An Offering for the Dead (10 page)

"If you at least were a woman," he then said in a very altered voice. I felt very sorry for him. I did not dare speak, because he would have noticed my pity.

"Earlier, as you know," I let him go on, "there was nothing I gave less thought to than marriage, and I found the idea of children highly repulsive. Not that my taste has changed on this point, but it stands to reason that we have to figure out how to create a bit more life around us. By the way, who knows whether we are still even capable of procreating. Perhaps this fine gift too has been taken from us. It would be worth the try. But for that, we need a woman. If only one of them had been sensible enough not to become a bird. It astounds me altogether: for behind their nonsensical fuss, women generally knew which side their bread was buttered on. Or did you encounter one in the fog, which made you fail to notice all these things, because you were having your fun with her? That would be just like you."

I pitied him more and more. I could not listen to the way he now yammered for a woman while couching his words.

"What is even worse," he continued, "is that we have been deprived of the freedom to decide on our end. How are we to kill ourselves? We have no weapons. This puddle here is too shallow to drown in. The walls are too soft to smash our heads against. There is no place to drive in a nail to hang ourselves from. In short, we are trapped."

"Fine," I pulled myself together. "Let us first look around for a woman?"

"Where do you intend to find one?" he quickly broke in. "Did you see it too?"

I did not know what he meant. He whispered to me that on the way, before getting completely lost in the fog, he had spotted a whole throng of figures on the opposite riverbank. There had also been women among them. Apparently, they had been just as astonished as he to witness that spectacle of humans fleeing into a bird existence. Highly desirous of discussing it with them, he had looked for a bridge. And he had found one. "Heaven only knows how it got there. It had not been there earlier, nor did it belong there. I stepped on to it gingerly. Yes, it held, it was really a bridge. But when I was halfway across, those stupid creatures noticed me and scurried off across a meadow, shrieking all the while."

"Why did you not chase after them?" I asked.

"I will tell you why, my friend. Suddenly, the bridge no longer struck me as being quite all there. And I was right. Believe it or not, the second half was missing, and I very nearly tumbled into the river. Why was the construction not completed? And how did the one half of that bridge manage to hover aloft in the first place? At any rate, I swiftly doubled back."

"They scurried away from you, shrieking?" I asked.

"Yes, they were apparently afraid of me." Then he leaned over very close to me, peering into my eyes. "What is your view of the matter?"

"They must have been corpses," I replied.

He heaved a sigh of satisfaction. "Yes, that is my opinion too. But why were they frightened, those stupid creatures? It used to be the other way around: the living were scared of the dead. But these people seemed to be shouting: Help! Here comes a living person! And why was no one guarding them? We were always told that there was a vicious dog and a ferryman. What terrible lies they always told us, even about such things, yet it would not have been necessary. But no matter, we cannot get a woman from there. And if they were really dead, what am I to do with a dead woman?" He spit again. Whatever had become of his good manners.

I got to my feet. He too instantly leaped up. "Where are you going?" he cried. I am not saying that he clung to me, but he practically did.

"Stay seated here and watch me," I calmed him down. "I am only going over there. The wall looks steeper and drier there. Perhaps the clay is exactly right for shaping a woman out of it."

"For me?"

"Yes, for you." Then I walked around the pond and tested the other wall to see whether the mass could be kneaded. It went fairly well, and I got to work on the spot. I wanted to mold the woman out of the wall. But I was soon so deeply immersed that I would have forgotten all about my friend if he had not drawn my attention by calling to me. "Well, how is it going?" he shouted from behind me. "Will it work?" But I did not reply. I was perspiring from the strain. I wanted to do as good a job as possible.

Actually, he talked the whole time. And no sooner were the first outlines of a Woman visible in the wall than he began to criticize me. "Do hot make her too big," he admonished me. "Otherwise, she Will thrash us soundly. Do not make her legs too short, I cannot stand short legs. Is she going to be blonde or dark? No matter; in any event, go all the way, you might as well make he
_r
young and pretty. What should we do with an ugly woman? We have enough of them as it is. Hey, look, her breasts have to be further up." But I ignored him and did what I could.

Then words of appreciation also came from his lips.

"Damn it, you do have the knack. Something is coming of it. She is damn attractive. Do you have some model in mind? Forget it, I do not want to know."

But I stuck to my purpose. I kept molding the woman indefatigably.

All at once, he stood at my side. I was so startled that I nearly botched up my work. There was something nasty in his voice. "Tell me, my friend, for whom are you making her?" "For you," I answered.

"So, for me? Ah, how selfless!" he jeered. "And what do
you
intend to do? Have you saved something better for yourself? You do not mean to tell me that you are going to leave me this woman and go empty-handed yourself?"

I thought it best to let him speak his piece without my replying. "I have been watching you, my friend," he went on in the same tone. "How you felt her up! Were you thinking of me? Do you believe that this creature will ever forget how you molded her breasts and thighs? Oh, you people! At times, you cannot even count up to three, but you succeed in something like this, of all things. It comes so easily to you people. You know very well that she will run after you like a puppy. These creatures cannot get away from their creator."

"That is not true," I cried out, becoming indignant myself. "On the contrary, they hate him because he did not make them perfect and he knows their flaws."

"But it sounds good: I am making this for you," he kept talking, unfazed. "Thanks, but no thanks! Being dependent on your generosity in this respect does not appeal to me." Turning his back on me, he walked to the other side of the pond. He was truly like an obstinate child.

The woman was completed. That is, she still had to be separated from the wall, to which she was attached through her spine. But that would have been easy to do. Before going about it, I wanted to check my work once again from a distance. That was why I followed my friend.

"Do be reasonable," I told him. "She is not even alive." That placated him a bit. "Yes, it is ridiculous fighting over
a lump of clay," he conceded. "Du you think that she will come alive?"

"It is not impossible. We have to wait and see." The two of us sat down in our old places and looked over at the woman. He kept talking uninterruptedly. I did not care to tell him that it would be better to wait in silence. He would again have suspected something to his detriment.

First he resumed praising the woman, and in rather uncouth words at that. He wanted to hide the fact that he was beginning to like her. Then he racked his brain trying to figure out what to dress her in. "With our rags perhaps?" This brought him back to our appearance. "We are nothing to write home about. I would not be surprised if she rejected both of us. On the contrary, my compliments! What could such ragamuffins offer her." Eventually, he suggested that we should let her choose, and that the rejected one should give his word of honor that he would disappear forever. "He can join the dead. It may not be so bad there, and they are not so far away. As regards me, you know that I always keep my word. Not out of noble-mindedness — this would not get us very far. But for reasons of common sense. After what has happened, it makes no sense fighting over a woman. So, how about it? Why are you reddening?"

I had not been listening, I had been gazing silently at the figure the whole time. It was only this last question that caught my attention. You see, while he was talking, it had looked to me as if the woman were beginning to come alive. Soon I believed I noticed a twitching in her legs, as if she were trying to lift her foot from the ground. Then again, it was as if her chest and belly were rising and she were breathing. One need only have called her by a name, and she would have started walking towards us.

Above all, however, she seemed to be turning rosy. I
rubbed my eyes, and to make sure I was not mistaken, I glanced behind me and above me to see whether the fog had retreated and whether the sun was coming through. But we were surrounded by the same colorless monotony as before.

Thus when I heard the question, "Why are you reddening?" I knew that the rosy glow was emanating from the woman. "Keep quiet and look!" I hissed at my friend.

He looked too; but, unexpectedly, he began laughing cruelly. It was like a murder. The glow instantly vanished.

"You did not make her a navel," he shouted, leaping up. And before I could stop him, he ran over to her.

"How can she have a navel if she was not born of a mother," I called out, chasing after him. But he was faster, and it was already too late. I was only halfway there, then the horrible thing happened.

He stood facing her, stretching out his forefinger to drill a navel into her belly. "Run away!" I shouted, but he was no longer listening. The woman took a step towards him. It looked as if he were pulling her towards him on his forefinger. Then she leaned over him very gradually and with soft movements, first out of tenderness and then as if she were unconscious. The last thing I saw of my friend was the way his hands braced against her, trying to fend her off But her body fell on top of him, pulling along the entire wall, from which it was not yet detached.

Thus, he was buried.

I did not yet see that the collapse of the wall had created a way out, which would lead to the people, among whom I am now standing. I could not see it because my eyes were confused. I can therefore report no details. Perhaps it is very shameful and ought to remain concealed, so that I need not blush about it in a lonely hour and my weakness need not arouse my false anger.

It may be that I threw myself into the pit and grubbed about in the soft earth in order to dig out my friend. It may be that tears of fright dripped from my closed eyes. And that this ground, on which, standing erect, I was used to measuring my size, yielded beneath me inexorably. Yes, I must have fallen into timelessness. As if the strings on which a puppet moved had all ripped. Nothing was left and there was nothing solid for me to grab hold of. I searched for something familiar that I could join, while simultaneously hoping I would not find it. In the twinkling of an eye, I had definitively sunk away from my past. All the houses, the cities, the countries that I had ever experienced were blasted to nothingness by the whirlwind of my plunge. The earth was merely a nebula through which I fell. I sank more swiftly. The millennia whirled past me like shreds of clouds. Faster and faster. I wanted to scream, yes. I was filled to bursting with a scream. But there was no air for me to utter the scream. I would probably have burst with pain if I had not been finally caught by a gentle unconsciousness that released me from the pain. All I could say was: "I am lost."

But it may also be that I only said this to that woman in whose room I was, who gazed at me from the mirror, and in whose eyes I had to experience all this. I would then have almost been forced to keep talking in an old-fashioned style, the way storytellers used to talk. "And he knelt down before her and buried his countenance in her lap. But she ..." She must have done what any woman would do if something like that happened to her. Such sentences arouse the delight of young people, because they believe that this is what life is all about, and they hope that they too will someday act like that.

Surely I did not kneel down. Yet something similar to what the storytellers mean to say must have occurred. However, be that as it may, a man in shock does not act according to the customs of his time.

At this point, I might pause in my account in order to collect my thoughts, and a few minutes of silence would ensue. My friend (naturally, I mean the one who is gazing at the great nebula of Orion and who was at first very reluctant to listen to me); this — friend would sit down somewhat differently and clear his throat.

"This is a love story," he would say. And since I have probably forgotten all about him during my story, I would not be able to respond instantly to this sudden cry from the darkness. That is why he would repeat: "It is quite simply a love story. And indeed, why not."

"Why a love story?" I would then naturally pull myself together. "Because it happens to include a woman? Or why else?"

"Because you anxiously avoid describing her."

"I cannot describe her. I have explained that often enough." "You cannot, that is precisely it. Yet she exists."

"You have to express yourself more clearly."

"You do not have to feel offended."

"I am not offended, but I do not understand you."

"The matter is quite simple," my friend would then try to explain to me. "I too once overly prided myself on the statement: I have experienced nothing but myself. In other words: All things and events have no validity whatsoever for me, I am interested only in their effect on me. One day, we
are taught that this is a highly unjust outlook, and that other things also have a life of their own, which eludes our perception. The result, of course, is a shock. One is driven from one's fancied center. One no longer dares to say: This is such and such. One grows taciturn. One can only marvel and look. And you yourself know that looking is a suffering, or, for all I care, an experience."