I went down and played “Mother Hulda” by the little fountain in front of the garden. Weeks passed before I went up again to visit “Susi,” as they called my playmate.
Early one spring morning her brothers and sisters called me again. Susanna was sitting upright in bed, her cheeks a ruddy brown, fiddling with colorful swatches of fabric and singing. We were all so happy. The sun was not yet burning, but it shone into our souls.
Then a girl from the neighborhood entered the room. She brought a doll with delicate limbs and a little knit jacket and hat and other nicely sewn doll clothes, as if it were a gift. But it wasn’t. She pushed me away from the bed and played with the doll for Susanna to see. She made me angry with her skill and her eagerness. I always had to think about her red hair.
She turned toward the early morning sun and said: “Susanna, tomorrow’s your birthday! Aren’t you going to celebrate?”
Susanna was silent. But her mother smiled in from the living room, and from that we could tell that there was a pleasant surprise in store for us.
The neighbor girl, satisfied, gathered up her doll things in her arm and left.
After that, the mother sat down next to Susi on her bed and talked to her about the coming day.
“Of course we’ll leave the doors open for you.”
The day passed, and the morning came, as beautiful as the one before.
There were buttercups and forget-me-nots on the bureau, and all sorts of gifts. Susanna’s brothers had gathered the flowers for the bouquet very early, far from the city, and the table of gifts had been prepared with secret excitement before Susanna opened her eyes. They made her bed in festive white, and braided red ribbons into her hair.
In her hands she held a book of fairy tales that she always loved to read. Everyone was quiet. They all had jobs to do.
And so the afternoon arrived, and her thirteen guests sat around her in their festive dresses and white skirts, chatting. They told stories from school, and played forfeits, and then feasted in their cloudless gaiety.
We didn’t even think about the fact that Susanna was sick. The children brought in chairs and played a wild circle game to the sound of a march.
As they were gently being herded from the room, the big old father came home with a sizable package under his arm. “Susi, guess what’s in here,” he said to her. “It’s not for me, is it?” Susanna asked uncertainly, before she could think of anything. He pulled out a big doll with blonde hair and a blue necklace and a richly decorated little shirt.
Then he went back into his study. Just after that, the children all bid her farewell, and everyone wished her good health once again.
Susanna held the doll weakly in her hands. She reluctantly wrapped it up again and laid it at the end of her bed.
Then she held out her hand to me — to tell me that I should go, or should be quiet, or that I shouldn’t think about it. But the doll was looking at me coldly through the wooden wall of its box, and I didn’t move from my spot while Susanna fell asleep, sweating and moaning.
“Susanna has to die.” We knew that, she and I, because of the doll.
Someone quickly turned down the bedspread, changed the sheets, and helped Susi return to her peaceful sleep. But the doll fell and shattered.
My mother called me to dinner. As I unexpectedly opened my eyes in the dark of night, it seemed to me that someone was crying above me, in my Susi’s room.
The next morning, very early, I was with her again. With a mute sound she gestured to an oil lamp; she wanted it moved away from her. That was easy to understand. But she had no language anymore. It was even more silent up there now than it had been before, so that Susanna wouldn’t have to think about the fact that she was mute.
She lost her hearing. She lost control of her limbs. And her eyes dimmed.
Her father walked through the room, hunched to death.
I wanted to forget everything, and I sat with my toys as I had before, by the wall of the house that faced the garden.
Then our maid came to me with tears in her eyes and said: “Susi is dead.” Now I knew, and I went out to the street to wait for my mother.
She was in the middle of a cheerful conversation with a lady, but I interrupted her and said: “Mother, Susi is dead.”
Her shock was enough for me. She rushed home, and the lady thoughtfully turned away. She looked up to the closed shutters.
But my pain was not yet allayed.
The brothers and sisters were standing at the other gate. I told them, too. They threw their school books on the ground and rushed into the house. And my sister Helene came. “Hey, I’ve told all the children. Susi is dead.” She turned pale, and then said in a comforting tone, “We don’t say dead, we say she passed away.”
Then she walked through the streets with me, talking about other things. She was like me, her soul in disarray.
They were all strangers to me now, the people in the house. I stood at the window in the stairwell, watching the mourners come and go, and the wreaths. And the sympathy cards that fell into the box; all these things that felt so far from my heart.
Her mother came out, large and dressed in black, and asked me in tears: “Do you want to see Susi again?”
She was lying in the coffin. I knew that. I trembled and ran down to the garden.
My doll was lying by the wall of the house. Susi had always been so cheerful. I thought of her.
Then a line of schoolgirls, dressed in black, came around the corner. Following a wagon.
“Susanna is in heaven now.
“But Helene will be gone until evening, too, the cemetery is so far. The bells are ringing.”
The Girl
A stroll through unknown territories, past small, unfamiliar properties, is not just a matter of walking, observing, and moving on. Somewhere those small, polished windowpanes, which always have the same lovely, well-tended fuchsias behind them, or the entrance hall of a house with its fresh-cleaned fragrance, or perhaps a white bench in front of the house, will imprint itself on our lives like a fine, archaic script.
Of course not all of them are like that. Some are in a state of slow decay. But for each person who seems to have fallen asleep on his estate, another is waiting to renovate it and bring it back into shape. As his own property, mind you, but what does that mean, except for that age-old and ever-present truth: that nature has made a pact with the mighty of this earth. These are all binding bills of sale: nature gives its grain, its trees, its furs, in short, it gives everything, everything it has. But man, for his part, cannot simply hold out his hands for a while. He must give his flesh and blood for ownership, indeed, he must give something which, at times, he takes nature herself to be lacking; he must give his own soul.
Yet sometimes nature, too, can be content with a lease. But all too often the tenants are poor, downtrodden people. They work up to deadlines, and appear and disappear again like shadows.
And in the country everyone can tell, even at three paces, if someone is an owner or a tenant. They can tell at least that much, if not much more. But this only makes a poor man doubly poor. For he is poor not only to himself, but to others as well.
All the more so if he is not just poor. If he has fully gone to seed. If he can no longer even offer to perform useful work for others. If poverty has shown itself in him, has made him a beggar to it, so that just as another man puts all his work into assembling a witty carnival costume, this man becomes an ever more consummate image of poverty. And in the end he is a consummate beggar, but the stages that he passes through on the way are very gradual, and barely visible to an observer. But sometimes (for it often happens in the end that hares, half-starved and fleeing for their lives, are pecked to death by birds, and so life reaches a great and seemingly unjust conclusion), sometimes everything takes a different turn, as if the story to be told were nothing but a peaceful idyll, an idyll of poor people, almost like those icons of saints in which the very slightest thing can touch our hearts, can touch our hearts more, in fact, than the most precious gifts of the three kings. But these poor people can hardly make it anymore, at least not on their own. They must be guided back into their own lives, so to speak. They have become too accustomed to sitting before the door of their own heart. And so it is nature’s duty to find someone who will show them to their own beds, who will give them their own bread to eat again, will give them a simple sip of water to show that they can recover their strength. But of course this providence does not amount to mercy as we understand it; since it is all-knowing, and because it follows the paths that are there to be taken, this providence often begins by putting those poor people up for sale, the very people it intends to help, putting them in a position that is simply laughable. For it really is a funny thing when such a good-for-nothing ends up at one of the many out-of-the-way auctions of this world.