Correction: A Novel (7 page)

Roithamer himself looked as though he were asking himself how it could have been possible for him, untrained as he was, in fact he had never held a gun in his hand but once in his life when he was nine years old and with his father’s help had tried shooting at paper roses and had of course made a sad mess of it, how could he possibly have brought down twenty-four roses with twenty-four shots? The onlookers of course challenged Roithamer at once to shoot down another series of paper roses, but of course he did not yield to such a provocation. He just waved his bunch of roses in the air above his head and made his way through the crowd, away from the shooting gallery and toward a table with some seating room left. I followed him there and saw him suddenly presenting all the paper roses he had won which, tied together as they were and held high in the air, looked more beautiful than fresh roses, to some unknown girl passing by who reminded him of his sister.

All the paper roses but one, that is, all except this yellow paper rose I had just rediscovered in the top drawer of the chest when I opened it to put my toilet things inside. So all these years, I thought, Roithamer has kept this yellow paper rose here, it probably reminded him of that music festival on his twenty-third birthday and everything connected with that music festival. I had taken the paper rose out of the drawer and held it against the light, it was unquestionably, the paper rose he shot down at the Stocket music festival along with twenty-three others. That music festival where we stayed till dawn at one of those large plank tables, in company with several of the country boys and coal miners we had known from childhood, has remained a pleasant memory, how Roithamer suddenly told them all about his childhood in Altensam, in that intense way he had, the characteristic narrative style of the country folk around Altensam, actually Roithamer had much in common with the countrymen around Altensam, while he had almost nothing in common with his own Altensam family; how very familiar he was with the ways of the country folk around Altensam, and how very much he loved their ways, I thought, as I stood by the window, with the paper rose in my hand, contemplating Hoeller’s attic from my vantage point at the window, looking toward the door, it was after all among them, these country folk, that he had grown up, as he would say, not in Altensam but among the country people and their families, and it is true that as a child Roithamer had spent more time among the country people in the villages around Altensam than he had in Altensam itself, his own home, he took advantage of every free minute he had to get away from the drill in Altensam, which was little more than a cruel and incomprehensible parental fortress to him, and escape to where he might find
actual kinship
, in the villages around Altensam, with the people of these villages, the farmers and young fellows and men working in the coal mines of Altensam, he would simply leave Altensam right after supper, without permission and go down to the villages below Altensam, to the people there who understood him, away from those who lived in Altensam and never understood him nor wanted to understand him, because down there, below Altensam, in the farmhouses and in the homes and hovels and huts of the miners down there he was always a welcome sight, and he could always count on having the attention of these simple people whose minds were as clear as they were incorruptible,
they listened to me
, Roithamer’s words,
whenever I said something, and they tried to understand me and they did
understand me
, and I could count on them to help me whenever I came to them, often in sharp distress, my conscience deeply troubled, they were friendly in their crude manner, always offered me food and drink, I could have stayed with them as long as I wanted and actually I would have preferred to stay with them always, even as a child, but the mere thought was out of the question. While I felt cold in Altensam, within the walls of Altensam, even among my parents and my siblings, going down to the villages always warmed me up, as a child I was always strictly forbidden to go down to the villages, even when they gave permission they didn’t like my going down there because they sensed that I felt good in the villages, that Altensam was a prison to me I had often told them, even as a child I had this idea that Altensam was nothing more than a prison, a prison from which I would one day have to escape, is what I always thought, even if I have been sentenced to life imprisonment in this dungeon of an Altensam, I must get out, get away from Altensam, where even my parents seemed always to have been there to guard or punish me, never to protect me, which is what parents are for, to take care of their children, what they should have been in Altensam is the preservers and protectors of their son and their other children, which is what my parents never were, instead they were inordinately strict and relentless in turning us children, without exception, into people according to their conceptions, their own absolutely and completely horrible conceptions, trying to turn us into physical and mental manikins in their own image, so that their chronic dishonesty and incessant cruelty shadowed, really darkened, all of our childhood and made my brothers what they are today, physical and mental effigies of their parents, and made my sister the unhappiest person I ever knew, everything in Altensam was most hateful to me, so I broke out of Altensam every chance I got, to go down to the villages and visit the farmers and their families and the coal miners and their families, with whom I could be happy as I never was in Altensam, Altensam was to me one continuous darkening of the spirit, Roithamer’s words. But just as Roithamer took every opportunity to get out of Altensam, so I seized every opportunity to get into Altensam, every welcome possibility of going to Altensam and being allowed inside, inside the Absolutely Other, where I could come to life again, for Roithamer it was the other way around, he had to get out of Altensam and down to the villages, where he came to life, most often in our house, my parents’ house; it is here, in your house, he always said, that I come to life again, everything inside me gets choked almost to death in Altensam, but here, near your (my) father and your (my) mother, I can breathe again and think again, the kind of thinking that always helps me to survive, Roithamer’s words, if I had to stay in Altensam all the time I’d be done for in no time at all, Roithamer’s words, while I for my part would tell him from time to time that the chance to go to Altensam, to walk those four miles through the forest that I had walked with my grandfather as soon as I could walk at all, each walking at his own pace, we had an unspoken agreement, he and I, beginning in my fourth or fifth year, each of us deeply absorbed in his own thoughts, wholly lost in his own thoughts, nothing in all my life was dearer and more important to me, as I now realize, nothing was ever of greater consequence for my life than these walks to Altensam with my grandfather, and so, while I staked everything and every day, whenever possible, on getting to Altensam, Roithamer had staked everything on getting out of Altensam, he loved my father and the special ambience of a village doctor’s household, the supreme orderliness of everything, the neatness, on the one hand, and its free-and-easy air on the other, so entirely and benignly different in every degree from the disorder in Altensam, the general negligence in Altensam, and from what Roithamer felt to be the spiritual confinement of Altensam, all the advantages held for me by Altensam were for him to be found in Stocket and in our house, he always used to tell me that he could never find in Altensam the happiness he found in Stocket and in our house, while I for my part told him that Altensam was to me what Stocket and my home were to him, drawing new breath, making progress, firing the imagination, productivity, joy in living, and so both of us strained eagerly, Roithamer in his way from Altensam to Stocket, to our home, our village, landscape, our world of nature, while I conversely was drawn away from our village life, from Stocket, from our home, up to Altensam, inside those walls, the enormousness of those walls which fortified everything inside me, I felt drawn upward to Altensam where everything unattainable to me in Stocket suddenly became attainable because once I was up there in Altensam my mind and my emotions actually opened up in the same way that Roithamer’s did in Stocket, in our home and in its environs, where he found what he never could find in Altensam, refuge and liberation in every way. While Roithamer loved my father, with whom he always spent all the time he could, always interested in my father’s medical work, he was, as I have always known but now can prove, now that I have dipped into the contents of his posthumous papers, Roithamer was always interested in everything relating to diseases, in the constant mutual interrelations of physical and mental diseases, he was most interested in this from childhood on when, at our house, he might encounter the strangest cases of disease every day and he, Roithamer, had always demanded that my father tell him everything about every disease, in fact he was never interested so much in anything, other than his scientific work, all his life, than in
human diseases
, of which he had come to know and explore, here in his closeness to my father, the greatest variety of the most widespread diseases, especially those of our own region, the diseases native to our province. In Cambridge he had often spent half the night, when he had tired of his own work but wasn’t yet ready to go to bed, not yet relaxed enough to sleep after the mental strain of his day’s work, when he asked me to stay with him, stay the night if necessary, as he frequently did when I had come over just for a minute after I had stopped work myself, to take refuge in his company from going crazy, as soon as we were in England and in Cambridge we had made a habit of breaking off our concentrated mental work and dropping in on each other for a chat because we were afraid of going crazy, even though we only talked about some other mentally demanding subject, but that no longer mattered because once we were together, in each other’s company, we felt safe from going crazy, and so, when we were together in his rooms or in mine, the distance between our digs was only about eight or nine hundred yards, we each had two rooms and a kitchenette, one room was the study and the other the so-called leisure room, then Roithamer used to talk half the night, in Cambridge, of his observations, and the experiences resting on such observations, of the diseases he learned about quite early in life in the company of my father, a respected and probably quite capable general practitioner, since a scientist, no matter what his specialty in science, should begin to concern himself early in life, long before he gives himself up to his (to a) special field, with disease, especially the mental diseases, which arise from the physical diseases. While I myself had hardly any rapport with my father, and my father, conversely, had really never sought any rapport with me, Roithamer had the best rapport with my father, and it was the same with the Roithamers, Roithamer himself had never entered into any rapport with his father and his father, conversely, had never sought any rapport with his son, yet I had an excellent rapport with Roithamer’s father, as Roithamer had with my father, and also with my mother, though I found it very hard to communicate with my own mother, yet I always communicated very well with Roithamer’s mother. What I had never found at home, meaning in our house and in our village down here, I found up there at Altensam, while Roithamer, conversely, never found in Altensam what he had always hoped for, and so we were drawn away from home even as children, I felt drawn up to Altensam, while he felt drawn away from Altensam down to us in Stocket. This tendency for me to feel drawn to them up there while he felt drawn to us down here, which we never understood clearly then, I now understand perfectly as a perfectly natural tendency. Just as I felt attracted, in Altensam, to the outlook of Roithamer’s father, so Roithamer for his part felt attracted by my father’s way of life and his profession, up there in Altensam I heard things I never heard at home, Roithamer heard things at our house he never heard in Altensam, all the time, hence our restlessness based on our dissatisfaction with our own home life, at home we had been seeking and hoping for what could never be found at home because it simply wasn’t there in our own homes, he, Roithamer, had never been able to find in Altensam what he sought there and had a right to expect, though it could never come to pass there, while I, on the other hand, had always sought in Stocket and in my home what simply wasn’t there, I had hoped for the impossible, and so we both always lived in hopes directed toward the other’s home, where we had actually found what we were looking for, consequently we were always the most miserable creatures at home where we could never understand or express what ailed us, all we could do was suffer our condition and be driven by it to nearly total despair in those most difficult years, between nine and eleven and beyond, but we had never gotten over it to this day. We loved everything in the other’s home and really hated everything in our own home from the earliest years in our lives, we liked everything in the other’s home while disliking everything in our own, we felt that our talents and their development were most wonderfully appreciated in the other’s home while they were never appreciated in our own home and as a result never developed, either, because everything in us and about us had met with nothing but rejection in our own home. The lack of sympathy which was always to be expected at our own home gave way, once we had gone to the other’s home, to a sympathetic understanding supportive to us in every respect, here at last we could relax and breathe and think freely. The prey of misunderstandings at home, we were always in a state of extreme irritability, Roithamer in Altensam and I in Stocket, we had to give all our attention to escaping from this state or easing it down to something bearable, and we did find life bearable at home when we were not left entirely to ourselves and our families, when Roithamer had come to me or when I had gone up to Altensam to see him. When we were together we managed to find something, perceive something and make use of it for our own satisfaction, even when we had thought there was nothing, nothing at all, for us; this Roithamer did for me in Stocket and I for him in Altensam. It often happened that our paths crossed, his downward path toward Stocket, my upward path toward Altensam, crossing at the same midpoint, the clearing in the forest.