The Wall (77 page)

With no worries, feeling almost lighthearted, I went along my way, stopping in front of shop windows, looking quickly at the piles of books displayed in the open in front of a rare-books dealer, and then moved on. On the other side of the street I suddenly noticed Otto Schallinger, who was hurrying along with a large bag. Should I call out to him? It would certainly have pleased him, but I had no desire to, and so I peeled off in a different direction. Of all my old friends, he was the only one who meant something to me, and who was still loyal. I had to admit that it was ungrateful of me, but I didn’t want to change my decision. He followed me with a relentless, to me, irritating persistence, by which he sought to maintain the same distance between us. This resulted in nothing other than dim memories that ran back as far as twenty-five or thirty years. Through his contact with me, Otto wanted to retrieve his long-lost youth and reawaken it. Innumerable details of a long-lost time that were unimportant to me, and that had, for the most part, disappeared from my memory, appeared to be meaningful enough to him to be thoroughly revisited. With Sylvia, who had little interest in Otto’s past and even less understanding of it, he could not talk about such things, as she expected something quite different from him. Therefore he sought, from time to time, a break from a present that wasn’t very satisfying by revisiting the past with us. If we agreed, then he would show up, avuncular and carrying little presents, feeling more at home on West Park Row than we could sometimes stand. Sylvia, however, never came with him. We had long been convinced that their life together was not so happy as he tried to assure us it was, yet she was good-natured enough to tolerate his visits to us, though perhaps they didn’t matter to her at all. Thus he turned to us as if fleeing to a lost paradise in order to escape the bustle of the metropolis and the country in which, despite Sylvia and his having lived here for twelve years, he never quite felt at home, although it had granted him a reasonable living, he feeling that, with us, so much of what he had experienced before the war, or at least in growing up, had been well preserved. Even our poverty,
sorry as he was for it, didn’t really bother him, for it even helped him to arrive at our house and feel himself amid a transformed and much more lovely youth. “Do you remember how …” many of his sentences began. No matter what I answered, it didn’t seem to jar him from his dreamy recollections, it only bothering him now and then when I couldn’t control myself and was indeed not very nice to him. Then he would gaze at me with such beseeching eyes, like a beaten child, in the hope that I would not destroy the realm he had projected. Then I had to be good to him and listen patiently to whatever he hauled out of the old schooldays, endless stories about teachers and schoolmates, and, above all, about himself. Then he pressed me to also share something of my own memories. How hard it was for me mattered as little to him as the questionable facts of my reports, for I made things up at random in order to please him, but also to spare myself and hide behind such tales.

Otto had a lot of trouble with his little Sidney, who, soon after my arrival in the metropolis, succumbed to a nasty illness that resulted in mental difficulties that required him to be institutionalized. To his sorrow, Otto had no other children, as Sylvia either could not have any more or didn’t want any more. Since the misfortune with Sidney, she had changed, Otto saying that the piano had become much more important to her than anything else. She practiced whenever she had an hour to spare, because it was her ambition to pass an audition for the radio, which she had failed to do three times already. She practiced further and was supposedly happy when we sometimes suggested that Otto also visit us on a Sunday. He liked these visits the best, since Michael was now grown enough to walk and had in fact begun to speak at an early age. Uncle Otto, as he was known to our children, brought along appropriate and inappropriate gifts, as well as his camera, in order to capture Michael’s curiosity about the little pictures and to win our favor. In order to be reminded more of the home he’d lost, Otto called the child Mischa, which didn’t please Johanna, but there was no dissuading him. Sometimes Michael was afraid of his uncle and didn’t want anything to do with him, which caused Otto to despair, though at other times the boy beamed and was trusting. Then Otto was happy, even when Johanna suggested, in good weather, that he take the child for a walk, usually to Shepherd’s Field, or especially when there was a fair, which never pleased Johanna, as the
child got overexcited because of it. But it was difficult to resist Otto’s requests; touched by his devotion, Johanna put up with him. She also hoped that his visits provided something of a distraction for me, and thought it good that I had at least some contact with someone who shared my past, though most of all she took pity on him. Johanna was grateful when he fixed something in our little garden or in the house, be it a rickety chair or an electric cord. I found that nice as well, though I liked it less when he messed about with how I liked to keep my own garden. Also his tedious talk, which easily became too much for me, Johanna listened to patiently and did not let on whenever it became uncomfortably too much for her as well. Everything would have been bearable if only Otto had not tried to interfere with my scholarly work with his well-meaning suggestions. He felt called upon to correct some of my ideas in order that they be more easily understood by the public. His greatest pleasure lay in trying to teach me something.

“Such oppression has economic reasons and is a consequence of the bad will of the propertied classes,” he would say. “Against that, my dear Arthur, since I don’t believe in revolution—one sees so many of them in other countries and what it leads to—against that one can only pose good upbringing. If one only tends to the youths, which you can easily do with your Mischa alone, and instill the idea that we must look out for one another, then things will be better for the next generation, and such horrible things as what we experienced, such beastliness, will not repeat itself. If such young people come of age, they will certainly be against oppression, you will see, and they will anchor the freedom of humanity in law. Good will triumph, just you wait!”

This was roughly the smartest thing Otto had to say. He incessantly filled my ears with such bits of wisdom and regularly repeated them, such that I could hardly stand it. If I wanted peace, then I said I was tired, which didn’t always work, or I kicked him out, which only upset him. Still, we never entirely discouraged his visits; they just needed to occur less frequently. A solution offered itself in letting him spend time with his Mischa, or Johanna occupied herself with Otto, while I, for shorter or longer periods, and sometimes for the entire visit, would retreat to my room under the guise of having pressing work to do.

Slowly I strolled farther along through the streets and thought about
my former friends. The Bergmann-Birch siblings no longer meant anything to me, I having rarely seen them since the first weeks after my arrival. Inge, especially, had withdrawn from me, So-and-So having correctly predicted that. She seemed inexhaustible in her knack for coming up with excuses as to why we couldn’t get together anytime in the next few days, and Oswald backed her up on it. That’s why I soon gave up trying to cultivate contact with her and finally got over this disappointment. Much more painful was the breakup with Oswald, which I suffered from for years. Since Inge could barely stand that I had survived the war, while her own loved ones had been killed, she was unsettled by the very nature of my friendly feelings, even if I didn’t think of her as at all brutal, but rather as so vulnerable that, out of self-preservation and defenselessness, she needed to wound me. I well understood Inge’s sick attitude, such that I hoped to earn her affection by gently approaching her indignant pain and sad anger. That was not to be. Whatever friendly words I said to her in self-abnegation had only the opposite effect in stirring her to launch abusive attacks on me. Oswald found his sister at fault and sided with me during these skirmishes, or at least appeared to, but in the end he cleverly and secretly incited her against me. In subtle ways, he destroyed my friendship with Inge.

In subtle ways—well, was it so subtle how Oswald plotted against me, or was it nothing but nasty? He withdrew from me in a different way than his uncontrollable sister. In the first days, he extended to me an embracing friendliness that suffused me with warmth, yet I was given good advice by nobody, least of all my own feelings, in not realizing that such lavish amplitude lasts only a little while, especially when the spender is reluctant to receive anything in return. The few meetings that Oswald granted me did not betray any cooling of his affections, nor did his mood change, but soon I could hardly reach him anymore—indeed, not at all. If I went to his house after we agreed to meet, he revealed to me straight off what a pity it was that he had only ten minutes for me, as something completely unexpected had come up that he couldn’t put off, though if it was all right with me, I should just come along with him. I would then do that, and after a short, hasty walk or a ride in a taxi he’d quickly say goodbye while showering me with reassurances of his friendship and with the request to visit him again as soon as possible, or at least call. If I showed up unexpectedly or uninvited, as
he suggested I do, most of the time he wasn’t there. If I didn’t happen to find him in, then he would explain to me in detail that it wasn’t the custom here in this country to surprise someone without calling ahead, for though I was always warmly welcome to visit, it would be better to arrange it beforehand.

Then I tried to reach Oswald by phone, which, unfortunately, involved a number of hurdles. Often, he wasn’t at home, and his maid didn’t know where he was, or he happened to have visitors, which prevented him from coming to the phone, or he had just come home or was about to leave, or it wasn’t a good time because he had just gotten a headache or he was swamped with work, or, finally, it might be, as he reported with a choked voice, that he just wasn’t in the proper mood for conversation. Our conversations on the telephone were often impersonal and for the most part rushed, being fruitless and soon leading to my feeling that I would soon not want to talk to anyone on the phone at all. Such paltry talk disappointed me deeply. Sometimes he employed sweet words in urging me to call again, perhaps some evening or early in the morning or the following week, perhaps the best being if Oswald could call me sometime. I would then tell him a time and place, at which he promised to reach me, though I waited in vain. And if a conversation on the telephone did occur, in which he at last listened to me with some patience and ease, at the end he would say that, much to his sincere regret, there was not much he could tell me that day, he being besieged from many directions these days, though he hoped in a week or so to free himself of all such unpleasant distractions; or he would explain that there were other reasons preventing him, there being unforeseen responsibilities that had to be taken care of, Inge’s health requiring regular attention and demanding great care, or a trip that could not be postponed had thrown all plans for the coming weeks in disarray. The reasons he produced as to why he couldn’t see me were inexhaustible.

So, in the first months that I was here, I often did not see Oswald for weeks at a time, and I soon began to call less often. He seemed less and less interested in my problems, declaring himself unqualified to judge my writings or my research plans, nor did he wish to talk about my experiences and my personal worries. Thus he made it impossible, for example, for me to tell him about my acquaintance and engagement with Johanna. Only after I pressed him numerous times was he willing to meet her, and on an
agreed-upon evening that had been put off three times—we had already been married for fourteen days—he conducted himself in such a formal and controlled way that he remained aloof from any concern, Johanna not believing me when I said that he had been completely different before the war. He hardly ever said anything about his life or his works but preferred to talk about some book I knew nothing about, or to ask about things that meant a great deal to him but certainly much less to me. When it came time to say goodbye, his voice sounded sad, and he said how it hurt him that we saw each other so little, for he had been so happy when I arrived and to have me now in this country, yet in the past year contact with those he held dear, and that included me, had been so sparse. But, certainly, that would change soon; I just needed to have a bit of patience with him, for next month he hoped to take it easy and visit us often on West Park Row, especially since Inge had to travel to France to work on a translation.

When I left Oswald alone after that and waited for the coming months to pass, everything became more complicated. He said that he was afraid he had to confess to me that Inge had not left, as everything in France had fallen apart, so she had taken on a deadline job for a local publisher, the translation of a novel that she could not manage on her own, thus requiring Oswald’s help in meeting the deadline. So his free time was entirely taken up, his sister, above all, having been made more nervous than ever with all this hectic activity, her stomach suffering as a result, and if Oswald didn’t make sure that she kept to a strict and normal diet she could become quite ill. Some time later, I learned that Inge’s work had gone well, and her health did not suffer that much, but now Oswald himself had a fixed contract that he couldn’t get out of, and which demanded that he work ten hours a day, at least, for the next two or three months. I needed to understand the pressure he was under. Thus arose the obstacles that prevented our meeting anytime soon. That was the last straw—nothing but excuses. I had had enough of Oswald.

“That means we just can’t see each other anymore!” I said emphatically on the phone.

Oswald seemed dismayed. He didn’t take my words as final, but rather as a form of mistrust that he wished to dissipate, for he hated any feelings of mistrust.