The god of that summer, p.18
The God of that Summer, page 18
The accordion fell silent and the girl opened her mouth without managing to get a word out. Somewhere in the noise glass clinked, dogs barked, and a sailor leaned over the bar, a young U-boat corporal, and waved a fan of banknotes around. His hair and eyebrows bright blond, his cheeks red, he called out: ‘Champagne! I want to drink champagne again! Give me a big bottle of your best, boss, Napoleon or something! Don’t worry about glasses.’
Elisabeth stroked Luisa’s back, pushed her gently aside and turned to the drunk. ‘Oh, young man,’ she said sadly. ‘Do you know how much it costs? Save your money! Buy your girlfriend something nice and have a beer.’
But the sailor, who had very pale blue eyes and no hair on his chin, and from whose shirt a silver cross dangled, waved his hand dismissively and lowered his eyes. He ran his thumb through a puddle on the counter. ‘What use is money to me now,’ he said. ‘We’re not coming back anyway.’
*
The evening sun shone through the chinks between the planks of the open barn on the country road to Quarnbek. Almost twenty men were lying on camp beds or sheaves of straw and looked at her. Their eyes were open wide or half-closed with exhaustion, their cheeks pale and sunken above their full beards, and their clothes were so dirty and ragged that it was only on closer inspection that they were recognizable as uniforms: Russian. Some prisoners wore boots, but most of them only foot-rags, and each had a cannula with a tube in his bare arm.
A soldier of the Waffen-SS and a nurse walked around among the rows and examined the vacuum flasks beside the camp beds. They were filling up drop by drop with the blood of the men, who were guarded by several members of the Hitler Youth wearing knee-length trousers. They carried new sub-machine guns on their shoulder belts, and when one of them hissed at her and jerked his pelvis obscenely, Luisa pedalled away.
She cycled along the canal for a while. On the opposite bank a row of fishing rods was wedged in the ground; the bells tinkled and the water foamed white where U-boats glided below the surface towards the North Sea. The light was fading, the ferry house and the window of the convent were already in darkness. A flock of thrushes fluttered up from the garden when a big Mercedes drove past it at great speed. The driver looked severely out from under the rim of his steel helmet.
On the back seat two officers sat flicking through files, and in spite of his uniform and cap Luisa recognized one of them as the man from Vinzent’s birthday party. The reflection of the orange sky slid across the lenses of his glasses when he looked at her and even turned his head slightly so that she could see his scar, the proud flesh, and then the car had already reached the canal, and the grains of sand whirled up as it passed and scratched her mudguards, her face. Before it reached the ferry building the car turned off towards Rendsburg.
From a distance she heard the lowing of the cows on the farm; the evening milking had begun. A light bulb flickered in the open churn room but there was no one in the yard as she cycled over the bridge. Motte, sitting between the pillars in the porch of the big house, wagged his tail, and Luisa got off her bicycle and scratched his fur, so that he whimpered and snuggled up to her. Sirens sounded in the distance, and a short while later bombers flew past the farm heading south, perhaps to Neustadt or Itzehoe. Someone closed the door of the byre.
Now it was almost dark under the linden tree, only a few white narcissi pierced the darkness in the front garden, and she pushed her bicycle to the barn. A chicken flapped towards her out of the half-open door and darted off to the side before it disappeared cackling into the field. There was no light in the building, which held an old tractor with steel wheels, a grain binder and her father’s bucket car. By day some light fell through the loopholes above the hayloft, now the wind whistled through them, and Luisa leaned exhaustedly against the wall.
Her legs hurt. The double-walled churns in the byre rang out like gongs, and children squealed behind the barn. The big storage boxes beside the gate had been empty for a long time but still smelled of the previous year’s apples and pears, and from somewhere came the sound of whispering and rustling, and something that sounded like tiny feet pattering on metal. But she kept her painful eyelids closed. Her throat was so dry from her long ride through the Baltic wind that she could hardly swallow. Her lips tasted salty.
It was only when she heard a clatter in the hay barn that she looked up. The board walls, the storerooms full of firewood and peat for the stove, and the black silhouettes of the machines impeded any kind of vision, but in spite of the darkness she felt no fear – which had less to do with her exhaustion, her sad drowsiness, and more with the arrival of a comforting aroma. The smell of winter fruit, tyre rubber and tractor oil beneath the high roof mingled suddenly with the elegant scent of pine trees, witch hazel and a hint of menthol, and she raised her chin and called out quietly: ‘Dad?’
A bat fluttered close to her ear. Spider webs brushed her cheeks and hands as she felt her way between a dented water-tank on wheels and the car with the fabric roof. The space was cramped, and she accidentally bumped against the front fender, much wider than the rear one, and rubbed her knee with a groan. Then she reached in through the open window for the quartz keyring, and carefully turned the key in the lock. After a moment’s hesitation the headlights came on.
Insects were already tumbling through the faint light, and as soon as she saw the dust floating in the air she couldn’t help coughing. The stalks of hay on the winch of the grain-binder had a golden gleam when the draught caught them. At first it was impossible to see what was beam and what shadow below the hayloft with the cross-shaped slits in the wall, but she could now sense a mute presence. A ladder with missing rungs lay on the mud floor, the axe was still stuck in an up-ended chopping block, a massive oak-tree trunk, and in the middle of the two white lines that shone from the blackout hoods of the headlights and struck the wall, the tarred bricks, she recognized his silhouette.
A sudden pulse in her throat, and horror to the roots of her hair was followed by a confusion that made her feel dizzy for a moment: the fact that she wasn’t breathless, that she didn’t lose her composure, didn’t tremble or cry or run screaming away seemed to her both proof that this sight wasn’t real and that there could be no doubt. She stepped into his shadow, stepped unexpectedly on the tie that lay there and tried to make out his face above her. And in the end it didn’t matter whether she cried out or only imagined that she had.
His answer, or what she perceived as his answer, came out of the infinity between two heartbeats: although the farm still echoed with the lowing of the cows in the byre opposite, the cries of the women and the laughter of the children as they sent jets of milk shooting from the teats into each other’s mouths, her father was surrounded by his own profoundly serious silence. Beneath its weight the darkness around her seemed to condense once more, and she felt clearly that it was the actual meaning, the secret heart of the word ‘death’. When she reached into the slits and pulled the rubber hoods from the headlights, the ploughshares in the corner flashed like a row of silver teeth.
To look at him more closely, she involuntarily adopted the same posture, head tilted, as the hanged man. His collar was crumpled on the inside, the skin around the rope was blue, and when she thought about it later, it was never his freshly shaven, fragrant cheeks or the shadows around his tightly closed eyes that struck her first, it was never the bitter-looking narrow-lipped grin or the big urine stain on his trousers, it wasn’t the shoe that dangled from his foot, revealing a torn sock. What she always thought of first was the position of his swollen hands with their cleaned nails and the first liver spots, their backs towards the front, making the elbows stand out slightly. He had never held his arms like that in life.
‘The universe is weightless,’ Herr Thamling used to say when someone’s burden was too heavy for them, and now she understood those words. The hayloft creaked again and she carefully pulled the dead man’s shoe over his heel. Then she reached up and held his fingers, which were cool but not yet cold, and ran her thumb over the back of his hand. His wedding ring had embedded itself deep in his skin; the second hand on his watch jerked forward and she even thought she could hear it ticking. But perhaps again that was the little feet on the metal roof. She pushed the door shut and ran across the yard.
Children were playing in the corridor of the farmhouse too. They crouched on the steps folding paper aeroplanes or cutting brownish figures and objects from old catalogues. Washing over the banisters and from the tips of the antlers on the wall; radio music and laughter came from the kitchen in the attic, and Luisa pushed open the door to her room. Warm air rushed towards her: the element in the heater was glowing.
With Billie’s dressing gown over her knees, her mother sat on the edge of the bed smoking. Her favourite cup, the one with the pattern of violets that had recently lost its handle, stood on her bedside table, a bottle of schnapps beside her, and Luisa took a deep breath and called softly, because she didn’t want the other refugees to hear her: ‘Mama, Mama, come quickly!’ And only now did her voice blur with tears. ‘Papa has hanged himself!’
But her mother didn’t react, she just smeared ash onto a saucer. The hairs on the back of her head had thinned from lying down so much, and she took a sip before looking around at her daughter. Her grey eyes were weary, as if she were looking through dust. ‘Again?’ she murmured at last, barely moving her lips, and when she shook her head the slack skin under her chin wobbled. She drew on her cigarette. ‘Well, then leave him hanging for a while, I would say. And make sure he’s really dead.’
Perhaps, once the lake withdraws, it will come to light: being granted the vision of a work is by no means the same as having the strength and the fortune of circumstances to bring it to completion. Everything is in the hands of the Lord, just as we are flayed and broken on the wheel. We are left with the incomprehension that he bestows on everyone like a fish seeing a coin. We are left with the vague hope that our life will have a meaning with him at least, even a golden one, though the zealous work may lie shattered like a chamber pot in the mud.
Between evening and morning, war – the work of the Devil with his partnering of saltpetre and sulphur – returned to our forests. Smoke drifted over the lake upon which floated the church, our heart’s little chapel. And even if the clash of the armies beyond the Ochsenweg was not meant for us, it was the height of stupidity to let the cattle go on grazing in the pastures, however pointed their horns or bone-crushing their hooves. They went to the knife and were devoured by those who could not keep pace with the camp followers, whether because of injury or strong drink.
The back-and-forth bullets of the field and chamber, singer and nightingale by name, whistled over our thatched roofs and hissed into the lake, and the horses perished and left us alone with our depleted strength. And the people, long weary of fighting, crept back among the thorny thickets, where there were no paths for the villains and their pikes. And so the two old men were left alone in the village with their illusion, namely the author of this chronicle Bredelin Merxheim, and his companion Johann Bubenleb.
Hand’s breadth by hand’s breadth we approached our goal, the finely carved wisdom of Horace could already be read in the arch above the door. The wind, which stirred the flames from the embers, dried our eyes, our soft spines cracked, and still we put our all in, because what else was there to do in those days? It was only when the scattered soldiers came to the village, marauders weighed down with weapons, that the work had to rest and a hiding place be swiftly found for the night. Devotees of Bacchus all, they brought lust and intoxication into our huts and made off in the morning in pursuit of the next death, in many cases their own. May God forgive their stinking souls.
And soon after it happened: the chapel, which we thought was already at the shore, listed on the capricious waves and drifted off course. A storm came up, thunder and lightning crashed down with a rain riddled with sharp hailstones whose like no one could remember seeing. Clothes clung icily to bodies, hat-brims drooped and to make matters worse one of the rotten cables on the boat was torn and could not be mended without entering the raging waves. But no one could swim, so all would have drowned.
So we pulled the frisky church on a rope, and grim-faced Bubenleb shouted through the storm: how did he spin all this together on his sheet of paper, when it should have been left virgin white? What else, old Merxheim, is due to come in this summer of comets? All we need is for stray cannon-fire to come our way! But then it will be gut’s Nächtle, good night, as my wife, the wise Swabian, used to say!
Beneath his rough talk he was, as I have explained already, hewn from the finest timber, and his grimness was inspired by goodness; so he needed no reply. ‘Speak of . . .’ his inkpot-wielding companion from the inkpot groaned and braced himself more firmly against the storm, his feet clawing more deeply into the mud: ‘Speak of the Devil and he . . .’ But who can doubt the power of the word once thought, and the Devil was already crashing into the wall – not of the church, but of the boat that had been built with such care, and which immediately filled with water.
We humans stood frozen and aslant, and even the goats, with wet shore grass in their mouths, stared startled. A smoking cannonball it was, black with powder, the size of a fallen angel, and in an instant the lake engulfed a dream leaving nothing, not so much as the tip of the tower. The rush and murmur of the waves in the reeds sounded like mischievous laughter.
O old eyes, wide with disbelief! Ruined we were, utterly. O gouty hands, too weak for prayer! We pulled our hats down before the void. As the noise of battle vanished northwards, probably towards Denmark, and corpse-robbers and mercy-killers swarmed over the fields in search of lucre, bent-backed with sorrow we went to the house of Johann Bubenleb, to warm our feet by the fire. And then, over punch from a clay beaker, tears came once more to the eyes of the author of this chronicle, the bitterest tears now, and he no longer knew what he was living for.
But the craftsman, once he had refilled his cup, grinned with all his gappy teeth. He cut a piece of blue sheep’s cheese, put it on the bread and said with his mouth full: I think I can already hear from the bottom of the lake, my dear Bredelin, the hiccup of the bell! Hic-hoc! The well-read current turns the Bible pages, psalm such-and-such, and the winged angels intoning their round-mouthed Hallelujah gurgle most beautifully along with the organ!
Most likely he meant the wind that whistled through the cracks of his hut, octaves of derision, and when his interlocutor had no words to utter in reply and only stared into the hole of the stove, his friend rested his hand on his neck and continued gravely: Why then must he blow affliction over the days of his old age! Master Merxheim! Must a bent nail point you in the right direction? What in truth has been lost? This was not a wash-house, or a shit-house for that matter, it was not a sty for pigs, was it?
We sit freely at the centre beneath the celestial arch, and while the God of this summer may despise our nearness – can he remove himself further than the thought intended for him? Have we not tried everything within the realm of human possibility? Our drudgery, for which no one earned as much as a pfennig, is hardly to be doubted; every fibre of our aching backs bears witness to us. Our efforts were pure and perfect, and could not have been truer, so everything has been successful, my Bredelin: seen by the Lord’s light we have reached our goal. The little church is in its rightful place! Think on that!
In the midday silence the only sound was the treadmill, the butter-dog in the dairy. Luisa waited by the new spruce-wood stairs leading up to the milkers’ rooms. A row of rubber boots stood on the platform, new amber tears sparkled in the sun here and there, and Walter grinned wearily and nodded to her.
He wore a khaki-coloured blouson with epaulettes, tight trousers with patch pockets and ankle-high laced boots. With a few shirts and the red velvet cover from his bed over his arm, he tramped down the last few steps, came to a stop beside the motorbike and looked at her affably. ‘Hey, you? How are those big fat tomes of yours?’ he said. ‘They’ve still got all their letters in there?’
With her arms folded over her chest, she smiled vaguely and ran the tip of her shoe through the aromatic sawdust on the floor. Even though she had only recently rearranged her books, alphabetically by author, she felt as if he were asking about a different, far-off time; she had read very little for months. She quickly studied him from top to toe and was relieved to see no scars or bandages. But he was paler now, and much thinner too, and his posture expressed a weariness that belied his age.
There was a sandy glow on his cheeks. When he had arrived an hour before on the loudly rattling motorbike, passing by the duck pond on his way to the big house after calling in at the byre, she had quickly changed her clothes: she was wearing Sibylle’s suede pumps, her midnight-blue dress and the little necklace with the single pearl. But he didn’t seem to notice. He smiled and said, ‘Wasn’t your hair longer before?’
There was a new expression in his eyes, a different seriousness with an underlying melancholy, but perhaps it only seemed that way to her because of his prominent cheekbones, or because the shadow of the flag darkened his face. His beautiful mouth with its almost feminine outline seemed thinner to her, more colourless than before, and she brushed her strands of hair, which had grown strongly back, behind her ear and answered: ‘It’s been shorter too.’
He nodded, his eyelids closed, and seemed to understand. He threw the things into the motorcycle sidecar to join a suitcase, a cardboard box full of papers and steel-tipped work boots. ‘Your Karl May’s in good shape. Oh, and sorry about your father, by the way. Terrible thing. I barely knew him, but I think he was a good man. He had a nice face. Was there a farewell note? Do you know why he did it?’
