She wouldn’t be able to bear it here much longer. Someone had put a record on outside. Dance music.
Am I in the way? Shall I go out? Ella was not expecting an answer. She positioned herself in front of the mirror and, with a brush, painted huge red marks on her cheeks, outlined her mouth and eyes with the same brush. Let him read poems if he liked, write new ones, regret the damn freedom he talked about, lie miserably on his bed — she was going to dance.
Hymn of gratitude
After the final end
(Autumn 1961)
The stones iron
The shadows have long lashes,
They beat in the wind. .
Cries cooing, a sound like bone
On the slopes
Decomposition grins back
In the dark
Statistics are silenced
For ever.
The moon has a yard
With little crosses
The night weeps
Horror limps on crutches
To another star –
which is glad to see it!
God has
Drunk himself to death.
He stinks of schnapps.
Tears clink like glass
A pearl necklace –
Endless!
Death sleeps
For ever –
He has been overworking!
He can’t rub his hands
Any more.
He’s too tired!
The light has dried up
Ice does not drench –
If God were not drunk
I would thank him!
Bending
The lodger’s room was taboo. Käthe sent Ella and Thomas into it in turn just to kneel and clean the floor. They drew back the curtains, aired the room and scrubbed the floor. All through the hot, stifling month of August he hadn’t been there, dead flies lay on his windowsill, and in sultry September he still didn’t come. It could hardly be a guilty conscience that kept him away, for it hadn’t been the first time he had raped Ella, and apart from Thomas no one knew she was carrying a child. Presumably his superiors at the Ministry of State Security had other plans for such a glorious and versatile lodger as he was. The anti-fascist struggle certainly called for conspiratorial meetings along the border which was making such waves. Perhaps the conspiratorial meeting place, the room under Käthe’s roof for entertaining officers and spies working undercover, seemed rather risky to the Ministry of State Security after 13 August. Ardent and zealous as the communist attitude of someone like Käthe might be, she went on welcoming friends and relations from abroad, whose true intentions and convictions could not be guaranteed as harmless. Hadn’t Thomas heard Käthe telling her American brother Paul at her summer party that her lodger was a State Security officer whose spying activities, as she saw it, were above all harmless, but also a lucrative source of income and necessary if she was to practise her profession? It was possible that this conversation had not only lingered in Thomas’s mind but had made its way into higher circles. How secret and secure was the Rahnsdorf room now? The question of whether she talked to her brother about her lucrative sideline entirely inadvertently, or on purpose, knowing that bystanders would hear this confidential remark and she would be rid of her lodger, gave him no peace. After scrubbing the floor, Thomas sat in the lodger’s armchair and would have liked to take a nap. Outside the window, the maple rustled in blood-red fire, its glow anticipating winter, and the wind bowed its branches. There had still been a lime tree beside it last year, with heart-shaped brimstone-yellow leaves and a black trunk. But it had been felled after Käthe managed to acquire a Wartburg. For the Wartburg — its acquisition being entirely due to that lucrative sideline of renting out a room, and maybe the lodger himself had something to do with it — Käthe needed a broader entrance to the yard, and had simply picked up a saw. She had been furious when Thomas refused to hold the other handle. In the end her hired model from Friedrichshagen had helped her.
Why was a dying leaf so beautiful? No mating took place in the maple’s autumn, only death, yet it magnificently outshone the courting of other deaths.
Ella had given birth to the child in the lavatory, she claimed. For the first time Thomas didn’t believe her. How? Thomas had asked cautiously, and regretted his question when she began to tell him. After all, there were such things as phantom pregnancies, couldn’t she have had one of them? Hadn’t the child maybe disappeared unnoticed, as people so nicely put it? But Ella would have no truck with such pious wishes. First she had drunk a litre of hot wine, she said, later a large glass of vodka, she had jumped off the bed to the floor, had drunk more vodka, had jumped again, it went on all night, hadn’t he heard her? He had been asleep, he hadn’t heard anything. Towards morning she had drunk castor oil, then she sat on the ice-cold lavatory seat waiting in pain as the cramps set in. Ella’s nostrils quivered. Hadn’t she moaned and groaned? she asked. Distressed, Thomas shook his head. He had been asleep. He hadn’t heard anything. Her wild eyes troubled him. How could he not believe them? He was her close friend, devoted and obedient. He placed his hand on Ella’s forearm, he placed his hand on her temples, he touched her forehead. He wanted to stop the noises she was making, stifle her twittering, and he held her close, to no avail. Ella went on, crackling, burning. First there had been pale scraps. Wouldn’t he believe her? The flashing of her eyes almost caught him out. But then the hairy tangle had fallen into the pan.
Mouth sealed, eyes blindfolded as befitted a confidant’s loyal silence. Not a word to a soul. Thomas had nodded, Ella had gone out dancing. In a few days’ time Thomas was to board the train for Magdeburg. Gommern was the name of his future. One day, surely, he could study geology in Freiburg. Someone who scored top marks in all subjects in his school-leaving exam ought to show that he has two good hands and can work in a stone quarry. He was to stay in the hostel on the spot. Working for the class struggle. Thomas closed the window looking out on the maple tree and drew the curtains again. No wind at all, it was as if he had never aired the room, which smelled stuffy. Thomas watched a spider that had woven a close-meshed funnel of a web between the curtain pole and the wall, and was now weaving another that seemed to be loosely connected to the first; the spider made skilful use of the weight of its body and the consistency of the thread. A knock on the door. There was only one person who didn’t ring the bell or simply walked into the house through the unlocked front door. Thomas went to open the door of the room to Michael.
Our lodger’s gone missing, Thomas announced to his friend, leading him into the stuffy room. He would never talk to Michael about the dubious aspects of the whole affair. He showed Michael the half-full bottle of wine he had found on the veranda. Laughing, Michael took a small package out of his net bag. The smell of grated lemon peel, warm egg yolk and love streamed into Thomas’s nostrils; he accepted the package, which was still warm, his mouth watering.
Michael shrugged his shoulders apologetically. She couldn’t get any vanilla, and she knows you don’t like raisins. She’s really worried, a young man can’t grow without cake, she thinks.
She’s right. Thomas nodded, he smelled the paper and soaked up the love of his friend’s mother, he could already taste the butter. He wanted to share the cake, but Michael waved the offer away, smiling and saying he had plenty of it at home. Thomas ate alone, the little package on the windowsill in front of him; he broke a piece off the cake and then another, eating it straight from his hand, licked the palm of the hand that he had used as a plate, munched the sweet dough. The warmth of the radiator rose from the grille, he went on eating the cake with his back to Michael, who wished him bon appétit again as he ate the last of it.