H. Adler - The Wall

As one can imagine, the letters differ in appearance in both content and form. From very short ones composed of halting words written in the style of telegrams — often barely the length of a line — to endless sentences that resemble serial novels in their length, you find all levels in between. Many writers reflect their innate or acquired artfulness, many dissemble and write in a consciously different manner than their nature dictates, turning grandiose phrases while sharing everyday events, or formulate tracts marching out in paragraphs like laws or mathematical or chemical formulas, while still others compose tiresome poems with heavy measures that resemble the language of sacred texts, or employ a philosophical diction that demonstrates their learning, their inherent sophistication, their righteousness, their pious nature, though, on the other hand, some formulate a strange and dead language, especially when they supplement this style through dictionaries and grammar, inventing their own language and constructing a secret code whose key is hard to find, also adding drawings and marvelous little pictures, attaching notes or enclosing them separately. They choose small and large formats, they use different inks and pens, having their own letter cases and small hand presses at home, as well as embossing machines for normal print and for Braille. They don’t use just paper but also bast, vellum, birch bark, silk, thin sheets of metal, and many other materials. Some use a stamped envelope with a return address and even include an empty sheet of paper for the convenience of the recipient, on which there is often a prepared response that the friend would have only to sign and return. What the content of the letters is can never be told. Both the general and the personal in lively exchange, sketches of nature or worries about love, homespun accounts and troubling questions, reprimands and confessions, requests and recommendations, familiar gossip and memory-laden reminiscences, essays on the everyday, trusted secrets, weather reports, business worries, announcements of happy or sad events, memories, nonsense, recipes, jokes, warm conversation, deep-seated fantasies — all of it makes up a vast and varied assortment.

So it goes, year in and year out. The urgency rises, matters get more pressing. Nonetheless, to this day not the least change has been made in this immense activity and its emotional costs, the marvel of which is difficult to express. Whoever considers it realizes that very little has changed, perhaps even nothing. Letters are written, but perhaps too few are written, or maybe too many, and it could be that one should never have begun writing them at all. You continually await a response, whether annoyed or undaunted, and sometimes you say aloud, “If only a single writer could get a single response, even if it was just a word, an empty page!” But, as experience tells us, you cannot expect that a response will ever come; the countries get larger, the borders are farther, the urgency rises tremendously, the desire for news persists bitterly into nothingness, while, at the same time, loneliness gets ever deeper and larger. It’s pointless, today more so than yesterday, and tomorrow likely more so than today, but this doesn’t keep cold humanity from waiting with determination and concentrated patience for the great miracle to occur.

Winter gets colder and longer each year. Now the assertion is casually made that the desire for a response increases with the cold, because it is believed that by attaining the longed-for relationship with one’s friends the ice age will pass. The letter writers are mistaken, but they cannot admit it to themselves or to one another, for they wish to live and affirm themselves, they want to survive and achieve something, they having persevered from generation to generation, which has encouraged them to think that eventually they will be saved. They sit at home in their lairs and wait to be called, dreaming of the day when they can leave behind the awareness of good and evil, and at last be able to say to the unknown familiar recipient of their letters, “Lord, where are you?” But, as long as the Lord does not answer, each person affirms each day the truth of the ancient legends — namely, that each letter is like that first attempted toss of a stone at a lost Paradise.

When I first wrote down this story it was not as clear, least of all to me. I had conceived it as an allegory of a general fate that certainly said something about my own disposition but was not particularly attached to it. Meanwhile, my relationship to this story had evolved. It had conveyed something about me, I had grown fond of it, and I’d learned something from it. There was a lot that was still missing from it, and that I had to accept without totally giving in to such judgment, for it was important not to let my efforts go to waste. To give in but not to give up — that’s what was needed. To slam into the wall as if it were not there, to flatter and play about with it, as if it would let itself be conquered, yet to acknowledge it and not doubt such knowledge of it, accepting that it’s pointless to do so and will probably always be pointless. To exit the most secret depths with great vigor, as if victory were assured, and let myself be battered and defeated, pushed back, back into the hidden recesses! To hope for nothing and then to invoke the wondrous as if what I had never dared hope were already guaranteed. To write letters but not to expect an answer, though not to waste one’s desires by the hour writing to false idols but, rather, only to make a plea out of a continually obsessed conscience, a plea directed at someone beyond all borders.

This I did not grasp when I first arrived in the metropolis. I had left the country of my home and my parents, and it was right to do so, for I didn’t belong there anymore, as everything there had been destroyed, everything that I loved and needed, it all giving nothing back to me but, on the contrary, taking much more away by shutting me out, and because I knew that it faced a coming perdition that I believed I did not have to partake in, or could prevent, since it was no longer my perdition, nor should it rob me of my success, dignity, and existence, myself craving the chance to gain these very items in order to live again. This alone was a mistake. I also didn’t want to search for anything in the areas bordered by the mountain woods but, rather, far away from the shadows cast by extermination, in order to find a way to break free, to live, to accomplish something. This I failed to do. Whether that was good or bad I had no idea back then. Only Johanna could see from the beginning how it was with me, but she hid it from me, for she wanted to spare me. She also did not share her views with others, as she was afraid to hurt me through such insinuations.

Besides, because of my aggressive behavior and my outwardly healthy look (one saw this in many who had survived the same conditions that I had experienced in the war), people believed in my vigor. However, because of this belief people found it easy not to be concerned with me at all. All one had to do was be nice to this Landau character, and that was all it took, for he didn’t really need any help. Those who first called themselves my friends, such as So-and-So and others in the country, pulled away from me more and more with each passing month. Some avoided me; others beat about the bush, put me off, or informed me that I really needed to learn the ropes, that I would first have to learn how things worked here, and that it would have been better if I had come over before the war or at least immediately after it. But if I was now in the country and wanted to stay there, then there was no way that I should stay in the metropolis, where it was too expensive and hectic, since people with even more talent and skills than myself could not make a go of it. Academics had to live in shameful conditions, or they carried on doing undignified jobs, so who was I to think that as a nonresident I could simply get a post as a sociologist?