The Hotel Years

64. Cradle

My earliest memory goes back a very long way. It is separated from a subsequent almost uninterrupted chain of memories commencing from my seventh year by a gap of several years, so that this earliest experience seems to stand all alone, like a brightly lit scene surrounded by darkness, and therefore all the more luminous. It is a sad memory, or at any rate, one that made me sad, for the first time in my life; and the scene, which, as I say, has remained very close to me, still radiates a sort of groundless melancholy, and therefore a true melancholy. The way a memory can remain so distinctly preserved under a layer of forgetting seems to heighten the importance of this early experience; there is almost something symbolic about it. It was a clear winter’s day. I still seem to see, in the small room that was mine at the time, a blue reflection of a cloudless sky, a thick, crystalline layer of snow on the windowsill and a few intricate ice flowers on the right-hand window. An old woman with a longish, grey brown shawl over her head and shoulders enters the room. My mother takes the bedding out of my cradle item by item, and lays it on a brown padded armchair. Then the woman in the shawl, who is not tall, steps up to my cradle, says something, picks up the cradle with a surprising turn of speed, holds it to her chest, as though it were a thing of no particular weight or dimensions, speaks for a long time, flashes her long yellow teeth, and leaves our house. I am left feeling sad, inconsolably helpless and sad. I seem to understand that I have lost something irrecoverable. I have been in a certain sense robbed. I start to cry, and am taken to a large white bed, which is my mother’s. There I fall asleep.

At this point the memory ends. The next four years are shrouded in shadow, in the thick shadow of forgetting. Later on, it transpires that my mother has no recollection of this day. Ten years later, she was unable to tell me when and to whom she had given my cradle. I wasn’t surprised, nor was I upset with her. She had merely missed the first grief of my life. She had no idea. The thing that upsets me is that she no longer knew whether it was summer or winter. By chance I was able to establish later who took the cradle and when. I must have been three years old at the time. I have the feeling that on that day, in that hour I became a grown-up — only briefly perhaps, but long enough to be sad, as sad as a grown-up, and perhaps for a better reason.

Die Literarische Welt, 17 December 1931