the
Sportswelt
transgressing natural thought as clearly as she passed the stages
of the months. She, the sorceress, sent them boiling and held them up for joy, feeling pain
only in the last moment before sleep, half-dressed, on the bedroom floor. Gerta, the nurse,
thought the Devil had come a long way from the forest to find her. Every dress she owned,
every male plate of armor, every bone comb and silken ban, was stamped with the seal of the
camp follower, and screaming in nightmares to the dead ears of her sleeping father, she
followed the weeks of 1914. Beneath her eyes she had painted indigo stains as if she had
been beaten, and her eyes swept from tall black trees to the glaciers of dead warriors,
green with the tint of pine trees, sober with a longingthat came of
eighteen years of summer patios and a partition of a princely nursery.
After the last chorus of the song, she bowed straight-legged from her
flaring hips, flushed to their applause, and made her way to old Herr Snow’s table, storing
appreciation up in her heart, storing each face beside the photograph of the white flaking
head of Gerta, the nurse. Blue smoke floated above the sawdust and the tide of conversation
rolled in the lion cage. She sat where Herr Snow, with his red beard, indicated, felt his
wrists slide her smoothly forward until she touched the table. She looked from face to face.
“You were excellent,” he said. “This is my son, Ernst, who enjoys your singing so much.”
Ernie, thin and more alive with beer, pushed back his chair and nodded, fixed her as he
might have fixed a rosy-cheeked sister, adult and come alive from his free past. “And,” said
Herr Snow, “this is Mr. Cromwell, a guest of mine.” Mr. Cromwell smiled with an easy drunken
grace and filled her glass. He did not miss the charm of London or of the English
countryside rollicking in summer but slept late and heard no cocks crowing in the early
dawn.
“You’re English?” asked Stella.
“Yes, but I particularly like Germany. The lakes and cities seem like vistas
cut into the ice age. You sing well.”
Herr Snow was proud of Ernie because his other son, a boy of nine, forever
wore his head strapped in a brace, and the words that came from the immovable mouth came
also from a remote frightening world. Old Snow, prosperous and long owner of the
Sportswelt
, looked with hard admiration on Ernie’s face, saw his own eyes and
nose staring resentfullyback. With mute excitement, Stella followed each
jagged crevice of the scars, noticed how they dug beneath the cheeks highlighting the bones,
how the eyes were pressed between encroaching blocks of web-like tissue. She waited for the
three claws of the left hand to close talon-like just above her knee, grew warm to the
close-kept face down in its corner. The orchestra filled out the room behind her, roasted
apples fell from the bosom of an oracle, burnt and golden, and gradually the three men drew
closer, warm with all the taste of a chivalric age. She covered the glass before her with
the golden hair and saw for a moment in its swirling depths, the naked cowardice of the
fencer, the future fluttering wings of the solitary British plane leaving its token pellet
in the market place, her mother’s body rolling around it like a stone stained forever, the
stain becoming dry and black as onyx.
The rain had begun to fall and the summer thunder drifted over the wet
leaves, coursed over the darkened glistening steeples. The carriage rocked to and fro, water
splashing from the wheels, dripping from the deep enclosures of passing doors. They traveled
slowly down
die Heldenstrasse
, hearing only the soft rain, the chopping of the
steel hoofs, the smooth movements of leather. Oiled gunmetal springs swung them easily
through the June night while Mephistopheles, crouching in a choir-room, circled this
eighteenth day of the month in red. He, in his black cowl,
Sportswelt
transgressing natural thought as clearly as she passed the stages
of the months. She, the sorceress, sent them boiling and held them up for joy, feeling pain
only in the last moment before sleep, half-dressed, on the bedroom floor. Gerta, the nurse,
thought the Devil had come a long way from the forest to find her. Every dress she owned,
every male plate of armor, every bone comb and silken ban, was stamped with the seal of the
camp follower, and screaming in nightmares to the dead ears of her sleeping father, she
followed the weeks of 1914. Beneath her eyes she had painted indigo stains as if she had
been beaten, and her eyes swept from tall black trees to the glaciers of dead warriors,
green with the tint of pine trees, sober with a longingthat came of
eighteen years of summer patios and a partition of a princely nursery.
After the last chorus of the song, she bowed straight-legged from her
flaring hips, flushed to their applause, and made her way to old Herr Snow’s table, storing
appreciation up in her heart, storing each face beside the photograph of the white flaking
head of Gerta, the nurse. Blue smoke floated above the sawdust and the tide of conversation
rolled in the lion cage. She sat where Herr Snow, with his red beard, indicated, felt his
wrists slide her smoothly forward until she touched the table. She looked from face to face.
“You were excellent,” he said. “This is my son, Ernst, who enjoys your singing so much.”
Ernie, thin and more alive with beer, pushed back his chair and nodded, fixed her as he
might have fixed a rosy-cheeked sister, adult and come alive from his free past. “And,” said
Herr Snow, “this is Mr. Cromwell, a guest of mine.” Mr. Cromwell smiled with an easy drunken
grace and filled her glass. He did not miss the charm of London or of the English
countryside rollicking in summer but slept late and heard no cocks crowing in the early
dawn.
“You’re English?” asked Stella.
“Yes, but I particularly like Germany. The lakes and cities seem like vistas
cut into the ice age. You sing well.”
Herr Snow was proud of Ernie because his other son, a boy of nine, forever
wore his head strapped in a brace, and the words that came from the immovable mouth came
also from a remote frightening world. Old Snow, prosperous and long owner of the
Sportswelt
, looked with hard admiration on Ernie’s face, saw his own eyes and
nose staring resentfullyback. With mute excitement, Stella followed each
jagged crevice of the scars, noticed how they dug beneath the cheeks highlighting the bones,
how the eyes were pressed between encroaching blocks of web-like tissue. She waited for the
three claws of the left hand to close talon-like just above her knee, grew warm to the
close-kept face down in its corner. The orchestra filled out the room behind her, roasted
apples fell from the bosom of an oracle, burnt and golden, and gradually the three men drew
closer, warm with all the taste of a chivalric age. She covered the glass before her with
the golden hair and saw for a moment in its swirling depths, the naked cowardice of the
fencer, the future fluttering wings of the solitary British plane leaving its token pellet
in the market place, her mother’s body rolling around it like a stone stained forever, the
stain becoming dry and black as onyx.
The rain had begun to fall and the summer thunder drifted over the wet
leaves, coursed over the darkened glistening steeples. The carriage rocked to and fro, water
splashing from the wheels, dripping from the deep enclosures of passing doors. They traveled
slowly down
die Heldenstrasse
, hearing only the soft rain, the chopping of the
steel hoofs, the smooth movements of leather. Oiled gunmetal springs swung them easily
through the June night while Mephistopheles, crouching in a choir-room, circled this
eighteenth day of the month in red. He, in his black cowl,
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