An Inventory of Losses

by Judith Schalansky

  We know that the two young poetesses Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien were disappointed when, in late summer 1904, they fulfilled a long-cherished dream and visited the isle of Lesbos together. When they finally reached the port of Mytilene, French chansons were blaring from a phonograph, and both the visual appearance of the island’s female inhabitants and the crudeness of their idiom were at odds with the poetesses’ noble imaginings of this place so frequently evoked in their own poems. Nevertheless, they rented two neighboring villas in an olive grove, went for long moonlit and sunlit walks, rekindled their love that had grown cold some years earlier, and talked about setting up a school of lesbian poetry and love on the island.

  The idyll ended when a third woman—a jealous and possessive baroness with whom Vivien was in a liaison—announced she was on her way, and a telegram had to be sent to stop her. Barney and Vivien separated. Back in Paris, their mutual Ancient Greek teacher served from then on as the bearer of their secret letters.

  We know that, in 2008, two female residents and one male resident of the island of Lesbos unsuccessfully attempted to introduce a ban on women not originally from the island naming themselves after it or being named after it by others: “We object to the arbitrary use of the name of our homeland by persons of sexual deviation.” The presiding judge rejected the application and ordered the three Lesbians to bear the court costs.

  Who, these days, is still familiar with the “Lesbian rule” alluded to by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, used in cases where general laws cannot be applied to concrete situations, following the example of the master builders of Lesbos, who used a leaden rule that “can be bent to the shape of the stone,” since it was better, in a concrete situation, to have a crooked but functioning rule than to follow an ideal which is smooth and straight but useless.

  And who, these days, is still familiar with the Sapphic stanza, that four-line verse form comprising three hendecasyllabic lines of matching structure, consisting of trochees with a dactyl inserted in third place, and an adonic as the fourth line, in which each line starts directly with a stressed syllable, every line ending is feminine, and the solemn dignity so characteristic of this meter yields at the end to a sense of reassurance or even serenity.

  For a long time terms like “tribadism,” “Sapphism,” and “lesbianism” were used more or less synonymously in the treatises of theologians, jurists, and physicians, though in some instances they denoted a perverse sexual practice or shameless custom, and in others a monstrous anomaly or mental illness.

  We do not know exactly why the term “lesbian love” has endured for some time now, only that this expression and its associations will fade in the same way as all its predecessors.

  L is an apical consonant, E the vowel expelled most directly, S is a hissing, warning sound, B an explosive sound that blasts the lips apart . . .

  In German dictionaries, “lesbisch” (“lesbian”) comes immediately after “lesbar” (“legible”).

  Behrenhoff

  The Von Behr Palace

  * From the fourteenth century, the Gützkow branch of the old von Behr family, also known as the “Swans’ Necks” in reference to the motif on their coat of arms, owned a large amount of land in the area in Pomerania known as Busdorf, near Greifswald.

  In 1804, with the approval of the Swedish-Pomeranian government in Stralsund, the place was renamed “Behrenhoff,” and cavalry captain Johann Carl Ulrich von Behr turned the farm estate into an entail in favor of his grandson Carl Felix Georg, with the stipulation that primogeniture should always apply in event of its inheritance.

  The latter had a new, two-story mansion built behind the old farmhouse in the late classical style based on plans by Friedrich Hitzig, a pupil of Schinkel, which was completed in 1838. In 1896 the building was extended by Carl Felix Woldemar, who had been elevated to the Prussian rank of count in 1877, and the two single-story verandas enlarged, with another story added on top.

  From 1936 to 1939, Countess Mechthild von Behr, widow of the last count, the Imperial District Administrator and longstanding member of parliament Carl Friedrich Felix von Behr, who died in 1933, placed the mansion at the disposal of the Confessing Church as a lecture venue. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is said to have been a guest there on several occasions.

  † On May 8, 1945 the mansion went up in flames. The burned-out ruins were used by the local residents as a source of building materials for new farmhouses.

  The nine-hectare landscaped park designed by Peter Joseph Lenné and laid out between 1840 and 1860 today has protected status.

  I remember the open window. It is night, and the air is cool. An open window on a summer’s night. No moon in the sky. Only the diffuse light of the street lamp. It smells of earth. Perhaps it has rained. I cannot remember.

  It was July 31, says my mother. She is quite certain, because July 31 is Tante Kerstin’s birthday, and that evening she was having a celebration in one of the old estate workers’ cottages opposite. It definitely didn’t rain, she adds. It was a fine day. Sunny the whole day. As you’d expect in July.

  The weather records also show that it was a hot day, indeed that the whole summer was warm and exceptionally dry.

  Summer 1984. It is my earliest memory: this I know, I think, I claim. I could telephone Tante Kerstin. She is still alive. As are my mother and both my fathers. The one who conceived me, and the one who, later that night, would cool my legs with ice and wrap them in gauze bandages.

  I play in the cemetery between the mounds overrun with greenery. I hide behind the graves and headstones, I crouch between plants with tiny blue and white flowers. An elderly woman, shrunken from stooping, throws wilted blooms and dried-out wreaths onto the compost. She holds a tin watering can under the rusty water tap then disappears behind the box hedges.

  I duck down, run my fingers over the smooth stone, feel the rough indentations of the chiseled letters and wait for the improbable. I wait to be found. I want to be found. I’m afraid of it.

  Throughout my childhood we lived in villages, in rural localities that gave little hint of their more glamorous past. Then, too, we were living in a village, just a few steps from its one and only bus stop, on the first floor of the old verger’s house next door to the towerless church with its high stone chancel. Our backyard was directly adjacent to the cemetery. Not even a fence separated the two compost heaps. In my memory, I was almost always alone. Alone in the graveyard, alone in the orchard surrounded by high red walls, alone on the heap of stones which, according to my mother, I kept jumping from on that day.

  But no one came; the miracle, as always, failed to materialize. Instead I picked a few flowers from the little flower beds, plucked pansies out of the ground and extracted single tulips from their pointy plastic vases stuck in the earth.

  I had some kind of inkling, but I did not know. Not, at least, that the flowers belonged to the absent, to the dead rotting in wooden boxes beneath the earth. When I took the posy home, my mother was cross and did not explain why.

  I had no knowledge of death as yet. That people die, that I myself would one day die, lay beyond my imagination. When, some time later, my cousin let me in on this secret, I did not believe him. I was certain he had overheard something and misunderstood it, as he often did. He grinned. He was sure of himself.

  I felt dizzy. I raced through the new-build apartment that was our home at the time, into the kitchen and asked my mother whether it was true that people really died, whether we would all die one day, in other words, me included. She nodded, said yes, and shrugged her shoulders. I looked at the trash can and, for some reason, imagined that the dead ended up in this container, as shriveled beings, to be carted off by the garbagemen. I clamped my hands over my ears, even though no one was speaking now, and ran into the hallway. Yellow light was shining through the ridged glass of the window onto the dusty green plants in the stairwell.
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br />   I keep my eyes closed on the ghost train at the funfair in a neighboring village. My parents let me go on it. Two of their pupils sit to the left and right of me, a boy and a girl.

  As we plunge into the darkness, I cross my arms in front of my face. A cool draft brushes my skin. I hear a clattering, the jolting and rolling of the car, a scream. I feel the skin of my eyelids, squeeze my eyes even more tightly shut, hold my breath for a moment, hum and wait. An eternity goes by.

  At some point someone taps me on the shoulder. My mother’s voice says: It’s over. I open my eyes. We are back outside. I kept my eyes closed the whole time, I say proudly. I cheated it. I cheated fear. What a waste of money, says my mother and lifts me out of the car.

  I play in the garden among the apple trees. I pick masses of buttercups and stain my fingers with dandelion juice. By the compost heap I discover a spiky ball. It is breathing. It is alive.

  When my mother sets a saucer of milk in front of the ball, it transforms into a wondrous creature. We crouch down. Black button eyes look at me. I feel my mother’s hand on my head. A pointy nose sniffs out the milk. A tiny pink tongue darts out. The animal grunts and slurps. Its prickles bob up and down.

  I enjoyed life. I was expecting nothing. My mother was expecting a baby. But I have no memory of a rounded belly or a man’s hand stroking its curves. She must have been pregnant, the dates tell me. She was pregnant, the photographs show. One month after that July night which cannot have been cool, my brother would be born and my grandmother, having taken the telephone call from the hospital, would stand in the bedroom doorway in her midnight-blue dressing gown and speak his name for the first time.

  I sat there in my grandparents’ bed, heard the name, which meant nothing to me, and turned back to the lipsticks, an astonishing collection of small shiny cylinders which my grandmother kept in a case above the bed.

  The bedroom window is open, but the door of the apartment is closed and locked, and the key is not hanging on the key holder or lying on the kitchen table. I have woken up and climbed out of my cot. I have opened the bedroom door and searched the whole apartment. All the rooms are dark, all the other windows closed: the semicircular dormer window in the living room, the skylight in the kitchen and the jet-black hole of the windowless box room which my father has turned into a small workshop.

  There were no other rooms. The bathroom was downstairs on the ground floor. We shared it with Tante Viola from the top-floor apartment. We shared the bathroom, the roaring boiler, the four-footed bathtub and the raffia mat in front of it. Tante Viola worked in the school canteen in the old stables at the north end of the grounds, a yellow brick building with a stone horse’s head looking down from either side of the entrance gate. Where once horses ate their hay, we now had our midday meal. We stood in long lines, the kindergarten children, the school pupils, the teachers, half the village. Tante Viola had bleached blonde hair, purple eye makeup, and a truck driver for a husband, who came home on Saturdays and left again on Sundays, a large faceless figure. The school was behind the grounds, two new buildings with long rows of windows. My parents and also Tante Kerstin taught there. The grounds were large and belonged to the palace that no longer existed. Neither Tante Kerstin nor Tante Viola was a real aunt. We just called them that.

  The palace was not a real palace either. It was a mansion, an elongated two-story building, the center of the estate, with, next to it, a stable block, a sheep shed, a cattle shed as well as an outbuilding and two barns. An avenue of lime trees led directly to it from the Bear Gate on the village high street, through the northern part of the grounds, which was out of bounds for villagers. My kindergarten stood on what would once have been the generous front drive, a grass-centered circle in front of an open portal that also served as a porch, surmounted by a balcony supported by eight pillars, with triangular gables over the windows, and Virginia creeper growing up the facade.

  The window is open; the door of the apartment is locked and bolted. My arm stretches up, reaches for the door handle, grips it, pulls it downwards—but the door stays closed.

  I remember the big wall cabinet in the living room, the toys lying around by the stove, the rocking chair in suspended motion, an oversized, tidy dolls’ house. Only the bedroom window is open and the air outside cool.

  The church was in the middle of the village, but everyone just walked on by. Nobody looked over the red brick wall, nobody glanced at the graves and crosses. Only a few stooped old women ever ventured through the creaking gate into the graveyard. We lived right next to the church. But none of it meant anything. Not the huge edifice of hewn granite and rough stone, not the vicarage diagonally opposite, not the wooden bell cage down at ground level, not the bell ringing on Sundays, not the lopsided rusty crosses in the churchyard, not the weathered burial chamber of the counts behind the wrought-iron gate, the crosses in amongst the ferns, the stone angels in half relief above a crumbling bench no one ever sat on, nor the plaque bearing the motto I did not understand, even that time when my mother read it out to me: “Love never fails.” They were remnants of a past that, so it seemed, had been overcome once and for all.

  It was an old, aristocratic family that had given the village its name, vassals of the counts of Gützkow and the dukes of Pomerania—“brave, beloved, and trusty knights,” according to an old deed of enfeoffment.

  They are words from a fairy tale. They appear in columns of dense writing in which the branches of the family trees go off in many directions. The von Behrs were squires and stewards, chamberlains and counts, provosts and professors, district and town councilors, curators and commanders, court tutors and cavalry captains, valets de chambre and young nobles in court service, soldiers, marshals, majors and captains, lieutenants—in the Polish war, in the Swedish household guard, in Danish or French service. A canoness and a prioress, a captain’s wife, even a poetess. But most importantly they were the owners of this place, including their fief, their possessions, seeds, chattels, and livestock. A feudal estate which, for lack of an heir, passed back to the old ancestral line in which, since time immemorial, the firstborn had counted for more than those born later, and the daughters for virtually nothing. They had goods which they sold and exchanged, retained and acquired, collecting interest on them or pledging their shares in them. Sometimes they signed deeds of enfeoffment, affixed their seal to thick paper, a sticky mass, as red as ox blood: a dancing bear with a swan on either side.

  My mother’s ancestors were farmers, livestock and timber traders, carters and master butchers, a forester, a pointsman, a sailor. My father’s ancestors, my biological father, that is, were millers and master tailors, cartwrights and carpenters, a musketeer, a few doctors, a seamstress of fine fabrics, a fisherman, a railway guard, a chemist, an architect, a factory owner, an armaments manufacturer, who after the war became a cemetery gardener.

  We only lived in that village a year, but it is the first year I can remember. It was not the cemetery but the grounds of the mansion that our yard backed on to, my mother says. And there were also the remains of a tumbledown wall, she adds.

  Some said the mansion was demolished after the end of the war, others that it had burned down before the end of the war, along with its entire inventory: the magnificent chandeliers in the entrance hall, the leaded glass of the doors to the two drawing rooms, the dark furniture, the books, the silverware and the china, the gilt mirrors, the old maps and the gallery of ancestors with its massive portraits of serious-looking gentlemen on large horses.

  We do not own any old things, any heirlooms. Only the house we live in is old. At night you can hear the marten in the attic. My parents are waiting for an apartment in the prefabricated building behind the swan lake. Three rooms, central heating and a bathroom with hot running water. They are on the waiting list. Time is short. The baby is due soon.

  It was not uncommon for the old buildings to be in such a dilapidated state that they collapsed i
n the night, like the coopera­tive store the previous autumn. The roof had simply caved in. In the morning the door could only be opened with brute force. I remember the cluster of people gathered in front of it, shop assistants and customers, women in flowery house dresses carrying limp string bags, men who came and pulled tin cans out of the rubble. They loaded the dusty goods into wheelbarrows and piled the tinned food, bags of flour, and bottles that the milkman delivered in a dark, musty room on the ground floor of our building. An emergency sale got under way. The light was on all day. The ringing of the till could be heard all the way up to our apartment.

  I was wearing sleeveless batiste pajamas with a pattern of tiny orange flowers. They had an elasticated waist. I remember the open window, the mild air, because it wasn’t cool, it couldn’t have been cool, and not so much as a breath of fresh air entered the room, for it was July, and Tante Kerstin’s birthday, and why Tante Viola had not come to check on me I do not know. I was three and a half years old, nearly four. Four fingers stuck up straight, nearly a whole hand.

  I have no memory of a pile of bricks, of a heap of stones in the yard which, that day, I apparently climbed on, higher and higher, and kept jumping down from. I see only the open window. The windowsill is level with my chest. I try to hoist myself up, but it is too high. I take a few steps back, think: Judith, you are not stupid, and say: Judith, you are not stupid. I keep repeating these words, first quietly to myself, then out loud. The words lead me into the kitchen. I take hold of the kitchen chair and slide it across the tiled floor. It makes a loud scraping noise. I drag it over the threshold, I haul and heave it over the orange living-room carpet, over the threshold into the bedroom, past my parents’ big bed to the window, which is standing open. I think of little Häwelmann in the fairy tale, but my nightshirt is not a sail, nor is my cot on wheels. It stays put next to the heater all night. I peer through the bars. I stand at the rail. I am Häwelmann, but the moon, which, speaking in my mother’s voice, asks, “Surely that’s enough?” has disappeared behind a cloud. Its edges glow. No one can stop me. I clamber onto the chair, my feet in their slippers. Dark-blue corduroy ones. I climb onto the windowsill and crouch there. The toes of my slippers are pointing out into the open air. I don’t wait. I don’t wait for anything. I don’t look at the lamp. I don’t look at the branches of the apple trees. Only down. The pavement. The patch of greenery below me.