H. Adler: The Wall

The little house on West Park Row was like a little volcano that held me inside and felt good to me. There I could work and gather my powers until they overflowed. But should I erupt and through my actions cast raging fire and glowing ash upon people, then terror was let loose and others had to defend themselves. For who indeed dared to consciously provoke me? It was a vain, indeed sick new beginning! Yet I couldn’t help myself, and, unfortunately, there was no one who could intercede between me and others. There was no such balance, and in the following years this sealed my fate. When today I look back at my life in this country, I have to admit that I am burned out, and the comparison to a volcano is somewhat close to the truth. But in the end one should never think in terms of metaphors, for they can drive you crazy. Much has changed over the years, and I’ve carried myself differently for some time now. By now, most of them have forgotten about me, those for whom back then my existence was a sensation that caused a real stir. Now I’m only dormant. However, a monument to my past actions I am not.

Rather, everything around me, whether human or concrete, has become perfidious, everything and everyone — except Johanna, the blesséd and ever-devoted companion, the woman, the incomparable essence at the heart of it all. How can one such creature alone encompass, and I really mean encompass, so much inside herself? There is a bounteousness in her that hardly any one person could contain, something so multifaceted and rich, yet hardly comprehensible. What can I say? It’s simply incomprehensible! When I really think about it, Johanna is everything I am, for I do not exist, only she does. She props me up and stands by me, she brings together many different sides of me, something that allowed me to exist again, that put me back together and taught me and gave me a name and made me whole.

It’s unimaginable to me what would remain of Arthur Landau without Johanna, because I have ceased to exist, called it quits, am completely spent, the vestige of a memory of who I no longer am, maybe even a message from nowhere, someone who can never find his footing, never land in one place. Other people are just as dubious, I am at least aware of that, but I never even rise to the level of a dubious existence, the fragile bearing of a single nature, because I am homeless in every sense, belonging nowhere and therefore expendable, never missed, because no one knows anything about me. But, because of Johanna, how I think of myself is not entirely true. She moves about the house, works in the kitchen, places food on the table, suddenly says something that is wonderfully clear, and always then follows up the consequences of any particular incident with something that makes sense of it all, everything placed in meaningful order, and — what is really amazing — most of it somehow relating to me, affirming me and affecting me. Johanna speaks, the two syllables of my name rolling out from her lips, such that I hear it, look up, understand, and already, amid the emptiness of my potential existence, something is planted which I must acknowledge — namely, that I exist. This is what Johanna wants. She married someone and bore him two children who belong not only to her but also to someone else, whom she softly and innocently calls Father. Father, Father! Then I have to wake up and look around, as if I were coming out of a dream, in order to realize that I’m there. The harder it is to do this, the more I feel it is true, because in realizing that I am simply here at all I could even agree with the philosopher who boldly wished to conclude from nothing more than his own thinking that he existed. Nonetheless, it is not thought that returns me to this sense of wonder; indeed, it’s not my own thinking at all, but rather a condition amid which one is conceived, and that one is me.

Johanna brought about this miracle. She took me in when I no longer even existed and before I reappeared. She took in something that lay among the fields of possibility, nothing that was certain and nothing that was real, but something she thought was there, which she had a feel for, and which to her was perceivable. She had an unshakable trust in the unreal she chose out of blind, hopeful courage, because she believed in the possible, in the promise of the future. That’s how she was able to wrest her very being free from the times that hardly offered any hope, much less a future to believe in, tomorrow an improbability in itself in which everything begins anew and is again created anew, whereby one greets it with a powerful cry of an inner birth: You’re alive! You’re alive! She must have sensed the kind of exultant inner strength that within the shadow of a ghostly entity still feels itself to be real, such that it also feels incarnate through a palpable presence and is freed from all other apparitions with its limbs intact, a single being in an equally apparent space. That remains an incomprehensible feat, and even if I am nothing else, I am this feat or, better yet, I am the culmination of this feat, he who sits amid the security of what he’s been given by this woman, who day after day does everything she can to assure my existence, so that I don’t sink into the ever-present danger of the delusional and disappear into things and dreams that surround me with a steady, mildly disorienting, and abrasive whir, reminding me that I am among them, a subject among objects, a separate other amid the endless flood of so much existence, relaxed and singularly composed amid an unfathomable network. Touched by such earnest effort, I cannot betray myself, or, at least, what I am. Thus my demise is avoided, such that I can feel alive. I hear laughter, and so I laugh along as well. Doubts creep up, but they cannot last for long on West Park Row, for I do not succumb to them. To the neighbors, my background seems nothing special; I’m just someone from elsewhere. But no one asks where, no one asks at all.

It’s good that I have been restored to life here. In the four rooms and the closets of the house, I don’t need to think of the life I lost anymore than I do in the tiny yard that is squeezed in among other such narrow yards belonging to the neighbors and the fenced-off green field that stretches out behind them, where the children play, both the children of others and my own — what it means for me to be able to say that! — where fat cats stretch out and yawn among thistles and coltsfoot. Here I don’t know my past, and everything is new, the foster home of one orphaned early, one who was once lightly told only in passing, “We brought you here from somewhere else far off when your father and mother perished. You were only a little boy then, so little that you can’t remember, and no one knows anything about it, for it all disappeared long ago.” Then I think hard, it lasting a while, myself serious, until finally I say, “Indeed, it must have been that way. Deep within there is a little room in my soul which I cannot enter, yet I see a faint shimmering that escapes from there, and then I finally know that there was a life, another life that must have belonged to me, and indeed it is my own life.” Not only did my mother and father die early; I also died, but people forgot that I had, which is why they neither put me in a casket nor buried me, but instead left me to lie on the side of a road or on a shore, outside of any place where one would notice whether one was really dead or alive, and that is where I was carried away while sleeping, far, far away, until I finally awoke.

Then I looked around. Johanna stood there with the key in her hand and pointed to the door and said, “Here we are — I’m going to open it right up.” We stepped in, the air damp. From every corner and crevice it was obvious that no one had slept here in a long time. Then we moved into the house. Beds, tables, bureaus, chairs, and boxes full of all the things needed to take care of our everyday needs were all carried in. I was tired and not of much use, the sweat of my own weakness breaking out on my forehead and neck. Full of worry, Johanna kept an eye on my struggles, taking me by the hand and leading me into the back room, where the sun poured in. She rustled up a chair, the window was opened, the barely stirring air pressing through the dormant old dust. I was ashamed that I was so incapable of being any help with moving in. Pleadingly I looked at Johanna to ask whether there was anything I could do, but she wouldn’t hear of it, and instead stroked my hair, hurried out, and returned with a little something to eat.