Wilhelm signaled for Berta’s brood to go with him; they shook their heads no; Wilhelm thought a while and decided: “When I return from Felsenstein, I’ll pick you up. In the meantime, Berta will look after you.”
The voiceless Berta screamed, “I’m not Berta! Wilhelm! I’m only the corpse! The corpse in question is me! Take the children with you!”
The children were nailed inside the apartment with the corpse in question. As their tomb was quite generously proportioned, with numerous burial chambers, it didn’t occur to the children at first that they’d been buried alive. With time, though, the madness of hunger began to ravage the children’s brains; they began to circle the corpse; the madness of hunger tore their jaws open wide. For long days their hunger encouraged them, before they finally wedged their spindly fingers into their mother’s rotting flesh and gnawed down to her bones.
The children’s skin slowly dried out until they looked more like prunes than people, walked crablike on all fours, howled indecipherable sounds and pounced on one another. When Wilhelm finally knocked at the door, they could no longer speak or stand upright. That noise, the uproar from inside the tomb, the scraping and the scratching, couldn’t possibly come from his children. Dumbfounded, Wilhelm asked himself whether a corpse could become restless in its grave, but he was probably just exhausted, he thought, and so it was best to assume he hadn’t actually heard anything.
“Odd. I could have sworn they were in there,” he mused, shaking his head, consoled by the thought that there was, after all, far more to the world than an average citizen like himself could ever imagine.
He walked downstairs, exited the building, more bemused than unsettled, more soothed than perturbed, more concerned with his duties as chauffeur and Come-hither-boy than with the strange goings-on in the thirteenth building on a small street in the city of Donaublau.
WILHELM MAY SOON COME BACK
Nightmares of this sort hacked away at Berta Schrei’s evenings, poisoning her sleep and weakening her defenses against the weight of things, making it harder and harder to make peace somehow with life as such and survive for the time that remained until Wilhelm’s return from Felsenstein. She chose not to tell Wilhelm about her nightmares over the phone; in view of their regularity, they were hardly news. And what Wilhelm wanted to know was news, not her day-to-day.
And though she had been yearning for weeks now for Wilhelm’s return, with ever-mounting intensity, yet she had also thought it better not to mention her yearning.
Instead, she set down the receiver each time hoping quietly that Wilhelm might come home soon, and that he would be able to explain to Little Berta how her transfer at school was of hardly any significance in her life to come, and to explain to her — to Berta — how to help her children put up with their benighted existence, and how she herself might maneuver through the leafless season that was ineluctably approaching.
If only the leafless season were already past, and the children, especially Rudolf, were cheerful, looking forward to the Christmas festivities, and the boy could take the winter break to get used to the diarrhea that tormented him each autumn when school started up, to get used to his stuttering, to his invariable I don’t know when standing in front of the teacher, and to his bedwetting, and especially to his headaches.
Then, perhaps, Rudolf’s restless nights would grow gradually more serene, his tooth gnashing would abate, and he wouldn’t cry so often in his sleep.
THERE ONCE WERE A PRINCE AND A PRINCESS
An hour came when Berta gave in, when she stopped sharing important life-lessons with her offspring, when she seized on an opportunity she’d long ignored. One morning, noticing the children were loath to get out of bed and put on their clothes, she said nothing, but called the teacher, said the children were sick, and sat down by them on the bed. After three days of this, Berta’s new life with her children was settled.
The children would stay in bed in the mornings, Berta would bring them breakfast, and once their appetite had been sated, all three would begin to sing. If a false note rang out, Berta didn’t reproach them, not even once; and, anyway, because they were her children, and she herself had a knack for music, they had a special flair for microtones, semitones, and other obscure intervals. They sang with all their might, and Rudolf and Little Berta managed to read their song lyrics from the songbook without difficulty. They began their singing hour with “Danube so blue, so blue …” continued with “There once were a prince and a princess …” and finished with “I know not, what does it mean …” then started over with “Danube so blue, so blue.”
After the singing hour they joked and played around. There was no homework, no Fs, no letters home, no black-and-blue marks on their bodies from fighting or gymnastics, no jabs and no jeers, no “ifs” and “buts,” no “on-the-one-hands” or “on-the-others,” and no warnings about behaving better and minding their manners.
Berta told her stories to a rapt audience while she cooked, ironed, and put things in order. Rudolf and Little Berta never left their mother’s side; they circled around her, every single day, caressed her, comforted her when cleaning up seemed to drag on, when she broke a glass while washing up, if she burned the potatoes till they were black rock-hard clumps, if there were scorch marks on the hand towels or nightshirts after she ironed. She might interrupt the Sisyphean task of putting things in order to look for the Faust family photo album or her collection of letters from the front: from her father, her brothers, or Big Rudolf. At last she would come to the solemn decision to put everything in order once and for all.
Despite, or perhaps precisely because of her conscientiousness, she never made much progress in this final task. The children told her it was just too hard to pick out one fixed place for every single object in their apartment, but they also tried to help their mother and not shirk their own responsibility. Dreadful to think how many possible places there were for each and every object in the apartment! Berta could order things this way or that, or some other way altogether. In the end, nothing came of it but pointless discussion, a kind of defeated meditation on the weight of things, useless both to her and her offspring.
JIBBER-JABBER! WAR!
“Yes. Yes,” Berta recounted to her offspring for the umpteenth time. “That’s what it was like then. My mother always used to say, ‘Not for the life of me, Berta. If there’s a direct hit on building 13, then that is the way God wants it. I’m too old to start over again somewhere else anyhow. And suppose building 13 isn’t hit, suppose I was to move away to exactly the place where I would get hit? It’s not logical. That can’t be what God wants. What am I getting at? I’m saying you shouldn’t uproot an old tree and plant it somewhere else. That’s no good for it. No. I’m staying here.’ Me, I said to my mother, Mama, maybe you’re right. But this is war.”
Berta smiled. “And do you know what my mother answered then?”
Rudolf waved her off and said, impatiently, “Jibber-jabber! War! If I hear that one more time … True as the Lord God hung up there on the cross. I’m here and I’m staying here!”
Berta nodded and stared straight ahead, reflecting.
Little Berta asked, breathless, “And did building number 7 get hit?”
Berta nodded, and Rudolf said, “Of course it did. What else?”
“And Grandma was right there in building number 7? ‘I’m just going over for a little chat.’ Didn’t she say that?” asked Little Berta, who always savored the same questions whenever this story was told. Her mother shrugged and kept silent, as she did every time after this question was asked.