Leavetaking (10 page)

agreement. With a friendly gesture, the store manager consented to my entering his firm as an unpaid assistant. I hardly realized what they were saying and immediately afterward forgot it, my father and the manager stood dark blue in front of me with curiously gleaming shirts. On the way back to my father’s office I slipped off into side-streets. I went among old-fashioned houses and tall castle walls, crossed a courtyard with a well, and entered a workshop. Inside a spacious room, borne up by high pillars, my pictures hung on the walls. For a few moments I interrupted myself and moved between the shelves filled with bales of material and the samples table in my father’s office, and compared the data on a list with the goods actually on the shelves. Then I went out in my yard, saddled a horse and rode over furrowed fields toward a rugged mountain ridge, at the border of a copse sat ragged figures armed with knives and halberds, slowly I rode past them, the bridle jingled, the typewriter clattered, the voice of the partner in the firm murmured at my father, and between the bare birch trunks shimmered large horned animals and the white torso of a woman. Toward evening I stood at the window of my room. Against the sloping gray walls leaned the few pictures I had managed to produce in my spare time. In the depths of the house lived my parents and my brother and sister. Blue dusk enveloped the garden. The striking of golf balls resounded from the links. The windowpane tasted bitter. A figure appeared from the shrubbery in green hunting clothes, with a game bag and a gun on his shoulder. With springy strides the
figure crossed the meadow and disappeared in the hedge on the other side of the garden. A soft warm terror arose in me. It was as if a hand had reached into myself. I sat down at the desk on which my manuscripts lay, lit the lamp and thumbed through the pages in which in monkish script I informed the world of my long past life. I had lived centuries ago, here at my desk I conjured up pictures and words that told of my lost existence. Steps that sounded on the stairs woke me from my otherness. They were Elfriede’s steps. Elfriede had moved with us, her room was next to mine. She did not close the door behind her. I heard her lighting a cigarette, brushing her hair, shedding her clothes. I got up and went on tiptoe to the door of my room. Below, my father was locking the house up for the night. My mother’s footsteps approached. Now she was coming up the stairs to the attic floor, the stairs creaked under the weight of her body and she was breathing heavily. I retreated into the middle of the room. The latch of my door was pressed down and my mother entered. Are you still up, she asked, what are you doing. I’m working, I said. She glanced around the room. She saw the papers on my desk and asked, What’s that you’re writing there. Nothing special, I murmured evasively. Don’t stay up too long, she said, and took the blanket off my bed. She turned back the top sheet and smoothed the pillow, then came toward me, took me in her arms and kissed me. When she had left the room, I went to the door again. I heard my mother let herself down the stairs step by step, in slow, heavy treads. Doors were opened and doors
were shut, my mother went from room to room making her evening rounds. Quietly I pressed down my door latch. I went to the next door that stood ajar and pushed it open, Elfriede sat in a short nightdress on the edge of her bed. I slid my hands over her shoulders and hair and she drew herself toward me, and clasped me in her arms and her mouth sucked at my mouth. I pulled her nightgown up above her outspread thighs. Elfriede undid my trousers and I had trapped myself in the obligation to perform an unintelligible task. Elfriede, breathing excitedly, put her hand around my penis and pulled it near the opening between her legs. Form and content of the task facing me were disconnected, made no sense. Elfriede, awaiting my penetration, closed her eyes, and when she opened her eyes again I had disappeared. I was in my room and had locked the door behind me. I paced up and down in my room. I had taken off my shoes so that my steps could not be heard. I imagined myself packing my pictures together and leaving the house. But I did not know where I could go with my pictures. Wherever I set them up in my thoughts, someone always came and moved them on. Finally I saw myself spreading them out on the road and lying down next to them and the tall red buses driving over us. Next day I was in the department store. The perfect clerk always carries a pair of scissors with him, said the floor manager, and thrust a pair of scissors in my breast pocket. Through his pince-nez he inspected my suit and my stiff white collar. Here everyone has to wear a stiff collar, no one dares say No to a stiff collar. He twirled his
little waxed mustache and showed me around my new place of work. In the interior of the storage rooms the rank growth of a primeval tropical world had been turned to stone. Lianas, roots, and fern fronds twined around the pillars, the vaulting and the balustrades. The walls and ceilings of the rooms were overgrown with mushrooms, fungi, and moss. The merchandise lay piled up in stalactite caverns. Among gritty rocks, thorns, and gnawed bones lay handles and sandals, blazers and razors, chests and vests, towels and trowels, cradles and ladles, pulleys and woollies, books and hooks, prongs and tongs, pins and bins. In the subdued light of the jungle orange-yellow salesgirls fluttered around like butterflies. In the depths of a white-tiled cellar I took up my first station. Behind the narrow table that stretched the whole length of the disproportionately long room, I bent with other condemned ones over the opened sample books. The city seamstresses came down to us, carrying between the fingers of their raised hands scraps of silk and velvet, linen and damask, spiked on needles, our fingers stretched out toward them, took hold of the needles with the many-colored bits of material and wandered with them across the pages of the book, to find a piece of material that corresponded to the sample. And when a suitable item had been found, numbers, letters and names were noted down on labels, and with these the seamstresses began their journey up into the higher reaches of the building. Our faces approached each other across the table, we whispered questions in their ears under the tickling blonde, black, red, or brown
hair, breathed in the skin fragrance of violet and snowdrop, drew the points of our needles scratchily over nipples that stood out from under their thin blouses. To avoid the stifling air of the cellar, we went many times a day to the washrooms, where the slamming metal doors of the clothes lockers clashed like cymbals. We sat in the toilets, whose walls were scratched full of fertility symbols and whose floors were smeared with spittle, urine and trodden butts. Here we sat, bent forward, and from the cubicles all around came a groaning and an inarticulated stammering, in a trance we sat amid the rush and drip of the plumbing, and on our shoulders we carried the burden of the vast, over-laden building. At midday we bounded up the sloping corridors to the street, past the time clock whose teeth hacked into our cards with a ping. Outside we forced our way through the solid ranks of vehicles, played toreador with the cars, beat our fists on the growling metallic beasts, hurtled into the crashing and whirling of the feeding places, gobbled down potatoes in congealed fat, beans, and pieces of stringy bacon. A tightness under the collar, a retching feeling in one’s stomach. Back through the throng. Briefcases and braces, pin stripes and pipes, wheels and squeals, seams and hair creams, tires and wires, hoofs and tubes, suitings and hootings, tie pins and pink gins. In the jungle of the store I was given the task of helping the window decorator collect material for his displays. On a piece of paper he wrote me out a list of the goods he needed, and I glided and skidded to and fro between the display window that was to be decorated, and the various
departments that were to provide the necessary material. I soon lost the list, the mass of goods filled me with hectic enthusiasm, blindly I hurtled back to the showcases and snatched up whatever came to hand. I piled up a mountain of goods inside the display window and, as the decorator had disappeared, I myself decorated the display window. In the hot glass terrarium I vaunted the surplus of the department store, surrounded myself with matches and hatchets, sandpapers and capers, guns and buns, ash trays and hair sprays, rubber boots and canned fruits, nails and pails, pliers and wires, envelopes and soaps, utensils and stencils, and I myself adopted the pose of an entranced tailor’s dummy exposing itself. And outside, beyond the glass, the passersby applauded me, a little sea of faces rocked and laughed, the whole street laughed, the cars tittered, the buses held their sides with laughter, policemen thrust themselves in between, their faces like red balloons, swollen with laughter. But hands grabbed me from behind and pulled me up and a yellow blind banged down at the window, and sharp eyeglasses flashed at me, and the scissors were pulled out of my breast pocket, I had proved unworthy of them. After this attempt I went on strike. But despite my strike I was subject to the laws of our household. After the grandfather clock in the hall below had struck seven, the day began. At the bottom of the stairs my father cleared his throat and called to me. I did not reply. He came up the stairs, opened the door of my room and said, it’s time to get up. I got out of bed and dragged my feet down to the bathroom and washed myself next to
my father. We did not speak to one another. I dressed myself and went down to the breakfast table. My place was here at table at the family meal. My disease was still regarded as merely temporary. My father asked, Don’t you want to go with me to the office. I did not reply. Without saying good-bye, wounded by my silence, my father left the table. I could not make my parents realize that for me painting and writing were work. The accusation from outside had steeped me in profound listlessness. Every day I began my work with a feeling of absolute uselessness. I painted with the colors of entrails, the colors of feces, urine, gall, pus, and blood. After a few hours I succeeded in working myself into forgetfulness. I painted until the dusk rose up from the garden and turned all the colors to black. When I had finished a picture, some urge compelled me to call my mother over. I knew how incomprehensible my pictures were to her, but I could not prevent myself from showing my pictures to her each time. I stood next to her and watched her looking at my picture. I showed her a picture of myself. I wanted her to stand a long time in front of this picture. She uttered a few non-committal words. You must move closer to it, I said, so that you can see the details. I can see it very well, she said, and turned away. I knew that I had only a short term of grace. I knew that I could not live here much longer on their charity. I lived like an obedient dog. I snapped up the scraps that I was thrown. I crept away and waited for the moment of an ultimatum. This moment came one green evening in the green garden room. My parents had called me to them.
They sat sunk in the green armchairs, my progenitors who had brought me up for seventeen years. What happened in this hour before I ran to the telephone and got myself caught up in the cord. Today I see my father and my mother after a year in a foreign country tired and lost. I see the shadows in their ailing faces, I see my mother’s hands pressed into her lap as if holding back some pain, I see my father’s shoulders drooping after the day’s exertions. They sat here in their home that they had preserved, they sat in their green chairs in front of the tall green curtains and outside dusk settled on the green garden and their postures expressed their uprootedness, they were frightened of the future, and when they glanced at me their faces were full of concern on my account. I see myself today as they saw me then, I did not understand what unimaginable effort it had cost them to keep this home with all its inhabitants alive. You can’t keep on living like this, said my father, you can’t keep on being a burden to me in the situation we’re in now, can’t spend all your time daydreaming, the world isn’t the way you think, you can never exist in it with your pictures and poems. I see myself as they saw me then, there I stood in front of them in the half dark, greenish room, I said nothing, I never said anything, just stood there tight-lipped and frozen, with my hands helplessly hanging down, perhaps I was really ill, mentally ill, and then my mother began to groan, she got up from the chair and raised her arm, made a few lurching steps toward the window, and her groaning became worse, and she sought for a grip with her hand and the
hand gripped tightly into the curtain and then she crumpled at the knees, tore the curtains down with her, and fell backward onto the carpet, pressing the curtains protectively around her waist. My father jumped up and shouted to me to call the doctor, and while I was rushing to the telephone my mother groaned, No, not the doctor, not the doctor, it’s just this always being upset. And I stood at the telephone, receiver in hand, the cord coiled about my arm and in the receiver buzzed the voice of the exchange and I saw a dark patch spread in the curtain, where my mother had held it pressed over her pelvic region. Just put me in bed, my mother said, then it will be all right again, don’t get a doctor, I don’t want a doctor, and I replaced the receiver and freed my arm from the cord. And then we dragged Mother between us to the stairs and blood dripped from her womb onto the floor, and on the narrow stairway my mother lay like a mountain between us, and my father’s back rubbed along the wall and at my back the banisters creaked and bent and the grandfather clock with the sun face ticked, and behind us the shapeless shadow of the Sandman panted up the stairs. Later, when my mother had calmed down in bed, I went out into the garden, and my younger brother came to me with the small models of his racing cars. It was already almost dark in the garden and light fell on us from the kitchen, where Elfriede was preparing the evening meal. On the path that led around the meadow, we let our model cars take off in a race, and we urged on our favorites, which we had given fantastic names, with shouts of encouragement, and as the
darkness thickened it swallowed up the last of my childhood. Now every day for many months I followed my father to the office. After office hours I often sat in a small Russian café near Hyde Park, half a story below street level. Here I met Jacques for the first time. I lent him my coat when he wanted to go out into the rain with his jacket collar turned up. He left his tattered attaché case as a pledge. I looked into the case and saw that it contained a few carpenter’s tools, I had rather expected to find leaves of notepaper in it. His face was small and finely chiseled, with a jutting chin and a sharp, hooked nose, his hair was bushy and tousled and his eyes, with their steely gray lustre, lay deep in their hollows. When he came back he sat down by me at the table. He informed me that he had spent the last few weeks as a construction laborer in the country. He laughed at my questioning glance and, pretending to hold a violin under his chin, described fingerings with one hand and moved the other through the air as if holding a violin bow, at the same time whistling Bach’s concerto for two violins. I joined in with the second violin. After the concerto I told him about my pictures, which in the last few months had been quite extinguished in me, and as I talked about them, they came alive again and regained their colors, and I noticed that my customary way of talking had disappeared, that with these words I was learning how to speak in a new way. By evoking my pictures for Jacques I was reminded that I possessed another life, a different life from my life between sample catalogues and rolls of material, and gasped for breath. I