over me, even though the message suggested no imminent cause for alarm. A hardness that had encompassed me melted away instantaneously; and I can say no more than that the state I now found myself in bore a great resemblance to my awakening on that night when I left my house, and to the moment of my anticipation of the singing arrow from above. I wa
nted to visit my mother right away, but she held me off with all sorts of excuses. At first she sent word that she looked forward to seeing me, but that I should wait out the lapse of this significant illness, so that she could welcome me home in good health. Later she let it be known that my visit would upset her too much for the moment. And finally, when I insisted, I was informed that recovery was imminent and that I should just be patient a little while longer. It seems as though she feared that a reunion between us might cause her to waver in her resolve. And then everything happened so quickly that I just barely still made it to the funeral.

  I found my father likewise ailing when I got there, and as I told you, all I could do then was to help him die. He’d been a kind man in the past, but in those last weeks he was astonishingly stubborn and moody, as though he held a great deal against me and resented my presence. After his funeral I had to clear out the household, which took another few weeks; I was in no particular hurry. Now and then the neighbours came by out of old force of habit, and told me exactly where in the living room my father used to sit, where my mother would sit and where they themselves would. They looked everything over carefully and offered to buy this or that. They’re so thorough, those small-town types; and once, after thoroughly inspecting everything, one of them said to me: it’s such a shame to see an entire family wiped out in a matter of weeks! I, of course, didn’t count. When I was alone, I sat quietly and read children’s books; I found a big box full of them up in the attic. They were dusty, sooty, partly dried out and brittle, partly sodden from the dampness, and when you struck them they gave off an unending stream of soft black clouds; the streaked paper had worn off the cardboard bindings, leaving only jagged archipelagos of paper behind. But as soon as I turned the pages, I swept through their contents like a sailor piloting his way across the perilous high sea, and once I made an extraordinary discovery. I noticed that the blackness at the top corner where you turned the pages and at the bottom edge of each book differed in a subtle but unmistakable way from the mildew’s design, and then I found all sorts of indefinable spots and, finally, wild, faded pencil markings on the title pages. And suddenly it came to me, and I realized that this impetuous disrepair, these pencil scrawls and hastily made spots, were the traces of a child’s fingers, my own child fingers, preserved for thirty-odd years in a box in the attic, and long forgotten!