Somewhere in Germany Read online

  “What am I supposed to do in England?”

  “Get married,” Max explained.

  “Who has been telling you that?”

  “Mr. Schlachanska. He told Papa that there are a lot of husbands for you in England. I listened carefully.”

  “Is that starting again?” Regina said and tried in vain to look the way she had looked just a minute ago. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Walter tried to calm her down. “Your brother is just proving once again that he is not yet ready to give an accurate witness report. The only true thing of the whole story is that we want to celebrate the day by having coffee with the Schlachanskas in Gravenbruch.”

  “Well, what do you know,” Regina said and searched for anything suspicious in her father’s face, but he returned her glance without averting his eyes. She stuck her fork into a piece of potato and swallowed her anger with Jettel’s especially delicious sauce.

  The popular Forsthaus in Gravenbruch was a favorite destination for excursions, which Walter had previously suggested only on special occasions and not at all anymore after his illness because he had started to classify all unnecessary expenses as irresponsibility toward his family. The cakes were more expensive in Gravenbruch than in the cafés in town. Coffee was only served in little pots and playing in the open air made the children price-increasingly thirsty.

  Their mothers, dressed in clothes that stood in stark contrast to the rustic surroundings, not only allowed them to order more drinks but they themselves tended to surrender to the persuasion of the well-trained personnel and concluded happy afternoons with expensive Danziger Goldwasser or egg liqueur.

  Mrs. Schlachanska was dressed in a new white hat with a wide brim and a big dark-blue tulle rose, and a blue silk suit with white polka dots that had been bought on her last trip to Paris. Jeanne-Louise wore a dress of yellow taffeta with ruffles, the white socks that Max still loved as much as on the first day of his fateful encounter with female beauty, and white patent leather shoes with delicate buckles. Jettel wore a black dress with a pink veiled hat and matching gloves, and Regina still wore the white blouse with a bow and the blue suit that she had worn for the oral exam.

  Walter had been able to get Jettel’s dress as a special deal from the textile merchant whose hand Regina had refused years ago; he had become a client of the practice of Fafflok and Redlich in the meantime, was married to a woman from South America, and was the father of two daughters.

  The gentlemen had been less particular about their attire. Joseph Schlachanska had stuffed his bulk into a white tennis sweater; Walter was wearing his British military khaki pants, which he had only had started to like in Frankfurt; and Max sported a red and white striped sweater and gray leather pants that had become too short for him. Max’s outfit elicited an ever-so-slight movement of Mrs. Schlachanska’s eyebrows; her daughter’s playmate looked too American on top and too German on the bottom for her pronounced sense of style.

  Jeanne-Louise, too, was amused. At age seven she had already learned enough from her mother to pay critical attention to outward appearances, but she was not yet adequately sophisticated to exhibit the necessary discipline that corresponded to her mother’s ideas of appropriate behavior. After coffee and an instant reprimand for a small spot of cream on her dress, she stumbled with her patent leather shoes into a puddle while playing catch and, on top of that, used a rather vulgar word that she had learned from Max just fifteen minutes ago.

  Free of the curious children and the pressure of responding to questions, which were never discouraged by the parents although the children could in no way understand their meaning, Joseph Schlachanska, after a third piece of cake and a second cognac, began to address the topic that had been the reason why he had suggested the excursion. He briefly spoke of his own final high school examination, mentioned his turbulent student days in passing, and suddenly asked, “Well, Regina, what are you planning to do now?”

  “I haven’t really thought about it yet.”

  “You are not planning to stay in Germany, are you?”

  “Oh, yes, I am going to,” Regina replied, and this time she knew without even having to look at Walter that a net had been put out for her. But Joseph Schlachanska was not the man who could be put off by the abruptness of an irritated young girl. He smiled at her with the charm of innocent friendliness that hardly any woman could resist.

  “I have suggested to your father that he should send you to England for a year. A young thing like you needs to get out of here for a while and meet new people.”

  “The ones I know are enough for me,” Regina said, and she did not take any time to catch more of a breath than she needed to get rid of her built-up anger that had just been revived. “You are not just talking about people, but about a husband I am supposed to find. But I have not gone to school all these years just to be married to some man whom I don’t know and who does not have anything to offer me except that he happens to be Jewish.”

  She impatiently waited for the storm she had just set in motion, and stared uncomfortably at her hands, which she suspected had the same color as her face. She let herself be shaken by helplessness and fury, and felt betrayed and humiliated. But when she looked at Walter, she caught the old, familiar, infinitely touching panic in his glance.

  When the first wave of tenderness started warming her, she realized that nothing had changed since the first days of the unwanted suitors. Her father feared nothing more than a separation from his daughter. He only had not had the courage to admit the truth to Schlachanska. Regina slowly dabbed the perspiration from her forehead. She had to concentrate so that she would not wink when she asked her father in a voice that trembled, only audible to her, “Could we discuss my future tomorrow? I do not want to spoil this beautiful day right now.”

  “Kessu,” Walter said with Owuor’s innocence in his eyes, and pressed Regina’s hand softly under the tablecloth. “Kessu,” he explained to Joseph Schlachanska, “is a wonderful word. It means tomorrow, soon, sometime, or never. I sometimes miss kessu in this country.”

  “Oh, Redlich, your damned Africa has messed you up. If you had stayed there, in the end you would have married Regina to an African.”

  “Is Regina allowed to marry an African if he is Jewish?” Max asked, and when he saw that his father laughed more loudly than on most other occasions, he used the chance to lick the last of the Danziger Goldwasser from a glass. He was then the only one who had an indelible memory of Regina’s last day of school.

  The little Opel, worn out by its years of service and Walter’s temperament, stood next to Schlachanska’s mighty Maybach on a meadow that had been dry in the early afternoon but after the first little rain shower had gotten wet surprisingly fast. Walter had almost reached the road with his family when he noticed in the rearview mirror that the Maybach had gotten stuck and sank in deeper every time the gas pedal was pushed. Schlachanska sat cursing at the steering wheel with a bright red face and moved his body toward the windshield every time he turned the motor off and on again as if he wanted to propel the car forward with the weight of his massive body, but the Maybach did not budge.

  Walter got out of the Opel whistling; loudly slammed the door; asked Mrs. Schlachanska and Jeanne-Louise to get out, which they did without the expected contradictions; and tried to push the metal colossus forward.

  “Don’t do that, you fool,” Jettel cried out in alarm after having gotten out of the car with Max. “A man with a sick heart does not push cars.”

  “Help me push, then.”

  All of them pushed—Walter gasping, Max shouting encouragement, Mrs. Schlachanska in high-heeled shoes, Jettel with her pink hat sliding, and Regina in the delicate outfit of her special day—but before getting totally exhausted they had to admit that their attempts were futile.

  “Come along, my friend, I am going to give you a ride home if you know how to get into a small car.”

  Joseph Schlachanska did not find enough room for his stom
ach in the passenger seat and when he pushed himself backward groaning, he got stuck with his nose pressed to the rear window. His feet, in the newly fashionable suede moccasins, dangled out of the car.

  “Just like Winnie the Pooh,” Max cheered.

  “Be quiet,” Walter scolded.

  He had to dismantle the passenger seat before he was able to push Schlachanska onto the backseat. With the windows turned down and Walter loudly singing “kwenda safari,” he started driving an hour later.

  Mrs. Schlachanska, mad because her silk dress was full of spots, and Jettel, with her veil askew, shared the torn seat of the Opel on the meadow between daisies and a black-headed sheep, in a first mild and later very strong spring wind. Jeanne-Louise sat silently on her mother’s lap. In spite of his mother’s and sister’s admonitions, Max could not be dissuaded from dancing around the freezing quartet and periodically shouting, “My father is the best driver in the world.”

  When Walter returned with Rumbler, the chauffeur—who had been summoned on his day off and was obviously animated by a large dose of malicious glee—to pick up his passenger seat and family, mother and daughter Schlachanska refused to wait for the Maybach to be freed from its ignominious state. They crowded, unusually subdued, into the Opel.

  “I will never forget this,” Max promised his father that night, still impressed by the victory of the David he had not recognized before over the Goliath he had admired for years.

  The somewhat overdue conversation between father and daughter took place two days later. Regina was embarrassed in a way that irritated her and became even more embarrassed when she realized that Walter felt the same way.

  “I am not a rich man,” he said with a formality that he immediately recognized as being exaggerated and foolish, “but I have enough money to let you study. You can choose any field you want. What have you been thinking of?”

  Baffled, Regina asked herself if her father really did not know that almost immediately after entering the Schiller School she had not wanted to study anymore and especially not at a German university. She felt oppressed by a feeling that she was duty-bound to be grateful for a favor and could not disappoint the benefactor for the simple reason that she could not feel anything when thinking about her future but the desire, which had become even stronger over the years, to be in an easily comprehensible world with people who thought the same way she did. She remembered just in time that it still might be possible to make her father happy with the answer that he most likely had been expecting from her for years. She smiled, full of regret when she realized that she had been negligent and had made her eyes blind and her mouth silent for such a long time.

  “Law school,” she said with satisfaction.

  “You can’t be serious, Regina. Only ugly girls go to law school. Real bluestockings who will never get married.”

  “We would have one less problem, then,” Regina deliberated and intensely reflected whether she had perhaps not understood the point of some joke, “but I don’t insist on law. It was just an idea because I am interested in everything you tell me about your work. Actually,” she said, briefly chewing on her relief and encouraged to tell the truth, “I don’t really want to study at all. I am almost twenty-one and have been a financial burden for you long enough.”

  “Don’t talk such nonsense. I told you I can afford to send my daughter to the university. Only I am not too excited about law school. And not only because you are a pretty girl. I found out what law means. You can work nowhere in that profession but in Germany. An attorney is a prisoner for life.”

  Confused, Regina asked herself what kind of an effort it had been for her father to make this confession. She knew that she could not look at him so she stared fixedly at the picture of the town hall in Breslau the way she had done as a child when the words had not jumped fast enough from her head to her mouth. “You want me,” she said, and all of a sudden it became easy for her to allude to the agreement of their eternal pact, “to stay here. How about becoming a kindergarten teacher?” she suggested. “After all, I like children a lot.”

  “Do you really still want to play ‘Ring-around-the-Rosies’ and sing ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ when you are going to be an old lady of fifty?” Walter asked.

  “You are too smart for me, bwana. Seamstress would not be too bad either. People always need clothes.”

  “I did not know that you like to sew.”

  “Neither did I,” Regina laughed. “How about selling books? Many in my class want to do that.”

  “An attorney’s daughter is not going to be a salesgirl. You did not go to school for years on end to stand in a store. Good God, Regina, there must be something in this world that an intelligent girl like you wants to do.”

  “Writing,” Regina realized. “I never really liked to do anything else as much in my life.”

  “Don’t tell me you want to write books. Didn’t you see in your father what it means not to be able to make a decent living?”

  “I have been thinking of becoming a journalist for some time now,” Regina said too quickly and even more perplexedly, but she considered it a lucky break that she had just been thinking about her German teacher who had annotated most of her essays with “too journalistic.” “But I have no clue how one goes about becoming one.”

  “Neither do I, but the idea is not as bad as the others. I can make some inquiries at court or in the Jewish community if anyone knows someone who has something to do with newspapers.”

  “The main thing is that the newspaper not be in England or some other country with a huge number of Jewish men intent on marrying,” Regina sighed.

  “I suppose you would not be that opposed to South Africa?”

  “How did you know?” Regina wondered aloud. “What made you think about that? Why did you never mention anything?”

  She was too confused and relieved to be angry with her father about the fact that he had gone hunting without first presenting her with the weapon he had sharpened with so much cunning and that had caught her unaware. For a heartbeat that made her skin warm and her head hot, she allowed herself the escape to a carefully hidden shore, and enjoyed the quiet of the moment and the taste of a memory mixed with salt and honey, but then she heard the hunter laugh and cut the dream with an equally sharp knife as at the moment of parting.

  “Did you really think I don’t know about you and Martin? Martin was never able to be with a woman for more than an hour without getting her.”

  “With me it was a night,” Regina said, “and I am glad that you know.”

  In the days that she had yearned for since her first hour in a German school and that now seemed to her as senseless as they were long, she tried to justify her lack of enthusiasm for the future and her even more annoying lethargy as the normal state of mind of a high school student who has been protected from life for too long in a community of equals. But she was not skilled enough in self-deception and not naïve enough either not to know better. Regina had never been able to overcome the fear of a child, who with irreparable suddenness and devastating vehemence, had been pushed out of its own world to permanently live among strangers.

  She considered it a special irony of fate that it was Joseph Schlachanska, of all people, for whom Regina’s wish to stay in Germany was a sin against experience and faith, who finally released her from the stranglehold of her self-doubts. He had connections to a publisher in Offenbach and persuaded him, without even telling Walter beforehand, to take a look at Regina.

  13

  AFTER TEN MINUTES OF NERVOUS WAITING, a petite, reddish-blonde woman with strikingly green eyes behind equally striking gold-rimmed glasses ushered Regina into the office of publisher Brandt and toward an empty chair in front of his imposing desk. Regina tried to smooth out her pleated skirt and to move as little as possible while doing so. She was wearing the blue suit that had accompanied her through her final oral exams at school and since then had had to ensure on all occasions of greater importance that she did
not have to be embarrassed about looking too young. Still, she was convinced that her eyes and her mouth, even before the first word of the interview, revealed her uncomfortable tension, which she considered as much of a burden as the doubt that she ever would be able to explain to her parents her first defeat on the way to an alluring independence.

  The publisher had one of those smooth, round faces that usually freed Regina of her shyness in front of strangers because widely spaced eyes and a broad forehead, even in white-skinned people, immediately made her think of the good-natured openness of black people. He was sitting in a tweed jacket—reminding her of her childhood, that is, her first headmaster—in front of a desk of dark wood on which yellowed newspapers were stacked up into a high, wobbly mountain next to a vase filled with lilacs.

  Regina realized that she did not have much time left to utter at least one intelligent sentence if she did not instantly break the silence, but she could not even remember the small platitudes that she had formulated and practiced over and over again on the long tram ride from the Konstabler Wache in Frankfurt to Offenbach.

  Despite all heart-pounding efforts to concentrate on the reason for her visit and especially the task of creating the impression of a smart young woman who was dying to take a hold of pen and paper and portray life, Regina let the time pass by with thoughts that she considered absurd but could not easily abandon. She imagined, with an attention to detail that she classified as remarkable in view of the circumstances, that with such mountains of paper her family would have been able to afford the diarrhea that they all feared more than a reduction of the fat rations every day.

  Regina only realized that she must have moved her lips while thinking of those days, when the printed word was far less important than the paper it appeared on, when Uwe Brandt said, “I like that. This happened to me all the time, too, when I was young. I just smiled and people considered me friendly.”

  “Thank you,” Regina said.