The Wall: And Other Stories

by Jurek Becker

  As I turn around, he jumps down from the wall by his own method. Though it’s not a bad fall, he doesn’t get up. Seeing him lying there on his stomach, I go back to him because he’s my friend. He’s crying, crying, and crying—I have never seen anyone cry like that before. I had already finished crying, now I start up again myself. I ask: “Did he take away the binoculars?” It is a while before he pushes my hand away and gets up. I can see the binoculars under his shirt. He limps away, crying all the time. I run after him and at last feel superior. I ask: “Are we going to meet tomorrow?” I see nothing wrong with this question, but what does Julian do? He hits me over the head. He looks at me as if he had more blows for me in his fists, then he limps on again. I stay where I am and can still hear him crying; I needn’t be that sorry for him that I have to run after him again. I’m looking forward to the hut, where I won’t have to feel cold any more.

  Beyond the door it is dark. I close it so softly that I hear nothing; anyone who wasn’t awake before will still be asleep. My parents are sitting on the bed, staring at me wide-eyed.

  Someone whispers: “Good God, what have they done to you?”

  Right now nothing hurts any more, yet I feel as if the worst is still to come. My Mother holds both hands over her mouth. Father doesn’t move. I stand between his knees. He puts one hand on my head and turns me around. Then he holds me by both shoulders and asks: “Where have you been?”

  I say: “I was outside and fell down.”

  Father says: “No one falls down like that.” My Mother has risen and is searching in our brown carryall. Father shakes me so violently that my head, which for a long time had given me no trouble, begins hurting again.

  I say: “We met outside and had a fight and beat each other up. That’s the truth.”

  He asks: “Who’s ‘we’?”

  I say: “You don’t know him.” Suddenly I can lie as never before. My Mother is holding a dripping towel. She takes me away from Father and leads me to the light by the window. Father follows us and looks on.

  “Go and ask Professor Engländer whether he can come and look at him,” says my Mother.

  Father asks: “Can’t we wait till after inspection?”

  “No,” she retorts, “or daren’t you go outside?” Off he goes on tiptoe, and at last my Mother strokes me. She says: “You must realize that he’s upset.”

  She lays me down on the bed and nurses my head on her lap. I think that later perhaps I’ll tell her the truth, only her. She says: “How tired you are, my little one.” It is bliss to lie in her lap, though her finger won’t let me fall asleep. She speaks to someone, a few times I hear the word “probably.” I open my eyes and she is smiling down at me as if I were something funny.

  Father is holding a little dark bottle in his hand. “Engländer gave me some iodine,” he says.

  I ask: “Will it hurt?”

  My Mother says: “Yes, but it can’t be helped.” So I get up and back away because in my opinion enough things have hurt this past night.

  Father says: “Don’t listen to her, it won’t hurt. It just cleans out the wound.” That sounds a bit better. He says: “I can prove it.” I watch very carefully—after all it’s my pain—I look at his outstretched arm. He dribbles a few drops from the bottle onto his arm; they form a little black lake and slowly spread. Then he says: “That’s supposed to hurt? Do you think I would put the stuff on my own arm if it hurt?” I look into his eyes from very close up and can’t see even the tiniest trace of pain. A further proof is that my Mother goes away; she was wrong and doesn’t want to admit it, so she simply goes away. Father says: “Come here now.” I hold out my elbow to him, he twists my arm a little so that the drops fall straight into the wound.

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz

  The Tale of the Sick Princess

  from Jacob the Liar

  Lina is in luck. Jacob soon finds the station where fairy tales are being told by a kindly uncle who says: “For all the children listening to us, your fairy-tale uncle will tell you the story of the sick princess.”

  “Do you know that one?” Jacob asks as Jacob.

  “No. But how can there be a fairy-tale uncle on the radio?”

  “What do you mean, how? There is, that’s all.”

  “But you said radio was forbidden for children. And fairy tales are only for children, aren’t they?”

  “True. But what I meant was that it’s forbidden here in the ghetto. Where there’s no ghetto, children are allowed to listen. And there are radios everywhere. Right?”

  “Right.”

  The fairy-tale uncle, a bit put out by the interruption but fair enough to look for the reasons in himself, takes off his jacket and puts it under him, since the bucket is hard and sharp edged and the fairy tale one of the longer ones—provided, that is, he can remember how it all goes.

  “When’s it going to start?” Lina asks.

  “The tale of the sick princess,” the fairy-tale uncle begins.

  About the good old king who had a vast country and a gloriously beautiful palace and a daughter as well, the old story, and how he got a terrible scare. Because, you see, he loved her more than anything in the world, his princess. He loved her so much that, whenever she fell and tears came into her eyes, he had to cry himself. And the scare came when one morning she didn’t want to get out of bed and looked really sick. Then the most expensive doctor in all the land was summoned to make her well quickly and happy again. But the doctor tapped and listened to her from head to toe and then said in great perplexity: “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. King, I can’t find anything. Your daughter must be suffering from a disease I have never come across during my entire lifetime.”

  Now the good old king was even more scared, so he went to see the princess himself and asked her what on earth was the matter. And she told him she wanted a cloud: once she had that, she would be well again immediately. “But a real one!” she said. What a shock that was, for, as anyone can imagine, it is far from easy to get hold of a real cloud, even for a king. All day long he was so worried that he couldn’t rule, and that evening he had letters sent out to all the clever men in his kingdom ordering them to drop everything and come forthwith to the royal palace.

  Next morning they were all assembled, the doctors and the ministers, the stargazers and the weathermen, and the king stood up on his throne so that everyone in the hall could hear him properly and shouted: “Si-lence!” Instantly you could have heard a pin drop, and the king announced: “To the one among you wise men who brings my daughter a cloud from the sky I will give as much gold and silver as can be heaped onto the biggest wagon in all the land!” When the clever men heard that, they started then and there to study, to ponder, to scheme, and to calculate. For they all wanted that heap of gold and silver, who wouldn’t? One especially smart fellow even began building a tower that was to reach up to the clouds, the idea being that, when the tower was finished, he would climb up, grab a cloud, and then cash in the reward. But before the tower was even halfway up, it fell down. And none of the others had any luck either; not one of the wise men could get the princess the cloud she so badly wanted. She grew thinner and sicker, thinner and thinner, since from sheer misery she never touched a morsel, not even matzo with butter.

  One fine day the garden boy, who the princess sometimes used to play with outdoors before she got sick, looked into the palace to see whether any of the vases needed flowers. So it came about that he saw her lying in her bed, under a silken coverlet, pale as snow. All through the last few days he had been puzzling over why she never came out into the garden anymore. And that is why he asked her, “What is the matter, little princess? Why don’t you come out into the sunshine anymore?” And so she told him, too, that she was sick and wouldn’t get well again until someone brought her a cloud. The garden boy thought for a bit, then exclaimed, “But that’s quite easy, little princess!” “Is it?” the princess asked in surprise. “Is it quite easy? All the wise men in the land have been rack
ing their brains in vain, and you claim that it’s quite easy?” “Yes,” the garden boy said, “you just have to tell me what a cloud is made of.” That would have almost made the princess laugh if she hadn’t been so weak. She replied, “What silly questions you ask! Everybody knows that clouds are made of cotton!” “I see, and will you also tell me how big a cloud is?” “You don’t even know that?” she said in surprise. “A cloud is as big as my pillow. You can see that for yourself if you’ll just pull the curtain aside and look up at the sky.” Whereupon the garden boy went to the window, looked up at the sky, and exclaimed, “You’re right! Just as big as your pillow!” Then he went off and soon returned, bringing the princess a piece of cotton as big as her pillow.

  I needn’t bother with the rest. Everyone can easily imagine how the princess’s eyes lit up and her lips turned red and she got well again, how the good old king rejoiced, how the garden boy didn’t want the promised reward but preferred to marry the princess, and they lived happily ever after. That’s Jacob’s story.

  * * *

  Jacob stands motionless at the little opening, his whole attention absorbed by the passing countryside. Lina taps his leg.

  He looks down and asks, “What is it?”

  “Do you remember the fairy tale?” she asks.

  “Which one?”

  “About the sick princess?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it true?”

  It is clear from his expression that he finds it strange for her to be thinking of that just now.

  “Of course it’s true,” he says.

  “But Siegfried and Rafi wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Maybe you didn’t tell it properly?”

  “I told it exactly as you did. But they say there’s no such thing in the whole world.”

  “No such thing as what?”

  “That a person can get well again by being given a bunch of cotton.”

  Jacob bends down and lifts her up to the little window.

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?” says Lina. “The princess wanted a bunch of cotton as big as a pillow? And when she had it she got well again?”

  I see Jacob’s mouth widen, and he says, “Not exactly. She wished for a cloud. The point is that she thought clouds are made of cotton, and that’s why she was satisfied with cotton.”

  Lina looks out for a while, surprised, it seems to me, before asking him: “But aren’t clouds made of cotton?”

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz

  The Most Popular Family Story

  I can’t say it doesn’t bother me that the tradition I’m about to relate both came into existence and vanished before my time. In those days our family was still extensive—the term “vast” suggests itself—and an occasion of some importance was needed to gather all its members in one place. Ordinary birthdays were not enough. My only bridge to this time, which I feel is most accurately described as “in those days,” was my father. When he passed away, I felt that I hadn’t been sufficiently informed about what it was like “in those days.” The information I did receive seemed more precious than ever all of a sudden. I knew nothing more would be added—by whom?—and I began to regard the few stories as a treasure to be handled with care.

  It was usually births that brought the entire family together, not that anyone decided it should be that way. But, as my father recalled, more often than not the cries of a newborn would accompany these events. Coincidence? He once asked me, who had attended only my own birth. He waited for a moment and began shaking his head, as if convinced that whatever my theories about the answer to his question, they were of exceptional stupidity. However, if it was not a coincidence, he asked, then what was the reason? I sat there, acting as if it pained me not to know the answer, and after I had shrugged my shoulders enough he revealed why it is that births present the ideal occasion for family gatherings. First, they happen only infrequently, much more so than birthdays, for example. Second, every decent human being feels the desire to see and touch and kiss a new family member. A sense of family, according to my father, was more than a mere theory. Third, they allow those in attendance—after admiring the newborn child and handing over their gifts—to swiftly and without delay sit down to fulfill the actual purpose of the gathering. They can ask about each other’s health, how business is going, and what news has emerged since the last birth. No one feels overlooked by this: not the baby—obviously—not the mother, who is busy with her child and her gifts, and also not the father, who is either drunk or in a serendipitous stupor. And lastly, my father explained to me, births have a tendency to induce a certain gleefulness in those present as soon as the door is opened before them. It is likely because of this that some stories were never told at these gatherings, while others were retold time and time again.

  Uncle Gideon, the owner of the most popular family story, must have been an impressive man. At large events, isn’t it true that there are usually a hundred different conversations going on at the same time, and what might sound like an incomprehensible hubbub to someone who has just entered the room in fact conveys a hundred different meanings? Yet when Uncle Gideon spoke, the others went silent. He wasn’t the richest member of the family, not at all. Nor was he the poorest. Nevertheless, no one had to fear hardship were they to fall out of favor with him. Before he would tell the story, there always had to be a substantial amount of pleading; everyone knew this. They pleaded with him as though the pleading were part of the story, as though he couldn’t start before he had been pleaded with enough. Then everyone felt the moment approach when it was Uncle Gideon’s turn to say: Very well.

  He was quite an old man already when his story achieved such renown. My father would describe to me his mouth and the scar on his forehead and his hair, and also the way he dressed and what his hands were doing while he was telling the story. Once my father said, Gideon was a very old man when they took him to Majdanek, but still.

  I don’t know why the story became so popular. Sometimes I feel like I heard it before, a long time ago, without my Uncle Gideon in it; but I may be mistaken. I think it’s not a bad story, but not a great one either. Its remarkable success must have stemmed from Uncle Gideon’s charisma, or from the taste of those who lived in those days. In any case, the reason remains obscure to me. My father told it to me ten or twenty times, as if he felt obliged to continue a tradition that the story must be retold again and again. Only a force as powerful as death itself could stop it. And because on the one hand I don’t want to be an ungrateful son to my father, and on the other I have no intention of holding onto this same story for as long as that, I’m setting it down now to get it off my chest. Every time he told it, my father would act as though he were telling it for the first time. He wanted to feel my curiosity, to savor my surprise and keep me in suspense again and again. I have to admit, whether I want to or not, that every time I heard Uncle Gideon’s story I enjoyed it a little more.

  Before I continue, there is one last obstacle to overcome, or rather, I would like to say how I intend to circumvent it. That is to say, the story has many versions. Whenever my father told it to me, it was different, albeit always revolving around Uncle Gideon, of course, who—in every version—had to travel to London on business. Nearly everything beyond that needs to be treated with caution. Most of the essential details in telling the story may be more accurately described as median values. I have calculated them myself, taking into account the deviations that occurred in every direction when my father told the story. Sadly, I’m only just now—much too late—beginning to ask myself whether Uncle Gideon himself may not have been at the origin of the different versions; and whether in the end it may be this very circumstance that lay at the heart of the story’s puzzling success. This, then, is the most popular family story:

  In the winter of 1922, Uncle Gideon travels to London. His journey is not for pleasure, as a stranger might presume. Two machines need to be procured for the hosiery factory of which Gideon—for all intents and purposes�
��is the director. Uncle Gideon hates traveling.

  He has never before really left Lublin, despite having almost reached the age of sixty. One time he made it to Lviv, a few times as far as Krakow, not counting the occasional holiday—usually spent in Sopot. Uncle Gideon likes to say: Traveling is the pastime of the dissatisfied. He likes to add: He who cannot find the world at home is also not at home in the world. These words are followed by a short silence, after which Uncle Gideon takes a cigar and places it between his teeth. The order remains unchanged, and in the short pause between the two sentences, Uncle Menachem has already reached for the box of matches. Anyway, Uncle Gideon feels more comfortable at home than anywhere else. As if to prove it, he looks at his wife, Aunt Linda, and at that moment everyone looks at her, too. And already a faint smile is making the rounds, because Aunt Linda is just a little too intimidating for Uncle Gideon’s words to be completely believable. Ultimately, he may mean the exact opposite, though no one knows for sure, and even Aunt Linda is smiling and appears to be flattered by her husband’s praise.

  So Uncle Gideon reluctantly travels to London and during the crossing is already plagued by a strange feeling. The water is calm, and fear of seasickness unwarranted. Uncle Gideon carries with him three different types of medication, for he has suffered from a weak stomach from a young age. The steward spills coffee on the plaid blanket that’s spread over Uncle Gideon’s lap but removes it quickly enough that his trousers—the dark brown ones made of Belgian wool, Aunt Linda interjects—remain untouched. London is shrouded in fog, like one reads about in the magazines. Uncle Gideon is not surprised. He takes a hackney carriage to his hotel. He can barely see what is right in front of him, yet the English cabbie hurtles on at speeds that would be appropriate only in the best of weather. It costs him his tip.