While my father was dying—and it took him a long time to die, a whole week—there was an earthquake somewhere in India, on the other side of the globe, or so the television said. While my father was dying, a magpie flew into our attic, and my grandmother and my older brother tried to catch it with a butterfly net (one of the tools of my father’s many abandoned hobbies), and my mother got agitated because she was afraid the bird would destroy the net. As I stood at the foot of the ladder to the attic, listening to the terrified bird rustling and fluttering, I thought about the CB radio that used to be completely irrelevant to me because what I wanted was an Amiga 1200 computer, and wondered whether the CB would go to me or to my cousin after my father died, since my cousin had shown more enthusiasm about this newest hobby of my father’s than I had.
While my father was dying, it was my little sister’s birthday but she refused with all her might to shut her eyes, make a wish, and blow out the candles on her birthday cake, as if she were afraid that her breath might blow my father out, as if she knew that her wish, if she made it, would not come true.
While my father was dying, I sat on his bed, tired out from sleepless nights and from his labored breath that echoed through the house, its struggle a last, mechanical remnant of hope, and I considered how my father’s consciousness had changed into this new speechless consciousness which was like sinking into a marsh, a falling and a leave-taking, an imprisonment that was just about over, from which he couldn’t reach me or understand me any longer.
Four days earlier, I’d spoken with him for the last time. “Father wants to see you,” my mother had told me, and told me not to contradict him, no matter what he asked. So I went into the darkened room, this room washed in his breath, this room that smelled of sweat and vomit. He opened his eyes, but didn’t move. I was ashamed because I felt like choking, but then I caught his eye, and he waved me to come closer. “Papa,” I said, near tears, but he smiled, and I was ashamed to cry. I was ashamed because crying would have shown that I had no hope. And he grabbed me by the sleeve and smiled again, and pulled so long on my sweater that my ear was finally next to his mouth, and he said, “Whakatane.” And then he looked at me as if he had reminded me of some great secret we shared, took my hand, and gripped it so hard that it almost hurt. Even though I didn’t know what he meant, I smiled back and lied and acted like I understood him. “Whakatane,” he said, with a gentle voice again, and smiled in closing, and his grip grew weaker, and then, firmly, as firmly as I could, I held his hand, but then he began to die and didn’t say another word. And I left, after my mother sent me away, and went to his study and opened the last volume of the Brockhaus Encylopedia and read, “Whakatane: city and region of New Zealand, 33,400 inhabitants.” And I read that the landmass on the eastern Bay of Plenty was broad and sunlit, and that in many parts of New Zealand there are ten times more sheep than men.
That was the day that my little sister broke her talking doll’s arm off in a rage, and that my brother was brought home by the police for shoplifting condoms from a supermarket, twenty packs he’d hidden in his schoolbag. When the policeman, smiling a little, presented the booty to my mother—saying he’d never seen anything like this in all his years of duty—my mother looked at him silently for a few seconds, and then suddenly started screaming at him for his tactlessness, and hitting him, until he fled without the swag. He never dared come back. My mother slapped my brother in the face, and took a bottle of vodka that was also a part of his loot from his bag. She went to the living room and sat on the couch, and after drinking half the bottle, she started saying that now everything was going to fall apart, and he, up in his room, was to blame, because he had allowed himself to leave her all alone, and she hated him for it and she didn’t care if he did get lost, and maybe it was better if he would just disappear already. And then she cried, I suppose; we couldn’t know for sure anymore because we had sought refuge in the basement, where we played loud music, and my brother let the model train run in circles so long and so fast that it finally went off the tracks and ran over a cow and a train worker.
When my mother came to get us after two hours, she was completely sober. She helped my sister glue her doll’s arm back on with airplane cement, so she wouldn’t feel guilty that he was going. But from then on, the doll could never move that arm again, and her voice, which continually said “Mama” and “Papa” sounded somehow different from before. And because everything was so strange and everything in life’s usual order had lost its thread, my brother and I went back down to the basement with the glue that my mother had left on the kitchen table, and huffed a third of it, until everything was spinning and we lay on the floor with limp arms and legs, light as a feather, drifting above the clouds, simply floating above the earth, until it was very dark and we reached the universe.
In the afternoon, my cousin came to use the CB radio in my father’s study to contact the son of a vintner on the Moselle River—who insisted, however, that he lived on Mars—and gave me a bar of chocolate that my aunt had given him to give me. He said that I would probably spend a couple of days with him and his parents next week, and I said, “Sure,” and ran out to the garden, under the pear tree, where the birds had gathered in a thick, dark knot between the leaves. They chattered so loudly and so saucily, and each one answered back the other, only I understood nothing. “Your father has to die,” I heard my grandmother say, “because everyone must die, sooner or later, and you must be strong and help your mother.” And I asked myself who “everyone” was, and whether an exception could be made, at least once, but I said to my grandmother, “Sure.”
The sunlight flashed in the window of my father’s room and the birds quit chattering because they had finished making their arrangements, and everything was so silent that I thought I could hear the smoke rising up the chimney of our house.
On the second day, we picked up my older sister from the train station, along with her boyfriend, who was swearing because his portable phone, which he carried on a hook with him, could get no signal in this “godforsaken” district, and my sister looked at him angrily, and we all kept quiet for the rest of the journey home, so quiet that you could hear the wheels thudding over the cobblestones. My sister finally asked how Father was doing today, but my mother shook her head.
When we arrived, the preacher was waiting by the door, because my grandmother wouldn’t let him in the house, because his predecessor, fifty years earlier, hadn’t intervened when the Nazis threw her first love, a Social Democrat, into a concentration camp for eight months, where he got such a severe lung inflammation that he died three years after the war. Because of the rampant man shortage, my grandmother had to marry my grandfather.
All the same, all of us stood around the bed, except my grandmother, as the preacher blessed my father with heavy hands. It looked to me as if he were trying to transform him into something that he would become in the afterlife, when he was buried in the earth of the cemetery and eaten by worms. For some reason I began to imagine the worms dancing and making music, with my sister’s worm-faced boyfriend as the conductor, and dancing worms with short skirts as backup, and I had to struggle to keep myself from laughing, also I then started to think about how long it would take the worms to journey through the preacher’s thick belly, once he was in his grave. I had to go to the bathroom so badly that I nearly wet my pants, and when my sister’s boyfriend’s portable phone rang shrilly in the next room—the signal suddenly kicked in—I took advantage of the situation and quickly disappeared.
At dinner, when my mother said grace for the first time since my first communion, my grandmother left the table without a word. My sister was sent after her with her dinner, and then nobody was left at the table who wanted to talk, so my mother talked with my sister’s boyfriend, who worked in computers and explained how, for the computer, the world is resolved into ones and zeros. And even though he started talking about the Amiga 1200, I wanted to plug my ears, first because he casually mentioned that he was thinking of marrying my sister, and then because he said that, through love, two ones could come together out of zero and, he added, grinning, maybe even three or four.
In the night, muffled groans came from the room my sister grew up in; my future in-law couldn’t restrain himself from ripping my sister’s clothes off, even with my father lying two walls away in his own piss, so that my mother had to change the sheets. And I started thinking about how I had been conceived, fourteen years earlier, in that darkened room for the dying, conceived out of a part of my mother and a part of my father. I imagined how they watched me grow in her body, how they watched me get bigger, and how they tried to amass tangible evidence of my growing and my development with a compact camera, and then I imagined ripping up all of the pictures, these proofs of my existence, making everything go backward, and shrinking back into myself and back into my mother’s body, so that I would never have begun, and then retreating back into my father’s semen, transforming backwards, simply to make sure that I was never there, that I had never existed, and then my father could live longer.
As it got quieter in the house later, I couldn’t sleep, and I went out to the porch with a glass of water. My sister was sitting on a beat-up, rusty garden chair in a T-Shirt, shivering and smoking a cigarette, and I sat on the other chair. We stayed quiet in the dark until I couldn’t stand the silence anymore, and, just to have something to say, asked: “Do you really want to marry him?” She blinked as if she’d woken from a dream, looked at me, and said: “I love him.” And I asked, “A lot?” And she showed me with her fingers how much—two thumbs wide—smiled, and said, “A little bit, like this.” She was silent for a while, as if reconsidering, then said, “But it’s enough!” And although I didn’t want to hurt my sister’s boyfriend, and doubted that she was telling the truth, I could see, on this night, that maybe it was necessary to love somebody, just to not be alone.
On the third day, all four aunts came to do their vigil, and to say good-bye to their brother. The pack of boy and girl cousins rolled in too, in full occupation mode, and set up a howling throughout the house that bothered me, and then I couldn’t cry anymore. Since I didn’t want to go check out the CB radio with my cousin, I hid in the hallway and listened to my aunts making plans about who should help my mother, who should deal with the funeral, who had to write the death announcement, and the invitation, and what should be on the wreath, until the youngest aunt lost it and shouted at them, “He’s not dead yet!” Then my favorite cousin came rocketing down the steps and rushed past me with shining eyes, saying that he’d spoken to Australia, and ripped the door open and told the aunts about it, and everyone was cheered up by the connection and by the spirit in his eyes. But I knew he was lying, and I told him straight to his face that the signal range was not more than a hundred kilometers—broad enough to reach the crappy wine grower’s son from Mars, but no way could it reach Australia.
While my father was dying, my mother washed mountains of bed linen, you’d see her many times a day carrying the laundry basket from the second floor down the narrow stairs to the basement, because my father couldn’t bear to sweat, even when he couldn’t speak. And the boy cousins and the girl cousins, who stood stupidly in the way, were given orders to play with me and my brother and sister, and they fell on us like hawks, reluctantly giving us model cars and records, until it felt like it was some kind of contest. My oldest cousin, like holy Saint Martin, shared with us in the garden his very first pack of cigarettes, which he’d got in exchange for a copy of Playboy that he’d found under the user’s manuals for the television, washing machine, and deep fryer in our uncle’s workshop. My brother asked if my uncle might have another one in his workshop, but we didn’t pursue it further, because my cousin lit the cigarettes and I started coughing pretty hard. My brother and the cousin laughed, hidden behind the young cousins, who were watching out to make sure that no grown-ups saw us, and we breathed the smoke into the cold air, and watched the exhalations slowly dissolve under the pear tree.
And suddenly, we felt so old, even older than the pear tree, as if we had been there forever, also because my cousin had an overpoweringly natural way of sticking the cigarette in his mouth. I couldn’t imagine that anything in this world could ever disappear or cease to be. Not us, not the pear tree, not the birdhouse where the family of chaffinches spent the winter, and not the swing, on which my youngest cousin was soaring, thrusting her legs deep into the sky.
Then my little sister, who was playing in the sandbox, started to scream because sand had got into her doll’s eyes and they wouldn’t open anymore, and that seemed much more terrible to her than the immobile arm did, because a doll who can’t open her eyes can’t cry. She screamed for a long time, until my brother took a match and pried open both the eyes by force, and then my sister calmed down, even when it turned out the eyes wouldn’t close. “Now she can’t sleep anymore,” said one of my girl cousins, but my sister shrugged her shoulders and ran into the living room, where the aunts were serving a strawberry-cream torte, and the afternoon visitors’ coffee orgy was in session, presided over by my grandmother, who was talking once again about the War and about her great, first love, until nobody spoke anymore, and everyone just stirred sugar into their cups.
And then I brought up the time when a butterfly flew into the room, such a beautiful and colorful one that my father—who changed hobbies every two weeks, and who never kept one up in earnest for more than a month—simply let it fly away because it would have been a crime to trap those beautiful folds in a net, and run a stickpin through its body, and spread it like Christ on the board in the living room, with its wings outstretched. And the butterfly came to rest on my grandmother’s nose, batted its wings so that she sneezed. And everyone—Mother, my sisters, the aunts, and the pack of girl and boy cousins—began to laugh wholeheartedly, unburdened, and at last my grandmother did too.
In the evening, as all the relatives left the house, we were all so fiercely and ardently hugged and kissed that you would think everyone was embarking on a long, dangerous sea journey, or joining a war against an invincible foe, and that we knew that on the next day, we would be setting out again. Then it was quiet, until a screech came from the living room, where my sister’s boyfriend was swearing as he tried to listen to the messages on his office machine before going on to conduct some all-important phone conference with some checked-tie–wearing scientist in America. Afterwards he pressed a hundred-mark bill into my grandmother’s hand.
My grandmother looked at my sister appreciatively, and praised her boyfriend’s correctness and his industriousness. Only my brother was angry, because the telephone line had been busy for over an hour, and he had been supposed to have his first date ever with a girl, and things had been planned in minute detail for three weeks, but because of the extraordinary situation and my grandmother’s advice, he needed to call it off. All the same, the girl turned up, indignant, and complained that he hadn’t met her at the church fair by the teddy-bear and chocolate-heart shooting gallery as they had planned, and it became clear to me that his weeklong training with Father’s air rifle in the garden had been for nothing.
My brother went with her out to the pear tree, and I listened from the porch as he told her that our father was dying and that’s why he hadn’t come, and the girl put her arms around him, but it was as if she were hugging a block of wood. She asked if she should stay with him, but my brother said only, “Not necessary,” and sent her away. Then he took a cigarette out of the pack that our cousin had left, and lit it, and night had fallen, and the ember danced in the dark like a firefly.
Once everyone was in bed and acting like they were asleep, I slipped into my father’s study and turned on the CB radio. For a long time, there was only noise and no other sound but the breathing of the sleepers as I listened in the night. Then a man named Helmut came on, saying, “Snowman calling Anchor, come in, Anchor!” and promptly someone named Annett responded, and he said how nice their visit to the firemen’s chapel concert had been the previous week, and she breathed, “Very nice,” and suddenly there was just noise again as the two of them fell over their microphones and fell asleep. Later a drunk complained about his wife, who had apparently been up to something with the butcher’s assistant in the forest, but nobody responded to him, and then the radio hummed and shrilled and sighed until two guys got on who discussed the horsepower and cylinder capacity of a used Honda that one of them had bought with money that his father, who had divorced his mother and lived abroad, had given him as a present when he finished his high school exams. And then the noise returned, and I thought about who would give me something when I finished my high school exams, and whether, in the present circumstances, I should even continue going to school.
At some point I picked up the microphone, but I didn’t know my father’s handle, so I just said “Hello.” Nobody bothered to answer, so I tried again, and went on: “Whakatane calling everyone! Whakatane calling everyone!” For a while it was silent, then the loudspeaker crackled and a woman answered and cheerfully asked how the weather was in New Zealand. After a short pause I said, “Excellent. Sixty degrees, sunny, with a gentle wind from the west!” She asked how the sheep rearing was going, and I told her about a black lamb that had been born. We spoke like this for more than half an hour, and I told her about our farm and about the kangaroos that had hopped over to New Zealand from Australia, until she finally asked if I didn’t want to come to the German CBers convention next year in Hanover. I said that I couldn’t afford a flight to Germany because of the new hay thresher we’d had to buy, and the little lambs had to be raised, and that anyway, I would never come home again if I went, and then she laughed, and didn’t stop laughing until I became furious and hurled the microphone against the wall and flipped the radio dial till it just made a shrill chirping sound, then finally nothing more. All at once it was quieter than it had ever been in my life, and I thought to myself that a person should know all of his father’s names and faces, the ones he used in the past and the ones that await him in the future like blurred shadows—but I didn’t know them.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, my father died. From eight in the morning, he hadn’t moved from his position on his back, he lay with his eyes wide open, his mouth contorted from the strain of drawing breath. Everyone sat around him on the bed, and it was like in the stable at Bethlehem, only all switched around. This was the day that we heard the magpie in the attic, flying into the walls again and again, panicked, helpless. We had to freeze my sister’s birthday cake, because nobody had any appetite. On the other side of the world, there was an earthquake, but where we were, there was just the sound of the church bell, tolling four times, and I noticed ants crawling into the room through a tiny opening in the floor. Important men signed a treaty on an island, and an Italian pizza-baker rolled out the longest noodle in the world and made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. My mother did not speak a word for three days, she simply sat, amid the cluster of aunts, who swirled around her like a team of generals, organizing my father’s exit.
Four days later, as my father was being buried, firemen in the rescue operation on the other side of the world found a young woman under the wreckage of a house, alive, with a pair of two-year-old twins. The little girl survived the earthquake, but the boy had been hit by a rock, he died the next day.
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