Читать книгу More Than Everything - Beatrix Ost - Страница 9

“WHEN I WAS STILL INNOCENT,” as the song says—that is, before one is swept away by the irresistible force called love and loses one’s innocence, a possession that never struck one as a possession. When I was still innocent, at the threshold between child and woman, when my mother still protected me…The stone sphere that lay on my desk came from that time.

I push open a door, and the sphere rolls with the buzzing tone of memory across a bumpy stone floor into the middle of a room.

In the spring of ’53, I drove with my parents to Italy. It was my first trip to another country. My mother, Adi, was driving her Blue Wonder, our first postwar car, a DKW, a blue-and-black-painted cabriolet with soft, luxurious leather seats she herself had worked over with saddle oil. She was passionate about driving, while my father, who never learned, sat next to her like a nervous hunting dog and combed the stretch we were racing along for every kind of obstacle, getting on Adi’s nerves with his exclamations:

Adi, watch out! A truck coming from the right!

Adi, a stop sign!

Please—over there, the bicyclist! He doesn’t see you!

Allow the woman with the pram to live! Please!

Oh, God, a pedestrian is crossing!

My mother drove on, composed and cheerfully chattering:

Yes, yes, I can see it! Why don’t you try looking at that waterfall up there to the right? The green bit next to it, with the moist haze…

In the rear-view mirror, the attentive eyes of my mother, which sometimes twinkled back at me; in front of me, the head of my father, with its ring of gray hair; all around me, the hum of the motor, which carried us through valleys into the higher Alpine altitudes beyond, only to deposit us in the southern warmth of the Italian climate upon our grand descent. Awaiting us there, along with the lighthearted temperament of the inhabitants, were the famous culinary delicacies and the fizzy, very agreeable country wine—

Perhaps you’ll even see palms, said my mother, and laughed, thrilled.

Since she had spent the winter months of her childhood in Venice, she was our tour guide. We were driving the country road; there was not yet an autobahn on this stretch. You could bet money on it: in every valley, a robber baron’s castle perched at a high elevation, agonized by the weather of the centuries, its noble inhabitants no longer tyrannizing the local people. And then, near the Italian border, in shocking contrast to an ancient little town with a bulbous golden spire adorning the church—some quite different fortresses, these made of concrete, bunkers blocking off a valley, indestructible bastions brutally reminiscent of the last war.

During the trip, my mother chatted herself into ever-greater youthfulness. The hours slipped past, with stories about her father’s experiment: buying our destination, Burg Persen, to create an idyll, in the Rousseauvian sense, retour à la nature. Adi’s parents, nicknamed Pülli and Blüschen, Pullover and Blouse, surrounded themselves there with friends and kindred spirits. Pülli jauntily tossed out his landscape paintings, Blüschen gave herself over to the Muse. The period: 1900 to the First World War.

Much later on, as a grown woman, I was invited to tea with friends in a house near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Snow lay in high drifts. A narrow path led through the corridor of sinister evergreens to a Bavarian country house. Frescoes adorned the walls on both sides of the entrance.

The cold was so icy that one could see one’s breath in the vestibule. The sweet scent of freshly baked cookies streamed in from a nearby room. A sheep dog wagged its friendly way toward us. We hung up our coats and hats on antlers. Along the tiled floor of the entrance hall ran a colorful, homey patchwork carpet.

Come on in, close the door, cold as a witch’s teat out there, called a voice.

On the bench embracing a green tile stove, at the seductively inviting coffee table, sat an old lady with fresh red cheeks. A trompe l’oeil.

Scarcely had I greeted her and looked around the room when I had to steady myself on the arm of a chair. My childhood sprang across to me like an echo. On the walls hung the same mountain views, nature studies, and landscapes as in the home where I had grown up: the superb paintings of my grandfather Max Rossbach. The wall at the lady’s back was adorned with a large mountain view, the companion piece to the Watzmann that hung in our home. Laughing, she handed me a photo album.

That is your grandfather Pülli, he often visited us here. There, look, the child, that is Adi with her long braids. And I am standing among them. A few years younger than your mother.

In another photo Adi’s brother Adalbert played tennis with Pülli. Ball and racquet were suspended in midair, à la Lartigue.

Blüschen leaning on the fence, a parasol in her gloved hand.

Adi, on skis, with her leggings wrapped high up her leg, a skirt over them, a pullover, fur cap, next to Adalbert in knickerbockers and tailored jacket, visored cap on his head.

Pülli with Blüschen on a bench beneath a locust tree, grapes entwined behind it, in sepia.

Yes, there you see the two of them. They always stopped by on the way to Burg Persen.

We hummed along in the Blue Wonder toward our goal, our grandparents’ idyll. In the distance, hills in the tender green tone of grapes; further, beyond steep cliff formations, gray steel knives, with white northern blankets of snow. Snuggled amidst them, the ribbon of the road unwound before us as we whizzed higher and higher. Suddenly it narrowed: on the one side by a wall polished flat by water, on the other an abrupt chasm. Scarcely more than a few bushes and we would be hurtling downward. Above us laughed the azure sky, with lamb clouds dancing.

Quite unperturbed, Adi called out: We’re almost there.

From the height where we had clambered, the little town of Pergine was sandwiched between variations of green; right nearby, on its cliff, squatted Burg Persen, its buildings jutting out like old teeth from the solemn-satiny black pine mouth. We were now winding our way along little streets and lanes, past gnarled vineyards between mint-green meadows strewn with confetti flowers.

Overjoyed that her Blue Wonder had made it, Adi parked in front of a rusted-out iron gate. She had recognized it right away. Wild rosebushes held the door firmly locked in place and let only one person slip through at a time.

Fritz remained sitting in the car, the top open. He let the seat fall back as far as it could, pulled his Borsalino over his face, and made himself comfortable.

Come back soon, I’m taking a nap, he said from beneath the hat.

Amid the animated spectacle of a completely forgotten slice of nature round about us, Adi and I wandered up the steep path leading to the fortress. The buzzing of insects; the silent, colorful jumble of every sort of butterfly.

A hare shot out of the undergrowth and hopped a ways off in front of us. Birds swirled out of the thicket shadows, into the hot brew of the midday sun. On both sides, unrestrained rosebushes, their tendrils holding hands across the path. The higher we struggled upward, the more the evergreens lit up; a thicket of needles, rickety with age, bent over by the winds, clawed at the cliffs. On a gnarled bough squatted several ravens, holding their heads askance, screeching questions into the hot air.

And then we had arrived. Lavender scent announced the blue of an ancient grove. Gravel crunched beneath our shoes. The climb through the shrill, sultry abandonment had left us hot. Steep stone steps that led to the vegetable garden. The remains of a gazebo. A clematis, seeking a hold, astray in the branches of a gnarled apple tree. The collapsed walls of a cistern. A frightened frog hurled himself into the golden mud puddle.

And right there, as answer to our exhaustion, Grandfather’s dream. Lilac and jasmine hugged the crumbling walls to the right and left of the entrance.

Adi pressed against the heavy door, nailed with rusted iron trusses. The doorknocker was missing; only the ornamental imprint of a metal plate with a hole in the middle revealed its long-past use.

We both leaned against the obstinate wood. The cleft widened. The hinges sighed in their bearings. With the last shove, something came loose and rolled clattering into the room. We squeezed through the cleft. On the floor, a mountain of bird droppings; up above, glued to the wall, the artfully fortified nest of a swallow.

The midday sun steep above us dipped the cruciform-arched room in twilight. Only a hint of the outdoors broke through the paneless window openings cut deep in the wall. On one side, stone stairs led upward, and there, in a small uneven spot, lay a stone sphere: gray, round, intact, the only living thing in this robust decay.

In the cool musty air hung spiderwebs spanning the cake ribs of the ceiling, full of fly and butterfly cadavers.

Here, in the twilight, Pülli’s vision is slumbering, my mother whispered.

And over there you can see what is left of the frescoes. A table with bread on it, a bottle of wine in the middle of a flowery meadow. And here at the window stood a long oak table. That’s where we ate.

Her eyes lingered on the place where the table once stood.

Yes, look over there on the wall, she smiled.

A muscular arm, a white, rolled-up shirtsleeve, swinging an axe. One could no longer recognize the face—it had been gnawed away by moisture—only the legs and a bit of lederhosen, and, right next to it, a girl in a dirndl and apron sitting on a stone, her dark hair braided into a crown, two little kid goats frolicking around her.

That’s me! laughed my mother. The one with the axe is Adalbert, my brother. Ah, my father, Pülli, had no idea how one gets things done, but he loved it when other people were competent. He gave directions.

Adi and I went slowly up the stairs and further, through the rooms that succeeded one another up here. We wandered through the dim, colorful tumult of decades-long decay. A grape tendril snaked through a smashed-in window, a thief’s hand. A bat skeleton, finely gnawed clean, lay on the gray wooden floor, surrounded by rat shit. In the corners, leaves, feathers, bird droppings. A deep armchair with a few scraps of red velvet bled in the twilight. Fallen down next to it, a washstand of rusted iron.

One actually bathed in such a thing, said Adi, or else just out there in the fountain. The loo was a wooden hut with a heart in the door. There in the garden.

We looked out the window. Below us, marked off by fruit trees and an olive grove, we could still make out vegetable beds, framed by stones. From outside, the sharp shriek of the cicadas pressed in; above us, in the cornice of the roof, cooed doves.

Suddenly, loudly and quite clearly, the shuffling of heavy boots across gravel. The sounds of nature withdrew into the background, for now one heard the winded breathing of someone who must have been running.

Who is there?! Adi tried to bend out the window, but the wall was too thick, the window too distant. She could not look straight down, only into the garden and across to the wall of evergreens, the black watchmen. I clambered up onto the window bench. But I, too, could only see the bit of path we came in on.

Hello! Is someone there?

No answer.

Now we heard shoving, creaking, rumbling at the door. Then it was silent. We went quietly down the stairs. As we arrived at the last step, the shadow of a figure stretched across the floor. Next to it lay the stone sphere. We took one more step. There, in the doorway, against the white hot day outside, loomed the black silhouette of a man.

The man stared toward us. He looked like Rübezahl in the fairy tale. In his right hand he held a cudgel.

We have just been looking around, my mother called out to the terror. He just stared at us with his mouth open, not moving away. Stubble cast a sinister shadow on his coarse features. His lower jaw was thrust forward. I was terribly afraid. The cry of the cicadas outside fell upon us like a fever. Even Adi was not sure what to do. The black figure had forced its way into this primal idyll and throttled our hearts. I ducked, pressed up against Adi’s back. Our hearts were pounding.

Mummy, I’m afraid.

There was only one way out, and it led past the monster in the doorway.

Adi took my hand, bent down, and lifted the stone sphere from the floor. Keep quite still, child. With the strength she always bore within herself, the way others carry a weapon, she cried:

Make way! Vai via! Vai! Vai!

And with the sphere in her raised hand she went toward the sinister figure in the doorway. A groaning sound crept up from his breast. With his cudgel he banged against the door.

Vai, vai! Adi shrieked again, with the voice of authority.

One could not read his expression. Only our own trepidation was familiar to us. Would Adi hurl the sphere?

We were now quite close to him, heard his panting. He ducked suddenly, like someone seized with fear, hissed something incomprehensible, kraaach irgganchuk, stepped back, out into the sun, onto the gravel, further back, until he felt the gnarled lavender bush behind him; there he remained standing, now quite helpless, merging into the undergrowth, becoming a grotesque element, nature sauvage.

We ran through the door, ran past him down the path, ran down between the thorny bushes that cut our legs. We did not look around us until we finally arrived, quite out of breath, at the rusty-red iron gate, which now stood wide open. I came to an exhausted halt and started to cry.

There, right there, waited our Blue Wonder, with Fritz. Fritz was beside himself, his features twisted, wrinkled, full of worry. He held firmly to the car, walking-stick and straw hat in hand, his hair disheveled.

My God, there you are! Do you know what happened!? A man stormed past me with a cudgel in his hand. Stop! Hold up, Signore! Stop! Wait! I shouted to him. I wanted to stop him. He had a look that could kill, but he didn’t react, simply ran onward. Without even noticing me, the fellow rammed open the gate so he could fit through. Ran up the path and vanished.

My God, if something had happened to you!

Maybe he was deaf and dumb, said my mother, now calmer. Perhaps he is the silent watchman. She dried her face with her embroidered handkerchief, still holding the sphere, the weapon, in her hand.

My father collapsed into the car seat, covered his eyes with his hand, and sobbed.

I have never forgotten this episode. It was a symbol charged, indeed burdened, with life itself. Innocent at first, then pregnant with the unforeseen, with the capriciousness of fate, with the invasion of a threat into a seemingly idyllic moment. Just as the innocence of love guarantees nothing—nothing at all.