“Christ Almighty! Christ Almighty!” Little Berta shouted and scratched her chin.
“She was very strict but very proper. My mother. A wise woman.”
“I like you better,” Rudolf purred, and laid his head in Berta’s lap. Little Berta growled, “Make a little room for me too! You always have to have everything just for yourself,” and Rudolf scooted reluctantly to the side, so Little Berta too could have the chance to put her head on her mother’s lap.
Berta laid her left arm around her daughter and her right arm around her son. She was kneeling in the bedroom on the marriage bed; Berta counted the chimes from the wall clock: it was eight in the evening, two days, or so she thought, before Wilhelm’s return from Felsenstein.
HURRY HOME TO YOUR WIFE
Berta Schrei did not know that the chauffeur and Come-hither-boy had lied to his employer for reasons that even he himself did not understand: “My wife is bedridden at home right now with a fever of 104. I hoped it would subside with the passing of time. But now I’ve just been informed that the fever refuses to go down.”
“But Wilhelm, why didn’t you say so earlier? I was already thinking to myself,” Johannes Mueller-Rickenberg said, “something’s not right with Wilhelm. So: how many days do you think your Dulcinea’s recovery will take?” Wilhelm declared it would be three days at most, then stressed his regret that they had fallen into this predicament. Two thin creases of displeasure emerged between the eyebrows of Johannes Mueller-Rickenberg’s forehead. The down-turned corners of his mouth, with the lower lip drawn over the upper, signaled to Wilhelm his employer’s inclination to put the chauffeur to a test.
“If you must rush off to your Dulcinea, you’ll also have to come up with some excuse to give the countess, because I’m staying put—don’t forget to report to her that my own health is in an extremely precarious state right now. That’ll make her stop fretting so much about my absence. And let’s not forget the most important thing of all: the crime novels. Tell the countess I’ve brought them over with me personally from France. Just pick up a few French and English ones on the way home. She needs about two or three more weeks’ worth of crime-fodder. Keep that in mind when you do your shopping! And once your Dulcinea recovers, don’t neglect to tell her we’ll be busy for a little while longer in Felsenstein this year. That’s all.”
Johannes Mueller-Rickenberg nodded, turned around, and crossed the yard, with its shading of fall colors, his hands clasped behind his back and his shoulders bowed slightly forward. Wilhelm knew his master would be heading back to the house; he was in a hurry. His new conquest, Francesca, a fresh import from Brittany, needed attending to.
GRAVEDIGGER, THEN INFANTRYMAN, FOR A TIME
Berta answered Rudolf’s question for the umpteenth time.
“What was Grandpa again?”
“A gravedigger. An infantryman. A gravedigger. When he was an infantryman, he deserted,” Berta chuckled. “He hid out in the hayloft of a farmer named Zweifel in Gnom. Until the war was over. Zweifel’s daughter smuggled him bread and speck. The farmer could never know about it. And he never did find out.” Berta chuckled again. “Yes, yes. Old farmer Zweifel was a distinguished gentleman in those days.”
“That’s not what I mean! In October! What happened with Grandpa in October?” Rudolf asked. It was only this one story, the story about October, that managed to hold his attention and calm him down somewhat.
“Of course. It was in the newspaper. Someone found a body. In the Mueller-Rickenberg forest, in the vicinity of Gnom near St. Neiz am Grünbach. Under a mound of earth, neatly covered with spruce branches. A grave. Shot in the head. Buried three to four weeks before. The corpse was gagged and its hands were bound behind its back.”
“And the corpse was the gravedigger?”
Berta shrugged. “He went into the forest, and he never came back out.”
“But how do you know that that was Grandpa’s body?” Rudolf insisted.
“Well, you know, they notified me.”
“Why didn’t you go looking for Grandpa? Maybe that unidentified corpse wasn’t actually him?”
Berta said: “That’s just how it happened.”
“Did Grandma see the corpse? What did Uncle Wastl think, and Uncle Karl and Uncle Richard? Did they really all think the same thing, that the corpse was definitely the gravedigger’s?”
“It happened in October!” Little Berta said, shoving her brother with her elbow. “Are you stupid? They were all dead by then.”
“Aha,” said Rudolf at length, and then once again, “Aha.”
“Why was my grandpa a gravedigger?” Little Berta asked, and Berta shrugged:
“He just was. He got his job back without any difficulty as soon as the war was done. He had no reason to disappear. The war was already well over.”
Rudolf patted his sister several times on the back and said, “Nothing can kill the gravedigger—he always keeps his word. When he says he’s coming home from the war, then he’ll come. And you know why?”
His sister, bored, answered, “Of course!”
“Then say it! Say it, if you know why!”
Little Berta, insulted, remained silent. Berta answered in her stead: “‘Because I’m a gravedigger. And we must have gravediggers if order is to be kept. That means I have no choice but to survive. It may be I’m the last one who still knows this craft! What happens to a craft when none of its masters return from the front?’”
Berta chuckled and said, “He was just a devoted gravedigger. He just knew what his work meant to people. He loved what he did.”
Berta’s gaze fell on Rudolf’s profile, and her thoughts turned vaguely to her father, the gravedigger, who had been an infantryman for a time, and she said, “Yes. Yes. You really were a good gravedigger.”
Rudolf’s eyes closed, but he went on speaking: “Maybe a gravedigger is something I can be, too,” and Berta thought how very close she and her children had become over those past three days. She didn’t know exactly why, but somehow it seemed right to stay up through the rest of the night. Either to avoid the nightmares, or to sift through her own life and the lives of her children.
Maybe it was all of those things, maybe none of them.
PRECISE, CLEAR, WELL-ROUNDED LETTERS
Berta Schrei had given birth to a boy in the year 1945 and to a girl in the year 1950 and in the year 1958, before the beginning of the leafless season, she saw fit to impart a certain piece of information to Wilhelm, a thing it seemed essential to impart, precisely and without distortions, in very legible letters: precise, clear, and well-rounded. She had always gotten As in handwriting. Her last report card attested to the fact: a certain Berta Faust, resident of building 13, apartment 12 in Allerseelengasse, Donaublau, had graduated with a cumulative grade of A.
Solely for reasons of thrift, Berta conveyed her disclosure in the same blue envelope that had come from the school, an envelope that served to hide—with extraordinary tact—the substance of the letter inside it, just as when the teacher, from pure sympathy and the warmest sense of compassion, had taken pains—again, with great tact—to soften the substance of the school’s decision with regards to Little Bertha, a decision that now loomed all the more ominously before Berta’s eyes, implying that her daughter, who had always learned everything so easily, might be an even worse student than Rudolf. “So much compassion,” as Berta knew already on her way home, “means that her case is hopeless.”
And on that long night, Berta Schrei came to a decision: “Two hopeless cases are a doubly heavy burden.”
AS SHADOWY AND GHOSTLY AS THE WAR YEARS
Wilhelm, still in his chauffeur’s uniform, had imagined that on returning from Felsenstein, at around eleven in the morning, he would be able to march in triumphantly, right before Berta’s eyes, and announce, “What do you say, Berta? Two days earlier than expected! Can you believe it?”
He crept in like a thief, laid his ear against the kitchen door’s keyhole, giggled to himself,
rubbed his hands together cheerfully, then threw the door wide open: “Berta, it’s me!” he shouted, his arms stretched outward.
Then he dropped into the chair disappointed, took off his chauffeur’s cap, thought to himself that his Berta must be out shopping, and cheered up once more as he imagined the look on her face when she came back home and found him sitting there in the kitchen, a sight as perfectly natural as it would be utterly unexpected. He laughed, pleased with both himself and the circumstances, and just then, his eyes fell on the blue envelope on the table.
“I have brought my cursed creations to an end. Your Berta, who loves you.”
He read and smiled, read again and smiled again. At first he didn’t understand, nor would he manage to understand later, when every trace of Berta Schrei had been struck from his life, and his children were lying in the ground.
It wasn’t until the second year following these events that the notion gradually dawned on him that the Earth’s shadow wasn’t simply passing him by, like a dream; that the Earth was a place he could make his home. He arrived somehow at the sense that he was a fully fledged resident of the Earth, and beyond that, the son of a nation, and not just of any nation, but the Isle of the Blessed.
It was with the aid of this feeling, as vague as it was pervasive, that he managed eventually to accept that, at a given moment in his life, a person existed who was capable of anesthetizing her children with sleeping pills and strangling them with her bare hands, only to fall on a butcher knife afterward with all her weight. It came to light that what she’d supposed to lie behind her left breast was instead concealed behind her right: a medical rarity. This circumstance assisted the doctors, who did still want to do their best to save this person’s life.
And in fact Wilhelm could just manage to accept it, so long as he allowed the events before the leafless season in 1958 to remain for him as shadowy and ghostly as the war years.
Much later, when he heard Wilhelmine’s decisive proviso to the proposal he’d never actually made—“If you want to marry me, then it must be on January 13th”—he understood, then, it was time to ask for Wilhelmine’s hand.
Somehow, it was Wilhelmine’s insistence on that date that restored to him the reality of that person, aforementioned, and she recovered her proper name, Berta.
THE BEST MOTHER OF ALL
Berta’s creations, Rudolf and Little Berta, were buried. Only that other creation, Berta Schrei, remained alive. And when the elder Berta saw that Little Berta, as she lay there still, bore no resemblance whatsoever to the Madonna from the painting, even though she’d finally been salvaged from the molding hands of life, she understood then that her delusion, founded on the casual resemblance of an image and a face, had been dispelled the moment it was carried out, and that reality was now spiraling into absurdity. Rudolf looked nothing like the Christ child either.
Berta Schrei roared at the Madonna and the Christ child. Her yearning for an ideal, her wish to shelter Little Berta and Rudolf from the weight of things, had ended in a madwoman’s double murder and her own failed suicide.
“How does it feel to be forty?” Wilhelm asked, and stroked Berta’s stringy mane, running the index finger of his right hand over the arrow-straight part in her hair.
Berta giggled and said, “I really need to go back to the hairdresser,” and tried with a jittery movement of her hand to make her girlish haircut look more womanly.
“Curls always look good on you. On the other hand, a hairstyle without curls also has a certain appeal. Curls all the time, perhaps that’s a bit much? What do you think?”
Berta felt the time had come to smile bashfully like a girl and turn her eyes away from Wilhelm’s gaze. Meanwhile, the Wise Little Mother had been waving her hands protectively, each gesture a bit more emphatic than the one before. But no one in Ward 66 paid much attention to these efforts to alert them to what was happening, and this indifference was yet another sign, to the old woman, that it was time to teach Life, the intruder, a definitive lesson. She stood up from her bed, shuffled over to Wilhelm, and stood there for a while in silence, folding her hands slowly and deliberately and staring down at Berta’s head; with the meekest look in her repertoire of meek looks, she purred at Wilhelm, “No doubt, no doubt,” but with a gently threatening undertone. Wilhelm at last deigned to look at her, disconcerted.
“Our Mother Fortress, the best of all mothers, has brushed Berta’s hair straight. Her hair no longer knows the winding, wending, crimping, curving folds or furrows of the wound, Life. It has achieved a state of peace, it has come to rest. Isn’t that right, dear Berta? Your hair has come to rest. Is that not so? Has it not achieved peace? Has it not come to rest?” Berta looked at the Wise Little Mother, and her body swelled with guilt. Wilhelm waited in vain for the long sigh that he knew so well. But it died away before it could escape her.
Wilhelm grasped Berta’s upper arm, gave her a soft but determined shake, and looked at her through the eyes of Wilhelm the returnee, a man who had tried, at the behest of his comrade, Private First Class Rudolf, his first and only friend, to explain the war to a certain Berta Faust. But when he stood there before her then, on that first day of June, in 1945, he got the feeling somehow that there was nothing to explain, and Wilhelmine’s prying inquiries had burdened more than just his eardrums.
THEN I WILL LOOK AFTER YOUR BERTA
“Wilhelm!” Several times on the journey from Denmark to Frankfurt on the Oder, Private First Class Rudolf shouted his friend’s name, with unexpected vehemence, taking him firmly by the upper arm.
“Wilhelm! Do you remember Berta’s address? Do you?”
Wilhelm nodded placidly; Rudolf shook him and demanded he recite it.
“Where does she live? Tell me right now! Where does Berta live?”
Only when Wilhelm had laid his calming hand on Rudolf’s thigh and answered his question in a tranquil voice did Rudolf begin to breathe easily again.
“Berta Faust. Allerseelengasse, building 13, fourth floor, apartment 12, Donaublau.”
“Exactly. You’ve got it. That’s very good. You have to pay close attention to everything I tell you. You have to look at Berta with my eyes, otherwise you won’t understand her. It’s important. Whoever sees Berta with my eyes will know that he has to protect her from all the filthy people who want to abuse her and disgrace her. She’s a child, Wilhelm. Even if her body is soft and warm, not awkward and bony like it used to be. She had no idea what men and women did together, I had to teach her that, the only men she knew were her father and brothers. The morning after, when she woke up, she looked at me like a baby. Curious. Trusting. Like a newborn suckling, imagining things would stay this peaceful forever. So curious, so trusting—she was an easy mark! Not even a child is so naïve. And yet I did it—you see? I did it with a baby!” And Rudolf’s face clouded over, and he had to force away his thoughts. He reached for Wilhelm’s upper arm again, then, and exclaimed, like a man doubting his own sanity: “And just because I played her the ‘Aquarelles’ and the ‘Blue Danube’!” He shook his head and laughed with rage.
“Do you get it? ‘The Blue Danube’: Strauss, of all things. Do you understand me?”
Wilhelm laid his calming hand again on the Private First Class’s leg and said, “It can’t go on much longer.”
And again Rudolf turned, again he took his friend’s arm, again he shook him and made his plea, as desperate as it was unnecessary: “If they get me, Wilhelm! I mean if they get me! You’re sure you’re listening to me?”
Wilhelm nodded and said, “There’s no need to worry.”
“Wilhelm. Swear to me. Cross your heart. Look me in the eyes. If they get me, do you know what you have to do then?” Wilhelm acceded for the umpteenth time. He knew that Rudolf would never rest until he’d taken his hand and sworn and promised something that to Wilhelm went without saying.
“Fine. I swear it. If they get you, then I’ll take care of your Berta,” and he smiled at his friend good-naturedly. “But
honestly, Rudolf, it’s an unnecessary and ridiculous thing to swear. I think it’s more likely they’ll get me. That would make more sense. If I’m gone, no one will notice.”
Rudolf brushed off his objection. The gesture was curt, but brimming with contempt. “Go tell Goebbels that. Maybe he’ll see the contradiction between making babies and waging war … You’ll never be a proper soldier, you know. You can’t use logic to win a game of chance. Not your kind of logic, in any case!” Private First Class Rudolf began to pontificate as if he were once again Music Teacher Rudolf, in the days when he’d pronounced upon the arcana of harmony before his students’ baffled eyes: “The front has its own logic, and it’s as simple as can be. Them or us. Period. If a single one of them is left, that’s one too many. Whoever grasps that has grasped the essence of the matter. Do you see, Wilhelm? This is the secret of politics by other means.” And Rudolf chucked his friend on the chin, snickered, and concluded, with something that nearly resembled mirth: “No, you’ll never grasp that. You could never understand a thing like that.”
Wilhelm answered gently, “If I understood it, I would stop it.”
At this new instance of Wilhelmish logic, Rudolf cackled and threw back his head.
“That is what I would do. If it had a logic, I mean. Because in that case, a person could stop it by being logical. That seems reasonable,” Wilhelm continued.
Now it was Rudolf who patted Wilhelm’s thigh: “You clearly think madness has no logic. But that’s a decisive misapprehension! Everything has its logic. Everything, understand? But let’s leave that aside for now …”
Wilhelm was well aware of his friend’s disdain for his inferior intelligence, and knew Rudolf considered any attempt to think about the war to be far too difficult a task for Wilhelm’s brain. Because he was so proud of his friendship with this clever man—a music teacher in a secondary school, not just a common trade school, but one where Latin and Greek, French and English were taught—he was able to forget the insults Rudolf was wont to lob at him each time Wilhelm made the least attempt at independent thought.
The Weight of Things Page 7
