Authors: H. G. Adler
Herr Meisenbach would normally come home at night, shake away the dust, and sit himself down, a book in hand, the assets of wisdom, he happy to read and read, the pages turning as his wife tends to him, and he reads aloud to her. And now she is unfaithful; it’s as easy as that. All it took was for him not to come home just once, he having made a mistake, for he was dead … the war. A stranger, or almost a stranger, sits in the realm of the dead one and doesn’t say his name. The books now represent neither assets nor wisdom, for the dust has gathered on them. I was ashamed, yet I was defenseless. What excuse did I have? There was no picture of the deceased
anywhere in the room. Alas, Herr Meisenbach was gone without even a picture left behind, since he was no longer welcome, done away with, only one thing still tolerated, and that was the dust. Not a single sign that he had even lived. The books now ownerless goods, abandoned, strange, no longer even cleaned. Ordered out of his home, he left wife and apartment and all his possessions behind. He would return, a cheerful wave, turning the corner, around a wall and gone. He would come, an echo bouncing off the walls. He would come, he would come, it was true, promised at the last moment, there was no doubt of it. What kind of man was he? He had deceived the future widow and was gone. Frau Meisenbach had to put up with it all; she was trapped. We all have to die, and doubt did no good at all. But what was I doing? I roused myself awake in my armchair and looked up.
Here I sit and see what’s around me on West Park Row, and I still don’t recognize anything. I have let myself drift too far into the otherworldly, and that’s the reason nothing is left of me. It’s the cause of my difficulties. Others simply make up their minds or their minds are made up for them, and thus they find a place in the world that is their own, it becoming clear that others are pleased with them. They keep themselves neat and have a job. It makes little sense for me to compare myself with such people, especially in this country, which seems so secure. I learn nothing from such comparisons, for, without feeling envious, I can’t help feeling that it wouldn’t do me any good to be more like them. They go their way, and thereby I recognize an order that is surprising, and by which I am almost awestruck in my feeling of detachment from the frigid night of these surroundings. The rest of you, just go your own way! The world left me behind on my own, more and more from year to year, the postwar years only reinforcing this separation after some doubtful breakthroughs that took place and were done, it all having been put into effect during the war. Still, I had hoped to be able to get free of them when, with tentative hopes for a new beginning, I fled the place of my overwhelming past for the metropolis. But here I was, at a dead end on West Park Row. With a great deal of skill, Johanna had discovered the little house and brought me here, but with the acquisition of this hideout I was not so much snug as always hidden, and now here I was, once again setting forth into the rattling fan of days, fed and cared for, allowed to rest and sleep through the night so that I would have enough strength for the
waking hours and keep myself busy, even as the day rattled on, thought following upon thought, the last one always falling away with the next churn of the fan.
Thus was I administered to, Johanna making it all happen, providing for my every wish, setting things down in dry terms, giving me something definite to do, something easy and yet meaningful, something certain and harmlessly predatory, such as the green market, with its fruit and vegetable stands, Johanna sending me there twice a week in the morning with two large sacks in order to choose and purchase something useful after I took Michael to school, he trembling with excitement and mischief as we crossed two dangerous intersections. Johanna embellished me, she the master, turning me into what she wished for, such that I would be a naïve, cheery man. She created him, she set him there, yet I am only a child sent outside and cannot go my own way. She fills the hours that I should know on my own with playful stuff in the little garden, letting me count the blossoms on the strawberries. Everything is lovely, she thinks, and she’s happy when, uncertainly, I tell her the number of blossoms, it sounding like a dark echo of her own voice. Johanna portions out to me what’s bearable, such as the rumbling sounds of the boy, the rummaging curiosity of our little daughter, Eva, it also often showing up in the sweetness of the mindful sounds with which Johanna fills the patient house while tending to things from morning to night. Johanna is happy to do so, because she loves me, and if I could feel thankful I would express it always in the morning and never at night. But Johanna is fast and goes about her business quickly, though she never looks for gratitude. Instead, I am always surprised anew that she is satisfied. I get worried about her when I see that her activities have no real point. How long will she stand my showing only empty hands each evening, it all threatening to go on indefinitely? I ask her, touched to the core, but without betraying what I feel, whether she is disappointed at not being able to change me, yet she dismisses it all. She says we have enough to get by, as I swallow down the last of it.
“A husband’s support.” I said that once, only as an attempt to seize hold of a fading wish, but Johanna shot back nothing more than merciful surprise. Sometimes I tried to figure out whether what she would have me believe was real, but I only sensed a suppressed pain in her that was not visible.
It’s all the same to her: the worries themselves, the numerous shortcomings of our household; none of it bothers her. It serves only to inspire her to a higher art. The essence of this art is patience; that’s all that’s needed, and it provides a relaxed, ongoing play in the return of reassuring conditions for my difficult-to-reassure, always disturbed, painful existence. How well it suits me that this tattered house puts up with me as an inhabitant in this meager neighborhood of careworn people. One can think whatever of me, but people live their lives without having to know about my empty troubles, for the stranger doesn’t bother the street at all.
Only Johanna knows, but what does she know? Almost nothing, and even that she covers up. Welcome to Peace. But will the children ever know it? No, Michael and Eva don’t know anything, at least not yet; that way, they don’t get confused. They have their time, and what is past should not bother them. When they finally learn, it will by then be lost, no way into it through memento, dream, or memory, at most a long-lost history, an account in a book one can read but which remains unknown. Michael and Eva, already members of the circle of street kids, the boy already at the school that harmlessly takes him away from his father, the father’s speech only a distant resonant sound that will not find new voice in the next generation. Thus they look at their father with hardly any feeling of danger, nothing more than a playmate, his place in the scheme of things undoubted. I, however, don’t disturb this fantasy, but rather protect it and feed it with jokes and games. Johanna also helps out, dismissing with a smile any groundless question, and wherever shadows creep or rustle she’s there to set things right with her hands. Quickly I shy away, leave quietly, and am glad to be back in my study. The children are allowed to run free outside and return to the light of day, unaffected, no loss having touched them.
Then I pray to an unknown guardian, he perhaps able to protect the children such that they have no idea of what they have mercifully been shielded from. The father should remain within their love as only the familiar stranger who once appeared, was there, then went away; yes, a passing ship, already having landed on the island and found the mother. Yet earlier there was nothing, only waves, nothing ever having happened. So it is in the world. One suddenly arrives, a ship, and everyone must travel to this island for the first time, an island where one can be and forget. Now the foundation
is laid, the arc of Being lifted, the bridge erect and no longer capable of being destroyed. Above lies the light of all the stars, sacred and undisturbed creation presiding, the earth illuminated in the hand of the Lord. Whatever has fought against this no longer exists and has damned itself to darkness and discord, never to be again. Sheltered prosperity, the joyful vicissitude of a good family passing from fathers to grandchildren to their children’s children with all daily hardships taken care of, but also blessed in itself. The sanctuary of the sexes that do their work, and when one dies a noble grave awaits him; kept gratefully alive in memory, he lives on as an example, nothing having been in vain. His acts will inform his descendants; they are not unique, but in being true they reveal what is just. No doubt presses back, such that the sinister severs the chain and casts away and destroys its earlier roots. May this be true for the children!
What will happen when the children no longer believe this? They will retreat from me and take me to task. You were a vagrant, a vagabond and a layabout. You just crept your way into this city; you are not our father and don’t belong to us. We don’t owe you anything, and we will disown you in order not to suffer eternal shame. And what will I, on the other hand, say to you? You are clever and gifted; how many years will pass before already you’re grown. Also, words will no longer comfort your mother. She would gladly stand sympathetically before the door of my room, but son and daughter will demand a royal entrance. Then I have to welcome them. They mess about in my drawers and demand the key to my desk. “What do you want to know?” I’ll ask. They will answer, “You!”—“I don’t exist,” I’ll assure them, but they will explain: “That is only half a memory. We want to find out about you. We want to know what is there when we see you—something horrible in your past, something disreputable which you keep secret.”
Then I’ll have to talk a lot. Trapped in a corner against the wall, I will tell them something I know nothing at all about, conjuring the semblance of it in order that the children tremble and shake; however, they won’t be shaken by it, for they are well shielded against the language of sin. “I don’t exist, I don’t exist! You simply have to believe that, for both your sake and mine. I don’t exist, and though you torment me with your penetrating curiosity, you’ll still never find out, for it’s impossible. All that is there is impenetrable
strangeness, because I don’t exist.” Should I expect this day to come, one in which I am overshadowed by Michael and Eva, such that my memory also will likely come to an end? It won’t change me at all, for I have decided that though the red seal of my guilt is long since reduced to dust, the future of these children will indeed be impugned. Can I protect them? Both the truth and not the truth will lead to the same doom. What, then, can I do? Why did I have children? O dull pointless lust! The belief in blind generation, for I madly wished not to be the last of my tribe, my precursors having been killed! To die childless felt like a sin. A world without children of the curse, and without memory of the fathers who suffered for them, so that there would be children of the curse. But Johanna? Her right to be a mother. The blessing of the womb, the transfiguration of birth, the soulfulness of a lullaby—all lovely, but it shouldn’t have sprung from my loins. Johanna wanted me. I pursued, it’s true, but she had consented, and that’s her fault. Yet, at the time she was attracted to me I didn’t know her; she had no idea what she had wreaked! Unhappy mother, who in conceiving children in her belly also bestowed on them an inextinguishable curse! Whatever staggeringly dumb vanity burned within me, away with it—go away, go home, go proliferate and fulfill your inchoate flesh and trembling spirit through children who are pure. Though you on your own can achieve no grace, see that the earth is inhabited with your blood and bones! Though you yourself have lived amid sin and error, you have indeed atoned for them, because you have tended to and hoped the best for your children. You have taken it upon yourself to make sure to balance your shortcomings with better intentions, such that they will be decreased, for benevolent is the Lord in the beginning, and he will forever forgive.
Dreaming before the wall, marking time. Slowly the earth gives way and sinks below you, the years elapsing before your doubled-over supplications. With your supplicating grasp, the net of confusion begins to loosen. You work hard, not wasting a single day. Task after task you have fulfilled; you haven’t dwelled on your frailty. Therefore don’t despair too much, and trust yourself to believe that a lost one will be comforted, for I am your rock and your redeemer. Voices that I hear, and which shimmer around me, immersing me in the inapproachable whenever the enemy’s rattling surrounds me, such that I do not perish, even if I am unworthy of being held
within the mesh of grace. Let it all pass, let everything pass! But I am carried through it. If I was too blessed at the wrong time, then this sinking into the ground is the sentence I must serve because I was too devout and not active enough. Now, however, you are there again. How can I resist you? Yet you still shimmer all about me, such that I am extinguished by the glow! Too much experience makes me empty, wisdom silencing any possible speech within me. Succor is my garb. That is what has happened to me; the rest is just extended sound. “You will be your own just reward.” But whose just reward will be my just reward?
Impudent, I stand before my wall. Is it the Wailing Wall, where the sadness of all prayers is nurtured? Sadness? Prayers? No, it’s not the Wailing Wall. Yet my state plunges me into the depths. A continually sunken resistance, which nonetheless hardens and does not budge. I remain silent within my abyss, completely guilty and always guilty, nor can I even once do something for myself. That I still exist cannot be reckoned with. How can I ever confidently exist even for a moment? You, however, say that I can find forgiveness, for your grace is endless. You ask that I not doubt so intensely and not doubt myself so. You send me forth upon the four winds, such that I gather myself in both the seas and the deserts, the open fields and the dense cities. You command trust because you have sounded out my weaknesses, and into the world’s battles you drive my steps so that they can learn to transform themselves into peace. This I say aloud, drawing the belief in the truth of the unimaginable into the sensual poverty of my slack limbs. I turn away from the dreamy misery of the resentment and dissatisfaction that I had been carrying and apply myself to the future legacy of my children, who have no idea of my misery, but who need to heal in order to fill the chasm between which I have created with my scattered existence.