Leavetaking (4 page)

I can take it apart and spread it out in front of me, but as I experienced it, there was no thinking out and no dissecting, there was no controlling reason then, I was walking down the avenue and my black laced boots were whitened by the dust of the avenue, and Friederle walked beside me, and the white swans swam in the pond and in one garden a peacock strutted and opened up his scintillating fan of feathers, and it was the first day of school, from all directions children were streaming into school and each of them carried a little bag of candy to console him, and fear of the school was sticky and sickly with the taste of raspberry sweets. But in front of the school entrance I fled back, I raced back over the black cinders—trampled hard—of the playground, I ran back along the white dusty avenue, past the peacock and the swans, over the little bridge that led from the avenue into the park, into the overgrown depths of the park up to the edge of the fields, I can depict it now, see it all now, my first day at school, the beginning of my panic, I did not want to get caught, I fled, gasping, I struggled for breath, my throat and chest burned like fire, and so I stand at the edge of the fields and gradually my breathing grows calmer and I feel safe and for a while am free and away from all threats. Before me a wild rose bush grows, and in the thorns of the bush trembles a woolly tuft of hare’s fur. Later that day, however, I was led back to school by my mother, later that day I stood with my mother in the corridor in front of the classroom door, and my mother knocked at the classroom door and the teacher opened the door from
within and inside all faces were turned toward me, all within had formed a community together and I was the one who had come too late. And every day I went down the avenue with Friederle, and Friederle pressed against me, dug his elbow into my side, shoved me to sidewalk edge. I avoided him and walked in the road. Why don’t you walk here beside me, Friederle asked, and made room for me. Hardly had I started walking next to him when he rammed his elbow into my ribs again. I began to run, but he held me back by my satchel. We came to the square where the street to school forked off, and Friederle stuck his leg between mine so that I fell, my satchel sprang open, books spilled out, the slate and the box of chalk clattered out, the box with my sponge in it rolled far away over the cobbles up to the tramcar conductors who here, at the end of the line, were sitting on the trolley car steps, eating their breakfast and laughing and munching their sandwiches, the conductors threw the box across to me, it was a box made of black lacquered wood, with a red rose painted on it. Here at the square where the road to school branched off, a whole enchanting world began, walls of fortresslike buildings pushed close together, with glimpses of courtyards and stables, a church tower built of rough stone rose up out of the shingled roofs, in a wheel at the top of the spire storks had made their nest and struck out at one another with their long, sharp beaks. Behind the leaded panes of a window sat an aged man in a rocking chair, and out of a gatehouse came two men with knives, their faces taut and reddish and silkily shining like the thin skin over
healing wounds, and behind them on a heap of brushwood lay a pig, its four legs bound together, and on a red-tiled wall a butterfly trembled with outspread wings that had black and yellow markings, and a hand holding a needle thrust out between its fingers approached the butterfly and the needle pierced it through. On the school playground rose a small stone building with an arched, shabby doorway, and when one pressed one’s eyes to the windowpanes and shielded them from the sides with one’s hands, one could see inside in the half dark the carriage with its high, turned doorposts and black canopy and it sometimes happened that the coachman came in a long frock coat with his big black horse, cautiously opened the door, backed the horse into the shafts, and drove the creaking carriage out. The piercing bell summoned us to the classrooms. Here was a whirring and stirring up of dust around the splintery desks that smelled of ink and cold sweat. I unpacked the slate and the broken chalk. Friederle turned around in his place and threatened me with his fist. The teacher called me out to the front. I had not understood his question, I never understood his questions. His bloated face rocked close in front of me, his eyes bulged at me, his thick lips opened. Now, what was it I wanted, he asked, and rubbed my ear with the knuckles of his clenched fist, and white threads of saliva trembled on his opened lips. From the benches all around me came a tittering. Even the teacher’s face was distorted into a grin. That they all laughed at me was proof that I was funny, and so I too grinned, and this ability to amuse others was a valuable
gift. But, the teacher screamed, you’re still laughing, and his grin had only been a baring of his teeth, and the laughter around me from the benches oozed away. I was hauled up by the ear onto the podium and placed in front of the blackboard, and what I had to demonstrate to the teacher and class was how one kept one’s palm held out under the raised cane. It was a difficult exercise, for my hand would not stay still under the cane, it always jerked back. The class was one, single, thick, bloodthirsty silence. The teacher took aim and swished the cane down and my hand drew back, and the stroke whistled through the air. And the teacher shouted, What, trying to duck your punishment, are you, and snatched my hand up again and once more swished the cane down at me, again my hand drew back and again it was held up, and the cane came down again, and again my hand drew back, and again it was held up, and again the cane whistled down until finally it caught my hand and the smarting weal spread out over my palm. Blinded by welling tears, gripping the wrist of my aching hand with the other hand, I stumbled back to my place. Thus it was that I learned in school how to hold out my hand for the teacher’s cane. And after school I tried to evade Friederle, but with his gang of cronies he hunted me out everywhere. When I ran they ran along beside me. When I walked slowly they walked slowly beside me. When I dodged suddenly to the other side of the street they threw stones at me. These small whistling stones, and the mocking voices over there, how well they knew that I was a fugitive, that I was in their power. And my
little subterfuges, suddenly I bent double and raised my hand to my forehead, screaming as if I had been hit. That alarmed my pursuers and they cravenly slunk away, but I was more cowardly for I knew that if they now felt guilty they would later only punish me the more, so I shouted after them, You didn’t mean me, it was a mistake, you meant someone else. After lunch, between two and three, as I lay on my bed resting, a lostness came over me. I lay motionless and held my breath. If I only lay long enough without breathing, I could forget the breathing altogether. Then, like a stone in water, I sank, and soft, black rings spread out above me. But suddenly I hit the ground and, shaken by the jolt, was wrenched back to the surface. Now everything in me became large and swollen and inflated, I became a giant, an all-powerful being, and stretched out on the yellow desert of the blankets I played with little colored grains of sugar that I had scraped off a piece of chocolate. The grains trickled around under my hands, grains like heaps of people seen from a vast distance. I blew into the motley heap of people and they scattered in wild flight. The giant is coming, the giant is coming, they shouted below in the desert, and the earth rumbled under the giant’s steps, the giant appeared on the horizon, the ingeniously constructed giant, a thousand stories high, populated by workers who serviced the heating system and the machinery, the electricity circuits and switchboards in the interior, and controlled by technicians and officers in the center of the globe of the head, in the eye chambers, the brain halls, the canals of the nostrils, the eardrums.
I myself was the commander in chief over this metallic structure in human form, I issued my orders through megaphones, and I was responsible for seeing that all the joints and limbs moved according to plan and that balance was kept at the vast speed at which it jerked itself forward. Jungles crumpled like stubble under the robot’s feet, with a single leap he sprang over the widest rivers, the highest mountains, the oceans were puddles to him, and his head disappeared in the clouds. Then I heard Tarmina outside in the garden calling my sisters. I ran to the window, saw Tarmina with upturned face among the rhododendron bushes, Tarmina Nebeltau in her pink dress with the silk ribbon in her hair. I ran downstairs, Margit and Irene came too, we fluttered around the garden, to the swing, the sandpit, the ditch, we trampled the tall grass down into paths, hid ourselves from each other, looked for each other. Then in the wood, to the witches and the will-o’-the-wisps. Ran on the soft springy carpet of pine needles, looked into the hollow trunk where the owl lived, started up rabbits in their runs, chased after the dragonflies by the pond, heard the cuckoo calling from the trees how many years we still had to live. Found in the grass the blue and white feather of a jay and gave it to Tarmina, who stroked herself with it on her closed eyelids. In a clearing I saw Tarmina dancing with Margit, Irene called after them and they rushed toward her, the branches they brushed past in their haste still swung as their steps faded away into the rustling foliage. This clearing, reached by a grass path, lies there in its glittering insistence, a milky blue
light hovers over the green green grass that has been stamped down by the dancers’ feet. Then back to the garden. Friederle, with a flushed face, called me over to the copper beech at the top of which he had built a lookout. We clambered up and saw far away on the horizon a factory erupt in flames and smoke, then we let ourselves drop backward, stretched out flat, springing from bough to bough. Friederle and my sisters disappeared in the tall grass. Alone with Tarmina beside the swing. Tarmina in front of me on the seat of the swing, swaying lightly away from me, toward me, the air heavy with the scent of lilac. Then suddenly she bends forward as she comes toward me, and kisses me on the mouth. She glides back again, jumps off the swing, and runs away. The kiss on my lips, the empty swing, swinging to and fro, Tarmina near me a moment ago, now with the others, did not again turn around to me. She disappeared with Friederle in the tall grass. Instead of going after her, instead of winning her for myself, I crept back into the house. The kitchen was empty, all the rooms were empty. Only Augusta was upstairs in her attic room. I went over to Augusta’s chest of drawers and took in my hand the round, white sea-smoothed and polished stone that she kept there, folded my hand over it, held it, felt the inside of my hand quite filled with it, and asked Augusta if she would put a disk in the music box. Augusta wound up the machine with the key. While the brittle, cracked melody trickled out of the indented tin plate, Augusta with the veined hands folded sat in her violet slip at the edge of the bed, and through the open window I heard
from afar the rolling of the trains and the voices of the children playing in the garden. From Augusta’s room it was only a few steps to the attic, a large room supported by wooden posts where the warmth pressed down on one, sultry and motionless, while beneath its round gable windows the floor lay full of dead wasps. The place of exile that I had found in the summer house continued in this attic. In the sensual pleasure of a secret search, I opened suitcases and chests in which things out of my parents’ past were kept, I lifted out a light gray uniform that my father had worn during the war, I spread out the uniform on the floor, laid the saber next to it, the saber with the silver tassel at the handle and the field glasses he had carried in the battle in which he was wounded. They were said to have saved his life, for the focusing screw was smashed flat and had softened the impact of the bullet that had penetrated his body. Black-rimmed bullet holes could still be seen in the leather case. Next to my father’s uniform I laid out an expensive dress of my mother’s, a fan of ostrich feathers, a pearl-inlaid diadem. This was the reconstruction of a prehistoric moment. Full of uneasiness and suspense I tried to find out something about my origins. About my father I knew nothing. The strongest impression he made was his always being away somewhere. I had heard only a few words about his past. My grandfather had a long white beard, he used to say. Or, I went into business when I was very young and supported my family. In the rare hours of mutual understanding, on a Sunday or on Christmas Eve, he used to tell me how when I was still
small he used to let me ride on his knee and how I always wanted to hear the story that he told me then, and now, playing with his saber in the loft, I sang this story to myself, Once there was a little boy, who climbed an apple tree, along came a man with a big sword, and the man shouted, You better get right down out of that apple tree, and the boy fell out of the tree. I could still remember how in that dark earlier time the knee pulled away from under me to one side, and I slid into the depths, held back by my father’s hands. Of my mother I knew that before she married my father she had been an actress. The costumes in the suitcases derived from that period, and little boxes were filled with photographs on which she could be seen as an Egyptian princess, an abbess, a gypsy woman, and a Greek priestess. Another picture showed her with my stepbrothers and her first husband, who wore a big, bristly mustache. On the basis of vague hints that I had heard about him, I imagined him as a thug and a sex maniac. He looked like my mother’s father, who appeared in another picture. At the dinner table this father used to keep a dog whip beside him with which he gave his six daughters cracks over the head, and made them, as they sat, keep newspapers tucked under their arms to learn perfect posture. I am grateful to him for this strict bringing-up, my mother said, it has made me strong. From the fragments I found in the attic, I was able to piece together a family history. There were photos of my father at an equator-crossing ceremony on board a ship going to South America, there was the engagement photograph with my father in
uniform, arm in arm with my mother. He was lean, delicately built, my mother large and stately in a dress that reached to the ground. My mother liked telling us the story of their first meeting, it was the romance of the little lieutenant who wooed the celebrated actress and showered her with flowers and finally won her. It was a story not to be fathomed, quite as impenetrable as it is today as I brood over those personal documents of my parents that had been saved from destruction. Why did my mother give up the theater. Did not her later lack of stability come from her having forsaken the career she was naturally cut out for. She did not like the world of the theater any more, she said, it was too free and easy, life in it too makeshift. She created the elegant and the grand in her own home, the large receptions, the extravagance, the expensive clothes, all these became her substitute for the roles she might have played on the stage. My researches in the attic are supplemented today by a letter that my father wrote my mother before the battle in which he received his stomach wound. The contents of the letter are as follows, Zaklikow, 5th July 1915. In the event of my being killed in battle, I request whoever finds me to send the enclosed letter to Frau XX by the quickest possible way, and furthermore to inform the same by telegram of my death. Please also send the ring on my finger, together with all my papers, to the same Frau XX. All other objects, such as my linen, clothing, and equipment, may be disposed of among such of my comrades as need them. Any cash remaining after deductions for postage expenses may likewise be