Visitation (12 page)

There was only one thing that he couldn’t understand at the time: that his friend only ever spent her vacations in the place where he lived. He lives there still, even though his hands are starting to turn into the hands of an old man. Only after his coming-of-age ceremony when he visited her in Berlin, on that one special weekend not long after his
Jugendweihe,
the one single time when the direction was reversed, when he was the one making the journey and she the one who lived there, had he understood, but by then it was too late.
You sunshine of my heart,
one of her schoolmates had written to her, always the same form of address:
You sunshine of my heart,
and then all sorts of other things on little scraps of paper that she kept in her pencil case. She laughed at him when he found the notes by accident one day and asked who else besides him was allowed to call her the sunshine of his heart. That was just someone kidding around, she said, just a joke, but when he didn’t let up and wasn’t prepared to start laughing, she became annoyed and for the first time ever she said aloud something that apparently had already been self-evident to her even then but to him was not at all self-evident, even now: that when she was in Berlin, which was where she lived, she could do whatever she liked.

From that point on it was never again possible for him—neither during her next vacation stay nor any of those that followed—to wait for her beside the long table while she sat eating breakfast with her family, suddenly he saw himself as a servant standing there, like someone serving himself up on a platter from head to foot with parsley in his mouth and a baked apple stuff ed between his toes. Would you care to eat me, madam? From then on the amphibian he had been up till then had chosen a life on land, and the amphibian that she was chose a life in the water, or the other way around, in any case the result of her late-Medieval evolution was that at some point or other, without her ever having to explain anything more to him, she showed up at his door with a male friend, a friend she wanted to introduce to him, her childhood friend, as she now described him. He, her childhood friend, had stood there in the doorway of his house with a plug made of a torn-off bit of tissue sticking out of his nose, because just before she had knocked on the door he had suddenly gotten a nosebleed and had doctored himself provisionally in this way. The knock she had used on his door was still the same secret knock they had used as children. He had opened the door and seen his friend standing there with her companion. Good day, would you like to come in. The friend from Berlin had looked at the bloody snippet of paper sticking out of the nose of his girlfriend’s childhood friend. I don’t want to disturb you. Later she didn’t knock on his door so often when she walked by his house in the company of one or the other boyfriend she’d brought out to the country with her, but when she saw his legs sticking out from under a car in the workshop he had set up next to his house, she would always shout out a greeting to him. When eventually she had married one of these boyfriends, it gradually, over the years, became self-evident that he would help her husband drag the rowboat out of the water in winter and turn it upside-down, hang the paddleboat on the rear wall of the woodshed, and in springtime help the subtenants put up the dock, and occasionally, when she and her husband had no time to come out to the country, he would even clip the hedge, rake the leaves and take care of all the other tasks for which the gardener was now much too old. The hourly wage they paid him was far higher than what was customary in the region.

Can you grab that box of books, sure, but I still have my left hand free, here are the shoes, OK, the coffee grinder is staying here, sure, makes sense, it’s all rusted anyhow, I laid out the clothing and coats from the closet on the bed, they won’t fit in any of the suitcases, they’ll have to be hung up, no problem, have you got the bed linens, yes, then just leave the key for the wall cabinets in the lock, who knows if someone else will ever need it, what does it matter, did you go down to the cellar to turn off the electricity and water, no, we’d better not, in case the gardener ever turns up again after all, and close the shutters in the bathing house, OK I’ll run down there, but leave the paddleboat where it is, I told the tenants they can take it if they want. The towels, what should I do with them, give them away if you don’t need them, can you give me a hand with this lamp, that’s all that will fit, you’re probably right.

When she moved out, the house still belonged to her and her father since they weren’t allowed to sell it as long as the question of its ownership was still up in the air. It belonged to her and to her father, and the telephone still worked. The electricity and water had been turned off when the speculator whom her father had engaged to invest the property for him interrupted the renovation work and left the house to its own devices—but if she had returned, she would have been able to start everything back up again with just a few simple adjustments. Only much later did this speculator call him again to ask him to dig up the soil of the road beside the house and cut through the electrical cable, and to dismantle the water line as well so that her father wouldn’t be responsible for the costs that might arise if someone were to decide to install himself in the empty house. Only the telephone line was left undisturbed, since the subtenants had, with her father’s permission, run an extension cable down to the workshop.

By doing work of this sort on the properties all around the lake, he’d sometimes made some extra income on the side in recent years. It used to be people had looked down on clandestine employment—“shoddy” was the word automatically assigned to such labor: additions to buildings made without permits and so forth—but now the shoddy work to be done was generally a matter of closing things up and tearing things down. Before this he had, at the request of Daniel’s half-brother, dug up the sandy road in front of Daniel’s bungalow to cut the electrical cable and disconnect the water supply. After the Schmeling house burned down, he helped with the clean-up operation, and the property suddenly became very cheap after the fire, but still not cheap enough for him, and at his age it wouldn’t have been worth it, in any case, to buy an undeveloped property, and he didn’t have anyone to leave it to. The next storm will rip the tarp back off the roof again, because it just isn’t possible to drive nails into straw—what he is tying to the roof of the bathing house with string is as shoddy as it gets, he thinks as he pulls the strings taut. When a decision has been made about his own house—for here too someone has filed a claim for the restitution of the property—he will find himself a small apartment in the district capital, something with central heating, convenient to shopping and not too expensive.

ON THE WEEKENDS
in winter when they come out to ice-skate, the subtenants see the footsteps of the gardener in the snow, they start at the guest room and lead sometimes here, sometimes there, crisscrossing the two upper meadows and also passing through the front garden and out the gate, but the prints make clear that none of these paths has been followed more than once. When they run into the gardener, which seldom happens, they ask if he needs something they can bring him next time they come—fresh bread from the baker in the village, eggs, noodles, fruit or something to drink. But the gardener always declines, he shakes his head and goes on his way, a cold cigar stump in his mouth. In the village they say that after the fall of the Berlin Wall the subtenants sold the genuine Meissen porcelain for cheap to buyers from the West. In the village, they say that the gardener has, for some time now, eaten nothing but snow.

When the mistress of the house arrives from Berlin to clear everything out for the investor, the gardener is not there. In his room, the table, chair and bed are as always, a few pieces of clothing have been tossed over hooks, and his rubber boots still stand in one corner, but the gardener himself is not there. The subtenants don’t know what to say when asked his whereabouts, they haven’t run into him for some time either; recently he’s been having more and more trouble walking, particularly downhill. Could something have happened to him? No, the subtenants respond, they don’t think so. Together with the mistress of the house and her friend from the village, they search the property from top to bottom looking for him, finally even checking along the shoreline as well. In any case, it’s obvious he is nowhere in the house.

The gardener is never seen again, and so two months later the mistress of the house and her father finally consent when the investor urges them once more to build a wall separating the gardener’s damp room from the main house to at last put a stop to the dry rot that has established itself there and begun to spread.

CLAIM: SURRENDER AND CLEARANCE
of the land and house in exchange for compensatory payment to be rendered. Counter-claim. Whether acquisition was in good faith and
in rem
right of use and enjoyment exists is not relevant to the matter under dispute. Civil code of the Federal Republic of Germany, paragraph 985, plaintiff ’s basis for claim. Undisputed. Actual possession. Actual possession means: Something is under a person’s control. Civil code, paragraph 17. As additionally the court may choose not to rule on whether you are entitled to payment as a result of third parties in full knowledge of the claim for restitution having undertaken utilizations of the property, and given the exclusion of a right of retention due to the nature of the creditor claim. Entitlement of counterclaimant on the basis of action under law of unjust enrichment may exist in the amount of the difference between the current market value of the real property and the value without the additional investments. The point of time at which these utilizations were undertaken. Conciliation proceedings. Reference to the registry of deeds will be required to determine with sufficient certainty. Registry of a first priority property lien. In the present settlement. Further: Upon fulfillment of the present settlement all claims with regard to the object of dispute are hereby. Further: All claims with regard to the object of dispute are hereby satisfied and further litigation is hereby. Is hereby excluded.

And now she wants to go into the house one more time. With the key still hanging on her keychain, the key with which all the doors in the house and also the woodshed can be opened and closed, this worn-out patent key, Zeiss Ikon brand, which she should have turned in officially two days ago now, with this key she wants to unlock, one last time, the door whose lock always sticks after the first half-turn of the key. The door’s glass panes make a faint clinking sound, brittle splinters of red and black paint fall to the ground from the iron tendrils protecting the glass. First she lifts the door a little the way she always does so that the key will continue to turn, then opens the door wide until it hits the wall of the house, pushes the stone in front of it that is still sitting there ready for use, and goes inside.

The painted door to the broom closet has been removed from its hinges, so the first thing she sees when she walks into the house is not, as before, the Garden of Eden in twelve square chapters but rather an old broom, a hand brush, a shovel and a few rags. The door to the living room is off its hinges as well, and so she doesn’t have to press down the brass handle to go in, and no metallic sigh is heard when she enters the room. Nine years before, everything made of wood on or adjacent to the two walls affected by dry rot had to be taken down or torn out, and so the long bench seat from along the wall is missing. Workers carried the matching table and the two doors out to the bathing house. The bathing house was too small for the table, so they set it on end, which is how it is still standing today, she glimpsed it through the crack in the shutters as she came in. The key to the bathing house is still hanging in its usual spot on the key board beside the key to the workshop, and the workshop key still has the golden spoon lure dangling from it as usual, and the key board is hanging, as usual, around the corner next to the heating stove, except that now the stove is gone, and the wall it stood against is rotting. The dry rot spread all the way upstairs while she was abroad for work, and her father spent an entire autumn, winter and spring negotiating with the gentleman whom he had offered the right to speculate on the house, which still officially belonged to them, in exchange for carrying out the urgently needed repairs. They weren’t allowed to sell it as long as the official decision regarding the restitution claim was still pending, but after all the East German bank accounts were cut in half, they no longer possessed the means to keep up the house themselves. Present exigency: The property that is the object of the proceedings. Pending determination of ownership. Registration number 654.

Her father had never much cared for nature, even in earlier years he’d only ever pronounced the word “nature” with a certain contempt, and he always said he hated mowing the lawn, was bored by flowers, and found swimming utterly uninteresting, only on rare occasions would he dive among the reeds to hunt pike with his harpoon. And so it hadn’t surprised her when, after the death of her father’s mother, he immediately added her as co-owner to the title of the house—deletions are marked by placing vertical lines above the first and beneath the last line to be deleted and connecting the two lines on the diagonal from upper left to lower right. It hadn’t even surprised her that he didn’t make even a single trip out to the property after the heirs to the wife of the architect, all of them living in the West, had filed to have the ownership of the land restored to them, nor did it surprise her that he didn’t participate in clearing out the house after he had finally reached an agreement with the speculator. Her childhood friend, who helped her clear it out, had been the one to notice the dry rot. One single time during all the many years when the house then stood empty, while she and her father were waiting for the official ruling, he said something to her that she had never before heard from him, namely that every time he found himself having to look at a landscape like this somewhere, a landscape full of hills and lakes, he felt much the same way he felt whenever he heard someone speaking Russian, the language of the country in which he was born. What exactly he meant by this was never explained. She knew only that by the time he got out of the children’s home his parents had sent him to because they believed in collective education, he was old enough to mow the lawn. Nature.

The drainage pipe is choked with roots. Six trees have to have their branches removed. The legal right of use has shared the fate of the contract of sale for the property: Neither has gone into effect. Conferred. Nullified. Defunct. The enforcement authority is unable to determine the appropriate settlement amount on the basis of approved methods of investigation. The amount along with the interest accruing during pendency of the proceedings. Effective both retroactively and in the future.

The speculator had gotten rid of the dry rot, installed a new roof, torn out the old bathrooms with the intention of renovating them from the ground up, walled off the gardener’s room that had become extremely damp, and broken through the wall to the garage to gain an additional room—but then, when his hopes of coming to an agreement with the heirs and therefore of being able to acquire the house proved illusory, he had the electrical cable severed and left the house as it was. It has been a long time since she last spoke with her father about the property. Leg. Sect. III, No. 1, encumbrance of the land, plot, parcel, property line. Property subject to dispute. Without possibility of appeal.

The stairs leading to the upper floor are covered with dust, bits of plaster from the vaulted ceiling have fallen on the steps and broken apart, and even upstairs the once gleaming cork floor is now covered with a uniform layer of dust. Existing structures in ramshackle condition, actionable. All that remains of the bathroom is the window with its brightly colored squares, the sink, shower, toilet and tiles are gone, now she can look right through the beams supporting the floor down into the hall at the approximate location where her grandmother used to sit on television evenings in the most comfortable of the garden chairs in consequence of her exalted personal status. In the Little Bird Room where she had slept during all the summer vacations of her childhood—petition after petition opposing clearance of the property under dispute—she now opens the heavy door of the hidden closet—unlawful trespass—the secret door of her childhood whose little wheels draw a semicircle in the dust, on the clothes rod are the bare hangers she herself left behind when she vacated the house. She can now walk through the interior of the large closet directly into the cupboard-lined room used by her grandparents, the wall that once separated these spaces now being absent—lacking the qualifications to acquire this permit, this ruling will remain in effect regardless of future changes in ownership, breach of jurisdiction. The closet through which she enters the cupboard room still smells, just like during her grandmother’s lifetime, of peppermint and camphor. In her grandmother’s study the ceiling has been eaten away by the feces and urine of the martens, on the desk lie reeds from the thatch roof, and through a hole in the ceiling you can look up into the darkness. The curtains in the windows are secured in their tracks only in a few last spots, the rest of the fabric hangs down askew, trailing loosely in the dust. The window frames are so warped they can no longer be opened. Existing permeabilities. Future permeabilities. Secondary motion is hereby rejected because it contains non-executable and therefore inadmissible provisions. Objection. As opposed to a bona fide. Provided the underlying assumptions have been dismissed. Burden of proof.

Without even having to stop and think, she begins to sweep the reeds from the desk, then goes downstairs again to fetch broom, dustpan, hand brush and rags. In her grandmother’s study, in the cupboard room, in the hallway and the Little Bird Room she first sweeps the spider webs from the corners and then from the windowpanes, then wipes the dust from the moldings of the wainscoting, then sweeps the floor, one room after the other, filling the old bucket she found in the kitchen with the dust, debris, reeds and marten feces scattered here and there. Still sweeping the stairs, she descends step by step and dumps out the contents of the overflowing bucket under the bushes. Then she walks, swinging the empty bucket in her hand, between the two meadows and past the big oak tree, taking the path down to the water. Half a year ago she’d had to give the subtenants notice after the bit of shoreline in question had been reassigned to the Jewish parcel to which apparently it once belonged. The dock, therefore, is still standing disassembled in the area before the workshop—but since the fence has not yet been rectified, she nonetheless goes to the old spot, where the path that used to lead to the dock now has only its torso remaining, and squats down there to scoop water from the lake. With one hand she steadies herself against the willow tree, with the other she drags the bucket over the bottom, then she returns to the house and begins to mop the floor upstairs. Five times she has to go down to the lake for fresh water before all the rooms are clean, and with a certain amount of effort she now succeeds in at least opening the balcony door in the Little Bird Room so that the floor will dry more quickly. Through the open window, warm summer air enters the house, and when she steps out onto the balcony, everything is just as she always knew it. Sunlight is falling on the pine tree closest to the house, announcing a beautiful day.

There’s more to be done downstairs, because here the stove was torn out, the wall to the garage was broken through to provide direct access, and the gardener’s room was walled off. For this reason, washing all the windows is more than she can manage today. In the evening she cranks down the black shutters on the ground floor using the mechanism concealed inside the wall, locks the door from the inside and lies down to sleep upstairs in the closet of the Little Bird Room. The next day she washes the windows, the day after that she carries the doors up from the bathing house and hangs them back on their hinges, she even drags the table, which is very heavy, across the meadow and terrace into the house and puts it back in the hall where it always used to stand. She finds the chairs with the carved initials in the garage, but the leather cushions that go with them are moldy. She starts making it a habit to park her car up at the edge of the main road, and from there she walks down the slope of the Schäferberg, winding her way between underbrush and raspberry bushes, and crosses the sandy road when no one is in sight. She never encounters any neighbors—either their houses have already been torn down or they are standing empty just like hers. Once, on a rainy day, she watches from the Little Bird Room as her childhood friend crosses the big meadow and goes down the hill, returning shortly afterward with the long ladder that still hangs on the back wall of the workshop and props it against the roof of the bathing house. He climbs the ladder, adjusts the tarpaulin that was stretched across the rotting thatch of the roof but has gotten tangled in the wind, and ties it fast at the corners.

On the morning when the real estate agent brings clients to the house for the first time, she has fortunately not gotten up yet and is still asleep in the closet, where she has also been storing her provisions and a few spare pieces of clothing to change into. She doesn’t wake up until the real estate agent reaches for the brass knob of the shallow outer door in which the mirror is set, opens the shallow door for her clients and says: And here is a mirror. She hears the clients running their hands over the bird’s eye maple veneer, saying: Too bad it’s gotten warped. You could have it repaired, the real estate agent says, and now, apparently with some effort, she tugs open the door to the balcony and says: And look what a view you have from here. The clients say: A bit overgrown. The real estate agent says: This here is definitely the better side of the lake—after all, sunsets are always in the West, she laughs, her clients don’t laugh, and besides, says the real estate agent, the properties on the other side are separated from the lake by the promenade. They don’t have direct access to the water? No, the real estate agent says, at least most of them don’t. She says: Just look at the bird here on the railing. Hm, the clients say. It’s a loving touch, the real estate agent says. The clients don’t respond. The architect, says the real estate agent, worked with Albert Speer on the Germania project. Really, the clients say, now that’s interesting.