Paromita’s Reviews > The Land of Green Plums > Status Update

When we don’t speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.

Whatever has taken a life will be swept away, I thought to myself. I couldn’t picture a coffin, only a window.
I didn’t know how the word transfinite came to be here in the graveyard. But beside this grave, I realized what it must always have meant.
I never forgot again.
I could have said to Tereza: Transfinite is a window that doesn’t disappear once someone has fallen from it.

Who loves and leaves turned out to be us. We had come under the curse of the song:
God shall punish him
with the pinching beetle
the howling wind
the dust of the earth.

I had told Kurt as well: Hold on to Tereza. A friendship isn’t like a jacket that you can pass on to me, he said. I could slip it on. It might even look as though it fitted, from the outside, but on the inside it wouldn’t keep me warm.
Whatever we said became final. The words in our mouths do as much damage as our feet on the grass—every goodbye was like that.

I didn’t want Tereza to be alone, and I said: Hold on to Kurt. Tereza nodded. You’re taking part of me away, she said, and you’re giving the rest to Kurt. And besides, I’m only half the nut anyway. It’s easy to share out something that isn’t whole anymore.
...Tereza knew that the door would close between us, that I wouldn’t be allowed back into the country to visit her.

The butcher birds stayed in Kurt’s wardrobe, in a shoe. In their place, Georg had flown out of his cul-de-sac into the sack with the window. Maybe the puddle where his head rested reflected the sky. Everyone had a friend in every wisp of cloud …

Grandfather, the barber, Toni the clockmaker, Father, the priest, and the schoolteacher all referred to Germany as the Motherland. Even though it was fathers who had marched off into the world for Germany, still it was the Motherland.
By leaving, Georg had beaten a path for Edgar and me to follow. Out of the cul-de-sac, he used to say. And six weeks later he was lying on the pavement in the Frankfurt winter.

Each of us imagined how we might desert our friends by committing suicide. And we each accused the others—without ever saying so—of being the sole reason for our not going through with it. In this way, we each became self-righteous, armed with a ready silence that blamed the others for the fact that we were each still alive instead of dead.
What it took to save us was patience.

Failure was as normal to us as breathing. We shared it just as we shared our trust. And yet each of us quietly added something special for himself as well: an extra bit of personal failure on the side. We each had a wretched image of ourself, along with outbreaks of agonizing vanity.

The woman looked at her two children and said: What can you do, some children are poor because they don’t have parents, others because they do.