Chapter 37
AS I WAS taking my second state exam, the professor who had given the concentration camps seminar died. Gertrud came across the obituary in the newspaper. The funeral was at the mountain cemetery. Did I want to go?
I didn’t. The burial was on a Thursday afternoon, and on both Thursday and Friday morning I had to take written exams. Also, the professor and I had never been particularly close. And I didn’t like funerals. And I didn’t want to be reminded of the trial.
But it was already too late. The memory had been awakened, and when I came out of the exam on Thursday, it was as if I had an appointment with the past that I couldn’t miss. I did something I never did otherwise: I took the streetcar. This in itself was an encounter with the past, like returning to a place that once was familiar but has changed its appearance. When Hanna worked for the streetcar company, there were long streetcars made up of two or three carriages, platforms at the front and back, running boards along the platforms that you could jump onto when the streetcar had pulled away from the stop, and a cord running through the cars that the conductor rang to signal departure. In summer there were streetcars with open platforms. The conductor sold, punched, and inspected tickets, called out the stations, signaled departures, kept an eye on the children who pushed their way onto the platforms, fought with passengers who jumped off and on, and denied further entry if the car was full. There were cheerful, witty, serious, grouchy, and coarse conductors, and the temperament or mood of the conductor often defined the atmosphere in the car. How stupid of me that after the failed surprise on the ride to Schwetzingen, I had been afraid to waylay Hanna and see what she was like as a conductor.
I got onto the conductor-less streetcar and rode to the mountain cemetery. It was a cold autumn day with a cloudless, hazy sky and a yellow sun that no longer gave off any heat, the kind you can look at directly without hurting your eyes. I had to search awhile before finding the grave where the funeral ceremony was being held. I walked beneath tall, bare trees, between old gravestones. Occasionally I met a cemetery gardener or an old woman with a watering can and gardening shears. It was absolutely still, and from a distance I could hear the hymn being sung at the professor’s grave.
I stopped a little way off and studied the small group of mourners. Some of them were clearly eccentrics and misfits. In the eulogies for the professor, there were hints that he himself had withdrawn from the pressures of society and thus lost contact with it, remaining a loner and thereby becoming something of an oddball himself.
I recognized a former member of the concentration camps seminar. He had taken his exams before me, had become a practicing attorney, and then opened a pub; he was dressed in a long red coat. He came to speak to me when everything was over and I was making my way to the cemetery gate. “We were in the same seminar - don’t you remember?”
“I do.” We shook hands.
“I was always at the trial on Wednesdays, and sometimes I gave you a lift.” He laughed. “You were there every day, every day and every week. Can you say why, now?” He looked at me, good-natured and ready to pounce, and I remembered that I had noticed this look even in the seminar.
“I was very interested in the trial.”
“You were very interested in the trial?” He laughed again. “The trial, or the defendant you were always staring at? The only one who was reasonably good-looking. We all used to wonder what was going on between you and her, but none of us dared ask. We were so terribly sensitive and considerate back then. Do you remember ...” He recalled another member of the seminar, who stuttered or lisped and held forth incessantly, most of it nonsense, and to whom we listened as though his words were gold. He went on to talk about other members of the seminar, what they were like back then and what they were doing now. He talked and talked. But I knew he would get back to me eventually and ask: “So - what was going on between you and the defendant?” And I didn’t know what to answer, how to betray, confess, parry.
Then we were at the entrance to the cemetery, and he asked. A streetcar was just pulling away from the stop and I called out, “Bye,” and ran off as though I could jump onto the running board, ran alongside the streetcar beating the flat of my hand against the door, and something happened that I wouldn’t have believed possible, hadn’t even hoped for. The streetcar stopped, the door opened, and I got on.