Gurkenberg and Black Horn, Keperling, Hoffte, Nackliger and Bulzenberg. And Mindach’s Hill. When her uncle lifted her up that day to the hump of the pine tree, it seemed to her as if from high up like that she really could recognize all the under-sea mountains in the water whose names the gardener had told her and which she still remembered today. Atop the highest elevation stood the church tower of a sunken city, its tip reached so high that the weathervane on top nearly surfaced amid the waves. Down on the bottom where the water was quite calm, on the streets and squares of this city, she could even make out people if she squinted, they were walking about, sitting or standing, leaning up against something or other — through the glittering surface of the lake she saw the silent throng of all those inhabitants of the city who had sunk beneath the waves along with it, who moved about quite naturally in the water without needing to breathe, walking, sitting or standing in this eternal life no differently than they had done before on Earth. She had squatted up there in the pine tree, holding on to its scaly trunk, and from there she saw the fish swimming about in the submerged sky above the city. After her uncle had lifted her down again, her hands were all sticky from the pine resin, and her father had taken sand and used it to rub the resin off.
As the girl sits there in her dark chamber and from time to time tries to straighten up but keeps knocking her head against the ceiling of her hiding place, as she opens her eyes wide but nevertheless cannot even see the walls of her chamber, as the darkness is so great that the girl can’t even recognize where her body stops, her head is visited by memories of days on which her entire field of vision was overflowing with colors. Clouds, sky and leaves, the leaves of oak trees, leaves of the willow hanging down like hair, black dirt between her toes, dry pine needles and grass, pine cones, scaly bark, clouds, sky and leaves, sand, dirt, water and the boards of the dock, clouds, sky and gleaming water in which the sun is reflected, shady water beneath the dock, she can see it through the cracks when she lies on her belly on the warm boards to dry off after a swim. After the departure of her uncle, her grandfather continued to take her sailing for another two summers. Surely her grandfather’s boat is still in the village shipyard. Four years in winter quarters. Now, without knowing whether it is day or night outside, the girl reaches out to grasp the hand her grandfather is holding out to her, she climbs from the dock onto the edge of the boat and watches her grandfather untie the knot that is holding the boat fast to the dock and toss the rope into the boat.
All the windows of the building on the street called Nowolipie where the girl is hiding are still wide open, until just a few days ago all the rooms were filled with human beings who wanted to breathe, but now everything is completely still. The people from the rooms are gone, and even down below on the street there is no longer anyone walking, no one is pulling a cart, no one is talking, shouting or crying, not even the wind can be heard any longer, no window slams, no door. While the girl sits in her dark chamber and turns her knees now to the right, now to the left, while beyond the chamber everything in the apartment is still, and beyond the apartment everything down in the street is still, and even beyond this street in all the other streets of the district everything is completely still, the girl hears everything that ever was: The rustling of leaves, the splashing of waves, the horn of the steamboat, the dipping of oars into water, the workers next door making a racket, a flapping sail. From C major you retreat by way of G major, D major, A major, E major and B major, going all the way to F-sharp major, further and further one sharp at a time. But from F-sharp back to C is only a tiny step. From playing all the black keys to playing all the white keys is the briefest of journeys, just before you return to the easy-as-pie key of C major everything’s swarming with sharps. That’s how he explained it to her before he left for South Africa, Uncle Ludwig, and in just this way Doris now, in this complete stillness and emptiness, sets her memory bumping up against the time when everything was still there.
Now only a brief transition still lies before her. Either she will starve to death here in her hiding place, or she will be found and carted off. None of the people who once knew who she was knows any longer that she is here. This is what makes the transition so insignificant. Step by step she has made her way to this place, almost to the end, in other words, her path must have had a beginning, and at the point of this beginning she must have been separated from life by as insignificant a distance as now separates her from death. The beginning must have looked almost exactly like life, it must have been right in the middle somewhere and not yet recognizable as the first part of this path that is leading her somewhere she only now recognizes. When the willow tree has grown up tall and can tickle the fish with its hair, you’ll still be coming here to visit your cousins, and you’ll remember the day you helped plant it. Was life still intact back then? When she thinks of Uncle Ludwig, she always sees him with the spade in his hand on the shore of the lake. When she thinks of his fiancée Anna, it occurs to her how Anna always told her to make herself light before she picked her up. As if the girl could reduce her weight just by thinking it. When her grandfather gave the towels of his own manufacture a glance before locking up the bathing house but then left the key in the lock for his successor, she had thought of his boat which this summer would remain on dry land for the first time. In the fall her parents sent her to Berlin to stay with an aunt so that she would no longer be subjected to teasing at school because of her Jewish blood. For two years, Sunday after Sunday, always after services at the church at Hohenzollern-platz, she had sat down at the window in her aunt’s kitchen and written a letter to her parents, but from Monday to Saturday she didn’t write, so as to save envelopes and postage. For the last meal she shared with her grandparents, who were rounded up in Levetzowstrasse in Berlin-Moabit and taken away, her aunt had made stuff ed peppers. On New Year’s Eve a friend gave her a little bowl filled with cotton and lentils. If you kept the cotton moist, a little forest would sprout from the lentils. During the big wool collection in January she hesitated to hand over not just her caps and the big scarf but also the little scarf because she could tie it up like a turban and then at least her ears would stay warm, but what if someone saw? When their visa for Brazil continued to be delayed, she started going to school wearing thin leather shoes instead of boots in -12 °Celsius weather as a precaution, to harden herself for Poland, for in Poland it would surely be even colder than in Berlin. She was to burn her father’s last letter, the girl’s mother wrote, because of the danger of contagion. The law that would have allowed the girl to travel home by train for her father’s funeral did not take effect in time. The lake on which the property lay that had once belonged to her uncle and where she had spent another two summers with her grandparents after her uncle’s departure was located exactly in the middle between Berlin and Guben. Was she, Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben, halfway distant from her life at that point, or more, or less?