H. Adler - The Wall

Johanna laughed into the telephone, the receiver vibrating and humming at my ear, such that I had to hold it away. I quickly said that everything would be all right, and I’d be right home. Then we said goodbye, our spirits almost too high. When I left the phone booth, however, everything changed, all my cheerfulness draining from me, gloom encompassing me. I had to acknowledge that I was a failure. I was indeed done with my last and most overzealous benefactor, saying to myself with a smile that the wallpaper had fallen from my eyes, though the backlash from this falling out and the effect upon my circumstances were not to be denied. The fiery drive that had served my youth also made it possible for me to get through the bad years, it having continued on into my first years in the metropolis, while even in my efforts for Eusemia it was still evident. This drive had always been my savior, the strength that led me on. But now there was nothing left of this drive, I had nothing more, a hollowed-out existence — indeed, no existence whatsoever.

If my attitude was negative, I thought, and if I was out of good ideas, then my sense of dissolution was understandable. But that was not at all how I felt! I still felt fired with the will to go on, to do something in the service of my fellow men through an honest effort, something meaningful, something that would legitimate me. I was a mirror for much of what I had experienced in these times, myself an individual eye that had taken it all in, and to have overcome it all was a worthy endeavor! Why should I be a failure? Only because I cannot exist, since I am an expression of something, not something in my own right? Then I would have to get used to it, an obedient Adam, here I stand, not I, and yet, one, it, a name, it not being easy to say what. An existence, that I don’t have, but, nonetheless, existence in itself is a powerful inner resource. I had come through; now I had to move ahead. I had been beaten, but I was not out. Something remained, something pushed on inscrutably, that inner resource. There was nothing more I could undertake, but I could just be. Perhaps I was the realization of a supernatural resolution: not an I, yet I; an I transformed by other graces.

I was shocked that I had not prayed for a long time. I needed to pray, not for something but to something. Nor even that; I just needed to pray. Could I gather myself together enough to do so? I looked down at myself and saw myself standing there remote and strange, untenable except through grace. Was I anything but borrowed grace, and thus not myself but some kind of grace somewhere, myself one who said to grace, “I am myself all the same, and yet again I am not.” An idle game. I was surprised at what philosophy had previously proposed, pronouncements about the self in particular, about the personal, the triumphant I — that false equation: I think, I am. If I am, then I do not think. I am or I think. I am or am not, whether I think or not. I am, therefore I think, therefore I also think; but I am not, because I think. What pride, what presumption, what incredible defiance, from someone who had stood up against the universe in order to exist, standing there after having been catapulted from Paradise like Adam, onto the abandoned field, precipitously, as if thrown from a tower, from the Tower of Babel, its audacious walls standing against heaven and earth. That I could not do and did not want to do any longer, and yet I did not want to be pitiful, not disobedient, not without humility, repentance, sacrifice, and prayer, not without empathy, not without knowledge of my guilt and a conscience, not to alienate Being and betray it, only because there is no known Being, no certain existence that I want to embrace or possess.

I admit, such perverse thinkers were the first to deny society, their protests having denied those forms into which human existence had packed itself and secured itself among many races. Now things were different; society no longer wanted any thinkers who only wanted to serve it without becoming its slave or just preach about destruction in a seductive manner. Don’t exist! So one was told aloud and secretly whispered to: Don’t exist! Yet you didn’t want to hear it, and so you went to the dogs nevertheless! What could one possibly say at that point? Perhaps this: Always be something less than what you are allowed to be in a pinch. Even then, it can soon occur that the next time you find yourself among your fellow men the most basic consideration will not be granted you.

“You’re still here? How strange! I thought they did with you as they did with your father and hauled you away. The main thing is that it will still happen. Which is fine with me.”

You couldn’t say anything in response, such as, “Yes, I’m alive, but I feel terrible,” for otherwise you would be severely reprimanded.

“What do you mean, ‘terrible’? You don’t make any sense! If you are alive, then things are good. You’re not allowed to complain.”

Basically, I had to agree. That someone could rise above one’s lot in life seemed a foolish idea. Each gets what he gets; that I had to accept. Perhaps I was myself a miserable bit of nothing, and perhaps that was why someone had decided to shove me to the side in order to show me what I was. If that was so, then even my dissatisfaction could be thought of as a splendid piece of luck; all my disasters, all my failures had nonetheless benefited me. Thus I had to maintain a condition of continued waiting, whose intensity could not lag, the hours flowing into yet more hours, the matter not real in itself but, instead, an artificial structure through which the most difficult thing of all, order, could be pursued. Thus I devoted myself to good fortune that never arrived but remained a possibility and which could someday occur for humanity, as well as for me, in unknown ways. The kingdom that we seek has existed from the very beginning, but to bring it about was certainly a tall order, though not one that was in our control.

“You’re one of the many who wish to exist. You have eaten of the fruit; that cannot be undone. Your mistake is this: that you wish to exist; what’s more, that you want to have done so from the very beginning and forevermore. You concern yourself much too intensely with that. Your will to be is inexhaustible.”

This I had to entirely agree with, for that was the only way I could find the strength within me to make my own determination. The wall rose up before me, though it couldn’t do so forever, yet I didn’t have the patience to wait to see what would happen with me. That’s why I decided to wake up and walk alongside the empty wall, feeling and testing my way. Where it would lead me I really had no idea. It seemed much longer than ever before. I was surprised at how long it was.

“If we follow the length of this wall,” I said, “we’ll soon be outside again.”

“It’s pretty dark.”

“It is. We know why. A new light will be installed soon.”

“That has to happen. One can break a leg.”

“I already told you, close your eyes for a little while so you can get used to the darkness.”

Then we were in the little foyer again, the tour over. Here the daylight pressed in, and the two of them breathed easier, having been released from the darkness. I opened the door to see them out, then I remembered that they had not yet signed the visitors’ book. I took out my fountain pen and unscrewed its cap.

“Please, sign our book!”

My pen was set aside and a much more beautiful one appeared, heavy, marvelous, gleaming gold. The man held it out to the lady. The pen was too much for her to handle and was hardly right for her shaky little handwriting. Then the man took hold of it, his strokes powerful, the sharp, angled lines of confident, knowing success. There, next to the date, stood “Mitzi Lever, Johannesburg; Guido Lever, Johannesburg.” Frau Lever’s signature was already dry, but Herr Lever’s name still looked wet. I took a piece of blotting paper and laid it on top and carefully dabbed at it.