On the one hand, I thought, I must try with all my might to work this creature out, and then I, who was to blame for her despair, would discover what was making my nanny so miserable on this morning, but on the other hand I couldn’t stand the idea of ever taking a close look at a stray young bird again. Because, but for the swift, this depressing breakfast scene would never have happened, I would never have had to sit helplessly opposite my nanny, unsure, torn this way and that, sad but a bit disappointed at the same time because she wasn’t interested in the admittedly puny legs of the swift.
I chewed silently. My nanny said nothing. As if I had contributed to the extinction of the swift. As if the day before I had taken the decisive, irrevocable step of making this bird species disappear from the earth forever. As if I had the last living specimen on my conscience.
4
STRANGE YOU SHOULD ASK that particular question, I said to Frau Fischer, because I’ve always wondered about it myself: Didn’t I have any school friends of my own age with whom I could play in the fields after school and spend long Sunday afternoons? Friends from my early schooling? I can’t remember any.
Over there on the edge of the forest, a herd of deer whose outlines you could only make out gradually after sunset in the field against the dark background: sometimes my father took me with him on his study outings. In the summer, when the evenings stayed light far too long for me to sleep, he came into my room to see if I was still awake and allowed me to get up and get dressed again. I was never a good sleeper.
Possibly because I thought of these twilight walks as an extraordinary reward — even if I never knew what for, because they were always bestowed on me out of the blue and no doubt on a whim of my father’s — on these outings of ours I was always particularly obedient and keen to learn. I learned from my father how to move silently through the undergrowth and, instead of constantly talking, how to listen for the most distant sounds. Did he dislike going alone? Was it a ruse on his part, to do with his idea of education? If we set off late in the evening there obviously wasn’t much to see anymore, and so I learned to concentrate on faint impressions and seemingly trivial phenomena.
We did not speak. He went ahead, gesturing toward a wallow or teeth marks on a birch tree. We crept to the edge of the wood and waited. Eventually, just as I had been promised at home while hastily throwing on my clothes, deer began to appear in the forest. The animals, I learned, talk to each other almost continuously; they often talk to us too, but we rarely notice what they’re saying, not realizing they mean us. The animals address themselves to us, from a distance, hidden in the leaves of the trees above us, from the thicket beside the path, they ask questions or they curse us, they are letting us know “I am aware of you.” But even to get anywhere near certain animals, to detect them in the first place, you have to know how to be silent; if you want to catch sight of them, these talking creatures, there’s one thing above all you mustn’t do: talk to them.
As I say this, there is after all a shadow that passes across my mind, but not the face that goes with it. I had a friend of my own age in Posen, our neighbors’ son, I ran into him occasionally in the street. We weren’t particularly close friends. It could be that whenever I had anything to do with him, curiosity and repulsion balanced each other out; a certain amount of pity came into it too. Was he retarded? He seemed very awkward and clumsy to me, there wasn’t much you could do with him. He didn’t talk a lot, and when he did his speech was indistinct but very loud. Drawn-out sounds that he produced with an effort, trying to make complete words out of them. When I was with him I was a bit scared. But at home I mimicked him.
He knew about our twilight excursions. He wanted to go with us. He begged his parents until they eventually let him. We didn’t have much to do with our neighbors, but I remember them asking my father in: Yes, he did sometimes take me out at night to the fields with him. And yes, the neighbors’ boy could come with us one evening. It’s hard to know whether his parents thought the boy was making it up, or maybe they wouldn’t believe my father until their own son reported back to them from one of these expeditions.
On the evening in question the boy came over to us, but he was too shy to come into the house, he stayed by the door. And I had never seen him so excited. This poor creature, at other times practically unable to utter a word, could not stop talking. An annoying evening, as my father and I agreed afterward. We didn’t sight a single animal. They must all have retreated silently at the approach of the babbling youngster.
Otherwise, nothing. No one else comes to mind. As though that first night in Dresden had wiped out a whole host of other images, as though the onslaught of those impressions alternating abruptly between extremes of brightness and darkness had driven out of my mind memories shaped in a more subtle light.
“What about your grandparents?”
I shook my head.
“Uncles, aunts, cousins?”
None of them either. Presumably my parents didn’t care much about keeping in touch with their relatives. Who knows, perhaps they were glad to escape from their family background by moving to Posen.
“Well, can you remember your parents’ friends or acquaintances?”
Only those I met again later as an adult. That could well have seemed rather unreal — being afraid that however hard you tried you might not recognize anything about a person, after a gap of ten, fifteen years. I did feel disoriented, helpless for a moment, but fortunately, before I had time to lose my equilibrium completely, the new faces brought back to me these people’s younger features, voices and movements that I was familiar with as a child.
“In an earlier life,” as the interpreter put it.
In an earlier life, you could say that. But knowing myself as an adult to be surrounded by these figures meant that I had preserved something from that life.
5
THERE WERE TWO MEN in uniform in the house. I clung to my nanny’s wrist, to her forearm, even if only with my eyes, since at that moment I couldn’t literally hold on to her because she was balancing a platter of meat in one hand and holding fork and spoon in the other while she served two slices of roast meat per person onto five large, ivory-colored plates of our best Sunday china, plates with a lime-leaf green border, a tendril that began nowhere and ended nowhere, though I was always trying to find its starting point nonetheless. Then, still holding the fork, Maria gave everyone some gravy, without dripping any of it, calmly but deftly, always leaning in over their left shoulders. She had begun with the guests, then served my parents, the steaming roast beef hanging for a moment in midair next to faces, ears, almost in front of people’s eyes, but no one noticed it, it didn’t bother anyone, everyone around the festively laid table went on talking, apart from me, to whom my nanny came last. I was hoping that, as she usually did, she would have saved a particularly good slice for me, totally free of the gristle which you would chew in vain and wouldn’t be able to swallow but which you couldn’t put back on your plate in front of guests, so that you would have to park it in the back of your cheek until the meal was over and you could get to the toilet. Then Maria lifted the lid of the potato dish and my father spoke into the rising cloud of steam: “Please help yourselves, gentlemen.”
There were two men in uniform in the house, and I was allowed to address them familiarly as Du. Earlier, when they arrived, I heard my parents greeting them at the door. I was sitting on the rug in my room, wanting to finish my game; light, friendly voices reached me, and then my mother was calling me down to say hello to Herr Spengler and Herr Sieverding. When I saw them in the hallway, there was some chat about our house, my mother was stroking my head, I was shaking hands with the guests, it was their boots I noticed first, clattering on the stone floor like nothing we had ever heard in our house before. I still didn’t know what to make of it, two uniformed men whose voices didn’t match their boots at all, they came up to just below their knees, so highly polished you could practically see your face in them. I stared at the boots, the grownups’ eyes were also drawn to the soft, black, gleaming boot tops, and one of the men began to laugh: “That’s not my doing, you’ll have to congratulate Martin here for that, he’s got the knack of losing himself for a whole afternoon in boot cleaning.”