After the death of the old householder, his son, the young householder, leases the workshop as weekend quarters to a young married couple from the district capital who keep their sailboat docked in the village harbor. In exchange, the two agree to regularly mow the lawn on the big and small meadows in summer. The daughter of the young householder and her friend from the neighborhood are allowed to hold the funnel when the gardener helps the subtenants fill the lawnmower with gasoline.
THE SUBTENANTS
YOU HAVE TO DECIDE that on your own, he’d said. And she had said yes. And after this yes she collapsed into a weeping ball without his knowing at first what the matter was. His wife who hadn’t even cried the first time she sat across from him in the visitation room at the prison. At the time he had said: I would have sent for you. And she had replied: I know. Nothing more than that. Let alone bursting into tears. Shortly after his release he had then quietly married her. Today, thirty years later, all he had done was say in the course of a conversation: You have to decide that on your own. And she had said something that sounded like “yes,” though admittedly the “yes” hadn’t been completely clear, and then she had begun to tremble, and since he’d thought she was cold, he’d put his arm around her. On many evenings they’d sat out of doors like that until late at night, side by side on the garden swing beneath the light of the lantern, chatting or in silence, gazing out in parallel lines into the blackness, at the lake whose waves softly lapped in the darkness. Startled by the sound of her crying, he at once withdrew his arm and looked at his wife as he had never before looked at her in thirty years of marriage. Then he got up and walked over to the dock without first, as usual, using his hands to part the branches of the old willow tree that hung down like a curtain above it. So now he stands there, gazing out into the night as his wife continues to sob on the shore behind him. Bawling on the bench, he thinks and can’t help grinning. And this grin pulls the corners of his mouth into so wide a grimace that he cannot pull them back again. He stands there on the dock, just at the point where it meets the shore, that place he had stepped to so decisively when his wife had suddenly begun to cry, as though he were striding into a staff dining room or over to the cash register at a department store, not even paying attention to how the branches of the old willow tree scratched against his face, just stands there, grinning out into the night. Lord only knows. Today during the day they’d gone for a sail, the wind was light. She’d held the sheets, he’d hoisted the sails and now and then steered a little.
Sailing is a beautiful thing. Because they loved the water so much, he and his wife had camped out for many years near the harbor before they seized the opportunity to set themselves up here. They were allowed to renovate the workshop down by the water to turn it into a weekend dwelling, but had kept a few useful items such as the workbench with its vice, the shelf for the fishing rods and a small washbasin. Among the nails, ropes and chisels, screwdrivers and rubber boots they had made themselves at home, television, table and bed, everything they needed was here, and now from here they could see their boat bobbing between two buoys near the dock. Sailing is a beautiful thing. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the mistress of the house was working abroad and neither she nor her father were taking care of the property, his wife had begun to decorate the small bit of lawn between the shed and the shoreline with stones, had planted asparagus beside the fence and also hung little baskets of flowers from the lower branches of the trees to the right and left of the garden swing, as she had done before in the campground. Beginning in springtime when the boat was put into the water, they would go sailing in virtually all weathers. They might also, for a change, go out in the paddleboat that was hanging on the back wall of the shed. The mistress of the house had given them permission. But they knew nothing more beautiful than just letting the wind carry them along. Sailing is a beautiful thing.
When he is sailing, everything seems so quiet. Even when the wind drives into the sails and tugs at the sheets, even then. You don’t hear the sound of your own blood either, he thinks, unless you hold your hand to your ear, and he holds his hand to his ear. When they are sailing, he and his wife exchange only the most necessary words. Sailing is like a service. What sort of service he really couldn’t say, and just as little does he know who has called for this silence that he and his wife maintain without ever having spoken of it. When he is sailing, the water seems infinite to him. Even when the shoreline is always in view. Even when they sail in circles or from one end of the lake to the other and then back again, over and over. Probably the sense of infinity comes from the motion, he thinks, but this is yet another thing he has never discussed with his wife. Should I call my sister or not, his wife had asked him, and he had said: You have to decide that on your own. Lord only knows. Now the water is lying black before his feet and lapping at the shore, and behind him his wife is sobbing. Perhaps this sobbing is only an inward-turned lapping of the water that is now, as she weeps, running from her eyes and nose, he thinks, and can’t help grinning once more. That one time, when he tried to swim to the opposite shore of the river, the water had been so black and had made faint splashing noises like this. He hadn’t gotten terribly far that night. Just like today. Today he stands grinning at the end of the dock and is already caught again, already nabbed once more from behind, without ropes—that time just by shouts from the shore, threats and curses, and tonight by sounds, that time without a boat under his rear end, swimming, and tonight standing at the end of the dock. His wife who didn’t cry even that first time when she sat across from him in the visitation room at the prison now is crying.
At the time he had known that he had to turn back. His friend hadn’t turned back. On this river, where swimming was forbidden, the water flowed downstream just like other rivers, he and his friend had often swum for pleasure in other rivers, had dived down to the bottom or let themselves be swirled around by the current. Still swimming that night, he had felt surprise that this thing that was utterly prohibited here was nonetheless so much like all the other swimming. Even today he knows that sooner or later he must turn back, return to the circle of light beneath the lantern where his crying wife is sitting on the garden swing. When he learned to ride a motorcycle, not even sixteen years old, he practiced together with his friends in a place close by here, on an unfinished bit of autobahn up in the woods, one of those strips of concrete leading from nowhere to nowhere that you could find everywhere in these parts if you knew your way around. A sandy path suddenly turns into highway and then just as suddenly reverts to a path again or else just stops somewhere right at the edge of the woods as if there were a wall. Back then, when he borrowed a motorcycle from an older friend for the first time to practice on this autobahn in the woods, he knew how to step on the gas but had forgotten to ask how to brake. When the autobahn then ended at the edge of the woods as if there were a wall, he had ridden at full tilt into the woods and swerved wildly around the oaks and pines with the wide mirrors his friend had mounted on the handlebars, not knowing how to stop a machine of this sort. Shit, he had thought, and steered and steered, searching for the way out of these woods more with his gut than with his eyes. It never occurred to him to just take his foot off the gas. Sometimes it happens that a joke has a hard seed inside and when he bares his teeth to laugh he finds himself biting down too hard and then he can’t let go. Shit. His wife is still crying. Shit, he thinks, standing with his back to her. Whether a single word can itself be a thought is something he doesn’t know, but in any case this one word is everything he is thinking, thinking more with his gut than his head. If so, it’s probably the sort of thought that suddenly appears without warning, just like the woods he’d gone zooming into that time, and then just as suddenly it’s over again. It’s just that the route between the oaks and pine trees planted much too close together appears infinitely long when you are swerving between their trunks, and the forest’s shade does not cool you as you careen through it, instead it burns from within. Shit. When
after infinitely many twists and turns he felt the autobahn beneath his tires again just as suddenly as it had vanished before, he was grateful to Hitler for the first time in his life. All the mirrors were still intact.
Turning back, then, is an art he has mastered, or else it’s mastered him, Lord only knows. Whether you swim straight ahead or turn back, the swimming is still the same. His friend, with whom he had gotten drunk on that night and then, as if it were just a joke, jumped side by side into the river, did not turn back. Either he hadn’t heard the shouts from behind him as he swam, or he took them for part of the joke, or else—and this too is possible—he simply hadn’t wanted to turn back. The swimming is always the same. His friend had never reached the opposite shore, or this one either. Sailing, he had practiced flipping the boat with his wife. Make the boat capsize, spin it on a longitudinal axis along with its crew and then right it again. Hold tight to the mast to stay on board as the boat surfaces again. Sailing is a beautiful thing. Lord only knows.
Only for the past week has his wife known she has a sister. One week ago the telephone rang. A friend from school whom the woman had neither seen nor spoken to in thirty or forty years. What a surprise, so you’re still, how did you, and who gave you, they’re talking about a reunion, no really, and so-and-so, and that girl who, and what’s the name of the one who prematurely, oh, so he’s already, how terribly sad, and did he, and how many children, work, husband, sailing, weekend property, does she actually have the address, and besides, what ever. Besides, what ever became of your sister. What sister. And is your stepfather still alive. What stepfather. Oh wait, you still don’t know, this friend says now, all of this on the telephone, I mean, your father wasn’t even, what, the woman says, gazing out at the water, as she holds the receiver to her ear, the sailboat is bobbing near the dock between two buoys, oh, I’m so sorry I, the voice of her friend is now saying inside the telephone receiver, but her husband cannot hear this. Her husband hears only how his wife, after pausing to listen to the telephone, just says: What sister, and a few moments later after a brief pause says: What stepfather. And then finally only says or asks: What? He had laid the telephone cable himself, back before the end of the GDR, running it down from the house all the way to the workshop. The father of the mistress of the house had given them permission to have their own extension off the main line. They themselves had been waiting thirteen years to have telephone service installed in their own apartment in the district capital. If there’s a telephone somewhere, it will ring.
My childhood was like something out of a fairytale, his wife had always said to people, smiling. She would then say something about her father, who had showed her how to catch fish, plant asparagus and handle a rake. Her father had always called her his baby girl. When she talked about her childhood, all the people listening to her always looked as if they wished they too had had childhoods like something out of a fairytale. She never spoke of her stepmother. When her father was home, her stepmother had never dared to strike her. She couldn’t remember her biological mother, and her father never talked about her. But now, a lifetime too late, she has learned on the telephone that even her father was not real and that besides her there was yet another little girl in a nearby village, her sister, whom she does not remember. Both of them, she and this other little girl, had been brought here as the small children of war refugees from the Giant Mountains on the border of Bohemia and Silesia and then had been given to different parents in different villages, her friend had said. Everyone in the village knew that. Everyone but her. Oh, I’m so sorry I, the friend says.
Should one, a lifetime too late, try to find one’s own sister, and if one actually succeeds in finding out where she is living, should one then call her, invite her for a visit or visit her oneself? Write her a letter, or else leave everything as it was before, even if from now on everything will be different? Any older woman sailing past her on a boat might be her sister. Or the madwoman who always pushes around an empty shopping cart in the nearby spa town, mumbling curses. A woman sitting in a café with a piece of cake. An energetic sixty-something seeking a non-smoking man in a classified ad, or else some scrawny old biddy in Berlin. Possibly her sister died ages ago and is already under the ground. Is everyone in the world now related to her, or is it the other way around, everyone once close to her now all at once either a stranger or dead? As a child she had always asked her father when she couldn’t make up her mind. Later, too, after her father’s death, she would imagine, whenever she wasn’t sure what to do, what he would have advised her in this or that situation. But if her father wasn’t even her father, who can give her advice? When she’d asked her husband just now whether she should call her sister, he’d just replied: You have to decide that on your own. Now, a lifetime too late, she is on her own. Where should she go if she wants to return to the place where she was actually born? The Giant Mountains?
Only a week before they climbed down into the black river from which he had emerged shortly afterward, dripping and shivering, but from which his friend had not, they had begun to give serious thought to their circumstances. In their course of study, they would soon both be facing exams that neither he nor his friend were going to pass, that much was clear. For various reasons they had used the time they should have spent studying for the exams on other things. His friend had been an organizer for the student carnival, had gone about investigating various locations and written numerous letters until finally the Museum of Natural History had agreed to open up several of its rooms to the party. Dressed as devils and swine, schoolgirls, Romans and mermaids, the students had descended upon the palatial building after closing time and had set up a cold buff et on the glass display cases, then proceeded to dance the night away between dinosaur skeletons and stuff ed gorillas, a few of them had tried to drink the alcohol from the display cases diluted with water, others had climbed into the larger dioramas, presenting tableaux vivants of love and slumber among the foxes and elks. The organization of this epic party, at which proposals of marriage were made and accepted, and children conceived, had driven every last thought of statistics and structural physics from his friend’s head. He himself, on the other hand, while out on one of his forays through the ruins of Berlin, had stumbled upon a catacomb dating from the previous century in whose vaults corpses from the Biedermeier period had been perfectly preserved along with their clothes and headwear. In their coffins they had outlasted the war and all those other, fresher deaths, and although they were shriveled up, they remained clearly recognizable down to their toenails and top hats. He had asked his now wife, who at the time was his fiancée, whether she wouldn’t like to keep one of these corpses in her hallway as a sort of valet stand. But his fiancée had thought the entire story was invented and the valet suggestion a joke, and a bad one at that, and therefore she hadn’t even laughed. He had then spent many hours down in this crypt sketching the corpses, without of course giving the least thought to the principles of physics that made it possible for a ruin, for example, to remain standing.
We have to get to the West, his friend had said then one evening when there was only a week’s time left before the exam. We’ll repeat the year there. Students from the East were held back a year when they continued their studies in the West, and that was precisely the year they had lost to their carnival and corpses. A new beginning, his friend had said. Here there was no chance: Here the files on their entire cohort—and along with them time—kept steadily advancing. Then they had thought about where their escape could be undertaken most easily. Neither he nor his friend were familiar with the terrain around the “green” unmarked border, and they didn’t have a balloon, so they decided to try the Elbe. It was still so cold, his friend had said, that the border guards wouldn’t seriously be expecting anyone to try swimming the river. We’ll get drunk first so we don’t feel the cold, and then we’ll just zip across, his friend, the Saxon, had said. Neither he nor his friend had brought up their women. Although this now appears to him beyond
comprehension, he would say that at the moment he had simply forgotten all about his fiancée. One week later they packed up a pipe wrench and three bottles of wine, got on a train with their bicycles, rode the train for an hour and a half, and then from a tiny train station bicycled out to the meadows along the Elbe. There they got drunk in the dark and then, on the eve of their exams in statistics and structural physics, just as planned, they climbed down into the river to swim back a year in time.
The next time he saw his fiancée—today his wife—it was in the courtroom. She had been called as a witness and asked whether she’d known of his intention to flee the country. And she had, quite truthfully, said no. Compared with this moment, all questions regarding structural physics suddenly appeared facile, and it was clear to him that he had swum into his test rather than away from it. The swimming though is always just the same. Later he asked his fiancée to bring him a book about structural physics, he studied the book and then conducted tutorials on this subject for his fellow prisoners. The percentage of men from the construction sector that were sitting in prison just then was higher than usual: During the construction of the Berlin Wall, a number of workers had attempted to reach the other side of the very structure they were building. After serving his time in prison, he went to see his former professor and asked for permission to take the exam even though he was no longer enrolled. He passed with flying colors but never took up his studies again.
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