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