Olga, page 9
I visited Olga on her birthday, and otherwise every two or three months. The train journey between my university and my hometown was a long one, and a lot of people there had claims on my time: my parents, old friends, the quartet I’d played the flute with for many years. But I would make sure that Olga and I had an afternoon and evening to ourselves. Sometimes we would go and do something together; Olga remained sprightly and curious.
Sometimes we spent the afternoon at her place, and in the evening I would take her out to a restaurant. In winter we sat opposite each other in the corners of a sofa in the living-dining room, beneath a watercolor of pine trees, a lake, and reeds that she had found in a junk shop and that reminded her of Pomerania. In summer we sat on the balcony, which was just big enough for two chairs. Trucks rumbled and locomotives whistled in the goods yard; the little garden smelled sweet and attracted the bees. I found it idyllic, but on my last visit Olga was unhappy about the view. The water tower had been demolished.
She always gave me something to take with me when I left: a marble cake with chocolate icing that she had baked, jam she had made, or apple slices she had dried. I was touched by this, and every time I found it hard to take my leave. As nimble and strong as Olga was, she was nearly ninety. She might have a fall, her heart might stop, or her brain malfunction, and every leave-taking could be the last. We didn’t hug each other in greeting or when taking our leave; it wasn’t the custom. She stroked my head, as she had stroked my head when I was a child. And that was what she still called me: child.
13
One spring morning I got a call from my mother. Olga was in the hospital, she was going to die, and I should come at once. My mother said something about an explosion and a serious injury; she couldn’t explain the details to me now, I should buy the newspaper at the station.
It was the front-page headline. Sometime in the early hours of Sunday morning, a bomb had gone off in the municipal park in my hometown. The attack had targeted the Bismarck monument, which had not been damaged, but it had critically injured a passerby, who had probably stumbled upon the bombers’ preparations and caused them to detonate the bomb too soon. This was the third such attack, following attacks on the war memorial in Hamburg and the Kaiser Wilhelm monument in Ems. It was the first in which someone had been injured. The editorial was about the students’ path toward radicalism and terrorism. Those who no longer showed any consideration for life and limb must reckon with the worst, it said; the full severity and rigor of the constitutional state must be brought to bear.
My first thought was of Olga and Bismarck. The man she held responsible for so much would now be responsible for her death. There was something comic, ironic, absurd about this, and I wondered whether Olga, if she could still laugh, had laughed about it. Then I wondered where she had been coming from or going to in the middle of the night, whether it was on account of her deafness that she hadn’t heard and steered clear of the perpetrators, what the nature of her injuries was, whether she was in pain, whether she was being given morphine, whether we would be able to speak to each other. It was only then that what my mother had said on the phone really hit me. Olga was going to die.
I sat on the train, passing through a spring landscape beneath a blue sky, forests in fresh green, fruit trees with pink blossoms, a landscape for hiking or walking. Olga had been looking forward to spring. I had planned to visit her again in three weeks’ time.
I knew she wasn’t afraid of death. I also knew that I would have to lose her eventually, a little earlier or a little later. She was old. But the understanding she showed me, both curious and indulgent, and her love, which delighted in me without needing me or making demands of me—this I had had with my grandparents, but not with anyone else, not with my parents, not with friends, not with lovers. I was losing something I would never find again. And I was losing the conversations with her, and her face and her form, her warm hands and her smell of lavender. After her death I would never return to my hometown, arrive there, the way I had before.
My mother picked me up at the station and drove me straight to the hospital. She prepared me: the explosion had ripped open Olga’s side and belly and had damaged her organs so badly that all they could do for her was take the pain away and wait for death. She was on morphine, dozing, sleeping, sometimes conscious, often not; she knew that she was dying and had come to terms with this. She was glad I was coming, but she would probably be asleep when I arrived, and I had to prepare myself for the possibility that she might not wake up.
14
A nurse brought me to Olga’s sickbed. She was lying in a single room with the sun shining in through the big window. I looked out over a parking lot, a little meadow, and a row of poplars. She was on a drip; the nurse checked that the clear liquid was flowing evenly into Olga’s vein and left.
Olga was asleep. Beside the little table, on which was a big bunch of flowers and a card from the mayor expressing his horror and sympathy and wishing her a swift recovery, stood a chair. I pulled it over to the bed, sat down, took Olga’s hand, and looked at her.
She had scratches on her face, conspicuous because they had been painted over in red, but not severe. Her skin was gray and wizened, her mouth was open, she was snoring gently, and her eyelids fluttered. She looked as if she’d had a sleepless night or had overexerted herself, not like the victim of a murderous attack; as if a day in the sun, good food, and a good night’s sleep would put her back to rights.
Her hand lay lightly in mine. I looked at the age spots, the prominent veins, the slender fingers with the bony knuckles, the short, clipped nails. It was her right hand, the hand with which she used to stroke my head. I placed my other hand on hers as if I could protect her.
She opened her eyes. Her gaze wandered for a moment, then found me, and her face lit up with such love, such delight, that I couldn’t help but weep. I couldn’t believe it: that this radiance was for me, that she so loved and delighted in me, that anyone could love and delight in me so.
“Oh, child,” she said. “Oh, child.”
We exchanged a few sentences.
“Are you in pain?”
“No, not at all.”
“Are they treating you well?”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’m glad I’m here.”
“Did your mother tell you about me?”
“What happened on Saturday night?”
“Does it matter?”
“You didn’t want to die like this.”
“It’s not a bad way to die.”
Then her eyes fell shut again. I went on holding her hand and looking at her face. She too had wept; tears clung to her cheeks.
I stayed until the doctor did his rounds. He threw a quick glance at the sleeping Olga, nodded to me, nodded to the nurse, and left again. The nurse hung a fresh bag on the drip, asked me how long Olga had been asleep, and advised me to come back later or the next day. If Olga hadn’t woken up when the doctor came by, she wouldn’t wake anytime soon.
I walked through the town, from bridge to bridge, up one riverbank and back down the other, through the streets and into the fields. I sat down beside the canal and watched the water and the barges. Then I was drawn to the municipal park, to the Bismarck monument. It was cordoned off, but no one was poking around in the gravel or grass for traces of the attack, and Bismarck sat firmly on his high pedestal. I had known it since childhood, pale sandstone on dark, shining granite, the bald head and mustache of the bust like the bald head and mustache of my grandfather. I had never studied the monument more closely. Was it a little lopsided? Or was I just imagining it? And was it only now that it was like that? Or had it always been that way?
At eight o’clock I was back at the hospital. Olga was asleep, as before, and I sat down by her bed again and took her hand again. Sometimes she opened her eyes for a moment or shook her head. Sometimes her mouth made a sound as if it were trying to say something, but they weren’t whole words and I couldn’t understand anything. Sometimes her hand twitched in mine. Slowly the liquid in the bag dripped down. Slowly it grew dark outside.
At some point I fell asleep. When I woke, Olga’s hand lay cold in mine. I found the night nurse, who accompanied me to her bedside. Yes, Olga was dead.
15
She was buried in the Bergfriedhof. A reporter who was writing something about Olga had tracked me down and asked me about her life. I’d told him about her love of the Bergfriedhof, he had mentioned it in his article, and, as the victim of a terrorist attack, she was sufficiently high-profile to be buried, by order of the mayor, in that place where not everyone could be buried.
The only funerals I had been to before this were those of my grandparents. Great crowds of relatives and friends had come to these events; memories of my grandparents had been exchanged and their lives celebrated. At Olga’s funeral my mother and I were alone at first, but then one of the mayor’s representatives turned up with a big wreath, along with the reporter I had met and a gentleman I didn’t know. We stood in the chapel and heard the vicar say what my mother had said to him about Olga, and we stood at the grave and threw our bouquet of colorful roses and our trowelfuls of earth into the grave.
On the way to the parking lot the gentleman I didn’t know addressed me. “Commissar Welker. Do you have a moment? I didn’t want to ask you to come in and see us specially; I just have a couple of questions.”
We stopped.
“There are things about the attack that are puzzling. The impact of the explosion, the type of injury—you might almost think the attack was aimed at the deceased. This is going to sound as strange to you as it does to us, but I have to ask: Do you know of any dangerous activities the deceased might, knowingly or unknowingly, have been caught up in?”
I laughed. “I think she would have been delighted the police thought her capable of doing anything dangerous. But it’s completely out of the question. You do know that she was deaf?”
He nodded. “Can you imagine what she might have been doing in the municipal park on Sunday morning between two and three a.m.?”
“I asked her, but she didn’t feel like answering. She had hardly any strength left to speak, and she didn’t think it was important. She liked to walk; perhaps she couldn’t sleep. She never said anything about it, but I can imagine her going for walks around town on sleepless nights. She wasn’t afraid of anything.”
Commissar Welker thanked me and left. My mother had been listening to our conversation. “If she’d been in the habit of doing that, she would have mentioned it at some point.”
I shrugged. “I think so too. But what do I know?” I’d thought I’d known her. But her late-night walk in the municipal park was a mystery, and a habit of taking late-night walks around town was still the best explanation.
I spent that night at my parents’ house before heading back to college the next day. Clearing out her apartment, stopping bank accounts, insurance policies, memberships, subscriptions—I was really the one who owed it to Olga to do this, but my exams were coming up, so my mother took over for me. On Monday we went to Olga’s apartment and made a note of the things I’d like to keep: the watercolor with the pines and the lake and the reeds, books, papers, the jewelry I liked to see Olga wear. My mother would deal with her estate.
A few weeks later I received a letter from the probate court. Olga had appointed me her legal heir. There were 12,000 marks in her savings account. I didn’t want to touch the money. I transferred the savings book into my name, put it away with my birth certificate, Confirmation certificate, and school certificates, and forgot about it.
16
I completed my studies with a doctoral dissertation on Rousseau’s philosophical and pedagogical novel Émile. The evaluation did not suggest that I should become a professor, as I would have liked. However, there were state ministers of cultural affairs, keen on reform, who were seeking to recruit not just teachers and lawyers but outsiders as well, so I started work at the ministry. It was at the ministry that I met my wife. When I became a civil servant, we got married; soon afterward we had our two children and built our house. The easy and difficult phases of our marriage, our delight in our children and our worries about them—this was the pattern of our life. Fate spared us its blows, and we never had reason to fear the coming day.
I stayed at the ministry and was, over the years, responsible for school statistics, requirements planning, task scheduling, personnel planning and development, recruitment and transfers, and free schools; by the time I retired, I was a department head. Sometimes I regretted not becoming a teacher and working with children directly. I worked for them indirectly, though. And I enjoyed my frame of activity: I entered it happily each morning, I knew how things worked there, and I left each evening feeling satisfied. Afterward, though, no one needed me anymore. In that respect, doctors and lawyers, who help out their successors a bit after they retire, and managers and engineers, who are in demand as advisers, have it better.
My wife was still working as an administrator, so I took over the chores I’d never really contributed to properly: shopping, cooking and washing up, the laundry, the garden. At first my wife was delighted by my evening displays of culinary expertise and by the fact that the laundry retained its colors, jerseys didn’t lose their shape, and blouses weren’t wrinkled. After she grew accustomed to it, sitting down at the table just as exhausted and taciturn and taking her clothes out of the wardrobe just as casually as I had done for decades, I stopped enjoying it.
I continued to enjoy the garden, though. By growing and blossoming and bearing berries, flowers and bushes reward the gardener, even if his exhausted, taciturn wife doesn’t praise him. But I was looking forward to the day when my wife would stop working. We would share the work in the house and garden and would finally go on those trips we had dreamed of to the north: to the Hebrides, to Scotland and Scandinavia, Canada and Alaska.
It didn’t turn out like that. A few months before her retirement—we had been horrified to read in the paper that morning about an arson attack on a refugee hostel—my wife was driving in freezing rain, had an accident, and died on the way to the hospital. I wasn’t able to say goodbye to her.
Since then, I’ve lived alone. The house is too big, but I’m attached to it, and I manage. My son is an architect; he builds in China, and when he’s in Germany he lives with me. My daughter is a teacher in a nearby town, married, a mother of three who take it in turns to visit me during the holidays. I have every reason to be thankful for my life, despite the pain of losing my wife. I’m attached to people and places, I need permanence, I hate rifts. I have led and continue to lead a constant life.
And I was, and am, constantly reminded of Olga.
17
And not only because the photographs of my loved ones on the wall beside my desk include the photograph she had taken of herself after her escape from the East. I found it under her papers with the photograph of Viktoria, Herbert, and her taken the day before their Confirmation; the diplomas from her teacher-training course and the school for the deaf; a sketch, signed by Eik, of the facade and floor plan of a school; and a bundle of letters from Herbert in German South West Africa.
Whenever I come to my hometown—which, since my parents died, isn’t regularly, but occasionally, for school reunions and to meet friends—I walk past the Bismarck monument. I’ve examined it often and carefully, and I’m sure now that it’s slightly lopsided. It’s still Bismarck, but his lopsidedness means that, for me, it’s a monument to Olga.
Whenever I go on a walk or a hike with someone and we don’t speak, or whenever I come out of the cinema with someone and we wait a while before talking about the film, I think of Olga. Also when someone happily tells me that they have found the person with whom they can be silent. It feels good to have a connection with another and not have to perform or entertain them. But this isn’t something some can do and others can’t, that connects some and separates others. Silence can be learned, like waiting, which is a part of silence.
The pleasure of walking in cemeteries is another thing I’ve inherited from Olga, and when it’s a particularly special cemetery, particularly old or particularly beautiful, enchanted or eerie, I take her with me in my imagination. We were closest in the cemetery I liked to visit when I was on holiday in rural America. It lay all alone in a forest, a flat meadow that turned into small hills covered with grass and crowned with trees. First the Indians buried their dead here, then the settlers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before later dead were buried in the meadow as well. It had no plots, only gravestones, big ones for adults and small ones for children, many of them bearing the same names, English, Dutch, German, sometimes the dead person’s profession and commendable qualities. On one a slave who had fled from the South to the North had noted the year of his freedom. Many bore little American flags that indicated a war veteran. Everyone lay together, from Indians who had died of the past to people of today who had died of the present. It was a place of equality, and death had lost its horror.
