After an hour of catching his breath by the pitch-black bay, while runners still panted past him constantly, and eating his evening meal at a Turkish restaurant in the pedestrian zone, which seemed to be all there was to Wilhelmshaven, he sat on a bench at the railway station, and later, until long after the last train's departure, on a baggage cart by the bumpers where the tracks ended. The row of shrubs over there was the only thing still stirring around midnight. The rounded, slightly convex bumper beams gave off a calm reflection. A railroad car, which had been standing on a siding for a long time, wheezed. The waxing moon was now bright enough so that the objects on the platform acquired an additional shadow. It was not cold, and the reader had taken off both his shoes, whose oval, blackish openings down by his feet, as he gazed at them, more and more took on the form of mouths opened in a death cry, and then were nothing but his shoes again, at the end of a long day.
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he following morning the reader set out for that pond in the Wilhelmshaven hinterland where, according to my story, I had planned, at my first reunion with my father, to let him drown.
The water was still there, out among pastures with mossy hillocks,
on the edge of a birch forest. But it could not be seen until he was standing directly beside it, because it lay so deep in a hollow below ground level, such as one otherwise finds only with groundwater lakes in old gravel pits. It also appeared as large as a lake, and beyond a bend it seemed to extend much farther, with an arm in horseshoe shape, like the cutoff meander of a river, peat black, impossible to see into from above.
The only way to get down the steep bank was by two overlapping ladders of white-barked birch, not nailed, only joined. Once at the bottom, the reader suddenly understood the expression I had used, “sound horizon,” which, in the context of my usually rather simple vocabulary, had startled him as he was reading the story. Every distant sound was inaudible in the hollow, that of cars as well as any other machinery, and there was nothing to be heard but the interior sounds, which, however, were amplified down to the most delicate by the restricted sound horizon, such that the silence round about took on audible formâthe rolling of a clump of earth, the fluttering of loose birch bark, the lapping of one of the infrequent waves.
It was only the reflection of the winter-black earth banks that made the water seem so impenetrable. From a squatting position one could see clear to the bottom, which, at least as far out as the end of the dock, was lined with the same white pebbles as the narrow beach. Now it made sense to him that in the summer people from town would walk out here occasionally, instead of along their everyday Jade Bay with its powerfully changing tides and often overcast horizons. And there, as if camouflaged under the dock, was also the boat, of which he was certain at once, even if it did not fit the facts at all: “It's the same one in which you invited your father, who can't swim, to go for a ride.”
Paddling out himself and venturing into the arm not visible from the beach, he also saw that my murder plan made sense. Today as then there was only a narrow canal leading into an extensive sea of reeds, with so many twists and turns that even if any swimmers had been there he would have been out of their sight in no time.
Yes, in that bayou-like corner, beneath the reeds, which formed a roof overhead, in that closed sound horizon, I had intended to make the boat capsize, in the deepest part, with me and my father. Even today I am surprised at myself, for I was dead serious.
Yet it had begun as a mental exercise, without any basis. For at twenty I did not hate my father. At most it bothered me for a moment or so that he avoided the sun, or that he could not be serious, especially in company. If he was ever the center of attention (“as you would have liked him to be all the time,” the reader wrote me), it was on the strength of his joking around. I saw him as frivolous, and at the same time as a spoilsport. And what bothered me most was to see him as the exact opposite of that father of my daydreams, who until then had been my invisible guiding image, my only one, someone mysterious, my sovereign. And although the Germans' actions during the last Reich had forever made me the enemyâof whom? yes, of whom, really?âI never held it against my father personally that he, at least according to his role, had been one of the perpetrators. He must have been as unserious about that as about everything else (except perhaps sometimes when he sat on the sidelines and watched quietly).
My decision that he should disappear into the reeds came perhaps merely from a summer whim, born one night when I was on a walk with my father and pointed out to him a cluster of lightning bugs deep in a clump of bushes, massed together into a glowing ball and seeming to revolve in the dark, and he did not respond with so much as a word. But when I invited him to go for a ride with me in the boat that afternoon, I realized there was no turning back. I had to push him overboard way out in the reeds. I had been planning the invitation all week long, word for word, intonation for intonation, and when I finally got it out, my voice was shaking and very soft. So: this would be it! What followed was easy to narrate, for a change: my father was not in the mood, and I felt infinitely relieved.
“But how you missed your father during the years before that!” the reader wrote or transmitted to me from the reeds. “The thought of him was closest to your heart. Your allegedly lost youth: you did have it, you were a youth without a father, and to that extent a young person if ever anyone was young. Your thoughts about the future circled not so much around a wife and child as around your absent father. And your thoughts were directed upward, from far below, such as come only from a son in need of a father. The time when you were waiting for your father was the only period in your life during which, instead of being blissful intermittently, as was later the case, you were consistently devout, almost
like the child of Siebenbrunn. The image of your father, destroyed by your mother and for a long time not inquired about by you, was, as became clear as you grew up, innate. If you ever expected salvation, it was from your father's turning up. At the slightest hint of a father, you would have been ready to set out in search of him. During your time of growing up: your father was it. And his image grew along with you. And one day you told your mother to her face that you were not fatherless, as she and the entire village had allowed you to think, but had a father. He exists. He has to exist. My father exists. Tell me who my father is. And where is he? And your mother burst into tears and said: Yes, you have a father. And your father is alive. And there, in the burning silence that followed, you experienced the greatest sense of triumph in your life and also for the first time pictured your life as an adventure. The far side of Eden was to become the here and now. And part of it was that when your mother admitted to you that your long-lost begetter was not a native, not a Slav, but rather a German, you felt proud of this father from the great, unfamiliar country of Germany, and it gave you a further incentive when your mother, whom he had loved, told you your father was not a villager, always spoke High Germanânot dialect!âand had always led her as light as a feather when they danced, and lived way up in the north, by the ocean!”
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he reader had time. In the following days he not only returned several times to the scene of my near-crime in Wilhelmshaven, where the wintry desolation made him feel less like murdering someone than like hugging someone, but also visited the area on the edge of town where my father lived.
Since the death of his lawfully wedded wife (whom I sometimes think my father poisoned), he had been living alone for a long time in his little, pointy-gabled row house, and the reader watched and followed the old man until the lights went out at midnight (after that, in the stairwell, where the steps could be dimly made out through a high milk-glass panel, from time to time a ghost light would go on to frighten off invaders from the planet Mercury).
My father hardly went anywhere on foot anymore. He rode his bicycle
to the Rathaus tavern for his early-evening beer with the two or three pals still alive, and on weekends drove to Oldenburg to see his lady friend, who was his own age, in his Mercedes, the new model of which he had already ordered from Untertürkenheim for delivery in the spring. During such drives he would pull over to the side of the road several times and take a catnap; or perhaps it only looked that way. In the company of his elderly friends, he, although also elderly, seemed by far the youngest, and when he spoke they tended not to register it. Each time he began with a stutter that was not a speech defect; it sounded as though it came from a schoolboy, the type who always contradicts and knows it all. But when they drank he was the one who replenished the others' glasses, always to the rim. One time he unexpectedly took a young woman in his arms and danced with her through the pub. And one time the eighty-five-year-old mentioned, without being asked and again almost unheard, that he had a son by a foreign woman, his great love, and his son was a joy to him. The reader reported to me that my father had said this without any stuttering.
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eeping himself in the background this way was something at which the reader had less and less success during his travels. Otherwise, wherever he was, he managed with his way of reading to achieve more than merely being overlooked: he created a zone around himself, just wide enough for turning a page, where even guests at a stag party would give him a wide berth. He became taboo, even directed the happenings around him.
But this time, as the days passed, he became downright suspect, except in the vicinity of my father. For he merely pretended to be reading, or he did read, and could have, if asked, recited every detail of the exemplary tale in question, but he remained uninvolved, receptive at most to the elegant structure of the Spanish sentences, and this was not his way of reading. It was like the repeated attempts he had made since childhood to read
Don Quixote.
He could neither take seriously nor find comical these self-anointed heroes and their flailing around. And yet he kept trying. At some point he had to enter into the world of Miguel de Cervantes. He believed, if not in the author, then at least in his, the
reader's, predecessors, through the centuries. This time he would find his way into the book. The wintry light on Jade Bay, clear, dark, as if from below, would help him.
One time, to make himself receptive for reading, he even swam in the cold February sea, and then thought, with one stroke: “Now!” No. The book remained mute. And afterward, as he ran over a bridge that crossed the locks, he, this corner-of-the-eye personâhe picked up things more quickly this way than by looking at them head-onâwho had been a goalie in his youth, caught sight of a car following him at a snail's pace, and the merest thing would have had to snap inside him for him to toss the book into the canal and go after that metal hulk with an iron rod. The car was a police car and in it the young policeman with the gentle voice, who asked if he was still working his way through
Novellas ejemplares,
whereupon my friend discovered that the person in uniform was a lovely woman.
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he reader tried to make headway with the book on Helgoland, and back on the mainland in Delmenhorst, Buxtehude, Hameln, Run-storf am Aalmeer, during Carnival, on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, on Ascension Day: Cervantes's sentences galloped, bounced, and danced, but they did not carry him along with them. Meanwhile he carried on his business, inconspicuous to an observer, yet when the moment came, completely focused, a dedicated businessman.
In a church in Hildesheim, looking at the roundheaded figures from the centuries of a very different Germany, and even looking at the Gothic ones, he wondered how Goethe could have been so disdainful toward such luminous figures and found them distorted and barbarous, he, for whom the human skull matched the vault of the heavens.
But without his reading my friend saw his Germany as more desolate than ever, and himself along with it. Without his reading his Germans appeared to him as usurpers in their own country, either hacking the air space apart with their excessively loud voices or whispering as mythological ear lindworms. When he still read, then under duress: “Liposuction,” “Utilization Factor.” And once, in another German pedestrian zone, he read a sign that beggar children held up to his chest, read it
from top to bottom, only to find that they had stolen everything off him but his paperback book.
But he had time, after all. And thus on a day in late spring when he was watching a national soccer match in Frankfurt's Waldstadion, he saw at halftime, out of the corner of his eye, a person next to him who picked up a book. It was a young woman, in profile. And she held the book away from her, at first still closed, which somewhat resembled the initial position in a wrestling match, also because her shoulders were leaning back and her eyes lowered. The woman's entire body was involved, and remained so when she began to read. It became just a bit quieter, at the same time more mobile, with the addition of silent exclamations or breaths, as if she were cheering the book on.
“All right, and now I shall read, too,” said my friend next to her, and spelled out in one fell swoopâthat was no contradictionâa page on which a Cervantes hero is finally taken seriously by another character in the story, whereupon the reader likewise could finally take him seriously, and read, and spelled out, spelled out and read, on and on. Then he looked up. He had read enough for today and was looking forward to tomorrow, with the book. And he looked at his neighbor, who now, at the end of halftime, closed her own book. Yes, wasn't it the pretty policewoman from Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay? She had been following him all this time!