...of refuge

...so then and there I had this argument with my mother, we were hurling all sorts of accusations at each other's heads while at the same time saying over and over again, now I to her, then again she to me saying calm down, will you, why don't you calm down, we'd keep saying this almost perverse do calm down, do calm down, tossed back and forth between us, probably resulting only in our getting deeper and deeper into our argument until, in the end, we'd argued ourselves as always into a state of exhaustion, these arguments always ended with both of us in total exhaustion, it was an effort and took the utmost willpower merely to keep upright after one of those battles, then, when mother invited me, at the upmost point of exhaustion from this argument, to have a bite with her in the kitchen, there was no one in it that day, cook was having her Tuesday off, to have a cup of tea, just a snack she had prepared for us with her own hands, a welcome-home snack as it were, so I followed mother into the kitchen and silently drank a cup of tea with her, naturally I ate nothing, I was simply in no condition to eat. Then, as we sat in the kitchen after our argument, so Roithamer, it was always basically the same thing, I arrive, we have our argument, we go in to drink tea, sitting in silence, totally exhausted, simply no longer capable of hating each other, we simply let go, sitting face to face, we let it go as it comes, as it is, nothing can be changed, suddenly she demands a description of my trip, how was my journey, was the weather in London good or bad, what had I been doing, my friends, my colleagues, she touched all these bases, but even the way she pronounced Cambridge, the way she said London, instantly aroused my anger against her again, the way she said Dover, the way she said Brussels, Cologne, all the time with her eyes on me, she'd question me with these cue-words that were always the same cue-words, every time I came home from England, she wanted to know everything, every detail, but I remained close-mouthed, I was silence itself, as always. She couldn't get a word out of me, I tried a bite of bread, choking on it, with her eyes on me, taking possession of me, as she thought. As always, my siblings were in their rooms, and I thought waiting in their rooms for our inevitable argument to be over, for us to have calmed down, as they thought, then they'd come down, to put in an appearance for their brother, who had withdrawn from all of them by going off to England. Without a word, "without a word' underlined, I'd got up and left my mother alone in the kitchen, and I went away from Altensam, down to the Aurach, into Hoeller's house. Away from the argument with my mother, into the silence of the Hoeller's.

[Correction, Bernhard, T.]