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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Germany, like many countries, has witnessed the rise of extremist far-right groups and parties in recent years, and no more so than in the eastern regions. Why have those parts of Germany that used to be part of the old GDR turned out to be so supportive of extremist groups and parties and such fertile ground for violence and hatred?
To try to find answers to this question, Ines Geipel, the former East German Olympic athlete, returns to her past in order explore the matrix of fear and anxiety that shaped the lives of people in the GDR. Spurred on by conversations at the bedside of her brother as he lay dying of a brain tumour, she probes into her own family background and discovers a web of secrets and denial that reflected larger processes of East German society. She finds that her father had worked as a special agent for the Stasi until the service had no further use for him, and her grandfather had joined the Nazi party in 1933 and was stationed in Riga at a time when tens of thousands of Jews were murdered in the nearby forests. Silence and denial within her family was mirrored in the collective loss of history outside her home, and the repression of ideological non-conformity made it difficult for a traumatized population to grapple with and come to terms with a brutal past. Instead, a politics of forgetting emerged which served the ends of an authoritarian state and seeped into private lives of individuals with deep and lasting consequences.
This powerful memoir, grippingly told, will appeal to anyone interested in the history of modern Germany, in the rise of far-right extremism and xenophobia and in the historical forces that shape the present.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Crystals
Slow motion
Tiny admiral
Our forefathers and their duty
Beacon
Royal relics
In a vacuum
Childhood organ
A growing void
Illuminated gondolas
Versions of a father
Eagle 1 over
Sound Mechanics
Dolls are easy targets
A Day at the pool
Country within a country
Cape of good hope
Gaps in time
Water ice
Nomads
Historical instinct
Magnetic fields
Exhalations
Dream machine
World of taboos
Nautilus
Skins of consciousness
Bright surfaces
Unification Nirvana
Blue in green
The East as a testing ground
Bibliography
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Crystals
Begin Reading
Bibliography
End User License Agreement
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Behind the Wall
My brother, my family and hatred in East Germany
INES GEIPEL
Translated by Nick Somers
polity
Originally published in German as Umkämpfte Zone: Mein Bruder, der Osten und der Hass © 2019 Klett-Cotta - J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, gegr. 1659, Stuttgart
This English translation © Polity Press, 2024
The translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5998-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023950626
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
I thank Tom Krausheer for the initial discussion we shared about the book.
Eva-Maria Otte for reading the first version, and for her generosity and support.
Andreas Petersen for his love and our ongoing conversations. Christine Treml for her calmness and guidance through the text.
Jochen Staadt for his highly pertinent ideas about the history of East Germany.
Tobias Voigt for his knowledge of the battlefields without a home.
Gerit Decke for her ideas and friendship.
Katharina Wilts, Verena Knapp and Marion Heck for their perspicacity when launching the German edition.
I.G., December 2018
CRYSTALS
The snow lies thickly on the ground, and it’s still snowing hard. I’m standing at the window looking at the sky. At the snowflakes falling heavily into the gloom. At the way they spin, get tangled with others and merge with them. At the new pattern they form together. My little brother pulls open the door. Another half hour, then it will stop and it’ll be cold enough to get going.
I look at Robby standing in front of me, muffled up like an Eskimo, holding a bucket of cold water in one hand and his toboggan in the other. He is six years old, I’m twelve. It’s the winter holidays, February 1973. We’re waiting for the cold, then we’ll rush down the long flight of steps, up the street, ice the run, smooth it out and link up our toboggans. Watch out, here we come! This is our territory, Zwanzigerstrasse, Weisser Hirsch, Dresden.
Later Robby pulls his scarf from his neck and holds it out to me. He’s sweating. He’s happy. We run up the street again and again. He slips his hand without a word into mine. Vapour comes out of our mouths. The pallid light of the lampposts, the icy clear night, the glistening snow, the crunching of our steps.
But above all, his small, warm hand.
Slow motion
BEING THERE. His right hand. There’s not much else my brother can still move. It’s 7 December 2017. I’m sitting at his bedside. Palliative ward, St. Joseph-Stift, Dresden. Robby has a glioblastoma, stage 4. The Herrndorf tumour,1 he says in greeting. The first operation in April, recurrence in the summer, the second operation at the end of November, a blood clot in the head, then three days ago a stroke. Doesn’t look great, he says. No luck. It’s good of you to come.
An afternoon. And Robby, who wants to reminisce. For six hours. Is that a lot? I mean, is that a lot of time? He grasps my hand, pulls it to him, places it on his chest. That’s where he wants it to be.
Can you see me? he asks softly.
Yes, why?
Because I see two of you. The tumour. It’s pushing my eyes apart. Hey, I have to tell you something.
I look at his face: the huge scar on his right temple, the sallow skin, his lips. How words keep emerging between them. Fast, slow, soft, hesitant. I don’t understand anything. As if I had been knocked down by a large animal, as if someone had stuck an ice pick in my brain. Robby, what’s going on? What happened? Why didn’t you call me? Why so late? Why only …? There are so many questions. I don’t ask him anything, just stare at his mouth. At the words coming out of them. Like silverfish, I think to myself. Diving, slipping away, wanting to get away, into the darkness.
We were poppers, he says and looks out of the window. Do you know what that is?
I don’t think so.
I was eighteen and wore a white suit. I had it made specially. Really cool. We would travel around the villages and go to the discos to pick up girls. My pals and I.
What’s a popper? Not a blueser.
So no Jesus boots.
Right. No long hair, no scruffy clothes, no peace signs, but shaved necks, blow-dried hair, blond streaks, you know, all that flashy gear, and our music.
What kind of music?
The Cure, Prince, Michael Jackson.
Prince, in the mid-1980s in East Germany?
Sure, why not? And what do poppers do?
Hang out, listen to music, have fun.
Robby shivers a little. Perhaps he has a fever. There must have been a mistake, I think to myself. Something has gone wrong, it can’t be right, it’s not true. Someone will come along any moment now to fix it. Sorry, they’ll say, it’s nothing, a data flash, wires crossed, we’ll soon put it right. I look towards the door. No one there. What’s going on here? Whose idea was this? What’s my brother doing in this bed? It’s OK, he reassures me and squeezes my hand as if it were a plastic duck. With all the Christmas balls around him, the stars, the hearts, the long string of lights behind his head.
It’s supposed to be a reminder of home, Oberlausitz, he nods. Do you remember the Herrnhuter?2
Hey, I can’t do this just now.
The idea was to comfort children whose parents had gone abroad and sent them to boarding school. The light tells those at home: we’re coming to fetch you. Just a little longer, it’ll be all right.
Has mother been here?
I don’t know. Have you brought any raspberries?
Raspberries?
Yes, fresh ones. They’re good for cancer.
How quiet the afternoon is. How easy the world still was yesterday. How naïve, unsuspecting, completely normal. I lay my head on Robby’s chest. If only it could stay there quietly for a while until the world finds its way again, until everything gets back to normal.
Is that OK? I ask.
Yes, it’s good.
Are you in pain?
No, nothing. I’ve got more chemicals in me than blood.
Hungry?
They’ll be along in a minute. Hey, tell me.
Yes.
What if the journey goes in the other direction? It’ll be pretty terrible.
Yes.
I’m scared.
Yes.
Scared of losing consciousness. Will you be here?
I’m here and I’ll stay here.
I put my head back in the place where everything is still normal. As long as it’s on Robby’s chest, nothing can happen. Do I really believe that? If so, why this feeling? The ice pick in my head is pressing, pushing, it wants to go further. What does it want? Outside it’s getting dark. As if the afternoon were a time capsule: floating, far from everything. Just the two of us. Just a brother and a sister. Just Robby and I. But what’s happening here? That there were so many other scenarios, just not this one, I think to myself. That being here is completely unreal, surreal. And what’s it like for him? Is there a moment of realization? When you have the courage to say to yourself that the journey has begun to go in the other direction? Does it come on a particular day, at a particular hour, at a particular moment? And if so, what next?
CONTINENTAL DRIFT. How small the words are suddenly. As if they wanted to withdraw, shrink, roll up, a bit like rubber bands. No voices around us, no footsteps, no doors closing.
Do you remember? asks Robby, breaking the silence.
What?
When you called me and arranged to meet the next day at the main railway station in Dresden. Come tomorrow to the night train to Budapest, platform 10, you said and then hung up. The next day was 31 August 1989. I remember the date. I’ll never forget it. We were standing on the platform. You hardly said a word. You wanted to get away.
I had to.
You wanted to get away, and I thought: How can she do that? Why does she of all people have to go to the West? To a place where we won’t exist anymore?
I had to.
You gave me the key to your apartment. The train guard was getting impatient.
The compartment door banged shut. You stood there, alone on the platform, and you didn’t wave. Not once. Take care, sister, you said. And then you followed the train on your moped, through the night. At least that’s what you said.
As far as the border, Bad Schandau. I had to.
Robby looks at the ceiling. We are silent. After a while, he says: it’s like being in the eye of the hurricane.
What do you mean?
All summer I’ve been digitizing photos. Our childhood, the Weisser Hirsch, the zinc bathtubs, the Luisenhof. Every night in my mind I get on the train and travel to another time. University, the trips away, the family, the children.
He has thousands of pictures in his head, I think to myself. He’s gone through them all again. He’s taken his leave.
Don’t you want to know what I discovered on the photos? he insists. We grin at each other. Time for Robby’s favourite stories. My brother has a weakness for losers, or more precisely for himself as a loser. It’s his pet subject. How, shortly after the Wall fell, he and his friends planned to cycle from Dresden to Scotland, and how, on the very first day, he found himself under a motorway bridge in a violent thunderstorm, abandoned by the others, his ID card gone, leaving him no choice but to cycle back. How he returned to the Weisser Hirsch on leave from the army and no longer had a home. Just a note on the door telling him to go to our grandmother’s, who had a sofa. How on the first night on the sofa hundreds of moths fluttered around him, and how he fled headlong the next morning to a squat in Dresden-Neustadt.
Stories I know. Pictures that hide other pictures. Robby laughs out loud. His eyeballs pop out. His right hand starts to paddle, as if it were trying to explain his bulging eyes. I would love to hear what he saw on the photos he spent all summer looking at. But my brother is an expert at talking through images. He doesn’t like speaking directly. Keep the balls in the air, otherwise you get bogged down. Why does he say that so often?
You have to keep the balls in the air, Robby says like a voiceover, otherwise you’ll get trapped.
What do you mean?
It’s OK, he says dismissively, later perhaps. Can you massage my hand? That’s my Nazi hand.
What?
Don’t talk, just massage.
Is that OK?
No, harder. It’s a weird feeling when your body just starts to shut down.
I swallow. As a child I used to be able to force back the tears. Stare at the ground and pretend outwardly that I was somewhere else. It used to work quite well. But here?
The story about the moths, I say.
Hm.
How did it go exactly?
You know how it went. Tell me something nice instead. Raindrops on the windowpane. Fine rivulets disappearing into nothing. Something nice, Robby demands. And if he doesn’t have a right to it, who does? He pulls his right hand back and stretches his arm in the air.
What are you doing?
I have to go.
Where?
Leave me. I have to go. I have to go to war.
DIFFERENCES. My brother’s hand drops down hard onto the blanket. His gaze drifts to the window. The ice pick again, the pressure in my head, the feeling of slipping away. Where to? Into the world before the loss? To where it all lies ahead? Is that what we tell ourselves? And what then? My brother summoned me when he knew that he had nothing left to lose. When he was sure that we could no longer find any answers. The words feel right, but they have no meaning. They disappear before they’re even here.
Don’t think about it, says Robby, without moving. There’s no point, it doesn’t help anyone.
His hand grabs at the empty space. He is perspiring. Rivulets of sweat around his eyes. Slow, gentle threads. His breathing rattles. In the background a machine beeps monotonously. Why is he so quick? I ask myself. How come he always knows?
You seem a bit weighed down, as if you were in slow motion, he says and looks at me out of the corner of his eye.
It’s not so easy here.
You can say that again!
Why did we lose sight of each other for such a long time? I retort.
How long?
Five years.
I don’t know.
About the moths, he says almost as an aside, it’s quite simple: it was at the start of my military service, at the end of October 1985. My first home leave. I was excited because I’d met Emma a week before I was called up.
The Brazilian with the wild hair?
Yes, her. I arrived on a Friday evening with all my kit at our parents’ place in Weisser Hirsch. I rang the bell but there was no one there. My key didn’t fit. Our name had been removed from the doorplate. It was still my home. It was only then that I saw the note stuck to the door. It was in father’s handwriting and said I should go to grandmother’s. No explanation. I travelled to town and ended up on the moth-ridden sofa. I didn’t see Emma. You know the rest. That’s all there is to it.
That’s not true. He knows it, I know it. But if I were to ask any more questions, I would be invading my brother’s private realm. I don’t want to do that. That’s not right. It’s not the moment. It was never the right moment, something in me echoes. Words, just words, that inevitably end up going nowhere. But what would be the point? Who wants to do that now? It’s clear that Robby wants to have a different story in his head from me. Not that there’s anything unusual about that. It’s just that that our stories are not just variants but really different. So different that the disparity cannot be simply ignored. The ice pick in my head has started up again. It clearly wants to pick its way right through to the other side. My brain feels as if it has been skewered and it’s icy, as if it were made of metal. The pressure gets more intense. But don’t worry, against my better judgement I’ll keep it to myself, the story that my brother doesn’t tell, can’t tell, blocks out. It is the story of an escape, our parents’ escape from their earlier life. A life in which my father, according to his 800-page file, was trained from 1973 by the state security service as a ‘terror agent’, as it was called in the technical jargon. He completed combat training, learned on a dummy how to deliver a knockout blow, and for twelve years travelled under eight different names to the ‘enemy territory’, the West, not simply as a Stasi informer but as a special agent.
At the end of 1984, father’s partisan service was suddenly over. The secret service had no further use for him. In my version of the story, Robby came back at the end of October 1985 to find himself locked out of our parents’ house. He wanted to change his military uniform for his white popper suit to go and meet his girlfriend. But he couldn’t get in. Our parents had kicked him out. They had left my brother behind and forgotten him. Why? Shortly before, my father had had a final meeting with the Stasi, which according to his file lasted two and a half hours and had only two agenda items: he was released from duty and was to receive some kind of settlement. It was a ‘housing exchange’ from the rented apartment in Weisser Hirsch, our childhood home, to a house with a garden in Saxon Switzerland. For some reason the deal had to be completed quickly, so my parents’ move was more like a moonlight flit. There was not even time to inform their own son of the new home, not to mention what his father had actually been doing for the previous twelve years.
QUESTIONING. Robby moans softly. He is restless. We look at one another as we will never do again. He cannot have known anything of the moth story in my head.
Will you write about it? he asks.
No. No family. I don’t want to. I’ve already said everything there was to say, and what I felt was right. I’m done with it.
Not true.
What’s missing?
A lot. Me, above all.
A questioning pause, in which Robby’s iPhone rings. It remains on the bed cover. We say nothing. My brother rubs his neck.
What were you saying? he asks.
No, Robby, it’s your story. You have to tell it yourself.
You can see how I am. I don’t have time for that anymore. Please no, not that. I can’t do it.
1.
Wolfgang Herrndorf was a German author who was diagnosed with the same glioblastoma and committed suicide at the age of forty-eight.
2.
Christmas decoration, also known as a Moravian Christmas star.
Tiny admiral
NO PICTURES. Behind the body the idea. But which one? Four days after our afternoon in the palliative ward, Robby is attached to an intravenous portal system. He can’t swallow anymore, he explains on the phone. The next day he comes home. The doctors are strongly against it, but he insists. I sit at his bedside as often as I can. There are no unknowns anymore. The signs are clear. But he is the same old Robby. And he’s there. I wonder how the two things can exist in parallel: what was always there, and what has gone forever. My brother is lying in the living room. He can see the Christmas tree, behind it the balcony, the rain on the window, the bare trees on the street. To the right of his bed is the large bookcase.
Most of the time he sleeps, dozes, sinks into a coma. 12 December, 14 December, 17 December. Afternoons, when the silence is there only to ask questions. No sign from him for hours on end. Just his lonely body, the room, the ice pick in my head, which, unusually, has stopped tapping. At some point Robby wakes up, blinks at me, and asks dry-mouthed: did you bring any raspberries? Five punnets, hand-picked from KaDeWe. No reaction from him. He can’t eat any more. He can’t eat at all.
I have almost no pictures left in me, he says. And instead? – I don’t know. Lots of white. A large void. The sudden need to protect him, to take him away, to bring him to a place where everything will be good for him. The sudden need to take a photo, to capture my brother, to resist the significance of the moment. How can it be that every pore in our body is against something, and yet it happens nevertheless? There’s no point, says Robby. The ice pick makes itself felt again. May I? I ask and take my iPhone out of my bag. He looks at me steadily for a long time.
I still have Camera Lucida you gave me, he says.
Yes.
It was good after all that you went to the West. I got your books and the other things you left behind. Roland Barthes and the lost mother. Those things.
Camera Lucida. The book I carried round with me all the time in my parka pocket at the end of my studies. I don’t remember anything about it anymore, except that in some arcane way it was a guiding light for him and that the book spoke ceaselessly of aura, magic, light and that Barthes did not seek solace. He didn’t want any. The mother was to remain the lodestar; nothing could compare with her. Barthes looked constantly at photos. He scanned every detail in his mind. But inside of him time didn’t exist.
Robby has dozed off. I take his hand and try to speak, to speak to him. Maybe he can hear me. Start, with something, quietly, anything. With the burning leaves in the garden of our childhood, with the unsuccessful search for Easter eggs, the aroma of chestnuts in the pan. I try to find pictures with both of us in them, pictures that define us. Pictures that are not so much about memory but about finding words that make links, that create something, that suspend the tense waiting for one another that perhaps only I feel.
MARKERS. Robby died on 6 January 2018. We had just one month to take our leave of one another. Thirty days. That’s all. As long as he was lying in his room in Dresden, I knew what to do. I got into the car and drove to him. Sometimes there was snow on the trees on the motorway, sometimes I looked at the grey winter sky, sometimes it rained, sometimes there were traffic jams. Once I heard a piece on the radio about the desert and how to find one’s way there. You should ask Bedouins, it said, and learn to read the signs. Particular markers, watering holes, camel skeletons, withered tree stumps. Wrecked cars or old tyres could also point to the right direction. In the previous four weeks I had seen no markers and also had no idea where I was. But I still managed to get to where I was meant to be, with my brother.
On 6 January 2018 it drizzles. Mild, hazy, slippery. I drive to Dresden to take leave of my brother. He is lying in his bed and looks good, young, relieved, almost disembodied. His lips are open as if he had wanted to ask something before he went. During the weeks I spent at his bedside, it was as if time had lost direction. I just sat there and looked at his face. Sometimes I said a few words. At some point he opened his eyes and said: As a child there was always this thing with my ears. Or: Our ships aren’t moving anymore. Or: Feathers, I want feathers. Or: In the Stasi house it’s always raining. I imagined an orchestra in the pit but without the energy to start playing. Just a sound now and then, a messy phrase, a couple of loose ends. And yet I never had the feeling that Robby’s words were incoherent. I even thought I could make out the pattern. But it was his final chord. Shouldn’t it remain unfinished?
REPRESSED LONGING. When I arrived home at night after my visits to Dresden, I sat in front of the computer and googled. Was there really no cure for him? Glioblastoma is the commonest malignant brain tumour. A glioblastoma starts in the white matter. Because of its shape, a glioblastoma is sometimes known as a butterfly tumour. Its growth is diffuse and infiltrating, and a glioblastoma is notable for its inhomogeneous and diverse appearance. A glioblastoma doubles in size every fifty days. A glioblastoma is extremely difficult to treat. The median survival rate of patients with a glioblastoma is 14.6 months. No definitive cure for a glioblastoma has yet been found.
Malignant, inhomogeneous, diffuse, infiltrating, extremely difficult. The only thing I retained was the word butterfly. I saw Robby and myself in our garden as children. My brother had come directly from his biology class and had something on his mind. He showed me the eggs stuck to the old blackthorn bush, the caterpillars in their pupal phase, then the fat admirals perched hungrily on the thistles. On the ground was one that had just slipped out of its chrysalis, all crumpled and trembling. We’ll save him, cried Robby, and clapped his hands. I ran off to fetch a bowl of sugared water and dribbled a few drops on it. The tiny admiral cautiously organized its flight apparatus, dipped its proboscis into the water, paused a moment, then flew off and landed with the others.
The butterfly in my brother’s head was only nine months old. I sit on his bed and think about the previous four weeks: as if something in me demanded stoically that what Robby had would end up the same way as the tiny admiral. The doctors would surely find the detail that would save him. The unimaginable would not take place. It mustn’t, it couldn’t, it had to be stopped. What is it? I ask myself. Some kind of madness? A state of shock? An attempt to escape from this feeling of powerlessness? Complete denial? Anxiety corresponds to repressed longing, says Freud, but it’s not the same thing. Repression also signifies something. But what?
Robby’s hands are cold. How dead people are as soon as they’re dead. I count back the days and decide that the previous month was an exception. And what about now? What name do you give to an exception that inevitably becomes the rule? I get up and go over to the large window through which in the final weeks my brother saw his last Advent sky. The Christmas tree on which our childhood decorations hung has been removed. As if something had been preserved in this room, I reflect. In this strange collection of things, to which so many old feelings are attached. I pick up the little Moor, the incense smoker from way back. A leftover from Advent. I’m amazed that it has survived. Perhaps this odd collection represents Robby’s wish for coherence, an assurance of a kind, the mark of a time long gone, from now on belonging only to itself.
STEADFAST. How familiar his body is to me. Like my own. Behind the body the idea. But what is there to understand here that was not already there? Everyone is alone in death, writes Canetti. So we are here twice, alone in life and alone in death. Alone twice over. A difficult concept, I find. I remember the first time Robby encountered death. He was maybe five. It was winter. We were by ourselves in the apartment, had made something to eat for ourselves and were sitting at the kitchen table. Suddenly my brother looked at me wide-eyed, jumped up, opened all the doors one after the other, turned on the lights in all the rooms, ran breathlessly through the apartment. He ran and ran until he came back to me and shouted: What is it, death? Is it coming to get me? Where do I go when it’s right there in front of me? Will you visit me? How his little body trembled, how frightened he was, how inconsolable.
How to let him go now? Why? What will it be like without you? Sister Rosa from the shift team stands next to Robby’s head and asks if I want a coffee. He’s breathing, I say, and point to his chest. He’s moving. I can still see it. He’s alive. He’s not dead, it must be a mistake. And everything else is wrong here, too. She nods gently and explains that he has always breathed and that’s why he continues to do so. An optical illusion that only goes away after a few hours. How brutal and yet civil death is, I think to myself. It lets Robby continue breathing until everyone around him has got the message. The sky outside the window, the Moravian Christmas lights that just continue to glow, his last washcloth, the little Moor. Perhaps death is a wave. First my brother dies in his bed, then his room, and finally everything on the street.
I look at his face. Is there something that wasn’t there before? Something hidden, a mark? I can’t see anything. It’s all smooth, almost perfectly even. As if the chemistry has also burnt away the years. How young he is. So do we just die like that, as the research seems to think, and the whole thing is nothing but chance, completely arbitrary? Or was there a moment that triggered the crisis in Robby’s head? Where could it have started? There are never direct connections, says Ingeborg Bachmann. So there are indirect ones. I can see the tiny admiral, how it weaves around trying to escape from the field of thistles, managing as far as the first lily but then falling back home again. I can see the colours, the stillness, the light at that moment, and my brother, blond, gentle, very delicate.
NEW SCENE. The story of the admiral was our secret. The thing with the sugared water was our secret. That Robby discovered why butterflies avoid shadows was our secret. That grandmother told us how the creatures fluttering around represent souls, and that they help the dead to speak to the living was our secret. My brother was not interested in the soul. He wanted to find out about the business with the shadows. He followed the tiny admiral wherever it went. Later we climbed the steps and he had a panic attack. In my head the butterflies had always been one thing and my brother’s panic attack another. They didn’t go together, they had nothing to do with one another.
Now, at his bedside, the two scenes mingle and become one. The new scene goes like this: Robby is determined to show me where the tiny admiral sleeps at night. We run home. We’re hungry. We sit at the kitchen table. We start to talk about all kinds of things. I tell him grandfather died yesterday. Otto, our mother’s father. There is no first moment. Why then am I so sure that this is the beginning?
Our forefathers and their duty
PHANTASMS.
