Leavetaking (8 page)

making the fact of my not belonging a source of power for a new independence. Before we left the country and began our journeyings across many frontiers Margit died. On the day her dying began our house was like a greenhouse in the muggy heat before a thunderstorm. My brothers and sisters squabbled and fought among themselves, my mother, tormented by headaches, lay on her bed in the darkened bedroom and shouted for quiet. Entangled in each other like a pack of foxes my sisters and my younger brother rolled into the corridor and my mother stormed out of her room with a tennis racket in her raised hand, her face crimson and her disheveled hair streaming. The combatants scattered, I heard their footsteps fleeing along the stifling corridor and heard Margit calling, Mama’s got cramps, Mama’s got cramps. Those were the last words I ever heard her speak. The door of the flat was wrenched open, the footsteps died away in the echoing well of the staircase and all was quiet again. After a while I too went outside. My sisters had disappeared, my brother was gliding slowly up and down the white-hot avenue on his roller skates. In glum boredom I slouched through the streets and arrived back later in front of our house, leaned against the porch underneath our balcony, drummed out a rumba rhythm on the rough crumbling surface of the masonry and hummed la cucaracha, la cucaracha. Suddenly I heard my name being called, a soundless cry, yet I had heard it, not so much a cry as an atmospheric disturbance, a breath of cold, and I looked up to the balustrade of the balcony where Irene was leaning out, her face white and
her mouth strangely twisted as if laughing, on the yellow wall between us. Then I heard Irene whispering, Margit has been run over. I rushed into the house, the door of our flat was wide open, I saw my mother standing in the depths of the hall. Ceaselessly she rubbed her hand across her face, which seemed to have gone to pieces, and without pause from her mouth came a stammering, everything’s all blood, everything’s all blood, everything’s all blood. Lined up before her in the hallway stood my younger brother, Elfriede, and Irene, turned to stone while in flight, like playing statues, Irene still half flying, just back from the balcony, Elfriede canted sideways and looking up at me, my brother crouched down, staring up at my mother. And all the time my mother was brushing her hand across her face and her eyes were shut and her lips murmured, Everything’s all blood, all blood, all blood. From out of her numbness Elfriede whispered to me that Margit was in the hospital and that they were waiting for my father to arrive. From outdoors came the sound of a car braking to a stop, right afterward my father’s hurrying steps on the stairs, he ran past us, leaning forward with his coat flapping, put his arm around my mother, supported her and propelled her at his side out onto the landing. Her face was unrecognizable. We held our breath as they went out. That evening my two elder brothers came and we went together to the hospital, I walking between them. Silently we walked through the dusk, saturated with exhaust fumes, and showers of coldness ran over me. In silence we crossed the broad tree-planted forecourt of the hospital and up
in the tall red façade nurses were leaning out of windows and shaking blankets and beating mattresses. In silence we approached Margit’s bed and the shuddering coldness gave way to a trembling that ran right through me. My sister’s head was tightly swathed in bandages, plaster concealed her cheeks and her squashed nose was stretched in a wire frame. Her grazed hands opened and contracted. A groan escaped her mouth but it sounded as if muffled by a gag. She’s unconscious, whispered a nurse in a wide black robe. Her words were meant to console us but what comfort was there in the face of the frightful convulsion which suddenly brought Margit’s body rearing up into a high arc, what was the use of such consolation when I could see my sister arching upward resting only on her head and toes as if stretching out in an ecstasy of voluptuousness to receive a lover, constructing a bridge between life and death. The blankets slid off her and I saw the bright smooth belly that I had felt against my body, I saw the tiny breasts I had caressed, I saw the soft curve of her womb which I had pressed with my body. The trembling came upon me, next day as I stood before the easel in my room and painted my first large picture. Three figures in white costumes, doctors or judges, loomed up out of the black background, their faces were bowed in an oppressive severity, their lowered glances refused all mercy. I painted on the following day also, still shaking with cold, and when Gottfried came into my room I had just finished the final strokes. In silence Gottfried looked at me and I knew that it was at an end. We went through
the warm, dark streets. In the sickroom my parents were sitting hand in hand at the death bed. In the background the Catholic nurse moved about like a large black bird. A candle was burning on the bedside table. Trembling, I stood in front of the immovable, the extinguished. I felt as if I were floating a few inches above the floor. The bandages and the wire frame had been removed from the grazed face. It was a yellowed, squashed, completely strange face. The eyes had sunk deep into their hollows. The dead hands were folded over her chest, they were like the tapering, carved hands of a Gothic sculpture. A black crucifix, huge and incongruous, lay beneath the stiffened fingers. My parents too were like statues submerged in the half dark. My mother lay back completely exhausted in the open car as we slowly drove home. Home. There was no home any longer. The journey into the unknown had begun. Like survivors of a shipwreck in a boat we drove through the gently surging ocean of the city. Next morning I saw Margit once again. She was laid out on a slab in the hospital mortuary. Her eye sockets were covered with cotton batting. Her neatly brushed hair had lost its sheen. A fly crawled over her brow. I shooed the fly away and in doing so brushed against Margit’s hair. My hand jerked back, her hair was so cold. I had never imagined that hair could be so cold. In the days that followed when the windows of our flat were draped and the curtains lifted like dark sails in the slightest breeze one could hear only now and then a whispering and a tapping of footsteps on tiptoe on the landing. My mother sat motionless in a chair, with
limply drooping arms like a clay figure. Once the pastor came. My father carried on an almost inaudible discussion with him about the memorial sermon that the unknown pastor was to read over the finished life of someone he had not known. My brothers, my sister, and I, the survivors, stood around the room and did not dare to look at each other, I noticed how Irene’s face sometimes sought mine, but I avoided her glance for I knew that I would have to laugh if our eyes had met. The pastor and my father sat in the deep armchairs, the pastor leaned over toward my father, my father’s voice murmured, the pastor jotted down a few notes, wanted him to name some typical quality, a phrase that would sum up the essence of Margit’s being, and I caught the word sunshine. She was a ray of sunshine to us all, the pastor said, and he tried out the sentence on his tongue. My father nodded dumbly. Gottfried had taken charge of negotiating with the undertakers. The coffin, the tombstone, the flowers had been chosen, the musical program to accompany the ceremony had been decided. I followed Gottfried to the funeral parlor. Margit’s body was already hidden in the coffin and the top screwed down over her. The coffin was lifted into the hearse, the hearse drove off to the graveyard with Margit shut into her coffin and with Gottfried and myself sitting next to the driver. Through the glass window of the hearse behind me I could see the white coffin laden with wreaths and bunches of flowers. The vibrations of the moving vehicle made the coffin shake, and inside the coffin my dead sister’s body shook in concert. At the funeral
service we sat packed closely together in the narrow chapel pews. When the pastor’s voice had died away and the sound of the word sunshine thrust into me like a knife for the last time, and when the last prayer had evaporated into the rotting scent of the flowers and wreaths and we had all dazedly worked our way out of the pews, my mother got stuck between the hassock and the armrest. My father and Gottfried rushed to her rescue and pulled her out sideways. Outside spots of sunlight were dancing. With strong bending and stretching out of arms, with arched backs and muscle-play beneath jackets, with their tensed thighs thrust forward the black-coated men lowered the white coffin down on ropes into the black hole in the earth. The pastor filled a shovel with sand, it was a little green shovel like the one we had to play with in the sandpit. My mother stood hidden behind a thick black veil supported by my father and Gottfried. From the ranks of the mourners a girl of Margit’s age stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied to her and withdrew into the background, whereupon a second girl stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied to her and withdrew into the background, whereupon a third girl stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied and withdrew, whereupon a fourth girl stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied and withdrew, whereupon a fifth and a sixth girl and more girls and even more girls stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied before her and withdrew, until all the girls from Margit’s class had come forward, shaken hands with my mother, curtsied
to her and returned again to their places. On the way back we sat squashed together in one car. I crouched on the floor, Irene half lay over me, my younger brother almost disappeared between my father and my mother, my father’s knees dug into my chest and Gottfried’s knees were thrust into my back. My face was streaming with sweat. Outside the summery streets flew past and there someone stood in the dust, looking after us. This was the beginning of the break-up of our family. Soon this trip in which once again we clung together was at an end, soon my stepbrothers got out and left us, soon the city lay behind us, and after that the country in which I had grown up, and a new life in a foreign country began. For many years still the outward structure of the family was to be kept intact in the carefully preserved home. Among silver-green willow trees of an English landscape, home was set up in a red brick house; in the mean-natured narrowness of a Bohemian industrial city, home was set up in a dirty, yellow-colored villa; the last time home was set up, it was in a large, dark brown wooden house on the shores of a Swedish lake, and there the decline that had begun with my sister’s death reached its conclusion. Our home was kept going by my parents but even their dying had begun, even their dying had begun with my sister’s death. My sister’s death was the beginning of my attempts to free myself from my past. There were periods when I raged and stormed about, the suppressed revolt flared up and cursed the old forces that had dominated me and lashed out, but the blows fell wide of their aim and the insults reached no one’s
ears. Hatred and violence were no longer of any use, the opportunities had been missed, the enemies were no longer tangible. I did not know where the enemy was concealed. I did not know what had happened to me. I was furious with myself for only in myself were there unprotected flanks to attack, only in myself was the past contained and I was the custodian of the past. Past events rose up in me like a gasping for breath, like the pressure of a straitjacket, the past would hem me around in a slow, black seepage of hours, and then suddenly recede and become nothing and allow a brief glimpse of freedom. Then I saw my parents and was full of sympathy and compassion. They had given us all that they had to give, they had given us food and clothing and a civilized home, they had given us their security and their orderliness and they could not understand why we did not thank them for it. They could never understand why we drifted away from them. In the confused knowledge of having made mistakes they bought themselves off with expensive presents, birthdays and bank holidays were the days fixed for paying out their unconscious guilt. And the presents were always wrong, however much we received we always stood there with dissatisfied faces asking for more. We never got what we wanted to have and we did not know what we wanted to have. Thus we confronted each other, children dissatisfied, parents insulted. And we were unable to explain ourselves to each other. And this obstacle I took over into myself. I took over my parents’ misunderstanding. My parents’ embarrassment became my embarrassment.
Their voices live on in me. I chastised and beat myself and drove myself to forced labor. Again and again the swamp fever of inadequacy gripped me. There I was again, a failure at school, sitting locked into my room, and the warm seething life outside was unattainable. There sat my mother next to me and heard me repeat my lessons and I could get nothing right. Schwein is pig, pig comes from to pick—pick, pick, pick, and she took hold of me by the scruff of the neck and pressed my nose into the vocabulary book, pick, pick, pick, so now perhaps you’ll remember it. I remembered it. At times I could be startled out of my dream, still feeling the grip of my mother’s hand on my neck, still feel the slap of my mother’s hand on my cheek, and hear her furious voice, see her index finger next to me travel down the keys of the piano, to point out to me the correct note, the note that I was unable to find, and she did not find it either, her finger missed its mark, the dissonance still shrills in my ears. And I take my mother’s hands and put them aside and my hand strokes her hands and I see my mother sitting under the floor lamp, her hands busy with pieces of clothing, her hands active, a whole lifetime at our torn stockings, shirts, and trousers, her hands, devoted a whole lifetime to caring for us, her hands a whole lifetime holding us, cleaning us, disciplining us, and suddenly these hands lie down tired, suddenly they have served their time, and her face, lit up by the floor lamp, stared in front of her, and her mouth opened and the hard lines of her face relaxed, and the face listened for the incomprehensible, and the face’s
listening is so intense that it takes on a look of nameless astonishment. This had always been a part of her, the fear of being stricken dumb, of becoming paralyzed, a fear that she resisted with all her energy, and which made her domineering and angry, and which at times overcame her with sudden fainting attacks. As if struck by a terrible blow she would sink to the ground, where she then lay, a ghastly sight, like a mountain, and as she aged these states came slowly and stiflingly, lay across her chest, encased her joints with lead, deadened the power of her voice. In her diary I found the following entry, Had a dreadful dream. Mamma took me by the hand and proudly introduced me to all the people in a large room. Then we came into a hall, where on a raised dais a bluish-red eagle sat. Everyone shut into the room was led up to it and the eagle slowly forced its talons into his mouth and ripped out his tongue. I too was led there. I woke with a loud scream. My mother once said to me, you’ve always been a stranger to me, I’ll never be able to understand you. To hear this was harder than to suffer her blows. The need to be embraced by her was not yet dead. There was one event that revealed the nervous tension in our relationship. After the period we had spent in the house in the park, we had moved to a new house. Friends of my parents had decided to celebrate our moving by a surprise party and on the evening for which this was arranged, my mother, who knew nothing of the preparation, was invited to the house of other people in the know. In ghostly haste the friends took over the house, and while they covered themselves in