Somewhere in Germany Page 11

  When he then told them that his father and sister had been murdered and they asked amazed, “But why?” and said with the same kind of innocence and bafflement, “They were such good people,” he never lost his patience, never got embarrassed, and never became suspicious. If someone from Leobschütz asked after former Jewish acquaintances, he never intimated that they should have known what had happened to people who did not emigrate in time. Walter, who at least since his emigration to Africa detested escaping into illusions and dangerous expressions of sentimentality, lost all sense of reality if someone was able to evoke the pictures and sounds of the homeland.

  Not once did Walter ask himself in those hours, when he drank the balm of forgetfulness with each swig of schnapps, why the people of Upper Silesia, specifically, would not have known what had happened to their Jewish neighbors. He never doubted the integrity and honesty of their outrage, and it never occurred to him that his beloved fellow Silesians could, like so many people in postwar Germany, have a past they did not talk about either. Until someone was able to prove the opposite, Walter would believe the best of everyone and was not interested in knowing anything that might have undermined his belief in integrity.

  He was firmly convinced that he could not find a better place to present a picture of a decent Germany to his daughter and little son with the Frankfurt dialect than in the circle of complaining and tearful people who had experienced the same injustice of expulsion as he had. He was deeply hurt when Regina asked, “Didn’t the synagogues burn in Leobschütz and Sohrau, too?” And he was outraged when Jettel, after a Sunday outing that he felt had been especially poignant, said, “Greschek told me quite a different story.”

  Yet it was Max who—with a single question—made his father stop looking for his lost homeland every week. In the synagogue Max fell spontaneously and undyingly in love with a curly-haired beauty of his own age with big eyes in a round doll’s face. He reproachfully asked his father, “Didn’t you know that there are Jewish children in Frankfurt?”

  It was one of the rare occasions when Walter did not give an honest answer to his son, whom he had enlightened very early and extensively about persecution and emigration.

  The enchanting girl, who was already as clever as flirtatious and self-confident, was called Jeanne-Louise and conquered Max with her white socks, Parisian elegance, and an invitation to visit her on the Shabbat. He would be able to eat as many chocolates as he wanted and could pet her dog. Jeanne-Louise’s father was born in Frankfurt, had returned as an attorney to his hometown a year ago, and was well on his way to becoming a wealthy man. Walter told neither his son nor the rest of the family that he had already known all this for quite a while.

  After his emigration, when Josef Schlachanska returned with his wife and daughter from France to Frankfurt, where many people still remembered him from before, and just as many soon started noticing him, he had a common acquaintance ask Walter if he would be interested in becoming his associate. This happened half a year after Walter had opened the practice with Fafflok. Walter had refused Schlachanska’s offer, and heard immediately afterward that he had said, “That fool from Africa will truly be sorry. From now on he is not even going to earn the butter on his bread.”

  Hurt and upset, and not completely without envy of the quick success of a man who did not even have to fight for victory, Walter avoided any kind of personal contact with Schlachanska although he was with him on the board of the Jewish community and liked him well enough there. Josef Schlachanska, with his mustache that made his full, round face even softer than it already seemed, was remarkable not only because of his astonishing corpulence in a time of just-conquered hunger. He was triumphant in a baroque manner. His ready wit and humor, and a calculated blend of comedy, derision, and self-effacing irony, were as infectious as his energy and titanic temperament.

  He possessed that contemporary good nose for profit and speculation that Walter considered beneath him. He was an attorney with an immense talent for acting, which Walter also rejected as unprofessional and which created quite a stir because he habitually and with expressive gestures refused judges as prejudiced, and thus created the impression that he was fighting for his clients with the full force of his two hundred and fifty pounds.

  Josef Schlachanska talked to the people in Frankfurt in their easy-going, earthy language; made the same jokes they made; and immediately gave them the confidence that he was one of them. He did not bother the Jews from the East, who chose him for their advisor as quickly as if they had just waited for him to get established as an attorney, with the details, precautions, and legal subtleties that they viewed as typically German. Walter was unable to do either.

  Josef Schlachanska, who was always willing to come to a compromise with secular moral principles and was never shy to admit this and, moreover, in a way that people appreciated, was a pious man. In spite of everything he had experienced when he and his wife had to find shelter with a young physician’s family in Paris, where they only dared to go on the street for a few minutes after dark, he had no doubts about a God who had allowed millions of his people to be murdered.

  Josef Schlachanska’s father had been a teacher at the Philanthropin, the renowned Jewish school in Frankfurt; his brother, headmaster of a Jewish school in Cologne, had returned shortly before the outbreak of the war from the safety of England and had been deported together with his pupils. But just like Walter, Schlachanska had realized that he could work in his profession only in Germany. He spoke of his return, but never of a homeland.

  Schlachanska’s household was kosher, his daughter received a strictly religious upbringing, and he and his family never missed a service. When he sang in the synagogue in a deep warm voice, draped in his white prayer shawl and his face lit with ardor, nobody saw and heard the cantor, but everybody just saw and heard him.

  He was big enough to admit his mistakes and did not deny the rude comment he had made about Walter, apologized with a charm that was just as fetching as his kindness, and extended both hands to Walter after the ice had finally been broken. He felt the necessity to share the abundance he needed to live and was a passionate host.

  Well-informed about the situation in Frankfurt, Schlachanska could only tolerate for a short while the apartment that had been assigned to him in the modest Frankfurt North End after his return from the French exile. He moved to a suite of six rooms with a large terrace on the prominent Eysseneckstraße, which had survived the war in good condition. There he resided under spectacular lamps and crystal chandeliers, amidst luxuriously covered armchairs and heavy, dark furniture. He owned French china and expensively framed pictures with Jewish themes, and had a maid, a nanny, and in everything the pompous taste that matched his magnificent appearance. Schlachanska knew of no inhibitions or limits to ostentation. His generosity ensured that his vanity and flamboyance were accepted with the same unqualified mind-set that common people exhibit toward an extraordinarily popular king.

  The pralines that his daughter had promised Max and that Schlachanska stuffed as freely into the mouth of his slobbering setter Seppl, as if he had never experienced hunger and the fear of death, tempted Walter to accept a second invitation after the first. With a bluntness in language and judgment, which, in spite of all differences, was in accord with Walter’s character, he was able to cut all barriers as quickly and decisively as Alexander the Great severed the Gordian knot.

  Josef Schlachanska represented to Max all he wanted to be himself someday—he was a rich, mighty, magnificent giant in Frankfurt with the biggest car: a Maybach. This lover of children, who could frolic like a clown and change the world like a magician, helped himself from glass bowls filled with mountains of sweets, and only had to clap his hands and everyone obeyed his commands. On a Shabbat afternoon he sat in striped pajamas in an ornate wing chair and created the first conflict of loyalties in the life of a five-year-old boy. He corrupted the innocence and modesty, which his own father emphasized daily, first a little with t
he electric train that the chauffeur had to operate and then completely with the Maybach.

  Since Max insisted on his right to play with Jeanne-Louise instead of having to bathe in the caresses and tears of unknown adults, the Shabbat invitations soon became as firm a tradition as the previous trips to the people of Upper Silesia. In the beginning Jettel was just glad that she had to bake only one cake for the weekend instead of two and did not have to worry about anything else till dinner. Yet she was the first who also made contact with Mrs. Schlachanska and was able to see more in her than just a demanding woman who wanted even more glamour than she already had.

  Mina Schlachanska was as vain and as sure of herself as her husband, but since she lacked his charm and especially his sense of humor, she appeared aloof and conceited. To take other people into consideration was a religious duty rather than a real need for her. Her originally small talent for tolerance had withered completely during the times when they had to fear for their existence and had to be afraid daily of being deported. After that, her forbearance only extended to the volcano at her side; he generously and cheerfully let her draw from the horn of plenty of his newly found wealth.

  Her elegance and the way she accentuated her taste, which had been influenced by French fashion, appeared provocative at a time when other people took their first, very reluctant steps from need to normality. She mistook shabby clothes for a shabby character, regarded the offensive compassion of the haves for the have-nots as genuine sympathy for the fate of others, and allowed only herself to escape from her critical judgments. Etiquette, conventions, and tradition were important to Mina Schlachanska. Wealth and the safety she had been forced to forgo for so long were everything.

  She came from a modest background, had met her husband as a young girl in Italy, and instantly married him even though he was divorced. She had a hard time reconciling this situation with her notions of morality and marriage, fled to France with him, and was interned in the women’s camp at Gurs when the German armed forces marched in. She hardly talked about that time, which had left her with wounds that could not be healed. Occasionally she mentioned the two years during which she had to live in hiding with her husband and how he had worked in a fish factory in Paris after the liberation.

  Mina Schlachanska was obsessed with the desire to make up for everything she had missed in life. Modesty no longer entered her mind—especially where it concerned her daughter, who was dressed far too elegantly and was not allowed to play with children who were poorly clothed. She considered luxury the prerogative of a woman who had not wanted to come back into the country of her persecutors.

  Even though Walter admired her industriousness, her discipline, her sense of decorum, her unquestioning love for her husband, and the perfectionism with which she ran her lavish household, he denied her the tolerance that he taught his children. He too often resented her materialism, which in his eyes made her crass and envious.

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” Jettel said. “What do you think I would be like if I had had to suffer what this woman had to suffer?”

  “I wouldn’t have let you, Jettel, and since when are there people in this world who have suffered more than you?”

  “She is a good woman.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “My knowledge of human nature tells me. You don’t have any. My mother always said so.”

  Walter was most uncomfortable with the thought that the Schlachanska’s lifestyle might make his children jealous and seduce them into megalomania. Max was no longer taken in by Jeanne-Louise’s white socks and patent leather shoes, but by her room, expensive toys, her father’s Maybach, and the chauffeur, who carried his bag to the car.

  Regina, on the other hand, very soon relieved her father of the worry that appearances would blind and permanently harm her. After Josef Schlachanska looked at her wistfully one afternoon and said, “A girl like her should not graduate from a German high school, she should be sent to England or Israel to find a husband,” she looked at everything he said and did in the future from her usual skeptical and suspicious point of view. Regina, therefore, was also the only one to whom Walter confided, “You know, your father will never be as rich as Schlachanska. But at least he can sleep well at night.”

  He considered it, thus, a double irony of fate that Schlachanska’s tirelessly repeated remark, “One does not live in a seized apartment, and especially not in the Höhenstraße,” motivated Walter’s ambition in a totally incomprehensible way.

  9

  “JETEL, BY EVERYTHING THAT IS HOLY TO ME, believe me. I went to law school for seven semesters and received my doctorate. You do not need a new hat to go to a notary.”

  “Don’t always act so smart. I was already working for a notary when your father was still paying your bills.”

  “So why this nonsense?”

  “I thought I was going to become a house owner today.”

  “The house will be registered in your name. That is what you do when you are self-employed. Besides, then you will be in a much better position once you have put me into the grave.”

  “You yourself said this is a big day.”

  “The biggest in our lives, Jettel, since we had to leave Leobschütz. Not counting the birth of our son.”

  “Well, there you go. Do you think Mrs. Schlachanska would wear an old hat on a day like this?”

  “Mrs. Schlachanska would even wear a new hat on the day they had to declare bankruptcy. But we have to keep our money together now. So I think you’d better listen to me rather than Mrs. Schlachanska.”

  “If there is not even enough for a new hat, you won’t get far with your construction.”

  “Our construction, Jettel.”

  The hat was light blue and had a white veil with tiny white dots, behind which Jettel’s skin had the same diaphanous sheen as her old blouse from the Indian tailor in Nairobi. Jettel almost did not come along to the notary because Walter had called the hat “terribly beautiful” and had laughed in spite of his anger. The circumstances required a quick reconciliation that finally took place in the waiting room of attorney Friedrich, whom Walter still knew from their common visits to the tutor Wendriner in Breslau and who transported Jettel into a state of glowing euphoria by not only kissing her hand when greeting her, but by almost simultaneously saying, “What a lovely hat, Mrs. Redlich; a spring poem. It is wonderful that our women have not forgotten how to lead us into the realm of dreams again.”

  “I found out early on, Friedrich, that you are as much a poet as a lawyer,” Walter remembered, “and if you keep on turning my wife’s head any more, she is not even going to let me move into her house.”

  In pensive moments it seemed to him just compensation through fate that the house in the broad, maple-lined Rothschildallee should have a Jewish owner again.

  His aversion to an excess of imagination, which he had found dangerous in every stage of his life, however, protected him from inappropriate comparisons and prevented him from overrating the duplicity of events.

  Walter had often looked at the heavily war-worn building from the window of his living room and knew about the tragic story of its owners. He had heard that the house was for sale at precisely the moment when he had finally decided to keep his promise to Mrs. Wedel and look for another residence.

  The apartment house, built at the turn of the century, with its wrought iron gate, high windows, and massive balconies that, in spite of the bomb damage, still symbolized the bourgeois pride of a self-confident generation, had no roof or upper floor. In the parlance of the times the two floors that were still inhabited were considered “unclaimed Jewish property.” After the war, the land and the house on it had been transferred to the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, which made sure that the new Federal Republic did not profit from any interest on the crimes of the old Germany.

  Walter was a consultant and notary for the organization and, because of his patient persistence and Schlachanska’s energetic efforts
, he was able to persuade the organization to sell him the house for a very good price. He had heard about the Jewish couple, the Isenbergs, who had been murdered in Auschwitz and had no heirs.

  Mrs. Wedel had told Walter about the fate of the Isenbergs shortly after they had moved in with her. She had also told him that the house, number 9, had been the first in the Rothschildallee to be bombed and that people had surreptitiously told each other that this was God’s punishment.

  When it became known that Walter wanted to buy the house, so many people in the neighborhood talked to him about the fate of the Isenbergs who “really had been decent people and were not to blame” that it occurred even to Walter, who hesitated for quite a while before he condemned anyone, that the deportation of the Jewish citizens in Frankfurt could not have happened quite as unnoticed as was maintained again and again after the war.

  “I can’t wait to see how many people will tell me now how terribly upset they were when the Isenbergs were taken away,” Jettel said.

  Walter nodded. He would not have contradicted her even if he had not agreed with her. His energy for arguments with his wife on this important day had already been spent by the early afternoon. In attorney Friedrich’s practice, Jettel had to be persuaded by the combined efforts of Friedrich, Fafflok, and Walter to go along with the necessary legal formalities. When she heard that Walter was not going to pay cash for the house, which incidentally was not the custom anyway, she angrily picked up her handbag and told the perplexed trio, “I have never had any debts in my life and I am not going to start having any now.”

  “Without you, Jettel, we would all be in the debtors’ prison,” Walter said.

  A blue parrot with a big beak said “Oh” twice in a row, while a tiny monkey chewed on a banana and demonstrated in its own way that life had changed—three years ago nobody would have thought that there would ever be enough bananas in Frankfurt and then for monkeys.