Forgiving is toughest of all, because it’s hard to find the midpoint between clemency and resentment. Alma was convinced that, depending on who you were trying to forgive, it wasn’t worth the effort. In fact, she never forgave The Binz. And she didn’t feel bad about it at all. I’m not surprised. When I think of the fear that Sergeant Forkel put me through and everything I haven’t been able to share with Alma because of the drunk switchman, I tend to agree with her. I haven’t forgiven Hofer either. Even though I hesitate there, since without Hofer I never would’ve been able to put my foot down. But I often wonder if that’s enough to overlook the bitterness I feel towards him.
It wouldn’t be bad if, at this point, when what I should be doing is not worrying about things, the water streaming down the panes would wash away all the uncertainties. Maybe then I could sit beneath the ginkgo by the lake and listen to the murmur of its leaves. Or even better: clearly remember my father’s voice, standing beneath the ginkgo in the Luxembourg Gardens as shelter from the rain, talking to me about a family dispute that I didn’t really understand, over a silver candelabra with arms in the shape of ginkgo leaves that led Grandma Johanna and one of her sisters — the famous “rich aunt, but you know where it came from” as everyone called her — to not speak for years; or Alma’s misty eyes as she looked up at the façade, decorated with ginkgo branches and leaves, of Prague’s Hotel Central, where she had seen her mother for the last time and where we stayed during our trip to recapture the landscapes of her childhood; or my mother’s dreamy pose in one of the studio photographs in her album, with a fabric backdrop embroidered with ginkgo leaves. A bunch of coincidences like any other yet, even though I know it has no special significance, I like to think it helps keep my memories from completely slipping away.
It seems my mother assembled her photo album for the same reason. According to my father, she spent many hours during her last months working on it for me. I’ve never seen anything like it: one photograph per page, glossed in her spiky handwriting. There was a bit of everything. Portraits of her parents and siblings; wedding pictures; postcards from their Paris honeymoon and some other trips. .“Here’s the little Buddha with a cranky face,” it says beneath one of my portraits. Bald, chubby-cheeked, serious. Father told me more than once that he’d have given anything to make me understand that I wouldn’t have a mother for very long, since, maybe that way, I would be less peevish. The conclusion one can draw from looking at the album is that, for Mother, everything happened very fast. Childhood, youth, love, marriage, birth, and death. But was she happy? I believe so. As you turn the pages, it’s inevitable that you wonder what’s better: a short but intense life or a long, tedious one.
The photograph with the ginkgo leaves eventually became one of the paintings on Hofer’s list, but I depicted my mother’s face not as a twenty-something year old, but rather how I imagined it would have looked with the passage of the years she didn’t live to see. Sitting beside the sewing box, she looked at me with a smile on her lips, as she might have done someday if I’d had the chance to explain to her that I’d “lost sight of the orpiment” when I saw Erika again at the Hans Goltz Gallery. Or when meeting Konrad. Or seeing the Cranach for the first time. My father didn’t like the painting. He said it didn’t look like her, but I suppose that, since it was Mother, nothing would have been good enough for him. That was the last piece on the list that I painted. Day had already broken. With a lump in my throat and fear gripping my bones.
What will happen to Mother’s album when I’m no longer here? I’ve considered destroying it, but I don’t have it in me. It would be a betrayal of my mother’s effort to transmit a part of her history to me. Perhaps someone will pick it up off the dusty ground of some flea market and, after turning a few pages, buy it to read all her comments, and that curiosity would give us the opportunity to escape oblivion.
The hours slip by maddeningly slowly. There are times when I don’t know how to fill them and I would give anything to be able to speed up time. Especially at night. During the occupation, I had the same feeling. There were days that I wished would end from the very moment they began. Under normal circumstances I’ve always taken advantage of moments like that, when holing up in my studio would have been a waste of time, instead taking long walks, visiting a museum, or seeing a friend. Anything but struggle in vain with my lack of motivation or ideas. Now, when I can barely keep my spirits up at all, it’s harder to overcome those periods of despondence. Listening to music or playing solitaire helps, but sometimes I get tired of that too. When the city was occupied it wasn’t easy either, because it really frustrated me to take part — as if nothing had changed — in the seeming normalcy imposed by the German authorities, but I could always go see an exhibition. Especially when they set up the Resistance galleries like Jeanne Bucher and L’Esquisse, where I remember seeing work by Miró, Léger, and Kandinsky. Contemplating such art was the perfect cure for all that ailed me since, at least for a while, I would forget about the worries that had forced me out of my studio.
As a young man, when things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, I would lose my head, convinced that I hadn’t learned anything, that I was a failure, that I would never achieve what I’d longed for since I was a child. Over the years I’ve discovered that, if I don’t paint today, I’ll paint tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that. And that everything is useful for filling up the sack from which, sooner or later, the paintings will emerge: a poem, a melody, a landscape, a conversation. . With effort, of course. Learning, not giving up, laying in wait for the right moment. Professor Müller told me long ago: “Everything has its price.” Even though we sensed there was truth in it, we never missed a chance to say it in a mocking version of his voice. Until one day he caught me repeating it blithely to a classmate who asked to borrow some cash to go out on the town. After a few seconds of silence — during which I wanted to vanish — he merely said, in the same tone he used when harshly critiquing our drawing exercises: “Laugh, laugh now, you’ll have plenty of time to cry once you realize the true scope of your mediocrity.” I was shocked.
The Cranach was also a distraction for me. I loved to observe its details and find new ones: a figure on its way to the castle, a bird on a branch, a columbine flower about to open. It’s perplexing that, often, we can take so long to notice minutiae and yet once we’ve found them, they’re so obvious that they even seem larger than they truly are. And that doesn’t only happen with paintings. Every once in a while, my father and I would compare our memories. We almost never coincided on the details. It was relatively easy to agree on where we were, but not on the clothes we were wearing, the color of a waitress’ eyes or the hotel room bedspread. “Remember? It had horrible flowers. .” one of us would say.“What? They weren’t flowers,” the other would answer. I suppose it’s inevitable, because sometimes our memories depend on barren seeds. The only thing I can remember about certain people is that one always had sweaty hands, or that another’s mouth smelled of rotten eggs. There are places I only remember as a tree or a door half-buried in snow. Nothing more. Like dead wells or paths that lead nowhere.