H. Adler - The Wall

“You don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry!”

“No matter. Whatever one owns here and is old, at least you’ve always had it. Nothing is interrupted, all your own things, a consistent string of time wonderfully split up into days, even if it were a thousand. Now do you understand?”

Yes, she understood and, with lips barely moving, she asked my forgiveness.

“No, that’s not necessary. You couldn’t know all that. Back there and here, everything is so different.”

“I know that, and yet I don’t know it well enough, for I have never known and have never known enough. That’s the main reason I wanted to get to know you. You see, I’ve talked to a lot of people and have read a lot, but the picture I have gotten from it all isn’t enough. I’ve heard about how many horrible things happened, but it’s not enough to simply describe the horrible; it doesn’t say enough, it’s dishonest, perhaps even unintentionally distorted. The truth must have been different. Not the horrible, but rather the human amid the horrible, is what’s important. Isn’t that so? I had hoped that you would know a lot about these things, and I hope you can share them with me.”

I looked at her doubtfully.

“I know you can share some of it to some extent, certainly you can. Everything that I know is not enough. I’m sure of that.”

Since I said nothing, Fräulein Zinner talked on.

“I have the feeling that you’ve been through a lot because of how you’ve been shaken to the core. And you seem to me to be truthful and talkative.”

“Talkative … well, yes. Perhaps too much so. But truthful? That I can’t judge. Though I do try my best.”

“That’s what I mean. My urge to tend to misfortune — you understand how I mean that, don’t you? — is what pushes me to take on this hopeless and thankless job. It’s all so lifeless. And it’s good that they will soon dissolve the Bureau for Refugees, which our Search Office is a part of. The lease is up next summer, and it won’t be renewed.”

“What will happen to this big building?”

“It was once a hotel. Hotel Ivanhoe. Maybe someone will open it up as a hotel again.”

“As a hotel …” I said absentmindedly.

“Maybe not, but they say so. It doesn’t matter to us.”

“But what do you do here besides close down the place, if I may ask?”

“I work on the card file of refugees with two other girls and a man who oversees us. The card file is supposed to be cleared up and closed down. Then it will be taken to another institution, where it will be stored.”

“What is this card file? I can hardly imagine.”

“Names, names. Anyone who has ever come to the Bureau for Refugees for advice, help, support, placement, or made an inquiry has to give his personal information — not to me here but rather at the other offices — and then this material comes up to us, is checked over, edited for all its statistical information, and then filed. I can tell you, it’s somewhat dismal work, but perhaps still the best to be had here.”

“Yet a lot gets done?”

“Illusions. Paper. Almost all just paper. Big words. Lots of activity. Names with hardly any people attached to them. The people were sent away, and all that’s left is the names. But I can see that saddens you, and perhaps I’ve put it too bitterly. When there’s too much hate for one’s neighbor rather than love, then such a bureau as ours is needed, and in the end something good does appear to come from all the waste of paper.”

“Tell me more!”

“There’s no lack of good will, but paper is stronger. It only uses names and dates, gulping them down insatiably, like a gristmill, and life, as a result, ends up too short, indeed ground to bits. That’s why we have the Search Office, which is why I’m there. There the names are consulted, and sometimes a miracle happens that rewards all our efforts. A brother finds a sister, even entire families come back together. I’m egotistical enough that I have made this my main job, while my colleagues sink themselves much more into the paperwork than I do. I can only think that they just don’t feel as much pressure as I do. They’re happy when everything on the page is in order and the Search Office has its role in making it so. Thus the paper finally does, in fact, come to life. We also have open office hours, where we give out information on names and addresses. Fates hang upon them. How empty our card file seems when people come to me to ask and to beg for information about their next of kin, and the cards are blanks and cannot help or advise. Eyes empty out before me, behind them nothing but raw despair or simply disbelief that erects itself against disappointing news, and then the request to look through the cards themselves. If there’s enough time, I let them, if only to assuage their mistrust, although it’s always pointless, because, first of all, our cards are not in such great order, and second, they are of no help to the person roaming around in search of someone with no peace to be had. Disappointment only rises in ever greater amounts when this senseless search produces no results, when similar names confuse people, until finally they grow bitter and either break down or consume themselves with blustering complaints about what a hopeless system we have, or something worse. I patiently let it roll over me, because I hope that it will ease the misfortunate a bit, but my colleagues do nothing of the sort, choosing instead to complain that their lovely card file is now a mess, mauled and marked up by dirty fingers. Indeed, visitors are not allowed to peek into the card file, so my boss officially doesn’t know anything about it. He puts up with it, but silently so, and only because I have often pressed hard at his conscience.”

“And what do you do with people when everything looks hopeless and pointless?”

“I send them to our researchers. There they tie them up with long forms that are filled out in detail. Or I tell them to try the Red Cross and other organizations. Then the people head off. Some of them leave without even saying goodbye, though I don’t blame them.”

I then asked to see the card file. Fräulein Zinner wanted to pull out one of the heaviest drawers from the iron cabinet, but I couldn’t let her do that and got up in spite of her protests and walked over to her.

“Do you really feel better?” she asked with anxious doubt.

“But of course. How many times must I tell you that it really was nothing at all. I should have put off my visit to another day. It wasn’t right for me not to consider my weariness, forgive me, and then on top of that the many steps as well.”

“Oh, what do you mean ‘put off’! We’ve already put off too much, and that alone is half the reason for our unhappiness!”

Fräulein Zinner didn’t want to hear any apologies from me, but instead just wanted to figure out whether I really was better and didn’t need further assistance. She doubted my claims, but I stood up firmly, stretching my back and lifting my head in order to reassure her strongly inquisitive gaze.

“Well, you do seem better. But I’m not entirely pleased, for you are pale to the bones.”

“I’m always that way. Even as a child. My mother—”

“You looked better at the Haarburgers’.”

“I hate to disappoint you; it was only the light.”

Fräulein Zinner could see that she couldn’t say anything more without upsetting and embarrassing me. She let me have a look in the open drawers, where the cards were arranged according to some kind of system that she indeed explained to me, but which I nevertheless didn’t understand, all of them neatly mounted and movable on metal rails. They could also be lifted halfway out without being removed from the drawer, though with a bit of manipulation they were easily taken out. The cards were numbered, and on each of them there were last names, first names, names of wives or husbands, names of parents and children, addresses, changes of address, old addresses, occupations former and current, dates and data from different countries, many coded symbols I didn’t understand, though Fräulein Zinner explained them readily, and then more numbers, crosses, stars, and notes, many of them written down in red ink, a bare graveyard with names and, invisibly behind it, a life and its twin life of worry, sorrow, hope, madness, glowing passion, pale disenchantment, and, yes, also illness, odors such as Lysol or chloroform, befogged, full of anxiety, and then death: a startling coldness in each card, unreal, belonging to no one, not of the present, but not of the past in any troubling way. In addition, everything was much too ethereal and mute, a finger running over them as well as uncertain and questioning glances, all of it set down cold in metallic type, the black letters of the machine pressing into the white flesh.