Leavetaking (3 page)

breasts, where drippy milk glands had been a moment before, darted the licking tongues of little snakeheads. Hands had been there earlier than the face. They grabbed me, ripped me up into the air, shook me, sprang at my ears and into my hair. Everything roared and surged about my mother’s form. I tried to escape her power by closing my eyes and pressing my lips together over my voice. But then I could no longer endure it, and had to open my eyes wide to cry for my mother’s face, and have it proved to me that it was still there. Around my mother everything was unstable, seething, swirling. But next to her stood Augusta, clearly outlined, mild and permanent. From the very first, Augusta was old, old as time. In her black, tightly laced dress, her hands softened by dishwater, red and swollen, Augusta stood clearly outlined in space, and everything that came near her increased its radiance. In my mother reigned the wild and unbridled, in Augusta sufferance, humility. When my mother shouted at her, Augusta bent deep over the white potato basin with the blue rim and the potato peelings curled over her hands. When my mother’s fury was spent, Augusta hit herself in the face as punishment or beat her own head with a coat hanger. Mother disappeared but Augusta remained there, and with tears in her eyes gazed at me and stroked my hands as if it were I who had to be consoled, and from a drawer in the kitchen table she took a dish of dessert, saved from mealtime. I went out into the street holding on to Augusta’s hand. My exploration of the city is connected for me with the pressure of Augusta’s hand. The streets rise
in front of me with their creaking iron-rimmed wheels, with their haze of tar and malt and wet dust, with their warehouses at whose façades the chains of the hoists rattled, and in whose storerooms shapes moved about in the uncertain light between packing cases and sacks. We penetrated ever deeper into the alleyways, arcades, and tucked-away squares, past the soot-blackened, scaly, be-scribbled masonry walls, until through gateway arches and down worn-out flights of steps we came to the dikes and onto the docks where the masts of ships stood out against the smoky sky, where watery reflections flickered on ships’ sides, where black and yellow faces peered out of the round portholes and shouted out strange words, where the pennants buffeted on the taut rigging and screaking cargo cranes swung long necks around. Sometimes scenes from these wanderings suddenly surface in my dreams, first impressions which have preserved their glassy transparence and sharpness of focus, they show places, often without any recognizable happening, motionless and still, where I had suddenly become aware of my own existence. There is a broad, sandy avenue, the houses that flank it lie far back from the road, with steep steps leading up to the doors, and in the sand there are wheel tracks. Perhaps a car has just passed, but now the avenue is still and empty, and broods in the noonday warmth and is saturated with the momentousness and uniqueness of my existence. There is a street that slopes down from a rise; it is toward evening, colors shine out of the pinkly shimmering dusk. With long, high leaps, I go soaring down the street.
Behind the redly lustrous shutters I can make out carved figures of gods and elaborate model ships, chests with chased-silver locks, caskets inlaid with shells and pearls, silk handkerchiefs adorned with fire-breathing dragons, lacquered fans, reddish-gold bird feathers, and deep-blue butterflies, daggers with waved blades and ivory handles, a rusty pirate musket, nail-studded belts and riding boots with spurs, a white swan with outstretched neck, a horse’s head with streaming mane, a naked blackblackwoman’s body, pearl necklaces, bracelets, sawfish, alligators, and monkeys, and in the depths of a workshop, amid his leather stuff, Master Stahlhut at his last, mouth full of nails, hammering on a shoe sole with his hammer, warty face lit up by the glow from a crystal ball. I stood with Augusta on the bank of the river, a train of barges passed by, wash fluttering on one of the barges, and a small white, barking dog, and Augusta took a piece of chocolate from inside the crumbly black leather of her handbag and put it into my mouth. It tasted soapy from the inside of her bag. We stood in a tunnel, and over us rumbled a train and on the deep camber of the wall were stuck yellowed posters, blistered by paste, which Augusta murmuringly deciphered. We looked from all sides at the stone giant Roland in the marketplace and wondered what the dwarf might mean whose head and arms lay crushed between the giant’s feet. Mother knew everything, could do everything, decided everything, but Augusta knew no more than I did and we looked at things with the same astonishment. We tried to explain to each other the snake gargoyles
along the tops of the drainpipes, the figures of saints on the cathedral façade, the inscriptions on the doorways and the kings and knights mounted on their green-smudged horses, we puzzled and felt our way along passages and clumsily built-over courtyards, we saw the pigeons flying around the towers and followed the marching soldiers, keeping in time with their flashing, crashing instruments. Once, we found ourselves caught up in a crowd that had assembled in a square. All eyes were directed upward to a large house. High up on the walls a man was climbing. Someone said, Human fly. I asked Augusta what that was, a human fly. She did not know. It seemed to me some sort of profession, a rare and unusually difficult task to which one would have to devote the whole of one’s life. I felt my palms beginning to sweat, I felt a fluttering in my stomach and in the bend of my knees, and a tickling on the soles of my feet, and I knew that this was all part of it. I realized that fear was the real motive for this performance, that one tried to overcome fear by the exertion of climbing. My encounter with the climber awakened in me the premonition of a vocation, it was as if I was looking ahead into my own future as, breathless and with fingers and toes tensed, I followed the movements of the man on the wall. At this moment, under a clear blue sky, out of which came the droning of a plane, light and metallic, the groundwork was laid of a longing to do something on my own. And so there was I, already involved in existence, already in the middle of life’s committedness and so pushed on toward the barrel organ pipings and
the uproar of the fair, in a growing throng. The ground was soft with confetti and paper streamers, in the booths hot sausages, pretzels, and spun honey were being offered for sale, trumpet blares, shots and runs on the barrel organ became ever more piercing, elbows jogged me, feet brushed against mine, and then everything was one rotating movement of bodies, one vast bawling and bubbling of voices, and I was part of it, was carried along between the faces, hats, and arms, between the swaying grape bunches of multicolored balloons, between the large flopping streamers, between the wonderfully painted whirring merry-go-rounds, and to the hoarse question from the Punch and Judy show, Are you all there, I answered yes in the chorus of countless voices, and as Punch whacked at the policeman with his club, I joined the collective shrieks of laughter, and I saw the lady snake charmer on the platform in her tights of scintillating black scales and the largest man in the world and the magician out of whose tailcoat pigeons flew and everything was fleeting, everything changed form, and the canvas of the tents billowed and whispered mysteriously in the wind, and the masks in the shooting galleries jerked open their mouths, and on black cushions lay golden medals, and over the rotating merry-go-round hung clacking rings to be caught while in circling flight, and in a miniature mine jerky little figures hacked at tunnel walls, and cars drawn by stiff-legged horses moved nearer along rails, and shovels were raised over the cars, and away went the cars, and baskets sank down through shafts, and cars inclined over baskets, and up
went the baskets and hung swinging over approaching trains, and everything rattled and jerked until the mechanism suddenly fell silent and everything stopped in mid-motion, cars stuck in the air with picks raised high, horses frozen, baskets hanging still in the shaft, until with a jerk everything got underway again, everything moved along again, shook again, bobbed again, dragged along again, hacked again, cracked again. And nearby on a camp stool sat an old man with a white beard and a broad-brimmed slouch hat, motionless and preoccupied he leaned against his mechanical box, deaf to all the questions one put to him. Amid a tangle of supporting beams I climbed into a little roller-coaster car, and the wild gay surge of life fell away behind me, ever farther I drew away from the roar and the bustle, until all I could hear was the rolling of the small, sturdy wheels on the rails, and I was taken higher and higher till the highest point was reached, from which I could look out far and wide over the whole of the fairground and the city. The car rested only a moment at its peak before it plunged into the depths, but this moment was enough to transfix me with an ecstatic feeling of liberty. There below me lay the sea of roofs, with their smoking chimneys, there lay the glittering water of the river, there lay the ships in the harbor, the freighters and the great liners, there arched the bridges with steaming trains, and on the towers the light green copper shone and the golden weather vanes flashed. Then came the downward plunge, down steep run after run, around breathtaking curves, to the last chasm with the pool where the water sprayed up around
the car as it shot through it. When it was dusk I drifted through the streets with the fair-day throng, swam slowly down the avenue with the crowd, saw above me the foliage of the trees glide back in autumnal gold, felt the wind on my perspiring forehead, held up before me the stick with the Chinese lantern in which a candle burned, and joined in the song that was always welling up in waves before and behind me, Lantern, lantern, sun, moon, and stars. And underneath the circus cupola a creature of the air lunged from trapeze to trapeze, turned a somersault, let out shrill, reckless cries, dived out of the heights at me with outspread arms, a precipitously flying mane of black hair, close in front of me she pulled herself out of her dive and drew herself up again, a breath of wind, filled with a curiously drugging fragrance, rushed past me. Her ecstatic smile in her golden-brown, slant-eyed face, her piercing bird cry, burned themselves into me forever. Soon, soon I would travel after her, would fly back and forth across the circus arena, soon, soon, only a short time off, I will belong to you, only first I have to learn to read and write, to get through school quickly, soon, soon, I shall be with you, and see your ecstatic smile again, and hear your wild cry. I learned writing with Berthold Merz in the shed next door in the courtyard of the slate factory, we scratched our first letters on black flat pieces from the scrap pile, and the sun shimmered through the cracks in the planks. Berthold’s figure is fluid and fading, like dream figures in the morning shortly before waking, only his hand with the short stubby fingers and the
bitten fingernails is clear. This hand grips the bow and shoots the arrow, the arrow with the feathered shaft, and the arrow rises high into the sky, so high that it disappears from our view and the arrow never returns. And Berthold Merz disappeared and Friederle took his place. A few years ago I stood in front of the house we had moved into at the time I was starting school. I had not seen the avenue for years, and now, seeing it again, I felt my childhood within me like the dull ache of an ulcer. The trunks of the trees at the side of the road had become strong and tall, the boughs spread far out over the road and their foliage closed together to form a thick canopy. Like someone entranced in an evil fairy tale I went toward the park to which the avenue led and in which our house lay hidden. On the pond at the edge of the avenue, a few white swans were swimming as before and in the hedge with the prickly leaves the white sweet peas bloomed as before. From the stream that separated the park from the avenue, I could see the house glinting bright red between the trees, it was intact, and in the adjoining garden lay the yellow villa in which Friederle had lived. Profound silence reigned, everything was steeped in its long past. In the muddy water of the brook a shoal of sticklebacks was flashing, tadpoles rowed with their tails around the algae, a frog with gaping eyes sat on the bank, a blue dragonfly whirred past. I went down the park path and stood still at the white posts of the garden gate in front of our house. The garden with its thicket of fir trees, its spreading copper beech and tall grass run wild extended to the elder bush at the edge of
the fields. Beside the garden path lay the green henhouse, low and shrunken, and once we had jumped down from the dizzying heights of its skylight. The fenced-in hen yard was deserted, but a few white feathers still shone out of the dust. I asked a woman who came out of the house if she knew anything about the neighbors. She told me that out of the whole large family only one son was still alive, Friedrich, he had been an outstanding officer and had won the highest honors. He still lived in the town and she gave me his address. But I did not look him up, I knew what he was like. There stood Friederle at the fence of the neighboring garden, it was the day we moved in. He folded his arms and asked me imperiously what my name was. Are you going to live here, he asked, and I nodded and with my gaze followed the men who were carrying our furniture out of the moving van and into the house. Your house belongs to my father, Friederle said, you are only renting it. My father is a president, he said, what is your father. I did not know. What, you don’t even know what your father is, he said. I sought for an answer that would overpower him, or win his favor, but I found none. Then he asked again. What’s that you’ve got on your hat. I took the hat off. It was a sailor’s hat with golden lettering on the headband. What is that, he asked again. I did not know. Can’t you even read what’s written on your own hat, he said. It says, I am stupid. And with that he took the hat from my hand and threw it high up into a tree. The hat stuck in the branches, the long blue ribbons fluttered in the wind. My mother came out onto the terrace of our
house and saw us standing there side by side. Have you found a new playmate already, she cried. Are you having fun. Friederle pulled me with him into the depths of the garden, past the henhouse, from which we could hear a scratching and clucking, past the pump and the strawberry beds, through grass that grew up to our shoulders, through the shrubbery to the wet ditch that ran in a wide arc around our lot. There in front of us were the fields, the vast plain, over which the sun was burning down, the wind rushed toward us out of the open spaces and showered us with its pregnant odors of growing grain and clover and cow dung. Like a thin mist, the pictures of my old world were scattered and everything was clothed in blinding brightness. With the help of a stick, Friederle jumped over the ditch and signaled impatiently for me to follow. I threw myself across onto the bushy slope, skidded in the mud, pulled myself up by juicy, damp grasses, staggered out into the weight of a sea of air in which green plover were whistling past. And everything belonged to Friederle, he showed me the speckled birds’ eggs in the dry, brittle sand, the bittercress with toad spit on it, molehills, field mice runs, foxholes, and then the hare. Do you see him, there, there, and I saw his white undertail disappearing in rapid zigzag leaps. He was always taking me into his domain, up to the marsh where the ground squished under our feet and where we sucked at the poisonous stalks of marsh marigolds. I went back by the avenue in the white dust of the roadway, my childhood lay decades behind me, I can depict it now with well-chosen words,