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Sport 40: 2012

About Me

page 260

About Me

This is the story of someone who never existed. It’s about me. To be honest, it’s not a story where much happens. I have neither career nor family highlights that I might have worked towards, full of hope and maybe sometimes with misplaced zeal. There were no dead-ends that I could present to you later as the life path of a woman who, despite or maybe even because of all the mistakes she never learned from, is a person with whom you can identify all the more. But can you feel for someone who never existed? No, you can’t. Can you like me? No again. Perhaps you envy me when something goes wrong in your life because once again you didn’t learn anything from your mistakes once again. But maybe it’s not even your fault. That could also be the case. Maybe you’re standing at the window of your employer who just left the office to put the notice of termination on the copier, you’re standing there and drinking the mixed fruit juice he offered you, you’re supporting yourself with a hand on the windowpane, which will leave a smudge, but you aren’t thinking about that now, you’re thinking: if only I wasn’t there. But when you think about those kinds of things it’s not so much about me. I don’t even exist. But this story exists, even if it is just a story. I’ll tell you who I have never been.

I’ll start really far back: many years after the death I didn’t die. So many years later that it doesn’t even matter any more how long ago it really was. No one even asks when it happened and under which circumstances, and there’s a simple reason: no one knows me. This is my favorite part of the story because it doesn’t make the slightest difference if I am talking about myself or about you. With a fair amount of certainty, no one will remember you either. No one will ever ask: When did he die again? What was it he drank all the time, mixed fruit juice? No one remembers you. They never knew you. And if, against the odds, someone were to look for you, they would find page 261 you in the church records and the archives of the registration office but they wouldn’t find any more than your name and a couple of dates: date of birth, date of death, and other immaterial details. But what does that say about you anyway? It’s as if you never existed. This is the point where you’re just like me.

Things look a little different when no more than a couple of years have passed since your or my death. People think: If only I had bought her something nice to wear when she couldn’t even get out of bed any more, it was all she really wanted. If only I had visited her more often. Why wasn’t I there when she died? Why didn’t I say goodbye? And that fight, the last time I was there; it was really unnecessary, wasn’t it. But she was such a stubborn person. And moody, especially towards the end! She was always crying that she wanted to go home to her cats, most of all to Blacky: what with her just having had kittens, poor Blacky, she needs me!, she always used to call. And then she would want to get up right away and would fall out of the bed, and it would take two carers to lift her into the bed because she was so heavy. And no sooner would they have left than she would try again and fall over before she reached the door. And then she would cry again, of course, even though she could have just stayed on the ground but she really was stubborn, yes, that’s what she was. And if she had really got it in her head to die before my next visit, then it worked out alright. I was so tired of it. I was really relieved.

But that’s just what they think, and no one says it out loud. Or when they do then just within their own four walls, and in the end they get comforted and hugged for a while and then they’re already doing better, thanks. Other people who didn’t know me quite so well talk louder. They ask: Wasn’t that the Party Secretary’s wife? Rubbish, she wasn’t a Red Sock! I’m not saying she was a Red Sock; she helped people across the border. Helped people, who did you hear that from? She told me herself. And then you go and believe it, when the Party Secretary’s wife tells you she helped people across the border? Why wouldn’t I believe it? For all you know she filed reports on them afterwards! Did she really? Of course she did, she was always so friendly and always asking how things were. You don’t say. What do you mean, you don’t say? I’m saying: I had my suspicions.—And that’s how they’ll talk and talk, till deep into the night, and the sun page 262 comes up at the end of all conversations, and no one really knows what’s true and what’s not, and who they were talking about in the end.

It could also be about you. But how about I take a step back? I had just turned eighty-three then and had a good head on my shoulders, had a fairly long story behind myself and so many memories handy that I preferred to speak in the past tense. In reality, of course, I don’t have any other story than the one you’re reading, but let’s assume for a moment: in the top drawer there lies a photograph of me in my first communion dress. I am really beautiful in the photo: tanned arms in snow-white puffy sleeves and my eyes flashing under the photographer’s sky. My granddaughter Fanny is sitting on the edge of the bed and digging in my things until she holds this picture in her little soft hands. Who’s that?, she asks me and scrunches up her eyebrows that look like the eyebrows of the girl in the old picture. That’s me, I say. Who else? That I haven’t changed a bit since then, that I’m still the one with the crazy stubborn head, that I’m still as scared of storms, even though it’s perfectly safe now because of the lightning rods, that I still haven’t shaken off the war, so much so that I could eat all the time, any time at all, that I have this incredible sweet tooth, as if there were a whole big life ahead of me instead of behind, I don’t tell Fanny any of that. I just say: That’s me. Who else? But Fanny doesn’t stop furrowing her eyebrows. That’s supposed to be you? I don’t believe that!, she calls, you’re just pulling my leg! And because I’m also a girl, a girl who’s hidden under a costume of wrinkles, I go for broke and ask Fanny the most impossible question of all: Do you really think I wasn’t ever young? Fanny tilts her head and thinks. And then she wraps her little soft hands around my neck and laughs: No grandma, you were never young!

We’re small, stiff, wrinkled people. We live in the presence of our grandchildren as if we had never been anything else besides old, and as if we never had to die. If we ever had a life, a life of our own or not, that doesn’t matter. Maybe the young are right and we have always been as old as we are today; it’s just our brains playing tricks on us. Then our life stories are nothing more than a biochemical dream. We just don’t have any evidence that we really existed.

And now we come to the hole in my story because I didn’t page 263 personally experience any of what you remember. I wasn’t at the outdoor swimming pool with Fanny on vacation, I wasn’t with my son in Venice over New Year, we didn’t have that little hotel room on the Lido with the bald hotel manager at the night desk who chatted to me while I wrote a whole stack of postcards because I wasn’t in the least bit sleepy. I didn’t even see the swaying banks of Venice or the man at the counter of the luggage room at the Basilica di San Marco who was working on a composition for five instruments in the breaks when no one wanted to hand over a backpack. At home I didn’t have this pre-fab house from Sweden or this talkative husband, who over the years had become more and more similar to me, so similar that sometimes he guesses what I think of the two of us and that’s why I avoid him. I have never seen how my son shaved his peach-fuzz facial hair each morning, always careful to avoid the zits. And I didn’t have this position at the women’s clinic where I helped children enter the world or leave it, and from where I rode home every evening with arms smeared darkly and my ears full of the first cries, rode my racing bike that my husband had given me for our first wedding anniversary and that I liked more than all the elegant women’s bikes in later years. But I don’t have a racing bike and didn’t have a husband, I never got married and I was never in love. We never went swimming in the carp pond in the middle of the night, equipped with a burning torch that he rigged up with a little tar and his mother’s Sunday apron wrapped around a fencepost. The first time I had sex with him didn’t hurt so much that I didn’t want to meet him for three weeks, and I also didn’t have a crush on that girl, that girl at my school with the chin-length fiery red hair. This school is just a bad dream in the first place, I wasn’t even there, and I wasn’t so lonely in the recess that I just couldn’t take it, but maybe this is where I should talk about the weather. About the sheet lightning that I saw when the girl with the fiery red hair and I rode all across Bohemia on our bikes. Or about the red corona around the sun when I looked directly at it through my sunglasses before I threw them onto the asphalt street while fighting with the fiery-red girl and both of the arms broke off, but I was going to talk about the weather. About the midsummer clouds over our old house and that I always imagined how the old bent-over folks’ fears would come true and the sky could fall to earth and that would be great, this high, soft page 264 mountain of clouds in our backyard and how I would throw myself onto it! And these clouds just before the rainstorm that looked like animals bucking and falling silent so that I could hear the swallows crying when they flew right over the overheated country road until the first drops hit them.

But I didn’t hear the swallows cry or the swarm of sparrows in front of our house and I didn’t catch our bilious green budgerigar chirping in imitation with the window thrown wide open, until the sparrows flew into the room in rage. Basically any bird you know I have never heard of and never seen, not the pigeons in the coop, not the storks on the barns, not the crows on the harvested fields, or the blackbirds in the bushes and the owls in the attic and all the birds whose names I never learned and not even the swifts over the blocks of houses in the city where the zoo was, I never saw any flamingos by the entrance because I never stood by the entrance. Shaky, garish beauties that still were invisible so that everyone walked past them looking for the real animals, you did too. So you never saw the flamingos, and you certainly didn’t hear them scream when visitors got too close to them, because you never got too close to them, but I never did that either.

But now I’m going back even further because here the part of my story starts where it doesn’t matter if it’s about you or me. You know that a man with a handsome black suit sometimes took you for a ride in his car and dropped you off at the door of the pre-school but you don’t know that it was Pauli Schroeder, who was charged with child abuse many years later; they just made you believe that. You know that you hid under your mother’s skirt because they served up that story at every family get-together. But can you remember the semi- darkness and the smell of her huge legs that you hugged with both arms, can you remember? Neither can I, so here we agree. I can’t remember how the visible world didn’t reach beyond the edge of a colorfully checkered blanket and how all of the colours really weren’t there, just voices and light and the floury taste on my tongue and the shadows and the weight of my own head, and then none of those things were there either and I was so light, I would never be so light again; but I can remember this just as little as you can.

At exactly this point everything comes full circle. Everything becomes just as it was in the beginning. No one asks about you, and no page 265 one asks about me. If someone other than me tells the story, starting at the right place and moving forwards, then you will exist and you will see and hear a few things that I have already told you, and they will seem strangely familiar to you just as this story seems strange to you. But now there is this story, and I am the hole in its centre, I am the silence in the breaths of those who read it to you or maybe I am also the space between the words that you will read yourself, and that’s something at least.

Stones are the closest things to me. They have never lived and still they’re there, they’ve always been there. Think about me when you stand at the foundation pit of your Swedish pre-fab house. Find a pebble and throw it in the deepest hole on the whole construction site. Keep an eye on the spot where your pebble disappears into the darkness. But don’t concentrate too much. Stare just a little to the side. What you see there is me.

From Flamingos © Schöffling & Co., 2010. English translation © Bradley Schmidt, 2012.