On May 4th, 1960, Rosa Zwiebelbuch, still a bit shy, was standing in the studio of the eyemaker Adolf Stauch, a buckskin in her hand and a vat full of water at her feet. Through the open window the noise of Seifertgasse drifted into the room—people hastening by, tripping along, clomping, laughing, chatting, calling, joking and singing, yelling and coughing. Fragments of music came from the house across the street, the animal house, Così Fan Tutte, she could understand “Amoooohohohore.” At the window, the figure of a man appeared, strangely dressed, a fully-grown man stuffed into a boy’s brown uniform. At the right arm he wore a black band with a swastika which Rosa found ominous. Didn’t Father Zwiebelbuch have an entire box full of this kind of cross in his attic, and didn’t he rummage around in there once in a while, talking about a “betrayed future”; and kneeling in the dust, he would pour tears on it—something he otherwise never did. He must be a traveller, Rosa contemplated, someone who misses his wife. With contempt she scrutinized the faded brown of his attire. She and the master would be spared of his company, someone like that walks the world with empty pockets and passes through Seifertgasse without any spare change.

Rosa Zwiebelbuch had set out early to fulfil her new duties after a night of dreamless sleep at the Blue Angel, a rooming house Master Stauch had recommended warmly because, for the amenities offered, the monthly rent seemed appropriate to him and he actually planned on paying it. Rosa could not yet comprehend what freedom felt like, having hardly tasted it. Without regret she thought about the farewell from her father that hadn’t taken place. He had returned to the cage she had shared with him for eighteen years. Grimly Rosa Zwiebelbuch wrung out the buckskin over the vat. Freedom—she wanted to take advantage of it, diligently and thoroughly. The eyes, these artificial eyes. Treasures, adornments, truths, signs of God and beauty. Rosa cast an eye into paradise, and ate of the apple handed to her by Adolf Stauch. She had always known the snake was of another sex. Rosa endured happiness.

She must not take her eyes off Adolf Stauch’s house. She circled around it, again and again, looking for the high narrow gable of the house, inhaling the new air through her nose. She made her rounds without Father Zwiebelbuch. In his socket Adolf Stauch had put in the eye with the leaden sea and the Hundred-Armed One. In silence Father Zwiebelbuch had then taken the basket with the preserves, the cold chicken, and the bread made by the wailing and moaning Anna Zwiebelbuch. He had taken his basket in silence and left the realm of Adolf Stauch. He took the night train. Without having extended his hand to Rosa. Sullenly he sat in the murky compartment. Left the foreign country. At customs he met the man in the dark raincoat and took the train that the man in the dark raincoat had taken before. With a gloomy look on his face he sat down in the murky compartment and went back to the morass that was his home.

On the evening of her arrival Adolf Stauch had thoroughly introduced Rosa to the secrets of his dainty cabinets. There they were, cradled in silvery bowls: the glass eyes, a collection of the finest craftsmanship from which the creator did not want to part. Eye after eye was entrusted to Rosa’s hands, to Rosa’s wide hands, for her to feel the eyes, the flawless glass, with the skilfully shaped iris and the legends in the depths of the pupils.

Moments like these are not suitable for babbling on about ideas of time and space, they are timeless. In moments like these even Rosa had all of life in front of her and all of death. It would change later on, gifts are not made for eternity. Otherwise how could we manage, what with the limited space up there where a visa will no longer admit you to eternal glory and where warranty cards even for the most necessary transfigurations are extremely rare.

In moments like these—Rosa felt it only vaguely—we get an advance on supreme happiness, no matter how much the priest is railing and preaching about price increases as if heaven were a pay envelope. In Rosa’s hands the eyes came to life gently; not wanting to scare her, they whispered and murmured, lest some cruel sound should disrupt Rosa’s happiness. Her deplorably abused past fell off her and with it her lodger Zwiebelbuch who had left behind her body as a rather blighted garret. That too shall pass, it whispered gently in Rosa’s hands, soon that room will be cleaned up and Zwiebelbuch’s shadow gone. The eyes didn’t say that someone else was already waiting to move into the gar-ret, in short order she should have sheets and a chamber pot ready. No, the eyes in Rosa’s hands were whispering stories as if to provide her with shield and sword but did not give away the coordinates for Rosa’s future. The artificial eye knows neither mathematics nor tea leaves by which to prophesy.

Each eye had a name engraved in its silver bowl, a name which amazed and delighted Rosa. She had never heard more melodious names. In her hometown the women were called Claudia, Lilo, Liliane, Silvia, Margrit, Ursula, or Maria, some were called Rosa like herself, or Gertrud, Verena, and Hildegard. No unpleasant names for sure. For example, to be called Silvia, meaning wood nymph, Rosa considered an honor she certainly would not have dared to claim for herself. Or Ursula, the shebear. What strength would inspire the bearer of that name.

But these names, slightly flowery letters engraved in the silver bowls, seemed to Rosa more beautiful than any names she knew. They were adornments in themselves, equal to any of the treasures Adolf Stauch had created. They jubilated on the tongue when rehearsed, they rolled over the lips like pearls, even when your name was Rosa and you weren’t particularly inclined towards poetry. They enticed, cooed, and twittered as they were pronounced. At first a little haltingly Rosa did so, and then as she calmed down, fluently. The names caressed the women, that’s how it seemed to Rosa who could not pronounce the names often enough, could not murmur and whisper them often enough. After revelling in the foreign sounds for quite a while, she took a closer look at the eyes: the eye of Leda, wife of Tyndareus of Sparta. Unfolded like a willing flower on the shore of the Eurotas river, the white swan in her arms, and her chaste face hidden in the animal’s plumage, she has given herself to the huge bird. In the depths of the pupil, Leda’s lust had been rendered miraculously by a delicate hand. As Rosa looked into this sweet abyss, a hardly perceivable sigh broke the silence in the sanctuary of the eyemaker Adolf Stauch who patiently stood next to Rosa, watching attentively the changing expressions that graced her face. There were many names: Europa, the beautiful child on the back of the bull, racing jubilantly across the sea with him to receive his seed on the shores of Crete. The artist endowed her with a proud face which openly expressed her lust and her exultance in surrendering to this lust which—so it seemed to Rosa—would never end. In gigantic waves the frothy sea surged over the shores. Insatiable is the greed of the bull and insatiable is the greed of the child. In the depths of Europa’s pupil the earth holds its breath.

And Alkmene, wife of brave Amphytrion. Her magnificent body rests on the royal sheets of the bed from which someone rose who wasn’t her husband. The lascivious curves of her body, brilliantly depicted by the artist, spoke of a great triumph, won just a moment ago, incomparably greater than any victory won on a battle field, so it seemed to Rosa. She trembled while her narrow eyes rested on the bottom of the pupil where the desires and the beginnings in Alkemene’s belly were in unison. But there was also Io, the unhappy one, the daughter of an Argive king. Io, the name melted on Rosa’s tongue, Io, the punished one who, beset by madness, stormed over the pasture as a white cow, pursued by Argos of the Hundred Eyes. Black is the abyss in the golden iris, difficult to discern there the fleeing animal, its woman’s memory preserved by an almighty avenger. Io suffers from an unappeasable desire for the one who rode her.

Under tears Rosa parted with the treasure and turned to the next one. Adolf Stauch called this eye Danae, Danae, the daughter of the ruler of Argos. Imprisoned in the dark dungeon and fastened to heavy iron shackles, she receives the golden rain that the gates cannot keep away, soothingly streaming into the woman’s melancholy until the dungeon becomes a holy shrine.

Rosa beheld eye after eye, amazed, confused and yet joyful in the act of feeling. Never had she seen anything like this in her poor life as the daughter of the itinerant butcher Zwiebelbuch, who knew how to strike with a steady hand and whom Anna Zwiebelbuch, née Lamm, never again received in her female quarters after the birth of her daughter.

The wounds healed under the gaze of Adolf Stauch. He patiently stood by her and accompanied her first, tentative steps into a new life. Ignorant Rosa did not notice that there was someone hiding behind the lust in the abysses of the pupils, someone missing, someone who wasn’t a swan or golden rain, and who wasn’t a bull either although even today quite a few want you to believe this, sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes brown or dun. Rosa fell victim to this deception like so many women before her, whose fate of bearing sons catches up with them in the supposedly most blissful hours. Deception is when golden rain pours down or when a swan’s plumage brushes ever so gently against a hot cheek, when the bull, lecherous and cheerful, swims towards the green shores of Crete, the child on his back exultant and shouting with joy when the animal enters the young flesh. Adolf Stauch did not dare to show that, under the plane-trees on the beach of Crete, the bull revealed himself as the Unaccountable One, as Laughter itself, under the dome of the sky. He did not dare to show the resounding laughter that makes the earth tremble and that crushes any love. That would have been the pain in the depths of every eye, and had Adolf Stauch expressed this pain, there would have been an escape. As it was, only Atropos, the Inevitable, stood at the side of Rosa Zwiebelbuch’s road; Clotho was missing, the spinner to whom we owe the balance between good luck and bad luck, as was Lachesis, who allots incidents of suffering and happiness to every man and woman as is due.

When Rosa Zwiebelbuch had carefully put Danae’s eye back into the silver bowl, the eyemaker Adolf Stauch opened the last window of the dainty little chest. Behind the window were eyes which, still innocent and white, awaited the artist’s hand of Adolf Stauch.

The virginal curves of the eyes scared Rosa, but cautiously yet firmly Adolf Stauch put one of these bowls in her wide hand. She was to keep it as a gift. Thetis: the name seemed to Rosa Zwiebelbuch even more melodious than the name of any other eye. Thetis: a cut diamond among women’s names. Thetis, the sea goddess, who was before her and who patiently waited for Rosa to come into being so that her fate would come true.

But Rosa Zwiebelbuch did not know anything of this fate, innocent in her mind and unspoiled by knowledge, she took the eye by the name of Thetis, cradled it in her hand, in her wide hand. Tired from looking and from the silence which now heavily weighed on the things in the room, she noticed the onset of dusk and wondered how she could take her leave without disrupting the silence which seemed to her of another world.

Adolf Stauch advised her to go to the Blue Angel where the rent wasn’t outrageous and the beds clean, he would take care of the rent as part of her monthly salary and of her breakfast as well, for her other meals she would have to pay herself. It would be fine with him if she started her working day at half past seven. Rosa noticed that Adolf Stauch used a pleasantly old-fashioned language, even for every-day things, a little stilted maybe, earnestly articulating each word as if even words were treasures.

This text has been published in "Read Frank"