And on that long night, Berta Schrei came to a decision: “Two hopeless cases are a doubly heavy burden.”
AS SHADOWY AND GHOSTLY AS THE WAR YEARS
Wilhelm, still in his chauffeur’s uniform, had imagined that on returning from Felsenstein, at around eleven in the morning, he would be able to march in triumphantly, right before Berta’s eyes, and announce, “What do you say, Berta? Two days earlier than expected! Can you believe it?”
He crept in like a thief, laid his ear against the kitchen door’s keyhole, giggled to himself, rubbed his hands together cheerfully, then threw the door wide open: “Berta, it’s me!” he shouted, his arms stretched outward.
Then he dropped into the chair disappointed, took off his chauffeur’s cap, thought to himself that his Berta must be out shopping, and cheered up once more as he imagined the look on her face when she came back home and found him sitting there in the kitchen, a sight as perfectly natural as it would be utterly unexpected. He laughed, pleased with both himself and the circumstances, and just then, his eyes fell on the blue envelope on the table.
“I have brought my cursed creations to an end. Your Berta, who loves you.”
He read and smiled, read again and smiled again. At first he didn’t understand, nor would he manage to understand later, when every trace of Berta Schrei had been struck from his life, and his children were lying in the ground.
It wasn’t until the second year following these events that the notion gradually dawned on him that the Earth’s shadow wasn’t simply passing him by, like a dream; that the Earth was a place he could make his home. He arrived somehow at the sense that he was a fully fledged resident of the Earth, and beyond that, the son of a nation, and not just of any nation, but the Isle of the Blessed.
It was with the aid of this feeling, as vague as it was pervasive, that he managed eventually to accept that, at a given moment in his life, a person existed who was capable of anesthetizing her children with sleeping pills and strangling them with her bare hands, only to fall on a butcher knife afterward with all her weight. It came to light that what she’d supposed to lie behind her left breast was instead concealed behind her right: a medical rarity. This circumstance assisted the doctors, who did still want to do their best to save this person’s life.
And in fact Wilhelm could just manage to accept it, so long as he allowed the events before the leafless season in 1958 to remain for him as shadowy and ghostly as the war years.
Much later, when he heard Wilhelmine’s decisive proviso to the proposal he’d never actually made—“If you want to marry me, then it must be on January 13th”—he understood, then, it was time to ask for Wilhelmine’s hand.
Somehow, it was Wilhelmine’s insistence on that date that restored to him the reality of that person, aforementioned, and she recovered her proper name, Berta.
THE BEST MOTHER OF ALL
Berta’s creations, Rudolf and Little Berta, were buried. Only that other creation, Berta Schrei, remained alive. And when the elder Berta saw that Little Berta, as she lay there still, bore no resemblance whatsoever to the Madonna from the painting, even though she’d finally been salvaged from the molding hands of life, she understood then that her delusion, founded on the casual resemblance of an image and a face, had been dispelled the moment it was carried out, and that reality was now spiraling into absurdity. Rudolf looked nothing like the Christ child either.
Berta Schrei roared at the Madonna and the Christ child. Her yearning for an ideal, her wish to shelter Little Berta and Rudolf from the weight of things, had ended in a madwoman’s double murder and her own failed suicide.
“How does it feel to be forty?” Wilhelm asked, and stroked Berta’s stringy mane, running the index finger of his right hand over the arrow-straight part in her hair.
Berta giggled and said, “I really need to go back to the hairdresser,” and tried with a jittery movement of her hand to make her girlish haircut look more womanly.
“Curls always look good on you. On the other hand, a hairstyle without curls also has a certain appeal. Curls all the time, perhaps that’s a bit much? What do you think?”
Berta felt the time had come to smile bashfully like a girl and turn her eyes away from Wilhelm’s gaze. Meanwhile, the Wise Little Mother had been waving her hands protectively, each gesture a bit more emphatic than the one before. But no one in Ward 66 paid much attention to these efforts to alert them to what was happening, and this indifference was yet another sign, to the old woman, that it was time to teach Life, the intruder, a definitive lesson. She stood up from her bed, shuffled over to Wilhelm, and stood there for a while in silence, folding her hands slowly and deliberately and staring down at Berta’s head; with the meekest look in her repertoire of meek looks, she purred at Wilhelm, “No doubt, no doubt,” but with a gently threatening undertone. Wilhelm at last deigned to look at her, disconcerted.
“Our Mother Fortress, the best of all mothers, has brushed Berta’s hair straight. Her hair no longer knows the winding, wending, crimping, curving folds or furrows of the wound, Life. It has achieved a state of peace, it has come to rest. Isn’t that right, dear Berta? Your hair has come to rest. Is that not so? Has it not achieved peace? Has it not come to rest?” Berta looked at the Wise Little Mother, and her body swelled with guilt. Wilhelm waited in vain for the long sigh that he knew so well. But it died away before it could escape her.
Wilhelm grasped Berta’s upper arm, gave her a soft but determined shake, and looked at her through the eyes of Wilhelm the returnee, a man who had tried, at the behest of his comrade, Private First Class Rudolf, his first and only friend, to explain the war to a certain Berta Faust. But when he stood there before her then, on that first day of June, in 1945, he got the feeling somehow that there was nothing to explain, and Wilhelmine’s prying inquiries had burdened more than just his eardrums.
THEN I WILL LOOK AFTER YOUR BERTA
“Wilhelm!” Several times on the journey from Denmark to Frankfurt on the Oder, Private First Class Rudolf shouted his friend’s name, with unexpected vehemence, taking him firmly by the upper arm.
“Wilhelm! Do you remember Berta’s address? Do you?”
Wilhelm nodded placidly; Rudolf shook him and demanded he recite it.
“Where does she live? Tell me right now! Where does Berta live?”
Only when Wilhelm had laid his calming hand on Rudolf’s thigh and answered his question in a tranquil voice did Rudolf begin to breathe easily again.
“Berta Faust. Allerseelengasse, building 13, fourth floor, apartment 12, Donaublau.”
“Exactly. You’ve got it. That’s very good. You have to pay close attention to everything I tell you. You have to look at Berta with my eyes, otherwise you won’t understand her. It’s important. Whoever sees Berta with my eyes will know that he has to protect her from all the filthy people who want to abuse her and disgrace her. She’s a child, Wilhelm. Even if her body is soft and warm, not awkward and bony like it used to be. She had no idea what men and women did together, I had to teach her that, the only men she knew were her father and brothers. The morning after, when she woke up, she looked at me like a baby. Curious. Trusting. Like a newborn suckling, imagining things would stay this peaceful forever. So curious, so trusting — she was an easy mark! Not even a child is so naïve. And yet I did it — you see? I did it with a baby!” And Rudolf’s face clouded over, and he had to force away his thoughts. He reached for Wilhelm’s upper arm again, then, and exclaimed, like a man doubting his own sanity: “And just because I played her the ‘Aquarelles’ and the ‘Blue Danube’!” He shook his head and laughed with rage.