The Wall (29 page)

I listened to see if I could hear anything, but everything was quiet; there was no recess. The children were sitting docilely on their benches and paying
attention, their discipline good, Herr Schnabelberger a good teacher, the students making progress, he himself teaching them energetically. Frau Dr. Kulka, however, now gave instruction in art history, learning the frames by heart, dividing them across a hundred and fifty years, the bad ones designated as kitsch, the good ones exhibited, though no one was ever let go. The school of life was what it was called, and for it everything was taken up and described, and no descendants had the right to these students. What did it matter that all descendants had disappeared, or were dead, their limbs scattered to the four winds, if only the students of this antiquity were alive and within the dust of their desire were gathered for free. They appeared completely satisfied and patient; things would come along, quietly anticipated, the names faint or obliterated. Thus they revealed their age, and I was responsible for them, a teacher meant to be enveloped by their two-dimensional mind so that it did not wrinkle with grief. The new benches already existed, the fresh wood sawed and planed so that the students could sit in peace, and I, the son, received the new class book of my father and mother, having to record the noble lineage and its dates on white cards. It was good work that I had to get started on, for I could be the legacy of my students. “Don’t forget the number! Below on the back of the frame it’s written small.”

Among the rank and file of ancestors who don’t need names but only numbers, there was comforting parity, be they good paintings or bad, for they all had their numbers. It was only the prayer books that no one cared about; they could be bundled up and stowed in the cellar. There it’s dark and damp, but the prayers can sleep, blessed be the Lord, and love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, for then the prayers, if they are not ruined, can be sent to America for a paltry sum. Alas, no one wants them. Their prayers have been ended and must remain down in the mines where the Lord cannot hear them, a single silent cellar prayer where once the coal slumbered in the dark without the protection of the Davy lamp against bad weather, the prayer now sleeping down among the footings, rolled up and torn, the building threatened, though the walls remain essentially eternal, the Lord of the world, who was king before all was created. Below it repeats itself a thousand times and ten thousand times, the morning prayer of the grave with its holy blessings; we miss them at every
turn, those that laud the rock of redemption, the eternal Creator. Above lies harm, for there the rooms are crammed full, the musty classrooms holding five thousand consigned pupils in broken frames, though for the most part it’s unknown stock, the past not pressing through, even when the paper rots between the book covers that hold it. In this building it’s all gathered, a hut, a tent—how lovely are your tents—and the bodies of the living as well as the dead are all scattered, their existence disgraced, the names sealed off and never available again. Yet the blessing remains and is tightly wound up in each, and whoever can no longer live is still transformed by it, the lament having its arches, its grave, its cellar, its walls.

I walked across my room and looked through the closets and shelves to see if there was anything that reminded me of old school prayers, but everything was empty, the prayers having long ago disappeared from here. Nor was there anything else there from the school, the wisdom of the teachers and the eagerness of the pupils having both vanished into thin air, leaving behind nothing more than thick piles of junk. Heaps of paper, organized and disorganized in disorderly piles, notebooks, scattered books, yet no prayers, empty boxes and others full of curling forms, many posed photos of sporting teams and gymnastics meets, discarded trash with souls eaten away, something quite distant from the pupils’ eagerness or the teachers’ command. The walls looked miserable, dark yellow and shabby, paintings scattered and broken, stacked up in the corner by the metal furnace and black with soot. In some spots the paint was scraped clean where paintings had once hung but which had long since migrated from this room. Only pictures of young girls and forgotten beautiful actresses cut from newspapers were hung on the walls with tacks and stared dryly into the emptiness. Also, a calendar from last year was out of date and illustrated the last autumn of the war. I looked at the first week and sighed deeply; it must have been a week of death. On a table there squatted a dented washbasin made of ugly, dirty zinc, dreaming of its stained and senseless end. I quickly put it into a chest where earlier I had found a blue pitcher with a rusted bottom, some used bars of soap in a little bowl, and some dirty hand towels. When I took away the washbasin, I noticed for the first time that the table was moldy and crusty from old soapy water. I took a brown sheet of packing paper, spread it out over the surface, and nailed it down tight.

On the desk could be found what my predecessor, who had disappeared, had left behind: a dried-up inkwell, rusted steel pens with gnawed caps, a decayed feather pen, pencils with broken-off points, and miserable stumps of broken-off erasers, two rust-flecked rulers, a broken blotter that fell apart in my hand, honey-yellow glue with a useless brush, a dirty typewriter, paper clips, stickers, piles of crumbs, and other useless things that I looked at uncomprehendingly, the detritus of a former office. But these ownerless goods had not entirely gone to waste, because as I went through them a spider withdrew that had settled undismayed among this clutter and was now getting as far away from me as it could. I followed its path of escape from the desk to the wall until, with haste, it disappeared behind a chest of drawers. Now I was ready to settle at the desk, but before I sat down I removed from the chair a worn-out cushion whose sawdust leaked from its flattened body. I began to rummage through the baskets that were on top of the desk. Nothing special turned up: old newspapers full of accounts of unbelievably old victories that weren’t true, the ridiculous decrees of officials long gone. I took the useless stuff and threw it in the garbage can next to the furnace. Even the drawers were full of useless junk—old rags, a dark-blue apron made of thick paper, and from the very back two pieces of bread uneaten, rotten, and covered with green mold with traces of dried-up butter.

Was my predecessor not hungry when he had to leave this room? Or was he chased away so quickly that he had no time to take his things with him? I was really sick of rummaging and pushed the drawer shut, for it horrified me. Whatever else there was to find could wait. I felt that the smartest thing to do would be to put things in order little by little. So I cleared off the desk in a superficial manner, pulling it away from the walls, which bothered me the most, and decided to go look for Herr Schnabelberger, for perhaps he would allow me to choose some paintings to decorate the walls. Among the paintings, I expected to encounter someone I knew, for there were too many for me to be spared. The brisk men from the Department for House Clearings walked around in a hurry and emptied out the stores of booty, one after another. They trotted swiftly down the Römerstrasse toward where my parents lived, there being no one there any longer, and so they made their way in, my father’s thick key ring clanging, though the clock did not chime anymore, as there was no electricity, Herr Schnabelberger having turned it
off and unplugged it so that it could slip into the museum proud and solid. Then my parents’ house was shut, many empty pages strewn about, the unspoken prayers having fallen out or flattened under the heavy weight, yet I was afraid I would find their traces in the school. Or not. The parents I prayed to did not grieve on any of the walls; they had never been painted, nor their ancestors, there being only photos of them that were not collected in the museum. I squirmed around in my chair and was nervous, sawdust leaking out again that gathered softly upon the faces, but I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on around me in the room.

“Look, what’s happened is that I don’t have a single little picture of my father, while of my mother I only have one of her dressed up for a masked ball; the only other—and it upsets me to say it—is a pointed caricature by an amateurish hand, for I hate caricatures, even when they are well done. I find them completely humiliating, inhumane. Forgive me for ranting, but for me there’s something obscene about caricatures.”

“How can you judge them so harshly?” said Frau Saubermann. “Often they involve just an exaggeration, sometimes a humorous or biting disclosure of the entire character.”

“That’s what I think,” said Herr Buxinger. “I’m happy to be caricatured when it’s only for fun. I wish I had good caricatures of my parents and not just those stiff photos that they took back then.”

“No the photos are much better,” Frau Saubermann assured him. “Even my husband takes excellent ones, and also collects them. I’d be happy to show you some. You should come over sometime soon.”

“With pleasure, madam.”

“Most of all I’m amazed, Herr Dr. Landau, if I can be frank, that you came here at all, but even more that you don’t want to return. It’s indeed a good job, such a museum, especially if one can help to build it oneself. All the modern approaches at your service. There my husband felt as if on virgin soil; he had revolutionary ideas. You should have heard him, Herr Dr. Landau. So much to profit from. You could return with great zeal and set up your museum. I think that would be wonderful. Wouldn’t you agree, Herr Buxinger? From the viewpoint of a bookseller and a friend of the arts, wouldn’t you say the same and immediately seize hold of the opportunity to create something?”

“Yes, there’s something to that, Frau Saubermann. But we who left before the war, who now exist here, we no longer belong there.”

“Nor here!” exclaimed Fräulein Zinner.

“No, my dear Johanna,” advised the wife of the manufacturer. “You mustn’t say such a thing, you of all people! You can’t only halfheartedly decide to live here.”

“Decide, decide!” the bookkeeper admonished her. “And there we find the heart of the question—one must decide to stay here. Homelessness is a horror. One must indeed decide—here or elsewhere, but decide. That’s my view.”

“That’s a view, Herr Buxinger, that I happen to share. We indeed have a foothold here. One knows where one is and where one lives. One can’t keep relearning things forever, but for Herr Dr. Landau the situation is quite different. He remained there, taken by surprise. Fine, that’s not pleasant at all. In fact, it’s terrible. I’m sorry, that’s the way I see it. But if one survives, then one has responsibilities, even when one is the freed citizen of an emerging free country. Thus a museum, just think, the building of it, what a future there is for it! And, besides, you are quite young, Herr Doctor. One can see just by looking at you.”

“Not all that young.”

“Well, can I guess? Thirty! What do you say?”

“Almost forty.”

“You don’t look it. And so much behind you. But nonetheless young, for forty is not old. Especially today, when life begins at forty.”

“Not for me, madam.”

“Go on, you’re a pessimist or entirely at loose ends. In two, three years you’ll see matters entirely different.”

“I’ve never been pessimistic, as you say, for otherwise I would have stayed back there. That I left shows that I had hope.”

“What lovely hope!” said Herr Buxinger. “But how can you say that? Our country is now poor after the war and offers a foreign-minded worker a tough existence.”

“But there’s my work. I’d like to have a research position. Perhaps at a university, a library, an institute. Proper affiliation. Dr. Haarburger is so kind, as well as Professor Kratzenstein.… Frau Singule is going to speak to her husband.”

Frau Saubermann lightly applauded.

“My dear friend, you are an optimist! All good spirits should credit you with that! Therefore I don’t wish to say anything against this or that splendid person who has done so many excellent things. Each of them is wonderful! Don’t misunderstand me. But think of the situation! I know them through and through, and Herr Buxinger will back me up, and certainly Fräulein Zinner as well. It’s incredibly difficult. One needs sharp elbows and luck and who knows what else in order to assert oneself. You should know what it’s like to be down and out! It’s horrible! My husband and I provide many poor wretches with enough to get by on, but not everyone can work for us at home. Then the charitableness of this country, for which it is so renowned, would disappear. We must help, and we’re happy to do so, my husband and I. We do what we can afford to. It costs a fortune, for one cannot just let people go hungry. We feel sympathetic, Herr Doctor. But, really, it’s simply become too much to handle.”

“You really think, madam, that I came to this country in order to put people out because of a local sense of charity?”

“I would never think that! I don’t mean you, and I wouldn’t hurt a fly. I’m only talking in general. But, I swear, what would you do if you didn’t have something to nibble on?”

“Madam!” whispered Fräulein Zinner.

“I don’t mean any harm. I’ve already said I would never hurt a fly. And perhaps Herr Dr. Landau can show us that he is, in fact, one of the few intellectuals who can do something. All the better. Then I’m right. What do you think, Herr Buxinger?”

“It’s not easy. But don’t let it get you down too much, Herr Dr. Landau. There are still possibilities, and relationships sometimes change overnight.”

“That’s right. I see it particularly from the vantage point of charitableness. I can indeed say a little something about that. In any case, Herr Doctor, the situation is completely bedeviled. If I were in your shoes, I would certainly have stayed where you were. Where so many had been murdered, brrr, it would have been horrible, but new able-bodied blood is certainly needed there.”

“It’s a graveyard.”

“You’re exaggerating, Herr Doctor. You’re being too emotional. Of
course, you’re always happy to see the dark side, but a graveyard is alive and blossoms and requires a horde of gardeners to tend to it. Yes, it’s true. Surely you cannot hold my decency against me, and new life blossoms from ruins. A German poet said that. And life brings us joy, so said another.”