It began in the Mánes cafe, where I persist in recalling that we ate eggs.This is false, I know, but now I often see eggs where they aren't. The egg in the pool for example, sat tethered and quiet, yet so ready for its journey, the chair inside so expectant, that in my mind it is already aloft,a frail,luminous dirigible.
In Mánes, Barbara said she had an idea. We had just come from her ethereal exhibit which, in recollection, seems so much about recollection. This was May of 1995,and all over Europe people were recollecting. Fifty years before, parachutes like Barbara's had bloomed in the sky, fumbled like hers to ensnaring lives and memories, like the driftwood snared in her silks.
Houses snare memories too, out of all the lives that come together in them, crossing and recrossing like the lines that Barbara strung in the rooms leading to the pool.
So you could say it began earlier, in another May, in 1938, when the family walked out of the house, one suitcase each, leaving in their wake, like Barbara's flotsam and jetsam on the floor of Mánes, fragments of their lives. Fragments that slipped into our lives, those of us who came after, so that parts of them became parts of us, their memories became our memories: books with their names on the flyleaf, stray envelopes, a child's nameplate, a silver tumbler , a china dog, asleep.
After that May came the unhappy years, then the end of the war and for the house at least, life, warmth, voices, but always below, tugging at recollection, the empty pool. But Barbara said it began earlier, with Kafka's diary and its brief entry for August 2,1914:
Morning -Germany declares war on Russia. Afternoon - swimming.
What more deliciously absurd? More Kafkaesque? Cataclysm and banality, juxtaposed. But in that deadpan pose is everything Auden said, years later.
About suffering they were never wrong
The Old Masters: how well they understood
its human position, how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.
You could imagine some Petschek, on that swaying train bearing them all away, noting down:
Swimming in the morning. Exile in the afternoon. Barbara said she wanted to fill the pool.I wanted to fill the pool, too.The engineers and I had discussed it: how to repair the pump, how to repair the pipes, how to repair the ceiling. This was to fill it with water, of course. Barbara said: how about an egg?
It looked remarkably at home and self-possessed, like something long awaited that had finally arrived. People peered down at it with the astonishment new life always provokes: babies, seedlings, even nations. Yet it had a temporal quality as if it were with us only briefly, as if we were a way station on its journey. There was candlelight and a violin, in memoriam and in celebration. This time, we did eat eggs.
After the family caught their train, they broke apart and scattered. But new lives emerged from the old. So with the pool. It too is broken, it still holds no water, the egg has departed. But the pool is no longer empty.