One Morning, Seven Days after my Fifth Birthday
My fifth birthday, 1937. My mother is very pregnant, in her eighth month. A week later, news reaches her of her father’s death. She sits at the secretary in the study, cries, writes letters, “works off her grief ”—but the tears still flow, unconsoled. When she has recounted the details often enough, written down the particulars in enough letters, the incomprehensible fact that she is now fatherless will be integrated into her new life.
She’s not completely alone. I’m loitering around the gas fireplace. Over it is a bookshelf on which sits a red morocco-bound set of Shakespeare’s Collected Works. Five years old, I can’t read the books. I can write my first name in capital letters. The volumes, part of my mother’s dowry, were imported from Berlin to Halberstadt. She has never read the books, either. One can take the books down from the shelf, finger them. The paper is tissue-thin. Turning over the pages, one senses: a valuable possession, not to be compared with the rough paper of the illustrated magazines or the daily newspaper. Next to the multi-volume luxury edition sits a guide to opera.
In my concrete memory (that is, when I concentrate on my impressions and leave out what I only “know”), I cannot tell the two books apart. Even though the paper is different, the books sit beside each other over the warming fire. So that the PROMISE of the “guide to opera” (considering the reverence with which my father takes it from the shelf) and the respectful FINGERING of the Shakespeare Collected Works (when the books are dusted, it is done with conspicuous care), blur together. Near me sits 152 a usually cheerful, now disconsolate mother, and thus, for me, more open and tolerant (I’m careful not to whine, try to escape notice entirely, so she won’t send me away; it is a long, happy morning). And so my devotion to opera, the gesamtkunstwerk of plot and music, came about before I could read or knew much about operas. First comes the ranking of things whose worth is measured by parents, then come the things themselves.
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