Marlene (3 page)

In the late afternoon we examined the lists of the missing. My mother always walked more slowly as we neared City Hall I didn't dare to ask her why and silently adjusted my step to hers. She would never let go of my hand, when she stopped there, only her head moved up and down as she looked through the names. I would watch her and try to guess when she would take the two steps sideward and with her head held high begin to read the next list. There were also many other women and young girls. But there was none of the pushiness that usually prevailed in front of the shops, in the endless lines at the doors of the bakeries. Those who were scrutinizing the list of the dead and wounded were polite, considerate of others. Why, I thought, couldn't we behave like this in times of peace as well? Behave as though we were still at war? I didn't share these thoughts with my mother, since I was sure that she thought likewise, viewed the problem as insoluble, and had decided to live as useful a life as possible. But it was not the war that taught my mother life's fundamental values. She knew them from way back when she taught me to read. She didn't use a blackboard; she would explain the pronunciation, the syllables and the punctuation with the help of the poems by Ferdinand Freiligrath written in splendidly colored letters that hung under glass in our living room!

O love, as long as you can!

O love, as long as you will!

For the hour will come, the hour will come

When you stand by the grave and lament!

Her deepest convictions did not rest on experience but on her intuition. She was always so sure of them, as if she had arrived at them by herself. When she quoted philosophers and poets for emphasis, you might think that, in a friendly way, she was allowing
them to share her personal views. Otherwise she was much too young to have had personal experience in all the areas she seemed to know so well. She had had a very sheltered childhood, and she had shocked the city's respectable society by her early marriage. She had become a mother at seventeen.

And there she stood now before the list of the missing. She was looking for a name she didn't want to find and holding on to a little girl's hand as darkness descended and the street lamps lit up. Still two more lists, hope, don't forsake me; “his” name will not be on it. Please, let it not be there. … Now the last ones. … Her finger followed the black letters behind the glass pane smeared by countless fingers. The pressure of her hand slackens, she bows her head, her eyes are moist, but they shine with a relief and a joy only I can see. “We're going home now, Paul. We want to open the canned food I set aside for a very special day like today, and we'll spend a restful evening. If you want me to, I'll also do your homework.”
Paul
was the name she called me when she was happy, and she uttered the word “canned food” in French to avoid the harsh German sound. It was so easy to love her.

I needed no affirmation, no proof, to be certain of her love. I don't remember when I sensed for the first time that she loved me. Surely already before my birth. I was her daughter, that sufficed for me. Now she no longer kissed me, she no longer took me in her arms as she once did when I was still very small. The older I grew the more reservedly she expressed her tenderness, the less she kissed me. She gave me a kiss on the forehead or on the cheeks, always very lightly, at times she would scold me for some kind of venial sin and then just walk off. Her feelings for me were surely the same as mine for her. She didn't want to know whether I loved her or not, she was simply convinced of this. She considered it more important that I should feel secure with her.

It was her task to dispel the insecurity and the anxiety that the war had brought. Every day she would have me repeat a dozen times: “When I'm with my mother, nothing can happen to me.” With her I would go fearlessly through the city enveloped in darkness, and with my hand firmly in hers, I would have unflinchingly faced the enemy lines, the plague, the poison gasses,
or the lion's den. Nothing could upset her plans, her hope. She always remained herself. She was trustworthy. Everything was clear to her. Perhaps she didn't love, perhaps she was just trustworthy. It didn't matter. She was there—strong, courageous, full of compassion. She deliberately placed her own feelings and desires in the background. Never was she ill or inaccessible. When she retired to her room and no one was allowed to follow her, she always made known how long she wanted to be alone. And on no account would she ever exceed this time. Her outer appearance was in no way inferior to her inner qualities. She was extraordinarily beautiful.

One of her favorite occupations was memory training, as she called it. If I asked her, “May I call my girlfriend and ask what homework we're supposed to do for tomorrow?” I was forbidden to touch the phone. In winter I would be bundled up like an Eskimo, and in rainy weather I would be wrapped in rain gear from head to toe and then be sent on foot to procure that valuable piece of information for myself. Yet I also knew that, at bottom, she loathed to act that way. She forced herself to do this to improve my memory and deliver a finishing blow to forgetfulness forever. She was successful. God bless her!

I felt a deep respect for my mother throughout her life. She possessed a kind of natural nobility. Her behavior, her authority, her intellectual attitude were like those of an aristocrat. Just looking at her made it easy to respect her, to put up with all the strict rules of everyday life and the more drastic rules of my wartime youth. These rules were so indisputable they seemed to be familiar and friendly, lasting, unalterable, irrefutable. Protective rather than threatening, no mood, no whim underlay them. Since my mother had laid them down and had been able to create a corresponding discipline, she must have understood all the wonderful secrets of a child's emotional world. She herself was like a kindly general. She followed the rules that she laid down; she set a good example; she furnished the proof that it was possible. No pride in success, no pats on the shoulder. The only aim was humble submission to duty.

First and foremost duty, the daily obligations.

And love of the duty to which you submit. Love of the work which you do, love of absolute trustworthiness, love of habit that must prevail in the daily struggle against the charm of the new. My mother knew how to structure a familiar activity so excitingly, precisely on the basis of its familiarity, that it, too, could be as exciting as a wholly new adventure. “To recover” something lost or forgotten made her eyes light up, quickened her movements. Her voice would rise uncontrolled and wild: “There! Just as I told you. See! Oh, look, just look! I knew it!” And she would stand there, beaming with joy, with pleasure because she had known what is useful and what is not. I felt as though I were in church and thought to myself: “Who am I, then, with my trivial thoughts, my petty cares, when she's standing there, here before me, and setting such a good example to me in this house in which our two lives are rooted?”

“To recover,” love of the known … what can all this have meant to my mother without that other imperative by which she was completely controlled but which she did not teach me, which she did not praise—loyalty. She didn't deliver any homilies to me on the subject, but to sense the depth of her feelings, it sufficed to observe her childlike dismay when she discovered that someone had deceived her. In the matter of loyalty my mother proved to be a fanatic—“fanatic,” yes, for here kindness or sympathy were irrelevant—an inexorable crusader under the banner of loyalty.

As a passionate “prosecuting attorney” she voiced sharp, decisive and irrevocable judgments. She was lenient and took time to think over violations of a rule she considered overrated. But she changed her tune, with flying colors, so to speak, when you were carried away by your own excitement. At such times she would not tolerate mention of guilt or extenuating circumstances. “When you're excited,” she would say, “you easily lose your head. Your feelings run away with you.”

It had become second nature to me to hold my feelings firmly in check, even before my mother decided that my dresses had to be made longer to cover my knees.

I also knew that one of her supreme fundamental rules of
behavior, easy to grasp but difficult to practice, enjoined: “Bear the unavoidable with dignity.”

Dignity ruled out waitings and complaints, consequently the twin rule stated: “The tears you shed over something unavoidable must remain secret tears.” A “logical mode of thinking” was another early achievement that was supposed to make learning easier and serve as a memory prop to a still untrained mind. But it was also the light that illumined the way to a clarification of problems. O logic, when I learned to love you, mother smiled. She smiled at me, at me who had grown up in a war she could not have prevented.

Such was my mother's loyalty—loyalty to appreciation, loyalty to hope, loyalty to the conviction that her body had been strong enough to give a new being a strength that would last throughout the war. “Your teeth are perfect,” she would remark when I brushed them. “They'll hold. That's hereditary—you can be grateful for that,” she would add, as though to reassure herself. She stubbornly believed in heredity, in the “stable” as she put it. She would take some of my own meager rations of milk, cheese, and meat to give them to her own mother.

My wonderful and gentle grandmother got the lion's share of all family rations. She was not only the most beautiful of all women but also the most elegant, most charming, and most perfect person that ever lived. Her hair was dark red and her eyes of an iridescent violet-blue. She was tall and slim, ever radiant and cheerful. She had married at the age of seventeen and was always taken to be as old or young as she herself wished to appear. She wore expensive clothes and even her gloves were made to measure. She was naturally elegant and didn't concern herself with what was fashionable. She loved horses, went riding every morning very early, and sometimes she would pass by our house just before school and throw me a kiss through a veil in which the early morning air mixed with her perfume. My mother never objected to any of her decisions, even though they might lead to a reversal of my daily program. My grandmother showered me with love, tenderness, and kindness. She awakened in me the longing
for beautiful things, for paintings, for Fabergé boxes, horses, carriages, for the warm, soft roseate pearls set off against the white skin of her neck, and for the rubies that sparkled on her hands.

She would let me balance her shoes on my little finger and say: “This is how light they must be.” Before the war I had always impatiently awaited the French shoemaker who would come in person every season to take orders for new shoes and to deliver already ordered shoes, but I was never allowed to see him. “School is more important,” she would say, “and besides, shoes are a serious matter.” My grandmother was at one and the same time very real and very mysterious, a dream image, perfect, desirable, distant, and fascinating. But her love was
here,
present. Her worries concerning those she loved were as passionate as her love for them.

Before I rang my grandmother's doorbell, my mother would pinch my pale cheeks, and I would utter a faint cry of pain. My grandmother would come running down the wide staircase, her skirts aflutter. Tirelessly she would repeat my name, crouch down to my height, and, radiant, sway back and forth with me. We would always talk about beautiful things, never about the letters that arrived from the front, never about the war or mourning. My mother planned our visits carefully so that my grandmother wouldn't notice that my cheeks were becoming progressively paler. She wanted to spare her mother any concern, any unpleasantness. On the way home my mother was always silent and sunk in thought. Sometimes she would lay her hands on my cheeks, turn my head toward her and adjust herself to my step.

On the day the telegram arrived that led to my mother's journey to the front, two older cousins and an aunt moved into our house. I took care of the household as I had been instructed to, and I was an obliging hostess without neglecting my usual chores.

My mother received a
laissez-passer
from General Headquarters, so that she could get to the Russian front “and again give strength to her husband,” as the telegram read. My father was seriously wounded and not transportable. He had succumbed to his wounds by the time my mother came back. Now a widow's cowl and veil, which hid her face, were added to her black dress.

When winter arrived she again left the house to transport her
husband's corpse in state. She identified him and accompanied the mortal remains to the city where her mother-in-law lived. For my mother, a mother's love was always more important than conjugal love, and so it was normal that her husband's mother should bury him where he had first seen the light of day.

At this time most of the men of our big family had fallen in combat. Women in deep mourning often came together to our house. My mother, resolutely and affectionately, would attend to their physical and spiritual well-being. She believed in the effectiveness of abundant and healthy nourishment and went from room to room with bowls full of bouillon and cups of herbal tea. She combined the meat rations to prepare a broth that occasionally even contained an egg. The herbal tea was tasteless, it was supposed to calm the nerves and induce sleep. At spring-cleaning time my mother had work for everybody. My aunts, great aunts, and cousins in black, contrasting with the white walls, stood on ladders, scrubbed, cleaned and re-hung the curtains through which the April sun shone. On those days supper did not proceed as quietly as usual. Those gathered around the table gossiped and sometimes even laughed.

Although the course of the day had remained the same, the rhythm and atmosphere had changed. My mother now moved around in a somewhat more leisurely manner, even the ringing of the doorbell couldn't quicken her step. She moved slowly, languidly, she held her head the way weary people do. She no longer listened attentively to what was being said, she no longer waited expectantly. She comforted herself as if someone was sleeping in the next room.