My mother leaves the hospital without a baby, takes the train to the new village, which has not only a bus stop but also a railway station. She walks past the church, on top of which there are storks feeding their young, past the co-op, a new building with bicycle racks on the concreted area in front. But the gossips in house dresses are already there. They look in her direction and whisper: a teacher from Behrenhoff who’s just moved into the new block. They beckon her over and ask if the baby was stillborn. They ask in standard German and in dialect: Were ’e stillborn?
An old woman finds me. She leans on her walking stick, bends over me and says: A right pickle you’ve got yerself into, duck!
My mother comes home without a baby. She does not even come home, because while I am at my grandparents’ for a week, my parents move to a newly built apartment in a neighboring village seven kilometers away, endlessly far away. Kilometers, that’s the largest unit, as inconceivable as years. I am three and a half years old, nearly four, but this I only know because it is shortly before my fourth birthday that my brother has his first glimpse of daylight—or rather the strip lights in Greifswald women’s hospital—and soon afterwards the light of the phototherapy lamp on his jaundiced skin. The apartment has a bathroom but no central heating. In the cellar there is some coal left over from the previous tenants. It is enough.
Like a snake, the umbilical cord had twined itself around the baby’s neck and first delayed his entry into this world, then complicated it and ultimately so jeopardized it that the live birth of the infant, whose hands and lips had already turned blue, bordered on miraculous.
I remember a nightmare in which I am underwater, sinking ever deeper, a layer of ice above me. I remember a cartoon on the television where a woman dives into an empty swimming pool and, like a doll, shatters into pieces. Even today that image still sparks a nameless terror in me.
I do not know what it feels like to be dead. I ask the teacher in my new kindergarten, a tall woman with a shock of curls.
She shakes her head. I don’t know, she says. I’ve never been dead.
I want to know what happens to the dead and buried. They rot. I do not understand the word.
Like a wrinkly apple which, as time goes by, gets infested and eaten up by worms and maggots, she explains.
I find myself thinking of the trash can in our kitchen, then she adds: You don’t notice anything though. Because you’re dead, of course.
Evil is the skin on heated-up milk, the thin layer of ice on the frozen village pond, the dozen shiny-black slugs in the yard. Death is an old woman in a flowery house dress. Goddesses of destiny wear a headscarf, walk with a stick and speak in dialect. They talk about stillborn babies, about a right pickle, and rake the graves of their prematurely deceased husbands.
The von Behrs were once brave, beloved, and trusty knights. Their palace burned down, say some. It was demolished, say others. The villagers looted it themselves and set it alight when the Russians came and the old countess had fled, says one elderly lady, who ought to know. They took whatever could be taken: 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 men on large horses, the silver cigarette case bearing the count’s crest: a black bear rampant on a gray escutcheon, its front paws raised as if in greeting, surmounted by a helmet topped by two swans facing away from one another with curved necks.
I land in a patch of stinging nettles. My slippers still on my feet, an ache in my legs. A numb feeling. The stinging of the nettles. The silhouette of a hunched old woman in the light of the street lamp. The asphalt shines. It has rained.
I read recently that stinging nettles grow wherever people settle, by walls and among debris. Like most prickly and thorny plants, they have traditionally been ascribed antidemonic properties. Pliny writes that the root of the stinging nettle can cure three-day fever if, as you dig it up, you utter the name of the sufferer, and whose child they are.
I did not know whose child I was.
I see the dazzling bedroom light, the cupboard with its woodgrain pattern beneath its smooth varnished surface. I lie on my back with my legs in the air like a beetle. I see my parents, larger than life. They do not look at me, only at my legs, which they wrap in gauze bandages. My legs hurt, my feet are numb. Their faces are bright patches with hairdos.
Nothing was broken. The X-ray images left no doubt about it. Nobody spoke of a miracle. Neither my mother nor the doctor in the nearby town. The nurse wrapped my sprained ankle in a zinc-paste bandage. My vaccination card, which she stamped, had three strips of plaster stuck on the first page. On them were written in block capitals my name and my new address in the village by the railway line, in my mother’s handwriting, a clearly legible teacher’s hand.
Nothing was broken, but I was unable to walk properly for many weeks. I hopped and hobbled, I held my arms out. My mother picked me up. Legs wide, I cling to her hips, inside her belly the unborn child.
Later on, my parents often talked about all the troubles my leap had caused them. But not about happiness or about the miracle, because miracles did not happen at that time, in that country.
I knew no god and no angels. The first time I saw one, in a colorful framed painting above the curiously short bed of an old woman, I was already going to school. The picture was a relic from a bygone age as dark as all the rooms in the estate workers’ houses with their rough stone gables and masonry, as remote as a world in which children are led away over a wooden bridge by the light of the moon by a long-haired man, colorfully attired, with large wings, glowing cheeks, blonde curls, and shining eyes.
At supper I looked at my mother for a long time. Was she really my mother? Was it not possible that she was only pretending to have given birth to me, after days of pain, as she mentioned repeatedly? Was it not just as feasible that she had simply found me somewhere and kept me, or had taken me from my actual real mother, who was waiting for me somewhere, inconsolable, as in the song of Little Hans?
I watched her butter my bread, cut it into small pieces and put it on my board. I studied her brown eyes, her mouth that was hiding something. I ran into the bathroom and positioned myself between the two mirrors, stared at the image repeated ad infinitum and looked for similarities.
It was a riddle, but I did not even understand the question, the task before me. The question was an open window. The answer was an open window. A jump from a height of four meters.
Years later I am lying ill in bed at my grandparents’. It is the holidays. The guest room is unheated. I am in pain and running a fever. They call the doctor. A tall man, who lays his pale hand on my neck and studies me with a long, hard look. He has a soft voice. His eyes are so deep-set they look as though someone had pushed them back in their sockets, from where they now peer out all the more urgently, strangely enlarged by the glass of his spectacles. It is a look that is trying to tell me something. His hand slides a photograph out of his wallet. It shows a child with sturdy calves in white socks, a huge umbrella in her hand. I nod and am none the wiser. It is a riddle, but I do not even understand the question, the task before me. The child in the photograph is me. The doctor is my father, and is not my father.
More than thirty years later, one cold spring day, I hold a measuring stick up to the facade of the refurbished verger’s house and am amazed that it is four meters exactly, to the last centimeter. The first-floor window has been widened. The old vicarage diagonally opposite is for sale. From its veranda you have an uninterrupted view of the open country, a flat landscape, meadows, fields with sandy, clayey topsoil. A man comes and points through the milky windowpanes. Saltpeter, he says. It sounds like a death sentence. Only now do I notice a white encrusted scum on the walls. It looks like an infectious disease.
For
the first time I go into the church. On the north wall of the chancel is a painting of the jaws of hell. Frogs, snakes, and people are tumbling in, condemned souls who are devoured by the flames. And sitting in splendor in front of all this is a pigfaced prince of hell complete with scepter and lightning bolt.
Is the jump out of the window my earliest memory? I ask my mother about the hedgehog. The hedgehog appeared the year before, sometime in the autumn, says my mother. But I do remember the hedgehog, which has to mean that my earliest memory is of that curious creature, and not of that night in July.
The stone bears still stand supreme on their rendered pillars at the entrance to the grounds, their paws clutching the weathered escutcheons, the crest of the last counts. An avenue of lime trees leads into the grounds. The cobbles have almost sunk into the earth. A landscape full of rhododendrons, sweet chestnut trees and magnolias, with two copper beeches, even a red oak and a tulip tree. Spreading over the ground is a white carpet of flowering spring snowflakes, snowdrops, and anemones.
At the edge of the sports field I discover the moss-covered stones of a hip-height wall. It must be the remains of the palace. It must be the remains of the mansion, which only became a palace when the only part of it left standing was the cellar vault. In the southern part of the grounds, a pair of swans sit in front of two artificial islands, as if painted.
Babylonia
The Seven Books of Mani
* Mani was born in the year 216 in Babylonia, near Seleucia-Ctesiphon on the banks of the Tigris, to Persian parents, and was raised by his father in a Jewish-Christian baptism sect on the lower Euphrates. From his earliest youth he received revelations. At the age of twenty-four he left the Elcesaite religious community and started preaching, gained followers and made enemies. He proselytized throughout Babylonia, in Media, Ganzak, and Persia, in the land of the Indians and Parthians and on the fringes of the Roman Empire.
Mani was patronized by the Sasanian ruler Shapur I and his son Hormizd I, before being imprisoned by their successor Bahram I at the behest of Zoroastrian priests in the year 276 or 277. He died on the twenty-sixth day of his incarceration. His corpse was mutilated and his severed head left to rot above the main gate of the city of Gundeshapur.
Manichaeism spread beyond Mesopotamia to the whole of the Mediterranean region including Spain and North Africa, as well as into Asia Minor and central Asia and along the Silk Road, reaching as far as the Indian and Chinese empires.
Its syncretic teachings incorporated elements of Zoroastrianism in Persia, Gnostic Christianity in the west and Buddhism in the east. In late antiquity, Manichaeism was a global religion with followers on three continents.
† There are barely any sources describing the demise of Manichaeism, as practically all its writings were destroyed during ancient times and the Middle Ages, the practice of the faith was suppressed everywhere, and its followers persecuted. From the year 382 onwards, in the western Roman Empire, any avowal of Manichaeistic faith was punishable by death. In the Chinese Empire, the religion was not banned until 843, and it persisted in some parts of East Turkistan until the thirteenth century, and in South China even into the sixteenth century.
Although all Mani’s books written in Eastern Aramaic once existed in translation in mission languages like Greek, Latin, Coptic, Arabic, Parthian, Middle Persian, Sogdian, Uygur, and Chinese, virtually nothing has survived of these texts. All that remains is the beginning of the Living Gospel, portions of the Fundamental Epistle, some fragments of the Book of Giants and a few snippets of the sacred book written in Middle Persian, the Shabuhragan. So for a long time efforts to piece together Mani’s teachings were dependent on the testimonies of the persecutors and on Arab encyclopedists of later times.
It was not until 1902 that some poorly preserved fragments of original Manichaean manuscripts were recovered in the central Asian oasis of Turfan. Large parts of a Manichaean-Coptic library, found in 1929 near the Egyptian oasis of Faiyum, ended up in collections in Berlin and elsewhere. Some of these manuscripts that had not yet been analyzed, including the volume containing Mani’s letters, were lost yet again in the process of shipment to the Soviet Union after the Second World War.
And if holy things really are only revealed to holy people, then it would be here—in the shimmering noon glare of a high desert sun, beneath the ragged date palms lining the banks of a sinuous tributary of the mighty many-branching Euphrates, which in late spring swells with the snowmelt from the northern mountains into a torrential river prone to burst its banks and dams, pumps vast masses of water into the impressive channels of the finer and finer branching irrigation system, which reaches into remote, indeed the remotest rain-deprived and rainless lowlands, fills diked basins, soaks fallow ground, makes bucket wheels turn and seeds sprout and flourish—and guarantees the two annual harvests that are the reason for this land’s fame and riches: the corn, the mountains of pomegranates, figs, and dates that float downstream on countless hundreds of rafts, until the water course, reaching the marshy delta, is united with its twin river and flows, swollen, towards the sea.
Here is the land of the beginning, the alluvial land of civilization, to which our remote ancestor with his heavy skull and freed-up hands was once drawn, in the process driving his wide-jawed cousin with the nostril-like flared nasal orifices and the melancholy bulges above his primate’s eyes ever further north, where he hid himself away in caves—armed with stone tools and bones gnawed bare—to die the unlamented death of his species. And out of the zigzag movements of the nomadic tribes there evolved a vague order: tribes became peoples who lined up their settlements along the meandering rivers like beads on a long, finespun thread, each town a kingdom in itself, a community of commoners who began to share the work and wages, the harvest, the yield—and, in the absence of stone, wood, and ore, built themselves a world of clay: mortar-rendered reed huts and simple round buildings for the shoeless peasants, square palaces for curly-bearded kings, wind-buffeted citadels and dust-swept ziggurats, avenues of blue-glazed bricks guarded by bull men and winged lions, gently raised reliefs of priests in long robes with crossed arms, densely inscribed clay tablets covered in dainty symbols like bird tracks in wet sand.
While those Adamitic tribes are still feeling the fleece of the wild sheep to test the woolen undercoat, snapping the ears of einkorn wheat off the stalks, collecting the husks of emmer wheat in brightly painted ceramic bowls and breaking up the earth with a crooked pickax prior to each new sowing, things, too, became more settled, supplies are accumulated and claimed as possessions, cattle are fenced in, wild horses tamed, land surveyed for the first time, and harvests eked out to supply the coming years. Tribal community is followed by tribal economy. Honey flows. Souls wander. The stone age is drawing to a close. Bronze shimmers, iron gleams, the age turns first golden, then gray. And the more settled those peoples become, the more restless grows their quest, their desire for truth and meaning, an inner agitation which is as novel as the sight of the never-changing horizon that swallows up the sun each evening. They gaze into the darkness and see no land, only the flickering patterns on the insides of their eyelids and the bottomless blackness punctuated by glowing specks that engulfs anything that dares approach it. The world is day and night, heat and cold, hunger, thirst, and repletion, a valiantly turning potter’s wheel, a wooden cartwheel, the tip of a cane that works the wet clay as the ox plows the field.
In the beginning—only this much is certain—was work, the circling of the great perpetuum mobile, which, once in motion, preserves energy, causes the rivers to swell and flow into the sea and the water to rise up to the sky, feeds into the great cycle, the changing of the seasons, the return of the conceptual pairs that have been stepping up, two by two, since the dawn of history, to play heaven and earth, mother and father, brother and sister, a pair of deities, two monsters that hate each other’s guts. The desolate emptiness of prehistory seems richer than the tedious law of
opposites, which henceforward weighs like a curse on mankind, which from now on has to decide between gathering and hunting, plowing the field and tending the flock, stoking the fire and going to the well. No one can say what is awaiting understanding, there in the depths, at the very root of being. Whether, in the beginning, a storm of chaos reigned, or a gaping void, or both or neither, whether creation happened randomly or for a purpose, the result of a contest between different generations of gods, a battle between Old and Young.
The cosmologies that spring from here are as countless as they are contradictory. What unites them is the concept of the imperfection of this world. There is a rift, undeniably large, a painfully deep gulf between the gods and the people cast into this world, between the eternal, unblemished soul and corruptible and hence corrupted flesh. The questions, old though they may be, are more pressing than ever before: what man is, where he comes from, where he is going, when and why this world has heaped guilt upon itself.
For its guilt is proved by the drought that knows no end. The days when the seeds yielded a twenty- to thirtyfold crop and every spring rain transformed the steppe into a sea of flowers are past. Water accumulates in the flooded fields, the harvest is spoiled, while the unremitting current flushes more and more sand onto the southern bank of the river, and the sea gradually recedes, leaving behind nothing but scurfy marshland. Sometimes rain falls, sometimes not. When the water levels rise, even just a cubit higher than usual, the floodwaters arrive too early, inundate the lowland, wash away the dikes and destroy the harvest, then the currents breed nothing but hunger and agony—and the memory of that great flood, on whose fatal waves a pitch-sealed wooden box carrying a select few drifted towards a new era, an age in which one of the gods conquered the others and, like a king, issued laws: no alliance without conditions, no trust without a contract.
An Inventory of Losses Page 13