Marianne Fritz - The Weight of Things

Not once did she manage to write out a text correctly, let alone form a complete sentence on her own. Little Berta and Rudolf vied for the title of most forgetful, recollected neither the Ten Commandments nor the name of their hometown; they even swore they didn’t know the name of the street where they played. If Berta lost patience, refused to believe her children’s confusion, and shouted out in desperation, “All right, out with it! How much is one plus one? You must at least still know that!” still she would get no more of an answer than the teacher had. Shrugged shoulders. Silence. Perhaps a meager “I don’t know.”

The result was that Berta herself came to doubt her children’s comprehension, and in spite of Wilhelm’s constant questions, was reduced to simply repeating: “Everything’s the same as always. What do you want me to say, Wilhelm? Everything’s as it was. That’s right. Yes. As you say.”

ANOTHER DREAM, WHICH GAVE HER MUCH TO THINK ABOUT

The night after the conversation with the teacher, Berta Schrei had another dream, which gave her much to think about. Little Berta was sitting at home with Rudolf; they were doing their homework. When the doorbell rang, Little Berta ran to the door, opened it, and a corpse was flung in at her feet, “The corpse! The corpse!” Little Berta screamed, “Rudolf, the corpse is here!” She walked in a circle around the corpse, and pointed at it as Rudolf ran over. The two children stared at each other, slapping their thighs with laughter, then dragged the corpse by its legs into the living room with their combined strength. They knelt down by it, stared at it, winked at one another, stood up, danced a “Ring Around the Rosie,” then knelt back down beside the corpse again. Hours passed, days, until hunger drove them out of the apartment; they walked from one house door to the other. Beggar children, imbeciles, with mindless hunger shining from their eyes.

In the dream Berta saw herself lying there, the corpse in the living room, saw her children on their journey, saw an edict tacked up to the notice board of the building: “Beggars, imbeciles, and maniacs are to be turned away from the door.” She saw her children at the trashcans, how they struggled with stray dogs over a bone. Once they’d rifled through the trashcans and waste heaps of Donaublau and crammed themselves full of whatever they found there, sometimes confusing an old scrap of fabric with a bit of food, they turned back to Allerseelengasse, saw a new edict tacked up on the notice board of building 13, collided with one another, giggled, danced a “Ring Around the Rosie,” and assured each other that they couldn’t read the edict’s words: “The corpse in question is not to be buried.”

Again and again, they danced their “Ring Around the Rosie” in front of the notice board, then with great hooting and giggling, madness in their eyes, the trashcan and waste-heap odors and scraps clinging to their bodies, they stormed up the stairs, once more to wait for hours, for days beside the corpse, until hunger drove them back out. They wandered like ghosts through the city of Donaublau, decrepit, dingy, feral creatures that everyone ignored, and in the face of whom everyone fled.

Hand in hand they skulked, stumbled, ran from door to door, from trashcan to trashcan, from waste heap to waste heap, later returning to their mother’s corpse, to slap their thighs with laughter, to yowl out dirges, to cry, to dance in a strangely disjointed manner, pausing once in a while to kneel down by the corpse, then staring off into space. And the dreaming Berta found it odd that no one came to bury her, to pull the children away from their deathwatch, or at least to beat them to death.

“Life as such. Life as such. Did you deny it?”

“Life as such. Life as such. Did you steal it?”

“The weight of things. The weight of things. Did you forget it?”

“The weight of things. The weight of things. Did you dream it?”

The dreaming Berta wanted to come to her corpse’s aid, to close Rudolf’s and Little Berta’s mouths, but scream as her body might, it was voiceless. The strain only made something crack in her head. The children could see clearly how the corpse had begun bleeding from its eyes, nose, and ears. They pointed at it with their spindly fingers, giggled, and chanted their song more ghoulishly and boisterously than ever.

“Life as such. Life as such. Did you deny it?”

“Life as such. Life as such. Did you steal it?”

“The weight of things. The weight of things. Did you forget it?”

“The weight of things. The weight of things. Did you dream it?”

And at that they returned to dancing in their strangely disjointed manner.

“Soon they’ll come to lock away the corpse! Soon they’ll come and seal up the apartment! Rudolf! Berta! This living room will become a coffin! Rudolf! Berta! This apartment will become a grave!”

Wilhelm came, along with the work crew who’d been employed to seal off apartment 12 in building 13 on Allerseelengasse, to keep the stench of rot inside.

Wilhelm signaled for Berta’s brood to go with him; they shook their heads no; Wilhelm thought a while and decided: “When I return from Felsenstein, I’ll pick you up. In the meantime, Berta will look after you.”

The voiceless Berta screamed, “I’m not Berta! Wilhelm! I’m only the corpse! The corpse in question is me! Take the children with you!”

The children were nailed inside the apartment with the corpse in question. As their tomb was quite generously proportioned, with numerous burial chambers, it didn’t occur to the children at first that they’d been buried alive. With time, though, the madness of hunger began to ravage the children’s brains; they began to circle the corpse; the madness of hunger tore their jaws open wide. For long days their hunger encouraged them, before they finally wedged their spindly fingers into their mother’s rotting flesh and gnawed down to her bones.

The children’s skin slowly dried out until they looked more like prunes than people, walked crablike on all fours, howled indecipherable sounds and pounced on one another. When Wilhelm finally knocked at the door, they could no longer speak or stand upright. That noise, the uproar from inside the tomb, the scraping and the scratching, couldn’t possibly come from his children. Dumbfounded, Wilhelm asked himself whether a corpse could become restless in its grave, but he was probably just exhausted, he thought, and so it was best to assume he hadn’t actually heard anything.

“Odd. I could have sworn they were in there,” he mused, shaking his head, consoled by the thought that there was, after all, far more to the world than an average citizen like himself could ever imagine.

He walked downstairs, exited the building, more bemused than unsettled, more soothed than perturbed, more concerned with his duties as chauffeur and Come-hither-boy than with the strange goings-on in the thirteenth building on a small street in the city of Donaublau.

WILHELM MAY SOON COME BACK

Nightmares of this sort hacked away at Berta Schrei’s evenings, poisoning her sleep and weakening her defenses against the weight of things, making it harder and harder to make peace somehow with life as such and survive for the time that remained until Wilhelm’s return from Felsenstein. She chose not to tell Wilhelm about her nightmares over the phone; in view of their regularity, they were hardly news. And what Wilhelm wanted to know was news, not her day-to-day.

And though she had been yearning for weeks now for Wilhelm’s return, with ever-mounting intensity, yet she had also thought it better not to mention her yearning.

Instead, she set down the receiver each time hoping quietly that Wilhelm might come home soon, and that he would be able to explain to Little Berta how her transfer at school was of hardly any significance in her life to come, and to explain to her — to Berta — how to help her children put up with their benighted existence, and how she herself might maneuver through the leafless season that was ineluctably approaching.