The tail end of the park was a narrow stretch of scrubby green caught tightly between high walls in the center of the city, an acre where the sun rarely fell, and low office men smoked at all hours. Strangely enough, today it was bright in the sunlight, and there were more clerks than ever, black and limpid. Stella walked up and down between two benches that left slat marks on shiny britches. Twisted black toes of shoes, stuck by the loungers into the narrow path, touched the hem of her gown, her head fluttered beneath the ribbons, pained worse, and a huge dog with black and white spots trotted by. The sky would darken for a moment with a smudge of cream, then would roll back to sheer white, turning the patches of grass to straw. Once she had hidden from Gerta beneath her mother’s skirts, had felt the overpowering comfort of her ruffles, and that was a strange experience. The mother had thrust heavy hands under the folds, caught the wriggler, and handed the daughter over to the nurse, who always gave bad advice, to be secured in a strict manageable grasp. “Your father wouldn’t like you to behave like that.” Stella shut out all the city but this one pasture, shut out all the light but that which ached in her head, and high above the whispering clerks realized she loved Ernst very much. City and keeps and roadways in the heat, he, by a forest of young hair, protected from that which is dying. She waited patiently.
“My God, simpleton, why don’t you sleep?” The mother spoke from a throat puffing over the edge of the sheet drawn tightly above her bosom with both hands. The father, back in the shuttered room with his tunic unbuttoned, wandered more bent and drawn around the three sides of the bed, his fine Roman nose twitching with excitement, the top of his scalp a sullen red. The room was sheltered, warm, an auburn fuzz glowed through the shutters and darkness. The old woman was white and still in the bed and about her the black wood was inlaid with bits, broken wings, of silver. The father was in one of his reveries, counting very slowly some outlandish or important number on his yellow fingers that would never total. Though one body was heavy and the other frail, though one voice bullied and the other barely mumbled, though the man wavered in agitation and the woman lay in state, they both were very much the same, because on both the hair had receded and become pale, leaving the foreheads, eyes and mouths expressionless with old age. A palmist looking at their hands would have seen no life for all the mazes of fine-drawn yellow lines, overlapping soft pads and untaken crowding roads. “If only he would slip off into the light of Heaven,” she thought. “Sit down,” she said, but he paid no attention, and she could hear only the long-legged rustling of his uniform, the unbearable sun pressing above them on the roof.
Jutta awoke and the room was filled with black shapes.
The heat seemed to grow more determined, even the clerks panted, whispering closely in each other’s ears, and Stella believed the sun would never fall flaming through the torpid clear sky. She wondered how the strange wild cannibals on tropical islands or on the dark continent, running with white bones in their hair, dark feet hardened in the shimmering sand, could bear, in only their feathers, this terrible sun. For the headache made her drowsy. She saw those men, carrying victims high over their heads, as tall, vengeful creatures who sang madly on their secret rock, who even at night slept on glistening pink stone in fire, who stretched their tall bodies whether in repose or in chase, and who kept wives bare from the waist up. Their ears were pierced, insects buzzed low over the children, the islands kept rising up out of the sea. Even when she was tired and desperately warm and even in such a trembling state, she loved him. Her temple throbbed, the clerks were watching. Her fired heart and sweltering faith were beginning to fall away, swept by impatience. She was tired of this park filled with noise, so close to the passing horses that wore skull caps with holes for the ears. She was afraid of being left alone. Then, before she had a chance to meet the image come too sudden before her, before she had a chance to guard against this reflection which she had searched for in all the shop windows, and guard against the terror of herself, she saw him running across the street and up the path, turned half sideways, thin, excited, smiling wildly through the fresh bandages round his head.
“Stella!”
“Ernst!”
They walked for twenty minutes under the yellow and green leaves and passed the cool pond as clear as the sky, smelled the berries cultivated by the park authorities, a few beautiful dripping flowers, and passed babies who screeched, dwarfed in the carriage. Then he took her home, left her, feeling at last the approach of twilight, feeling his heart full and as vague as water.
By the end of the next week the first thousands were far into enemy land, ammunition trains roared all through the night, the city burned late in tumultuous but magnificent organization, and the house was full of callers trying to pay respects to her parents in the bedroom. All seeking on their padded feet to scale these, her walls, to climb over them in a house that was no more hers than theirs, to seek out the mother, flies over the white sheet, for knowledge of the venerable man, they crawled exactly as she crawled. She caught, unwittingly, scraps of words, part of love during the seven days and forgot about the cannibals. “We met in a beautiful copse on a summer’s eve, smelling the dew.” But through the hours, while Gerta stamped about serving tea to them in the anteroom, where they still wore their monstrous hats, she felt for some reason as if these short-winged creatures, all but strangers, had come to mourn, and that mourning, visiting with the dead, was the last desperate attempt, the last chance for gossip. She felt that they were taking away the joy of sunshine, casting a blot, like an unforgivable hoard, on the very search and domestic twilight peace that she did not understand. The seascapes lost their color, in the midst of this remarkable mobilization she began to feel cheated. Ernst was gone for that week, and the old house was sealed tight though they squeezed through the doors and windows. Jutta was more rude than usual.
The seventh morning was freakishly cool. All the light was gone, the fruit flat, the clatter of servants obtrusive and harsh, bands playing in the park were loud and off key. They settled down. The old man beat about the empty halls quicker than usual, the brothers whispered, the entire ring of dark chambers was gathered, not wistful but strained, unhappily into the tight present. Men were pushed first on one shoulder, then on the other, off into the grey line, and the whole house from rafters of teak to chests of wine began to shiver. That morning the mother stepped out of the bed as if alive, stared for one moment about her in the unpleasant shadows and with exact stoic movements began to dress and became, gradually, monstrously large. She was dressed in a long black gown, heavy grey gloves, a tight ruffled collar, and a hat with an enormous drooping brim that made the dark patches around her eyes and in the cheeks more prominent, more like injuries to hide. At one time, years ago, the mother had left the father and had come back three months later thin as a rail, lovely. Now her age hung upon her in unlovely touches, though she stepped out today as if to make one last effort to slough them off. Her black patches were fierce and when it was known that she was up, the house fell into silence, though the father still moved fitfully, getting in the way, as if something were wrong. The mother had somewhere forgotten about morals, self-conquest and the realm to come. She was too weighted down, it was time to go, for age filled in the lacking spaces.