Marlene Read online

  I ran, and my heart pounded as though it were about to burst when I secretly slipped into the house through the cellar door. The anniversary of the storming of the Bastille came to a quiet close. Nobody had noticed my absence.

  On the following day a teacher came by to see my mother. I had been seen. The teacher was ready to forgive me, to forget this “childish” prank, but the mothers of my schoolmates had demanded my expulsion from the summer school.

  My mother remained quite calm. No anger, no nervousness. I was ashamed of myself for her sake and broke into tears. I didn’t get to hear the familiar phrase: “A soldiers daughter doesn’t cry.” When I raised my eyes she was standing there, motionless, looking at me and weeping.

  Now that I was left to my own devices for the rest of the summer, I gave a lot of thought to the notion of justice, confused thoughts, questions without answers, buzzed through my head. The war was unjust. Good and evil, these poorly defined concepts, have a clearly etched meaning in the world of children. They are like a primal law: unchangeable, always explainable, inexorable and mighty. Outside the world of children, on the other hand, good and evil seem to be changeable, deceptive, and invented arbitrarily.

  I lay on the grass and thought about God and about Mlle. Breguand.

  Both were somewhere, very far from me. God would come back after the war, I was as much convinced of this as I was of His absence. Yet I wasn’t so sure in the case of Mlle. Breguand: First of all because she was a young woman, and then because I knew her less well than I knew God. I could rather easily foresee what God would do. Mlle. Breguand’s image, however, was blurred and yet fascinating, full of surprises, it would suddenly turn up, flooded with light and vanish again as suddenly as it had appeared. Why should she have to come back after the war? The peace, perhaps, would not reconcile the French and the Germans, and besides, I might be too old to still be at school. God, on the other hand, had to come back, as He is responsible for us and, unlike us, does not reckon in years. He would come back to us again and reward those who suffered in the war permitted by Him. Yet none of these reasons spoke for the return of Mlle. Breguand.

  Deep down I thought it was proper that God and Mlle. Breguand should keep their distance for a while, because men were slaughtering each other and making a mockery of human and divine laws. Summer came to a close, and sadly, I boarded the train that brought me back to the city.

  I sang “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” in the spacious school courtyard amid my girlfriends. But I kept my mouth hermetically closed when the imprecation “May God punish England” reverberated from the walls. And again more victory celebrations, again holidays in exchange for gold pieces we were told to elicit from our mothers and grandmothers. Holidays in the event of death in the family. Once more, girls absent from school, more girls in black, food ration cards, lists of the wounded, lists of the missing, lists of the dead. Family gatherings with coded words, phrases overheard through closed doors: “The children mustn’t notice anything. Careful, speak softly, there are children in the house.”

  Grief of the grown-ups. In the church, religious services for the missing. Tears hang like silver pearls from veils that flutter in the cold gusts and summer winds. The hope that you will never have to experience war when you are grown up.

  Our mothers. How do they bear this ordeal of fate? How do they still muster the courage to cook, sew, help their children with their homework, attend to them, listen to the melodies they play over and over again on the piano, go for walks with them on Sundays? All these women bereft of their husbands! They press us to their hearts, we embrace them in our turn, and the men for whom they yearn will soon be corpses. How sad … If at least we could cry. But we can’t. We have our children’s sorrows, our daily disappointments, our world in which things are going wrong, going to pieces without any reason, resisting our efforts, desperate efforts, to cover up our stupidities, to hush up our memory gaps, to hide our ignorance, forgetfulness and inattentiveness, to atone for our sins—on paper and in our heads—to veil a lie with more and always new lies! And this terrible and insufferable anxiety against which only illness can be of some help, fever, doctors and bed, always the same routine—the bed, a haven, a bulwark, a fortress. It resists the assaults of teachers and principals who draw the parents to their side—and silken soft angel arms that cradle us like babies, protected in warmth, in security.

  Children are condemned to silence and solitude in advance. They may not let on that their own fears bring them close to those who are suffering at the front every day and who live in fear of ambush and mutilation. If grown-ups were to listen to us, would they stop slaughtering each other? But we are only the passive witnesses of history’s upheavals. We attend, as usual, to our affairs morning, noon and night, as though God were with us and blossoming apple trees bedecked the entire earth. Why send us to school if we are going to lose the war anyway? But no! We shall not lose the war, and we must go to school. God is with us, don’t you know that? God, do You know that You are with us? Us the Germans? How do You choose what side You are on? Do You support the best ones? The best pupils? Are You only on one side? Then You cannot be God, or can You? You let the just and the unjust come to You. Are we the just? We are victors. Doesn’t that mean that we are the just? Don’t ask questions. Do your homework. Attend to your daily chores. And, finally don’t forget music.

  My mother taught me a waltz by Chopin that I was allowed to play as a reward, if I had diligently practiced Bach and Handel. Sometimes we changed places, and then she played, her fingernails touching on the keys with a delicate click. I knew this sound from earliest childhood. It belonged to a house full of flowers, to my mother’s perfume, to her evening gown, her beautiful hairdo, to the smell of my father’s cigarette coming through the open door of the library where he strode back and forth on a thick rug and listened to my mother playing the piano. Everything was ready for the guests.

  The fingernails had stopped striking the keys. I took my place again at the piano and noticed how precipitously my mother had left the room. The doorbell had rung. I heard my mother race to the door. It could not be the mailman, but she ran. She ran because she was waiting; all day long she waited for letters from the front, for something else. In the way she raised her head, you could feel that one-half of her being was steeped in anxiety and sorrow, and the other was restricted to performing the duties of day-to-day living. “My fate is that of millions of women,” she would say. For her that was neither good nor bad. With deeply bowed head, she read a letter from the family, and then she told me about the death of a relative, as if she had been expecting it for a long time.

  She was always dressed in black. A black band was put over my left sleeve as a sign of permanent mourning for all the family dead. Mostly, I wore dark blue dresses and coats. Gray was also a mourning color, but one could go over to gray only after several years. Little white cuffs and collars constituted the only modification of this outfit’s severity. I wore braided black ribbons on the pigtails that hung below my shoulders. Before the war I was allowed to wear my hair loose, held only by a headband—something now allowed only on Sundays or holidays. During the war there were no holidays. I dreamed of an armistice and peace; I dreamed also of the warm, wild, and fragrant sweep of hair that once fell on my face and on my neck.

  Toward the end of the war I was vaccinated against smallpox, and a red band adorned my arm: black and red, the German flag. I painted for myself my own black and red homeland. Harmony, harmonicas, accordions, violins. No teachers, no soldiers. Twilight instead of dark nights. Plains and rivers, houses with straw roofs, children in big feather beds, a cow for each one, golden wheatfields in the sun, sweet-smelling lupines, moist and dark earth, green clover and sour sorrel, lavender honey-scented pillows, hammocks for summer afternoons, carefree, fleeting time. The hammock sways, the back of the hand grazes the grass, now this way, now that. Back and forth without stopping. Nobody calls you. You eat whatever you like. No thunderous voices
, no battle, no war. Silently, I swore allegiance to my flag when the moment came to remove the red band. But the black band remained on my sleeve.

  In the late afternoon we examined the lists of the missing. My mother always walked more slowly as we neared City Hall I didn’t dare to ask her why and silently adjusted my step to hers. She would never let go of my hand, when she stopped there, only her head moved up and down as she looked through the names. I would watch her and try to guess when she would take the two steps sideward and with her head held high begin to read the next list. There were also many other women and young girls. But there was none of the pushiness that usually prevailed in front of the shops, in the endless lines at the doors of the bakeries. Those who were scrutinizing the list of the dead and wounded were polite, considerate of others. Why, I thought, couldn’t we behave like this in times of peace as well? Behave as though we were still at war? I didn’t share these thoughts with my mother, since I was sure that she thought likewise, viewed the problem as insoluble, and had decided to live as useful a life as possible. But it was not the war that taught my mother life’s fundamental values. She knew them from way back when she taught me to read. She didn’t use a blackboard; she would explain the pronunciation, the syllables and the punctuation with the help of the poems by Ferdinand Freiligrath written in splendidly colored letters that hung under glass in our living room!

  O love, as long as you can!

  O love, as long as you will!

  For the hour will come, the hour will come

  When you stand by the grave and lament!

  Her deepest convictions did not rest on experience but on her intuition. She was always so sure of them, as if she had arrived at them by herself. When she quoted philosophers and poets for emphasis, you might think that, in a friendly way, she was allowing them to share her personal views. Otherwise she was much too young to have had personal experience in all the areas she seemed to know so well. She had had a very sheltered childhood, and she had shocked the city’s respectable society by her early marriage. She had become a mother at seventeen.

  And there she stood now before the list of the missing. She was looking for a name she didn’t want to find and holding on to a little girl’s hand as darkness descended and the street lamps lit up. Still two more lists, hope, don’t forsake me; “his” name will not be on it. Please, let it not be there. … Now the last ones. … Her finger followed the black letters behind the glass pane smeared by countless fingers. The pressure of her hand slackens, she bows her head, her eyes are moist, but they shine with a relief and a joy only I can see. “We’re going home now, Paul. We want to open the canned food I set aside for a very special day like today, and we’ll spend a restful evening. If you want me to, I’ll also do your homework.” Paul was the name she called me when she was happy, and she uttered the word “canned food” in French to avoid the harsh German sound. It was so easy to love her.

  I needed no affirmation, no proof, to be certain of her love. I don’t remember when I sensed for the first time that she loved me. Surely already before my birth. I was her daughter, that sufficed for me. Now she no longer kissed me, she no longer took me in her arms as she once did when I was still very small. The older I grew the more reservedly she expressed her tenderness, the less she kissed me. She gave me a kiss on the forehead or on the cheeks, always very lightly, at times she would scold me for some kind of venial sin and then just walk off. Her feelings for me were surely the same as mine for her. She didn’t want to know whether I loved her or not, she was simply convinced of this. She considered it more important that I should feel secure with her.

  It was her task to dispel the insecurity and the anxiety that the war had brought. Every day she would have me repeat a dozen times: “When I’m with my mother, nothing can happen to me.” With her I would go fearlessly through the city enveloped in darkness, and with my hand firmly in hers, I would have unflinchingly faced the enemy lines, the plague, the poison gasses, or the lion’s den. Nothing could upset her plans, her hope. She always remained herself. She was trustworthy. Everything was clear to her. Perhaps she didn’t love, perhaps she was just trustworthy. It didn’t matter. She was there—strong, courageous, full of compassion. She deliberately placed her own feelings and desires in the background. Never was she ill or inaccessible. When she retired to her room and no one was allowed to follow her, she always made known how long she wanted to be alone. And on no account would she ever exceed this time. Her outer appearance was in no way inferior to her inner qualities. She was extraordinarily beautiful.

  One of her favorite occupations was memory training, as she called it. If I asked her, “May I call my girlfriend and ask what homework we’re supposed to do for tomorrow?” I was forbidden to touch the phone. In winter I would be bundled up like an Eskimo, and in rainy weather I would be wrapped in rain gear from head to toe and then be sent on foot to procure that valuable piece of information for myself. Yet I also knew that, at bottom, she loathed to act that way. She forced herself to do this to improve my memory and deliver a finishing blow to forgetfulness forever. She was successful. God bless her!

  I felt a deep respect for my mother throughout her life. She possessed a kind of natural nobility. Her behavior, her authority, her intellectual attitude were like those of an aristocrat. Just looking at her made it easy to respect her, to put up with all the strict rules of everyday life and the more drastic rules of my wartime youth. These rules were so indisputable they seemed to be familiar and friendly, lasting, unalterable, irrefutable. Protective rather than threatening, no mood, no whim underlay them. Since my mother had laid them down and had been able to create a corresponding discipline, she must have understood all the wonderful secrets of a child’s emotional world. She herself was like a kindly general. She followed the rules that she laid down; she set a good example; she furnished the proof that it was possible. No pride in success, no pats on the shoulder. The only aim was humble submission to duty.

  First and foremost duty, the daily obligations.

  And love of the duty to which you submit. Love of the work which you do, love of absolute trustworthiness, love of habit that must prevail in the daily struggle against the charm of the new. My mother knew how to structure a familiar activity so excitingly, precisely on the basis of its familiarity, that it, too, could be as exciting as a wholly new adventure. “To recover” something lost or forgotten made her eyes light up, quickened her movements. Her voice would rise uncontrolled and wild: “There! Just as I told you. See! Oh, look, just look! I knew it!” And she would stand there, beaming with joy, with pleasure because she had known what is useful and what is not. I felt as though I were in church and thought to myself: “Who am I, then, with my trivial thoughts, my petty cares, when she’s standing there, here before me, and setting such a good example to me in this house in which our two lives are rooted?”

  “To recover,” love of the known … what can all this have meant to my mother without that other imperative by which she was completely controlled but which she did not teach me, which she did not praise—loyalty. She didn’t deliver any homilies to me on the subject, but to sense the depth of her feelings, it sufficed to observe her childlike dismay when she discovered that someone had deceived her. In the matter of loyalty my mother proved to be a fanatic—“fanatic,” yes, for here kindness or sympathy were irrelevant—an inexorable crusader under the banner of loyalty.

  As a passionate “prosecuting attorney” she voiced sharp, decisive and irrevocable judgments. She was lenient and took time to think over violations of a rule she considered overrated. But she changed her tune, with flying colors, so to speak, when you were carried away by your own excitement. At such times she would not tolerate mention of guilt or extenuating circumstances. “When you’re excited,” she would say, “you easily lose your head. Your feelings run away with you.”

  It had become second nature to me to hold my feelings firmly in check, even before my mother decided that my dresse
s had to be made longer to cover my knees.

  I also knew that one of her supreme fundamental rules of behavior, easy to grasp but difficult to practice, enjoined: “Bear the unavoidable with dignity.”

  Dignity ruled out waitings and complaints, consequently the twin rule stated: “The tears you shed over something unavoidable must remain secret tears.” A “logical mode of thinking” was another early achievement that was supposed to make learning easier and serve as a memory prop to a still untrained mind. But it was also the light that illumined the way to a clarification of problems. O logic, when I learned to love you, mother smiled. She smiled at me, at me who had grown up in a war she could not have prevented.

  Such was my mother’s loyalty—loyalty to appreciation, loyalty to hope, loyalty to the conviction that her body had been strong enough to give a new being a strength that would last throughout the war. “Your teeth are perfect,” she would remark when I brushed them. “They’ll hold. That’s hereditary—you can be grateful for that,” she would add, as though to reassure herself. She stubbornly believed in heredity, in the “stable” as she put it. She would take some of my own meager rations of milk, cheese, and meat to give them to her own mother.

  My wonderful and gentle grandmother got the lion’s share of all family rations. She was not only the most beautiful of all women but also the most elegant, most charming, and most perfect person that ever lived. Her hair was dark red and her eyes of an iridescent violet-blue. She was tall and slim, ever radiant and cheerful. She had married at the age of seventeen and was always taken to be as old or young as she herself wished to appear. She wore expensive clothes and even her gloves were made to measure. She was naturally elegant and didn’t concern herself with what was fashionable. She loved horses, went riding every morning very early, and sometimes she would pass by our house just before school and throw me a kiss through a veil in which the early morning air mixed with her perfume. My mother never objected to any of her decisions, even though they might lead to a reversal of my daily program. My grandmother showered me with love, tenderness, and kindness. She awakened in me the longing for beautiful things, for paintings, for Fabergé boxes, horses, carriages, for the warm, soft roseate pearls set off against the white skin of her neck, and for the rubies that sparkled on her hands.