Somewhere in Germany Page 30

  With a despair that pulled her down into hopelessness with each new attack, she tried to relive the conversation of the last night, but she only heard bits and pieces of words that did not warm her and remained without meaning. Regina only knew one thing: She had not called her father bwana a last time, neither had he tenderly called her memsahib, and from now on nobody would share those conspiratorial words with her. The songs had faded, the magic was dead, and the game was over.

  Owuor had extinguished the fire in the oven, just as he had done on the poisoned day in Nairobi, when he had left at dawn with the old dog on a rope and his belongings tied into a kitchen towel. Regina and Walter had sat in the kitchen. At that time, there had been a long farewell, one that fixed the images that had to stay in one’s head forever, in form and color, with sound and scent. Had her father called a last time for the friend from his long wanderings as he often did when he needed something and nobody was around? Had he heard Owuor laugh one more time? Had he heard the echo bounding back?

  Regina could not shake the memory of Owuor. She knew that she only had to close her eyes to see his face, but she did not dare give in to her longing. It was not good to go on safari with one’s head as long as the body was still needed.

  The hall was silent for a moment. An older man slowly went up to the speaker’s platform. There he looked for a while for the paper in his coat pocket and touched his hat as if he wanted to take it off, but he remembered just in time that Jewish religious law requires one’s head to be covered. He smiled self-consciously and blinked when he let his arms sink down. The man was speaking for the people from Upper Silesia. Regina initially just heard words without putting them together into sentences, but she forced herself to pay attention and soon realized that she had heard the speech once before.

  She noticed it from the way the word “homeland” was emphatically stressed and how the short, thickset man with the steel-blue eyes said “Dr. Redlich”: Walter had drafted the speech of the Upper Silesians in great detail and, as became evident now, almost word for word. The mixture of sobriety and unexpected sentimentality suited him. Regina heard her father laugh. Or was it Owuor? He had taught her that words were only good and right if one said them twice. The echo of Owuor’s laughter had taught her to laugh.

  The sadness became remote and soft. Regina felt consoled in a familiar way. It was not entirely true that one needed a long farewell so that one would not lose the love of one’s life. It would not be any different with her father than with Owuor. He too could not leave her if she did not let it happen. Like Owuor, Walter had given her the gift of laughter. In another language, but with the same indestructible magic. Regina bent forward slightly and looked at her brother who, with the certainty of a well-prepared student, recited several of the words before the man from Upper Silesia uttered them. She realized that Max, too, would be capable of wit and sarcasm, but also of the love exemplified by his father. Only he did not know it yet.

  The cantor rose and started singing the first notes of the prayer for the dead. Regina had often heard it during memorial celebrations for the victims of the concentration camps and she always experienced how this old complaint released tears in everyone whose heart it reached. Now the poignant melody, sorrow made rigid in word and music, in fervor, piety, and eternity, applied to her father. Her eyes remained dry. The farewell was already behind her. And ahead of her lay only the days in which she had to let just one scene enter her head. Her father stood in Nairobi under the guava tree, tightened the bow, and hit her heart with Cupid’s arrow. Regina needed no more for a lifetime of love.

  When she got up to follow the coffin with Jettel and Max, she became aware of many curious and critical glances directed at her; she lifted her head even though she knew that this was not the custom for those from whom death demanded suffering. This way she was able to hear two women discuss in detail why she was not married and Max had not cried.

  “Nebbish,” one of the women said, “they are too proud for either. The girl to get married and the boy to cry. And the boy is just about to have his bar mitzvah. That is the worst that can happen to a boy. To be without his father on the most important day of his life.”

  “I feel sorry for the mother,” the second woman said. “She did not deserve this. Such a good, refined woman.”

  When Max, so different in his seriousness, spoke the son’s prayer for the father at the grave, Regina was hardly able to hold back her tears. They were not for her father but for her brother, who much earlier than she had lost the protection and confidence of childhood. Full of protest and sadness, she thought about the bar mitzvah that now during the year of mourning would only take place in the smallest circle, and she took Max by the hand to console him. The pressure of his fingers was firm and warm. He had already started to take on the duty that he had been burdened with. He was not even thirteen yet.

  Only when Fafflok, the thoughtful, taciturn companion of the last part of Walter’s life, halting with grief, spoke the truest and warmest words of the day at the graveside, did Regina realize that her father, neither in a cheerful mood nor in one of his depressive moods, had never drafted Fafflok’s speech. Regina gathered the reason. Fafflok had become his only friend in Frankfurt. Walter had only spared him, whose faith he respected like his own beliefs, from the macabre game.

  Regina’s memories wandered back to the beginnings in the foreign city; to hunger, hardship, and hope; to the first meeting with the Faffloks, the purchase of the house in the Rothschildallee, and Walter’s obsession to leave his family a debt-free house. So many scenes, conversations, and emotions rushed at her that she did not see the woman in the headscarf coming up to her. Regina only noticed her when the stranger took a small knife from her handbag and cut into Regina’s coat. Startled, she looked at her brother. His new dark suit, already bought for the bar mitzvah, was cut up just like Jettel’s coat.

  “One does that to spouses and children,” Max whispered. “It is a sign of grieving.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I did. But I didn’t think of it. Papa always told me to wear my old jacket to the funeral. He will be quite mad that I forgot.”

  “And how,” Regina agreed.

  “We’ll know the next time,” Max whispered.

  “Are you starting to be like your father already?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good. That’s the way it is supposed to be.”

  Two hours after the funeral the first visitors came to the Rothschildallee to pay their respects. Because the Sunday made it possible to follow tradition right away, it turned into a hurricane of condolences. There had never been this many people in the apartment—friends, acquaintances, and even strangers came to embrace and kiss the bereaved; to sigh, lament, and cry; to appraise the furniture and future; to give advice and remember their own sorrows. They pressed Jettel close, furtively and critically looked at Regina and Max, registered without exception that their eyes were not red from crying, and assured the sobbing widow that a husband’s death was so much harder on a woman than the death of the father on the children.

  Jettel nodded knowingly and judiciously, but said that she had good children who would never leave her and, like her late husband, would remove all difficulties from her path. They had had to give him their solemn promise. The people, who no longer whispered with dismay but openly demonstrated their active ability to take care of the sufferings of others, looked at Regina and Max again and nodded back. The most pious ones lowered their eyes and were quiet. Following the old customs, they brought soup, meat dishes, fish, fruit, and cake to the house. Whoever has to bemoan the death of a loved one should not be distracted from mourning through everyday needs like the necessity of supplying food.

  “I like the pious ones the best,” Max said in the kitchen, put a piece of gefilte fish on his plate, and eyed a cake.

  “Your father used to say the same thing.”

  “Because he liked to eat as much as I do?”
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br />   “No. He always envied the pious people because they know where they belong. I do, too, by the way.”

  Jettel, in spite of her tears, composed and in a gray flannel dress with white ruffles—she had only found out at the cemetery that Jews do not wear black as a sign of mourning—kept on talking about Walter’s last days, the unfinished crossword puzzle, and the happiness of her marriage. Her cheeks were pink. She was already in the process of weaving a new chapter in the story of her life.

  “My husband,” she reported, “fulfilled my every wish and even anticipated it. And he taught his children to do the same.”

  Regina envied Jettel very much, and not just because she was one of those rare women who did not look ugly in tears. She tried to imagine the future with her mother. She was not yet able to do so, but she was willing to take on the duty she owed her father. She was almost ready to smile at the thought of the embellished past that Jettel would now convert into a truth she would believe. Regina asked herself if Jettel was not going to miss the daily squabbles of her lively marriage; this time she really had to pull herself together not to smile. She was convinced that her mother would find new partners in her and, later when he was old enough, also in Max to continue proving herself in her fights against logic, insight, and any willingness to compromise.

  The last visitors finally left the house in the early evening. Jettel asked Ziri to set the table. “We are going to live as we did before,” she solemnly said. “I owe that to my husband. But I am not going to be able to eat a bite.” She ate with a good appetite and sighed a lot. “He would have wanted me,” she said, “to eat these sausages from the Silesian butcher. I got them especially for him.”

  After dinner she looked around and said reproachfully, but without malice, “I am surprised that the two of you did not shed a single tear. Several people approached me to ask if Papa’s death did not affect you deeply.”

  “One can cry without crying,” Regina replied, but her mother had never been able to recognize the regular repetition of words if they were not her own.

  When Max had gone to bed, she went to his room the way she had done when he was still a child. He had often asked for new wallpaper, but Walter had been too careful with his money. It had been an old, protracted fight between father and son, and it would not find a quick end now with a mother who on the day of the funeral already considered herself an impoverished widow.

  Regina stared at the pictures on the wall: peasant carts and busy horses; castles, trees, and babies in cradles; boys with balls, girls with dolls, and clowns with trumpets; men with goats and villages with church steeples and roosters crowing on them. She saw her brother lying on a white pillow in his blue and white striped pajamas. His eyes resembled those of the dolls on the wallpaper. His face was pale, his hair was dark, and the hand that reached for hers was too small for what it wanted to give.

  “Do you remember,” Max said, longing in his voice, “how you used to recite poems to me in the past?”

  “That was because I could not sing. I did not expect you to remember that.”

  “I still remember everything,” Max said, and after a pause he asked, “Don’t you have a poem for today?”

  “Yes,” Regina said. “Do you really want to hear it?”

  “Really.”

  She got a well-thumbed paperback from her room even though she knew by heart the text of Kurt Tucholsky’s poem, which she had not been able to banish from her sorrow for the last two days. She only needed the book to hide her face. She pushed the small chair in front of the bed and began reading aloud without even looking at Max once:

  The world looks different now. I cannot believe it yet.

  It cannot be.

  And a low, deep voice says:

  “We are alone.”

  A day without a fight—that was an empty day.

  You dared.

  What everybody feels, but no one wants to say:

  you said it.

  Regina heard her father’s voice simultaneously with her own. It was a parched day in Nairobi; she sat on the lawn burned by the sun, rocked the baby carriage, and recited verses from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Max, six months old, kicked his naked legs and gurgled with pleasure. Walter stepped out from behind a tree in his khaki uniform and asked, “Well, Regina, are you stuffing your brother’s ears with poems again?” The disapproval in Walter’s voice had made her embarrassed, but she had continued in Shakespeare’s voice, and her father had listened.

  Regina shook her head as on the long-forgotten day and continued:

  Each one of us was your beloved guest,

  who brought you joy.

  We carried everything to you. You loved

  to laugh so much.

  And never any pathos. That was not part of it

  in all that time.

  You were a Berliner and did not like

  formality too much.

  When Regina noticed that her voice was starting to become unsteady because she saw her father’s face too clearly and his life and love turned into a surge of pain, she vacillated if she should read the last two verses she feared so much or tell Max that the poem was finished. His appreciation of language and beauty did not allow it.

  “Go on,” he urged.

  We are following, because we have to, on your path.

  You are resting in your sleep.

  You have inflicted the first pain on me now.

  It hit its mark.

  You encouraged. Quietly took care. Laughed.

  If I am able to do anything:

  It is all done for you alone.

  So please accept it.

  Regina had learned the magic from Owuor at the edge of the flax field in Ol’ Joro Orok in the blue rush of the long rains: Tears, if of laughter or sorrow, made one heart out of two. People whom this happened to would never be able to separate during their lifetime without having their hearts broken forever. Yet once before she had felt the weight of a chain that had been forged from love and she held back her tears. But only till she heard Max cry.