I could see my birthday magazine was sitting, ostentatiously wrapped, among the cakes and fruit on the table. When it could be avoided no longer, I took it down and unwrapped it. Everyone was watching me expectantly. The cardboard cover was overlaid with chequered fabric and covered with designs of cut-out felt figures.
Someone—probably Sophie, I thought—had spent a lot of time on it. Uta exclaimed loudly and craned her neck the better to see it. I opened it to the first page with a feeling of foreboding. The eyes of the room were on me, watching me for my reaction.
The first few pages were quite harmless, with a sketch by my mother and a spoof newspaper article written by Sophie. There was also a little poem, gaudy and overblown, which I thought must be from Felix. On the following page was a drawing in dark ink, which at first I could not identify. The heavy lines suggested a kind of haystack blown by the wind. I glanced around at the faces of the guests and saw that Oskar was nodding encouragingly as though the drawing were his. When my eyes found the paper again, the lines had resolved into the figure of a hunchback, clutching a swooning damsel in one hand; Quasimodo rescuing Esmeralda. Everyone was looking at me.
I cleared my throat, but could think of nothing to say. ‘Quite a resemblance,’ I managed after a moment. My voice sounded very loud in the room. Everyone’s eyes had been fixed on me, but now they bounced away in shame.
‘Quasimodo,’ Sophie said by way of explanation, ‘is a man of gentle heroism and a pure heart. Like you, Max.’
I found the truth of this comment to be negligible, but poor Sophie’s face radiated such concern that I tried to smile at her.
‘He is quite like you, Max,’ Uta broke in, examining the drawing. ‘Very like.’ There was a silence. ‘That muscular back, those strong hands.’ Her faltering voice crashed around the room and then dropped away, and no one filled the emerging silence.
I turned the page and everyone exclaimed and laughed too loudly over the next piece, a long ballad that recounted my achievements of the year in the style of a heroic saga.
After the ordeal of the magazine was over I wanted nothing more than to retire to my room. My body felt frayed and ragged and at the back of my mind the problem of Anja’s letter called for my attention. I could feel the sharp edges of the paper in my pocket, and it crackled with every movement I made. More cake was passed around and then Oskar came and sat beside me on the sofa. He seemed wholly unaware of having caused any offence with his drawing; on the contrary, he thought it was a great joke, and was, moreover, pleased with himself at having surprised me with his attendance at the party. The long letter I had read that morning had been a carefully designed ruse to make me unsuspecting of his visit.
He asked me familiarly what I was working on, and then without waiting for me to reply told me that he had heard that I was helping Franz write a travelogue and wondered what it was like to work with such a celebrated writer. I was too tired to do anything but nod. I was lucky, he said, to have the support of such a well-known literary figure. I just nodded. Yes. Very lucky.
There was no escape. From the corner of my eye I could see Uta hovering a short distance away, waiting for the moment she could break into the conversation. I looked at her and felt a great weariness. Her face was fat and shiny and framed by her frilly pink collar and yellow hair. She was my fate; perhaps there was no reason to continue to struggle. I thought of Oskar’s drawing and I imagined the life of Quasimodo in that church, ringing the bells and, dog-like, feeling only devotion. I had never read the novel, afraid that I would recognise in it a too-accurate portrait of myself, but somehow, despite this, the story had still filtered through to my awareness. That afternoon, in the overheated room filled with the cloying smell of oily pastries and close bodies, loud laughs and voices echoing from the walls, a solitary life in a damp church or upon some mountaintop seemed an idyll beyond imagining.
Oskar was still speaking to me, but I had stopped listening to him long ago. Now I turned and smiled at Uta and she joined us on the sofa. Uta and Oskar’s voices issued from their mouths and rose up into the air, like sticky condensation that adhered to the surfaces of the room and the skin on my face. I was much too tired to think now of anything except lying down, and fortunately my illness was a ready excuse for me to soon retire to my room.
24.
THAT NIGHT, DESPITE MY FATIGUE, I COULD NOT SLEEP. I LAY ON my bed and looked at the patterns that the light from the streetlamp made on the ceiling and the walls of the room. I had put the letter on my night table, where it glowed like a little moon. As I lay there, my head full of night-time terrors, the awful thought came to me that Franz might be in Berlin with Anja. Perhaps it had been he, gloating, who had asked her to send me the stories. I thought of the house in Berlin, its thick walls enclosing the bodies of Franz and Anja. I found that at first I could consider this horror with a degree of equanimity, but the more I pictured it, the more uncomfortable I became. The thought that they could be, at that very moment, in the unknown house, living, breathing, perhaps sleeping, perhaps reading, was as strange and awful as considering the unknowable details of one’s own death.
I had put my watch on the night table and took it up from time to time to squint at its face, but it had become an indecipherable object, its hands indicating an illogical sequence of hours. The ticking of the watch became louder and louder and, it seemed to me, slower as the hours passed. The interval between each tick became longer and within this suspended space a host of other mechanical noises made by the watch gradually came to my attention: clicks and whirrings and the musical notes of tiny springs, like the calls of metallic birds.
In the dark, the dimensions of the room altered themselves and became strange to me. In the short time between closing and opening my eyes the distance between the pieces of furniture became unfamiliar, as though I were seeing the room for the first time. The wardrobe was like a dark elongated box rearing precariously over me, and the legs of the dressing table had grown long and spindly.
I thought of Franz and Anja moving through the house in Nostitzstrasse, going from room to room. The house became like a dolls’ house, with one wall that swung open so I could easily observe the pair and manipulate them like miniature dolls. I pictured the Franz doll and the Anja doll arranged in different tableaux, in all kinds of vulgar embraces and poses, while their faces smiled silently at me and the ticking of my watch reverberated around the room.[20]
I threw off the bedclothes and looked down along my body spread on the white sheet. It looked just like a normal, straight BODY. I shifted my feet back and forth and they obeyed me. I had made up my mind. Without turning on the lamp, I gathered my clothing from where I had discarded it around the room and dressed. I put the letter and the now-booming watch in my pocket and left the house.
Then I was at the train station and the little lighted cabins of my train pulled up and I got on and there was no one in my compartment but me. My watch was making a slow thud from my pocket and my whole BODY vibrated with each shift of the little golden hand. I placed my hand over my pocket to dull the sound. I sat next to the window but could see nothing of the dark landscape that passed, and even if I pressed my face up against the glass all that was visible to me was a series of rushing shapes, like night ghosts, that formed a shifting background to the image[21] of my own white face looking back at me.
20
The following pages were written on blank writing paper torn from a different notebook and clipped to the pages of the exercise book. The writing is written in a small hand, and is in several places barely legible. The following section contains a number of unclear words, which have been approximated and are indicated in SMALL CAPS.