Turning back, then, is an art he has mastered, or else it’s mastered him, Lord only knows. Whether you swim straight ahead or turn back, the swimming is still the same. His friend, with whom he had gotten drunk on that night and then, as if it were just a joke, jumped side by side into the river, did not turn back. Either he hadn’t heard the shouts from behind him as he swam, or he took them for part of the joke, or else — and this too is possible — he simply hadn’t wanted to turn back. The swimming is always the same. His friend had never reached the opposite shore, or this one either. Sailing, he had practiced flipping the boat with his wife. Make the boat capsize, spin it on a longitudinal axis along with its crew and then right it again. Hold tight to the mast to stay on board as the boat surfaces again. Sailing is a beautiful thing. Lord only knows.
Only for the past week has his wife known she has a sister. One week ago the telephone rang. A friend from school whom the woman had neither seen nor spoken to in thirty or forty years. What a surprise, so you’re still, how did you, and who gave you, they’re talking about a reunion, no really, and so-and-so, and that girl who, and what’s the name of the one who prematurely, oh, so he’s already, how terribly sad, and did he, and how many children, work, husband, sailing, weekend property, does she actually have the address, and besides, what ever. Besides, what ever became of your sister. What sister. And is your stepfather still alive. What stepfather. Oh wait, you still don’t know, this friend says now, all of this on the telephone, I mean, your father wasn’t even, what, the woman says, gazing out at the water, as she holds the receiver to her ear, the sailboat is bobbing near the dock between two buoys, oh, I’m so sorry I, the voice of her friend is now saying inside the telephone receiver, but her husband cannot hear this. Her husband hears only how his wife, after pausing to listen to the telephone, just says: What sister, and a few moments later after a brief pause says: What stepfather. And then finally only says or asks: What? He had laid the telephone cable himself, back before the end of the GDR, running it down from the house all the way to the workshop. The father of the mistress of the house had given them permission to have their own extension off the main line. They themselves had been waiting thirteen years to have telephone service installed in their own apartment in the district capital. If there’s a telephone somewhere, it will ring.
My childhood was like something out of a fairytale, his wife had always said to people, smiling. She would then say something about her father, who had showed her how to catch fish, plant asparagus and handle a rake. Her father had always called her his baby girl. When she talked about her childhood, all the people listening to her always looked as if they wished they too had had childhoods like something out of a fairytale. She never spoke of her stepmother. When her father was home, her stepmother had never dared to strike her. She couldn’t remember her biological mother, and her father never talked about her. But now, a lifetime too late, she has learned on the telephone that even her father was not real and that besides her there was yet another little girl in a nearby village, her sister, whom she does not remember. Both of them, she and this other little girl, had been brought here as the small children of war refugees from the Giant Mountains on the border of Bohemia and Silesia and then had been given to different parents in different villages, her friend had said. Everyone in the village knew that. Everyone but her. Oh, I’m so sorry I, the friend says.
Should one, a lifetime too late, try to find one’s own sister, and if one actually succeeds in finding out where she is living, should one then call her, invite her for a visit or visit her oneself? Write her a letter, or else leave everything as it was before, even if from now on everything will be different? Any older woman sailing past her on a boat might be her sister. Or the madwoman who always pushes around an empty shopping cart in the nearby spa town, mumbling curses. A woman sitting in a café with a piece of cake. An energetic sixty-something seeking a non-smoking man in a classified ad, or else some scrawny old biddy in Berlin. Possibly her sister died ages ago and is already under the ground. Is everyone in the world now related to her, or is it the other way around, everyone once close to her now all at once either a stranger or dead? As a child she had always asked her father when she couldn’t make up her mind. Later, too, after her father’s death, she would imagine, whenever she wasn’t sure what to do, what he would have advised her in this or that situation. But if her father wasn’t even her father, who can give her advice? When she’d asked her husband just now whether she should call her sister, he’d just replied: You have to decide that on your own. Now, a lifetime too late, she is on her own. Where should she go if she wants to return to the place where she was actually born? The Giant Mountains?
Only a week before they climbed down into the black river from which he had emerged shortly afterward, dripping and shivering, but from which his friend had not, they had begun to give serious thought to their circumstances. In their course of study, they would soon both be facing exams that neither he nor his friend were going to pass, that much was clear. For various reasons they had used the time they should have spent studying for the exams on other things. His friend had been an organizer for the student carnival, had gone about investigating various locations and written numerous letters until finally the Museum of Natural History had agreed to open up several of its rooms to the party. Dressed as devils and swine, schoolgirls, Romans and mermaids, the students had descended upon the palatial building after closing time and had set up a cold buff et on the glass display cases, then proceeded to dance the night away between dinosaur skeletons and stuff ed gorillas, a few of them had tried to drink the alcohol from the display cases diluted with water, others had climbed into the larger dioramas, presenting tableaux vivants of love and slumber among the foxes and elks. The organization of this epic party, at which proposals of marriage were made and accepted, and children conceived, had driven every last thought of statistics and structural physics from his friend’s head. He himself, on the other hand, while out on one of his forays through the ruins of Berlin, had stumbled upon a catacomb dating from the previous century in whose vaults corpses from the Biedermeier period had been perfectly preserved along with their clothes and headwear. In their coffins they had outlasted the war and all those other, fresher deaths, and although they were shriveled up, they remained clearly recognizable down to their toenails and top hats. He had asked his now wife, who at the time was his fiancée, whether she wouldn’t like to keep one of these corpses in her hallway as a sort of valet stand. But his fiancée had thought the entire story was invented and the valet suggestion a joke, and a bad one at that, and therefore she hadn’t even laughed. He had then spent many hours down in this crypt sketching the corpses, without of course giving the least thought to the principles of physics that made it possible for a ruin, for example, to remain standing.