Somewhere in Germany Read online

  “What for?”

  “For saying anything at all.”

  “The famous first word,” Brandt laughed. “All journalists have a hard time with that.”

  Regina realized before the publisher that he himself, even though most likely unintentionally, had mentioned the reason for her visit. She searched in her handbag, too long as she instantly registered, handed him her final school report at last, and wondered if it was too early and too much of an exaggeration to mention that her German teacher had recommended journalism to her.

  “Oh, just forget about that, lovely lady. I do not put much stock in report cards. The top student in my class only got to be a supervisor at the railroad and ended up in a mental institution.”

  “I hope something like that is going to happen in my class, too,” Regina said. She became embarrassed again when she realized that she had laughed, but to her amazement she found the courage to keep on talking. “I have not been the best in my class. Not since Africa.”

  “What makes you mention Africa all of a sudden?”

  “I lived there,” Regina said. She unhappily asked herself how it could have happened that, without the slightest provocation, she had been tempted to talk about herself and then immediately about something this important. She did not want to drop the thread of her conversation right away either, so she explained, “I mean, we emigrated to Kenya when the Nazis came.”

  When the publisher, spontaneously and with the kind of attention that Regina had not encountered often, asked her about her family, emigration, and life in a foreign country, and she told him without reservations and with increasing happiness about Ol’ Joro Orok, the flax fields, Owuor’s wisdom, and the night sounds, she was certain that she had summoned the black God Mungu just as she had done as a child when there was no way out. He had come to her aid and had thrown his stroke of lightning into her tongue.

  “You can tell a good story,” Uwe Brandt said after Regina had also described their return to Germany and even the desire to stand somewhere and not to see a house or a human being, and that she was still waiting for that moment. She heard him laugh and then speak.

  “That is more than most journalists can do. Tell a good story well. What were you thinking of, the Offenbach Post or the Evening Post?”

  Regina had to take an immense detour to return to the present. She thought with much more effort than matching results if she had ever heard of the Offenbach Post and if this was even the name of a paper. Relieved, because at least it gave her a clue, she thought of the young men at the main station who held the Evening Post up high and cried out the most recent news in an amazing volume although one could read the huge letters of the headlines even from far away. She tried to concentrate hard, but was not sure why she had to pick one of two possibilities.

  “The Evening Post,” she haltingly said.

  “Well, you have taken on a huge bite. Tabloid journalism is not easy for a woman. By the way, do you know Mr. Schlachanska well?”

  “Very well,” Regina said, happy that Uwe Brandt obviously did not expect a comment on the first two sentences.

  “An interesting man.”

  “Very,” she agreed.

  “But that just makes me think.”

  “Why?”

  “You see,” the publisher began but became silent too quickly and also changed his face too noticeably not to put Regina into a state of heightened alert. He carefully moved the vase with the lilacs from the right to the left side of his desk, searched some time for his handkerchief first in his jacket pocket and then his pants pocket, and dried his forehead.

  “May I tell you a little story?”

  Regina forced herself to nod. She let the weight of her discomfort press her deeply into the chair and asked herself if the publisher knew Joseph Schlachanska well, and especially since when, and to what extent he would make her feel responsible for his Maybach and appearances. Only too discouragingly clear did she hear her father’s reprimand, “That is going to affect all of us, the way good old Schlachanska behaves.”

  “Two weeks ago,” Uwe Brandt said and looked at Regina with a glance that she interpreted as skeptical, “a paper salesman came by and made me an offer. A really nice young man who spoke German well. I looked over his offer and found it too expensive. And you know what happened when I told the good man?”

  “No.”

  “He made a terrible scene right here in my office and screamed that I was only denying him the order because he was a Jew. Just ask my secretary how terrible this was for all of us.”

  “Yes,” Regina said.

  “I don’t know if you can imagine why I tell you this story.”

  “I think so.”

  “If I now decide not to employ you as an intern in our house because we do not have an opening, you will most likely assume that I am rejecting you for racial reasons. I mean we can’t even talk normally about these things anymore these days. That is the problem with our times.”

  Even before she had heard the last sentence, Regina knew that she had actually summoned the God Mungu and that He had lent her for a short, revitalizing moment the magic power of His right arm, which weak people asked for when a thief threatened to forever steal their face and strength. As she took her report card from her lap, folded it very slowly, put it into her handbag, and afterward got up with the sly suddenness of a water buffalo blinded by lethal danger, she was not yet quite sure if the beams of Mungu’s deadly fire were also caught between her teeth. But the wish burned strongly in her humiliated senses and drove her to a shore she had never reached before.

  “If you think this way,” Regina said and could not believe that her voice was as calm as a dying wind, “there is no point in talking to me any further. At home we refer to this as the liability of the whole family for the actions of one of its members.”

  When her eyes were searching for the door she felt how the rage in her gave way to a great comforting feeling of release. Finally liberated from the day—which had troubled her for so long—when her father had confronted the anti-Semitic driver in the Höhenstraße, she now only thought with the delight of the magically empowered about the cowardly wasted minutes when she had known nothing but silence and fear. She even thought that she heard herself laugh, loud and heartily, but then she realized that the laughter that had reached her ears was not hers.

  “For heaven’s sake stay, you temperamental Miss,” Uwe Brandt called out. “That was not what I really meant. On the contrary. I like you. I find it fabulous how you just told me what you think of me.”

  “Yes,” Regina said and was annoyed that she was only able to produce a whisper at this point. She was not able to decide fast enough if she should sit down again or would immediately have to say more than just one word, but the way to the chair seemed too far for her and she also recognized that her eyes were unable to focus on a single destination. She remained standing and after a few seconds, during which she was still searching for an answer that was appropriate under the circumstances, she settled for the fact that she had at least succeeded in closing her mouth.

  “Journalists need courage,” Uwe Brandt explained with the kind of goodwill that was generally regarded as infectious. “I learned that when I started at Ullstein. I better send you to the editor-in-chief of the Evening Post. If you can get along with him, nobody here is going to be happier than I. I am also happy to do a favor for my old friend Schlachanska. You better have a cup of coffee with me first. We should give our friend Emil Frowein a little time to recover from the shock. He is having a hard time accepting women, you know. Just go ahead to the secretary’s office. I am going to be right there.”

  Emil Frowein put the receiver down with a sigh and examined very thoroughly, and, as usual, mercilessly, the reason for his mood change. It was not the common aversion of the editor-in-chief against the interference of the publisher in things that concerned the editorial office that bothered him. He considered himself diplomatic enough not to show his wear
iness of the repeated intervention and was always ready for a patient and sympathetic conversation with people who were interested in his profession.

  Emil Frowein always made every effort to find out if the young people in the chair in front of his desk were only the victims of romantic illusions or, on first impression at least, seemed to be capable of following a path that had not spared him, for one, from some painful admissions regarding his own talent and, even worse, the dangers of being ready to accept compromises too quickly, as well as from an ambition that he had considered unhealthy for quite a while now. It was the way that Brandt had announced the young woman that bothered him—not the fact that editors-in-chief were better off by not rejecting the personnel suggestions of their publisher without any really sound reason.

  “I am sending over something very special for you to review,” Uwe Brandt had said on the phone. “A strikingly attractive person. Female. She has beautiful black hair, the kind only Jewesses have.” “Uwe,” as he was known in the editorial offices, had ended the conversation somewhat abruptly but not quickly enough to leave his editor-in-chief in doubt about the fact that he had laughed jovially.

  It was well known—in fact a joke in the business, accepted by all—that Emil Frowein had reservations against women journalists unless they stayed with the established subjects of church, kitchen, children, and lately, of course, also fashion. He had little trouble and used only a few ironic remarks to give a sound defense for an attitude that was no longer considered quite appropriate for the times. Frowein considered women—even though ambitious enough to live up to his high expectations—too sensitive, jealous, argumentative, and thus almost always a problem in an editorial office that was dominated by men. They also had a tendency—which in his opinion aggravated a continuous working relationship beyond any reasonable measure—to put too much emphasis on personal security, which he basically understood and even welcomed. They let their private lives distract them too much from their professional ones and often got married just at the time when they were about to become useful members of the staff.

  Frowein used the regrettably short time that remained until he had to meet with Uwe’s dark-haired beauty to recognize clearly and relentlessly that this time it was not the prospect of a disturbing female presence in his office that irritated him. Dear Uwe, with the sure instinct of a man who knew a lot and said nothing, had laughed at exactly the right moment. He might as well have asked his editor-in-chief, “And how about your religion?”

  It was not as if Frowein, after his experiences in Poland, Holland, Belgium, and France, had specifically avoided the confrontation with a past that he did not gloss over in any way and was even less able to understand. If there was a man in the new, oblivious Germany who was unable to get rid of the pictures he had seen, and who was burdened by the guilt that his early-benumbed conscience tortured him with in all eternity, it was Emil Frowein.

  There had not been a day in his life after the hour zero, which he considered as such with all his intelligence and ready insight, on which he had forgiven himself for the weakness and blindness of his youth. After the war, however—and that became obvious to him only now as he stared at the door of his office and waited for the expected knock—he had never had any contact with Jewish people beyond the strictly professional requirements and had not anticipated that he might ever have a personal conversation with them again.

  Frowein had, of course, attended the dedication of the rebuilt synagogue in the Freiherr-vom-Stein-Straße as an invited guest because this was natural in his position as editor-in-chief. Although it would have been easy for him to delegate this to a reporter, he himself had even written about the event, which had moved, had depressed, and had actually driven him to face that part of his personality that he wanted to make ever fewer apologies for with every hour of soul searching.

  He did not miss any Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation events, which journalists were invited to, he gave extensive coverage to reports about the Brotherhood Week, and he considered it more than just his duty as a chronicler to participate in the annual commemorative ceremonies for November 9, 1938, at the site of the burned-down synagogue in the Friedberger Anlage.

  Now, at this moment that deprived him of his peace with an intensity that he was unable to explain in spite of all he knew about himself, he felt like a frightened child who does not know how to get home. He clearly saw that his theoretical exercises in remorse had lifted only a very small burden from his penitent soul. He shuddered.

  Frowein poured some coffee for himself from a thermos and took a cigarette from a mangled pack of Lucky Strikes. He had just discovered that his hands were as unsteady as his head when he heard the knock. He energetically untangled himself from the web of his emotions and called, “Come in!” with great determination. He jumped up, which he had not planned to do, saw Regina standing in the door, saw that she actually had very black hair just like his tomcat, and said, “I have been expecting you. Come in; sit down. I do not bite. I just look as if I do.”

  Routine immediately took away his embarrassment and he asked her the usual questions about her school, her high school diploma, her special interests, and her ideas about a profession that he was somewhat reluctant to recommend. He did not get the usual answers. Regina did not hide her ignorance about journalism or the fact that she had arrived in the room she was sitting in now more by chance than inclination.

  The rigid tendency of her English schooling to understatement and restrictive modesty attacked her in an uncompromising way that she had not experienced for a long time, and guided her head and tongue. She talked, amused and ironical, about her mediocre accomplishments in school, the German teacher and his aversion to any oversimplification of complex topics, and—because she could not think of any other details about her mental development but wanted to keep up the conversation—about her time at the Guggenheims. Slightly embarrassed, she also mentioned her enthusiasm for art and the theater, adding that her father suspiciously held his own enthusiasm for art and the theater in check.

  “Does he want you to be a journalist, then?”

  “He is not opposed to it. In any case he thinks it is better for me than painting pictures or becoming an actress.”

  “Oh, you paint?”

  “Well, no.”

  “And did you ever consider acting”

  “I would have been thrown out of my home a long time ago. Besides, I have been much too shy to even recite a poem all my life.”

  “I have too many unfounded fears, too, as a father.”

  “Then you should meet my father sometime,” Regina said.

  Frowein noticed her voice, and above all the precision with which she articulated every word with the unusual hardness of a language that did not correspond to her reserved manner and in addition offered memories of a long-hidden cheerfulness. He needed more time than he had expected to tell himself that it was only Regina’s language that concerned him, and asked, “Where are you from?”

  “From Africa. I mean,” she quickly corrected herself, “I lived there for a long time.”

  “Were you born there?”

  “No. I was born in Germany.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh,” Regina said and blushed, “you will not know it. I have never met anyone in Frankfurt who knows this funny place unless he happens to be from there.”

  “Try me,” Frowein smiled.

  “From Leobschütz.”

  “In Upper Silesia. My wife was born there.”

  They both laughed and Regina laughed so much that she had to bite her lips so that she would not talk about Owuor and tell how he had enchanted her as a child with the wisdom that the hearts of two people would immediately grow together if they laughed at the same moment. She had often and always without luck tried to catch the sounds of a sudden laughter in time. It was important to steal the stranger’s glance instantly. Regina discovered in Frowein’s face that expression of persecuted concern that she knew from
her father. She also realized that the man in front of her had shadows in his eyes and in his conversation often protected himself with wit and irony, and this reminded her a lot of Martin. She had to prohibit her thoughts to break away from her head.

  “What are you going to do,” Frowein asked, “if I send you to the theater to write a review and the theater starts to burn?” Regina hurried back to the gate of the labyrinth and looked at Frowein, taken aback. “I am going to make sure that I get out and run home,” she said.

  “And you don’t call the office to report that the theater is on fire?”

  “I never would have thought of that. At least not before I had assured my family that I was still alive.”

  “This was actually,” Frowein said, “the decisive question to determine if you are suited to be a journalist.”

  “I must have flunked that one.”

  “That’s right,” Frowein said. “But not as a daughter. I want to give you a try anyway. Only you better start right away at the feuilleton. It is the only section of the newspaper that allows journalists to have a heart.”

  He asked his secretary for fresh coffee and a second cup. Regina did not dare tell him that she was still feeling sick from the first one with Mr. Brandt and she dared even less to ask him what he meant by “giving her a try.” She stared at the coffee and said she always took it black because she saw that was the way he drank it, and then she had a hard time explaining why the remark “No milk, again!” amused her so much.

  They lifted their cups at the same time as if they were about to toast each other and put them down again. Regina thought about her brother and a game that he had loved for a long time. Whoever spills the first drop loses. Frowein was thinking about a black-haired girl, with raised hands and dead eyes, whom he had once seen in Holland. Only a minute, an eternity. He cleared his throat and said, “I want to tell you something else.”

  “Yes?” Regina asked.

  She sensed—when she looked at him and detected his pallor, which she had not noticed before, and also alarmed by his serious, formal tone—that she would now experience something similarly painful as with Uwe Brandt. She tried to numb her senses, but her heart beat so violently that she caught herself thinking of the old childish question of whether a heart that was beating too loudly could betray a person, but she managed to hold her eyes in check.