Visitation (6 page)

She was feeling so poorly during this period that she’d had to ask one of her nieces to come stay with her to help out around the house while her husband was closing down his office in Berlin, packing up the construction plans and organizing a fireproof hiding place for his documents. How good it was that the telephone sat so close beside her bed in its niche, for now she generally kept to her bed even during the day. As she held the receiver to her ear, listening to her husband tell her who had been buried in the rubble, which building had collapsed and how crowded it was down in the cellar, she gazed at the colorful feathers of the little bird that sat forged to her balcony railing, and behind the bird the leafless branches of the trees, and through the branches of the trees the Märkisches Meer glittering. Only after the battle at Seelower Höhen had she sent her niece to stay with relatives in the West to shield her from an encounter with the Slavic hordes, while she herself took refuge behind the double door of the walk-in closet with the last of the provisions and a bit of water. And then the Russian came.

She doesn’t want to think that word, that word he called her, that unthinkable word with which he drilled a hole in her eternity for all eternity. Her body, already infertile by then, had drawn him to her—this man who knew the word that robbed her of all strength—had drawn him violently to her and for the length of time a birth might take had smothered the laughter that had stood in her body’s way all this time, and during this night in the hidden closet that her husband had built specially for her, because back when she was still a circus princess she had wanted him to, she had finally joined forces with the enemy. Only after the capital had fallen was her husband able to return to her, and what he found was a trampled garden and a gardener weeping at the devastation. His wife shared with him the half loaf of bread the Russian had left for her.

Have you heard this one? A musician is on tour. His very pregnant wife is supposed to let him know when their child is finally born. Their code word is to be: cantaloupe. So the musician is sitting on stage playing. And now one evening a colleague whispers to him from the wings: cantaloupe, cantaloupe, cantaloupe—two with stems, the other, nope! There are things you can’t help laughing at every time. This joke is always a success, everyone always laughs, the architect always laughs, and his wife laughs too, even though she’s the one who told the joke, and their guests also laugh. Musician on tour, cantaloupe, nope. Around fifteen years ago, the actor Liedtke, who was married to an operetta diva and lived at the end of the sandy road, had done her one better and, using his hands to suggest ample breasts, had quoted from
The Merry Widow
: On account of my melons—um, millions! Musician on tour, cantaloupe, nope; it even worked during the war when the coffee and tea importer from next door told them that the butcher’s daughter had just given birth to twins even though her husband hadn’t been on furlough from the Eastern front in over a year. Musician on tour, cantaloupe, nope, the architect’s wife says today to the director of the State Combine for Automobile Tires, a friend of her husband’s, once the laughter has died down: You know, I found it utterly outrageous for Hitler to demand that we women bear children for the state—we aren’t machines. And her husband says: In her own way, my wife was practically in the Resistance. The director of the State Combine for Automobile Tires laughs, and the architect laughs, and his wife laughs as well.

All the while, for nearly six years now, time has been draining away through that hole the Russian drilled in her eternity near the end of the war. Only because times are hard has something like a historical moment of inertia set in, only because times are so hard that time has trouble even just running away—it’s having to take its time—does the architect’s wife still sit there on her terrace six years after the war, sit there with a pot filled with crabs boiled till they are red, serving up her guaranteed punch lines to her friends, laughing herself harder than anyone, and gazing out over the lake that has meanwhile become state property. Time is draining away as the architect’s wife, on her husband’s arm, accompanies her guests down to the gate and waves after them in the dark, draining away as the couple goes back inside again, as they stack up the plates covered in crab shells and carry them into the kitchen, as she says to him that she’s tired already, and he says he wants to smoke one last cigarette outside, as she walks up the stairs, undresses in her room, puts on the silk robe and goes into the bathroom, the colored glass panes in the windows to the right and left of the mirror are even blacker than other glass at nighttime, draining away as the woman sits down on the edge of her bed to rub her legs with camphor oil and her chest with peppermint salve, draining away as she calls out “good night” through the half-open balcony door to her husband, who is smoking one last cigarette down on the terrace, draining away and away as she hangs the cream-colored silk robe back on its hook in the shallow part of the walk-in closet, away and away as she lies down and falls asleep. Away. Soon she will be living in a one-bedroom apartment in West Berlin, and later in a retirement home near Bahnhof Zoo. From her escape to the West until the end of her life, she will always keep everything one might urgently need in an emergency on hand in her purse, things such as paper clips, rubber bands, stamps, scraps of paper to write on and pencils. And in her testament she will leave the property beside the lake and the house that unto all eternity will smell of camphor and peppermint—that house that in purely legalistic terms still belongs to her even though it is located in a country she may no longer set foot in without risking arrest—to her nieces and the wives of her nephews. But not to any man.

IN THE SPRING
,
using a plan sketched out by the householder, an apiary for twelve colonies is set up facing south on the newly acquired land right next to the fruit trees, both to increase the yield of the trees and to provide honey as an additional benefit. Next to the room with the beekeeping equipment is a room for extracting the honey, and since the gardener, who has an excellent grasp of apiculture, will henceforth be spending all his time not devoted to the upkeep of the garden tending the bees, he soon installs a makeshift bed in the extractor room and finally, with the householder’s permission, moves in altogether.

The Polish forced laborers in the village say that the potato beetles, which have long since crossed the Oder, are now making their way through Poland. In summer the gardener waters the flowerbed twice a day along with the cypress tree on the side of the house facing the sandy road, and he also waters the roses on the terrace facing the lake, as well as the forsythia bushes, the lilac and the rhododendrons along the edge of the big meadow: once early in the morning, and once at dusk. He begins to make a habit of smoking cigars so the smoke will keep the bees away when he sits on the threshold of the apiary to rest. In fall he rakes up the leaves beneath the big oak tree and burns them, he saws the dry branches from the pine trees, saws them up, splits the pieces and stacks the logs in the woodshed.

NOW NO ONE KNOWS
she is here any longer. All around her everything is black, and the core of this black chamber is she herself. The circumstance that there isn’t even a narrow crack to let the light in is intended to save her life, but it also means there is no longer anything differentiating her from the darkness. She would like to have some sort of proof that she is here, but there is no proof. She Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben. To whom do these words now belong in such darkness? While she sits on the little crate, and her knees bump against the opposite wall, and she moves her legs now to the right, now to the left so they don’t fall asleep, time is passing. Probably time is passing. Time that is probably taking her further and further from the girl she perhaps once was: Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben. No one is there any longer who might be able to tell her whether these words have been abandoned and have only accidentally found their way into this chamber, this head, or whether they truly belong to her. Time has wedged itself between her and her parents, between her and all other people, time has dragged her off and locked her away in this dark chamber. The only thing here that has color is what she remembers in the midst of all this darkness surrounding her, whose core she is, she harbors colorful memories in her light-forsaken head, memories belonging to someone she once was. Probably was. Who was she? Whose head was her head? To whom did her memories now belong? Did black time keep going on and on, even when a person was no longer doing anything but just sitting there, did time keep going on, dragging even a child who has turned to stone away with it?

Gurkenberg and Black Horn, Keperling, Hoffte, Nackliger and Bulzenberg. And Mindach’s Hill. When her uncle lifted her up that day to the hump of the pine tree, it seemed to her as if from high up like that she really could recognize all the under-sea mountains in the water whose names the gardener had told her and which she still remembered today. Atop the highest elevation stood the church tower of a sunken city, its tip reached so high that the weathervane on top nearly surfaced amid the waves. Down on the bottom where the water was quite calm, on the streets and squares of this city, she could even make out people if she squinted, they were walking about, sitting or standing, leaning up against something or other—through the glittering surface of the lake she saw the silent throng of all those inhabitants of the city who had sunk beneath the waves along with it, who moved about quite naturally in the water without needing to breathe, walking, sitting or standing in this eternal life no differently than they had done before on Earth. She had squatted up there in the pine tree, holding on to its scaly trunk, and from there she saw the fish swimming about in the submerged sky above the city. After her uncle had lifted her down again, her hands were all sticky from the pine resin, and her father had taken sand and used it to rub the resin off.

As the girl sits there in her dark chamber and from time to time tries to straighten up but keeps knocking her head against the ceiling of her hiding place, as she opens her eyes wide but nevertheless cannot even see the walls of her chamber, as the darkness is so great that the girl can’t even recognize where her body stops, her head is visited by memories of days on which her entire field of vision was overflowing with colors. Clouds, sky and leaves, the leaves of oak trees, leaves of the willow hanging down like hair, black dirt between her toes, dry pine needles and grass, pine cones, scaly bark, clouds, sky and leaves, sand, dirt, water and the boards of the dock, clouds, sky and gleaming water in which the sun is reflected, shady water beneath the dock, she can see it through the cracks when she lies on her belly on the warm boards to dry off after a swim. After the departure of her uncle, her grandfather continued to take her sailing for another two summers. Surely her grandfather’s boat is still in the village shipyard. Four years in winter quarters. Now, without knowing whether it is day or night outside, the girl reaches out to grasp the hand her grandfather is holding out to her, she climbs from the dock onto the edge of the boat and watches her grandfather untie the knot that is holding the boat fast to the dock and toss the rope into the boat.

All the windows of the building on the street called Nowolipie where the girl is hiding are still wide open, until just a few days ago all the rooms were filled with human beings who wanted to breathe, but now everything is completely still. The people from the rooms are gone, and even down below on the street there is no longer anyone walking, no one is pulling a cart, no one is talking, shouting or crying, not even the wind can be heard any longer, no window slams, no door. While the girl sits in her dark chamber and turns her knees now to the right, now to the left, while beyond the chamber everything in the apartment is still, and beyond the apartment everything down in the street is still, and even beyond this street in all the other streets of the district everything is completely still, the girl hears everything that ever was: The rustling of leaves, the splashing of waves, the horn of the steamboat, the dipping of oars into water, the workers next door making a racket, a flapping sail. From C major you retreat by way of G major, D major, A major, E major and B major, going all the way to F-sharp major, further and further one sharp at a time. But from F-sharp back to C is only a tiny step. From playing all the black keys to playing all the white keys is the briefest of journeys, just before you return to the easy-as-pie key of C major everything’s swarming with sharps. That’s how he explained it to her before he left for South Africa, Uncle Ludwig, and in just this way Doris now, in this complete stillness and emptiness, sets her memory bumping up against the time when everything was still there.

Now only a brief transition still lies before her. Either she will starve to death here in her hiding place, or she will be found and carted off. None of the people who once knew who she was knows any longer that she is here. This is what makes the transition so insignificant. Step by step she has made her way to this place, almost to the end, in other words, her path must have had a beginning, and at the point of this beginning she must have been separated from life by as insignificant a distance as now separates her from death. The beginning must have looked almost exactly like life, it must have been right in the middle somewhere and not yet recognizable as the first part of this path that is leading her somewhere she only now recognizes. When the willow tree has grown up tall and can tickle the fish with its hair, you’ll still be coming here to visit your cousins, and you’ll remember the day you helped plant it. Was life still intact back then? When she thinks of Uncle Ludwig, she always sees him with the spade in his hand on the shore of the lake. When she thinks of his fiancée Anna, it occurs to her how Anna always told her to make herself light before she picked her up. As if the girl could reduce her weight just by thinking it. When her grandfather gave the towels of his own manufacture a glance before locking up the bathing house but then left the key in the lock for his successor, she had thought of his boat which this summer would remain on dry land for the first time. In the fall her parents sent her to Berlin to stay with an aunt so that she would no longer be subjected to teasing at school because of her Jewish blood. For two years, Sunday after Sunday, always after services at the church at Hohenzollern-platz, she had sat down at the window in her aunt’s kitchen and written a letter to her parents, but from Monday to Saturday she didn’t write, so as to save envelopes and postage. For the last meal she shared with her grandparents, who were rounded up in Levetzowstrasse in Berlin-Moabit and taken away, her aunt had made stuff ed peppers. On New Year’s Eve a friend gave her a little bowl filled with cotton and lentils. If you kept the cotton moist, a little forest would sprout from the lentils. During the big wool collection in January she hesitated to hand over not just her caps and the big scarf but also the little scarf because she could tie it up like a turban and then at least her ears would stay warm, but what if someone saw? When their visa for Brazil continued to be delayed, she started going to school wearing thin leather shoes instead of boots in -12° Celsius weather as a precaution, to harden herself for Poland, for in Poland it would surely be even colder than in Berlin. She was to burn her father’s last letter, the girl’s mother wrote, because of the danger of contagion. The law that would have allowed the girl to travel home by train for her father’s funeral did not take effect in time. The lake on which the property lay that had once belonged to her uncle and where she had spent another two summers with her grandparents after her uncle’s departure was located exactly in the middle between Berlin and Guben. Was she, Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben, halfway distant from her life at that point, or more, or less?

Now she has to pee, but she cannot leave the chamber, that’s what her mother said before she left for work. Her mother will not come back again, for meanwhile all the occupants of the apartment are gone, all the occupants of the building on the street called Nowolipie, and all the occupants of the district in which the building stands. The district has no doubt been cordoned off meanwhile, for it has been completely still for a very long time now. But as long as this sentence still stands, her name is still Doris, and she still exists: Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben. So she gets up, knocks her head against the ceiling of her hiding place and tries to pee in such a way that the board on which she has been sitting does not get wet.

Sienna, Pa
ska and Twarda, Krochmalna, Chłodna, Grzybowska, Ogrodowa, Leszno and Nowolipie, where the girl is hiding, then Karmelicka, G
sia, Zamenhofa and Miła. When you die at age twelve, do you also reach old age earlier? Everything had kept getting less, they’d had to leave behind more and more baggage, or else it was taken from them, as though they were now too weak to carry all those things that are a part of life, as though someone were trying to force them into old age by relieving them of all this. Two woolen blankets they had—no featherbed—provisions for five days, wristwatch, handbag, no documents. This is how her mother, leading her by the hand, had entered the ghetto, and even the part of the city they had entered had already been relieved of many things. There were no trees there, let alone a park, but there wasn’t a river either, there were no automobiles, no electric streetcars and so few remaining streets that it didn’t even take the length of a Lord’s Prayer to rattle off their names. Everything that was still the world could easily be traversed on foot, even by a child. And this world had gone on shrinking as the end approached. At first the small ghetto was emptied out and dissolved, now it was the turn of the southern part of the large ghetto, and the rest was sure to follow soon thereafter. Don’t be so wild, her father had always said to her when she went skidding across the parquet from one end of the room to the other, now she was being a wild child here, but what being wild meant here was: not going instead of some other girl, not offering her head to be counted, playing dead instead of reporting to die, trying to survive without drinking or eating. Never in her life has she been wilder than in this tiny chamber in which she doesn’t speak, doesn’t sing, can’t stand up and, when she sits, keeps banging her knees against the wall. She, Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben, a wild child, a blind and deaf old woman scarcely capable of moving her limbs any longer.

In Brazil, her father had said, you’ll need a hat for the sun. Are there lakes in Brazil too? Of course. Are there trees in Brazil too? Twice as tall as here. And our piano? It won’t fit, her father had said and then shut the door of the container, which now held her desk and several suitcases filled with linens and clothes, and her bed with the mattresses and all her books, closed it and locked it. This container was surely still standing on the lot of some shipping company in Guben, but all of this was so long ago that her bed, if she were now to arrive in Brazil, would be much too short for her, and the shirts and stockings and skirts and blouses several sizes too small. Their apartment in Guben had been dissolved when they packed the container for their move to Brazil; after this the girl had been sent to Berlin, and her parents’ address to which she sent her Sunday letters changed several times from one shabby part of Guben to an even shabbier one. But as long as there was still hope that they would be allowed to emigrate, it didn’t seem important to her parents or her that they’d had to pull the rug out from under their own memories when they packed for the journey to Brazil. When her father received the notice to report for forced labor at the autobahn construction site, the refrigerator built to withstand the heat of the tropics was still standing in the container on the lot of the shipping company. Only after her father’s death did it become clear that the packing up of their everyday existence in Guben into this darkness had in truth been an anticipation of their own being packed up, and that both these things were final.