The Class by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-11-04T16:52:35+00:00

Chapter Eight

That night Josef Blau slept in the living-room. Frau Nowak slept in his bed, that had been moved away from Selma’s.

He heard the infant crying. Was it hungry? Its mother had not yet suckled it. It’s the first night in Josef Albert’s life, Josef Blau thought. Josef Albert. We’re already calling him by his name.

Josef Albert cried and went back to sleep, only to wake and cry again, lustily at first, then more and more feebly until he fell silent. He went to sleep when his tiredness was greater than his hunger. He will have many more nights, Josef Blau thought, in which tiredness will eventually submerge everything – fear, worry, prayer, regret, pain – in a light, dream-tossed sleep. Josef Albert has torn himself free from his mother. He is breathing. He has a name. Inside his mother he was his mother’s breath, heartbeat, hunger, pain, joy. He has been Josef Albert for ten hours and already no one knows what is inside him. Is it just the hunger crying out of him, or his fear of all the frightening things surrounding him, of the gigantic, bare, red faces with the dark, wide-open maws bending over him and emitting terrible noises – they strike Josef Albert’s ear-drum like claps of thunder – of the bright light, of the cold? He was in warmth and darkness. Does he remember? Does he know? No one reaches him. He is alone. There is a gap between him and everything that he will never bridge. He has parents. The father talks to his son. What do they say? They do not understand each other. Will Josef Albert understand his father when he looks at him, speaks to him? He is Josef Blau’s flesh and blood. He is his son. He has been born into his father’s life, into his entanglements, into his name, into the ugly face of his deaf grandmother that he bears, born today, why not tomorrow, in ten years, in a hundred? When his son questions him, demands an explanation, will he understand his father’s words, his looks, his mute embrace? Can he understand what Selma cannot: that their fates are interconnected. Will he not ask him why, why is my fate linked with yours, with Josef Blau’s and not with something else? His father will not cease fighting to protect him, so that the son shall not be the victim of a fate for which his father, his mother are to blame, or even just set in motion through a word, an act.

The door to Selma’s room opened. Josef Blau awoke with a start. It was Frau Nowak in a white bed-jacket, which made her body beneath it rounder, larger.

‘What has happened?’

‘Nothing, it’s all right,’ said Frau Nowak. She pronounced the ‘s’ with a lisp, she said ‘sh’. She had taken her dentures out. ‘It’s the flowers. The scent is too strong. I’ll put them here. Everything is all right.’

The scent of the flowers was bad for the new mother and her baby.

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