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

take our chances."
    And he nodded at me amiably. Nevertheless, I was slightly embarrassed about the diaries. "Come here," he said. "Perhaps we will not meet again that soon. Who can tell what is going to happen. I cannot judge it so exactly. Besides, none of this depends on me, you ought to know." And I realized that he meant that it depended on me. This was his way of suggesting something to me. He fearfully avoided anything that sounded like a demand. "In any case, let us sit together once again. Perhaps the others will also come if it is necessary."
    Ah, I do not wish to say anything more about it. I will later on. Or else not. For what words should I use to describe that afternoon and our sitting together? You must bear in mind that he was my real father. Not the one who has the name of "father" in the lawbooks, because he performed the job of procreating me with a woman (I will have to speak about him too some day); but that is an entirely different matter. No, I was lucky enough to find my real father.
    One day on the street. A wagon with heavy brown horses was standing at the curbstone. Thick white tufts of hair fell over their hooves. A man was talking to them and feeding them crusts of old black bread. Then I heard his voice. And I was amazed that not everyone heard it, since he was speaking so distinctly, and it could not be misunderstood. And now I knew that this was my father.
    I have not heard him again since the thing that happened. I have listened closely; for I cannot imagine that his voice could have been lost. Perhaps it signifies that I am now to speak like him, and then his voice will be here again. But who could manage to do so?
     
    At the table now, where they thought I was sitting, the question that my so-called friend had asked me was answered by the hostess in my stead.
    "Why do you think that we ought to know more about it?" she asked.
    I do not mean to claim that he was rattled by her response; he had too much control over his facial features. He stared unswervingly at the hostess next to me, but it took him a remarkably long time to ask: "We?"
    It may be that this small word was not spoken aloud, and that the other diners failed to notice anything; why, it may even be that I was the only one who thought that word. I have already said that he knew my thoughts and used to voice them. Very slowly, he shifted his eyes towards me, so slowly that the image of the woman by my side, whom he had been watching so attentively, did not evaporate from his face, and I could still make out her barely perceptible nodding. Then he began to speak in his normal way:
    "There are only two explanations for what we have seen today," he said in a glass-hard voice, as if pronouncing an unappealable court verdict. "Either those two ridiculous birds were really here, and (no matter where they come from, however many of them there are, and whatever they can do to us) that would mean that things are possible that, so far as we know, could not be possible. In other words: these would not be things that we see unclearly only for now, but that we will have undoubtedly researched, with gradually increasing knowledge, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow; rather, these would be unknown things that have never been and never will be calculated. And, like those birds, they can erupt into our lives at any time; and all we can do is admit that our knowledge is null and utterly useless. Or else: Those birds were not here in the first place; but everyone imagined seeing them. In effect, the two are practically one and the same; the second possibility may perhaps be somewhat worse. For it would mean that we can rely neither on ourselves nor on that which surrounds us — I mean that which we created, and believe we control, by virtue of our minds; for if we accepted our hallucinations as real, we would devaluate everything that we have previously considered reality. To speak even more clearly: We would then scarcely have the right to call