Leavetaking Read Free Page B

the glass door into the garden, so making the bushes, the pear tree, the gravel path, the lawn, and the summer house appear first in a fiery glow and then in subdued, submarine tones. At the time of this viewing, my basic nature had already been formed, and only when the observing, controlling part of me wearies and my consciousness loses its hold do impulses arise in me out of my earliest life, and it is in half sleep, in dreams, in periods of depression that I re-experience the helplessness, the feeling of having been handed over and the blind rebellion of the time when strange hands tamed, kneaded, and did violence to my being. When my mother once told me the first words I ever said were What a nice life I have, what a nice life, in it I heard the ring of something that had been drummed into my head, parrot-taught, something with which I had wanted to amuse or mock those around me. Like an evil spirit I came into this house, lying in a tin box carried by my mother, received by wild tom-tom beats and my stepbrothers’ exorcismal cries. My mother had found me at the edge of a pond among the rushes and storks. The first house has large blind spots in it. I can’t find my way through this house, can only dimlyremember the steps of a staircase, the corner of a floor on which I built little red-brown houses with blocks grown greasy from so much handling and green redoubts, dimly recall a little toy truck filled with miniature boxes, and the thought of those boxes brings back a thick, heavy sensation in the roof of my mouth. I vaguely recall postage stamps spread out before me, rose-colored and light green stamps with the face of a king with twirled mustaches and my older brothers rushing in and shouting, and my mother sweeping the stamps together and throwing them into the stove. And there is the edge of a tiled stove and the arms of a sofa and I sit on one arm of the sofa and one of my brothers tickles me and I fall backward onto the edge of the stove and knock a hole into my head and some liquid is poured out of a bottle into the hole in my head and my head froths and all the sense runs out of my head. I see a room that is green, the floor green, the curtains green, the wallpaper green, and I am sitting on a raised porcelain vessel shaped like a guitar and my mother stands in back of me and shoves her forefinger into my bum just above the anus, and I push and she pushes and everything is green, and the street outside is green, and the street is called Green Street, the street in the green twilight was full of the trundling of drays laden high with barrels. The hoofs of the heavy shaggy horses struck sparks from the cobblestones, the coachmen clicked their tongues and cracked their whips and a heavy, sweet smell swelled in waves from the breweries. Our house, with its high gables on whose ridge I rode a race against the moon andfrom whose chimney I sprang with a leap into the sky, lay narrow and squashed between warehouses and the wall of a factory yard. Once a man climbed over our roof, there was commotion in the streets and shots rang out, and my brothers stormed through the house and shouted that someone had fled onto our roof and men rushed in from the street into our house, and the men carried guns in their hands, and they all ran into the garden and switched on their flashlights and shot up at the roof and the wounded man fell from the roof down to the men in the garden below. The house remains strange to me, I cannot find my way around its interior, but I take the garden for my own, I lie stretched out on the ground under the bushes, feel the dry earth between my hands, put the earth into my mouth, crunch the earth between my teeth, feel the white, round pebbles, put the pebbles in my mouth, feel on my tongue their roundness and the warmth of the sun. Closeness, a shut-in feeling reigned in the house, and my senses were trapped. Here out of doors my senses could expand and when I entered the summer house I entered a