“Without me.”
“Yes, without you.”
Again there was a pause before his mother answered. As if giving herself a shake, she finally said, “What a lovely idea! Can you write your father a letter? I’m afraid he’ll feel pressured on the phone and react negatively. And then he’ll soon regret it. But why have to sort things out after the fact when a letter will work better to begin with?”
3
On a Thursday in September he picked up his father in the little town where his parents lived and where he’d grown up. The hotel rooms and concert tickets were booked. He had decided against the larger places with their fine turn-of-the-century houses; his father liked things simple, so they were going to stay in a plain hotel in a little village where the beaches ran on for miles. They would hear the French Suites on Friday afternoon, two Brandenburg Concertos and the Italian Concerto on Saturday evening, and motets on Sunday afternoon. He had printed out the concert programs and gave them to his father when they were on the Autobahn. He had also worked out what he wanted to ask his father along the way: about his childhood and youth and his studies and the beginning of his career. It should all go without any arguments.
“Lovely,” said his father when he’d read the programs, and then was silent. He sat upright, legs crossed, arms on the armrests, and hands hanging down. That was the way he sat in his armchair at home and that was also how he’d seen him when he paid a visit to him in court before he finished high school and witnessed him during a trial. He seemed relaxed, and the angle of his head and the hint of a smile indicated that he was focused and listening carefully. At the same time it was a posture that spoke of distance; it was the relaxed body language of someone who doesn’t relate to people or situations, who’s hiding behind his smile and listening with great skepticism. Since to his own horror he’d caught himself on several occasions sitting the same way as his father, he knew what it signified.
He asked him about his earliest memory and learned about the sailor suit his father had been given for Christmas when he was three. He asked about what he’d liked and hated in school, and his father became more talkative and told him about doing drill at gym, and patriotic history lessons and the difficulty he had writing essays until he started imitating articles he read in a book he found in his father’s cupboard. He told him about dancing classes and gatherings of the twelfth graders where people drank the way they drank in student clubs and afterward the ones who felt particularly grown-up went to brothels. No, he’d never gone along, and he’d never kept pace with their drinking, either, except halfheartedly. He’d refused to join any fraternity when he was a student although his father pushed him to. He’d wanted to study and encounter the riches of the mind at university, after the pittance there had been in high school. He talked about professors he’d heard, events he’d attended, and then he got tired.
“You can put the seat back and sleep.”
He did so. “I’m just going to rest.” But it wasn’t long before he was asleep, snoring and occasionally smacking his lips.
His father asleep—he realized he’d never seen this before. He couldn’t remember as a child ever having rolled around in bed with his parents, or gone to sleep or woken up with them. They had taken their holidays without the children; he and his brothers and sister had been sent to their grandparents or aunts and uncles. He liked this; holidays were freedom not just from school but from his parents too. He looked over at his father, saw the stubble on his chin and cheeks, the hairs growing out of his nose and his ears, the spittle in the corner of his mouth, and the burst blood vessels around his nose. He also smelled his father’s smell, a little stale and a little sour. He was glad that aside from the ritual hello and goodbye kisses, which mostly he could avoid, there was no intimacy between his parents and him either now or in earlier days. Then he wondered if he’d feel more affectionate toward his father’s body if there had been.
He stopped for gas, and his father turned on his side as best he could and kept on sleeping. While he was stuck in traffic, an ambulance cut its way through with flashing blue lights and the siren going, and his father murmured something but didn’t wake up. His father’s deep sleep annoyed him; it struck him as an expression of the clear conscience with which his father had gone self-righteously through life, judging and condemning him. But then the traffic jam broke up, he drove around Berlin, through Brandenburg, and reached Mecklenburg. The bare landscape fitted his melancholy mood, and the onset of dusk was suitably mild.
“How still the world and in the shroud of twilight how intimate and fair.” His father was awake and quoting Matthias Claudius. He smiled at him and his father smiled back. “I dreamed about your sister, when she was small. She climbed up a tree, higher and higher, and then flew into my arms, as light as a feather.”
His sister was the child of his father’s first wife, who had died in childbirth, and was known in the family as heavenly mother, as opposed to his second wife, who was present here as earthly mother. His second wife was the mother of his two sons and had also become mother to his sister; the children had always regarded themselves as fully related, never as half brothers and sister. But he had sometimes wondered if his father’s particular love for his sister was an extension of his love of his first wife. The twilight, his smile, the telling of his dream as an acknowledgment of longing and a sign of trust—he thought he could ask his father a question. “What was your first wife like?”
His father didn’t reply. They drove from twilight into darkness, and his face became invisible and unreadable. He cleared his throat but said nothing. When his son was about to give up hope of a response, the father said, “Oh, not so different from Mama.”
4
The next morning he woke up early. Lying in bed he wondered if his father had evaded him or had nothing more he could say about his first wife than he had said. Had he made the two women into a single person in his thoughts and feelings, because he couldn’t bear the tension of remembering and mourning and forgetting?
These were not questions he could ask his father over breakfast. They sat on the terrace with a view out over the sea. His father passed on greetings from Mama, to whom he’d just spoken on the phone, cut the top off his egg, put ham on one half of his roll and cheese on the other, and ate with silent concentration. When he’d finished, he read the paper.
What did he and his mother have to talk about on the phone? Did they just tell each other how they’d slept and what the weather was like here and back there? Why did he call her Mama, when none of the children did? Was he interested by the newspaper or just hiding behind it? Did he feel trapped by this journey with his son?
“I expect you’re pleased that the government …”
It sounded as if his father wanted to launch into one of their customary political arguments. He didn’t let him finish. “I haven’t read the paper for days. Not till next week. Shall we take a walk on the beach?” His father insisted on reading the rest of the paper, but stopped trying to draw him into an argument. Finally he folded the paper and laid it on the table. “Shall we?”
They walked along the shore, his father in a suit and tie and black shoes, he in shirt and jeans, his sneakers tied by the laces and hanging over his shoulder. “You were talking about your student days on the way here—what came next? Why didn’t you have to fight in the war? What exactly was the reason you lost your position as a judge? Did you like being a lawyer?”
“Four questions at once! Back then I already had the arrhythmia I still have now; that’s what saved me from the war. I lost my position as a judge because I gave the Confessional Church legal advice. That angered both the president of the State Court and the Gestapo. So I became a lawyer and as such continued to advise the church. My partners in the law firm didn’t hinder me; I had almost no involvement in regular legal work like contracts and forming companies and arranging mortgages and drawing up wills, and I almost never appeared in court.”
“I read the es
say you wrote in 1945 in the Tageblatt. No hatred for the Nazis, no settling of accounts, no retaliation, pull together to cope with need, pull together to rebuild shattered towns and villages, solidarity with the refugees—why so forgiving? The Nazis did worse things, I know, but they did also destroy your position.”
They made slow progress in the sand. His father made no move to take off his shoes and socks and roll up his trousers, but walked awkwardly, step by step. He didn’t care that they would never get to the end of the long, shining beach this way and reach Cape Arkona—but he was sure his father did, because he always had goals and made plans, and had asked questions about the Cape at breakfast. In three hours they had to be back at the hotel.
Once again he was ready to give up hope of any answer when his father said, “You can’t imagine what it’s like when life goes off the rails. The only thing that matters then is to reestablish order.”
“The president of the State Court …”
“… greeted me amicably in the fall of 1945 as if I’d just returned from an extended holiday. He wasn’t a bad judge or a bad president. He’d gone off the rails like everyone, and like everyone he was glad it was over.”
He saw the beads of sweat on his father’s forehead and cheeks. “Would you go off the rails if you took off your jacket and tie and went barefoot?”
“No.” He laughed. “Maybe I’ll try that tomorrow. Today I’d like to sit down by the sea and look at the waves. How about right here?” He didn’t say whether he couldn’t go on or whether he didn’t want to. He hitched up his trouser legs so they wouldn’t crease at the knees, sat down cross-legged on the sand, looked out to sea, and said nothing more.
He sat down beside his father. Once he’d rid himself of the feeling that they somehow had to talk to each other, he began to enjoy the view out over the sea, the white clouds, the interplay of sun and shade, the salty air, and the light breeze.
“How come you read my essay from 1945?” It was the first question his father had asked him since they’d set out, and he couldn’t detect whether it was mistrustful or merely curious.
“I did a favor for a colleague at the Tageblatt and he sent me a copy of your piece. I’m guessing he checked in the archives to see if there was anything that might interest me.”
His father nodded.
“Were you afraid when you were advising the Confessional Church?”
His father uncrossed his legs, stretched them in front of him, and propped himself on his elbows. It looked uncomfortable and clearly was, because after a time he sat up again and went back to sitting cross-legged. “For a long time I intended to write something about fear. But when I retired and had the time, I didn’t do it.”
5
The concert began at five. When they parked at four thirty in front of the castle in which the concert was taking place in the great hall, most of the parking spots were empty. He suggested they use the time before the concert began to take a walk in the castle gardens. But his father was insistent, so they sat down in the front row of the empty hall and waited.
“It’s the first time Ruegen has organized a Bach festival.”
“People need time to get used to everything. At first they had to get used to Bach’s music too. You know it was Mendelssohn who discovered him and reintroduced him in the nineteenth century?” His father talked about Bach and Mendelssohn, about the evolution of the Suite as an assemblage of dances in the sixteenth century, about the appearance of the name Partita alongside Suite in the seventeenth century, about Bach’s suites and partitas as the works in which he emphasized lightness, about the early drafts of some of the suites in the Little Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, about the origin of the French Suites, the English Suites, and the Partitas between 1720 and 1730, about the three French Suites in minor keys and the three in major keys, and their various movements. He talked animatedly, enjoying his own knowledge and his son’s attentiveness, and stressed how much he looked forward to the concert.
A young pianist whom neither father nor son had ever heard of played with cold precision, as if the tones were numbers and as if the suites were calculations. His bow to the small audience at the end of his performance was just as cold.
“Would he have played with more heart in front of a larger audience?”
“No, he thinks that’s how Bach is to be played. He thinks the way we like hearing Bach is sentimental. But isn’t it splendid? No interpretation can harm Bach, not even this one. Not even being used as a ringtone—I’m sitting in the tram, I hear a cell phone, and it’s still Bach and it’s still good.” The father was talking warmly. On their way to the hotel he compared Richter’s and Schiff’s and Fellner’s and Gould’s and Jarrett’s interpretations of the French Suites and the son was as impressed by his father’s knowledge as he was alienated by the sheer flow of words that kept pouring on and on—uninterruptedly, obliviously, impervious to any question or comment. It was like his father was talking to himself.
Over dinner it just went on. The father turned from the interpretation of the French Suites to that of the masses, oratorios, and passions. When the son finally returned from a long visit to the toilet, the flood of words had ceased, but the father’s animation, his joy and warmth, had vanished along with it. The son ordered a second bottle of red wine and was prepared to get a comment from the father about extravagance and gluttony. But the father accepted another glass gladly.
“Where do you get your love for Bach?”
“What a question!”
The son didn’t give up. “There are reasons why one person loves Mozart and another loves Beethoven and the third one loves Brahms. What interests me is why you love Bach.”
Once again the father sat upright, one leg crossed over the other, arms on the chair arms and the hands dangling down, head bent, and the hint of a smile. He was staring into the blue. The son observed the father’s face, the high forehead under a still-full head of gray hair, the deep grooves above the nose and running from the nose to the corners of the mouth, the pronounced cheekbones and flabby cheeks, the thin lips, the tired mouth and strong chin. It was a good face, the son could see that, but he didn’t see what lay behind it, which worries had carved the furrows in the forehead, which ones had made the mouth weary, why the gaze was empty.
“Bach made me …” He shook his head and started again. “Your grandmother was a sparkling, capricious woman, and your grandfather a conscientious bureaucrat, not devoid of …”
Again he stopped. The son had visited the grandmother in a home with his father several times; she sat in a wheelchair, didn’t speak, and from a conversation between father and doctor he gleaned an impression that she was depressed in her old age. He hadn’t ever consciously known his grandfather. Why couldn’t the father talk about his parents? “Bach reconciles opposites. The light and the dark, the strong and the weak, the past …” He shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps it was just that with Bach I learned to play the piano. For two years I was allowed to play nothing but études, and after that the Little Notebook was a gift from heaven.”
“You played the piano? Why don’t you play anymore? When did you stop?”
“I wanted to take lessons again when I retired, but it didn’t happen.” He stood up. “Shall we take a walk along the beach after breakfast tomorrow? I think Mama packed me a suitable pair of pants.” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder for a moment. “Good night, my boy.”
6
When he thought back later about the trip with his father, the Saturday was all blue sky and blue sea, sand and cliffs, beach and pine woods, fields and music.
They set off after breakfast, he in jeans and a shirt again with his sneakers over his shoulder; his father in pale linen trousers, a sweater around his hips, and sandals in his hand. When the sand came to an end, they put on their shoes. They made good progress and after several hours they reached the Cape. They didn’t talk. When he asked his father if he’d really like to keep going or would rather turn back, h
is father only shook his head.
At the Cape they rested, again without talking, called a taxi to take them home, sat silently in it, and looked out at the landscape. In the hotel they relaxed until it was time to go to the concert in town. The school hall was full, and father and son were united wordlessly in their pleasure at the energy that the players brought to the music. “I’m glad they’re playing the Fourth Brandenburg with flutes, not recorders,” was his father’s only comment.
In the hotel they ate a light, late supper, hoped for good weather the next day, planned an expedition to the chalk cliffs after breakfast, and wished each other a good night.
He took the half-full bottle of wine to his room with him and sat out on the balcony. His shared time with his father had been as wordless as the father’s and daughter’s work together at the end of the movie. But it had felt more like a silent truce than wordless intimacy; his father didn’t want to be pressured again, he wanted to be left in peace, and he had left him in peace. Why did his questions pressure his father? Because he didn’t want to turn his insides out, particularly in front of his son? Because his insides, where the doors and windows had never been opened, were all shriveled and dead, and he didn’t know what his son wanted of him? Because he’d grown up before psychoanalysis and psychotherapy had made revelations a daily occurrence and he had no language to communicate his inner feelings? Because whatever he’d done and whatever happened to him, from his two marriages to his professional obligations before and after 1945, he saw in it such a continuity that it was in fact the same and there was nothing to say about it?
He would talk to his father again tomorrow. Wordless intimacy had been too much to hope for. Nor could he hope for loquacious intimacy. But he wanted to reach him. After his death he wanted to have more of him than a photograph on the desk and memories he could have done without.