He walks once more up the stairs, which creak at the second, seventh and second-to-last step, passing his wife’s room from which emanates, as always, the smell of peppermint and camphor; the way to his studio leads him through the crepuscular room lined with cabinets, he’d built a small window there, semicircular, shaded like an eye by the straw roof, it wasn’t long ago that a marten appeared to him at this window. The marten looked through the eye into the house just as he himself was looking out through the eye, animal and man both frozen there for a moment, and then the creature flitted away. The panes of frosted glass he’d had mounted in a frame of two times three panels in the door to his studio clink softly one last time as he approaches, he opens the door and enters, stands for a moment behind his drawing table and gazes down at the lake, the table is still covered with drawings for his first building in the Berlin city center, the most important commission in his life as an architect, the commission that has now caused his downfall. In the beams he hears the martens scrabbling. The martens are staying here.
He walks back down the stairs, on the way down they creak at the second, fifteenth and second-to-last step; he himself whittled grape leaves and clusters of their fruit on the finial at the bottom of the banister. Lock the door. In his trouser pocket the key is jingling that can open and close all the doors of the house including the apiary and woodshed, Zeiss Ikon, a key meeting the highest safety standards, quality German workmanship. Lock the door. And then crossing the living room, the light-colored slabs of sandstone beneath his footsteps in the entryway, fifty-by-fifty centimeters — the handle of the door to the vestibule made of brass, flat on top to sit well in the palm, edges grooved to offer traction to the thumb, when he depresses this handle it emits, as always, a faint metallic sigh — the slabs of sandstone beneath his footsteps in the entryway thirty-by-thirty centimeters; the birds on the door of the broom closet are flying, they’ve been flying there for a century, the flowers have been blossoming for a century, more grapes are hanging down, the Garden of Eden in twelve square chapters; he’d salvaged the door from an old farmhouse, its beauty makes you forget entirely about the scrub-brush, broom, bucket, dustpan and brush it conceals. Frame the view, that’s what he’s always thought, lead the eye. In the kitchen a faucet is dripping, shut it off. Look out through the bulls-eye panes at the sandy road and trees. The colored glass turns even the bare trees green, frame the view, it’s the first day of the new year, the gardener is still asleep, no one is out for a walk. Happy new year. In two hours he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn to West Berlin.
Lock the door. Lock the door and leave the key in the lock. He doesn’t want them to break any of his bones. Doesn’t want them to break down the door, twist off or saw apart the ironwork protecting the glass of the front door, this ironwork is painted red and black, just like the ironwork of the National Glider School that he worked on before the war, which was blown up just after the war ended, no one knew why. Lock the door.
His profession used to encompass three dimensions, height, width and depth, it was always his business to build things high, wide and deep, but now the forth dimension has caught up with him: time, which is now expelling him from house and home. We won’t be doing any arresting over the weekend, the official said and let him go, meaning that he wasn’t going to be killed, he was just supposed to leave, get out, scram, make himself scarce, go to the deviclass="underline" In two hours he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn that will bring him to West Berlin. Five years at least, the official said, for the ton of screws he bought with his own money in the West to be used in the East, a ton of brass screws for the most important building of his life: on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin-Mitte. A building for the state that is now driving him out. He knows much less than he used to.
That’s his profession: planning homes, planning a homeland. Four walls around a block of air, wresting a block of air from amid all that burgeoning, billowing matter with claws of stone, pinning it down. Home. A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing. Homestead. A house made to measure according to the needs of its master. Eating, cooking, sleeping, bathing, defecating, children, guests, car, garden. Calculating all these whethers, all these thises and thats, in wood, stone, glass, straw and iron. Setting out courses for lives, flooring beneath feet for corridors, vistas for eyes, doors for silence. And this here was his house. For the sitting to be done by his wife and himself, he designed the two chairs with leather cushions, for observing the sunset, he made the terrace with its view of the lake, and their shared pleasure at receiving guests had taken shape as a long table in the main room, the chill he and she felt in winter would be combated by the tiled heating stove from Holland, his and her weariness after ice-skating by the bench beside the stove, and finally his drawing at the drafting table was provided for, as it were, by the studio. And now he had to consider himself lucky he was escaping with his life, suffering his third skin to be stripped from him and fleeing, insides glisteningly exposed, to the safety of the West.
When over the enemy’s lines never forget your own line of retreat. Even in the first war this was easier said than done. They’d been able to discharge their bombs over Paris, but then the airship was struck and gradually lost altitude until finally it settled on the roof of a stable in a Belgian village, burying its own gondola beneath the huge limp sack. When he and his comrades worked their way out from beneath the cloth, they saw a few chickens pecking at the sand down below in the yard, saw a cat sleeping in the sun, and only when the farmers refrained from shooting at him and his comrades but instead fetched a ladder did they know that the village had already been occupied by the Germans. And so it was pure chance that instead of being shot they were invited to climb down a Belgian ladder back into life. From the airship you gazed down at the world as if at a floor plan, but it wasn’t so easy to see where the front was from so high above. To them, the village they owed their life to was occupied territory; to the Belgians, it was home, and quite possibly the front ran right between the whiskers of the sleeping cat. The lesson he learned that day was never to take a risk on so close a call.
He walks around the house to the left, passing the rhododendrons, beneath his feet the gratings with which he covered all the basement windows during the second war. The words “Mannesmann Air Raid Defense” are stamped on these gratings, even now, in the middle of peacetime. By the time the second war came along, he was already too old to be sent into battle, but in his own way he’d expanded his occupied territory. Rule number one for aerial battle: When you attack, keep the sun behind you.
In the morning the sunlight grazed the tops of the pine trees before the house, this meant that the weather would be lovely all day long, the terrace still lay in the shade of the house, and the butter on the breakfast table hadn’t yet begun to melt. All day long, the sun shone on the two meadows to the right and left of the path that led down to the water, the sisters of his wife lay and sat there with their children in the grass playing, sleeping or reading, sunlight spotted the path as it descended amid oak leaves, conifers and hazelnut bushes down to the paved steps, eight times eight, rough sandstone in its natural color; down beside the lake the sunlight pierced the alder foliage only at intervals to reach the black earth of the shoreline, which was still moist, and the closer you came to the glistening surface of the lake, the louder the leaves rustled, the shadier it was all around you — blackout shades, Mannesmann Air Raid Defense — but all of this only in order to blind him, a summer visitor taking his first step out onto the dock, between sunlight and water he would walk toward the end of the dock, and apart from him, the one walking there, nothing else remained that might have cast a shadow. Here the sun unleashed its force, falling upon both him and the lake, and the lake threw its reflection right back up at the sun, and he, who was now sitting or lying at the end of the dock, observed this exchange, casually extracting from his hand a splinter he’d gotten when he sat or lay down, smelled the pine tar used to impregnate the wood, heard the boat plashing in the boathouse, the chain it was bound with faintly clinking, he saw fish suspended in the bright water, crabs crawling, felt the warm boards beneath his feet, his legs, his belly, smelled his own skin, lay or sat there, and since the sun was so bright he closed his eyes. And even through the blood behind his closed eyelids he saw the flickering orb.