On the night of the wedding, overcome with suppressed fury and resentment, knowing he has been robbed of his dream, Adam does what he has never yet dared, and thought himself incapable of daring to do — he seeks out a prostitute. So, while Peggy takes off her white dress in some honeymoon suite and prepares to yield her virgin body to her husband, Adam in a short-stay hotel room watches some unknown woman with dyed hair undress with routine gestures and present to him her already faded body. She lies on the bed and spreads her legs. And there he has done with his virginity, with his dream of a sun of silk-soft warmth. He has done with his false innocence and his batch of naive images, but not with the strength of his desire that on the contrary becomes still more ardent.
The Schmalker house, to which he continues to return for all the holiday periods, seems very empty to him now. With the perfume and laughter of the young girls gone there is a drabness that now prevails. From time to time faint cries and mewlings are to be heard, those of Erika’s daughter, Myriam, when the young woman visits her parents with her baby. This is the first baby Adam has ever seen, for though as a child during the exodus he observed a lot of dead bodies along the way he has never before laid eyes on a newborn infant, and the sight amazes him. Myriam is a tiny creature with brown hair stuck to her head, her frog-like bulging eyes shut, little fists tightly clenched, a mouth greedy for milk and ready to complain. He dare not take her in his arms, her fragility terrifies him, her smell repulses him, her whimpering irritates him. But he bends over her when she is lying in her cradle and studies her at length, disturbed by this strange mixture of purity, daintiness and delicacy, and pathetic toad-like ugliness when the little face screws up and convulses as a result of hunger or some other vexation, the face of a miniature old man with diaphanous satin-like skin concentrating on some ancestral wisdom much too vast for his still unformed mind. He himself, he reflects, was like this baby, like some nacreous-hued ancient sage full of age-old knowledge, quivering with comfort in the maternal arms, with repletion on the maternal breast, with light in the maternal gaze, and imbibing, from his mother now dead, her milk, smiles, and tender words, her caresses and her smell. And he suspects this cannot have totally disappeared, that this original love must be dormant deep in his flesh. In far-off days her milk nourished him, her smiles quieted him. And her softly sung words wakened him to the world; her caresses, to his own body; and the clearness of those maternal eyes, to the beauty of the day. Maybe, in days yet to come, this love lying dormant in the darkness of his heart will raise its auroral face to cast light on him at last, to help him forgive all those crimes with which, out of pride and tragic stupidity, that foolish mother of his colluded. Maybe.
And he holds his breath on the brink of this maybe, before the infant snuggled in her cradle, before the enigma of that body, so tiny and vulnerable and yet supreme, absorbed in the sound of its own blood in which there yet murmurs the entire memory of the world, the universe.
Hannelore always behaves towards him as a considerate but distant host; Lothar, as a tutor primarily concerned for the sound academic, moral and religious education of his nephew. But offering no emotional guidance whatsoever. His feelings are unruly, he does not know what he likes, or what he wants. He does not know how to love. From time to time, whenever he can, he goes with a prostitute, but his heart rings hollow.
This is what it comes down to: the Schmalkers are tutors carrying out their educational duty as best they can. For Adam is well aware he is an outsider grafted on to his uncle’s family, a refugee twice over under the roof of emigrés. He is not their son and never will be. Worse, he remains the offspring of a cowardly killer and through her stupidity and vanity a criminal by association. His powerlessness to wipe out this sickening ancestry, or at least call to account the parents he loved with an innocence he now deems culpable, translates into a violent animus towards himself. This bitterness inwardly chokes him, and as he emerges from adolescence sculpts his features with harshness.
The puny child he used to be, owing to years of poverty in Friedrichshafen, becomes at eighteen a young man of medium height with burly shoulders and a rough-hewn face. His hair has darkened to a shade of walnut with coppery glints and his once winsome curls are now shaggy and unkempt. His forehead is broad and prominent, his eyebrows are bushy circumflexes, and there is a bronze-tinged smokiness to his deep-set light brown eyes. He has high cheekbones, a flat nose, full lips, the upper one slightly projecting, and a square jaw. None of the prettiness of his mother or the imposing aspect of his father in their younger days. There is something of the bear and ram about him.
Note
BEAR: Like all large wild animals, the bear is one of the symbols of the chthonian unconscious — lunar and therefore nocturnal, deriving from the inner landscapes of the earth mother.
Many peoples regarded the bear as their ancestor. In Siberia until a short time ago there were still graveyards for bears.
For the Yakut of Siberia the bear knows everything, remembers everything and forgets nothing. The Altaic Tartars believe the bear hears through the medium of the earth, and the Soyot say, the earth is the ear of the bear.
In Europe the mysterious huffing of the bear emanates from caves. It is therefore an expression of darkness, of gloom; in alchemy it corresponds to the blackness of the primary state of matter. Darkness and the invisible being associated with that which is taboo, the bear’s role as initiator into the arcane is thereby reinforced.
RAM: The ram is a cosmic representation of the animal force of the fire that erupts dramatically, explosively, at the earliest moment of materialization. This fire is both creative and destructive, blind and rebellious, chaotic and prolonged, prolific and sublime, and from a central point spreads out in every direction. This fiery force relates to the inceptive surge of vitality, the primordial impulse of life, with all that is pure crude urgency in such an inchoate process, all that is ebullient, zestful, indomitable energy, dynamic excess, fervid animation.
Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant
Dictionary of Symbols
Fragment 10
Since he has a great facility for learning languages and still nurtures an obscure passion for Spanish, he chooses to study Romance languages at university, Portuguese and French as well as Spanish. In fact he is especially gifted with an extraordinary memory, having diligently trained it from the age of six as a defensive reaction to the loss of all his memories of early childhood. He can instantly memorize every new word he reads or hears. This retentiveness also applies to anything visual. But while this excessive memory might be an advantage in his studies, it is also a burden to him. His memory remains active without respite, registering the slightest detail, letting nothing go. It torments him even at night, fomenting in his dreams a riot of images and words with an exactitude that sometimes wakens him with a start, so razor-sharp is it. He then has the impression of a rift in time, of past and present colliding, running into each other, overthrowing the sequence of events. Coexisting inside him, intact, unbearably vivid and enduring, is every moment of his life since the age of six. It is therefore impossible for him to mourn his parents, to distance himself from them, from their lies, their madness, their crimes. And their ill deeds oppress him with shame, sadness, and anger, they contaminate his body, imprison his youth. They hold his heart captive. He is the posthumous hostage of two predators whose death now guarantees them eternal impunity, and therefore a perpetual injustice to him. Whether or not there is any judgement to face in the hereafter does not concern him. It is here and now, before the world, that the mortified son would like to make his parents pay, and particularly his father.