Somewhere in Germany Read online

  “What is wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Walter said. “You do not have to be concerned. We can go on fighting.”

  His voice was strange and weak, his gasping breath too loud, and when he put both arms on the table and let his upper body slide forward, he groaned quietly and pressed his lips together.

  “For heaven’s sake, something is wrong. Did you eat anything on the way home? Shall I call Dr. Goldschmidt?”

  “Let it be, Jettel; we cannot afford a doctor till we have saved enough for Regina’s tuition.”

  For a short moment Jettel thought with relief that he was feeling better already and had just made one of his usual jokes, reminding them of the time of their emigration when there had not been enough money to think of medical help even in life-threatening situations. Her instinct, however, had become as sharp and suspicious through the pictures that this one sentence evoked as during dangerous times on the farm. She understood, overwhelmed by terror and also tenderness, that Walter had actually confused the times and scenes of his life. She saw the fear in his eyes and the fluttering eyelids, helped him get up from the table while murmuring, “You will feel better in a moment,” and led him to the wing chair in the living room. Then she ran to the telephone.

  Half an hour later Walter was in the hospital. On the first day the physicians diagnosed a heart attack, on the second day they suspected severe diabetes and spoke about acetone, and on the third day, the leading physician recommended that the infected teeth in his upper jaw be extracted. When Max was finally allowed to visit his father on the fourth day, the teeth were lying in the sink and Walter was giggling in bed.

  “Your Papa,” he said and began to swing the empty bedpan toward the window, “bit a nurse to death and now has to eat porridge as a punishment for the rest of his life.”

  “Mama says you will never be able to eat chocolate again.”

  “Women’s talk,” Walter laughed. “You know how women are. Long hair, little intelligence. Go look at my teeth.”

  “Regina says one should put the tooth under the pillow and wish for something. During the night a fairy will come and get the tooth.”

  “Don’t let Regina tell you such nonsense. You are a man.”

  Max was just about to admire the seventh pulled tooth when the head nurse, Clementine (the other nurses did not dare bring the patient, who had been classified as unusually difficult, his meals), arrived with a bowl of grits and applesauce and was sent out again by Walter with the grumpy remark, “The doctor can eat that stuff himself.”

  “Are you allowed to do that?” Max asked, impressed.

  “Just remember this, son,” his father told him. “If you believe in the diseases the doctors want to convince you of, you are lost. If I had had money for a physician in Africa, I would be dead by now.”

  Except for malaria shortly after arriving in Kenya and black-water fever in the military, Walter had never been seriously ill. On the farm, he had been determined from the very beginning to fight illness with willpower and fearlessness, and during the time of loneliness and hopelessness, he had become as fatalistic as the people in the huts who did not interpret the signals of the body as warnings because they entrusted their life and death to the black God Mungu without resisting fate.

  Even though he had experienced the fear of death before he had been checked into the hospital and had not forgotten his panic, he was not willing—and because of his experiences in Africa, which had marked him for all times, also no longer able—to consider a collapse, for which the physicians only suggested rest and a special diet, a serious illness. He had his files brought from the office, composed letters and briefs by hand sitting at a little round table in his room, insisted that Fafflok come to visit him daily and tell him about the practice, and did not allow being spared even the smallest professional annoyance or any major agitation.

  Even though the physician had recommended that only family members should come to visit him, Walter called his friends from Upper Silesia four days after being checked into the hospital. They instantly arrived in droves to sit at his bedside, unload their problems, and get free legal advice. He greedily drank in the rough wit of the straightforward language of home and ate with relish the fat sausages and heavy cakes they brought along.

  He fought with Jettel as in healthy days when she carried the chocolates home before he had a chance to open the box. He made fun of her when she read the dietary prescriptions the doctor had given her and maintained that she had waited all her life just to take the chocolates away from him. He told the doctors and nurses over and over again that he had been hungry for too long to have them rob him of the only pleasure in life that was left to a man his age.

  When Jettel, Regina, and Max were in his hospital room at the same time, he would paint them a picture of his funeral with an imagination that in pensive moments surprised even him. It would be a solemn ceremony with mourners, some of whom, Jettel among them, of course, were about to throw themselves into the grave. Walter, in a white nightgown with a red sash wrapped around it in memory of the outfit in which Owuor had served large meals for special guests and occasions, composed graveyard speeches for Karl Maas, who had become district court president; for the representatives of the bar association; for the board of the Jewish community; for Schlachanska in tux and cylinder hat; and for the Territorial Association of Upper Silesia.

  He promised that Jettel would have a new black hat with a large veil and that his son would be allowed to wear his grandfather’s gold pocket watch for the funeral, sit in the first row, and never have to go back to school because he had to earn the livelihood for his incompetent mother and shy sister. Jettel was furious, Regina unhappy, and Max enthusiastic.

  The conscious escape from reality, provoking of the physicians, melancholy grim humor, and constantly crossing the gulf between irony and suppressed fear only protected him during the day. At night, unable to sleep and brooding, he felt old and was tortured by the idea that he did not have enough time to leave the house in the Rothschildallee free of debt for Jettel and his children.

  The existential worry of the emigration, which he had thought would only be a memory of happily conquered times after the powerful rebuilding, returned to him as a hissing monster with talons and sharp claws and he returned to Ol’ Joro Orok to sit with Kimani, the thoughtful judge of human nature, at the edge of the flax field. In his color-drenched waking dreams he heard the friend of years past say again and again, “No man dies, bwana, unless he says, ‘I want to die.’” Before Walter turned off the light, he removed the mask of the clown who deceived the world with his cheerfulness. Then he only saw Kimani’s face with his perceptive eyes and white teeth that shone in the midday sun, and he fell asleep, confused but consoled.

  Regina, who brought him the newspaper every day before she went to school, found her father one morning with closed eyes, his hands folded on his stomach. “Na taka kufa,” he said quietly.

  “You shouldn’t say that,” she cried, horrified, and crossed her fingers. “You do not joke about that. It is bad luck.”

  “Why? Kimani said it, too, when we left the farm, and they found him the next day dead in the woods. He said, ‘Na taka kufa.’ I know that for sure even though I was not with him.”

  “He wanted to die; you don’t.”

  “I am an old man, Regina. My time has come.”

  “You are not even fifty yet.”

  “Much older. Hitler stole years from me.”

  “And now you are stealing them from yourself once again. Don’t you want to see your son grow up?”

  “Yes,” Walter said, “but the good Lord is not going to let me.”

  “How can you talk about God and not trust him? Has everything you taught me as a child been only a fairy tale you did not believe in yourself ?”

  “You are right, memsahib kidogo. I have only been on safari.”

  “But you forgot once again to take your head along. Owuor told me before leaving t
hat you are a child and I have to protect you. Don’t make it so hard for me.”

  “Don’t you understand me anymore, either? I want to make it easy for you when the time comes. You are supposed to sit at my funeral and laugh because everything has happened exactly the way I predicted it.”

  Even before Regina felt the first kernel of salt scratching her throat, she understood that the old, never-forgotten story was about to repeat itself. Nothing had changed since the days that were dead. Her father was again the cunning Cupid from the Masai tribe who in the fight for her heart carefully took aim before letting his arrow fly from the bow. She was once again the child who turned into a woman and was unable to defend herself against the avaricious flame of love that he had ignited.

  Regina saw herself standing under the guava tree in Nairobi and heard her father talk about returning to Germany. He asked her not to doubt him and to come with him on the safari without return, and she promised to go along.

  Only for a short moment, during which she felt that she could not carry the new burden, did she hesitate. Then she took the newspaper off the bed and embraced Walter. She felt his tears on her lips, heard his heart and hers beating, and knew that she was ready to go with him the way that neither of them wanted to follow.

  “Let it be a long safari, bwana,” she swallowed. “We have a lot of time.”

  “As long as possible, memsahib kidogo. I promise. And now give me the fine chocolates from Mrs. Schlachanska that your mother hid in the closet.”

  12

  AT THE BEGINNING OF HER LAST DAY, which Regina had looked forward to with an intensity that could only be explained by long-pent-up loathing and her inability to talk about her own troubles, she experienced a double surprise at the Schiller School. She found out that she was going to have oral examinations in English and German. Without joining the complaints of most of her fellow students, who used their self-doubts as flirtatious demonstrations of modesty, Regina immediately knew that she would pass the high school finals even though she had handed in an empty sheet for the written mathematics test and had also gotten an F in biology.

  The English teacher had never really forgiven Regina for her unusual entry into life at a German school—the stuttering girl from Africa had used the familiar form of address for her and thus exposed her to the ridicule of the class—but her vanity was more strongly developed than the kind of imagination she would have needed to muster sympathy for frightened children from a different world. At this point she had not been able to resist the temptation to suggest that Regina, in spite of language skills that so unpleasantly surpassed the class level, would get a B as an overall grade, which she could possibly bring up to an A through an oral examination. She saw this as a chance to present to the observing teachers, and especially to the representative of the Hessian Ministry of Education, who was known to be quite critical, a student who would be proof of her excellent teaching abilities. After all, the difficult girl from Africa spoke English without an accent, knew about literature that had not even been read in class, and presented the Hamlet monologue as if she had written it herself.

  Regina, for her part, had never forgiven the English teacher for her intolerance toward a student who, at age fifteen, sentenced to speechlessness, had stood at the edge of an unfamiliar culture that, at best, had condemned her to mediocrity for all times. Even less could she excuse the fact that the teacher had let the naïve initial misunderstanding over time turn into a very conscious aversion, which she was unable to express in bad grades only because the unloved student had spent years in emigration and was, therefore, performing too well. Regina abandoned the temptation of tasting the sweetness of revenge with a slight hesitation when she considered that the school was about to attest to a certain degree of moral maturity in her. Reluctantly she did not use her talent, trained so early by Owuor, to imitate voice and gestures. She deprived the celebratory community of the experience of hearing her speak English with the same bad pronunciation as her teacher.

  Regina had given the German teacher—who had fascinated, encouraged, and promoted her from the start, and who was the only teacher she would part from with the feeling that their encounter had been a worthwhile and lasting one—credit for those caring characteristics she had profited from ever since her first day at a German school. Only when he did not ask her a single question about Faust II, in spite of the fact that they had studied Goethe extensively in the last two grades of high school, but immediately encouraged her to talk about the author she had chosen as her specialty, did she suspect that even this humanitarian, whom she admired, might have special reasons for placing a student whose development was somewhat out of the ordinary into the spotlight.

  While the other graduating students had limited their own choice of authors whose work they wanted to independently study to Rudolf Binding, Manfred Hausmann, and, at most, Hermann Hesse, Regina had chosen Stefan Zweig. Now, during her oral examination, when she talked about his inability to forget his mother tongue and roots and to develop new ones in exile, she saw with amazement and even shock that several of the teachers, and among them some she certainly never would have expected it from, were wiping their tears away when the topic of homelessness was mentioned. Regina particularly noticed the dismay of the French teacher, who was generally praised as a capable educator and was surprisingly cosmopolitan. She had never been able to understand why a child who had been educated in an English school would speak French with an accent that she regarded as an insult to her ears. She had covered them theatrically whenever Regina started to speak.

  The biology teacher, who had misconstrued Regina’s dislike of the thorough study of genetics as laziness and malice, suffered so noticeably when she heard about Stefan Zweig’s suicide that Regina, had her inborn skepticism not been heightened by the Schiller School, almost would have forgiven her the F in her report card and the insults that had been evident only to her.

  Even though she passed the German exam with the coveted B, she felt awkward about the suspicion that she had just been set up as an actor in a skillfully staged play in which her teachers had been able to demonstrate the kind of tolerance that she had not encountered over the years. The events of the last school day caused Regina, without the wistfulness that young people generally experienced at a crossroad in their lives, to take leave from a community to which she, in spite of the friendliness of many of her fellow students and the friendship of a very few teachers, had never completely belonged.

  When she stood undecided and unmoved in the Gartenstraße and looked, lost in thought, at the school’s gray walls, whose stones had been salvaged by students, ready for sacrifice and motivated by eloquent teachers, with their bare hands from the rubble, she even found herself shuddering. All of this increased her desire to share this day of happiness and liberation with only her parents and to enjoy it in an atmosphere where there were no hidden allusions or the exhausting need to clear up misunderstandings.

  In contrast to her usual school days, when an acceptable amount of dawdling had resulted in the delay of unpleasant domestic chores, Regina now ran, without stopping to enjoy the old houses or the newly built-up houses on both banks of the Main, across the Eiserner Steg. She chased the tram to Bornheim at the Konstabler Wache and hurried to her destination in the Höhenstraße like an exuberant child expecting its due reward.

  It was a mild, March day, full of the anticipation of spring. In the tiny front yard of 9 Rothschildallee, the first crocuses had sprung up in yellow, white, and purple, surrounded by chickadees. The lilac that Walter loved and tended carefully, and that every May again symbolized for him the natural events he had dreamed of in Africa, already had buds. In a round bed the first green went into the strong stems of the carnations, which had been grown from seeds that originally came from Sohrau and which Owuor had carried from Rongai to Ol’ Joro Orok in a white envelope.

  Regina only permitted herself a short encounter with Owuor among the healthy carnations at home—yet it was l
ong enough to smell her friend’s skin and to feel his arms while he lifted her up to the sun and told her that she was as smart as he was. She still felt his light breath at her ear when she rang the doorbell. On the stairs she could already smell that her parents had waited for her with lunch.

  “Did you flunk, my daughter?” her father shouted from the fourth to the first floor in a voice that would have been well suited for the beloved echo from the mountains. “Never mind; that happens in the best of families.”

  “Not in ours,” Regina shouted back. “I passed.” She simultaneously embraced her parents and pushed their bodies together the way she had always done as a child when she had returned from school to the farm and could not decide whom to give her love to first. The emotional tears her fellow students had shed finally came to her, too, when her mother said, “We are having Königsberger Klopse. I always made them when you came home from your boarding school.”

  “And then you always used to say, ‘There are no capers in this damned country.’ And I asked, ‘What are capers?’”

  “Why don’t you look at your plate,” Max said impatiently.

  With the money he had asked her for last night he had bought his sister a gold-colored coin on a ribbon and he had painted her a picture with a red car, blue sun, two green stick figures, and the sentence “Regina has her Final exxam. Now you’ll not Be with Us much longer.” She took him on her lap and squeezed him tight till his laughter and hers had become one. Then she asked, “Why will I no longer be with you just because I am not going to school anymore?”

  “Because you have to go to England.”