Olga, page 14
It’s turned cold; the newspaper writes that we haven’t had such a cold April since 1848, when meteorological records began. It’s killed off the tree blossoms, and poor families don’t know where they’re supposed to find money for coal. I have a warm stove and hot tea and a guilty conscience, because I’m fine. I hope you’re being spared this dreadful weather.
I just got up and went to the cupboard, and behind my reserves of sugar and honey I found your notebooks. As if you had wanted to hide them from me. Or did you want to find a place for them where they wouldn’t bother me? Your notes don’t bother me!
No, that’s not true. I read them and they made me cross. The allure of distant lands, the expanses of the desert and the Arctic, your longing for somewhere and nowhere, your colonial fantasies—such castles in the air! I know you’re not alone in building them. Not a week goes by that I don’t read about Germany’s future on the high seas and in Africa and Asia, about the value of our colonies, about the strength of our navy and our army, about Germany’s greatness, as if we had outgrown our country the way one outgrows a robe and needed a bigger one.
For a long time your dreams were more honest than that. You loved emptiness, the emptiness of the desert and—you didn’t know it yet, but it enticed you—the emptiness of the Arctic. Later you talked about plantations, factories, and mines in the desert and about the Northeast Passage—you disguised your love of emptiness the way politicians and newspapers disguise their love of emptiness with economic and military goals. It’s not about the goals. They’re puffed-up nonsense, just as Germany’s greatness is puffed-up nonsense. Sometimes I read and hear that there will be war soon. In a war, nothing will be left of the colonies, nothing, and no one will let Germany keep the big robe it doesn’t actually need.
The French and the English and the Russians had their fatherlands early on; for a long time, the Germans had theirs only as a fantasy, not on earth but in heaven—Heine writes about it. On earth they were divided, riven with strife. By the time Bismarck finally created their fatherland for them, they had grown accustomed to fantasizing. They can’t stop. They go on fantasizing; now it’s about Germany’s greatness and its triumphs on the seas and on distant continents and about economic and military marvels.
They’re empty fantasies, and it’s the emptiness that you actually love and seek. You write about devotion to the great cause, but you mean melting away into emptiness, into nothingness. I fear the nothingness into which you want to melt away. It’s greater than the fear you will meet with an accident. I didn’t take what you wrote seriously back then. I thought it strange, but that didn’t matter, because you were near me. Now you are far away. In your notebooks I meet you as a stranger, and I see that you were already a stranger to me then.
I hold you tight, in desperation,
Your Olga
April 6, 1914
Dearest,
Everything I wrote yesterday is true, and yet . . .
I love your radiance, your determination, your persistence. Whenever you encounter misfortune, you brush it off—like a dog coming out of the water and shaking himself to make the drops fly away. You were never able to comfort me when I was sad; you would stand beside me in my sorrow like a helpless child. After a while, though, you would think of a way to draw me out of my sorrow with some mad or silly thing.
Even when we were young—do you remember how I despaired when my grandmother had hidden my books, and you dyed your hair with shoe polish and drew on a mustache to play the robber at Grandmother’s house and fetch the books? And the time we sat beside the Neman, and I was sad because I couldn’t get my favorite pupil into high school in Tilsit, until you climbed the poplar tree, dizzyingly high, to prove to me that anyone who really wants to reach the top can get there. You have a wild imagination and a wild longing, and you deserved a better focus for both than our age has to offer.
Perhaps you will still find it.
And along with the wildness you have another side that I love no less. Perhaps I love it even more. Your devotion. I never had to ask you, you never had to reassure me: I know you never had another woman, not in the brothels of Berlin like other officers, and not on your travels. Whenever you came back to me, after a short time or a long one, you asked me whether I still cared for you, still loved you, still wanted you, not because you’d done something that might have cost you my love, but because my love for you is a miracle you can scarcely believe. Whenever you said goodbye, you said, “Don’t forget me,” as if I could ever forget you, and for a long time I didn’t understand that you simply wanted the same fixed place in my heart that I have in yours.
You’re a little timid, even if you don’t admit it to yourself, but you’re not a timid lover; you’re passionate, and at the same time tender and gentle. You’ve cultivated your own expectations of your life, as I have of mine. But the realm of love is something we created together, and here there is nothing that you hold back from me or I from you. Here you are as attached to me as I am to you. Oh, my dearest. When you’re with me, it’s easy for me to accept your two sides. Like when you’re standing beside me singing the Deutschlandlied, and at first it’s Deutschland that’s über alles for you, and then you’re filled with enthusiasm for German women and German loyalty, and you smile at me and take my hand.
Your Olga
April 11, 1914
Herbert, my love,
The newspaper is full of you again. A few days ago, the Norwegians from your expedition arrived at the settlement the captain also reached at the end of last year. They had no news of you; they had spent the winter on board ship in the pack ice, and left it in the spring.
At least they survived the winter, and the paper says that what was possible on board ship is also possible in a hut, or even in a well-situated, well-secured tent. Perhaps you and your people have also returned to the ship by now. There’s hope that, in the coming months, you too will turn up at the settlement, or that one of the expeditions currently underway will find you.
On May 12 it will be four years since you gave your lecture to the Tilsit Patriotic Society for Geography and History about Germany’s mission in the Arctic. The society has planned an event on that day commemorating your lecture. They hoped to be able not just to pay tribute to you, but to welcome you as well; at present, things are looking auspicious for your rescue.
No, I’m not going to start again about your longing for the great expanse. But there is one thing that bothers me. I hardly ever travel any farther than Tilsit. The trip to Posen for the anniversary of our graduation from teacher-training college was the longest trip I’ve made in years. I didn’t tell you about the anniversary, because you’re not interested, and I won’t tell you about it now. It was at the start of the school holidays, so I was able to stay on in Posen for a day after the celebration. That evening, as I walked around the town—which I like—on my own and the bells were ringing and the lights going on in the houses and shining from the windows, I felt homesick for my dilapidated village and my wretched apartment at the back of the school. I know that sounds ridiculous, but listen. It’s not that when I’m in my dilapidated village and my wretched apartment at the back of the school I am content. I often want to leave; I often want to go out into the world and see Paris and Rome and London, and the Alps and the ocean. I have wanderlust. And my wanderlust feels no different from my homesickness: there is a tugging in the stomach, my chest starts to feel tight, and my throat fills with tears that I cannot shed, but that stop me breathing freely.
Perhaps the longing to reach your destination has been consumed by your longing for nothingness and the great expanse. Just as Germans long for emptiness and, at the same time, for comfort. I have never insisted you reveal your thoughts and feelings to me. But when you come back, I don’t want you to hide anymore by saying you can’t explain what you’re feeling.
Come back soon!
Your Olga
May 13, 1914
Dearest,
A month has passed since I last wrote to you. I lost faith. For a long time, it felt as if by writing these letters to you I was keeping you in the world and preserving and protecting you. These past few weeks, I couldn’t believe it anymore. When I sat at the table and wrote to you, no courage or strength flowed into the letter, only ink.
Things are better again today. Yesterday the event in Tilsit was held in your honor, and any day now another expedition is setting out to rescue you. The speeches at the event and the newspaper report were optimistic. The report doesn’t gloss over the criticism of your belated departure to the Arctic, but it pays tribute to your strength of will and initiative and quotes a researcher who says the success of an expedition is five percent dependent on the equipment, five percent on timing, and ninety percent on its leader. I can’t really envisage this, and I’d never heard of the researcher either. But I know that, as a leader, you won’t fall short.
At the end of the event they sang “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” again, like last time. As if Deutschland is going to bring you back to me. Perhaps some brave, competent Norwegians will. It was all too loud. I thought of you, and in my thoughts it was completely silent all around you; the snow was falling quietly, covering everything with a white blanket. They frightened me, the silence and the blanket.
The day before the event, the school board had invited me to a teachers’ conference in Tilsit. They talked about you there too; you were praised and damned and everything in between. I defended you; it did me good. The school inspector who visited me in September came as well; he offered me his arm and was friendly in a paternal way, as if he knew about you and me and wanted to express his sympathy. Is it possible he knows about us?
It was the first teachers’ conference I’d attended. I learned that teachers have very different ways of dealing with parents who want to put their children to work in the fields instead of sending them to school. I’ve always said no. From now on, we were asked to be generous in granting their wish. A young colleague sitting beside me said, “So that’s it, then.” We’d been chatting earlier, and had gotten along, and I asked him what he meant by “that’s it.” War, he said: we were to prepare the children to take their fathers’ place.
I met a lot of young colleagues; there are more of us than we realized, and we want to go on meeting privately. I’m also going to get more involved with the association of woman elementary schoolteachers. I don’t want my life to be limited by the boundary of my village any longer.
I’ve been saving, and soon I’ll have enough money to buy myself either a secondhand bicycle or a secondhand piano. I have to decide. It’s going to be the bicycle; I want to get out of my village, and although I don’t have a piano, I do at least have the organ.
This is what my life is like these days. I think of you—not five minutes go by without my thinking of you. There’s not an evening when my last thought isn’t of you or a morning when it isn’t my first. May my thoughts bear you up!
Your Olga
June 16, 1914
Oh, Herbert, my love,
May was not a good month. In May a German–Norwegian expedition reached your ship and saved the two Germans who had stuck it out on board. You and your companions were not on the ship, and the Germans had no news of you. One expedition is still underway. They’re looking for you along the east coast of Nordaustlandet. The newspaper says they should look for you on the west coast. The paper also says you should have reached the settlement by now. Wounds or frostbite might hold a group up, but if one person were still able to set off, he would, and if none of you were in a condition to do so and you were stuck in a hut or a tent, searching for you was like searching for a needle in a haystack. The paper mentions a Danish expedition that survived two winters in Greenland. But it writes that Eskimos helped the Danes, and there are no Eskimos and no Lapps on Nordaustlandet.
When I’ve written to you about my life in my letters, it’s felt as if you were able to watch me, to be with me—from far away, but I didn’t sense the distance. Now I do. Will what I’m writing still reach you? I feel closest to you when I write about you, your ship, your people, and the expeditions to save you. When I tell you about the events of my everyday life, it drops into the gulf that has opened up between us.
I don’t want that gulf to be there. I want you to stay with me. Eik is interested in expeditions. Sanne doesn’t get the newspaper; he reads it at my house. He read about you and asked me about the Eskimos and the Lapps.
I met up with one male colleague and seven of the female colleagues I got to know at the teachers’ conference. The other male colleagues preferred to meet without the women, and the other female colleagues were worried the meeting might annoy the school board. We resolved never to talk about ourselves, only ever about classes and the children, and, this time, about how to persuade parents and pastor to send a child to high school or the girls’ secondary school. I’d had more success with this than the others in recent years.
In the end, we did talk about ourselves, after all. One of us wants to get married, but her fiancé doesn’t earn enough; between the two of them they would earn enough, but if she got married she would have to leave the teaching profession. Incidentally, the male colleague who came has inherited a bicycle that he doesn’t ride because it’s a women’s bicycle; he’s offered to sell it to me for a good price. Sanne and I preserved jam and are going to sell it at the market in Tilsit next Sunday, as we planned on New Year’s Eve. Sanne’s husband has built me a henhouse, and I’m getting chicks next week and will soon have chickens, which was also one of my plans.
Do you remember, four years ago, after your lecture, how we heard the song of the nightingale? This summer I hear it every night. I like its fluttering and trilling, but I really love its long notes; they pierce my soul.
The summer is warm, and I would like to lie with you beside the Neman or beside the sea and bid the day farewell, welcome the night, and look up at the sky; at first it’s still light, then dark, and our gaze finds stars upon stars and loses itself in the depths of the sky. The nightingale sings of love and death: our love, our death.
When I asked you what attracted you to the Arctic, you couldn’t give me an answer. Do you have one now? Either to the Arctic or to war, you said, and that friends of yours said war was coming soon. Old Mina says the same; she claims to have seen the four horsemen.
I often feel as if I can’t stand it anymore, that it’s all too much, the love, fear, hope, despair, closeness, and estrangement. Sometimes I’m so angry with you it almost rips me apart, and then I’m immediately consumed by my guilty conscience. Come, I keep calling out to you, come; but you don’t hear me. Hear me—come!
Your Olga
July 1, 1914
My dear Herbert,
June was a bad month too. The last expedition that was still looking for you has returned. They found no trace of you, no message left in a cairn, as expeditions usually do, no abandoned tent, no equipment left behind. Your ship is in Spitsbergen again; the ice released it, and the men from the expedition brought it back.
There will be no more rescue missions. On June 28 a Serb murdered the heir to the Austrian throne and his wife in Sarajevo. Many are saying that Austria will declare war on Serbia; many fear that Russia will stand by Serbia. Whatever happens—no one is going to raise the money and the personnel for another expedition to the Arctic. You’re on your own.
When the newspaper reported on the return of the rescue expedition, it speculated about your and your companions’ prospects. Your provisions, the provisions that previous expeditions and fishermen and hunters have left behind in huts and camps, could last a long time. But it said the idea that all four of you had been wounded, had recovered over the summer, and would soon turn up again was too unlikely. One should never abandon belief or hope; people sometimes surpassed themselves and were carried beyond their limits by miraculous powers. However, one should think with love of those to whom you had not returned, and probably never will.
No, I am not abandoning belief or hope, and I think with love of no one but you. Yes, you were sometimes distant from me in recent months. But you are no more distant now than you were before you returned from the last expedition, or any more distant than you were before you set off. I don’t care what they write about you. You remain in my heart, and I hope with you, and believe in you, and love you, and am
Your Olga
August 8, 1914
My dearest,
Germany declared war on Russia, then on France, and then England declared war on Germany.
The 41st Regiment has marched out. I was with the schoolchildren in Tilsit. There were music and flowers, men waved their hats, young women let soldiers take them in their arms and saw them off at the station, and the trains were hung with slogans: “An Outing to Paris” and “Off to Flog the Frog.”
Here in the village there’s no enthusiasm. Every call-up is a blow for farm and family. The few volunteers are young people whose fathers treat them worse than slaves. One came to bid me farewell; he was afraid of war, but he was more afraid of his father.
War is a thing for city people, not farmers. And for children. The small and weak are made to play the Serbs and the English; then the others set upon them, shouting, “Serbia must die,” and “May God punish England!” The fear of a Russian invasion is also greater among farmers, who are worried about their supplies, than among city dwellers, who have fond memories of the Russian officers from the nearby Tauroggen garrison when they were guests in the Hôtel de Russie.
I can imagine what you would do. You wouldn’t hesitate to report to your regiment. For one unthinking moment I was happy that you were safe on Nordaustlandet.
Your Olga
September 13, 1914
My love,
Yesterday our soldiers beat the Russians. Their infantry and the Cossacks had been occupying Tilsit since August 26, and everything was fine with them. Once, a troop of Cossacks turned up in our village, let the children admire them and the mayor serve them beer, and were soon gone again. The farmers had hidden their wives, daughters, and maids in cellars and attics, but the Cossacks didn’t ask for women.
