by Jurek Becker
“I’m thinking,” Aron said, “whether I should simply try again later or not.”
“Try what?”
“Go to him, without asking.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“And why not?”
“It’s simple,” Weber said. “You’re leaving tomorrow but he stays here. Or are you planning to take him with you right away?”
“I can’t.”
“So you see.”
“Where’s your dog?” Aron asked.
It wasn’t his dog, Weber said. He suggested they go for a little walk, the weather was so pleasant, the surroundings were delightful, and they could eat something on the way. Aron was surprised — it was unlikely that somewhere along the way there would be an inn that was still intact — yet since Weber suggested it he agreed. He also agreed because any way of passing time was preferable to staying in the barrack and, as for Mark, Weber was probably right.
They went in the direction of the small town, only a short way, then Weber turned off the road and led Aron across a wide field. From the very first step, Weber produced an endless flow of words; at first he made a number of general comments about the region, Bayern, the correlation between war and crime, or the fight against crop pests, yet he skillfully approached his actual topic, Alois Weber’s past. Weber portrayed the thorny career of a Social Democrat, even his grandfather had been a Social Democrat, the field wasn’t wide enough for the whole story. Weber interrupted himself only now and then to point out a fleeing animal or a rare bird, which interested Aron as little as his life history. Weber wasn’t disagreeable, that’s why Aron let him talk; he stopped listening only when Weber got to his twenties. He thought of other things, and Weber didn’t suspect that he was talking to himself. For example, Aron says, he had thought that he wanted to bring Mark to Berlin as soon as possible, but how? Once Weber tugged on his sleeve and asked, “What do you think ofthat?” And Aron risked the answer “Unbelievable.”
That seemed to be appropriate. Luckily Weber didn’t challenge Aron a second time by asking him to declare his view of the circumstances, so they both went about their business undisturbed. Later, when they were surrounded by the woods and Weber, after listening briefly, had reached the point of his unavoidable arrest by the Gestapo, he said, “I’ll tell you later how it turned out, perhaps this evening. Now let’s enjoy the air.”
“You’re not just going for a walk with me?” Aron said. “You’re taking me somewhere?”
Weber grinned and said, “You notice everything.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to a ranger widow.”
“A what?”
Aron found that Weber’s grin took on a suggestive twist while he explained: in the woods there was a ranger’s lodge, what kind of a German wood would this be if there wasn’t one? The ranger had been killed in the war, yet his widow, pretty and lonely, was still alive; these two facts too were not uncommon in our time. In his heart, Weber thanked destiny for having let him, quite by chance, find the little house during a solitary walk hardly two weeks before. “And we will eat there.”
“She sells food?”
“Nonsense. I haul everything I can find over there.
She also has a child.”
“Why do you do this?” Aron asked.
In spite of the grinning, he says, he expected a philanthropic answer, but Weber teased the obtuse Aron. He said, “You have three guesses,” and he supported this with an offensive gesture. “That’s why I do it. Or should I wait till the ten-year mourning period is up?”
“You’re right,” Aron said, “life must go on.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
When they arrived, Aron concluded that he and Weber held completely divergent views on female beauty. The plumpish woman was introduced to him as Margarete; she was considerably younger than Weber, and this had probably had a positive influence on his assessment of her charms. A child was nowhere to be seen; only the dog Aron had already met came toward him. Thus Aron could infer where Alois Weber had spent the previous night. Yes, he told himself, like this the barrack is easier to bear.
The food was good; it consisted of, Aron remembers, potatoes, mushrooms, and canned meat, with red wine on the side. Weber helped with the preparations while Aron sat on a deck chair in front of the house and enjoyed the peace and quiet. He decided to invite Weber for a return visit the following morning when they took leave of each other.
In the meantime supper was on the table, and the way back was overshadowed by the rest of the Weberian story.
Don’t you want to tell me his story? At least the gist of it?”
“I already told you, I don’t know it.”
When they got back to the home, it was pitch black. Only a few feet away from the lodge, Aron had offered to Weber to go back alone; he would definitely find the way, and an empty bed too. Yet Weber had declined and explained, “At my age one can’t always do as one wants.”
“Which bed do you want?” Weber asked.
“I don’t care.”
Aron lay down on the one closest to Weber’s living corner. He was so tired that the barrack, contrary to all fears, hardly kept him from falling asleep.
The next morning time for conversation with Mark turned out to be brief because Weber, who was already dressed, woke Aron with the news that the car was already waiting outside.
“What’s the time?”
“Six thirty.”
“Are the children awake?”
“No.”
Aron stole into the dormitory, didn’t come across any personnel on the way, and woke Mark up. He put a finger on his lips and whispered, “I have to leave now.”
He waited for an expression of disappointment, Mark’s “Already?” or if and when he’d come back. Yet nothing of the kind happened, so Aron said, “I will come back soon and take you with me to Berlin.”
“What is that, Berlin?”
“Berlin is a big city. But don’t be impatient.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll come for you soon. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
Aron kissed Mark and said, “And now go back to sleep, you must sleep a great deal.”
The parting from Weber was heartfelt; it even came, Aron says, to an embrace — initiated by Weber. Weber pressed a package with a sandwich into his hand; Aron assured himself that Weber had noted his address correctly.
Then the greeting with Clifford; Clifford said, “We’re early.”
They both sat in the car exactly where they had been two days earlier. Aron breakfasted and drove toward Paula; he already thought, Yesterday was a day without Paula. Clifford asked him about his meeting with his son, and Aron gave him some information without going into details.
Normally,” he says, “one wouldn’t need to waste one word on the return trip. But I already told you several things over which one normally needn’t waste one word, and I will do it again often. Listen to what happened on the way home. We sit and drive and talk, I forget about what, only our driver is silent the whole time. I can’t talk to him because of the language barrier, you know, but I notice that Clifford isn’t talking to him either. Not even when he’s not talking to me. Perhaps, I think, they can’t stand each other or they drive together so often that they have already talked themselves out. At a certain point the car turns into the wood again and stops next to the fuel truck; Clifford climbs out and beckons to me. I don’t really want to get out, everything is full of sand, but he waves and I don’t want to be impolite. So I get out of the car. In the meantime it’s boiling hot, we walk to the shade, sit on a bench, and smoke. Suddenly there’s such a blast that I feel like the world is falling to pieces. A pressure wave as hard as iron tears me from the bench. I fly a couple of yards and fall in the sand, but I’m not unconscious. My ears hurt. I see Clifford lying not far from me. You must imagine, the pressure was so strong that even the heavy stone bench has fallen over. Clifford isn’t hu
rt either; he asks what happened and I tell him to turn around. There’s a pillar of smoke. It must be the truck, I immediately think, where our car was parked. Clifford dashes away; I stay sitting on the ground and check if my limbs are intact. In brief, the truck has exploded. Why, nobody knows. Our driver is dead, another soldier is dead, and there are a couple of wounded, too. I think, I only got out of the car because I wanted to be polite and that saved my life. Clifford had to go to Berlin urgently. They found a jeep and a new driver; nothing was left of our car. So we sit again and drive, I’m quiet — what can one say about such a story? — Clifford also says nothing. But suddenly he starts crying, crying like a child. A delayed shock, I think, but he doesn’t stop. I see that he wants to stop but he can’t. I told you, I had the impression he treated the driver as if he didn’t exist, which is why I’m so surprised that this story hurts him so. Until he tells me that the driver was his son. Your son? I ask. His son-in-law. And he cries all the way to Berlin. I imagine how he will tell his daughter, and I remember Weber’s asking whether I wanted to take Mark with me right away.”
Aron‘s last thoughts during the drive, when it was already dark, with Clifford moaning softly in the background, circled around Paula. If she would still be there, and if not, if she would come back, if perhaps the feared farewell letter would be lying there. He even started thinking if he could do something to keep Paula, but he did not know what.
Paula was there. She was lying on the bed reading a book in English when Aron walked into the room. (The book, one of only a few keepsakes, is still in Aron’s possession. It is entitled Erewhon, or Over the Range and is written by Samuel Butler.) She said, “Is it all right that I’m still here?”
From then on she lived with Aron. Little by little she brought everything she needed from her own apartment, which she didn’t give up and which Aron never saw. Primarily she brought clothes, but also tableware, some vases because it was summertime, a number of canned goods, a night table, so that soon there was no reason for her to go home anymore. Aron didn’t think about their living together, he explains, he virtually avoided the subject. The knowledge of being in love was enough, and he had no further thoughts about Paula’s motives. She must, like him, have been in love, what else? He excluded pity; he strongly believes that he would have known if it was pity. Yet days later, coming back to Paula’s reasons, he actually can’t imagine that a woman like her could have been in love with him. Therefore, he absolutely could not think of any reason why Paula had lived with him, even though, naturally, there must have been one; it’s logical, nothing happens without a reason.
Soon their relationship became marriagelike. They respected each other’s habits and posed no demands they assumed might be arduous or tiresome. Aron reports that his main occupation during those first days was finding out Paula’s habits. He wanted to avoid any accidents that might arise from not knowing these habits, and Paula, judging from their success, must have made a similar effort.
As for her past, Paula was discreet. Unlike with Alois Weber, Aron would have liked to hear a long history from her, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Only when he posed concrete questions, never on her own initiative, did she offer information about herself. In these instances, her tone wasn’t unfriendly, but her replies were always brief and never went beyond the specifics of the question. From this he concluded that she answered unwillingly, that she said things only so as not to appear curt, which is why he soon stopped questioning her. Once he asked her if she had spent the war in a camp, whereupon she answered, “No, in England.” Nothing else, not even later, even though she must have realized from his question that he was interested in more detailed information. So he knew almost nothing about her past.
Aron’s knowledge of contemporary Paula was extensive, even if one must take into consideration that ignoring her past inevitably led to a certain superficiality. But the attainment of this knowledge, Aron emphasizes, was delightful. He soon found out, he says, that Paula was primarily a theoretical person. She preferred to talk about problems concerning humanity, the century, or science, and talked about the basics of living together only when it was unavoidable. If Aron asked her what she wanted for dinner, he could be certain that she would name the first dish that came into her mind, and that was that. But if he brought the conversation around to the closing of vacant lots, he had to be careful or she would be late for work.
He thought she suffered from an illness. He came to this conclusion because, as long as she lived with him, she took a pill every morning and every night, but she said nothing about this either. She didn’t keep it a secret; sometimes she would already be in bed while Aron was still up and she would call out, “Will you bring me a glass of water for the pill?” She simply didn’t talk about it. The name that Aron read on the bottle revealed nothing; he wrote it on a piece of paper and intended, if the opportunity presented itself, to ask a doctor what the pills were for or against, but he forgot about it.
He found that Paula exaggerated hygiene. After the smallest household task she would wash her hands, she spent hours in the bathroom daily, the best discovery for her were the bottles of bath oils. Twice a week she would change the sheets, the towels daily, and it often happened that when Aron would have liked to have her with him she’d be standing in the bathroom doing the washing. The corridor was always full of laundry hung up to dry. This obsession of hers, as Aron calls it, wasn’t an issue, however; even when it bothered him he stuck with his intention of accepting Paula with all her characteristics.
I don’t just mean in this specific case,” I say, “but don’t you think it’s false tolerance when one resolves not to criticize someone under any circumstance?”
“Our relationship,” Aron says, “had nothing to do with tolerance. I didn’t want to disturb her, just like I didn’t want to be disturbed by her.”
“But she did disturb you?”
“Do you think I didn’t disturb her? Trust me, the person who never disturbs anyone hasn’t been born yet. Not disturbing means to disturb as little as possible.”
I hadn’t asked my question randomly; for a long time I had been looking for a pretext to involve him in a discussion about tolerance. Since we first met, I have suspected more and more that Aron’s solitude lies essentially in the fact that, in his world, tolerance and lack of criticism are considered one and the same. But the privilege to be left alone, not to be bothered, in the long run, is a horrible disadvantage, because it means nothing more than exclusion fromthe community. The most honest intentions can be behind it, but that doesn’tchange the result. Yet suddenly I doubt if it makes sense to discuss this in detailwith someone who is the victim of such a delusion.
In erotic matters, a field that is not irrelevant when considering the prospect of living together for an extended period of time, Aron says, Paula had been a great experience for him, a revelation. Not because she was particularly refined, nor because of the extent of her demands. She had never made any, thus there had been no cause for his fear that their age difference, the real extent of which only he knew, could lead to complications. He was much more amazed, and at the same time delighted, at how much she attracted him, not only during the first days. And this meant far more to him than any other comfort in that otherwise bleak time. It also helped him enormously in getting over the difficult loss of his wife, Lydia, about which and of whom he never said a word to Paula.
An even greater quirk than the excessive hygiene was, in his eyes, Paula’s passion for astrology. She owned several books on astrology, among them a thick one with the horoscopes of famous people. She didn’t read it from start to finish, simply because she already knew all their horoscopes; rather she would dip into it now and then. The possibility that constellations could influence people’s destinies fascinated her, or at least it preoccupied her constantly, and it wasn’t easy for him, Aron, always to keep a straight face when she talked about it. Still, he doesn’t think she went so far as to come to any conclusions about he
r own behavior based on the position of celestial bodies. She never said, “Today Jupiter and Uranus are so-and-so aligned, therefore today I’ll do this and that or I won’t do this and that.” And she didn’t think that way either. Her preoccupation with astrology was predominantly theoretical; her pleasure in it was Greek to him. Once he asked her, “Do you believe it or not?” She replied, “It’s so mysterious.”
A finishing touch to her personality: Aron relates that Paula was — he can’t find a more appropriate word — a fanatic flower lover. To my question if he isn’t exaggerating the details now, he says no, that characteristic trait absolutely belongs to Paula and I shouldn’t always think exclusively of getting on with the story. The number of vases she had brought from her apartment had been, in his opinion, incredible. Thirteen pieces in all, and he couldn’t remember that a vase ever stood empty in the room, not from the first day of his return.
Usually she would leave the apartment at half past eight in the morning and come back in the evening, around half past six. Aron was alone the whole day, except for Sundays.
One afternoon, when he was getting his monthly aid from the department in the center of the city (the first clue regarding his income), he met an acquaintance who had survived the same camp he had, a certain Abraham Kenik. Kenik came up to him in the waiting room and said, “Is it really you, Aron?” They had last seen each other the day the camp was liberated. “What brings you to Berlin?” Kenik asked.
“Where else should I be?”
“How should I know? Home?”
“You’ll laugh,” Aron said. “This is my home.”
“Right, you are at home here. By the way, Aron, why do I never see you?”
“Where should you see me?”
“Didn’t anybody tell you where we meet?”
“Who’s we?”
“Our people. Those of us who survived. At least a few of us.”
“No, where do you meet?”
“We have a bar. That is, it’s not ours, I don’t even know who it belongs to, definitely a goy. Do you have pen and paper?”