And now she wants to go into the house one more time. With the key still hanging on her keychain, the key with which all the doors in the house and also the woodshed can be opened and closed, this worn-out patent key, Zeiss Ikon brand, which she should have turned in officially two days ago now, with this key she wants to unlock, one last time, the door whose lock always sticks after the first half-turn of the key. The door’s glass panes make a faint clinking sound, brittle splinters of red and black paint fall to the ground from the iron tendrils protecting the glass. First she lifts the door a little the way she always does so that the key will continue to turn, then opens the door wide until it hits the wall of the house, pushes the stone in front of it that is still sitting there ready for use, and goes inside.
The painted door to the broom closet has been removed from its hinges, so the first thing she sees when she walks into the house is not, as before, the Garden of Eden in twelve square chapters but rather an old broom, a hand brush, a shovel and a few rags. The door to the living room is off its hinges as well, and so she doesn’t have to press down the brass handle to go in, and no metallic sigh is heard when she enters the room. Nine years before, everything made of wood on or adjacent to the two walls affected by dry rot had to be taken down or torn out, and so the long bench seat from along the wall is missing. Workers carried the matching table and the two doors out to the bathing house. The bathing house was too small for the table, so they set it on end, which is how it is still standing today, she glimpsed it through the crack in the shutters as she came in. The key to the bathing house is still hanging in its usual spot on the key board beside the key to the workshop, and the workshop key still has the golden spoon lure dangling from it as usual, and the key board is hanging, as usual, around the corner next to the heating stove, except that now the stove is gone, and the wall it stood against is rotting. The dry rot spread all the way upstairs while she was abroad for work, and her father spent an entire autumn, winter and spring negotiating with the gentleman whom he had offered the right to speculate on the house, which still officially belonged to them, in exchange for carrying out the urgently needed repairs. They weren’t allowed to sell it as long as the official decision regarding the restitution claim was still pending, but after all the East German bank accounts were cut in half, they no longer possessed the means to keep up the house themselves. Present exigency: The property that is the object of the proceedings. Pending determination of ownership. Registration number 654.
Her father had never much cared for nature, even in earlier years he’d only ever pronounced the word “nature” with a certain contempt, and he always said he hated mowing the lawn, was bored by flowers, and found swimming utterly uninteresting, only on rare occasions would he dive among the reeds to hunt pike with his harpoon. And so it hadn’t surprised her when, after the death of her father’s mother, he immediately added her as co-owner to the title of the house — deletions are marked by placing vertical lines above the first and beneath the last line to be deleted and connecting the two lines on the diagonal from upper left to lower right. It hadn’t even surprised her that he didn’t make even a single trip out to the property after the heirs to the wife of the architect, all of them living in the West, had filed to have the ownership of the land restored to them, nor did it surprise her that he didn’t participate in clearing out the house after he had finally reached an agreement with the speculator. Her childhood friend, who helped her clear it out, had been the one to notice the dry rot. One single time during all the many years when the house then stood empty, while she and her father were waiting for the official ruling, he said something to her that she had never before heard from him, namely that every time he found himself having to look at a landscape like this somewhere, a landscape full of hills and lakes, he felt much the same way he felt whenever he heard someone speaking Russian, the language of the country in which he was born. What exactly he meant by this was never explained. She knew only that by the time he got out of the children’s home his parents had sent him to because they believed in collective education, he was old enough to mow the lawn. Nature.
The drainage pipe is choked with roots. Six trees have to have their branches removed. The legal right of use has shared the fate of the contract of sale for the property: Neither has gone into effect. Conferred. Nullified. Defunct. The enforcement authority is unable to determine the appropriate settlement amount on the basis of approved methods of investigation. The amount along with the interest accruing during pendency of the proceedings. Effective both retroactively and in the future.
The speculator had gotten rid of the dry rot, installed a new roof, torn out the old bathrooms with the intention of renovating them from the ground up, walled off the gardener’s room that had become extremely damp, and broken through the wall to the garage to gain an additional room — but then, when his hopes of coming to an agreement with the heirs and therefore of being able to acquire the house proved illusory, he had the electrical cable severed and left the house as it was. It has been a long time since she last spoke with her father about the property. Leg. Sect. III, No. 1, encumbrance of the land, plot, parcel, property line. Property subject to dispute. Without possibility of appeal.
The stairs leading to the upper floor are covered with dust, bits of plaster from the vaulted ceiling have fallen on the steps and broken apart, and even upstairs the once gleaming cork floor is now covered with a uniform layer of dust. Existing structures in ramshackle condition, actionable. All that remains of the bathroom is the window with its brightly colored squares, the sink, shower, toilet and tiles are gone, now she can look right through the beams supporting the floor down into the hall at the approximate location where her grandmother used to sit on television evenings in the most comfortable of the garden chairs in consequence of her exalted personal status. In the Little Bird Room where she had slept during all the summer vacations of her childhood — petition after petition opposing clearance of the property under dispute — she now opens the heavy door of the hidden closet — unlawful trespass — the secret door of her childhood whose little wheels draw a semicircle in the dust, on the clothes rod are the bare hangers she herself left behind when she vacated the house. She can now walk through the interior of the large closet directly into the cupboard-lined room used by her grandparents, the wall that once separated these spaces now being absent — lacking the qualifications to acquire this permit, this ruling will remain in effect regardless of future changes in ownership, breach of jurisdiction. The closet through which she enters the cupboard room still smells, just like during her grandmother’s lifetime, of peppermint and camphor. In her grandmother’s study the ceiling has been eaten away by the feces and urine of the martens, on the desk lie reeds from the thatch roof, and through a hole in the ceiling you can look up into the darkness. The curtains in the windows are secured in their tracks only in a few last spots, the rest of the fabric hangs down askew, trailing loosely in the dust. The window frames are so warped they can no longer be opened. Existing permeabilities. Future permeabilities. Secondary motion is hereby rejected because it contains non-executable and therefore inadmissible provisions. Objection. As opposed to a bona fide. Provided the underlying assumptions have been dismissed. Burden of proof.