H. Adler - The Wall

“And who is now the owner?”

“What do you mean?”

“The owner of the painting.”

Herr Schnabelberger put back the painting, crept through the stacks, and turned off the light, pushing me ahead of him and locking the door behind.

“Yes, you probably mean the legal owner? Not everything has been made clear. First and foremost, there is the museum. They are working on the statutes. Right now, we are effectively the custodian on behalf of the state. But there is no doubt that it all belongs to us. The people are dead or have disappeared, and therefore it would be very difficult for them to make a claim.”

Herr Schnabelberger took me up to the third floor and opened the room that was to be mine.

“You can have the key. I recommend that you lock up whenever you leave the room. But when you leave the building, leave the key with Herr Geschlieder, the porter.”

The air was extremely dry and much too warm. I asked if I could open a window.

“Yes, of course. Don’t forget to close it if you leave the room for any length of time. It hasn’t been used in months — not since the end of the war, and maybe even longer.”

“Since the war?”

“Yes. Most of the ones who worked here back then were hauled off. You know, of course, that the workers were not here of their own choice but were forced labor. Only a few escaped being sent off or came back to the museum like us, who couldn’t just let it be. Most of us were sent off in the last months of the war. Some came right back.… Yes, you know what I mean, I don’t have to tell you. There were many commendable people who in the middle of the war set up the museum. An indescribable loss — we miss them day in and day out. You see, Herr Dr. Landau, that’s why we need new blood, and we are especially pleased to have you with us.”

Herr Schnabelberger said this in a wonderfully friendly manner, and I thanked him. Then he excused himself, saying he had to go to his office, but if I wanted to come to him in an hour that would be good, for then he could introduce me to all of my fellow workers, above all Frau Dr. Kulka, my immediate superior. In between, I should set up my office according to my wishes, for I could do whatever I wished with it. Herr Schnabelberger smiled encouragingly and took his leave.

His steps echoed down the hall, and I walked over to the window. I looked down into the schoolyard. It was still, no children to be seen, the last traces of their youthful spirits having disappeared. Only some empty boxes stood open and desolate, as well as some dented suitcases soaked by the rain. Was there no longer any school here, no teachers or children? It didn’t look as if any teaching was going on, all the desks having been taken away. My room was long and narrow, a closet for school supplies, certainly not a classroom at all. Maps must have been stowed away here, fat round globes with the countries of the world and their mountains and rivers, as well as the blue of the long-dry seas. The circles and dots of cities, the pointer having followed the red lines where the trains traveled fast from place to place with many, many people carried past all borders. The teacher spoke softly amid the boyish wonder, but on the last benches dangling legs swayed and a forbidden pocketknife sharply carved into the green surface of the desktop. “What are you doing back there?” came the stern question, passing over all the rows. Quietly the knife snapped shut and disappeared into the depths. There the men lived through mining, tunnels were bored, and with luck the miners went down into the caverns to the prayer books and hauled the coal out of the seams. What could be wrong? They were protected from the bad weather and had their Davy lamps to see by, a blesséd invention. Then the bell rang, the students shifted in their seats more loudly, the teacher took a breath, the maps were rolled up, two leather straps encircling them and holding tight their narrow bulks. Then the class leader, Adam, lifted them up and wandered upstairs to the closet, the teacher hard on his heels. The teacher pointed to the proper place, the boy nodding and then excused, quickly disappearing into the bustle of recess.

I listened to see if I could hear anything, but everything was quiet; there was no recess. The children were sitting docilely on their benches and paying attention, their discipline good, Herr Schnabelberger a good teacher, the students making progress, he himself teaching them energetically. Frau Dr. Kulka, however, now gave instruction in art history, learning the frames by heart, dividing them across a hundred and fifty years, the bad ones designated as kitsch, the good ones exhibited, though no one was ever let go. The school of life was what it was called, and for it everything was taken up and described, and no descendants had the right to these students. What did it matter that all descendants had disappeared, or were dead, their limbs scattered to the four winds, if only the students of this antiquity were alive and within the dust of their desire were gathered for free. They appeared completely satisfied and patient; things would come along, quietly anticipated, the names faint or obliterated. Thus they revealed their age, and I was responsible for them, a teacher meant to be enveloped by their two-dimensional mind so that it did not wrinkle with grief. The new benches already existed, the fresh wood sawed and planed so that the students could sit in peace, and I, the son, received the new class book of my father and mother, having to record the noble lineage and its dates on white cards. It was good work that I had to get started on, for I could be the legacy of my students. “Don’t forget the number! Below on the back of the frame it’s written small.”

Among the rank and file of ancestors who don’t need names but only numbers, there was comforting parity, be they good paintings or bad, for they all had their numbers. It was only the prayer books that no one cared about; they could be bundled up and stowed in the cellar. There it’s dark and damp, but the prayers can sleep, blessed be the Lord, and love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, for then the prayers, if they are not ruined, can be sent to America for a paltry sum. Alas, no one wants them. Their prayers have been ended and must remain down in the mines where the Lord cannot hear them, a single silent cellar prayer where once the coal slumbered in the dark without the protection of the Davy lamp against bad weather, the prayer now sleeping down among the footings, rolled up and torn, the building threatened, though the walls remain essentially eternal, the Lord of the world, who was king before all was created. Below it repeats itself a thousand times and ten thousand times, the morning prayer of the grave with its holy blessings; we miss them at every turn, those that laud the rock of redemption, the eternal Creator. Above lies harm, for there the rooms are crammed full, the musty classrooms holding five thousand consigned pupils in broken frames, though for the most part it’s unknown stock, the past not pressing through, even when the paper rots between the book covers that hold it. In this building it’s all gathered, a hut, a tent — how lovely are your tents — and the bodies of the living as well as the dead are all scattered, their existence disgraced, the names sealed off and never available again. Yet the blessing remains and is tightly wound up in each, and whoever can no longer live is still transformed by it, the lament having its arches, its grave, its cellar, its walls.

I walked across my room and looked through the closets and shelves to see if there was anything that reminded me of old school prayers, but everything was empty, the prayers having long ago disappeared from here. Nor was there anything else there from the school, the wisdom of the teachers and the eagerness of the pupils having both vanished into thin air, leaving behind nothing more than thick piles of junk. Heaps of paper, organized and disorganized in disorderly piles, notebooks, scattered books, yet no prayers, empty boxes and others full of curling forms, many posed photos of sporting teams and gymnastics meets, discarded trash with souls eaten away, something quite distant from the pupils’ eagerness or the teachers’ command. The walls looked miserable, dark yellow and shabby, paintings scattered and broken, stacked up in the corner by the metal furnace and black with soot. In some spots the paint was scraped clean where paintings had once hung but which had long since migrated from this room. Only pictures of young girls and forgotten beautiful actresses cut from newspapers were hung on the walls with tacks and stared dryly into the emptiness. Also, a calendar from last year was out of date and illustrated the last autumn of the war. I looked at the first week and sighed deeply; it must have been a week of death. On a table there squatted a dented washbasin made of ugly, dirty zinc, dreaming of its stained and senseless end. I quickly put it into a chest where earlier I had found a blue pitcher with a rusted bottom, some used bars of soap in a little bowl, and some dirty hand towels. When I took away the washbasin, I noticed for the first time that the table was moldy and crusty from old soapy water. I took a brown sheet of packing paper, spread it out over the surface, and nailed it down tight.