The poet who hid her back then had written a poem in which he described going home as crossing over to the shores of Death. She had learned to remain silent then, and after all the deprivations, this silence was the greatest gift that had ever been given to their dream, which remained so large that every single one of the comrades was utterly alone when he walked about in it.
The poet who hid her back then now lives with his wife in a summer cottage on the other side of the lake, and this afternoon they will perhaps land at the dock in their motorboat made of dark shiny wood, and then her friend will toss the rope to her husband, her husband will catch the rope and tie it to the dock, and the granddaughter will watch her grandfather and take note of the figure eight the rope makes when it is wound around the cleat.
I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e. The actor who built a bungalow a few properties down recently stayed behind in the West after a performance there and will soon be having his wife and son join him. The bungalow has already been sealed. He had wanted light blue tiles for his bathroom. Light blue tiles did not exist in this part of Germany. Where the new person is to begin, he can only grow out of the old one. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. The new world is to devour the old one, the old one puts up a fight, and now new and old are living side by side in a single body. Where much is asked, more is left out.
When they returned to Germany, it was a long time before she and her husband could bring themselves to shake hands with people they didn’t know. They had felt a virtually physical revulsion when faced with all these people who had willingly remained behind. After his return, her husband had even hesitated to visit his mother and sisters, who lived in the Western part of Germany. The only visit they ever made to this West German city was undertaken with the sole purpose of showing their son his grandmother, and neither she nor her husband shook hands with his mother or sisters when they greeted them. They saw, too, that this omission occurred by mutual consent. Immediately before they fled to Prague, they had deposited a picture and a few pieces of furniture with her husband’s sisters. Her husband’s mother and sisters were now sitting at this table, on these chairs, and the picture hung on the wall. And she and her husband now sat on these chairs as if they had come to their own house for a visit. The two Communists were at a loss for the words they would have needed to demand their own possessions back from these Germans to whom they had once been related. Later, when their son was old enough to travel by train without them, they let him make the trip twice on his own when he expressed the desire to visit his grandmother.
Now the gong is calling her to lunch. She walks through the closet room and the hallway to the bathroom, where she washes her hands, her fingertips are smudged with black from changing the ribbon, she looks into the mirror, arranges her hair, closes the right-hand wing of the small window that had been open for air, now the mosaic of colorful squares is complete again. Before she goes down to eat, she quickly steps back into the Little Bird Room to get a jacket from the wall closet, since it’s always chillier than you’d expect inside the house, even in summer. The Little Bird Room got its name from the small iron bird forged to the railing of the balcony. During school holidays, her granddaughter sleeps here. The granddaughter now strikes the gong downstairs for a second time, possibly out of impatience, or else because it’s fun.
Even at midday, what strikes the long table through the colorfully glazed windows is more penumbra than light, and around this table sit her husband, their son with his wife and her granddaughter, and often also friends and colleagues from Berlin, comrades or, as today, the visitor, then the cook and finally the gardener. After the soup is brought out, her husband speaks about this and that, her son about something else, her daughter-in-law contributes a remark, the visitor remains silent, the gardener remains silent, the cook serves the main course, she herself elaborates, her daughter-in-law has yet another question, her son says: I don’t see how that’s possible, her husband says: But it is. She herself says: That’s certainly interesting, and: Do take some more potatoes, the visitor says: No thank you, the gardener remains silent, her granddaughter shakes her head, her son says: Send them over, the daughter-in-law: That was delicious, she herself says: It truly was, the gardener says: Thank you, the cook: The soup was a bit too salty, her son says: Not at all, the cook stacks up the dirty plates and balances them out into the kitchen, she returns with tiny little bowls on a tray, distribution of the compote, everyone gets busy with their spoons, general quiet reigns, the door handle is depressed from the outside, giving off a metallic sigh, the boy next door wants her granddaughter to come out and play, he remains standing beside the stove, waiting until everyone has finished eating, the visitor brings her compote cup to her lips and sips the last dregs of juice, her daughter-in-law says to the little girl: But first help clear the table, her husband says: Well, then, she herself nods to the cook. They all get up and leave the room in one direction or other.
I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e. No, she and her husband did not go home to Germany; what they wanted was to bring this country—only coincidentally the one whose language they spoke—back home again in their thoughts. They wanted finally to drag from beneath the German rubble some ground they could keep beneath their feet, ground that would no longer be illusory. Although their bodies would grow old, their hope for mankind’s salvation from greed and envy would, they thought, remain young for a long time, the errors of mortals were mortal, but their work was immortal. And now it is precisely that young doctor whom they allow to examine their aging bodies once a year, that doctor who is taking advantage of the State to become the heir to its founders. It has once more come to pass that the invisible army, now divided, is soundlessly striking its own forces with invisible lances and shields. Perhaps these young people, who know the enemy only from the reports of their elders and have never seen him face to face, will soon be ready to defect and join the ranks of this foe, even if only to have at last the opportunity—after so many years of siege—to take up arms once more.
Have the words in her aging mouth aged as well without her noticing? After supper, the chairs from the garden are set up in the hall so that everyone can join in watching the news on television: she and her husband, their son, their daughter-in-law, her son’s little girl, the visitor, some friends or other who will be spending the night in the bathing house, and sometimes the cook as well. On the seven o’clock news they hear about bringing in the harvest, farmers are standing in the dust between rows of stubble talking about planned production targets, combine harvesters can be seen and also silos. Foreign words that did not grow in the farmers’ mouths are relegating them to the dust of the fields where they must serve as a focal point. Since her return to Germany, all her passion has been devoted to attempting to use the words she’s typed out letter by letter to transform her memories into the memories of others, to transport her life on paper into other lives as if ferrying it across a river. These letters she’s been tapping out have allowed her to draw to the surface many things that seemed worthy of preserving, while pushing other things, painful ones, back into obscurity. Now, later, she no longer knows whether it wasn’t a mistake to pick and choose, since this thing she’d been envisioning all her life was supposed to be a whole world, not a half one.
Yes, she reads several days later in a statement sent to her from the municipal offices, she too is welcome to purchase her house, but not the land on which it is standing, and the bathing house can, if she so desires, be relocated to the meadow at the top of the hill at government expense, as a way of facilitating the doctor’s lake access while at the same time fulfilling the State’s obligations to her. She removes from her typewriter the sheet of paper containing certain words and not containing certain other words, sets it on the not particularly high stack of already written pages of her new book, removes a sheet of laid paper from the drawer, rolls it into the machine and responds to the municipal offices: Yes, she would like to purchase her house and of course would be grateful to have the bathing house relocated
to the top of the hill. With Socialist greetings.
THE GARDENER
NOW THAT THE WALNUT tree whose hollow was filled with concrete continues to stand upright but has stopped bearing nuts over the past three years, the gardener chops it down at the householder’s bidding. He saws up the trunk, splits the pieces and stacks the logs in the woodshed. During the cherry harvest the gardener falls off the ladder and breaks his leg. For two months he has to lie in bed until his bones have knitted together and he can start learning to walk again. Fortunately the son of the householder has begun this summer to spend his entire vacation time on the property, he has been discharged from the Home and is now living with his parents again—and he has meanwhile grown tall and is strong enough to take over the task of mowing the lawn. But the fungus that attacks every last one of the fruit trees this summer goes unnoticed too long during the gardener’s convalescence, and so when the gardener gets up again for the first time he finds all the apples and pears withered on their stems.
After his fall, the gardener is no longer able to perform heavy labor. All he’s been able to do since then is walk slowly across the property, here and there picking up bits of fallen wood, he trims the dry blossoms from flowers and shrubs, waters shrubs and flowers twice a day, once early in the morning and again when dusk arrives, at the beginning of winter he empties all the water pipes in the house and turns off the main valve. He closes all the shutters, both in the main house and the bathing house down by the lake.
The householder and his son now take over the yearly task of repairing and dismantling the dock. To supplement the heating stove in the house a night storage heater is installed, now the firewood cut in earlier years will readily suffice for charging the stove on chilly spring and autumn days. Apple and pear trees fail to recover from the fungal infestation, even over the next several years. Spider mites attack the cherries. When the garbage pit is expanded, it furthermore becomes clear that the pipes that provide water to the orchard rusted out long ago, but water pipes are not currently available for purchase by private citizens. For the first time there is talk of reducing the size of the leased property.
In the village people are saying that the householder’s son used to bring any number of girls back to the bathing house after a dance or other festivity to spend the night with him, and that the gardener, seated on a bench beneath the eaves of the bathing house, kept watch on such nights to prevent the mistress of the house from discovering these goings-on. People also claim to have heard from the gardener that when this son finally got engaged to a young woman from Berlin, his mother put up the fiancée in the bathing house of all places, so that no one would accuse her of procuring. This gives the village something to laugh about.
After the young householder marries, a daughter is born to the couple, and this baby is scarcely six weeks old when her parents start bringing her to the garden on weekends, and when it is warm enough outside, they place the perambulator with the sleeping infant under the hawthorn tree at the edge of the small meadow. The gardener walks around the property, a burning or already extinguished cigar stump in his mouth, he picks up dry twigs here and there and, when the days grow warmer, he turns on the sprinkler twice a day to water the flowerbeds and meadows, once in the morning and once early in the evening.
When the gardener is no longer able to squeeze shut the handles of the big tree trimming shears, the young woman takes over the task of pruning the shrubs during the spring and summer. The still fruitless trees are finally sawed down by a farmer on the householder’s orders and chopped up, the farmer stacks the logs in the woodshed. The gardener now spends many hours sitting, always with one and the same cold stump of a cigar in his mouth, on the threshold of the apiary. The last bees remaining from what were once twelve entire colonies continue to fly about their hives for a little while after the orchard is cleared, then disperse in search of new breeding grounds in the surrounding woods. Sometimes the little girl and her friend from next door sit down beside the gardener, who shows them millipedes and wood lice living in the old logs, and shows them how to make a blowpipe out of the hollow stalks of the elderberry, or whistle with the help of a lilac leaf.
THE VISITOR
THE MAIN THING is that here she can go swimming again. Even if the first time she visits she doesn’t know the little pieces of porcelain on the table are for resting one’s silverware on between courses. Nor does she succeed in eating her breakfast roll with a knife and fork, which she’d hoped would compensate for her gaff e at lunch the day before. Both misunderstandings produce the same silent smile on the face of her hostess, accompanied by the same light touch of the hostess’s cool hand on her forearm. This bread, the hostess says, is so precious that it’s perfectly all right to pick it up in one’s hands. Back where she comes from she never had to lose any thought over whether or not the bread was precious enough to touch. She’d planted the grain herself, and when she reached out her hands, it was always with the same gesture, from the sowing of the seed to the harvest and baking to the eating of the bread. But here all that is left to do with one’s hands is reach out for the finished bread: a skin covering some unknown interior like the Christmas goose with its hidden stuffing. Here in this garden, unlike the garden that belonged to her, there is nothing to sow and nothing to harvest. All one finds here are pines and oak trees with shrubs growing slowly in their shade, the gardener waters the lawn, the flowers are all perennials, and the dill for the potatoes comes from the neighbor woman at the end of the sandy road—the little girl is sent to fetch it from her. Everyone who spends time in this garden does so only in order to be in a garden. Probably she has now reached the right place at the right point in her life, for she too is spending time in her life only in order to be alive. In other places, or so she’s heard, old people like her are just stuck up in a tree and left to starve, but nowadays they’re even given money to survive on, even if they’re no longer able to work. Never will she get used to this money that is given her month after month for doing nothing. In this garden there is nothing left for her to do but sit—sit there in broad daylight with her hands in her lap, watching the larks fly to and fro. Stop dawdling, she hears herself crying out in an inaudible voice as she sits there, stop dawdling, just as she would shout out the kitchen window at her daughter when she was indulging in idle gossip with the girl next door—her daughter was to come inside to do the dishes, scale fish or pluck a chicken. Her daughter always came running, but now her own hands continue to lie motionless in her lap, and as she sits here she can hear her husband playing the accordion—her own parents are silent as their grandchildren babble away—and she answers inaudibly, she offers silent words of consolation or sings without a sound or else just simply goes on saying nothing, and the main thing is that when evening comes she can go swimming again in this shimmering green, cool lake, almost like at home.
It’s certainly better, at any rate, to be a stranger among strangers. Once, she had returned from the city they’d fled to at first, walking with her three grandchildren all the way back to the farm, thirty kilometers on foot in the wrong direction, and for a short time had worked as a dairymaid for the Poles who had already taken over the house: she had worked as a maid on the farm that belonged to her. So that her daughter would find her if she were to come back from the labor camp after all. Her little grandson had wanted to dig up the toy tractor he’d buried in a corner of the yard several weeks before when they were leaving, but she wouldn’t let him. Her daughter never came back, but the wedding photo she’d always carried with her made its way back into the hands of her mother after various detours, all tattered now and creased, with notations in Cyrillic handwriting on the back. On her way through the garden to the church, her daughter had gotten her veil caught on the red currant bushes and thus had to get married in a torn veil. For the photograph she arranged the veil in such a way that the tear didn’t show. Her daughter never came home. And so the mother, who now was only a grandmother, set out again for the seco
nd time with her three grandchildren. It’s certainly better, at any rate, to be a stranger among strangers than in one’s own home.
Visitation Page 10