Somewhere in Germany Read online

  She was not able to return from Ol’ Joro Orok in time to restrain her tongue, to admonish her head to be careful. “I was sorry that I learned so little about your other daughter. I mean,” Regina said, horrified when she heard herself talk, “she was your child, too.”

  She had not expected that Otto Frank would react so spontaneously and would get up this fast. She wanted to tell him that she had not meant to insult or hurt him, that she had only been an ignorant, curious child when she read Anne’s diary. She was unable to utter aloud any of the explanations that raged within her. Otto Frank pushed his chair back, quickly walked around the small table, and stood behind Regina, bent down. Then he pressed her close and kissed her. When her tears came, she also felt his.

  “Thank you, Regina,” he whispered, “for saying that. I have waited for so long to hear this just once. It has always pained me that the entire world talks about Anne and nobody speaks of Margot. She was a wonderful girl. So generous, so understanding, and so modest. I never heard her complain in all that time. We understood each other perfectly. She was her father’s daughter.”

  After sitting down again, he talked—with the obsession of a man who has hemmed in the flow of his memories for too long—of his older, forgotten daughter, whom he could only speak about to the few people who had known both his children. He showed Regina every nook of the small house in Amsterdam where things had happened, which people thought they knew well, and he spoke with tranquility as if time could offer the solace of understanding to a father.

  She, too, was calm. At times she felt as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she closed her eyes but could not stop pursuing the tracks that became as fresh as the print of a naked foot in loam. Her questions embarrassed her only at the beginning of the conversation, but soon she no longer considered them to be the curiosity she despised so much, and she understood that Otto Frank expected and wanted to hear them.

  Regina realized only then that he addressed her with the informal “you,” and in a moment of escalating fear she thought he might also confuse times and faces the way she did when she was unable to hold her head in the present time. Full of compassion, she hoped he, too, would be granted the short, merciful dream of a successful escape, but he looked at her and said, “I have waited for years for this evening. I will never forget it.”

  “Don’t tell me my reserved daughter actually opened her mouth and entertained a stranger,” Walter said.

  Neither of them had seen him come to the table, and they simultaneously moved their heads as if a door had opened and an unexpected current of air had brushed against them.

  “Yes, she did,” Otto Frank said. “Fathers never know enough about their daughters. I bet you never realized that Regina is a brilliant listener.”

  “Oh yes,” Walter defended himself. “She had already opened her ears wide as a six-year-old. Children learn to do that very early in Africa.”

  He looked exhausted, his face gray, too thin, and his shoulders carried a heavy burden, but his eyes lit up when he reached for the menu. He also ordered eggs in “green sauce,” said they were the only thing good to eat in Frankfurt, and apologized for letting his guest wait so long.

  “I had to have a client of mine declared unfit to undergo detention,” Walter said and hit the tip of Regina’s shoe under the table with the practiced precision of many years.

  “And where is he now?”

  “In the hospital. I’d rather visit my clients in the hospital than in prison.”

  “Your letters had already left me with the impression that you are a kind person. Did you know, Regina, that your father wrote to me in detail about your time in Africa?”

  “Oh,” Regina said.

  “You see,” Walter laughed, “as soon as her father shows up she leaves the talking to him.”

  Free of Jettel’s watchful eye and exuberant like a child, who at the moment of his action already knows that he is safe from punishment, Walter ordered a bottle of Mosel wine. He had another portion of eggs and green sauce brought to him, drank as fast as he talked, and enjoyed speaking, as never before, of the time of his emigration, drawing on an abundance of experiences that Regina had never suspected to still be in his head. On this night of remembrances Walter only told of the happiness and beauty of Africa, and with such joy and at times even longing that he occasionally got caught up in the soft, dark sounds of Swahili that floated in the empty restaurant till they disappeared.

  “Are you happy here in Germany, then?” Otto Frank asked.

  “Very happy, just not glücklich. If you know the old emigrant joke.”

  “I do, but the other way around.”

  “I, too, only heard it the other way around, before,” Walter said and emptied his third glass. His face was red, his eyes full of delight.

  “If you keep on drinking like this,” Regina said and borrowed Jettel’s voice, “you will hit your clients on the head with their files tomorrow morning.”

  “Not the files, not the clients either. The head is wrong, too,” Walter enumerated. “My daughter has no clue as usual. Do you know, Mr. Frank, why I was able to have your claims processed so quickly? I was lucky enough to be assigned a particularly anti-Semitic judge.”

  “And what is lucky about that?”

  “He picked his nose with one finger and with the other he poked around in my brief, the way these gentlemen do, because they do not yet dare to say what they’ve thought for a long time. But then this fellow did say that he needed more witness statements to prove the entire story. He actually said ‘the entire story.’ The next day I slammed Anne’s diary on his desk and told him to call me if he had any further questions. He had none.”

  “Thank you,” Otto Frank said, “for the slam. And also thank you for Regina.”

  It was close to midnight when they left the hotel. The street was empty. An old man was asleep on a bench, wrapped in his coat.

  “He is lucky,” Walter said.

  Regina had to dissuade Walter from going to a bar with her and then she had an even harder time preventing him from running back to the hotel, calling Jettel, and asking her if he should bring home a bottle of wine. Walter finally managed to start the car at the third try. When he put it in reverse, he nicked a street lantern and called Regina a hysterical goat when she screamed. She was quiet and reproached him only in front of the house, labeling him a cruel father who was turning his children into orphans.

  “Half-orphans,” Walter corrected her. He was sober enough, too, at this point to say, “Don’t tell your mother.”

  “She is going to find out anyway that you have been drinking. If she is still awake.”

  “I am not talking about the wine, you silly goose. I mean the judge. Your mother will be gloating. She is so full of glee when my eyes are occasionally being opened, too.”

  15

  BENT OVER, HIS FACE CONTORTED AND ASHEN, Walter unsteadily walked through the abandoned garden. Groaning, he dragged himself to a bench and let his aching body slide forward and his head fall onto his arms. It was three o’clock in the morning and precisely three months before his fiftieth birthday.

  “I am not going to make that anymore,” he quietly complained but sat up straight again. “I hope they have not yet bought any presents.”

  “Don’t talk such nonsense,” Fafflok said calmly and with conviction. “We don’t have far to go.”

  He had raced to the Rothschildallee when he got Jettel’s panicked and barely intelligible call, and after that he instantly drove Walter, who had refused to bother Dr. Goldschmidt in the middle of the night because of a condition he flippantly dismissed as a stomachache, to the university hospital. Fafflok’s equanimity was challenged even further at the emergency department.

  With a suddenly revived voice, Walter called a startled young doctor with a small beard a stupid goat because he had talked about a fracture and had tried to put the patient in a wheelchair. Walter angrily shouted, “Not me!” and insisted on walking to the surgery
department.

  “Only three more minutes,” Fafflok encouraged him, “if the goat is right. Most likely it will not take heroes like you even that long.” When he pushed open the surgery department’s old, heavy doors, he too was only able to breathe with difficulty. He had to prop Walter up.

  The physician, old and sufficiently well shaven to be considered competent by Walter, diagnosed a strangulated hernia. In addition, on the patient’s chart he noted some mental confusion, which, even considering that he was suffering severe pain, seemed atypical. Walter had acknowledged the necessity of an immediate operation with the remark, “Sir, I am telling you right now that I am going to speak German under anesthesia.”

  “Naturally, you do that,” the physician tried to soothe him, “if you get to talk at all under our efficient modern anesthesia.”

  “It is not natural at all,” Walter explained during an interval between two painful attacks. “They were quite offended by my mother tongue when I had black-water fever.”

  “Black-water fever? Where was that?”

  “In Nakuru. The Nakuru Military Hospital. ‘Sergeant Redlich, we are at war with Germany. Do not forget that!’”

  “Dr. Redlich was an emigrant,” Fafflok clarified, “in Kenya.”

  When they put him on a stretcher Walter asked to speak with Fafflok for five minutes in private in the white-tiled room.

  “You should not,” the surgeon murmured, but he did leave the room.

  “Take care of my Jettel,” Walter said and energetically removed his arms from under the thick cover, “if I don’t come back. She is so unfit for life and is not even aware of it. Someone has to take care of her. Regina is not ready to do that yet.”

  “Man, a hernia operation is not a big deal these days.”

  “It is if one has a weak heart. It is if one wants to die.”

  “Don’t say such a thing.”

  “One does in Africa. One says na taka kufa and they put you in front of the hut. And then the hyenas come. Marvelously practical for the people who are left behind.”

  “We are in Germany. That means no pain, no gain,” Fafflok said. “We even have to earn death the hard way. I learned that myself during the war. And besides, I already bought your birthday present.”

  Fafflok wondered, while quickly walking back through the garden into the day, if Walter had still been able to hear him. He wished for it so much that he thought himself naïve and frivolous. He realized, amused but not fully relieved of the ghosts Walter had conjured, that he himself was truly a man who could not be frightened easily and had survived a hernia operation a long time before those had become routine procedures. To his surprise, Fafflok found himself talking aloud.

  When he saw a stray dog in the street and immediately thought about hyenas, even though he had only seen pictures of hyenas and those only long ago, he smiled and shook his head. Yet he drove so fast and absentmindedly across the Friedensbrücke to get Jettel to the hospital that he had to rein in his imagination before decreasing his speed.

  The operation was completed without complications. On the following day Walter was thirsty and called the nurse a mjinga mingi because she would not allow him to drink anything. Any child on the farm would have recognized the term as “fool,” but she, however, patiently took it for a Yiddish expression. On the second day he was hungry and swore so rudely—in German!—that even the hospital personnel crept out of the room on tiptoe. On the third day he was bored and harassed Jettel and Regina—because they had forgotten to bring him the newspaper—so persistently that both dissolved into tears.

  On the fourth day Walter had files brought in from his office despite the chief of surgery’s protest and Jettel’s threat that she would never visit him again. He angrily declared that he owed it to Fafflok not to leave him alone with all the work; otherwise he would terminate the partnership. Fafflok, called in to help again, managed to remove at least half of the files the secretary had lugged to the hospital. At the end of the week Walter had an embolism. Max was home alone when the call from the university hospital came.

  “I am not allowed to ride the tram by myself until I am nine,” he reported into the phone.

  “Wait till your mother comes home,” the nurse told him, “but tell her to come to the hospital right away. Tell her it is urgent. Your father is not doing well. Did you understand me?”

  “Yes,” Max said impatiently, “I have known how to use the telephone for quite a while.”

  He took the money that his mother secretly used to put aside from her household money (she thought he did not know where it was hidden) from a tin labeled “Personal” on the upper shelf of the kitchen cabinet, cleaned two ink stains from his hands, and smoothed his hair with water. He ran down the Höhenstraße as fast as he could, got into the streetcar, and changed at the right stop. An hour later he stood, very breathless and even hotter from pride than from running the last part of the way, at his father’s bedside.

  “Where is your mother?” Walter asked.

  “At her afternoon coffee party at the Kranzler.”

  “What, she is at a café while her husband is dying? This is proof again, son, that women have no brains.”

  “But she doesn’t know that you are dying. Regina doesn’t know it either. She is at work. And Else has her day off.”

  “Your Papa is not going to die,” the doctor said, giving Walter an injection and patting the son on the head. “We discovered at exactly the right time that he was going to play a very bad trick on us.”

  “What kind of a trick?” Max asked.

  “You spoiled all the fun for my son,” Walter said. “I had promised him that he could sit in the first row at my funeral.”

  “You should not talk so much. You need a lot of rest now. I already got a hold of your wife. She is going to be here soon.”

  “And how am I going to get any rest then?” Walter asked and winked at his son. Max knowingly returned the look of their beautiful conspiracy.

  Since Walter had never been interested in medicine and even less in sickness, and that on principle, because he considered it wise and a measure of self-defense and could not be dissuaded from his opinion that doctors had a tendency to exaggerate, he was the only one who did not know that his condition was actually quite critical for a few days.

  The physicians admired his spirit, courage, humor, and craziness. They considered the way he provoked them original and likeable, and regarded it as the secret weapon of a man who had experienced adversity and knew how to talk about it with the kind of jovial wryness that even most healthy people could not muster.

  Jettel spoiled the difficult patient with a lot of affection that both had not thought possible any more and above all she spoiled him with boiled sausages, herring salad, and poppy seed cake. The head of surgery and the medical director had to taste the delicacies to convince themselves of the superior quality of Silesian cooking. The fishmonger sent a bouquet of flowers that was even bigger than the one from the Jewish community.

  Max, who had proved beyond a doubt that it was unreasonable to restrict him from using the tram by himself until his ninth birthday, insisted on his new privileges. He would arrive unaccompanied in the early afternoon to help Walter with the files that had been returned to the hospital, and he was particularly interested in criminal law and difficult divorce proceedings. When he put a chocolate bar on his father’s bed, both laughed and said “attorney-client privilege.”

  “I would like to live to see two things,” Walter said.

  “Which ones?” Max asked.

  “My birthday and your bar mitzvah.”

  “Your birthday first,” Max decided. “My bar mitzvah is not going to be for another five years.”

  “At least I have one child who is able to think logically and is standing with both feet on the ground. Maxele, my son, you have to go to law school.”

  “I am going to, and I will only marry a Jewish girl.”

  Regina came to visit her father at t
en o’clock in the morning before driving to the editorial offices in Offenbach. During the first days after the embolism she tried to restrict their conversation to topics that she thought would not excite Walter. She never spoke about his illness, never about the future and, consoling herself in her worries about her father, invoked only the soft pictures of the past. Later when Walter was allowed to get up, they played solitaire on the small table in front of the window. It was the first time they did this together since the long evenings at Ol’ Joro Orok when it had been a ritual to consult the cards about one’s fate. The superstition had remained as strong as the ability to look back and not admit it.

  When Walter had become strong enough to go into the garden with Regina, he looked for the bench he had sat on with Fafflok before his operation. From then on they enjoyed the heat of July, the flowers, the many birds to whom they shouted good wishes in sweeping Swahili sounds, and above all the very visible progress Walter made every day.

  “It should always be like this,” Walter wished.

  “It will be,” Regina said and crossed her fingers.

  Walter saw it and said, “Mental reservations. You always used to do that.”

  He was peaceable, witty, and exuberant; whistled at young nurses; let Jettel persuade him to get a new robe because, he said, he had noticed that he still had a chance with women; and in long conversations finally abandoned the suspicions he had held against Regina’s profession. They were both able to laugh over and over again and aloud about the fact that Max had not gotten frightened at all by the call from the hospital and had only thought about raiding his mother’s secret stash.

  On the day before his release from the hospital Regina finally found the courage to express the thoughts that had started to oppress her more and more since Walter’s first heart attack. “You should not talk so much about death with Max,” she said with as much equanimity in her voice as if she had just thought about this reprimand.

  “Why? He has to know about his father’s condition. He is supposed to be a man when the time comes and he should not stand at my grave like a child. That is the only thing I can do for my son.”