A Sorrow Beyond Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

is distinct. Only then, only if a sentence is firmly and circumspectly centred on my personal or, if you will, private subject, do I feel that I can use it.
    Another specific feature of this story is that I do not, as is usually the case, let every sentence carry me further away from the inner life of my characters, so asfinally, in a liberated and serene holiday mood, to look at them from outside as isolated insects. Rather, I try with unbending earnestness to penetrate my character. And because I cannot fully capture her in any sentence, I keep having to start from scratch and never arrive at the usual sharp and clear bird’s-eye view.
    Ordinarily, I start with myself and my own headaches ; in the course of my writing, I detach myself from them more and more, and then in the end I ship myself and my headaches off to market as a commodity—but in this case, since I am only a
writer
and can’t take the role of
the person written about
, such detachment is impossible. I can only move myself into the distance; my mother can never become for me, as I can for myself, a winged art object flying serenely through the air. She refuses to be isolated and remains unfathomable; my sentences crash in the darkness and lie scattered on the paper.
    In stories we often read that something or other is “unnameable” or “indescribable”; ordinarily this strikes me as a cheap excuse. This story, however, is really about the nameless, about speechless moments of terror. It is about moments when the mind boggles with horror, states of fear so brief that speech always comes too late; about dream happenings so gruesome that the mind perceives them physically as worms. The blood curdles, the breath catches, “a cold chill crept up my back, my hair stood on end”—states experienced while listeningto a ghost story, while turning on a water tap that you can quickly turn off again, on the street in the evening with a beer bottle in one hand; in short, it is a record of states, not a well-rounded story with an anticipated, hence comforting, end.
    At best, I am able to capture my mother’s story for brief moments in dreams, because then her feelings become so palpable that I experience them as doubles and am identical with them; but these are precisely the moments I have already mentioned, in which extreme need to communicate coincides with extreme speechlessness. That is why I affect the usual biographical pattern and write: “At that time … later”, “Because … although”, “was … became … became nothing”, hoping in this way to dominate the horror. That, perhaps, is the comical part of my story.)

    In the early summer of 1948, my mother left the eastern sector of Germany with her husband and two children, carrying the little girl, who was just a year old, in a shopping bag. They had no papers. They crossed two borders illegally, both in the grey of dawn; once a Russian border guard shouted “Halt!” and my mother’s answer in Slovenian served as a password; those days became fixed in the boy’s mind as a triad of grey dawn, whispers, and danger. Happy excitement on the train ride through Austria, and then she was back in the house where she was born, where two small rooms were turnedover to her and her family. Her husband was employed as foreman by her carpenter brother; she herself was reincorporated into the household. In the city she had not been proud of having children; here she was, and often showed herself with them. She no longer took any nonsense from anyone. In the old days her only reaction had been a bit of back chat; now she laughed. She could laugh anyone to silence. Her husband, in particular, got laughed at so vigorously whenever he started discussing his numerous projects that he soon faltered and looked vacantly out the window. True, he would start in again the next day. (That period lives for me in the sound of my mother laughing at people!) She also interrupted the children with her laughter when they