Chapter 7
THE NEXT night I fell in love with her. I could barely sleep, I was yearning for her, I dreamed of her, thought I could feel her until I realized that I was clutching the pillow or the blanket. My mouth hurt from kissing. I kept getting erections, but I didn’t want to masturbate. I wanted to be with her.
Did I fall in love with her as the price for her having gone to bed with me? To this day, after spending the night with a woman, I feel I’ve been indulged and I must make it up somehow - to her by trying at least to love her, and to the world by facing up to it.
One of my few vivid recollections of early childhood has to do with a winter morning when I was four years old. The room I slept in at that time was unheated, and at night and first thing in the morning it was often very cold. I remember the warm kitchen and the hot stove, a heavy piece of iron equipment in which you could see the fire when you lifted out the plates and rings with a hook, and which always held a basin of hot water ready. My mother had pushed a chair up close to the stove for me to stand on while she washed and dressed me. I remember the wonderful feeling of warmth, and how good it felt to be washed and dressed in this warmth. I also remember that whenever I thought back to this afterwards, I always wondered why my mother had been spoiling me like this. Was I ill? Had my brothers and sisters been given something I hadn’t? Was there something coming later in the day that was nasty or difficult that I had to get through?
Because the woman who didn’t yet have a name in my mind had so spoiled me that afternoon, I went back to school the next day. It was also true that I wanted to show off my new manliness. Not that I would ever have talked about it. But I felt strong and superior, and I wanted to show off these feelings to the other kids and the teachers. Besides, I hadn’t talked to her about it but I assumed that being a streetcar conductor she often had to work evenings and nights. How would I see her every day if I had to stay home and wasn’t allowed to do anything except my convalescent walks?
When I came home from her, my parents and brother and sisters were already eating dinner. “Why are you so late? Your mother was worried about you.” My father sounded more annoyed than concerned.
I said that I’d lost my way, that I’d wanted to walk through the memorial garden in the cemetery to Molkenkur, but wandered around who knows where for a long time and ended up in Nussloch. “I had no money, so I had to walk home from Nussloch.”
“You could have hitched a ride.” My younger sister sometimes did this, but my parents disapproved.
My older brother snorted contemptuously. “Molkenkur and Nussloch are in completely opposite directions.”
My older sister gave me a hard look.
“I’m going back to school tomorrow.”
“So pay attention in Geography. There’s north and there’s south, and the sun rises ...”
My mother interrupted my brother. “The doctor said another three weeks.”
“If he can get all the way across the cemetery to Nussloch and back, he can also go to school. It’s not his strength he’s lacking, it’s his brains.”
As small boys, my brother and I beat up on each other constantly, and later we fought with words. He was three years older than me, and better at both. At a certain point I stopped fighting back and let his attacks dissipate into thin air. Since then he had confined himself to grousing (Slang) complain; criticize) at me.
“What do you think?” My mother turned to my father. He set his knife and fork down on his plate, leaned back, and folded his hands in his lap. He said nothing and looked thoughtful, the way he always did when my mother talked to him about the children or the household. As usual, I wondered whether he was really turning over my mother’s question in his mind, or whether he was thinking about work. Maybe he did try to think about my mother’s question, but once his mind started going, he could only think about work. He was a professor of philosophy, and thinking was his life - thinking and reading and writing and teaching.
Sometimes I had the feeling that all of us in his family were like pets to him. The dog you take for a walk, the cat you play with and that curls up in your lap, purring, to be stroked - you can be fond of them, you can even need them to a certain extent, and nonetheless the whole thing - buying pet food, cleaning up the cat box, and trips to the vet - is really too much. Your life is elsewhere. I wish that we, his family, had been his life. Sometimes I also wished that my grousing brother and my cheeky little sister were different. But that evening I suddenly loved them all. My little sister. It probably wasn’t easy being the youngest of four, and she needed to be cheeky just to hold her own. My older brother. We shared a bedroom, which must be even harder for him than it was for me, and on top of that, since I’d been ill he’d had to let me have the room to myself and sleep on the sofa in the living room. How could he not nag me? My father. Why should we children be his whole life? We were growing up and soon we’d be adults and out of the house.
I felt as if we were sitting all together for the last time around the round table under the five-armed, five-candled brass chandelier, as if we were eating our last meal off the old plates with the green vine-leaf border, as if we would never talk to each other so intimately again. I felt as if I were saying goodbye. I was still there and already gone. I was homesick for my mother and father and my brother and sisters, and I longed to be with the woman.
My father looked over at me. “‘I’m going back to school tomorrow’ - that’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” So he had noticed that it was him I’d asked and not my mother, and also that I had not said I was wondering whether I should go back to school or not.
He nodded. “Let’s have you go back to school. If it gets to be too much for you, you’ll just stay home again.”
I was pleased. And at the same time I felt I’d just said my final goodbyes.