Visitation

THE ARCHITECT’S WIFE

HAVE YOU HEARD this one? OK, here goes.

She can’t help laughing all over again, even though she’s told the joke many times now, she laughs, and the others are already laughing in any case, she really does like to laugh, sometimes as a child she’d gotten stuck in her laughter, that’s what her father called it, getting stuck in laughter, as though her body were holding on to the laughter and absolutely refusing to give it up, convulsive laughter that just went on and on without her. Even her big sisters who had to take her, their little sister, everywhere they went, would laugh when she crossed her eyes and made faces or let them talk her into trying sneezing powder as healing salts for her nose or hot chilies in place of sweet peppers. She would sneeze, snort or spit, and the others would laugh. A tightrope walker is what she wanted to be, or else a lion tamer, but this she confided to no one, not even her father, the chief mogul, who was really chief consul, all she wanted to do was laugh and travel for the rest of her life while her sisters went on growing, got fat and had children. Unlike them, she would go on tour forever and ever. As soon as she was old enough to balance on a tightrope or start training lions, the chief mogul, who was really chief consul, recommended she take a course in stenography. Stenography, said the mogul to the lion tamer, was worth as much as six foreign languages. Stenographers and typists were in demand all over the world, the chief mogul said. Now she was sitting with her husband and a few friends out on the terrace around a big pot in which crabs were floating that she had caught herself in the lake that afternoon and then boiled until they turned red, in her hand she held a crab’s pincer and was continuing to laugh. Even before the war she’d sat here like this with her husband and several of the neighbors, or else with friends, a practice she continued during the war as well, sitting out on the terrace until late at night with a view of the lake, and still she was sitting here. She would happily keep sitting here like this unto all eternity.

Before she met her husband, for whom she started working as a stenographer as soon as she completed her training, she would never have thought that one of the greatest adventures could consist in having someone marry her. At the time her husband was still married to his first wife, he possessed a family — a wife and child, as one says. For the first time in her life, weeping borrowed her body from laughter for several evenings in a row. It had taken three quarters of a year before her boss had given her a first kiss, and a further half a year followed before the two of them began to joke about a life they would live together, and then several months more before, lying in the grass beside her on one of their outings to the countryside outside Berlin, on the shore of this wide, glittering lake, he suddenly said: This is where we could live, don’t you think? Not until this day did the tightrope walker understand that a person who possesses all sorts of things, including a wife and child, must first finish sitting, then get up, then begin to walk, and then much, much later work up some speed, and only then will this person be able to take a leap, if indeed he is ever able to do so, and that when a person like this leaps, he wants to land somewhere and not nowhere. Not until this day when he said to her: This is where we could live, don’t you think? and she was lying there on her back watching the pine trees sway back and forth before the blue sky — from this day on it was clear to her that he would arrive where she was only if she was willing to wait for him on this one particular bit of earth located not terribly far from Berlin. And so the young stenographer, who would have liked best to go on tour for the rest of her life, surprised herself by replying: Yes.

It then took another half a year before he really did have the contract of sale prepared and had her sign it so that when his divorce became final half the property would not go to his wife, to whom he was still married at the time, and their son. All together, things took first as long as she had imagined they would, and then twice that, so that it was as much as she could possibly endure, and finally an additional length of time beyond the point of what was endurable. When she signed the contract of sale for the property beside the lake, she was so exhausted that when her future husband used the word “sod” to refer to the piece of land, she involuntarily heard “sad” instead and couldn’t help thinking back to that forlorn Berlin winter far in the past when, as a child, she had secretly leapt from the shore onto the frozen Spree River and the very piece of ice she happened to land on cracked off from the impact and began to float downstream with the current. The sliding and balancing, her feet like ice in their wet shoes and finally the grasping to catch the hands, ladders and canes being held out to her — but above all her fear that she could drift out of Berlin before anyone succeeded in rescuing her — left her so exhausted that, still dripping, she fell asleep in the arms of the man who was carrying her home to her parents.

After signing the contract of sale, the architect had indeed gotten divorced, had shortly thereafter married her and begun construction on the house. Her laughter had returned to her, and as if her husband wanted to build this laughter into the house forever, he fulfilled her every most extravagant wish: He had a little iron bird forged onto the balcony railing in front of her room, he concealed her clothes closet, fitted with a secret mechanism to open it, behind a double door; for the telephone, there was a tiny niche in the wall beside her bed, the bedding could be stowed away behind three flaps that were built into the paneling around her bed and covered with rose-colored silk, various windows in the house were set with panes of colored glass, one of the two chairs at the dining table bore his initials, the other hers, and the shutters on the ground floor could be opened and shut by means of a concealed crank in the interior of the house — when someone was walking by, how amusing it was to startle the stranger with the silent, ghostly movement of the black shutters. Like a genie at her service, he conjured up the house for her, and she laughed. That no room was provided that might some day become a nursery was accepted by both as a matter of course.

She continued to work in her husband’s office in Berlin, but on weekends the two of them always drove out to the country, and since her husband was soon designing houses for one or the other neighbor who wanted to build beside the lake and then supervising the construction, they came to spend more and more time on their bit of sod, as her husband still liked to refer to this piece of land, and their circle of friends continued to grow. While they were eating crabs, one of them — sometimes he, sometimes she — would begin to tell stories, and the more practiced they became, the more effortlessly one would interrupt the other as if by chance, to deepen their guests’ laughter, and the more skillfully they delivered their punch lines. Haven’t we told you this one yet? How he, and then how she, how then he, and how she, how he — how surprised she was when, how she literally had thought that, and that finally he, and so really, she says, now shaking her head mutely to fill the pause guaranteed to come. Her husband adds, she interjects, he elaborates, but she really has to add that, and he agrees with her. Just before the climax she herself starts laughing in advance, then finally the punch line, and everyone laughs, they all laugh and laugh, another beer, another glass of wine, oh yes, not for me, thank you, maybe just a glass of seltzer. In this way the architect and his wife pass the time on many evenings both for themselves and for their guests.

The architect’s wife who, now that she’s gotten married, understands that adventure is really always just subjecting yourself to something unfamiliar, throws herself into this sedentary life with all her inborn love of movement, and the property, not least on account of its waterfront location, proves an appropriate refuge. Her sisters, both of whom have meanwhile become mothers, watch from the dock as she swims the crawl, crossing the steamer’s route and then going much farther out until her swim cap is visible only as a pin-sized dot, while they themselves stay close to shore, splashing about in the shallow water with their children; her sisters like to eat crabs, but they screech when their younger sister picks up the flailing creatures by the scruff and throws them into the net with no sign of disgust; when the swing for her nieces and nephews gets tangled in a branch of the big oak tree, she is the one who at once digs fingers and toes into the furrows of the tree’s bark, quickly ascending, then straddles tree limbs to slide forward to where she can release the loop of rope caught in the leaves as if it were nothing. Her older sisters and their children sleep in until the housekeeper summons them to breakfast with the gong, but she goes walking for at least an hour before breakfast, on cool mornings the handle of the big front gate is often still wet with dew when she sets out, she hikes up into the woods and then, with a view of the lake, crosses the fields to return home. Every summer her sisters visit her with their off spring to spend a few weeks on her bit of sod, they swim, eat and swap recipes, they watch their childless sister laugh and let their bodies melt in the shade as they rest after lunch, they are relaxing, people would say, but nonetheless, even though they are refraining from all strenuous activity, these women sometimes do not look at all relaxed, they look more as if they were waiting for something and finding it difficult to wait.

And so the years pass and are like one single year. Whether the cockchafer plague was in ’37 or maybe one year later is something she can no longer say, but she can still remember the sound to this day, the noise it made when she was out for a bicycle ride with her niece, rolling over the beetles that had transformed the sandy road into a dark, teeming surface, she hasn’t forgotten the cracking beneath her tires. All summers like one single summer. Whether it was ’38 or ’39, or perhaps even 1940 when they began to use the dock belonging to the abandoned property next door, and when her husband built the boathouse beside the dock — she’s no longer sure quite when that was. Surely he hadn’t built the boathouse until the next-door property already belonged to them, but when was that? Summer after summer swimming, sunbathing and picking raspberries at the edge of the woods across from the house, autumn after autumn hearing the gardener rake up the leaves in the garden, smelling him burning the musty heap, winter after winter speeding across the frozen lake on an ice yacht and afterward taking in the sail with fingers frozen red and quickly ducking into the house: warming her hands at the stove until they hurt; Easter after Easter hiding hard-cooked eggs among the first flowers for her nephews and nieces. All like a single one. Today can be today, but it might also be yesterday or twenty years ago, and her laughter is the laughter of today, of yesterday, and just as much, the laughter of twenty years ago, time appears to be at her beck and call, like a house in which she can enter now this room, now that. Have you heard this one? While she was spending her whole life laughing, her blond hair imperceptibly turned into white hair. Today or yesterday or twenty years ago she is sitting with friends around a large pot in which crabs are floating, crabs she caught herself, gripping them firmly behind the neck, and later boiled until they turned red. Eating such a crab is not so simple. First you twist the creature’s head off and suck its juices, then you rip off the claws and use a tiny skewer to pull out the meat. The best part of a crab though is the meat from its tail, which is referred to as its heart. Before you can eat it, you remove the crab’s entrails and lay them aside.

Humor is when you laugh all the same, she says on one of those summer evenings during one of the last twenty years while she is sucking the marrow out of one of the claws, one of their friends, a film director, has just told everyone what a hard time the make-up department has been having making Aryan actors look Semitic so they can play that irksome racketeer Ipplmeier and his vassals. But in the rushes, at least, they looked like the real thing, the director says, heaving a sigh, and her husband says: Hope springs eternal, and she says: Humor is when you laugh all the same. Humor is when you laugh all the same, she says on some other summer evening during a different one of the last twenty years, and she cracks the shell of a crab as her husband is telling friends that he must travel to the West and use his own private funds to buy screws for the young republic because it has been expressly demanded of him that he stay within the allotted budget while also completing the building he’s now working on in time for the third anniversary. In the entire Eastern Zone there are no screws to be had, unbelievable, he says, and she says: Humor is when you laugh all the same. On some summer evening during one of the last twenty years her husband tells one of the guests how at the end of the war the Russians had converted the garden to a paddock for their horses, how everything had been trampled, how he had even seen the gardener cry, he says all these things, and his wife says nothing, she is just wiping her hands on a napkin, and their friend, who after all can only judge what has been said to him, now makes his contribution to the subject by repeating in his turn: Humor is when you laugh all the same, and while he is saying this, he fishes another crab out of the pot. If it had not been for that one night, that one night in the walk-in closet that her husband had designed especially for her, she might perhaps still believe that when her husband slid the contract of sale over to her to sign he was buying her a piece of eternity and that this eternity did not have a single hole in it anywhere.

Even today when she hears someone speak of the war she thinks first of the war that her own body began to wage against her just as the first bombs fell on Germany. Despite the shrinking supplies of food, her body had, utterly illogically, grown fat all at once while others who had been fat beforehand, her sisters for example, first grew slender with all the excitement and then the hunger, and then they grew thin and then haggard. The 6th Army capitulated outside of Stalingrad, and already the morning of that day she was overcome by hot flashes, the sweat covered the space between her lips and nose like a moustache of tiny droplets, this sweat was embarrassing, but it would have embarrassed her even more to wipe it away, the Russians were marching toward Poland, and she felt dizzy, often several times a day, so that she had to steady herself by grasping table edges and door handles so as not to fall down, and finally, just as the Allies were landing in Normandy, even weeping returned to her body, taking hold of it and refusing to leave again, like a long-forgotten creditor come to collect on a debt she no longer recalled. She who had always cut such a boyish figure now stood there every morning before the mirror sweating, she steadied herself on the edge of the sink so as not to fall down, she wiped her tears, avoiding the sight of that round, milky face with which she shared no memories; compared to this face the colored glass in the windows to the right and left of the mirror looked so much more familiar — glass that her husband had put there just because she wanted him to.

She was feeling so poorly during this period that she’d had to ask one of her nieces to come stay with her to help out around the house while her husband was closing down his office in Berlin, packing up the construction plans and organizing a fireproof hiding place for his documents. How good it was that the telephone sat so close beside her bed in its niche, for now she generally kept to her bed even during the day. As she held the receiver to her ear, listening to her husband tell her who had been buried in the rubble, which building had collapsed and how crowded it was down in the cellar, she gazed at the colorful feathers of the little bird that sat forged to her balcony railing, and behind the bird the leafless branches of the trees, and through the branches of the trees the Märkisches Meer glittering. Only after the battle at Seelower Höhen had she sent her niece to stay with relatives in the West to shield her from an encounter with the Slavic hordes, while she herself took refuge behind the double door of the walk-in closet with the last of the provisions and a bit of water. And then the Russian came.

She doesn’t want to think that word, that word he called her, that unthinkable word with which he drilled a hole in her eternity for all eternity. Her body, already infertile by then, had drawn him to her — this man who knew the word that robbed her of all strength — had drawn him violently to her and for the length of time a birth might take had smothered the laughter that had stood in her body’s way all this time, and during this night in the hidden closet that her husband had built specially for her, because back when she was still a circus princess she had wanted him to, she had finally joined forces with the enemy. Only after the capital had fallen was her husband able to return to her, and what he found was a trampled garden and a gardener weeping at the devastation. His wife shared with him the half loaf of bread the Russian had left for her.

Have you heard this one? A musician is on tour. His very pregnant wife is supposed to let him know when their child is finally born. Their code word is to be: cantaloupe. So the musician is sitting on stage playing. And now one evening a colleague whispers to him from the wings: cantaloupe, cantaloupe, cantaloupe — two with stems, the other, nope! There are things you can’t help laughing at every time. This joke is always a success, everyone always laughs, the architect always laughs, and his wife laughs too, even though she’s the one who told the joke, and their guests also laugh. Musician on tour, cantaloupe, nope. Around fifteen years ago, the actor Liedtke, who was married to an operetta diva and lived at the end of the sandy road, had done her one better and, using his hands to suggest ample breasts, had quoted from The Merry Widow: On account of my melons — um, millions! Musician on tour, cantaloupe, nope; it even worked during the war when the coffee and tea importer from next door told them that the butcher’s daughter had just given birth to twins even though her husband hadn’t been on furlough from the Eastern front in over a year. Musician on tour, cantaloupe, nope, the architect’s wife says today to the director of the State Combine for Automobile Tires, a friend of her husband’s, once the laughter has died down: You know, I found it utterly outrageous for Hitler to demand that we women bear children for the state — we aren’t machines. And her husband says: In her own way, my wife was practically in the Resistance. The director of the State Combine for Automobile Tires laughs, and the architect laughs, and his wife laughs as well.

All the while, for nearly six years now, time has been draining away through that hole the Russian drilled in her eternity near the end of the war. Only because times are hard has something like a historical moment of inertia set in, only because times are so hard that time has trouble even just running away — it’s having to take its time — does the architect’s wife still sit there on her terrace six years after the war, sit there with a pot filled with crabs boiled till they are red, serving up her guaranteed punch lines to her friends, laughing herself harder than anyone, and gazing out over the lake that has meanwhile become state property. Time is draining away as the architect’s wife, on her husband’s arm, accompanies her guests down to the gate and waves after them in the dark, draining away as the couple goes back inside again, as they stack up the plates covered in crab shells and carry them into the kitchen, as she says to him that she’s tired already, and he says he wants to smoke one last cigarette outside, as she walks up the stairs, undresses in her room, puts on the silk robe and goes into the bathroom, the colored glass panes in the windows to the right and left of the mirror are even blacker than other glass at nighttime, draining away as the woman sits down on the edge of her bed to rub her legs with camphor oil and her chest with peppermint salve, draining away as she calls out “good night” through the half-open balcony door to her husband, who is smoking one last cigarette down on the terrace, draining away and away as she hangs the cream-colored silk robe back on its hook in the shallow part of the walk-in closet, away and away as she lies down and falls asleep. Away. Soon she will be living in a one-bedroom apartment in West Berlin, and later in a retirement home near Bahnhof Zoo. From her escape to the West until the end of her life, she will always keep everything one might urgently need in an emergency on hand in her purse, things such as paper clips, rubber bands, stamps, scraps of paper to write on and pencils. And in her testament she will leave the property beside the lake and the house that unto all eternity will smell of camphor and peppermint — that house that in purely legalistic terms still belongs to her even though it is located in a country she may no longer set foot in without risking arrest — to her nieces and the wives of her nephews. But not to any man.