Gerda Baehr

I lie here and think of you. Or perhaps I’m just dreaming of you; it makes no difference. I know that today is Sunday, because there’s a lot of activity up above. Before, on Sundays, we would sometimes stay in bed; we would make love and then just lie quietly. Long before that, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to have so much fun with a fat man. We didn’t spend all day in bed, of course. No one does that. But outdoors was nice as well. A Sunday without you was incomplete. Making love with you, then lying beside you, in bed, in the grass, in the snow. That was everything.

K. P. Lindow

A little boy is sitting in front of his radio in the garden. He hears a song and starts to cry. He whimpers and sobs. Not because the song is so sad. He whimpers and sobs because it will soon be over.

It’s summer. Wasps are coming into the house. They’ve hatched too early, and dozens of them buzz about the room, above the table, at the window, before dying. My mother sweeps them into her little dustpan; my father climbs onto the garage roof to look for the nest. He wants to smoke it out. I liked the wasps. I wasn’t afraid that one of them might sting. I was afraid of other things. To me, the wasps were innocent. They were angels, now small and curled and dead and trickling into my mother’s dustpan.

Collected: stones, little lumps of sulphur, milk teeth, snail shells, bits of dirt, pictures of nude women, dead people’s names, rubber bands (all colours except red), corkscrews, beer mats, stamps, spectacle lenses, swearwords, revenge fantasies.

Revenge fantasies: discover my parents’ secrets and circulate them by way of anonymous letters. Stretch a thin wire across Marktstrasse to decapitate my maths teacher as he cycles past. Blow up various buildings. Win her back, only to leave her again. Self-­immolation on the town hall square. Gouge out Father’s eyes. Hack Mother to pieces. Renounce revenge, thereby shaming the enemy with goodness and generosity and leaving him in a swamp of his own villainy.

My hands, small, soft, pink balls, strike the carpet. Then the building blocks. The fire station. All of it must be destroyed. All of it must dissolve in my hot, wet, bubbling anger. My hands do what I want. They strike the grown-­ups’ words dead before they can reach my ears. They are my friends, the only ones I have.

The same hands (are they really the same?), seventy years on. I stare at them, the blotches, the wrinkles, the hairs, the scars. What happened? They lie on a yellow plastic tablecloth, fingers intertwined like gnarled roots. Praying came to them after all, with age. Or rather, pleading. Please give me. Please let me. Please grant me. Please. Please!

Gradually, imperceptibly, the longing for first times transforms into hoping for last ones.

All those plastic tablecloths. In the attic. In the garden. In school. In the back room. In the common room. In the guest house. At the neighbours’. At the police station. At the fire station. At everyone else’s house. In the hospital. In the quiet room. In the basement.