Visitation Read Online Free PDF Page B

house, this meant that the weather would be lovely all day long, the terrace still lay in the shade of the house, and the butter on the breakfast table hadn’t yet begun to melt. All day long, the sun shone on the two meadows to the right and left of the path that led down to the water, the sisters of his wife lay and sat there with their children in the grass playing, sleeping or reading, sunlight spotted the path as it descended amid oak leaves, conifers and hazelnut bushes down to the paved steps, eight times eight, rough sandstone in its natural color; down beside the lake the sunlight pierced the alder foliage only at intervals to reach the black earth of the shoreline, which was still moist, and the closer you came to the glistening surface of the lake, the louder the leaves rustled, the shadier it was all around you—blackout shades, Mannesmann Air Raid Defense—but all of this only in order to blind him, a summer visitor taking his first step out onto the dock, between sunlight and water he would walk toward the end of the dock, and apart from him, the one walking there, nothing else remained that might have cast a shadow. Here the sun unleashed its force, falling upon both him and the lake, and the lake threw its reflection right back up at the sun, and he, who was now sitting or lying at the end of the dock, observed this exchange, casually extracting from his hand a splinter he’d gotten when he sat or lay down, smelled the pine tar used to impregnate the wood, heard the boat plashing in the boathouse, the chain it was bound with faintly clinking, he saw fish suspended in the bright water, crabs crawling, felt the warm boards beneath his feet, his legs, his belly, smelled his own skin, lay or sat there, and since the sun was so bright he closed his eyes. And even through the blood behind his closed eyelids he saw the flickering orb.
     
     
    If this bit of land, the house and the lake had not signified homeland to him, nothing would have kept him in the Eastern Zone. Now this home had become a trap. At the end of the war he had haggled and drunk with the Russians in Berlin five nights long to keep the machines from being removed from his cabinetry workshop, he had salvaged his architecture office, his business, even during the first wave of expropriations, with Socialist greetings, the rejection letter from Speer had even, in the end, gotten him the commission for the Friedrichstrasse project under the Reds, but now, six years after the end of the war, the Communists were making a grab for his business after all, this had only now occurred to them, suddenly, in the middle of peacetime—Mannesmann Air Raid Defense, always keep your eye on your opponent. Like children with an animal whose nature they are unable to comprehend, they were now ripping the head off this toy and would be surprised to see the thing stop twitching soon thereafter.
     
     
    All his life he had worked to transform money into something real, he’d at first bought only half of this bit of land and built the house on it, later he’d added the other half with the dock and the little bathing house, his entire savings, earned by hard labor, was grounded here, it had literally put down roots as oaks, alders and pine trees, making an investment is what they used to call it, converting money into durable goods in troubled times, that’s what he’d been taught, but unfortunately what he’d been taught had recently become unmoored from reality, and in the wondrous disorder that the Russians left behind for the Germans one could only pity a person who owned a piece of land and not a flying carpet.
     
     
    Someone who builds something is affixing his life to the earth. Embodying the act of staying put is his profession. Creating an interior. Digging deeper and deeper in a place where there is nothing. From outside, the colored glass in the living room windows he’s now walking past looks dull and impenetrable, the light doesn’t take on life