Olga, page 8
This was not what I’d learned in my history lessons about the foundation of the German Empire, and I’d never heard anyone say that everything in Germany was getting too grand either. Nor did I know what to think of the idea that Herbert had wanted to lose himself in nothingness. I knew the feeling that there was nothing to strive for, nothing to work for or believe in or love, that truly gave satisfaction. This feeling, transformed into philosophy, was what I understood as nihilism. Herbert’s longing for nothingness must, however, have been something else.
7
During the last few years that Fräulein Rinke was with us, she still sewed the occasional item now and then, but would sit at the sewing machine for long periods without working. She would sew a seam and not stop at the end of the material, creating a tangle of threads that she would sit in front of, sad and helpless. She would thread the needle, lean back, put her hands in her lap, and turn to look out of the window at the street, where nothing was going on. Or she would fall asleep, her head dropping onto her chest until the back of her neck hurt and she woke up. “Your family needs another seamstress.”
But our sewing days were over. My brother was no longer growing out of trousers, jackets, and shirts I could wear with slight alterations. My thrifty mother found a secondhand shop with plenty of clothes that fit me and didn’t need Fräulein Rinke’s attentions. In any case, my brother and sisters soon left home, and when I finished school I moved out as well.
When Fräulein Rinke started to find sewing exhausting, we thought she was just old and tired. But, instead, leaving sewing behind seemed to revive her, to set her free. She could do whatever she liked.
After years of living as a lodger, she was allocated her own apartment on the fourth floor of a housing co-op: two small rooms and a kitchen, bathroom, and balcony. The goods yard started right beside the building, and she liked the wide view of the tracks, the old shunting house, and the old water tower. In summer she would sit on her balcony, where she cultivated a small flower garden in a long window box.
At last she could read everything she’d always wanted to read: classical and modern; novels and poems; books about the history of women, the blind, deaf, and dumb, the German Empire, and the Weimar Republic; musical scores she had played on the organ; and the music she would have liked to play. She went to the cinema and saw films where little was said and a great deal happened: dance films, adventure films, westerns. She continued to vote Social Democrat, and attended the trade union demonstration on May Day and church on religious holidays.
Every few weeks my mother would invite her over for Sunday lunch, and I would pick her up and take her home. An uncle had given me an old Opel the car dealer had refused to trade in for a new one. Sometimes I would pick her up on other days too, and we would do something together: see a film, go sightseeing or to an exhibition, eat at a restaurant. My grandparents, with whom I had spent the happiest holidays of my childhood, whom I’d loved very much and visited often, had died. There was a space in my life.
She was happy for me to accompany her to the art galleries in the nearby town, where she always liked to look at the same pictures. They were paintings from the time when, as a young woman, she had first discovered art, from Anselm Feuerbach and Arnold Böcklin to the Impressionists and Expressionists. One of her favorite pictures was The Execution of Emperor Maximilian by Édouard Manet.
“Why do you love this painting?”
“The emperor is frivolous and absurd, and yet we sympathize with him. The painter is trying to criticize Napoleon’s political adventure, but all he can do is romanticize it. And the picture’s so huge we could walk into it.”
Sometimes, on our walks, we stumbled over her past. Outside the window of a stationer’s shop she recalled her Soennecken fountain pen. “It was stolen from me when I was fleeing, along with my watch and ring—not by Russians, by Germans. But I was lucky. Other women had far more taken from them during their flight.”
As we were strolling through the market, a man came toward us with a dog. She stopped and couldn’t take her eyes off the dog, a black Border collie with a white neck and blue eyes. “Herbert’s dog looked exactly like that.” She held out her hand, and the dog sniffed it and let her stroke him.
Once, when we were on our way home from the cinema and the full moon was particularly large, she thought about her school and how she had sung “Now All the Woods Are Sleeping” with the children.
After a day out at the Villa Ludwigshöhe, we were sitting on the terrace of its café when she suddenly stopped talking and stared at an elderly lady and gentleman a few tables away, the woman white-haired and plump, the man bald and slim, both well dressed. Olga rose to her feet, took two or three steps toward them, and stopped. She just stood there, with her distinctive, upright bearing; then she shook her head, and her shoulders drooped. I jumped up, but she waved me away. All she wanted to do was leave.
“What was it?” I waited until we were seated in the car before asking.
She didn’t reply until we stopped outside her house. “The woman was Viktoria . . . that pouting mouth . . . that haughty look . . .” Then she told me how Viktoria had tried to keep her and Herbert apart.
“What happened to her?”
“You just saw her. She’s withstood everything, the first war and the second and the bombs and the inflation. She’s the kind of person who withstands everything.”
8
Sometimes we drove out to the Forest of Odes or the Hardt Forest and went hiking. Fräulein Rinke had hiking maps and would plan where I should drive and which route we would take.
For me, going for a walk with someone was a chance to talk. Twice a year my father would take us children for a Sunday walk to ask us what we were doing, learning, reading, thinking. My mother, for whom things were real only if they had been the subject of a conversation and who couldn’t talk to her monosyllabic husband anywhere near as much as she would have liked, took advantage of every shopping trip, social call, or attendance at church to talk to us children. Hiking with friends was also all about exchanging thoughts and ideas. Fräulein Rinke and I couldn’t talk to each other while we were hiking. She had to be facing me, looking at my face and reading my lips, in order to understand me.
So we would walk without speaking. Sometimes she would hum under her breath. It took a while for me to get used to it; then I liked it. There was so much to see and hear without the distraction of conversation! Grasses and flowers, the trees’ green and multicolored leaves, beetles, birdsong, the wind in the trees. And there was the smell of freshly felled, resinous wood, and of moldy wood that had been stacked for a long time, the smell of mushrooms in late summer and rotting leaves in autumn.
There was plenty to think about too, because in our own way Fräulein Rinke and I were in fact in conversation. We would sit on benches not just to rest or have a picnic, but if we wanted to say something, and sometimes there wasn’t a single bench we didn’t sit on. Fräulein Rinke sat at an angle, sidesaddle, as it were; I would sit opposite her, astride, and we would pick up the conversation where it had ended on the previous bench.
If she was tired and didn’t want to hike too far, she was happy for me to drive her up the Königstuhl, the mountain behind the city, with its level paths and panoramic view to the west. The view extended over the neighboring towns on this and the other side of the Rhine, to the smoking chimneys and steaming cooling towers of the Baden Aniline and Soda Factory, to the mountains on the far edge of the plain. In those days there were still a lot of fruit trees on the plain, and the countryside blossomed white and pink in spring. In autumn it was clothed in a bright-leaved blaze of color; in winter it lay cloaked in white. One evening, fog shrouded the countryside, the towns, the factories, covering the plain all the way from the mountain where we stood to the far mountains, behind which a red sun was setting, gently reddening the fog. It was cold. It must have been a late autumn or early winter evening, and we were freezing, but we couldn’t tear ourselves away from the scene until it faded.
9
She was never too tired to walk around the city cemeteries. There were about a dozen of them, and Fräulein Rinke knew them all, but there were some she particularly liked: the Bergfriedhof, the city’s largest cemetery; the Ehrenfriedhof, the soldiers’ cemetery; the Jewish cemetery; and the Bauernfriedhof, the farmers’ cemetery outside the city gates. At the Bergfriedhof she liked the variety of paths, tombstones, mausoleums; at the Ehrenfriedhof it was the terrain, which first rose, then fell away, seeming to lead over the field of stone crosses all the way up to heaven. At the Jewish cemetery it was the darkness beneath the old, tall trees; at the Bauernfriedhof it was the red poppies and the cornflowers in the borders of the neighboring fields. She liked the flowers at the Bergfriedhof too, but she liked the snow in winter even better, which would blanket the paths and graves and settle on the heads, shoulders, and wings of the statues of angels and women.
We spoke little, less than on our other walks. Occasionally Fräulein Rinke would stop, make a comment about a tombstone, a name, or a plant, look at me, and I would reply. Other than this, I heard our steps, the birds, the occasional whirr of a gardening tool, the howl of the machine digging a grave, or the quiet speaking and singing of a funeral party.
I thought I knew why Fräulein Rinke liked walking through cemeteries. Throughout her life she had lost so many people whose graves were unknown or unreachable that she wanted to commune with her dead among the graves of strangers: with Herbert and Eik and her neighbor from the Memel region and her grandmother, and her parents, whom she seldom spoke of but remembered. I understood this. I liked to stand at my grandparents’ grave to tell them that I was grateful to them and that I missed them. But when I said this to Fräulein Rinke, she had a different reason.
She wasn’t communing with her dead among these strangers’ graves. She liked to walk through cemeteries because everyone was equal here: the powerful and the weak, the poor and the rich, the loved and the neglected, those who had been successful and those who had failed. A mausoleum, an angel statue, or a big tombstone didn’t change any of that. All were equally dead, no one could or wanted to be grand anymore, and too grand wasn’t even a concept.
“But the Ehrenfriedhof . . .”
“I know what you’re going to say. It’s too grand, and too much a glorification of the soldiers. Everyone should lie together anyway, the soldiers and the Jews and the farmers and the people buried in the Bergfriedhof.”
They should lie together, she said, and remind us that we are equal in death as in life. Death lost its horror if it were no longer the cruel leveler at the end of a life of inequality, privilege, and disadvantage, but simply the continuation of a life in which we were all equal.
I asked her whether souls that had lived in this way migrated through death into a new life. She shrugged. The idea of the migration of the soul was intended to take away people’s fear of death, she said. But a person who had understood the truth of equality had no fear of death.
She explained this to me on a bench beneath a big oak tree in the Bauernfriedhof. Then she laughed. “Here I am talking about equality. You should address me informally, as I do you, and call me Olga.”
10
Talking was more important to her than the things we did together. She could go to an exhibition, take a walk, or see a film on her own. Conversing was something she could only do by talking to us, sometimes to my mother and my siblings, but most of all to me.
The talking was never an accompaniment. As on hikes, we didn’t speak when we were out together. If we had seen a film, we could only discuss it once we had left the cinema, walked for a bit, found a café, and were sitting opposite each other. Being at Olga’s was also different from being at home or at friends’ houses. Communal activities like cooking, laying the table, serving the food, clearing away, washing up, which were usually cheerful, chatty, and loud, were performed in silence. Olga could have talked. But she didn’t like talking without seeing the person opposite her, their reactions, their interjections. Whatever there was to say had to wait until we were sitting opposite each other at the table.
She particularly wanted to talk to me about what was happening in politics and society. She was a daily, attentive, critical newspaper reader.
She followed everything that was published about German South West Africa very closely. Before long, the thesis was put forward that the Germans had committed genocide against the Herero. Whether because she refused to countenance such an accusation being made against Herbert or because she had read enough research to the contrary, she reacted fiercely. “Genocide? Isn’t it enough that the Germans waged an ugly colonial war as others did?” She threw up her hands. “It has to be something grand—the first genocide!”
When the politics of opening up toward the East began to take shape, she was in favor of it. At the same time, she couldn’t get over the fact that the land where she had grown up and studied and taught and loved Herbert and cared for Eik was lost. It’s not lost, I objected; soon it would be possible to travel there again, perhaps live there again one day. But she just shook her head and said nothing.
She followed the student uprising with sympathy, and soon with scorn. She liked that traditions were being subjected to scrutiny, that the grand talk about culture, freedom, and justice was being confronted by social reality, that old Nazis were being unmasked and people fighting back against house demolitions and fare increases. But she thought the desire of us students to create a different kind of human being and a different society, liberate the Third World, and stop America’s war in Vietnam was too much.
“You and your friends are no better,” she said. “Instead of solving your problems, you want to save the world. For you too it’s all getting too big, too grand. Can’t you see that?”
I couldn’t see it and contradicted her. “Too big? Maybe the task is too big. But not the commitment to it! Colonialism and imperialism are terrible, unjust, and immoral.”
“You and your friends are all for morality, I know.” She scowled at me. “Moralizers want it both ways: big and cozy at the same time. But no one’s ever as big as their moralizing, and morality isn’t cozy.”
Too big—it was to this that Olga thought she had lost Herbert and Eik, what she held Bismarck responsible for, and what she thought was tempting my generation too. I contradicted her, accused her of glorifying the small, the trivial, the bourgeois, of not distinguishing between right and wrong, between good big ideas and bad ones. But I didn’t convince her.
11
Since starting to call her Olga, I dared to ask her more direct, personal questions. Her stories about her childhood had accompanied mine, and as I got older she told me stories about the rest of her life. But they usually dealt with external events; there was much about Olga’s inner life that I didn’t learn until I asked her.
I wanted to hear more about her love for Herbert, too. I wanted to know how her love for him was compatible with her rejection of his fantasies, and I learned that love doesn’t keep a tally of the other’s good and bad qualities.
“Isn’t that what determines whether or not they’re a good match for you?”
“Oh, child, it’s not qualities that make two people a match. It’s love that does that.”
Then I wanted to know how long love lasts, how long after death, and what still sustained her mourning for Herbert after fifty years.
“I don’t mourn Herbert. I live with him. Perhaps it’s because I lost my hearing and didn’t get to know many people after that. The people I was close to before I’m still close to: my grandmother, Eik, my friend in the neighboring village, a colleague, a few pupils. I talk to them sometimes. There are others who are still present for me too: the school inspector, the girls from the teacher-training college, Herbert’s parents, the pastors in whose churches I played the organ. But I don’t talk to them. After Herbert’s death, I didn’t want anything to do with him for a long time. But when I couldn’t hear anymore, and he knocked again, I opened the door to him.”
Then I asked her why she hadn’t taken another man after Herbert’s death.
“Taken? What a thing that would be, if one could take men like apples off a tree. And if good men hung around as abundantly as good apples. Who was I supposed to find in my village? I could have gone to Tilsit and sung in the choral society or joined the committee for the Ännchen von Tharau festival and hoped to find someone. But there were so many who didn’t come back from the war, and other women were already courting the few who had returned. If an apple had fallen into my lap . . .” She laughed quietly. Then she nodded. “That’s how it is, child. You can’t make the best of what you’re given unless you accept it.”
12
After a few semesters I transferred to a different city and a different university. I also switched subject; after theology and medicine, I decided to study philosophy.
My parents were worried about this, given the lack of professional prospects, but supported me. Between four children, though, the support didn’t stretch far, so I got a job as a waiter in a guest house in the rural suburb where I lived. I liked the guests, who acknowledged the student waiters with good-natured admiration and generous tips, and I delighted in my skill at balancing ever-increasing numbers of plates and glasses. Sometimes there would be an attempt to run out on a bill, a loud argument, a brawl, a visit from the police. The most exciting thing I experienced as a waiter was a man attacking his wife’s lover with a knife; blood was spilled, and the guest house had to stay closed all the following day. Some weeks later, attacker and attacked sat having a beer together; the woman wanted nothing more to do with either of them. I waited tables three nights a week, and with that and my studies and the orchestra, my life was full.
