The dandelions are the same here as back home, and so are the larks. Now, as an old woman, she has grown into the sentence that her husband always said to her forty years before. The dandelions in her village were the same as the dandelions where he grew up, in the Ukraine, from where he’d come vagabonding along, and the larks too, that’s what he always said. And in Bavaria, from where his great-grandparents had emigrated to Russia, and to where he’d originally meant to return, without knowing anything more about this homeland than its name, there were surely also such dandelions, such larks. Surely her husband’s great-grandparents had at some point or other uttered this very sentence another seventy or eighty years before. She wonders whether the sentences go out looking for people to utter them, or whether it’s just the opposite and the sentences simply wait for someone to come along and make use of them, and at the same time she wonders if she really doesn’t have anything better to do than wonder about such things, what silliness, she thinks, and then she remembers that she doesn’t have anything better to do, she looks at the ottoman on which her crooked legs are propped, it’s upholstered in the same red vinyl as the armchair in which she sits. Probably, she thinks, the sentences all get overtaken sooner or later and are spoken by someone or other, somewhere or other, just as everything belongs to everyone among people who are fleeing—factored over the length of a lifetime, the course of both objects and human beings was no doubt no different from the experience of a refugee. In peacetime it was poverty, during the war it was the front that kept pushing people before it like a long row of dominos, people slept in other people’s beds, used other people’s cooking utensils, ate the stores of food that other people had been forced to leave behind. It’s just that the rooms became more crowded the more the bombs fell. Until in the end she arrived here, in this garden, and when the gong calls her to supper, she finds it quite plausible to think that this gong was already calling to her back then, when she turned her back on her farm for the last time and set off again with her three grandchildren, carrying an eiderdown and with a blue-patterned kerchief on her head. When you’ve arrived, can you still be said to be fleeing? And when you’re fleeing, can you ever arrive?
Her husband died before all of this. When she looks back from his death to the accident with the clover press, it seems to her as if his dying had arrived then already, slipping in through a side door without bothering to identify itself. Even the tearing of her daughter’s bridal veil was a sort of entrance, through a side door, of what was to be, but since that was still the time when all the rest was yet to come, she couldn’t yet recognize it. Now that she is old and living only to be alive, all these things exist simultaneously. Now that she is old, her husband’s injury could be the reason she fell in love with him, and the music he played when he arrived in her village had its roots in his early death, and her daughter, on the other hand, was perhaps already sitting beside her there in the oven, holding her hand when she was pregnant with her, she had been locked up in the oven because she’d fallen in love with that vagabond, the father of the child she was carrying. And this, if you looked at it the right way, was surely the reason he’d come vagabonding along, even before he knew her. As she looks back like this, time appears in its guise as the twin of time, everything flattening out. Things can follow one after the other only for as long as you are alive in order to extract a splinter from a child’s foot, to take the roast out of the oven before it burns or sew a dress from a potato sack, but with each step you take while fleeing, your baggage grows less, with more and more left behind, and sooner or later you just stop and sit there, and then all that is left of life is life itself, and everything else is lying in all the ditches beside all the roads in a land as enormous as the air, and surely here as well you can find these dandelions, these larks.
You aren’t going to marry a man like that, her mother said and locked her up in the oven for several days. But when it turned out she was already pregnant, her mother let her out of the oven again and said: You could have had the postman, the forester, the head fisheries inspector. In order to earn money for his family, her husband had begun to maintain the equipment and machinery of the farmers, including the clover press. From then on he played his music only for his own pleasure and for hers, for the pleasure of his wife. But after he’d cut off four fingers of his left hand on the clover press, he could play neither fiddle nor accordion. Along with his fingers, the clover press had cut off his music from him. This music that he’d played until his accident came from the Ukraine, from where he’d arrived as a vagabond. After his injury, his hand always felt cold, and so she’d sewed a fur-lined mitten that he wore year in and year out from September until well into May. With this mitten on his hand and his hand in his lap, her husband had often sat there in his final years, just as she was doing now, although he was still young. When he died, still in his early forties, she couldn’t bring herself to throw away the fur mitten. But when she had to flee, it got left behind in the house.
She can go swimming here just like at home, and swimming has remained easy for her, unlike walking, for which her bones haven’t been strong enough for some time now. At night, when she takes down her gray knot of hair before going to bed, her hair is still damp. In summer, when she was young, she swam and dove her way through the Masurian lakes, fished in them too, and in winter she went ice-skating, the blades would be screwed into the soles of her boots. She reached out her hands to touch the waters of these lakes, washed herself in them, drank from them, ate their fish and scratched up their ice, she’d worked over the lakes the way her daughter, who so loved to bake, later worked over the cake dough she would knead four hundred times with both hands before putting it in the oven. To this day her shins are blue and purple from the lace-up boots, which had to be laced especially tight for ice-skating, blue and purple and shiny as stone from the hours and hours of being laced up, hours and hours of racing across frozen lakes that let out dark cries of jubilation beneath the cuts the girl was carving into them with her skates. Now her crooked legs with their shins that still shine blue and purple lie upon the red vinyl of the ottoman, which is intended for one to prop one’s feet on, and they are nonetheless still her legs. She doesn’t know what the lake here looks like in winter, the mistress of the house keeps referring to the house as her “summer place.” In the winter it’s just the gardener living in his room, otherwise the house is empty, and then it’s closed up for the winter, the shutters are placed over their windows, the night storage heater turned down to its lowest setting. And then everyone leaves for the city. Her husband went fishing even in winter, he was always one of the first on the ice, when it was still cracking, a small, dark figure crouching there at dawn, motionless. In winter they heated their house with wood, they would light the stove with pine shavings, but as soon as the fire was burning well they would switch over to beech and oak, the hard wood burned longer. When the pump in the yard froze solid, they would fetch their water from the lake, from a hole that her husband hacked in the ice near the shore. It’s quite possible, she thinks, that ottomans for propping one’s feet on were invented only after people had begun to choose their seasons. Invented here, in this season where she will now be a visitor for the rest of her life.
The youngest of her three grandchildren, who had a squint her whole childhood and had to go to school bald her first day because of scabies, this most infelicitous youngest child who fell into the water when trying to jump the creek and came home with her clothes all green, this youngest daughter married the son of the mistress of the house and is now, a towel across her shoulders, clattering down the stone steps to the lake in wooden sandals, humming under her breath and turning to give a quick wave before she disappears behind the large fir bush. Sometimes she sits down beside her grandmother and chats for a bit while painting her toenails red. When her, the grandmother’s teeth come unglued during a meal, she feels more ashamed before her granddaughter than the mistress of the house. Back where she learned about growin
g old from old people, there were no false teeth. When you got old, your mouth collapsed. But nowadays in the place where she is a visitor, even faces are made ready for winter.
Being a visitor isn’t easy. In her village it was customary to reject a gift exactly three times before accepting it, and when you accepted it, you yourself brought a present the next time, which the other person would then reject exactly three times before accepting it, and so on. A flowering plant in exchange for strawberries, a bottle of home-fermented wine for a piece of freshly slaughtered pork, apples for pears. To this day her friend, the only one from their village who also wound up in Berlin after the war, brings her a little pot filled with clover every New Year’s Eve in which a tiny chimney sweep made of wire is standing, and she herself has just the same sort of little clover pot with the chimney sweep stuck into it as a gift for her friend. The pots with their sweeps are exchanged at midnight, and on New Year’s morning her girlfriend carries home the pot she has received as a present in the same bag she used to carry her pot there. Since her granddaughter got married, she has been bringing her, her grandmother, along with her on summer vacations to visit her mother-in-law, and this mother-in-law is approximately the same age as her daughter would be now, the daughter who left for her work detail and remained there for all eternity. And when she, the grandmother, asks her granddaughter what she should bring as a hostess gift, the granddaughter always replies: But you’re part of the family. But she isn’t so sure she belongs to this family in which she has been warmly received by her granddaughter’s mother-in-law for the last five summers now but always greeted using the formal mode of address, always Sie and never du. This mother-in-law sometimes recommends a salve to help with her rheumatism, asks her about her apartment in Berlin, says she could have this or that dress of hers altered by her seamstress to fit the grandmother, but she has never once called her du. For the fifth summer in a row, her granddaughter’s mother-in-law uses formal address as she says: Do have a few more potatoes, would you like some more vegetables or a slice of meat, and she doesn’t know whether it counts as more polite here to simply say yes or to go ahead and help herself out of the pots and bowls as though she were at home here, or whether she shouldn’t, as she would at a stranger’s house, say no three times before she accepts. The visitor doesn’t understand that her granddaughter’s mother-in-law is waiting for her, the grandmother, as the older of the two, to suggest that they call each other du.
In fact she even finds it easier to be a stranger among strangers since being a stranger is so familiar to her, she got used to it on one and then the other side of the big gate that separated her farm from the road above. For as long as her family still owned the farm, this big wooden gate was always kept closed unless they were just carting out milk or bringing in the hay. But when suddenly she had cause to seek employment as a dairymaid on her own farm, she knocked on this same gate from the outside and asked the Poles who had meanwhile taken over the farm whether they could hire her. Being at home had already been the first half of this strangeness without her having realized it back then, when she was still at home, chapter one so to speak, and then going away was only the other half, chapter two, strangeness seen from the outside, both halves equal in size, mutually corresponding, but all of it at once—in other words: shutting a gate and being either inside or outside—all of this is very familiar to her. Germany started the war and then lost it, if it had begun it and won, then others would have lost instead. She has learned how to lose; chapter one: having, and chapter two: losing, she kept losing and losing until she’d mastered it. It may be that when one has learned a thing, something else disappears from one’s head. When her granddaughter once asked her whether she wasn’t sad about it—about the house, the cows, all their possessions—she no longer even understood the question. She had rescued the children, that’s all there was to say about it.
She still remembers the stranger who one day, a year or two after the death of her husband but still before the start of the war, had knocked on the gate of the farm. She’d opened it and asked what he wanted. And he had said he wanted to visit his brother, the musician, he’d heard that his brother lived in this village and had even gotten married. The German in which he asked about his brother was antiquated and a little foreign-sounding, just like the German her deceased husband had spoken. No, she’d said, there wasn’t any musician here. Could you maybe give me something to drink, he had asked then. And she had left him standing there before the gate and had gone to fetch a glass of milk, she had waited until he’d finished drinking it, then had taken the glass back from him, wished him a good day and closed the gate to the farm again.
The main thing is that here she can swim again.
Back where she comes from, she never had to lose any thought over whether or not the bread was precious enough to pick up in your hands.
In other places, or so she’s heard, old people like her are just stuck up in a tree and left to starve.
The main thing is that when evening comes she can go swimming again in this shimmering cool green lake.
Her little grandson had wanted to dig up his toy tractor again.
On her way through the garden to the church, her daughter had gotten her veil caught on the red currant bushes.
The dandelions are the same here as at home, and the larks as well.
What silliness.
When it turned out she was already pregnant, her mother let her out of the oven again.
After his injury, his hand always felt cold.
At night, when she takes down her gray knot of hair before going to bed, her hair is still damp.
The hard wood burned longer.
When you got old, your mouth collapsed.
Apples for pears.
At some point the gong sounds, calling them all to supper. Then her granddaughter comes back up from sunbathing on the dock, humming quietly to herself just as she has done all her life, even as a little girl. Which means that in the end there are certain things you can take with you when you flee, things that have no weight, such as music.
THE GARDENER
IN FALL THE OLD householders invite the gardener to move into the guest room of the main house, this room is on the ground floor, it has its own washbasin and separate entrance, and is easy to heat even in winter with the help of a night storage heater. The gardener accepts the offer. The latest news is that a doctor from Berlin is supposed to be leasing the apiary and erstwhile orchard. While clearing out the shelves in the apiary, the young householder finds a crate filled with silver among the jars of honey. He takes out the silver cutlery and arranges it in the silverware box in the main house. He carries the heating coil, which has been left in the extractor room since the previous winter, back down to the cellar. At exactly the place where a fence once stood, the Berlin doctor has a new fence put up right away, even before the end of autumn, as soon as he’s taken possession of the right-hand part of the property. This is not only his right but his duty, since each leaseholder here is responsible for maintaining the property line on the left-hand side as one faces the water. The gardener is able to show the man from the village who is carrying out this work a few of the old border stones that, hidden beneath bushes, can still be detected here and there.
In the village they’re saying that since the apiary was torn down the gardener has refused to trim his toenails. According to this rumor, the nails have grown down the front of his toes all the way to the underside of his feet and then up behind the feet to his heels, and even though he hides them inside shoes and socks, you can clearly see by his limping gait that something isn’t right. In the village they say that the gardener egged on the householders’ little daughter to rip out bunches of grass and throw them along with the dirt clinging to the roots at the freshly plastered house just erected by the doctor from Berlin, and the clumps of dirt thrown by the girl left stains that are still clearly visible. In the village they say that the workers from Berlin who were to drag the bathin
g house up the hill all showed up for work wearing suits and ties, and that they wore dark-colored windbreakers over their suits as camouflage, information ostensibly provided by the gardener. In the village they say that the new leaseholder of the parcel of land once owned by Jews, this very doctor from Berlin, was to blame for the fact that the senior householder, who went into the hospital with nothing more than a head cold, soon died there. The doctor intentionally gave the man too many shots, they say, because the narrow right of way down to the lake wasn’t enough for him, he wanted to have the dock as well, the gardener could certainly attest to this. Finally the gardener, they say, has reported that this Berlin doctor recently, after a celebration in the village pub The Crooked Spruce, went sneaking across his own property with a girl from Frankfurt an der Oder down to the water and from there climbed over the fence so as to make this very dock, the use of which was never granted him by the municipality, the site of an adulterous encounter. The gardener, they say, saw it with his own eyes.
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