No matter how big the trouble he was in, how hard he laughed at himself for his miserable saving ideas, the verity of his dream remained more realistic. Perhaps because it was on Isolde’s bed, in Isolde’s bedroom that his shame had caught up with him.
Disgrace.
But his shame also clarified connections that until now neither he nor anyone in his family could have understood, and no one in all of Germany could have, either. He even understood, at last, that this was the reason he could not speak German in his dream. He’d rather be a different man. It was also more pleasant to escape from his shame, back into his dream, which, despite his being awake, had not stopped. The dream literally forced itself on him, as if whispering seductively, if you want me to, honey, I can take you even deeper. It was very clear now: the others remained unsuspecting to this day about the paper box because they are truly innocent.
Isolde was alone when she found it in the fruit-drying shed. Who else would have found it.
There could hardly be anything clearer than this.
He also found it interesting that his dream reworked the relationships among his relatives. He turned his great-grandfather, whom he could hardly have known, into his grandfather, and the older brothers into cousins. The dream showed Isolde too, as a cousin, though she was his aunt. It’s clear that my aunt Isolde kept her secret to herself, but her career, so strongly out of tune with the family’s general financial situation, one could understand only from the dream.
He appeared to be dreaming again, even though he was awake and free to be euphoric about having finally found the explanation.
Isolde’s father accepted the paper box, rode his bicycle to the farm, hid the box there, but the following morning three inmates freed from the nearby camp killed him in front of his house. When four years later Gerhardt Döhring returned from a POW camp, he did not believe the desperate explanation according to which the concentration-camp inmates must have taken the mysterious paper box with them and the family members knew nothing about it. How could he have thought his older brother was so stupid as not to hide the box properly. It must still be around somewhere. He could not have hidden it so stupidly that those miserable inmates would find it right away. More than once, they helped him turn the whole farm upside down, the cellar, the attic; they tapped the chimneys, the walls, all the floors. Twice they carried all the firewood out of the woodshed and back again. The fruit-drying shed they searched from top to bottom at least three times. Not by accident. They dug in the more suspicious places. Still, Gerhardt refused to accept the cold fact that there wasn’t any paper box anywhere. In the family, they knew about every possible and actual hiding place in the house; in the wall of the fruit-drying shed was a secret hollow, made 150 years ago for just such a purpose, but the paper box was nowhere to be found. Who could have imagined that two weeks before Gerhardt Döhring’s return, Isolde had found the box, Isolde, a mere child.
Barely a few weeks after his return from the POW camp, the entire town became frightened of Gerhardt Döhring. Even though strangers could not have known anything about the paper box.
Without authorization he conducted a secret investigation of the extraordinary events that had occurred during the last weeks of the war. Not alone, but with two good friends and the hero of Sedan, his own father, who was a lawyer, after all, and on whose pockmarked face Gerhardt, from his early childhood, had been observing and touching with his fingers the strange and hostile history of the world. The four of them held the view that the fact of the occupation could not retroactively justify major crimes; those who disobeyed orders, traitors, saboteurs, and deserters could not escape the appropriate punishment. And the four of them had to deal with these matters behind the backs of the occupiers and as quietly as possible. Of the deserters who managed to survive the first years of the occupation, two vanished without a trace, and to dispel any doubt about the cause of their disappearance, a third one was found dead. There was another unsavory affair Gerhardt Döhring was keen on uncovering. If the two hospital barracks had been properly set on fire, why did they not burn down completely, and how could the prisoners have escaped from them. He sought answers to these questions as frenetically as to those about the paper box.
In his dreams, however, he had to admit that Gerhardt Döhring had not been mad, contrary to the family’s opinion. He was tormented by being unable to avoid his own story, but only a lack of acceptable solutions to his problems later drove him to insanity. Defeat could not be redeemed by murders. Now he could see this with absolute clarity, but it only made him experience the intolerability of his newfound knowledge. With this knowledge, he would follow into madness the old man who lived in him.
The fruit-drying shed was heated up twice a year.
When fruit was plentiful, the first heating would last and continue into the second one, and together they would take a whole month. It was quite possible that in the fourth year, after having been heated to a red-hot state twice a year, the paper box simply went up in flames.
Of Döhring’s two daughters, Isolde disliked housework more than her sister did.
After the horrible death of their father, all the heavy work was left to the only son. The widow tried to keep things equal among the three of them. She was always after Isolde, would not let her shirk her duties or slacken at the expense of her siblings; that winter too it was Isolde whom she sent alone to the farm to put the drying racks in order. This job did not necessarily require two people. And if Isolde was afraid, well, let her get over it. As she was pulling the racks out of their slots, she noticed a few sparkling objects among the charred remnants of the paper box inside a pan that usually caught dripping fruit juice. She didn’t know what to think. A few minutes later she found the large pile of gold in the secret hollow. It was clearer than daylight who and in what circumstances must have hidden it there.
For the first time in his life, he was sure about something.
Even though he had been the cause of many terrible things.
And at last, he was startled to wakefulness by the horror of his dream, which showed him things no one had been able to decipher.
While taking in the bedroom and its open doors glimmering in the yellow and red reflections of the nocturnal city, he still hoped a little that shitting in his pants was part of his dream.
But it was, along with its stench, part of reality.
He pulled up the wide, striped pajama pants to his knees, held them together, and stepped off the bed; it could drip only to his knees. Plenty of it remained on the bedding. He took small steps, managing to carry the sausage for a few paces, squeezed between the cheeks of his buttocks, but the moment he reached the nearby bathroom, it fell out, fell apart, and he had to scoop out the pieces with his hand from the diarrhea-filled pajama pants.
By then, everything was dripping and became smeared everywhere, as blood would be after a brutal murder.
Le nu féminin en mouvement
He had had it up to here with them.
He saw clearly that the morality, loyalty, and devotion he had demanded of himself were nothing but shameless hypocrisy, lying, and cowardice. Simply put, I’m gay — he should have said it out loud.
I’m looking at the men, he now admitted to himself.
Still, he couldn’t accuse himself of anything.
It would be closer to the truth to say he didn’t know his way around women and, though he was looking for nothing more than their company, was frightened of them. He couldn’t specify what he was frightened of, and would have been hard put to draw up the orographic and hydrographic maps of his fear, but he grew so intent on observing what men did, whether they were as frightened as he was or what made them luckily enough not frightened, that he could not pay attention to anything else.