Somewhere in Germany Read online

  Walter and Jettel were sitting in the Cafe Wipra at the Liebfrauenberg, and were already agreeing again on an important point of mutual interest: This was the only place where one could eat real poppy seed cake. The owner and his wife were from Silesia and, in contrast to the inhabitants of Frankfurt, knew that poppy seeds had to be ground twice and had to be soaked in milk before baking. Cafe Wipra, with its blooming, real tropical plants, birds, monkeys, and the many other animals, which were happy enough in their cages to give the admiring guests a feeling of vacation and exotic climates, was a special favorite among children. Walter and Jettel often went there alone as well. On this happy day Walter had dreamed not only of poppy seed cake but also of another pastry, the hard to digest “Liegnitzer Bomben,” and Jettel felt the desire to introduce her new hat to a place where hardly any lady appeared hatless.

  Both ordered two portions of whipped cream with their cake, Walter a double cognac afterward, and Jettel an egg liqueur that put her in such a good mood that she tried to smoke one of Walter’s cigarettes. Both remembered simultaneously that she had done that last during an excursion from Leobschütz to Jägerndorf and had coughed in the same way then as now in Frankfurt.

  The times in which they had been hungry were not yet far enough removed to consider a full stomach to be unpleasant. To be more than just satisfied smoothed the hard edges of life. The fullness made Jettel tender and Walter pensive. Even though they had just traveled to Leobschütz, they arrived in Africa.

  It was Walter who looked for too long at the little monkey in the cage in front of the small marble-topped table and was unable to protect himself. He first thought about the farm at Ol’ Joro Orok and how the Indian Daji Jiwan had had a house built there from freshly felled cedars. Initially Walter only smelled the wood, but his nose urged him on and he saw how Owuor fed the fire in the fireplace with his breath, slowly rose, and looked around with satisfaction. When the picture finally lost its colors, Owuor started to sing “Ich hab’ mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren.” His voice carried to the huts near the river. Walter felt his neck getting stiff and the cognac burning in his throat. “Strange,” he sighed, “at least I knew what I was afraid of at the farm.”

  He was startled when he realized that he had just elicited an answer from Jettel that was sure to lead to an argument that would still ruin the day, but to his surprise she took his hand and squeezed it.

  “We are going to end up as a couple of love birds yet in our old age,” Walter laughed, “and I have to admit, I do like your hat.”

  In the following weeks he also got to know Jettel from another, quite welcome side. With the recurrent remark, “It is my house after all,” and already dressed early in the morning as if she were going to call on the mayor himself, she turned the renovation of 9 Rothschildallee into a personal mission. Adorned with a hat and white lace gloves, without which a lady could not be seen in the street, she stomped through the rubble of the building site with the fighting spirit and self-confidence of an Amazon, exhibiting the coquettishness that, during the time of her dancing lessons, had made all the young men notice no one but her in the ballroom.

  She enraged the architect with her demands, suggestions, and unexpected flow of tears, and calmed him just as quickly with her charm, cherry cake, and truly fascinating stories about her experiences as a builder in Ol’ Joro Orok. She got workmen, whom she rendered defenseless with her temperament and enchanted with her helpless smile, to come from their place of work and she enticed them with complaints, many promises of a taste of specialties from her kitchen, and ingenious appeals to their honor to come to the building site. All of this was necessary because Walter had once again succumbed to the lure of his old habits before the currency reform and had hired carpenters, plumbers, painters, masons, electricians, and roofers who had not paid his fees and were quite unenthusiastic at the prospect of working off their debts, and could only be motivated to show up in the Rothschildallee by Jettel’s varied appearances.

  The house that originally had been three floors high grew to four. The uppermost floor was divided into two small apartments. One had been promised to Greschek, who wrote every week that he could not stand life for another day as an ostracized refugee in the village where he was exposed to outrageous suspicions and even physical violence and that he wanted to work in his old job again.

  “Greschek never had a job in his life,” Walter remembered. “He always had others work for him. But he needs to get out of that damn village. He is going to perish there. We will give him a position as superintendent. He doesn’t have to pay any rent then and Grete can do the little bit that needs to be done.”

  The thought of Grete’s capabilities and industriousness alone gave Jettel renewed energy. She had already been worried that an apartment with five rooms would be too much for one maid alone and especially for Else, who was not familiar with the sophistication that was required by the etiquette of the evermore budding miracle of better times. The anticipation of having Greschek’s tireless Grete, who most likely would also be devoted to her, at her side, seemed like a repetition of the happy days on the farm where there had been a man with strong arms for every task.

  During this time, when the future meant so much more than the past, Regina’s thoughts only traveled in a different direction. When she was sent to the building site in the afternoon with cake, sandwiches, and coffee in a thermos and saw the roof grow, she realized how disturbingly vivid the flood of pictures still coursed within her. Again and again, she remembered the days on the farm when she had seen the house at Ol’ Joro Orok get bigger. One last time, before the roof was covered, she had climbed up onto the narrow beam on the top.

  While she leaned against the raw walls here in Frankfurt, she was suddenly nine years old again and intoxicated with the happiness of the laughing peaceful people, and the sounds and smells. She saw the snow gleaming far away on Mount Kenya, smelled the freshness of the red soil after the start of the long rains, and heard the drums that told about the new house and its bwana. Even worse, she heard her own voice rolling from the mountain into the valley as she cried out jubilantly, “There is no place more beautiful than Ol’ Joro Orok.” And she knew that nothing had changed for her since then and she would never be able to delude her nostalgia.

  “Now,” Walter said and looked at the small front yard with the lilac bush that had defied the bombs, “you, too, have something to call your father’s house.”

  Regina thought of the photo album with the worn gray linen cover that had traveled to Africa and back, and of the small, yellowed picture of the Redlich’s hotel in Sohrau with the words “My father’s house” written under it. She looked at her father. She succeeded in not shaking her head but smiled at him instead, as in the days without beginning and end when she had always been able to summon the balm that healed his wounds.

  Regina knew all about close connections to one’s father’s house, and how it could turn into a prison there was no escape from. But her father, whom she loved so much that she did not even dare to hurt him with one of her thoughts and fears, knew nothing about his daughter. That had not changed, either, since the time when Owuor, at the edge of the large flax field with blue flowers of eternal happiness, had whispered to her, “The bwana has forgotten to take his heart along on the big safari.”

  Grete Greschek, small, wiry, her blond hair with its strands of gray tied into a thin bun at the back of her head, and her hands as red as her narrow face that was lit by the happiness of seeing everyone again and a burning desire to get to work, arrived a few days before the move in Frankfurt. After the first shared meal, she retrieved from her worn gray cardboard suitcase a washboard that she called by its Silesian name, “Rumpel.” She also produced a can of lard (“the real thing with greaves, the way our Dr. Redlich always got it from me”), and a blue apron dress. She took the plates that Jettel was about to collect out of her hand and said, “That is not for you.” She had not forgotten anything else, either, since 1938, the
year in which the “Doctors” had had to “make off.”

  At every move in Leobschütz, Grete had been an active consoling force who, without being able to put it into words, had known the sorrow of separation from the people she was connected to in the same reliable, familiar way as to her siblings. She could remember what the kitchen in the Lindenstraße, the curtains at the Hohenzollernplatz, and the bed of winter pansies at the Asternweg had looked like. She also still remembered that Walter became hungry when he got upset and that Jettel started to cry when there were unexpected challenges or excitement and would talk about her mother, who had recognized her sensitivity early on.

  Greschek’s Grete, as she still referred to herself when talking about those times in Leobschütz, when room and board were still payment enough for her, was undauntedly convinced of the healing powers of hot soup. As soon as Walter and Jettel started one of those battles without beginning or end, she put the pot on the stove and began to cut the bread. With the call, “Soup is ready,” she brought the soup terrine to the table. Grete called slippers “pampooshes” and had them ready as soon as Walter rang the doorbell and started whistling “Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten.” When Max ran around between the cartons and boxes, disturbing Grete while she was packing glasses and dishes, she fished in the pocket of her apron for a ten-pfennig piece, told him, “Here is a Groschen,” and sent him to the street vendor in the Allee to buy himself a treat.

  She called Else a “dumb goose” when she squashed a cordial glass with her big hands and once said the same of Regina because she considered modesty in people she valued as too much baggage for life. At night she talked about Greschek, who wanted to stay a few more months in Marke to settle some important business transactions he had started. Under no circumstances did Grete want to move into the superintendent’s apartment by herself. After the move she insisted on sleeping on a cot in the kitchen. While she was making the coffee for breakfast, she told Max about her goat, Lemmy, that she loved so much that she started crying when she described it jumping around in the garden as soon as the rooster, which she seemed to love as much as the goat, started crowing. Grete thought the eggs in Frankfurt were not fresh enough and the people too fresh.

  Regina was the first to realize that the Grescheks were not planning to move to Frankfurt, but as hard as she tried she was not able to find the words that would protect her parents from their illusions and desire to turn back the clock.

  Beds, tables, chairs, a sideboard, a bookshelf, closets, a stove, a sofa, easy chairs, a console, and a dressing table with a three-part mirror, the kind Mrs. Schlachanska had, needed to be purchased because Mrs. Wedel not only got her apartment back but also her furniture. And, as Jettel heard from the greengrocer’s wife, she also got money for the renovation. Walter denied that, called the greengrocer’s wife an old gossip, and refused to have radishes on his bread.

  Grete washed out the furniture (which had all been bought secondhand) with vinegar and scrubbed the new linoleum with liquid soap till it looked as if several generations had already run across it. She waxed the parquet floor until one could slide on it, in the backyard beat the moth-infested carpet that Walter had received from a client as a fee, and put the three rubber trees, which had been delivered for the housewarming party and were used for airing out her dust cloths, into the sun room.

  There a snakeskin, a souvenir of an unforgettable day at Lake Naivasha, crawled along a wall painted in a sunny yellow. Below that Masai warriors with tiny arrows and shields of genuine buffalo hide marched on a white plastic shelf that was just becoming the clean, handy symbol of the new times. Among the carved men with fine metal rings around their necks, a bald Kikuyu woman made of light wood sat on a stool nursing her child.

  Jettel had given the Indian shopkeeper at Ol’ Joro Orok two plates from the fruit set for the figures. Walter had gotten so mad that he threw the remaining four against the wall. Now, however, both were talking admiringly and tenderly of their “African corner” and greeted the wooden elephants with “jambo, tembo” in the morning.

  An “Ice Günther” truck had come to the Höhenstraße three times a week to deliver two blocks of ice for the icebox. In the Rothschildallee, a refrigerator stood next to the window—“a real electric one from Bosch,” as Jettel never forgot to mention. In front of the magnificent white marvel she and Walter ended the longest battle of their marriage. It had gone on since the day when Jettel, contrary to her husband’s advice to bring an icebox from Breslau, had instead arrived on the farm with an evening gown.

  “You always knew everything better,” Walter said and happily stabbed his knife into a piece of cold, hard butter. “That was the great tragedy of our emigration.”

  “The evening gown was exquisite. I don’t care what you say. I will never find one like it in Frankfurt.”

  On the first Saturday in the new apartment, Walter opened the bottle of wine that had traveled to Africa and back. On the day of his emigration his father had given him two bottles for good days but there had only been one good day.

  “Do you remember,” Walter asked, “when we drank the wine?”

  “When the baby was stillborn,” Regina said.

  “Was that a good day?” Max asked.

  “Yes, because your mother did not die.”

  “Fine,” Max said, and let an ice cube tumble into his glass.

  Since the move Max had started to add ice water to his sherbet powder and had dreamed of a refrigerator in the Maybach he would drive to court once he became an attorney.

  The harmony of the moment had rendered Regina idle; she let her head have its way and remembered the fairy that had lived in her colored cordial glass and had shared pleasures with her of which her parents were unaware. The thought of the magic that had served her for so long warmed her even more than the wine, but her good mood did not have the same stamina as the fairy. All of a sudden she felt sorry for Max because he had not known the adversity and anxiety that had made her resilient and because he did not know anything about the power of an imagination that goes beyond material desires. She got up to get a glass for Grete and touched his head in passing.

  “Careful with my ice cubes,” Max admonished her.

  Grete emptied her glass in one gulp, fumbled at her apron, got out a letter, and said, “I will have to leave soon. Greschek wrote. He needs me.”

  “To pack?” Walter asked.

  “But no,” Grete laughed, “to clean. He cannot manage by himself.”

  “But you are going to move to Frankfurt,” Walter said. “Josef wants to leave Marke. He writes in every letter how unhappy he is.”

  “Don’t you believe it, Dr. Redlich. You cannot believe Greschek. He is full of talk. He could never live in Frankfurt. Everything here is much too big and too dirty and too noisy. He certainly wouldn’t like the people here. And the superintendent’s apartment is no good for him. He needs his freedom.”

  “And you, Grete?”

  “My goat is waiting for me, Dr. Redlich, but I will always come to you when the missus needs me.”

  “It would have been so nice,” Walter sighed. “I am going to drive you home and have a talk with your Josef.”

  Two weeks later, on a Saturday, Walter, Jettel, Grete, and Max departed for Marke and Else went by train to visit her sister in Stuttgart. Regina, who had sprained her ankle and had not told anyone that it did not bother her anymore, stayed home by herself. When she saw the car leave and waved with a handkerchief in each hand, as she had done as a child when she had to leave the farm, she remembered the two black oxen at Ol’ Joro Orok. They had always seemed much stronger and younger at night when the yoke was taken off than in the morning. She was ashamed of her happiness, but the relief remained.

  Regina determined that she was going to spend the weekend, which seemed very long and precious in her liberation, as if she were just like any other young woman. She very seldom had a chance to visit her friend Puck without having to take her brother along.

/>   Puck lived with an old, deaf aunt and she enjoyed all the freedom that Regina was denied, the experiences of life beyond school and middle-class prudishness that Regina longed for, and a born winner’s attractive charm, which she admired without being jealous. On this weekend, without pressure, Regina longed more than ever for the happiness and cheerfulness that waited for her at Puck’s; for uncomplicated conversations about clothes, hairstyles, and movies, which the times had made possible once again; and for the natural confidences among girlfriends.

  She stood for quite a while in front of the built-in closet that the architect had labeled “Girl’s Room” in pencil on the door, first put on a white blouse with the blue skirt, then a yellow one that corresponded more to her good mood, and tried Jettel’s rouge and lipstick in the bathroom that still smelled of Grete’s soapsuds. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror and laughed aloud at the thought that some of her classmates were allowed to come home as late as they wanted, but were not allowed to put on makeup and did so only after leaving their house. With her it was just the opposite. Regina could have put on as much makeup as the vamps in American movies without upsetting her father. He offered her cigarettes and liked it when she drank a glass of schnapps with him, and he was tolerant in his conversations and thoughts, but felt insulted, upset, and dejected when Regina wanted to go out. In most instances she gave up her plans before even talking about them.

  She had just locked the apartment when the doorbell rang. Since she was only able to reach the buzzer from the inside and had already put away her keys, she quickly ran downstairs. There was a man in a blue uniform standing next to the mailboxes, and for a short moment she assumed he was a policeman. She needed some time till she understood that he was handing her a telegram. Her hand turned cold when she took it, but she was still able to swallow the first wave of fear and was even able to follow the messenger with her eyes when he left the yard.