Visitation (5 page)

With the folded-up plan Ludwig manages to smite a mosquito that has just settled on his father’s arm. To the left, the banging has stopped now, on the right you can hear the scraping of the masons’ trowels against naked brick. Time to call it a day. This here is your inheritance, says the senior partner. Yes, he says, Ludwig, I know, and stows the plan for the bathing house (5.5 m long, 3.8 m wide, outer wall construction: wood, roof construction: thatch), stows both the plan and the mosquito in his briefcase. On a German shelf, this mosquito, pressed flat between large quantities of paper, will outlast time and times, and one day it might even be petrified, who knows.

Eight iron trestles topped with flat panels, each constructed of ten boards nailed together, with one such panel between each pair of trestles, the dock is twelve meters long, painted black with pine tar so the wood will last longer. Anna picks up baby Doris before she steps onto the dock because she’s afraid the child might fall in the water. Doris wraps her legs around Anna’s body.
Heil
. Elisabeth says, let her be, she won’t fall.

Come on, I’ll put you to bed, it’s still light out, that’s just how it is in summer, and Elliot, he’s older than you, but I don’t want to, come along now, but only if you carry me, all right; baby Elisabeth wraps her legs around Anna’s body, Anna carries the girl, body to body, carries this child or that. Perhaps he married Anna because he liked the way her body jutted forward to support the weight of a little girl.

When it’s winter here, that means it’s summer back home and vice versa. On the skat cards belonging to Ludwig’s parents, Arthur and Hermine, there was always half a king on one side of the line, and a second half on the other. One might assume it would be with just the same precision that he, Ludwig, who like his father was a cloth maker, was now being mirrored at the equator, reflecting back the image of an auto mechanic. If you look at it this way, the rustling of the eucalyptus trees is just like in the song about the linden tree beside the fountain, and the water of the lake seeps through the Earth’s center to become the ocean, it’s not by chance we refer to it as groundwater. Elisabeth even resembles Elisabeth.

Doris says: Now the sun is going down already. Even when you are an old woman, says her grandfather Arthur, you’ll still come sit here on the shore to watch the sun slipping behind the lake. Home. Why, the girl asks. Because everyone likes to watch the sun as long as possible, says Hermine, Ludwig’s mother, grandmother of Doris.

Sometimes when you’re lucky you can see the tablecloth hanging down around Table Mountain, a veil of fog that displays a pale pink tint at sunrise. He left behind the table silver but packed the Christmas tree decorations. Twelve aluminum clips to hold the candles, Christmas tree ornaments, stars made of straw, tinsel and the glass topper. Purchased in 1928 for 14 marks 70. What are icicles, his little girl asks him, Elisabeth. On that one winter day he spent at the lake, Anna, his future wife, taught his niece Doris how to ice-skate. What is snow, his little girl asks him, Elisabeth.

Hermine and Arthur, his parents.

He himself, Ludwig, the firstborn.

His sister Elisabeth, married to Ernst.

Their daughter, his niece, Doris.

Then his wife Anna.

And now the children: Elliot and baby Elisabeth, named for his sister.

In March ’36, at the end of the winter, he, Ludwig, went chasing the winter together with his future wife Anna, traveling through the Strait of Gibraltar, the coast of Europe to the right, the coast of Africa to the left. They traveled through all of this from winter to winter. Here there is no snow in winter, only rain, lots of rain, and nonetheless he feels colder here than he ever did at home. In 1937 his parents came to visit them for two weeks, his mother says, it’s so nice here, and then returns home. His father says, but what a shame about your inheritance, and returns home together with Ludwig’s mother. Baby Elisabeth is still far from being born yet, even Elliot isn’t there yet, the two of them are still swimming around in Abraham’s sausage pot. His parents came to visit. Arthur and Hermine from Guben came to visit their son Ludwig, who has emigrated to Cape Town, and now they are traveling back to Guben, going home again, from summer to summer, through the Strait of Gibraltar, to the right the coast of Africa, to the left the coast of Europe. He and his wife Anna remain standing for a while at the harbor. He doesn’t say a word, and his wife doesn’t say a word either.

When in 1939 Arthur and Hermine do apply for an exit visa after all, they sell Ludwig’s property along with the dock and the bathing house for half its market value to the architect next door. On account of the profit he is making on this transaction, the architect pays the National Finance Authority a 6% De-Judification Gains Tax.

The proceeds from the sale, which the parents, Arthur and Hermine, are to use to pay for their passage, which Ludwig is pleading with them to do as quickly as possible, must be transferred to a frozen bank account until their passports are ready. At approximately the same time, they are forbidden to set foot in public parks. Elliot learns to walk down the three steps to the garden without holding his mother’s hand. Ludwig plants, together with his gardener, whose hair is so curly that a pencil stuck into it remains there, a fig tree and the first of the three pineapple palms.

When Holland enters the war the passports for Ludwig’s parents are ready, but it is no longer possible to wire the money to the steamship company. Ludwig knows that it is not without its dangers to lie down to rest beneath a eucalyptus tree. But he loves the rustling sound. Even when the gardener shakes his head the pencil does not fall out. Elliot speaks his first word: Mum. Anna is pregnant for the second time.

Two months after Arthur and Hermine get into the gas truck in Kulmhof outside of Łodz, after Arthur’s eyes pop out of their sockets as he asphyxiates, and Hermine in her death throes defecates on the feet of a woman she’s never seen before, all their assets, together with the assets remaining in Germany that belonged to their son, Ludwig, who has emigrated, are seized, all the frozen bank accounts dissolved and their household goods auctioned off. All the possessions of Arthur and Hermine, including the proceeds from the sale of the property beside the lake containing 1 bathing house and 1 dock, become the property of the German Reich, represented by the Reich Finance Minister.

The town is also called Moederstadt, the Mother City. Shortly before Christmas, Ernst, Ludwig’s brother-in-law, the father of Doris, contracts spotted fever while performing forced labor at the autobahn construction site and dies several days later. On Easter Monday it is Elisabeth’s and Doris’s turn to make the trip. It’s only supposed to be a short journey, Elisabeth writes to him, Ludwig, her brother, still sitting in the train. 1 letter opener, ebony with a tin handle, purchased in 1927 for 2 marks 30. Ludwig’s reply from Cape Town to Warsaw takes six weeks to get there and six weeks to come back, it is returned to him unopened. Three months later baby Elisabeth is born. In the Mother City, at the most beautiful end of the world.

WHEN THE PROPERTY
is expanded, the householder assigns his gardener the job of tearing down the fence and felling the pine trees on the highest part of what used to be the next-door property. The gardener saws the wood into pieces, chops it up for firewood and stacks the logs in the woodshed. He also uproots the bushes on the level clearing at the highest point of the newly acquired land and in late fall begins to dig holes for fruit trees. Five apple trees, three cherries and three pears at the householder’s request. As he digs he works his way through a thin layer of humus and then strikes bedrock and breaks through it, uncovering a layer of sand with groundwater coursing through it that displays a wave-like pattern showing how, thousands of years ago, the wind blew across the lake, and finally beneath this sand is the blue clay found everywhere in the region. The gardener digs the holes to a depth of 80 centimeters and then fills them with composted earth so the fruit trees will flourish. He diverts a few pipes from the underground drainage system he had set up on the original property so the young fruit trees will receive additional water. The gardener adds topsoil and sows grass seed between the young trees. By the time the first frost arrives, grass has sprouted on the bare soil.

HAVE YOU HEARD
this one? OK, here goes.

She can’t help laughing all over again, even though she’s told the joke many times now, she laughs, and the others are already laughing in any case, she really does like to laugh, sometimes as a child she’d
gotten stuck in her laughter,
that’s what her father called it, getting stuck in laughter, as though her body were holding on to the laughter and absolutely refusing to give it up, convulsive laughter that just went on and on without her. Even her big sisters who had to take her, their little sister, everywhere they went, would laugh when she crossed her eyes and made faces or let them talk her into trying sneezing powder as healing salts for her nose or hot chilies in place of sweet peppers. She would sneeze, snort or spit, and the others would laugh. A tightrope walker is what she wanted to be, or else a lion tamer, but this she confided to no one, not even her father,
the chief mogul
, who was really chief consul, all she wanted to do was laugh and travel for the rest of her life while her sisters went on growing, got fat and had children. Unlike them, she would go on tour forever and ever. As soon as she was old enough to balance on a tightrope or start training lions, the chief mogul, who was really chief consul, recommended she take a course in stenography. Stenography, said the mogul to the lion tamer, was worth as much as six foreign languages. Stenographers and typists were in demand all over the world, the chief mogul said. Now she was sitting with her husband and a few friends out on the terrace around a big pot in which crabs were floating that she had caught herself in the lake that afternoon and then boiled until they turned red, in her hand she held a crab’s pincer and was continuing to laugh. Even before the war she’d sat here like this with her husband and several of the neighbors, or else with friends, a practice she continued during the war as well, sitting out on the terrace until late at night with a view of the lake, and still she was sitting here. She would happily keep sitting here like this unto all eternity.

Before she met her husband, for whom she started working as a stenographer as soon as she completed her training, she would never have thought that one of the greatest adventures could consist in having someone marry her. At the time her husband was still married to his first wife, he possessed a family—a wife and child, as one says. For the first time in her life, weeping borrowed her body from laughter for several evenings in a row. It had taken three quarters of a year before her boss had given her a first kiss, and a further half a year followed before the two of them began to joke about a life they would live together, and then several months more before, lying in the grass beside her on one of their outings to the countryside outside Berlin, on the shore of this wide, glittering lake, he suddenly said: This is where we could live, don’t you think? Not until this day did the tightrope walker understand that a person who possesses all sorts of things, including a wife and child, must first finish sitting, then get up, then begin to walk, and then much, much later work up some speed, and only then will this person be able to take a leap, if indeed he is ever able to do so, and that when a person like this leaps, he wants to land somewhere and not nowhere. Not until this day when he said to her: This is where we could live, don’t you think?, and she was lying there on her back watching the pine trees sway back and forth before the blue sky—from this day on it was clear to her that he would arrive where she was only if she was willing to wait for him on this one particular bit of earth located not terribly far from Berlin. And so the young stenographer, who would have liked best to go on tour for the rest of her life, surprised herself by replying: Yes.

It then took another half a year before he really did have the contract of sale prepared and had her sign it so that when his divorce became final half the property would not go to his wife, to whom he was still married at the time, and their son. All together, things took first as long as she had imagined they would, and then twice that, so that it was as much as she could possibly endure, and finally an additional length of time beyond the point of what was endurable. When she signed the contract of sale for the property beside the lake, she was so exhausted that when her future husband used the word “sod” to refer to the piece of land, she involuntarily heard “sad” instead and couldn’t help thinking back to that forlorn Berlin winter far in the past when, as a child, she had secretly leapt from the shore onto the frozen Spree River and the very piece of ice she happened to land on cracked off from the impact and began to float downstream with the current. The sliding and balancing, her feet like ice in their wet shoes and finally the grasping to catch the hands, ladders and canes being held out to her—but above all her fear that she could drift out of Berlin before anyone succeeded in rescuing her—left her so exhausted that, still dripping, she fell asleep in the arms of the man who was carrying her home to her parents.

After signing the contract of sale, the architect had indeed gotten divorced, had shortly thereafter married her and begun construction on the house. Her laughter had returned to her, and as if her husband wanted to build this laughter into the house forever, he fulfilled her every most extravagant wish: He had a little iron bird forged onto the balcony railing in front of her room, he concealed her clothes closet, fitted with a secret mechanism to open it, behind a double door; for the telephone, there was a tiny niche in the wall beside her bed, the bedding could be stowed away behind three flaps that were built into the paneling around her bed and covered with rose-colored silk, various windows in the house were set with panes of colored glass, one of the two chairs at the dining table bore his initials, the other hers, and the shutters on the ground floor could be opened and shut by means of a concealed crank in the interior of the house—when someone was walking by, how amusing it was to startle the stranger with the silent, ghostly movement of the black shutters. Like a genie at her service, he conjured up the house for her, and she laughed. That no room was provided that might some day become a nursery was accepted by both as a matter of course.

She continued to work in her husband’s office in Berlin, but on weekends the two of them always drove out to the country, and since her husband was soon designing houses for one or the other neighbor who wanted to build beside the lake and then supervising the construction, they came to spend more and more time on their bit of sod, as her husband still liked to refer to this piece of land, and their circle of friends continued to grow. While they were eating crabs, one of them—sometimes he, sometimes she—would begin to tell stories, and the more practiced they became, the more effortlessly one would interrupt the other as if by chance, to deepen their guests’ laughter, and the more skillfully they delivered their punch lines. Haven’t we told you this one yet? How he, and then how she, how then he, and how she, how he—how surprised she was when, how she literally had thought that, and that finally he, and so really, she says, now shaking her head mutely to fill the pause guaranteed to come. Her husband adds, she interjects, he elaborates, but she really has to add that, and he agrees with her. Just before the climax she herself starts laughing in advance, then finally the punch line, and everyone laughs, they all laugh and laugh, another beer, another glass of wine, oh yes, not for me, thank you, maybe just a glass of seltzer. In this way the architect and his wife pass the time on many evenings both for themselves and for their guests.

The architect’s wife who, now that she’s gotten married, understands that adventure is really always just subjecting yourself to something unfamiliar, throws herself into this sedentary life with all her inborn love of movement, and the property, not least on account of its waterfront location, proves an appropriate refuge. Her sisters, both of whom have meanwhile become mothers, watch from the dock as she swims the crawl, crossing the steamer’s route and then going much farther out until her swim cap is visible only as a pin-sized dot, while they themselves stay close to shore, splashing about in the shallow water with their children; her sisters like to eat crabs, but they screech when their younger sister picks up the flailing creatures by the scruff and throws them into the net with no sign of disgust; when the swing for her nieces and nephews gets tangled in a branch of the big oak tree, she is the one who at once digs fingers and toes into the furrows of the tree’s bark, quickly ascending, then straddles tree limbs to slide forward to where she can release the loop of rope caught in the leaves as if it were nothing. Her older sisters and their children sleep in until the housekeeper summons them to breakfast with the gong, but she goes walking for at least an hour before breakfast, on cool mornings the handle of the big front gate is often still wet with dew when she sets out, she hikes up into the woods and then, with a view of the lake, crosses the fields to return home. Every summer her sisters visit her with their off spring to spend a few weeks on her bit of sod, they swim, eat and swap recipes, they watch their childless sister laugh and let their bodies melt in the shade as they rest after lunch, they are relaxing, people would say, but nonetheless, even though they are refraining from all strenuous activity, these women sometimes do not look at all relaxed, they look more as if they were waiting for something and finding it difficult to wait.

And so the years pass and are like one single year. Whether the cockchafer plague was in ’37 or maybe one year later is something she can no longer say, but she can still remember the sound to this day, the noise it made when she was out for a bicycle ride with her niece, rolling over the beetles that had transformed the sandy road into a dark, teeming surface, she hasn’t forgotten the cracking beneath her tires. All summers like one single summer. Whether it was ’38 or ’39, or perhaps even 1940 when they began to use the dock belonging to the abandoned property next door, and when her husband built the boathouse beside the dock—she’s no longer sure quite when that was. Surely he hadn’t built the boathouse until the next-door property already belonged to them, but when was that? Summer after summer swimming, sunbathing and picking raspberries at the edge of the woods across from the house, autumn after autumn hearing the gardener rake up the leaves in the garden, smelling him burning the musty heap, winter after winter speeding across the frozen lake on an ice yacht and afterward taking in the sail with fingers frozen red and quickly ducking into the house: warming her hands at the stove until they hurt; Easter after Easter hiding hard-cooked eggs among the first flowers for her nephews and nieces. All like a single one. Today can be today, but it might also be yesterday or twenty years ago, and her laughter is the laughter of today, of yesterday, and just as much, the laughter of twenty years ago, time appears to be at her beck and call, like a house in which she can enter now this room, now that. Have you heard this one? While she was spending her whole life laughing, her blond hair imperceptibly turned into white hair. Today or yesterday or twenty years ago she is sitting with friends around a large pot in which crabs are floating, crabs she caught herself, gripping them firmly behind the neck, and later boiled until they turned red. Eating such a crab is not so simple. First you twist the creature’s head off and suck its juices, then you rip off the claws and use a tiny skewer to pull out the meat. The best part of a crab though is the meat from its tail, which is referred to as its heart. Before you can eat it, you remove the crab’s entrails and lay them aside.

Humor is when you laugh all the same, she says on one of those summer evenings during one of the last twenty years while she is sucking the marrow out of one of the claws, one of their friends, a film director, has just told everyone what a hard time the make-up department has been having making Aryan actors look Semitic so they can play that irksome racketeer Ipplmeier and his vassals. But in the rushes, at least, they looked like the real thing, the director says, heaving a sigh, and her husband says: Hope springs eternal, and she says: Humor is when you laugh all the same. Humor is when you laugh all the same, she says on some other summer evening during a different one of the last twenty years, and she cracks the shell of a crab as her husband is telling friends that he must travel to the West and use his own private funds to buy screws for the young republic because it has been expressly demanded of him that he stay within the allotted budget while also completing the building he’s now working on in time for the third anniversary. In the entire Eastern Zone there are no screws to be had, unbelievable, he says, and she says: Humor is when you laugh all the same. On some summer evening during one of the last twenty years her husband tells one of the guests how at the end of the war the Russians had converted the garden to a paddock for their horses, how everything had been trampled, how he had even seen the gardener cry, he says all these things, and his wife says nothing, she is just wiping her hands on a napkin, and their friend, who after all can only judge what has been said to him, now makes his contribution to the subject by repeating in his turn: Humor is when you laugh all the same, and while he is saying this, he fishes another crab out of the pot. If it had not been for that one night, that one night in the walk-in closet that her husband had designed especially for her, she might perhaps still believe that when her husband slid the contract of sale over to her to sign he was buying her a piece of eternity and that this eternity did not have a single hole in it anywhere.

Even today when she hears someone speak of the war she thinks first of the war that her own body began to wage against her just as the first bombs fell on Germany. Despite the shrinking supplies of food, her body had, utterly illogically, grown fat all at once while others who had been fat beforehand, her sisters for example, first grew slender with all the excitement and then the hunger, and then they grew thin and then haggard. The 6th Army capitulated outside of Stalingrad, and already the morning of that day she was overcome by hot flashes, the sweat covered the space between her lips and nose like a moustache of tiny droplets, this sweat was embarrassing, but it would have embarrassed her even more to wipe it away, the Russians were marching toward Poland, and she felt dizzy, often several times a day, so that she had to steady herself by grasping table edges and door handles so as not to fall down, and finally, just as the Allies were landing in Normandy, even weeping returned to her body, taking hold of it and refusing to leave again, like a long-forgotten creditor come to collect on a debt she no longer recalled. She who had always cut such a boyish figure now stood there every morning before the mirror sweating, she steadied herself on the edge of the sink so as not to fall down, she wiped her tears, avoiding the sight of that round, milky face with which she shared no memories; compared to this face the colored glass in the windows to the right and left of the mirror looked so much more familiar—glass that her husband had put there just because she wanted him to.