The Weight of Things Read online

  “Inwardness. Inwardness is what eludes me. I’m too caught up in the world, too concerned with surfaces …” Thus Berta often rebuked herself, and frequently and sincerely tormented herself, trying to get at something, the thing she could never quite reach, the truly inward gaze.

  PRIVATE FIRST CLASS RUDOLF

  In February of 1945, Berta experienced a moment of freedom from the weight of things, in particular from that weighty circumstance historians call the Second World War. The thirty-one-year-old Private First Class Rudolf was standing at the window, staring out, his elbows propped on the window frame, his head buried in his hands, which were frozen from the cold, and saying to her, “You’d be better off out in the countryside.”

  Berta, standing at a prim distance from Rudolf, shrugged her shoulders and replied, “I can’t leave Mama alone, and Mama won’t budge from this street. ‘I’ve grown old here, I’m staying here,’ she says.”

  “And Wastl? What about Wastl?”

  “His last deployment was supposed to be in mid-January, in Grajewo.”

  “And the twins?”

  “Nothing. Not from Richard, anyway.”

  Private First Class Rudolf stood up straight, tore his eyes from the wreckage of the houses on the opposite side of the street, and turned to face Berta. “So. Nothing new.”

  Berta shook her head in confirmation.

  “But Karl?”

  “In the field hospital in Castelfranco, somewhere near Modena. And you?”

  “Back to Denmark. For the time being.”

  “So. So.”

  “And the old gravedigger?”

  Berta shrugged. Rudolf laid his hands on her shoulders. She turned away and her body grew stiff. Rudolf let his hands fall, stood slouching for a moment in front of her, then turned and walked toward the dresser, in the top drawer of which lay his fiddle, which he’d left in Berta’s hands before he set off for duty with the words: “Until the war is over!”

  Now the former teacher turned back to Berta, smiled like a child, rolled up his secret marching orders, and tried to leaven the glum moment with a harmless cliché, emphatically delivered: “All this will be over before long!”

  Berta clapped her hands, spun in a circle several times, snapped to attention, and marched back and forth across the small room, a female soldier who didn’t take her soldiering especially seriously, whose manner was rather carefree and amused. She hummed the “Radetzky March” and let herself fall laughing on the bed, sat up, breathing heavily, giggled again at Rudolf, full of mirth, and then, abruptly, fell to thinking.

  “Any last requests?” asked Rudolf, courage and discouragement struggling in his eyes. Berta laid an index finger on her lips, thought for a moment, and then called out in a victor’s pose: “I do! I want to hear the ‘Aquarelles’ by Strauss! Yes. Yes. That’s what I want.”

  Rudolf’s brow furrowed, then he smiled and said a bit curtly, “If you wish.”

  Berta forgot about the weight of things, the cold in the unheated room; forgot her nineteen-year-old brother, from whom they’d had not one word since March of 1944. All she knew was he’d been stationed to post number 34421-A and had departed from Upper Silesia. At least she could still write to Karl: Wastl was off at a training camp, some fourteen kilometers from Grajewo; Rudolf unexpectedly here on leave, Mother doing well, she herself doing well too; but how would she fill in the blank space that corresponded to Richard?

  The giddy thaw of youth was still on Berta’s face, the belief that the present is always the best time to spread your arms wide and embrace the whole world, all at once, as best you can.

  There was a trembling around Rudolf’s mouth; the tacked-on second skin of the Private First Class was flaking away, the man inside was coming to life, was urging him toward the woman, and in proximity to her sensuousness and warmth, the waltz with all its frivolity—which he had always dismissed, thinking it sordid and juvenile—took on a new appeal. And when Berta then requested that Rudolf the fiddler play “The Blue Danube,” even he began to feel that the Danube was truly so blue and eternal, and that despite everything, a person had a right to be happy, that there was no time for sorrow and gloom, that it was possible to abandon oneself to the soft butterfly’s flight of a melody. “And when the people start to complain / Shove a few more in the oven’s flame …”

  With his eternal weakness for muses, this music teacher at a girl’s secondary school in the city of Donaublau now discovered, with almost ferocious voluptuousness, the Johann Strauss inside him, and defended this silly Johann Strauss heroically against his own rather nettlesome character, ordinarily so inclined to stubbornness: “So I’m a Johann Strauss. Fine then. Who cares about those Beethovens or Alban Bergs? They find a hair in every soup. Live and let live, that’s what I say. Live and let live!”

  In Berta’s presence, Rudolf had felt strengthened in his struggle against his own irascible character. With a look of solemn inwardness, Berta defended her “Blue Danube”; her mouth flapped open and closed, diligently and eagerly, like a duckling waddling in that perfectly blue river. At the same time, her eyes turned naughtily to Rudolf, as if inviting him over, and her singing faltered before she slipped back with renewed intensity into that inwardness betrayed by her child-like voice, and she managed to convince Rudolf that he had never really been a soldier in the German army, that it was only a nightmare he shouldn’t take too seriously. He was the music teacher at the girl’s secondary school in the city of Donaublau. And he was more than that. In him Johann Strauss had found the most ardent admirer and ally!

  When Rudolf laid the fiddle back in the dresser and walked over to Berta, who was now sitting on her bed, she no longer turned her head away, and her body had slackened; it felt soft and pliant.

  The next morning, the thirty-three-year-old bachelor with an irascible character, who had so passionately deflowered the twenty-two-year-old neighbor girl Berta Faust, promised himself he would make sure that—as soon as this nightmarish war was over—the broodingly shy Berta with the vast astonishment in her eyes would get a man with Alban Bergian faithfulness and Beethovenesque rigor.

  “Why should I take Strauss from her? To ignore the ‘Aquarelles’ and the ‘Blue Danube’ would mean to ignore what brought us together. And what, after all, does the ‘Blue Danube’ have to do with ‘Deutschland Über Alles’? They’re water and fire—and I prefer to stick with water.”

  These were his thoughts while he sullenly observed the sleeping creature beside him.

  DUTY IS DUTY, SCHNAPPS IS SCHNAPPS

  Berta Schrei, with her immense affection for Johann Strauss, could only wonder why it was that this man Wilhelm was so difficult to fit into her life. Looking up at the rearview mirror, she saw Wilhelm’s eyes: fixed rigidly, or so it seemed, to the road. She shut her mouth, and when for a moment Wilhelm’s eyes met hers, more by chance than design, it wasn’t the stare of Wilhelm the returnee she saw—the Wilhelm who looked at her with Rudolf’s eyes—but instead of Wilhelm the chauffeur, humming some vague tune as he adjusted the rearview mirror. What Berta refused to say aloud began to teem in her mind with dreadful intensity.

  “When our little girl sleeps, she looks like the Madonna,” Berta had wanted to say, but did not.

  Wilhelm’s mouth was as tightly sealed as Berta’s throughout the drive home. This left time for Berta to indulge her thoughts about Little Berta’s resemblance to the Madonna. During dinner, when Berta was finally on the verge of revealing this discovery, which to her felt quite essential, the telephone rang, and Wilhelm, chauffeur and Come-hither-boy, said, “Very well.” And, “Yes, naturally.” And, “In a quarter-hour it’ll be taken care of.” And, “But that goes without saying. It’s what I am paid for!”

  In truth, Wilhelm Schrei had, like Berta, felt something needed to be said about the events of earlier that day; yet the Come-hither-boy and chauffeur to Mueller-Rickenberg—a vocation by which he assured the Schrei family’s continued existence, and not too shabbily at that�
�knew he must set aside his private life as soon as duty called. Berta understood this, too; she no longer hemmed and hawed about it, as she’d done in the old days. She stood up without a word, left for the bedroom, and took Wilhelm’s uniform down from its hanger. She was standing with her back to the Madonna. But then she happened to look at it. Forgetting the chauffeur’s uniform draped over her arm, she stood rooted to the spot and stared, as though the real reason she had entered the bedroom was to make an especially attentive, conscientious study of the Madonna’s face. The likeness really was astounding. When Little Berta slept, she was the perfect image of the Madonna.

  “When she’s asleep, you know, she’s not so caught up in the world, so concerned with the surface of things. The stamping and molding hands of life, the rolling, pressing, and flattening fingers—the weight of things, life as such, it can’t hurt her so long as she’s asleep. It’s that simple. Sleep startles everything away. Everything and everyone.”

  “Berta! What’s keeping you so long?”

  Wilhelm’s shout from the bathroom only confirmed what Berta was feeling. And after his bellowing, Little Berta came in to her mother with a wrinkled nose, the corners of her mouth turned contemptuously downward, to ask, harsh and a bit imperious, “You’re not right in the head, are you Mama? Papa needs his suit!”

  “So. So,” Berta said, and after a long pause: “Papa needs his suit? Yes. That may well be.” She let the suit be dragged off her arm and didn’t even wince when Little Berta stuck out her tongue, in all its splendor, as far as possible, before running off to Papa with the suit.

  Wilhelm, now in his work uniform, tapped Berta on the shoulder, all the while smiling his Wilhelm-smile, ever at the ready for whatever occasion may arise, and the affectionate knowingness that lay behind it brought back to Berta her worries about the weight of things; she nodded in affirmation, saying, “Well then. You have to hurry if you want to arrive on time. Go now, Wilhelm. Go now. I have a lot to do here.”

  “When I’ve returned,” he said, “perhaps we’ll have the chance to talk …?”

  Berta nodded, cast a thoughtful glance at Wilhelm’s chauffeur cap: “It really is a handsome uniform. It suits you so well,” she said, and turned toward the dresser. “Let’s not hold each other up,” she added, and before he left apartment 12 in building 13 on Allerseelengasse, he went into the kitchen to say good-bye to Rudolf and Little Berta with a kiss on the head for each. Berta looked back thoughtfully at the painting of the Madonna, sighed, and turned to the kitchen, where Rudolf and Little Berta were jabbing listlessly at their plates and observed her entrance with sour looks on their faces.

  “The nightgown really suits you,” said Berta to Little Berta, and thought of the Madonna’s blue, undulating cloak in the painting. Little Berta said nothing. Rudolf said nothing. The dinner dragged on; Berta’s attempts to brighten Rudolf and Little Berta’s faces only clouded them over further.

  “All in all, it was still quite a nice trip, in some ways?”

  Nothing.

  “Isn’t there anything nice we can say about it? About the new car, for instance? Or the pretty roses? Did you see the pretty roses?”

  Nothing.

  Berta leaned her head toward Rudolf as though she was hard of hearing. “What did you say?” She strained to listen for a moment, then turned to Little Berta and asked her, “Or was it you who said something?”

  Nothing.

  After turning over in her mind what else there might be for her to say, Berta shrugged and stood up: “Well then. It’s getting late.”

  Rudolf nodded in agreement, tilted his head to one side, and appraised his mother with a critical-contemplative gaze.

  I KNOW WHAT’S WHAT

  After a while, the boy asserted firmly: “Anyhow, I’m thirteen.”

  “Thirteen years old, Rudolf. We say: I’m thirteen years old.”

  “And the 13th is when you tumbled into the world.”

  “I don’t believe it can be said that I tumbled into the world. I arrived in the world. That is proper. That much certainly can be said. And not just on the 13th, but on the 13th of January, 1923.”

  “You can’t swim.”

  “That can also be said.”

  “It can’t not be said,” Rudolf replied sardonically and scratched the back of his head. “And I can’t swim! And that one over there—she can’t swim either!” The boy pointed at Little Berta, who was wriggling back and forth in her chair.

  “We don’t raise our voices, Rudolf. One doesn’t raise one’s voice. People who raise their voices often have something to hide. People who raise their voices are often in the wrong and that’s why they yell so loudly. And that one there, that one there has a name. Her name is Berta. Do you not know that?”

  “The chauffeur can swim though.”

  “You mean your papa?”

  “No. The chauffeur.”

  “The chauffeur didn’t come into the world on the 13th!” Little Berta shouted triumphantly, scratched her chin, went on thinking for a moment, and then reached a conclusion that catapulted her from her seat: “And you neither! And me neither! Only that one there! She’s the only ‘thirteen’ person!”

  Berta shrugged and said: “So. So.”

  With contempt, Rudolf eyed his sister, some five years younger, and said, “Anyway, I’m a Friday child, I tumbled into the world two months early, and my father is the music teacher without a head and yours is the chauffeur who still has his.”

  “Rudolf! Where did you get all that from?”

  “I know what’s what, and anyway Aunt Wilhelmine says it too: he’s Rudolf through and through, that’s what she says about me—maybe not as handsome or as clever, but still: Rudolf through and through.” And Rudolf stared straight ahead. “Can that be said?” he asked trenchantly.

  “Well now. That’s all very much a matter of perspective.”

  “But I won’t become any music teacher at a girl’s secondary school. At best, if I’m lucky, I’ll be a street sweeper or a coal shoveler.”

  “Rudolf!” Berta sat down again and stared at her thirteen-year-old son as if he were indeed a bad omen. “There are many reasons you shouldn’t say things like that,” Berta countered. “And bear in mind you have weak arms …”

  “And two left hands.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Berta objected.

  “But it’s true. And also I have lousy luck—so I won’t even be a street sweeper or a coal shoveler.”

  “Maybe … I mean, it’s conceivable … maybe you’ll become a chauffeur?” Berta asked, looking at her son full of expectation. Rudolf waved her off and said, “You’re not right in the head.”

  “All right then. Your objection stands. Driving school is still school, I suppose. And school doesn’t quite suit you …”

  “Right! And I can’t play any instrument the way a music teacher could, and I also can’t sing, and I can’t catch a ball.”

  “Well then.”

  “As soon as I fall down, my nose starts bleeding.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And I fall down all the time.”

  “That may well be.”

  “My nose bleeds a lot, and then I cry.”

  “That much is evident!”

  “And I go to a special school.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I’m dumb.”

  “No! That’s not true! I mean, there are nicer ways of putting it. No, no, dumb you are not.”

  “I’m to be taken out of special school after the fifth year. Now, am I dumb or am I not?”

  “Well, if you want to take such a superficial perspective. I mean … One shouldn’t do that—you have to look at the situation more deeply, more carefully. After that, you may well see things in a more reasonable light. Don’t you think?”

  “I was born too early.”

  “Yes, that’s true. Yes.”

  “I’m ugly.”

  “Rudolf!”

  “No one likes me. I’m annoying.�
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  “No. No. It’s not like that. No. No. That is completely, completely wrong. I, for example, like you, and Papa likes you too.”

  “Papa is dead. He can’t like me. I have no papa. I don’t want another one.”

  Little Berta patted her brother’s hand and said, “I’m not dead. I like you too.”

  Rudolf looked scornfully from Little Berta to their mother and back: “And who likes you? What do you think, Mama? Who likes her!” And Rudolf pointed at Little Berta, then at his mother, who slapped his index finger away and declared, “We do not point at people. That’s something we do not do—no, that is something we absolutely do not do.”

  “Who then, Mama? Tell me. And who likes you? Aunt Wilhelmine? The chauffeur? I think they’re happy when they can get a little peace from your constant blabbering.”

  Rudolf stood and paced moodily back and forth several times in the kitchen, then turned finally toward the door and marched off sulking to bed.

  Little Berta looked at her mother, full of reproach, threw back her head, stomped one foot, and said, “You’re not right in the head!” And she added, her features twisting into a grimace: “Everyone knows it. Aunt Wilhelmine knows it, and Papa knows it, and me, I know it too!” Little Berta stuck her tongue out at her mother, and the hate from her eyes collided with Berta’s despair. Little Berta threw the kitchen door open and slammed it closed over and over. And Berta winced each time, as though someone were lashing her with a whip. This loud, portentous exit served its purpose: Berta did not dare follow her children into the bedroom.

  THEY WAIT FOR WILHELM

  That evening Berta decided, without a single “on-the-one-hand” or “on-the-other,” no longer to dole out further lessons to her children about the weight of things. Instead, she would try to introduce them to life as such through stories she would invent more or less from scratch and tell them night after night, and Berta Schrei was a good storyteller, at least at these moments. She would tell these stories of her own invention—they hardly ever had happy endings—and then she would wait an hour, two hours, three. After the third she felt secure in her hope that the weight of things had given up its pursuit of her children, and that Rudolf and Little Berta, ferried over now to the realm of dreams, were safe and sound, far from the grasp of the wrenching and molding hands of life.