She was feeling so poorly during this period that she’d had to ask one of her nieces to come stay with her to help out around the house while her husband was closing down his office in Berlin, packing up the construction plans and organizing a fireproof hiding place for his documents. How good it was that the telephone sat so close beside her bed in its niche, for now she generally kept to her bed even during the day. As she held the receiver to her ear, listening to her husband tell her who had been buried in the rubble, which building had collapsed and how crowded it was down in the cellar, she gazed at the colorful feathers of the little bird that sat forged to her balcony railing, and behind the bird the leafless branches of the trees, and through the branches of the trees the Märkisches Meer glittering. Only after the battle at Seelower Höhen had she sent her niece to stay with relatives in the West to shield her from an encounter with the Slavic hordes, while she herself took refuge behind the double door of the walk-in closet with the last of the provisions and a bit of water. And then the Russian came.
She doesn’t want to think that word, that word he called her, that unthinkable word with which he drilled a hole in her eternity for all eternity. Her body, already infertile by then, had drawn him to her — this man who knew the word that robbed her of all strength — had drawn him violently to her and for the length of time a birth might take had smothered the laughter that had stood in her body’s way all this time, and during this night in the hidden closet that her husband had built specially for her, because back when she was still a circus princess she had wanted him to, she had finally joined forces with the enemy. Only after the capital had fallen was her husband able to return to her, and what he found was a trampled garden and a gardener weeping at the devastation. His wife shared with him the half loaf of bread the Russian had left for her.
Have you heard this one? A musician is on tour. His very pregnant wife is supposed to let him know when their child is finally born. Their code word is to be: cantaloupe. So the musician is sitting on stage playing. And now one evening a colleague whispers to him from the wings: cantaloupe, cantaloupe, cantaloupe — two with stems, the other, nope! There are things you can’t help laughing at every time. This joke is always a success, everyone always laughs, the architect always laughs, and his wife laughs too, even though she’s the one who told the joke, and their guests also laugh. Musician on tour, cantaloupe, nope. Around fifteen years ago, the actor Liedtke, who was married to an operetta diva and lived at the end of the sandy road, had done her one better and, using his hands to suggest ample breasts, had quoted from The Merry Widow: On account of my melons — um, millions! Musician on tour, cantaloupe, nope; it even worked during the war when the coffee and tea importer from next door told them that the butcher’s daughter had just given birth to twins even though her husband hadn’t been on furlough from the Eastern front in over a year. Musician on tour, cantaloupe, nope, the architect’s wife says today to the director of the State Combine for Automobile Tires, a friend of her husband’s, once the laughter has died down: You know, I found it utterly outrageous for Hitler to demand that we women bear children for the state — we aren’t machines. And her husband says: In her own way, my wife was practically in the Resistance. The director of the State Combine for Automobile Tires laughs, and the architect laughs, and his wife laughs as well.
All the while, for nearly six years now, time has been draining away through that hole the Russian drilled in her eternity near the end of the war. Only because times are hard has something like a historical moment of inertia set in, only because times are so hard that time has trouble even just running away — it’s having to take its time — does the architect’s wife still sit there on her terrace six years after the war, sit there with a pot filled with crabs boiled till they are red, serving up her guaranteed punch lines to her friends, laughing herself harder than anyone, and gazing out over the lake that has meanwhile become state property. Time is draining away as the architect’s wife, on her husband’s arm, accompanies her guests down to the gate and waves after them in the dark, draining away as the couple goes back inside again, as they stack up the plates covered in crab shells and carry them into the kitchen, as she says to him that she’s tired already, and he says he wants to smoke one last cigarette outside, as she walks up the stairs, undresses in her room, puts on the silk robe and goes into the bathroom, the colored glass panes in the windows to the right and left of the mirror are even blacker than other glass at nighttime, draining away as the woman sits down on the edge of her bed to rub her legs with camphor oil and her chest with peppermint salve, draining away as she calls out “good night” through the half-open balcony door to her husband, who is smoking one last cigarette down on the terrace, draining away and away as she hangs the cream-colored silk robe back on its hook in the shallow part of the walk-in closet, away and away as she lies down and falls asleep. Away. Soon she will be living in a one-bedroom apartment in West Berlin, and later in a retirement home near Bahnhof Zoo. From her escape to the West until the end of her life, she will always keep everything one might urgently need in an emergency on hand in her purse, things such as paper clips, rubber bands, stamps, scraps of paper to write on and pencils. And in her testament she will leave the property beside the lake and the house that unto all eternity will smell of camphor and peppermint — that house that in purely legalistic terms still belongs to her even though it is located in a country she may no longer set foot in without risking arrest — to her nieces and the wives of her nephews. But not to any man.
THE GARDENER
IN THE SPRING, using a plan sketched out by the householder, an apiary for twelve colonies is set up facing south on the newly acquired land right next to the fruit trees, both to increase the yield of the trees and to provide honey as an additional benefit. Next to the room with the beekeeping equipment is a room for extracting the honey, and since the gardener, who has an excellent grasp of apiculture, will henceforth be spending all his time not devoted to the upkeep of the garden tending the bees, he soon installs a makeshift bed in the extractor room and finally, with the householder’s permission, moves in altogether.
The Polish forced laborers in the village say that the potato beetles, which have long since crossed the Oder, are now making their way through Poland. In summer the gardener waters the flowerbed twice a day along with the cypress tree on the side of the house facing the sandy road, and he also waters the roses on the terrace facing the lake, as well as the forsythia bushes, the lilac and the rhododendrons along the edge of the big meadow: once early in the morning, and once at dusk. He begins to make a habit of smoking cigars so the smoke will keep the bees away when he sits on the threshold of the apiary to rest. In fall he rakes up the leaves beneath the big oak tree and burns them, he saws the dry branches from the pine trees, saws them up, splits the pieces and stacks the logs in the woodshed.
THE GIRL
NOW NO ONE KNOWS she is here any longer. All around her everything is black, and the core of this black chamber is she herself. The circumstance that there isn’t even a narrow crack to let the light in is intended to save her life, but it also means there is no longer anything differentiating her from the darkness. She would like to have some sort of proof that she is here, but there is no proof. She Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben. To whom do these words now belong in such darkness? While she sits on the little crate, and her knees bump against the opposite wall, and she moves her legs now to the right, now to the left so they don’t fall asleep, time is passing. Probably time is passing. Time that is probably taking her further and further from the girl she perhaps once was: Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben. No one is there any longer who might be able to tell her whether these words have been abandoned and have only accidentally found their way into this chamber, this head, or whether they truly belong to her. Time has wedged itself between her and her parents, between her and all other people, time has dragged her off and locked her away in this dark chamber. The only thing here that has color is what she remembers in the midst of all this darkness surrounding her, whose core she is, she harbors colorful memories in her light-forsaken head, memories belonging to someone she once was. Probably was. Who was she? Whose head was her head? To whom did her memories now belong? Did black time keep going on and on, even when a person was no longer doing anything but just sitting there, did time keep going on, dragging even a child who has turned to stone away with it?