Somewhere in Germany Page 5

  “Good God, Regina speaks Silesian,” Puttfarken exclaimed. “Just think about it; she grows up in the bush and speaks Silesian.”

  His laughter reminded Regina of the long buried echo that was warmed by the sun in the mountains around Ol’ Joro Orok. She readied herself once more to fight her tears. When she opened her eyes, she saw that Puttfarken was still laughing. Her father, too.

  Once the hearts had been opened so suddenly and in such an unexpected way, the words could not be held back anymore. They tumbled with unrestrained force from the silence; even the briquettes, wrapped in moist newspaper in the oven and already given up for the day, seemed to struggle for new life. The wind shook the windows but its voice had lost its fury and bitterness.

  Puttfarken spoke of the anxiety and fear about his Jewish wife during the years when every day was a renewed gift and yet at the same time an extension of the anguish, of his call to forced labor, of the misery of the flight from Upper Silesia, and of the difficulties and hopes of a new beginning. His voice had become calm, but not his eyes.

  Jettel and Walter fought about Africa. She talked about the farm and Nairobi, of friends and joys she had to leave behind; he spoke about the despair of those years in a foreign country.

  Jettel said, “Walter was always a dreamer.”

  “And you only liked to be where we were not at the moment,” Walter reproached her.

  Hans Puttfarken smiled faintly and said, “The two of you always fought with such gusto. How nice that that is still the case.”

  Regina was trying to understand the word “humiliation” that her father spat out in the same way she had once spat out the hot berries of the pepperbush, but her thoughts first went on a safari that she did not want to start and, after that, her ears traveled into a country where the words that she did not know could no longer bother her.

  Later she sat with her brother, who warmed her limbs the way the dog Rummler had done once, asleep on her lap, and Mrs. Puttfarken in the darkest corner of the room that was illuminated by only one light bulb. The day turned out to be a good one because Mrs. Puttfarken wanted to know everything about Africa, tried to pronounce Owuor’s name, and while doing so laughed in such a way that her eyes changed color. She was even interested in the guava tree fairy that had accompanied Regina when she was still a child and had been allowed to believe in fairies.

  “Do you know Swahili?” Mrs. Puttfarken asked. “My son really wanted me to ask you that. He is fifteen, too. Just like you.”

  “I can say everything in Swahili,” Regina assured her.

  “How do you say,” Mrs. Puttfarken whispered and laughed a second time, “I hate the Germans?”

  “I do not know the word for hate,” Regina perplexedly realized. “I think we did not hate at home. I was only allowed to hate the Nazis,” she remembered, “never the Germans.”

  “Lucky child,” Mrs. Puttfarken sighed. “I learned to hate and I cannot forgive.” Her eyes were very small in large hollows. Her hands were trembling again.

  “I hate the Germans, too,” Jettel said.

  Else carried the dishes into the kitchen and did not return, even though the Puttfarkens asked for her when they were leaving and called out, “See you in Hochkretscham.”

  Regina put Max to bed by herself. She softly sang the song of the jackal that has lost its shoe, waited until Max was asleep, crept out of the small room, and went looking for Else. She found her sitting without any color in her face, with her long blonde hair matted and wet, and her small eyes red from crying at the kitchen table. Her shoulders were shaking.

  Regina tried stroking her but Else’s body was as limp as the top of a thorn acacia that has been broken by a storm, and she reacted as little to the tenderness of the touch as her ears responded to fearfully whispered questions. Regina tore the door to the living room open and called for her parents. “Else, what on earth is the matter?” Jettel shouted, alarmed. “What has happened?”

  “Who hurt you?” Walter asked.

  Else clutched her hands together and started to cry again. When she was finally able to speak between two bouts of crying, she sobbed, “My father.” Later she screamed, “They beat him to death. Like an animal.”

  Walter was very pale when he asked, “Who?”

  “Why?” Jettel asked. “Why your father, of all people, Else?”

  It was almost midnight when Else—wrapped in Mrs. Wedel’s blanket and supplied with malt coffee that Jettel warmed up again and again and held out to her—was again able to control her body and voice.

  “The Poles beat my father to death,” she said and stared at the stove. “They came to the farm, dragged him outside, and killed him.”

  “Why?” Regina asked.

  “Because he was a German,” Walter said.

  They went to bed in silence. Regina tried to revive the old incantation to protect her against terrifying images, but it had not been able to survive the long journey and had lost its power. The words, and above all the devils that she had tried to kill with the balm of her childhood days, mocked her like a warrior who meets an unarmed opponent and is not satisfied with the arrow alone from a taut bow.

  From her parents’ bedroom she heard the first, still-muted sounds that preceded the war, then she heard her father say, very clearly, “If you hate all Germans, do not forget Else either.”

  Jettel’s voice, full of the bewilderment that Regina loved in her mother and would never be able to understand, said, “But not our Else. I do not hate her.”

  “But you are allowed to hate Mrs. Wedel,” Walter said. “She was even a Nazi.”

  “I will not have anything said against Mrs. Wedel. Not against her! Where would we be without her?” Jettel angrily asked.

  Walter’s laughter, strong enough to bounce against the wall, and not losing any of its sharpness in the process, reached Regina’s ears a fraction of a second before she was sure that she had been wrong. The old magic of the God Mungu, whom she had been forced to leave, was not dead. Only Mungu dried tears before they hardened into salt and turned them into laughter.

  4

  DISTRICT COURT PRESIDENT KARL MAAS was an exceptional individual. He was pleasant toward everyone, but also suspicious—without letting his distrust become offensively obvious—of people who considered it opportunistic to vie for his friendship too quickly. He was neither taken in by continual complaints about the present nor by people’s constant compulsion to prove their innocence in the past. He used the kind of straightforward language that was considered typical for the comfortably simple and unaffected way of life in the old Frankfurt. Even in February 1948, when provisions had become as meager as never before, Maas appeared as well nourished as in peace times.

  That a person could manage to look healthy, well-fed, and above all as if he were able to concentrate on things other than butter and ration cards for meat, and could even be content, gave hope. It could not be overlooked that Maas had very nourishing connections and obviously also the courage to use them in spite of his office. Contrary to the common practice of envying others’ well being, no one begrudged the corpulent district court president his satisfying sense for practical affairs. In addition to his sense of humor, which was always down-to-earth but never crude, and his quick answers that balanced sharpness with wit, it was his ample girth—so atypical in these times of need—that actually contributed to his popularity.

  All of this made many people forget how strongly the events of the Nazi period had shaped Maas. The general consensus at court was that he had been let go from the legal profession because of his courage and his unwillingness to reach a compromise with a regime that he had recognized for what it was very early on. But in reality he had a Jewish wife whom he only knew to be safe when the American troops marched into Frankfurt.

  The humiliations he had suffered and the fear of the long years without hope made Karl Maas sensitive to the fate of people who had been forced to endure the same shame of defenselessness; since their first
meeting, he had felt connected to Walter. At first he had only been touched by the younger man’s disheartened demeanor, his palpable fear of not being able to fulfill his old job after years in exile, and the almost frightening eagerness of the outcast to be an equal among equals again.

  But when Karl Maas realized that Walter had the same kind of personal courage as he did, and that he reacted temperamentally and very harshly to consciously insulting or even involuntarily voiced slights from his colleagues, the spontaneously felt sympathy turned into a relationship that younger men certainly would have interpreted as friendship.

  At first they took every meeting in the corridors of the courthouse as an excuse for a conversation, but very soon they no longer left those encounters to chance. Beyond the obligations of his office and considerations for a man who was missing ten years of professional experience, Maas felt responsible for Walter. Walter, in turn, was able to speak with Karl Maas about his plans and hopes without his usual fear of revealing too much about his feelings and sometimes even about the despair that in his darker moments, he felt as foreign in Frankfurt as he had in Africa.

  The two men only met twice outside of the court: once at the Maases’ apartment, once at the Redlichs’ in the Höhenstraße. Both invitations turned out to be just an oppressive exchange of civilities. It was obvious that Mrs. Maas was irritated by Jettel’s complaints and helplessness and especially by the persistence of a woman who put strangers in the position of a referee in her domestic squabbles. The daughters, too, even though they were almost the same age, did not have much in common. The Maases’ daughter, robust, athletic, and sociable, was unable to relate to Regina’s reserved behavior, her seriousness, and her concern for her little brother, a feeling that was unfamiliar to an only child. She did not leave any doubt that she had no intention of following her father’s recommendation to accept Regina into her circle or even become friends with her.

  The bond between the two men became even stronger without the restraints of a social etiquette that Maas would have considered a hindrance. Walter gave up the habit of using the warm stove in Maas’s office as an excuse for his frequent visits. Maas no longer disguised his conversations with Walter as business-related. It was only natural therefore that Maas was the first one Walter told that he did not want to be a judge any longer than absolutely necessary. He had expected objections, even feared that Maas would think him ungrateful, but did not delay the conversation once he had made up his mind.

  But Karl Maas only said, “I am not surprised.”

  “Why?”

  “You are not born to be an employee.”

  “I had enough time to learn, but I did not succeed. I want to be free. In all those stolen years I dreamed of being an attorney again. I never thought of being a judge.”

  “Have you told your wife yet?”

  “Not yet. She hates change.”

  “Wait till it is all settled then,” Maas advised him. “It is not easy these days to get established as an attorney. Office space is in even shorter supply than bread.”

  Walter was relieved. His plans were not yet concrete, almost illusions still, but it had bothered him not to tell Maas about them. The conversation seemed to him a first, important step toward the kind of freedom that he was, in spite of all efforts, unable to find as a judge. For the first time since his arrival in Frankfurt, he gave in to the pleasure of his true dreams. He saw himself sitting in his own office, reading files, composing briefs, dictating letters, and giving advice to clients: an independent man who is only accountable to himself—and has finally reached his goal.

  Walter was so occupied with his fantasies and his flight into the future, which all of a sudden seemed no longer so far out of reach, that he only slowly became aware of a silhouette in the corridor in front of his room. He was able to make out, quite clearly, two rusty pails next to a big suitcase that was held together by some string. The bigger pail was filled with potatoes, the smaller one with onions. The thought of a plate heaped with home fries full of fat and smothered in a brown onion gravy came quickly and uninvited. It tortured Walter’s nose and tormented his stomach, which immediately reacted with cramps; anxiously he tried to fight off the yearning for steaming bowls in a cozy kitchen.

  Walter imagined in too much detail, with too much pleasure, and for too long how he would feel if he were ever full enough again to leave leftovers on his plate. He only noticed that the man with the pails had gotten up when he saw that the stocky figure in the gray coat was no longer sitting on the chair in front of his room. After some time, in which Walter once again only thought of fried potatoes, he realized that the man stretched his body, lifted his head, and slowly put one foot in front of the other. He advanced three steps toward Walter and stood still.

  Only his gray hair, strangely light in the dark corridor, seemed to move; it stood upright and crowded together like young plants that stubbornly push out of the ground before their time, on a head that seemed especially big and angular and in an almost bizarre way familiar to Walter. The veil in front of his eyes became thick and the pictures that he allowed to get through ambushed him with a suddenness that rushed his memory through the years. Walter was able to see clearly now that the man had a red face and arms with powerful hands that he stretched out to him. It was the voice, so hard and yet so incredibly soft, so long gone and yet never forgotten, that made Walter run.

  “Dr. Redlich,” the voice said, “do you still recognize me?”

  Walter swayed as he reached for the gray coat, but he did not fall when the flame of recognition started to burn his body. The rough cloth chafed his face and caught the tears that started to flow. He made no attempt to defend himself. The happiness that flooded him made him blind and mute, and yet through the emotional upheaval he very clearly heard his own deafening scream.

  “Oh, my God,” Walter shouted. “Greschek. Josef Greschek from Leobschütz.”

  He registered, even though his head and heart were already racing backward into the past, how the doors around him opened and his colleagues rushed into the corridor, perturbed and uncomprehending; he felt their astonishment without seeing anyone but the one whose picture had accompanied him for so long.

  Walter could not take his eyes off Greschek. He pushed him through the corridor, shook him, clapped him on the shoulder, grabbed his gray mop of hair, and stroked every line in the face that he pulled close to his own again and again. When Walter, after a while in which he only heard the beating of his own heart and the rattle of his breath, was finally able to at least control his hands, he let go of the gray coat, ran to the door of his room, took a pail into each hand, clanged them together, and hurried back to Greschek.

  “Greschek from Leobschütz,” Walter shouted into the line of curiosity and disapproving bewilderment in front of each room. “We are both from Leobschütz. Take a good look at the man who was not afraid to come to a Jewish attorney up to the last day. He accompanied me all the way to Genoa when I had to emigrate and not even a dog would take a piece of bread from me anymore.”

  “The onions and potatoes are for you, Dr. Redlich,” Greschek said. “I brought them from Marke. You know that I made off to the Harz. I wrote that to you in Africa. Did you ever get my letter over there?”

  “Oh yes, Greschek. You cannot imagine what that day was like. We cried like children. Before that we did not even know if you were still alive.”

  “The Missus, too? She cried, too?”

  “Yes. She, too.”

  “That is nice, the way you said that,” Greschek smiled. “I sometimes dreamed of that.”

  The reunion made it impossible for the two men to express their thoughts. They walked from the court to the Höhenstraße past ruins and black walls, wheelbarrows, trams, and leafless trees with contours that in the light rain of the afternoon seemed deceptively subdued. As soon as the two friends stood still, they looked at each other and simultaneously shook their heads. Greschek was carrying both pails and, grumbling, repeatedly ref
used Walter’s attempts to help him. “A man like you does not lug potatoes.”

  Walter kept on saying, “That I live to see this.”

  He stayed on the stairs and had Greschek wait alone in front of the apartment till the door was opened. A plate fell from Jettel’s hand, and she heard the high sound of her own voice at the same time as the hollow sound of the broken dish. She screamed, “Greschek!” She sobbed and laughed as she opened her arms, and she pulled Greschek close and danced through the kitchen with him—the way she had once danced with Martin at Ol’ Joro Orok when the friend of their youth had come from South Africa and had released her and Walter for two unforgotten weeks from the trauma of abandonment.

  Later, still reeling from the shock of the encounter, Jettel insisted on preparing the fried potatoes, which Else had already peeled and salted with her tears.

  “My husband likes them just the way my mother used to make them,” she said and bent over the cut onions when she started to feel the pressure in her eyes.

  Greschek’s tempestuous welcome also reminded Regina of Martin and her first, long-buried, but never forgotten love. She sat in the kitchen and was unable to stop the journey into the good days because her nose had already started to rule her head. The images became clearer with every piece of onion that was thrown into the hot fat. She saw Owuor standing in the kitchen; she watched his arm with the gleaming skin move the pan, heard the sound of his voice when he sang, and felt his breath that formed small circles in the smoke.

  “I never realized,” she sniffled, “that Greschek really exists.”

  “Greschek,” Walter said and bit into a piece of raw onion, “is the embodiment of the decent German for me.”

  “Then you have not met many decent people in Frankfurt yet, Dr. Redlich,” Greschek said. “I was not decent, only not as bad as others.”