Mohr

by Frederick Reuss

  “Someone who can’t walk properly?”

  “It’s a joke Papa and I had together. Gaurisankar and Klotz am Bein. You want to climb up Gaurisankar, but there’s Klotz am Bein always holding you up, pulling you back. Anyway, I didn’t want to be Papa’s Klotz am Bein.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “What you always have to do when you’re stuck between Gaurisankar and Klotz am Bein.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Compromise. Papa said, ‘How about this. We’ll do it your way for the first two weeks. Nice and cushy and comfortable, places where there are other people, tourists. And then we’ll split up. I’ll bring my gear along with me. My saddle.’”

  “A saddle?”

  “So he could ride. Up into the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

  “At any rate, we eventually arrived in Genoa. I still remember the lights. We arrived late at night. Stars shining brightly overhead. Palast Hotel Miramar. I was trembling with excitement, visions of silk sheets and breakfast in bed. Would Papa go for it? I wondered. The Miramar? We arrived on the platform. ‘Where are you going? Which hotel?’ the porters asked. ‘Come. Come, follow me.’ The hotel touts descended on us. Papa shooed them all away. We came into the main terminal of the train station. ‘Oh, there,’ said Papa. ‘That’s the one.’ And he steered straight toward this cripple standing there with a hungry-dog look on his face. ‘Albergo?’ Papa asked. He liked to think he could speak Italian, or any language he felt like. We followed the man down a series of dark, narrow streets, and into a dingy old building. It stank horribly. An old, bedraggled woman led us inside. ‘We’d like a room, please,’ he said to the old lady, politely, as if it were the Miramar. She looked at him like he was loony. The room stank even more than the lobby downstairs. Two narrow, iron-post beds, dirty linen, a tiny metal basin on a wobbly old stand. ‘Prego!’ she said. ‘Bene, bene,’ said Papa. ‘Perfect! Just the place. Let’s go down and see what’s happening. Looks like there might be a nice, cozy trattoria downstairs. Or maybe we should go out and find someplace to eat?’ A trattoria? In this dump? Wait a minute, I wanted to shout! This is my ten days! What about my Gaurisankar? I was too tired to go out. We stayed in our fleabag hotel. All night long I heard strange noises. And the door wouldn’t even close properly. I tried to be optimistic. The glass is half-full, I kept telling myself. Don’t leave the toothbrush on the washstand. Better not get undressed for bed. ‘Do you hear those noises?’ I asked Papa. ‘Nah.’ He slept right through the night, and was bubbling with excitement the next morning. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? What a beautiful city! Look at the wonderful shops. Oh, look! There is a Miramar here! I’d rather die than stay there, wouldn’t you? What a bunch of snobs. Palast Hotel, pfui! Are you hungry? Me too. Let’s find someplace to have breakfast. Croissants and coffee.’ In the main shopping street we stumbled into this Swiss hotel that was just wonderful, and so we moved there right away. Silk sheets, blue. Just clean and simple and not a trace of the obnoxiousness of the Palast Hotel. We stayed two nights. Very grand. Then a little way outside the city we found a really nice place, a real albergo. At night people came out from the city to dance there. We stayed a few days and then Papa said he wanted to go back to Genoa, to the harbor to find a ship. ‘I’d like to go first to Spain,’ he said. ‘I’ll look for an old freighter, something cheap. From Spain maybe on to Tangier, something like that.’ So, we went back to Genoa to look for a boat, stood around the harbor day after day. Can you believe it? The two of us just standing around the harbor? Finally he found just what he wanted and he put me on the train.”

  “Were you sad?”

  “No. I was thrilled to be back home. It was springtime. Just lovely.”

  “You came back all alone?”

  “Sure. He wanted to go off like a tramp, and I wanted to come back home. It was a practical solution, don’t you think?”

  Eva shrugs, unimpressed.

  “Every day I got a telegram from him. Barcelona: ‘Thinking of you.’ Madrid: ‘Not much to report. Missing Wolfsgrub.’ Pamplona: ‘Bull-fighting is cruel. Not in the mood for Africa.’ A few days later, Paris: ‘Nothing.’ And then about a week later, he showed up at the door, as glad to be back home as ever.”

  Käthe gets up and stretches lazily. The afternoon sun has drawn more people down to walk along the river. She picks up her handbag, smooths down her skirt. “That’s just the way he has always been. Wanting something badly, and then finding out it wasn’t what he wanted after all.”

  KÄTHE SETS DOWN the new suitcase. “Anyone who hasn’t mowed a field with his own hands will never know how big the world is,” she groans. She’s carried the bulky case all the way from the bus stop. They are at the top of the road leading down to Löbelhof and Wolfsgrub. A cool summer evening. The rain that never came to Munich fell here sometime during the afternoon. The fields are in greenest summer bloom. A few wisps of cloud drift overhead. Eva slept for nearly the entire trip, on the train and then again on the bus. She is still groggy in spite of having walked from the bus stop. Käthe flexes her fingers, stiff from gripping, and sits down on the case to rest. “Anyone who hasn’t carried a heavy bag from Rottach to Wolfsgrub will never know how big the world is, either.”

  “In the store you said it wasn’t heavy, Mama.” Eva plucks a tall stalk of grass at the border of the field. “Isn’t that why you bought it?”

  “It wasn’t as heavy as the others.” Käthe bounces lightly on the case, testing its sturdiness. Less than a kilometer to go, but they’re in no hurry. Dampness rises from the surrounding fields. Ripe, cool, quiet. Wolfsgrub lies just at the end of the narrow lane, hidden in a little grove at the foot of the mountain. For seventeen years she has walked down this road. Now, all of a sudden, she is about to walk away.

  “Think how heavy it will be with all our stuff in it,” Eva says, peeling a stalk of grass. Käthe watches her peel away layer after layer until the stalk is reduced to a bundle of wet strands. She sucks on the end of it, then flings it away and pulls up another. “That man in the store was mean, didn’t you think?”

  Käthe stands up. “Some people think they know what you need better than you do yourself. Anyway, it doesn’t feel all that aerodynamic to me.” She lifts the suitcase. “Let’s see if we can make it the rest of the way without stopping.”

  As they draw closer, Käthe begins to wonder what not being here will feel like. When does a somewhere become nowhere again? Can a somewhere become a nowhere? Mohr believed that somewhere and nowhere were one and the same place. She dismissed it as a fine little romance, an opinion he held for the way it sounded rather than out of any rigorous philosophical conviction. Wolfsgrub was always a nowhere. It was he who had changed. “Let’s wander off,” he liked to say, “into our own nowhere.” She would ask why he seemed so restless and discontented all the time. How impossibly naive such talk seems now, when people are no longer wandering but scrambling—and not just somewhere or nowhere but anywhere that can offer refuge.

  The Daibler twins appear near the end of the road—on stilts. Eva runs to meet them. Seethaler’s truck is parked at the gate. Käthe leaves the suitcase at the front door, finds him and two young helpers working in the ditch.

  “Grüss Gott.” He climbs out of the ditch. “The pipe came in yesterday.”

  She peers down at the pipe.

  “Cast iron,” Seethaler says. “From start to finish.” He gestures from the house to the tank, covered with a concrete slab.

  “Very nice. It seems deeper than before.”

  “That’s because it’s getting dark out,” Seethaler says. “The boys’ll come back in the morning and fill it in.”

  “I can use the kitchen sink now?”

  “All set to go.”

  “At last.” Käthe sighs happily. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure, Frau Mohr.” He smiles. “My pleasure.”

  She shows him to a spigot at the back of the house where they all wash.

  “Mama!” Eva s
houts, rounding the corner of the house, waving something over her head. “A letter from Papa!” She thrusts the envelope at her mother. “Open it,” she demands.

  “In a moment. I need to talk to Herr Seethaler.”

  “Can I open it?”

  The Daibler boys are negotiating their way through the garden gate, tottering precariously on their stilts. Käthe hands the envelope back to Eva. “I’ll be a minute.”

  Seethaler wipes his wet hands with a rag.

  “I’d like to speak to you about the bill.”

  “Don’t worry, Frau Mohr. The invoice is all prepared.”

  “That’s what I would like to discuss. But first, I owe you an apology, Theo.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I want to apologize for my rudeness the other day.”

  “Nonsense,” Seethaler repeats, then shouts to the boys to gather up the tools and meet him at the truck.

  “I’d like to ask if you would consider a trade instead of cash.”

  “A trade?” Seethaler starts in the direction of the truck.

  “Something unexpected has come up. I’m short of cash.”

  “Frau Mohr, Frau Mohr.” Seethaler tugs his mustache, shakes his head.

  Her heart begins to pound. What she is about to propose occurred to her only moments ago. The new suitcase cost twice what she’d planned to spend—and turned out twice as heavy, too.

  Seethaler climbs into the truck, rummages around on the front seat, then closes the door. He hands a sheet of paper through the open window. “As promised.”

  Käthe is shocked by the figure. “Theo! Surely this isn’t the cost!”

  Seethaler smiles. “I found a cheap supplier.”

  She folds the paper, flushing with embarrassment. She fumbles for a moment, creases the paper with her nails. Seethaler looks past her to the boys still cleaning up. The Daibler boys are teasing them from up on their stilts. “I would still like to propose a trade,” she finally says.

  Seethaler gazes out the front window of the truck.

  She tucks the bill into her pocket. “Before my husband left I had a little cabin built.” She points to the woods sloping up behind the house. “Up there, near Kaltengruben. It’s just a little hut, really. A place for him to write.”

  The boys are coming across the lawn. “Don’t forget the shovel!” Seethaler shouts.

  Käthe puts her foot on the running board. “You can have it.”

  “Have it?” Seethaler is surprised. “Have what?”

  “The hut. Take it away.”

  “Take it away?”

  “The whole thing. Windows, stove, floor planks, roof shingles. There’s plenty of good lumber. Just take it away. Whatever you want.”

  Seethaler seems amused. The two boys stroll up, smoking cigarettes. They put the shovels into the truck and then climb up into the bed.

  “Think about it.”

  Seethaler starts the engine. A blast of black smoke erupts from the clattering tailpipe. He revs once, twice; puts the truck into gear. “Was kostet dännn därrrr ganzä Bärg?”

  “Theo Seethaler. Stop your games and just do what I say!” Immediately she feels ridiculous.

  Seethaler is surprised by the outburst. “I’ll think about it, Frau Mohr,” he says through the window. Then waves and drives off shaking his head.

  Eva calls from the kitchen. “From Japan, Mama! Look. With a photo.” She holds the letter out. “Read it.”

  Fuji New Grand Lodge

  Lake Yamanaka

  Japan

  Liebste Käthe,

  Have landed in a wonderful spot. A tiny Japanese cottage on Yamanaka, one of the five Fuji lakes. Was away for three days, up Fujiyama, the most beautiful mountain on earth. Am completely exhausted today, saddle sore and a stiff back. 12,400 feet (4,100 meters), straight up, and down. Did very well. A great view of the Pacific and a deep, dangerous crater on top. Pilgrims everywhere, all slept in the shelter on top together. Just beautiful. But a dangerous mountain, too. You ride for hours and hours and then through the lava fields, like being on snow. Looks just like the Wallberg—but four times as high, and jutting up alone out of the landscape. It was wonderful, but exhausting. I am having a wonderful time. Out on horseback early every morning, then again in the evening. Remember the yellow morning glories you handed to Lawrence the day he left? They are everywhere here, sprouting in glades of tiger lily and more than a thousand species of songbird, giant butterflies, dragonflies. A dream from childhood, riding through volcanic forests, galloping along the shores of the Fuji lakes. All this beauty, and war breaking out! Everyone is frantic and I feel completely calm, inside and out. They are evacuating Americans to Manila, English to Hong Kong, and Germans here, to Japan. Of course, as a non-Aryan, I am not among them, which is just fine with me. I don’t know how I’m going to get back to Shanghai. But I am determined to go back. What’s going to happen to my practice? Don’t worry. I’m not worried, though I think we can count now on a long and nasty war. Depressing to see how this thousand-year-old silk and garden-house culture is being murdered by technological modernity. This is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I wish the two of you were here with me; then again, I don’t, and would rather be back with you in our little nook at the foot of the Wallberg, clear-headed and healthy and awake and able to see the beauty in everything. All my love to you and Eva. MM.

  Käthe folds the letter, picks up the photograph. Mohr holds two horses by the reins as they graze in front of a large bush. He is wearing a white shirt with sleeves rolled high up his arm, looking over his shoulder, hair tousled, wind-blown. There are mountains in the background.

  “Why two horses, Mama?” Eva asks.

  “I don’t know,” Käthe says, and puts the photograph down on the table.

  Part Two

  From a distance there is no difference between a rainy and a sunny day.

  Emotion toward things of the past is less intense than toward things of the present. That’s how Spinoza put it, and his formulation makes sense. But Spinoza had never seen a photograph. To say the rain that fell last week is the cause of your mood today would be absurd. So how is it that looking at old photographs has such intense effect, moves you so strongly?

  You put down the picture you’ve been studying.

  It is dark throughout the house but for the yellow cone of light that shines on the center of table, the very same table at which Käthe and Max are sitting, crumpled and unhappy, in the picture you have just set aside. The electric bulb flickers, making the light in the room seem uncertain.

  You’ve been sitting all evening at the old oak table, sorting and arranging, resorting and rearranging photographs. The piles are now all in disarray. You stopped following a time frame. But when, exactly? You smile at the irony of the question, stand up to stretch your legs. The light fixture buzzes. As you leave the room you consider switching it off, then change your mind and linger for a moment.

  Mohr used to say that writing was simply the effort of capturing all the various strands of consciousness and putting them into words. But are words precipitated out of experience the way images are precipitated out of the light captured in a camera? Photographs. Do they convey the simultaneity of impressions we have when we see? Of thoughts, when we think? The tune of consciousness? No. They can’t. They are a subversion of the moment, the way words are a subversion of what we are really thinking deep within ourselves. The world is always near at hand, yet inexpressible, and the gulf can only be partially bridged in acts of memory.

  Take in the setting: a table covered with snapshots; two cigar boxes, lids open; four bound albums, one missing its cover; lengths of ribbon, some old and faded, some still bright; souvenir postcards of the Graf Zeppelin, the Kürsingerhütte on the Gross-Venediger, the Pension Goelands in Bandol, France; a pen-and-ink drawing of the Shanghai Bund; a magnifier; a teapot and cup; an ashtray; a covered butter dish; a plate with a brown apple core and bread crumbs—all lit from above by a small light han
ging low over the center of the table.

  You step outside for a breath of fresh air. It’s a cool, moonless night. The surrounding hills, a line of blackness etched against the starry sky. Everything seems so perfectly familiar and natural. How to know Max and Käthe. Photographs make everything seem recent and vivid, tensed and tenseless, the future past nested in a moment.

  You sit on the bench by the front door, light a cigarette. These little breaks intensify the sense of being both lost to and intimately connected to the present moment. Of course, you have your own pictures to pass along, too; someday your children and grandchildren will look back—at you, at themselves. What moves you in looking at these old snapshots of people who were gone long before you entered the world isn’t nostalgia, but a thrilling sense of connection, and it makes you both happy and sad to realize that what is keeping you up so late into the night is a feeling not of presence, but of absence.

  What can be more natural than going through old pictures?

  There you were, Max. Here you are, Käthe.

  Which tense to use? How to describe a photograph?

  There had been a sack race, seven children hopping across the yard. There is Martin, in last place, and Eva about to tumble over the little girl who has just fallen in front of her. Their joy is plain to see, not only in their faces, but in the blur of motion as they tumble forward, giddy, hopping and falling in their sacks. The photographer intrudes into the foreground of the scene: Mohr’s shadow on the grass, a reminder of what is and is not present. The narrator. Other photos were taken that day, but this sack race is the one that carries the fullest measure of the moment. On that day, as Mohr chased around, photographing the children’s games, had he already known he would leave? Had he told Käthe yet?

  She must have wondered herself. Perhaps even as she sat up at night, looking at the very same picture. Why do people keep photographs? To remind them of the past, or to guard against the future? “I’ve had enough of the future,” Mohr told her shortly before he left. “Especially a future where all everybody talks about is the future.”