Mohr

by Frederick Reuss

  When Eva finally leaves the water, her lips are blue and she is shivering. Käthe wraps her tightly in a towel. “How can you stay in the water for so long? You’re frozen through.” Eva drops onto the blanket, scoots up next to her mother, teeth clattering in merry little bursts. Käthe returns to her sewing, pulling each stitch carefully and deliberately, amused by Eva’s happy shivering, and the way she gazes contentedly across the lake with glazed eyes, a little joy released into the world. Every so often she finds herself remembering little phrases Mohr would come up with on the spur of the moment, a way of fixing it like a photograph. All she wants is to talk with him again. Face to face. But all she has are hundreds of letters, all bundled up and tucked away, and his impulsive and urgent little telegrams:

  The old tabby cat in the Café Dobrin has become a good friend. MM.

  The pralines are delicious. Eat them all yourself. MM.

  Letter abandoned. I love you. MM.

  Advertisements radio a thousand wild proposals. MM.

  He always signed them MM, like a quiet, self-deprecating hum. To have so many words and yet also to have nothing but words.

  MARIE BERGHAMMER is outside in her garden as they arrive back at Wolfsgrub. She is tending a stand of hollyhocks planted along the side of the house. “A beautiful afternoon,” she says, crossing the yard. Marie is sturdy, a cheerful, sober woman. She and her husband manage a little dairy of fifteen cows. Although Käthe and Marie have always been friendly, there is still a vestige of reserve on Marie’s part. Käthe gave up trying to break it down years ago, realizing how her egalitarian urbanity only stiffened Frau Berghammer’s more formal country manners.

  “We were down at the lake,” she says, pulling to a stop.

  “A perfect day for it.” Marie brushes the dirt from her apron.

  “Marie, they’ve closed the school.” Käthe steps off the bicycle, leans it against the fence.

  “Summer vacation.”

  “No! For good!”

  Marie squints back, something she often does in place of asking questions.

  “They sent a letter. The such-and-such regulation of the such-and-such administrative reorganization of the so-and-so. Anyway, the school is now officially closed. Finished.”

  “Forever?”

  Käthe nods.

  Marie brushes the front of her apron again. “What about the children?”

  “They will all be sent to Tölz.”

  She feels her pulse quicken, an urge to explain, to take Marie into a deeper confidence. They are friends, after all. There can be nothing wrong between them. “I am thinking of hiring a tutor.” She stops there, wondering if Marie will read anything into it. There is a canny streak in the woman that Käthe regards highly, if a little grudgingly. It came into full relief over the parcel of Berghammer’s land they bought after Mohr’s play, Ramper, was turned into a film. It wasn’t anything to do with the actual deal. It was what Marie had said shortly afterward—that it was a sign of trouble when a man who is so often away from home buys land for his wife.

  “It’s how things used to be,” Marie says thoughtfully. “Lessons in the morning, work in the afternoon.” She bends to pluck a weed from the upturned dirt along the fence and chuckles. “Herr Lickleder. We drove him mad. Always skin and bones, poor man; came here to write—like your husband—except he wasn’t a doctor, so he had to give lessons.”

  Käthe knew old Lickleder well, the first of the local eccentrics Mohr had ferreted out when they first moved here. He died a few years ago.

  “Ach! He drove us crazy with his poems. ‘Wenn der Morgen trunken heraufgeht.’” Marie laughs, shakes her head. “You were baking this morning. I could smell it.”

  “For Eva’s last day of school.”

  Käthe waves good-bye and pushes the bicycle the short distance home. Back inside the house, Eva is sitting at the kitchen table, feeding Wutzi the last crumbs of cake from the palm of her hand. She glances up as her mother enters. “Why do we have to go to China? Why doesn’t Papa just come back here?”

  Käthe regards the pile of dirty dishes stacked on the counter, decides to wash them before preparing supper. “I’ve told you. It’s complicated. Papa is in China now so that he can earn money. When the proper time comes he will send for us.”

  “Why don’t we just go now?”

  “Is something wrong? Are you feeling sad?”

  Eva shrugs, pats Wutzi. “You never talk about Papa anymore.”

  “That’s not true. We talk about Papa all the time.”

  “Not about the old days. You never talk about the old days anymore.”

  She is about to protest but stops herself. Eva is growing up, isn’t satisfied with promises of good things to come. She needs more than promises. Käthe thinks back to the poem Mohr sent. Perhaps she had it all wrong; perhaps some fatherly intuition gave him just the right sense of what Eva needs to know now. There are bonds and there are bonds; those that connect and those that strangle. Time spent together in the kitchen is a bond. Suddenly Käthe realizes her daughter is asking for something only she can give her. A sudden twinge in her stomach. How could she not have noticed? Hasn’t she been paying attention?

  She takes a large pot from under the sink and begins filling it with water, glances over her shoulder and sees that Eva is waiting “What would you like to talk about?”

  “I don’t know.” Eva picks up a knife and begins drumming idly on the tabletop, then suddenly perks up. “Tell me the mountain-climbing story.”

  “Again? You’ve heard it so many times.”

  “You haven’t told it in a long time, Mama. Please?”

  The dog gets up, lopes out of the room. Käthe lifts the pot onto the stove and lights the burner, then sits down beside Eva. The kitchen ceiling is lower than any other room in the house. A beam running down the middle makes it necessary to duck going from the stove to the sink. Another time marker, when Eva begins to duck. Käthe takes the knife Eva has been drumming the table with. “We’d been married just two years.” She wipes the blade clean on her apron, then sets it aside. There’s a difference between what once happened and what once was. She would like to explain this to Eva, but stops herself. Maybe when Eva starts bumping her head on the ceiling.

  “Go on, Mama,” Eva says impatiently.

  “It was 1922, a terribly cold winter. Just going outside for more than a few minutes at a time was difficult. One day, your father announced that he wanted to climb the Gross-Venediger.”

  “Where’s that again?”

  “In Tirol, near Kitzbühl, over three thousand five hundred meters high. I didn’t want him to go.”

  “But he had done it before, right? He was a good climber.”

  “Yes. He’d climbed it once before the war, so I knew I had to let him go. Not that I could have stopped him.”

  She glances at the pot on the stove. Eva is right. She doesn’t tell stories of the old days anymore. It feels strange, but she’s confirming something—the way a person is reminded of the moon on a moonless night.

  “I watched him get packed and ready. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ The morning he set off—it was very early, four o’clock—I went upstairs, got back into bed, and watched from the window as he skied off in the dark.”

  “He skied there?”

  “No. He skied to the station in Tegernsee and took the train from there. Six days later a telegram came. Arrive tomorrow 11 A.M. Bring sleigh. Max Mohr. At first I was relieved. But ‘bring a sleigh’? And signed ‘Max Mohr’? He never signed his telegrams with his full name. What was going on? Oh, God.

  “It was early morning when the telegram came. I was all alone. I ordered a sleigh. And waited all day and prayed and prayed. I couldn’t sleep. Finally the time came to go. The sleigh took me to the station and the train arrived and everyone got off. But no Papa. I waited and waited—old people, stragglers, and still no Papa. Then I saw the conductor get out carrying Papa’s rucksack and skis.


  “‘Where is he? What’s happened?’”

  “‘Back there,’ the conductor said. ‘The last car.’

  “I ran down the platform, scrambled onto the train. Papa was lying there with both his feet bandaged and raised up, tears streaming down his face. Out of happiness, he said. His whole body was shivering. Both feet were frozen up to the ankles. Third-degree frostbite.”

  “Is that the worst?”

  Käthe nods, glances again at the pot of water on the stove. “An infantry doctor in Rosenheim saved him; worked on him all night. Gave him tetanus injections. Without that doctor Papa would never have made it. If he hadn’t suddenly turned up Papa might have been stranded in Tirol. The doctor in Mittersill had wanted to send him to Salzburg to take off both his legs! But Papa wouldn’t allow it, wouldn’t let anybody into his room. For two days he lay in a little guesthouse in Mittersill. Finally an ambulance came. He had to change trains seven times to get back here, but, finally, he did.”

  Eva puts her head down on the table.

  “Are you tired?”

  Eva shakes her head vigorously. “Go on, go on,” she insists.

  Käthe takes a moment to check the pot on the stove, thinking, for some reason, of Mohr’s letter—the dream he wrote about, of walking down to the house from the upper meadow, and her outside, beating the dust from the old green sofa. Is that really his vision of home sweet home? With her playing the good little Hausfrau?

  “Go on, Mama,” Eva says, growing impatient. “I’m listening.”

  Käthe sits back down. “Remembering is hard work.” She strokes Eva’s hair. Swimming has made the child tired, though she denies it. “Where was I?”

  “At the train station. He had to change seven times.”

  “Right. At the train station I rounded up some men to carry him to the sleigh. When we arrived home, Kerbel, the coachman, and Hiasl got him into the house.”

  “Old Hiasl carried Papa?” Eva laughs.

  “Fifteen years ago he was one of the strongest woodcutters anywhere. Anyway, as soon as Papa was inside the house, he began feeling better. He played his accordion.”

  “What did he play?”

  “I don’t remember, exactly. Some old song.”

  “I bet it was ‘Wenn die Hähne kräh’n.’”

  Käthe laughs, remembering Eva’s little-girl look of nervous anticipation as she waited for Mohr’s window-rattling cock-a-doodle-doo at the end of the song. “Yes. That could very well have been it. Anyway, it didn’t last long. The pain started to get worse again. And worse and worse. We just sat there, completely helpless. We had no clue how dangerous it was. Papa couldn’t walk, not one single step. Hiasl had to carry him upstairs to the bedroom. It was cold up there. And the bed was too short. His feet had to be kept raised. I lit the stove, set a little table at the foot end of the bed, and piled pillows on it. Then I wrapped his legs in blankets. No! No! Too heavy. For God’s sake, take them off. So I took them off, and he began to shiver with cold. I shoveled more wood into the stove, but then it got too hot. Air! For God’s sake! Back and forth, back and forth. There was no way to make him comfortable. Night came. I sent Hiasl home. We began to get scared.”

  “What about a doctor?”

  “I had called the doctor in Tegernsee, but he couldn’t come until the next morning. Back then you could only telephone during the day, so there was nothing we could do but wait. And so, that evening, between bouts of pain and talk about how we would handle the situation, Papa told me the entire story of what had happened.”

  The water is now too hot to wash with. She turns off the burner, adds some cold water, and puts on her apron. Eva begins tapping with the knife on the tabletop again. “So tell me, Mama. What happened up on the mountain?”

  “He arrived in Mittersill on the first day and stayed overnight at the Deutsch-Österreicher Alpenverein. He was a member, and was given keys to the group’s climbing shelter up on the mountain. The next morning he packed some firewood and headed out. The route up the lower glacier to the shelter wasn’t particularly difficult. Papa had done the tour before the war and knew the route well. But it had been a long time and the glacier had changed quite a bit. On top of that, the whole place had been more or less deserted since the war. Right away, he knew things were not going to go the way he had thought. He had to cut steps into the ice. All day long he worked hard with the pick, but it was January and the days were short. He wasn’t getting far enough. The damn ice. To lighten his pack and make better time, he threw away the wood he was carrying. He worked and worked, step by step. Twilight fell. Still no sign of the shelter. Finally night fell. A frigid night. Bitter cold. Papa said the stars seemed too close and too bright. He stopped for a rest and thought, Oh God. It’s all over. And then he drifted off.”

  “On the ice?”

  Käthe laughs. “No, in bed, as he was telling me the story.” She is enjoying Eva’s suspense. “The story didn’t come out all at once,” she teases. “He told it to me very slowly and quietly, as if in a trance. It was as if he kept having to remind himself of how it felt to be all alone out there, how it had taken every last bit of his strength.”

  She hoists the heavy pot and tips the water into the metal basin in the sink. She will have to use the basin until the drain can be fixed.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Help me and I’ll tell you.” She turns on the ceiling light. Right away, a moth flutters and buzzes around the bulb. Eva heaves herself up. Käthe hands her a towel for drying, pins her hair back with an extra pin. The warm water feels nice as she begin washing. The sharp soap smell tickles her nose. She rubs it with the back of her hand, passes the first clean dish for Eva to dry, and resumes the story.

  “He finally reached the shelter at about two o’clock. But the door was completely blocked and he had to clear the snow away. He dug and dug and at last he got it open. He had thrown away his wood, so as soon as he was inside the shelter, he had to chop up a chair to make a fire.”

  “That was bad, throwing the wood away.”

  “He needed to go faster and to save his strength. There wasn’t anything else he could have done. Anyway, that’s when he began to notice that his feet felt strange. But it was too dark to see very much, and he was dead tired. He pulled his boots off and fell straight to sleep. When he woke up it was morning, and very cold inside the shelter.”

  “And his feet?”

  “They were frozen, swollen thick, completely numb. He went outside and tried to warm them in the sun. But that only made it worse. He had to turn back right away. But he couldn’t get his boots on! The situation was desperate. He knew it would take everything he had, every ounce of strength, right up to the end. I have to go back, he said to himself. I have to make it. Calm down, try to stay calm. Have a cigarette. Concentrate.”

  “What about his shoes? Did he get them back on?”

  “No. But luckily, he had a pair of soft leather house slippers, which he had brought to wear inside the shelter. He was able to get them on. He took the straps from his rucksack, somehow fastened the house slippers to the bindings of his skis. Everything else he left behind. And off he went.”

  “How could he ski with frozen feet?”

  Käthe shakes her head. “God knows. But Papa is an expert skier. Somehow, he managed. Sometime around midnight, a group of drunk men were leaving the village tavern, singing, playing the accordion. Papa yelled to them from where he was lying beside the road. They brought him into the tavern, laid him next to the stove. It was two days before the ambulance came to take him.”

  She hands over the last dish, and dries her hands. The moth continues to flutter and buzz around the light. She pauses for a moment to watch it. Telling stories often brings on a curious feeling. She belongs and lives here with all her being, but something happens whenever she begins to tell Eva of the past. For a moment, rather than filling the house with her presence, she feels like a mouse running along the floorboards. It’s not so terrible. She h
oists the heavy basin from the sink and carries it outside to the vegetable garden, watches the water course through the little runnels between the beds until all is absorbed into the soil.

  They are eating dinner when Berghammer and his cows finally come down from the meadow. They pass directly in front of the house, fifteen in all, mooing as they approach the barn. Suddenly the lights flicker and go out. They wait for a moment in the dark, and when the lights fail to go back on again, Käthe goes outside for a look. The lights are out at Berghammers’ as well.

  Eva has already lit the kerosene lamp and is collecting the plates to take back to the kitchen when Käthe returns. “Let’s continue with the story, Mama,” she says. “It will be fun in the dark.” She finishes clearing the table as Käthe lights the lamps in the hallway and in the kitchen, pours a second cup of tea, and goes outside to sit on the bench by the front door. The moon is rising over the mountains. Eva comes out and sits beside her. Sipping tea, Käthe resumes the story.

  “We were all alone. Just like the two of us are now. I don’t remember how the rest of that first night went. The doctor from Tegernsee came in the morning and wanted to cut off Papa’s toes. Papa sent him away, even though they hurt terribly.”

  “How could they hurt if they were frozen?” Eva interrupts.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sometimes when I wake up at night and my arm is asleep, it feels dead. It doesn’t hurt, it just feels funny.”

  Käthe shrugs. “I can’t explain it. All I know is Papa didn’t have a moment without pain. Somehow we made it through the next few days. Papa was so exhausted that he couldn’t eat. And he reacted badly to the medicine, which he gave himself. Nothing could take away the pain. Not even morphine. We didn’t sleep. There were brief moments of hope, but then the pain would return worse than before. Early on Sunday morning I heard someone downstairs. It was Krecke.”