“Rudolf, what are you talking about? Our Berta is a quick learner. Isn’t that right, Berta? Aren’t you a quick learner?”
Little Berta pursed her lips and said, “What can you expect, with a mother like that.”
“Where did you learn to speak this way?”
“From me,” Rudolf answered and scratched the back of his head. “And I heard it from Aunt Wilhelmine.”
“So. So,” Berta said, and considered. “But I was always a quick learner. Straight As. Yes. Yes. Look now! All As on my transcript. You don’t believe me? Ask Aunt Wilhelmine then. You’re being unfair. I was never dumb. Never!”
“So. So,” said Little Berta, and grinned maliciously; but then she hunched over and shivered with an overwhelming sense of defeat. Rudolf rose up from his corner, walked stiffly over to Little Berta, patted her shoulders, awkwardly caressed her hair, looked down at his sister with the expert eye of a specialist—for he was a specialist in the matter of defeat—and said, “Don’t take it like that. You get used to it.” A moment later, the little boy, the specialist in matters of defeat, crashed past his mother and out of the bedroom. He ran through the living room and off down the hallway.
He was truly frantic. At that time of year, diarrhea permeated his day-to-day life as breathing permeates prayer.
THE CONVERSATION WITH THE TEACHER
The conversation with the teacher ended the same as the one with the principal. But Berta still couldn’t understand. She stood gawking at the teacher as if she’d been clubbed over the head, staring at her in the hope that in the next moment, or the moment after the next, at least, the teacher would offer some consolatory words about her and the little girl she had brought into the world.
“My dear Mrs. Schrei. Maybe Berta really is a quick learner. However, in view of the circumstances. I have forty children in my class. I can’t just concentrate on one individually until, sooner or later, most likely later, she’s ready to show me she has at least some notion of what one plus one might equal …”
“But Little Berta knows that!” her mother countered, and the teacher shrugged ruefully.
“But she doesn’t know it when I ask her. And I can’t know what’s going on in her head. She doesn’t even know the name of the city where she was born, the city where she lives. I can’t worry myself constantly over what’s going on in her mind. Just try and imagine, worrying constantly over forty little minds. It’s impossible! Utterly impossible! Now, I know this isn’t exactly an ideal solution. But how can I get through my material if I have to worry what’s going on in each of forty little minds? It simply can’t be done.”
“Give her another year. I know Rudolf was a bit of a bad student from the beginning. But Berta. Isn’t Berta a quick learner? Hasn’t it always been that way? Why should things be different now?”
“My dear Mrs. Schrei. You’re giving this little transfer too much significance. What’s really happened, after all? Berta’s changing classes. That’s it. Try to look at the whole thing as a kind of organizational matter. It really is nothing. It says nothing about Berta’s future development. She may yet grow up to be a Madame Curie!”
“No. I just can’t accept it. You can’t turn my daughter into a special student. That’s something you just cannot do! I always got straight As, Miss, and my daughter will also get nothing but straight As. That I promise you! On my life: I will make sure of it. Just one more year. A year!”
“Calm down, Mrs. Schrei. Please, don’t get so worked up …”
“My Berta is going to be placed in a special school! My Berta is supposed to be an idiot! And I should calm down?”
The teacher tried to console Berta Schrei with sympathetic words as Berta walked out of the classroom, waving her hands.
In a trance, she walked in the direction of Allerseelengasse 13, bravely choking back her tears. But hardly had she taken the first step onto the sidewalk of her street than the shame of it all shook her and the defeat streamed from her eyes, and it was more blind than seeing that she stumbled along Allerseelengasse, till she made it to building 13.
THE USUAL, WILHELM, THE USUAL
After her conversations with the principal and the teacher, Berta stopped upbraiding her daughter. She no longer bothered to remind Little Berta to cinch her schoolbag tight or to carry it up on her back.
Whenever Wilhelm called from Felsenstein to find out what was new, Berta told him that everything was the same.
She didn’t mention how Little Berta was skulking around the house like Rudolf, dragging her schoolbag like some heavy, nearly immovable burden, and she likewise neglected to mention their daughter’s transfer to a special school.
When Wilhelm asked whether she had gone to see the teacher and, if so, what the latter had wished to tell her, Berta replied, “The usual, Wilhelm, the usual.” She also failed to mention Little Berta’s transformation from conscientious and motivated to slovenly and utterly indifferent.
There was a time when, if Little Berta’s fountain pen had slipped from her hand, or if she’d dripped a small blot of ink in her notebook, she would rush to rewrite its entire contents in a fresh one, and very neatly at that. Her once precise, rounded, and actually quite beautifully formed letters seemed now to jut up and down every which way across the page. One would lean to the left, another to the right; there wasn’t a single example of a letter keeping within its prescribed lines. Little Berta’s writing trailed upward, downward, ran aground on ink blot after ink blot, and she would say laconically, without fail, about each assignment she worked on: “I can’t do it.”
Not once did she manage to write out a text correctly, let alone form a complete sentence on her own. Little Berta and Rudolf vied for the title of most forgetful, recollected neither the Ten Commandments nor the name of their hometown; they even swore they didn’t know the name of the street where they played. If Berta lost patience, refused to believe her children’s confusion, and shouted out in desperation, “All right, out with it! How much is one plus one? You must at least still know that!” still she would get no more of an answer than the teacher had. Shrugged shoulders. Silence. Perhaps a meager “I don’t know.”
The result was that Berta herself came to doubt her children’s comprehension, and in spite of Wilhelm’s constant questions, was reduced to simply repeating: “Everything’s the same as always. What do you want me to say, Wilhelm? Everything’s as it was. That’s right. Yes. As you say.”
ANOTHER DREAM, WHICH GAVE HER MUCH TO THINK ABOUT
The night after the conversation with the teacher, Berta Schrei had another dream, which gave her much to think about. Little Berta was sitting at home with Rudolf; they were doing their homework. When the doorbell rang, Little Berta ran to the door, opened it, and a corpse was flung in at her feet, “The corpse! The corpse!” Little Berta screamed, “Rudolf, the corpse is here!” She walked in a circle around the corpse, and pointed at it as Rudolf ran over. The two children stared at each other, slapping their thighs with laughter, then dragged the corpse by its legs into the living room with their combined strength. They knelt down by it, stared at it, winked at one another, stood up, danced a “Ring Around the Rosie,” then knelt back down beside the corpse again. Hours passed, days, until hunger drove them out of the apartment; they walked from one house door to the other. Beggar children, imbeciles, with mindless hunger shining from their eyes.
In the dream Berta saw herself lying there, the corpse in the living room, saw her children on their journey, saw an edict tacked up to the notice board of the building: “Beggars, imbeciles, and maniacs are to be turned away from the door.” She saw her children at the trashcans, how they struggled with stray dogs over a bone. Once they’d rifled through the trashcans and waste heaps of Donaublau and crammed themselves full of whatever they found there, sometimes confusing an old scrap of fabric with a bit of food, they turned back to Allerseelengasse, saw a new edict tacked up on the notice board of building 13, collided with one another, giggled, danced a “R
ing Around the Rosie,” and assured each other that they couldn’t read the edict’s words: “The corpse in question is not to be buried.”
Again and again, they danced their “Ring Around the Rosie” in front of the notice board, then with great hooting and giggling, madness in their eyes, the trashcan and waste-heap odors and scraps clinging to their bodies, they stormed up the stairs, once more to wait for hours, for days beside the corpse, until hunger drove them back out. They wandered like ghosts through the city of Donaublau, decrepit, dingy, feral creatures that everyone ignored, and in the face of whom everyone fled.
Hand in hand they skulked, stumbled, ran from door to door, from trashcan to trashcan, from waste heap to waste heap, later returning to their mother’s corpse, to slap their thighs with laughter, to yowl out dirges, to cry, to dance in a strangely disjointed manner, pausing once in a while to kneel down by the corpse, then staring off into space. And the dreaming Berta found it odd that no one came to bury her, to pull the children away from their deathwatch, or at least to beat them to death.
“Life as such. Life as such. Did you deny it?”
“Life as such. Life as such. Did you steal it?”
“The weight of things. The weight of things. Did you forget it?”
“The weight of things. The weight of things. Did you dream it?”
The dreaming Berta wanted to come to her corpse’s aid, to close Rudolf’s and Little Berta’s mouths, but scream as her body might, it was voiceless. The strain only made something crack in her head. The children could see clearly how the corpse had begun bleeding from its eyes, nose, and ears. They pointed at it with their spindly fingers, giggled, and chanted their song more ghoulishly and boisterously than ever.
“Life as such. Life as such. Did you deny it?”
“Life as such. Life as such. Did you steal it?”
“The weight of things. The weight of things. Did you forget it?”
“The weight of things. The weight of things. Did you dream it?”
And at that they returned to dancing in their strangely disjointed manner.
“Soon they’ll come to lock away the corpse! Soon they’ll come and seal up the apartment! Rudolf! Berta! This living room will become a coffin! Rudolf! Berta! This apartment will become a grave!”
Wilhelm came, along with the work crew who’d been employed to seal off apartment 12 in building 13 on Allerseelengasse, to keep the stench of rot inside.
Wilhelm signaled for Berta’s brood to go with him; they shook their heads no; Wilhelm thought a while and decided: “When I return from Felsenstein, I’ll pick you up. In the meantime, Berta will look after you.”
The voiceless Berta screamed, “I’m not Berta! Wilhelm! I’m only the corpse! The corpse in question is me! Take the children with you!”
The children were nailed inside the apartment with the corpse in question. As their tomb was quite generously proportioned, with numerous burial chambers, it didn’t occur to the children at first that they’d been buried alive. With time, though, the madness of hunger began to ravage the children’s brains; they began to circle the corpse; the madness of hunger tore their jaws open wide. For long days their hunger encouraged them, before they finally wedged their spindly fingers into their mother’s rotting flesh and gnawed down to her bones.
The children’s skin slowly dried out until they looked more like prunes than people, walked crablike on all fours, howled indecipherable sounds and pounced on one another. When Wilhelm finally knocked at the door, they could no longer speak or stand upright. That noise, the uproar from inside the tomb, the scraping and the scratching, couldn’t possibly come from his children. Dumbfounded, Wilhelm asked himself whether a corpse could become restless in its grave, but he was probably just exhausted, he thought, and so it was best to assume he hadn’t actually heard anything.
“Odd. I could have sworn they were in there,” he mused, shaking his head, consoled by the thought that there was, after all, far more to the world than an average citizen like himself could ever imagine.
He walked downstairs, exited the building, more bemused than unsettled, more soothed than perturbed, more concerned with his duties as chauffeur and Come-hither-boy than with the strange goings-on in the thirteenth building on a small street in the city of Donaublau.
WILHELM MAY SOON COME BACK
Nightmares of this sort hacked away at Berta Schrei’s evenings, poisoning her sleep and weakening her defenses against the weight of things, making it harder and harder to make peace somehow with life as such and survive for the time that remained until Wilhelm’s return from Felsenstein. She chose not to tell Wilhelm about her nightmares over the phone; in view of their regularity, they were hardly news. And what Wilhelm wanted to know was news, not her day-to-day.
And though she had been yearning for weeks now for Wilhelm’s return, with ever-mounting intensity, yet she had also thought it better not to mention her yearning.
Instead, she set down the receiver each time hoping quietly that Wilhelm might come home soon, and that he would be able to explain to Little Berta how her transfer at school was of hardly any significance in her life to come, and to explain to her—to Berta—how to help her children put up with their benighted existence, and how she herself might maneuver through the leafless season that was ineluctably approaching.
If only the leafless season were already past, and the children, especially Rudolf, were cheerful, looking forward to the Christmas festivities, and the boy could take the winter break to get used to the diarrhea that tormented him each autumn when school started up, to get used to his stuttering, to his invariable I don’t know when standing in front of the teacher, and to his bedwetting, and especially to his headaches.
Then, perhaps, Rudolf’s restless nights would grow gradually more serene, his tooth gnashing would abate, and he wouldn’t cry so often in his sleep.
THERE ONCE WERE A PRINCE AND A PRINCESS
An hour came when Berta gave in, when she stopped sharing important life-lessons with her offspring, when she seized on an opportunity she’d long ignored. One morning, noticing the children were loath to get out of bed and put on their clothes, she said nothing, but called the teacher, said the children were sick, and sat down by them on the bed. After three days of this, Berta’s new life with her children was settled.
The children would stay in bed in the mornings, Berta would bring them breakfast, and once their appetite had been sated, all three would begin to sing. If a false note rang out, Berta didn’t reproach them, not even once; and, anyway, because they were her children, and she herself had a knack for music, they had a special flair for microtones, semitones, and other obscure intervals. They sang with all their might, and Rudolf and Little Berta managed to read their song lyrics from the songbook without difficulty. They began their singing hour with “Danube so blue, so blue …” continued with “There once were a prince and a princess …” and finished with “I know not, what does it mean …” then started over with “Danube so blue, so blue.”
After the singing hour they joked and played around. There was no homework, no Fs, no letters home, no black-and-blue marks on their bodies from fighting or gymnastics, no jabs and no jeers, no “ifs” and “buts,” no “on-the-one-hands” or “on-the-others,” and no warnings about behaving better and minding their manners.
Berta told her stories to a rapt audience while she cooked, ironed, and put things in order. Rudolf and Little Berta never left their mother’s side; they circled around her, every single day, caressed her, comforted her when cleaning up seemed to drag on, when she broke a glass while washing up, if she burned the potatoes till they were black rock-hard clumps, if there were scorch marks on the hand towels or nightshirts after she ironed. She might interrupt the Sisyphean task of putting things in order to look for the Faust family photo album or her collection of letters from the front: from her father, her brothers, or Big Rudolf. At last she would come to the solemn decision to put everything in order on
ce and for all.
Despite, or perhaps precisely because of her conscientiousness, she never made much progress in this final task. The children told her it was just too hard to pick out one fixed place for every single object in their apartment, but they also tried to help their mother and not shirk their own responsibility. Dreadful to think how many possible places there were for each and every object in the apartment! Berta could order things this way or that, or some other way altogether. In the end, nothing came of it but pointless discussion, a kind of defeated meditation on the weight of things, useless both to her and her offspring.
JIBBER-JABBER! WAR!
“Yes. Yes,” Berta recounted to her offspring for the umpteenth time. “That’s what it was like then. My mother always used to say, ‘Not for the life of me, Berta. If there’s a direct hit on building 13, then that is the way God wants it. I’m too old to start over again somewhere else anyhow. And suppose building 13 isn’t hit, suppose I was to move away to exactly the place where I would get hit? It’s not logical. That can’t be what God wants. What am I getting at? I’m saying you shouldn’t uproot an old tree and plant it somewhere else. That’s no good for it. No. I’m staying here.’ Me, I said to my mother, Mama, maybe you’re right. But this is war.”
Berta smiled. “And do you know what my mother answered then?”
Rudolf waved her off and said, impatiently, “Jibber-jabber! War! If I hear that one more time … True as the Lord God hung up there on the cross. I’m here and I’m staying here!”
Berta nodded and stared straight ahead, reflecting.
Little Berta asked, breathless, “And did building number 7 get hit?”
Berta nodded, and Rudolf said, “Of course it did. What else?”
“And Grandma was right there in building number 7? ‘I’m just going over for a little chat.’ Didn’t she say that?” asked Little Berta, who always savored the same questions whenever this story was told. Her mother shrugged and kept silent, as she did every time after this question was asked.
The Weight of Things Page 6
