More than anything, Uncle Hugo loved his cello. It was brown and shiny as a chestnut. It cracked once, and he was beside himself. And the only one who could mend it was Uncle Olov, who was good at anything that had to do with wood. But the sad part was that of all Grandpa and Grandma’s children, it was only Uncle Olov who didn’t believe in God. The other uncles could make a lot of noise about how they didn’t believe in God, but they carried on so dreadfully that it seemed to me that deep down they really did believe after all. But Uncle Olov just said nothing and looked embarrassed and went out to his woodworking shed. I don’t think it was easy for Uncle Hugo to take his cello out to the shed. But Uncle Olov fixed it perfectly and it was just as beautiful as ever.
One time Mama was really mad after morning prayers. Uncle Hugo had prayed for all of us as usual and given thanks for everything we’d been given in our spiritual lives – and then he went and gave thanks for everything Mama had been given in her material life!
I said to Karin, “Your papa doesn’t know a bloody thing about my mama!”
She just looked at me with her beautiful eyes and smiled as if she was forgiving me for saying something really stupid.
I admired Karin, enormously. When she sang harmony in the hymns, you just shivered with divine joy and sadness. She was like a bird from heaven above all the others, but she was afraid of wasps. One day a wasp came in during morning worship at breakfast and flew around her and Karin stopped singing and just went berserk. We were hearing about Job’s Afflictions that day, I remember. That wasp wasn’t the least bit interested in attacking Karin, he just wanted to find his way out, but she leaped up and started flailing her arms and screaming and spoiled the whole atmosphere completely. When the cousins saw Karin carrying on that way, they all started screaming themselves, and I started laughing so hard I was crying and had to leave the table. It still makes me laugh to think about it.
One day just when the sun was going down, Uncle Hugo took my hand and said we should take a walk in the meadow. In the middle of the meadow, under Grandpa’s huge birch tree that he planted a hundred years ago, we sat down in the grass and Uncle Hugo said, “How wonderfully peaceful. I’d like to have a little talk with you.” First he talked about Grace and then he started talking about Satan and said he was very sad for my sake. I had not understood that Satan’s minions were everywhere – a single wicked thought could bring them closer. “Closer and closer,” Uncle Hugo said. “In the evening before you go to sleep, they’re all around you, although you can’t see them. The only thing you can do then is pray. I would very much like to help you. Will you talk to me about these things?”
But I didn’t know what to say about them.
When evening came, I got under the quilt and told the minions, “Go away! Go away!”
Uncle Hugo was right. They really were everywhere.
3
Many years later I got to make my first trip abroad and stay with the Uncle Hugo and Aunt Elsa in Germany. Karin had grown even prettier and still more serious. Suddenly we had difficulty talking to each other, and I could see that made Aunt Elsa unhappy.
They lived in a very small city in the Rhine Valley. The city was surrounded by broad fields and meadows with groves of acacia here and there. A small, narrow, brown river wandered off toward the horizon. Every day we went to hear Uncle Hugo preach in the church hall, and it was always full. One time after his sermon he said that now we were going to pray for a dear guest who had come from a foreign country. “She has not been granted the grace of atonement. Let us pray for her.” And everyone bowed their heads in prayer and then looked at me. Afterwards I went to Aunt Elsa, and she said, “Don’t take it so seriously. He means well. He has so much love to give.”
So as not to make them unhappy, I would take long walks out of town when I wanted to smoke. Members of the congregation might have seen me otherwise and told people what I’d done. As I sat in the shade of an acacia’s delicate foliage, I could see that the landscape, in all its horizontal dreariness, was nevertheless beautiful, and I thought about Uncle Hugo, what an unusually virtuous person he was and how he was only trying to help people live slightly purer lives in accordance with God’s intentions. That is, if any human being can venture to say what God’s intentions are.
When I got back, I stopped in the doorway and burst out, “How nice it smells here – just like home!”
Aunt Elsa said, “It’s denatured alcohol. We’re washing windows.”
Just outside the town there was a very pretty little park-like wood. The trees were tall and old. Uncle Hugo and I walked there once through a greenish dusk shot through with shafts of sunlight. He was wearing his brown velvet coat and his white peaked cap.
“I love this wood,” he said. “It makes me feel so peaceful. It’s called Buchenwald, beech wood. I always come here when I’m having trouble with a sermon.” After a while, he went on. “My parishioners believe in me. But sometimes they come and ask why God couldn’t prevent some great misfortune or injustice. ‘It would be so easy for Him,’ they say.”
“And what do you tell them? That God’s ways are inscrutable?”
“More or less,” said Uncle Hugo sadly. “It isn’t always so easy.”
Sometimes we talked in his garden right behind the house. It was really a wonder. Small as it was, it had everything that great patience and a love of flowers could achieve.
“I learned from your grandfather,” he said. “Or maybe even more from the Japanese. You have to plan. You have to replace plants that have stopped blooming with the ones that are about to start, and colours are very important. You can’t have colours that don’t go together blossoming at the same time.”
“But they do,” I said. “Think of a meadow. Everything haphazard.”
And Uncle Hugo explained that we’re not to compete with God’s garden, where miracles occur, but if we indulge the whims of nature for even a moment, the harvest will be mostly weeds.
Uncle Hugo had one theme he often returned to, and that was the wise and the foolish virgins. And, one day as we were weeding the garden, he asked me if I could paint a picture of them for him, preferably together with Christ.
The picture grew very large and was very difficult to paint. Uncle Hugo came and looked at it now and then and said the virgins were going to be very fine and beautiful but “I don’t recognize Christ.”
I had thought to make Christ less gentle than he’s usually portrayed and capture some of his critical strength, the controlled violence I’ve always expected of him –but it didn’t turn out right. I moved him further and further away until he was almost nothing but a bright shape in the distance. I’d rubbed his face so hard and so often that it was all just rough and blurry.
Uncle Hugo shook his head and said, “I can see that you’re moving further and further from Jesus. You’re no Gotteskind, and if you’re not a friend of Christ’s, then you can’t paint His picture. But we’ll hang it up anyway.”
Karin’s room was a girl’s room all in white, surely unchanged from when she was little. Our beds stood against opposite walls and between them was a window with white curtains. You could see right out over Uncle Hugo’s garden. Somehow Karin didn’t fit in, although it was her room – something about her earnestness, her restless eyes. She read the Bible every night before going to sleep. One night she asked me if I believed in the absolute.
“How do you mean?” I said.
“To believe in one thing absolutely, the only path to salvation, giving up everything that might stand in your way. Everything.”
I didn’t know what to answer.
She came over and put her gold bracelet in my hand. “It was Grandma’s,” she said. “I like it too much and therefore I have to give it up. Believe me, I do it with joy, I’m relieved.” She looked at me with a kind of strict tenderness. Then she went back to her reading.
Aunt Elsa was disappointed in us. Maybe she thought friendship between us would liven up her long letters to a beloved
sister.
One day Aunt Elsa wanted me to go out for a walk with her, since it was such a beautiful day. She set off straight across the meadows, full of wild poppies. There was no breeze. It was hot. Aunt Elsa was wearing her dark glasses. She said nothing.
Only when we had left the town far behind did she ask me if I’d ever heard of secret microphones, listening devices. I answered that I’d heard of them, but surely there weren’t any such things in an ordinary parsonage?
She laughed at me and said, “He doesn’t believe in them. He won’t believe anything bad about his country. But the devil’s minions are everywhere.”
Aunt Elsa talked for a long time. It was like she was going to burst. Finally she said, “Give my love to my sister. Try to tell her all the things I don’t dare write to her. Now I have to get home to make lunch. Hugo eats far too little. He wears himself out with parish work.”
“But doesn’t he understand what’s happening?” I asked.
Aunt Elsa didn’t answer. It was way too hot, and I wasn’t yet accustomed to unhappy people. But it occurred to me that she needed to protect Uncle Hugo. Among other things, from her homesickness. And from becoming aware of the perilous borderlands of religion, which he was incapable of understanding.
Finally she said, “Have you talked to Karin? I mean do you two talk to each other? Do you understand each other?”
“Yes. Absolutely. I love her.”
“Is she happy? Is she calm?”
“Yes,” I said. “Utterly. Completely calm.”
The last night of my stay at the parsonage, Aunt Elsa came up to our room and put a bottle of red wine on the table. “Don’t tell him,” she said. “He wouldn’t understand.” Then she smiled and went back downstairs.
“How nice of her,” Karin said. “She wants us to enjoy ourselves.” Karin filled our glasses. “You don’t know,” she went on. “You don’t know. It comes like a waterfall, like music, you’re very close to the absolute and then it vanishes again. Mama doesn’t know, no one knows. All material things become superfluous, and you’re afraid.”
I asked cautiously, “But what are you planning to do with your life?”
Karin looked past me and said, “It’s a matter of loving, absolutely. First and foremost, God. And then your neighbour, your enemies, the smallest sparrow and blade of grass. Therefore”, she added, “I can’t afford and I don’t have time to love those who expect me to love them. I’m forced to give them up.”
“But who is your neighbour?” I said. “We’re just ordinary people, after all. We like you, I mean, your family, your friends, your best friend.”
Karin smiled and explained. “You don’t understand. I can honour them, I can honour you. You’re a gift that I’m grateful for, but not something to keep for myself.”
I didn’t understand, not then. I admired Karin as much as ever, but my feelings were confused.
The next morning, I went with Uncle Hugo and Aunt Elsa on his vacation to Switzerland, to Grindelwald, which they loved. From there I would travel on to Finland. Karin stayed at home. She stood on the steps and watched us leave, as serious as ever.
Grindelwald – that frightening landscape of craggy perils and fabricated idylls where the shadows come too early and there is no horizon …
We hiked off in a large group, higher and higher amidst the beauty of the wildflowers. Uncle Hugo had his alpenstock and his camera. He stopped often to take pictures, he changed his film, he took small detours – and suddenly he was gone. They searched for him, had worried discussions, time passed. Aunt Elsa sat on a rock, silent, unmoving, conveying her anxiety right through her dark glasses. I could see how much she loved Uncle Hugo.
When they finally found him, he was not even embarrassed, just happy as usual, and he smiled at everyone with his unnaturally white teeth. “A little adventure!” he said. “Now let us walk on through this glorious, openhearted world.”
We came to a little Alpine tarn. It mirrored the sky and lay like a little blue jewel among those dreadful crags. Aunt Elsa turned to me and finally spoke. “You know, that little tarn is so like him. That’s his very nature. Pure.”
On my very first trip I had made a vow – I would swim in every new body of water I came to, a river, a sea, a lake. But Alpine tarns are really a little too cold.
4
Many years passed once again, and then after the war Karin came to stay with me. She met my friends and everyone liked her. They were fascinated. “Are you really related?” they said. “She’s simply wonderful, and so calm and collected!”
Karin said very little. They didn’t realize they’d been introduced to a saint.
I now loved Karin without envy. I wanted to give her presents, anything she might need or want, but each time she had to go into the bathroom first and talk to God to see if she could accept the gift. There were some things she decided she could keep, but most of it had to be thrown into the sea. The things Karin liked most were quite literally thrown into the sea.
I asked about Uncle Hugo and Aunt Elsa, and Karin replied that she had given them up because she loved them too much. “I will give you up as well,” she said.
And then I knew that she loved me, but it was a sad kind of joy.
Electronic music had just begun to appear at that time – Pierre Schaeffer, Klaus Schulze – an abstract music of galactic desolation that enraptured me. I wanted Karin to hear it too, but I should never have played that record. I explained that this was a new thing they were experimenting with. “Now just listen to this,” I said. “It’s like the pulsing of the spheres in space. Don’t you think?”
“Quiet,” said Karin. “I’m listening.”
We listened together. The room seemed to throb electronically. Karin had gone pale and sat utterly motionless.
I jumped up to turn off the music but Karin yelled, “Don’t! This is important to me!”
I should have remembered this was the moment when Dante descended into the Underworld and was met by the cries of the lost souls.
“I know,” Karin said. “This is it. Now comes the voice of God.”
And it came. How could she have known!? A deep, sorrowful bass that cut through the music with incomprehensible words and vanished into the galaxy amidst the vibrations that finally lost themselves in silence.
“Forgive me …” I said. “You understand, this is a new kind of music they’ve just invented.”
“No,” said Karin calmly, “it has always existed. The lost souls are with us always, I know them. It’s like a grey wave – any time, any place, on the street, on the train – obliterating everything. They cry for help and we sink in sin, theirs and our own. Can you play it again?”
But I didn’t want to.
When I hugged her, she held me the way you protect and comfort a stranger who has injured or made a fool of himself.
When Karin had gone, the bathroom continued to be a sacred place for quite some time. Now and then I would go there to seek answers to the unanswerable questions.
A Trip to the Riviera
WHEN MAMA’S SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY approached, she made it known that gifts were unnecessary but that she did have one simple wish – to visit Barcelona in an effort to understand Gaudí’s architecture. She also wanted to visit the Riviera, specifically, Juan les Pins. And of course she wanted her daughter Lydia to come with her, since they were used to living together. But the journey must not cost too much.
Everyone explained that the Riviera was very expensive, but a dream is a dream and when dreams grow old, they grow strong.
The travel bureau reported that, unfortunately, they knew of no cheap hotels on the Riviera, in any case not in the vicinity of Juan les Pins, not even pre-season.
Friends and acquaintances made some calls. Mama’s ideas always amused them. And finally someone’s cousin came up with the address of a pension that was cheap if you were careful not to come during the season. It was owned by a certain Monsieur Bonel.
“Lydia,” said
Mama, “write that we’re interested but we want only one meal a day.” She had calculated that if they travelled third class and spent only one day in Barcelona and avoided all unnecessary expenses, they could manage well enough.
“Of course, Mama,” said Lydia and started looking for someone to cover for her at the library.
They began their trip by boat. Their friends stood on the quay and waved. Up on deck, Mama was clearly visible with her white hair and her large, light grey hat, broad-brimmed, strict, with a low crown – the very epitome of hatness. She hadn’t changed her headgear since 1912.
Everyone cheered and the boat pulled away.
At long last, Mama and her daughter arrived in Barcelona, where she spent the entire day admiring Gaudí.
“Lydia,” she said, “I don’t know a thing about architecture, but here we see the irrational in all its violent, headstrong glory. That’s sufficient. I don’t need to understand. By the way, I think I’ll buy a new hat, a toreador hat.”
It wasn’t easy to find the right size for her majestic topknot, but the hat was found and purchased, and now Mama was tired and wanted to sit down and have a cup of coffee. They went into a little café with only a couple of tables and a counter. The walls were decorated with bullfight posters. A number of older men stood talking at the bar. When Mama entered in her toreador hat, they turned and looked at her and the hat and expressed their appreciation in a quiet and respectful “Olé”. Someone set out a chair, but she preferred to stand. Each of the ladies was served a small glass of sherry. The café had gone quiet. Now one of the old men came up to Mama and lowered himself on one knee. She handed him her shawl.
Whereupon, his gaze fixed on hers, he performed the Bullfight, the ritual movements that precede and culminate in the death of the bull. His friends stood motionless in rapt attention, sometimes uttering a barely audible “Olé”. When the bull had been dispatched, Mama emptied her glass, thanked them all with a quick bow and someone opened the door.
“That was elegant.” Lydia said. “Where did you get the idea for the shawl? If only Papa could have seen it!”