Authors: Peter Weiss
distributed among my companions. If possible also inform the aforementioned person where I am buried. With many thanks for any trouble the carrying out of my requests may have caused you. Then the letter to my mother, My dearest wish was to return home once more from the war, to return to you, my beloved. If it is not granted me to see you again, these lines that I write before going into battle will greet you for the last time. It is difficult for me to imagine that I shall no longer see your dear eyes nor feel your lips, that your arms will no longer enfold me. If I were still alive your life would only just have begun, I should have arranged everything more beautifully than you could have ever dreamed of, my life too would only just be beginning. The will, of which you have a copy, is deposited with the lawyer. See to it also, please, that the balance sheet is audited at M’s, and then I wanted to say to you that my, that is my heirs’, profit-sharing in the business continues for another year. The articles in my apartment are all at your disposal. And the ring you gave me that I am now wearing, I hope you get it back. Never give it to anyone else. And now farewell, my beloved, I shall kiss you to my last breath. Reading this letter brings back to me my eavesdropping in the nights of my childhood when I lay awake with my ear pressed to the wall to catch something of the distant, murmuring voices of my parents. This eavesdropping, this groping, this concealment upstairs in the sultry attic. The battlefield. The shots of the machine gun. My father in a foxhole. My father with a bleeding stomach, moaning among other wounded in
the field hospital. And then my mother appearing. She finds him in this field hospital, in this overcrowded, stinking ward where he lies bleeding. She carries him out in order to look after him herself. In the picture world of my mythology she holds him in her arms, she carries him along a sodden and rutted track, above her the torn, low-flying clouds. Columns of soldiers, cannons come toward her, the wind rushes through the willows. This retrospective brooding and fantasy-making, this expectant eavesdropping, this suspense came before the secret games that were the real reason for my visits to the attic. Filled with the certainty of being completely secluded and forgotten by everyone, I stole away to my model countryside which I had built on a plank from clay and sand and stones and moss. When I lowered my face to the edge of the countryside it was as if I were there myself, reconnoitering, and my watchful gaze lit upon hills, woodlands, ditches and gullies and trenches and drawn-up cannons and the General Staff in a council of war and everything held its breath, everything waited for the explosion. With a cold passion I marked off the countryside, arranged the positions of the troops, built up the fortresses, made a gully steeper, put in another thicket, and only when I was finished with every detail and the total impact of the work satisfied me did I move on to the actual combat. The battle broke out. Soldiers stormed out of their trenches, the cannons opened up their bombardment. After every hurricane of annihilation that I let loose over the landscape, I scrutinized the resulting situation from all angles, in close-up I saw
the dead and wounded half buried in shell craters and uprooted woods, the fallen horses and smashed cannons in the ruins of castles, saw soldiers lying on top of each other in a cruel wrestling match, saw troops lurking in ambush. Again new waves of attacks broke loose, crowned by the holocaust. The copse, the fences, the bridges, the melting dugouts turned to charcoal, soldiers collapsed, the colors ran off them like blood and mud, and I drank in the visions of my passing world, breathed in the stench of molten tin and burned wood until nothing existed any longer but one single smoldering desolation. After the great battles when the mangled corpses had been buried and the wounded had been brought to the field hospitals, I made little expeditions, in which only a few specially privileged figures took part. These expeditions were marked by a sense of relief and a desire to explore. With these figures I crossed the broad sweep of the floor, landed with them on foreign shores, reached inaccessible mountain peaks or distant planets. But always I had to return to my battleground on the board and had to recompose my landscape and populate it with troops. High up in our house I spread death and destruction all about me. Something incomprehensible had begun within me. I sought release. But in the evenings the incomprehensible came and paralyzed me. I hid my hands under the blanket. But my mother would come and lift out my hands again. Imperiously she pressed my hands down onto the blanket. My hands had to lie outside in the cold, exposed to ghostly attackers. Cramped in fear I lay, abandoned to
visions of giants and huge animals. I stared into the twilight of the room that became ever more inky until the objects in it began to dissolve into black floating patches, I strained my eyes to the utmost to find something recognizable and things moved everywhere in the shadows, in the shadows the figures squatted and lurked, they crept out from behind the curtain, they rose up from the floor with a soft crackling and whistling. Sweat streamed down over me. The attacks had hardly begun but I was already annihilated. I did not move, so as not to attract the attention of the ghosts. I held my breath, only my heart hammered, and now it came toward me from all sides, I pretended to be dead, if only my heart would not thud so, I lay amid crouching nameless things that were plotting to murder me. I could not scream, I tried frantically to force out some sound but I didn’t succeed, it was as if I no longer knew my own voice, how I could ever make it come out again, only after complete exhaustion did a strangled sound come out, which hung in the room and balled itself together, to come at me again. Every night I died, strangled, suffocated. Still, sometimes, after reaching insensibility, I succeeded in getting beyond fear, in breaking through horror once it had reached its utmost power, whereupon I got out of bed, the horror having changed into a voluptuous weightlessness, on tiptoe I glided through the room, opened the door, jumped over the large yellow lion that lay in front of my door and with floating steps, which seemed nevertheless to be held back by some tough, slimy resistance, moved along the corridor to the door
of my parents’ bedroom. It was an endlessly long corridor, behind me loomed the stairs up to the attic and beside me stretched the banisters, below which lay the dark shaft of the stairway down to the entrance hall, in front of me, in the niche next to my parents’ bedroom, a few wicker chairs stood softly creaking and crackling, the white parts of their flower-patterned cushions standing out sharply in the darkness. From below came the slow, heavy ticking of the grandfather clock, slow, heavy steps came up the stairs, it was the Sandman coming with his sack of sand. Beyond the window lay the garden plunged in deepest violet, the window was open, the garden stretched and breathed, and from the ditch I caught the half-extinguished cries of a drowning child. The door to my parents’ bedroom stood ajar, I cautiously pushed it open and entered. In their double bed, which stood at right angles to the wall and protruded into the middle of the room, lay my parents, on the left my father snoring softly and on the right my mother, her face framed by the darkness of her hair. Both lay on their backs, and above them, on the wall at the head of the bed, hung three pictures, on the left a painting of my father’s face, the head, in the oval of the cardboard mount, looking like a head cut off, to the right a reproduction of a picture of a naked youth, seen in profile, who with his arms around his knees and his face resting on his knees sat high up above a desolate mountain landscape, and in the middle the picture of the naked goddess, who, surrounded by foam, bent stiffly forward, without ever losing her balance, covering her breasts
with one hand and with the other clasping a strand of her long, flowing hair in front of her genitals, stood on the rim of a huge shell. The clothes lay carefully folded on the chairs next to the bedside tables on my father’s side and on my mother’s side, and beneath the chairs the shoes stayed close together like patiently waiting animals. In the mirror of the large wardrobe on the wall opposite the bed, I saw myself, saw myself in the violet moonlight in the depths of the transfigured room. My parents tried, on our family doctor’s advice, to put an end to my nocturnal wanderings, they surrounded my bed with large basins of water that were to wake me from my somnambulant state when I stepped into them. This treatment resulted in my learning to fly. I increased the horror and the creepiness by artificially induced cold shivers that had the property of making me weightless and with their help, stretched out stiff, I hovered up out of bed, to fly, feet first and flying on my back, straight across the room, through the open window and over the garden. I steered myself with light movements of my hands and toes, feeling triumphantly happy, lowering and raising myself according to the varying degrees of my cold shivers. I passed so close by the top of the copper beech that its soft warm leaves brushed me. These nocturnal excursions were the preliminaries to severe attacks of fever which for a long while, at intervals of two weeks or so, overcame me for some days at a time. A committee of doctors stood around my bed, removed their glittering pince-nez, tugged thoughtfully at their beards, tested my pulse, pressed hairy middle fingers
into my stomach, knocked with bent index fingers on my chest, telephoned to my heart, hit my knee with little silver hammers, and could find nothing to explain my symptoms. Finally the theory was put forward that a fly had carried bacilli to me from the malaria cultures of a nearby mental hospital. The chain of thought that attributed the origins of my illness to a mental hospital made me think that I must be near to madness, I studied my face in the mirror, made faces, babbled foolishness and let my spittle drip out of my mouth as I had seen happen at times with the mental defectives I had watched on their walks in the park. I learned to live in that way, I know that something is missing, I fumble about and search, I whimper and scream and I don’t find it, I grow, I develop, and my freedom of movement is ever more restricted, I scarcely dare look any longer, everywhere I knock against boundaries, and creep off to hide. I learn to fly and I learn how to catch fevers. I make myself at home in the great lack, in the disease of disappointment, of impotence and mistrust. And deep down in me the unsatisfied wish lived on. When my mother, summoned by my scream, came to my bed and set me upright and enclosed me in her arms, the sinister atmosphere to which her own appearance had contributed vanished. It was she who threatened me, but at the same time she was my savior. She took away with one hand and gave back with the other, and thus kept me in continual suspense, almost as if I longed for the eerie, as if I found a certain enjoyment in its torments because I could afterward savor the relief. Only once in my
childhood had I experienced a foretaste of bodily freedom. I was with my parents and brothers and sisters on a visit to a family with whom we were on friendly terms, Fritz W., our host, was in every way my father’s opposite. He was strong and lively, he had a witty and direct way of speaking, he was comradely in the way he treated his children and intimate and demanding in his approach to my mother, who blossomed in his company. I perceived clearly the rivalry that arose between him and my father, with Fritz the contest was relaxed and self-confident whereas with my father it expressed itself in strained self-control. Fritz’s children jumped around the garden naked, two girls and a boy, the same age as I and my two younger sisters. We were in our Sunday best and looked on in embarrassment at the naked, sun-burned bodies at their play. My sisters wore white frocks with starched collars, white knee stockings, and buckled shoes. I had on my dark blue sailor suit, with the thickly knotted tie, also white stockings and black laced boots. It was midsummer. Then Fritz suddenly leaped at us, and in a few tugs ripped my sisters’ clothes off, I myself crept under the low branches of a fir tree, but he pulled me out into the open, stripped off my trousers and blouse and shoved me together with my sisters into the circle of his own children. In dismay we fumbled off the remainder of our clothing and felt the warm air on the whole of our skin. My parents had got up from their garden chairs and were completely overcome by what was happening. And we now found out what we could have found out any day that summer, though it never
returned, how alive we became in our nakedness. We felt the grass, leaves, earth, and stones with all our pores and nerves, romping and shouting with joy, we lost ourselves in a brief dream of unsuspected potentialities. On one other occasion Fritz W. intervened in my life. It was years later. I came home with my school report, which contained one terrible sentence, in face of which my whole being seemed to crumble. I made great detours with this sentence, did not dare go home with it, always looked to see if it had not suddenly disappeared, but it was still there, clear and distinct. When I finally reached home, because I did not have the courage to ship out as cabin boy to America, Fritz W. was sitting with my parents. What’s that glum face for, he called out to me. Is it a bad report card, my mother asked in her concerned voice and my father looked toward me as if he saw all the troubles of the world piling up behind me. I passed the report to my mother, but Fritz snatched it out of my hand and read it and broke into peals of laughter. Not promoted, he cried, and slapped himself on the thighs with his powerful hand. Not promoted, he shouted again, while my parents looked in consternation first at him, then at me, then he drew me to him and slapped me on the shoulder. Not promoted, just like me, he said, I stayed in the same class four times, all gifted men have had to repeat classes at school. With that my deathly anxiety dissolved, all danger passed. No longer could my parents’ shocked faces work themselves into a rage, no longer could they reproach me with anything, for after all Fritz W., this hard-working and successful man,
had removed all stigma from me and even thought me worthy of special honor. These two encounters with Fritz W. were the highlights of my childhood, for they showed me how different the course of my life could have been under other circumstances, and they showed me the wealth of unexpended happiness that was in me and still lies within me beneath the boils and matted hair. When my puberty began, my mother again forced me onto the white guitar-shaped sacrificial bowl on which I had already sat in Green Street, this time to clean my penis. With soap, warm water, and cotton wool my mother tried to force back the foreskin, one hand holding my genitals, while the other pressed and urged the all too tight skin. I had half fainted with pain and humiliation by the time the tip of my penis was laid bare and my mother had washed away the smegma that had collected under the foreskin. Later I asked her what it was, the white slime that sometimes leaked out of me at night, I knew well enough, but I wanted to provoke her, by pretending ignorance I taunted her, and she answered, that’s dirt, you must keep yourself clean, absolutely clean, the dirt comes from all those dirty thoughts you have. For a long time I could not rid myself of the feel of her hand grasping my penis. In bed of an evening it twitched and reared up, it throbbed and swelled up and burned. A furious hatred of this organ seized me, I would have liked to chop it off, but the voluptuousness that accompanied these painful movements increased and I gave way to them even if as a result of this surrender my hair and my teeth should fall out and my face be