An Offering for the Dead (7 page)

"No," I replied, "that will not be possible."

"Why should it not be possible? Just because you do not wish it?"

"Because no creature can kill itself," I said.

"What do you mean?" he asked in amazement. "I can hang myself or shoot myself."

"But you cannot strangle yourself with the strength of your own hands. And if you could, you would already be sick and ready to die, because you would be making the attempt. A tree is toppled by a storm because it is rotten or because its roots do not hold fast. Or people chop it down because they need it. But it does not kill itself."

"I am not a tree," he retorted, annoyed, "still, I will take you at your word. We are sick and rotten, for all I care. But it is an unalterable fact that we are capable of killing all life." And he proved it to me scientifically, and I was unable to argue. Still, I shook my head.

"You do not believe it," he jeered once again, "because you do not want to."

"Of course I do not want to," I confirmed.

"It will do you no good. It will kill you too."

"Perhaps it will."

"You and everyone and everything. There is no way out," he concluded.

But this time I dug in my heels. "You yourself said they will shout: Look, a new star!"

"Well?"

"So they kill merely in order to live."

If my father had not been sitting with us, I would scarcely
have managed to say that. But I did not wish to disappoint him. You see, I figured that he expected this answer from me. I uttered it for him.

Standing alone on the terrace after dinner, I was reminded of my father's eyes, his trustful way of looking at me during that conversation. The meal was over; the others had stepped into the room where I had previously seen the books and the piano. Neither my friend nor that woman was with me. Only a big, brown, shaggy dog pushed against my knees. I scratched the fur on the back of his neck, and he looked up at me in the same way as my father had looked at me when I said: They kill one another because they want to live. Those eyes had so much confidence, they relied so thoroughly on me as a matter of course that I too had no doubts that I had said the right thing. As if those eyes were speaking to me: What can happen? You are here.

Kill! Kill! How many killed people run about and do not realize it. They were killed by a thought or by someone else's wish. No one sees it. Everyone thinks: These people are just like us. They make the same movements and everything is as it should be. How are we to find out what might have become of them if they had not been killed prematurely. Indeed, the murdered live together with their murderers, sitting at the same table, and sleeping in the same bed; for the murderers too have long since forgotten their deeds. And if they remembered, it would be even worse; they would ask perplexedly: Who made me do this deed? And by then it would be too late; the murdered person would not have the strength to say: It is my fault. I disappointed you. They would then run about like spurned victims.

Yes, a little while ago, I had to ponder quite soberly
whether I should not kill. One of the people lying about murmured in his sleep, startling me. I went to him and leaned over him. He was a middle-aged man; perhaps he looked younger than he was. Long thin hair poured, disheveled, from under a sort of cap and stuck to his chin. His face was broad and his nose short and stubbed. Despite his hollow cheeks and the scar deforming his upper lip, his features were soft and vague. Indeed, a bit sinister, for he could have been mistaken for a woman had it not been for his clothes and his beard stubble. Only his hand, which was cramped on his chest, was the hand of a man. Otherwise it was as if this body had not yet clearly made up its mind what it wanted to be. Incidentally, perhaps he would not have made this impression when awake, and perhaps a person is always like that when asleep, because the flesh remembers that it was born of a woman.

And this is someone with whom I am supposed to live. Ah, a dangerous thought! I tried to make out what he was mumbling. I raised him up slightly by his shoulders, but he slipped out of my hands, and his head dropped back into the clay as if he had no bones. Yet, to my dismay, I had nearly tripped over him. I returned to my post and eyed my hands in disgust. Something of the pasty mass of which this sleeper seemed to be consist had stuck to them. I pondered: If he had talked so loudly as to wake the others, and if he had even (for what do I know about him?) announced something of what had existed previously, what should I have done? And if he did it tomorrow? His face was like a barely kneaded, not yet baked dough. An utterly alien destiny could gain control of it, turning it into something that could not be evaluated. It could become a brother or a scornful adversary. But whatever would have become of it, it would not have been itself. Even if he had eliminated me, it would only have been this alien entity, which would have entered the dough as yeast. I was afraid, certainly! But not so much for my sake. Was it to start again with a murder? And would the dough have collapsed after the deed?

My so-called friend, who used to address me as "friend," would not have doubted what to do for even an instant. But I was not my friend. I myself am like this gray, indefinite face. Hardship and this filth, which besmirch us, making us unrecognizable, form a crust that shields our marrows against freezing. That is the only security we now have.

Ah, to think that I must talk about such matters! Perhaps it is hunger that drives me to it, and I breathe poorly because my stomach is empty. I would so much like to think of something beautiful and talk about it. About young girls strolling along the street, arm in arm. They wear new frocks, and their sole concern is: Don't we look attractive? And whoever sees them smiles joyfully and because spring has come. Or about an adolescent boy, who, in feverish haste, writes something that he believes will be an earthshaking opus. And he peers at the sky and says: Let me live until I finish this. And one's heart quivers with anxious delight when one hears this.

However, my character is such that I do not know how I would act if I suddenly found a lone rosebush in this muddy world. It is possible that the old song would come to my mind:

Oh, why do you still blossom, rose? To whom shall I give you today? The summer is gone forever, rose, I now must think of yesterday.

But it may be that I will tear it off, thereby injuring my fingers. And then I would hurl the rose on the ground and trample it.

As I have said, I was standing alone on the terrace, with the brown dog. Heavily fragrant white flowers were blooming in green boxes all around on the wall cornice. Several belated bees hummed around the flower cups. In the park, opposite, a song thrush sang, a teensy dot on the tip of a poplar, which stood upright like a supple sword, watchfully pointing at the sky. A pair of lovers walked with a rolling gait across the lawn towards the secret bush. Through the gaps in the trees, one could see the other side of the river, which had to be there somewhere, and the dark, distant line of wooded hills, which separated the world from the boundlessness. The sun had just set behind them. A few beams were still groping their way back into the sky, but were caught by a narrow strip of violet clouds, which hovered over the fiery place of the sunset — like the wings of a gull. And a nameless blue-green arched over it. Anyone who could see it as I did, would have had to cry out: Eternal!

I listened inside myself. A female voice was singing in the house. It was a lullaby.

And then all at once, my friend was standing next to me. I had not heard him coming. I winced as if I had been grazed by the shadow of one of the birds that had been discussed at dinner.

"Now they shout: Mama," he said, his head nodding towards the rooms. He gave me a scornful look.

I wanted to place my hands on his shoulders and say to him: "Would it not be better if we talked about it?" I wanted to tell him everything I knew. I wanted to hide nothing from him.

I had spoken about my father and about the others with whom I had been together. Perhaps I would have even mentioned my mother for the first time. That was how shaken I was when I saw him standing before me and I already knew precisely how he would die. It appeared to be my final chance to save him and to prevent what was to come about. I wanted to speak and then leave before he could answer. I did not doubt that he would then go back into the house.

But my hands were leaden and my tongue was lamed. He shook himself angrily and said: "Thank you, my friend! You are very kind."

Then he turned his back on me and left the terrace by way of the steps leading to the front garden. The brown dog gazed after him. Then it looked at me, its eyes asking whether I would follow my friend. Perhaps I would have hurried after him, but then the dog began to wag its tail, and a voice behind me said: "Do you not want to come in? They are all gone. We are alone."

The ethereal blue-green of the sky left me defenseless.

Someone was always there to guide me, and then it was the right path. It was my fault if I paid no heed and tried, deaf and headstrong, to take a different path. But then the man who wanted to guide me stood sadly at the crossroads, watching me go astray. Yet none of them ever reproached me or said afterwards: You see, why did you not follow us. They merely did their job unassumingly and waited for me to entrust myself to them.

Thus, I was also guided by my brother, the motherless one, to my mother. How could I guess that he knew her? Nor would I have ever dreamt that this was necessary. Now, in hindsight, I naturally realize that there was no other possibility.

It all took place that afternoon when I was with my father for the last time. The others, as he had already surmised, came into my room little by little. First my teacher, whom I had not seen for a very long time; for I imagined I had nothing more to learn. He strode in swiftly, keeping his body rigidly erect, although he seemed to be in pain, or perhaps precisely for that reason, so that no one would notice. Only his head stooped forward at a slight angle under the burden of thoughts. Most of the certainties that one believed in rarely stood their ground against his lucid, penetrating gaze. They simply vanished, and that was why he initially radiated an icy emptiness. Yet his gaze was not unkind, and if one entrusted oneself unprotestingly to the blue of his eyes, everything was fine. He was accompanied by a small, ugly puppy, and he seemed very concerned about it. The puppy licked its feet, which it had injured.

After shaking our hands (he did it with a very firm squeeze), the teacher halted at the bookcase and read the titles while listening to us.

The next to arrive was a large, fat man. I could always hear him wheezing in the stairwell, which made me smile. My father smiled too; we could not help it the wheezing alone made us feel good. And what a radiant smile emanated from the man's beardless face as he lingered at the threshold for a moment, completely out of breath, waving amiably at us. The doorway seemed too narrow for him, and, after stepping into the room, he also filled it out completely. Not because he was so fat, it was really his personality. He moved like a grand gentleman, everything instantly belonged to him, and there was nothing that could elude his cheeriness. Whenever he laughed, it came from infinite depths, and a merry quaking infected everyone and everything — the people, the furniture, the books. One felt like dancing. It was like an overwhelming piece of music.

He tapped my cheeks with his fleshy hand as if to say: Do not worry, my boy. And my father cried out to him: "This way, old boy!" and pointed at the chair by his side, where the old boy then settled with a moan. I believe his vision was poor, perhaps he was even blind. But that made no difference; for he perceived everything with his ears.

We waited quite a while, and they chatted — I no longer know about what. I must confess that I uneasily listened towards the door. For I venerated more than anyone or anything the man who was still to come, and I was afraid I would not pass his strict muster. My father and my teacher were also uneasy, although they tried to conceal it. Only the fat man remained calm and utterly sure of himself.

Finally, the man we were expecting came — accompanied by my brother. Perhaps they had first met on the stairs, perhaps earlier. My brother, incidentally, was the youngest of us, even younger than I. To my astonishment, his head was bandaged; indeed, some blood had oozed through on the right side of his forehead. Now I knew he had once been hurt in an accident; but that was a long time ago, and he usually did not wear a bandage. So he must have been injured again, or else the old wound had broken open.

I was always very worried about him. He would easily get enthusiastic about something, but was just as quickly disappointed, and it was to be feared that someday, the wrong word, randomly spoken, might reduce him to despair. No one knew better than I how much tender shyness was meant to be disguised by his somewhat eccentric behavior, and what unsated hunger for life was masked by the cynical curl of his lips. So he did not care if from one minute to the next he did the exact opposite of what he had only just claimed in all earnestness; and if people then felt shocked, he would even jeer at them. That was how I had first met him. He had been sitting in a restaurant garden with a number of students, entertaining them with his jokes. The students were fairly drunk and they guffawed at what he said. Incidentally, he too was a student in those days. I was sitting at the next table and I had noticed that he glanced at me several times as if trying to determine whether I was laughing too. Finally, since the noise was becoming too much for me, I stood up, paid, and left the restaurant. At the exit from the garden, he was suddenly at my side, and without so much as asking me whether I even cared to have him come along, he said: "Those professors try to teach us that those mountains back there and these trees and the gables of the houses and that puddle there, which reflects the stars, and this soft night wind that grazes through the archways, and the laughter that we hear from the meadows — that in reality, all those things may be something entirely different and would stop being what they are if we no longer felt them as such. The people who talk to us like that have their podiums and their tenure; it is easy for them to talk. But what can we go by if we are still nothing?" And as we walked side by the side through the streets of the old town, he spoke to me about those things with such girlish tenderness, as befitted the mild summer night. But he broke off somewhere in mid-sentence and said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world: "Now let's visit the hookers and act like pigs!" And that was where we went. He acted very familiar and exuberant with the girls, and I was eager to see what would come of it. But one of the girls leaned over me and said: "Take him away. It would be too bad about him." I do not know what prompted her; but it dawned on me that she was right, and that no purer boy existed than this one who was experimenting there with indecencies. She had spoken so softly that he could not possibly have heard, and yet he seemed to have: for he took his hat and left the house. In the street, he tried to spit in a virile way and cursed: "God damn it, not even these women know what they are here for."