It’s as though all through childhood my ears rang from the cries of the women. For a long time I failed to hear them; only later did they reach me distinctly, rising far away, faint, then louder and louder, as through a warren of alleys down which I gradually approached the one street completely filled by them, as by strident songs, a ghastly composition. . In my dreams I approach this disharmony of cries; they swell, and when I’m in their midst, when I hear them from all sides, I awaken with a start; alarmed, I strain my ears into the night, which though utterly still I know holds a cry, inaudible only by chance.
The cries ring out through my memory of the years when I was ten or twelve, when I had given up all hegemonic claims within the family and ceased to respond to the cries of the women. Only then did I guess the exact words they spoke, did I think I understood when they gasped out the seeming non sequitur: The lake! The lake! I’m going to throw myself into the lake!
And often it seemed to sound like: We’re going to throw ourselves into the lake! — But that couldn’t be; the term we, in this random lot of people cooped up in a tiny flat and forced into a group, had fallen completely out of use.
All women uttered this threat, at every opportunity that arose, it was the most devastating declaration of a ruptured, ever-unraveling communal life; these were words that could come only from the women, whose numbers in the house were incontestably superior: for one of us there were three, sometimes four of them, counting all who fluttered in and out our doors, and the worst thing that could happen was when they sought to unite their voices in a chorus, though they failed, all screaming over one another. — The lake! they screamed, I’m going to throw myself into the lake! I’ll throw myself into the lake right this minute! You had to take it with a grain of salt.
These threats were always preceded by muffled sobs — then you still had time to flee — and in the end the words were underlined by loud weeping, quite unmusical, swelling all the louder the longer one delayed one’s disappearance. Grandmother, Mother, all the aunts sashaying about our flat, the presumably divorced sisters-in-law who sought refuge with us, the female friends from the neighborhood, all made abundant use of this weapon, and the cousins too, and at last, or so it seemed, even some of my female acquaintances when they dropped by, which astonished me. They had come solely to lend support to the women of the family, I thought, seeing that I immediately forfeited their sympathy, that they chimed in with the others’ woeful wails if I left the room even for a moment. . What pained them so was my apathy, which I took almost to the point of invisibility: I hunched speechless in some seat in the flat’s periphery, and my contours grew fainter and fainter.
Though the first cause of these cries was Grandfather’s smoking and drinking, soon that seemed forgotten, and they focused all their vocal force on me. The occasions were arbitrary: my silence was as good as my speech, I heard the cutting words whenever I lied or stole money, when I brought home bad grades, when it came out that I’d cut school, roaming the rubbish dumps outside town or near the lakes in the woods. . but most of all when, muddy and matted, I came home an hour before midnight, and when I seemed kindled by filthy secrets, burning all the way to my hair’s sticky ends, and all the more when I didn’t come at all; everything was cause enough for the threat: The lake. . I’m going to throw myself into the lake!
Come now. . am I your darling? Come on, tell me! one of the aunts urged, purring, as she oversaw my bedtime washing ritual. — No, I replied coldly, and immediately sensed the sobs rise in her throat; in a moment it would end in the cries I knew so well. — What’s he done this time, the little bugger! my grandmother’s voice rang out from the next room. He’ll send me into the lake yet, that golden boy of yours! — Those last words were directed at my mother, who defended herself, weeping: No, it’s me. . it’s me he’s going to send into the lake! I’m going to throw myself in, oh yes I am! Dear God, he’s just never there when you need him, and it’s not like you’re asking too much of him! He just never comes when you tell him. And I’m constantly telling him! He’s making me miserable, driving me to despair. Every time I tell him: come. . come home by six p.m. or, fine, by seven, that’s when he doesn’t come. No, no, I’ll throw myself into the lake yet!
When I lay in bed — secretly reading, under the covers with a flashlight, pulp novels my mother termed smut that would only incite me to brutality and wickedness — I was really only waiting for the flat to quiet down so that I could sneak outside. Silently I shut the doors behind me, groped down the dark stairwell, and opened the rough wooden door to the yard leading to the street with a duplicate key I’d filed to shape myself and hidden in the crack of my mattress. The key was my true secret, and I hid it with a certain pride, having produced it from directions I’d found in my pulp novels.
But my flight might also be noticed immediately, and through the second-story windows, open to the summer night, the sirens of their screams burst out onto the street, so fiercely that the neighborhood dogs began to bark. — He’s off again. . like a thief, like a criminal! He gets it from that wretched trash he reads. Oh, he’ll be the death of me yet, oh, he never listens to me. . one of these days I’m going to throw myself into the lake! — Come, come, we’ve got to look for him, came the reply; but they never followed me, for Grandfather would intervene, slamming his fist on the table: Quiet! He’ll come back sure enough. .
But in my mind’s eye they searched the entire flat for me, as though I might still be hidden somewhere. They searched the closets, under the beds and in the toilet cubicle. . they must have read too many trashy novels themselves. And their stirred-up scolding rang out onto the street, above me, before me, and behind me; I was at the center of a musical piece in which all instruments were aimed at me. But I didn’t hear it; I’d developed a form of deafness, a mystery even to myself, which I rarely neglected to make use of. When I switched it off now and then to verify that the world still existed, I heard the voices of the women, waging their war against the summer in the street: He doesn’t hear, no, he simply doesn’t hear. . oh, I could just throw myself into the lake! And their voices made the sickle moon tremble, thin as a thread, a symbol of remote, unearthly elegance floating in the east above the black woods.
As by day, my nightly path took me to a small peninsula that jutted omega-shaped into a secluded forest lake. The narrow causeway leading out to the head of the formation — a dam that regularly vanished, inundated, in the spring; only a line of trees rose from the water to show where it lay, and the reed-edged circle of marsh in the middle of the lake was a true island — this path leading out was so densely flanked by brush and birch saplings that you vanished from sight the moment you set foot on it. At night the gleaming birch leaves caught the moonlight, and when they stirred in a breeze, a flutter or flicker passed down the edge of the causeway, an iridescent glitter like crinkled tinfoil, coming from beyond, from the rubbish heaps that loomed nearby forbiddingly with the blood-red light of fires, hellfires, shooting up between them: the red luminescence and the moon’s silver dazzle were echoed in the ripples of the bay, shifting out and back again, until the glimmer was swallowed by a cloud’s shadow-flight. . and the shadow-form groping its way through birch thickets out onto the lake had not failed to note the cloud. Directly above the circular island, straight up from the head of the omega, the cloud stopped, so it seemed, to cast down its darkness: the sharp shadow of the cloud beneath the moon fell upon the marshy isle and shrouded it completely; the inner circle of the reed girdle immediately went dark. . blotted out, lightless beneath the cloud, a place of utter invisibility: here you could learn unbeing through sheer being, here you could wait out the night. It was virtually shut out, the night that lay upon the lake, resting and yet restlessly at work, perpetually processing secrets like a ruminant beast; there was always some stir in the tall, impenetrable reeds that girded the peninsula: a constant moan and sigh in the growing of the reeds, as though night sought an answer there. . some word from the invisible things that kept hidden in the dark.