When she got out of Ravensbrück, Alma went back to Vienna to look for Jakob and apologize for her behavior, but all she was able to find out was that he’d been arrested trying to cross the border. No one knew anything more about his fate. With no reason to stay in the city, and no reason to move back to Berlin or Prague, Alma decided to start from scratch far from those places where she hadn’t been able to live in peace. With the few things the looters had left in her home, some photographs and books that a neighbor had saved for her in a box, she took off for Paris.“See? Stealing just a few years of my life wasn’t enough for them,” Alma said to me on several occasions.
I understand her exasperation perfectly because, even though I’ve never gotten caught up in collecting for collecting’s sake, I like to live among the indispensable objects from my past, so I have clues to help me travel back. Laugel’s star and my father’s zoetrope, my mother’s album and sewing box, Alma’s poster from the Schall und Rauch, one of Marcellus Goldschmidt’s erotic postcards, Braque’s book, Grandma Johanna’s rocking chair, a drawing that Konrad made. .
I also retain something from Sergeant Forkeclass="underline" his eyes wide with fear. It was during our retreat from theVaux forest. Fleeing the gas, I tripped and fell into a crater, where I found him sprawled amid the grime and wreckage. He had a bullet wound in his back and a broken leg. The bone was coming through his pants.“You’re so useless you can’t even run away,” he told me in his usual arrogant tone.“But it’s lucky for me, because now you can help me out of this hole.” Between my itchy neck and my heart about to burst out of my chest, I couldn’t even respond. Also, for a few seconds, I was thrown off by his helplessness, as if he weren’t the same man I’d seen act so cruelly. But only until he insisted with a “Because I figure you don’t have the balls to leave me here, right?” The first kick caught him by surprise. All I remember about the rest was a confused jumble of blows and moans. And Sergeant Forkel’s mumbling as I dragged myself out of the crater: “I hope they blow your brains out.” It’s hard to believe that such a feeble voice could hurt so much. I ran like a man possessed as I kept constantly repeating “Another ‘one more down.’ Another ‘one more down.’ Another ‘one more down.’”When I got to the trench, my fellow soldiers received me as if I’d come back from the dead. I didn’t tell them anything about Sergeant Forkel. I imagine they would have understood it but, as my father used to say, “what’s kept quiet is worth more than what’s said.” Though I didn’t sleep a wink for days.
I don’t regret what I did, but I’m not proud of it either. Every time I’ve had to deal with remorse, I’ve gotten past it by reminding myself that Sergeant Forkel wouldn’t have had any mercy a week later, when I broke down as we were about to begin an attack. I’m convinced that, like on so many other occasions, he’d have been cold-blooded. But perhaps that’s just a cowardly excuse to shrug off the voice of my conscience. Since I’ve fallen ill, I think about him fairly often and I wonder what must have gone through his head. Alone. Abandoned in a hole filled with stinking mud. With the terror that clings to those last agonizing moments like a leech.
Well, it seems it won’t be long before I know what it’s like. My decrepitude doesn’t rest. It advances like the tide. Firm, obstinate. And I no longer even have Doctor Zomer as an excuse for putting up a brave front. He died before my father did. Well, actually, he killed himself. And that was another thing my father could never understand. “How can someone who’s devoted himself to saving other people’s lives end up taking his own?” he would ask. And when he was ailing, he kept saying,“If only Doctor Zomer were here, at least.” Or “What a shame that Doctor Zomer’s not here. He had a clinical eye. .” My current doctor is nothing like Doctor Zomer. He’s young and energetic, and a bit inexperienced, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t take much skill to realize that trying to nurse me back to health is a wasted effort and that, as my father used to say, “each day I’m more there than here.” Maybe I should leave everything to the doctor. He has mentioned that he likes art. “Art,” not “my art,” but that doesn’t mean anything. Who knows, if he looks at it long enough, he might eventually find something he likes in it. Maybe, sitting in the garden in Hauterive or strolling along the banks of the river filled with color, he can amuse his friends or impress his girlfriend with the story of the Cranach.
If only I could do what my father did. He explained the story to me the evening before he died but, without Alma or Konrad, I don’t have anyone close enough to save it from oblivion. My father held out the key to one of the closets in his study and asked me to bring him a wooden box. “Here, now it’s yours,” he told me. When I opened it and saw the three figures in the painting, I knew right away. “That’s us!” I exclaimed. My father just nodded.“Where did this come from?” I asked him. First he gave me one of his enigmatic smiles, but he soon answered. When she knew she was dying, my mother gave the photo from Rügen Island to the “famous copyist, you know the one I mean” so he would paint her a Cranach.“She wanted it to be her last gift,” he told me.“So that everything would end where it had begun: with Cranach and orpiment.” For a while, as my father observed me in silence, I ran my eyes over the contours of the clouds, the landscape in the background, the withered fir tree, the cluster of grapes, the mallow bush without a single bloom. And the three figures. Mother, with the same distracted pose as in the photograph taken on Rügen Island. The helpless tenderness in my father’s eyes. My old man face. The painting arrived, along with the photograph and a note from the copyist, when my mother had already died. Over the years it became a secret that he only shared with me once there was no other option, and the Cranach was, as he admitted to me, “the least painful of consolations.”
During my father’s last few weeks, we switched the roles we’d had in my childhood. I could spend hours reading his favorite books to him or repeating the stories he’d explained to me so many times. When I think about those days, I remember two desires mixing together, one more selfless than the other: taking care of him so he didn’t want for anything, and gathering sensations for when he was no longer here. What he most asked me to read to him was Marco Polo. He knew it so well that he would ask me directly for his favorite episodes, like the description of the Green Mount at the Cathay Palace, where the Great Khan collected the most beautiful trees in the world; his stay in the Kingdom of Maabar, where the fish-charmers protected the pearl fishermen; and the story of King Caidu’s daughter, who made a pact with her father that she would only marry the man who could vanquish her in every trial. And, our favorite chapter of them alclass="underline" the trip to the lapis lazuli quarries in Badakhshan. When he listened to the part that spoke of the river’s blueness, about the flight of the falcons and the musky scent of the women dressed in silks, he would close his eyes and smile as if he were the one riding over the frozen plain on a shoeless horse.