Urs Widmer, My Father's Book, Trans. by Donal McLaughlin, Seagull Books, 2012.
In this companion to Urs Widmer’s novel My Mother’s Lover, the narrator is again the son who pieces together the fragments of his parents’ stories. Since the age of twelve, Karl, the father, has observed the family tradition of recording his life in a single notebook, but when his book is lost soon after his death, his son resolves to rewrite it.
Here, we get to know Karl’s friends—a collection of anti-fascist painters and architects known as Group 33. We learn of the early years of Karl’s marriage and follow his military service as the Swiss fear a German invasion during World War II, his political activity for the Communist Party, and his brief career as a teacher. We are told of Karl’s literary translations of his favorite French books, and, most important, the eerie and ever-present coffins outside the houses in the home village of Karl’s father, one reserved for each individual from the day he or she is born.
Widmer brilliantly combines family history and historical events to tell the story of a man more at home in the world of the imagination than in the real world, a father who grows on the reader, just as he grows on his son.
“One of the best representatives of Swiss literature.”—Le Monde
Urs Widmer, woefully underappreciated in the English-speaking world, is one of Switzerland’s most prominent and prolific writers. And My Father’s Book is one of Widmer’s very best. A fictionalized biography of his own father, Walter Widmer, this novel is by turns heart-wrenching and laugh-out loud funny. Heady, intellectual passages alternate with slap-stick comedy in this exploration of how much we can know even those closest to us.
The narrator’s father, Karl Widmer, is an unworldly, intellectually voracious man whose fiery temper is balanced by his essential good nature and extreme absent-mindedness. He lives primarily through the great works of French literature he translates—Stendhal, Flaubert, Rabelais, Balzac, and Diderot, whom he treasures above all others—and dies in his fifties of a heart ailment exacerbated by a life of chain-smoking. Karl is an inveterate idealist who venerates the Encyclopédistes and the rationalism of the dix-huitième. He becomes a Communist for a time, but is too impolitic for the Party. What he loves, he loves ardently. He only occasionally registers the fact that his beloved wife’s tendency to withdraw is a sign of unhappiness, and always too late.
According to tradition in Karl’s remote ancestral mountain village, on his twelfth birthday he was given a book for him to record each day’s events throughout his life. On the day after his father dies, the narrator learns to his horror that his mother had already disposed of Karl’s book along with mountains of manuscripts and unpaid bills. The narrator, who had only glanced through it the night before, resolves to rewrite his father’s book, now in the readers’ hands. Widmer not only recalls the events and circumstances of Karl’s life, he is able to render a sense of the man’s internal life by quoting imagined passages from the imaginary book.
As the Germans advance through Europe, Karl, until now unfit for service, is called up along “with a few other oldish men with weak hearts” to protect Basel from the Wehrmacht. In the barracks at night Karl dutifully makes his daily entries in which mundane events alternate with vivid meditations on things literary.
‘19.5.40 Letter from Clara,’ my father wrote, once he’d saved the quill from the hobnailed boots of a comrade racing to the toilet. ‘Kitchen duty for insubordination (the corporal asked me—it was to do with the dismantled gunlock I wasn’t able to put together again—whether I thought he was stupid and I said yes). The Germans still aren’t here yet. General mobilization nonetheless. —In the ancien régime, ladies vaginae could speak too. Not just their mouths. Often the gentlemen would sit with their countesses and ducal lovers, having tea, and chatting to one another about an especially good bon mot of Madame de Pompadour or the Pope’s last bull, while, simultaneously, from beneath their skirts—many-layered mountains of material—came a chattering and sniggering, the sense of which they didn’t quite catch. At any rate, there was almost constant chat from down there. The many different materials muffled the voices, but people sometimes thought they would hear their names, without knowing what the braying laughter beneath all the other skirts was all about. —The light! The light of the dix-huitième, you don’t get light like that nowadays.My Father’s Book is a boisterous, expansive novel, an encapsulation of twentieth century Swiss life through an idiosyncratic and highly concentrating prism. This sense of breadth comes not only from the contrast of Karl’s engagement in politics and his ludicrous stint as a soldier with his wife’s extreme introversion, but also from his appetite for life and the arts, which Widmer evokes beautifully. The sheer artistry of the writing in this novel alone would be deserving of the Best Translated Book Award, but in addition Donal McLaughlin’s translation is pitch-perfect, capturing the various registers and tonalities of Widmer’s prose and, most difficult of all, the many shades of his humor. - Tess Lewis
Deviation From The Norm, or The Realistic Fantast
A look at the work of writer Urs Widmer
By Roman Bucheli
Urs Widmer, born in Basel in 1938 but for many years now an inhabitant of Zurich, is without doubt one of the most significant and versatile talents currently at work in the field of contemporary German-language literature as well as one of the most successful. His sales are invariably in the high five-figure bracket and, as for prizes, the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize awarded to him last year was merely the latest in a collection which already included the 2002 Grand Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Grosser Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste, awarded to a writer for a lifetime’s work). Widmer studied German, French and history at the universities of Basel and Montpellier. After completing his PhD he worked briefly as an editor at Suhrkamp Verlag, but left the publishing house during the Lektoren-Aufstand (‘Editors’ Revolt’) of 1968.*
That was also the year in which his literary debut, Alois, was published. Since then he has created a body of work which is hard to beat for its technical versatility and thematic breadth. Widmer has also had success as a playwright, an essayist and a short story writer. To date he has only produced one published poem, but it would come as no surprise if, tucked away in a drawer, were some stabs at lengthier verse. He has also translated books from English and French, among them Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and dramatic works by Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Labiche.
Urs Widmer’s technical virtuosity is perhaps most evident in the books he published between the years 2000 and 2006 and which form a sort of informal trilogy. Der Geliebte meiner Mutter (‘My Mother’s Lover’) was the first to appear. It is a thinly veiled depiction of the unhappy love affair between Widmer’s mother and the musician and patron of the arts Paul Sacher. Both a quiet maternal requiem and a savage critique of the corrupting power of money, it manages to accentuate the potential pathos of suffering and grieving both by emphasising the sensual element and adding touches of burlesque. Following this novel four years later came Das Buch des Vaters (‘My Father’s Book’). While in the mother’s book the figure of the father was almost ghost-like in its absence, here the father receives his narrative due. Now the mother is in the background, a figure seen to be suffering in silence; while, in stark contrast, the father takes centrestage, eccentric, obsessed with literature – when he dies, he leaves his son a notebook completed almost to its very last page. If in the mother’s book grieving is kept at bay by narrative ingenuity and linguistic wit, the life of the father, apparently richly imbued with humour, sensuousness and zest for life even in dire times, is peppered with gentle melancholy. This, too, is a book of farewell, and thus also a kind of requiem; and yet Widmer counterpoints his father’s own biography, a man less at home in the real world than in the imaginative worlds of writers, with a realism that occasionally drifts into the fantastic. In his Frankfurt lectures on poetics ** (Vom Leben, vom Tod und vom Übrigen auch dies und das, 2007), the author said that literature is always ambivalent and that in everything lies its opposite: ‘When literature concerns itself intensively with death, it is concerned in equal measure with life.’
This ambivalence of narrative that constantly casts its subject in a light tinged slightly with its converse is beautifully executed in both these books. Finally Urs Widmer undergoes a further transformation with the third book in this unofficial trilogy: in 2006 Ein Leben als Zwerg (‘Life as a Dwarf’) was published and, following on from the books of the mother and the father, this is a kind of autobiography. In it Widmer recounts his childhood and youth – albeit from the perspective of one of his toy dwarves made of hard rubber which he’d loved playing with as a boy. The ageing writer has kept one of these dwarves from his childhood; it stands aloft on a shelf in his study and tells his own story and the stories of the other dwarves who were lost over the years – and through this dwarf’s tale we learn a certain amount about the life of the writer as a child. Though this seemed to be a never-ending playsession with the dwarves, the book strikes the reader as a merry, but serious, memento mori: for what the dwarves speak of is nothing less than the irrevocable process of their material disintegration. They are at one and the same time the cheeriest and yet saddest actors in this spectacle of transience.
In his Frankfurt lectures Urs Widmer emphasised that literary writing is based upon a subtle shift, a deviation from the speaking norm. It is this difference that defines the work of art, but it also gives rise to the critical awareness that makes us question the world and the effectiveness of its institutions. Particularly in his plays, Urs Widmer poses insistent critical questions of the time. In the play Frölicher – ein Fest (premiered in 1991) Widmer discusses the role of Switzerland in the Second World War through the figure of the controversial Swiss envoy to Berlin who stubbornly stayed put to the bitter end, while in Top Dogs (premiered in 1996) he examines the relentless nature of an achievement-orientated society. Managers themselves made redundant try to feel their way into their new existence, but not one of them succeeds in returning to ‘normal’ life. What they dealt out as bosses to their employees in spades is now happening to them. Just a moment before still top of their game, they’ve now fallen victim to their own criterion of success. With razor-sharp analysis Widmer explores in this play the inhumane ideology of maximising profit and efficiency.
Yes, a moralist certainly lurks in Urs Widmer, but a moralist with humour and linguistic wit who recognises the human comedy implicit in tragedy and knows the melancholy of cheerfulness.
Translated by Rebecca Morrison
* A group of editors and authors approached the then publisher Siegfried Unseld asking to be more involved in the decision-making and running of the house, following a ‘model of participation’; when he refused they left, some setting up their own publishing house, Verlag der Autoren – Urs Widmer was one.
** This renowned series of lectures began in 1959/60 with Ingeborg Bachmann, who was followed by names such as Böll, Enzensberger, Christa Wolf, Dürrenmatt, Muschg, Grass and Jandl. They are held in Lecture Hall VI at the University of Frankfurt – where Adorno once taught and the tumultuous events of 1968 took place.
Urs Widmer, My Mother's Lover, Trans. by Donal McLaughlin, Seagull Books, 2011.
It’s Switzerland in the 1920s when the two lovers first meet. She is young, beautiful, and rich. In contrast, he can barely support himself and is interested only in music. By the end of their lives, he is a famous conductor and the richest man in the country, but she is penniless. And most important of all, no one knows of her love for him; it is a secret he took to his grave. Here begins Urs Widmer’s novel My Mother’s Lover.
Based on a real-life affair, My Mother’s Lover is the story of a lifelong and unspoken love for a man—recorded by the woman’s son, who begins this novel on the day his mother’s lover dies. Set against the backdrop of the Depression and World War II, it is a story of sacrifice and betrayal, passionate devotion, and inevitable suffering. Yet in Widmer’s hands, it is always entertaining and surprisingly comic—a unique kind of fairy tale.
“Dichten = condensare” but it’s the rare German novelist who has the gift for it. Urs Widmer is a happy exception, and Donal McLaughlin’s translation of Widmer’s My Mother’s Lover (Der Geliebte der Mutter) renders that succinctness beautifully. I won’t say much about the author or the book — you can find good information on both elsewhere — but I have a few words about the translation and its publisher.
My Mother’s Lover is pseudo-autobiographical account of the failed love affair that overshadows all events personal and political in the life of Clara, the narrator’s mother. The book has a naturally stilted quality, owing to the fact that the narrator is a derivative product of a shadow of a being living only for the solidity of her erstwhile lover. I mean stilted in a good way, and as I said, the book is incredibly dense. Add to this that Clara’s voice, her verbal tics, shine through and warp the narrator’s account, and you have one very complex narrative voice to translate.
The book’s pacing, and the translation of it, is truly stunning. As noted, its richness is not something I’ve come across often in German, and it may be that I like it so much in English because (a prejudice of mine) I think of English as a ‘dense’ language. (I don’t mean this as an indictment of the German original, which was enchanting.)
Here it’s a moment captured (or is it many moments?):
She liked the town, especially the countless streets, full of nooks and crannies, around the cathedral. The shops, the tradesmen. She saw a cobbler with such a long beard that it kept getting between his hammer and the sole of the boot he was working on. A goldsmith was bent over a ring, his magnifying glass up at one eye. A barber with round metal-rimmed glasses was soaping his client’s hair in a shop so small that he himself was out in the street. Green-grocers, potters, junk dealers. And again and again, old men: their black cloaks, black hats, long beards and plaited hair. They spoke with their hands — really! — My mother turned away so they couldn’t see how much they made her laugh.
Again and again the immensity of the world, of history, of time, contracts to fit into Clara’s withdrawn existence. You can feel the view magnify, from the town, to its streets and buildings to the people on them, the details of their persons, down to that magnificent ‘really!’ at which point we fall through the looking glass and into Clara’s consciousness. In my opinion it’s things like McLaughlin’s ‘really!’ (or maybe all of the work leading up to ‘really!’ and allowing me to be stunned by ‘really!’) that make this book what it is.
A word on Seagull Books. They’re one of the most fascinating English-language publishers out there; they’re certainly doing some of the most interesting German translations available. Though I would categorize My Mother’s Lover as ‘the sort of thing that gets translated’ (literary fiction written by a hoary prize-winning male septuagenarian, albeit Swiss), Seagull often also surprises me with curve balls — eg. a copy of Rights, “an informed insight into the daily practices of the rights and permissions departments of a leading European publishing house,” just landed on my desk.
Seagull itself is a curve-ball, in that it’s an India-based publisher getting world rights to major translations. Viewed cynically, you could say that the one upshot of the US/UK’s lack of interest in translation is that it’s driven German publishers to give up their own prejudices and treat India as an equal player in the field. Alternately, you could say Seagull is snatching up the opportunities other English-language publishers won’t (or can’t or assume they can’t) take advantage of, and this globalized world of ours has made their location irrelevant, or even an advantage. Either way they’re doing a bang-up job of it. Oh, and see Katy Derbyshire’s post on the dream-job they gave her! - Amanda DeMarco
Of course, I couldn’t help thinking of Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig. There are similarities. Two women desperately in love with a famous man (a writer / a conductor); two men unaware of the consuming love they have kindled. Contrary to Zweig’s woman, Clara is unbalanced, she’s had a hard childhood with a dominating father, has known poverty, rejection. She’s madly in love with Edwin, in the literal sense of the word. She behaves like Virginia Woolf, going into the water at night, all dressed up, carrying a heavy rock, as if she intended to drown herself. She’s suicidal, a terrible mother dragging her boy in her crazy behaviors. I pitied the poor boy and I wondered where his father was. (I think there’s a book about the father’s story)
Clara’s son relates her story, as the title shows it. I didn’t find it convincing. How did he get to know how his mother felt? How did he know about her sex life, her internal turmoil, her personal demons? Is it healthy for him to know that? Clara had no friend, she couldn’t have confided in anyone. Now I found that I miss the 19thC device that consists in an introductory chapter in which the narrator explains where he/she knows the story from.
When I was reading, I saw black and white news films from before WWII. People move slightly faster than their real pace, there’s no sound, only a voice over. I saw the images of Clara’s life and heard her son’s detached tone commenting. A voiceover, flat, matter-of-factly describing things with well-chosen words, maybe taking a necessary distance with it to protect his sanity. I remained aloof too, it didn’t reach me. Plus I had guessed one of the key things of the story, which irritated me a bit.
I wonder if I could rate the books I read according to the number of quotes I note down. I guess on this scale of stars, it wouldn’t grant a high rating to this book. No quote at all. The style is good though despite a wild use of punctuation. Sometimes I was tired of exclamation marks, constant insertion of text in brackets or – and so on. It has a musicality but it didn’t move me. Honestly, that’s me, not the book. Caroline loved it; I perfectly understand and it’s worth reading her review as it covers parts I didn’t mention. What she writes is absolutely true but didn’t have the same effect on me. I recommend reading it in one to three reading sessions (It’s short) to have the time to enter the book and hear the music of Widmer’s words. Something else may have prevented me from fully enjoying it: I’m a zero in classical music and I didn’t get the references included in the book. For someone better informed, it can be more enjoyable. So, to sum it up, it didn’t work for me but it’s a good book, very well-written. - bookaroundthecorner.wordpress.com/
He’d been a musician, a conductor. Three days before he died, he conducted his final concert in the Stadthalle. Gyorgy, Ligeti, Bartok, Conrad Beck.–My mother loved him all her life. Not that he noticed. That anyone noticed. No one knew of her passion, not a word did she ever speak on the subject. ‘Edwin,’ mind you, she would whisper when she stood alone at the lake, holding her child’s hand. There, in the shade, surrounded by quacking ducks, she’d look across at the sunlit shore opposite. ‘Edwin!’ The conductor’s name was Edwin.
Many may not have heard of Urs Widmer, but if you’re wanting to get a good taste of modern Swiss literature, he’s definitely the man to start reading. Born in 1938, he looks like the love child of Perec and Gene Hackman. And if it weren’t for Seagull Books, we may not have had the pleasure of reading this contemporary author. My Mother’s Lover is a quick-paced and tragic tale of obsession. If you’re into grim fairy tales about unrequited love, this is the book for you. Beginning around the turn of the century, it chronicles the love affair between Edwin and Clara.
At turns digressive and narrative, the first part of the book focuses on their burgeoning relationship and their familial heritage. They meet in the ’20′s in a town in Switzerland. Edwin is a poor musician and Clara is rich and beautiful. Edwin, remote and talented, conducts The Young Orchestra which dares to bring the works of new composers to his town. Half the audience would cheer and half would hiss in disapproval. Clara, a devout music lover, becomes a volunteer secretary for Edwin and the Young Orchestra who are youthful, eager, and all working for free. Clara does an excellent job fixing whatever problem arises and without much notice from Edwin. Until a trip to Paris when after a joyous performance, the go back to her room and consummate their relationship.
After this, the Depression hits and tragedy strikes Clara. Her father dies (her mother had been dead many years) and she loses everything. Because Edwin is becoming successful, he offers her a room. Soon after her father’s death, she visits his relatives in Italy. Welcomed with love and fanfare, she feels a unity she has not felt before and admires the strength of her uncles. When she returns home, Edwin is cold and cruel, only visiting her to sate his sexual needs. She becomes pregnant. Edwin cannot abide this at his point in his career. She aborts. Edwin’s best friend, Wern, than asks her to escort him on a trip to Frankfurt. When they return, she is heartbroken to learn that Edwin has married a rich heiress and lives on the lake in huge mansion. By this time, she has quit her job with The Youth Orchestra
out of anger.
This is when Widmer covers a lot of historical ground. Clara marries and lives on the other side of the lake from Edwin. Widmer decides never to mention the husband’s name or anything about their relationship, which is because her love is for Edwin only and he doesn’t matter to her. At night, she walks along the lake and takes the heaviest stone she can find in her arms and walks into the lake repeating ‘Edwin’. This ritual continues, even when she has a child and replaces the stone with a child. This is a gruesome image and it is explored more in the dreams she has which are blood-filled and violent.
This obsession with Edwin is never revealed to anyone. And is often the case with unrequited love, if it is not processed, it implodes and madness becomes the result. As her madness becomes frenetic, Edwin’s success and riches abound. Eventually, she becomes hospitalized and given electroshock treatments. When she returns home, it is during the lead-in to WWII, and she rips out all the flowers and begins to plant trees and vegetables. This is where Widmer’s intention of paralleling the rise of Hitler and the demise of Clara who could be seen as the blind followers of the Nazis and the Fascists, as he cleverly shows in this passage:
She put wood wool beneath the still green strawberries. She sprayed poison. (Hitler bombed Coventry to bits.) She ran with the wheelbarrow, full of peat or old leaves, along the paths between the vegetable patches, paths the width of her feet. Yes, she ran, she didn’t ever walk. She forced the garden hose into a mouse hole, turned the water on, and used her shovel to kill the mice that fled from the other holes. (Hitler had now reached Narvik too, the North Pole, or almost.)
The her use of the garden hose on the mice symbolizes Hitler’s hunt for Jews. These political themes are present in the beginning but grow much more ominous as the novel progresses. When Clara decides during this time to visit her Italian relatives, she is ignored because of the arrival of Il Duce (Mussolini) at her relatives house for a meal. They have succumbed to Fascism, but Clara is oblivious to who Il Duce is and to the horrific war happening. All she has is her love for Edwin.
The prose is clipped and sparse. Nothing seems extraneous which also speaks well for the translation because his minimal style loses nothing in the translation by Donal McLaughlin. This reportage style contrasts the sadness that permeates
My Mother’s Lover. Edwin’s name is used most often and Clara is most often referred to by the narrator, Clara’s son, as ‘my mother.’ This emphasizes the rich and powerful vs. the poor and powerless construct that threads through the narrative as well.
It’s obvious that this isn’t going to end well for Clara. Until her death, she keeps her devotion as her link to life. A tragic story, told in a fairy talesque manner,
My Mother’s Lover examines how love destroys in many manners–love of nation, unrequited love and love of self. The males in the novel are regarded highly while Clara represents the silenced women of a patriarchal society. And like the men who wage wars, Edwin dismisses Clara and smites a life and a love of a person her never really knew. - Monica at www.salonicaworldlit.com
Urs Widmer, one of the living greats of Swiss literature, based My Mother's Lover on a real-life affair. Set against a backdrop of the footloose 1920s, the Depression, the Second World War and its changing fortunes for citizens of a neutral Switzerland, and the effects of Italian fascism on a Piedmont wine-producing family, its deceptively simple narrative explores the destructive nature of yearning for what, or whom, one cannot have, and the cruelty of carelessness. Musical references, grand gestures, and eccentric characters abound. The pathos of mother Clara's situation, her love for the renowned conductor Edwin, is portrayed with a lightness of touch and fairy-tale quality that enchants, but does not detract from the pain of unrequited love nor the absurdities and horrors of war. There is whimsy in the description of Edwin's Zurich-based Young Orchestra.
Clara, its manager, is still a young lady of means. In Paris, after a concert attended by Ravel, we read of "thirty sleeping musicians, their dreams all in major". Clara's obsession grows even as the maestro marries into wealth: "Every fibre in my mother's body called 'Edwin'. Soon all the birds were singing 'Edwin' ... The wind whispered it, the sun burned it into her skin." Donal McLaughlin's translation delivers all the charm, sweet sorrow and gentle humour of the original. -
The unnamed narrator in this deceptively thin novel is a man trying to tell — through a mix of elision and detail — the story of his mother’s life and death in (and as) the shadow of her lover, a great conductor, during the early and post-war years of the 20th century in Switzerland. Towards the end, when the mother is an old woman, long after her years as “maid-of-all-work” for the youth orchestra set up by the conductor, the son tells us how she dreams that “her child ate his own heart because he was afraid of what his mother fed him”. “She dreamt,” he writes — and then stops for a moment to wonder, “Or was it her child that dreamt this?”
This sudden slip in the narrator’s memory — mother and child, who is the object of whose imagination? — fleetingly lights up the treacherous web of remembering and empathy that the Swiss writer, Urs Widmer, unravels in My Mother’s Lover, translated by Donal McLaughlin. Logically, there are two possibilities. Either the son combines real memories of his mother with what she has told him about her past, filling in the gaps with hearsay and imagination. Or the mother actually tells him, minutely and relentlessly, every detail of her inner and outer lives, including dreams, traumas and sexual experiences — a series of tender or monstrous confidences and unspeakable handings-down. Which of these two, equally compelling but sinister, explanations we lean towards as readers depends on how, in our own lives, we carry our parents, especially our mothers, inside our heads, and on the extent to which we relish or resist turning into their historians and archivists, allowing their stories and voices to become ours.
Within this framework of transferences, identifications and transmissions, Widmer explores another psychosexual phenomenon, rather more predictably: female devotion, service and servitude to male genius. The mother’s total, abject, yet profoundly suffered self-effacement founded on depths of self-hatred is given not only a prehistory and afterlife by Widmer, but also a historical and political setting. This setting interlaces the rise and fall (or normalization) of European fascism (the Führer and the Duce) with the emergence of a “new music” in Stravinsky, Bartók and Ravel, among others, and with the story of how these interlaced historical, cultural and psychic upheavals settle into the unreal feel of modern ‘normality’ and Swiss neutrality.
Interestingly, one of the works in the conductor’s repertory is Willy Burkhard’s Lieder nach Tagore, suggesting an avant garde context for Rabindrasangeet largely ignored or wished away by Tagore’s devotees today. In fact, Widmer’s novel casts a fascinating light on the bevy of women who had devoted themselves to the poet with such competitive ardour. In this, My Mother’s Lover is a psychological kin of Mircea Eliade’s La Nuit Bengali.
Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke’s film of her novel, Liliana Cavani’s film, The Night Porter, and Coetzee’s Summertime are among several contemporary works that explore the disturbing underbelly of European, especially Germanic, classical music — the tense reconciliation of opposites within the ‘Classical’ itself that could, in a moment, tear itself apart in an explosion, or implosion, of power gone terribly wrong. But the psychic theatre in which this happens exists beyond right and wrong, whatever the judgments of history; and at the heart of this theatre is usually a damaged woman. Think of Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher or Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter. Widmer’s novel is in this lineage.
Aveek Sen
An extract
‘Shall I start with ninety?’—‘I’d say so, yes. We can always go higher.’—The electric shock was like an explosion. A flash in her head, a whip lashing through every muscle. She writhed, bit into the rubber, forced her eyes shut, tore them open again. Howled inwardly, like a wolf; she was a wolf. A storm within her until she lay there motionless; remaining so, once the fetters were undone. The piece of rubber was taken out, her mouth stayed open. ‘Okay. That’s us finished.’ She was moved back to her room where she lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. Every morning she was brought to the treatment room, often enough for her—now an empty shell—to start lying down of her own accord, putting her hands, without hesitation, in the leather fetters. For her to feel as much before the electric shock as she did afterwards; as little. The rest of the time, she lay in her white room—light, more light, the curtains moving in the breeze; it was spring again—until one of the doctors came and told her she was healthy and could go home again. ‘Isn’t it wonderful you’re now so well again?’ And so my mother got up, packed her nightdress and toothbrush in her little case, took her coat with the fur collar from the hanger, and went home where her child, me, was still, or again, in the doorway and wet himself when she appeared at the open gate.)—Now, the sun was shining again, the trees were in blossom, the grass a bright green. Invisible, in the distance—invisible for the moment—was the war. (Hitler had ravaged Poland.) My mother put her case in the bedroom, hung her coat in the wardrobe, put on her oldest dress and her mountain boots, and went into the garden. She felled the lilac tree and the whitethorn, and ripped out all the narcissi, tulips, daffodils, irises and cowslips. With a spade, she turned over the flower garden she’d just cleared—a bare field now, from one horizon to the other—without any help. There were no men any more. She broke the clods of earth up with a hoe, throwing all the stones—a great many, countless, the field was very rocky—on a pile that soon became a mountain. She raked the broken-up clay, again and again, and then once more. Until it was grainy; flour-like almost. (At Dunkirk, Hitler hounded the British into the sea.) My mother dug holes with a dibble, made furrows with the back of her hand. She scattered seeds from small packets, and pressed seedlings into the earth. Watered them, individually, with rainwater that wasn’t too cold, taking it from a rusty drum, surrounded by a little marsh, beside the tool shed. Walking at a slant, with one arm in the air, she dragged watering cans from which the water splashed. She rammed wooden poles into the ground, long ones for the climbing beans, and short ones for the peas. Beneath the chestnut tree and the beech tree she spread cloths out and, standing on a ladder, beat the cockchafers down. Thousands of brown beetles (Hitler marched into Paris, his arm extended, in the air) that she filled into buckets and, for five rappen per litre, brought to the collection point by bike, the buckets either side of the handlebars; she was thrown from her bike several times, of course, into the nettles where the beetles disappeared.—The dog was always around somewhere too, she now had a dog.—She tied the tomatoes up with yellow bast and broke off the shoots she didn’t want. She put wood wool beneath the still green strawberries. She sprayed poison. (Hitler bombed Coventry to bits.) She ran with the wheelbarrow, full of peat or old leaves, along the paths between the vegetable patches, paths the width of her feet. Yes, she ran, she didn’t ever walk. She forced the garden hose into a mouse hole, turned the water on, and used her shovel to kill the mice that fled from the other holes. (Hitler had now reached Narvik too, the North Pole, or almost.) With one of her buckets and a shovel in hand, she followed the farmers’ horses, collecting the droppings. She picked camomile from alongside the paths and dried it on cloths. On all her windowsills lay half-green, half-red tomatoes. The aroma of them! The granite slabs in the path to the garden gate were burning hot! Lizards would vanish between the stones! Every now and then, my mother would straighten up—she was always bent over a barrel of rose-hip syrup or a weed—and, turning her upper lip up, would blow down her blouse. Even she was finding it hot! Mosquitoes, the drone of mosquitoes was everywhere. Swarms of flies round her head. Crouching between the green plants, she hunted Colorado beetles. She would dig out molehills and crush cockchafer grubs with her foot. Mole crickets, if ever a mole cricket flew over the vegetable patches, you’d hear her scream! (Now Mussolini went mad too, marched into Greece.) On the compost heap, more of a mountain, huge cucumbers were growing. Courgettes and zucchetti, resembling primeval creatures, were bulging over each other. (Hitler met Pétain, who was wearing a feathered hat.) When it got colder, when rain poured down, my mother, wrapped in a black cape, would crouch among the potatoes and dig them out. She filled crate after crate and, with a rolling gait, carried them down to the cellar. She would string onions together and hang them up in the shed. Even with the door closed, you could smell the strings of onions, the scent went as far as the water drum that smelled of moss. At harvest-time there was no festival, my mother didn’t do festivals. But apples, pears, quince and nuts were piled up everywhere. My mother would stand in the kitchen, making jam. Steam. There was no sugar, but she got some from somewhere. It was just for the preserves, though, not for sweet things. Cellophane, red rubber rings. For the bottled pears, apricots and plums, she had green jars from Bülach. That they were from Bülach was somehow important.—She cleaned, ran, cooked, scrubbed. Rose with the sun—she who, once, had been too fond of her bed—and lay down at midnight.—Then snow fell. Now—if she wasn’t clearing the paths or stamping around in the sauerkraut barrel—she would sit in the one room she was prepared to heat, and that she called ‘the warmth’. She would sew trousers, darn socks, knit pullovers and clean the old silver, the silver from before, until it glistened and sparkled and shone. She’d then lock it away again; she never used it to eat.—She no longer went to the lake. From time to time, she would just stop at the little table, the altar; but not really praying. At most, she would flick through a programme, then put it back. Sometimes she’d stand at the window and look across at the forest. But rarely, you’d have to say it was rarely.—This was how she lived. Hitler attacked Russia and my mother planted onions. Hitler laid siege to Moscow. My mother pulled out turnips. Rommel’s tanks chased Montgomery’s across the Sahara. My mother stood in the smoke from a fire that put an end to old branches. Hitler reached the Don. My mother in among the corn. Stalingrad! My mother sewed black curtains, put them up in all the windows and, trudging through snow, checked from outside to ensure no light whatsoever was getting through. The Americans took Sicily. My mother stood, wringing her hands, at the sight of tomatoes rotting before they ripened. The Americans, the British, the Canadians and the French landed in Normandy. My mother removed a silvery film from the beans. De Gaulle, bigger than everyone else, marched into Paris, leading his troops, while my mother was feeding the rabbits. When the Allies reached the Rhine, my mother was filling the fruit and vegetable racks in the cellar with russet apples. And when Hitler, crazier than ever, gave the command for the Ardennes Offensive, my mother was chopping a young fir down in the forest—at dusk, so as the forester didn’t catch her because it was Christmas and my mother had never ever spent Christmas without a tree with candles. The Russians fought their way through to Berlin, and my mother was getting new vegetable patches ready. On 8 May 1945, around midday, all the bells were ringing. In the distance, beyond the horizon —my mother didn’t live near a church. It was as if the earth itself were ringing. My mother dropped the hoe she’d been using to break up clay onto the ground, and sat down on the garden bench that, for five years, had served only as a place for her gardening clothes or the hedge-clippers. She breathed in, breathed out. The cherry trees were beginning to blossom, and the swallows were circling their nests. You could hear the goldfinches. The laburnum was flowing from its branches, the wisteria was in bloom. From far off, over the fields and up the road, black dots were approaching. Were getting bigger and, finally, big. The men. The men were returning, in their uniforms, with their knapsacks and carbines over their shoulders. They were laughing and waving, each and every one of them recognizable now. My mother raised her hand, waved too. ‘Dog,’ she said to the dog, ‘From today, the two of us will have to pull through peacetime, we will.’ She stood up, stepped over the child that was on the ground, using stones to build a castle, an impregnable fort, and went into the house.
THE war was over. Everyone who was still alive raised their heads and looked around, my mother too. What had become of the others? Far from the town, at its outermost edge, my mother didn’t get to hear much. And so the first piece of news that was important didn’t reach her until a burning day, at the height of summer. It came from Wern, from that very person. My mother met him at the gents’ underpants bargain basket in EPA, a department store in the town centre. She blushed,—would have fled perhaps, had she been able to do so, unseen—as she’d been caught in a shop that a Lermitier lady or a Bodmer lady or Edwin’s wife would never have entered. Not ever. Wern, who was holding flag-sized white underpants out from his stomach to gauge the size of them, was not in the least embarrassed, on the contrary. He was pleased to see her, hugged my red-faced mother and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘Clara! How nice!’ He was accompanied by an exotic-looking lady, a minute beauty with almond eyes and a radiant smile. She was from Bali, and his wife. It turned out both had arrived in town just two days before, after an adventurous trip on the backs of donkeys and on ships that had stopped in every, literally every, port, and so they’d been travelling for more than two months. They had set out on the day peace was declared. ‘Why from Bali?’ my mother said. Wern laughed, throwing the underpants back in the basket. ‘Good luck, or bad luck, judge for yourself.’ He’d been travelling through the South Seas when the war spread to Asia. No way of getting home. He made the best of the situation by wooing a young island beauty who, when he won her over, turned out to be the daughter of a local king. Wern told the latter he was a king back in Europe, and a conjurer who, by snapping his fingers, could make the greenfly ruining the king’s plantations vanish. He snapped his fingers, sprayed his product, snapped his fingers again, and the king saw, with amazement, how his plants began to flourish. His daughter did too, the princess, and so he gave Wern her hand. Wern now lived in a luxury palm hut, slept in a hammock with golden threads, drank pineapple juice and sugarcane schnapps from elaborately carved bowls and smoked cigars he rolled himself, using local tobaccos—the only hint of bitterness in this chalice of complete and utter bliss.
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