Granta 125: After the War (13 page)

S
een from behind, the women’s hairdos were sitting cats. Why do I have to say sitting cats to describe hair?

Everything always became something else. At first unobtrusively something else, if you just happened to look at it. But then demonstrably something else when you had to find the right words to describe it. If you want to be precise in your description, you have to find something completely different within the sentence to allow you to be precise.

Every woman in the village had a long, thick plait. The plait was folded back on itself and directed vertically upwards, and a rounded horn comb kept it standing proud above the middle of the head. The teeth of the horn comb vanished into the hair, and only the corners of its curved edge peeked out like small, pointed ears. With those ears and the thick plait, the back of the women’s heads looked like a cat sitting bolt upright.

These vagabond qualities that turned one object into another were unpredictable. They distorted one’s perception in the blink of an eye, made of it what they wished. Every thin branch swimming in the water resembled a water snake. Because of my constant fear of snakes I have been afraid of water. Not out of fear of drowning, but out of fear of snake wood, I never learned to swim for fear of scrawny, swimming branches. The imagined snakes had a more powerful effect than real ones could have, they were in my thoughts whenever I saw the river.

And whenever funerals approached the cemetery the bell was sounded. One long tug on the rope followed by the small bell with its rapid, urgent ringing – for me that was the cemetery snake that
lured people towards death with its saccharine tongue, and the dead towards the caress of the grave. And those caresses soothed the dead, you could sense it from the breath of wind in the cemetery. What soothed the dead revolted me. The more it revolted me, the more I had to think about it. For there was always a breeze, always some cool or warm and dry wind. I was distressed by it. But instead of hurrying, only my breath came in a rush, and I carried the water slowly, watered the flowers slowly, lingered. Those imagined objects in my head with their vagabond qualities may have been an addiction. I was constantly looking for them, so they came looking for me. They ran after me like a mob, as if my fear could feed them. But they probably fed me, gave an image to my fear. And images, above all threatening ones, don’t have to console, and therefore they don’t have to disappoint, and therefore they never shatter. You can conjure up the same image again and again in your head. Thoroughly familiar, it becomes a support. The repetition made it new every time, and took care of me.

When my best friend came to say goodbye the day before I emigrated, as we embraced thinking we would never see each other again, because I would not be allowed back into the country and she would never be allowed out – as my friend was saying goodbye, we couldn’t tear ourselves apart. She went to the door three times and each time she came back. Only after the third time did she leave, walking in a steady rhythm the length of the road. It was a straight road, so I could see her bright jacket getting smaller and smaller, and strangely enough becoming more garish as she went into the distance. I don’t know, did the winter sun shine, it was February, did my eyes shine with tears, or did the material of her jacket gleam – one thing I do know: my eyes followed my friend and, as she walked away, her back shimmered like a silver spoon. So I was able to sum up our separation intuitively in two words. I called it silver spoon. And that was the simplest, most precise way to describe the whole event.

I don’t trust language. At best I know from my own experience that, to be precise, it must always take something that doesn’t belong to it. I have no idea why verbal images are so light-fingered, why the
most valid comparison steals qualities it’s not entitled to. The surprise comes about only through invention, and time and again it proves true that one gets close to the truth only with the invented surprise in the sentence. Only when one perception steals from another, one object seizes and uses the substance of another – only when that which is impossible in real life has become plausible in the sentence can the sentence hold its own before reality.

My mother believed that in our family fate always intervened during winter. When she emigrated with me from Rumania it was winter, February. Twenty years ago.

A couple of days before departure, one was allowed to send seventy kilos of luggage per person in advance from the customs post near the border. The luggage had to be packed in a large wooden crate with prescribed measurements. The village carpenter built it out of pale acacia wood.

I had completely forgotten this emigration crate. I hadn’t given it a thought since 1987, since I got to Berlin. But then there came a time when I had to think about it for days on end, for it played an important role in world events. Our emigration crate made history, it was at the centre of world events, it had become a celebrity, was on television for days on end. What with one thing and another, when objects become independent, when in your head they slide for no reason whatsoever into other things, ever more into other things, the better your head knows that they have absolutely nothing to do with these other things: so I kept seeing our emigration crate on television because the Pope had died. His coffin looked just like the emigration crate. Then the whole emigration resurfaced.

At four in the morning my mother and I left on a lorry with the emigration crate. The journey to the customs post was five or six hours. We sat on the floor of the trailer and sheltered behind the crate. The night was ice cold, the moon was rocking up and down, your eyeballs felt too bulky, like frozen fruit in your forehead. Blinking was painful, as if a dusting of frost were in your eyes. At first the rocking of the moon was mild and gently curved, then it got colder, it began
to sting, had been sharpened to a point. The night was not dark, but transparent, the snow seemed like a reflection of daylight. It was too cold to talk on this journey. You don’t want to keep opening your mouth if your gums are freezing. I wasn’t about to breathe a word. And then I had to speak, because my mother, perhaps intending only to mutter to herself, said out loud:

‘It’s always the same snow.’

She was referring to January 1945 and her deportation to the Soviet Union for forced labour. There were sixteen-year-olds on the Russians’ lists. Many people hid. My mother spent four days in a hole in the ground in the neighbour’s garden, behind the barn. Then the snow came. They couldn’t bring her food in secret any more, every step between house, barn and hole in the ground became visible. Throughout the village, the way to every hiding place could be seen in all that snow. Footsteps could be read in the garden. People were denounced by the snow. Not just my mother, many people had to abandon their hiding places voluntarily, forced out voluntarily by the snow. And that meant five years in the work camp. My mother never forgave the snow.

Later, my grandmother said to me, ‘You can’t imitate freshly fallen snow, you can’t rearrange snow so it looks undisturbed. You can rearrange earth,’ she said, ‘sand, even grass, if you take the trouble, water rearranges itself because it swallows everything including itself and closes over once it has swallowed. And air,’ she said, ‘is always arranged, because you can’t even see it.’

Hence every substance other than snow would have remained silent. And to this day my mother believes the thick snow was mainly responsible for her being carted off. She felt that the snow fell on the village as if it knew where it was, as if it were at home here. But then it behaved like a stranger, straight away at the service of the Russians. Snow is a white betrayal. That is exactly what my mother meant by her sentence: It’s always the same snow.

My mother never said the word
BETRAYAL
, she didn’t need to. The word
BETRAYAL
was there because she didn’t say it. And the
word
BETRAYAL
even grew over the years the more she told her story without using the word
BETRAYAL
, in repeated sentences always with the same formulations that had no need of the word
BETRAYAL
. Much later, when I had long known the stories of being carted off, it occurred to me that by dint of systematic avoidance the word
BETRAYAL
had become monstrous in the telling, in fact so fundamental that, had you wished, you could have summed up the entire story with the words
SNOW BETRAYAL
. The experience was so powerful that in the years to come perfectly common words were sufficient to tell the story, no abstractions, no exaggerations.

SNOW BETRAYAL
is my phrase, and it’s like
SILVER SPOON
. For long, complicated stories, a simple word contains so much that’s unspoken because it avoids all details. Countless possibilities stretch out in the listener’s imagination, because such words curtail the course of the action to a single point. A phrase such as
SNOW BETRAYAL
allows many comparisons, because none has been made. A phrase like that leaps out of the sentence, as if made of a different material. I call this material: the trick with language. I am always afraid of this trick with language, and yet it’s addictive. Afraid because, as I am engaged in the sleight of hand, I feel that if the trick succeeds, something beyond the words will become true. Because I am taken up for so long with succeeding, it is as if I wanted to prevent it. And because I know the gap between success and failure swings like a jump rope, I know that in this instance it is the temples and not the feet that are jumping. Invented by means of the trick, and therefore entirely artificially, a phrase like
SNOW BETRAYAL
resonates. The material it is made of changes and becomes no different from a natural physical sensation.

I was responsible for the first betrayal I can remember: the betrayal with the calf. I had two calves in my head, and I measured one calf against the other, if not there would have been no betrayal. One calf was carried into the room, the other calf’s foot was broken. One calf was carried into the room shortly after it was born and placed on the sofa in front of my grandfather’s bed. My grandfather had lain paralysed in this bed for years. And for fully half an hour
he looked at the newborn calf in total silence with piercing, greedy eyes. I sat on the sofa at the foot of the bed and at the foot of the calf. And I watched my grandfather. Sympathy for him almost broke my heart, just as I was repulsed by his gaze. It was a thieving gaze, aimed directly at the calf, it stretched tight like a glass string in the air between bed and calf. It was a look in which the pupils shone like freshly soldered metal droplets. An obscene, despairing admiration that consumed the calf with the eyes. My grandfather could only see the new calf, he couldn’t see me – thank God. For I could feel how all-consuming that gaze was, how shameless. What hunger in the eyes, I thought. Then
HUNGER IN THE EYES
was another phrase that kept coming into my head.

That was one calf. The other calf had its foot broken with an axe just after it was born, so that we could slaughter it. Killing calves was forbidden. They had to be handed over to the state after a couple of weeks, once they had reached the right weight. Only in the case of an accident did the vet allow enforced slaughter, and then one was allowed to keep and eat the meat. When my father explained the accident with the calf to the vet, how the cow had placed its heavy foot on the calf, I shouted, ‘You’re lying, you did it yourself with the axe!’

I was seven years old, I knew from my parents that one should never lie. But I also knew that the state is bad, and that it locked people up in prison because they told the truth. I knew too that the vet was a stranger in the village, against us and for the state. I almost caused my father to go to prison because he instinctively trusted me to distinguish between the lies that were not allowed at home and the white lies that were permitted because so much was forbidden. Once the vet had gone, after a hefty bribe, I understood, without knowing the word, what I had done, what betrayal is. I felt scorched. I felt sick from head to toe.

For years we had faithfully handed over every calf to the state. Now we wanted to eat veal. That’s what it was about. But it was also about several principles, which got confused. Lies, truth and dignity. It was permissible to lie to the state whenever possible, because it was
the only way to get your due, this I knew. My father’s lie was effective, it was flexible, and necessary too. So what was it that caused me to betray my father in front of this vet? I was thinking of the other calf in my paternal grandparents’ house, the one the selfsame father carried from the stall into the room in his arms and placed on the velvet sofa. The calf on the sofa was not beautiful, because a calf has no place on a sofa. It was ugly, the way it just lay there, even if it could do nothing about the fact that it was a calf on a velvet sofa, that it was being so spoiled. But the calf whose foot had been broken with the axe was beautiful. Not out of pity, because we wanted to slaughter it. If you want to eat meat, you have to slaughter – no, the calf was beautiful precisely because we couldn’t slaughter it but were obliged to put it on show and torment it. To my peasant eyes, that turned it into an impressive creature. Countless times every day I watched without the slightest problem as chickens, hares or goats were slaughtered. I knew how young cats were drowned, dogs slain, rats poisoned. But an unfamiliar feeling came over me because of the broken foot, I was taken by the natural beauty of the calf, its almost notoriously mawkish innocence, a kind of pain on witnessing the abuse. My father could have ended up in prison. Prison – the word struck me like a knife, in the emptiness of my betrayal my heart pounded up to my brow.