Things That Disappear

Translated from the German by Kurt Beals.

Memories

The farewells are what I remember. How thin and white R. looked beneath his shock of hair when I said goodbye to him for the last time and he nodded to me without lifting his head from the pillow, just briefly closing his eyes. How I didn’t go back to his bed, but simply closed the door behind me. The next day I had to pick up his things from the hospital, including the razor I’d charged for him the day before. The razor was charged, but R. was dead.

When I left my grandmother’s house, she was standing at thewindow of a dark room, waving as I walked away, her silhouette illuminated only by the light that burned behind her in the hallway where we had just said our goodbyes. Two days later she fell, and when I saw her again, her face motionless and her eyes closed, she was lying in a coma in the hospital, where some time later she died.

I remember how R. would nod after he had examined something – a car, a new apartment – I remember how he would hum along under his breath when there was gypsy music playing in a Hungarian restaurant, I remember how he would hunch his shoulders when he was carrying a tray back to the kitchen. I still recall how my grandmother used to say ‘Oh dear, oh dear’ when she was in a hurry and didn’t know what to do first, I remember her hands with their gnarled fingernails and her laughter. I already find it hard to recall whether her mouth was open or closed when she laughed, but at least I know how it sounded, and how her laughter gradually faded into laughter at herself.

There’s very little that I can touch, see and hear with my memory anymore. The thoughts of someone who no longer exists can be translated into my thoughts, and the actions of that  person into my actions, but the tangible part of those memories will probably fall to pieces sooner or later. When reality no longer grows back, it will become a skeleton, individual bones with a great deal of soil in between. Recently, it’s often happened that I find myself sitting across from someone who’s still perfectly alive, yet looking at him as if he had already disappeared. At those moments, half hopeful, half ashamed, I pick out single frames of the film while it’s still running, as if I could select my memories in advance and learn them by heart, so that I could be sure to recall them later. As for myself, I’ve already considered whether anyone will remember the way I blow my nose, or the way I watch a boxing match on TV, or my knees.

Miezel

On the way to see Maria, known as Miezel, I have to drive through the valley, first down to the lowest and coldest point along the route – the road makes a sharp curve there, so it’s easy to skid in the winter – then back up at the other end of the valley, then a right at the Kreuzwirt tavern, past the forest that Miezel helped plant thirty years ago – at night you can often see deer in the meadow that borders the forest, standing there as if petrified, blinded by the headlights. Today, in the sunlight, I see two figures coming toward me there: an overweight mother with her equally overweight, grown-up daughter, holding each other’s hands.

The journey to see Miezel has become a very long one since I moved back to Berlin. Hunched over like a crescent moon, her silhouette approaches the frosted glass panes of the door. Then Maria, known as Miezel, opens the door to me. In the time I’ve known her, she’s grown ever thinner and more frail. Still, her hair is only grey in a few places. She wears an apron over her skirt, and slippers on her feet because of the corns. ‘Pain,’ she says, and smiles, ‘constant pain!’ – she smiles and shakes her head as if in amazement, her feet are bony like the rest of her body, and whenever she bumps into anything her skin immediately turns blue in that spot, since the veins are just beneath the surface.

Miezel lives in the castle where she served as a maid all her life, on the ground floor, right next to the entrance. Until just a few years ago, she was still carrying suitcases up to the third floor. She cooked, cleaned and tended the garden for the masters of the estate. She opens the door for guests, workmen, the chimney sweep and the postman. The bricklayer and the gardener take their lunch break in her kitchen. Miezel drinks raspberry syrup mixed with tap water, she cooks her food on an iron stove, and any leftover provisions that aren’t suitable for the compost are thrown onto the fire. Miezel has never flown in an airplane. She always used to walk the three kilometres to the village on foot, back before she started to get dizzy so often. She never learned to ride a bicycle, and never used an escalator. When the masters aren’t at home, she tends the castle, and her only companions are the dormouse, the Aesculapian snake and the red salamander. The house where she was born is at the foot of the hill where the castle stands. Miezel can see it from her window.

One of the two rooms she’s lived in for thirty years is the front parlour. She keeps fruit and cake there in a cool and shady place, baskets and trays are laid out on a huge black table with lathe-turned legs that once belonged to someone or other who lived in these rooms before. The other room is the one where Miezel sleeps, her dresses and aprons are hung there in a shallow closet, and there’s a TV, too, and an armchair, its upholstery already worn rather bare in the spots where Miezel places her hands on the armrests. She brings in the coffee pot, and I can see that a coffee pot like that holds weight.

Back when I was her neighbour, she would always carry something in her hands when she came to visit me – a head of lettuce, or two or three apples, or some mushrooms, or a plate of cakes. ‘A few Buchteln,’ she’d say, Austrian sweet rolls. The things she brought were things she’d planted, cooked, baked or found in the woods herself. Later, when she couldn’t go into the woods or work in the garden anymore, or even cook or bake, she made me open-faced sandwiches. White bread with cheese or salami, with slices of egg or halved sour pickles on top. She arranged the slices of egg on the bread with her bony hands, and if I didn’t manage to eat it all, I had to take the rest home with me wrapped in aluminum foil – for this evening, for tomorrow – along with a package of cookies for my child.

When I ring her doorbell today, it’s a long time before the door is opened. Her caretaker must not be very familiar with the keys yet. High up in the sky, far above the big cherry tree, a hawk is circling. Inside, in her dimly lit kitchen, Miezel is seated at the table; her caretaker has set her there and pushed the chair close to the table so that she can hold herself upright. Miezel sits there, but she’s so weak that she can’t even manage to open her eyes. I look out her window. Through the bare trees, I can see as far as the house where her mother was a maid and her father was a servant. Miezel sits there motionless. That means that when I leave, I can only hug her from the side.

Cheese and Socks

The other day I bought some cheese, a particularly expensive piece of cheese, I cut myself a slice while I was standing in front of the refrigerator, and it tasted very good. That same evening, the piece of cheese was nowhere to be found – not in the refrigerator, or in any of the cabinets, or on the table, or in the freezer, or even in the toolbox, in the washing machine, in the linen closet, or on the balcony. Not in the oven, either. In fact, it had really and truly disappeared, and it stayed that way, too, it had disappeared so thoroughly that it didn’t even start to stink after a while from any corner that I might have forgotten about while searching for my piece of cheese. I ask my mother, who knows her way around my house: Have you by any chance seen the cheese? She says no. I say: Did you by any chance throw it away? My mother says no.

The same thing happened to my son with the little book that we kept in the bathroom to read aloud from during his longer visits: How to Survive Situations You’ll Probably Never Get Into. It included instructions on how to fend off a crocodile, a shark, and a cougar, how to climb from a motorcycle into a car while driving, what to do if your parachute doesn’t open, and so forth. We spent a lot of time studying that little book, so much time that I got quite tired of the page with the shark and preferred to roll down the windows while driving across a frozen lake to balance the water pressure in case of sinking – then it would be a piece of cake to get out of the car at the bottom of the lake. But suddenly that little book has disappeared. It isn’t on the bookshelf, it isn’t mixed in with the waste paper, it hasn’t slipped behind the radiator or into the basket with the dirty laundry. I ask my mother: Have you by any chance seen our little yellow book? She says no.

Third, a single sock disappears, half of my favourite pair, but that’s not at all unusual. I’ve heard that in probability theory there’s a law concerning this very phenomenon (the Greek word for ‘appearance’): the law of disappearing socks. And this brings me to my hope. My hope that the disappearance of things in one place necessarily results in their appearance in another place, that there may be a world in which my sock, filled with that expensive piece of cheese, plunges from a very high bridge and survives the fall.

Friend

Now I’m going to make you disappear in this column. It’s as simple as that. In you go. But why, my friend asks. That’s what I’m asking you, I say. What’s this all about, she says. Yes, I say, that’s what I’d like to know, too. In you go, I say, then shut the lid, then everything is calm and quiet. Calm and quiet sometimes occur in friendships, and there are different kinds: the calm after the storm, the calm before the storm, or simply calm. This last sort of calm has something to do with the disappearance of the friendship, that much is certain; perhaps this calm is not calm at all, but silence, and perhaps this silence itself is the cause of the silence, in which case the disappearance would be something circular.

When I’m riding my bike, little insects sometimes fly into my mouth or up my nose. And before I know it, they’re in my throat, and my throat gulps them down, and there’s nothing I can do but try after the fact to think of the insects as food, so that it doesn’t bother me that they’ve ended up inside me. In the case of one of those little flies or mosquitoes, you could certainly say that it disappeared into my mouth or nose, but really it’s still there, just out of sight. Whenever a little mosquito or fly disappears into my mouth and my throat gulps it down against my will, I ask myself whether just slipping out of sight is enough in itself to count as disappearance, or whether a more thorough dissolution is required.

The other question that inevitably occurs to me each time something disappears is whether anything was there to begin with – and if so, what. In the case of a friendship, for example, which is invisible from the start, it may be that the bond whose disappearance I mourn was only an appearance anyway, that in essence there were just two lonely quantities of the most eclectic odds and ends that overlapped for a while and are now drifting apart again.

The most encouraging reading would be that the more thoroughly a friendship disappears, the more securely it is preserved. That silence takes up just as much space and connects us just as firmly to one another as all the walks, conversations, shopping trips, afternoons spent at playgrounds, glasses of wine and cups of coffee put together. That the answers that were not given remain faithful to me, through their absence, for all eternity. That although the disappearance has entered my body against my will, in retrospect it can be seen as nourishment, at least until I have had my fill.

Men

For a few weeks there was a strong smell of cats emanating from the middle apartment on the third floor, then it grew into a stench, the windows in the hallway were left wide open during the day and even at night, and finally the animal welfare agency, acting on a tip from some neighbours, broke down the door and freed three cats that had gone mad – two more already had their insanity behind them, they were dead. On occasions like that, the animal welfare men wear helmets made of metal mesh, as if they were dressed for fencing, because the abandoned animals in their rage make no distinction between one person and another. The cats’ owner, it was said, had probably simply forgotten about his animals.

In Wagner’s Ring cycle, the forgetful hero Siegfried, wrapped in his airy invisibility cloak, travels swiftly from marriage to marriage; today he would probably be called a marriage swindler. The man is already thundering down the stairs, fleeing across the courtyard, when the woman shouts after him: ‘Get out!’ – as if these words, of all things, could persuade her beloved to stay. The fact that disappearing from one place means appearing in another can hardly be shown more beautifully than in the film The Man Who Walked Through the Wall, in which the tax official Buchsbaum (Heinz Rühmann) discovers one day that he is able to pass in and out of closed rooms, to move through walls as if through water. In essence, he disappears from his life as a third-tier tax official and reappears as a supernatural being. Rarely has the change of circumstances, or the change of state that necessarily accompanies the disappearance and reappearance of both people and things, gone more smoothly.

An acquaintance of mine had a child who was only three months old when her husband told her he was leaving. Then he left. Thirteen years later, he came back and befriended his daughter. Another friend had phases like that in her life, too, sometimes the moon was in its first quarter, sometimes it was full, sometimes it wasn’t visible at all. The father of her child had actually acknowledged his son in advance, but he never made an appearance after the birth. When the child was one and a half, the father unexpectedly showed up at the door. For a few months he played with his son, went on outings, and even bought a Christmas tree. Then he disappeared as suddenly as he had come, and he has not been seen again; the child is seven now. In any case, disappearance is surely no less powerful than love, but it remains astonishing that thin air can sometimes have just as much weight as something that is really there.

Disassembly

We are only guests on earth, we’ve known that for a long time, but even before we vacate the premises altogether, we are guests time and again, as if for a trial run: in other people’s apartments, summer houses, hotels. Before we vacate the premises altogether and all our baggage inevitably falls away, we have the opportunity to transport our earthly belongings to this place or that, as we please. At some point, when the time is up, a woman may come, or a man, or an owner, or a landlord, and tell us to disappear. It’s also possible for us to disappear before we’re asked to. Or to disappear reluctantly, and belatedly. Finally, it’s possible for us to be gone before anyone has even noticed that we were there to begin with, so that our disappearance goes entirely unnoticed. But wherever we stay, for however short or long a time, we always, at a minimum, open a door, go inside, breathe, perhaps sit on a chair, eat from plates, drink from glasses, sleep in beds, we may stock up on essentials, play games, browse through books, move the rug a bit when we go out, turn the key only once when we lock up, instead of twice as the owner of the house usually does. We bring some things with us, we handle others, move them just a bit, or our smell clings to them, but in any case, when we disappear, our things are supposed to disappear as well, the mark we’ve made is supposed to be taken back and disappear along with us, then we have to drag all our belongings from the apartments, the houses, the rooms that we leave, the way an octopus drags its tentacles from an undersea cave.

And that’s why this weekend I’m standing on a teetering platform in the branches of an oak tree, pounding on the boards of a tree house with a hammer to pry them loose, that’s why I’m using a pipe wrench to unscrew the hammock hooks from tree trunks full of resin, the pipe wrench breaks and it all blows up in my face, that’s why I’m deflating balls, folding chairs and tables, wrapping plates and glasses in newspaper, that’s why I’m stuffing jackets and sweaters into suitcases, rubber boots and ice skates into a big bag, that’s why I’m even digging up my peony at the very last minute. When you leave a hotel, you often see the doors of the rooms that have already been vacated standing open, revealing rumpled sheets, empty bottles, crumpled paper, cigarette butts and ashes. Now the rented place where we spent four summers doesn’t look much different than those abandoned hotel rooms. As I’m driving away, I can barely fit into the car because so many things have become attached to me and have to disappear with me when I leave.