Читать книгу More Than Everything - Beatrix Ost - Страница 6

ONE MUST HANDLE ONE’S OWN HISTORY CAREFULLY. One must not wound the living, nor insult the dead. I am owner of my past, and, at the same time, its victim.

Memory’s locations are often mirages. Snapshots, visions of people I know, peer through the tangle of memory that I hold firmly once again, until they willfully or inadvertently hop from my hand.

Threads free themselves, impossible to grasp firmly. Scent of lilac, the twilight moisture beneath the arc of the bridge, whispering voices, glances through cigarette smoke, skate blades sharp as swamp grass cutting into ice. A yellow border rings the beak of a bird child. The grinding beneath my feet on the pebble paths in the garden.

There are things, even banalities, that are uncommonly impressive, the building blocks of memory. One is constantly stalked by parables, by spiritual states, that melt together with tiny impressions. The strict voice of my father, Fritz, his office door ajar. White thread on a woolen skirt. Saliva in the corner of a mouth as it speaks.

I spent my childhood on an estate near Munich: Goldachhof. We were like a receiving camp for relatives and friends the war dealt our way. We had food. Some years after the war, as the country tried to recover, they left our secure niche, one by one, to build themselves a new life, to find lost family members, simply to go home.

I remember these partings.

Many partings. My heart had two halves. In one, knowledge of transience. In the other, awakening curiosity about new things—new loves. And I grasped very early on that everything always repeats itself, that only the exterior changes, replaced by something else.

Yes, replaced—and there is Ferdinand, my first husband, that handsome devil, the scraping noises he made during his ritual pipe cleaning, which gave him time to consider his next seductive chess move.

I close my eyes, draw the curtain before the present, and let in the robust past.