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Excerpt of The Blindness of the Heart by Julia Franck
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Prologue

A seagull stood on the windowsill, uttering its cry, as if the Baltic itself were in its throat, high as the foaming crests of the waves, keen, sky-coloured, its call died away over Königsplatz where all was quiet, where the theatre now lay in ruins. Peter blinked, he hoped the gull would take fright at the mere flutter of his eyelids and fly away. Ever since the end of the war Peter had enjoyed these quiet mornings. A few days ago his mother had made up a bed for him on the kitchen floor. He was a big boy now, she said, he couldn’t sleep in her bed any more. A ray of sunlight fell on him; he pulled the sheet over his face and listened to Frau Kozinska’s soft voice. It came up from the apartment below through the cracks between the stone flags on the floor. Their neighbour was singing: My dearest love, if you could swim, you’d swim the wide water to me. Peter loved that melody, the melancholy of her voice, the yearning and the sadness. These emotions were so much larger than he was, and he wanted to grow, there was nothing he wanted more. The sun warmed the sheet over Peter’s face until he heard his mother’s footsteps, approaching as if from a great distance. Suddenly the sheet was pulled back. Come on, come on, time to get up, his mother told him sternly. The teacher’s waiting, she claimed. But it was a long time since Herr Fuchs the teacher had minded whether individual children were present or absent. Few of them could still attend school regularly. For days now his mother and he had been going to the station every afternoon with their little suitcase, trying to get a place on a train bound for Berlin. If one did come in, it was crammed so full that they couldn’t climb aboard. Now Peter got up and washed. Sighing, his mother took off her shoes. Out of the corner of his eye, Peter saw her untie her apron and put it to soak. Every day, her white apron was stained with soot and blood and sweat; it had to be soaked for hours before she could take the washboard and rub the fabric on it until her hands were red and the veins on her arms swollen. Peter’s mother raised both hands to her head, took off her nurse’s cap, pulled the hairpins out of her hair and let it tumble softly over her shoulders. She didn’t like him to watch her doing that. Glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, she told him: And that too. It seemed to him that she meant his little willy and with some repugnance was telling him to wash it. Then she turned her back to him and passed a brush through her thick hair. It shone golden in the sun and Peter thought he had the most beautiful mother in the world.

Even after the Russians had taken Stettin in the spring – some of the soldiers had been sleeping in Frau Kozinska’s apartment ever since – their neighbour could be heard singing early in the morning. Once last week his mother had sat down at the table to mend one of her aprons while Peter read aloud, because Herr Fuchs the teacher had told him to practise that.Peter hated reading aloud and he had sometimes noticed how little attention his mother paid when he did. Presumably she didn’t like to have the silence broken. She was usually so deep in thought that she didn’t seem to notice at all if, in mid-sentence,Peter suddenly read on to himself instead of aloud. He’d been listening to Frau Kozinska at the same time as he was reading to himself. I wish someone would wring her neck, he heard his mother say abruptly. Startled, Peter looked at her, but she just smiled and put her needle through the linen.

The fires last August had completely destroyed the school and since then the children had met Herr Fuchs the teacher in his sister’s dairy, where there was hardly ever anything for sale now. Fräulein Fuchs stood behind the empty counter with her arms crossed, waiting. Although she had gone deaf, she often put her hands over her ears. The big shop window had been broken out of its frame, the children sat on the windowsill, and Herr Fuchs the teacher showed them numbers on the board: three times ten, five times three.The children asked him to show them the places where Germany had lost battles, but he didn’t want to. We’re not going to belong to Germany any more, he said, adding that he was glad of it. Where, then, asked the children, where will we belong? Herr Fuchs the teacher shrugged his shoulders.Today Peter planned to ask him why he was glad of it.

The Blindness of the Heart © 2007 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH; English translation © 2009 by Anthea Bell, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.