H. Adler - The Wall

“Did Franziska wear the string of pearls?”

“Hardly, my dear. I don’t believe I ever saw them on her. She liked to wear amber most of all, sometimes turquoise, as well as large Bohemian garnets, which I no longer have.”

“Sweetheart, forgive me, but we had a marvelous day! We had the loveliest day we’ve had since we’ve known each other, and I am wearing Franziska’s barely worn pearls. Still, will you be so good and tell me something of Franziska?”

“Franziska … my darling, I had a dream about her. I’m almost not inclined to share it, for it could be wrong to do so, more of an image conjured by me than a true spirit. I don’t know if I should tell it.”

“Don’t be afraid! But, if that’s the way you feel, you don’t have to say anything. I don’t wish to interfere. The legacy is yours, it’s yours, and I respect that.”

“If that’s the case, Johanna, then I can tell you. I lay asleep in bed and believed that I had woken up. I was not in Vaynor, nor in the metropolis, nor actually back there. I was in no place I recognized. But I was somewhere far off, in an apartment that belonged to me. And then Franziska was there, quiet and radiant — everything about her was radiant, her clothes, her hands, and her face. But, above all, the face, and most of all the forehead above her eyebrows. That glowed the most, even more than her glowing hair and eyes, which indeed were open but looked as if they gazed through a veil. She came very close to me, pressing close to my bed. I thought that she wanted to sit down next to me, so I tried to sit up in order to show her how happy I was that she was there. But with sweeping, half-lifted arms she waved me off. Then I remained still and turned my head more strongly in her direction. She didn’t sit down, but instead got very close, standing next to the bed such that her clothes rubbed against it. I couldn’t touch Franziska but only behold her, my hands remaining under the blanket, and it being impossible to pull them out from there. She looked at me tenderly, very kindly, with a sympathetic and also animated sorrow. She was otherworldly, sad, and majestic, though she was also confident and not full of despair. I felt guilty before her, for she was not alive, she was just there, and I felt that anything alive had to feel guilty in the face of everything dead, the guilt of living in the face of the departed and the sublime, which we often call the eternal. I wanted to share my deepest feelings with Franziska, but I didn’t want to say it aloud, I just wanted to somehow share it. Nor could I speak. Somehow I shared it with her, without words and speech, as well as without looking at her or giving her any sign; the only way she could know was because she understood me, and because I felt nothing else but this. She gazed at me intimately, not all-consuming, yet intently. Then she said, ‘You mustn’t worry!’ I didn’t worry, or at least not any longer, but then an irrepressible sadness filled me to the core, for I had left Franziska. I had left her without asking her permission, deeming it all right to be without her. That was a betrayal; I had become unfaithful. You need to know in order to understand, Johanna, that ever since the day the murderer’s hand separated us, separated us forever, as she was asphyxiated and her defiled noble body was burned to ashes, I never thought of or looked at another woman, even Anna, with so much as the slightest desire, until I saw you. Then it was obviously clear to me from the first moment, and that is why when we sat with Frau Saubermann and Herr Buxinger at the Haarburgers’ I was so bold as to speak to you despite all reason and my own will, reaching out to you in hardly a subtle fashion. Yet back to the dream. But wait. Before I go on with my story, I must tell you about a visitation that I experienced during my escape from over there and which was similar to my dream but also completely different. During that one, I spoke to Franziska and asked her, ‘Will you let me go?’ Or no, it was not during the journey but after, a few weeks later in the guesthouse, just before the first time I called you and visited you in the Office for Refugees. You already meant a great deal to me, for otherwise why would I have asked Franziska this question? But, nonetheless, it was different, as you will soon hear. She let me go; her voice was clearly audible, yet only her voice. I had not asked Franziska but simply posed the question. But it was Franziska’s voice, clearly, no mistaking it, that answered me, saying that she had let me go, whether I existed or not. Yet now, in this dream, it was different. I had left Franziska. It had to have been so, because I could do no different, but it was, in fact, my choice; I had done it on my own. I felt the hot demands of lust that lead to adultery. Franziska knew so, for alas, she knew everything. She observed me with resonant kindness, her gaze penetrating my skeleton and lifting it up. She spoke with a level yet muffled voice: ‘I have protected you. I am now leaving you. You are free, you are free. You will now follow your own path. May the blessing of grace attend your fortunes!’ I wanted to grab hold of her hands before she disappeared, a mixture of sorrow and shame and bitterness roiling inside me. But I could not grab hold, since my hands lay continually immobile under the blanket, nor could Franziska grab hold of mine, for she had withdrawn, the separation having been announced. She looked at me again in an incomparable way that I could only call benevolent, though I have never seen a look quite like it from anyone living or dead, even in a dream. Franziska moved her head slowly and gently, her eyes almost shut, as if to say ‘No.’ Then she lifted a hand and held it high above me, giving clearance, saying goodbye and blessing, all of it together, and then she walked away, adorned in exalted splendor. She didn’t walk toward any door but rather only to the opposite wall that had no door, and which appeared to retreat from Franziska for a while, as if the room were expanding. During this she often turned to look back at me, always with a loving, departing expression, and I knew that she was not of this earth, and that as soon as she reached the wall she would step through it. I bent my head strenuously in the direction she moved, but the wall was opaque glass and Franziska walked inside it. The divider remained transparent enough, such that she turned toward me more and more often and smiled abstractly in the direction of my bed and nodded as if to indicate something to me, as if I were still a part of her realm. She remained lit up, but in her passage through the wall the distance was more shadowy, otherworldly, thinner, and, to me, disembodied and blurry. Also, it was harder and harder to see through the wall, it becoming more and more hazy, the wall fading, giving off only a vague idea of itself, and all at once, with a last look and a hand raised high, the figure stepped through the wall while turning away and leaving with its back to me. There being nothing more to see, I was alone, abandoned, lying in the room in severe, heavy darkness, my gaze always directed toward the wall, which was hardly recognizable, although gradually it appeared to be closing in from the distance and returning to the dimensions of the middle-sized room that had been there at the start of the dream. Loneliness rose up sharply within me and closed about my throat, such that I grew anxious. I couldn’t see anything else, my eyes sank in a sea of tears, and as I torturously closed my eyelids in order to stop the burning stream, the thought of my mother occurred within me. Without looking at me, she sat sewing a shroud. I said a shroud, for I didn’t know whose it was, my father’s or mine. We were indeed both there, Father and I. I called out to Mother. She didn’t hear and continued sewing, a bloody band painfully adorning her neck. Then I called to Father, asking him to have Mother turn to me, but he refused. I insisted that he do so in a last attempt: ‘Father and Mother, I’m here, your only son, your other child, your only daughter having died many years ago in the days of limited sorrows, which now, in the days of endless loss, no longer exist.’ But neither reacted to my words. Then I held out an apple as an offering, an apple like this one in my hand. No one took it, and so I set it down. Father and Mother were buried in darkness. I had to find Franziska again, so I opened my eyes wide, the stream of tears having stopped, the sockets painfully dry as sand, but nothing visible, for Franziska was now behind the wall forever. With her departure I felt eased, but extremely unhappy about where I was. Then I thought of you, Johanna, but I didn’t know where you were. I was worried about you and me, and I wanted to look for you, but I had no idea where I might find you. And then I woke up. Next to me you lay in a deep slumber, no movement at all except your quiet, even breathing. Then I knew that our bond was still not complete, and yet that it could be completed, and so I lay closer to you, but without waking or disturbing you, and soon fell asleep. That’s why I brought the pearls along today. I wanted to give them to you the day we got married; that’s what I planned, but I couldn’t then, and then I waited and waited. Now it’s right, now at last.”