The architect’s wife who, now that she’s gotten married, understands that adventure is really always just subjecting yourself to something unfamiliar, throws herself into this sedentary life with all her inborn love of movement, and the property, not least on account of its waterfront location, proves an appropriate refuge. Her sisters, both of whom have meanwhile become mothers, watch from the dock as she swims the crawl, crossing the steamer’s route and then going much farther out until her swim cap is visible only as a pin-sized dot, while they themselves stay close to shore, splashing about in the shallow water with their children; her sisters like to eat crabs, but they screech when their younger sister picks up the flailing creatures by the scruff and throws them into the net with no sign of disgust; when the swing for her nieces and nephews gets tangled in a branch of the big oak tree, she is the one who at once digs fingers and toes into the furrows of the tree’s bark, quickly ascending, then straddles tree limbs to slide forward to where she can release the loop of rope caught in the leaves as if it were nothing. Her older sisters and their children sleep in until the housekeeper summons them to breakfast with the gong, but she goes walking for at least an hour before breakfast, on cool mornings the handle of the big front gate is often still wet with dew when she sets out, she hikes up into the woods and then, with a view of the lake, crosses the fields to return home. Every summer her sisters visit her with their off spring to spend a few weeks on her bit of sod, they swim, eat and swap recipes, they watch their childless sister laugh and let their bodies melt in the shade as they rest after lunch, they are relaxing, people would say, but nonetheless, even though they are refraining from all strenuous activity, these women sometimes do not look at all relaxed, they look more as if they were waiting for something and finding it difficult to wait.
And so the years pass and are like one single year. Whether the cockchafer plague was in ’37 or maybe one year later is something she can no longer say, but she can still remember the sound to this day, the noise it made when she was out for a bicycle ride with her niece, rolling over the beetles that had transformed the sandy road into a dark, teeming surface, she hasn’t forgotten the cracking beneath her tires. All summers like one single summer. Whether it was ’38 or ’39, or perhaps even 1940 when they began to use the dock belonging to the abandoned property next door, and when her husband built the boathouse beside the dock — she’s no longer sure quite when that was. Surely he hadn’t built the boathouse until the next-door property already belonged to them, but when was that? Summer after summer swimming, sunbathing and picking raspberries at the edge of the woods across from the house, autumn after autumn hearing the gardener rake up the leaves in the garden, smelling him burning the musty heap, winter after winter speeding across the frozen lake on an ice yacht and afterward taking in the sail with fingers frozen red and quickly ducking into the house: warming her hands at the stove until they hurt; Easter after Easter hiding hard-cooked eggs among the first flowers for her nephews and nieces. All like a single one. Today can be today, but it might also be yesterday or twenty years ago, and her laughter is the laughter of today, of yesterday, and just as much, the laughter of twenty years ago, time appears to be at her beck and call, like a house in which she can enter now this room, now that. Have you heard this one? While she was spending her whole life laughing, her blond hair imperceptibly turned into white hair. Today or yesterday or twenty years ago she is sitting with friends around a large pot in which crabs are floating, crabs she caught herself, gripping them firmly behind the neck, and later boiled until they turned red. Eating such a crab is not so simple. First you twist the creature’s head off and suck its juices, then you rip off the claws and use a tiny skewer to pull out the meat. The best part of a crab though is the meat from its tail, which is referred to as its heart. Before you can eat it, you remove the crab’s entrails and lay them aside.
Humor is when you laugh all the same, she says on one of those summer evenings during one of the last twenty years while she is sucking the marrow out of one of the claws, one of their friends, a film director, has just told everyone what a hard time the make-up department has been having making Aryan actors look Semitic so they can play that irksome racketeer Ipplmeier and his vassals. But in the rushes, at least, they looked like the real thing, the director says, heaving a sigh, and her husband says: Hope springs eternal, and she says: Humor is when you laugh all the same. Humor is when you laugh all the same, she says on some other summer evening during a different one of the last twenty years, and she cracks the shell of a crab as her husband is telling friends that he must travel to the West and use his own private funds to buy screws for the young republic because it has been expressly demanded of him that he stay within the allotted budget while also completing the building he’s now working on in time for the third anniversary. In the entire Eastern Zone there are no screws to be had, unbelievable, he says, and she says: Humor is when you laugh all the same. On some summer evening during one of the last twenty years her husband tells one of the guests how at the end of the war the Russians had converted the garden to a paddock for their horses, how everything had been trampled, how he had even seen the gardener cry, he says all these things, and his wife says nothing, she is just wiping her hands on a napkin, and their friend, who after all can only judge what has been said to him, now makes his contribution to the subject by repeating in his turn: Humor is when you laugh all the same, and while he is saying this, he fishes another crab out of the pot. If it had not been for that one night, that one night in the walk-in closet that her husband had designed especially for her, she might perhaps still believe that when her husband slid the contract of sale over to her to sign he was buying her a piece of eternity and that this eternity did not have a single hole in it anywhere.
Even today when she hears someone speak of the war she thinks first of the war that her own body began to wage against her just as the first bombs fell on Germany. Despite the shrinking supplies of food, her body had, utterly illogically, grown fat all at once while others who had been fat beforehand, her sisters for example, first grew slender with all the excitement and then the hunger, and then they grew thin and then haggard. The 6th Army capitulated outside of Stalingrad, and already the morning of that day she was overcome by hot flashes, the sweat covered the space between her lips and nose like a moustache of tiny droplets, this sweat was embarrassing, but it would have embarrassed her even more to wipe it away, the Russians were marching toward Poland, and she felt dizzy, often several times a day, so that she had to steady herself by grasping table edges and door handles so as not to fall down, and finally, just as the Allies were landing in Normandy, even weeping returned to her body, taking hold of it and refusing to leave again, like a long-forgotten creditor come to collect on a debt she no longer recalled. She who had always cut such a boyish figure now stood there every morning before the mirror sweating, she steadied herself on the edge of the sink so as not to fall down, she wiped her tears, avoiding the sight of that round, milky face with which she shared no memories; compared to this face the colored glass in the windows to the right and left of the mirror looked so much more familiar — glass that her husband had put there just because she wanted him to.