Visitation

THE GIRL

NOW NO ONE KNOWS she is here any longer. All around her everything is black, and the core of this black chamber is she herself. The circumstance that there isn’t even a narrow crack to let the light in is intended to save her life, but it also means there is no longer anything differentiating her from the darkness. She would like to have some sort of proof that she is here, but there is no proof. She Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben. To whom do these words now belong in such darkness? While she sits on the little crate, and her knees bump against the opposite wall, and she moves her legs now to the right, now to the left so they don’t fall asleep, time is passing. Probably time is passing. Time that is probably taking her further and further from the girl she perhaps once was: Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben. No one is there any longer who might be able to tell her whether these words have been abandoned and have only accidentally found their way into this chamber, this head, or whether they truly belong to her. Time has wedged itself between her and her parents, between her and all other people, time has dragged her off and locked her away in this dark chamber. The only thing here that has color is what she remembers in the midst of all this darkness surrounding her, whose core she is, she harbors colorful memories in her light-forsaken head, memories belonging to someone she once was. Probably was. Who was she? Whose head was her head? To whom did her memories now belong? Did black time keep going on and on, even when a person was no longer doing anything but just sitting there, did time keep going on, dragging even a child who has turned to stone away with it?

Gurkenberg and Black Horn, Keperling, Hoffte, Nackliger and Bulzenberg. And Mindach’s Hill. When her uncle lifted her up that day to the hump of the pine tree, it seemed to her as if from high up like that she really could recognize all the under-sea mountains in the water whose names the gardener had told her and which she still remembered today. Atop the highest elevation stood the church tower of a sunken city, its tip reached so high that the weathervane on top nearly surfaced amid the waves. Down on the bottom where the water was quite calm, on the streets and squares of this city, she could even make out people if she squinted, they were walking about, sitting or standing, leaning up against something or other — through the glittering surface of the lake she saw the silent throng of all those inhabitants of the city who had sunk beneath the waves along with it, who moved about quite naturally in the water without needing to breathe, walking, sitting or standing in this eternal life no differently than they had done before on Earth. She had squatted up there in the pine tree, holding on to its scaly trunk, and from there she saw the fish swimming about in the submerged sky above the city. After her uncle had lifted her down again, her hands were all sticky from the pine resin, and her father had taken sand and used it to rub the resin off.

As the girl sits there in her dark chamber and from time to time tries to straighten up but keeps knocking her head against the ceiling of her hiding place, as she opens her eyes wide but nevertheless cannot even see the walls of her chamber, as the darkness is so great that the girl can’t even recognize where her body stops, her head is visited by memories of days on which her entire field of vision was overflowing with colors. Clouds, sky and leaves, the leaves of oak trees, leaves of the willow hanging down like hair, black dirt between her toes, dry pine needles and grass, pine cones, scaly bark, clouds, sky and leaves, sand, dirt, water and the boards of the dock, clouds, sky and gleaming water in which the sun is reflected, shady water beneath the dock, she can see it through the cracks when she lies on her belly on the warm boards to dry off after a swim. After the departure of her uncle, her grandfather continued to take her sailing for another two summers. Surely her grandfather’s boat is still in the village shipyard. Four years in winter quarters. Now, without knowing whether it is day or night outside, the girl reaches out to grasp the hand her grandfather is holding out to her, she climbs from the dock onto the edge of the boat and watches her grandfather untie the knot that is holding the boat fast to the dock and toss the rope into the boat.

All the windows of the building on the street called Nowolipie where the girl is hiding are still wide open, until just a few days ago all the rooms were filled with human beings who wanted to breathe, but now everything is completely still. The people from the rooms are gone, and even down below on the street there is no longer anyone walking, no one is pulling a cart, no one is talking, shouting or crying, not even the wind can be heard any longer, no window slams, no door. While the girl sits in her dark chamber and turns her knees now to the right, now to the left, while beyond the chamber everything in the apartment is still, and beyond the apartment everything down in the street is still, and even beyond this street in all the other streets of the district everything is completely still, the girl hears everything that ever was: The rustling of leaves, the splashing of waves, the horn of the steamboat, the dipping of oars into water, the workers next door making a racket, a flapping sail. From C major you retreat by way of G major, D major, A major, E major and B major, going all the way to F-sharp major, further and further one sharp at a time. But from F-sharp back to C is only a tiny step. From playing all the black keys to playing all the white keys is the briefest of journeys, just before you return to the easy-as-pie key of C major everything’s swarming with sharps. That’s how he explained it to her before he left for South Africa, Uncle Ludwig, and in just this way Doris now, in this complete stillness and emptiness, sets her memory bumping up against the time when everything was still there.

Now only a brief transition still lies before her. Either she will starve to death here in her hiding place, or she will be found and carted off. None of the people who once knew who she was knows any longer that she is here. This is what makes the transition so insignificant. Step by step she has made her way to this place, almost to the end, in other words, her path must have had a beginning, and at the point of this beginning she must have been separated from life by as insignificant a distance as now separates her from death. The beginning must have looked almost exactly like life, it must have been right in the middle somewhere and not yet recognizable as the first part of this path that is leading her somewhere she only now recognizes. When the willow tree has grown up tall and can tickle the fish with its hair, you’ll still be coming here to visit your cousins, and you’ll remember the day you helped plant it. Was life still intact back then? When she thinks of Uncle Ludwig, she always sees him with the spade in his hand on the shore of the lake. When she thinks of his fiancée Anna, it occurs to her how Anna always told her to make herself light before she picked her up. As if the girl could reduce her weight just by thinking it. When her grandfather gave the towels of his own manufacture a glance before locking up the bathing house but then left the key in the lock for his successor, she had thought of his boat which this summer would remain on dry land for the first time. In the fall her parents sent her to Berlin to stay with an aunt so that she would no longer be subjected to teasing at school because of her Jewish blood. For two years, Sunday after Sunday, always after services at the church at Hohenzollern-platz, she had sat down at the window in her aunt’s kitchen and written a letter to her parents, but from Monday to Saturday she didn’t write, so as to save envelopes and postage. For the last meal she shared with her grandparents, who were rounded up in Levetzowstrasse in Berlin-Moabit and taken away, her aunt had made stuff ed peppers. On New Year’s Eve a friend gave her a little bowl filled with cotton and lentils. If you kept the cotton moist, a little forest would sprout from the lentils. During the big wool collection in January she hesitated to hand over not just her caps and the big scarf but also the little scarf because she could tie it up like a turban and then at least her ears would stay warm, but what if someone saw? When their visa for Brazil continued to be delayed, she started going to school wearing thin leather shoes instead of boots in -12 °Celsius weather as a precaution, to harden herself for Poland, for in Poland it would surely be even colder than in Berlin. She was to burn her father’s last letter, the girl’s mother wrote, because of the danger of contagion. The law that would have allowed the girl to travel home by train for her father’s funeral did not take effect in time. The lake on which the property lay that had once belonged to her uncle and where she had spent another two summers with her grandparents after her uncle’s departure was located exactly in the middle between Berlin and Guben. Was she, Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben, halfway distant from her life at that point, or more, or less?

Now she has to pee, but she cannot leave the chamber, that’s what her mother said before she left for work. Her mother will not come back again, for meanwhile all the occupants of the apartment are gone, all the occupants of the building on the street called Nowolipie, and all the occupants of the district in which the building stands. The district has no doubt been cordoned off meanwhile, for it has been completely still for a very long time now. But as long as this sentence still stands, her name is still Doris, and she still exists: Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben. So she gets up, knocks her head against the ceiling of her hiding place and tries to pee in such a way that the board on which she has been sitting does not get wet.

Sienna, Paska and Twarda, Krochmalna, Chłodna, Grzybowska, Ogrodowa, Leszno and Nowolipie, where the girl is hiding, then Karmelicka, Gsia, Zamenhofa and Miła. When you die at age twelve, do you also reach old age earlier? Everything had kept getting less, they’d had to leave behind more and more baggage, or else it was taken from them, as though they were now too weak to carry all those things that are a part of life, as though someone were trying to force them into old age by relieving them of all this. Two woolen blankets they had — no featherbed — provisions for five days, wristwatch, handbag, no documents. This is how her mother, leading her by the hand, had entered the ghetto, and even the part of the city they had entered had already been relieved of many things. There were no trees there, let alone a park, but there wasn’t a river either, there were no automobiles, no electric streetcars and so few remaining streets that it didn’t even take the length of a Lord’s Prayer to rattle off their names. Everything that was still the world could easily be traversed on foot, even by a child. And this world had gone on shrinking as the end approached. At first the small ghetto was emptied out and dissolved, now it was the turn of the southern part of the large ghetto, and the rest was sure to follow soon thereafter. Don’t be so wild, her father had always said to her when she went skidding across the parquet from one end of the room to the other, now she was being a wild child here, but what being wild meant here was: not going instead of some other girl, not offering her head to be counted, playing dead instead of reporting to die, trying to survive without drinking or eating. Never in her life has she been wilder than in this tiny chamber in which she doesn’t speak, doesn’t sing, can’t stand up and, when she sits, keeps banging her knees against the wall. She, Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben, a wild child, a blind and deaf old woman scarcely capable of moving her limbs any longer.

In Brazil, her father had said, you’ll need a hat for the sun. Are there lakes in Brazil too? Of course. Are there trees in Brazil too? Twice as tall as here. And our piano? It won’t fit, her father had said and then shut the door of the container, which now held her desk and several suitcases filled with linens and clothes, and her bed with the mattresses and all her books, closed it and locked it. This container was surely still standing on the lot of some shipping company in Guben, but all of this was so long ago that her bed, if she were now to arrive in Brazil, would be much too short for her, and the shirts and stockings and skirts and blouses several sizes too small. Their apartment in Guben had been dissolved when they packed the container for their move to Brazil; after this the girl had been sent to Berlin, and her parents’ address to which she sent her Sunday letters changed several times from one shabby part of Guben to an even shabbier one. But as long as there was still hope that they would be allowed to emigrate, it didn’t seem important to her parents or her that they’d had to pull the rug out from under their own memories when they packed for the journey to Brazil. When her father received the notice to report for forced labor at the autobahn construction site, the refrigerator built to withstand the heat of the tropics was still standing in the container on the lot of the shipping company. Only after her father’s death did it become clear that the packing up of their everyday existence in Guben into this darkness had in truth been an anticipation of their own being packed up, and that both these things were final.

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 Gsia 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.