A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (3 page)

Without his knowledge, she gave herself an abortion with a knitting-needle.

For a time he lived with his parents; then they sent him back to her. Childhood memories: the fresh bread that he sometimes brought home; the black, fatty loaves of pumpernickel around which the dismal room blossomed into life; my mother’s words of praise.

In general, these memories are inhabited more by things than by people: a dancing top in a deserted street amid ruins, oat flakes in a sugar spoon, grey mucus in a tin spittoon with a Russian trademark; of people, only separate parts: hair, cheeks, knotted scars on fingers; from her childhood days my mother had a swollen scar on her index finger; I held on to it when I walked beside her.

And so she was nothing and never would be anything; it was so obvious that there was no need of a forecast. She already said “in my day”, though she was not yet thirty. Until then, she hadn’t resigned herself, but now life became so hard that for the first time she had to listen to reason. She listened to reason, but understood nothing.

She had already begun to work something out and even, as far as possible, to live accordingly. She said to herself: “Be sensible”—the reason reflex—and “All right, I’ll behave!”

And so she budgeted herself and also learned to budget people and objects, though on that score there was little to be learned: the people in her life—her husband, whom she couldn’t talk to, and her children,
whom she couldn’t yet talk to—hardly counted, and objects were available only in minimal quantities. Consequently, she became petty and niggardly: Sunday shoes were not to be worn on weekdays, street clothes were to be hung up as soon as you got home, her shopping bag wasn’t a toy, the warm bread was for the next day. (Later on, my confirmation watch was locked up right after my confirmation.)

Because she was helpless, she disciplined herself, which went against her grain and made her touchy. She hid her touchiness behind an anxious, exaggerated dignity, but at the slightest provocation a defenseless, panic-stricken look shone through. She was easily humiliated.

Like her father, she thought the time had come to deny herself everything, but then with a shamefaced laugh she would ask the children to let her lick their sweets.

The neighbours liked her and admired her for her Austrian sociability and gaiety; they thought her
FRANK
and
SIMPLE
, not coquettish and affected like city people; there was no fault to be found with her.

She also got on well with the Russians, because she could make herself understood in Slovenian. With them she talked and talked, saying everything she was able to say in the words common to both languages; that unburdened her.

But she never had any desire for an affair. Her
heart had grown heavy too soon: the shame that had always been preached at her had finally become a part of her. An affair, to her mind, could only mean someone “wanting something” of her, and that put her off; she, after all, didn’t want anything of anybody. The men she later liked to be with were
GENTLEMEN
: their company gave her a pleasant feeling that took the place of affection. As long as there was someone to talk with, she felt relaxed and almost happy. She let no one come too close; she could have been approached only with the delicacy which in former days had enabled her to feel that she belonged to herself—but that was long ago; she remembered it only in her dreams.

She became sexless; everything went into the trivia of daily life.

She wasn’t lonely; at most, she sensed that she was only a half. But there was no one to supply the other half. “We rounded each other out so well,” she said, thinking back on her days with the savings-bank clerk; that was her ideal of eternal love.

The postwar period; the big city—in this city, city life was no longer possible. You took shortcuts, up hill and down dale through the rubble, to get there sooner, but even so you found yourself at the end of a long line, jostled by fellow citizens who had ceased to be anything more than elbows and eyes looking into space. A short, unhappy laugh; like the rest of them, you looked away
from yourself, into space; like the rest of them, you gave yourself away, showed that you needed something; still, you tried to assert yourself; pathetic, because that made you just like the people around you: something pushing and pushed, shoving and shoved, cursing and cursed at. In her new situation, her mouth, which up until then had been open at least occasionally—in youthful amazement (or in feminine acting-as-if), in rural fright, at the end of a daydream that lightened her heavy heart—was kept closed with exaggerated firmness, as a sign of adaptation to a universal determination which, because there was so little to be
personally
determined about, could never be more than a pretence.

A mask-like face—not rigid as a mask but with a mask-like immobility—a disguised voice, which for fear of attracting attention not only spoke the foreign dialect but mimicked the foreign turns of phrase—“Mud in your eye!”—“Keep your paws off that!”—“You’re sure shovelling it in today!”—a copied posture, with a bend at the hips and one foot thrust forward … all this in order to become, not a different person, but a type: to change from a prewar type to a postwar
TYPE
, from a country bumpkin to a city person, adequately described in the words:
TALL, SLIM, DARK-HAIRED
.

In thus becoming a type, she felt freed from her own history, because now she saw herself through the eyes of a stranger making an erotic appraisal.

And so an emotional life that never had a chance of
achieving bourgeois composure acquired a superficial stability by clumsily imitating the bourgeois system of emotional relations, prevalent especially among women, the system in which “So-and-so is my type but I’m not his” or “I’m his but he’s not mine” or in which “We’re made for each other” or “Can’t stand the sight of each other”—in which clichés are taken as binding rules and any individual reaction, which takes some account of an actual person, becomes a deviation. For instance, my mother would say of my father: “Actually, he wasn’t my type”. And so this typology became a guide to life; it gave you a pleasantly objective feeling about yourself; you stopped worrying about your origins, your possibly dandruff-ridden, sweaty-footed individuality, or the daily renewed problem of how to go on living; being a type relieved the human molecule of his humiliating loneliness and isolation; he lost himself, yet now and then he was somebody, if only briefly.

Once you became a type, you floated through the streets, buoyed up by all the things you could pass with indifference, repelled by everything which, in forcing you to stop, brought you back bothersomely to yourself: the lines outside the shops, a high bridge across the Spree, a shop window with baby carriages in it. (She had given herself another secret abortion.) Always on the move to get away from yourself and keep your peace of mind. Motto: “Today I won’t think of anything; today I’ll enjoy myself”.

At times it worked and everything personal was swallowed up by the typical. Then even sadness was only a passing phase, a suspension of good cheer: “
Forsaken
, forsaken,/Like a pebble in the street,/That’s how forsaken I am”; with the foolproof melancholy of this phony folk song, she contributed her share to the general merriment; the next item on the programme might, for instance, be the ribald tone of a male voice getting ready to tell a joke. And then, with a sense of release, you could join in the laughter.

At home, of course, she was alone with the
FOUR WALLS
; some of the bounce was still there, a hummed tune, a dance step while taking off her shoes, a brief desire to jump out of her skin. And then she was dragging herself around the room again, from husband to child, from child to husband, from one thing to another.

Her calculations always went wrong; the little
bourgeois
recipes for salvation had stopped working, because in actual fact her living conditions—the one-room apartment, the constant worry about where the next meal was coming from, the fact that communication with her
LIFE COMPANION
was confined almost exclusively to gestures, involuntary mimicry, and embarrassed sexual intercourse—were actually pre-bourgeois. It was only by leaving the house that she could get anything at all out of life. Outside: the victor type; inside: the weaker half, the eternal loser! What a life!

Whenever she told me about it later on—and
telling
about it was a need with her—she would shake with disgust and misery, but too feebly to shake them off; her shudders only revived her horror.

From my childhood: ridiculous sobs in the toilet, nose blowing, inflamed eyes. She was; she became; she became nothing.

(Of course what is written here about a particular person is rather general; but only such generalisations, in explicit disregard of my mother as a possibly unique protagonist in a possibly unique story, can be of interest to anyone but myself. Merely to relate the vicissitudes of a life that came to a sudden end would be pure presumption.

The danger of all these abstractions and formulations is of course that they tend to become independent. When that happens, the individual that gave rise to them is forgotten—like images in a dream, phrases and sentences enter into a chain reaction, and the result is a literary ritual in which an individual life ceases to be anything more than a pretext.

These two dangers—the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences—have slowed down my writing, because in every sentence I am afraid of losing my balance. This is true of every literary effort, but especially in this case, where the facts
are so overwhelming that there is hardly anything to think out.

Consequently, I first took the facts as my starting point and looked for ways of formulating them. But I soon noticed that in looking for formulations I was moving away from the facts. I then adopted a new approach—starting not with the facts but with the already available formulations, the linguistic deposit of man’s social experience. From my mother’s life, I sifted out the elements that were already foreseen in these formulas, for only with the help of a ready-made public language was it possible to single out from among all the irrelevant facts of this life the few that cried out to be made public.

Accordingly, I compare, sentence by sentence, the stock of formulas applicable to the biography of a woman with my mother’s particular life; the actual work of writing follows from the agreements and
contradictions
between them. The essential is to avoid mere quotations; even when sentences look quoted, they must never allow one to forget that they deal with someone who to my mind at least is distinct. Only then, only if a sentence is firmly and circumspectly centred on my personal or, if you will, private subject, do I feel that I can use it.

Another specific feature of this story is that I do not, as is usually the case, let every sentence carry me further away from the inner life of my characters, so as
finally, in a liberated and serene holiday mood, to look at them from outside as isolated insects. Rather, I try with unbending earnestness to penetrate my character. And because I cannot fully capture her in any sentence, I keep having to start from scratch and never arrive at the usual sharp and clear bird’s-eye view.

Ordinarily, I start with myself and my own
headaches
; in the course of my writing, I detach myself from them more and more, and then in the end I ship myself and my headaches off to market as a commodity—but in this case, since I am only a
writer
and can’t take the role of
the person written about
, such detachment is impossible. I can only move myself into the distance; my mother can never become for me, as I can for myself, a winged art object flying serenely through the air. She refuses to be isolated and remains unfathomable; my sentences crash in the darkness and lie scattered on the paper.

In stories we often read that something or other is “unnameable” or “indescribable”; ordinarily this strikes me as a cheap excuse. This story, however, is really about the nameless, about speechless moments of terror. It is about moments when the mind boggles with horror, states of fear so brief that speech always comes too late; about dream happenings so gruesome that the mind perceives them physically as worms. The blood curdles, the breath catches, “a cold chill crept up my back, my hair stood on end”—states experienced while listening
to a ghost story, while turning on a water tap that you can quickly turn off again, on the street in the evening with a beer bottle in one hand; in short, it is a record of states, not a well-rounded story with an anticipated, hence comforting, end.

At best, I am able to capture my mother’s story for brief moments in dreams, because then her feelings become so palpable that I experience them as doubles and am identical with them; but these are precisely the moments I have already mentioned, in which extreme need to communicate coincides with extreme speechlessness. That is why I affect the usual biographical pattern and write: “At that time … later”, “Because … although”, “was … became … became nothing”, hoping in this way to dominate the horror. That, perhaps, is the comical part of my story.)

In the early summer of 1948, my mother left the eastern sector of Germany with her husband and two children, carrying the little girl, who was just a year old, in a shopping bag. They had no papers. They crossed two borders illegally, both in the grey of dawn; once a Russian border guard shouted “Halt!” and my mother’s answer in Slovenian served as a password; those days became fixed in the boy’s mind as a triad of grey dawn, whispers, and danger. Happy excitement on the train ride through Austria, and then she was back in the house where she was born, where two small rooms were turned
over to her and her family. Her husband was employed as foreman by her carpenter brother; she herself was reincorporated into the household. In the city she had not been proud of having children; here she was, and often showed herself with them. She no longer took any nonsense from anyone. In the old days her only reaction had been a bit of back chat; now she laughed. She could laugh anyone to silence. Her husband, in particular, got laughed at so vigorously whenever he started discussing his numerous projects that he soon faltered and looked vacantly out the window. True, he would start in again the next day. (That period lives for me in the sound of my mother laughing at people!) She also interrupted the children with her laughter when they wanted something; it was ridiculous to express desires in earnest. In the meantime, she brought her third child into the world.