Homecoming Page 7

  12

  WHY HAD THE AUTHOR deviated from his model at the end? Though the analogous question is equally as interesting: Why had he followed the model until the end?

  It was not as if the author had mechanically transposed adventure after adventure from the world of the saga to Karl's: the story was too playful for that. No, he felt compelled to tell a soldier's tale, a tale of homecoming. He knew the jargon, he knew The Odyssey, and he took it easy: he did not go to the trouble of researching Siberia's geography or vegetation; he did not care that rivers in Siberia flow north, not south. All he knew was that in the north Siberia has tundra and forests and rivers and in the south it is hot and dry and bordered by a number of countries. Why trouble the reader with detail?

  Do we actually want to know? I thought of an old friend who is better at naming and interpreting stars and constellations than anyone you can imagine. He makes it all up, but even if you know he makes it up you enjoy listening to him. Is it because the true names are of as little use to us as the false ones? Because all we care about is bringing the mighty glitter of the firmament down to earth, using names and interpretations to help us feel at home with them?

  After The Odyssey I read Josef Martin Bauer's As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me. I remembered the success it had back in 1955 when it appeared, a success it owed to the impression it gave of telling a true story. It did the German soul good to hear that a German soldier had made his way back from Siberia on his own steam. Clemens Forell's route, like Karl's, took him along and across great rivers and led through tundra and forest and over mountains. Both heroes headed south, following the natural route across the Urals, through Russia and Poland or Czechoslovakia and into Germany. Clemens Forell's itinerary is so precisely marked by the stops he makes, and the circumstances surrounding his arrival in Iran are detailed with such clarity, that the account sounds totally authentic. I started to wonder whether my picture of a playful, imaginative writer was not a bit of an oversimplification. Couldn't the author of Karl's story have told a true or at least probable story, embellishing it only slightly?

  The literature on German POWs in Siberia revealed that most German prisoners there had neither the will nor strength, let alone courage, to resist. Very few dared to attempt escape; not one succeeded. By imagining that there was a way out of captivity, that escape was possible, and that the escaped prisoner could eventually make his way back home, the author of As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me had domesticated what was otherwise overwhelming, rendering it something people felt at home with.

  So my author had simply had a story to tell and made things easy for himself. How does someone so intimately acquainted with The Odyssey come to write a Novel for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment? Clearly he had had a classical education. He must have been unable to go back to his old job after coming home from the war and was keeping his head above water with hack fiction. Had a Jason volume or an Oedipus or Orestes volume followed his Odyssey? And as the times got better, did he start teaching Greek or philosophy or found a theater?

  I wrote to the German and Swiss national libraries asking whether they had the Novels for Your Reading Pleasure series in their collections and received replies in the negative. Their goal was to collect everything published in Germany and Switzerland, respectively, they wrote, but they might have overlooked publications of smaller presses.

  I put the following classified advertisement in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “Volumes of ‘Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment’ sought for scholarly purposes. Please submit volume title and author and price requested to box no. xy.” I received only one reply, which included volume 242, Midnight Emergency by Gertrud Ritter, free of charge. From that I learned, if nothing else, that the series had been published by the Rhein-Verlag in Basel and that its logo consisted of a river being crossed by a ferry. My bookseller had never heard of the Rhein-Verlag, but I did find it in the Basel business directory and the name of the owner in the Basel telephone book. I phoned and got the man's son, who had the same name. His father was dead, the publishing house likewise; he was in computers. He remembered my grandfather: when he was a boy, the old man would come regularly to fetch and deliver manuscripts and proofs. No, there were no archives.

  13

  ONE THURSDAY I DROVE to Kleinmeyerstrasse 38 after work and rang the second-story bell. I chose the second floor because the longer I mulled over the vague memory of the novel's ending the surer I was that Karl had climbed only one flight of stairs. I had neither written nor phoned in advance: I wanted to climb the stairs and stand at the door like Karl, unannounced and unprepared for what would happen.

  The nameplate next to the bell read bindinger. I waited. I could hear children playing in Friedrichsplatz and the Church of Jesus bells chiming six. Just as I was about to ring again, I heard the buzz of the door opener and pushed the heavy door open. The staircase was large, the stairs wide and deep, the chest-high wooden paneling with meander relief was obviously well cared for, and the wall opposite the entrance to the ground-floor apartment was fully covered by a picture, dark with age, of a man on a horse before a motley crowd waving flags large and small. I climbed the stairs.

  Standing in the doorway was a woman my age, of average height and weight. She had pale blond hair pulled back and held with a clip. She was wearing floppy jeans and a loose red sweater. Her feet were bare. She took the clip out of her hair, shook her head until the hair came loose, and said, “I've just come home.”

  “From work?”

  She nodded and raised her eyebrows inquisitively.

  “I'm on my way from work too.”

  She smiled. “No, I mean: What brings you here?”

  “It's hard to explain. It goes back quite a few years and has nothing to do with you. It has to do with your apartment. Do you know who lived here after the war?”

  “We did.”

  “You?”

  “My parents, my sister, and I. Who are you?”

  “My name is Debauer. Peter Debauer.”

  I put my hand in my pocket and came up with a business card. I gave it to her and said, “May I tell you the whole story?”

  She looked at my card, at her watch, into the apartment, and back at me. She nodded and held out her hand. “Barbara Bindinger.”

  The entrance hall was large and had the same paneling as the staircase. Through an open double door I could see a room with molding and a parquet floor and—through an open double door of glass—a balcony. The fittings were handsome, even lavish, which made the furniture, curtains, and carpets, of fifties and sixties vintage, look out of place. It also looked as if no one had put things away or cleaned up for quite some time.

  “Shall we go out onto the balcony?” she asked. “I think it's warm enough.”

  I began my tale. After a while she got up and brought out a bottle of wine and served it. She was an attentive listener. There was nothing special about the way she had stood in the door, walked onto the balcony, or now sat facing me, but I liked how she'd shaken her hair free, liked her slightly crooked, warm smile. And only now in the bright light of the balcony did I see her pale blue eyes and her complexion, with its hint of pink, yet so pale, so white, so naked as to make me feel I was stealing an unseemly glance at her breasts or genitals. I noticed a small scar on her upper lip, the remnant of an otherwise perfect operation or a fall. Her lips were beautiful.

  She smiled again when I finished. Then she shrugged. “I can't recall having peeked out coyly from behind my mother's apron when a stranger came up the stairs. Or could it have been my sister who peeked out coyly and I was the one my mother was carrying? I don't remember any man other than my father, neither then nor later. My parents were happily married, the way people of their generation were happily married. I can't possibly imagine Mother having secrets or a lover. But how can I be sure? My sister has my mother's documents, and they may include a diary with pictures of a lover and letters from him and, between its pages, the pressed rose he ga
ve her or had sent to the hotel after the first night. I certainly wouldn't have begrudged her that, especially during her years as a widow. But that wouldn't bring you any closer to the end of your novel, would it?”

  “Can I speak to your sister?”

  “She doesn't live here. Though she doesn't live far away either.”

  I could not tell whether the answer was meant to put me off or encourage me. I did not want to make a thing of it, nor could I, because she took up again immediately. “What fits is the house, the floor, and the two sisters. Maybe the author lived in the building. We could ask around and see whether an indigent Greek teacher moved here after the war. What else did you say? Philosophy professor, theater director? We did have a theater director living on the ground floor—he's the one who hung that reject painting from the props department downstairs—but he didn't move in until the fifties and moved out long ago. Too bad we can't ask Mother.”

  “Is she no longer with us?”

  “She's been dead for three months. I moved in two weeks ago and haven't been able to take care of things after work. Fortunately Margarete took all the stuff that was worth anything; all I have to do is get rid of what's left.”

  I told her about my still-empty flat.

  “An empty flat instead of one filled with things you don't like—that's better, isn't it?”

  “I think it's terrific. And for the time being I don't feel like traipsing through furniture showrooms and junk shops.”

  She asked me if I'd be willing to help her with the clearing operation. She was a teacher, had just come back from six years in Kenya, and all her old friends were gone. “How about Saturday? I'll rent the van and cook a dinner. I'm a good cook. Trust me.”

  14

  ON SATURDAY WE EMPTIED the apartment of her mother's belongings and transported them to the dump. Barbara cooked an African meal. We ate on the floor: the only things Barbara had kept were the refrigerator and stove, dishes and cutlery, and sheets, towels, and blankets. She slept on the floor too. I asked what she'd done with the furniture she'd had in Kenya. She said she had tired of it and left it behind. She was living out of three wardrobe trunks equipped with large drawers and rods for hanging clothes. She'd bought them in Kenya secondhand. “I'm not the domestic type.”

  But finding the right furniture was important enough to her to send us poking through antique shops each Friday for the next few weeks. At first we limited ourselves to local establishments; then we branched out into the neighboring regions of Spessart, Hunsrück, and Eifel. During the preceding week Barbara would look them up in the local phone books and make the necessary calls, and by the weekend she knew where to go. The best places were the biggest: they had the biggest selection and the biggest mess, which meant you could pick up for a song what in a small shop would be the showpiece in the display window. She had her eye on art nouveau, and the dining room set and the desk with matching chair and the bookcase that she put together piece by piece over the weeks turned out to be perfect for her place. She had taste.

  As for me, I was not looking for a specific style. I found a tall narrow wardrobe with a large oval mirror in the door and a wide bed, both of cherrywood, and a set of bookshelves with glass doors that went well with Grandfather's desk and chair. “If we lived together,” she said with a laugh, “we'd have everything we needed.”

  At first we would set off at two and be back by evening; later we would stay overnight somewhere, taking a double room: “You don't mind, do you? We need our money for other things.” To tell the truth, I did mind: I have always had problems with being close to people at night when I am not intimate with them—on overnight school excursions, in mountain chalets, with friends, with my mother, even with my grandparents, when they let me sleep in their room because painters were taking care of some water damage in mine. But I said nothing. Besides, I was amazed at how easy—and pleasant—it was to spend the nights with her: Barbara's need to go on reading or suddenly turn out the light, her occasional awakenings in the middle of the night, her noises and smells, my waiting to use the bathroom and at times our mutual use of same, her face as she fell asleep, when she got up, in front of the mirror, and her body with its heavy breasts, thick thighs, cellulite, often displayed in worn, baggy underwear—none of it put me off, went too far, invaded my privacy. She was so nonchalant about everything that I, despite my weeks in paradise still rather timid in matters of the body, found myself following suit. Not only that, she was so cheerful and witty that at first I thought it was put on, but in time I was infected by it. She would pose as a baroque angel, as the Reich eagle and its Federal Republic equivalent, as a bewildered beaver and dying swan. She danced out of bed to the bathroom and back to the music of the radio alarm clock, and before long I was dancing with her. When she split her sides laughing over some witty little poems I knew by heart, I learned some more. She even had a cheerful—or at least content—way of saying nothing.

  I had never before fallen in love with a woman I really knew. It may not have happened the first time I met her, but the second or third time—or sometime in between—I would wake up with the conviction that I had fallen in love with the woman I had gone out with the previous evening. Things were different with Barbara. When she said that if we were living together we would have everything we needed, I just laughed. Then I thought that we would be good together and eventually that I would actually enjoy living with her. In the end I realized it was much more; it was what my happiness, my whole life depended on: living with her, falling asleep and waking up next to her, cooking and eating with her, spending my day-to-day existence with her, having children with her. After that I thought things would take the course they normally took when I fell in love: I could hold off and wait to decide whether I wanted to jump into this thing or not. But this time I was already in it.

  The next weekend we were in the Eifel region, between Bonn and Cologne, in a gigantic warehouse with all kinds of junk, though a few finds as well, from Biedermeier to art deco, including a bed and a leather couch that caught Barbara's fancy. When she started bargaining for the bed, I said, laughing so she could take it as a joke if necessary, “Why not stick to the couch. We've got all the beds we need.” She laughed too, dropped the bed, and started in on the couch.

  That night she got into bed with me and cuddled up close. Then she sat up, pulled off her nightgown, and said, “You too. I want to feel you.” She said it in a voice I had never heard her use. We made love.

  15

  I TOOK IT AS A SEAL on an unspoken agreement. When she awoke the next morning, her head on my throbbing arm and her arm on my chest, I thought everything would be different now, everything would be right. The first time we were frenetic and bumbling, but we woke up in the middle of the night and made love as easily as if our bodies had been intimate for ages.

  Barbara's tenderness was another plus I had trouble believing at first but was soon infected by. We could not keep our hands off each other: in the car, in the street, in shops and restaurants. She was so unbridled in her passion that she swept me away with her, washed away my inhibitions, my stiff, ungainly ways. The voice she used when she wanted to make love made me glow all over, and the small, dark drop of blood that sometimes appeared in the scar on her upper lip burned in my heart. I felt more alive than I ever had before. But what was even more of a miracle than the passion was the tenderness, a tenderness that transformed the day, minute by minute. Yes, everything was different now.

  At the same time everything remained as it was. The space the relationship occupied in our lives did not increase. It was limited to our weekend forays and a single, at most, meeting during the week, when either she invited me or I her to dinner. And whereas we had formerly taken leave of each other at the end of the evening, we now spent the night together. If after working late, say, I gave her a spur-of-the-moment call and asked if I could drop in and spend the night, I never got anywhere. Either she was out or was on her way to a parents' evening at school or a meet
ing with a colleague or she had to prepare her lessons for the next day or correct homework or she was tired or had her period or a headache or a backache. She would be tender about it and laugh and tell me how much she looked forward to next time. Sad as I was, I knew I could use the evening for other things and didn't worry. I didn't want any worries.

  If I was unable to increase the space our relationship occupied, I tried at least to refashion it: vary the venues of our weekend visits, bring us together with her new and my old friends, and—besides cooking and eating together—go to films, plays, concerts. Visit her sister.

  That was what led to our first quarrel. “Why do you make such a mystery out of her?” I asked. “Since she used to live here and had to report her departure to the residence registration office, I could find out the address for myself.”

  “What would you tell her?”

  “That she comes up in a novel, what the novel is about, that I want to find out if . . . But why am I going on like this? You know.”

  “How will you explain the way you found her?”

  “I'll just . . .”

  “Through me. You'll tell her you talked to me and I told you about her. What else will you tell her about me?”