Visitation (9 page)

I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e. No, she and her husband did not
go home
to Germany; what they wanted was to bring this country—only coincidentally the one whose language they spoke—back home again in their thoughts. They wanted finally to drag from beneath the German rubble some ground they could keep beneath their feet, ground that would no longer be illusory. Although their bodies would grow old, their hope for mankind’s salvation from greed and envy would, they thought, remain young for a long time, the errors of mortals were mortal, but their work was immortal. And now it is precisely that young doctor whom they allow to examine their aging bodies once a year, that doctor who is taking advantage of the State to become the heir to its founders. It has once more come to pass that the invisible army, now divided, is soundlessly striking its own forces with invisible lances and shields. Perhaps these young people, who know the enemy only from the reports of their elders and have never seen him face to face, will soon be ready to defect and join the ranks of this foe, even if only to have at last the opportunity—after so many years of siege—to take up arms once more.

Have the words in her aging mouth aged as well without her noticing? After supper, the chairs from the garden are set up in the hall so that everyone can join in watching the news on television: she and her husband, their son, their daughter-in-law, her son’s little girl, the visitor, some friends or other who will be spending the night in the bathing house, and sometimes the cook as well. On the seven o’clock news they hear about bringing in the harvest, farmers are standing in the dust between rows of stubble talking about planned production targets, combine harvesters can be seen and also silos. Foreign words that did not grow in the farmers’ mouths are relegating them to the dust of the fields where they must serve as a focal point. Since her return to Germany, all her passion has been devoted to attempting to use the words she’s typed out letter by letter to transform her memories into the memories of others, to transport her life on paper into other lives as if ferrying it across a river. These letters she’s been tapping out have allowed her to draw to the surface many things that seemed worthy of preserving, while pushing other things, painful ones, back into obscurity. Now, later, she no longer knows whether it wasn’t a mistake to pick and choose, since this thing she’d been envisioning all her life was supposed to be a whole world, not a half one.

Yes, she reads several days later in a statement sent to her from the municipal offices, she too is welcome to purchase her house, but not the land on which it is standing, and the bathing house can, if she so desires, be relocated to the meadow at the top of the hill at government expense, as a way of facilitating the doctor’s lake access while at the same time fulfilling the State’s obligations to her. She removes from her typewriter the sheet of paper containing certain words and not containing certain other words, sets it on the not particularly high stack of already written pages of her new book, removes a sheet of laid paper from the drawer, rolls it into the machine and responds to the municipal offices: Yes, she would like to purchase her house and of course would be grateful to have the bathing house relocated to the top of the hill. With Socialist greetings.

NOW THAT THE WALNUT
tree whose hollow was filled with concrete continues to stand upright but has stopped bearing nuts over the past three years, the gardener chops it down at the householder’s bidding. He saws up the trunk, splits the pieces and stacks the logs in the woodshed. During the cherry harvest the gardener falls off the ladder and breaks his leg. For two months he has to lie in bed until his bones have knitted together and he can start learning to walk again. Fortunately the son of the householder has begun this summer to spend his entire vacation time on the property, he has been discharged from the Home and is now living with his parents again—and he has meanwhile grown tall and is strong enough to take over the task of mowing the lawn. But the fungus that attacks every last one of the fruit trees this summer goes unnoticed too long during the gardener’s convalescence, and so when the gardener gets up again for the first time he finds all the apples and pears withered on their stems.

After his fall, the gardener is no longer able to perform heavy labor. All he’s been able to do since then is walk slowly across the property, here and there picking up bits of fallen wood, he trims the dry blossoms from flowers and shrubs, waters shrubs and flowers twice a day, once early in the morning and again when dusk arrives, at the beginning of winter he empties all the water pipes in the house and turns off the main valve. He closes all the shutters, both in the main house and the bathing house down by the lake.

The householder and his son now take over the yearly task of repairing and dismantling the dock. To supplement the heating stove in the house a night storage heater is installed, now the firewood cut in earlier years will readily suffice for charging the stove on chilly spring and autumn days. Apple and pear trees fail to recover from the fungal infestation, even over the next several years. Spider mites attack the cherries. When the garbage pit is expanded, it furthermore becomes clear that the pipes that provide water to the orchard rusted out long ago, but water pipes are not currently available for purchase by private citizens. For the first time there is talk of reducing the size of the leased property.

In the village people are saying that the householder’s son used to bring any number of girls back to the bathing house after a dance or other festivity to spend the night with him, and that the gardener, seated on a bench beneath the eaves of the bathing house, kept watch on such nights to prevent the mistress of the house from discovering these goings-on. People also claim to have heard from the gardener that when this son finally got engaged to a young woman from Berlin, his mother put up the fiancée in the bathing house of all places, so that no one would accuse her of procuring. This gives the village something to laugh about.

After the young householder marries, a daughter is born to the couple, and this baby is scarcely six weeks old when her parents start bringing her to the garden on weekends, and when it is warm enough outside, they place the perambulator with the sleeping infant under the hawthorn tree at the edge of the small meadow. The gardener walks around the property, a burning or already extinguished cigar stump in his mouth, he picks up dry twigs here and there and, when the days grow warmer, he turns on the sprinkler twice a day to water the flowerbeds and meadows, once in the morning and once early in the evening.

When the gardener is no longer able to squeeze shut the handles of the big tree trimming shears, the young woman takes over the task of pruning the shrubs during the spring and summer. The still fruitless trees are finally sawed down by a farmer on the householder’s orders and chopped up, the farmer stacks the logs in the woodshed. The gardener now spends many hours sitting, always with one and the same cold stump of a cigar in his mouth, on the threshold of the apiary. The last bees remaining from what were once twelve entire colonies continue to fly about their hives for a little while after the orchard is cleared, then disperse in search of new breeding grounds in the surrounding woods. Sometimes the little girl and her friend from next door sit down beside the gardener, who shows them millipedes and wood lice living in the old logs, and shows them how to make a blowpipe out of the hollow stalks of the elderberry, or whistle with the help of a lilac leaf.

THE MAIN THING
is that here she can go swimming again. Even if the first time she visits she doesn’t know the little pieces of porcelain on the table are for resting one’s silverware on between courses. Nor does she succeed in eating her breakfast roll with a knife and fork, which she’d hoped would compensate for her gaff e at lunch the day before. Both misunderstandings produce the same silent smile on the face of her hostess, accompanied by the same light touch of the hostess’s cool hand on her forearm. This bread, the hostess says, is so precious that it’s perfectly all right to pick it up in one’s hands. Back where she comes from she never had to lose any thought over whether or not the bread was precious enough to touch. She’d planted the grain herself, and when she reached out her hands, it was always with the same gesture, from the sowing of the seed to the harvest and baking to the eating of the bread. But here all that is left to do with one’s hands is reach out for the finished bread: a skin covering some unknown interior like the Christmas goose with its hidden stuffing. Here in this garden, unlike the garden that belonged to her, there is nothing to sow and nothing to harvest. All one finds here are pines and oak trees with shrubs growing slowly in their shade, the gardener waters the lawn, the flowers are all perennials, and the dill for the potatoes comes from the neighbor woman at the end of the sandy road—the little girl is sent to fetch it from her. Everyone who spends time in this garden does so only in order to be in a garden. Probably she has now reached the right place at the right point in her life, for she too is spending time in her life only in order to be alive. In other places, or so she’s heard, old people like her are just stuck up in a tree and left to starve, but nowadays they’re even given money to survive on, even if they’re no longer able to work. Never will she get used to this money that is given her month after month for doing nothing. In this garden there is nothing left for her to do but sit—sit there in broad daylight with her hands in her lap, watching the larks fly to and fro. Stop dawdling, she hears herself crying out in an inaudible voice as she sits there, stop dawdling, just as she would shout out the kitchen window at her daughter when she was indulging in idle gossip with the girl next door—her daughter was to come inside to do the dishes, scale fish or pluck a chicken. Her daughter always came running, but now her own hands continue to lie motionless in her lap, and as she sits here she can hear her husband playing the accordion—her own parents are silent as their grandchildren babble away—and she answers inaudibly, she offers silent words of consolation or sings without a sound or else just simply goes on saying nothing, and the main thing is that when evening comes she can go swimming again in this shimmering green, cool lake, almost like at home.

It’s certainly better, at any rate, to be a stranger among strangers. Once, she had returned from the city they’d fled to at first, walking with her three grandchildren all the way back to the farm, thirty kilometers on foot in the wrong direction, and for a short time had worked as a dairymaid for the Poles who had already taken over the house: she had worked as a maid on the farm that belonged to her. So that her daughter would find her if she were to come back from the labor camp after all. Her little grandson had wanted to dig up the toy tractor he’d buried in a corner of the yard several weeks before when they were leaving, but she wouldn’t let him. Her daughter never came back, but the wedding photo she’d always carried with her made its way back into the hands of her mother after various detours, all tattered now and creased, with notations in Cyrillic handwriting on the back. On her way through the garden to the church, her daughter had gotten her veil caught on the red currant bushes and thus had to get married in a torn veil. For the photograph she arranged the veil in such a way that the tear didn’t show. Her daughter never came home. And so the mother, who now was only a grandmother, set out again for the second time with her three grandchildren. It’s certainly better, at any rate, to be a stranger among strangers than in one’s own home.

The dandelions are the same here as back home, and so are the larks
. Now, as an old woman, she has grown into the sentence that her husband always said to her forty years before. The dandelions in her village were the same as the dandelions where he grew up, in the Ukraine, from where he’d come vagabonding along, and the larks too, that’s what he always said. And in Bavaria, from where his great-grandparents had emigrated to Russia, and to where he’d originally meant to return, without knowing anything more about this homeland than its name, there were surely also such dandelions, such larks. Surely her husband’s great-grandparents had at some point or other uttered this very sentence another seventy or eighty years before. She wonders whether the sentences go out looking for people to utter them, or whether it’s just the opposite and the sentences simply wait for someone to come along and make use of them, and at the same time she wonders if she really doesn’t have anything better to do than wonder about such things, what silliness, she thinks, and then she remembers that she doesn’t have anything better to do, she looks at the ottoman on which her crooked legs are propped, it’s upholstered in the same red vinyl as the armchair in which she sits. Probably, she thinks, the sentences all get overtaken sooner or later and are spoken by someone or other, somewhere or other, just as everything belongs to everyone among people who are fleeing—factored over the length of a lifetime, the course of both objects and human beings was no doubt no different from the experience of a refugee. In peacetime it was poverty, during the war it was the front that kept pushing people before it like a long row of dominos, people slept in other people’s beds, used other people’s cooking utensils, ate the stores of food that other people had been forced to leave behind. It’s just that the rooms became more crowded the more the bombs fell. Until in the end she arrived here, in this garden, and when the gong calls her to supper, she finds it quite plausible to think that this gong was already calling to her back then, when she turned her back on her farm for the last time and set off again with her three grandchildren, carrying an eiderdown and with a blue-patterned kerchief on her head. When you’ve arrived, can you still be said to be fleeing? And when you’re fleeing, can you ever arrive?

Her husband died before all of this. When she looks back from his death to the accident with the clover press, it seems to her as if his dying had arrived then already, slipping in through a side door without bothering to identify itself. Even the tearing of her daughter’s bridal veil was a sort of entrance, through a side door, of what was to be, but since that was still the time when all the rest was yet to come, she couldn’t yet recognize it. Now that she is old and living only to be alive, all these things exist simultaneously. Now that she is old, her husband’s injury could be the reason she fell in love with him, and the music he played when he arrived in her village had its roots in his early death, and her daughter, on the other hand, was perhaps already sitting beside her there in the oven, holding her hand when she was pregnant with her, she had been locked up in the oven because she’d fallen in love with that vagabond, the father of the child she was carrying. And this, if you looked at it the right way, was surely the reason he’d come vagabonding along, even before he knew her. As she looks back like this, time appears in its guise as the twin of time, everything flattening out. Things can follow one after the other only for as long as you are alive in order to extract a splinter from a child’s foot, to take the roast out of the oven before it burns or sew a dress from a potato sack, but with each step you take while fleeing, your baggage grows less, with more and more left behind, and sooner or later you just stop and sit there, and then all that is left of life is life itself, and everything else is lying in all the ditches beside all the roads in a land as enormous as the air, and surely here as well you can find these dandelions, these larks.

You aren’t going to marry a man like that, her mother said and locked her up in the oven for several days. But when it turned out she was already pregnant, her mother let her out of the oven again and said: You could have had the postman, the forester, the head fisheries inspector. In order to earn money for his family, her husband had begun to maintain the equipment and machinery of the farmers, including the clover press. From then on he played his music only for his own pleasure and for hers, for the pleasure of his wife. But after he’d cut off four fingers of his left hand on the clover press, he could play neither fiddle nor accordion. Along with his fingers, the clover press had cut off his music from him. This music that he’d played until his accident came from the Ukraine, from where he’d arrived as a vagabond. After his injury, his hand always felt cold, and so she’d sewed a fur-lined mitten that he wore year in and year out from September until well into May. With this mitten on his hand and his hand in his lap, her husband had often sat there in his final years, just as she was doing now, although he was still young. When he died, still in his early forties, she couldn’t bring herself to throw away the fur mitten. But when she had to flee, it got left behind in the house.

She can go swimming here just like at home, and swimming has remained easy for her, unlike walking, for which her bones haven’t been strong enough for some time now. At night, when she takes down her gray knot of hair before going to bed, her hair is still damp. In summer, when she was young, she swam and dove her way through the Masurian lakes, fished in them too, and in winter she went ice-skating, the blades would be screwed into the soles of her boots. She reached out her hands to touch the waters of these lakes, washed herself in them, drank from them, ate their fish and scratched up their ice, she’d worked over the lakes the way her daughter, who so loved to bake, later worked over the cake dough she would knead four hundred times with both hands before putting it in the oven. To this day her shins are blue and purple from the lace-up boots, which had to be laced especially tight for ice-skating, blue and purple and shiny as stone from the hours and hours of being laced up, hours and hours of racing across frozen lakes that let out dark cries of jubilation beneath the cuts the girl was carving into them with her skates. Now her crooked legs with their shins that still shine blue and purple lie upon the red vinyl of the ottoman, which is intended for one to prop one’s feet on, and they are nonetheless still her legs. She doesn’t know what the lake here looks like in winter, the mistress of the house keeps referring to the house as her “summer place.” In the winter it’s just the gardener living in his room, otherwise the house is empty, and then it’s closed up for the winter, the shutters are placed over their windows, the night storage heater turned down to its lowest setting. And then everyone leaves for the city. Her husband went fishing even in winter, he was always one of the first on the ice, when it was still cracking, a small, dark figure crouching there at dawn, motionless. In winter they heated their house with wood, they would light the stove with pine shavings, but as soon as the fire was burning well they would switch over to beech and oak, the hard wood burned longer. When the pump in the yard froze solid, they would fetch their water from the lake, from a hole that her husband hacked in the ice near the shore. It’s quite possible, she thinks, that ottomans for propping one’s feet on were invented only after people had begun to choose their seasons. Invented here, in this season where she will now be a visitor for the rest of her life.

The youngest of her three grandchildren, who had a squint her whole childhood and had to go to school bald her first day because of scabies, this most infelicitous youngest child who fell into the water when trying to jump the creek and came home with her clothes all green, this youngest daughter married the son of the mistress of the house and is now, a towel across her shoulders, clattering down the stone steps to the lake in wooden sandals, humming under her breath and turning to give a quick wave before she disappears behind the large fir bush. Sometimes she sits down beside her grandmother and chats for a bit while painting her toenails red. When her, the grandmother’s teeth come unglued during a meal, she feels more ashamed before her granddaughter than the mistress of the house. Back where she learned about growing old from old people, there were no false teeth. When you got old, your mouth collapsed. But nowadays in the place where she is a visitor, even faces are made ready for winter.

Being a visitor isn’t easy. In her village it was customary to reject a gift exactly three times before accepting it, and when you accepted it, you yourself brought a present the next time, which the other person would then reject exactly three times before accepting it, and so on. A flowering plant in exchange for strawberries, a bottle of home-fermented wine for a piece of freshly slaughtered pork, apples for pears. To this day her friend, the only one from their village who also wound up in Berlin after the war, brings her a little pot filled with clover every New Year’s Eve in which a tiny chimney sweep made of wire is standing, and she herself has just the same sort of little clover pot with the chimney sweep stuck into it as a gift for her friend. The pots with their sweeps are exchanged at midnight, and on New Year’s morning her girlfriend carries home the pot she has received as a present in the same bag she used to carry her pot there. Since her granddaughter got married, she has been bringing her, her grandmother, along with her on summer vacations to visit her mother-in-law, and this mother-in-law is approximately the same age as her daughter would be now, the daughter who left for her work detail and remained there for all eternity. And when she, the grandmother, asks her granddaughter what she should bring as a hostess gift, the granddaughter always replies: But you’re part of the family. But she isn’t so sure she belongs to this family in which she has been warmly received by her granddaughter’s mother-in-law for the last five summers now but always greeted using the formal mode of address, always
Sie
and never
du.
This mother-in-law sometimes recommends a salve to help with her rheumatism, asks her about her apartment in Berlin, says she could have this or that dress of hers altered by her seamstress to fit the grandmother, but she has never once called her
du
. For the fifth summer in a row, her granddaughter’s mother-in-law uses formal address as she says: Do have a few more potatoes, would you like some more vegetables or a slice of meat, and she doesn’t know whether it counts as more polite here to simply say yes or to go ahead and help herself out of the pots and bowls as though she were at home here, or whether she shouldn’t, as she would at a stranger’s house, say no three times before she accepts. The visitor doesn’t understand that her granddaughter’s mother-in-law is waiting for her, the grandmother, as the older of the two, to suggest that they call each other
du
.