Somewhere in Germany Page 20

  “You are taking away his innocence.”

  “Don’t talk so bombastically. The boy doesn’t need any innocence. Do you still have yours?”

  “You are trying to change the subject, bwana. You know exactly what I mean. Max is still a child. It is a sin to burden him ahead of time.”

  “Not among Jews. We have been doing it for centuries. Had to do it. When the children of Israel went with Moses, they were not told that they were going for a Sunday outing either. Our children are not permitted to grow up and think that they are people like everyone else.”

  “Isn’t it enough that Max knows about Auschwitz and how his grandparents died?”

  “You knew all of that, too, Regina.”

  “Those were different times. I had to know. But I was able to escape into my imagination. You have no idea how much my dream world meant to me.”

  “Oh yes,” Walter disagreed with her, “I always knew. Sometimes I even envied you. And I was afraid to let you escape into your fantasies. I always thought you might not be able to survive in real life.”

  “And do I?”

  “Yes, at least I think so. In your own way. You are very different from your brother. He is already magnificently able to hold his own today.”

  Regina looked at her father and let Owuor’s derision get into her glance. He had never understood why his smart bwana only saw people’s faces and heard only the words they spoke. “You are sleeping on your eyes again,” she laughed, picking up a small stick from the ground and carefully breaking it into two equally long pieces. “I am the strong one, not your son. I have learned things on the farm that Max will know nothing of all his life. He cannot escort you. So play your games with me.”

  “I am going to try, clever memsahib,” Walter smiled, “but make sure that you are going to be around.”

  “I promise. I already asked for a day off for your birthday.”

  September 5, 1954, was a day filled with summer sun and mild autumn air. Heavy-headed dahlias, Walter’s favorite flowers after vetches and roses no longer bloomed, stood in his mother’s crystal vase and lured him into the dining room during the night.

  At five o’clock in the morning he was unable to control his impatience any longer. He first woke his family, then Else on the fifth floor, and finally the screeching parakeet, Kasuko, under his embroidered cover. He called out several times, “I made it. I am a real quinquagenarian,” and sang “Gaudeamus Igitur” after that.

  In a new robe and with a crown that he had fashioned from a brown paper bag during his sleepless night, he sat in the flowered wing chair and enjoyed his survival in the sun-drenched living room. At first he disliked the fifty candles, which Regina and Else had stuck into a bowl filled with sand, because some of them were not straight and others were placed too close to each other, but when they were all finally lit, he was happy like a child and laughed with the sound of his healthy days.

  “It was the same at my father’s birthday,” Else remembered. “The candles were all crooked, too.”

  “What was good enough for your father is good enough for me, Else,” Walter decided.

  Jettel gave him two new shirts, which he declared were more than he would be able to wear out for the rest of his life, and a gold-banded watch, which surprised him so much that he was silent with embarrassment for a moment. Jettel said that she had pinched and scraped to buy the expensive present.

  “From your household money,” Walter reminded her but he held the watch up to the light with a serious face, let the parakeet listen to it ticking, and gave Jettel a big kiss. “We are both becoming childish in our old age,” he said, “and forget what time it is.”

  “I am not that old yet.”

  “What a diplomatic remark!”

  “You are not old yet, either,” Jettel said conciliatorily.

  Max handed his father a huge bunch of asters and was astonished to find that Walter noticed that the flowers came from their own front yard. Max also gave him, with a longing glance, the four-color pen that cost twelve marks and that he himself had wanted for a long time and had actually saved for from his allowance. For the first time this day, and not realizing how often he would have to repeat it, Max recited a poem written by his sister.

  The poem had roughly constructed end rhymes and such a poor rhythmical meter that his markedly early feeling for language nearly prevented him from giving a smooth recital. Walter, usually quick to suspect dilettantism in his children and to criticize it, too, appreciated the verse with rare empathy as a declaration of love by the author and remembered with some emotion that she had never been able to rhyme. He dried his tears with one of the six handkerchiefs Else had given him. They were tied together with a pink silk ribbon that Else had braided herself and he had wound around his neck.

  Regina had thought about her present for months—in melancholy memory of the first crocheted potholder and the scarf, which Walter had worn without complaint in the African heat because he cherished, most of all, the effort that had gone into the gift. In the same manner, Walter received her first book. It was entitled “Do You Remember?” The pages were typed on the old typewriter that had traveled from Germany to Africa and back and were sewn together by Regina with blue wool. The yellow cardboard cover was decorated with a steamer, its flag fluttering in exactly the opposite direction of the smoke that rose from two smokestacks into the sky. The subtitle was written into the ocean waves in block letters: “From Mombassa to Leobschütz.”

  To Regina’s consternation her father read the end first and thus prematurely learned about the author’s intentions. “I have,” Regina had written on the last page of the book, “won the biggest prize because I have learned to recognize good fortune when I come across it. For this I have to thank my father, who enriched my childhood with his love and kindness so much that all my life I will pity all the people whom fate has deprived of such a father.”

  Walter needed the second of Else’s expensive handkerchiefs before he was able to speak again. He promised, with an earnestness that moved Regina even more than his tears, that he would read the book after breakfast, and he said that it had just occurred to him that one could actually earn a living by reading and writing alone.

  He was just in the process of beheading the second of his hardboiled eggs, a much-appreciated additional gift from Jettel, who had promised not to mention doctors or dietary prescriptions on his special day, when the doorbell rang. Regina and Jettel looked at each other and let the displeasure of suddenly interrupted hostesses sweep across their faces. Max held a hand in front of his mouth and giggled with such facial expressions that his sister kicked him under the table and his mother elbowed him, but Walter did not notice any of this. With the napkin around his neck, waving the egg spoon, he ran into the hall and told Else, who was there already, “You would like to do that, wouldn’t you, to take away my birthday surprise.” He pushed the parakeet aside and pulled open the door to the apartment. “Somebody is groaning on the stairs even worse than me,” he reported.

  “Well, I am not as young as you are, Dr. Redlich,” Josef Greschek shouted up from the second floor.

  He was lugging the same pail he had arrived with on his first visit to Frankfurt. This time the never forgotten, newly polished magic container was filled with fresh chanterelles and portini mushrooms instead of potatoes. Greschek had replaced the bacon, which was no longer considered healthy for largely immobile urbanites, with two remarkably fat ducks and a rabbit that in honor of the special birthday had a gold ribbon around each haunch.

  Later on Greschek retrieved from his suitcase—it was still the old, tattered brown one—a new, dark suit for himself and a package of old postcards from Leobschütz for Walter. He had only been able to accumulate this melancholic panorama after a lot of correspondence with compatriots and the allusion to a good purpose. On the birthday card with a golden fifty surrounded by golden leaves, Grete had written in her neat handwriting “To the esteemed Attorney and Notary Dr. Walter
Redlich on his fiftieth birthday,” and then with her ability to summarize the essential, she had added, “We think about Frankfurt a lot, and are doing well in Marke.”

  “That you have come, Greschek, is the most beautiful present of all. I wanted to write to you but my wife said I could not ask you to make the trip because you have been sick, too. Now I know why she acted that way.”

  “I was not going to come at first. I thought, Dr. Redlich is a fine gentleman now and I am going to be out of place among all the fine guests.”

  “I should throw you out immediately for that kind of a remark. You never would have thought like that in Leobschütz.”

  “But Frankfurt is not Leobschütz.”

  “Whom are you telling that to, Greschek? I long so often for our old comfortable life and the friendly people.”

  “It was not all that comfortable, Dr. Redlich, when you had to leave. And the people were not altogether friendly either. You spent too much time among the Africans to really know about the whole thing.”

  Of the guests who had been invited for dinner, only the Faffloks came at four o’clock for coffee, apple and poppy seed cake, and the big butter crème torte from the bakery. In a family that had no relatives anymore, they were considered as such and brought along fourteen-year-old Michael, who displayed his father’s quiet patience and instantly realized that he would be spared from Max and his invitations to play as long as he had a filled plate in front of him. Ulla, three years younger than her brother and with the blonde looped plaits that Max adored, as self-assured and honest as her mother, soon got a book from the children’s room and, unperturbed, called the host’s son a spoiled brat. This only upset the harmony until Max was allowed to recite the poem again.

  Fafflok gave Walter an oil painting of an open river landscape framed by large trees that perplexed Walter so much that he remarked, “The painter forgot to put people in the foreground.” When his son corrected the omission a few days later with the new four-color pen, Walter was beside himself with anger.

  “The ‘Tommies’ would have paid a fortune for a real oil painting,” Greschek sighed.

  Greschek particularly enjoyed Mrs. Fafflok; she talked about Ratibor, Gleiwitz, and the escape from Upper Silesia in the same way as he did, soberly and without longing for a life that Greschek only evoked when he was in Frankfurt. He was quite impressed that the Faffloks not only had a house of their own but were also planning to build an apartment house.

  “They came into an inheritance,” Max explained. “We can’t do that because our family was murdered.”

  When the men drank cognac and the women drank cocoa with nuts, and when even Jettel laughed about the story of the icebox she had not brought along for their emigration, they felt nothing but the relaxed happiness of a close inner bond. All of them sensed that, regardless of the high points, speeches, and ceremonies that the evening’s celebration was yet to bring, these were the hours that would be remembered.

  “You have become my only friend,” Walter said. “Greschek does not count. He is from earlier times.”

  “I didn’t know you then,” Fafflok pondered, “otherwise it might have been me then.”

  In the early evening when the women were all just about to go into the kitchen and share the domestic duties, the postman delivered a telegram from South Africa. “To my best friend Walter—may he stay young forever!” Martin had written.

  “Nebbish,” Walter said and immediately put the telegram into his pocket so that his daughter would not be able to read “A special kiss for my little Regina.”

  But Regina did see the sentence below Martin’s name, turned pale, and insisted that she, not Else, would get the wine from the cellar. She stayed too long in the consoling damp darkness. Walter went to look for her. This is how it happened that he got carried away on his fiftieth birthday to utter a sentence that he would have called an oath of disclosure on normal days. He demonstrated to Regina that he was not only her very serious, rigidly moral, and passionately jealous father, but also the only man whom she had ever really permitted to look into her heart.

  “I would have wanted you to have him,” Walter swallowed, “but only because I have always remained the fool who promised his daughter that he would simultaneously get her the moon and the sun from the sky.”

  16

  IT WAS A COINCIDENCE without special meaning that Walter found out about the changes imminent in the lives of his two children on the same day in the late summer of 1956. In the morning came the long-awaited news that Max had passed the entry examinations for the first year at the Heinrich-von-Gagern Secondary School. It gave Walter a lot more peace of mind than Regina’s remark that evening that she had finished her internship at the Evening Post and would from now on be a permanently employed member of the editorial staff.

  In no way did Walter pay more attention to his son’s development than to his daughter’s destiny. Nobody knew that better than he did when he took a painfully black view into a future where he would no longer be able to accompany his children. However, he considered it better suited to him and certainly much easier to deal with a secondary school than a newspaper that he had used to call a “tabloid” and whose popularity in his own law office he failed to understand when he looked at the red, tasteless headlines that were of no significance whatsoever to the course of world events.

  Walter bought his son a new soccer ball as a reward for his intellectual efforts, now considered much less a child’s obvious duty than once upon a time in Regina’s case, and he also gave him the long-yearned-for briefcase to replace the backpack that was considered too childlike now. Walter also promised him nightly visits to the six-day bicycle race and a noticeable increase in his weekly allowance for as long as the success lasted. In case of occasional failures, which he considered quite likely in memory of his own school years, he threatened his son with physical demonstrations of his displeasure and a cross-eyed tutor with heavy legs.

  “When your sister wanted to learn Latin,” Walter preached while Max had to scratch his back, “I had no money and she wasn’t allowed to learn a word of the world’s most beautiful language. This is just going to show you how rich we are today. You are allowed to learn whatever you want, my favorite son.”

  “Swahili,” Max suggested with the long-practiced sense for the danger of obscure promises, “so that I finally understand what you are saying about me when you talk to my mother and my sister.”

  “Just make sure that you use your practical head in school, too. I was always the sixth in my class; I am not asking more from you either.”

  “The sixth of seven,” Max said and enjoyed the old joke, liberated from his father’s misguided hopes about his intellectual ambitions.

  Walter had a hard time assessing the change in Regina’s life simply because Regina had failed to dispel her own long-held doubts that she might have misjudged her talents, would fail somewhere along the line, and would not be allowed to stay on after her internship. Moreover, he started to notice Regina’s new dress at precisely the moment when he found out about her new position in life.

  He was, therefore, not able to focus on the news right away. Regina had apparently gotten dressed up in anticipation of her new salary, which she mentioned with unusual pride. Walter considered her behavior wasteful and thought the dress was too tight, too short, too provocative, and too low-cut. The new-fangled expression “sex appeal” entered his mind; he had an aversion to connecting this concept with his own daughter.

  He looked at her for only an instant with the attentive eye of a man who observes more than the length of a skirt, but very quickly he turned his newly sharpened view, which had just registered changes that had escaped him before, into a hint of fatherly displeasure by saying, “You will have even less time for your old father now.”

  “More,” Regina contradicted him with an eagerness that at first convinced her more than her father. “You know, editors don’t have to write about prize-winning cats and the distribu
tion of Christmas presents at homeless shelters. We send interns to do that.”

  “What business does a Jewish girl have with the distribution of Christmas presents? You never told me about that. I didn’t know that you did such nonsensical things.”

  “Yes,” Regina lied, “I did. At least sometimes.”

  When she lay in bed she became more pensive than she had intended to be on this happy day. First she realized that she was unable to focus on Saint-Exupéry’s much-loved and often re-read book Wind, Sand, and Stars, and then she remembered once again how Walter had looked at her, and that she had, at least in the beginning, been flattered. She heard her parents debate about how many new pairs of pants Max needed for his new school. Regina wanted to get up and stop the fight that was going to harm Walter when it reached the anticipated level, but instead she stayed in her room.

  The short conversation with Walter took on unexpected dimensions and disturbed Regina. She self-critically asked herself whether she really had only wanted to reassure her father when she told him that he could still count on her in her free time. But it seemed to her more likely that she had been carried away in a euphoric moment to almost allude to her special relationship with her editor-in-chief. Regina was unable to explain to herself what kind of craziness might have nearly compelled her to burden her jealous, choleric, concerned father with that kind of a superfluous confession.

  It appeared useful and important to her to find at least some kind of answer to her question, but after barely disentangling these difficult problems, she decided not to bother her conscience on such a good day. Regina told herself that it was the wrong time to justify the fact that she certainly had not behaved differently from any other woman who had caused a man to lose his head. She fell asleep before she found time to think about more than the most important point of her professional life. The way things stood, Emil Frowein would rather go into a monastery than leave her, and she knew it.