Lost by Hans-Ulrich Treichel

Author:Hans-Ulrich Treichel [Treichel, Hans-Ulrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-55758-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

From the day of the funeral, my mother took over my father’s business. She was just as strict as my father had once been. The drivers called her Chief, the suppliers respected her, the customers revered her, and nobody noticed how deeply she suffered over everything that had happened. It was only in the evenings, after the drivers had left the yard and the big searchlight was switched on that bathed the cold storage shed in dazzling light every night after the robbery, that my mother became herself again. But when she became herself again, she wasn’t a Chief, she was a woman who vanished in a fog of grief. She took care of me but she didn’t seem to notice me, and if she did notice me it was as if she wasn’t seeing me, but somebody else. Often when she looked at me she was overcome by emotion. She gazed at me, her eyes lost themselves in my face, and while her eyes lost themselves in my face, her own face seemed to blur and dissolve. These moments were torture for me, I moved my mother and I didn’t want to move her. Nobody else reacted to the sight of me this way. I was too fat, I was on the verge of puberty, and I had a short haircut, even though it hadn’t been trimmed since my father died. There was nothing about me that was moving in any way at all. Most people overlooked me, and the ones who didn’t overlook me told me to go to the hairdresser, eat less, and do more sport. Only my mother was so moved by the sight of me that her face almost seemed to dissolve when she looked at mine. My moved and dissolved mother made me bad-tempered and uneasy. I could feel that she saw something in me that she had lost. I reminded her of my father. And I also reminded her of Arnold. But I couldn’t take the place of Arnold for her. If it had been up to me, I would have taken Arnold’s place for her without further ado. I could eat for two. Watch TV too. I brought enough bad reports home from school already. No Arnold was needed in that department. But I wasn’t enough for her. I was only what she didn’t have. I was the finger in the wound, the grain of salt in the eye, the stone in her heart. In the most literal sense of the phrase, I was to weep for, but only much later did I understand why. Back then all I noticed was that the sight of me put a look of pain on my mother’s face, and that I began to hate this pain as much as I hated my own reflection in the mirror. I became what is known as a difficult boy, ungrateful, obstinate, always irritated, always pestering my mother just when she felt bad. Luckily Mr. Rudolph continued to take care of my mother and me too.

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