Leavetaking Read Online Free PDF

we moved in. He folded his arms and asked me imperiously what my name was. Are you going to live here, he asked, and I nodded and with my gaze followed the men who were carrying our furniture out of the moving van and into the house. Your house belongs to my father, Friederle said, you are only renting it. My father is a president, he said, what is your father. I did not know. What, you don’t even know what your father is, he said. I sought for an answer that would overpower him, or win his favor, but I found none. Then he asked again. What’s that you’ve got on your hat. I took the hat off. It was a sailor’s hat with golden lettering on the headband. What is that, he asked again. I did not know. Can’t you even read what’s written on your own hat, he said. It says, I am stupid. And with that he took the hat from my hand and threw it high up into a tree. The hat stuck in the branches, the long blue ribbons fluttered in the wind. My mother came out onto the terrace of ourhouse and saw us standing there side by side. Have you found a new playmate already, she cried. Are you having fun. Friederle pulled me with him into the depths of the garden, past the henhouse, from which we could hear a scratching and clucking, past the pump and the strawberry beds, through grass that grew up to our shoulders, through the shrubbery to the wet ditch that ran in a wide arc around our lot. There in front of us were the fields, the vast plain, over which the sun was burning down, the wind rushed toward us out of the open spaces and showered us with its pregnant odors of growing grain and clover and cow dung. Like a thin mist, the pictures of my old world were scattered and everything was clothed in blinding brightness. With the help of a stick, Friederle jumped over the ditch and signaled impatiently for me to follow. I threw myself across onto the bushy slope, skidded in the mud, pulled myself up by juicy, damp grasses, staggered out into the weight of a sea of air in which green plover were whistling past. And everything belonged to Friederle, he showed me the speckled birds’ eggs in the dry, brittle sand, the bittercress with toad spit on it, molehills, field mice runs, foxholes, and then the hare. Do you see him, there, there, and I saw his white undertail disappearing in rapid zigzag leaps. He was always taking me into his domain, up to the marsh where the ground squished under our feet and where we sucked at the poisonous stalks of marsh marigolds. I went back by the avenue in the white dust of the roadway, my childhood lay decades behind me, I can depict it now with well-chosen words,I can take it apart and spread it out in front of me, but as I experienced it, there was no thinking out and no dissecting, there was no controlling reason then, I was walking down the avenue and my black laced boots were whitened by the dust of the avenue, and Friederle walked beside me, and the white swans swam in the pond and in one garden a peacock strutted and opened up his scintillating fan of feathers, and it was the first day of school, from all directions children were streaming into school and each of them carried a little bag of candy to console him, and fear of the school was sticky and sickly with the taste of raspberry sweets. But in front of the school entrance I fled back, I raced back over the black cinders—trampled hard—of the playground, I ran back along the white dusty avenue, past the peacock and the swans, over the little bridge that led from the avenue into the park, into the overgrown depths of the park up to the edge of the fields, I can depict it now, see it all now, my first day at school, the beginning of my panic, I did not want to get caught, I fled, gasping, I struggled for breath, my throat and chest burned like fire, and so I stand at the edge of the fields and gradually my breathing grows calmer and I feel safe and for a while am free and away from all threats. Before me a wild rose bush grows, and in the