The Wall (46 page)

“Many thanks! I can manage without the elevator.”

That was, of course, not at all true, for the stairs were very hard for me. The stairwell was poorly lit, as everywhere people cut back on anything they could, so why would it be any different at the Search Office, where people did research on the lost! The stately building, although some years ago it had been elegant and well cared for, had lost its splendor and was now crusted over with dirt and sadness. If you took a breath, it smelled sour and damp, and it irritated my nose, causing me to sneeze, which then echoed resoundingly in the stairwell. My knees began to quiver, so I stopped on a landing and had to interrupt my climb several times. When I got to the fourth floor, I felt so miserable that I stopped for even longer. I didn’t want to press on any farther, but rather the opposite, yet to hang about between the porter and the fourth floor wouldn’t work at all. Which was why I did nothing and just waited. Inside, I hoped for a sign of rescue in order to conquer my inability to move.

I hadn’t felt so bad since the war. Sweat poured from me, my forehead and neck wet, and I was dizzy. Back there during the first weeks, I often thought that my health had been broken, but it didn’t matter to me; I didn’t want any help from doctors. It is what it is, I stubbornly said whenever Anna reproached me for my recklessness, though finally I gave in to her nagging and a doctor poked around me, tapped on my breast and back, took my weight, stood me up before the fluoroscopic screen, and asked me a couple of questions. The doctor nodded in satisfaction: “Nothing organically wrong with you.” He could see that I was very weak, a bundle of nerves, he
said, so it was no surprise that I felt so bad, but otherwise he was satisfied and said, as he prescribed a restorative and wrote out instructions for extra monthly rations of butter, milk, and eggs, that I was surprisingly healthy and in good shape, and that I should see the poor devils that came to him. Above all, this stiffened my will, which always fought against sickness, and I told myself, “You survived, now it’s your responsibility to be healthy.” That’s how I thought, for I didn’t think of myself as war wounded. No matter how much I deceived myself about my condition and overestimated my staying power, I recognized first that I was in the metropolis, in unfamiliar though fervently sought-after surroundings that had more to offer me than I could handle. I felt stress that I’d never felt before, nor through any measures or any amount of rest was I able to assuage it. Even though my condition had previously been in question, now it was destroyed. This I saw clearly, sensing it and yet not daring to admit it, nor allowing others to take notice of it. I was afraid that my frailty would harm me in the eyes of others and ruin my prospects. If one was going to be amazed, it made more sense to consider how well I had come through it, and to such talk I simply smiled and felt flattered. I didn’t like the weather, I found the food terrible, I could never get enough sleep or sleep well, the way of life bothered me, which is why I constantly felt under a stress that threatened to do me in. Now I was lost in the middle of a sad building, in a strange stairwell, where I had not come in search of anything, office hours now over as well, while in the stairwell there slumbered an uncomfortable and awful stillness that caused my inner unease to hammer on all the more.

I couldn’t stay here forever, so I had to decide something. If nothing better occurred to me, then I had to sit on a step and wait until someone came along and helped me. Eventually Fräulein Zinner would have to lose patience and leave the building, which gave me hope that she would find me, unless she used another stairwell that I didn’t know about. What would happen to me then I didn’t dare think about. She was prepared to welcome a difficult guest (though who knew what had moved her to do so, perhaps a moment of compassion), though she wasn’t at all prepared for a patient who would have to be tended to and who could not go to dinner. She would stand before me, tall and strange, her head lifted up high and above the protective scarf, though from my perspective, bent down and somewhat bewildered,
perhaps even repulsed, myself indeed small and meek before her, a cowering puppy on the stairs. I couldn’t allow myself to sit there. I gathered myself together and had already decided for sure to mount the last floor, no matter the cost, but the steps rose higher than my feet and wouldn’t bow to my weakness. I had to querulously acknowledge my powerlessness and rest awhile longer to gather my strength and attack the devilish ascent.

I leaned against the window, but I was immediately shocked to find that the paint did not stick to it but instead came off in washed-out flecks that stuck to my jacket. Thus I could no longer lean against it and had to try to wipe the nasty traces from my jacket, but neither rubbing nor swatting at them seemed to work. Like spongy flour, they attached themselves to the fibers of the fabric. While saying a quick prayer, I sought release from my plight, but it hardly eased me, my pleas crumbling to nothing, unfortunately useless. Then I sought refuge again on the landing and clung to it with both hands, my gaze wandering cockeyed over the wall, following its surface halfway up to the next floor. Graffiti, scrawled in pencil or scratched out with knives or nails, waited for the absolving hand of whoever might paint the room, the names and monograms obliterated and painted over which sat here unused and pointless, probably inscribed by those in search of something, having seen their day, a beginning without end, even in the double strangeness of an international bureau for refugees and its search office, perhaps posting a silent request—as I had once been told back there in the Office for Returnees—passing searchers who wanted to know that not everything was lost, there were some who had been saved and were found again, the harvest of gentle patience, just once, after many years, indeed.

I decided to try to find this stairwell during daylight in the next few days, once I again felt better, in order to carefully explore the graffiti from the ground floor to the top. It certainly made no sense to do so, but such never-resting desire could be just the thing to provide an enticing sustenance. There were so many people once known and yet forgotten, the mention of their names enough to bring them back, and that could indeed be good. They exist, they exist, even strangers exist, and it’s comforting to know they exist; one should know them and gather them and humbly commemorate the signs they left behind, this being perhaps a first step toward self-awareness. Names written down—oh, the courage of avowal, where all
the others have already fled—then to bow before the wall of life and in hasty humility offer up that they exist, when indeed they no longer exist, stumbling up and down the stairs in further flight, now indeed more prepared for their own passing, since with bold recklessness they have inscribed their names. Trembling, I pulled a pencil from my pocket, a worn-down stub from who knows where. Wait, now I remember that, absentmindedly, I had taken it from the phone booth of my guesthouse, a stubby thing that was useless, though here it was, me staggering to the wall, bending over and getting down on my knees, for I wanted to be way down, down where it hadn’t even occurred to the others to search for a spot, where the wall was only marked by thoughtless feet, that being where I scribbled it ever so slowly, nothing but an “A,” a big clumsy “A.” Then I let the stub fall, it being no longer of any use to me or to anyone else, rolling away, at first slowly, then a bit faster, nearing the landing where I expected there would be some resistance, but the gap between the flooring and the iron bars of the landing that ran below was large enough to let it pass through, soon rolling on and disappearing, floating on air, though I couldn’t see it but instead felt it, a soundless flight down through the stairwell of the Search Office, a message descending from the dreaming Adam, me listening and finally hearing it hit, two times, one right after the other, it likely having hit and bounced up, the horror of such a fall wishing to occur twice in one life. But then it was over—stillness, nothing moving—and the porter in his cell hadn’t heard a thing, or it simply didn’t worry him. He had seen too much in his job already to ever be frightened by a mere thought.

I pulled myself up and felt a pang in my hips, but I staggered over to the landing, though I didn’t look down; I hadn’t lost anything, my head feeling heavy. Then something rattled; it could have been the wind or something rustling in my ears, perhaps someone opening a door. I can hardly describe the alarm it set off inside me. All I could do was smile about my flight of fancy, for it was only an illusion and not an incident, or an incident in the most hopelessly serious sense, myself again aware that everything had collapsed, the stairwell empty and fallen. I had done nothing, yet all of it was burned out, no flooring and no roof, only an empty shell, a flourishing space amid nightmarish growth extending to the wounded ends of the universe, and something there within it, unfathomably small and lost, almost nothing,
only the shiftless tiniest trace of a past without a home anywhere in the world. Then I no longer looked at the markings and names that I had not read, nor did I even look at my own “A,” which could have been just three scratches, a chance rune, nothing in particular and nothing worth bothering about, no “A,” it already having been sucked into the filthy cloud of dust and covered over, gone. No, I had done nothing. It rose high above me, the steps finally carrying me up, always very steep, though they held my step, and as the first two lifted me upward, they did so more easily than I expected. Above, steps could be heard, me feeling premature joy as I was still far below, for it was just an echo, those not being my steps. Then I looked up and heard her voice, not at all impatient but instead full of calm assurance, but friendly, and tinged with only a touch of concern.

“What took you so long? I called down again and then came out to look for you.”

“I’m coming!” I called with a breaking voice.

It sounded more uncertain than I wanted it to, so I tried to make up for this bad impression by quickly bounding up the stairs two at a time. Fräulein Zinner stood there in her hat and coat, her purse under her arm.

“You don’t have to hurry anymore!”

Her response disappointed me, for why had I exerted myself so? I didn’t want to say anything in return, yet when she started to come down the steps toward me her heels sounded loud and I was bitterly affected. I was also scared by the thought that I would immediately have to go through the adventure of the stairwell again. Although this time I would be headed down the stairs and accompanied by someone, at the moment it felt like too much.

“No, no! Please, no! Wait there! I’ll come up!”

I said that with such pressing and beseeching urgency that she stopped and could do nothing but stop and do as I asked.

“Well, as you wish. We can sit for a while in my office.”

“Yes, please! That’s the reason I asked.”

I don’t know how I managed to stumble upward—perhaps through some kind of magic, for certainly not through my own strength—myself almost stumbling head over heels, my legs having dragged themselves along and barely lifting one after the other over the steps. Reeling and exhausted, I felt that I knew what it was like to be left for dead. I couldn’t stand on my
feet, and as a distraction I extended my hand, though in truth I really did it in order to seek support, which she returned too slowly for my needs and gripped too softly.

“Good evening!” I rasped, and saw that she didn’t understand me. “Please, do forgive me for being so shamefully late!”

“It wasn’t so bad,” she replied, somewhat distracted.

She wanted to let go of my hand, but I grabbed her more tightly in order that she see that, at the moment, I couldn’t yet relinquish her help.

“It wasn’t so bad that you have to excuse yourself that much. In these parts, we don’t make such a big deal about such things.”

“I haven’t gotten used to that yet. I’m totally inexperienced. Totally! Where, indeed, might your office be?”

“Do you feel all right, Herr Landau? Your hands are cold and damp.”

“No, I’m fine. Forgive me! I’ll be all right in a minute. A bit faint. Please, your office. Maybe sit for a while. Very, very weak.”

Fräulein Zinner took me under the arm and carried me more than I walked along myself to her office door. Here she had to let go of me in order to get the key from her pocket, but I held on to her shoulder, my only wish being to sit down. She unlocked the door, turned on the light, after which I sat or nearly lay down on a chair. It was uncomfortable and pressed at me. She looked at me seriously and with such extreme pity that it shook me and made me tremble inside. I turned to her sharply and yet beseechingly.

“Don’t worry so, and just give me a minute! Everything will soon be all right!”

She turned on a space heater and pushed it closer to me.

“Many thanks! But I don’t need it. I feel warm, much too warm.”

“Do you have a fever? What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing, nothing at all! Just give me five minutes! You’ll see, everything will be better! It was just the stairs, believe me. Really!”

From my hand Fräulein Zinner took the hat that I had absentmindedly played with, and then I managed to free myself from the oppressive jacket without standing up. She then took the jacket as well. I quietly let her do so. My hostess said nothing. The quiet pleased me, and slowly the whizzing inside my head calmed down, the cold sweat ending, my heart not beating as fast as earlier. I stroked my hair to straighten it out, as it had again fallen
into disarray, and blinked feebly at the garish globes that suffused the room with an almost consistently strong light, but which didn’t bother me. Fräulein Zinner moved to sit down in a corner, which I observed without interest, though even if I didn’t care what she was doing, I did nonetheless note that she moved around with some glasses, pouring something into them, busying herself with a tin cup, then with a plate or a little dish on which she laid something, most likely a dry roll. When she came over to me, I forced myself to look in another direction and heard a second chair being shoved around and a tray placed upon it.