Marlene (4 page)

Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night and discovered my mother, fully dressed, lying on my bed and fast asleep. I was happy to see her near me. But I didn't exactly know why that made me so happy. I had heard her say: “If only I could sleep.” And my aunt had answered: “The war has robbed us all of our sleep.”

This war did not seem ever to come to an end. Peace was a long forgotten dream, and we had ceased to make plans for so distant a hope. Our victories were rarer. That was why the war dragged on so. Only our complete victory would bring it to a
close. We prayed for victory, we prayed for peace, we prayed for the dead, the forgotten dead. They had already been gone for so long, we had not seen them again, even once, before they departed from us. If we had not been told, no one would weep over them. It's easier to tell the truth than it is to console women's hearts. Naturally, everything I thought up in order to soothe the pain did not work, and I began to doubt many things that before I had accepted respectfully and automatically.

Yet I hardly had time to reflect on those confusing realizations. Everything revolved around school, which demanded my full attention and involvement. I was exhausted and became even paler. After lunch I had to sleep. Once in bed I enjoyed this midday rest, but it brought disorder into my activities that had been skillfully divided to take up the whole afternoon, those brief periods that began at one o'clock and ended at seven when I would go to sleep. It was like this throughout the period of my school days. Sleep before midnight—in my mother's view a miracle drug. She clung as loyally to it as to loyalty itself. This principle and the halo with which she surrounded it had, I believe, nothing to do with the fact that I, like all the children of my age, was undernourished. Throughout her youth and up to her marriage she had known the same discipline: She was sent to bed at the stroke of seven. She recounted this full of pride—Was she actually proud of something that concerned herself?—and obviously attributed great importance to it.

I had to get up early in order to do my homework. Long sleep was lost time. For months I was up before daybreak, shivering with cold and fatigue in the light of a petroleum lamp. We had to save electricity, fuel, save our Fatherland. Although pale and thin, I felt strong and healthy. Morning, afternoon, and evening we ate turnips—turnip marmalade, turnip cakes, turnip soup, the roots and the leafy tops of turnips were cooked in a thousand ways …

Nobody complained over these meager meals, the children even less than the grown-ups. If I was hungry, there were potatoes in the afternoon and in the evening. Potatoes, true friends of childhood. There they lay, white, tender and mealy, easy to eat and digest. They didn't give us stomachaches. They were still
warm when everything else on the table was already cold, arousing the anger of mothers, governesses, and aunts.

We had no milk, but I didn't miss it, and I knew no girl who did. In the summer we drank soda sweetened with saccharine when we were thirsty. In the morning we were given cocoa with water, and at home there was always water whenever we wanted it. Outside the house, however, it was considered impolite to ask for something to drink.

Physical self-control was difficult to learn, but it would never have occurred to anybody at that time to grumble. Each one helped his or her neighbor and drew a lesson from this ordeal of fate. Grown-ups submitted to it calmly and with composure, and they set an extraordinary example for us children. We emulated them without any expectation of reward: No praise, no honors crowned our successes. Negligence was synonymous with sin: Neglecting the body, neglecting feelings and sentiments, neglecting compassion for others. In everything that concerned the body, neglect was called stupidity, and in relation to feelings, it was deemed unseemly. And when we sinned neither out of stupidity nor of impropriety, judgment was pronounced in a firm tone: “That's not done.”

Every time my mother wished to end a discussion, she would say: “Later you'll be thankful to me.” Then I would argue further, but silently, since I had reached the age when you simply must contradict those who lay down the rules. I didn't call the basic principles into question, of course. Only the unpleasant orders and the daily chores that appeared unnecessary or obsolete to me.

The war had repealed many rules and habits. The country found itself in a state of emergency. The fact that our education continued as though we were still at peace prompted us to doubt the intelligence of grown-ups. We shook our heads, perplexed; we felt ourselves to be mature and wise, but at the same time powerless and ignorant.

For example, the importance that my mother attached to lacing my shoes was really something exaggerated. Even after she had tied them very firmly to the very top, with an energetic finger, she would then pull out each hook up to the knot and re-do it all
over again to make the shoelace really sit tight: “When you are bigger, you should have slender ankles, they must be supported so they don't spread.” I certainly did not share her interest in my ankles. Nor did I like to wear laced boots or even to look at them. I considered my ankles my mother's property, and all that I did for her a favor. Slender ankles and wrists had something to do with the “stable,” and that seemed to be important. I loved this childish feature in my mother; it brought her a little closer to me when she had lost her laughter and seemed to be so quiet and distant. To my regret I resembled my father. To me that was a misfortune.

But my mother assured me that children who resemble their fathers are lucky children. My father: tall, imposing stature, leather smell, shining boots, a riding whip, horses. My remembrance was blurred, indistinct, enveloped in darkness by a power that did not permit a clear portrait of him. That power probably was death.

I passively accepted this blurred portrait of my father whenever I was reminded of him. Most of my schoolmates no longer had fathers. We didn't miss them, we hardly grasped that they had gone forever.

We lived in a women's world; the few men with whom we came in contact were old or ill, not real men. The genuine men were at the front, they were fighting until they fell. After the war many years went by before men existed again. Our life among women had become such a pleasant habit that the prospect that the men might return at times disturbed us—men who would again take the scepter in their hands and again become lords in their households.

The women did not seem to suffer in a world without men, they were calm, relaxed. The visit of one of my aunts' cousins, who had been transferred from the East to the West, proved that I was right: Feverishness spread throughout the house, feet ran hurriedly upstairs and downstairs. Voices trembled, sounded altered, impatience and reproaches lay in the words and gestures, dishes clattered long before suppertime, the house seemed to have been shaken by an earthquake.

The cousin arrived almost secretly. He took a look at me, lifted me high in the air, pressed a long kiss against my cheek and then set me down again on the floor. The iron cross on his chest became entangled in my dress and pulled a thread that stretched between us while the soldier steadily gazed at me. Suddenly, unnoticed by him, my mother stood beside him. The thread broke the moment he turned around and said: “Isn't there anyone around here to greet a weary warrior?” I noted an unusual expression on my mother's face. “She's getting big, cousin Hans,” she said. “Yes, I can see it,” he answered.

This dialogue seemed stupid to me. My mother out of the blue announces I was getting big! It was not anger that saddened her voice, but something that I had never heard before. She took cousin Hans by the arm and they left the room. She was speaking to him, but I couldn't understand any of their words, which were lost on the way to the other wing of the house.

While they were drinking tea in the garden, I was doing my homework and heard my cousin Hans's laughter. His voice boomed so loudly—at least so it seemed to me—I had to close my window. Before I went to bed I made a curtsy before all the people in the room, except before cousin Hans. Suddenly I had the feeling that I could not bow before him and, instead, just extended a hand to him. He grabbed it, stroked my cheek, and turned again to the conversation with my mother. Everybody must have felt relieved when he left.

The ashtrays spilled over with cigarette butts, and ashes were scattered all over the floor. Two “field gray” shirts were soaking in the laundry room in a milky water full of green soap flakes, the back parts had been inflated with air and towered above the water. I stuck a finger in the sleeve, but it immediately filled up with air again. I suddenly realized that cousin Hans's shirts were to be washed and then sent to him at the front. This thought struck me as grotesque, idiotic, ridiculous, so that I, always taking two steps at a time, ran up the attic and, desperate, huddled in my favorite hiding place. I curled up inside a wicker chest and broke into tears over cousin Hans, over the “field gray” shirts, over the trenches
and the packages prepared by women whose minds were befogged by a desperate sorrow—suddenly after so many daydreams I had come face-to-face with the war.

The wars described in the history books, all the wars with which I had to concern myself and whose dates, causes, and outcomes I had to memorize have never especially interested me. I never understood the Wars of Religion. To kill on religious grounds went beyond my powers of understanding; I kept every thought on this theme from me, as you would scare off an angry bee.

I had to experience that extraordinary evening in order really to understand the meaning of the war we were going through. The soldier in our house, the mood he brought with him and left behind, his steps that resounded on the floors, his bulky body, the dangers he had experienced and that awaited him after his departure, the kiss he had given me, his “field gray” shirts, the certainty that he would never come back again, all this for the first time clearly brought the war before my eyes. It seemed that up to this moment I had lived in a kind of fog. I wept further in my wicker chest, and the tears dripped on my knees.

“I'm crying over the war,” I answered my mother as she leaned over me in the darkness, lifted me up, and locked me in her arms. “Now that the Americans are fighting against us the war will end soon,” she said.

“When they fight, must we pray for them?”

She deposited me gently on the floor. “Do that, if you wish.” She stretched out her hand. “And what if you dried your tears now?” In the dark I couldn't see her face too well, but her voice betrayed to me that she was smiling.

The mailman brought us small packages from the front.

“The war is taking a bad turn for us,” wrote cousin Hans. “The men in the trenches on the other side obviously pity us. At night when the guns are silent, they throw cans of food over here.”
Their corned beef had a heavenly taste, which is engraved on our memory forever. It was reassuring news, proof that people, whatever the risk, were still thinking for themselves even if in opposition to the politics and the masses of their countries. A further hero was added to my secret love for France—the American soldier. I prayed for all the American soldiers who had come from so far to put an end to the war.

I had already prayed for a long time. I didn't believe, admittedly, that God heard me or that He wanted to hear me, for even more strongly than before, I was convinced that He really wasn't at all interested in humans. But it made me unhappy not to be able to confide to anyone my anxieties and cares that concerned the entire world. Would God, since His wrath may have subsided again, perhaps grant me some attention? No wrath lasts eternally, I thought, so I would try my luck and since the things for which I prayed were important, God will have nothing to object to if he hears me. In the morning I prayed for the Americans, and in the afternoon I thanked the Americans instead of thanking God knowing, as God also would know, that I meant the corned beef, and that if He had not commanded them to send it to us, they must have arrived at this decision exclusively on their own. Therefore, one also had to thank them for it. But my sympathy didn't rest on the fact that the Americans had come to the help of the French. I should have been grateful to them for that, but this wasn't reason enough. I thought it over and came to the conclusion that Italy had done the same. It had, however, earned only contempt because betrayal was a sin. Even when the breach of faith helped my beloved France.

One of my favorite pieces on the violin was the “Serenade” of Giuseppe Torelli. I played it before and after my lessons, it was a lullaby. Each time I played it, my mother would stand at the open door, sometimes she would also come into the room, sit down at the piano, and accompany me. So before all else I was punishing myself when I decided no longer to play this piece for as long as the war lasted. Gounod's “Berceuse” served me as a substitute. The lovelier the melody the better it pleased me. Because my violin teacher loathed lovely melodies, I procured them myself, and
since I never listened to her anyway, I would play them in my own way and give them a cloying melancholy. It was said that I had an extraordinary aptitude for the violin. That made my mother very happy, and she congratulated me for each success, no matter how slight, in this area. I loved the tender, plaintive tone of the strings, but I didn't like the boring etudes, the only pieces I was allowed to play. It was different at the piano. My piano teacher raved about Chopin, Brahms, and the melodies of the great—and less great—Romantic composers. Yet the greatest among them fully sufficed to fill out the piano lesson hours. At other times I played scales and exercises, which are infinitely easier than on the violin. On the keyboard the notes are present, you don't have to form them. All you have to do is to strike the keys without wondering whether the sounds are in tune. On the violin, instead, you constantly have doubts about the purity of the tone, even when the teacher nods approval.