The Death of
Walter Bernd
F
or an hour Bernd murmured gibberish. Then he went silent and Volkheimer said, “God, have
mercy on your servant.” But now Bernd sits up and calls for light. They feed him the last of the
water in the first canteen. A single thread of it runs down through his whiskers and Werner watches
it go.
Bernd sits in the glimmer of the field light and looks from Volkheimer to Werner. “On leave last
year,” he says, “I visited my father. He was old; he was old all my life. But now he seemed
especially old. It took him forever just to cross his kitchen.
He had a package of cookies, little
almond cookies. He put them out on a plate, just the package lying crosswise. Neither of us ate any.
He said, ‘You don’t have to stay. I’d like you to stay, but you don’t have to. You probably have
things to do. You can go off with your friends if you want to.’ He kept saying that.”
Volkheimer
switches off the light, and Werner apprehends something excruciating held at bay
there in the darkness.
“I left,” says Bernd. “I went down the stairs and into the street. I had nowhere to go. Nobody to
see. I didn’t have any friends in that town. I had ridden trains all goddamn day to see him. But I
left, just like that.”
Then he’s quiet. Volkheimer repositions him on the floor with Werner’s blanket over him, and
not long afterward, Bernd dies.
Werner works on the radio. Maybe he does it for Jutta, as Volkheimer suggested, or maybe he
does it so he does not have to think about Volkheimer carrying Bernd into a corner and piling
bricks onto his hands, his chest, his face. Werner holds the field light in his mouth and gathers what
he can: a small hammer, three jars of screws, eighteen-gauge line cord from a shattered desk lamp.
Inside a warped cabinet drawer, miraculously, he discovers a zinc-carbon eleven-volt battery with
a black cat printed on the side.
An American battery, its slogan offering nine lives. Werner
spotlights it in the flickering orange glow, amazed. He checks its terminals. Still plenty of charge.
When the field light battery dies, he thinks, we’ll have this.
He rights the capsized table. Sets the crushed transceiver on top. Werner does not yet believe
there is much promise in it, but maybe it’s enough to give the mind something to do, a problem to
solve. He adjusts Volkheimer’s light in his teeth. Tries not to think about hunger or thirst, the
stoppered void in his left ear, Bernd in the corner, the Austrians upstairs, Frederick, Frau Elena,
Jutta, any of it.
Antenna. Tuner. Capacitor. His mind, while he works, is almost quiet, almost calm. This is an
act of memory.
Sixth-floor Bedroom
V
on Rumpel limps through the rooms with their faded white moldings and ancient kerosene lamps
and embroidered curtains and belle époque mirrors and ships in glass
bottles and push-button
electrical switches, all dead. Faint twilight angles through smoke and shutter slats in hazy red
stripes.
Temple to the Second Empire, this house. A bathtub three-quarters full of cold water on the third
floor. Deeply cluttered rooms on the fourth. No dollhouses yet. He climbs to the fifth floor,
sweating. Worrying he got everything wrong. The weight in his gut swings pendulously. Here’s a
large ornate room crammed with trinkets and crates and books and mechanical parts. A desk, a
bed, a divan, three windows on each side. No model.
To the sixth floor. On the left, a tidy bedroom with a single window and long curtains. A boy’s
cap hangs on the wall; at the back looms a massive wardrobe, mothballed shirts hung inside.
Back to the landing. Here’s
a little water closet, the toilet full of urine. Beyond it, a final
bedroom. Seashells are lined along every available surface, shells on the sills and on the dresser
and jars full of pebbles lined up on the floor, all arranged by some indiscernible system, and here,
here! Here on the floor at the foot of the bed sits what he has been searching for, a wooden model
of the city, nestled like a gift. As big as a dining table. Brimming with tiny houses. Except for
flakes
of plaster in its streets, the little city is entirely undamaged. The simulacrum now more
whole than the original. A work of clear magnificence.
In the daughter’s room. For her. Of course.
Von Rumpel feels as if he has come triumphantly to the end of a long journey, and as he sits on
the edge of the bed, twin flares of pain riding up from his groin, he
has the curious sensation of
having been here before, of having lived in a room like this, slept in a lumpy bed like this,
collected polished stones and arrayed them like this. As though somehow this whole set has been
waiting for his return.
He thinks of his own daughters, how much they would love to see a city on a table. His youngest
would want him to kneel beside her.
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