LITMIR.BIZ

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people, depending on them, obeying them, necessarily becoming like them. I had played the role of a grown man, of a hero; now I had to endure the consequences.

      I was glad that, when I walked in, my father dwelt on my wet shoes. It was a diversion, he didn’t notice what was worse, and I was allowed to undergo a reproach which I secretly applied to all the rest. As that happened, a strangely novel feeling was aroused in me, a malicious corrosive feeling full of barbs: I felt superior to my father! For the space of a moment I felt a certain contempt for his ignorance, his scolding on account of my wet shoes seemed petty to me. “If you only knew!” I thought, and I felt like a criminal being interrogated about a stolen bread roll whereas he could have confessed to murders. It was an ugly, repellent feeling, but it was strong and had a profound attractiveness; more than any other notion, it chained me more tightly to my secret and my guilt. Perhaps, I thought, Kromer has already gone to the police and turned me in, and storm clouds are gathering over me while I’m being treated here like a little child!

      Out of that whole experience, to the extent that I have narrated it up to here, that moment was the important and lasting element. It was the first rift in my father’s sanctity, it was the first nick in the pillars on which my childish life had rested, and which every human being must destroy before he can become himself. It is of these experiences, invisible to everyone, that the inner, essential line of our destiny consists. That kind of rift and nick closes over again, it is healed and forgotten, but in the most secret chamber of the mind it continues to live and bleed.

      I myself was immediately terrified by this new feeling; I could have kissed my father’s feet right away, in order to apologize to him for it. But nothing so fundamental can be apologized for, and a child feels and knows that just as well and profoundly as any wise man does.

      I felt the need to think over my situation, to make plans for the following day, but I didn’t get that far. I was occupied that entire evening solely by getting used to the altered atmosphere in our parlor. It was as if the wall clock and the table, the Bible and the mirror, the bookshelf and the pictures on the wall were saying good-bye to me; with a heart growing cold I had to watch my world, my good, happy life, becoming the past and detaching itself from me; I had to perceive that I was anchored and held fast outside in the unfamiliar darkness by thirsty new roots. For the first time I tasted death, and death tastes bitter because it is birth, it is anxiety and terror in the face of a frightening innovation.

      I was happy when I was finally lying in my bed! Before that, as my final purgatory, I had had to endure our evening prayers, during which we had sung a hymn that was one of my favorites. Oh, I didn’t join in, and every note was gall and wormwood to me. I didn’t join the prayer when my father spoke the blessing, and when he ended “. . . upon us all!” I was convulsively torn out of their circle. The grace of God was upon them all, but no longer upon me. I left, cold and enormously weary.

      In bed, after lying there a while, lovingly enveloped in warmth and security, my heart in its fear wandered back again, fluttering anxiously over what had occurred. As always, my mother had said good night to me; her steps still echoed in the room, the glow of her candle still shone through the opening in the door. Now, I thought, now she’ll come back again—she’s felt what’s going on—she’ll give me a kiss and she’ll ask me about it, ask me kindly and promisingly, and then I’ll be able to cry, then the stone in my throat will melt, then I’ll throw my arms around her and tell her everything, then things will be all right, then I’ll be saved! And when the door opening had already grown dark, I still listened a while and thought that it just had to happen.

      Then I returned to reality and looked my enemy in the eye. I saw him clearly, he had half-shut one eye, his mouth was laughing coarsely, and while I looked at him and bitterly acknowledged the inevitable, he became bigger and uglier, and his malicious eyes flashed devilishly. He was right beside me until I fell asleep, but then I didn’t dream about him or that day’s events; instead, I dreamt we were sailing in a boat, my parents and sisters and I, surrounded by the perfect peace and glow of a holiday. In the middle of the night I awoke, still feeling the aftertaste of bliss, still seeing my sisters’ white summer dresses shimmering in the sunlight, and I relapsed from all that paradise into the reality of my situation; once more I was confronting my enemy with his malicious eyes.

      In the morning, when my mother arrived hastily, calling out that it was already late and asking why I was still in bed, I looked sick; when she asked if anything was wrong with me, I vomited.

      That seemed like a small gain for me. I very much liked being slightly ill and being able to stay in bed all morning with camomile tea, listening to my mother tidying up in the next room and to Lina greeting the butcher out in the vestibule. A morning without school was something enchanted, like a fairy tale; the sun would poke around in the room, and it wasn’t the same sun that we shut out in school by lowering the green curtains. But even that had no savor today; it had taken on a false note.

      Yes, if only I had died! But I was merely a little unwell, as often in the past, and nothing was accomplished thereby. It protected me from school, but it in no way protected me from Kromer, who would be waiting for me in the Market around eleven. And this time my mother’s friendliness offered no comfort; it was burdensome, and it hurt. Soon I pretended to be asleep again, and I thought things over. There was no help for it, I had to be in the Market at eleven. And so I got up quietly at ten and said that I felt well again. As usual in such instances, it meant that I either had to go back to bed or attend school in the afternoon. I said I’d like to go to school. I had devised a plan.

      I couldn’t meet Kromer without money on me. I had to get my hands on the little money box that belonged to me. There wasn’t enough money in it, I was well aware, not nearly enough; but it was still something, and a premonition told me that something was better than nothing, and that Kromer had to be at least pacified.

      I was in low spirits when I crept into my mother’s room in my stocking feet and took my box out of her desk; but it wasn’t as bad as the events of the previous day. The pounding of my heart choked me, and it didn’t get better when, down in the stairwell, I discovered on my first investigation that the box was locked. It was very easy to break it open; I merely had to rip apart a thin tin grating; but it hurt me to rip it open, because it was only then that I had committed a theft. Up until then I had merely filched some tidbit, sugar lumps or fruit. But this was stealing, even if it was my own money. I felt that I had taken one more step nearer to Kromer and his world, that bit by bit I was fairly headed downhill, and I retorted by defiance. Let the Devil carry me away, now there was no turning back! I counted the money fearfully; while it was in the box it had sounded like such a lot, but now in my hand there was miserably little of it. It came to sixty-five pfennigs. I hid the box in the vestibule, held the money in my clenched fist, and left the house, feeling different from any other time I had walked through that gate. From upstairs someone called after me, it seemed; I departed swiftly.

      There was still plenty of time; I sneaked by roundabout paths through the narrow streets of a changed town, beneath clouds never before seen, past houses that looked at me and people who were suspicious of me. On the way I recalled that one of my school chums had once found a thaler coin in the Cattle Market. I would gladly have prayed to God to perform a miracle and let me make such a find, too. But I no longer had any right to pray. And, even so, the money box wouldn’t have been made whole again.

      Franz Kromer saw me from a distance, but he walked toward me very slowly, seeming to pay no attention to me. When he was close to me, he signaled to me imperiously to follow him, and continued walking calmly, without looking around even once, down Straw Lane and over the footbridge until halting among the last houses, in front of a construction site. No work was going on there, the walls stood there bare without doors or windows. Kromer looked around and went in through the doorway, and I followed. He stepped behind the wall, beckoned me over, and held out his hand.

      “Have you got it?” he asked coolly.

      I drew my clenched fist out of my pocket and shook out my money onto the flat of his hand. He had counted it even before the last five-pfennig piece stopped clinking.

      “This is sixty-five pfennigs,” he said, and he looked at me.

      “Yes,”

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