Somewhere in Germany Page 24

  “That doesn’t look too bad,” she heard Dr. Schmitt murmur. “We have to be satisfied.”

  “I am glad that at least you are satisfied,” Walter said.

  It was the irony in her father’s voice—that familiar mixture of bitterness and amusement—that rescued Regina from the sharp claws of her fear. She closed her eyes for a short moment and moistened her throat, heard her own breath, and felt that her heart was beating more slowly again. She calmly tried to imagine what the physician might have seen. She understood, relieved and consoled, that she still had to forge a weapon to drive the despair back into its lair. She did not have to know anymore; she was allowed to trust. The warriors had not struck. They were blind and mute.

  The gray shapes on the white piece of paper that the physician held in his hand did not tell of her father’s kindness, his love for his family, his fanatic sense of justice, or his ability to forgive. Such a heart, she felt with renewed strength of her old confidence, would not be condemned to an early death by God. She almost felt a little sorry for Dr. Schmitt because he could only see what his equipment let him see. But she merely had to push the sigh back into her throat and the salt into her burning eyes with the practice of many years.

  “Well, Regina,” Walter asked when he put on his tie and while doing so watched her face in the small mirror over the sink, “what are you thinking about?”

  “Sorry, I was just dreaming.”

  “My daughter, you have to know, is a master dreamer. She is even going to dream during my funeral.”

  “We are not there yet,” Dr. Schmitt said, “if you live reasonably.”

  “That means for you doctors to do without everything that makes life worth living. What is the purpose of living then?”

  “A dreaming daughter.”

  “I have another reason as well,” Walter said in a voice that could only make the physician believe that the thought had just occurred to him. “I have to be at my son’s bar mitzvah.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Let’s call it the Jewish confirmation. With us a boy becomes a man at age thirteen. It is the proudest moment in a father’s life. My father was not able to be there for me. He was fighting for Kaiser and Reich. I was very upset at the time. I have to pull through for another year and three months for my son’s sake.”

  “You are still going to dance at your son’s wedding,” Dr. Schmitt said, “if you do without the cigarettes and the chocolate, and if you fight a little less.”

  It was good that you went with me,” Walter said after driving silently for ten minutes. “I had wished for it often, but I didn’t want to offend your mother. I am getting sentimental in my old age. I imagined that you could look into my heart.”

  “I could. Exactly. Just drive a little more slowly. There is a man under that big tree. And don’t give him a ride. It is too dangerous in the dark.”

  “Since when does one leave people standing in the rain? Have you forgotten how we squatted on the edge of the road in Nairobi and waited for someone to take us along? I am not afraid of anything. Only of people who forget too quickly.”

  The hitchhiker was an old man with a long white beard, a black beret, a big rucksack (the kind that was used for amassing food during the days of hunger), and a wide coat that even the heavy rain had not been able to rid of the smell of onions and cold smoke. The completely filled rucksack was pushed into the back first and then the man quickly climbed onto the backseat, sat down remarkably straight, and sighed with relief. He was very small and had a slight humpback; his walking stick was so big that he had to hold it in front of him.

  “Are you Rübezahl?” Walter asked, and accelerated a little too quickly. “I knew him well.”

  “I don’t know,” the man pondered. His voice was deep. “There is nobody who knows me anymore. So I don’t spend any time thinking about who I am.”

  “Rübezahl after all. Where do you want to go?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Not at all?”

  “The main thing is that the place has a jail.”

  When the exhausted man’s clothes and beard stopped dripping, his tongue started to move. When he nodded, and he did so frequently, his head lightly touched the driver’s seat and the beard tickled the back of Walter’s neck. He did not tell his name, did not talk about the future, and laughed often but always without cheerfulness. He said he moved from village to village during the summer and lived outdoors. During the winter he tried to stay in jail at least for the night.

  “During this kind of horrible weather,” he said, “there is nothing like a good, warm cell and if I am lucky they even give me breakfast the next morning. But that hasn’t happened a lot lately.”

  When he started his journey, he had dreamed of making it to Paris someday because he had heard about the bridges where one could comfortably spend the night with like-minded people. He was intrigued by the fact that he would not be able to understand their questions, but he never got further than Kehl.

  “I liked being in France,” he said.

  “When?”

  “During the war.”

  “During the war?” Walter asked. “Weren’t you much too old then?”

  “Not during the first one. I was allowed to go then. During the second war they put me into a concentration camp.”

  He could not be motivated to talk about a time for which, he said a little lower than before, he had been unable to find the right words for a long time now. His memory was no longer any good either and he was too old to torture himself with recollections full of blood. Regina turned around to meet his glance, but she was only able to see the outline of his head in the dark.

  “I’m sorry,” the man apologized. “I don’t know what made me talk about the concentration camp. I only do that very rarely these days. Most people don’t want to hear about it anyway.”

  “I do,” Walter said, “and my daughter here, does too.”

  After the war he had stopped searching for lost traces. He lived off the things that were given to him and restricted his worries to the selection of jails that would open their doors to him. “It is not always easy,” he complained. “The people in charge are becoming fussier all the time. They only want criminals.”

  “Don’t worry,” Walter told him. “You will have a bed in Preungesheim tonight.”

  “Preungesheim has been impossible for quite a while. The people of Frankfurt are especially particular.”

  “I know Preungesheim well.”

  Shortly before reaching Bad Homburg, they drank rye whiskey and ate fried eggs in a pub with Christmas decorations where they were the only guests. Regina wanted to call her mother so that she would not worry, but the telephone was constantly busy and she gave up. The man finally admitted that his name was Rübezahl and Regina apologized to her father after all these years. As a child she had always suspected that he had invented Rübezahl in the same way that she had fabricated her fairy.

  “You are drinking your third schnapps already,” she reproached Walter and took the glass from his hand.

  “A man should be allowed to have a drink with a friend,” Walter said seriously. “What I would like to know—” he asked and looked at the nameless man with a tiredness that had not been in his eyes before, “—did you never hear that you are entitled to restitutions for the time in the concentration camp?”

  “Oh, yes,” the man said, “but I didn’t want that. Or do you believe that money can pay for a stolen life?”

  “No,” Walter said, “I don’t believe that, but I would have liked to help you. I help a lot of people.”

  “I knew right away that you were a Jew.”

  “Why?”

  “You did not drive faster when I mentioned the concentration camp but slower.”

  “At times one does not want to go on driving at all.”

  Fifteen minutes later Walter brought the car to a squealing halt in front of a shabby, small guesthouse in Preungesheim. He honked the
horn several times, and then he said with an irritation that did not deceive Regina for a moment, “There you see what is wrong with jails these days. They don’t even have guards.”

  “But this is not the prison.”

  “Oh, yes, it is. Believe me. I am an attorney and know my way around. Come on, let’s just go in and straighten them out.”

  The old man reluctantly got out and followed Walter, who pushed open the door to a dark restaurant where a few guests made a lot of noise at a round table. The owner, who was wiping a beer glass with a soiled towel, lifted his head slowly, but when he saw Walter he put down both glass and towel, and said with delight, “That I see you again, Dr. Redlich. And so late at night. What brings you to our part of the woods?”

  “Business. My friend here needs a room tonight and a good breakfast tomorrow,” Walter said and handed him a banknote. “He actually wanted to stay in jail, but I told him that your place would be dirty enough, too.”

  The owner took the money and winked at Regina, “Always a joker, your father. That is what I like about him.”

  “He is serious,” Regina explained. “He wants to help his friend. The man does not know where to go in the rain.”

  The innkeeper first looked at Walter, then at the old man. “For you I will do anything, Dr. Redlich. You also didn’t ask a lot of questions when you helped me. Come along,” he said to the old man, “I am going to show you to your room. If Dr. Redlich wants it this way, it must be all right.” He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder and pushed him out of the door. For a moment the two of them stood in the dreary light of a stale-smelling corridor. The friend of the one night waved before he turned, and Walter and Regina lifted their hands, too.

  For a moment they lingered in the car in front of the dilapidated house and stared into the darkness.

  “How come you know such dives?” Regina asked.

  “Oh, the owner was once a client of mine and I helped him a little when he was in need. He has never forgotten that.”

  “It was probably not a little, the way I know you,” Regina laughed.

  “You are starting to sound just like your mother,” Walter accused her.

  “A strange day,” he mused. “I can’t even remember how it started. But it has somehow made me feel better. Rübezahl reminded me of the African people, whom I used to envy so much. No beginning and no end. What are we going to tell your mother? Where in the world could we have been for so long?”

  “Lies are your department,” Regina reminded him and raised her arm with the watch. “I am only an accessory.”

  They did not have time for the well-practiced game of great confusion. Jettel stood, pale and with red eyes full of tears, at the door to the apartment. “I always knew that the thirteenth is an unlucky day,” she cried. “Schlachanska had a heart attack. He is dead.”

  19

  THE FIGHT LASTED FOR TWO DAYS. It was in keeping with the cause and especially the shock. Except for regrettable eruptions, the tone was subdued, but from the start there was no hope of reaching a consensus through compromise. Jettel was against taking Max to Schlachanska’s funeral. She argued passionately but also with uncommonly clear logic, which inspired her husband’s opposition even more than usual, that Max was still a child and it would distress him too much to see Jeanne-Louise crying at her father’s grave.

  Max had confessed to his sister—imploring her not to tell anyone about his fears—how much the thought of Jeanne-Louise crying disturbed him. Since Walter did not know this, he was especially offended when Regina sided with her mother. He grumbled about women’s hysteria being the greatest enemy of reason and missed no chance to point out that in any case his son, at almost twelve years old, was no longer a child and thanks to his father’s foresight not a coddled one either. Besides, it was never too early for a man to get used to distress and to learn to clench his teeth.

  “Looking at you,” Walter complained, “one can see what happens when mothers bring up their children to close their eyes to life.”

  He did not come home for lunch on the day of the funeral but instead went to buy Max the pair of dark pants that he had needed for quite a while anyway. Trying to prove, though, that he was not totally lacking in sympathy like the dictator his wife and daughter took him for, he also bought Jettel the black leather gloves that he had refused to buy since the purchase of the Persian lamb coat.

  “Someday,” he said with satisfaction, “you will all be grateful to me.”

  Since the car, despite the cold weather and previous problems with the battery, started instantly, they arrived at the cemetery half an hour early. There were already so many people standing in the yard in front of the funeral hall that Walter assumed for a moment that he had been wrong about the time. Nervously he ran ahead with Max, and absentmindedly greeted a group of women and after that with surprise several attorneys, whom he had not expected to see there given the circumstances of the judgment against Schlachanska.

  Amused, he imagined the witty comments Schlachanska would have made seeing the people whose attachment only became apparent once more after the person involved could no longer notice it. His reflection gave Walter the kind of grim pleasure that always made his thoughts drift too far—he first remembered the pralines in the silver bowl of Schlachanska’s elegant living room and then how he had stuffed them into the mouth of his drooling setter. Thus he did not see the small, bearded man—in a worn coat and big hat, running up to him with excited gestures—until he stood immediately in front of him and said with determination, “This is not acceptable. The boy has to leave.”

  “Why?” Walter asked, surprised. For a moment he thought that Max might have forgotten to cover his head and did not remember fast enough that that had not happened for years now. He became embarrassed when he noticed that he had run his hand over his son’s head to feel if he was wearing his skullcap.

  “Children are not allowed in the cemetery.”

  “We have been friends with the family for years,” Walter explained to the man. “Our children grew up together. Joseph Schlachanska would be quite surprised if my son were not here today.”

  The man leaned on his cane, opened his mouth wide enough to indicate a laugh, and shook his head. “Not at all. Mr. Schlachanska was a pious man. He knew. Children who still have a mother and a father are not allowed in the cemetery.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since there have been Jews, Dr. Redlich,” the man said with the compassion of the educated for those who no longer know to think in periods of time that matter. “But in Frankfurt they disrespected the law until our rabbi came. Even our people brought wreaths for the dead.”

  “All right,” Walter murmured.

  He felt ashamed when he looked at the eager man admonishing him. The frail little man with the overly alert eyes and grand gestures reminded him of the men he had seen in the prayer hall in Sohrau. They had all been as devout as poor and his mother had often invited them home on Friday nights. He saw the white tablecloth with the poppy seed twist and the silver chalice that was passed around from one to the other and he was able to smell the chicken broth.

  The thought that his mother’s household had still been kosher and that she had been able to ask the most pious of the pious to her table made Walter melancholic. For a moment, which seemed very long to him, he envied the old man’s steadfastness of his belief, which did not demand God to adapt to the changing times.

  Sadly, Walter remembered that he had thought exactly this way the last time he had been at a funeral—in Nairobi when old Professor Gottschalk had died. It had been a Friday, and because of the Shabbat the rabbi had not wanted to wait until the daughter of the deceased arrived to begin the funeral. At the time, Walter was the one who understood the message. “Without the pious ones among us, there would no longer be any Jews at all,” he had defended the rabbi, and almost all the people who heard him had called him a fool.

  “All right,” Walter repeated and held his hand out to
the old man. “I am not a devout man, but I respect the laws.”

  He ran back to the gate with Max and wished with all his heart that at some later point in his life his son would be able to say the same. The thought that this might not be the case almost turned into a physical pain. But he said aloud, “You see, your mother is a smart woman after all. She has proven once again that she knows things that she cannot know.”

  He laughed but without a sound while he spoke, and then he pondered, still in a state of reverie and longing that he could not explain to himself, why all of a sudden all the bouquets, which he now saw everywhere and had not noticed before, were disturbing him. Obviously many of Schlachanska’s non-Jewish clients had chosen to prove to him one last time that they held a different view from the judges in his case.

  Walter decided to eventually enlighten his own clients about the simple rites of a Jewish funeral and the inappropriateness of flowers. He saw himself smiling ironically while he talked to his people from Upper Silesia and heard them say that they had always loved his sense of humor, but this time he was going too far with his jokes. He felt as if he had allowed himself some cheerfulness at the wrong time and with a small sigh released himself from his imagination.

  “You better go home with Regina,” he said. “I do not want to use Schlachanska’s funeral to clear up whether we adults have to be half-orphans, too, before we are allowed in the cemetery. I am sorry, Maxele; now you will have to wait for my funeral to understand what I wanted to teach you today.”

  Regina and Max walked, first silently and later enjoying a really funny joke Ziri had made last night, along a wall that was overgrown with ivy. Regina noticed that Max no longer, as on the hike in the Harz, walked with small childlike steps next to her and also no longer played soccer with every larger stone. She was moved and quite receptive to the thought that this was a very suitable day to ponder the small signs of fleeting times.