Leavetaking (9 page)

white sheets, bowls of various foods were produced and servants laid the table and when everything was ready someone called my mother on the phone and informed her in a dark, mysteriously disguised voice that I, who had lain that evening feverish in bed, needed her help. My mother told me later she had believed at that moment that in a feverish fit I had leaped out of the window. A terrifyingly altered reality presented itself to her as she burst into our house and through the wide opened door of the dining room saw a party gathered by candlelight around the table, all deathly still and hidden under their tall peaked hoods, and in the hall Augusta was standing and grinning and gesticulating with her arms as if she were out of her wits and my mother pushed her aside and leaped with a yell into my room, ran to the open window, leaned far out and shouted my name. Here I am, I called and sat up in bed. She spun around and, putting her arms around me, broke down before me weeping. But the heart of our relationship was touched on much earlier on our short, extraordinary journey. The doctor had advised my mother, because of my frequent illnesses, to take me to a convalescent home on an island in the sea. There I stand in this Home, a broad, smooth parquet floor stretches out in front of me, my mother has left me alone, my mother has cast me out, and my life is finished. I run over the mirrorlike smoothness of the parquet floor and land upon a path, it is a path of white sand, and in the white sand black patches occur, and the black patches become ever closer and tears stream down onto me, and I run along down
the path to the beach, and in front of me lies the vast gray-green body of the sea and the body breathes with rushing noises and lifts itself toward me and calls to me, and I run to this body and I want to go into this body, and then arms enfold me and hold me back and my mother holds me and leads me back, but not back into the Home, not back into exile, she elopes with me to her room in the hotel, and in this room we sit by night, my mother in a wicker chair beneath the window, I at her feet, and at dawn our ship is to leave and I am alone with my mother, have her entirely to myself, and she has given me bank notes to play with, bank notes whose figures promise vast riches, bank notes that will be devalued by tomorrow, and the bank notes rustle in my hands and the searchlight of a lighthouse flits at regular intervals through the room and illuminates a white chest of drawers, a mirror, and the large flowers of the carpet. And then the coach brought us to the landingstage and in the coach a man sat opposite us with a broad black slouch hat, and his face lay in deep shadows. On board ship, I stood on the companionway near the bows and my senses were wide open, and I sang into the fierce wind, and salty foam sprayed over my face and dark snatches of cloud raced adventurously across the lightening sky. Even if I knew nothing about my mother, her body was tangibly there, in forceful encounters. I had become aware of her presence, in the sounds of her voice, in the sweaty exhalations of her sex. But my father was unapproachable and withdrawn. In the mornings when I washed myself next to him in the bathroom I
watched him with a searching excitement. Thin, colorless hair spread around his large flat nipples and the middle of his chest. His skin had a white sponginess about it. Below the navel the beginning of a scar was visible. His genitals remained hidden, he had never been naked in my presence. When I washed I took off my nightshirt and bound it around my hips by the sleeves, so that the shirt hung down over my legs like an apron. My father surveyed my washing. Whenever he saw that I shrank from the cold water, he would seize the washcloth and rub down my face and neck with it. My father’s relationship to me at home was forced. At my mother’s insistence he made himself at times a disciplining authority, which was out of keeping with his retiring nature. When he came home after work, it sometimes happened that my mother worked him up with a report of my misdoings. What these misdoings really were usually remained uncertain—perhaps it was an attack I had made on my younger brother or sister, or a reprimand I had had from a teacher. In the case of exceptionally grievous offenses, my mother waited for my father at the garden gate, I could see her there from the room in which I had been locked for punishment. She paced uneasily up and down and when my father appeared rushed toward him. I pressed my face to the pane and followed their violent gestures with my eyes. The suspense in the pit of my stomach was like a tickle to make one laugh. My parents came along the garden path toward the house, then my father’s steps approached on the stairs. I remained glued to the window and listened
to the manipulations of the door handle and key. My waiting for the punishment to begin was extended by the difficulties my father had to overcome to unlock the door. While he fumbled away at the door he shouted threatening words to me in order to work himself up into a fury. Finally he came rushing into the room, ran up to me, took hold of me, and bent me over his knee. As he was not strong, his blows did not hurt. But the humiliating communion in which we found ourselves was painful to the point of nausea. He beating me, I moaning, we lay over one another in a terrible embrace. I shouted for forgiveness and he shouted disconnected words, and he no more knew why he was beating me than I knew why I was being beaten, it was a ritual process forced upon us by unknown higher powers. Breathless and covered in perspiration, my father sat there, having spent his strength, and now he had to be consoled and nursed, he had done his duty, now came the reconciliation, now came the artificial family peace, my mother ran to join us, and like a single block we lay entwined in one another, sobbing tears of relief. Together we now went down into the house we inhabited together and we ate cakes and drank chocolate with whipped cream. Only on Sundays, on which I sometimes accompanied my father to his office, did the beginnings of opportunities occur for some other sort of being together. These beginnings were never allowed to develop. In the entrance hall, right next to the stairs that led up to the office, was a peepshow whose vaulted entrance was surmounted by the mask of a boy’s face with empty
eye-hollows and half-open downcast mouth. In passing I glanced anxiously up to the white visage that had wept all its tears and had turned to stone over its pain. The office smelled of tobacco and cold ashes, and on the smoke-stained paneling of the wall hung framed pictures of factories and chubby, bewhiskered faces, and a map of the world with shipping routes marked on the blue of the oceans. Three deep leather armchairs surrounded the smoking table, on the round hammered brass top of which stood blackly mottled ash trays and a white porcelain elephant and wooden cigar boxes which when their lids were raised revealed on the inside colorful pictures of sailing ships, dark-skinned women, anchors, crossed flags, and golden coins. The tall brown bookshelves were filled with rows of files and pattern catalogues. My father sat at his desk in front of the catalogues and opened his mail with an ivory paper knife. I sat opposite him and in a bowl of water loosened the stamps from letters and spread them out to dry on a large piece of green blotting paper. Surreptitiously I watched my father as he sat with his letters, with a grave expression on his face, making his notes and holding in his pale, well-manicured hands with their bluish veins standing out a cigarette whose smoke spiraled upward. The silence was broken only now and then by my father clearing his throat and perhaps he looked up once and met my gaze and smiled at me and from time to time there was a feeble humming in the yard below where underneath the peepshow cupola of glass protected by wire netting a picture-drum jerkily rotated. Sometimes
I went down into the theater, the proprietress of which sat in corner darkness in a rocking chair, a toy-size dog asthmatically snoring in her lap. Usually I was the only visitor, and the proprietress let me attend several showings, I sat on a chair in front of the big black drum and pressed my eyes against the greasy glass behind which stereoscopic scenes appeared in glaringly lit stiffness. There were herds of buffalo, fleeing a prairie fire, huntsmen under the northern lights of a polar landscape being attacked by polar bears, condemned men bound fast to the block, the executioner holding the ax in readiness to let it fall, a city vanishing in an earthquake, a moon rocket just landed on a distant planet. With smarting eyes and benumbed by a feeling of dizziness, I stared at the panoramas as they hove into view, paused briefly, and then turned on again. Most impressive was the room in which the thief crouched in front of the bureau drawer he had just broken open. It was a refined, well-cared-for room. The cushions on the sofa were squashed down as if someone had just sat in them, a book lay open on the table under the lamplight, and the fire was burning in the grate, the only disturbing thing was the dog, who lay with legs outstretched on the floor. The thief’s hands were sunk deep in the drawer, and his face, concealed up to the eyes by a black cloth, was peering toward the open door, as if he had heard some sound in the darkened hall outside. And now I am in London, standing in the storerooms of my father’s office, between the samples table and shelves filled with rolls of cloth, and a rankling uneasiness wells up in me, I lean forward
and hold my breath and look through the glass window of the door into the office where my father, slim and erect, sits at his desk and his partner, spongy and flabby, leans on the table next to him and bends over it. The partner’s clucking voice jabs insistently at my father, who glances up at him with his head on one side. At the back of the room, a Miss Gray sits and hits the typewriter keys with her fingers. I sit down at the samples table, press myself close to the edge and pull a book out of my pocket. I set the book down in front of me at the edge of the table under the cover of a voluminous storeroom catalogue. I open the book and begin to read while a tiny guard on my shoulders is watching and keeps an eye on the door and while my hand lies on the alert with raised pencil in the lists of the catalogue. The words of the book penetrate into me, while I feel the stone floor on the soles of my feet, while above the thick glass squares set into the ceiling, a ceiling covered with maplike stains, there was a rolling of cartwheels and a darkness of shoe clickings, while in the outer office there was whispering and stirring, while unease radiated from my stomach into chest and bowels. “It was during the time I wandered about and starved in Christiania: Christiania, this singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there.” Then the guard clapped me on the shoulder, his other small, hard, flat hand at my throat, the door opened, and the warehouse clerk entered with wheezing breath and heavy, creaking tread. Disheveled gray hair fluttered about his head, the bristles of his beard shone silver. I slid the
book down onto my lap and back into my pocket. The warehouse clerk sat down opposite me at the other end of the long table. Between us ran the thick lines of the grain of the table-top, cut across here and there by knife marks. The warehouse clerk dug a flat green flask out of his pocket, uncorked it, raised it to his mouth, took a couple of gurgling swallows, wiped the back of his hand across his lips, and thrust the flask back into his pocket. My gaze fastened onto his emptily staring but powerful face with its big, dirty pores. His jacket was threadbare, his shirt greasy, his trembling stubby hands were busy with a bundle of gray dog-eared papers. To his mouth he lifted an indelible pencil, short and thick as if crushed between his fingers, and moistened the tip with his tongue, leaving a violet dot on it like a pearl. Miss Gray appeared in the doorway and called to me. My father wanted to speak to me. I went into the adjoining room. My father was still sitting at his desk, he was leaning far back in his swivel chair into the yielding back rest, while the partner sat on the desk in front of him and bent over him, bubbling over with talk, his sausage-like hands folded on his stomach, his face with its fatty double chin and bushy eyebrows rocking up and down. I stood next to Miss Gray and smelled the dry, stale odor of her body. She smiled nervously with her faulty teeth, and a slight blush spread over her downy skin. I saw my face in her pupils, my image had penetrated into her head and stared dully back at me from her eyes. My father turned to me, drawing away to one side from his partner’s advancing bulk. The face my father turned to me was of a
sickly yellowish hue, and I saw a few beads of sweat stand out on his brow. His face was pleading, I could see that his partner had the advantage over him, he was the native here, not only a partner in the firm, he was its founder and owner and had taken my father on out of charity. My father’s hand felt its way down to the handle of the leather samplecase. He said that he had to visit the manager of a department store and asked me to go along. I took the case from him and we went out into the alleyway. Dark, shaggy horses, the muscles in their haunches rippling with every step, stamped past us, their hoofs striking sparks from the cobbles, and rays of light flickered through the rotating spokes of the cartwheels. A booming of bells tumbled down from the dome of St. Paul’s. I went with my father through the surge of bells and my father described the manager of the department store to me. From his voice I could feel how he was trying to give himself courage, how he wanted to make himself and me believe that the manager was waiting for him with friendly feelings and that the visit to him was bound to be a great success. Surrounded on all sides by the clangor of the bells and the aggressive cries of the newspaper vendors, I felt how my father was trying to win me for his occupation, how he was trying to paint a rosy future for me in business. For a few paces I forgot where I was, the roaring surf of bells and the rushing of automobiles on whose hoods burned white jets of flame and the rattling and ringing of the red double-decker buses, behind whose windows huddled rows of faces, became lost in the soughing and the
brooding of my shapeless world of thought. Before we entered the office of the department store manager, I had crossed a sunken Vineta. We waited on an upright wooden bench. My father had opened the leather case and taken out a few patterns. He pointed out the quality of material to me. His voice was uncertain and strained. A girl with platinum blonde hair came and led us along a corridor, as she walked her hand with its red-varnished fingernails pressed and remolded the bun of hair on her neck. She opened a door for us and out of the blinding brightness of the room the manager of the store came toward us, with elegantly cut suit and broadly jutting, padded shoulders, gold glittering, effervescent, laughing. He patted my father with his hand as one pats a horse, led him to a table as if to a crib, and helped him to empty out the case of samples. My father, with delicately testing fingers, spread out the pieces of material on the table. The manager’s hands swooped with sprinkling gestures onto the material, rubbed and tugged at it and flipped it over. Quipping as he picked at it with sharp fingers he made his selection, while my father every now and then winked at me confidentially and his pale hands with their narrow knuckles and the evenly manicured polished fingernails lay expectantly on the edge of the table. The room was a block of light with glittering windows. In this block of light hovered the reflecting surfaces of the table tops. At times figures with dissolved contours went through the room. Above the gleaming surface with the multicolored scraps of material, my father and the store manager were coming to a business