An Offering for the Dead by Hans Erich Nossack Read Free Book Online Page A

at me so forlornly that I grew quite helpless. At such moments, it would have been better if one of us had wept for the other. But we men do not allow ourselves to cry and have therefore quite forgotten how to do it. Indeed, we are so afraid of tears that we resort to the most absurd devices to prevent them in women too. That was why the female visitors never wept, although they may have often felt like it, and it would have been beneficial for both sides. So I could think of nothing else than to stroke the sad woman's hair and ask her to spend the night with me. Then we embraced; not out of love, but because we did not know what to do. However, this seldom happened. When I awoke in the morning, they had long since left me without waking me up. But the imprint of their sorrow remained next to me in the pillows, and the smell of those women clung to me so strongly that I was certain the people in the street or on the train that I rode to the city must have noticed it.
    Once there was a very young girl present, she could have been barely fourteen years old. Although it must have been winter, she was wearing a kind of shirt of very fine material, which reached down to her bare feet. She warmed her hands at the stove; the heat radiating from the stove door shone right through them. The line of the back of her neck and the tiny hairs also shone. My heart quivered with tenderness. I do not know what she was after. I did not dare to ask; for she would certainly have been frightened. Besides, it was enough that she was warming herself.
    Incidentally, it now occurs to me that the male visitors and the women never arrived together or at the same time. While the two sexes usually strive to get as close to each other as possible, trying to abolish the difference, these people showed no such yearning; they kept apart, as if knowing nothing about each other. Indeed, it was as if they lived in completely different worlds.
    I am struck by a terrifying thought. What if my name and my image were still alive somewhere? And my name were speaking to another name at this very moment, and I did not know what? Who says that my name perished? Or else it sits on the edge of a woman's bed, and she is deceived by it? Or is a woman not deceived by such a thing?
     
    How shall I check it? This thought, that there can exist such a world of names, and that it may be more powerful, and that I may be utterly superfluous here, is so terrifying that I dare not speak any further.
    But no! I experienced it myself.
    When I now entered the room, my father was sitting on the sofa. His head had sunk down to his chest so that his beard pushed up along his chin. The corners of his large, kind mouth drooped wearily on both sides. His lips were arched like the wings of a gull. His hair also stuck out, disheveled. Even now, in his sleep, anxious thoughts moved to and fro along their trodden paths on his high forehead.
    I heaved a deep sigh of love and gratitude when I saw him. I closed the door as softly as possible, but it awoke him all the same. He must have been immeasurably exhausted. His eyebrows and the shadows under his eyes formed black rings like the frames of glasses. But his eyes themselves shone like dark, mild suns.
    Whenever I met him or he visited me, I always pondered what good things I could do for him, even at the cost of my own life; for I believed that he was not sufficiently respected, indeed, that he was pushed around a bit as if he were in the way; nor did he grant himself what was right. Yet I could never hit on anything that would suffice for this purpose, and so I felt guilty towards him. It was the same now, and I believe he noticed it precisely. He beckoned at me to sit down with him, and he asked: "Do you want to save the diaries?"
    Only now did I see that he had read parts of them. He was allowed to do so; for it seems to me as if I wrote them for him. For whom else? And he had fallen asleep while reading.
     
    "No," I answered, "we have to