20
From the darkness a small hand reaches out to her, something yellow in its palm. Ah, finally Sasha is handing her the lemon she’s been waiting for all this time.
21
When they reach the grave, the flag bearers dip their two flags while the urn is lowered into the pit. Forward, brothers and sisters, and the Last Judgment let us face. Oops, must have misheard — he knows perfectly well that the trumpets of the working class call the brothers and sisters to the last fight, not the Last Judgment. But isn’t the last fight death? The Internationa-a-le. Unites. The hu. Man race.
The son now takes up position, as arranged, to the left of the grave, behind him the table with his mother’s books. On the other side of the grave, the velvet cushion with the medals has been set on a pedestal again, and between the medals and the grave stands a cemetery worker offering the mourners rose petals from five baskets.
Anyone who joins this line must first pass by the cushion with his mother’s medals, then the cemetery worker, then the grave with the little bronze-colored pot at the bottom, finally arriving before him, the only son of the deceased.
The son shakes hands.
He shakes the hand of the President’s daughter and the hand of the President himself, shakes the hand of the artistic director of the Volksbühne Berlin, shakes many hands of famous writers, famous sculptors, and famous composers, he shakes the hand of the woman with rheumatism, the hand of the Deputy Ambassador of the Soviet Union in Berlin, Capital of the GDR, and also the hand of the brigade leader of the Salad Division of the fish-processing plant Sassnitz; he shakes the small hands of pioneers, the young hands of women who perhaps want to be writers themselves some day, and the old hands of comrades who knew his mother from Moscow, Prague, or Ufa.
At the very end of the reception line, he holds out his hand to a man he doesn’t know, and this man looks at him with his own gray-blue eyes, the mouth of the man looks exactly like his own mouth that he sees every morning in the mirror. With exactly the same sort of raspy voice he himself has, the man, after clearing his throat, utters his heartfelt condolences, except that his heartfelt condolences sound different from those of the others — they’re called soboleznovaniya — reminding the son so abruptly of his own Russian childhood, it’s as if his memory were a curtain suddenly ripping in two.
22
Thank you, he says, and the man nods to him, but then others arrive wanting to shake the son’s hand, and by the time the line is finally at an end and the funeral director places his mother’s medals back in their proper boxes, handing them to him, and a soldier of the Guards Regiment places his mother’s books in a bag, carrying them away, and a gravedigger begins to fill up the pit again with pale Brandenburg sand, and one or another of his mother’s friends, their eyes filled with tears, strokes the son’s head one last time as they are leaving, by the time the group of mourners has finally dispersed and departed, the stranger is nowhere to be seen, and he, the sole survivor, the son of the deceased who has not yet even reached the age of maturity, takes streetcar No. 46 back to the house where he has lived until now together with his mother, and where there is now no one awaiting him.
Please take off your shoes in the hall. Walking through his invisible mother, he climbs the stairs, goes into his mother’s dressing room, takes the key from its secret hook, and unlocks the linen cabinet. Inside are duvet covers, pillowcases, towels, and sheets.
At the very bottom, under the sheets, is a sealed letter.
Russian stamps, a Vienna address in his mother’s handwriting, and above it a stamped message adorned with a swastika: Evacuated to the East.
At some point his mother slid this letter under the sheets.
Now he has retrieved it.
He looks at the envelope, turns it over, and on the back is an address in Cyrillic script.
He slides the letter back under the sheets.
But now the hiding place is no longer a hiding place.
Does she really not have a photograph of his father?
On the evening of this day he takes out the atlas from his mother’s bookshelf.
Where is Kharkov anyhow?
23
The next morning is Sunday.
The next morning his mother is still dead.
If only she would stop being dead soon, he thinks.
If only the stairs didn’t exist, his mother would still be alive, he thinks.
If only they hadn’t moved into this house with a staircase.
If only his mother hadn’t liked this house so much.
If only she hadn’t liked this place so much where she would break her neck.
Those stairs are treacherous.
In his mother’s atlas, still lying open on his table from the night before, he flips from the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, featuring the major city Kharkov, back to the page that shows Berlin. Scientific convention has assigned Berlin, this city where his mother was until recently still alive and where she is now dead, the coordinates 52.58373 degrees latitude north and 13.39667 degrees longitude east (coordinates that were assigned to this place before her death and remain assigned to it now). And since, after all, human beings can’t go strolling around on the moon and falling down dead there, it stands to reason that two of the coordinates in his atlas must be the coordinates of the place where he himself will stop living. Where his bones will rot. A place he doesn’t know yet — and by the time he does, it won’t do him any good.
Mama, does that mean that some day my body will be my corpse?
With all its birthmarks and scars, with the skin, hair, and veins I know so well already? Does that mean I’m basically sharing my entire life with my corpse? Is that how it is, Mama? You grow up, you get old, and when the corpse is ready, it’s time to die?
Since his mother is no longer winding the clock on the wall, it’s quieter in the house than ever.
So now in this world that has been surveyed to within an inch of its life, he is alone.
Alone.
Alone with shelves filled with books, cabinets containing drawers filled with files and notes; alone with chairs, beds, tables, sofas, cupboards, coat hooks and lamps; alone with the chandelier, with rugs, a rattan trunk, winter coats, with his mother’s typewriter; alone with bottle openers, aspirin, bed linens, scouring powder, tools, shoes, and pots, with ironing board, laundry rack, tea table, and the wall hanging with the huge yellow sun, with broom and mop, his mother’s combs, brushes, and makeup, with shower gel and skin creams, dishes, knives, and forks, flower vases, paper clips, envelopes, his mother’s diaries and manuscripts, records and a record player, eight bottles of wine, a music box, chains, rings, and brooches, two cans of lentils, a refrigerator containing half a stick of butter, three tubs of yogurt, two slices of cheese; he’s alone with a revolving chair, countless drawings and lithographs in varying formats, several paintings, one of them a portrait of his mother; alone with ten apples, a loaf of bread, with sundry pencils, pens, erasers, and stacks of white paper; alone with twine, coasters, potholders, with coins and bills from many lands, with mirrors, extension cords, and a tabletop fountain that no longer works; alone with two potted rubber trees, several coverlets, woolen blankets, pillows, with empty suitcases, handbags, house slippers, nutcrackers, tablecloths and carbon paper, towels, eyeglasses, sweaters, stockings and blouses, underwear; alone with his mother’s cardigans and scarves; alone with his own first sweater and cap from when he himself was still an infant, and a little cutting board he painted back in kindergarten in Moscow.