Читать книгу More Than Everything - Beatrix Ost - Страница 13

MY FATHER QUICKLY GREW OLD. His features irrevocable, his gaze astonished and critical, paired with the portentous emptiness of the cripple. He had only the Now, no future worth mentioning. Sometimes he laughed; then I ran to him straightaway.

Increasingly his sick legs prevented him from traveling the land that had claimed all his love, and slowly the illness killed even the wish. Our long family walks, proper wanderings, were now abbreviated, and he more often avoided them. His oblique humor bore sarcastic thorns. Remarks slipped from his lips, sharp and pessimistic.

Come on Fritzl, you don’t really mean it! said my mother, and calmingly stroked him across his shoulder.

Fritz looked up angrily to the ceiling.

That’s exactly what I do mean.

Adi, who was still very beautiful, whose face had not changed, laughed and took Fritz’s black remarks as testimony to their opposite.

People always wanted to look at my mother. Her high forehead, her face the perfect oval of an Ingres portrait. Still framed by black hair, rolled up into a knot at her neck. Her body was strong, almost coarse, yet satisfied and in relaxed good health. She could hold everything at bay and everything together.

Often in families a theme is smothered in silence, because there is a general theory that this will put the matter to rest. In my family, we spoke no more about Heinz, but for a time the frightful arguments lurked in the rooms, the corridors, before falling silent en route to oblivion.

This was the period when my parents bought the car, the DKW cabriolet, and Adi, with her strong nerves, hurled herself onto the roads, which were still uncongested, since few people owned cars. Back in the trunk a canister of petrol always traveled along, for there were not many filling stations. We drove Anita in the “blue miracle” to Schloss Elmau, a hotel near Garmisch, and we actually arrived—noteworthy, since the Blue Wonder was full of technical glitches, which often left my mother on the shoulder, waving in despair at one of the autos that infrequently passed by. Often Adi would forget to top up the petrol canister in the trunk. The auto tours where everything went smoothly always stood out as special in our memory.

Anita was now nineteen years old and was to learn hotel management in the Schloss hotel at Elmau. Our parents had found this profession for her and she immediately agreed. She would have agreed to do a doctorate in janitorial science if it would get her away from home.

I remember an elated letter, even some photos, telling the story of a picnic in an alpine meadow, with a naked cliff tooth in the background, my ravishing sister in her dirndl, laughing; next to her, waving into the camera, a blonde student friend with her hand on her forehead, shielding her eyes against the sun.

On the picnic blanket, across the cake, the cups, across Anita’s feet, stood the ominous shadow of the photographer.

And when my sister returned from her hotel training, which lasted half a year, she had grown up. She held her head high, chin forward. Her face had lost its softness. Her mouth, too, was decided, her gaze critical and somewhat bored. When one asked her something, she needed a little while to answer, as if she were surfacing from some other much more important world of thought.

Within the family, only the more straightforward things were discussed. And so it was the season of forgetting.

With me she had once again found the abrupt tone of an older sister. There were no more secrets to guard. Friendly was now superfluous.

On the windowsill, my throne, bleached by the morning sun, dead flies were scattered like black crumbs. Outside in the courtyard, Anita mounted her Bella. Up above, between the buildings, a little patch of blue sky. She turned Bella, clicked her tongue, and trotted out through the gate. The hooves thundered across the wooden planks. She was outside, free.

My mother wished very much that someone would take over the farm, take it off Fritz’s hands. This wish had to be handled with a cool understanding and very little emotional expenditure. Heinz, whose competence would have made him the ideal candidate, had fallen out of the running.

My father stood in the middle of the courtyard, leaning on his cane. His brow was furrowed. Everywhere he saw impudence and disobedience. A bridle lying about. A hay wagon with a broken axle, simply forgotten there. Buckets that caught the water that streamed through the damaged roof on rainy days. Cattle that grazed through broken barbed-wire fences. Fewer and fewer chickens—these were gradually succumbing to friend fox, who grew ever bolder, dared enter the garden, where he manifested as a rust-red daub of color complacently strolling among the vegetables.

At first Fritz did not want to believe it. But as everything got worse and worse he was seized by impotent rage.

What is this goddamned chaos? he screamed into the courtyard. Does no one have eyes in their head?!

My long-alienated brother Uli shook his head over his father’s abstruse fantasies. What did the parents still want here on the estate? He could not understand why the farm should be preserved. He also found the idea of a successor, supposedly assured by marrying Anita off to an agriculturist, completely cracked. The thought that somehow he, Uli, might run the farm struck him as absurd. He had married into a brewery that had made him rich, and my parents, happy. Now he visited us only occasionally with his wife and their three boys. It looked to me as if he came from the mainland to visit us on an island. And as if he had to hold a mirror up to this inside-out world to understand our parents.

•

In the kitchen there was an hourglass into which moisture had seeped. One had to tip it with one’s finger or the sand would get stuck, and then one would think: now time is standing still.

But at some point, quite without grand gestures, without ceremony, silently, the way people manage it with great resolve, my sister’s glass menagerie was carefully rolled up in cotton wool and newspaper, packed up in little boxes. I was allowed to help her. The glass armoire was disassembled into flat parts and two drawers. Then both our beds. The round table from the middle of the room, the sofa, two chairs, and the commode were brought downstairs. In the room next door, which looked northward, the skeleton of my grandmother’s old bed filled up with a mattress and duvet for me to sleep. A dog slept in my room now, instead of my sister.

Anita took along everything my mother gave her.

Mountain landscapes painted by Grandfather. Five Piranesis. Her horse, the saddle, linens, Meissen crockery. Anita took along everything my mother gave her. She moved in with Heinz on a farm near Bamberg, where he was now the manager, as he had been with us. Adi could only think of one thing: how poor Anita would now be. So she slipped her all sorts of things. My sister seemed insatiable. This quality both women would forever retain in their relations with one another: indefatigable and insatiable.

The truck, piled up with furniture, baskets, and boxes stowed under the billowing tarps, pulled away. Mother, Anita, and I jumped into the Blue Wonder, to help with moving in. My father stayed behind, alone on the farm.

All the best to you, child, he had said as they left, kissing Anita on the forehead as he spoke. He turned from us so that we would not be able to see his face, and pushed aside a stone with his cane. As he turned back to us again, he had recovered his composure. He was a man who did not easily display his feelings, his sentimental side, including his sorrow, although to emotions such as impatience and anger he gave free rein.

Resigned and exhausted by wishing for the ideal life he had thought out for her, he turned and went slowly to the lookout where he could see us and we him from a long, long ways off. My mother twisted around constantly in her seat so she would not lose sight of Fritz. One hand gripped the wheel; with her free hand, she waved. Anita stuck her head and arm out of the open window and stared back at Father, who melted ever further into the landscape.

I do not know whether he ever gave Anita his blessing.

A bit further, in the forest, Anita and my mother noticed that they had traded Fritz for the trees; they rolled up their windows. My sister leaned back with a long sigh and closed her eyes. She smiled, and it seemed as if she were extinguishing the dark times with the precision of an eraser.

•

I was an old child. I say this because I can clearly remember that at the age of ten I often knew, rather exactly, what was going on inside the people around me. Although one never spoke directly about money among us—that was simply not decent—I could sense, through allusions and scraps of conversation, that our fortune was slowly running out.

Indeed, the farm my father loved so much had to be sold.

Arriving at the uppermost stair on the upper floor of our ancient home, one found oneself looking into a gray mirror that had hung there for a very long time, witness to generations that had lived here before us. Longing, joy, hatred, shortcomings, love, death had filed past it. Time and moisture had contributed to the dissolution of the mirror surface into dust. Now it was blind. Silhouettes from out there—a section of roof, the clouds, treetops, and you yourself—stood shadowy in the silver-gray of a life-sized daguerreotype.

My father quoted Goethe:

Du musst steigen oder sinken,	You must climb or sink,
Du musst herrschen und gewinnen,	You must rule and win,
Oder dienen und verlieren,	Or serve and lose,
Leiden oder triumphieren,	Suffer or triumph,
Amboss oder Hammer sein.	Be hammer or anvil.

Anita was to be a hammer.

•

In a tiny farm chapel Anita waited for her marital blessing in front of the ornamented altar. Silent as a flower. She wore her saffron dress, the one with the birds of paradise. Next to her stood Heinz in a blue suit that hung on him as if he had borrowed it from a giant. Heinz—this he had in common with my father—was not made for sentimentality. So he spent the ceremony clinging to his stiff dignity.

My mother and I sat together with the aristocratic couple for whom Heinz now ran agricultural operations. They were smitten with Heinz’s competence, just as my father had been. But they had seen through the situation here and were glad my sister was not their child. Just like my parents, they too would have wanted someone else for their daughter.

That Fritz had stayed home—that they understood.

My sister’s happiness bathed the little baroque chapel in an otherworldly light. And, bathed in this light, the frescoes gleamed within their false perspectives, as did Lazarus with his far-too-large head. And it became an enchanted wedding party. Two lilac bouquets framed the couple like a gem of imperishability. My mother cried bitterly, as if it were a funeral, did not calm down until the ceremony was over and Baron Sachenbacher reached her his arm.

To celebrate, we went across to the castle, past the forgotten flower beds that encircled the little porter’s house in which we had already laid out Anita’s dowry. Heinz’s motorbike with its sidecar was once again leaning in front of the door.

I too became a wild animal, once the time had come.