Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
HOW BITTER IT IS
that he is having to bury everything. The porcelain from Meissen, his pewter pitchers and the silver. As if it were wartime. He himself doesn’t know whether he is burying something or simply laying in provisions for his return. He doesn’t even know if there’s any real difference between the two. In general he knows far less now than he used to. Just before the Russians marched in, his wife had packed up these very plates, these tankards and this silverware in crates, but that time she’d rowed out on the lake with the crates and lowered everything into the water on the shoal of the Nackliger which she knew from swimming. That was the place in the middle of the lake that was so shallow that when she was swimming far from shore in summer her feet would suddenly get tangled in the water plants and then she would start laughing and pretend to be drowning. The Russians, looking for what might have been hidden from them, only thought to poke around in the grass and the flowerbeds with long sticks, and while they were jabbing their sticks around, the lake was unhurriedly rinsing the dust from the treasures that were being kept safe from them. The new occupants of the house will have more time for swimming.
He’s lucky the winter is so mild this year, lucky that he’s able to get his spade into the earth at all. He buries his pewter pitchers among the roots of the big oak tree, the Meissen under a bushy fir, and the silver in the rose-bed right next to the house. Rest in peace. He knows that two hours from now he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn to West Berlin, his fingernails still rimmed black with dirt. The architect fills up the holes, wondering whether pewter pitchers will now sprout from the buried pewter pitchers, plates and cups from the plates and cups, and forks, knives and spoons from the forks, knives and spoons, shooting up between the roses. He considers whether he shouldn’t finish up by burying the spade as well and use his bare hands to cover this final pit. And finds that he no longer knows something he once used to know: what counts as valuable and what does not. Will finding his Meissen porcelain again when he returns—if he returns—really make him any happier than finding this spade worth 2 marks 50 whose wooden handle has been polished smooth by the hands of the gardener over the past twenty years? But a wooden handle like this would be eaten by worms in any case. And so he doesn’t bury it, he brings it, as usual, back down to the toolshed beside the water, where for the past twenty years the spade has occupied its place among hoes, rakes, picks and shovels. Locks the toolshed, the golden spoon lure he once fished with dangling from the key, walks back up the shallow stone steps, hangs the key on the key hook in the living room, rinses his hands in the bathroom, two hours from now he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn to West Berlin, his fingernails still rimmed black with dirt, he draws the crank for the shutters out of its niche in the wall one last time and closes the shutters from inside by means of the hidden mechanism he himself once thought up as a young man, to make his wife laugh.
He walks once more up the stairs, which creak at the second, seventh and second-to-last step, passing his wife’s room from which emanates, as always, the smell of peppermint and camphor; the way to his studio leads him through the crepuscular room lined with cabinets, he’d built a small window there, semicircular, shaded like an eye by the straw roof, it wasn’t long ago that a marten appeared to him at this window. The marten looked through the eye into the house just as he himself was looking out through the eye, animal and man both frozen there for a moment, and then the creature flitted away. The panes of frosted glass he’d had mounted in a frame of two times three panels in the door to his studio clink softly one last time as he approaches, he opens the door and enters, stands for a moment behind his drawing table and gazes down at the lake, the table is still covered with drawings for his first building in the Berlin city center, the most important commission in his life as an architect, the commission that has now caused his downfall. In the beams he hears the martens scrabbling. The martens are staying here.
He walks back down the stairs, on the way down they creak at the second, fifteenth and second-to-last step; he himself whittled grape leaves and clusters of their fruit on the finial at the bottom of the banister. Lock the door. In his trouser pocket the key is jingling that can open and close all the doors of the house including the apiary and woodshed, Zeiss Ikon, a key meeting the highest safety standards, quality German workmanship. Lock the door. And then crossing the living room, the light-colored slabs of sandstone beneath his footsteps in the entryway, fifty-by-fifty centimeters—the handle of the door to the vestibule made of brass, flat on top to sit well in the palm, edges grooved to offer traction to the thumb, when he depresses this handle it emits, as always, a faint metallic sigh—the slabs of sandstone beneath his footsteps in the entryway thirty-by-thirty centimeters; the birds on the door of the broom closet are flying, they’ve been flying there for a century, the flowers have been blossoming for a century, more grapes are hanging down, the Garden of Eden in twelve square chapters; he’d salvaged the door from an old farmhouse, its beauty makes you forget entirely about the scrub-brush, broom, bucket, dustpan and brush it conceals. Frame the view, that’s what he’s always thought, lead the eye. In the kitchen a faucet is dripping, shut it off. Look out through the bulls-eye panes at the sandy road and trees. The colored glass turns even the bare trees green, frame the view, it’s the first day of the new year, the gardener is still asleep, no one is out for a walk. Happy new year. In two hours he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn to West Berlin.
Lock the door. Lock the door and leave the key in the lock. He doesn’t want them to break any of his bones. Doesn’t want them to break down the door, twist off or saw apart the ironwork protecting the glass of the front door, this ironwork is painted red and black, just like the ironwork of the National Glider School that he worked on before the war, which was blown up just after the war ended, no one knew why. Lock the door.
His profession used to encompass three dimensions, height, width and depth, it was always his business to build things high, wide and deep, but now the forth dimension has caught up with him: time, which is now expelling him from house and home. We won’t be doing any arresting over the weekend, the official said and let him go, meaning that he wasn’t going to be killed, he was just supposed to leave, get out, scram, make himself scarce, go to the devil: In two hours he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn that will bring him to West Berlin. Five years at least, the official said, for the ton of screws he bought with his own money in the West to be used in the East, a ton of brass screws for the most important building of his life: on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin-Mitte. A building for the state that is now driving him out. He knows much less than he used to.
That’s his profession: planning homes, planning a homeland. Four walls around a block of air, wresting a block of air from amid all that burgeoning, billowing matter with claws of stone, pinning it down. Home. A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing. Homestead. A house made to measure according to the needs of its master. Eating, cooking, sleeping, bathing, defecating, children, guests, car, garden. Calculating all these whethers, all these thises and thats, in wood, stone, glass, straw and iron. Setting out courses for lives, flooring beneath feet for corridors, vistas for eyes, doors for silence. And this here was his house. For the sitting to be done by his wife and himself, he designed the two chairs with leather cushions, for observing the sunset, he made the terrace with its view of the lake, and their shared pleasure at receiving guests had taken shape as a long table in the main room, the chill he and she felt in winter would be combated by the tiled heating stove from Holland, his and her weariness after ice-skating by the bench beside the stove, and finally his drawing at the drafting table was provided for, as it were, by the studio. And now he had to consider himself lucky he was escaping with his life, suffering his third skin to be stripped from him and fleeing, insides glisteningly exposed, to the safety of the West.
When over the enemy’s lines never forget your own line of retreat.
Even in the first war this was easier said than done. They’d been able to discharge their bombs over Paris, but then the airship was struck and gradually lost altitude until finally it settled on the roof of a stable in a Belgian village, burying its own gondola beneath the huge limp sack. When he and his comrades worked their way out from beneath the cloth, they saw a few chickens pecking at the sand down below in the yard, saw a cat sleeping in the sun, and only when the farmers refrained from shooting at him and his comrades but instead fetched a ladder did they know that the village had already been occupied by the Germans. And so it was pure chance that instead of being shot they were invited to climb down a Belgian ladder back into life. From the airship you gazed down at the world as if at a floor plan, but it wasn’t so easy to see where the front was from so high above. To them, the village they owed their life to was occupied territory; to the Belgians, it was home, and quite possibly the front ran right between the whiskers of the sleeping cat. The lesson he learned that day was never to take a risk on so close a call.
He walks around the house to the left, passing the rhododendrons, beneath his feet the gratings with which he covered all the basement windows during the second war. The words “Mannesmann Air Raid Defense” are stamped on these gratings, even now, in the middle of peacetime. By the time the second war came along, he was already too old to be sent into battle, but in his own way he’d expanded his occupied territory.
Rule number one for aerial battle: When you attack, keep the sun behind you.
In the morning the sunlight grazed the tops of the pine trees before the house, this meant that the weather would be lovely all day long, the terrace still lay in the shade of the house, and the butter on the breakfast table hadn’t yet begun to melt. All day long, the sun shone on the two meadows to the right and left of the path that led down to the water, the sisters of his wife lay and sat there with their children in the grass playing, sleeping or reading, sunlight spotted the path as it descended amid oak leaves, conifers and hazelnut bushes down to the paved steps, eight times eight, rough sandstone in its natural color; down beside the lake the sunlight pierced the alder foliage only at intervals to reach the black earth of the shoreline, which was still moist, and the closer you came to the glistening surface of the lake, the louder the leaves rustled, the shadier it was all around you—blackout shades, Mannesmann Air Raid Defense—but all of this only in order to blind him, a summer visitor taking his first step out onto the dock, between sunlight and water he would walk toward the end of the dock, and apart from him, the one walking there, nothing else remained that might have cast a shadow. Here the sun unleashed its force, falling upon both him and the lake, and the lake threw its reflection right back up at the sun, and he, who was now sitting or lying at the end of the dock, observed this exchange, casually extracting from his hand a splinter he’d gotten when he sat or lay down, smelled the pine tar used to impregnate the wood, heard the boat plashing in the boathouse, the chain it was bound with faintly clinking, he saw fish suspended in the bright water, crabs crawling, felt the warm boards beneath his feet, his legs, his belly, smelled his own skin, lay or sat there, and since the sun was so bright he closed his eyes. And even through the blood behind his closed eyelids he saw the flickering orb.
If this bit of land, the house and the lake had not signified homeland to him, nothing would have kept him in the Eastern Zone. Now this home had become a trap. At the end of the war he had haggled and drunk with the Russians in Berlin five nights long to keep the machines from being removed from his cabinetry workshop, he had salvaged his architecture office, his business, even during the first wave of expropriations, with Socialist greetings, the rejection letter from Speer had even, in the end, gotten him the commission for the Friedrichstrasse project under the Reds, but now, six years after the end of the war, the Communists were making a grab for his business after all, this had only now occurred to them, suddenly, in the middle of peacetime—Mannesmann Air Raid Defense,
always keep your eye on your opponent.
Like children with an animal whose nature they are unable to comprehend, they were now ripping the head off this toy and would be surprised to see the thing stop twitching soon thereafter.
All his life he had worked to transform money into something real, he’d at first bought only half of this bit of land and built the house on it, later he’d added the other half with the dock and the little bathing house, his entire savings, earned by hard labor, was grounded here, it had literally put down roots as oaks, alders and pine trees, making an investment is what they used to call it, converting money into durable goods in troubled times, that’s what he’d been taught, but unfortunately what he’d been taught had recently become unmoored from reality, and in the wondrous disorder that the Russians left behind for the Germans one could only pity a person who owned a piece of land and not a flying carpet.
Someone who builds something is affixing his life to the earth. Embodying the act of staying put is his profession. Creating an interior. Digging deeper and deeper in a place where there is nothing. From outside, the colored glass in the living room windows he’s now walking past looks dull and impenetrable, the light doesn’t take on life until you’re sitting behind the glass, only then does it become visible as light—when it is being used. Dürer too peered through colored panes of this sort, seeing only the light of the world and not the world itself, he sat indoors creating his own world. If Dürer’s wife wanted to know who was strolling about in the Nuremburg marketplace, she had to open a little flap to look down at the square. The thicker the walls and the smaller the windows, the less warmth was lost by the inhabitants of a house. Fieldstone, straw, plaster: all local materials. In the crotch marking the transition from the gabled to the side-gabled area of the roof was a small shed dormer. The house was to look as if it had just grown here like a living thing. He’d helped brick the chimney himself. He’d always gotten along well with workers and farmers. But not with this state in which one official never knew what the other was doing.