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  “She leaves her house less and less,” I said. “I went to visit her yesterday. She barely said a word.”

  “She loves to talk, but never about herself. She never speaks about how much her mother mistreated her when she was a child, nor about how much they mistreat her now in the prisons. I had a premonition that one day her strength will be broken.”

  “She was so strong, but now she is like a frightened bird.”

  “Promise me,” she pleaded. “Promise me that you will not forget Klara. And help her if you can.”

  I promised, and she set the caterpillars in her lap.

  Sarah had always been sickly, but we look on the illnesses of sickly people as part of their everyday life, and we rarely think that one of those illnesses must be their last. During the final weeks of Sarah’s life, her imminent disappearance from this world was fully evident, but we all still believed her illness was something that would pass—all of us, that is, except her, though she never said so. I recognized her presentiment of death in the concern that some who, on seeing their end approach, have for those who will be left behind. I no longer remember how I detected her quiet concern for me, about what awaited me in my life, but I do remember that during each of my visits she mentioned Klara. “I beg you, do not forget Klara,” she said to me. “And help her if you can.”

  After every meeting with Sarah, I thought about going to see Klara, but instead of going to visit her I returned home.

  Whenever Sigmund came to our home, I said not a word about Sarah’s illness, until the day it was evident she would soon no longer be in this world. My brother wanted to visit her with me. As he approached her, lying in bed with her hands clasping the book on her chest, it seemed to me that I saw the same thing I had seen during their first encounter, what I saw every time they met: that forced restraint, that subdued excitement, that anticipation. Again, I was here with them (they had never met alone; I was the eternal witness to the quavering in their words and the persistence of their silence; I closely observed each of their gestures, each facial expression, which disclosed many unspoken things), but now, when my brother sat down beside Sarah’s bed, I lowered my gaze and only listened. I listened, but I did not hear anything except the weary tolling of their voices; somehow I could not make out their words. When my brother stood up from Sarah’s bedside, I turned my gaze back upon them. Sarah had unclasped her hands from the book, and she handed it to my brother.

  “You gave me this book that day we were walking in the park. We have not seen each other since, and I forgot to give it to Adolfina to return to you.”

  My brother hesitated. He had given her that book of poems by Mickiewicz, and now she was returning it to him as if he had merely lent it to her. While he stood staring at the book, the unpleasantness of that thought was expressed in the stiffness of his body, in the stiffness of his voice when he asked a completely ordinary and unnecessary question: “Were there any poems you especially liked?”

  “The one about the young woman who, even years after his death, sees her beloved with the eyes of her soul and never stops talking to him.”

  My brother took the book, and from between its pages fell the dandelion that the child in the park had given her through the bars of the fence. The dandelion fell to her breast.

  Sarah and I never saw each other again. Afterward, whenever I thought of her, I thought of the dandelion and of her hands receiving that fresh flower in the park, when a child handed it to her through the fence, of her hands raising the dried dandelion from her breast after it had fallen from between the poems of the book.

  AFTER SARAH’S DEATH, I VISITED KLARA SEVERAL TIMES AT her home but was greeted by her mother’s hostility. Klara was absent even when Klara was at home. I spoke to her, but I knew she could not hear what I was telling her. Her gaze drifted somewhere far, far beyond the wall she was staring at, and even when I touched her hand and asked, “Are you listening to me, Klara?” she remained absent. Only when I mentioned Sarah would she smile the smile of those who have made peace with the devastation their lives have become. When I saw how Klara was lost to a kind of emptiness, I recalled Sarah’s words: “I beg you, do not forget Klara. And help her if you can.” So I spoke to Klara about Sarah. I told her about the butterfly house, about the butterflies that landed on her body, about the poetry that Sarah read. I told her about so many things that had happened, told her these things as if they were happening now, and I said not a word about one thing alone: the thing that would prove that what I was telling her existed only in the past and in the memory of that past.

  AFTER MY BROTHER HAD MOVED AWAY FROM HOME AND started spending all the time he was not with patients with Martha Bernays, after I had begun to meet Sarah only in my memories, after Klara had sunk into her oblivion, a feeling of abandonment, a sense that no one yearned for my presence any longer, made me vulnerable.

  My mother often said to me, “Look at your sisters. Try to be at least a little like them. If you cannot be like them, try at least to resemble them a bit.”

  I looked at my sisters. During the previous summer, the four of them, without telling me they were planning it, had gone to take care of the children of German families who lived in Paris. They returned that fall, and in the course of just one season they had turned into beautiful young women with refined manners, French phrases accenting their coquettish speech, expressions on their faces that conveyed not confusion or humility but an easygoing modesty and joy of life. I was entranced by my sisters, by their gestures, their conversations. I always sat near them but never with them; I watched them, listened to them, felt happy for them. But aside from that happiness, I also felt something different, because I knew how distant I was from them, as distant from them as I had once been close to my mother.

  My mother often gathered my sisters, finding some way not to include me, and then they would sit for a long time in the kitchen. At those times, I would sometimes walk a little way down the hall and then return to my room, and in that short moment when I approached the door dividing me from them I managed to hear a small part of their conversation, the kind that most mothers had with their daughters: what a daughter had to do in order to be a good daughter, the ways in which one enters marriage, the responsibilities of wives toward their husbands and children. I remained outside their world and their conversations, in which they spoke about themselves as wives and mothers. I overheard how they looked toward the future, while I looked to the past, and it seemed to me that with marriage and motherhood, for which they were preparing themselves, they were conquering time, that through those things they were connecting themselves with the entire line of mothers down to the first blood. But I felt I remained far from that line.

  My mother sensed my vulnerability, and she plunged her hatred into it. Hatred cannot be understood completely, nor its sources known, just as Sarah had once said of happiness that it could not be defined—it could be only felt. Perhaps, like sin and happiness, hate also exists only in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes I tried to make sense of my mother’s hatred toward me. Perhaps I was something like a pit into which my mother could throw her darkness. Perhaps, I thought, she hated in me my father, her ancient husband, who was older even than her own father. Perhaps in her hatred toward me she extinguished her longing to have a husband her own age even before that yearning had been ignited. Perhaps her hate was an expression of that distant pain, born of being forced to smother her girlish dreams prematurely, to obey her ancient husband in silence, to live in poverty and give birth and raise children in that poverty. Or perhaps, because of my attachment to my brother, she hated me because she was powerless to hate the one who had separated her golden Siggie from her. He was beginning a different life, building a new world in which we could be only incidental passersby, and had now chosen to be just a guest in our world. But if my mother had taken a dislike to Martha Bernays, there was nothing she could do to her, since poison directed at my brother’s beloved would never reach her, would remain in my moth
er, and therefore she had chosen me.

  That is how it seemed to me, though perhaps I was mistaken, as I tried to explain to myself the burden of my existence. Already in a child’s first glimmers of consciousness there is a heavy sense of time, a vague premonition that our existence is formed of grains of sand that the wind disperses, and that it is only the sense of ourselves, of our I, that holds us intact, until the last small grain of sand—the last relic of life—is blown away, when our I will also be extinguished, and behind us all that will remain is the wind of time. From time to time, the wind blows so fiercely that it carries away not only the grain of sand but also parts of the I itself, and the I feels powerless—it feels the wind will carry it away along with the sand, that it will be extinguished before all the grains of sand allotted to it for a lifetime have blown away—and then the I seeks another I, some other I’s, to accompany it while the wind of time howls around it; it needs these other I’s as support for the survival not of its material substance but of what is most essential to that I.

  My mother, by her glance, her word, her gesture, broke off a part of me, a part I would always lack, a part I would always seek. Throughout my life I felt I was lacking something, the way the Venus de Milo lacks arms. I lacked nothing in my outer appearance but something inside me, as if the arms of my soul were lacking, and that absence, that lack, that feeling of emptiness, made me helpless. Throughout my life I felt as though someone’s gaze were destroying my existence, and, at the same time, I sought some being who would heal the brokenness of my I.

  5

  COME SEE WHO HAS TURNED UP IN OUR CITY,” my brother said to me one day while I was visiting him at the Vienna General Hospital. There, lying motionless on one of the beds in the room my brother had led me to, was a young man who had been pulled from the Danube the day before. As we approached him, he cracked open his eyes. Although years had passed, I recognized that look—those were the eyes that cried inside, and whose tears fell somewhere deep within him. They were the eyes of Rainer Richter. I had heard nothing about him all those years, but that afternoon he told me why he had returned.

  He had not yet posed the question one asks on the threshold of maturity, “What will I grow up to be?,” when his parents died one after the other—first his mother, then his father. Rainer opened the letters his father had kept; from one, he learned he had been adopted. He began to search for those who had conceived him, and his path led him back to Vienna, where those he had long believed to be his parents had lived when they adopted him. For him, the search for his parents was like heading down a hallway on whose left-hand wall was his past, which was already dead, on whose right-hand wall, behind a veil, were those who had discarded him at birth, and at the end of which, somewhere far in the distance, spread out the emptiness of his future.

  His abandonment by those who had conceived him hurt more than the death of those who had raised him. “Why did they abandon me?” was the dark question that carried, like an echo, a demonic double: “Was it worth my being born at all?” His abandonment reverberated like a rejection of his existence. He searched for his origins, hoping to discover that some great tragedy had separated him from his parents; he surmised that they had died suddenly after his birth, or that they had lost him in some unfortunate circumstance and never could find him. But that other thought, that he was abandoned as a newborn because he was unwanted, caused him mortal pain, a pain that led him to jump into the Danube. Despair drove him, not thought or readiness. He had not set off to drown himself in the river, but he had abandoned himself to the water to carry him away to some different existence.

  At the time I stood beside his hospital bed, Rainer was eighteen years old. After he returned from the hospital to his Vienna home on Schönlaterngasse, I left home every morning, saying I was going to read in the library, leaving behind my mother’s rebuke that my peers stayed at home all day and went out with only their mothers, or an older family member, so as not to ruin their reputation in front of the matchmakers. At home, Rainer waited for me so he could fall asleep.

  “I cannot fall asleep when I am alone,” he told me the first time I encountered him after a sleepless night.

  I watched him as he fell asleep, and I wanted to lie down beside him, but I remained sitting in the corner of the room with a book in my lap. I had told him that I read while he slept, when in fact I spent the hours focused on his face. Sometimes he moaned in his sleep, the way a sick person moans, and I would go near him to try to understand the words he was whispering. When he awoke, we would set off to the atelier of some painter or other to ask whether twenty years earlier he had been acquainted with the painter Friedrich Richter and his wife, but none of them had heard of them, so the motivating question, “Whom did they adopt their child from?,” was left unspoken. Rainer also visited Dr. Auerbach, who had cured him of despair at one point in his childhood, but apparently Friedrich Richter had not told the doctor his son was adopted.

  In the way Rainer’s movements cut through the air, in the shadow of his glance, in the echo of his words, something resembling the flow of blood was discernible. Once, he recalled the words of Kierkegaard: “What is a poet? An unhappy man who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music.” And then he added, “But I have only the pain, not the gift of poetry.” And immediately he bit his lip to silence his despair.

  Once, while we were walking along a street lined with wild chestnut trees, he said to me, “Everything is so full of life, but there are moments still when many things compel me to death. There are moments when I am afraid to go near the window—it beckons me to open it and jump out. Sharp objects call me to cut my body; pointed objects, for me to stab them into my heart. The river calls me to it, with the same rapidity and strength with which it flows. Everything is so alive, yet everything calls me to my death.”

  Even as he spoke these words, I could see from the expression on his face that he regretted what he was saying.

  “No,” I contradicted him. “Everything calls you to life. Even that dead house,” I said, and pointed across the street.

  We walked toward the house, whose residents had long since moved away. We entered through the broken door, and then moved through the rooms. We looked at the floor, where objects no longer needed were strewn about. Rainer went to one of the corners, bent down, reached out his hand, and picked up a needle threaded with red thread. He held the needle and thread between his line of vision and mine. I wanted Rainer to run the thread along the edges of my lips, but I did not say anything. He put the needle and thread back on the floor in the corner of the room.

  We were at an age of innocence. His innocence and mine were like two soap bubbles that merge rather than burst on contact. When Rainer’s eyes looked into mine, and mine into his, his glance did not descend along my neck, to my breasts, between my legs, nor did my glance fall on his neck, his chest, and below. Rather, the center of my eyes pressed into his and went beyond; the center of his eyes pushed behind my eyes; and then we sought and found beyond our bodies something warm and soft, what some call a soul. We waited for the day we would feel that unseen and untouched warmth and softness through the union of the hidden parts of our bodies as well. We were at an age of innocence when, through touch and sound, taste and smell and sight, one could sense things beyond the surface, when it seemed to us that blood flowed even through inanimate objects. We were at an age when we could not foresee that one day our senses would convince us only of our captivity in space and time, and not lead us to an awareness of something beyond. We were at an age of innocence when the soul is still soft clay and does not know that one day it will turn to stone or barren earth; we were at an age when the soul is clay that can easily be warmed by a kindred spirit, when it is possible for two to become one. We were at an age of innocence when a shy look and a secretly expressed longing make our souls erupt under the delicate and tender wrap of our bodies, an age w
hen the soul and the body are still bound into one, an age when excitement does not know it will someday turn into indifference or a simple urge to satisfy bodily needs, and that when one manages to infuse oneself with passion there is neither the capability nor the desire to turn that moment of pleasure into a brief eternity.

  I did not go to Rainer’s on Sundays, because the library was closed then, and I did not know what pretext I could use at home. One Monday morning, I found Rainer lying in bed with a piece of paper in the palm of his hand. He said that, the day before, he had met a gallery owner who had been a good friend of the person who had called himself his father, the person who had raised him. He told Rainer what he knew. She was a young girl named Gertrude, who was fifteen years old when she gave birth to him, and at that time, more than eighteen years ago, had lived on the street whose name Rainer had written down on the piece of paper he held in his hand. As we stepped across the threshold of the house to which he had been brought eighteen years ago by those who had adopted him, and as we set off toward the house in which his mother had separated from him, Rainer took my hand in his, the one that held the scrap of paper, and said, “Ever since my childhood ended, up until I came here, sometimes when I closed my eyes I glimpsed a bodiless female. She had no name, she did not even have a face; she was a being of light that flickered before my closed eyes. She was bodiless, yet still all my longing poured into her, because I knew that somewhere in this world she had her own bodily form. And my heart was restless with the thought that if I wanted my life to be called a life I must leave my parents’ home and search for her, but I did not know whether I would find her. When my parents died and I learned I had been adopted, I set off on a different quest. When I met you, I realized my search for those who had conceived me had led me to the embodiment of that female being who had appeared to me for years. That female being must have been created from the traces of our childhood meetings. I did not tell you, because I knew that first I needed to complete the quest to learn about my birth. But now, when only a short time separates me from discovering that answer, the dreamed-for existence I have waited so long to attain is beginning for me.”