Somewhere in Germany Page 4

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8

  We visited the Wedels in the Höhenstraße. They are quite nice and do not look like Nazis at all. They are supposed to move into a couple of attic rooms. Their furniture does not fit into those and so we can use it. Mama and I are sure that this is only a trick, but Papa says Mr. Wedel works for the gas company and most likely does not have anything with which he could bribe the people at the housing authority. Who knows? …

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14

  Papa went to see Mrs. Wedel again, and all of us are full of hope and stomachaches. We are supposed to move tomorrow. The cook all of a sudden became quite friendly when he found out and sent us four portions of the Shabbat meal, even though we only used to get the midday meal till now. If I am not here at this time tomorrow, I will believe in miracles again. And I will start praying again, too.

  3

  KARL WEDEL WAS A MID-LEVEL EMPLOYEE at the municipal gas company. He was hardworking and frugal, and he liked to tinker around in his free time. As long as the situation had permitted, he had built German castles and fortresses with matchsticks and with the same kind of meticulousness that his superiors valued in his work. For most of his life he had relied more on the sense of reality that his courageous wife displayed than on the promises and pressures of the times. Up to the lethal attacks on Frankfurt, he had never been interested more than absolutely necessary in events that he felt he could not change anyway. After the war he found it all the easier to concentrate on his own affairs because that attitude seemed to be the only one feasible for people who did not want to stand accused of being too intensely involved in politics again.

  The eviction notice came at a time when he no longer expected it. The postwar period had brought general deprivations like hunger and a short supply of electricity and coal but had demanded fewer sacrifices of the Wedels than of other people in similar circumstances. They also did not have to deal with any of the bothersome acknowledgements of guilt.

  Appearing in court for a denazification trial had not been easy for Karl Wedel, who had a hard time standing up for his own interests and found it even more difficult to talk about himself. Before the trial he had been in a state of permanent anxiety. Yet the outcome had not been entirely unsatisfactory. He had been categorized as highly incriminated because of his early entry into the party, which had been influenced more by his wife’s urgent pleas than by the definitely persistent and unmistakably threatening recommendations of his superiors at work. But in early 1947, because of a shortage of experienced and qualified people, his place of employment had been able to get special permission for him to keep working at the same level as those of his colleagues who, through clever corrections to their life’s histories, had attained the desired status of nominal party members.

  The order to give up his apartment at such a late time seemed too harsh a punishment for a man who, even considering the new democratic ideas, had never exposed himself to criticism. Once again his wife turned out to be the stroke of luck and stabilizing force in a series of circumstances that he felt were as unfortunate as unjust.

  In contrast to him, she had not been blinded by the apparent calm and was prepared. Through connections that Karl Wedel was unable to fathom and as a municipal employee would have been unable to endorse, Frieda had had the two attic rooms finished in such a way that they were ready to be occupied at any time. In spite of this, and because he knew that his tenants were not exposed to an equal fate, he considered the planned move of the returning emigrant Redlich family into his apartment a personal defeat.

  He would have felt less oppressed if lodgers had been assigned to one of his three rooms as was customary for the times. Then he could have talked about this daily sacrifice and could have complained without any fear of the misunderstandings that were so typical for the new times. Also, he would not have become, as he imagined he was now, the secret laughing stock of people who had never acted any differently from him but had been luckier in the current so-called democratic times.

  When it became obvious that all protests to the housing authorities were futile and might in the future even lead to incriminations that were difficult to predict, Frieda Wedel went back to her old habit of accepting the inevitable and making the best of a bad situation. Her experiences as the eldest of five children with a prematurely widowed mother; the deprivations of her youth during World War I; her relationship with a constantly undecided husband; her dealings with two stepdaughters who, despite all her efforts, had remained strangers; and, above all, the long dispute over the inheritance of the house in the Höhenstraße, had at every turn in her life kept alive a natural talent that enabled her to come to an arrangement with fate without worsening the situation through her own actions.

  When the inescapable became a fact, Frieda Wedel made the final preparations for the two attic rooms with the same energy that she had invested as a young woman in fixing up their first apartment. She mobilized, quite successfully, the hope that the uninvited guests might disappear as quickly as they had come. There were the corresponding rumors, in this case quite encouraging, that the Jews in Germany were sitting on packed suitcases anyway, and were only waiting to move to countries where they were not the cause of such problems.

  Even though Frieda Wedel considered it an irony of fate that she could not fully understand—why she of all people had to relinquish her apartment to a Jewish family returned from emigration—she still found it a blessing that she personally did not have anything to reproach herself for in this regard. Even during those years when it would have been understandable and opportune, she had never taken part in any of the events that today, rightly so, were designated as cruel.

  Apart from the Isenbergs, who had disappeared suddenly and had owned a house in the Rothschildallee, which she had been able to see from her window, and the unfortunate wife of the mailman Öttcher, to whom Frieda Wedel had given bread and sausages a few times when it was dark and even after the woman had been forced to wear the yellow star, Frieda Wedel did not know any Jews. Yet, she was apprehensive about meeting the Redlichs. People like Frieda, who were interested in current affairs, could not be as uninhibited at the prospect of Jewish tenants as of people whose customs and reactions were predictable.

  The first meeting with Walter Redlich was unexpectedly pleasant for Frieda Wedel. He had not, as she had anticipated and feared, confronted her as a man who was certain of his rights, but instead had acted rather shy and almost as if he had trouble with the fact that he was driving her out of her apartment. Two weeks later, Frieda Wedel was satisfied to find that the favorable impression of the first encounter of two such disparate worlds had not been false. On the contrary.

  Frieda Wedel liked the Redlichs whether she was pleased about it or not, whether her acquaintances understood her or not, whether she could explain her feelings to herself or not. It was not only that she considered a university-educated man, who would not have rented an apartment in the Höhenstraße in normal times, an enrichment for the middle-class housing community. The Redlichs obviously had even less than most people although there was all that talk that Jews were doing well again. Frieda Wedel was touched by the Redlichs though she was unable to account for her emotions and softheartedness, which at the beginning of autumn, and in view of imminent problems like cold and hunger, seemed ridiculous and not at all in step with the times.

  Walter Redlich was reserved, friendly, obviously grateful for every conversation in the staircase, open to suggestions, and surprisingly receptive to the situation of the Wedels. His modesty and the totally unexpected pleasure that even after moving in he still talked about “your apartment,” as if he were aware of the temporary nature of their relationship, made this clear in an almost delightful way.

  Jettel Redlich was to Mrs. Wedel the embodiment of the lady she would have liked to be, and she admired Jettel without reservation. She found that baffling. Jettel’s helplessness in practical matters, her thoroughly engaging lethargy, and her absolutely astonishing naiveté whe
never an emergency had to be faced with experience and ingenuity, held for Mrs. Wedel the kind of special appeal of a culture that had disappeared completely from the times and was longed for. The oddity alone that Jettel had a maid in a three-room apartment and had told Mrs. Wedel, during their first conversation, that she had never been without household help in all her life and could not be either, impressed Mrs. Wedel. She also liked the fact that Jettel was not aloof or even arrogant, but was always ready for a conversation and would then talk about her life in Africa in the same matter-of-fact way as Mrs. Wedel about her garden plot in nearby Seckbach. That she was able to help this bird of paradise with her practical advice gave a boost to her self-confidence, which otherwise certainly would have been undermined by the forced expropriation.

  There was more. Frieda Wedel envied the Redlichs’ family life, which she had not been allowed to experience in this way. Even though Walter and Jettel became so loud at times during their fights that Jettel’s accusations and Walter’s equally violent answers could be heard in the two attic rooms, Mrs. Wedel could sense the bond that, as she had already heard before, was typical for Jewish families. Mrs. Wedel was utterly fascinated by the fact that Regina came home immediately after school, did not meet her friends, pushed the pram every afternoon to the Günthersburg Park, and almost insisted on taking care of her brother, who would not only say “Mama” to his mother but often also to Regina.

  In spite of the happiness to have escaped the nursing home and with that the malice of the cook, the caretaker, and the fellow lodgers from Shanghai, Walter, Jettel, and Regina found adjusting once again to new surroundings more difficult than they had originally envisioned. With the cold weather, which set in very suddenly at the end of November after the steaming summer, came the worries about coal, restrictions in the use of electricity and gas, and above all the lack of winter clothes.

  Jettel alone was all set with her black wool coat from Breslau. She had only kept it during the hard times of the emigration because winter coats could not be sold in Kenya anymore after the beginning of the war when the rich British farmers’ wives did not need them any longer to travel to England.

  Walter’s gray winter coat from the British military had been stolen on the first cold day at court. He was left with a dustcoat that was too big for him and he got so cold in that his old rheumatism acted up again. He often pondered if his pains were bothering him more than his hunger, and he did his best to hide his state from Jettel and Regina.

  Regina got an old ski outfit of her mother’s that was almost completely new because it had only been worn once during her honeymoon in the Riesengebirge, but it was so old-fashioned that it stood out as strange even in destitute postwar Frankfurt. On the first cold day she came home with frozen hands; for the rest of the winter she had to protect herself from the elbow down with woolen cloths, and she felt like the tattered men on crutches whom she met on the bridge. On rainy and stormy days she would remember how a pregnant Jettel had been sitting under a tree in the glowing heat of Nairobi, the rains long overdue, and had said, “You can protect yourself from the cold, but not from the heat.” The anguish of her memories discouraged her even more than the realization that she did not have the strength to defend herself against her despair.

  Else still had a winter coat that she had bought before the war in Leobschütz, but no shoes except for a pair of sandals that she had worn all summer long in the Gagernstraße. This only became evident when she refused over and over again to leave the house, which led to the first serious conflict with Jettel, who did not want to stand in line in front of the stores while Regina was in school.

  Walter’s old military boots, which he had not turned in during the demobilization, saved the situation. Else even wore them in the kitchen, where only the coal stove, which because of a lack of electricity was also used for cooking, was heated. Walter taught her to say, “A present from King George” and her trouble with the pronunciation amused the whole family during their most dismal hours.

  Without Mrs. Wedel the mood would have plummeted even more precipitously than the thermometer. She put in the good word that was necessary for people without connections with the coal dealer so that he at least delivered the fuel that they were entitled to on their ration coupons. She revealed to Jettel the addresses of halfway sympathetic merchants who on rare occasions would surrender some articles against clothing coupons, and she talked to the neighborhood greengrocer. Without the encouragement of a woman who was well informed about her past, the owner would not have even surrendered turnips, let alone a potato, to the Redlichs.

  Regina not only learned how to knit from Mrs. Wedel, but also how to unravel old sweaters from her supply, use the wool over again, and furnish her brother with sweaters, caps, and mittens. Else got such useful recipes for turnips from her that she only occasionally still muttered, “At home only our pigs used to eat these.”

  The axe, cooking utensils, blankets, needles and mending yarn, ink and the little bag for soap scraps, mason jars for grocery shopping, little zinc tub for bathing Max, clothespins, coal shovel, pail, broom, and all those other things for daily use, for which politically and racially persecuted people got special coupons, but that could not be found in any store, came from the Wedels’ well-equipped household.

  In the beginning Mrs. Wedel was confounded by her compassion, but after that more by the fact that just at a time when the only important thing seemed to be one’s own survival, she was, in spite of her tough sense for the practical, unable to combat her continually growing readiness to help.

  It was not, as most of her neighbors and acquaintances surmised and sarcastically remarked, that Frieda Wedel had recognized the signs of the time and sensed personal advantages when she took the obligation to right wrongs literally, which was publicly endorsed but usually considered superfluous and burdensome. She just had not been prepared for the fact that these people, rumored to be doing better than everyone else, were in even more dire circumstances than the many envious people who believed in their own rumors.

  For Hans Puttfarken’s visit, Mrs. Wedel, because she was impressed by the fact that the head of a ministerial department from Wiesbaden was going to sit on her sofa, not only contributed the recipe for the cake made of oats, artificial cocoa, and honey, but also the cake mold and an apple from her garden. The result was a personal triumph for Jettel. She wondered if the Puttfarkens might like the taste of a piece of the gray cake mound, which had luckily absorbed the aroma of the roasted apple peel, or if a man in high office like Puttfarken might be used to better food than a judge and would, therefore, have to force down every bite. This question occupied her even more than the anxiously anticipated reunion itself.

  After Puttfarken’s letter to Nairobi announcing Walter’s appointment as a judge in Frankfurt, there had only been one further contact. Walter and Jettel had received a postcard to welcome them to Frankfurt, and this gesture had actually hurt them more than it pleased them. The few sentences had been more formal than friendly, even stiff, just the way the two of them remembered Puttfarken from his time as a judge in Leobschütz and quite different from his heartfelt, open letter to Kenya that Walter for a long time had called “the beginning of my third life.”

  “Jettel,” Walter had said when he brought the card home from court, “we have to get used to the fact that a mere judge is only a nebbish for a man in high office.” It was one of those rare moments since arriving in Frankfurt that Jettel agreed with her husband.

  Now Hans Puttfarken stood in their living room: tall, blond, hardly changed at first glance, only thinner and with the gray skin tone that corresponded to the shabbiness of the times, in a jacket that was too big and a shirt that was too loose. He was as embarrassed as he had been when he had come to bid them farewell in Leobschütz and had been afraid it could be rumored that he was still visiting Jewish friends.

  He moved his hand as if he just had to straighten out his hair, which prevented him from taking a clear fir
st look to check and collect himself. But then he surrendered utterly to the surprise that Jettel was still the beautiful woman he remembered with the thick, midnight-black hair, the perfect skin, and that trace of discontent in her soft brown eyes, which had always made her seem capricious and, in a disquieting way, desirable to him. He was searching for words to tell her about those of his emotions he could disclose, but his throat was dry and his tongue was heavy.

  He wanted to draw his wife, whose unease he could sense even though she was standing behind him, into the circle of mutual expectations, but he did not succeed in that either. Then he noticed Regina with her sunken cheeks, but still not without the kind of harmony that he was no longer able to interpret, and a happily crowing baby on her stomach who was clapping his hands and blowing tiny bubbles of spit from his mouth. Relieved, because he was too shy to embrace the father, Hans Puttfarken closely hugged the laughing package in the gray terry towel.

  “Too much has happened,” he murmured.

  “Too much,” Walter agreed, relieved that the emotions of the moment made them mute.

  They sat down at the table. Else served the malt coffee from the well-traveled coffee pot with the floral pattern that Owuor had once loved and bathed in the sun of Ol’ Joro Orok. Regina saw a black arm glisten, heard the shuffle of bare feet on the thick wooden floor boards, and smelled the sweetness of Owuor’s skin. Startled and hurriedly, she swallowed the salt of the memory before it could get into her eyes.

  Mrs. Puttfarken, with tired eyes marked by suffering, her hands shaking, which she tried to suppress in vain, praised the cake and timidly stroked Max. Jettel smiled, but the uneasiness, frozen onto the rigid faces like ice-flowers to a window, remained an unwelcome companion for people who wanted to recapture the years but did not know how.

  Max reached for his cup with one hand and with the other for a small pin that gave a shimmer of light to Mrs. Puttfarken’s dark brown dress, when Regina said in the best Silesian dialect, “Careful with the mug!”