The broken house, p.5
The Broken House, page 5
That Monday morning in March 1938 brought a wonderful and, we might say, musical vividness to our house; never did I feel as much at home in Eichkamp as I did when Ursula died. A dam had broken, a wall collapsed, and all of a sudden life returned to us: glorious, wild life, wonderful unease, and nothing worked any more. Chaos rose to the top. At our house everything had always worked all by itself, everything operated like clockwork: sleeping, waking, getting up, breakfast, the schoolbag and the walk to Eichkamp station – I always had my yellow monthly ticket in my pocket. That’s how it had been my entire life. I had always longed for something extraordinary and wonderful: a summer day at the Teufelssee and lots of naked men and so much sadness in me – it must have been life I was looking for, and now all of a sudden it was there. Its name was chaos.
My parents couldn’t cope with such a blow of fate. They ran desperately and helplessly around, they panted up the stairs and came back down, muttering something incomprehensible, they tore the windows open and closed them, they pulled the curtains shut and then threw them open again. My mother would sometimes collapse from exhaustion and fall into her club chair. She wailed loudly and then began to weep quietly, and later the weeping turned into prayer. From the study a pleading Our Father could be heard, followed by a higher and quicker Hail Mary. Meanwhile my father, who had never managed to commune on this higher level, had to look for the bunch of keys he had mislaid in all the excitement. And of course they were both confronted by a mystery, much worse and more incomprehensible than what happened seven years later when fate struck once more: in March again, March 1945, when British bombers left our house in ruins for ever – it must have been something like a foreshock within the closest circle of the family, an intimate vibration of world history. When things had a political nature, they almost made sense. In the closest circle they were incomprehensible. Family is mysterious.
My parents lamented their fate, which had taken such a disastrous turn. They spoke of the bosom of the family and children’s ingratitude, and they listed their good deeds in the First World War, during inflation, throughout the Great Depression. There had always been milk, even in 1923, and all the schoolbooks they had bought, and all the money for summer camp and the whole burden of our education, everything had always gone well, everything was going well now – and then this by way of thanks: simply throwing life away as if it were nothing at all. They agreed that Ursula’s desire not to go on living was an act of extraordinary ingratitude, a rejection of the order of God, my mother said, a rejection of the order of the state, my father said, and an act of sinful ingratitude towards them, and basically aimed only at them. Children owed their parents undying, lasting gratitude, and children who kill themselves are actually killing their parents, I learned, and I could see some truth in that last conclusion.
On that Monday morning my parents were really very lucky that they had me. In their despair they had left Ursula lying there all day, so intensely preoccupied were they with their misfortune that the idea of calling an ambulance never occurred to them. So it was up to me to take charge of things. I felt nothing but coldness and clarity. I was nineteen and yet I acted as prudently as a fifty-year-old; my mind was quite sober. I stood on the solid ground of truth that had suddenly appeared in our house, and I said to myself: Now you must take the telephone book, you must look up ‘accident’ or ‘hospital’, you must pick up the phone, say something about an accident and call an ambulance. It must come at once, she might still be saved. You must finally look after your sister – now you can do that for the first time.
Of course the whole thing had to be hushed up. When the ambulance rang at the door and the men with the red cross and the long fabric stretcher came clattering up the stairs, my mother hurried into the street where people had gathered around the vehicle with the red cross.
Emergency vehicles very rarely came to Eichkamp. You could be certain that something extraordinary was going on. Once, in 1929, on Lärchenweg, I would have been nine or ten at the time, an elderly spinster had poisoned herself. It must have been gas, because the firemen climbed up the outside walls with a fearsome selection of ladders, clambered about awkwardly on the roof and got inside through some skylight or other. I didn’t understand the circumstances, because nothing was visible from outside, everything looked as it always did. My mother had been afraid of gas ever since, and it was then that the routine with the square spanner had begun. Once a couple had killed themselves with sleeping tablets; that was in 1934. They were thought to have been Jews, and terrible things like that did seem to happen to Jews. Once a maid from Kiefernweg had strangled her illegitimate child with a towel. The news ran through our little estate in a flash like an Athenian message of terror, and irrefutably confirmed for us the complete depravity of the lower orders. It was then that my mother dismissed our maid, because she saw her as a danger to us children. She always said: They’re all the same, one rabble very much like another. They are all marked by God.
Yes – and now it was our turn. Now the ambulance was parked outside our house at number 35 Im Eichkamp. It was spring 1938, everything was still intact and looked kind and inviting, the walls of the house were covered with Virginia creeper, and pansies were already coming up in the front garden, and while the men upstairs moved my whimpering sister, my mother downstairs was explaining to the people in the street that it was something to do with her appendix, that her daughter had a case of acute and serious appendicitis. That made sense, and then she ran upstairs and for the first time she carefully wiped the blood from her daughter’s face, because of course even the people of Eichkamp knew that appendicitis didn’t usually lead to bleeding from the mouth.
Then the ambulance drove away. No one was allowed to go with her. The orderlies had immediately grasped the situation, they might even have sensed that something forbidden was going on, everything must be left as it was, they also had to inform the police. Our green pinewood front door slammed shut, the new security lock snapped into place, and I was suddenly sitting with my parents as if in a mousetrap. Eichkamp imprisonment: now it was obvious. An air of crime, an air of grandeur and destiny had settled upon us all. We sat helplessly in our big club chairs and for the first time we sensed the breath of the big world passing through our cramped rooms. Life was incredible – who would ever have thought it? Now school and the Hitler Youth, and Tacitus’ writings about the Teutons, were no longer worth heeding; not the Ministry, Reich Minister Rust* and the many fine laws and decrees of the völkisch state, not the art about which my mother was so enthusiastic, Schubert’s Winterreise and Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder – death had suddenly intervened, and we could not cope with its immensity.
We sat there as if time had suddenly stopped. That morning we were like bad amateur actors performing a swiftly improvised Electra and Antigone in a Berlin back room. Tragedy had moved into our house, and of course we were not a match for the script. My acting was particularly bad. I should have been moved and unhappy. That was what the part called for. She was my sister. But all I felt was a malevolent feeling of triumph: Now there you have it. It’s come out now. This is what life is like, just like this.
Ursula was delivered to the Westend Hospital. She lived on, in a tough and stubborn way, for another twenty-one days, as she approached the death that she herself had summoned. Death rose slowly upwards from her abdomen, it began between her genitals and her intestines and crept slowly up from there. It was a case of violent poisoning, the doctors explained to us.
Sublimate is highly concentrated mercury, and if a person ingests large quantities of it they are introducing the poison into their stomach and from there into their intestines. There it stays and begins to break down the organism. Sublimate is a universal decomposer, a universal crusher; it turns our flesh to mush and dissolves the organs very slowly into a bloody sludge. Then it rises through the body, and when it reaches the kidneys, the kidneys are dissolved, and then they are unable to filter out urine. The urine remains in the body and builds up, and when the urine reaches the heart, the heart stops and it’s over. That is called uraemia, and it usually happens very quickly, but in Ursula’s case it took a long time. She took three weeks, and those three weeks allowed us very slowly to grasp the disaster, to come to terms with the calamity. Death requires style, style wanted to form – who could ever understand death without style?
The shadow of criminality had quickly faded from our house. My father had telephoned the police from the Ministry, the Westend Hospital had telephoned my father, and then the police had telephoned the Westend Hospital again. The matter was now running along official tracks which quickly and completely exonerated us. Admittedly the rumour of appendicitis did not survive for long in Eichkamp. Some things had seeped through. Certain admissions had to be made, initially vague and ambiguous; an arrangement had to be reached. My mother now spoke often of the blow that fate had dealt us, and when one day she suddenly admitted over lunch: ‘The poor child, our Ursel, how she must have suffered!’ she was on the right path.
Life slowly re-established itself in our house. Everyday life wanted to reclaim its rights. I went to school again, prepared myself for the Abitur, wrote a long essay about Hans Grimm and the ‘völkische Lebensraum’,* my father travelled again to the Ministry of Culture at 8.23 and brought home lots of files about art, and my mother now cooked with greater care and produced tastier meals than ever before. And in the afternoon we went in turn to the Westend Hospital and visited our dying child: only twenty-one years old. It was a moving expansion of our Lebensraum. Never had we left Eichkamp so frequently. There was something missing at home, that was certain, but on the other hand we now had a bright and high-ceilinged room in Charlottenburg that clearly bore the thrill of another world. We took the suburban train, but those train journeys were more like quiet pilgrimages to Lourdes or Konnersreuth. My mother now spoke often of Therese, and I never knew if she meant the one from Avila, the one from Lisieux or the one from Konnersreuth.* The mystery of the blood preoccupied us, the mystery of suffering cried out for resolution, and the books of Chaplain Fahsel were now joined by accounts of the Konnersreuth case. In that instance they had learned how easily suffering in girls can involve blood. It was a mysterium, as I was often told. The word was new to me. I looked it up in the dictionary and saw that the matter was, quite surprisingly, taking a religious turn.
Ursula’s sick room was, in fact, little suited to spiritual transfiguration. It was in the women’s section, ward B, fifth floor, room 23. Everything in the Westend Hospital had the whiff of doctors; at reception you had to awkwardly identify yourself, you had to stick meticulously to the visiting hours and do battle with cantankerous nurses, and the floor upstairs was polished until it was so bright and shiny that you had to take great care as you walked along it. Ursula was in a high white enamel bed, strangely packed and wrapped up. Lots of devices stood around her bed, lots of jars on these devices were connected to her bed by brown tubes. Clearly she was being artificially fed, and had to be artificially emptied as well. The whole hidden sphere of the abdomen, which in our house had always been considered as low and dirty, had now become art, the pure art of the doctors, and beneath this artifice her face blossomed with charm and beauty. She lay there as if in ecstasy; now she was able to speak a little again. Words issued quietly and intermittently from her scabbed mouth, and like all suicides who return to life she now regretted what she had done. She showed a mute determination to reverse the whole process and the doctors confirmed that hope for her: Definitely, quite certainly, in three or four weeks she would be back home, perhaps in a wheelchair; that possibility could not be discounted for the time being.
So Ursula went through a distinct phase of regeneration, and that period of vital recovery gave my mother a bright idea. She had decided that Ursula must convert. That Monday, she said one day over dinner, had been a clear hint from heaven. Many things had been ignored in our family, many things criminally neglected ever since her marriage. She had married as a Catholic without the blessing of her Church, and the room in which Ursula was dying in Charlottenburg was now giving her the powerful piece of moral superiority that was so urgently required for the correction of such early and grievous errors.
My father was essentially indifferent to such things. He had no interest in religion in this respect or any other. It was probably his mother who had, in the manner of stubborn old Protestants, demanded that spiritual humiliation of her Catholic daughter-in-law. That was a long time ago, the day war broke out in 1914. His Protestant mother was dead now, her remains had lain in Buckow in the Märkische Schweiz since 1931, and Catholicism, long suppressed, was now suddenly dominant in response to our disaster. There was much revising to be done.
So on the afternoons when she wasn’t visiting, my mother went in search of spiritual support. This proved to be an extremely delicate matter. On the one hand, my mother insisted that they had to be gentlemen of the better kind, high-ranking dignitaries and if possible members of priestly orders, not profane secular priests who led an ordinary and dubious worldly life with their housekeepers and members of their Berlin congregations; on the other hand, those gentlemen with theological pedigree were the very ones who proved most intransigent. The cathedral prelates and monsignors to whom my mother effortlessly gained access, the heads of spiritual orders and padres always twitched a little when, after some well-spoken words, they heard the term ‘suicide’. That was a difficult matter, she was informed. The Church, the Holy Mother, required of their children full spiritual clarity for such a grave step and sound health was also required. There was talk of a complete conversion, of complete penance and mercy. It was clear that the senior-ranking gentlemen had no intention of presenting themselves as a pious firm of undertakers. Even Thomas Aquinas had …
But meanwhile my mother had been busy too. In the evening hours, when she had previously opened the local newspaper, she thumbed pious books and happened upon a quotation that she now used to back up her position. She had bought Saint Augustine’s Confessions in a pocket edition – at a cost of two marks eighty – and she read it attentively in the evening. There she had happened upon a quotation that seemed apt, like a key to the heart of the Church and her daughter. The phrase was ‘Restless is our heart until it comes to rest in Thee, O Lord!’ That poor child, our Ursel, she now liked to say. Her restless heart. She was fundamentally in search of God.
It really was apt. I don’t know how many churches and chapels, monastic houses and church offices between Friedrichstrasse and Grunewald my mother hurried to in those days. She proved extraordinarily active and proficient in matters pertaining to the Church. One evening she came home at around six o’clock with an air of quiet triumph, contentedly put her black handbag inside our baroque cabinet, turned the heavy key twice, pulled it out and locked it in the drawer of my father’s desk, pulled that key out as well, put it in our sideboard and, as she locked the sideboard too, declared that it had all been sorted out. Father Ambrosius of the Salesians would be looking in at the hospital the next day.
Father Ambrosius was a kindly, bald man with a slight but barely noticeable outward squint. He wore a black habit, and a small cap on the top of his head, kept his eyes lowered and came from somewhere near Zehlendorf – his order’s Mother House was in Freilassing near Salzburg. He was not really distinguished enough for our case, and he also seemed to lack a sense of spiritual vocation. He showed a curious kind of theological stubbornness and wanted to start out with a clumsy conversion class; he brought his catechism and instructed the dying child from Eichkamp about the whence and whither and what-for and why of the world in general, about the intentions of the Creator, which were essentially good and pure, and how differently things had turned out because of Eve.
My mother was irritated by this. No fuss, she sometimes said crossly, just get on with it – the spirit is all that matters. She was probably on the left wing of the Church, and even then rebelled against the cool rationalism of the Thomist healing apparatus. ‘Mercy,’ she said, ‘all that matters is mercy!’ In fact there was no time to lose. Her daughter was still blooming a little from the artificial feeding and evacuation, but the redness and beauty of her face were already shadowed by the dark grace of death. And just as a spiritual man was beginning to take charge of her regime the doctors slowly withdrew their assistance and said sadly that things could be over any day now. They had done everything they could. Then another doctor must come, my mother exclaimed, meaning not Father Ambrosius but Jesus himself. We were swimming in a sea of religiosity.
On 11 April – it was a Tuesday, ten o’clock in the morning – the other doctor did come. Room 23 had been transformed into a little blossoming chapel. It no longer smelled of doctors, it smelled entirely of Catholicism. A lot of flowers in the room, pictures of saints on the wall, a little holy water stoup beside the door. In the corner an actual altar had been set up with candles and a crucifix, and Father Ambrosius brought the little bit of altar stone, the martyr’s bone required by Roman custom, in a black leather bag which, like an overnight bag, was filled very practically with all kinds of religious utensils for every eventuality. From this case he took the sacred implements required for the administration of baptism, followed by confession, followed by a mass with holy communion followed by extreme unction. I was surprised and startled by so many rituals from Zehlendorf. Four sacraments were being administered at once, and if my mother had been elevated to the rank of bishop and allowed to choose, there might also have been a confirmation. The mercy was boundless; it broke like a torrent over the sinner from Eichkamp and washed her miraculously clean. As it did so Father Ambrosius sang, exchanged words with an altar boy, donned new garments, trickled water over Ursel’s brow, placed a stole and books at the ready, prayed for a long time and later mixed an oil, and in between there was a lot of incense and bell-ringing and candlelight. Tears were also appropriate now. Tears of grief and beatitude.
