Mother Lives on Her Pension

(1931)

She is seventy-six years old, withered from a hard-working life, with a little bird’s head her loose skin bunches and bags over. Her voice has grown lighter and higher in the last decade, and she screams because she can’t judge volume any more: her deaf ears no longer pick up anything.

Even though she has seven surviving children she lives with strangers, who have rented her the attic for four marks a month. She gets a pension of thirty-five marks, ‘more than enough’ to live off, only the winters feel terribly long, and coal is unaffordable. She doesn’t calculate by marks and pfennigs, but by the price of a loaf. When her pension is reduced by two marks, she says: ‘Just imagine, that’s four loaves of bread! Four whole loaves!’

Bread has always been the cornerstone of her existence; everything has always revolved around bread. She knows better than anyone else what it is: bread – and she knows what it is to be without it. There were times when it came easily and willingly into her house and was never finished, there was always another slice to be cut from it. And there were other times when she could only see the gleaming brown loaves in the windows of bakers’ shops; everything was topsy-turvy and the children fretful. She managed to get through those times, she can no longer say how. Bread returned, not suddenly but gradually, and there was again enough to go round.

Then they invented a wonderful substance called margarine, which was so much better than beet syrup or the plum mush of yore. Yes, the world was making progress, poor people were no worse off, they muddled along, God only knew how.

She was never really envious of the rich – and rich for her began a long way down. Shop windows, dresses, fur coats, bright, happy, attractive women with soft, snow-white hands – that was another world, remote and unattainable, it was nothing to do with her. Her fingers, yellowish and rough like the claws of a bird, are crooked now, she can no longer straighten them. For the whole of an endless life they were always grasping some utensil, the handle of a tool, the handle of a paring knife. How many thousands of tonnes of potatoes she must have peeled in the course of her life!

And she is still at it today, day after day, month after month. At eight in the morning she slips out of her garret, walks ten blocks to the restaurant of her son. She sits there until noon, peeling potatoes and washing up, and in return she gets a meal. Her daughter-in-law is loath to give it to her, the old woman doesn’t deserve it for the work she does. But here it’s as well that she’s deaf and doesn’t hear the griping and cursing. Her son’s place is going well, he has an Opel, he is well fed and contented, often a little tipsy. ‘You leave Mama alone,’ he says, ‘she’s got an appetite like a sparrow anyway.’ She feels grateful to him, never having heard the proverb, ‘Who gives bread to their children and later falls upon hard times has no one to blame but themselves.’ She is glad her children have come to something.

None of the others want to know. If she visits, she’s sat down in a corner or told to go away. ‘Mother has her pension.’ But the seventh, the one she never thought much of – because of course she had her favourites – the seventh is the best of them. She hasn’t seen him now for twenty years – or is it thirty? – but he still sends her postal orders from time to time. Five marks, or ten. She puts them by. They’ll give her a wonderful send-off that way. A good boy, even if she never cared for him much.

At least once a month, she takes the long trip out to the graveyard to visit her old feller. He’s been dead eleven years, but she still tells him everything, shares her life with him. On visiting days she begs her neighbours for a couple of flowers. They tease her: she’s to convey the regards of Frau Rohwedder, is that right, or Toni Menzel. As if! She wouldn’t even tell him the flowers were a present, he’s to think she bought them for him. Men don’t need to know everything. She doesn’t feel sad, she doesn’t cry, with her light chirruping child’s voice she tells him stories. Why should she be sad? Her children have grown up, she has a roof over her head and bread. Is there any more you can ask for from this life?