Marianne Fritz - The Weight of Things

Berta nodded, and as the nurse laid the chain hastily around her neck, Berta let it vanish inside her institution uniform and stared at nurse Franzi with a look that seemed desperate for approval. Querbalkner nodded her head several times, impressed, and then squeezed Berta’s hand approvingly before stepping away from Ward 66. For the rest of that day Nurse Franziska felt like a person who’s accomplished the impossible, while Berta Schrei rushed to have herself blessed by the Wise Little Mother, not just once, but several times.

Wilhelm smiled when Berta held out the tiny Madonna trinket to him; her face looked almost shrewd. It struck him then that sometimes a certain unfamiliar pressure in the stomach region could be more dangerous than the most excruciating cramps. Stomach cancer, for example, did not necessarily announce its treachery in the body with great fanfare; in fact it was inclined to do quite the opposite. He had read that or else heard it somewhere, sometime.

“I’ll visit you more often from now on. You know that it’s your birthday today, right? I have a feeling this could be a new beginning.”

Wilhelm believed what he was saying, and Berta stopped twirling the Madonna back and forth between her fingers. She strained to hear his voice, which reached her ears like the song of the Lorelei calling out to the fishermen. Berta thought she could smell the beguiling odor of the roses creeping up into her nostrils, and Wilhelm’s voice and Wilhelm’s proximity turned time backward.

THE BOAT TRIP

Berta was walking to the lake behind Wilhelm; the children were up ahead; there were summer blossoms for the eyes and rich aromas for the nose. Overcome by the opulence of the vegetation, Berta’s doubting and brooding compulsion seemed to be swept away, and she thought to herself:

“I am a blank slate.”

All around, the vibrant green was like a broad canvas upon which an exuberant painter had daubed generous swaths of color, as though his feelings and his passion for these many shades of green were not the least bit limited by the price of paint. To the children’s delight, when they’d made it to the shore, Wilhelm coughed up the fare for the boat trip without any “ifs” or “buts,” any “on-the-one-hands” or “on-the-others”! To Berta’s delight, he even launched the boat without any “ifs” or “buts,” “on-the-one-hands” or “on-the-others.” The children were happy! Berta was happy! Wilhelm looked at Berta again with the eyes of Private First Class Rudolf, with the eyes of Wilhelm the returnee.

But soon they began to cry, Little Rudolf first and then Little Berta, and the children tendered their own “ifs” and “buts,” their own “on-the-one-hands” and “on-the-others.” They began by calling the boat trip into question, and ended by declaring it a torment. Rudolf, the little scamp, let it be tearfully known that he wished only to lie flat on the bottom of the boat, then stood up from his seat to get ready to do so, and stumbled. Nor was there time to consider the cause of his stumbling, for he instantly plunged into the water — a dire situation indeed, since, like his mother, Rudolph could not swim. He would likely have drowned had Berta not dove into the water to snatch the scamp by a tuft of hair, thus startling — at last — the clueless Wilhelm into a demonstration of his swimming prowess.

With characteristically laggard urgency, Wilhelm saw what was happening and dove to rescue the two of them, neither of whom would have been there to rescue even a moment later. Eventually the Schrei family made it back into the boat, hurt, coughing, disconcerted, and one lesson the wiser. All Berta’s anxieties about herself, which had been growing over the course of the year, were confirmed once again. Their lovely outings inevitably ended with her and the children embroiled in some catastrophe that Wilhelm somehow always knew how to fix.

They had christened their new car with this excursion to the lake. Whereas on the drive there Berta had been proud to sit beside Wilhelm, on the way home she cowered in the back, her right arm around Little Berta, her left arm around Little Rudolf, both of them cuddled up to their maker, as if they wanted to crawl back inside her and resume their places there.

Berta contemplated the boy’s profile. Rudolf drowsed, the corner of his mouth tending softly downward. She didn’t need to lean over to know that the other corner of his mouth was likewise tending downward and that two steep wrinkles of displeasure were etched between his brows, and this knowledge triggered the same sensation that always beset her in late autumn, when she would lose herself staring at the barren branches of the trees that writhed so strangely toward the heavens, giving an impression of such extraordinary muteness that even the din of the city seemed to die away, and she would strain her ears, then, listening only for a scream. A scream always bored into Berta like a bark beetle through wood before finally, freed from the clutches of decay and death, it would echo off into the sky. Berta was afraid of late autumn, which she used to call the leafless season, and felt relieved, in a certain way heartened, when the first snowfall came, bringing with it the perennial hope that the bare branches, writhing strangely heavenward, would soon be covered by a blanket of ice.

Little Rudolf slept more fitfully than Little Berta. Eight-year-old Berta slid into sleep like the Madonna herself — who occupied her proper place over the marital bed in the Schrei bedroom, in a painting with a ponderous gilded frame: the Madonna with the Christ child. The Madonna’s face had long troubled Berta. In all the time she’d looked at it, not a single wrinkle had ever crossed the Madonna’s face. Why should it be free from even the slightest trace of life’s hands, their pounding and molding? The Madonna seemed untouched by those thick fingers, their rolling, pressing, flattening — untouched, that is, by daily life, by the weight of the earth itself, or by the weight of those circumstances that Berta referred to, simply, as life as such.

“Inwardness. Inwardness is what eludes me. I’m too caught up in the world, too concerned with surfaces …” Thus Berta often rebuked herself, and frequently and sincerely tormented herself, trying to get at something, the thing she could never quite reach, the truly inward gaze.

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS RUDOLF

In February of 1945, Berta experienced a moment of freedom from the weight of things, in particular from that weighty circumstance historians call the Second World War. The thirty-one-year-old Private First Class Rudolf was standing at the window, staring out, his elbows propped on the window frame, his head buried in his hands, which were frozen from the cold, and saying to her, “You’d be better off out in the countryside.”

Berta, standing at a prim distance from Rudolf, shrugged her shoulders and replied, “I can’t leave Mama alone, and Mama won’t budge from this street. ‘I’ve grown old here, I’m staying here,’ she says.”

“And Wastl? What about Wastl?”

“His last deployment was supposed to be in mid-January, in Grajewo.”

“And the twins?”

“Nothing. Not from Richard, anyway.”

Private First Class Rudolf stood up straight, tore his eyes from the wreckage of the houses on the opposite side of the street, and turned to face Berta. “So. Nothing new.”

Berta shook her head in confirmation.

“But Karl?”

“In the field hospital in Castelfranco, somewhere near Modena. And you?”

“Back to Denmark. For the time being.”

“So. So.”

“And the old gravedigger?”

Berta shrugged. Rudolf laid his hands on her shoulders. She turned away and her body grew stiff. Rudolf let his hands fall, stood slouching for a moment in front of her, then turned and walked toward the dresser, in the top drawer of which lay his fiddle, which he’d left in Berta’s hands before he set off for duty with the words: “Until the war is over!”