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Overview
Monika Maron was born in Berlin in 1941. Raised in the German Democratic Republic, she immigrated to West Germany in 1988. Brigitte Goldstein, a production editor at Rutgers University Press, has numerous translations to her credit, including Gertrud Kolmar's A Jewish Mother from Berlin and Susanna.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803282551 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska Paperback |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2000 |
| Series: | European Women Writers |
| Pages: | 135 |
| Sales rank: | 320,474 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Monika Maron was born in Berlin in 1941. Raised in the German Democratic Republic, she immigrated to West Germany in 1988. Brigitte Goldstein, a production editor at Rutgers University Press, has numerous translations to her credit, including Gertrud Kolmar’s A Jewish Mother from Berlin and Susanna.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
When I was young, I was certain, as most young people are, that I would die young. I was filled with youthfulness, such promise, the end could only be imagined as violent and beautiful. No, I certainly wasn't destined for gradual decay. Now I'm a hundred years old and I'm still alive. Maybe I'm only ninety, I don't know for sure, but most likely a hundred after all. Except for the bank where I keep an account, nobody knows I'm still among the living. Once a month I go to the bank to withdraw a small sum of money. I live very modestly. And yet each time I am afraid the teller will tell me my money has run out. I had a few savings, but it is hard to believe that they have lasted all these years I have been living on them. Maybe I'm getting a small pension from somewhere. Or maybe I'm only ninety or even younger. I no longer pay much attention to what goes on in the world, and I don't know what time period we are living in right now. When I run out of food, I go to the weekly farmers' market, where I prefer to shop since I stand out less in the crowd. I never meet anybody I know; I'm not sure I would recognize them anyway. They're probably all long dead, and only I am still alive. I'm surprised that I'm still able to walk quite well at my age. It is not much of a burden for me to carry my groceries, even though I always buy for two or three weeks in advance, and the load is quite heavy. That's why I sometimes wonder how old I really am. I may quite possibly have miscalculated the time I have been living in seclusion.
My apartment has no mirrors in which I might count the wrinkles in my face todetermine my age. In another time, long ago, fifty or forty or sixty years ago — it was an autumn day, this I remember clearly — I made up my mind not to add any more episodes to my life and I smashed them all to pieces. I could, if I were so inclined, examine the condition of my skin while changing my clothes in the evening or morning, had I not deliberately ruined my eyesight decades ago.
My last lover, the one for whose sake I withdrew from the world, forgot to take his eyeglasses when he walked out on me. For years I wore those glasses and fused my healthy eyes with his weak eyesight into a symbiotic blur in a last desperate attempt to be close to him. One day — I was heating noodle soup with bits of chicken — the glasses dropped to the stone floor in the kitchen and shattered, but my eyes had already lost their natural sharpness so I didn't miss the glasses very much. Since then I have kept them on the little table next to my bed, and sometimes, though less and less frequently now, I put them on just to feel what my lover must have felt when he wore them.
I remember my lover very clearly. I know what he looked like when he entered my apartment, reticent, with the measured steps of a high jumper taking aim for a precise jumping-off spot. I can still sense his smell as if he had just left this room; when I'm lying in the dark, tired and weary, I can feel his arms around me. I have forgotten only his name and why he left me.
One day — it was autumn, this I remember clearly — he left and didn't come back. It is possible that he died then. Sometimes I seem to remember my telephone ringing thirty or fifty or forty years ago and a voice, probably his wife's, telling me that my lover was dead. She introduced herself by name, which was the same as his; since then I have forgotten it. It is, however, quite possible that I am imagining all this. I have been sitting here much too long making up stories to explain why he walked out of my apartment that autumn night. It didn't rain that night — he left in a hurry because he was a bit late, and he never came back.
I waited for him. For weeks I didn't dare go out for fear he would come back just then and go away for good because I wasn't home. At night I kept the telephone close to my pillow. While I was waiting for him, I thought only of him. Every encounter, every word he ever spoke to me, our nocturnal embraces, I rehearsed it all in my mind over and over again. I managed to draw my lover so close to me in my imagination that I was able to be happy for hours, as if he were with me in body. In time I reconciled myself to the fact that I was waiting in vain. If it is possible to wait without hope of fulfillment, that's what I did, and truth to tell, I'm still waiting to this day. Waiting has become part of my nature, and the hopelessness no longer pains me. I don't know how long I actually knew my lover, a long time or not such a long time, long enough to fill forty or fifty years of memories, a very long time.
I was no longer young when I decided to turn my life into a never-ending, unbroken love story. My body was already in that precarious state that shows signs of the onset of old age in particularly endangered parts. Sagging folds around the posterior; soft, undulating flesh on the belly and inner thighs; under the skin, tissue separating into small clumps. Nevertheless, a certain youthfulness still adhered to its contours and with favorable lighting and a posture that tightened skin and flesh, the illusion could be created that I was no farther away from the days of my youth than from old age.
Fortunately, I'm not aware of the miserable picture my body presents now. I've become rather emaciated. In bed I have to stuff the covers between my knees because my bones are so bard they hurt me. Actually I don't care much what appearance I present during my rare forays into the world. At my age, one can be regarded as beautiful if one doesn't evoke disgust in other people. I still take regular showers and I take care that my nose doesn't drip.
After my lover had left me, I stripped the linen from the bed in which we had lain close together one last time and stored it, unwashed, in the closet. Sometimes I take it out and put it on the bed, taking care not to lose a single strand of my lover's hair or a skin flake. The flowery print of intense red, green, and lilac on the cover reminds me of the flowers of carnivorous plants. The sheet is black, and my lover's semen is still quite clearly, and beautifully, recognizable — a not-too-large stain in the shape of a seated poodle and, next to it another, larger, less sharply drawn image that presents new possibilities of interpretation every time I look at it, for instance fleeting clouds in the sky.
I get undressed and stretch out on the bed. My lover sits among the carnivorous plants. He is sitting upright with his back against the wall, his neck too very erect, which gives him a certain determined look. In reality this posture only serves to take the weight off his spine. My lover isn't any younger than I am, a few years older even. All I can make out are the contours of his body; it is almost dark in the room. When he sucks on his pipe, I can hear him opening his mouth with a gasping sound. In such moments, I always wait for him to say something, nothing in particular, just something, but he doesn't say it. He doesn't look at me, he simply stares into the darkness at the windows behind the drawn curtains. I light a cigarette and manage to slip somehow underneath his hands. That night, forty or sixty years ago, we had known each other for only two weeks.
If I remember correctly, I once studied biology, then again, it may have been geology or paleontology. Anyway, at the time when I met my lover, I had long been immersed in the study of the skeletons of prehistoric animals and was working at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, the very place where we first met. This museum then housed, maybe it still does today, the largest dinosaur skeleton to be seen in any museum. A brachiosaurus, about twelve meters high and twenty-three meters long. As in an ancient temple, it, whom I called he, stood erect under the glass cupola in the middle of a pillared hall; he stood massive and majestic, a godhead with a laughably small head, grinning down at me, his high priestess. I began my daily morning worship of him with a moment of silent meditation. For about a minute or so, I placed myself in front of him looking into his wonderful eye sockets, composed of thin bone clasps, and I wished we had met when his skeleton was still wrapped in fifty tons of flesh and he was searching for food one morning, 150 million years ago, under the permanently bright sun near Tendaguru, where he died and presumably also lived.
I like to think about the brachiosaurus. Besides my lover and the brachiosaurus, there is not much else I like to think about. Over the years I have learned not to remember what I would rather forget. I don't understand why people clutter their memories with mountains of inconsequential events, most of them not worth experiencing in the first place, so they can rummage around in them a hundred times or more and parade them as if they were proof positive of a life well spent. In my life there was not much that didn't deserve to be forgotten; consequently, the version I deem worth preserving has become a rather condensed life. I don't know what the current thinking is about this, but forty or fifty years ago, when I was still living among other human beings, forgetting was considered to be a capital sin. Even then I didn't understand it, and since then I have come to regard such an attitude as life-threatening nonsense. If one bars people from forgetting, one might as well bar a person in excruciating physical pain from fainting when only fainting can prevent fatal shock or lifelong trauma. Forgetting is the fainting of the soul. Remembering has nothing at all to do with not forgetting. The whole world had forgotten the brachiosaurus. For 150 million years he had been lost to earthly, maybe even cosmic, memory, until Professor Janesch found a few bones in Tendaguru. From then on, we began to remember him, which means: We reinvented him, his tiny brain, his food, habits, contemporaries, the long span of his species' life, and his death. Now he exists again, and every child knows him.
Since its passing, I have been inventing and reinventing that night, forty or fifty years ago, when my lover was sitting upright with his back against the wall, surrounded by carnivorous plants, like all the nights I spent with my lover. This way time passes and yet stands still.
Since I can't remember his name, I simply call my lover Franz, because I am certain I have never known another Franz in my life. I tried to invent a nicer name for him, but behind each one I liked that seemed suitable for my lover, someone else with that name emerged, someone I had known, even if only superficially, who might inadvertently come to mind just when I wanted to be alone with my lover. Besides, the name Franz can be beautifully pronounced by stretching the "a" as much as possible, starting very low and then pulling it up at the end ever so slightly — by no means too much, that would sound silly, only a nuance — so the sole vowel doesn't get crushed between the four consonants. Then Franz becomes a beautiful, dark word like tomb or coffin.
I will never know what Franz is thinking when he sits upright and stares into the darkness surrounding the windows behind the drawn curtains, gasping for air as if he wanted to say something. I presume, however, that he is only thinking about how he can keep the words that threaten to burst from his lips from actually coming out. These must be terrible words, or wondrous ones.
In the dim light of the street lantern filtering through the white curtains, Franz resembles an underexposed black-and-white photograph, ghostly pale, cast into the gray darkness around him. The blurred focus erases the signs of age in his face and, for just those hours, gives him back his youth. As I would do then, forty or thirty years ago, I take up a half-sitting position between my lover's extended legs, his firm, warm animal belly against my back, and like him I gaze at the window behind the drawn curtains and puff on my cigarette.
On that evening, we had known each other for two weeks. If I remember correctly, I had lived a rather average life until then. I had been married and even had a child, a pretty girl, who must be seventy or sixty by now. I don't know whether she still writes to me or not. Sometimes I get mail, but because of my poor eyes I am unable to read even the return address. In the last letter from my daughter that I was still able to read, she wrote that she got married to either an Australian or a Canadian with whom she would move to either Australia or Canada, and that she was happy. No other news has reached me since. Maybe she thinks I am dead and has given up writing.
My husband must have discreetly vanished from my life after I met Franz. Only this explains why Franz was able to visit me at any time in this apartment, in which I have lived forever. As far as I can remember him, my husband was a personable and quiet person. We must have been married for at least twenty years. At any rate, my daughter was already grown up when I met Franz and I didn't have to show consideration for anybody. It is, of course, possible that I should have shown consideration for somebody and just didn't do it. But Franz, who was of a more sensitive nature than I, would never have permitted me to send my child away because of him.
Sometimes, rarely really, this or that day from these twenty years comes to my mind. If I was unhappy then, I certainly wasn't aware of it, until that day in April when someone, I don't know who, turned off the electric current to my brain. I was crossing the Friedrichstrasse in the early evening to catch the elevated train when my tongue suddenly felt a mysterious numbness, a numbness that soon spread to the rest of my senses. What happened during the next twenty minutes, I know only from the report of a young woman who had stopped to help me as I lay on the asphalt in contortions and foaming at the mouth.
After recovering from a three-minute fainting spell, I apparently remained in a state of total confusion for another fifteen minutes. I was told I thrashed my arms about wildly when the rescue workers tried to take me to the ambulance. They had to pretend to be driving away to calm me down, only to return after a few minutes to take me finally to the hospital. The young woman who accompanied me told me I looked so frightened, heartrending, until a certain moment when my face suddenly relaxed and I asked in a sober tone, though exhausted, what had happened. I don't have the faintest memory of the time that elapsed between the moment my senses went numb and the moment I found myself on the stoop of a building. None of the tortures of modern medicine I was subjected to was able to detect any organic anomaly in me that might have triggered the spell.
For several weeks I had at times the impression that something in my head didn't function as it did before the spell - reversed sides, as if someone had switched the poles around. For example, I remembered people's first names after their last names, or I wrote twenty-three when I meant to write thirty-two, or I reached left in my own apartment knowing very well that the door I wanted to open was to the right. As a natural scientist, I knew, of course, that such symptoms had logical, in this case even simple, explanations. Still, the more I thought about it, the more disquieted I became about this fainting spell and its consequences. For the first time in my life, I wondered why the theory of evolution is thought to disprove the existence of a higher reason; evolution might just as well be the creation of that reason. I became obsessed with the idea that an alien force had simply switched me off for fifteen minutes that evening in the Friedrichstrasse and, for reasons unknown to me, had slightly altered the way my brain functions. I didn't really believe that, but it corresponded well with the state in which this inexplicable incident had left me. However, if this strange event simulated my death in order to resurrect me later with a slight disorientation in my brain as a memento, if it was meant as a scathing demonstration of my mortality, then it was possible to conceive of another force behind all this besides a few neurons gone haywire in the hippocampus or the amygdala.
The disquiet this episode precipitated in me was only bearable because I was able, in retrospect, to endow what happened with a certain sense and to interpret the sign. Maybe I had only been waiting for a sign to ask myself the one question and to give the one answer: What would I have missed if this fainting spell had not been a mere simulation of my death, if I had actually died that evening? The only thing one can miss out on in life is love. That was my answer, and I probably knew it long before I put it into words.
A year later I met Franz. I had not been searching for him, nor had I been waiting for him. One morning he appeared at my side. The brachiosaurus lowered his grin on both of us as he had so many times on me alone, and Franz said, unforgettably, in a soft voice: A splendid beast.
Just as the skin is sometimes uncertain for a second or so whether a sudden pain derives from boiling hot or ice cold water, I was unsure for a few moments what was happening to me; whether the strange soft voice was mocking my silent exchange with this skeleton, or whether it belonged to someone who knew my secret, who, over a span of more than 150 million years, could hear this heartbeat weighing a ton and could revive the decomposed flesh.
Franz's eyes — I couldn't have forgotten his real name since I didn't know it yet — were small and pike gray, as gray as the eyes of Modigliani's women are blue, not the least bit of white space between the eyelashes. This was an error I am still unable to correct. Franz had small, pike-gray eyes surrounded by as much white as is normal for small eyes. Later I even thought sometimes of the white in Franz's little eyes as ominously large. Nevertheless, whenever I think of my first encounter with Franz and his eyes, I always feel this totally gray, diffuse gaze fixed on me.
I often ask myself why I didn't take Franz, as he stood before me, pale and slender, a gray coat draped over his arm, for a regular, respectable middle-aged gentleman with a serious occupation. I could have taken his remark that the brachiosaurus was a splendid beast as small talk to start a conversation with me about dinosaurs, instead of being moved as deeply as if an oracle had been proclaimed. The extinction of the dinosaurs was a favorite topic among journalists and newspaper readers of all ages, even children, about forty or thirty years ago. I used to be perplexed that nobody was interested in the life of dinosaurs, only their death. Nobody asked how these colossi had survived for a hundred million years or longer, which was the real mystery for me. As if it weren't quite natural that something that had existed on earth for such a long time should also disappear again one day. It was probably a sense of foreboding that made people search for a logical, unique cause for the dinosaurs' extinction, a cause that couldn't be replicated and wouldn't apply to themselves. Actually people were constantly preoccupied with fears of their own extinction, through the atom bomb, or a new kind of disease, or the melting poles; they feared the extinction of mankind as intensely as if their own life and death depended on it. They had even come to regard each other with dread. They looked on with trepidation as their own species grew into an insatiable, voracious monster, and they seemed to be waiting for it to either burst or come to a bad end in some other way; or they expected a miracle to happen. Apparently it was this penchant for excess that created a certain sense of kinship with the dinosaurs, and they saw in their fate a parable of the threat to human existence. Most popular was the theory that a meteor was responsible for the dinosaurs' death. The disaster was thought to have come from the great beyond. They simply did not take into account that small turtles survived the catastrophe, whatever it may have been.
It must have been Franz's gentle voice, with the undertone of an undefinable dialect, and the diffuse seriousness in his little pike-gray eyes, that kept me from taking him even for a second for one of those solace-seeking apocalyptics when he called the brachiosaurus skeleton a splendid beast. When I had reassured myself that he wasn't mocking my morning devotion in front of the brachiosaurus, I replied: Yes, a splendid beast.
I have relived this minute two thousand times or more, even though I forbade myself to do so incomparably more often, since I feared that my uncontrollable mania to relive it over and over again could deprive this most precious moment of my life of its magic. But every time I permit myself to stand next to Franz under the cupola of our museum and to answer him: Yes, a splendid beast, wondrous music roars up as it did then, music that seems to descend from the glass roof, echoing from every corner of the hall and making the bones of the brachiosaurus quiver with its sound. "Praise and honor to the highest good," the heavenly chorus sings out, and Franz smiles.
Franz told me later that the moment he entered the hall and saw me in front of the animal, he was seized by an inexplicable sense of anticipation that compelled him to speak to me, although he couldn't remember ever having approached a woman in such a straightforward manner, not counting a few awkward adolescent indiscretions.
It doesn't matter whether I am a hundred years old or only eighty, whether I have been thinking for forty, thirty, or sixty years about what really happens when we get ourselves into this state in which we say: I am in love. Even if I should rack my brain about it for another fifty years, I couldn't figure it out. I can't even tell if love breaks in or out. Sometimes it seems to me that it breaks into us like a strange being that has been lurking about us for months, even years, until we are visited by memories and dreams and we longingly open our pores, through which it seeps within seconds and blends with every substance contained within our skin.
Or it breaks into our body like a virus, becomes lodged in us, and quietly awaits the day when it finds us susceptible and defenseless enough to break out as an incurable disease. However, I can also imagine that it lives imprisoned in us from the moment we are born. Once in a while it manages to free itself and break out of its prison, our body. When I picture it as a prisoner escaping from a life sentence, I can best understand why it goes wild during those rare moments of freedom, why it tortures us so mercilessly, why it promises us the greatest happiness and almost immediately flings us into deepest despair, as if to give us a glimpse of the gifts it could give us if we would only let it, as well as our deserved punishment for not permitting it free reign.
I believe my love had plotted its liberation long before I met Franz. Ever since I had asked myself the one question to which I had given the one answer — ever since I knew that, of all life has to offer, only love is indispensable — it must have been digging its escape route. When I first met Franz, it had already been set free. It determined my behavior from the very first moment. I don't remember ever having made even the least decision in this matter together with Franz. Not that it would have made any differences, but there was nothing to decide, since everything had been decided from the very first moment. I never tried to resist it, even though I was humiliated by its no-questions-asked attitude toward me. Each feeble attempt to put it in its place ended in its triumph and in yet another humiliation for me; it simply informed me I had better submit to its designs, and that was all.
Only since Franz left me and I have waited without hope for his return have I lived with my love in complete harmony. I no longer make a distinction between love and myself, and all that has happened to me since happened because I wanted it so.
Of course I believed at the time, fifty or sixty years ago, that all my happiness and unhappiness came from Franz.
I lived most of my life in a peculiar time, a time that had just come to an end when I met Franz. I no longer read newspapers, and except for my bank teller I don't know a single soul with whom I exchange a few words now and then. I am, therefore, totally ignorant of the general opinion that has meanwhile been formed about that time period, of what people say about it. I find it hard to believe that anybody today could understand how a gang of criminals, in the guise of an international liberation movement, managed to hermetically seal off from the rest of the world the entire Eastern European landmass, including its inland seas, several offshore islands, and their occupied territorial waters, and to pass themselves off as the legitimate governments of their respective countries. All this happened as the result of a war, unleashed and lost by a national, that is, a German gang of criminals. Among the victors was a west Asiatic republic, already dominated for decades by said liberation gang. All of Eastern Europe was ceded to this republic as its spoil of victory, including half of Germany and half the city of Berlin, where my hapless mother had given birth to me between two bombing raids.
In my younger days I once read a book; its title was a date, nineteen hundred and something. The conditions described in this book closely resembled the conditions of our lives, the only difference being that what went on in our world was even more devoid of any rhyme or reason. This, however, was presumably due only to the stupidity of the organizers. Thank God, I have forgotten much of what happened during those forty years. Most of it was too absurd to remember. I would have had to memorize it like the names of bones or sites where bones were found, with which I was already preoccupied and which was at least interesting. Someone accustomed to thinking in terms of hundreds of millions of years, as I am, will presumably be better able to regard this forty-year criminal regime as a doomed mutation, whose existence, seen from a broad historical perspective, would not even occupy as much time as the brachiosaurus required to lift one leg off the ground. I personally followed the events of this time primarily with the interest of a natural scientist — I kept a very close watch on my own reactions to the illogical, frequently species-threatening demands. I even jotted some of them down in a notebook. Now this is neither of use to me nor does it do me any harm. Since I am no longer able to read, I am not tempted to give in to a sudden flash of curiosity that could spoil the edifice of forgetfulness I have erected around me with great care in the course of decades.
My life, like everybody else's life in Eastern Europe, was subject to arbitrary absurdities and was affected in a cruel way. Besides the brachiosaurus, our museum had one of the most magnificent dinosaur collections in the world. We had a dicraeosaurus, a dysalotosaurus, a kentrurosaurus, plateosaurus, bradysaurus, and above all the primeval bird, the wonderful, precious primeval bird. But I, who wanted to be their collector and discoverer, I was reduced to the level of a cleaning woman. I was allowed to administer the collection, to look for crumbling spots in the joints, but not to search for their brothers and sisters in Montana, New Jersey, the Connecticut Valley, or the Red Deer River Valley. I wasn't allowed to see for myself the strange birdlike footprints that Pliny Moody of South Hadley in Massachusetts had found in his own garden early in the nineteenth century. I wasn't even allowed to attend international conferences where I might have met people who had seen it all.
Only someone who has developed an interest in life for one thing above any other, who is imbued with the desire to learn everything there is to know about this one thing, will be able to understand my despair. About three hundred meters from our museum was the wall that had been erected all around the western European enclave in the midst of East Germany, around the western part of Berlin. I regarded it as second-rate that this wall, during the decades of its existence, was cutting me off from the greater part of my city. And yet I never ceased to be amazed, until the very end, that it was possible to pull off that criminal coup, and that the four million inhabitants of this city took the preposterous piece of masonry in stride, just as the inhabitants of California must be taking in stride the fact that one day the San Andreas Fault will ultimately break open. Just as the attempt to imagine the infinite universe made me dizzy as soon as I thought about it, so did the incomprehensible thought that this ugly three-meter-high concrete wall separated me not only from the rest of the world, but from its entire prehistory. It deprived me of the Paleozoic era, the Mesozoic era, the Cretaceous period, and the Jurassic period. It deprived me of everything to which I longed to dedicate my life.
I still remember a young man who worked with me in the dinosaur department and who dreamed for years of using the glass roof above the head of the brachiosaurus as a launching pad for a three-hundred-meter balloon flight over the wall. His success would have required a steady east wind, which was rare and hardly reliable. In addition, such an undertaking would have required conspicuous preparations. A hot air balloon was out of the question, for the flame of the burner would have to be kept lit at night. The young man would, of course, have been able to fly away only at night. A hydrogen balloon would have required carrying at least ten heavy steel bottles, a meter and a half in height, up to the glass roof to be stored there, possibly for weeks, until the next east wind, without being discovered. And yet, one day the young man had disappeared, like my daughter. We received a postcard from him postmarked Rome. I remember him very well and often imagined myself at night in the dark hall next to the brachiosaurus, watching the balloon expand slowly on the glass roof until its skin was taut and lifted the young man off the roof. I saw the soles of the young man's shoes lift off from the glass, his legs dangling as if he were walking on air. I really lived in strange times. Who knows whether I would really have understood the dinosaurs better had I been allowed to follow their tracks all over the world. Could it be that my constant dialogue with the one whom I loved more than any brought me closer to the dinosaurs' secret, even though my presentiments about them wouldn't produce a single reference in a textbook? I don't know.