Somewhere in Germany Page 22

  Over the past years Jettel, of course, had also assumed that his deteriorating health would prevent him from betraying her with anything other than the cigarettes he secretly smoked in his office and the chocolate stashed in his coat pockets. The literature, which Walter derided but which was read by the ladies of the best society, at least, had led her to believe that there was a very close connection between physical health and intact marital relations.

  At the same time, Jettel was relieved that at the height of this unexpectedly sudden crisis another article, which she had just read a week ago, gave her clear directions on how to proceed. She was not supposed to show any dismay or jealousy and above all not her immense bafflement that Walter actually seemed to succeed in banning from his face even that small trace of a guilty conscience that, as Jettel knew for certain, was part of the overall picture. His shoulders were straight, and his eyes clearer and more cheerful than they had been for a while. He carried his head insultingly high.

  “Jettel,” he said, and pressed the roses into her completely calm hands, “I have to tell you something.”

  She tightened her lips and unfortunately squeezed her eyes tight, too, and thought with some effort how much time the experienced marriage counselors would grant a woman till she could be true to her temperament and at ease in her heart. She had not been feeling well all day and realized now that her headache felt worse than before and that the ground seemed to be moving under her feet.

  She only said, “Yes,” and tried not to turn the agreement into a question.

  “Not here in the hallway.”

  “Just say what you have to say. I already know what you have to tell me anyway. You cannot pull the wool over my eyes.”

  “I have deceived you.”

  “So it is true.”

  “What do you mean, it is true? You never exactly asked me. I only told you once that I would need three more years and I left you to believe that. But I already did it today.”

  “What?”

  “The house is free and clear. For God’s sake, Jettel, that is no reason to cry right away. You would have had reason to cry if I had left you with debts as a widow.”

  Jettel realized, with a gratitude that left her unusually ashamed, that this was one of the most fulfilled moments of her marriage and one of the rare instances in which she managed to laugh about herself. Warmed by a feeling that she effortlessly identified as happiness, she forgot that she was clever, dynamic, and experienced, and told Walter where her imagination had led her.

  With a consciously theatrical gesture she threw up her hands and talked about an abyss. Walter noticed how beautiful her hair was and happily contemplated how she had come up with that word. He also wondered if women shared their husbands’ professional secrets during their confidential chats.

  They were sitting next to each other on the sofa, and laughed themselves into a mood that invigorated them, drifting in a gentle way into the harmony of lost days. Both remembered simultaneously that they had laughed once before in the same unrestrained way in Leobschütz, but they could not remember why and grew a little sad. The parakeet kept on pulling Jettel’s hair and Walter pulled on her ear once.

  “My Jettel,” he giggled, “still believes in my virility. That is the best compliment you have given me in years.”

  “Why?” Jettel asked and blushed in a way that made Walter even more wistful.

  He drank the Swiss pear schnapps that he had hidden in the bookcase for the days when the pains tore his chest apart and ate, even though it was only five o’clock in the afternoon, a piece of bread with cold beef gravy. After that he kissed Jettel one more time and wiped, without her saying a word, his greasy hands on the living room table’s light yellow tablecloth that she never put on without complaining that she never would have bought it had she known how hard it was to keep clean.

  With the pleasure of a mountain climber who reaches the peak earlier than expected, Walter told how difficult it had been to get the Rothschildallee debt-free so quickly and how happy the thought made him to have been able to fulfill his obligation. When he reached for the bottle with the pear schnapps again, he became exuberant and asked for two soft-coddled eggs for dinner.

  Since Jettel nodded as if it were actually Sunday, as he claimed, the last bit of resistance of the time of great frugality abated. He promised to finally buy himself a new pair of shoes and Jettel the Persian lamb coat she had wanted ever since the severe winters in Leobschütz.

  “For our silver wedding anniversary,” he promised, “my Jettel will no longer be able to run around and tell everyone that her old man is letting her freeze.”

  Jettel, once again able to trust her experience in dealing with complex situations and relying on her good instinct for the right timing, told Walter about another of her dearest wishes. “I would really like,” she said, stroking Walter’s forehead, “to go on a trip for our silver wedding anniversary. On a real winter journey the way so many people do again these days.”

  “By yourself ? Are you going to look for a young man who is capable of more than just gasping?”

  “You don’t always have to get so indecent right away. Of course, I mean all of us. We have never been away together. We never had a day’s vacation. We do not even know what a holiday is. Some people are even going to Mallorca again.”

  “Why didn’t you say right away, Jettel,” Walter laughed, “that you just don’t want to have to bother with a big party? Maybe you are even right. Few of the people we would invite are real friends. Oh, Jettel, I always dreamed in my first life that we would celebrate our silver wedding anniversary in Breslau. Do you know why?”

  “Because my mother was a good cook.”

  “That, too. But I wanted to take you quite ceremoniously in my arms and say: See, my dear Ina, I have now lasted a whole lifetime with your spoiled daughter. You didn’t expect that at our wedding, did you?”

  “Yes,” Jettel said, “she knew. It was the last thing she said to me when I went onto the boat in Hamburg. ‘Be good to Walter, he loves you so,’ she said.”

  “Your mother was a smart woman. You don’t know how often I think of her.”

  “I do, too. Oh, Walter, life has never turned out to be the way it was before the Nazis.”

  “It would have been an insult to the dead if it were otherwise.”

  “I didn’t know you felt that way.”

  “There are lots of things you do not know.”

  An hour later, after Max had come home and found out about the debt-free house, and proved once again to his father’s pleasure that he, in contrast to his mother, was able to calculate percentages, Walter put on his coat and declared that he would pick up Regina from the tram.

  “I cannot wait,” he said, slightly embarrassed, “to tell her about our good fortune.”

  “You want to go up and down the stairs again?” Jettel asked in her apron, ready to prepare dinner. “You don’t even know exactly when she is going to come. Have you gone crazy?”

  “I have. There are no stairs for me today. I am able to fly today.”

  “Can I fly with you?” Max asked.

  “Let your father go,” Jettel understood. “Not everything in our family is only for men. You’d better help me set the table.”

  “Only today, my son, a man does not belong into the kitchen. Do you think the Rothschildallee would be free and clear today if I had helped your mother peel potatoes?”

  Regina had just gotten off the tram when her father arrived at the stop. She only needed a split second to push back the old fear of a sudden emergency and to read his face.

  “I have something to tell you, Regina.”

  “You don’t have to; I can see it in your face. The Rothschildallee is debt-free.”

  He embraced her in front of a newsstand, told her, still amused and even though he had promised Jettel that he would never reveal the secret, of her doubts about his marital fidelity, and took a small package from his coat pocket.

&nbs
p; “A watch,” Regina wondered, “and what a beautiful one. Have you gone crazy? What made you do that? It is not even my birthday.”

  “But it is mine. I was reborn today. I want you to know that I know to whom I owe my courage.”

  “But you can’t do that. What is Mama going to say? She is going to be offended when she sees that you bought me and not her something this expensive. You know how jealous she is. I don’t want her to get upset.”

  “Your father has a sick heart, but a healthy head. Let me take care of it. You will be amazed.”

  “No humbug, bwana,” Regina pleaded, “we are getting to old for that.” She took off her old watch, put on the new one, and held up her arm. The streetlamps drilled a hole into the damp fog with their yellow light. The golden watchband became bright and for a happy moment reminded her of the green shard of glass with which she had caught the last sunbeams during the hour of the long shadows at Ol’ Joro Orok. “You are in charge of humbug, you cunning memsahib of the deceitful Owuor.”

  They walked the short way home even more slowly than Walter’s short steps demanded and warmed themselves on their mutual love. To enjoy an extra portion of their closeness, they did not ring the bell at the house door and took long breaks on every floor because the stairs were now becoming hard for Walter after all, and only his joy still had wings. Again without ringing the bell, he unlocked the apartment door and to Regina’s surprise stamped his foot so violently that the parquet floor resounded.

  “Look at this, Jettel,” he shouted angrily, still in his hat and coat. “See what your fine daughter has done now. She takes a gold watch as a present from a strange man.”

  “It is not gold,” Regina stuttered and needed a lot of imagination and strength, and almost too much time to chase the surprise from her eyes, “and besides, I bought it myself.”

  “Of course it is gold,” Walter contradicted her, grasped Regina’s arm, pushed up her coat and sweater sleeve and dug his nails into her skin, “and I bet it is from your fine Mr. Reiswein.”

  “Frowein,” Regina corrected him admiringly, “and he does not give me any presents. You should know that. A good father would know that. He would also know that his daughter can economize very strictly to fulfill her heart’s desire at times.”

  “Bravo,” Walter mumbled, “you found a good excuse there.”

  They agreed to drive to the Harz Mountains to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary the day before Christmas in Bad Grund and to stay till New Year’s. A man from Upper Silesia had opened a small hotel there several years ago. He immediately answered Walter’s letter and wrote that he would, of course, give “our dear Dr. Redlich and his esteemed family” a special price and that he considered it a special honor to treat such dear guests “in a family atmosphere to the home-cooked meals they are familiar with.”

  Jettel got her Persian lamb coat. It was too heavy and was no longer quite in style, but it beautifully matched her black hair and rejuvenated her face with pleasure. Walter said she looked like the Princess of Pless and since Jettel had heard how wealthy the Prince had been, she considered it a compliment and bought herself a black hat from the money in her private cashbox.

  For the first winter vacation of her life, Regina was furnished with one of the new Norwegian-patterned sweaters, which had now become available in moderately priced clothing stores. Max got used ski boots; they were such a poor fit that he also got a sled as a consolation and the assurance that Regina would go sledding with him. Walter let himself be persuaded to get a wool cap, mittens, and a blue scarf, and he called wife and daughter spendthrifts.

  At five o’clock on the morning of their departure it was already cold and wet in Frankfurt. On the way the icy windshield had to be scraped free several times and the family had to be warmed with coffee from the thermos. When it started snowing heavily at the foot of the Harz Mountains, one of the windshield wipers stopped working. Walter cursed a lot because he had not had it repaired, but he did not let anything spoil his good mood, and insisted, in spite of Jettel’s bad-tempered protests that the trip would be too strenuous for him and that she was already suffering from frostbite, on making a detour to Marke to invite Greschek and Grete to come to the silver wedding anniversary.

  “No, Dr. Redlich,” Greschek objected after lunch, “you can’t ask me to do that. Sit in a hotel without anything to do? That is nothing for the likes of me. I would go crazy there. And Grete has to stay with our goat anyway.”

  “So you aren’t coming to my funeral either?”

  “That’s different. Come to Marke on your way back and stay a few days. Then I will also have enough time to get some beautiful mushrooms for you.”

  “What, in December, Greschek?”

  “He doesn’t have a clue,” Grete said. “He has never picked a mushroom in his life.”

  In Bad Grund, “Römer’s Hotel,” for the last couple of years only open during the summer, was a half-timbered house with broken shutters and faded splendor. The hotel received its only guests with a large Christmas tree in the noticeably drafty lobby and with the warm assurance of its owner that no one would disturb the family celebration. He had ordered two rabbits and had the stove in the dining room inspected.

  “You have central heating, don’t you?” Walter asked

  “Oh, that does not work too well, Dr. Redlich. You must know all about the workmen in the damned West. All they want to do is make money.”

  “We can warm ourselves under the Christmas tree,” Max whispered on the way to the rooms.

  “A Jewish child does not sit under a Christmas tree,” Walter grumbled.

  “But we didn’t put it up. So it doesn’t count.”

  “One cannot deceive God.”

  The rooms were spacious and filled with furniture, which the yellowed hotel brochure that lay on a round table on an equally yellowed crochet doily described as “homey, cozy” and Jettel labeled “old junk.” The closet doors were sticking, the beds squeaked once one sat down on them, and the washbowls on the iron stands were all rusty, the water in the pitchers ice-cold.

  In the room that Walter and Jettel chose after a discouraging tour of the entire establishment, the stove that had been started by a sullen housemaid glowed fiery red without giving out any heat. In the room Max and Regina were supposed to sleep in, the stove smoked so much that the four of them were already lying in the parental bed at the beginning of the first night: Jettel in her fur coat, the other three in their coats, too, and Walter also in cap and mittens.

  “I always dreamed of this in Africa,” Walter said.

  Max giggled himself to sleep, while his father coughed so much that he had to get up during the night. He sat down at a small glass table, lit a candle, and scribbled with his fountain pen in the exercise book that Max had had to take along to learn some difficult Latin vocabulary.

  “What are you doing?” Jettel murmured.

  “I am writing poetry.”

  “You are getting more meshuge all the time. You are not even able to see there.”

  “When I see you everything starts to rhyme.”

  Breakfast—with invigorating hot coffee, poppy seed cake, and rolls, which Walter for the first time in years called Semmel again and thought that they tasted just like the ones from the bakery in Sohrau—found general approval, just like the suggestion by the hotel’s owner, with the pleasantly clear Upper Silesian voice, that Jettel’s special chair for the night’s celebration should be decorated with a silver garland.

  “My wife, unfortunately,” Walter sniffled, “has another rather immodest wish. She doesn’t want to be cold on her special day.”

  “There is going to be chicken soup as a first course,” the host remembered. “My mother always said nothing warms you like a good chicken soup. And we still knew what a real winter was at home.”

  “I think this one here is real enough,” Walter remarked. “I could not have caught a cold any faster in Leobschütz.”

  He was unable to sta
nd the raw cold and coughed so much that after five minutes he had to give up the walk that Jettel had only been able to persuade him to by pointing out the well-known healing power of the winter air. Even though she, albeit during the summer time, always complained that it was possible to protect oneself from the cold, but not from the heat, she was relieved that she had to go back to the hotel with Walter.

  Regina ran on with Max in the whipping wind under snow-covered pines. She realized that she had never experienced a winter landscape and that she did not like it. She told Max how she had imagined, as a child in the scorching heat, that she was Captain Scott on his way to the South Pole.

  “Did you have any live friends, as well,” Max asked, “or did they all come from the library?”

  “I usually had,” Regina remembered, “only one girlfriend. I was a very shy child.”

  “I’m not shy, but I also have only one friend.”

  “Don’t you like being in secondary school?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I like the teachers all right, but the boys often say things that I cannot repeat at home if I do not want to upset Papa.”

  “I know all about that,” Regina sighed, “but I did not like my teachers, either.”

  When she pressed her brother close and he remained motionless for a moment in her arms, she heard his heartbeat and saw his eyes and thought of the day he was born. She was delighted to find that the happiness she had felt then was still within her and she smiled.

  “Why are you laughing?” Max asked.

  “Because when I was a child I always wished that my deer would turn into a brother.”

  “And now you want me to turn into a deer?”

  “No, but when I think of the Harz later on I will always think of this moment.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Max said. “You always say such strange things.”

  On the night of the silver wedding anniversary it turned even colder than before but the dining room, transformed by twenty candles in four bronze candleholders, had a festive air. A bottle of red wine stood in a silver goblet. The paper napkins were folded into little boats, and a grapefruit on a glass plate was decorated with small cheese squares.