Somewhere in Germany Page 27

  At noon they ate standing up at the shop of a butcher, on whose behalf Walter had just filed for divorce and with whom he shared identical views about marital infidelity and pork chops. They bought curried sausages at a stand, got cream-filled chocolate cakes for dessert, and ate the cakes on a bench in the small park in front of the office. Walter once asked his son if he did not prefer to spend his time with the other boys in his class.

  “No,” Max said, “I am taking a vacation from the boys in my class.”

  Twice they sat on a scorching hot day under trees at the grand “Kaiserkeller,” and first embarrassed the waiter by taking off their shoes and socks, and then even more when Walter pretended to have lost his wallet. He bought Max a bell that sounded like a car horn for his bicycle, and bought himself a chain so that his glasses could slide directly from his nose to his chest. The optician told them that such chains had only been available in America till now. They immediately realized that this was true because the people who saw Walter’s suspended glasses stopped in their tracks and laughed surreptitiously.

  Other than that there were the soccer playoffs. After two weeks of flickering pictures, screaming reporters, excitement, and constant fears about the well-being and success of his fabulous home team, Walter was sufficiently trained to denounce, in the same outraged volume as his son, all referees and players who endangered a German victory and German honor. Without expecting it, he was also faced with an immediate realization that would touch him deeply. It was the day of the enthusiastically awaited game between Sweden and Germany that would determine the entry into the finals. Walter initially enjoyed the duel in Goeteborg as if he had never been interested in anything else but free kicks, corners, and penalties in all his life. He rejoiced just like Max when the German team, whose players Walter had been able to name for a while now, succeeded in a surprise attack. But his concentration decreased earlier than in previous games—it had been a discouraging day with a lost case and a fight with a judge whom he perceived as insulting.

  Even though he initially hesitated to disappoint Max with his inattentiveness, the pictures first lost their clarity and then their meaning. Finally, only his ears received nourishment. A force, whose attraction he was soon unable to resist, pulled him toward the never-forgotten sound of familiar noises. The longer the play went on, the more the driving, regular, and monotonous screams of “heia, heia” of the Swedish spectators reminded him of the drums in the forest of Ol’ Joro Orok.

  Walter saw himself, when he permitted his eyes the journey for just a moment, standing at the edge of the large flax field. He also saw Regina tossing her hat into the air and lying down on the shining red soil to catch the message of the sounds, and he heard the black monkeys with the white manes screeching and afterward Owuor laughing. The echo bounded back from the mountain like a hollow thunder. The three of them were standing in the lightning, and they shouted with one voice into the woods, indicating that the drums had reached them.

  “Heia, heia,” Walter called out to the pictures and made his voice dark.

  “You are not supposed to say heia,” Max complained. “That is treason.”

  “High treason,” Walter corrected him. “I only want to chase away the enemies with noise. That is what you do in a war. I still remember that from the locusts.”

  He was, however, unable to emerge quickly enough from a world that in retrospect had been able to lead him to believe in the fleeting harmony of life because he was young and healthy then. Simultaneously, with the memory of his still-unbroken strength, he again felt the heavy oppression of Africa and suffered, with freshly bleeding wounds, the yearning for the homeland that had expelled him, as if he had just recently had to leave Germany. Conflicting memories, each single one leading into a different direction, scorched Walter’s senses. He groaned to extinguish the fire and with it the unsettling recognition that he had not found the home, which he had mourned in Africa, in Germany after all. Taken aback, he held his hand in front of his mouth so that the painful sound of resignation would not be repeated, but all of a sudden he realized that it was his son who had groaned. Relieved, he opened his eyes and looked at Max.

  “That pig took Juskowiak out,” Max screamed.

  “Is he one of ours?”

  “Papa, you know Juskowiak. How are we supposed to win now?”

  Since the sound of the hard syllables fascinated him in a strange way, Walter wondered about the name Juskowiak. The time was long enough for another flood of pictures. He thought about Sohrau and his father’s house with the linden trees. He saw streets, places, people, and scenes; thought finally about the Upper Silesian vote after World War I; and remembered how fanatically he had fought as a young man for his homeland to stay German. He heard himself talking persistently and obsessively about German culture and a German fatherland, and about loyalty, honor, and sacrifice. He tried to remember what he had felt when he said those words; tried to imagine the young men who had also devoted themselves to a lost cause, but he could not remember a single name, only the eagerness and the hate in the rough, determined faces. All of a sudden he envied the friends of those days, envied even the young man he had been, and envied the certainty of a conviction that their cause was the only just one.

  “Fritz Walter got hurt. Man, he is out. He is limping off the field. The Swedish pig fouled him. This is unfair,” Max shouted. “Look at this foul play, Papa.”

  Walter’s eyes started to burn when he discovered in his son’s red, swollen face the traces of fervor and hate he had just been thinking about. He did not like the mirror image of his own youth. He felt the need to finally protect himself from the misunderstanding that he now recognized as a lifelong illusion that made men blind. He felt compelled to tell the young man of those earlier days that home is only a dream, but he was no longer sure if he wanted to warn himself or his son.

  “We only have nine left,” Max called out. “We are lost.”

  It was the despair in the childish voice that drove away the ghosts. Walter noticed with relief how Max bit his lips and clenched his fists. He immediately made out the signs that troubled him even more than the look into the past. It was a moment of great release when Walter understood that his son had found the homeland that his father would never have again.

  “Soccer,” he said, “is really beautiful.”

  “But you have been asleep the whole time,” Max complained.

  “A father is never asleep. He is lost in thought. Remember that, my favorite son.”

  The game finished three to one in favor of the Swedes. Even in bed Max still repeated that the end of the German hopes amounted to a tragedy and that he was never going to be able to laugh again in his life. But he did laugh nonetheless when Walter in his pajamas twirled an umbrella, called “heia, heia,” and suggested they should blacken their faces with shoe polish.

  The next morning, two hours before the special train from Tyrol arrived, Walter and Max went into the Kaufhof, the department store for everything, to receive Jettel with a new saucepan. It was even higher and a lot bigger than the old stockpot that had remained in Leobschütz during the emigration, and it had gleaming handles and shone like a silver goblet. Walter lifted it on top of his head and the young salesgirl licked her lips and admiringly said, “You made a good choice. Genuine Swedish steel.”

  “Swedish steel,” Walter imitated the high voice. He slammed the lid onto the pot and asked aloud, “Don’t you know what happened? You don’t seriously think that a decent German can cook his soup in a Swedish pot. I am no traitor to the fatherland.”

  With a voice that kept on getting louder, he shouted, “Heia, heia.” The customers came closer and looked amused, curious, and sometimes admiringly at Walter. He yelled “Heia, heia” one more time into the room; this time the people who were standing around him chanted the calls with him and applauded loudly.

  “That was a good job,” Max praised him when he arrived on the platform with his father. “I don’t have enough co
urage to scream that loudly in front of that many people.”

  “We Germans are not going to put up with everything,” Walter giggled. “We are holding our heads high again.”

  The train from Innsbruck arrived two minutes early in Frankfurt, so Walter did not have time to explain to his son the difference between courage and high spirits nor was he able to tell him what he had wanted to explain to him the previous night after the last Swedish goal.

  21

  IN MID-NOVEMBER an unusually cold day ended an exceptional period of mild sun and warmth, which had made the early fall golden. With cutting wind, rain, hail, and an unexpected drop in temperature, this day of contrasts robbed Walter of all hope that he only needed to adjust to the change in weather in order to easily survive the winter through sheer willpower. As soon as he left the house he felt in his arm the sharp aches that he had learned to identify ever since his first heart attack. He had coughed so violently during the night that he was unable to stay in bed, and suffered till dawn in the wing chair in the living room. When walking, he gasped after only a few steps. Since he did not even have enough energy to make his objections known to Jettel, three days later, even though he was feeling much better just this afternoon, he sat in Doctor Heupke’s consulting room.

  There he stared so furiously at the asters in a light green marble vase, which made him think of an urn at precisely this inappropriate moment, as if the flowers and not the man behind the desk were responsible for the unsolicited message he had just received. Walter had considered the examination itself as much too thorough for his state, which he characterized once again, and as he thought quite descriptively, as a minor and temporary indisposition.

  Walter was annoyed—even more than by the examination—by Doctor Heupke’s latest suggestion, his serious tone, and his detached face. Walter angrily defined this facial expression as the established means of a professional clan, for whom he had nothing but disdain, to maneuver a patient from a state of temporary despondency into the kind of submissive attitude that in his opinion every physician since Hippocrates had misused for the credible practice of his healing powers.

  Walter turned away disgustedly and for some time only concentrated on the big raindrops on the windowpane. When he finally turned around again, he lightly slammed his fist on the desk and clenched the other hand in his jacket pocket. He nodded and straightened his shoulders to indicate that an answer to the question put to him a few minutes ago had finally occurred to him. Relieved and all of a sudden reconciled to his fate, he realized that he still had enough power of resistance to defend himself with his usual heartiness. He liked the wordplay. He laughed, slightly amused, when he considered that it was especially appropriate for him at this moment.

  “Not this time,” he said overly distinctly. “Nobody is going to get me into your hospital anymore.”

  “But you know how it is. The whole thing is just routine,” Doctor Heupke patiently contradicted him, “so that we can get you back on your feet again.” He mobilized the big share of confidence he needed to smile unselfconsciously. At the same time he was amazed that he was still able to feel the same kind of sympathy for Walter that he had extended to him since his first consultation a few years ago. “A few days in the hospital,” he stated, “will be good for you.”

  “That is what you said the last time, too,” Walter reminded him. “Don’t you physicians know when you have reached the end of your rope? You cannot implant a new motor.”

  “But we can correct your blood sugar level,” Doctor Heupke enumerated, “and strengthen your heart. And make sure that you get some rest. I don’t want any more than that. Why don’t you,” he suggested, “give a physician a chance for once to help a patient who has grown close to his heart.”

  “No flattery,” Walter sternly disapproved. Even more than by the persistence of the physician, which, he noticed, resembled his own in the most irritating way, he was annoyed that Jettel had not only catalogued his symptoms with the kind of detail he would have appreciated a lot more in better circumstances, but also confirmed every sentence Doctor Heupke said with the hated comment, “That’s what I always say.”

  “After Christmas,” Walter triumphantly said, “I am going to have all the time in the world. But that is when the physicians go on trips these days and don’t give a hoot about their patients.”

  “Not I.”

  “Of course, you are going to celebrate New Year’s Eve at the bedside of your favorite patient.”

  “Don’t worry about New Year’s,” the doctor promised. “You will get a break from the hospital then and celebrate with your charming wife. You can eat all the wrong foods you like, and I will start all over again at the beginning of the New Year and not say a word.”

  “I am going to think about it,” Walter replied. “And only because you just made the first joke since we have known each other. But don’t get your hopes up too high that I am going to loaf around here.”

  “And, please, don’t get your hopes up too high either if you do not let us help you. And that is not a joke.”

  “Two in one day would have been too much anyway.”

  During the sleepless nights after the doctor’s visit and on days that seemed without beginning and end to him, Walter admitted, at least to himself, that the improvement had been short-lived. Yet his stubbornness held on to the hope that his body would once again help itself. He was neither planning on going to the hospital nor thinking about the doctor’s suggestions, but Jettel and Regina did not leave him alone.

  For four weeks both of them threatened, implored, cried, and fought with Walter. They yelled at him and got yelled at in return, they reconciled with him, and they promised to visit him twice a day in the hospital and to tell all his acquaintances to do the same. They swore that they would bring him cigarettes and chocolates and would not object if he had files brought in from the office. Jettel appealed to his reason with just as little success as Regina tried to appeal to his sense of responsibility. As a last hope to persuade him to undergo the hospital treatment, she engaged Fafflok, but he, too, gave up. In the end it was Ziri who performed the miracle at a point in time when no one expected it. She changed Walter’s mind with a single sentence.

  “I always thought,” she said a week before Christmas, “you wanted to be at your son’s big celebration.”

  “Ziri is the only one of you women who has a brain in her head,” Walter declared that night. “At any rate, a bar mitzvah can only be celebrated in the smallest circle if the father has just died. I have to make it through March. I owe that to my only son. Whatever gave you the idea that I was not going to the hospital?”

  His surrender, which he now described with a grin as a game that anyone with the least bit of a sense of humor could have been wise to detect immediately, all of a sudden changed life for everyone. The quarrels with Jettel were about everyday banalities again and lost their sting. Walter teased Max and Ziri with his old gusto. Above all, he and Regina returned to the accord he had missed so much.

  After the call to Doctor Heupke, whose sympathetic friendliness pleased him as if he actually deserved it, Walter’s cough and mood improved with surprising speed. His choleric outbursts became less frequent; his insulting aggression was replaced by eccentric jokes that he greatly enjoyed. Regina even expected that he would soon come up with the suggestion that he need not go to the hospital after all, but she was wrong.

  On good days Walter would whistle “Ich hab’ mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren” after a breather on the third floor of the stairs and would call Ziri, whose name he was still unable to pronounce, Owuor. With increasing frequency, expectantly, and with ever more concrete plans that stood in striking contrast to his frugality and modesty, he talked about the bar mitzvah in March of the coming year.

  He promised his son a celebration that Frankfurt would be talking about for years to come and promised his wife a new dress from one of those small shops that had recently become fashionable among the ladies.
At night he drafted a long guest list that he happily expanded the next morning. For the most part it included the Jewish community, as well as colleagues, judges, district attorneys, and good clients. Also on the list were people from Upper Silesia and Walter’s former fraternity brothers, several of whom had returned to Germany in recent years. Greschek was supposed to sleep in the living room and Grete in the conservatory. One night, he suggested that Martin should be invited. Regina objected, but her father was already too captivated by his idea to see through her game. He fell into the trap and wrote to South Africa.

  For their anniversary he presented his wife with the pearl necklace that she had wanted for years. One day later, on Christmas Eve, he fought so violently with her—because she wanted to divide the carp and goose into two meals—that she threw the pearl necklace onto the kitchen table with a dramatic gesture and threatened never to wear it again and to stick the goose that Greschek had sent from the Harz into the oven without plucking it first. But Jettel’s rebellion, which was as much a part of the holiday tradition as the honey gingerbread that she had baked on the farm even where there was no honey, could not dampen the mood in the long run.

  “At Christmas,” Walter used to say since the days of hunger were past, “even the Jews can eat their fill.”

  He maintained that he had learned that as a boy as part of his bar mitzvah instructions and always especially looked forward to the holidays. Even though Walter had taught his children early on only to identify with their own religious holidays (he did not tolerate any fir branches in the apartment and since their engagement had reproached Jettel about the Christmas tree in her mother’s living room), he did not find it inappropriate to sing along with the Christmas songs on the radio, to admire the beautifully decorated tree at Fafflok’s on the second day of Christmas, and to eat so much Stollen, the traditional German holiday bread, that he was getting sick.