But then suddenly he was standing again, the clown, as if resurrected; on the backs of all the horses. He was screaming at them with a single fury. He wanted them to swim now, to drown in the grass that was surging like a flood. Light fell on him from somewhere, the rapidly changing flashes of fireworks. He looked so much like his brother in suffering, up there in the stands, that you could have mistaken one for the other. The circus had caught hold of them both. The latter man must have taken off his coat long ago, for he sat there unmasked before the world. How horrible the world can be. And even to itself. But perhaps this is its health, its only source of courage. By giving voice to everything, perhaps it finds itself again. Nevertheless, the violin maker’s staid Sunday suit was only decorated with a watch chain and a few dangling silver thalers, it was nothing compared to the clown’s finery. And those around him could hardly have noticed the resemblance. For the clown had a silky red shock of hair that stood up on top and stuck out to the left and right. And the face with its make-up looked out sadly from beneath the pointy white felt hat. He had little stars on his cheeks and chin and a half moon on his forehead. All of this made him larger and smaller, and seemed in some secret way to belong on his face. But then there was the many-layered lace collar that completely encircled this neckless man, repeating the circle of the dogs, the circle of the horses, and the circle in which he himself had flown. And after that came the giant hump that made this large man small, that folded him together as if to set him aside. This hump was the circus. It was the leap that everyone had to take here in the circus. First the animals, then the acrobats, tightrope walkers, and horse trainers; and then we ourselves, the spectators in the stands. But finally even those who had never gone to the circus, the whole rest of the world. In a sense, everyone at one time or another had hung from the tail of flying horses.
I sat there for a long time. But even in retrospect, I feel unable to describe the events that followed—.
After many madcap stunts and tricks, it was like a church procession when the twenty elephants left the ring. There was no need for music anymore. The people left.
And only when the tents had been taken down, and there was nothing left in the town that recalled the circus, did I go to my violin maker again to pick up the violin. I went there as if there had never been tents in the distance, I only wanted to feel what was there in the present again: the violin maker’s room. It was nothing but a quiet Sunday that prompted me to go. The threat that lurked there was forgotten. And yet I might very well have still been thinking of it. In fact, it would have been quite possible. And in that case, wouldn’t the whole episode have had to start again from the beginning? But I only fetched my violin, and inside everything was silent, as if no one was there. You could hardly say a word. In that silence, soft as velvet, everything was suspended. Even the hunchback himself was quiet, as if otherwise he might disturb someone. Only the stroke of the clock was there again, with its gentle reverberations. It was just three o’clock. I was on the verge of leaving, lost in thought as always happens there, when I caught sight of the mirror in the dark shadows:
A little picture was mounted below it, newly acquired. A hunchback stood there, a clown. He was taking a bow, with one hand propped on his side while the other held his hat as politely as could be, bidding farewell to anyone who still had something to ask.—
Susanna
We children were playing ourselves weary by the open window. The day had not yet faded, but for us it was an hour of rest.
My sister was speaking loudly.
Then a girl came into the room. Her hair was brown and hung down in long braids. Her dress gray, her skirt gray. We had to stop talking; this new girl looked so wise. “I heard that there are children in the house, may I play with you?”
We played, and when the clock struck eight, she took her knitting again and went back to her apartment.
Just then our mother came home, and we told her: “Susanna was here.”
Countless times in those years I sat alone with my doll by the wall of the house that faced the garden, dreaming my way down those trellised paths.
Once, when I found our door locked, I went to the upstairs apartment.
Susanna was there. She was standing at the kitchen window, erasing something from a drawing.
Her mother was slicing bread for a long table, each piece in its proper place.
That sight of her would stay with me forever: large and haggard, a dark countenance, her clothing all one color, black. She kindly offered me a piece of bread for my afternoon snack. Then I left again.
The next time I visited, it was already close to Christmas. A lamp cast its green light on the table. The family sat around it. The mother was knitting, the brothers were drawing. Others were flipping through illustrated magazines.
I didn’t see the father anywhere. So I made straight for the oldest brother and begged him in a whisper: “Make my doll better, her head fell off.” And there were a few little pictures on the music table, he gave them to me and pasted them onto the first page of an album. They always spoke in a whisper. They rarely had anything to say to each other. It never occurred to me to make noise, either. Just once I laughed, and the floor creaked under my foot. Then the man at the head of the table stood and leaned his white hair in my direction and roared: “Quiet!”
All these thoughts had been wiped away again by the time my mother said: “You can go up there again; Susanna’s there.”
I looked up into the air, asking questions in my mind.
“She had scarlet fever, she’s in bed.”
There was a room with two beds. Susanna was lying toward the window. Her eyes and her long brown hair were just like before. But her cheeks were pale.
Day after day I sat by her bed, and we chatted just as we had before. Her brothers and sisters, too, took turns sitting in her room, or sometimes neighbor girls visited to provide some entertainment.
And often, when the room was filled again with that old peaceful silence, I would pull a little gift from my pocket, one of my own prized possessions that my mother had put there as a present for her.
“But don’t you want it yourself?” Susanna would always ask before reaching out her hand. But the joy that I felt for her was so evident that we owned everything in common.
When I entered the living room another time, I found her sitting there in the corner of her sofa. “She’s visibly improving,” her mother told me. But to me Susanna seemed quiet and a little sad. After a time, her sisters led her back to her room. She walked like an old woman, and her shape had changed as well. That alone was enough to tell me that she wasn’t happy. When she was finally resting on her cushions, they told her about a wheelchair that they wanted to buy her to use during her recovery.
The doctors came. Two tall, dark men, and I thought that the man with the white hair must have done this to her.