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.Her son was going to a private school where there were no black children, and he didn’t play with any at home either.That morning I had heard an interview on the radio with a black cook.She was very old now and had worked for a long time for the Rockefeller family, and later for the family of an eminent politician who was apparently involved in a case of fraud.She was asked if she had known anything about that, or if they had talked about it among themselves in the kitchen.Oh, no! she said, very surprised at the question.We had too much to do.Cooking three meals a day! It wasn’t easy.Hmm, Peter Gutman said.Classless society.He had shown up again at my door one night with as harmless a look on his face as he could manage.May I? he asked.He was curious about what I was writing.I handed him a couple of pages.It was the answer to a friend’s letter, a kind of self-analysis.He read it for a long time, too long I thought, and said nothing.We drank the wine he had brought and ate crackers.As you know, Peter Gutman said after a while, I have a telephone relationship.And what does she have to say at the moment?She counsels moderation.Especially toward oneself.She can’t stand it when she sees someone lashing out at themselves.Who does that, you?I do it too, Peter Gutman said.Sometimes.At the moment?We are not talking about me, Madame.We are talking about you.Listen to what a wise old man has to say: To love oneself is the most difficult love of all.And you, my friend, win the prize for transparent attempts to dodge the question.But I’ve been asking myself recently if I didn’t miss out on the greatest chance of my life.And what might that have been? Peter Gutman asked.To come to the West.In May 1945.To cross the Elbe.Our caravan of refugees was trying to get there, like all the other caravans and all the war-weary soldiers who had thrown down their weapons too.The officers too—they had torn off their epaulettes and stripes and medals and burned their papers in little fires at the side of the road, which I despised them for, by the way.It was a matter of hours.We thought we had made it, the Americans were the initial occupation power, they took us in, then the English controlled the corner of Mecklenburg where we were being put up.But in the end, that same summer, it was the Soviet troops who advanced to the Elbe after all, as agreed, and who established their system in the eastern part of Germany.That was where I grew up, and where I lived as though it were a matter of course.It came down to a couple of hours: if the landowner whose carts we were crouching in had had horses that were not so worn out that even blows of the whip couldn’t get them to move any faster—I would have lived an entirely different life.I would have been a different person.That’s how it was in Germany then, you were in the hands of utter chance.And? Peter Gutman asked.Would you want to go back and correct the chance? Cross the Elbe this time? Be that other person you would have become?I would probably have become a teacher, which is what I actually wanted to be.I don’t know if I would have written anything, because the conflicts I had in that society were always what drove me to write.I would not have met my husband.I would have had different children, or no children.Different aspects of my personality would have come out and others would have been the ones I had to suppress.Would I have lived in a row house at the edge of a big city? Which party would I have voted for? Would my life have been boring? I would have been too old to be a ’68er.I would never have visited the East.I would have spent my vacations in Italy.Now that the Wall has come down, I would go as a foreigner to see the foreign land where German is spoken too, but I wouldn’t have understood the people there.Because I would think that the life that I, that we, had led was the true one, the normal one.And I would have been blameless.Okay, Peter Gutman said.That’s enough.He left.I wasn’t tired yet, I took down the red folder.Not counting the last letter, from May 1979 and by “Ruth,” not L., which informed Emma that her friend had died, there was only one letter left.In it, L.apologized that so much time had passed since the last time she’d written.Don’t think, my dear Emma, that I’m not thinking of you.On the contrary, I think about our years together more than ever.Those were also my first years together with my dear gentleman.You have probably guessed why I haven’t written in so long, Emma—my dear gentleman is dead.Even now it’s hard for me to write it down so simply.I long for him, for his physical presence, as powerfully as ever.I still expect to see him standing in the door when I turn around from my desk, I still feel the same pain that he isn’t there, that he’ll never be there again.He was in despair.All his research for the past few years was devoted to the question of where humanity is going.He never gleefully prophesized the downfall of our species, I can attest to that.The political events of recent years—the McCarthy era, the U.S.-backed coup against Allende in Chile and everything that happened in and with that country since—they finished him off [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]