Visitation

THE WRITER

I A-M G-O-I-N-G H-O-M-E, was the sentence she last wrote on her typewriter yesterday. Now she takes out the sheet of paper and sets it off to the side, sets it on the stack, still not very high, of the already written pages of her new book, she removes a sheet of laid paper with a watermark from a drawer and begins her letter to the general concerning the new neighbor’s entitlement to lake access and concerning also the bathing house situated on precisely the bit of shoreline that is at issue — state property that she has been leasing for twenty years now along with the house — she addresses the general by his childhood nickname and in a familiar tone, and while she is writing her fury seeps away and turns into exhaustion. She asks herself what forces are at work here, what might be empowering a local official to speak to her of directives “from higher up.” Beneath the shroud of secrecy that a handful of comrades who became accustomed to this shroud during the era of illegality have managed to preserve even now, in this time of reinvented peace, something new is afoot, something even she is unable to recognize.

From her desk she can see the lake shimmering between the reddish trunks of the pine trees. Down in the kitchen the cook is making the plates clatter, the gardener is sitting on the threshold to his room smoking a cigar, on the big meadow her granddaughter and the boy next door are spraying each other with water, her daughter-in-law is just making her way down to the dock to sunbathe, the visitor is lying in a lawn chair beneath the hawthorn tree, her son is mowing the grass, and down below, in front of the workshop, her husband is painting the fishing stools, whose red paint is flaking off, green. The window stands open, and so she smells the lake and the sunshine, smells the smoke from the gardener’s cigar, but also the odor of roast meat rising from the kitchen, she smells the mowed grass and, when the wind turns and begins to blow from below, even the fresh green paint. The tapping of her typewriter mixes with the calls of the cuckoo, letter for letter it can be heard from both upper meadows, all the way down to the workshop and even on the dock, when the wind blows from above to below.

The doctor from the government hospital in Berlin, for whom she had successfully petitioned the municipality to get him permission to lease the orchard and the apiary, immediately had all the fruit trees chopped down — certainly not what they’d agreed on — and then tore down the apiary as well. With supernatural speed, practically overnight, unknown workers from Berlin soon thereafter put up a large house where the apiary had stood, and rumor had it that he’d even been permitted to purchase this house, which went against the usual practice. When she lodged a complaint with the municipality, she was informed that everything had been decided “higher up” and that further instructions had meanwhile been received to grant him lake access by reducing the size of the property she was leasing, the arrangement for a new fence leading down to the water was to be worked out as soon as possible. This young doctor, who hadn’t even been born yet when she returned to Germany after years of exile, was meanwhile personal physician to some high-up official and now, it seemed, actually had the gall to make his move against her using the invisible army whose generals she had rocked in her arms during her emigration.

She puts the letter in an envelope, addresses and seals it, then she takes up the sheet of paper she’d set aside earlier that morning and puts it back in the typewriter to go on working where she stopped the day before. I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e. The keys of the typewriter she writes on have already been rubbed smooth, the individual letters can scarcely be distinguished from one another. It is still the same typewriter she brought with her on that odyssey from Berlin to Prague, from Prague to Moscow, and then from Moscow to Ufa in Bashkiria, and near the end of the war, when her son could already speak Russian fluently, back again to Moscow and finally, Berlin. She carried this typewriter in her hand through many streets of many cities, held it on her lap in overcrowded trains, gripping its handle tightly when in this or that foreign place, alone on an airfield or at a train station, she didn’t know where to go, when she’d lost her husband in the throng, or else his duties took him elsewhere and he’d boarded a different train. This typewriter was her wall when the corner of a blanket on a floor was her home, with this typewriter she had typed all the words that were to transform the German barbarians back into human beings and her homeland back into a homeland.

Home, all he wanted was to go home, the German official who’d been installed as mayor in a tiny little town in the so-called Reichsgau Wartheland wrote in his diary after a colleague had reported to him that while he was on vacation all the Jews from the entire region had been rounded up in the church, held there for three days and then loaded into gassing trucks and transported to the woods. The corpses of the ones who had already died during the three days in the church had been tossed into the gas trucks along with the living, the dead children hurled at the heads of their still living parents. Home, all he wanted was to go home, the mayor had written then in his diary. This diary was later included in the materials placed at her disposal for use in her radio show in the Ural region. By then the impending defeat of the Germans was already becoming quite clear, and every one of the Red Army’s victories brought her, her husband and their son who had been born in the Soviet Union that much closer to going back to Germany.

Holding the mayor’s diary in her hands, she’d felt disgusted that, as became clear from the further course of the diary, the German official did decide to remain in his post and office after all, that he continued to preside over this small town until the Red Army marched in and he fled to the West. But all the same she could never forget his sentence about just wanting to go home. Home! he’d cried out like a child that would give anything not to be seeing what it was seeing, but precisely in this one brief moment in which he hid his face in his hands, as it were, even this dutiful German official had known that home would never again be called Bavaria, the Baltic coast or Berlin, home had been transformed into a time that now lay behind him, Germany had been irrevocably transformed into something disembodied, a lost spirit that neither knew nor was forced to imagine all these horrific things. H-o-m-e. Which thou must leave ere long. After he had swum his way through a brief bout of despair, the German official had applied to retain his post. Those others, though, the ones who had fled their homeland before they themselves could be transformed into monsters, were thrust into homelessness by the news that reached them from back home, not just for the years of their emigration but also, as seems clear to her now, for all eternity, regardless of whether or not they returned. I just want to go home, just home, she’d often thought in those days, and from the Urals had directed her machine gun fire at her homeland, word after word. But now that no one country was to be her homeland any longer but rather mankind in general, doubt continued to manifest itself in her as homesickness.

This morning she and her husband took the long walk up to the forest, to the bench in whose wood her son had already carved his parents’ initials with his pocket knife years before. The four letters have long since turned gray. They always stop to rest upon this bench for a while before turning around. They sit and gaze, their eyes following the course of the hill that descends gently to the lake, they watch as the wind stirs the grain field, and behind it they see the broad surface of the lake, leaden, from a distance they cannot see how this same wind is rippling the water, nor do they see the house between the hill and the lake, from this perspective it is hidden in the shadow of the Schäferberg. They look at the ground, close by, at their feet, where yesterday’s rain has pressed the sand into little rivulets, they see flint and pebbles of quartz or granite, then they get up again, she takes her husband’s arm and the two of them make their way downhill, back to the house, where today he intends to give the fishing stools, whose red paint is flaking off, a coat of green paint, while up in her study she will sit at her desk and write down what she remembers of her life.

This doctor wasn’t even born yet when she returned to Germany. He has traveled to Japan with one or the other government delegation, to Egypt, to Cuba. I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e. Down in the kitchen the cook is making the plates clatter, the gardener is sitting on the threshold to his room, on the meadow her granddaughter and the boy next door are spraying each other with water, her daughter-in-law is sunbathing on the dock, the visitor is lying in a lawn chair, her son is mowing the grass, her husband is painting the fishing stools green. There are things she remembers but does not write. She doesn’t write that she said no when, after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union a German comrade whose husband had just been arrested came to her with her small child asking to be hidden. No, because her own residence permit had already expired and even she herself could only enter or leave her Moscow quarters at times when no one would see her. She doesn’t write that the manuscript for her radio show about the daily work of the German official was corrected by the Soviet comrades. The episode with the Jews in it was cut. That wouldn’t appeal to German soldiers, she’d been told, it might possibly hurt the cause and in any case was irrelevant in this context. She who had emigrated not because of her Jewish mother but as a communist had, without putting up a fight, cut that part of her report. She doesn’t write that eventually she did begin after all, after several comrades known to be Jews had vanished, to dye her coppery hair that even during her German childhood had caused her to be taunted as a Jew. She doesn’t write about how she and her husband were asked by her Soviet comrades to board a train to Novosibirsk. That they hid instead of getting on the train. A German painter from their circle of friends had obeyed the Party’s order and boarded a similar train, and then he had starved to death building a dam in Kazakhstan. While outside the cuckoo is calling, her fingers rest upon the typewriter keys.

The poet who hid her back then had written a poem in which he described going home as crossing over to the shores of Death. She had learned to remain silent then, and after all the deprivations, this silence was the greatest gift that had ever been given to their dream, which remained so large that every single one of the comrades was utterly alone when he walked about in it.

The poet who hid her back then now lives with his wife in a summer cottage on the other side of the lake, and this afternoon they will perhaps land at the dock in their motorboat made of dark shiny wood, and then her friend will toss the rope to her husband, her husband will catch the rope and tie it to the dock, and the granddaughter will watch her grandfather and take note of the figure eight the rope makes when it is wound around the cleat.

I a-m g-o-i-n-g h-o-m-e. The actor who built a bungalow a few properties down recently stayed behind in the West after a performance there and will soon be having his wife and son join him. The bungalow has already been sealed. He had wanted light blue tiles for his bathroom. Light blue tiles did not exist in this part of Germany. Where the new person is to begin, he can only grow out of the old one. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. The new world is to devour the old one, the old one puts up a fight, and now new and old are living side by side in a single body. Where much is asked, more is left out.

When they returned to Germany, it was a long time before she and her husband could bring themselves to shake hands with people they didn’t know. They had felt a virtually physical revulsion when faced with all these people who had willingly remained behind. After his return, her husband had even hesitated to visit his mother and sisters, who lived in the Western part of Germany. The only visit they ever made to this West German city was undertaken with the sole purpose of showing their son his grandmother, and neither she nor her husband shook hands with his mother or sisters when they greeted them. They saw, too, that this omission occurred by mutual consent. Immediately before they fled to Prague, they had deposited a picture and a few pieces of furniture with her husband’s sisters. Her husband’s mother and sisters were now sitting at this table, on these chairs, and the picture hung on the wall. And she and her husband now sat on these chairs as if they had come to their own house for a visit. The two Communists were at a loss for the words they would have needed to demand their own possessions back from these Germans to whom they had once been related. Later, when their son was old enough to travel by train without them, they let him make the trip twice on his own when he expressed the desire to visit his grandmother.

Now the gong is calling her to lunch. She walks through the closet room and the hallway to the bathroom, where she washes her hands, her fingertips are smudged with black from changing the ribbon, she looks into the mirror, arranges her hair, closes the right-hand wing of the small window that had been open for air, now the mosaic of colorful squares is complete again. Before she goes down to eat, she quickly steps back into the Little Bird Room to get a jacket from the wall closet, since it’s always chillier than you’d expect inside the house, even in summer. The Little Bird Room got its name from the small iron bird forged to the railing of the balcony. During school holidays, her granddaughter sleeps here. The granddaughter now strikes the gong downstairs for a second time, possibly out of impatience, or else because it’s fun.

Even at midday, what strikes the long table through the colorfully glazed windows is more penumbra than light, and around this table sit her husband, their son with his wife and her granddaughter, and often also friends and colleagues from Berlin, comrades or, as today, the visitor, then the cook and finally the gardener. After the soup is brought out, her husband speaks about this and that, her son about something else, her daughter-in-law contributes a remark, the visitor remains silent, the gardener remains silent, the cook serves the main course, she herself elaborates, her daughter-in-law has yet another question, her son says: I don’t see how that’s possible, her husband says: But it is. She herself says: That’s certainly interesting, and: Do take some more potatoes, the visitor says: No thank you, the gardener remains silent, her granddaughter shakes her head, her son says: Send them over, the daughter-in-law: That was delicious, she herself says: It truly was, the gardener says: Thank you, the cook: The soup was a bit too salty, her son says: Not at all, the cook stacks up the dirty plates and balances them out into the kitchen, she returns with tiny little bowls on a tray, distribution of the compote, everyone gets busy with their spoons, general quiet reigns, the door handle is depressed from the outside, giving off a metallic sigh, the boy next door wants her granddaughter to come out and play, he remains standing beside the stove, waiting until everyone has finished eating, the visitor brings her compote cup to her lips and sips the last dregs of juice, her daughter-in-law says to the little girl: But first help clear the table, her husband says: Well, then, she herself nods to the cook. They all get up and leave the room in one direction or other.

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.