Alone.
Will he have to pick up her glasses to remember her eyes, her wallet to remember her fingers, a pair of shoes to see her feet eternally in their shoes, and her woolen blanket to remember until the end of days how her body looked when she was napping after lunch? How many objects and coverings will be needed if she is to retain at least a life of memory inside him? But probably there isn’t anything his mother’s hands, reaching out from the realm of the dead, will be able to grasp so firmly — no object, no piece of furniture, or item of clothing — as she grasps him, the one to whom she first bequeathed her heartbeat, and then, when he was still small, whose diapers she changed and whose nose she wiped, whom she looked at again and again, watching and observing him, and whom later, as he grew, she taught language and read to, whose hand she held to cross larger streets, whose hair she combed, whose sweater she pulled on over his head and whose shoes she tied, whom she looked at again and again, watching and observing him, whom she consoled when he fell down, whose temperature she took and whom she taught to ride a bicycle, to whom she said what she found good and proper and what wrong, what she found tedious, amusing, interesting, whom she looked at again and again, watching and observing him, whom she scolded, shouted at and cursed, and often also praised and kissed. For the first time now, he tries to see himself through his mother’s eyes, from the outside, as it were, but this is difficult. Strange, he thinks, that we use blind spot to designate a place that cannot clearly be seen because it is too close. Still, memory no doubt prefers to be able to exchange the bit of blindness for a living body.
During spring break he’ll start cleaning out the house, and in the summer he’s supposed to move to a Home where he’ll spend the final year before he comes of age, his legal guardian told him.
When the doorbell rings, he knows that on a Sunday it can be neither the mailman nor the housekeeper.
The man looks at him with his own gray-blue eyes, and 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, says good day in Russian.
In the pause that follows, German silence and Russian silence intermingle.
And then the boy’s father grabs him by his shock of hair and pulls him in for a hug.
Like an exhausted boxer, the boy remains briefly in his embrace before pushing away.
From the hall you can see into his mother’s study.
Is that where she wrote? his father asks.
Yes.
Would you make us some tea?
The boy nods.
While the boy puts on the kettle, takes out cups and tea from the cupboard, and finally pours the water, his father leans against the doorpost, watching his son move around busily, picking things up and putting them down.
When the tea is ready, the boy’s father picks up the teapot and leads the way.
Let’s sit in here, his father says, walking into his mother’s study.
This is the first time for as long as the boy can remember that a visitor is taking a seat not in the parlor but at the little tea table in his mother’s study. On the wall is the wall hanging with the huge yellow sun.
Do you really live in Kharkov?
Why Kharkov?
The boy shrugs. He sits bent over in his chair, the cup in his hands.
At first the father hears only a regular dripping sound, then he sees the rings forming in his son’s teacup, a new ring each time a tear falls from the tip of the boy’s nose into the tea.
When I met your mother, she was going through some difficult times.
Everything started when I asked whether her husband had returned home yet and she burst into tears.
I wanted to give her my handkerchief, but there was still a knot in it.
The knot was so tight that I couldn’t get it open right away.
That was how it started.
Maybe you need one yourself?
Yes, please.
The father pulls a pressed handkerchief out of his front pocket and gives it to his son.
What was the knot supposed to remind you of?
That there was an assembly that night.
And then?
I forgot the assembly.
INTERMEZZO
If she’d gone downstairs just five minutes later, she’d have missed the entrance to the underworld, which would have trundled on its way, offering its open hole to someone else instead; or if she’d taken that step with her right foot instead of her left, she wouldn’t have lost her footing; or if she’d been thinking not about this and that but about that and this, she’d have seen the steps instead of not seeing them. Even so, some death or other will eventually be her death. If not sooner, then later. Some entrance will have to be for her. Every last person, every he and every she, has an entrance meant for him, for her. So does this underworld consist only of holes? Is there nothing more to it? A different wind is blowing here. Is there nothing that could prevent a person from — sooner or later, here or there — stumbling right into it, flailing, falling, plummeting, sinking?
In the fall of ’89, the partition between the Eastern and Western parts of Germany collapses: it gets flattened, breached and scorned, and the mob that’s been working itself into a frenzy stampedes out of its own country and flings itself into the arms of its capitalist brothers and sisters — joy, rapture and sweet oblivion — an entire body politic is emptied out, thrown up (why is it throwing when you throw up), surrendering all power, all sovereignty, then collapsing, spent. Now another wind is blowing, something that used to be called a life is now called forty years of waiting that have only now proved worthwhile. What’s a five-year plan? Everything is being called by different names, new “shores” on the horizon. Words, which long ago stopped being as real as a bag of flour or a pair of shoes, have failed, becoming economically unsustainable. Twenty sorts of butter, whereas before there was just one, rents are now being multiplied by ten, different plays are being put on at the theater, the Russians are closing their barracks and selling their forefathers’ fur hats, uniform jackets, and medals from the Great Patriotic War at the Strasse des 17. Juni flea market. On June 17, 1953, workers in East Berlin staged a revolt against the excessive quotas being imposed on them, but they were unsuccessful, while the miner and early activist Adolf Hennecke (pioneer of the quota) was now living in a villa in Pankow. Down with privileges! In 1990, former government ministers, currently unemployed, lean on their garden fences, chatting with retirees out walking their dogs. Whether they will be allowed to hold on to these properties is being looked into. The Easterners head to the West to collect their welcome payments, and return home Westerners. East is no longer anything more than a point on the compass. The publishing house that printed the books of the estimable author goes bankrupt. The readers have other things to do than read these days, first they want a trip to the Canaries. It is not enough to be eighteen years old. The century that used to be so young is now terribly old. His mother, too, is old.
Her son comes to visit her on Sunday at four.
She says she’s realized that she’s been hiding things and she no longer remembers where. She says she’s no longer herself.
The housekeeper brings coffee and cake on a tray, then she goes back out again.