He’d read once that embryos in the womb go through all the stages of evolution, that they begin as fish and amphibians, and later get fur, then for a while have the spinal columns of pigs and only afterward are born as human beings. Perhaps, he thinks, a second primeval era begins after birth, this time the speeded-up history of mankind but now going under the name of childhood, as if the time of the hunter-gatherers had to be shared by everyone once more, as the basis from which the various sorts of adults could develop. After all, fish and amphibians gave rise, in the course of evolution, to a large variety of creatures, some had developed into land animals which in the end became monkeys and cats, and others chose to spend their lives in the water and later became dolphins or whales. If this is how things were, then he had made her acquaintance in the Stone Age and shared his life with her until approximately the late Middle Ages, and after all this was a period lasting two and a half million years.
Perhaps — at least this is how it looks to him today — such a primeval era that two people spend together is a more indissoluble bond than a promise would be. The eyes with which he and she saw something that day in the woodshed that it would have been better for them not to see, are still right there in their heads after all, even though these heads are meanwhile, seen in purely spatial terms, far removed from one another. The seeing from that day still persists. In the woodshed, he and she had made themselves a hiding place up on top of all the wood, in the one meter of space remaining between the stacked logs and the roof of the shed. They had used logs to divide the space up there into rooms, lined the rooms with leftover bits of carpet, here and there nailed scraps of cloth to the wood, and hung up a flashlight to provide illumination — and so, crawling around, they had a whole apartment to keep house in. From his ladder, he can see the roof of the woodshed, which meanwhile is entirely covered with the leaves and dry branches that have fallen. My cousin, Nicole, is here for a visit, she always wants to go swimming naked, and she even lets me kiss her when she’s naked. René, the nephew of the director of the State Combine for Automobile Tires, was a bit older than they were, the child of vacationers, and whenever he was there, he would always come looking for them in the shed and crawl up to sit with his head ducked down in their hiding place, full of suggestions of things they should try. My cousin, Nicole, is here for a visit, she always wants to go swimming naked, and she even lets me kiss her when she’s naked, she’s only twelve like you, but I’m sure she’d sleep with me too. Every electrical outlet has three cables, a blue one, a red one and a yellow one. The blue and red ones are necessary for the electricity to flow, and the yellow one, even though it’s never connected anywhere, is there too, and it’s called the ground. My cousin, Nicole, she always wants to go swimming naked, and she even lets me kiss her when she’s naked, she’s only twelve like you, but I’m sure she’d sleep with me too. If you hide behind the wood, you can watch, do you want to?
By this time they’d long since learned what it looks like when blood flows out of a cut, they had even sliced open their own arms with a pocket knife so they would be blood brothers, and they also knew what it looks like when a person shits and the sausage first starts coming very slowly out of the hole and then quickly pops out and falls, under the willow tree beside the water first he, then she had squatted down so that the other could watch. And since seeing had always only been seeing, neither touching nor smelling nor tasting nor even hearing — for hearing, your hand would still vibrate when you held it to the cloth cover of the radio’s loudspeaker — since seeing itself could never be filled with even the tiniest bit of reality, the storerooms behind their eyes had, at the time, seemed infinitely large to both of them, and that was no doubt why both she and he immediately responded to their neighbor’s suggestion by saying yes.
Of course they could have given a nudge to the pile of logs separating them from the bedroom of their hiding place when René asked his cousin Nicole if she knew how children were made. Even somewhat later, as René was explaining this to his cousin Nicole, who didn’t yet know about it, they might still have burst suddenly out of hiding and declared it all one big joke. But when René, who was already somewhat older, asked Nicole whether she wouldn’t like to try out what he had just been explaining to her and she said no, and then kept saying no again and again while he held her down and used his body to press her legs apart, and both of them were still naked from swimming, and when Nicole, who was only twelve and weaker than René, who was already going to be starting an apprenticeship after this summer, started crying, and he held her mouth shut and then began to jerk back and forth on top of her, he and she were still watching through the tiny slit that allowed them enough space between the logs to see everything that was happening. First it had been too soon to burst out of hiding, and then it was too late, and the dividing line between too early and too late was so sharp that it couldn’t even have been called a no man’s land. Behind the wooden wall where René had walled in the two seers, it was dark and cramped, and if they had so much as shifted position, everything would have collapsed.
They saw. They saw so long and so much that all the storerooms behind their eyes were filled with what it would have been better not to have seen. He has no memory of how he and his friend later crawled out of their hiding place, how they climbed down the variously tall piles of wood and escaped to freedom. If you had to go by what a person remembers, he would consider it possible that they never did get back outside again but were still squatting to this day beneath the roof of the shed, which meanwhile is entirely covered with the leaves and dry branches that have fallen. That one can be more thoroughly tied to a place through shared cupidity and shame than by shared happiness is something he wishes he’d never had to learn.
There was only one thing that he couldn’t understand at the time: that his friend only ever spent her vacations in the place where he lived. He lives there still, even though his hands are starting to turn into the hands of an old man. Only after his coming-of-age ceremony when he visited her in Berlin, on that one special weekend not long after his Jugendweihe, the one single time when the direction was reversed, when he was the one making the journey and she the one who lived there, had he understood, but by then it was too late. You sunshine of my heart, one of her schoolmates had written to her, always the same form of address: You sunshine of my heart, and then all sorts of other things on little scraps of paper that she kept in her pencil case. She laughed at him when he found the notes by accident one day and asked who else besides him was allowed to call her the sunshine of his heart. That was just someone kidding around, she said, just a joke, but when he didn’t let up and wasn’t prepared to start laughing, she became annoyed and for the first time ever she said aloud something that apparently had already been self-evident to her even then but to him was not at all self-evident, even now: that when she was in Berlin, which was where she lived, she could do whatever she liked.
From that point on it was never again possible for him — neither during her next vacation stay nor any of those that followed — to wait for her beside the long table while she sat eating breakfast with her family, suddenly he saw himself as a servant standing there, like someone serving himself up on a platter from head to foot with parsley in his mouth and a baked apple stuff ed between his toes. Would you care to eat me, madam? From then on the amphibian he had been up till then had chosen a life on land, and the amphibian that she was chose a life in the water, or the other way around, in any case the result of her late-Medieval evolution was that at some point or other, without her ever having to explain anything more to him, she showed up at his door with a male friend, a friend she wanted to introduce to him, her childhood friend, as she now described him. He, her childhood friend, had stood there in the doorway of his house with a plug made of a torn-off bit of tissue sticking out of his nose, because just before she had knocked on the door he had suddenly gotten a nosebleed and had doctored himself provisionally in this way. The knock she had used on his door was still the same secret knock they had used as children. He had opened the door and seen his friend standing there with her companion. Good day, would you like to come in. The friend from Berlin had looked at the bloody snippet of paper sticking out of the nose of his girlfriend’s childhood friend. I don’t want to disturb you. Later she didn’t knock on his door so often when she walked by his house in the company of one or the other boyfriend she’d brought out to the country with her, but when she saw his legs sticking out from under a car in the workshop he had set up next to his house, she would always shout out a greeting to him. When eventually she had married one of these boyfriends, it gradually, over the years, became self-evident that he would help her husband drag the rowboat out of the water in winter and turn it upside-down, hang the paddleboat on the rear wall of the woodshed, and in springtime help the subtenants put up the dock, and occasionally, when she and her husband had no time to come out to the country, he would even clip the hedge, rake the leaves and take care of all the other tasks for which the gardener was now much too old. The hourly wage they paid him was far higher than what was customary in the region.