“No! That’s not true! I mean, there are nicer ways of putting it. No, no, dumb you are not.”
“I’m to be taken out of special school after the fifth year. Now, am I dumb or am I not?”
“Well, if you want to take such a superficial perspective. I mean … One shouldn’t do that — you have to look at the situation more deeply, more carefully. After that, you may well see things in a more reasonable light. Don’t you think?”
“I was born too early.”
“Yes, that’s true. Yes.”
“I’m ugly.”
“Rudolf!”
“No one likes me. I’m annoying.”
“No. No. It’s not like that. No. No. That is completely, completely wrong. I, for example, like you, and Papa likes you too.”
“Papa is dead. He can’t like me. I have no papa. I don’t want another one.”
Little Berta patted her brother’s hand and said, “I’m not dead. I like you too.”
Rudolf looked scornfully from Little Berta to their mother and back: “And who likes you? What do you think, Mama? Who likes her!” And Rudolf pointed at Little Berta, then at his mother, who slapped his index finger away and declared, “We do not point at people. That’s something we do not do — no, that is something we absolutely do not do.”
“Who then, Mama? Tell me. And who likes you? Aunt Wilhelmine? The chauffeur? I think they’re happy when they can get a little peace from your constant blabbering.”
Rudolf stood and paced moodily back and forth several times in the kitchen, then turned finally toward the door and marched off sulking to bed.
Little Berta looked at her mother, full of reproach, threw back her head, stomped one foot, and said, “You’re not right in the head!” And she added, her features twisting into a grimace: “Everyone knows it. Aunt Wilhelmine knows it, and Papa knows it, and me, I know it too!” Little Berta stuck her tongue out at her mother, and the hate from her eyes collided with Berta’s despair. Little Berta threw the kitchen door open and slammed it closed over and over. And Berta winced each time, as though someone were lashing her with a whip. This loud, portentous exit served its purpose: Berta did not dare follow her children into the bedroom.
THEY WAIT FOR WILHELM
That evening Berta decided, without a single “on-the-one-hand” or “on-the-other,” no longer to dole out further lessons to her children about the weight of things. Instead, she would try to introduce them to life as such through stories she would invent more or less from scratch and tell them night after night, and Berta Schrei was a good storyteller, at least at these moments. She would tell these stories of her own invention — they hardly ever had happy endings — and then she would wait an hour, two hours, three. After the third she felt secure in her hope that the weight of things had given up its pursuit of her children, and that Rudolf and Little Berta, ferried over now to the realm of dreams, were safe and sound, far from the grasp of the wrenching and molding hands of life.
“That’s all it is. The three of us are just too caught up in the world, too superficial, somehow. What we lack is inwardness, a belief in ourselves.”
Berta could hear the wrathful voice of Wilhelmine: “Berta! What’s to become of your children? They’ll end up losing their heads just like your doomed Rudolf!”
Berta looked thoughtfully at the clothesline that was stretched from the window frame to a hook that Wilhelm had nailed in over the stove, where their wet clothes were now hanging.
“Wilhelmine. Yes. Yes,” Berta said, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. For Berta, Wilhelmine was the embodiment of life as such, the way it spoke to her, the way it prophesied a dismal end for her, for her and her children.
“Somehow we just do everything wrong. Somehow we just don’t fit,” Berta had thought, crouched down with one arm around Little Berta, the other around Rudolf, sitting between the children in the new car, while Wilhelm, the chauffeur, said nothing, his eyes fixed rigidly on the road.
“He knows it. Yes. Of course. Everyone knows it.”
Later, Berta felt the need to verify the intuitions that had struck her on the drive home.
She’d crept into the bedroom, knelt down by Little Berta’s bed, and in the soft half-light of the lamp compared Little Berta to the Madonna from the painting. She hadn’t been wrong; even scrutinizing the girl so closely, even with such careful consideration, the resemblance was still there.
“When Berta sleeps, she looks just like our Madonna. Not just outwardly, not just superficially. It is the inward gaze of sleep. It’s what silence does for her,” she murmured to herself.
Around midnight Berta was sitting on her bed; upright; a rigid pillar; with a strange gaze fixed rigidly on her daughter’s face.
“If only Little Berta could always sleep this way, she would look like our Madonna forever. If only she could always sleep this way — if.” In her mind, Berta worked and reworked this thought, which sprang from the basic resemblance she had noticed in her child, but she neither spoke of it aloud nor even murmured it to herself. It was just a thought; nothing more and nothing less.
She waited up for the chauffeur Wilhelm until four in the morning; sitting upright in bed; rigid and with that same strange gaze fixed on her daughter’s face.
At around four-thirty in the morning, Berta finally fell asleep, only to be jolted awake by Wilhelm: “Stop that screaming! You’ll wake the children! Berta! Stop that screaming!”
It was too late. Rudolf and Little Berta sat straight up in their beds, terrified, then shot sinister glances at their mother, who said to them, finally shaken out of her sleep, “It’s nothing. Everything’s fine. I was just dreaming.”
Wilhelm shook his head, more dumbfounded than annoyed, lay back down, said, “What were you dreaming about, then?” and immediately turned away from her onto his side: “I’m tired. Wake me around eleven. We’re driving to Felsenstein.”
“To Felsenstein?”
Wilhelm mumbled something not even he could understand, and soon afterward the regular course of his breathing made clear that he had fallen asleep once more.
“So. So,” Berta Schrei said, “to Felsenstein,” then looked perplexed from Wilhelm to Little Berta, from Little Berta to Rudolf, and from Rudolf to Little Berta once more.
“The resemblance really is astonishing. I need to think about it more,” Berta said to herself, then bent over Wilhelm, and with a push of the button on the lamp on the night table, draped the room in darkness.
“This is no coincidence. And the dream I had is also no coincidence.”
A CHARMINGLY UNASSUMING CREATURE INDEED
Berta Schrei, who saw in her dreams allusions to life as such, and therefore found them worth taking to heart, lay on her back in bed, her eyes turned toward the window, and decided it would be better to stay awake. She looked at the blinds, remembered how Wilhelm had carved the wooden slats himself in the workshop of his colleague Ferdinand Wolf, and how Wilhelmine had sewn the fabric holding them together.
When the work was over, Berta had offered a shot of schnapps to her laborers, and they all stood in the bedroom to marvel at this masterpiece: Ferdinand Wolf, Wilhelmine and Wilhelm, Rudolf and Little Berta.
“Really. It’s beyond belief. How did you ever do it?” Berta asked, and stared at Wilhelmine, astonished. Wilhelmine responded to her astonishment with pity, saying, “Well, it’s nothing. You take some old fabric out of your dresser, you reuse it, andsoonandsoforth. Anyone can do it.”
At that Wilhelm nodded, stroked Berta’s cheek, and said, “Don’t rack your brains over it. The important thing is we have our blinds now. What do you say, Ferdinand?”