The Ants
(Here the original German text)
The adults were talking about the war. I was little, sitting in
the garden, bored. An ant scrabbled over the wall by the cellar
steps. It was red and dragged a withered flower petal over the
bumpy ground. Just before it reached a crack, I squashed it with
my thumb. It twitched a bit with its antennae, then lay there
motionless. I was lonely. Before, I had helped my mother in the
garden, pulling weeds, planting potatoes, picking currants. But
now my mother was dead.
I watched how the ants crawled out of the crack, bustling and
hurrying over the wall and disappearing into the gravel. Often
they carried grains of sand or splinters of wood back with them
to their nest. There they began to build what looked like tunnels
and caverns. I watched them. Then, with one quick sweep of my
hand, I smashed the foundations of their settlement. In the garden,
I waged my own lonely war against the red ants. Sometimes Julia
would talk about the bombs that fell on her street and on her
house, about all the burned and mutilated people she used to have
to climb over to get bread. She talked about reconstruction. I
watched the ants bring back grains of sand untiringly, constantly
building new settlements as I destroyed one after another.
Once airplanes plunged out of the sky, howling past the town just
above the roof tops. Soldiers fired into the air. Julia ran down
into the cellar. But it was only maneuvers. The war was over.
In a meadow, I discovered an anthill artfully heaped out of earth
and sand. I stabbed a stick into it. Tunnels collapsed. In panic
the ants carried their white eggs off to safety. I stomped on
their hill until it looked like the cities in Germany that I had
seen on a trip with Julia. Exploded facades, hills of rubble,
people wandering aimlessly through the chaos. The train stations
overflowed with soldiers. Occupying forces, Julia said. The enemy.
The ants in the meadow were small and light red. I allied myself
with them to fight against the dark red ones on the cellar steps.
I held a stick in the hill of the light-red ants, waited until
it was covered with ants, then went and dropped them on the path
my enemy traveled. They were like the paratroopers that had seized
Julia’s city. A fierce struggle began. But the dark red ants were
bigger and had stronger pincers. They crushed the light red ones,
who cramped up in their death throes. The victors carried their
victims around for a while, then let them die and moved on to
the next task.
We can’t let things get us down, Julia said. The shoe store that
her parents had bought from a Jewish family before the war was
doing well again. The former owners were still missing. The sale
made it possible for them to escape, Julia said. In the forest
I discovered a big anthill made of pine needles. When I would
get close, the black forest ants would spray bitter poison into
the air. I gathered some of them in a cream cheese box, certain
that their poison and pincers would vanquish my enemy. But the
forest ants ran blindly and aimlessly over the wall, escaping
into the gravel.
In the spring the gardener sprayed the fruit trees by the cellar
steps with poison. He said the ants carried the aphids onto the
trees. The ants liked the juice that the aphids extracted from
the leaves. The ants were pests. They had to be eradicated. He
also sprayed poison into the cracks where they had their nest.
But the wall had barely dried when a few ants crawled out and
followed the trail of a scent that led them through the gravel
to the root of a tree. Julia said she never shouted «Heil Hitler,»
but «Zwei Liter.» The Fuhrer might still be alive. They never
found his body. If he comes back, he’ll do better. He did some
good too, like building the Autobahn and having the mentally retarded
castrated. The gardener left a bucket of poison behind, which
we put in the cellar.
By summer, the poison was almost dried out, and the remainder
stank so bad it brought tears to my eyes when I lifted the lid.
I shoved the concentrated poison into the cracks. Soon a few ants
crawled out, followed by some more. Still more ants poured forth,
running one after another as if in flight. They flowed out of
their poisoned nest. Soon there were a dozen, then hundreds flowed
in a brown stream over the wall. Some lost the trail, turned in
circles, twitched and died. Others reached the gravel and disappeared
between the stones. For a couple of minutes, the red ants moved
over the wall and left their home for good. I had won my war,
but their flight, their staggering and miserable deaths, the eradication
and extermination shocked me.
I never told anybody about this, I felt ashamed, and the sight
was too horrifying. When I see pictures of escaping refugees–
the long trains of ragged, sick and disgraced figures– I always
think of the ants. I never again saw any ants in the wall in the
garden. The nest remained poisoned forever. Hitler called Jews
and Gypsies vermin who must be wiped out, said Julia. I wiped
out my red ants.
Translated by Jason Vincz and Johannes Gorannson