The Passport (3 page)

“Now she’s baking cakes again,” said the skinner, “and Rudi can’t even eat them.”

Windisch drew his hands back from the table.

“The clouds hang low over the town,” said the skinner. “People walk about among the clouds. Every day there’s a thunderstorm. People are struck down by lightning in the fields.

Windisch put his hands in his trouser pockets. He stood up. He went to the door.

“I’ve brought something with me,” said the skinner. “Rudi gave me a little box for Amalie.” The skinner pulled open a drawer. He shut it again. He looked in an empty suitcase. The skinner’s wife looked in his jacket pockets. The skinner opened the cupboard.

Exhausted, the skinner’s wife raised her hands. “We’ll look for it,” she said. The skinner looked in his trouser pockets. “I had the box in my hand only this morning,” he said.

THE CLASP-KNIFE

Windisch is sitting in front of the kitchen window. He’s shaving. He’s painting white foam across his face. The foam crunches on his cheeks. Windisch spreads the snow around his mouth with the tip of his finger. He looks in the mirror. He can see the kitchen door in it. And his face.

Windisch sees that he has painted too much snow on his face. He sees his mouth lying in the snow. He feels that he can’t speak because of the snow in his nostrils and the snow on his chin.

Windisch opens the clasp-knife. He tests the blade of the knife against his finger. He places the blade under his eye. His cheek bone doesn’t move. With his other hand Windisch pulls flat the wrinkles under his eye. He looks out of the window. He sees the green grass.

The clasp-knife jerks. The blade burns.

Windisch has a wound under his eye for many weeks. It’s red. It has a soft edge of pus. And every evening there’s plenty of flour dust in it.

A crust has been growing under Windisch’s eye for several days.

Each morning, Windisch leaves the house with the crust. When he unlocks the mill door, when he has put the padlock in his pocket, Windisch touches his cheek. The crust has gone.

“Perhaps the crust is lying in the pot hole,” he thinks.

When it’s light outside, Windisch goes to the mill pond. He kneels down in the grass. He looks at his face in the water. Small circles eddy in his ear. His hair disturbs the picture.

Windisch has a crooked, white scar under his eye.

A reed is bent. It opens and closes beside his hand. The reed has a brown blade.

THE TEAR

Amalie came out of the skinner’s yard. She walked through the grass. She held the small box in her hand. She smelt it. Windisch saw the hem of Amalie’s dress. It threw a shadow onto the grass. Her calves were white. Windisch saw how Amalie swayed her hips.

The box was tied with silver string. Amalie stood in front of the mirror. She looked at herself. She looked for the silver string in the mirror and tugged at it. “The box was lying in the skinner’s hat,” she said.

White tissue paper rustled in the box. On the white paper lay a glass tear. It had a hole at its tip. Inside, in its stomach, the tear had a groove. Under the tear lay a note. Rudi had written: “The tear is empty. Fill it with water. Preferably with rain water.”

Amalie couldn’t fill the tear. It was summer and the village was parched. And water from the well wasn’t rain water.

Amalie held the tear up to the light at the window. Outside it was hard. But inside, along the groove, it quivered.

For seven days the sky burned itself dry. It had wandered to the end of the village. It looked at the river in the valley. The sky drank water. It rained again.

Water flowed over the paving stones in the yard. Amalie stood by the gutter with the tear. She watched as water flowed into the stomach of the tear.

There was wind in the rain water too. It drove glassy bells through the trees. The bells were dull; leaves whirled inside them. The rain sang. There was sand in the rain’s voice too. And tree-bark.

The tear was full. Amalie brought it into the room with her wet hands and bare, sandy feet.

Windisch’s wife took the tear in her hand. Water shone in it. There was a light in the glass. The water from the tear
dripped between Windisch’s wife’s fingers.

Windisch stretched out his hand. He took the tear. The water crawled down his elbow. Windisch’s wife licked her wet fingers with the tip of her tongue. Windisch watched as she licked the finger which she had pulled out of her hair on the night of the thunderstorm. He looked out at the rain. He felt the slime in his mouth. A knot of vomit rose in his throat.

Windisch laid the tear in Amalie’s hand. The tear dripped. The water in it did not fall. “The water is salty. It burns your lips,” said Windisch’s wife.

Amalie licked her wrist. “The rain is sweet,” she said. “The salt has been wept by the tear.”

THE CARRION LOFT

“Schools don’t make any difference either,” said Windisch’s wife. Windisch looked at Amalie and said: “Rudi’s an engineer, but schools don’t make any difference either.” Amalie laughed. “Rudi doesn’t just know the sanatorium from the outside. He was interned,” says Windisch’s wife. “The postwoman told me.”

Windisch pushed a glass back and forward across the table. He looked into the glass and said: “It’s in the family. They have children, and they’re crazy too.”

Rudi’s great-grandmother was called “the caterpillar” in the village. She always had a thin plait hanging down her back. She couldn’t bear a comb. Her husband died young, without falling ill.

After the burial, the caterpillar went looking for her husband. She went to the inn. She looked each man in the face. “It’s not you,” she said from one table to the next. The landlord went up to her and said: “But your husband is
dead.” She held her thin plait in her hand. She wept and ran out into the street.

Every day the caterpillar went looking for her husband. She went into every house and asked if he had been there.

One winter’s day, when the fog was driving white hoops across the village, the caterpillar went out into the fields. She was wearing a summer dress and no stockings. Only her hands were dressed for snow. She was wearing thick woollen gloves. She walked through the bare thickets. It was late afternoon. The forester saw her. He sent her back to the village.

The next day the forester came into the village. The caterpillar had lain down on a blackthorn bush. She had frozen to death. He brought her into the village across his shoulder. She was as stiff as a board.

“That’s how irresponsible she was,” said Windisch’s wife. “She left her three-year-old child alone in the world.” The three-year-old child was Rudi’s grandfather. He was a joiner. He didn’t care about his fields. “He let burdock grow on that good soil,” said Windisch.

All Rudi’s grandfather thought about was wood. He spent all his money on wood. “He made figures out of wood,” said Windisch’s wife. “He carved faces out of every piece of wood — they were quite monstrous.”

“Then came the expropriation,” said Windisch. Amalie was painting red nail varnish on her finger nails. “All the farmers were shaking with fear. Some men came from town. They surveyed the fields. They wrote down the names of the people and said: Anyone who doesn’t sign, will be imprisoned. All the gates on the lane were locked,” said Windisch. “The old skinner didn’t lock his gate. He left it wide open. When the men had come, he said: I’m glad you’re taking it. Take the horses too, then I’m rid of them.”

Windisch’s wife snatched the bottle of nail varnish out of
Amalie’s hand. “No one else said that,” she said. In her anger, a small blue vein swelled up behind her ear. “Are you listening at all,” she had shouted.

The old skinner had carved a naked woman out of the lime tree in the garden. He put it in the yard in front of the window. His wife wept. She took the child. She laid it in a wicker basket. “She took the child and the few things she could carry and moved into an empty house at the edge of the village,” said Windisch.

“The child already had a deep hole in its head from all the wood,” said Windisch’s wife.

The child is the skinner. As soon as he could walk, he went into the fields every day. He caught lizards and toads. When he was bigger, he crept up the church tower at night. He took the owls that couldn’t fly out of their nests. He carried them home under his shirt. He fed the owls with lizards and toads. When they were fully grown, he killed them. He hollowed them out. He put them in slaked lime. He dried them and stuffed them.

“Before the war,” said Windisch, “the skinner won a goat at the fair. He skinned the goat alive in the middle of the village. Everyone ran away. The women were sick.”

“Even today no grass grows on the spot,” said Windisch’s wife, “where the goat bled to death.”

Windisch leant against the cupboard. “He was never a hero,” sighed Windisch. “He just knackered animals. We weren’t fighting lizards and toads in the war.”

Amalie was combing her hair in the mirror.

“He was never in the SS,” said Windisch’s wife, “only in the army. After the war he started hunting owls and storks and blackbirds again and stuffing them. And he slaughtered all the sick sheep and hares in the district. And tanned the hides. His whole loft is full of carrion.”

Amalie reached out for the small bottle of nail varnish.
Windisch felt a grain of sand behind his forehead; it moved from one temple to the other. A red drop fell onto the tablecloth from the small bottle. “You were a whore in Russia,” said Amalie to her mother, looking at her fingernail.

THE STONE IN THE LIME

The owl flies in a circle over the apple tree. Windisch looks at the moon. He’s watching which direction the black patches are moving. The owl doesn’t close its circle.

The skinner had stuffed the last owl from the church tower two years before and given it to the priest as a gift. “This owl lives in another village,” thinks Windisch.

The unknown owl always finds its way here to the village at night. No one knows where it rests its wings by day. No one knows where it closes its beak and sleeps.

Windisch knows that the owl can smell the stuffed birds in the skinner’s loft.

The skinner had given the stuffed animals to the town museum as a gift. He didn’t receive any money for them. Two men came. Their car stood in front of the skinner’s house for a whole day. It was white and closed like a room.

The men said: “These stuffed animals are part of the wildlife population of our forests.” They packed all the birds in boxes. They threatened a heavy punishment. The skinner presented them with all his sheepskins. Then they said everything was all right.

The white, closed car drove out of the village as slowly as a room. The skinner’s wife smiled in fear and waved.

Windisch is sitting on the veranda. “The skinner applied later than we did,” he thinks. “He paid in town.”

Windisch hears a leaf on the stones in the hallway. It’s scratching on the stones. The wall is long and white.
Windisch closes his eyes. He feels the wall growing on his face. The lime burns his forehead. A stone in the lime opens its mouth. The apple tree trembles. Its leaves are ears. They listen. The apple tree drenches its green apples.

THE APPLE TREE

Before the war an apple tree had stood behind the church. It was an apple tree that ate its own apples.

The night watchman’s father had also been night watchman. One summer night he was standing behind the boxwood hedge. He saw the apple tree open a mouth at the top of the trunk, where the branches forked. The apple tree ate apples.

In the morning the night watchman didn’t lie down to sleep. He went to the village mayor. He told him that the apple tree behind the church ate its own apples. The mayor laughed. The night watchman could hear fear behind the laughter. Little hammers of life were beating in the mayor’s head.

The night watchman went home. He lay in bed with his clothes on. He fell asleep. He slept covered in sweat.

While he was sleeping, the apple tree rubbed the mayor’s temple raw. His eyes were reddened and his mouth was dry.

After lunch the mayor struck his wife. He had seen apples floating in the soup. He swallowed them.

The mayor couldn’t sleep after his meal. He shut his eyes and heard tree-bark scraping against the other side of the wall. The strips of bark hung in a row. They hung on ropes and ate apples.

That evening the mayor called a meeting. The people assembled. The mayor set up a committee to watch over the apple tree. Four wealthy peasants, the priest, the village
teacher and the mayor himself belonged to the committee.

The village teacher made a speech. He named the apple tree committee the “Summer Night’s Committee”. The priest refused to mount watch on the apple tree behind the church. He made the sign of the cross three times. He excused himself with: “May God forgive his sinners.” He threatened to go into town the following morning and report the blasphemy to the bishop.

Darkness fell very late that evening. The sun had been so hot that the day would not end. Night flowed out of the earth and over the village.

The Summer Night’s Committee crawled along the boxwood hedge in the darkness. It lay down under the apple tree, and looked into the tangle of branches.

The mayor had an axe. The wealthy peasants laid their pitchforks in the grass. The village teacher sat under a sack beside a storm lantern with a pencil and an exercise book. He looked through a thumb-size hole in the sack with one eye, and wrote the report.

The night had reached its peak. It pressed the sky out of the village. It was midnight. The Summer Night’s Committee stared at the half-dispersed sky. Under the sack the teacher looked at his pocket watch. Midnight had passed. The church clock had not struck.

The priest had stopped the church clock. Its cogged wheels were not to mark the hour of the sin. Silence was to accuse the village.

No one in the village slept. Dogs stood in the streets, without barking. Cats sat in the trees, looking with glowing lantern eyes.

People sat in their rooms. Mothers carried their children back and forward between burning candles. The children did not cry.