Somewhere in Germany Page 28

  It never would have entered his head to do without the herring salad, stuffed gooseneck, carp with beer sauce, and poppy seed dumplings, which reminded him of Christmas in Upper Silesia. He gained three pounds over Christmas and was in a good mood, even playful, when Jettel packed his suitcase for the hospital after the holidays.

  Walter was familiar with the Holy Spirit Hospital from earlier visits. Above all, and this was much more important to him, most of the nurses knew him and this time again greeted him with a warmth that made him feel good. They had already learned that Walter’s frequently rude ways were only a way to disguise his kindness, so they readily tolerated his teasing, crude jokes, and banter, showed understanding for his often unfair nature, and were never deceived by his brusqueness when he disliked some small thing.

  The gray-haired nurses as well as those with firm hips and slim waists appreciated his free and easy compliments and generous tips. They found Walter amusing and were quite touched by the love that he showed for his family and his family showed for him. Above all they had the greatest respect for a patient who knew the head nurse well enough so that she visited him every night and had long conversations with him. On the last day of the year hardly any of the nurses missed the opportunity to wish him all the best in person.

  Walter promised all of them that he would take care of his health, return with low sugar levels and poppy seed dumplings for the entire floor, and grumpily made them all promise not to tell of his generosity. He had asked the head nurse to provide champagne and open-faced sandwiches to a six-bed room at his expense and had slipped a student nurse, whose parents were from Ratibor, some money for a train ticket home.

  Walter solemnly promised two physicians and the head nurse that he would take a taxi home, but after lunch he snuck out of the hospital, took his car from a side street, and drove home singing. Since his family did not expect him before the afternoon, he could not resist the temptation of frightening them even more than he would have done by just ringing the doorbell early. He unlocked the door to the apartment with a shout that only Owuor had been able to produce at Ol’ Joro Orok when he wanted to hear a threefold echo from the mountain, threw his hat past Jettel’s head onto the kitchen table, boxed Regina’s back from behind, and sent Max to the corner drugstore to buy sparklers, streamers, party crackers, lead, and a sugar cone.

  “You are getting more meshuge all the time,” Jettel scolded and yet made him feel that she was happy. After a heated debate of three days, she had finally been persuaded to prepare the potato salad the way she used to make it in Leobschütz and not to leave out the herring that did not agree with Regina or Walter.

  He tasted it standing up, wiped his lips smacking at the freshly washed kitchen curtain, lovingly called Jettel his “old woman,” and gave her a kiss. “Too bad that Ziri cannot celebrate with us today,” he said and pretended not to hear the giggles from the broom closet. He pulled her out, pressed her close, and sighed, “You don’t know how happy you are making an old man.”

  “That’s why I came today.”

  “Did you tell your mother that you are having an affair with your boss?”

  “Yes,” Ziri laughed, “but she didn’t believe me.”

  “I am a very different father then,” Walter said emphatically and looked at his daughter. “I would instantly believe my daughter if she told me something like that.”

  After dinner Walter insisted, although it was an especially mild day, on trying the Feuerzangenbowle, the punch with burned sugar, and the first five sparklers. Luckily for the further progress of the night, Jettel, after only half a glass of the much-too-strong alcoholic beverage, was no longer able to determine who had burned the hole in the curtain of the living room window and limited herself to a small series of complaints. Walter ominously accused his son and Max just as excitedly blamed him. Regina realized, with a touch of sadness that made her heart fly as fast as an arrow, that her brother had already mastered to perfection her old game of putting down false tracks without going easy on oneself in the process.

  Following an old English custom, Regina had hidden a coin in one of the jelly doughnuts. It promised future health and happiness to the finder. But in a rather un-English way she had already undermined the English law of fairness and equal chance while baking. She had marked the fateful doughnut with a big raisin, quickly put a doughnut on everyone’s plate and pushed the lucky one toward her father.

  “Typical of the English,” her father muttered when he spat out the fifty-pfennig piece, “that they consider it a sign of good luck if someone breaks his tooth on New Year’s Eve.” Yet it was obvious that he was immune to sentimentality but not to superstition.

  When they poured the molten lead from a spoon into the water to tell their fortunes, Ziri retrieved a lump from the bowl that Walter graciously identified as a wedding carriage, but when Regina poured a very similar shape, he was not ready to extend the same generosity to her.

  “Everyone can see,” he said, “that this thing is a large suitcase. You most likely want to leave your old father forever in the New Year. Just like Hamlet’s daughter.”

  “Lear’s daughter,” Regina corrected him. “Hamlet died a bachelor.”

  “Was he unhappily in love then?”

  “Yes, with a girl from South Africa.”

  Jettel’s lead figure was unanimously declared to be a lucky chimney sweep, Max’s, after long deliberations, was only a spoon.

  “A silver spoon,” Regina enthused and made an effort to look like the fairy of her childhood days, “is the sign of the greatest fortune in a lead-pouring ceremony.”

  “Don’t talk such nonsense,” Walter contradicted her. “A spoon means that you, my son, will have to scoop up by yourself all the soups you will have gotten yourself into over the coming year.”

  He warmed his lead last, bent all the way over the bowl with water, and retrieved a small rectangular platform. Before anyone was able to look at it closely, Walter took it into his hand and said, “Nebbish, what was I supposed to get? This is a coffin.”

  Ziri crossed herself and turned pale, and Jettel and Regina became red and angry. Walter asked his son if he knew why women did not have a sense of humor. Max shook his head, rolled his eyes, murmured “long hair, little intelligence,” got up, and embraced his father from the back.

  Half an hour before midnight, Ziri went to the renters on the fifth floor to bring them their best wishes for the New Year and a taste of Jettel’s poppy seed dumplings. She had been gone less than ten minutes when Walter, without anyone noticing it, called there and, with his voice disguised, asked for Ziri, whispering into the phone, “Come down immediately, Dr. Redlich just died.”

  Wearing a colorful paper hat made from one of the party crackers, Walter, giggling in the hallway, received the sobbing Ziri and the distressed young couple from the fifth floor. He had more trouble than anticipated in explaining the situation to Jettel, Regina, and Max, and he finally calmed all of them sufficiently so that they became willing to forgive him and were able to go into the New Year with dry eyes. Still, he kept insisting that in all his life he had never played a more successful New Year’s Eve prank. At five minutes to twelve he sang the first notes of “Auld Lang Syne.” His voice was strong and clear.

  Regina stared at her father, frightened, and could not believe that she was hearing the long-forgotten sounds. She saw tiny stars, which melted into a spinning ball around her bewildered senses and then fell apart like a rain of fire. Her body trembled, her eyes burned, and she managed for only a moment to ban the salty grains from them before the pictures became ignited with the power of a hastily nourished bush-fire and became a burning forest. The old Scottish song, full of yearning, with its piercing melody that she knew since her days in the English boarding school, had always touched her. The memories now raged mercilessly in her head: scenes from a tropical night, the sounds of voices under the lemon and guava trees that were whipped by a humid wind. She had last heard the song in Na
irobi on New Year’s Eve of 1946.

  At the time, the emigrants from Germany had clumsily sung “Auld Lang Syne,” embarrassed to prove at least to themselves that after desperate years of searching for new roots, they had found a new home in Kenya and were no longer displaced people. With alarming clearness Regina saw the people, whom she had not thought of for years, standing in a circle and extending their hands to each other.

  She heard them sing again and felt the pressure of hastily stifled laughter in her breast once more when the hard, throaty, German pronunciation reached her ears. Only Walter, who had learned the song in the British army, had made the old Gaelic words, the fleeting nostalgia, and the mystical romanticism resound. She had been proud of the splendid knight whose tongue, when it spoke English in this one wonderful moment of brief fulfillment, did not stumble like that of the foreigners.

  Regina saw her father standing in a sergeant’s uniform under Africa’s fragrant trees. The three white stripes shone brightly on the sleeve of his khaki shirt. Walter was slim, and taller than most of the people standing around him. His eyes were clear, his hair full and black. He held Regina’s hand and with the warmth of his touch he split her heart into two parts because she knew that he was unable to dream of anything else but the return to the Germany she feared. When she heard her father singing so forcefully in a language that was not his own, she had felt for the first time that he would neglect to protect himself from those memories that stole a man’s peace forever before leaving. It had been one of those many moments in her life, and one of the earliest, in which the bond of love with her father became the demanding chain of inseparability.

  The Frankfurt night sky turned as light as day, glittering green and burning red. The sound of church bells and muffled shots from saluting guns streamed in through the open windows. Cars raced and sounded their horns in the street. A dog yowled; pigeons flew up. Noisy children threw grasshoppers from balconies. A golden rain fell into the front yards and died down. Regina clapped her hands over her ears to protect herself from the sounds of the old world and opened her eyes wide. The flame under the burned sugar punch was glowing blue; the light from the lampshades of the six-arm ceiling lamp was pale yellow. Jettel’s pearl necklace shimmered on white skin.

  But the sparkler that Walter gleefully flourished while he shouted “Happy New Year” immersed his face with the malice of a lurking monster in the poisonous colors of transience. Regina saw gray skin; dark melancholy eyes and deep furrows on his forehead; bent shoulders that had carried, for too long, a burden for which their strength did not suffice; a slightly extended stomach; arms that had become thin; and white fingers with blue knuckles. The pain of recognition was devastating. Her father was a man marked by age and sickness. She knew that she would not be able to bear the truth much longer without having her eyes betray the fact that she was giving up the hope she owed him since the hour he himself had lost hope. But then Walter reached for her hand again—with the same warmth as in the long-dead days, with the same magic trembling in his fingers and as if nothing had happened since that night in Nairobi. The chain of love around Regina’s body became heavy and hot. Walter awkwardly bent down to her, and his lips stroked her hair and touched her ear; she only cared that nobody but she should hear him say “thank you.”

  “What do you two always have to whisper about,” Jettel complained.

  “We didn’t whisper,” Walter maintained, offended. “Regina, please instantly tell your jealous mother what I just told you.”

  “He wants to have a piece of bread with gravy and did not dare tell you,” Regina mediated.

  In the late afternoon of New Year’s Day, happily waving from the taxi and brandishing his hat from the window, Walter drove back to the Holy Spirit Hospital, strengthened physically by Jettel’s roast rabbit and spiritually by a night that he thought of as carefree, stimulating, and extraordinarily successful. He told the cabdriver that he basically spent his vacations in the hospital and realized, a little taken aback but still in a good mood, that he had actually begun to think of the stay that way. The smell of the waxed floors in the long corridors reached his nose. He liked it. The warmth made him feel good, as did the nurses whose faces, still tired from the long night, lit up when they welcomed him. The head nurse had had a Christmas rose put into his room in a blue glass. He touched one of the blooms tenderly, opened his heart for a fleeting moment to its beauty, sat down on the freshly made bed, and noticed that it was no longer an effort to untie his shoes. When he got into his pajamas, he whistled “Auld Lang Syne” once more; delight in life made his temples throb.

  With the fatigue he started to feel soon afterward came a satisfaction that his nature, which always fought against his failing body, seldom allowed him to enjoy. The twilight put him into a mild and confident mood even though ever since Africa he considered the time between day and night too long and dangerous. He closed his eyes and was fast asleep for several minutes. When he woke up, refreshed, he saw Regina’s face, returned her look full of love, thought of Max’s bar mitzvah, and resolved to make the time he had to spend in the hospital easy for the doctor and himself. He heard footsteps in the corridor and the clatter of dishes outside the rooms and enjoyed the familiar sounds in the same way as in the nights on the farm when he was able to identify the sounds before they began to trouble him.

  The young student nurse (to whom he had given the money for a train ticket home) with the Frankfurt accent and the parents from Ratibor was back and thanked him with poppy seed dumplings prepared according to her grandmother’s recipe from Hindenburg. He told her, with minute details that he greatly enjoyed, about a small swindler whom he had once defended in the district court and had been able to save from jail. The young girl in her starched uniform had very beautiful teeth when she laughed, but her glance and even more so her words told him that Upper Silesia had become a very distant land. He sighed; the chubby blonde asked him if he was having any pains.

  “Not where you think I would,” he diagnosed.

  In the late evening the head nurse visited him with a brightly polished apple on a finely grained wooden plate. Her voice reminded him of his mother’s, and her black skirt stood out in the white room of fears he wanted to forget, but he told her, amused again, about his New Year’s Eve prank and how he had frightened everyone. “You know that people who are presumed to be dead live longer, don’t you?” he recalled.

  “I feel sorry for your poor wife,” she said.

  “I do, too. At least sometimes. But I have made up my mind to become a new person in the New Year. They still need the old drudge.”

  He so enthusiastically liked the concept of the new person who, by sheer willpower and a sense of responsibility, would manage to take control of himself, that he told Doctor Heupke about it the next day. The doctor recognized his chance and said, “Then you should stay with us ten more days. You will see how good that is going to be for you.”

  “Eight,” Walter determinedly bargained with him. “I want to be home by January 9. In exchange I’ll let you do everything to me while I am here.”

  He kept his word, followed the dietary prescriptions almost without complaint, took a long rest at noon, lived in tolerable peace with Jettel, and stayed far enough away from professional demands so as not to get upset more than once a day. At the end of the week, he felt strong and sure. In the afternoon he went for a half-hour walk with Jettel in the snow-covered park around the hospital. Although he had at first declared that he was not able to walk at all and that she just wanted to kill him as fast as possible so that she could spend his hard-earned savings on trips, he did not feel any shortness of breath or pain in his chest despite the cold. He eventually lost three pounds, and his face regained its contour and color. The high sugar levels improved, as did the mood of the doctor, who became so enthusiastic that he talked about post-recovery and a cure in Bad Nauheim.

  “Only over my dead body,” Walter said.

  Regina visited Walter late in
the evenings after work. She brought him newspapers and books and confirmed his long-held opinion that his gloomy daughter was much more cheerful in the editorial office than at home. She told him about colleagues, discussions, meetings, and the theater. For the first time, Walter was genuinely, and without his usual reservations and ironic remarks, interested in her work. He even went so far once as to call her capable and let himself get sufficiently carried away to admit that he did not think her job was as unsuitable for her, after all, as he had always maintained. He finally acknowledged something she had known for a long time, namely that he read the Evening Post in his office and liked her articles.

  “I would have liked a son-in-law better, though,” he immediately qualified his remarks.

  “Don’t fib like that, bwana. We agreed a long time ago on that topic. You would never have allowed any rival to have me.”

  “But I took away your freedom.”

  “You gave it to me.”

  They talked a lot about Ol’ Joro Orok and Owuor, suppressed—amused that they were able to do so—the hard times of the past, and saturated the presence with a sadness that they would have been ashamed of in any environment other than that of the hospital. They enjoyed their long conversations, intimacy, and, above all, the knowledge that they were enough for each other. During the long hours of mutual understanding, neither of them managed adequately to hide their feelings so that the other did not realize how unswervingly their memories went to the much-loved people in Africa who accepted illness as God’s will and were not afraid of the future.

  “It is time I come home,” Walter realized. “Looking back makes you weak.”