Mohr - Frederick Reuss

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He lit a cigarette, and pointed to the roof. “You can’t even tell they’re new.”

      Seethaler helped Mohr carry the ladder and tools to the barn. Käthe went inside to take down the wash from the upstairs balcony. The low slant of the sun cast everything in a golden light. They returned from the barn, and Mohr invited Seethaler to sit with him on the bench. She folded clothes and listened as they talked. There was something sweet in the trust the local boys placed in Mohr, the way they telegraphed so much of themselves in conversations about ski bindings or bicycle racing. Seethaler was clearly upset about having to help in the family plumbing business.

      “So, you prefer life in the big city,” Mohr said.

      “Don’t you?”

      Mohr didn’t answer right away, then he said, “If being comfortable means having your fat behind padded, then I guess the city’s the place. But upholstery costs money.”

      Seethaler laughed. “It’s better than being stuck out here.”

      “What is it that you like better in the city?” Mohr asked.

      “Everything.”

      “Go back, then. People who want money should stay in the city. It’s the people who want to get away from money who should come here.”

      She heard him stand up and go around to the side of the house. A moment later he walked out into the yard carrying a wooden chair. He set the chair down on the grass, flashed a grin, then took a few steps back, rubbing his palms together—one, two, three—and with a loud yell leaped over the chair and landed on his feet on the other side.

      Eva appeared at the top of the meadow where she and Lisa had been playing, and the two of them ran down to join the game. Mohr beckoned to Seethaler and stood aside, hands on hips, beaming. “Come on down,” he shouted up to the balcony.

      “I can see just fine from here,” Käthe called back.

      Seethaler failed to clear the chair and fell in a heap. He insisted on a second try, and when he failed, Mohr urged him to take his time and try again. When he failed a third time, Mohr lifted him up from the ground and took him inside for a farewell schnaps.

      In those last autumn days and weeks, they were conscious of marking time. It grew cooler; the trees blazed with colors and dropped their leaves. They slept late, took their time around the house, went on longer and longer afternoon walks. They prepared the house for winter, split and stacked wood, filled the cellar with beets and onions and potatoes. At night, after Eva went to sleep and Mohr went upstairs to his attic room to work, Käthe would read or knit by the stove. If the calm that had settled on her was comforting, the clarity of it was frightening. She would look up from her knitting or her book, acutely conscious of the passing moment.

      On one of their last walks together, Mohr told her how anxious he was to get going. It was painful to hear. “How can you say that?”

      “I’m going to start a new life for us in China.”

      “But everything’s being uprooted, torn apart.”

      Mohr shook his head. “Plants have roots. The world is big and we’re still young and life is long.”

      Did he really think he could escape the problems of the day just like that?

      They were on the footpath that led across the valley toward Kaffee Angermaier, the inn where the Lawrences had stayed when they’d come to visit just a few years earlier. Lorenzo’s death had contributed much to Mohr’s crisis. It wasn’t merely the loss of a friend but a feeling of irrelevance, of time wasted. The famous Englishman had cut a wide and deep swath in the short period of their friendship. He had always been harsh in his judgment of Mohr’s work. A strong and mutual affection compensated for the harshness, but even that became complicated as Lawrence’s health deteriorated. Mohr saw his friend’s long, drawn-out illness and death as a sign. He said he needed to find a new direction. Käthe watched the change come over him gradually, and for a time felt a tinge of resentment toward Lawrence. There is something awful in making a legacy of a friendship, but that was what Lawrence had left Mohr with in the end.

      They stopped walking. “What do you call this?” Käthe asked, trembling. “What is this, if it isn’t home? Our home?”

      Mohr dug his hands into his pockets and looked at her with a slightly shamed look. “I don’t know what to call it anymore. I don’t think I even recognize it.” He turned slowly, hands in his pockets, as if taking in the entire panorama of the valley, hatless, hair tousled in the breeze. The fields were plowed up on all sides and smelled strongly of newly spread manure. She tried to imagine what lay ahead in the years to come—when they were reunited in China. Would they live in a big, modern apartment? Go riding in the countryside, learn Chinese and English, and be healthy? Eva could take singing lessons. They would go to concerts.

      But China was so far away, another world entirely.

      EVA IS WATCHING her mother. Käthe bites into a slice of buttered bread and chews with a soft click click in the left side of her jaw. Mohr is all bunched up in his tweed traveling jacket and bow tie. He seems physically altered, as if the changes that will come over him in time are already rising to the surface. He has been smoking heavily, and his pallor is not healthy in spite of six weeks of fresh air and outdoor work. The flab he put on in Berlin is gone. In the last month they plowed and prepared a whole new field for planting. Käthe now has nearly half a hectare of delphinium under cultivation, and enough hay cut to last the animals well into the winter.

      “Are there elephants in China?” Eva asks.

      Mohr puts down his cup. “A very good question. If I find any, I promise to send you one.”

      “An elephant? How?”

      “By post, of course. Trans-Siberian.”

      “You can’t send an elephant by post.”

      “Why not?”

      Eva stands up. “They’re too big.”

      “Have you ever seen a Chinese elephant?”

      Eva shakes her head.

      “Indian elephants, African elephants, they’re big. Maybe Chinese elephants are small—the size of a little dog.”

      Käthe gets up to put another log into the stove. The speculation about Chinese elephants continues. “In China there are dragons, and monkeys, and silkworms, and giant panda bears that live in bamboo forests.”

      “There are dragons?”

      “That’s what I hear. So why not miniature elephants?”

      “Tiny ones?” Eva cups her hands. “Like this?”

      Mohr begins to clear the table. “Yes, little tiny ones.” Eva follows him into the kitchen, and afterward they all go outside together to say good-bye to Minna. The cow comes loping over to the fence. Mohr strokes and pats her nose. “Good old Minna von Barnhelm. I remember the day we first saw you.” He turns to Käthe. “Remember how skinny she was? We thought she’d never produce a single drop of milk.” He cups Minna’s wet nose in his hand, then turns and gazes down toward the house. He fishes a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt, lights it, and they stand there quietly for a time. It is just after nine o’clock. The whole day lies ahead: the taxi, the train to Munich, the final good-bye.

      Back inside, Mohr sits beside Käthe on the old green sofa. She puts her head on his shoulder. Eva looks on, uncertain. The room has never seemed so small, the ceiling so low, the stove so warm, the floor planks so creaky, the windows so narrow, the sofa so musty, their fourteen years together in this three-hundred-year-old farm house so quickly vanished. It can’t be recaptured, only evoked . . .

      . . . IN PHOTOGRAPH after

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