Somewhere in Germany Page 25

  Regina realized from her brother’s firm gait that he was familiar with the path. Yet she was surprised when he stopped in front of the gate to the main cemetery and in a conspiring tone, which he only used with her and even more frequently in recent times, said, “We are allowed to go to the Christian cemetery. I know a bench very close to the entry.”

  “How?”

  “I used to sit there with Else,” Max told her, “when I was little.”

  “I thought you went to the Günthersburgpark with Else.”

  “Not on All Saints,’ All Souls’ Day, and Christmas,” Max enumerated. “On Christmas I always went to church. To the crèche. Else,” he giggled, “even let me hold the baby Jesus when I was really little.”

  “You should tell that to your father,” Regina said, full of amazement.

  “Else always said if I told at home that I had gone to church with her, I would fall down dead.”

  “I know that, too,” Regina remembered, “only my Else was called Owuor.”

  “So you did not tell everything either when you were a child?”

  “No, not everything. I lived in two worlds at the time and had a very hard time keeping the black world apart from the white world. I was always afraid Papa and Mama would be upset. I did not want to distress them.”

  “Neither did I,” Max nodded. “You are the only one who I am never afraid will get upset. I can tell you everything.” He drew circles in the wet soil with his stick and energetically drilled three holes into each one of them. “Did you know,” he said without looking up, “that Schlachanska got a year and a half ? Why did he never have to go to jail then?”

  “You really should have asked your father about that. He could explain it much better to you than I can. The judgment had not yet been final. Papa thought the punishment was much too severe. How did you hear about it?”

  “From Jeanne-Louise,” Max said.

  “Dear heavens. I thought she never found out. You didn’t tell her, did you?”

  “Nonsense. Some girl in her class did. I think it’s great that Jeanne-Louise never told her father that she knew. One is allowed to lie if one loves someone, isn’t one?”

  “One has to, only I didn’t know that you are that far already.”

  “Strange, I never want to lie to you and yet I love you, too.”

  “There are some people you don’t have to keep anything from. That is an exceptional good fortune in life,” Regina remembered, and saw Owuor’s head, with his curls wet from the rain, appearing behind a dripping tree.

  She aimed her eye at her brother’s pupil. It was an old magic game—from an earlier life, not for children, and never for people who only grasped what they understood with their heads. Whoever lowered his eyes first, lost. But if four eyes gave up the fight with one movement of their eyelashes, the day would become one that never could be forgotten by either of the challengers. For the first time, Regina experienced the silent magic connection between like-minded people in this intensity with her brother. She looked at Max longer than the rules of the game permitted.

  Her skin became warm when she realized that the old story of a love without escape had just started anew. When Cupid got ready to pierce her heart for all time, he still disguised himself as the cunning warrior of the Masai tribe and she was just as unable to defend herself as under the guava tree in Nairobi when her father had finally defeated her. Her brother, for whose birth she had once begged the great God Mungu, was no longer a child. He did not know it yet, but he already knew how to tie knots that neither of them would ever be able to sever.

  “Come on,” Regina sighed, “we have to go. How are we going to explain where we have been all this time? Nobody is going to believe that we spent the entire time sitting in front of unknown graves in the wrong cemetery.”

  They ran the last part of the way, but the car was already parked in the yard. An unusually large cardboard box was lying between the two trashcans. Max said, “Oy vey, there is going to be a fight. Papa bought a new gadget that Mama does not want.” They did not have time to pursue their curiosity any further. On the staircase they heard their parents fighting.

  “I am not going to have that thing in the house,” Jettel screamed. “Everyone says that the programs only start very late at night. The boy will not want to go to bed on time anymore and in the morning he is going to be too tired to pay attention in school.”

  “Since when are you interested in Latin vocabulary, Jettel? And why does a twelve-year-old boy have to be in bed by eight?”

  “He is only eleven. You always make him older when it is to your advantage. I am only interested in the welfare of my child. I just read the other day that a television is the devil’s contraption if one has children.”

  “The Schlachanskas have had that devil’s contraption for years. You always liked to sit in front of it. And Jeanne-Louise is still the best in her class. Television is no different from the cinema. Only that you do not have to wash your neck first if you want to watch something. Besides, our television is already standing there and it will stay.”

  The television set was the payment from a client, who still worked on the exchange basis, for Walter’s success in a case that seemed hopeless from the beginning. The man was one of the oldest clients of the practice and owned a hotel in the inner city, had shares in a company in Tel Aviv, and mainly paid his fees with happily accepted invitations for Sunday dinners in his own restaurant or with grapefruit and avocados that he imported by the case from Israel.

  Jettel had only decided to put up with the grapefruit, which were only available in a few luxury shops, after she found out that the Faffloks, who also regularly received the fruits that she considered unacceptably bitter, served them daily for breakfast and that they had resulted in a remarkable decrease of colds there. Her dislike for avocados remained, but Jettel had at least stopped rejecting them as poisonous green pears and throwing them in the garbage right away. She once even served the unwanted gifts, as the recipe in one of the progressive women’s magazines suggested, with salt, pepper, and lemon juice. After the first night of heated debates, she also displayed an unexpected flexibility toward television.

  It became apparent very quickly and definitely that the television, a light screen within a dark brown box that stood on the small living room chest that had been cleared for it, possessed unexpected powers that went beyond its original use. The unprepossessing device, on which a lamp and pipe-smoking gnome were standing, became a peacemaker in a marriage in which up to then fights about trivialities had even sapped the strength of the temperamental fighter who had initiated them.

  During those days when the painful awareness emerged that the entire family had lost a loyal and unusual friend in Joseph Schlachanska—a cheerfully wise mediator of Jewish life and very unconventional advisor—the television diverted them, at least for a few hours, from the depressing feeling that life was once again and forever marked by a farewell.

  It was just a coincidence that television began to cheer up the evenings at precisely the time as the agonizing depression after Schlachanska’s death upset the daily rhythms. It was no coincidence, however, that Walter, Jettel, and Regina reacted with special intensity to a stimulus that they had known existed but had never attracted them.

  The fascination of the gray pictures on a black-and-white background not only heightened their imagination in a very unusual way; but it also offered the possibility of repeating experiences that they had not thought about for a while, and in retrospect that made them as cheerful as people who find an old picture book in the attic and happily immerse themselves in the past. Jettel and Walter agreed that television affected them in the same way as the silent movies, which they now remembered with such joy and surprising clarity as if they were just coming out of the cinema in Breslau.

  The news became the nightly high point that nobody wanted to miss for the simple reason that it was such a novel and almost comical experience to be able to see Adenauer and all t
he other important Bonn politicians, whom one only knew from fuzzy pictures in the newspapers or, at most, the weekly newsreels in the movie theater, close-up as if they were invited and welcome guests.

  “Only that they are visitors you don’t have to offer anything to and they don’t expect to have a conversation with you,” Walter cheerfully said.

  “You finally had a good idea there,” Jettel agreed contentedly. Jettel, who had never been interested in politics except when questions of Jewish life in the new Germany came up, now paid as much attention to the debates and parties in the Lower House of the German Parliament and complicated economic connections as to the gestures, facial expressions, and suits of the representatives.

  Pictures of events abroad held a special fascination. They made the world bigger and reduced one’s own world to a surprisingly small scale. A street in New York; a fashion show in Paris; pictures from Bombay, Tokyo, or Tel Aviv; even a dog in London’s Hyde Park or the British queen in her carriage: all turned into an extraordinary panorama of foreign life, which one could be a part of by simply pressing a button.

  One night the Suez Canal was shown on the screen. Jettel, Walter, and Regina jumped up as excitedly as if they were again on deck of the “Almanzora” that had carried them back to Germany.

  “No camels,” Walter reported.

  “They are all on board, sir,” Regina shouted, and the three of them enjoyed the old joke with such gusto as if they had waited for years to unearth it from the depth of a trench that had been dug too hastily.

  They were not even embarrassed about their childish behavior in front of Ziri and Max when they momentarily allowed themselves the old, suddenly rediscovered joy of alleviating the sharpness of the real contours. As soon as the pictures started to flicker, Walter, Jettel, and Regina felt as if they had returned to the times when the radio had been their only connection to the world. They remembered—even Walter not without delight and melancholy—how they had pulled all the windows and doors open at the farm and the people from the huts had come together with their sleeping infants, goats, and dogs to happily listen to the small box’s sounds that were unintelligible to them.

  Max had his own pleasures. He loved the family dramas that almost always featured a boy his age who thought exactly the way he did. For the Schölermann family, with the attractive father, the efficient, understanding mother, and the loveable children, on Wednesdays he crept in his pajamas to the door of the living room and lay on the floor—the encouraging stories of the strength of love and harmony were broadcast too late and his mother still insisted that he be in bed by eight o’clock. The fear of discovery was, however, made worthwhile by the surprising revelation that other families were not much different from his.

  “One day,” Regina speculated full of hope after a broadcast about life in Cairo, “we will also get to see Nairobi and Owuor will wave to us.” “Why Nairobi?” Walter asked, and his eyes betrayed that he, too, longed for quite specific images.

  “You don’t seriously think that Owuor remained in Nairobi without us?”

  “Wishing doesn’t cost anything. You always told me that as a child.”

  A few days later there was no longer any doubt in Regina’s mind that she and her father had summoned fate in the old reliable way. She recognized the provocation too late. They had been too light-hearted and had forgotten that wishes needed the protection of wise limits. The hour of truth, therefore, transformed their careless high spirits into a lethal monster with freshly sharpened teeth.

  At the end of the evening news, there was a report about the murder of a farmer. Walter was just about to complain that Jettel had not bought the sausages from the Silesian butcher; the discussion about the missing garlic diverted them from the events on the screen long enough so that nobody noticed that it was Kenya that was in the news. Only when the announcer’s tongue stumbled when he tried to say Naivasha did the word get its first outline. All three, still without any suspicion, called it out to the man in the box as seriously as if the right pronunciation of the full-sounding syllables were of special importance.

  The first picture was still only a shadow in a room full of laughter. But then the charred walls of a burned house emerged from the gray of the screen. A broken-down door lay across a bed of trampled carnations; the laughter stopped, drowned in the horror of uncomprehending silence. On the closely cropped lawn in front of the house lay a dead cow with its stomach slit. Bloodstained hair was stuck to a white fence. Black men in police uniforms and two white men in khaki shorts were standing in front of a jeep. A dog, which was not visible, barked. Small photographs of three blond children and a woman were shown. Walter got up and turned off the television.

  “Naivasha,” Jettel whispered. “It cannot be. It was so beautiful there.”

  “We went boating on the lake with Martin,” Walter said. “I didn’t even know that this had reached Naivasha.”

  “Mau-Mau,” Regina swallowed.

  They had all known about the war of the blacks against the farmers in the highlands, but without pictures the faraway stroke of lightning had not turned into the thunder of reality. It had always just remained a presentiment of transformations full of violence in a world that they knew as soft and bright. They had often and quite early heard about Jomo Kenyatta’s fight against British colonial rule, had seen his photo in the papers, and—each on their own—had tried to interpret the features of the old, determined warrior who spoke of freedom and ordered murder. They had known the word Mau-Mau as the bloody slogan for rebellion and independence. They knew right away that it meant death, and even when they heard that peace was starting to return to Kenya, they did not dare pronounce this foreign word.

  Walter was least able to explain his silence. The Mau-Mau uprising, in which even children had been killed by people who had loved them like their own, was at least a late confirmation for the farsightedness of his decision to leave Kenya. During recent years in Frankfurt, they had gotten a lot of mail from old acquaintances who had been forced to leave their farms and had wandered on to an uncertain future in America, England, or Israel. Even Jettel only rarely mentioned Kenya as the paradise she had been forced to give up.

  But Walter was not concerned with the fact that he had done the right thing when he was one of the first to depart before the storm. The late confirmation of a foresight, which he had not had, was unpleasant to him. He only knew too well that he had never thought about a bloody war between blacks and whites in Kenya. In retrospect he felt only gratitude and recently also nostalgia for the country that had saved him and his family from death. He suffered more than he was willing to admit to himself from the idea that the old world no longer existed in which sun, wind, rain, and peaceful people had determined his life for such a long time.

  Regina, on the other hand, always knew why she should not utter the word Mau-Mau. She would only be able to save the forests and fields, the mountains, the huts, the beloved people, the animals, and the wise God Mungu for her head and heart if she kept her lips closed. Now reality had caught up with her with a blood-smeared grimace that made her shudder. Regina drilled her fingers into her temples while she stared at the dark television set, but there were no answers to her questions and she had a premonition that in the future she would no longer know where to go on the days without light.

  “I wonder if our house in Ol’ Joro Orok is still standing,” Jettel whispered, “and the outhouse with the three hearts and the beautiful kitchen under the big tree.”

  “Does it matter?” Walter answered. “We have had to part with so many things in life. We will also be able to get over the fact that another part of our memories no longer has a home.”

  Regina immediately switched off the small lamp on her night table after she went to bed. With the practice of many years, she was also able to put out the conflagration of the pictures, but her thoughts were like the most dangerous bushfires that always relight themselves with their own ambers—she felt too fervently that her ea
rs had caught a word and had not yet passed it on to her head. She sat up in her bed and ordered, like a hunter who has lost the track, the pictures and sounds back once more. Only after wandering for a long time in a forest overgrown with vines did she emerge at that light spot where a lost person is able to see again. There the long-expected echo reached Regina’s ears. Her father had spoken of Ol’ Joro Orok and had said home.

  She repeated the word, full of surprise, and yet she needed even more time than before to comprehend the message. Bewildered and yet liberated in a way that calmed her overwrought senses, she finally realized that Walter had gone on safari just like her. At the moment of this blissful discovery, she felt at first as if someone had pushed aside the big boulder that had hindered her view for such a long time. The happiness was short-lived. Then she understood, dismayed and with a sadness that first split her head and then her heart, why Walter had returned into the world he had wanted to leave in order to find a home again. In parting he had endured that sharp pain that never heals. The bwana had never reached home.

  20

  FOR HER FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY in June of 1958, Jettel wanted a trip abroad in late summer from her husband, and wanted Regina to accompany her. She was surprised at herself when she finally had the courage to make her wish known and was convinced that Walter would not even make an effort to talk seriously with her about this idea. Thinking about the long trip she had in mind seemed so unusual and, considering her husband’s conservative views, even provocative to Jettel that she only dared to express her wish when she inadvertently found out that Walter was going to give her a new rug for the living room.

  Whenever Jettel tried to talk about vacations, Walter would become irritable and insulting. During the disagreeable disputes he used to tell her that she had delusions of grandeur and he called her a spendthrift. Angrily he pointed out that he had truly gotten around enough in his life and certainly not voluntarily, and that he had only one wish: to see the Riesengebirge once again. The modern yearning for luxury, holidays, and foreign countries, which to Walter’s consternation even gripped people who had previously never gotten any farther than their uncle’s place in the country, struck Walter as a regrettable sign of the times, obtuse, presumptuous, and in his own case ungrateful toward a fate in which the word “departure” had a special meaning.