The Weight of Things

by Marianne Fritz

  It wasn’t until later, sometime after Dr. Reichmann had come to rely upon Wilhelm and his pleasant, dependable smile, that Wilhelm understood the favor the attorney had done him in highlighting a decisive gap in his education. He discovered that Dr. Ulrich Reichmann belonged to a particular group of people, well-versed in the law, whose profession consists of merging business enterprises, or organizing corporations into their ideal legal form—the ideal legal form being, it goes without saying, the one in which the least taxes are paid and the company is least vulnerable to any official prying. In brief: Wilhelm came to understand it was pure nonsense to think a good attorney must go to court as often as possible if he wanted to make any money.

  And so Wilhelm the chauffeur could now confidently sum up Dr. Reichmann’s character with the same words that had formerly caused him such confusion: “A good attorney never stands before the court.” Whenever he uttered these words, he would nod knowingly and not without satisfaction. Indeed, he took great pleasure in springing this sentence on the uninitiated.

  Regarding his own profession, however: one passenger, the poet Fonderstrassn, had once waxed so lyrical in his praises of Wilhelm that the chauffeur felt duty-bound to put a damper on his enthusiasm.

  “Maestro! Maestro! Don’t offend a chauffeur! I’ll admit that there may indeed be some artistic skill to driving through the fog, to recognizing a stag for a stag and not some trick of the mind, some phantom seen through windshield wipers that a driver might ignore or not, as he likes, without suffering any damage … That much I’ll give you wholeheartedly! But sir, don’t scatter your genius at the feet of such triviality. Your eloquence is, if I may venture a most deferential criticism, too lofty for a chauffeur’s quite inconsequential duties. Only great men, men of significance, men struggling with complicated, contradictory, nay, tragic intrigues—that is what should inspire you, that is what makes you a maestro. Not a little, undistinguished man, a nobody, a faceless, colorless Come-hither-boy … a simple chauffeur.”

  BERTA SCHREI HAD THOUGHT ABOUT WILHELM A GREAT DEAL

  Since 1958 Berta’s doubting and brooding compulsion had centered solely on Wilhelm. The administration at the fortress found nothing objectionable in this; in fact they encouraged Berta’s reflections on Wilhelm with utterly unbounded broadmindedness. As it happens, everything Wilhelm had ever disclosed to her bore some relation or other to his métier of chauffeur and Come-hither-boy. Even his child-rearing maxims would eventually wend their way back to his experiences as a chauffeur and Come-hither-boy.

  “Berta. You need to teach your children to be more flexible. The world is one obstacle after another—and it’s in man’s nature to put himself in harm’s way. You have to pay close attention, like a good chauffeur, and take care to avoid collisions. What do you think would happen if I said to myself sometime, Hey, look at that fellow driving right down the middle of the street, does he think he owns the road? Well, I’ll show him! What would be the outcome then, Berta? No, for better or for worse, I have to swerve out of his way. And if the other children continue to beat our little Berta black and blue, well, then our little Berta simply has to learn. If I go out looking for a collision, I too will end up black and blue; if, however, I know how to avoid a collision, then I will not end up black and blue. It’s a question of wits, Berta. And we’re all responsible for having that kind of wit.”

  Wilhelm dispensed generic philosophical advice of this character in hopes of raising their children, Little Rudolf and Little Berta, as competent citizens with both feet on the ground. Berta, his then-wife, might complain as often and in as many ways as she pleased: Wilhelm would just smile and philosophize away all her questions about upbringing, and Berta would twirl off back into her mind, where she would wrestle with the endless “ifs” and “buts,” the “on-the-one-hands” and “on-the-others,” today forbidding what tomorrow she would naturally allow (constraining this naturally with an “if” and a “but,” an “on-the-one-hand” and “on-the-other”), and the next day permitting what she would saddle with a stern prohibition one day later.

  Wilhelmine, her friend, was repulsed by Berta’s incapacity to keep her doubting and brooding compulsion from getting in the way of her children’s upbringing.

  “Berta! My little catastrophe! Your children have no use for your doubts and brooding! They need a steady hand, Berta! Don’t fuss for so long. Just say yes or say no and then stick to it! One time this way, one time that way, it makes people lose perspective, if not their minds to boot! You’ve got no backbone!”

  And yet if Berta would go on insisting her children be cautious and flexible, before later switching gears with Little Rudolf or Little Berta, or both at the same time, this was because, irrespective of Wilhemine’s resolute example, Berta—so fickle, so soft and acquiescent—did indeed lack a backbone.

  Berta Schrei was thankful for every hour allowed to her for raising her children. She brought them up with heartfelt devotion, and considered it a lost opportunity, something to be mourned, if at any hour she failed to share an important life lesson with her two little sprouts; she would bewail herself, bemoan herself, bethink herself a bad mother, swear to improve until the next unpardonable oversight, which she would aspire to correct at the first available opportunity. That is how she brought her children up—with great ardor—until the year 1958.

  BERTA GREETS WILHELM; DOES BERTA SCHREI HAVE A VISITOR?

  Berta said: “So. So,” and a drawn-out, seemingly endless sigh rose from her ribcage. Whenever Berta used to sigh that way, Wilhelm always smothered her fears, misgivings, doubts, and broodings about her children with his smile and his bits of chauffeur-philosophy.

  By now Head Nurse Gotaharda had left Ward 66 to the visitor and his secrets, and the Wise Little Mother watched Wilhelm and Berta closely from the corner of her eye. Scarcely ten minutes had gone by since the Wound of Life had made its treacherous entrance into the Wise Little Mother’s realm. It was that whore of a Head Nurse, who threw herself into the arms of anyone who came her way, who had befouled their corner of eternity, and it weighed upon the Wise Little Mother now, a heavy burden. The old woman resolved to alert Berta to the evil forces around her.

  “You must reflect on what is happening here, Berta dear. Reflect and be careful. Life is a wound, and this wound … this wound is slow to heal.”

  Thrice she made the sign of the cross with her right hand, staring straight at the grating over the window, thrice more made the sign of the cross staring straight into the bars of the cage, and then turned back to Berta: “Life, so say the wise, appears incurable.” From her bed the old woman peered up at Wilhelm. “Bring word of life, and you bring pain. Bring word of death, and you bring deliverance. So it is. Indeed. Are you bringing deliverance then?” she purred at him.

  Berta giggled, and the Wise Little Mother laid her hand on Berta’s shoulder, whispering serenely, “Yes indeed, our Berta has a visitor. Berta Schrei, is it? Berta Schrei has a visitor? Is that right? Does Berta Schrei have a visitor?” A murmur coursed through the rest of the ward. Berta Schrei has a visitor. Does Berta Schrei have a visitor?

  Tears streamed over the face of Eulalia Mondschein, and she proclaimed, with mounting intensity: “All my fault! My own irreparable fault!”

  Viktoria Löffelholz shouted “Oh!” clapped a hand over her impertinent mouth, and then looked over at Wilhelm, begging his pardon, before vanishing beneath her bed, where she cowered, ashamed, until the visitor took his leave.

  “Without a doubt. Life is visiting Berta. Berta Schrei. And life … We know this, don’t we, my dear Berta? We know this. Life is hope and hope is a wound. Yes indeed. It’s come full circle. Isn’t that so?”

  And turning to Wilhelm, she brought her observations to a close: “Did you not know? Did you not know that hope is a wound? What do you know then?”

  She scuttled back to her bed, twiddled her thumbs, and prayed her “Hail Mary, full of grace …”

  BERTA SCHREI HAS A VISTOR

&
nbsp; In Ward 66, on the 13th of January 1963, it was apparent that the Little Mother must once have sung in the church choir, for only a trained singer could sing as well as the Wise Little Mother did.

  “Hail, O star of the ocean, God’s own mother blessed!” The newness of the sound remained new, and it raised gooseflesh up and down Viktoria’s spine. Eulalia’s body began to rock back and forth, faster and faster, and her guilty conscience overwhelmed her: to temper her tears, she kept glancing at the cage, beseechingly, and this helped her to banish her sickness back inside her body. Eulalia felt the old need, so long in abeyance, but now vital, even urgent, for self-recrimination, to still the gods’ wrath and arrive at some insight capable of striking a decisive blow against her illness:

  “Eulalia, Eulalia, behave yourself. Eulalia. Eulalia. Don’t take more blame on your shoulders. Eulalia. Eulalia. It’s just your disease. You can’t give in. Eulalia. Eulalia. Speak the words that will banish your sickness. Speak them yourself, or else let the gods speak them. Eulalia. Eulalia. Everything is fine. What’s trying to come out of you isn’t you, Eulalia. No. It’s the sickness. Eulalia. Eulalia.”

  It seemed the Wise Little Mother had successfully initiated a general rebellion against life—which just today had wormed its way with such shameful presumption into Ward 66. She took note of her victory with equanimity, and with equanimity she struck up her song one more time, from the beginning.

  “Hail, O star of the ocean, God’s own mother blessed!”

  Berta giggled. She said: “So. So.”

  Wilhelm looked down at his right hand and concluded he had five fingers on it, and the same for the other one too: not three, seven, or twelve. This somehow impressed and emboldened him a great deal; he almost felt himself the sort of man who could face life’s ups and downs without fear.

  “Berta, my dear. I’ve brought you something,” he said, and laid the bouquet of roses gently on her lap. Berta looked up, lowered her eyes again, then her hands twitched slowly upward in the direction of her neck, feeling for the necklace with the tiny Madonna inside her institution uniform.

  THE NECKLACE WITH THE TINY MADONNA

  Berta Schrei always spent a long time observing her Madonna trinket carefully in the washroom mirror; in the mornings, before the fortress day began, and in the evenings, before the fortress night, and during the morning and evening ablutions, she was always the second-to-last—and the Wise Little Mother the last—in the line of miserable souls into and out of the washroom … and for good reason.

  For Berta Schrei was the only one in the entire fortress with a necklace with a tiny Madonna.

  For years, the struggle to win back this prize had been waged by the shy and brooding and not at all shrewd Berta with surprising ingenuity and tremendous shrewdness, day in and day out. Yet in the end she had only to win the support of the Wise Little Mother, who entered into tireless negotiations with Nurse Franziska Querbalkner—remarkably, as the old woman’s general preference was to have nothing to do with Querbalkner whatsoever.

  To have recruited the old woman, this tireless servant of the fortress regime, as her own sworn advocate in a battle against that very same institution—this was a great triumph for Berta, and had made all the difference in her struggle. From then on, her hope of getting the necklace back from the fortress’s administration soared, onward and upward. Until finally, on the very day when Wilhelmine had married Wilhelm, Berta got her Madonna back at last.

  It was on that day—Berta’s birthday—that Nurse Franziska smuggled the necklace out of the fortress depository and passed it to Berta, adding emphatically that she should hide this diadem of hers—that was the nurse’s word—as safely as possible inside her institution uniform. “If you don’t keep an eye on that diadem of yours, it’ll get lost again—forever, Berta. Understand? So be careful. Don’t forget. Keeping it safe will be an almost impossible task! To accomplish it will require constant attention and watchfulness and great cleverness too—for the man who makes light of what he’s won is never able to defend it, and the man who doesn’t know how to defend what he’s won will lose far more than just his treasure!”

  Berta nodded, and as the nurse laid the chain hastily around her neck, Berta let it vanish inside her institution uniform and stared at nurse Franzi with a look that seemed desperate for approval. Querbalkner nodded her head several times, impressed, and then squeezed Berta’s hand approvingly before stepping away from Ward 66. For the rest of that day Nurse Franziska felt like a person who’s accomplished the impossible, while Berta Schrei rushed to have herself blessed by the Wise Little Mother, not just once, but several times.

  Wilhelm smiled when Berta held out the tiny Madonna trinket to him; her face looked almost shrewd. It struck him then that sometimes a certain unfamiliar pressure in the stomach region could be more dangerous than the most excruciating cramps. Stomach cancer, for example, did not necessarily announce its treachery in the body with great fanfare; in fact it was inclined to do quite the opposite. He had read that or else heard it somewhere, sometime.

  “I’ll visit you more often from now on. You know that it’s your birthday today, right? I have a feeling this could be a new beginning.”

  Wilhelm believed what he was saying, and Berta stopped twirling the Madonna back and forth between her fingers. She strained to hear his voice, which reached her ears like the song of the Lorelei calling out to the fishermen. Berta thought she could smell the beguiling odor of the roses creeping up into her nostrils, and Wilhelm’s voice and Wilhelm’s proximity turned time backward.

  THE BOAT TRIP

  Berta was walking to the lake behind Wilhelm; the children were up ahead; there were summer blossoms for the eyes and rich aromas for the nose. Overcome by the opulence of the vegetation, Berta’s doubting and brooding compulsion seemed to be swept away, and she thought to herself:

  “I am a blank slate.”

  All around, the vibrant green was like a broad canvas upon which an exuberant painter had daubed generous swaths of color, as though his feelings and his passion for these many shades of green were not the least bit limited by the price of paint. To the children’s delight, when they’d made it to the shore, Wilhelm coughed up the fare for the boat trip without any “ifs” or “buts,” any “on-the-one-hands” or “on-the-others”! To Berta’s delight, he even launched the boat without any “ifs” or “buts,” “on-the-one-hands” or “on-the-others.” The children were happy! Berta was happy! Wilhelm looked at Berta again with the eyes of Private First Class Rudolf, with the eyes of Wilhelm the returnee.

  But soon they began to cry, Little Rudolf first and then Little Berta, and the children tendered their own “ifs” and “buts,” their own “on-the-one-hands” and “on-the-others.” They began by calling the boat trip into question, and ended by declaring it a torment. Rudolf, the little scamp, let it be tearfully known that he wished only to lie flat on the bottom of the boat, then stood up from his seat to get ready to do so, and stumbled. Nor was there time to consider the cause of his stumbling, for he instantly plunged into the water—a dire situation indeed, since, like his mother, Rudolph could not swim. He would likely have drowned had Berta not dove into the water to snatch the scamp by a tuft of hair, thus startling—at last—the clueless Wilhelm into a demonstration of his swimming prowess.

  With characteristically laggard urgency, Wilhelm saw what was happening and dove to rescue the two of them, neither of whom would have been there to rescue even a moment later. Eventually the Schrei family made it back into the boat, hurt, coughing, disconcerted, and one lesson the wiser. All Berta’s anxieties about herself, which had been growing over the course of the year, were confirmed once again. Their lovely outings inevitably ended with her and the children embroiled in some catastrophe that Wilhelm somehow always knew how to fix.

  They had christened their new car with this excursion to the lake. Whereas on the drive there Berta had been proud to sit beside Wilhelm, on the way home she cowered in the back,
her right arm around Little Berta, her left arm around Little Rudolf, both of them cuddled up to their maker, as if they wanted to crawl back inside her and resume their places there.

  Berta contemplated the boy’s profile. Rudolf drowsed, the corner of his mouth tending softly downward. She didn’t need to lean over to know that the other corner of his mouth was likewise tending downward and that two steep wrinkles of displeasure were etched between his brows, and this knowledge triggered the same sensation that always beset her in late autumn, when she would lose herself staring at the barren branches of the trees that writhed so strangely toward the heavens, giving an impression of such extraordinary muteness that even the din of the city seemed to die away, and she would strain her ears, then, listening only for a scream. A scream always bored into Berta like a bark beetle through wood before finally, freed from the clutches of decay and death, it would echo off into the sky. Berta was afraid of late autumn, which she used to call the leafless season, and felt relieved, in a certain way heartened, when the first snowfall came, bringing with it the perennial hope that the bare branches, writhing strangely heavenward, would soon be covered by a blanket of ice.

  Little Rudolf slept more fitfully than Little Berta. Eight-year-old Berta slid into sleep like the Madonna herself—who occupied her proper place over the marital bed in the Schrei bedroom, in a painting with a ponderous gilded frame: the Madonna with the Christ child. The Madonna’s face had long troubled Berta. In all the time she’d looked at it, not a single wrinkle had ever crossed the Madonna’s face. Why should it be free from even the slightest trace of life’s hands, their pounding and molding? The Madonna seemed untouched by those thick fingers, their rolling, pressing, flattening—untouched, that is, by daily life, by the weight of the earth itself, or by the weight of those circumstances that Berta referred to, simply, as life as such.