Visitation (7 page)

The only place that can still be counted on to resemble itself and of which the girl would be able to say even from here in her dark chamber what it looks like at the present hour is Uncle Ludwig’s property. Perhaps that is why she remembers the few weekends and the two summers she spent there more clearly than anything else. On Uncle Ludwig’s property she can still walk from tree to tree and hide behind the bushes, she can look at the lake and know that the lake is still there. And as long as she still remembers something in this world, she isn’t yet in the foreign place.

And indeed it had already happened weeks before, precisely on that day in June when her mother had gone to G
sia to sell the wristwatch on the black market and she herself, waiting beside a book stand on Ulica Karmelicka, had discovered the book her mother had refused all that time to let her read, a novel with the title
Saint Gunther or The Man without a Homeland
, on precisely that day when she, standing on Karmelicka, struggling a little to hold her ground amid the press of people, leafed through this book and read and was happy that the owner of this portable booth lacked the strength to prevent her from reading the book without paying for it, precisely on that day all their possessions from their household in Guben were removed from the shipping container in reverse order from the way her father and mother had packed them into this container two years before in preparation for their journey to Brazil, removed by one Herr Carl Pflüger and the chief inspector Pauschel who had been assigned to him, removed and then prepared for auction. On that very day when she spent so long standing there on Karmelicka reading, because she didn’t have any money to buy the book and, as long as she kept reading, she didn’t have to think about stuff ed peppers or pancakes with applesauce or even just a simple slice of bread with butter and salt, precisely on this day in June, approximately two months following her arrival in Warsaw, her childhood bed from Guben, lot number 48, was sold unbeknownst to her for Mk. 20.—to Frau Warnitscheck of Neustädter Strasse 17, her cocoa pot, lot number 119, to Herr Schulz of Alte Poststrasse 42, just a few buildings down from the building in which they’d lived, and her father’s concertina, lot number 133, for Mk. 36.—to Herr Moosmann, Salzmarktstrasse 6. On the evening of this day on which she returned to her quarters only just before curfew, on this evening of one of the longest days of the year 1942, on which a faint early-summer breeze was lifting up the newspapers that covered the bodies of the dead and the odor of decay rose into the air, on this evening when it was still light out and she, as she had grown accustomed to doing here, was walking home in zigzags so as not to trip over corpses, on the evening of this day on which, as on all the other evenings, the crying of motherless children rose up in the hallways of the buildings, on this Monday evening on which her mother served her the potatoes she’d gotten in exchange for the wristwatch, very probably the last potatoes she will ever have eaten in her life, already on this evening all the bed sheets belonging to Ernst, Elisabeth and Doris, auctioned off by the pair at prices ranging between 8 marks 40 and 8 marks 70, lot numbers 177 to 185, lay neatly pressed in the linen cupboards of the families Wittger, Schulz, Müller, Seiler, Langmann and Brühl, Klemker, Fröhlich and Wulf.

As dark as it is here, it was probably just as dark under the boat that time when it capsized right near the shore when the boy from the village was trying to sail it up to the dock. Before he walked back to the village, the girl had brought him to the raspberry bushes up by the sandy road. Later the boy had returned the favor by showing her how to swim. Right next to the shore where the water was so shallow that her feet grazed the bottom as she swam, she experienced for the first time the sensation of having the water buoy her up. It was this same summer that the woman from next door had showed her how to catch crabs. But did crabs exist? A lake, a boat, raspberry bushes? Was this boy still there if she couldn’t see him? Was there anyone else besides her left in the world? Now something is becoming clear to her that she has failed to consider all this time: If no one knows she exists any longer, who will know there is a world when she is no longer there?

She didn’t notice that the floor of the old building where she is hiding isn’t quite level, and since it is so dark that she cannot see anything at all, she also cannot see how the little rivulet now meanders out under the door of her hiding place into the abandoned kitchen of an abandoned apartment in abandoned Ulica Nowolipie in Warsaw. By the time the Appropriations Commando under the leadership of a German soldier takes over the apartment, the rivulet has formed a little lake on the kitchen floor.

For the last time now she has to walk north up Zamenhofa with the sun at her back. Beside her others are walking whom she doesn’t know, all fortunate coincidences have now run out of steam, now all of them are finally going home for good. In the empty streets that the procession crosses block after block lie the shattered tables and beds of those who walked this road before them on the paving stones in the shadow of the buildings. Since the ghetto was never particularly large, the girl knows quite precisely what she is leaving behind. Listing the few streets by name doesn’t even take as long as reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Schmeling, they say, once put a tree trunk across his shoulders and walked like that the entire way from his summer cottage in the nearby spa town to the swimming hole in the village. This was to strengthen his arm muscles, the boy from the village had said to her. She’d told him she didn’t believe him, and the boy had insisted it was true, saying he’d been there himself when Schmeling arrived. At the swimming hole, Schmeling had tossed the tree trunk off his shoulders as if it were made of paper, he’d stretched his arms and then jumped into the water and swum out so far you couldn’t see him any longer. One of the villagers had shouted: For Heaven’s sake, our Schmeling is drowning! He’d believed it was true and had implored the villager to swim out after the boxer and save his life. But it had just been a joke all along.

Of the one hundred and twenty people in the boxcar, approximately thirty suffocate during the two-hour trip. As a motherless child, she is considered an inconvenience that might interfere with things running smoothly, and so the moment they arrive she is herded off to the side along with a few old people who cannot walk any longer and the ones who went mad during the trip, she is ushered past a pile of clothing as high as a mountain—like the Nackliger, she can’t help thinking and remembers her own smile that she smiled that day when the gardener told her the funny name of that underwater shoal. For two minutes, a pale, partly cloudy sky arches above her just the way it would look down by the lake right before it rained, for two minutes she inhales the scent of the pine trees she knows so well, but she cannot see the pine trees themselves because of the tall fence. Has she really come home? For two minutes she can feel the sand beneath her shoes along with a few pieces of flint and pebbles made of quartz or granite; then she takes off her shoes forever and goes to stand on the board to be shot.

Nothing is nicer than diving with your eyes open. Diving down as far as the shimmering legs of your mother and father who have just come back from swimming and now are wading to shore through the shallow water. Nothing more fun than to tickle them and to hear, muffled by the water, how they shriek because they know it will make their child happy.

For three years the girl took piano lessons, but now, while her dead body slides down into the pit, the word piano is taken back from human beings, now the backflip on the high bar that the girl could perform better than her schoolmates is taken back, along with all the motions a swimmer makes, the gesture of seizing hold of a crab is taken back, as well as all the basic knots to be learned for sailing, all these things are taken back into uninventedness, and finally, last of all, the name of the girl herself is taken back, the name no one will ever again call her by: Doris.

IN WINTER THE
gardener brings the seasoned logs from earlier years up to the house in the wheelbarrow and kindles fires in the heating stoves for the mistress of the house and her niece.

He prunes the apple and pear trees. In spring he helps the mistress of the house carry down the crates in which she has stowed everything of value, to save it from the Russians. He fetches the oars and oarlocks when she is ready to go out in the boat to sink the crates on the shoal of the Nackliger. When the Russians arrive, they place nearly two hundred horses in the garden, around seventy on the smaller meadow beside the house, and around one hundred and thirty on the larger one to the right of the path that leads down to the lake. The horses scrape at the ground that is just beginning to thaw, transforming it into a morass within a single day, the horses eat everything around them that can possibly serve as food: the fresh leaves and blossoms of the forsythia bush, the young shoots of the fir shrubs and the lilac and hazelnut buds. The Russians confiscate the entire supply of honey. By this time the potato beetle, pursuing a course diametrically opposite to the direction in which the Red Army is marching, has already reached the Soviet Union and is preparing to devastate what potato fields there were spared by the Germans.

OVERNIGHT ANOTHER TWELVE
horses were brought. Now more than two hundred total are standing in the garden, snorting and pawing the ground. The young Red Army officer walks among them as if walking through a stable whose roof is the moonless sky. The smell of animals closes off the garden against the night better than walls could or a gate. Trees black, bushes black, black the grass trampled beneath hooves, black the bodies of the animals that are so familiar to the youth that he could walk blind from horse to horse to make his way back to the house. He has ordered the others to set out once more to search the surrounding countryside for hidden animals. In the house it stinks of the excretions of his men. The more affluent the homes in which they make their quarters, the more shitting takes place, as if it were necessary to employ this method to restore equilibrium to something off kilter. His men, egging each other on, have shat upon the shiny stone floor, pissed against the painted door and vomited behind the stove. For this reason he has withdrawn to the upstairs of the house, reserving for his own use a small room with a balcony. He himself pees off the balcony and defecates in the garden, but only because he would rather be alone for these activities. Only recently, now that they have penetrated deep into German territory, has the fury of the soldiers reached such a level that they are using the insides of their own bodies to wage war. The more German houses they set foot in, the more painfully they are faced with the question of why the Germans were unable to remain in a place where nothing at all, not the slightest little thing, was lacking.

The young Red Army officer has kept his distance from many things the older soldiers have gotten into, but this does not include battle. This is why he is already a major although his skin still displays the downy radiance of a child. He enlisted voluntarily at the age of fifteen after his mother, father and sisters had all been killed by the Germans. The first one he’d found was his little sister, just four years old, when he returned from the paddock to the family’s home. She was floating in the well, face-up. The night before she’d still been lying beside him in the bed they shared, breathing. From then on he had always been right on the front line, and at some point the driving-out had given way to a taking-in, and the defense of his homeland became a ravaging of foreign lands that he would otherwise surely never in his life have set foot in. Like a weed that is ripped from the earth and then thrown through the air in a high arc, he was being carried on by a force that lay outside himself, outside his still youthful body, a force that caused him to march and fight and seize in order to push the Germans further and further across the map, pushing them beyond the borders of their own country, all the way through Switzerland or France or Austria and Italy, further and further until they were shoved into the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, and plunging after them into the depths, sinking further and further to a place where both their movements and his own would be drowned in the same silence. His little sister had probably run out of the house and been caught there by the Germans. His father, his mother and his older sister had burned together with their house. The hands, breasts and eyes of his mother had burned inside the house.

All around the bed in which he now sleeps, the wall is covered to half its height with pink silk. This silk conceals large wooden flaps that are set into the wall and can be opened with a four-sided key, and behind the flaps was the bedding he’s been sleeping in for several days now. The bedding smells of peppermint and camphor, as does the cream-colored morning coat he found hanging inside a shallow closet across from the bed. This shallow closet, flanked to the right and left by wooden columns, is set into the wall like a door and opens with a brass knob. On the inside of the door of this closet a full-length mirror is mounted. When he moved into the room, the young Red Army officer had opened the door to see what was behind it, he’d seen the morning coat hanging there and, without knowing why, he’d taken the cloth in his hands and inhaled its fragrance, peppermint and camphor, and meanwhile the mirror had mutely reflected his image from his short Russian hair to the now very thin soles of his boots in which he had marched all the way from his homeland to here, all this reflected in the German mirror, and then the youth had closed the door again. Sometimes when he is alone in the room in the evening he goes over to the shallow closet, opens it without knowing why, buries his face for a little while in the cream-colored fabric, ignoring his mirror image, then at some point closes the door again and goes to bed. Tonight, too, he puts his hands into the smooth, lustrous cloth, pulls it to his face, rubs it between his fingers, rubs the fabric’s rough inner surface against its rough inner surface, fills his lungs with the scent of peppermint and camphor before he closes the door and lies down on the bed, all around him the walls covered in pink silk; the balcony door is open to the darkness, and down in the garden the horses are softly neighing and pawing the earth and snorting in the huge muffled stall that extends all the way to the stars.

And then there is one additional sound this night, a rustling sound like the sound of the martens that make their nests in the attic, he’d caught one of them yesterday, and the creature’s fur is now hanging over the railing of the little balcony, once more a rustling comes from behind the wall in which the shallow closet is set. The young Red Army officer gets up quickly, before there’s even time for him to think that if things are as they should be, there’s no room for a marten inside a wall. He opens the door, and at once everything falls silent behind the wall on which the morning coat is hanging. Only now does he step back and examine the shallow closet from top to bottom, he examines the wooden columns that flank it, and only now does he see that they don’t quite reach all the way to the floor, in the few millimeters left between the columns and the floor, he sees, kneeling down on the floor now, the outermost curve of tiny wheels almost entirely concealed in the interior of the columns. Only now does he see that the soft cork floor directly in front of the shallow closet has been polished in a half-circle, even though the door with the mirror on it always opened easily. In the remaining fractions of a second in which he thinks and grasps all these things, he also thinks and grasps that on the other side of the shallow cupboard someone is breathing who already knows all his thoughts and is now awaiting the end of this very, very long second.

He reaches for his revolver, quietly closes the mirrored door, and then gives a strong quick tug on the metal knob without turning it first. As expected, one of the wooden columns now emerges from the paneling of the wall, and with a faint squeaking sound the shallow closet follows his energetic tug as if the youth had just opened the thick page of a wooden book. He peers into a deep closet that had previously been hidden, he sees jackets, dresses, coats, shirts and blouses hanging close together one beside the other, and in a compartment above them sweaters, scarves and hats. The closet’s rod and shelf extend off into the darkness to the right of the door. And there something is rustling, but the young Red Army officer cannot see. A vibrant odor—urine and feces—engulfs him, and beneath the hanging clothes he sees a pot filled to the brim with filth. Some defecate out of fear, others because they cannot come out of their hiding places, and still others out of anger, he thinks, and all of this together is called war. Maybe the Germans used to hide too much, it occurs to him, now that he has happened upon this secret closet, they even hid the bedclothes in the wall and put up wooden gratings to hide the radiators. And they weren’t even taking into account that the war might come washing back over them, they concealed all these things from their own eyes alone. Now finally everything is being dragged back out again: clothes, jewelry, bicycles, livestock, horses and women. Now everyone else sees it, and they themselves are being forced to see it as well. Everything is being dragged out into the light and put to use, anyone still alive stops washing himself, and anyone buried beneath the rubble rots and thus also begins to stink.

The Red Army officer forces his way between the clothes, his revolver pointed into darkness, to the back of the closet where he encounters a body that mutely begins to put up resistance when he reaches for it. Before the war, the Red Army officer was still a child, and making use of women had never interested him during the war, but here, as he puts his revolver away so as to be able to use both hands to hold fast what is struggling here in his grasp, he is so occupied with seizing and grasping and forced by this seizing and grasping into such close proximity that before he can even consider what he is doing, he touches the warm breasts of a woman in the dark, a woman who is continuing to struggle and in this struggle forcing him to ever greater proximity, then he feels her hair on his face and finally, when he has forced her into the farthest corner and she bites his arm and he twists both her arms behind her back, he catches a whiff of camphor and peppermint, this smell of illnesses one waits out lying in bed, this smell of maturity and peacetime.

Then he grows calm, and calmly he begins to kiss the lips he cannot see, he who has never before kissed anyone on the mouth, he kisses this most probably German mouth that is full and perhaps also slightly wilted, but he cannot judge this because he has never before kissed anyone on the mouth, then he releases her arms and strokes the woman’s head, she is no longer struggling, but he hears her begin to cry, he strokes her head as if to comfort her, and then doesn’t know what to do next, although he’s seen often enough what his men do in comparable situations.
Mama
, he says, without knowing what he is saying, it’s so dark that you cannot even see your own words, and she thrusts him away from her, he stumbles, falls down, she kicks him, he tries to grasp her once more and in the process takes hold of her knees, and then she stands still, then she slowly pulls her dress up a little, he rests his forehead against her belly, she appears to be naked under her dress, he inhales the smell of life emanating from the curly hair. She says one or two words, but her words too are invisible in this dark hiding place. Perhaps the war consists only in the blurring of the fronts, for now, as she pushes the soldier’s head between her legs, pushing it between her legs perhaps only for the reason that she knows he has a weapon and that it is better not to struggle, she begins to guide him, perhaps war consists only in one person’s guiding another out of fear, and then the other way around, and on and on in this way. And as now the young soldier, perhaps only out of fear of the woman, pushes his tongue in among the curly hair, tasting something that tastes like iron, a warm stream begins to flow over his face, first gently, then more forcefully, the woman is urinating on his face, urinating on him in just the way his men urinated on the painted door in the entryway below, and so she too is waging war, or is this love, the soldier doesn’t know, the two seem to resemble one another, and now, when it ought to be his turn to take over, to guide her, he remains kneeling there, and amid all the wetness tears have begun to flow down his face, and his tears have the same temperature as the great river that is flooding him, with which his tears now intermingle here in the depths of a German closet. Instead of taking over, he remains kneeling there at the feet of the woman, sobbing audibly now, but perhaps it is precisely his weakness that disarms the woman far more effectively than force would have done. For now she draws him at last to his feet, dries his face on one of the pieces of clothing between which they are standing, and speaks softly to him. It wouldn’t take much for her to push him out of the closet with a little spank, like a mother sending her young son off to school.

Back where he was at home there was no such thing. It’s as if his childhood had stopped where his homeland did. Back where his home was, the girls wore two braids on their way to school or else tied these braids into loops with big, red silk ribbons and a triangular neck scarf. When they walked, they held their heads up in a way he has not seen any woman do here in Germany, as if everything that might have weighed them down had been lifted from their shoulders. On summer evenings they went strolling along with their heads held high like this, strolling one last time out to the edge of the field, linking their arms in pairs or even three at a time, chatting and laughing when they saw the boys leaning up against the linden tree, they laughed and went walking past, and the swallows were flying, and the boys were sitting and standing around the linden tree, and sometimes, very rarely, they succeeded in engaging the girls in conversation on their way home, and only one single time did one of the girls take up the boys’ offer and sit down on the bench under the linden tree, the boys had all gotten up at once, gangly and downy, and had nudged and shoved one another while the girl remained sitting there for approximately five minutes exchanging wisecracks with them. In his homeland he had never seen women offering themselves openly on the street or in their apartments like here in Germany, nor had he seen indecent pictures or magazines. In a German photography studio two or three towns back, its display windows shattered and its walls falling in, a creased picture had caught his eye while his men were plundering the shop, this picture lay on the floor and in it he had seen a naked woman threatening another naked woman with a whip. This photograph was as far removed from the mosaics adorning the town hall in the larger town near where he grew up as Russia was from Germany. These mosaics had shown women with sheaves of grain in their arms, young students holding test tubes in their hands, and mothers with babies on their hips. To watch a girl undo her braid while bathing and then see her hair tumble down about her shoulders would have been enough, back home, to fall in love, but these women with whips in their hands he associated with the photo studio itself that had been bombed into rubble and then plundered, as though these women were standing upon layer after layer of things that had been trampled, torn up and worn down, and were whipping one another to set everything ablaze with this last malicious pleasure. His men had taken this picture and many other ones like it and were now carrying them around in their uniform jackets, face to face with the photographs of their wives and children. In school he had learned that the seed for the happy future of mankind was being sowed in the Soviet Union. But now, on his journey through Germany, this journey that was the war, an unsavory dirty past that until then had been unknown to these Soviet men was catching up with them and dragging them deeper in this foreign land. And yet, if you stopped to consider that since the beginning of the war Poland had all but ceased to exist, there was now a border where Russia and Germany met.