Somewhere in Germany Read online

  He did not sleep well in the night before his release, and he woke up at five in the morning. His impatience and restlessness, and his yearning for work, duty and action, merit, and independent decisions had caught up with him. He needed family, home, and activity. He asked for his breakfast the moment the cart with the dishes clanked on the corridor, ate quickly, and got annoyed with the thin coffee and the egg that had been cooked for too long. He dressed, and he packed his small suitcase although Jettel was not coming till ten o’clock to pick him up. He stood at the window for a moment, counted the cars, fretted that his was standing at home, and rang for the nurse.

  “Holy smoke, you are all packed already. The doctor wants to come and see you before you leave.”

  “He doesn’t have to, I am going to send him a picture of myself.”

  “He is going to be here at eight at the latest. He specifically promised you that yesterday.”

  “And what does he think I am going to do here till then?”

  “Now don’t be so impatient on your last day here, Dr. Redlich. That is not going to be good for you.”

  “Waiting around will be even worse for me.”

  “It’s not that long. Why don’t you work on a crossword puzzle?” nurse Martha suggested. “You always like to do that.”

  “Just for your sake,” Walter grumbled, “but under protest.”

  He needed some time to find his fountain pen and he searched for an equally long time for his glasses, sat down in the easy chair at the window, and opened the magazine, reconciled to the enforced idleness by the routine movement that already seemed like a part of everyday life to him. For a short moment the thought engaged him that nurses were much better at placating a discontented husband than a wife, and he smiled. All his life Walter had found satisfaction in the logic of crossword puzzles. They were in accord with his inclination to reach a set goal through perseverance and without emotions. He was fascinated by the fact that in crossword puzzles the outcome did not depend on chance. During the emigration it had struck him as symbolic that he did not know enough English to solve even a single puzzle.

  He noticed that he was filling the empty little squares too fast, so he took a break to extend the pleasure for a while longer and looked out of the window. The clear light of the street lanterns matched his mood. The trees had become frozen during the cold night, but the first frost flower on the windowpane had melted already. When the second one began to drip, he bent over the paper again and kept on writing. It was so quiet in the room that the scratching of the pen seemed loud.

  The alarm clock that had been set for seven o’clock rang piercingly. Nurse Martha came into the room. The hard linoleum did not dampen any of her firm steps. “See,” she said, “now you have fallen asleep again with your glasses on your nose.” As quietly as her heavy shoes allowed, she went to the night table to pick up the tray with the breakfast dishes, but her sleeve got caught on the small lamp and she had a hard time holding onto the tray. The small milk jar hit the coffee pot, the cup shattered noisily on the floor, and the pieces fell against the iron bedpost.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that,” the nurse said and turned to Walter, alarmed. When he did not move, she started laughing. “You have to play your jokes with us to the last moment. Well, it is all right, Dr. Redlich; I know for sure that I have woken you with the noise.”

  She put the tray down and, still laughing, took the few steps toward his chair. Since his head was bent down, first she only looked at the small table with the open magazine. There were only a few empty squares left in the crossword puzzle.

  Walter had not found the last answers before his death. He still had the pen in his hand.

  22

  IN ONE OF THE NIGHTS raging with the thunder of the black God in Ol’ Joro Orok, far ahead of the time when it is necessary for a human being to gain everlasting vision, Regina had learned about the days of the final lightning. Those days armed themselves with a lethal axe and inflicted wounds that would never heal again. Whoever had suffered their pain was always able to count the scars and make them talk. None of the warriors of the dark, though, ever succeeded in ultimately taking away the hope of a child who still feels her father’s hand on her shoulder. Now that day had come.

  January 11, 1959, was a destroyer of life. One single strike delivered the decisive blow. Regina prepared herself to receive the foe she had feared for so long. When she caught the noise of her teeth, which clicked together like clubs with iron heads, she pressed her lips tight. She knew that if she wanted to show herself worthy of her father’s legacy, she had to defend herself against the quick tears of sorrow with the same determination as a young Masai defending himself against the pain of his first wound. The discipline with which he had carried his burden was the recognition she owed him.

  Far away, church bells rang from the world of life. The second day of the new era was a Sunday. After an icy night it brought low temperatures that had hardly ever occurred in the gentle mildness of Frankfurt winters and the air stayed rigidly frozen even at ten in the morning. Still, it became obvious half an hour before the scheduled time that neither the abnormal cold nor the biting, steadily increasing wind and certainly not the far ride many people had to make had been able to dissuade just one friend, acquaintance, colleague, or like-minded person, who felt the duty of being there, from coming to Walter’s funeral.

  The freezing people were assembled in small groups in front of the white cemetery walls, were congregated in the yard by the funeral hall, and stood under trees that guarded the first row of the snowed-in graves. Those familiar with the customs—those who did not have to suspect that they might offend some religious law unknown to them by some inadvertent movement with consequences they could not fathom—entered for a short while into a small, longish waiting room where each breath turned into a cloud of gray, damp mist. On a narrow white wooden bench, Jettel waited crying and Regina sat silently next to Fafflok. On the opposite side sat a few women in worn clothing and bearded men with alert glances.

  Regina had never seen them before and Jettel had only seen them at funerals. The strangers, whose faces lacked timidity and whose many expressive gestures made clear that they were more familiar with death than life, talked to each other with a cheerfulness that matched neither their gray, furrowed faces nor the occasion. They made very abrupt pauses during their conversations, then looked thoughtfully at mother and daughter, and started to talk again as instantly as they had stopped. When they nodded, which they did frequently, it seemed as if they had practiced the uniformity of their movements for a long time.

  Whenever the good silence started, Regina heard her brother’s voice, which was reassuringly firm and very clear. For a moment she felt liberated from the prying glances that distressed her. She turned around and could even see Max if she dared to stretch her body and lift her head high enough. He stood in the next room with his tutor and practiced the prayer for the dead one last time. Even though she did not know Hebrew, it had become as familiar to her during the two days since the call from the Holy Spirit Hospital as if she had heard it all her life.

  While holding her mother’s cold hand, she tried to summon some ability to feel back into her own limbs to pass on pain and sympathy as required by the laws of daughterly love. But she was unable to steer her thoughts, which in an inattentive moment had stolen away from the present to the days without fear and death, into the right direction. The escape took all power away from her head and drained too much strength from her body.

  Regina squeezed her eyes tight with a determination to turn the water in them into salt that would remain invisible once again and looked out into the yard. She saw the towering black hats, the wall of dark coats, and a never-ending sea of white faces, and her senses took flight again. She caught herself imagining that seeing so many people would have pleased her father and then she remembered how he had always said, cheerfully and amusedly, that nobody would miss his funeral for the simple reason that o
ne did not have the expense of a wreath at a Jewish funeral.

  She considered it a sin to enjoy a joke at a moment that required introspection, respect, and humility. She was ready to atone. Max came from the backroom. His steps were loud in the sudden silence. He sat down next to Regina and leaned on her shoulder. She finally felt the warmth she had been unable to pass on to Jettel before.

  Distraught by regret and shame because she had so contentedly thought about her father’s life and not his death, and moreover with a tranquility that she found strange and provocative, Regina let go of her mother’s hand. Bewildered, she turned to her brother to claim the consolation of silent sharing, which flowed through her. She became aware that Max still had the same gentle eyes with the heavy eyelashes that had enchanted people when he was a child. But now, while premature knowledge overshadowed these eyes, another shade had been added—the kindness that had made her father the man he had been.

  “Do you know when we can finally get out of here and go into the hall?”

  “As the last ones,” Max said. “Just think about it. We are sitting in the first row over there. I know that. Papa always promised me that.”

  He tried hard during the last sentence to have his voice laced with the sorrow that the ears of friends and, more importantly, strangers expected from him, but Regina detected the familiar, telltale sound of quickly suppressed levity and was aware of it, She bit her lips again to hold back the smile within before it became visible. Max was not able to get his father’s jokes out of his ears either.

  “Do you remember when he promised you that the first time?”

  “When he had his first heart attack,” Max recalled. “Do I have to be ashamed today because I laughed so hard then?”

  “No, he wanted you to be able to laugh when you thought about him. Even today. He always promised me as a child that I did not have to wash my neck for his funeral.”

  “That is just as good.”

  On the way to the cemetery hall, her arm around Jettel and hand in hand with her brother, Regina noticed a large group of older people standing at the door, waiting uncomfortably. The men’s black hats were conspicuously new; the coats looked as if they had lived through as much as their owners. The women, small of stature and plump, had hard features. The faces with the red eyes and the expressions of gloomy discomfiture were similar to each other. Even though Regina nodded to these mourners—whose sincerity she felt—to let them know that she thanked them in memory of her father, she was unable to remember any of their names. But without having to think for a moment, she knew the names of all the small towns and villages that had been their homes.

  She was deeply moved when she saw the silent group. They had all come: the people from Silesia and Upper Silesia, those uprooted people with whom Walter had shared the memories of a naïve youth and the unappeasable longing for Breslau, Leobschütz, and Sohrau—these people alone with their idealized view of the past had made it possible for his lifelong dream of a homeland to become reality once more without having to admit that his illusions had died.

  Regina noticed that many of Walter’s much-loved compatriots held their hands folded in front of their stomachs as if they had to abstain from an action they wanted to perform. Yet she was unable to explain the associations to herself until a woman stepped up to her and whispered, “Dr. Redlich always said we were not supposed to disgrace him and come to a Jewish cemetery with flowers.”

  “He would have been happy that you thought of that,” Regina whispered back to her. Again a funny thought prevented her from giving in to her pain. She remembered how Walter had told her that he had informed his people from Upper Silesia, whenever they came to his office or he went to theirs, about the rites of the Jewish burial and how they had all said, “How can one follow a gentleman like Dr. Redlich with empty hands on his last journey?”

  Regina was so precisely able to imagine the hard sound of the Silesian voices, the surprised exclamations with the long, drawn-out vowels, and the brusque, picturesque expressions that she was able to hear her father talk. His voice was present enough to sharpen her senses. When the familiar sounds were supplemented first by wit and irony, and then by pictures that had been painted so long ago, Regina realized what her father had done for her.

  He had been a wise man in the traditional costume of the fool. He had not rehearsed the future with his family out of some grotesque sense for the macabre, but only so that they would be able to stand the present without despairing. It was only Regina’s body that was still trembling and only the cold that made it shiver.

  Not all people, by far, found room in the large cemetery hall. They stood against the walls and in the center aisle. It was not possible to close the door; the ice-cold wind pushed up to the simple wood coffin. Regina tried to imagine her father in this coffin, but her head rejected the reality. She also told herself again and again that the thought that death had come to him so fast and without pain and premonition should console her, but she was only able to think of the lead being poured at New Year’s Eve and the strange hoaxes of the night. Embarrassed, she squeezed Jettel’s hand when the rabbi stepped to the podium.

  He was a white-haired man of imposing height with a red face ready for anger at any time, arresting eyes, and the kind of voice that the most upright and eager of the biblical prophets were rumored to have. He spoke thunderously of the duty to preserve faith and tradition and said that, in spite of his liberalism, he had always found that commitment in his conversations with Walter. He called the deceased a contradictory man who had courageously taken on the emigration to a coffee plantation in South America, had loved his family, and had not been allowed to see his children grow up and follow in his footsteps. Regina stared into her lap, but then she lifted her head after all. She searched for her brother’s look behind her mother’s back. His shoulders were shaking, too, but he held a hand in front of his mouth.

  “Just don’t laugh when the rabbi mixes me up with someone else,” Walter had often said. “He does that on principle at funerals. The main thing is that he says I was a good human being.”

  The staid speeches—by the representative from the bar association, who spoke of the now rare professional ethos of a “fair” man without ever becoming aware of the wordplay that his remark played with Walter’s last name; the president of the Jewish community, who called Walter a man of the first hour and subtly transcribed his choleric temper as personal courage; and an old fraternity brother from the Breslau student days, whose address was interspersed with Latin expressions—often so strikingly resembled, word for word, Walter’s ironic drafts that even Jettel had to smile once. She had sometimes looked like that on the farm when she had suddenly thought about her youth and had dreamed of her successes as a young girl. Rarely had she done so later on.

  Regina remembered the days of her first life and became wistful. Even though she told herself that this was not the time, she started brooding about her parents’ marriage. She asked herself if her father had at least realized in the short moments of Jettel’s liberating laughter that his wife had more of a sense of humor than he was willing to admit. The sigh that Regina suppressed and also the tears that welled up seemed disloyal to her. Still, the question persisted as to why her father never could be persuaded to let go of any kind of prejudice. She was satisfied that her love had always been strong enough to be understanding of others in this respect.

  The need for air and escape became unrelenting when the fraternity brother followed his Latin quotes with Greek ones. Regina’s eyes, controlled for too long by a will that did not permit the display of actual feelings, were unable to distinguish one face from another. All of a sudden she saw Emil Frowein standing among the faceless crowd. She could not believe it.

  He towered over most of the people there and it was obvious that he was one of the few who were able to understand the speaker. Regina had never seen him in such a stiff, black hat and she needed a moment to recognize him. She asked herself how he had gotte
n the idea that he should share this farewell, which could not mean anything to him, with her. She found no answer. The secretary had been the only one who was there when Regina had called in to say that she was not coming to work. The fact that Frowein had bought a new hat touched her even more than his unexpected appearance. She intended to tell him that when she was able to think, feel, and talk again.

  It was now Regina who smiled when she remembered that her father had always said “Reiswein” when he talked about her boss. She had often been upset about it. She did not even understand why anymore, thought the altered form of the word witty all of a sudden, and realized that the clumsy joke was most likely the only thing that permitted her father to keep his distance and still talk about a part of his daughter’s life that mattered to him.

  It had never occurred to Regina to introduce the two men to each other. Frowein, she believed now, would have agreed in any case. Walter most likely would not have agreed. Yet Regina felt as if she should have at least tried to find a connection for the two chapters in her life. She was sorry about the missed opportunity; it seemed like too nasty a twist of fate that death was writing the epilogue that she herself should have thought of.

  Frowein and her father were very similar to each other in their modesty, honesty, and integrity. Regina had felt from the beginning that this was why what had happened over and over again during the past years—when she had looked for dialog, confirmation, and loving care—was understandable. It made her sad that she had never been able to tell her father about the similarity between the men who shaped her life. Walter had longed so much for an explanation, and Regina had always been silent.

  At this moment of passing thoughts that had nothing to do with her sorrow, her fear of separation, or the knowledge that all love has to die, Regina understood what had happened to her. She had not been able to get to the crucial word, to turn her head once more. When the call from the hospital came, she had not fared any differently than at the time when she had left the farm at Ol’ Joro Orok without forewarning, without farewell, without a real last look at the house, woods and fields, people and animals, and had never returned again. This time, too, she had not been allowed to say goodbye.