Ingeborg Bachmann: Youth in an Austrian Town

On fine October days, as you come out of the Radetzky-strasse, you can see by the Municipal Theatre a group of trees in the sunshine. The first tree, which stands in front of those dark-red cherry trees that bear no fruit, is so ablaze with autumn, such an immense patch of gold, that it looks like a torch dropped by an angel. And now it is burning, and the autumn wind and frost cannot put it out.

Who, faced with this tree, is going to talk to me about falling leaves and the white death? Who will prevent me from holding it with my eyes and believing that it will always glow before me as it does at this moment and that it is not subject to the laws of the world?

In its light the town too is recognizable again, with pale convalescent houses under the dark hair of their tiles, and the canal that every now and then brings in a boat from the sea which ties up in its heart. The docks are undoubtedly dead now that freight is brought to the town quicker by train and lorry; but flowers and fruit still fall from the highquay onto the pondlike water, the snow drops off the boughs, the melted snow comes rushing noisily down, then washes back and raises a wave and with the wave a ship whose bright-coloured sail was set on our arrival.

People rarely moved to this town from another town, because its attractions were too few; they came from the villages, because the farms had grown too small, and they looked for accommodation on the outskirts where it was cheapest. Here there were still fields and gravel pits, big market gardens and allotments on which year after year the owners grew turnips, cabbages and beans, the bread of the poorest settlers. These settlers dug their own cellars, standing in the seepage. They nailed up their own rafters during the brief evenings between spring and autumn, and heaven knows whether they ever in their lives saw the ceremony that takes place when the roof is put on.

This didn't worry their children, for they had already grown familiar with the ever-changing smells that came from far away, when the bonfires were burning and the gypsies speaking strange languages settled fleetingly in the no-man's-land between cemetery and airfield.

***

In the tenement in the Durchlasstrasse the children have to take off their shoes and play in stockinged feet, because they live above the landlord. They are only allowed to whisper and for the rest of their lives they will never lose the habit of whispering. At school the teachers say to them: 'You should be beaten till you open your mouths. Beaten...' Between the reproach for talking too loud and the reproach for talking too softly, they settle down in silence.

The Durchlasstrasse, Tunnel Street, did not get its name from the game in which the robbers march through a tunnel, but for a long time the children thought it did. It wasn't until later, when their legs carried them farther, that they saw the tunnel, the little underpass, over which the train passed on its way to Vienna. Inquisitive people who wanted to go to the airfield had to walk through this tunnel, across the fields and right through all the embroideries of autumn. Someone had the idea of putting the airfield next to the cemetery, and the people in K always said it was convenient for burying the pilots who for a time made training flights here. The pilots never did anyone the favour of crashing. The children always yelled: 'An airman! An airman!' They raised their arms towards them as though to catch them, and stared into the cloud zoo in which the airmen moved among animals' heads and masks.

The children take the silver paper off the bars of chocolate and whistle the Maria Saaler Geläut on it. At school the children's heads are examined for lice by a woman doctor. The children don't know what the time is, because the clock on the parish church has stopped. They always come home late from school. The children! They know their names when put to it, but they prick up their ears only when someone calls out 'Children'.

Homework: down strokes and up strokes in neat writing, exercises in profit and loss, the profit of new horizons against the loss of dreams, learning things off by heart with the help of memory aids. Their task: to learn an alphabet and the multiplication tables, an orthography and the ten commandments, among the fumes of oiled floors, of a few hundred children's lives, dwarfs' overcoats, burnt India-rubbers, among tears and scoldings, standing in the corner, kneeling and unsilenceable chatter.

The children take off old words and put on new ones. They hear about Mount Sinai and they see the Ulrichsberg with its turnip fields, larches and firs, mixed up with cedars and thorn bushes, and they eat sorrel and gnaw the corn cobs before they grow hard and ripe, or bring them home and roast them on the glowing embers. The stripped cobs disappear into the wooden box and are used as tinder, and cedar and olive wood is laid on top, smoulders, warms from far away and casts shadows on the wall.

The time of trophies, the time of Christmases, without looking forward, without looking back, the time of the pumpkin nights, of ghosts and terrors without end. In good, in evil—without hope.

The children have no future. They are afraid of the whole world. They don't picture the world; they picture only the geography of a hopscotch square, because its frontiers can be drawn in chalk. On one or two legs they hop the frontiers from one region to another.

One day the children move into the Henselstrasse. Into a house without a landlord, into an estate that has crawled out tame and hidebound from under mortgages. They live two streets away from the Beethovenstrasse, in which all the houses are spacious and centrally heated, and one street away from the Radetzkystrasse, through which the trams run, electric-red and with huge muzzles. They have become the possessors of a garden, in which roses are planted in the front and little apple trees and blackcurrant bushes at the back. The trees are no taller than the children, and they grow up together. On the left they have neighbours with a boxer dog, and on the right children who eat bananas and spend the day swinging on a horizontal bar and rings which they have put up in the garden. They make friends with the dog Ali and compete with the children next door, who always know better and can do things better.

They prefer to be by themselves; they make themselves a den in the attic and often shout out loud in their hiding place,trying out their crippled voices. They utter little low cries of rebellion in front of spiders' webs.

The cellar is spoiled for them by mice and the smell of apples. They go down every day, pick out the rotten fruit, cut out the bad bits and eat what is left. Because the day never comes on which all the rotten apples have been eaten, because more apples are always turning rotten and nothing must be thrown away, they hunger after an alien, forbidden fruit. They don't like the apples, their relations or the Sundays on which they have to go for walks on the Kreuzberg above the house, naming the flowers, naming the birds.

In the summer the children blink through the green shutters into the sunshine; in winter they make a snowman and stick pieces of coal in its head for eyes. They learn French. Madeleine est une petite fille. Elle regarde la rue. They play the piano. 'The Champagne Song'. 'The Last Rose of Summer'. 'The Rustle of Spring'.

They no longer spell. They read newspapers, from which the sex murderer jumps out at them. He becomes the shadow thrown by the trees in the dusk as they come home from Bible lessons, and he causes the rustling of the swaying lilac along the front gardens; the snowball bushes and the phloxes part for a moment and reveal his figure. They feel the strangler's grip, the mystery contained in the word sex that is more to be feared than the murderer.

The children read their eyes sore. They wake up tired because they spent too long in the evening in wild Kurdistan or with the gold-diggers in Alaska. They eavesdrop on a conversation between lovers and wish they had a dictionary in which to look up all the words they don't understand. They rack their brains about their bodies and a quarrel that takes place at night in their parents' bedroom. They laugh at every opportunity; they can scarcely contain themselves and fall off the bench for laughing, get up and go on laughing, till they get cramps.

But the sex murderer is soon found in a village, in the Rosental, in a barn, with tufts of hay and the grey photographic mist in his face that makes him forever unrecognizable, not only in the morning paper.

There is no money in the house. No more coins drop into the piggy bank. In front of children adults speak only in veiled hints. They cannot guess that the country is in the process of selling itself and the sky along with it, the sky at which everyone tugs until it tears and a black hole appears.

At table the children sit in silence, chewing for a long time on a mouthful, while a storm crackles on the radio and the announcer's voice flashes round the kitchen like ball-lightning and ends up where the saucepan lid rises in alarm above the potatoes in their burst jackets. The electric cables are cut. Columns of marching men pass through the streets. The flags strike together over their heads.' We shall march on and on till everything crashes in ruins,' they sing outside. The time signal sounds, and the children start giving each other silent news with practised fingers.

The children are in love but do not know with what. They talk in gibberish, muse themselves into an indefinable pallor, and when they are completely at a loss they invent a language that maddens them. My fish. My hook. My fox. My snare. My fire. You my water. You my current. My earth. You my if. And you my but. Either. Or. My everything... my everything... They push one another, go for each other with their fists and scuffle over a counter-word that doesn't exist.

It's nothing. Those children!

They develop temperatures, they vomit, get the shivers, sore throats, whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever; theyreach the crisis, are given up, are suspended between life and death; and one day they lie there numb and shaky, with new thoughts about everything. They are told that war has broken out.

For a few more winters, until the bombs fling up its ice, there is skating on the pond under the Kreuzberg. The fine glassy surface in the centre is reserved for the girls in flared skirts who perform inside edges, outside edges and figure-eights; the circle round this belongs to the speed skaters. In the warming-room the bigger boys pull on the bigger girls skates and their ear-flaps touch the leather that is like swan's necks as it is stretched over thin legs. You have to have skates that screw on in order to count as a real skater, and those who, like the children, have only wooden skates attached with straps retire into remote corners of the pond or look on.

In the evening, when the skaters of both sexes have slipped off their boots, slung them over their shoulders and stepped up onto the wooden stands to say goodbye, when all the faces, like fresh young moons, are shining in the dusk, the lights go on under the snow canopies. The loudspeakers are switched on, and the sixteen-year-old twins, who are known throughout the town, come down the wooden steps, he in blue trousers and a white sweater and she in a gauzy blue nothing over her flesh-pink tights. They wait nonchalantly for the music to strike up before leaping down onto the ice from the last step but one—she with a beating of wings, he plunging like a magnificent swimmer—and reach the centre with a few deep, powerful thrusts. There she launches out into the first figure, and he holds out to her a hoop of light through which she springs, encircled by a haze, as the gramophone needle begins to scratch and the music grates to an end. The old gentlemen's eyes widen under their frosty brows, and the man with the snow shovel clearing the longdistance skating track round the outside of the pond, his feet wrapped in rags, rests his chin on the handle of his shovel and follows the girl's steps as though they led into eternity.

The children get one more surprise: the next lot of Christmas trees really do fall from heaven. On fire. And the unexpected present which the children receive is more free time.

During air raid alarms they are allowed to leave their exercise books lying on their desks and go down into the shelter. Later they are allowed to save up sweets for the wounded, to knit socks and weave raffia baskets for the men who are fighting on land, on sea and in the air. And to write a composition commemorating those under the earth and on the ground. And later still they are allowed to dig trenches between the cemetery and the airfield, which is already paying tribute to the cemetery. They are allowed to forget their Latin and learn to distinguish between the sounds of the engines in the sky. They don't have to wash so often any more; no one bothers about their finger nails now. The children mend their skipping ropes, because there are no longer any new ones, and they talk about time fuses and landmines. The children play 'Let the robbers march through' among the ruins, but often they merely sit there staring into space, and they no longer hear when people call out 'Children' to them. There are enough bits of rubble for hopscotch, but the children shiver because they are soaking wet and cold.

Children die, and the children learn the dates of the Seven Years War and the Thirty Years War, and they wouldn't care if they mixed up all the hostilities, the pretext and the cause, for the exact differentiation of which they could get good marks in history.

They bury the dog AH and then his owners. The time of veiled hints is past. People speak in their presence of shooting in the back of the neck, of hanging, liquidating, blowing up, and what they don't hear and see they smell, as they smell the dead of St Ruprecht, who cannot be dug out because they have been buried under the movie theatre into which they slipped surreptitiously to see Romance in a Minor Key. Juveniles were not admitted, but then they were admitted to the great dying and murdering which took place a few days later and every day after that.

There is no more light in the house. No glass in the windows. No door on the hinges. Nobody stirs and nobody rises.

The Glan does not flow upstream and downstream. The little river stands still, and Zigulln Castle stands still and does not rise.

St George stands in the New Square, stands with his club and does not strike the dragon. Next to him stands the Empress and she does not rise either.

O town. Town. Privet town with all its roots dangling. There is no light and no bread in the house. The children are told: 'Keep quiet, keep quiet whatever you do.'

Among these walls, between the ring roads, how many walls are still standing? Is the bird Wonderful still alive? He has been silent for seven years. Seven years are over. You my place, you no place, above clouds, beneath karst, under night, over day, my town and my river. I your current, you my earth.

Town with the Viktringer Ring and the St Veiter Ring... All the ring roads ought to be named by their names like the great starry ways that looked no larger to children, and all the alleys, Citadel Alley and Corn Alley, yes, that's what they were called, Paradise Alley, not to forget the squares, Hay Square and Holy Ghost Square, so that everything here shall be named, once and for all, so that all the squares shall be named. Current and earth.

And one day nobody gives the children report cards any more, and they can go. They are called upon to step into life. Spring descends with clear, raging waters and gives birth to a blade of grass. There is no need to tell the children it is peace. They go away, with their hands in their ragged pockets and a whistle that is meant as a warning to themselves.

***

Because at that time, at that place, I was among children and we had created fresh space, I gave up the Henselstrasse, as well as the view of the Kreuzberg, and took as my witnesses all the fir trees, the jays and the eloquent foliage. And because I have become aware that the innkeeper no longer gives a groschen for an empty soda siphon and no longer pours out lemonade for me, I leave to others the path through the Durchlasstrasse and pull the collar of my coat up higher when I cross it without a glance on my way to the graves outside, a passer-through whose origins are evident to no one. Where the town comes to an end, where the gravel pits are, where the sieves stand full of pebbles and the sand has stopped singing, you can sit down for a moment and take your head in your hands. Then you know that everything was as it was, that everything is as it is, and you abandon the attempt to find a reason for everything. For there is no wand that touches you, no transformation. The lime trees and the elder bush...? Nothing touches your heart. No slopes from former times, no risen house. Nor the tower of Zigulln, the two captive bears, the ponds, the roses, the gardens full of laburnum. In the motionless recollection before departure, before all departures, what can be revealed to us ? Very little is left to reveal things to us, and youth has no part in what is left, nor has the town in which it was passed.

Only when the tree outside the theatre works the miracle, when the torch burns, do I manage to see everything mingled, like the waters in the sea: the early confinement in darkness while the aeroplanes flew above incandescent clouds; the New Square and its absurd monuments looking out upon Utopia; the sirens that wailed in those days with a sound like the lift in a skyscraper; the slices of dry bread and jam containing a stone on which I bit by the shores of the Atlantic.