H. Adler - The Wall

“I will do anything you wish. I’ll stand by you, whatever happens. I love you so unutterably and have limitless faith in your future, in your integrity, and your great strength.”

“Don’t go too far, Johanna, not too far! The darkness inside me will still shock you. My weaknesses weigh on me and can at times almost consume me entirely.”

“I’m not afraid of anything, Arthur. Maybe I’m a dumb fool and have a thousand senseless anxieties of my own, but I am not a child. I’m not blind to the danger. That’s why I offered to talk to Betty. She is simple and not fraught with problems, but she has the wisdom of the heart, and because of that she is kind.”

“Then let us be grateful that we have her backing. But let’s not ask anything of her, anything that will guarantee our life or my life in this border land. Let me sink into the metropolis. It’s immense, labyrinthine, sinister, and I have yet to figure it out. But it has a mysterious neutrality, completely different from the big cities I knew back there. One doesn’t belong to this city but, rather, lives with it, independent, almost free, hardly touched by it, and having nothing to do with one another. It feels as if I can never be entirely lost in its lostness. I can be unhappy in the thick of it, but there I feel the unhappiness much less than if I lived in Vaynor and climbed Twyn Croes with you each week. I have no home and seek no home. Yet the metropolis, with its couple of dozen neighborhoods — it, at least for the foreigner, is not a home but rather a habit. And not even the entire city, just the neighborhood in which one settles.”

Johanna didn’t say anything in response, murmuring something inaudible that still felt loving. She took me by the hand, then soon let go again and looked for a little spot where we could rest awhile. It took some time before we found a place where we could sit on the half-dry ground. Johanna took from me the knapsack — the same one that I had bought before the journey to the mountain woods — and set out something for us to eat. She did so gracefully, less energetically than Anna, she being somewhat dreamy and inward and yet, of course, confident, as if it were a matter of serving invited guests. We ate almost all the good things we’d brought along in the bag. All that remained was a piece of chocolate and two apples, which Johanna insisted that we save for later.

“Are you happy?” she asked out of the blue.

I looked at her long and hard, said nothing, laughed, and moved closer to her.

“We are very much together, Johanna. You are so good to me.”

“And the dead?”

“We live from the dead, Johanna. Everything living comes from the dead. When they pass away in peace, it’s forgotten, in the sense that through greater awareness we do not have to suffer a terrible shock to our consciousness. We talk about parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and can follow a complete chain all the way back to the first people, back to Adam and Eve. But if one’s parents and loved ones have been swallowed up by a distant, ambiguous, and often unknown death, then naturally we succumb to a horror that we can hardly overcome, and by which we are eventually bested, one’s own family chain having been severed, and this horror can never be overcome. It weighs upon us because it is not there. Because we cannot bury it away in our souls. Thus there is no way for us to forget, for now our knowledge is meager, and with that our consciousness remains constantly on edge. For it cannot console us.”

“What shall we make of it together, my dear?”

“We must live like the first human beings, Adam and Eve in the far fields after their sin.”

“Yet that can’t happen. That would not only be blind but also impossible.”

“You’re indeed right; I don’t mean it literally. But we have a duty to begin again, and in this duty we are like the first human couple. What our ancestors realized, built and also misconceived is, for people like us, so beaten down and destroyed, there is nothing left but a brave new beginning to set in motion many things and plans erupting within our hearts. I don’t mean by this that we should smash to pieces everything that remains and let our souls rot. On the contrary, we need to preserve what we can preserve. You know, Johanna, those I know and who know me, they don’t want to hear that I call myself a conservative and feel myself to be one. When I briefly mentioned it to So-and-So, he doubled up with laughter, and then showered me with his derisive scorn. But it is indeed so, every tradition — though, of course, with this I am by no means talking about evil that’s bred, the sum of which can be referred to as natural and developed over time, no, not that at all — in every tradition that really is ancient, the most inner essence of the shared existence, no matter how it transforms itself, is sacred to me. From that we should drink, absorb with every fiber, guard as the most valuable treasure, care for and preserve and share with those who come after us in ever more pure and noble fashion.”

“Where, then, is the new beginning? How will it all come together?”

“The new beginning? You see, Johanna, with every heart that survives the Lord sets forth the creation once again. That is always true, and for every person. But it is hardly known and only rarely sensed. We who almost do not exist any longer feel it stronger and perhaps deeper. For the fact that we exist is a miracle. We who are no longer tolerated nor should be thought of and yet nonetheless remain, we who are not a miracle, but who are seen and thought of only as a miracle, we who are on this side and, as I know you understand, we who, no matter how much we lean back to the other side, never reach it, nor can reach it, as we can hardly recall it anymore and have only the blessing of memory in order to say something about the past, which is entirely lost. Memory, Johanna, which you honor, for I’ve heard you say so, that is the sacred tradition that I honor as well. It is the culmination of everything, as long as we do not lose hold of it and serve it faithfully. The new beginning that we commence with our faith and our works is indeed a repetition, yet, above all, it is a new beginning, the commitment and sacrifice to the future, the daily prayer, the journey toward a destination, and we can only know we’re headed toward a destination, Johanna, for we can only hope and wish for the destination, but we don’t know it and cannot reach it. It’s not what is achieved but, rather, what awaits us that matters. Do you understand what I mean? Ah, I shouldn’t be lecturing you!”

“I don’t know if I understand it all, Arthur, and yet it says a great deal to me. You must speak, and speak freely. It’s all a part of you, and it is you yourself, and I need to hear it.”

I rummaged in my coat pocket and pulled out a little leather box and held it out to Johanna.

“This is for you, dear.”

She fiddled with it in her hands, the clasp not opening, and only after several tries finally giving way. The pearls lay within, dull silver, sitting there somewhat embarrassed and shy, Franziska’s pearls, which she never wore, a gift from her father, she once said, which I remembered now, but she only liked to wear amber or turquoise, and kept the valuable jewels in a box that she hardly ever touched. I also could see the hands that after the war had brought them and given them to me. There was no more amber, no more turquoise to receive, they were lost, but the pearls in the leather box lined with tissue paper slid from my hand into the case; I could no longer look at them. There they rested until I risked taking them with me, as Anna advised. Safely I had carried them through all the borders.

“Do you like them, Johanna? You said that you are very fond of pearls and had to leave them at home. On the morning of your departure, your mother removed them from your neck.”