H. Adler - The Wall

With no worries, feeling almost lighthearted, I went along my way, stopping in front of shop windows, looking quickly at the piles of books displayed in the open in front of a rare-books dealer, and then moved on. On the other side of the street I suddenly noticed Otto Schallinger, who was hurrying along with a large bag. Should I call out to him? It would certainly have pleased him, but I had no desire to, and so I peeled off in a different direction. Of all my old friends, he was the only one who meant something to me, and who was still loyal. I had to admit that it was ungrateful of me, but I didn’t want to change my decision. He followed me with a relentless, to me, irritating persistence, by which he sought to maintain the same distance between us. This resulted in nothing other than dim memories that ran back as far as twenty-five or thirty years. Through his contact with me, Otto wanted to retrieve his long-lost youth and reawaken it. Innumerable details of a long-lost time that were unimportant to me, and that had, for the most part, disappeared from my memory, appeared to be meaningful enough to him to be thoroughly revisited. With Sylvia, who had little interest in Otto’s past and even less understanding of it, he could not talk about such things, as she expected something quite different from him. Therefore he sought, from time to time, a break from a present that wasn’t very satisfying by revisiting the past with us. If we agreed, then he would show up, avuncular and carrying little presents, feeling more at home on West Park Row than we could sometimes stand. Sylvia, however, never came with him. We had long been convinced that their life together was not so happy as he tried to assure us it was, yet she was good-natured enough to tolerate his visits to us, though perhaps they didn’t matter to her at all. Thus he turned to us as if fleeing to a lost paradise in order to escape the bustle of the metropolis and the country in which, despite Sylvia and his having lived here for twelve years, he never quite felt at home, although it had granted him a reasonable living, he feeling that, with us, so much of what he had experienced before the war, or at least in growing up, had been well preserved. Even our poverty, sorry as he was for it, didn’t really bother him, for it even helped him to arrive at our house and feel himself amid a transformed and much more lovely youth. “Do you remember how …” many of his sentences began. No matter what I answered, it didn’t seem to jar him from his dreamy recollections, it only bothering him now and then when I couldn’t control myself and was indeed not very nice to him. Then he would gaze at me with such beseeching eyes, like a beaten child, in the hope that I would not destroy the realm he had projected. Then I had to be good to him and listen patiently to whatever he hauled out of the old schooldays, endless stories about teachers and schoolmates, and, above all, about himself. Then he pressed me to also share something of my own memories. How hard it was for me mattered as little to him as the questionable facts of my reports, for I made things up at random in order to please him, but also to spare myself and hide behind such tales.

Otto had a lot of trouble with his little Sidney, who, soon after my arrival in the metropolis, succumbed to a nasty illness that resulted in mental difficulties that required him to be institutionalized. To his sorrow, Otto had no other children, as Sylvia either could not have any more or didn’t want any more. Since the misfortune with Sidney, she had changed, Otto saying that the piano had become much more important to her than anything else. She practiced whenever she had an hour to spare, because it was her ambition to pass an audition for the radio, which she had failed to do three times already. She practiced further and was supposedly happy when we sometimes suggested that Otto also visit us on a Sunday. He liked these visits the best, since Michael was now grown enough to walk and had in fact begun to speak at an early age. Uncle Otto, as he was known to our children, brought along appropriate and inappropriate gifts, as well as his camera, in order to capture Michael’s curiosity about the little pictures and to win our favor. In order to be reminded more of the home he’d lost, Otto called the child Mischa, which didn’t please Johanna, but there was no dissuading him. Sometimes Michael was afraid of his uncle and didn’t want anything to do with him, which caused Otto to despair, though at other times the boy beamed and was trusting. Then Otto was happy, even when Johanna suggested, in good weather, that he take the child for a walk, usually to Shepherd’s Field, or especially when there was a fair, which never pleased Johanna, as the child got overexcited because of it. But it was difficult to resist Otto’s requests; touched by his devotion, Johanna put up with him. She also hoped that his visits provided something of a distraction for me, and thought it good that I had at least some contact with someone who shared my past, though most of all she took pity on him. Johanna was grateful when he fixed something in our little garden or in the house, be it a rickety chair or an electric cord. I found that nice as well, though I liked it less when he messed about with how I liked to keep my own garden. Also his tedious talk, which easily became too much for me, Johanna listened to patiently and did not let on whenever it became uncomfortably too much for her as well. Everything would have been bearable if only Otto had not tried to interfere with my scholarly work with his well-meaning suggestions. He felt called upon to correct some of my ideas in order that they be more easily understood by the public. His greatest pleasure lay in trying to teach me something.

“Such oppression has economic reasons and is a consequence of the bad will of the propertied classes,” he would say. “Against that, my dear Arthur, since I don’t believe in revolution — one sees so many of them in other countries and what it leads to — against that one can only pose good upbringing. If one only tends to the youths, which you can easily do with your Mischa alone, and instill the idea that we must look out for one another, then things will be better for the next generation, and such horrible things as what we experienced, such beastliness, will not repeat itself. If such young people come of age, they will certainly be against oppression, you will see, and they will anchor the freedom of humanity in law. Good will triumph, just you wait!”

This was roughly the smartest thing Otto had to say. He incessantly filled my ears with such bits of wisdom and regularly repeated them, such that I could hardly stand it. If I wanted peace, then I said I was tired, which didn’t always work, or I kicked him out, which only upset him. Still, we never entirely discouraged his visits; they just needed to occur less frequently. A solution offered itself in letting him spend time with his Mischa, or Johanna occupied herself with Otto, while I, for shorter or longer periods, and sometimes for the entire visit, would retreat to my room under the guise of having pressing work to do.

Slowly I strolled farther along through the streets and thought about my former friends. The Bergmann-Birch siblings no longer meant anything to me, I having rarely seen them since the first weeks after my arrival. Inge, especially, had withdrawn from me, So-and-So having correctly predicted that. She seemed inexhaustible in her knack for coming up with excuses as to why we couldn’t get together anytime in the next few days, and Oswald backed her up on it. That’s why I soon gave up trying to cultivate contact with her and finally got over this disappointment. Much more painful was the breakup with Oswald, which I suffered from for years. Since Inge could barely stand that I had survived the war, while her own loved ones had been killed, she was unsettled by the very nature of my friendly feelings, even if I didn’t think of her as at all brutal, but rather as so vulnerable that, out of self-preservation and defenselessness, she needed to wound me. I well understood Inge’s sick attitude, such that I hoped to earn her affection by gently approaching her indignant pain and sad anger. That was not to be. Whatever friendly words I said to her in self-abnegation had only the opposite effect in stirring her to launch abusive attacks on me. Oswald found his sister at fault and sided with me during these skirmishes, or at least appeared to, but in the end he cleverly and secretly incited her against me. In subtle ways, he destroyed my friendship with Inge.