Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

I grew up in a family without sisters, together with older brothers who, far from cherishing my company, used to beat me up. My worst torturer was the second oldest, Jupp, who later blossomed forth as an unassuming bachelor poultry farmer with a long tobacco pipe, an enviable annual egg output, and a love for music and all the arts. Incidentally, he is also the breeder of the first non-hybrid German zero-altitude chicken. This fellow was a tyrant, with a dangerous fist that he would raise and then smash down on his hapless victim whenever his bidding was left undone. In this we can, of course, discern the rudiments of his development toward a successful career as poultryman, a boss who dictates to hens just how high they may fly. Flightless chickens for the Volk ohne Raum !

A lift of his hand, a look of fury, and a fear-inspiring shout of “Get a move on!” were sufficient to banish any thought of disobedience, and thus little Albert was kept in the vilest slavery. “Get a move on!” was a phrase he had picked up from our father, who often used it for child-rearing purposes and was indeed delighted when things actually moved. Father was an uncommonly peace-loving and amiable man; after a somewhat dissolute, beery stage in his younger days, he had turned rather taciturn, but he was a democrat through and through. He wept when Gustav Stresemann died, and this was the first time I had ever seen that introverted person react in any way to an event in the outside world. I owe a great deal to him, above all the realization that nothing at all in this world is worth hastening one’s pace for by as much as single heartbeat. I never once saw him running. What is more, after my ungainly soul ruined a whole series of chances for earning an earthly existence, he financed my university education — likewise a failure. Last but not least, he paid for all the postage that sustained my aforementioned activity as a “writer.” Yet all of these parental subsidies had to be earned. Once a week, I was obliged to give the old man a haircut, a radical clipping down to one-tenth of a millimeter. This regular task was my father’s discreet method of minimizing my inferiority complex. More than once he complained of how slowly his hair grew. An enemy to all forms of obscurantism, in his enlightened manner he rejected my suggestion to use Salvacran or some other nostrum. As my epistolary literature grew in volume, the good man had no choice but to increase the wages for his court barber. Heaven has rewarded his kindness, his big-heartedness, and his psychologically untutored understanding for his inscrutable tramp of a son, by granting him a painless death in old age.

But to return to my twerpish terrorist brother Jupp: for years I had to share a room with him, and for a time a bed, and thus not even the nighttime afforded protection against kicks and punches. Before the age of mandatory school attendance, I was already aware that man can find no privacy even in the hours of the night. We must retreat ever further into the darkness if we are to escape the wiles of the world. Like the fertile kernel inside the seed prior to the sowing, our secret, safe place can be found only deep within ourselves. Some are successful in this quest for the innermost locus of being; if they are blessed enough to be able to map out this experience for others, as certain artists can, they thereby become immortal. Immortality: to me that is a terrifying idea!

My toys were no safer than I was from the two pint-sized barbarians who were my brothers. They located my most carefully selected caches, and then waited in hiding for as long as it took, until they could revel at the tears that slowly began to flow when I removed my hand from the empty place of concealment. Eventually I decided to react like a chameleon, although this infantile mutation didn’t last very long. I started playing with dolls, but shied from the girls who habitually did the same. This behavior elicited nasty teasing and constant reviling from my know-it-all brothers and their equally disgusting neighborhood buddies. But at least there was an end to stolen toys — after all, boys just don’t rob little girls.

This is how I learned early on to walk with a pronounced stoop. I sometimes shudder to think what might have become of my gait if my mother had emulated her biblically fertile mother-in-law, who gave the gift of life to nineteen children. I imagine that, having stooped to the level of a dachshund, I would have crawled inside a badger hole, never again to be snagged out, not even by the most bloodthirsty ferret.

At home I was referred to by one and all as “the scaredy-cat,” and I have to admit that, with this new name, these anabaptists were right on the mark. And if it occurred to them today to sprinkle me once again with their water of misfortune, I am certain they could still be just as resourceful. It will be apparent that by every significant measure I take after no one in my family. If my reader feels moved to inquire further as to the nature of that family of mine, I’ll concede that I would probably be a happier man today if I had indeed “taken after” my family, as one might concede that a stone is happier than a plant. But to answer the query directly, I would be forced to go into further detail about my childhood. That would cause me pain, and I would rather spare my reader a mess of masochistic pottage. I do not wish the application of my recollections to go so far as to include the exhibition of my earliest post-hatching phases. Besides, I am no great fan of childhood memoirs; I much prefer intelligent stories about animals. It isn’t important what anyone experienced as a child. What is of importance is how such experiences are interpreted. Since that would entail applying psychology of the depth-sounding variety, for me that would mean nothing but trouble. I confess to being content with a single eviction from Paradise. In terrifying dreams I have often seen Sigmund Freud as a cherub with flaming sword. Poor heart of mine, enshroud thy pain in silence!

Julietta, who has forced me to take this detour into my girl-less childhood, when compared with my own development at her age was already a condemned soul, and not just because the little sexpot had already begun sprouting her quills. My reader will be no more flustered than I was when I report that once, in despair at my bumbling efforts to produce a rolling Spanish rrr , she suddenly threw her arms around my neck and gave me a resounding kiss. This brought an immediate end to our experiments with rolling phonemes, and had other things been equal, we ought to have practiced cooing together. Seated on my lap, she plagued me with Spanish verbs, beginning with the classic paradigm of all language instruction: amo, amas, ama, amamos, amáis, aman . My rusty Latin readily flew to my aid, and I was overcome with gratitude as I recalled the academic deadbeat who, in the pigsty of a grammar school that I attended under privilege of Kaiser Wilhelm II, beat into our backsides the profoundly sage motto Non scholae sed vitae discimus . By the time of my linguistic tête-à-tête with Julietta, this cane-wielding taskmaster was already dead, rotting away somewhere like the stuff he was paid to teach us. Had he been still breathing, I would have sent him a picture postcard from Palma, begging his pardon for the impassioned, quasi-atheistic prayer I once uttered in the schoolyard, wishing him a speedy and painful demise. I was joined in this diabolic incantation by the rest of the entire class, with the exception of two execrable teacher’s pets. These classmates of ours were also “learning for life,” but for a sharply truncated life; they wanted to be priests, and that’s exactly what they got.

Julietta was proud of the success her Vigoleis had achieved after only a single week’s lessons. He was in command of a handful of polite phrases, was able to exchange a few minimal words with her mother, and had mastered the all-important statement “I love you.” Understood purely as part of my language instruction, such an assertion might never have caused complications. But actually it did, because Pilar and I had already held wordless conversations on the same topic. There are glances of a certain type that one can project; one can bring one’s shoulder imperceptibly in proximity to hers, and no sooner does limb approach limb when the spark jumps the gap. We shiver, our lungs labor like some old, worn-out bellows, and if language were at all available, it would have to be severely forced. Nature has arranged all this in masterful fashion: when the sexes come near each other, the human animal immediately reverts to primitive behavior.