He climbed bolt upright up the ladder, treading into the gray infinity between the rungs, while David climbed down to him from above. A slight man. All his life long he could have worn the same suits he’d bought for himself when he was young. Watch out! Why do you two have to stop up there half-way up, why can’t you at least sit down on the rungs, if you have to talk to each other, instead of standing up straight like that. Were they really putting their arms around each other, did the son really have his arm around his father’s shoulders, the father’s around his son’s?
Coffee, Huperts, strong and hot with a lot of sugar; he likes it strong and sweet in the afternoon, my lord and master, and weak in the mornings. He’s coming out of that gray infinity into which the upright and unbending one is disappearing, with his long strides. My husband and my son are brave, coming here to see me in this dungeon of the damned. My son twice a week, my husband only once. He brings Saturday with him, he carries a diary in his eyes. With him I cannot hope to say it’s the barber makes him look like that. He’s eighty; it’s his birthday today, and it will be solemnly celebrated in the Café Kroner. Without champagne. He always did hate it and I never knew why.
Once upon a time you dreamt of having a tremendous party on your birthday. Seven times seven grandchildren, great-grandchildren, too, and daughters-in-law and great-nephews and great-nieces by marriage. You’ve always felt a little like Abraham, founder of a mighty clan; you used to picture yourself with your twenty-ninth great-grandchild in your arms when you were dreaming of the future.
Increase and multiply. It will be a sad feast. Only one son, then the blond grandson and the dark-haired granddaughter Edith gave you; and the mother of the clan in dungeon with a curse on it, accessible only by infinitely long ladders with giant rungs.
“Come in, and welcome, old David, still with your young man’s waistline. But spare me the diary in your eyes. I’m sailing along on the little diary page, marked May 31, 1942. Have pity on me, beloved, don’t burn my little paper boat made of that folded diary page, don’t spill me into the sea of sixteen years forever gone. Do you still remember? Victory is won, not given. Woe to all those who don’t take the Host of the Beast. And of course you know that sacraments have the terrible quality of not being subject to the finite. And so they hungered, and the bread was not multiplied for them, nor the fish, and the Host of the Lamb did not still their hunger, while that of the Beast offered nourishment in plenty. They’d never learned how to reckon: a billion marks for a piece of candy, a horse for an apple, and then not even three pfennigs for a roll. And everything always in order, everything always respectable, honorable, loyal. Give it up, David, why carry the world around on your back? Be merciful, get the diary out of your eyes and let the other fellow make history. The Cafe Kroner is a safer bet for you. Some day a monument—a little bronze one—will show you with a roll of drawings in your hand, small, slender and smiling, something between a bohemian and a young rabbi, with that indefinable country air. You’ve seen where political reason leads—would you want to take my political unreason away from me?
You called down to me from your studio window: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll love you, there’ll be none of those dreadful things your school friends tell you about, the things that are supposed to happen on wedding nights. Don’t believe a word of what those fools tell you, we’ll laugh when it gets to that point, truly, I promise you, only you’ve got to wait a little, a couple of weeks, a month at the most, until I can buy the bunch of flowers, hire the carriage and ride up to call at your house. We’ll travel, see the world, and you’ll give me children, five, six, seven, and they’ll give me grandchildren, five times, six times, seven times seven. You’ll never notice that I’m a working man. I’ll spare you the manly sweat and the muscle-bound, uniformed seriousness. Everything comes easy to me, I’ve learned it, I’ve studied a little, got my sweating over and done with. I’m no artist, don’t fool yourself about that. I won’t be able to give you the demonic, sham or genuine, in any shape or fashion, and what your school friends make into hair-raising stories will never happen to us in the bedroom, but out in the open air, so you can see the sky over you and have grass and leaves falling on your face, and smell the autumn evening, and not feel you’re doing some disgusting gymnastic exercise that you have to go through. You will smell the autumn grass; we’ll stretch out on the sand by the riverbank, between the willows, just above the high-tide mark. Bull-rushes, a couple of old shoe-polish cans, a cork, a rosary bead dropped overboard by a barge-woman, a message in a lemonade bottle. In the air the smell from ships’ funnels, the rattle of anchor chains. We won’t make all blood and seriousness. Though naturally there’ll be some blood and seriousness.’
And the cork I picked up with my naked toes and offered you as a souvenir. I picked it up and gave it to you, because you’d spared me the bedroom, the gloomy chamber of horrors hinted at in novels, schoolgirl gossip and nunnish warnings. Willow boughs hung down to my forehead, silvery-green leaves about my eyes, which were dark and shining. The steamers hooted; they called to me that I wasn’t a virgin any more. Twilight, an autumn evening, anchor chains long since let down, seamen and barge-women coming ashore over swaying gangplanks, and I already longing for what a few hours before I’d feared. Though a few tears came into my eyes when I thought how I wasn’t living up to my ancestors, who would have been ashamed to turn duty into pleasure. You stuck willow leaves on my brow and on the tear-stains, down by the riverbank, where my feet stirred the reeds, moved the bottles with their holidaymakers’ greetings to local inhabitants. Where did all those shoe-polish cans come from; were they for the shiny boots of seamen ready to go ashore, for the barge-women’s black shopping bags, and, yes, surely for the shiny-peaked caps glimmering in the twilight as we sat in Trischler’s cafe, later on, on the red chairs? I was amazed at the loveliness of that young woman’s hands, the one who brought us fried fish and lettuce so green it hurt my eyes. And wine. That young woman’s hands, the same one who, twenty-eight years later, bathed my son’s mutilated back with wine. You ought not to have yelled at Trischler when he called up and told us about Robert’s accident. High tide, high tide, I was always tempted to throw myself in and let myself be carried out to the gray horizon. Come in, welcome, but don’t kiss me; don’t burn my little boat. Here’s some coffee, sweet and hot, afternoon coffee, strong and black, and here are some cigars. Sixty-centers, Huperts got them for me. Change the focus of your eyes, old man, I’m not blind, just crazy and perfectly well able to read the date on the calendar down the hall. It’s September 6, 1958. Blind I’m not and I know I can’t put down your appearance to the barber’s skill. Get in the game, lengthen the focus of your eyes, and don’t tell me the same stories over and over about your stunning blond grandson with his mother’s heart and his father’s brains who’s representing you in the reconstruction of the Abbey. Has he graduated yet? Is he going to study statics? Is he taking his on-the-job training? Forgive me if I laugh. I never could take building seriously. Concentrated baked dust, dust transformed into a building. An optical illusion, fata morgana, doomed to be reduced to rubble. Victory is won, not given. I read it in the paper this morning before they took me away. ‘A wave of jubilation arose—they drank in the words, full of trusting faith—and over and over again the enthusiastic rejoicing welled up.’ Do you want me to read it for you in the local paper?
I promised Edith, the lamb, that your flock of grandchildren—not seven times seven, but two times one, one times two—would have no privileges. They would never take the Host of the Beast, and never learn that poem for school.
Praise every blow that fate doth strike,
Since pain makes kindred souls alike.
You read too many newspapers with a national circulation; you let them serve up the Host of the Beast sweet or sour, baked or fried, in God only knows what kind of sauce. You read too many fancy newspapers; here, in the local sheet you can have the real, genuine muck of every day, unadulterated and unalloyed,
and as well-meant as ever you could wish. The other ones, your national newspapers, are not well-intentioned at all, they’re nothing but cowards, but here, everything’s meant well. No privileges, if you please, no coddling. Look here, this bit is aimed at me: ‘Mothers of the Fallen … And though you are the people’s holy ones / Your souls cry out to your lost sons.…’ I’m one of the people’s holy ones, and my soul cries out, my son has been killed: Otto Faehmel. Respectable, respectable. Honor and Loyalty. He denounced us to the police, and suddenly was the mere husk of a son. No special consideration, no privileges. They did go easy on the Abbot, naturally; he did have a taste of their sacrament, of respectability, orderliness and honor. They celebrated it, monks with flaming torches, up there on the hill with a view of the lovely Kissa Valley. A new age began, an age of sacrifice, of pain, and so once again they had their pfennigs for rolls of bread and their half-groschen for cakes of soap. The Abbot was astonished at Robert’s refusal to take part in the celebration. They rode up the hill on big horses steaming from the effort, and lit their fires. Solstice time. They let Otto light the bonfire; he shoved the flaming torch in among the twigs, singing, with the selfsame voice that had sung the rorate coeli so wonderfully, singing what I want to keep away from my grandson’s lips. How weary these old bones—aren’t yours trembly yet, old man?
Come, put your head in my lap, light yourself a cigar, here’s the coffee right by your hand. Close your eyes, shutters down, all done, diary obliterated. We’ll say our do-you-remember prayer and remember the years when we lived out there in Blessenfeld, where the evenings smelled of people taking their leisure, stuffing themselves at fish-fries, at sugared-doughnut shops and ice cream carts. Blessed are those who are allowed to eat with their fingers; I never could as long as I lived at home. You used to let me. The hurdy-gurdies droned away and the merry-go-rounds squealed round and round and I smelled and heard and felt that only the transient has permanence. You got me out of that dreadful house where they all had huddled for four hundred years, trying in vain to free themselves. When they sat down in the garden to drink wine, I used to sit up there in the roof garden, during the summer evenings. Evenings for men, evenings for women, and in the women’s shrill laughter I could hear what I heard in their husbands’ raucous laughter: despair. When the wine loosened their tongues and freed them of tabus, when the smell of the summer night let them out of their prisons of hypocrisy, it all came out into the open. They were neither rich enough nor poor enough to find out that only the transient is permanent. And I longed for the ephemeral, though I’d been brought up for permanent things, marriage, loyalty, honor, the bedroom where only duty lay, not pleasure. Seriousness, buildings, dust changed into structures, and in my ears a sound like the call-note of the murmuring river at high tide: whywhywhy? I didn’t want any part of their despair, or to feed on gloomy legacy handed down from generation to generation. I longed for the airy white Host of the Lamb and tried, during the mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, to beat the ancient heritage of power and darkness out of my breast. I laid my prayerbook down in the hall when I came home from Mass, getting there just in time to receive Father’s morning kiss. Then his rumbling bass went away across the courtyard to the office. I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and I could see the hard, waiting look in my mother’s eyes. She had been thrown to the wolves. Should I, then, be spared the same fate? The wolves were growing up, into beer-drinkers wearing peaked caps, both the attractive and the less attractive ones. I looked at their hands and their eyes and had the awful curse laid on me of knowing how they’d look at forty, at sixty, with purple veins in their skin and never smelling of good times after work. Men, responsibility. Obeying the law, imparting a sense of history to children, counting money and resolved on political reason, all were doomed to partake of the Host of the Beast, like my brothers. They were young in years only, and only one thing—death—promised them glory, would give them greatness and enfold them in veils of myth. Time was nothing but a means of bringing them closer to death. They sniffed out its trail, liked what they smelt. For they smelled of it themselves; it lurked in the eyes of the men to whom I would be thrown. Wearers of caps, guarders of the law. One thing only was forbidden: to want to live and play. Do you understand me, old man? Play was a deadly sin. Not sport, they put up with that, it kept you lively, made you graceful, pretty, and stimulated their wolfish appetite. Dolls’ houses: good, they were all for housewifely and motherly instincts. Dancing: that was good, too, part of the marriage market. But if I wanted to dance just to please myself, up in my room in my petticoat, that was a sin, because it wasn’t a duty. I could let the wearers of caps paw me as much as they wanted at a dance, in the hallway shadow, or after a picnic in the country, or in forest shadow put up with their less ambitious caresses. After all, we’re not prudes. And I prayed for him, the one who would set me free and save me from death in the wolves’ lair. I prayed for that while I put the white Sacrament to my lips and saw you over there at your studio window. If you only knew how I loved you, if you had any idea, you’d never open your eyes like that and greet me with your diary look and want to tell me how my grandchildren have grown since then, how they ask for me and haven’t forgotten me. No, I don’t want to see them. I know they love me and I know there’s one way to give the murderers the slip—be certified insane. But what if I’d gone the way Gretz’ mother did? What then? It was a stroke of luck with me, pure luck in a world where a gesture can cost a life, and being certified insane can save you or kill you. I don’t as yet want to give back the years I’ve swallowed; I don’t want to see Joseph as a twenty-two-year-old with mortar spots on his pants’ legs and plaster stains on his jacket, a stunning young man swinging his folding rule with a roll of drawings under his arm. I don’t want to see nineteen-year-old Edith reading her Love and Intrigue. Shut your eyes, old David, snap your diary shut—and there, there’s your coffee.
I really am scared, believe me, I’m not lying. Let my little boat go sailing on, don’t be a wanton boy and sink it. It’s a wicked world and the pure in heart are so few. Robert humors me, too, and obediently goes to each station as I send him. From 1917 to 1942—not one step farther; he goes in his upright and unbending German way. I know how homesick he was and how unhappy, playing billiards and boning over formulas in a foreign land; he had come back not just for Edith’s sake. He’s a German, reads Hölderlin and has never let the Host of the Beast touch his lips. But he’s no lamb. He’s a shepherd. I only wish I knew just what he did in the war. But he never talks about it. An architect who’s never built a house, never had a smitch of plaster stain on his pants’ legs. No, impeccable and correct, an architect of the writing desk, with no enthusiasm for housewarming parties. But what has happened to the other son, Otto? Killed at Kiev. He came from our own flesh and blood, yet where did he come from, where did he go? Was he really like your father? Did you ever see Otto with a girl? I do so wish I knew something about him. I know he liked beer, didn’t like sour pickles, and I know how his hands moved when he combed his hair or put on his overcoat. He denounced us to the police and joined the army—even before he’d finished school—and wrote us postcards of deadly irony: ‘I’m well, hope you are too, need 3.’ Otto never once came home on leave. Where did he go? What detective could supply that information? I know his regimental number, his field post office number and his successive ranks: first lieutenant, major, lieutenant-colonel Faehmel. And the final blow in figures again, a date: Killed, 12.1.1942. With my own eyes I saw him knock down people in the street because they didn’t salute the flag. He raised his hands and knocked them down, and would have knocked me down, too, if I hadn’t turned quickly into the other street. How did he ever get into our house? I can’t even cling to the foolish hope he might have been the wrong baby. He was born right in our own house fourteen days after Heinrich died, up in the bedroom on a gloomy October day in 1917. He looked like your father.