That winter our house was lost. At last, I would add from this vantage. A storm just before Christmas put an end to the wall, granting the second flood tide free access to the cliff. Warren never got the chance to fill up the lost earth; those were the first weeks of the new year, weeks during which almost no building was going on and no rubble was available.
Factors, circumstances.
When the forecasts began speaking again of bad weather, Warren appeared at the door with a face like iron.
‘I need to talk to your mother,’ he said.
I traipsed upstairs like a little boy and tried to listen in, but by the time they reached my ears the words had become unintelligible. Once he had left, I asked, rather casually, ‘So what’s the news?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Warren thinks. . the forecasts are bad. He’s afraid, I mean, he thinks this might be the end.’
But still. The weight. The irreversible. It hasn’t made itself known, it was simply waiting for you all that time in the dark.
‘What are you thinking, love?’
I blinked back tears and said from the doorway, ‘I’m going to pack my things.’
What a house means. The walls around a cavity. It means inside, it protects you against the outside. Now inside was about to become outside. The roof would be ripped open, the dark sky would force its way in, the cold, black sea. I looked around my room, pondering over what should be taken and what not. There was no plan, no destination; the best thing was to pack as lightly as possible. I had a brown cardboard suitcase, found along the street, with stickers from a Rhine cruiser and the Lorelei. Two pairs of trousers, shirts, underwear, a bound-up packet of letters and postcards. For the rest, those valuables I thought I could probably hock should life turn against me: mother-of-pearl cufflinks, the automatic Tissot watch that had belonged to my great-grandfather, Friedrich Unger. (He, Friedrich Unger, had crossed the border from Ostfriesland to east Groningen province to marry a Dutch girl, Aleida Wanningen — ancestors immortalized in photographs in which time seemed recalcitrant and stiff, you couldn’t imagine people laughing out loud or cheating on their spouses. My mother got her beauty from Aleida; even the fashion of that day and the sepia print couldn’t hide her regular, noble features. Friedrich and Aleida’s son, Wilhelm Unger, known as Willem, was the father of my mother and Aunt Edith. I had never seen my grandparents; my grandmother died early on of heart problems, my grandfather had turned his back on my mother after Lilith. As far as my mother knew, he still lived with his second wife in the brick colossus close to Bourtange, the farm I knew from pictures in which my mother wore cotton dresses and walked barefoot through the dust of dry summers. When we were in Holland, the stopping-off place between Alexandria and here, he had refused to see us. That’s what his second wife, Aunt Wichie, said; he himself refused to come to the phone. At the time I had noticed nothing of that, that I had a grandfather not so far away.)
I took along some sheet music and three books, Moby Dick (my loveliest book), The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (from my mother’s bookcase, the promise of grown-up literature) and A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell; still unread, but impressive after our English teacher, Mr. Dowd, told us that Russell had written the book during a passage by steamer to the United States, from memory, almost without reference works.
A quiet knock on the door, my mother. Her arms folded across her chest, she leaned against the doorpost. I asked what she wanted.
‘There’s a truck coming the day after tomorrow,’ she said.
I looked around, the posters on the walls, the computer, the metal bed, the cupboard that listed to the right because it was not screwed together well.
‘That’s what I want to keep,’ I said, pointing to the things on the bed.
The howling of the wind, only the beginning.
‘It’s just a forecast,’ she said.
‘Dream on.’
‘We do have to be prepared,’ she admitted, ‘you’re right.’
We talked about the end, my mother and I. It was our best conversation in a long while. We were not melancholy or dramatic, those were moods that had gone before; in the cold light of the fait accompli, the evacuation and the loss seemed easier to bear.
‘And afterwards?’ I asked.
‘When this is gone, you mean?’
She nodded at the window, outside which the chasm had approached to within a single bound.
‘There has to be something then,’ I said.
‘I have faith that something will come along.’
Faith was her secret charm, the abracadabra of holistic magic. For a moment there was the wrenching feeling of irritation, but I let it pass. She said, ‘I can always get work cleaning houses, or. .’
‘Or at a roadside garage, then we’ll be white trash and we can live in a mobile home along the highway! And we’ll drive around in a van full of junk and neglect our teeth, okay?’
She laughed. The tinkling sound of ice cubes in a glass.
‘So, the day after tomorrow.’
She nodded and said, still in the doorway, ‘We have to be strong, okay, sweetheart?’
‘Strong. .’
‘You already are, you always have been. I don’t know anyone else like you, Ludwig. In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore.’
Gently, I pushed the door closed behind her.
Sometimes the final notes of a song will go nagging on in my mind. For hours, until a new melody arrives to replace the old one. The same happens to me sometimes with the final words before a silence. They nestle in my head and echo there for a long time. A mysterious, internal repetition. That evening it was my mother’s voice. In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore. Later, as I was playing the piano as welclass="underline" In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore. It summoned up an entire world view. The crowning element in personal development was to not need anyone, to be alone, a mote in the darkness. The final consequence of this view of life, of course, was that she didn’t need me either, anymore.
On my way home I noticed that the wind had picked up. The foam on the surf glowed in the moonlight. The waves were already washing up against the sea wall, but still lacked the force to do it any harm. But it would swell, gather momentum, bubbling and hissing, to strike at our Achilles’ heel. I would sleep poorly in my bed beside the chasm.
Movers arrived. She pointed out the things to them. That needs to go with, that one doesn’t, careful with that lamp, you’re going to dent the copper if you do that. I remembered the house on the Rue Mahmoud Abou El Ela, the faded negatives of cupboards and tapestries on its walls after the dismemberment, and felt the brief stab of loss when I thought about the treasure buried in the Eden of roses, bougainvillea and blue-blossoming jacaranda.
There were three of them. The driver was the boss. He shook his head as he worked.
‘I can have them bring a bigger lorry,’ he said a few times.
They wound their way amid the ten thousand things, an elephant ballet. Outside the wind mocked our efforts. The mover drove back and forth twice between our house and Warren and Catherine’s shed, where we could store our things until further notice. A double row of moving boxes was piled up against the back wall, full of objects swaddled in soft tissue paper, starting in on their period of waiting in the dark.
*