H. Adler - The Wall

“A husband’s support.” I said that once, only as an attempt to seize hold of a fading wish, but Johanna shot back nothing more than merciful surprise. Sometimes I tried to figure out whether what she would have me believe was real, but I only sensed a suppressed pain in her that was not visible. It’s all the same to her: the worries themselves, the numerous shortcomings of our household; none of it bothers her. It serves only to inspire her to a higher art. The essence of this art is patience; that’s all that’s needed, and it provides a relaxed, ongoing play in the return of reassuring conditions for my difficult-to-reassure, always disturbed, painful existence. How well it suits me that this tattered house puts up with me as an inhabitant in this meager neighborhood of careworn people. One can think whatever of me, but people live their lives without having to know about my empty troubles, for the stranger doesn’t bother the street at all.

Only Johanna knows, but what does she know? Almost nothing, and even that she covers up. Welcome to Peace. But will the children ever know it? No, Michael and Eva don’t know anything, at least not yet; that way, they don’t get confused. They have their time, and what is past should not bother them. When they finally learn, it will by then be lost, no way into it through memento, dream, or memory, at most a long-lost history, an account in a book one can read but which remains unknown. Michael and Eva, already members of the circle of street kids, the boy already at the school that harmlessly takes him away from his father, the father’s speech only a distant resonant sound that will not find new voice in the next generation. Thus they look at their father with hardly any feeling of danger, nothing more than a playmate, his place in the scheme of things undoubted. I, however, don’t disturb this fantasy, but rather protect it and feed it with jokes and games. Johanna also helps out, dismissing with a smile any groundless question, and wherever shadows creep or rustle she’s there to set things right with her hands. Quickly I shy away, leave quietly, and am glad to be back in my study. The children are allowed to run free outside and return to the light of day, unaffected, no loss having touched them.

Then I pray to an unknown guardian, he perhaps able to protect the children such that they have no idea of what they have mercifully been shielded from. The father should remain within their love as only the familiar stranger who once appeared, was there, then went away; yes, a passing ship, already having landed on the island and found the mother. Yet earlier there was nothing, only waves, nothing ever having happened. So it is in the world. One suddenly arrives, a ship, and everyone must travel to this island for the first time, an island where one can be and forget. Now the foundation is laid, the arc of Being lifted, the bridge erect and no longer capable of being destroyed. Above lies the light of all the stars, sacred and undisturbed creation presiding, the earth illuminated in the hand of the Lord. Whatever has fought against this no longer exists and has damned itself to darkness and discord, never to be again. Sheltered prosperity, the joyful vicissitude of a good family passing from fathers to grandchildren to their children’s children with all daily hardships taken care of, but also blessed in itself. The sanctuary of the sexes that do their work, and when one dies a noble grave awaits him; kept gratefully alive in memory, he lives on as an example, nothing having been in vain. His acts will inform his descendants; they are not unique, but in being true they reveal what is just. No doubt presses back, such that the sinister severs the chain and casts away and destroys its earlier roots. May this be true for the children!

What will happen when the children no longer believe this? They will retreat from me and take me to task. You were a vagrant, a vagabond and a layabout. You just crept your way into this city; you are not our father and don’t belong to us. We don’t owe you anything, and we will disown you in order not to suffer eternal shame. And what will I, on the other hand, say to you? You are clever and gifted; how many years will pass before already you’re grown. Also, words will no longer comfort your mother. She would gladly stand sympathetically before the door of my room, but son and daughter will demand a royal entrance. Then I have to welcome them. They mess about in my drawers and demand the key to my desk. “What do you want to know?” I’ll ask. They will answer, “You!”—“I don’t exist,” I’ll assure them, but they will explain: “That is only half a memory. We want to find out about you. We want to know what is there when we see you — something horrible in your past, something disreputable which you keep secret.”

Then I’ll have to talk a lot. Trapped in a corner against the wall, I will tell them something I know nothing at all about, conjuring the semblance of it in order that the children tremble and shake; however, they won’t be shaken by it, for they are well shielded against the language of sin. “I don’t exist, I don’t exist! You simply have to believe that, for both your sake and mine. I don’t exist, and though you torment me with your penetrating curiosity, you’ll still never find out, for it’s impossible. All that is there is impenetrable strangeness, because I don’t exist.” Should I expect this day to come, one in which I am overshadowed by Michael and Eva, such that my memory also will likely come to an end? It won’t change me at all, for I have decided that though the red seal of my guilt is long since reduced to dust, the future of these children will indeed be impugned. Can I protect them? Both the truth and not the truth will lead to the same doom. What, then, can I do? Why did I have children? O dull pointless lust! The belief in blind generation, for I madly wished not to be the last of my tribe, my precursors having been killed! To die childless felt like a sin. A world without children of the curse, and without memory of the fathers who suffered for them, so that there would be children of the curse. But Johanna? Her right to be a mother. The blessing of the womb, the transfiguration of birth, the soulfulness of a lullaby — all lovely, but it shouldn’t have sprung from my loins. Johanna wanted me. I pursued, it’s true, but she had consented, and that’s her fault. Yet, at the time she was attracted to me I didn’t know her; she had no idea what she had wreaked! Unhappy mother, who in conceiving children in her belly also bestowed on them an inextinguishable curse! Whatever staggeringly dumb vanity burned within me, away with it — go away, go home, go proliferate and fulfill your inchoate flesh and trembling spirit through children who are pure. Though you on your own can achieve no grace, see that the earth is inhabited with your blood and bones! Though you yourself have lived amid sin and error, you have indeed atoned for them, because you have tended to and hoped the best for your children. You have taken it upon yourself to make sure to balance your shortcomings with better intentions, such that they will be decreased, for benevolent is the Lord in the beginning, and he will forever forgive.

Dreaming before the wall, marking time. Slowly the earth gives way and sinks below you, the years elapsing before your doubled-over supplications. With your supplicating grasp, the net of confusion begins to loosen. You work hard, not wasting a single day. Task after task you have fulfilled; you haven’t dwelled on your frailty. Therefore don’t despair too much, and trust yourself to believe that a lost one will be comforted, for I am your rock and your redeemer. Voices that I hear, and which shimmer around me, immersing me in the inapproachable whenever the enemy’s rattling surrounds me, such that I do not perish, even if I am unworthy of being held within the mesh of grace. Let it all pass, let everything pass! But I am carried through it. If I was too blessed at the wrong time, then this sinking into the ground is the sentence I must serve because I was too devout and not active enough. Now, however, you are there again. How can I resist you? Yet you still shimmer all about me, such that I am extinguished by the glow! Too much experience makes me empty, wisdom silencing any possible speech within me. Succor is my garb. That is what has happened to me; the rest is just extended sound. “You will be your own just reward.” But whose just reward will be my just reward?