Frau Schimpf’s Last Letter
Non-fiction by Peter Babiak
The last letter she sent was just a few sentences written on a Walt Disney-themed sticky note the size of an index card. There was a sentence printed on the back. “Maybe you should next time bring home soil,” she wrote on the seam flap all the way to the corner, then added “with you to help” down the right side. The words were accented by the angular ligatures and sharp diacritics of the Gothic script she learned as a child. You don’t see handwriting like that anymore.
Frau Schimpf, with whom I’ve been exchanging letters for about fifteen years, is ninety-five and lives in a faded red brick bungalow seventeen houses down the street and around the corner from the faded yellow brick bungalow where I grew up and where my mother still lives. Having passed her corner lot thousands of times as a kid, she was something of a visual touchstone for me, the German lady who seemed to live outside in her garden. Turning soil and seeding in Spring, pruning fruit trees or staking tomatoes in Summer, raking leaves in Autumn, shoveling in Winter, and sweeping her walk and driveway enthusiastically all year. I’d see her regularly on the way to school or the store, though I never spoke with her until I was on a trip to Toronto to visit my mother the year after my dad died. She and my mother, who had grown close in their shared widowhood, were in the kitchen comparing their various ailments and telling each other about people who’d died, as old people do. One of them said Jetzt sind wir in der ersten Reihe, or “Now, we’re in the first row,” an expression that always strikes me as a palatable take on Heidegger’s ominous “being-towards-death.” To tilt the too Germanic conversation about death-knowledge to something more cheerful, I complimented Frau Schimpf on the state of her yard and asked what kind of pears grew on her trees. “Bartlett,” she said, and the next morning she trundled her sturdy Bavarian frame around the corner with a basket of pears for me to bring home to Vancouver. For some reason, I kept a few of the seeds, planted them in small pots in the kitchen window. Now there are two little pear trees in my backyard.
I sent my first letter to Frau Schimpf early the next year to tell her that the seeds from her pears had sprouted and grown well over the winter. Each spring since then I’ve sent her a few sentences with news of the trees— repotting them as they grew, pruning them, mending the blight, setting them into the earth. Each letter is underwritten by a worry that, time being what it is, she might never even receive it, but then each note she’s sent back to me is, in turn, a fortuity. She’s a remarkable woman who, until recently, has occupied herself in her garden, but I can’t help think that she must be struggling as she loses her grip on life. This is partly because I heard from my mother, who’d exchange daily telephone calls with her just to check in, that Frau Schimpf went quiet, and that fear has been amplified by the marginalization of the elderly — what some people have called “an invisible human rights crisis” — that was thrown into bleak relief when the pandemic started. I’ve come to think of my old neighbour as the widow in Janet Frame’s story about aging, “The Bath”, who is “waiting, waiting, for one moment of inattention, weakness, pain, to claim her forever.” An even better analogy is Anthony Hopkins’ heartrending character in Florian Zeller’s The Father, who at one point confesses, “I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves. The branches and the wind and the rain. I don’t know what’s happening anymore.” Aging is anguish at the best of times, but it must be so much more agonizing for people who’ve lived so much life outdoors in yards and gardens. So I want to believe that my letters relieve some of my Frau Schimpf’s abiding griefs, and I do believe it. As absurd as it sounds and is, each letter is a temporary reprieve, kind of like Scheherazade’s stories that put off death for another day.
I’m not sure why I write to Frau Schimpf. It gives me the opportunity to practice some German sentences, but it’s not like I write letters to people any more. It must be an attempt to hold something of my own past, to stabilize the transitory experience of living, or something like that. The Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, writes that memory ensures “the wholeness of the self.” Our memories “have to be watered,” the organic analogy reminding us that we need “regular contact with the witnesses of the past.” In my case, besides my mother, Frau Schimpf is the only one of my old neighbours who “witnessed” a past that dovetails with my past, so I suppose if there’s some deep symbolism in my letters about the two pear trees that grew from her seeds it’s that they’re an homage to the characters who inhabited the first setting in my life’s story. The sidewalk slabs split by the oak roots, the musky smell of the creek running beneath the street down at the corner, the sound of cicadas in the summer and the scent of frying smelt in the winter, the old Italian who’d walk the streets Saturday mornings ringing his bell and pulling his portable knife sharpening wheel behind him, Frau Schimpf in her sleeveless white blouse, capri pants, and sandals working in her garden just over the hedge — each particle of my memory of the neighbours, even coloured by romantic nostalgia and wistful melancholy, is a vital truth that structures a part of plot. Many of the modest bungalows around that corner have been razed and replaced by grander houses with little green space, and most of the families — Wynneczuk, Cabral, Kozmak, Costa, Poweska, Windisch, Pinheiro — have moved or passed away. The old bungalows with their old people are being dwarfed, Frau Schimpf wrote in one of her letters, by monster houses, though she wasn’t too critical, adding that old neighbours had to “make room for the new ones.” I suppose my letters are a living memory that I need to cultivate so that I stay “whole” as Kundera puts it. They’re metaphors, in other words, and like all metaphors they seem ornamental but are much more important to our well-being than most facts.
I think of Frau Schimpf as my Nachbar, the German word for “neighbour,” the noun deriving from the older Germanic words neah and gebur, “near” and “dweller,” a beautiful compound that retains the distant echo of the ancient word bheue, which just means “to be, exist, grow.” We don’t think of neighbours in these poetic terms, I know, but maybe we should. There are some writers who, building on the old Biblical commandment about loving neighbours as we love ourselves, argue that the concept of a neighbour is the necessary context for under- standing what it means to be a genuinely good person. The Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, for example, in his under-appreciated book on love, says “the neighbour is the other you...The other self.” I’m not entirely sure what that really means, but it has something to do with being good to people. And when I think of my two pear trees grown from seeds from my old neighbourhood, I think that Frau Schimpf and I are, in a way that I could never properly explain, one and same, that she is the “other” me, weird as that might sound. It’s not just that I see my habit of being out in the yard — tilling, seeding, pruning, sweeping — as a reflection or continuation of hers. It’s because she was part of my context, a “neighbour” in Kierkegaard’s sense. Not a stranger but not quite family or friend, either. Just a woman I regularly saw working in her garden who occupied a secondary role in the setting of own life’s story and with whom I existed and grew for a time. No more, but no less.
The two pear trees have yet to bear fruit, and I had told her as much, which is why I think she wrote that sentence about bringing “home soil,” by which I think she meant I should bring soil from my old neighbourhood to ease their growth in their new garden home. Kind of like the opposite of tossing handfuls of soil you see people do at some funerals. I don’t know this for sure because she went quiet. I’d heard from my mother that she was unwell and quite sad because one of her daughters decided to move west, leaving her with one fewer person in an already depleted cast of family and friends that many elderly people experience over time. It was agonizing news, the kind that breaks your day to think about. I wrote her a birthday card in June, but still heard nothing. But then, in a stroke of fortuity, when I visited my mother in late August to attend to her burgeoning health issues, somehow Frau Schimpf had found out because on the second day of my visit there was a knock at the front door. Her son-in-law had walked around the corner with a bag of pears. There was no letter, just a note delicately ripped from a sheet of paper and scotch-taped to the bag. She had written a single sentence in that familiar, angled style. “Thank you for the love,” it said. As I ate the pears, as I did fifteen years ago, a verdant pathos rose in me and I couldn’t shake the thought that I will never see writing like this again. I think it was also the closest I’ve ever been to experiencing what people call grace. »