Herbert Truczinski’s Back

Nothing, so they say, can take the place of a mother. Soon after her funeral I began to miss my poor mama. There were no more Thursday visits to Sigismund Markus’ shop, no one led me to Sister Inge’s white uniforms, and most of all the Saturdays made me painfully aware of Mama’s death: Mama didn’t go to confession any more.

And so there was no more old city for me, no more Dr. Hollatz’ office, and no more Church of the Sacred Heart. I had lost interest in demonstrations. And how was I to lure passers-by to shop-windows when even the tempter’s trade had lost its charm for Oskar? There was no more Mama to take me to the Christmas play at the Stadt-Theater or to the Krone or Busch circus. Conscientious but morose, I went about my studies, strode dismally through the rectilinear suburban streets to the Kleinhammer-Weg, visited Gretchen Scheffler, who told me about Strength through Joy trips to the land of the midnight sun, while I went right on comparing Goethe with Rasputin or, when I had enough of the cyclic and endless alternation of dark and radiant, took refuge in historical studies. My old standard works, A Struggle for Rome, Keyser’s History of the City of Danzig, and Köhler’s Naval Calendar, gave me an encyclopedic half-knowledge. To this day I am capable of giving you exact figures about the building, launching, armor, firepower, and crew strength of all the ships that took part in the battle of the Skagerrak, that sank or were damaged on that occasion.

I was almost fourteen, I loved solitude and took many walks. My drum went with me but I was sparing in my use of it, because with Mama’s departure a punctual delivery of tin drums became problematic.

Was it in the autumn of ‘37 or the spring of ‘38? In any case, I was making my way up the Hindenburg-Allee toward the city, I was not far from the Café of the Four Seasons, the leaves were falling or the buds were bursting, in any event something was going on in nature, when whom should I meet but my friend and master Bebra, who was descended in a straight line from Prince Eugene and consequently from Louis XIV.

We had not seen each other for three or four years and nevertheless we recognized one another at twenty paces’ distance. He was not alone, on his arm hung a dainty southern beauty, perhaps an inch shorter than Bebra and three fingers’ breadths taller than I, whom he introduced as Roswitha Raguna, the most celebrated somnambulist in all Italy.

Bebra asked me to join them in a cup of coffee at the Four Seasons. We sat in the aquarium and the coffee-time biddies hissed: “Look at the midgets, Lisbeth, did you see them! They must be in Krone’s circus. Let’s try to go.”

Bebra smiled at me, showing a thousand barely visible little wrinkles.

The waiter who brought us the coffee was very tall. As Signora Roswitha ordered a piece of pastry, he stood there beside her, like a tower in evening clothes.

Bebra examined me: “Our glass-killer doesn’t seem happy. What’s wrong, my friend? Is the glass unwilling or has the voice grown weak?”

Young and impulsive as I was, Oskar wanted to give a sample of his art that was still in its prime. I looked round in search of material and was already concentrating on the great glass facade of the aquarium with its ornamental fish and aquatic plants. But before I could begin to sing, Bebra said: “No, no, my friend. We believe you. Let us have no destruction, no floods, no expiring fishes.”

Shamefacedly I apologized, particularly to Signora Roswitha, who had produced a miniature fan and was excitedly stirring up wind.

“My mama has died,” I tried to explain. “She shouldn’t have done that. I can’t forgive her. People are always saying: a mother sees everything, a mother forgives everything. That’s nonsense for Mother’s Day. To her I was never anything but a gnome. She would have got rid of the gnome if she had been able to. But she couldn’t get rid of me, because children, even gnomes, are marked in your papers and you can’t just do away with them. Also because I was her gnome and because to do away with me would have been to destroy a part of herself. It’s either I or the gnome, she said to herself, and finally she put an end to herself; she began to eat nothing but fish and not even fresh fish, she sent away her lovers and now that she’s lying in Brenntau, they all say, the lovers say it and our customers say so too: The gnome drummed her into her grave. Because of Oskar she didn’t want to live any more; he killed her.”

I was exaggerating quite a bit, I wanted to impress Signora Roswitha. Most people blamed Matzerath and especially Jan Bronski for Mama’s death. Bebra saw through me.

“You are exaggerating, my good friend. Out of sheer jealousy you are angry with your dead mama. You feel humiliated because it wasn’t you but those wearisome lovers that sent her to her grave. You are vain and wicked—as a genius should be.”

Then with a sigh and a sidelong glance at Signora Roswitha: “it is not easy for people our size to get through life. To remain human without external growth, what a task, what a vocation!”

Roswitha Raguna, the Neapolitan somnambulist with the smooth yet wrinkled skin, she whose age I estimated at eighteen summers but an instant later revered as an old lady of eighty or ninety, Signora Roswitha stroked Mr. Bebra’s fashionable English tailor-made suit, projected her cherry-black Mediterranean eyes in my direction, and spoke with a dark voice, bearing promise of fruit, a voice that moved me and turned me to ice: “Carissimo, Oskarnello! How well I understand your grief. Andiamo, come with us: Milano, Parigi, Toledo, Guatemala!”

My head reeled. I grasped la Raguna’s girlish age-old hand. The Mediterranean beat against my coast, olive trees whispered in my ear: “Roswitha will be your mama, Roswitha will understand. Roswitha, the great somnambulist, who sees through everyone, who knows everyone’s innermost soul, only not her own, mamma mia, only not her own, Dio!”

Oddly enough, la Raguna had no sooner begun to see through me, to X-ray my soul with her somnambulist gaze, than she suddenly withdrew her hand. Had my hungry fourteen-year-old heart filled her with horror? Had it dawned on her that to me Roswitha, whether maiden or hag, meant Roswitha? She whispered in Neapolitan, trembled, crossed herself over and over again as though there were no end to the horrors she found within me, and disappeared without a word behind her fan.

I demanded an explanation, I asked Mr. Bebra to say something. But even Bebra, despite his direct descent from Prince Eugene, had lost his countenance. He began to stammer and this is what I was finally able to make out: “Your genius, my young friend, the divine, but also no doubt the diabolical elements in your genius have rather confused my good Roswitha, and I too must own that you have in you a certain immoderation, a certain explosiveness, which to me is alien though not entirely incomprehensible. But regardless of your character,” said Bebra, bracing himself, “come with us, join Bebra’s troupe of magicians. With a little self-discipline you should be able to find a public even under the present political conditions.”

I understand at once. Bebra, who had advised me to be always on the rostrum and never in front of it, had himself been reduced to a pedestrian role even though he was still in the circus. And indeed he was not at all disappointed when I politely and regretfully declined his offer. Signora Roswitha heaved an audible sigh of relief behind her fan and once again showed me her Mediterranean eyes.

We went on chatting for a while. I asked the waiter to bring us an empty water glass and sang a heart-shaped opening in it. Underneath the cutout my voice engraved an inscription ornate with loops and flourishes: “Oskar for Roswitha.” I gave her the glass and she was pleased. Bebra paid, leaving a large tip, and then we arose.