by Jurek Becker
I took the money I’d changed from my pocket and put it on the table. It was still in the envelope from the bank. I didn’t want to carry it back across the border and back again the next time I came over. It had been burning a hole in my pocket the whole time during the border control. Of course, I could hardly ask Klara for a receipt, but we didn’t know each other well enough yet for the money. I resolved to wait for the rest of the evening and then decide whether I could leave the envelope or not. I told myself: If she watches television the entire time, I’ll be none the wiser.
I pulled her down to me by her hair. She didn’t resist and said: I guess you’re right. We kissed. Suddenly, she didn’t seem shy at all. Not because she was kissing me so passionately or skillfully, but more that she was kissing me in a somewhat detached way, almost like it was a matter of course. I wondered why she didn’t want me to buy the blouse for her at the store earlier. I would have liked to turn off the television: it interrupts you because you keep understanding a few words here and there or because you’re trying to remember who the singer reminds you of. But when my hand reached for the switch, Klara pulled it back. I had never made love with the television running, not least because I didn’t own one. She said: Leave it, it’s fine. I once had a thing with a girl who wound her watch in the middle of sex. I got my revenge on her, but I don’t want to say how.
We kissed again for a little while, then we got undressed. First I undressed her, then she undressed me. I tried to hold her in such a way that she couldn’t see the television. We began to make love, but I already knew it wouldn’t be anything special. Her eyes were closed, and she held me without moving, as if that was a rule. Because she was a nurse, I didn’t need to ask her any questions. I like when girls move and make some noise, when they show you there’s something going on with them and you’re not having fun all by yourself. She lay impossibly still, and only her mouth, when we kissed or when she licked her lips, showed me she hadn’t fallen asleep. I tried all sorts of things, I explored her body—which all of a sudden seemed tiny to me—for any sensitive spots. I had once learned in a sex education movie that everyone has these spots, you just have to find them. But I couldn’t find them.
A new program started on the television. Maybe she was listening intently and wasn’t thinking about us at all. I thought I could probably risk leaving the money, she didn’t seem like she would cheat me out of it. Then I couldn’t wait any longer, and the lovemaking had to come to an end. I leaned close to her ear and asked her whether she had finished, too. She said: A while ago. I resolved to deal with this issue later, if we stayed together. I told her: If you show you’re having fun more, you’ll have more fun. But she didn’t react. She drank a little wine, then she said that every three weeks she had to work the night shift. It was the second clear sign that she had plans for me. I would have wished for a better sign, but at least I now knew that I could leave the money. It seemed too early to be talking about living arrangements on this first night.
I fell asleep and dreamed of home, as I do almost every night. I woke up and was shocked, but Klara immediately said there was still enough time. She wondered about the money on the table, which she had discovered in the meantime, and I explained it to her. I said I wanted to leave it here until next time, because it would be stupid to carry forbidden money back and forth across the border. I acted as though we had already agreed on our next meeting, and she didn’t seem to mind. She stood up, took the envelope with the money and put it in a drawer with her underwear. She asked whether I knew exactly how much it was. I said yes, because naturally I knew exactly how much it was, it was a stupid question. She came back to the couch and stroked my chest, which surprised me, and we made love again. She had completely changed, as if the first time she had just been practicing and only now was getting serious. I thought how mysterious love is. She looked at me now and moved her arms and used her hands, and I liked her a hundred times better. I asked what was going on all of a sudden, and she said: What do you mean? As if she didn’t even know what I was talking about.
Later, she went to the kitchen to make some sandwiches. I was happy, because it was quite nice with her and I could just as well have ended up with someone else. Of course, I wouldn’t have had to end up with just anyone, I know that. But when you’re desperately trying to save money, you can’t be too picky, and most of all you can’t wait forever. I shouted to the kitchen, asking whether there was anything I could do to help. She laughed a little and shouted back that I should just stay put and relax. I liked that, too.
As I was getting dressed, I saw some numbers on the television; it was running the entire time. They looked like lottery numbers, and when Klara returned with the sandwiches, I asked whether there was a lottery in East Berlin. She said: Of course there’s a lottery. I enjoyed the sandwiches. The slices of meat were cut very thick. She had brought the tomato juice, but I preferred to have some more wine. I told her that I play the lottery regularly every week in West Berlin, for four marks. I always play the same numbers and in the first week right away won five marks, but nothing since then. She did some calculations in her head then she said, four marks every week, that’s more than two hundred marks a year. She asked whether there wasn’t anything better I could be spending that kind of money on.
I explained to her that there’s nothing better to spend four marks a week on. I don’t need to be told that the chances of becoming a rich man by playing the lottery are small. But if I didn’t play, the chances would be even smaller, and that hope is worth four marks a week to me. I told Klara about my mother, who has a similar habit—she just doesn’t play the lottery. She gives the same amount of money to the church every month, not for a happy afterlife, I know that much, but because she’s expecting some kind of miracle in this life. A few times she has encouraged me to do the same, but I consider her method pointless. Because if you could bribe God with four marks a week, he wouldn’t be any good in the first place. When I play the lottery, I can become a millionaire for the same money.
Klara thought this was nonsense. She said: After all, it’s your money you’re throwing out the window. There wasn’t much time left, and I didn’t want to attract any attention on my first trip by being too late. I asked whether there was anything else she wanted me to get for her besides the record. She said nothing came to mind at the moment, but she could think about it until next time. She asked whether I wanted to come back the following Saturday, and I said yes, next Saturday. We have a proverb that goes: If you want your ox to pull your plow a little longer, you’ll have to wait a little longer for its leather.
She told me she had to work the weekend after next. I said: It’s a while until then. She sat next to me in her underwear. I could have made love to her again right then, but I didn’t even kiss her. She had the bus timetable in her head. She said that to be safe I shouldn’t wait for the very last one, because sometimes the bus was canceled. As she got dressed for the walk to the bus stop, I had a really good idea. I asked her for a piece of paper and wrote down all the numbers I played in the other lottery. I told her to mark these same numbers on a lottery ticket and play them for me every week from now on. I didn’t know how much a lottery ticket was over here. Klara said about fifty pfennig, but she didn’t know exactly. In any case the price was minute at this exchange rate. I was pleased with my idea. Of course, the same exchange rate applied to the winnings, but a quarter of the grand prize is still a grand prize. I told her to make sure to remember it every week, in case I ever forgot to mention it. She was welcome to think this was crazy, if only she didn’t forget to buy the tickets. I was so excited at this new prospect that I drank the rest of the wine from the bottle. On the television they were now showing soccer. I would have liked to watch it, but we had to go.
There were a few people waiting at the bus stop; the last bus hadn’t come. Klara said that was a good sign. They never canceled two buses in a row. We walked a few steps away from the bus stop so we could talk better. Agai
n, she explained the way to the border in detail. Then she said she had remembered something I could get for her. She wanted a certain kind of hair spray, and I promised I would find it. She said the hair spray you could buy over here was so terribly sticky and didn’t smell very nice either. I said she didn’t have to explain herself: if she wanted something, I would just get it for her. Then we walked up and down a little bit because it was too chilly to stay in one spot. When the bus came around the corner, I reminded her again about the lottery tickets. She hugged me and asked quietly whether I really liked her. I said: Yes.
Translated by Jonathan Becker
The Invisible City
When I was two years old I came to this ghetto. At age five, I left it again, headed for the camp. I don’t remember a thing. This is what people told me, this is what is in my papers, and this was, therefore, my childhood. Sometimes I think: What a shame that something else isn’t written there. At any rate, I know the ghetto only from meager hearsay.
My father talked to me about it a few times, reluctantly and seldom. During his lifetime I wasn’t curious enough to outsmart him with subtle questions, and then it was too late. Nevertheless, I wrote stories about the ghettos as if I were an expert. Perhaps I thought that if I could only write long enough, the memories would come. Perhaps at some point I even began to take some of my inventions for memories. Without memories of childhood, it’s as if you’re condemned to constantly carry around with you a box whose contents you don’t know. And the older you get, the heavier the box feels and the more impatient you become to finally open it.
Now the floor of my room is littered with the photos of this exhibition. If I had memories, they would have to be at home there, on those streets, behind those walls, among these people. The women in the pictures interest me most: I don’t know what my mother looked like. No photos of her exist. She died in the camp. I could just choose one of the women, I suppose. My father said that she was strikingly pretty, of course.
Most of the pictures convey a tranquility for which we yearn. They radiate peacefulness. In my eyes, they depict something of the good old days. The photographer seems to have been striving to prove that the ghetto wasn’t as gruesome a place as enemy propaganda might have insinuated, that things happened there as they do among the rest of humanity. Even though these people were a bit peculiar, a bit different. But we knew that before. If we look closely, we might even think that the ghetto was a place of meditation.
The young Jewish policeman, who examines the paperwork of a suspicious-looking passerby, as is the duty of police officers all over the world. The barber, who has taken off his cap before the photographer and waits for customers in front of his wooden house, which is certainly comfortable on the inside. The bearded man, who pulls a wagon with rubber tires over the cobblestones. The worker, who isn’t exactly killing himself. Even the four Jews who carry a dead person alongside a wall don’t deserve more than a brief moment of pity. For four people, carrying a corpse can’t be all that hard, and death happens everywhere. We might actually have more sympathy for the German guard next to the sentry box, standing there so far from home and so lost. It’s so damn lonely at the entrance to the ghetto. No one wants to go in and no one out. The pictures suggest that everything is carefully regulated here, in a manner deeply inherent to the things and people.
In short, I think up theories about the photographer’s objectives. I see through his intentions; the guy can’t fool me. But all of a sudden, something unsettling happens. Individual pictures absorb my gaze. I fall into them, far from any intention to write a text. I see two pictures of children. In the first, they wait for rations to be handed out, pots and little buckets and spoons in hand. In the second, they’re wearing red caps and staring at the photographer. Interrupted at play and nonetheless motionless. No, a child as small as I must have been then is not to be seen. But there are probably children in the pictures who knew me, who took things away from me, or beat me up or ordered me around. Perhaps there is someone standing there who would be my best friend today, had things taken a slightly more favorable course.
I hate sentimentalities. They cloud the mind. I’d prefer to close up all the holes they might crawl out of. Each time my father was overcome by emotion, I left the room until he got hold of himself again. Suddenly, that’s irrelevant. The pictures fill me with emotion, me of all people, and I have to wipe the most ridiculous tears from my eyes. No girls in the photos, just boys, boys, and more boys. Why is that? Is that the reason girls, for as far back as I can remember, have always been special creatures to me?
In one of the pictures, Jewish firefighters drive through the ghetto. What was it about those firefighters? My father told me something, that they existed, that he knew one of them, or that they always came too late, or that there was always something burning. I have forgotten even that. Constantly, I have the feeling that I simply need to make a bit more of an effort to remember, instead of waiting lazily and lethargically for the memories to come to me. But I make an effort until I go crazy, and nothing comes. Only the pictures lie in my room, so incomprehensibly near.
When I received them, when I opened the package and began to spread them out, I soon had the sense that I needed to put them in a different order. But, in what kind of an order? What belonged to what and what should be separated? Do children belong with children and bearded men with bearded men and tradesmen with tradesmen? And police officers with police officers and blondes with blondes? In any case, the order isn’t right. It’s like a crack in a disk that ruins the most beautiful record. I order and reorder the pictures over and over again. I want to solve the puzzle. I put the train station on the outside, the cemetery on the outside, the streets in the center, wooden houses together, stone houses together, the workshops in between, the border on the border. Again and again everything is wrong. The little lamp of memory fails to light.
I stare at the pictures and search for that one decisive piece of my life until my eyes are sore, but only the vanishing lives of the others are recognizable. To what end should I speak of outrage or sympathy? I want to climb down among them and don’t find the way.
Translated by Martin Bäumel and Tracy Graves
Acknowledgments
“The Wall” was originally published under the title “Die Mauer”in Nach der ersten Zukunft, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980.
“The Tale of the Sick Princess” is taken from Jurek Becker’s novel Jacob the Liar, translated into English by Leila Vennewitz, published by Arcade Publishing.
“The Most Popular Family Story” was originally published under the title “Die beliebteste Familiengeschichte” in Nach der ersten Zukunft, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980.
“The Suspect” was originally published under the title “Der Verdächtige” in Nach der ersten Zukunft, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980.
“Romeo” was originally published under the same title in: Nach der ersten Zukunft, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980.
“The Invisible City” appeared in the catalog accompanying the exhibition Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit (Our Only Chance Is to Work), 1990, and was collected in Ende des Grössenwahns, published by Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996. This translation first appeared in My Father, the Germans and I, by Jurek Becker, published by Seagull Books in 2010, and is reprinted here by the kind permission of the publishers.
