Visitation (8 page)

Amid all this silence the woman goes on the attack again, she attacks him right in the middle—stop dreaming all the time, his mother always said to him—she seizes his cock right through his trousers and pushes the youth to the ground, she’s much stronger than he is, and now she throws herself on top of him, there’s nowhere to take cover here, she wants to cover him, this mare, with experienced hands she tears open his trousers and spears herself on him, riding him deeper, then she grabs him in a chokehold and squeezes his throat, whispering curses, he has stopped resisting—if that’s what she wants—he drives his barb into her flesh, she holds his mouth shut and spits on his face, she rubs herself against him, he thrusts, she tears open her blouse and slaps her breasts in his face, and he—hears himself moaning, hears himself saying
No
in Russian, and she says
Yes
, so he keeps thrusting, thrusts the mare in two, victory grinding itself against defeat, defeat against victory, and sweat and juices between the peoples, and spurting, spurting until all life has been spurted out, the final cry the same in all languages. Now death has finally been brought to its knees, youth and age as well, no point at all thinking of what was and what will be, now there is nothing left any more, nothing at all, nothing, nothing, just weary breath still drifting between mouths, a leftover scrap of something, limp as the summer dresses hanging beside the heads of the Red Army officer and this woman, who cannot be recognized in the darkness. Last summer, when perhaps she or some other woman wore these dresses, the war had not yet disturbed the peace here.

In fact all he did was open a closet.

Now he shuts the closet door again.

Outside his men are at work, they’re just back from their foray. He hears them shouting out in the garden with the horses, shouting and talking, then the shouting and talking enter the house, they call upstairs to him, he says: I’m coming. He goes downstairs, sees his men sprawling on the long bench seat, herrings are lying on grease-soaked paper on the long table, bread as well, someone else is just adding a bottle of vodka. No more horses, they say, all we found were a few German uniforms in the woods, not hidden very well, under leaves. They say: The Germans have flown the coop. One of them is just trying on one of the German coats. Not bad, he says, it fits. On the floor lies his Soviet coat, badly tattered. That’s a good idea, another one says and begins to undress. I’m going to sleep down here tonight, the young major says. Guess you were scared all by yourself, says one of the older soldiers with a laugh and shouts: Go on, give him the cushions from the bench; two others remove a cushion hanging from little brass hooks, hooting once the wall behind it comes into view: It is covered with leather. There’s my new boots, shouts one of the two and pulls out a knife. Not so fast, says the young major, the boots are for me. He pushes the table to one side, takes the cushion and tosses it to the man wearing the German coat, grabs the knife from the hand of the other one, who says: The little man always gets screwed, grinning, because he is much larger and stronger than the major and everyone can see this, and now the others grin too as he kneels down on the bench to be able to cut better. There are two remaining cushions, he removes both of them and tosses them to the others, square after square he cuts out the leather, twelve powerful strokes, he cuts decisively but not at all greedily, as though this were merely some necessary operation he was performing to save a wounded man. Two men meanwhile begin to fight over the remaining German coat. Another belches. One lies down on the bench beside the stove to go to sleep and says: Just like home. Outside it is growing light already, but the colored bull’s eye panes in the windows make dawn in this house green. Two hours of sleep, then the horses must be gotten ready, and we leave again at noon, the major says. He stacks the squares of leather one atop the other, rolls them up and places them, as he now lies down on the cushions to go to sleep, as a leather roll beneath his head.

In the morning, when the others are already busy driving the horses out of the garden onto the sandy road, he takes half a loaf of bread and goes back up to the bedroom one last time. There he plucks the marten pelt from the railing of the balcony, throws it over his shoulder, then goes over to the closet, grabs hold of one of the fake columns and yanks open the door. Without looking inside, he throws the heel of the bread back into the darkness, then closes the door and leaves the room. With the pelt dangling over his shoulder, an uncured skin, and the roll of leather in his coat pocket, he looks like a hunter. At home, in his village, there was one like that, he had gotten so used to living in the woods that he returned to human society only to sell or trade his kill for weapons and ammunition. He felt more at home among the animals who sooner or later became his quarry than among human beings. Sometimes he stayed away from the village for a long time, and then he’d start coming again, so that you couldn’t tell whether or not he’d died yet. Now it seemed the village no longer existed, but perhaps the hunter was still roaming through the woods. Or else he’d long since lain down among the animals and died there, finally his own quarry.

AFTER THE RUSSIANS
have pulled out, the gardener prunes the shrubs and bushes in the hope that they might bud a second time. He turns the soil of the big and small meadows and sets out potatoes forty centimeters apart. The potato plants require a lot of water. The gardener fetches the oars and oarlocks from the workshop for the mistress of the house and assists her in retrieving the crates sunk on the shoal of the Nackliger and bringing them back to the house. He extracts the honey. In the evening he sits on the threshold of the apiary and smokes a cigar, at nightfall he lies down to sleep on his cot beside the drum of the extractor. When the potatoes have reached a height of fifteen to twenty centimeters, he hills the plants. He gives the dock a coat of pine tar and replaces the rotten boards. He prunes the willow tree beside the shore whose twigs have grown down so low over the edge of the dock that they get in your way when you step out onto it. He places new frames in the beehives. He pulls out the weeds growing between the roses and in the flowerbed in front of the house. He waters the shrubs, potatoes and flowers twice a day, once early in the morning and once at dusk. When the foliage of the potato plants begins to wither, it is time for the harvest, and he stores the potatoes in the cool, dark cellar. In fall he rakes up the leaves, burns them, covers the rose-bed and the flowerbed before the house with spruce twigs to protect the plants from the frost, when fall is coming to an end he empties all the water pipes in the house and turns off the main spigot, he closes all the shutters including those of the bathing house down by the water. He retrieves the electric heating coil from the cellar and sets it up near his bed in the extractor room. In winter he prunes the apple and pear trees. He heats the house in advance when the architect and his wife are planning a visit and turns the water back on for the length of their stay.

In spring he helps the householder erect a fence in front of the house to enclose the flowerbed with its cypress tree, the entrance to the garage and above all the big gate, to protect the house from unwanted visitors. The gardener prunes the shrubs, replants grass on the two potato fields, helps empty the cesspit, he pulls out weeds, waters the bare dirt of the big and small meadows until the grass begins to sprout, he harvests cherries, harvests apples and pears, stores them in the cellar of the house, rakes the leaves, burns them, saws off dry branches, splits the wood, retrieves the heating coil from the cellar and sets it up near his bed in the extractor room, during the winter he sets traps in the attic for the martens. He heats the house in advance when the architect and his wife are planning a visit. In spring, he prunes the apple and pear trees, he uncovers the beds, prunes the shrubs, pulls up weeds, swaps out the frames in the beehives; in summer, he runs the sprinkler twice a day and prunes the cherry trees. In fall he chops wood and smokes out the moles, at the beginning of winter he empties all the water pipes in the house.

When several years later the blue spruce is blown over just before New Year’s, it barely misses the thatched roof of the house. It falls right across the path that leads between the small and big meadows down to the water, and is heavy enough to crush several rosebushes in the bed beside the terrace. The gardener saws up the trunk, splits the pieces and stacks the logs down in the woodshed. In spring when he is digging up the rose-bed to replace the dead plants with new ones, he discovers a chest filled with silver. Since the house is sealed, he takes the chest for safekeeping and places it, just as it is, on a shelf in the extractor room next to the jars of honey.

The following year, the municipality issues the gardener a permit to continue to make his residence in the extractor room and entrusts him with the keys to workshop and woodshed. For a spring, a summer, a fall and a winter the gardener continues to tend the now ownerless garden just as before: He fertilizes, waters, prunes, swaps out the frames in the beehives, extracts the honey, wraps the trunks of the fruit trees with cloth to keep the deer that leap over the fence from chewing the bark; the gardener weeds, harvests, rakes, burns, saws, splits, smokes out and covers beds with spruce twigs. What he needs to live he acquires from the farmers by bartering fruit, firewood and honey. A year and a quarter later, new householders arrive, having leased the property from the municipality: A writer couple from Berlin. The gardener shows them the garden, the workshop, the woodshed, the dock and the bathing house, as well as the apiary for twelve colonies and the extractor room and gives them the keys.

The new householder seeks out the gardener to discuss several changes with respect to the garden. A staghorn sumac is to be placed at the center of the small meadow, and at the center of the large one a maple. The gardener digs the holes for the plants. After working his way through the thin layer of humus, he first strikes bedrock that has to be broken up with his spade, and only beneath this is the layer of sand with the groundwater coursing through it, and finally beneath the sand the blue clay found everywhere in this region. The gardener excavates the holes up to a depth of eighty centimeters and fills the bottom with composted soil so the staghorn sumac and the maple will flourish.

After consultation with the householder, the gardener fills the hollow in the trunk of the walnut tree with concrete to give the tree greater stability. He fertilizes the flowers, the shrubs and the freshly planted trees, mows the grass of the two meadows, swaps out the frames in the beehives, extracts the honey, he harvests cherries, twice a day in summer he waters the rose-bed and the flowerbed next to the house and the shrubs; meanwhile he turns on the sprinkler on the small and big meadows for half an hour daily as well as beneath the fruit trees so that everything will be well irrigated, he prunes the cherries, harvests apples and pears. On instructions from the mistress of the house, he delivers two thirds of both the honey and the harvested fruit to the local FVP, the government trade organization “Fruit, Vegetables and Potatoes.”

Together with the new householder, he paves the area in front of the workshop with flagstones to have a better work surface for painting and repairs. In winter, the rowboat along with the iron trestles and the wooden planks for the dock are to be stored there. At the householder’s request, the gardener tears down the wooden boat shelter beside the dock—its posts were rotting. The gardener makes urgently needed repairs on the thatch roofs of both the main house and bathing house. In fall he saws up the branches felled by storms from the big oak tree and several of the pines, splits the pieces and stacks the logs in the woodshed, when fall is coming to an end he retrieves the heating coil from the cellar of the house and sets it up beside his bed in the extractor room, and finally at the beginning of winter he empties all the water pipes in the house and turns off the main valve.

The following spring, on instructions from the householder, all the windows of the main house, the bathing house and the extractor room are given a fresh coat of paint, the gardener stuff s more oakum into the gaps between the boards of the bathing house where the walls have become leaky and applies pine tar to renew the waterproofing. Sometimes when he is sitting on the steps of the apiary, smoking a cigar to protect himself from the swarms, the son of the writer couple—who comes only occasionally during vacations for a few days and the rest of the time lives in a home for children—sits down beside him and asks him questions about the life of the bees.

I A-M G-O-I-N-G H-O-M-E
,
was the sentence she last wrote on her typewriter yesterday. Now she takes out the sheet of paper and sets it off to the side, sets it on the stack, still not very high, of the already written pages of her new book, she removes a sheet of laid paper with a watermark from a drawer and begins her letter to the general concerning the new neighbor’s entitlement to lake access and concerning also the bathing house situated on precisely the bit of shoreline that is at issue—state property that she has been leasing for twenty years now along with the house—she addresses the general by his childhood nickname and in a familiar tone, and while she is writing her fury seeps away and turns into exhaustion. She asks herself what forces are at work here, what might be empowering a local official to speak to her of directives “from higher up.” Beneath the shroud of secrecy that a handful of comrades who became accustomed to this shroud during the era of illegality have managed to preserve even now, in this time of reinvented peace, something new is afoot, something even she is unable to recognize.

From her desk she can see the lake shimmering between the reddish trunks of the pine trees. Down in the kitchen the cook is making the plates clatter, the gardener is sitting on the threshold to his room smoking a cigar, on the big meadow her granddaughter and the boy next door are spraying each other with water, her daughter-in-law is just making her way down to the dock to sunbathe, the visitor is lying in a lawn chair beneath the hawthorn tree, her son is mowing the grass, and down below, in front of the workshop, her husband is painting the fishing stools, whose red paint is flaking off, green. The window stands open, and so she smells the lake and the sunshine, smells the smoke from the gardener’s cigar, but also the odor of roast meat rising from the kitchen, she smells the mowed grass and, when the wind turns and begins to blow from below, even the fresh green paint. The tapping of her typewriter mixes with the calls of the cuckoo, letter for letter it can be heard from both upper meadows, all the way down to the workshop and even on the dock, when the wind blows from above to below.

The doctor from the government hospital in Berlin, for whom she had successfully petitioned the municipality to get him permission to lease the orchard and the apiary, immediately had all the fruit trees chopped down—certainly not what they’d agreed on—and then tore down the apiary as well. With supernatural speed, practically overnight, unknown workers from Berlin soon thereafter put up a large house where the apiary had stood, and rumor had it that he’d even been permitted to purchase this house, which went against the usual practice. When she lodged a complaint with the municipality, she was informed that everything had been decided “higher up” and that further instructions had meanwhile been received to grant him lake access by reducing the size of the property she was leasing, the arrangement for a new fence leading down to the water was to be worked out as soon as possible. This young doctor, who hadn’t even been born yet when she returned to Germany after years of exile, was meanwhile personal physician to some high-up official and now, it seemed, actually had the gall to make his move against her using the invisible army whose generals she had rocked in her arms during her emigration.

She puts the letter in an envelope, addresses and seals it, then she takes up the sheet of paper she’d set aside earlier that morning and puts it back in the typewriter to go on working where she stopped the day before. I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e. The keys of the typewriter she writes on have already been rubbed smooth, the individual letters can scarcely be distinguished from one another. It is still the same typewriter she brought with her on that odyssey from Berlin to Prague, from Prague to Moscow, and then from Moscow to Ufa in Bashkiria, and near the end of the war, when her son could already speak Russian fluently, back again to Moscow and finally, Berlin. She carried this typewriter in her hand through many streets of many cities, held it on her lap in overcrowded trains, gripping its handle tightly when in this or that foreign place, alone on an airfield or at a train station, she didn’t know where to go, when she’d lost her husband in the throng, or else his duties took him elsewhere and he’d boarded a different train. This typewriter was her wall when the corner of a blanket on a floor was her home, with this typewriter she had typed all the words that were to transform the German barbarians back into human beings and her homeland back into a homeland.

Home, all he wanted was to go home, the German official who’d been installed as mayor in a tiny little town in the so-called Reichsgau Wartheland wrote in his diary after a colleague had reported to him that while he was on vacation all the Jews from the entire region had been rounded up in the church, held there for three days and then loaded into gassing trucks and transported to the woods. The corpses of the ones who had already died during the three days in the church had been tossed into the gas trucks along with the living, the dead children hurled at the heads of their still living parents. Home, all he wanted was to go home, the mayor had written then in his diary. This diary was later included in the materials placed at her disposal for use in her radio show in the Ural region. By then the impending defeat of the Germans was already becoming quite clear, and every one of the Red Army’s victories brought her, her husband and their son who had been born in the Soviet Union that much closer to going back to Germany.

Holding the mayor’s diary in her hands, she’d felt disgusted that, as became clear from the further course of the diary, the German official did decide to remain in his post and office after all, that he continued to preside over this small town until the Red Army marched in and he fled to the West. But all the same she could never forget his sentence about just wanting to go home. Home! he’d cried out like a child that would give anything not to be seeing what it was seeing, but precisely in this one brief moment in which he hid his face in his hands, as it were, even this dutiful German official had known that home would never again be called Bavaria, the Baltic coast or Berlin, home had been transformed into a time that now lay behind him, Germany had been irrevocably transformed into something disembodied, a lost spirit that neither knew nor was forced to imagine all these horrific things. H-o-m-e.
Which thou must leave ere long
. After he had swum his way through a brief bout of despair, the German official had applied to retain his post. Those others, though, the ones who had fled their homeland before they themselves could be transformed into monsters, were thrust into homelessness by the news that reached them from back home, not just for the years of their emigration but also, as seems clear to her now, for all eternity, regardless of whether or not they returned. I just want to go home, just home, she’d often thought in those days, and from the Urals had directed her machine gun fire at her homeland, word after word. But now that no one country was to be her homeland any longer but rather mankind in general, doubt continued to manifest itself in her as homesickness.

This morning she and her husband took the long walk up to the forest, to the bench in whose wood her son had already carved his parents’ initials with his pocket knife years before. The four letters have long since turned gray. They always stop to rest upon this bench for a while before turning around. They sit and gaze, their eyes following the course of the hill that descends gently to the lake, they watch as the wind stirs the grain field, and behind it they see the broad surface of the lake, leaden, from a distance they cannot see how this same wind is rippling the water, nor do they see the house between the hill and the lake, from this perspective it is hidden in the shadow of the Schäferberg. They look at the ground, close by, at their feet, where yesterday’s rain has pressed the sand into little rivulets, they see flint and pebbles of quartz or granite, then they get up again, she takes her husband’s arm and the two of them make their way downhill, back to the house, where today he intends to give the fishing stools, whose red paint is flaking off, a coat of green paint, while up in her study she will sit at her desk and write down what she remembers of her life.

This doctor wasn’t even born yet when she returned to Germany. He has traveled to Japan with one or the other government delegation, to Egypt, to Cuba. I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e. Down in the kitchen the cook is making the plates clatter, the gardener is sitting on the threshold to his room, on the meadow her granddaughter and the boy next door are spraying each other with water, her daughter-in-law is sunbathing on the dock, the visitor is lying in a lawn chair, her son is mowing the grass, her husband is painting the fishing stools green. There are things she remembers but does not write. She doesn’t write that she said no when, after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union a German comrade whose husband had just been arrested came to her with her small child asking to be hidden. No, because her own residence permit had already expired and even she herself could only enter or leave her Moscow quarters at times when no one would see her. She doesn’t write that the manuscript for her radio show about the daily work of the German official was corrected by the Soviet comrades. The episode with the Jews in it was cut. That wouldn’t appeal to German soldiers, she’d been told, it might possibly hurt the cause and in any case was irrelevant in this context. She who had emigrated not because of her Jewish mother but as a communist had, without putting up a fight, cut that part of her report. She doesn’t write that eventually she did begin after all, after several comrades known to be Jews had vanished, to dye her coppery hair that even during her German childhood had caused her to be taunted as a Jew. She doesn’t write about how she and her husband were asked by her Soviet comrades to board a train to Novosibirsk. That they hid instead of getting on the train. A German painter from their circle of friends had obeyed the Party’s order and boarded a similar train, and then he had starved to death building a dam in Kazakhstan. While outside the cuckoo is calling, her fingers rest upon the typewriter keys.

The poet who hid her back then had written a poem in which he described going home as crossing over to the shores of Death. She had learned to remain silent then, and after all the deprivations, this silence was the greatest gift that had ever been given to their dream, which remained so large that every single one of the comrades was utterly alone when he walked about in it.

The poet who hid her back then now lives with his wife in a summer cottage on the other side of the lake, and this afternoon they will perhaps land at the dock in their motorboat made of dark shiny wood, and then her friend will toss the rope to her husband, her husband will catch the rope and tie it to the dock, and the granddaughter will watch her grandfather and take note of the figure eight the rope makes when it is wound around the cleat.

I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e. The actor who built a bungalow a few properties down recently stayed behind in the West after a performance there and will soon be having his wife and son join him. The bungalow has already been sealed. He had wanted light blue tiles for his bathroom. Light blue tiles did not exist in this part of Germany. Where the new person is to begin, he can only grow out of the old one. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. The new world is to devour the old one, the old one puts up a fight, and now new and old are living side by side in a single body. Where much is asked, more is left out.

When they returned to Germany, it was a long time before she and her husband could bring themselves to shake hands with people they didn’t know. They had felt a virtually physical revulsion when faced with all these people who had willingly remained behind. After his return, her husband had even hesitated to visit his mother and sisters, who lived in the Western part of Germany. The only visit they ever made to this West German city was undertaken with the sole purpose of showing their son his grandmother, and neither she nor her husband shook hands with his mother or sisters when they greeted them. They saw, too, that this omission occurred by mutual consent. Immediately before they fled to Prague, they had deposited a picture and a few pieces of furniture with her husband’s sisters. Her husband’s mother and sisters were now sitting at this table, on these chairs, and the picture hung on the wall. And she and her husband now sat on these chairs as if they had come to their own house for a visit. The two Communists were at a loss for the words they would have needed to demand their own possessions back from these Germans to whom they had once been related. Later, when their son was old enough to travel by train without them, they let him make the trip twice on his own when he expressed the desire to visit his grandmother.

Now the gong is calling her to lunch. She walks through the closet room and the hallway to the bathroom, where she washes her hands, her fingertips are smudged with black from changing the ribbon, she looks into the mirror, arranges her hair, closes the right-hand wing of the small window that had been open for air, now the mosaic of colorful squares is complete again. Before she goes down to eat, she quickly steps back into the Little Bird Room to get a jacket from the wall closet, since it’s always chillier than you’d expect inside the house, even in summer. The Little Bird Room got its name from the small iron bird forged to the railing of the balcony. During school holidays, her granddaughter sleeps here. The granddaughter now strikes the gong downstairs for a second time, possibly out of impatience, or else because it’s fun.

Even at midday, what strikes the long table through the colorfully glazed windows is more penumbra than light, and around this table sit her husband, their son with his wife and her granddaughter, and often also friends and colleagues from Berlin, comrades or, as today, the visitor, then the cook and finally the gardener. After the soup is brought out, her husband speaks about this and that, her son about something else, her daughter-in-law contributes a remark, the visitor remains silent, the gardener remains silent, the cook serves the main course, she herself elaborates, her daughter-in-law has yet another question, her son says: I don’t see how that’s possible, her husband says: But it is. She herself says: That’s certainly interesting, and: Do take some more potatoes, the visitor says: No thank you, the gardener remains silent, her granddaughter shakes her head, her son says: Send them over, the daughter-in-law: That was delicious, she herself says: It truly was, the gardener says: Thank you, the cook: The soup was a bit too salty, her son says: Not at all, the cook stacks up the dirty plates and balances them out into the kitchen, she returns with tiny little bowls on a tray, distribution of the compote, everyone gets busy with their spoons, general quiet reigns, the door handle is depressed from the outside, giving off a metallic sigh, the boy next door wants her granddaughter to come out and play, he remains standing beside the stove, waiting until everyone has finished eating, the visitor brings her compote cup to her lips and sips the last dregs of juice, her daughter-in-law says to the little girl: But first help clear the table, her husband says: Well, then, she herself nods to the cook. They all get up and leave the room in one direction or other.