Somewhere in Germany Page 6

  Before it got dark they sat at the table, Greschek between Jettel and Walter, a little embarrassed and even more awkward in his movements than at other times. He had traveled for three days by train, had to defend his pails for a very long time at the border between the occupation zones, and now he was distressed that he had not listened to his wife, Grete, and had not taken a fresh shirt.

  “The lard was more important,” he said and put the knife into his mouth.

  “Man, Greschek, can you imagine that I am full for the first time since we arrived in Frankfurt?”

  “Yes,” Greschek answered. “I only have to look at all of you to imagine that. Miss Regina is not going to survive much longer.”

  As soon as Regina wiped her brother’s greasy hands, he would put them back into the dish. He had to stand up on the chair to reach the mountain of home fries and, bursting with happiness, was looking for fresh prey while he was still chewing.

  “Regina, don’t let him eat too much. He is going to be sick. A two-year-old cannot take that much.”

  “Let him be, Jettel,” Walter said. “My son has not been able to get sick to his stomach for a long time. Who knows when he is going to have this opportunity again?”

  “Just let me take care of that, Dr. Redlich. I am going to stay for a while, if your Else washes my shirt and it is all right with your wife. One cannot leave a man like you on his own at a time like this.” Since he did not know anything about the laziness of a full stomach, Walter also forgot to shut off his head and throat in time. While he listened to the sounds of his stomach, which was pleasantly extended, he tried to catch the images of the day. It became a long journey that expanded into one of those confusing safaris, which, as Walter now realized, no longer ensnared only his daughter with their appeal. Alternately he stopped in Leobschütz, Genoa, and Ol’ Joro Orok and then found himself, too unexpectedly to be cautious, standing at the warm oven with Karl Maas and talking about plans in which hunger was no longer the measure of life.

  “You know, Greschek,” he said in the direction of the dozing head in the easy chair with the flowery upholstery, “one of these days I will be an attorney again. And then we will sue everyone in Marke who upsets you.”

  Jettel heard her husband’s words just as she was in the process of giving herself over to the confusing feeling that her body did not have any more demands, but she did not make an effort to understand those sentences. She only moved her head. She, too, was too full, too unaccustomedly content, and above all too tired to sense, even remotely, any danger of change.

  Later, when Greschek was snoring on the couch and Else was letting water run into the bowl in the kitchen while putting up her field bed, softly singing, Regina heard the bed in her parents’ bedroom squeak. At first she smiled knowingly as in the days when she did not yet have a brother and wanted nothing more in the world. Yet when she noticed that she was listening for every sound and tried to interpret it as in her childhood days, she was ashamed that she had ever been able to think that her parents might have forgotten the only part of their lives that came without a fight.

  Greschek, physically lazy but with a mind that was all the more active when it came to the climate of the times, which called for men like him, did not waste any time changing his friends’ lives and making them more nourishing. Even during the days when his electrical appliance store in Leobschütz was flourishing, he had taken more pleasure in conducting business outside the ordinary channels than in those that were deemed appropriate and the norm in a small town and which he found monotonous and not profitable enough. The long, arduous escape on foot from Upper Silesia and especially their life afterward as unwelcome “Eastern scum” in the small village in the Harz Mountains, where people had to accept them, had brought Greschek’s talent for improvisation and his business acumen to new heights. Since he was shrewd and above all knew people, he made Jettel his confidante for those undisclosed ways that he knew Dr. Redlich would not approve of.

  Jettel, who considered herself a businesswoman, was delighted. She was flattered that Greschek praised her street smarts and she concurred from the bottom of a full, long-suppressed heart with his opinion that decency was just a lack of courage to claim one’s own. Most of all, she recognized Greschek as a jewel—rough and grumpy, it was true, but above all as devoted as she was used to men being toward her. The first day she showed Greschek the green coffee beans from Kenya in the little bag that Walter was saving for a special occasion. He took it wordlessly, shaking his head, and returned just as mutely with a pound of butter and a pack of cigarettes. The second day, he took half a pack of cigarettes with him and came home with a radio.

  “You are not among the Africans anymore, Dr. Redlich. Cut off from the whole world. I still remember how happy you were when I sold you your first radio in Leobschütz.” At the end of the week Greschek had procured a side of bacon, a small tub of liquid soap, half a pound of roasted coffee, four cans of corned beef from American supplies, and two pairs of nylon stockings, with which Jettel danced around the apartment as happily as if they were diamonds.

  To the general bafflement of all, Greschek was able to trade in the unwanted, bitter cornmeal that had been distributed as food rations for weeks for the coveted white flour; he exchanged the dates they had gotten as meat rations for two bananas for Max. From his rucksack he proudly produced two Hershey’s bars for Regina and suffered his first defeat. She only licked the chocolate and then happily stuffed it in her brother’s mouth.

  “Miss Regina is just like her father,” Greschek complained to Else, whose earrings he had traded for shoes. “Too good for this world.”

  Jettel, although without hope, brought out a little sack of tea from Kenya. During the passage a bag of detergent had split open and made the tea forever unpalatable. This was the only time Greschek laughed out loud.

  “Don’t you know that good tea always tastes a little bit like soap?” he asked. Late that night, when Walter, who saw doom coming any day, believed that he had been arrested, Greschek returned home without the tea, but with two meters of flowered fabric for a dress for Jettel.

  She was ecstatic and gave Greschek a kiss. (This had never happened before.) Nobody knew how he got the things that so radically changed their life. He could neither be persuaded to tell where he conducted his beneficial transactions nor how he, who came from a village and did not know the city, had found the right access routes to the black market so quickly.

  He did not even tell Jettel that on his way there he used the trained eye of the electrician he had been in his youth and the expertise of the junk dealer he had become to remove electric cables and pipes from bombed-out houses and even from a few buildings that were being reconstructed. He considered it an ill-timed waste to disappoint the large number of fences who were already counting on his deliveries.

  Greschek reserved the evenings for the real kind of happiness that had driven him to Frankfurt. As soon as the women had gone to bed, the two men talked as in the old days when Greschek had been Walter’s only sounding board. But Greschek never talked as much of Leobschütz as Walter would have liked. Instead, work, duties, and especially the moral principles of a German judge interested him much more than the memories of Upper Silesia. He enthusiastically listened to Walter’s reports about Karl Maas, whom Greschek had met and whose position he held in the kind of respect that was otherwise foreign to him. He obtained salami for Maas on the black market. Walter was very embarrassed when he brought the gift, Maas not at all.

  With every nightly conversation Walter felt more strongly that Greschek was the only one who really understood why he had returned to Germany. One night Greschek told him that he had visited Walter’s father two times in Sohrau even after the Germans had marched into Poland, had brought him some groceries, and had seen him at the railroad station in Kattowitz when he had to flee, but had not dared to speak to him anymore.

  “I do not believe in God, Dr. Redlich,” Greschek said, “but He will punish me fo
r that one of these days.”

  “If only one out of every ten had your conscience, Greschek, I would be happier here,” Walter answered. All at once he noticed that he had just taken away years of hope with a single sentence, and he was not even able to talk with Greschek about his father’s death. He went to bed dejected.

  At the end of the third week of Greschek’s visit and just as the well-filled bowls on the dinner table had started to become a habit, Regina became ill. What at first looked like a bad cold developed into a state that Walter called the flu, Jettel labeled pneumonia, and Dr. Goldschmidt claimed to be the result of malnutrition.

  Greschek got milk and butter for her on the black market, a chicken for a real soup, the kind his mother used to make when one of her six children was sick, and to lift her spirits a lipstick that made her mother much happier than Regina. When the high fever persisted, Greschek arrived home with penicillin and the news that this was a wonder drug that would cure any illness overnight.

  Dr. Goldschmidt refused to inject Regina with the penicillin and with that made an enemy for life out of Greschek. Instead, he repeated once again, “Regina is suffering from malnutrition.” He vaguely spoke about the possibility of sending her to Switzerland for three months. Regina refused, horrified. She had heard about the Swiss aid for children long ago at school, and had been afraid her parents might find out about it.

  Regina was not suffering as much from being sick as was apparent. She rather welcomed the opportunity to go on safari undisturbed, free from the daily household chores and her self-imposed ambition to reach a goal in school that was as unattainable to her now as on the first day. As soon as she was alone in the apartment, she happily summoned the pictures of the days gone by in spite of fever and weakness.

  She lay down at the edge of the flax fields with Owuor and smelled the sweet scent of his steaming skin, enjoyed his silence, heard the drums beating and the monkeys calling, dug her bare feet into the red soil, and let time run through her hands until Owuor’s laughter thundered back from the trees like an enormous echo and caressed her ears. On other days she climbed onto the guava tree in Nairobi, numbed her nose, and woke her fairy from the eternal slumber to which she had been condemned on the day when Regina no longer needed her because she now had a brother.

  During those quiet days between waking and sleeping, sickness and recovery, Regina discovered that she still had the ability to find refuge in her own magic. But her sense of reality, which she had developed early on, remained as acute as a newly sharpened bush knife. She realized more intensely than ever that she needed both the escape and the return to a world that she did not love but accepted because her parents and her brother lived in it.

  At any rate, for the sake of a few pounds, Regina did not plan on giving up the familiar miseries of Frankfurt for being rootless again in a country she did not know much more about than the fact that it had as many mountains as cows and, therefore, milk and chocolate.

  Coincidence and the timing of the discussion about her health were against her. Dr. Goldschmidt had hardly planted the seed when Walter found out that Jewish families in Zurich wanted to take in children from the Jewish community in Frankfurt, but the community did not know how to respond to this offer. The community did not have enough children for the action: Most children had been born after 1945 and were, therefore, too young for the philanthropic aspirations of the Swiss foster families.

  Although her father said nothing, Regina gathered that he would register her with the community for a journey to Switzerland so she tried very hard to appear healthy, content, and busy with the task of finally catching up with the schoolwork for her grade. Her situation, however, deteriorated rapidly when Greschek all of a sudden had to return to Marke and it became clear that a renewed period of hunger was only days away. Indeed, Walter talked to her the night Greschek left.

  “Dr. Alschoff promised that he will personally make sure that you are going to stay with a good family,” he said.

  “Mine is good enough,” Regina furiously replied.

  “But you no longer are.”

  “I am getting better every day. If I did not have to be afraid that I will have to leave home, I would already be completely well.”

  “Dear God, Regina, what are you afraid of ? That you will eat too much chocolate? You didn’t complain when you were seven years old and had to leave us, and now you are rebelling because of three months.”

  “I had to go to school then, not to Switzerland.”

  “Are you starting to become like your mother? No changes ever.”

  “That is not fair. I have never complained.”

  “There is the problem; you never complain. In that you are just as stupid a fool as your father. Heavens, Regina, don’t make it so hard for me. I am simply afraid for you. And I am not used to fighting with you, either. I’m not going to force you to go. I am only asking you to take the pressure off me.”

  This time the never-vanished pictures came without invitation to Regina. She relived the day once more on which her father had become the crafty hunter in the fight for her heart and she had decided once and for all to give it to him. He still knew how to draw the bow to shoot his arrow.

  “It is all right, bwana,” she murmured, “you are winning, but I want you to know that I do not like to go.”

  “You don’t have to like it, memsahib kidogo,” Walter smiled. “The main thing is that you gain some weight.”

  5

  ON THE TRIP FROM BASEL TO ZURICH, in a train with small, neat curtains in front of gleaming clean windows, Regina succumbed to the delicate flowers of the forsythia bushes that glowed in provocative yellow on the hills; the black-and-white cows, well-nourished as in old picture books, on soft green meadows; the small houses in their spotless cleanliness; daffodils and primroses in tiny gardens; and the spring exuberance of young dogs. In parting she had defiantly been determined to shut herself off from a world she had not wanted to enter because she knew that the promised paradise would turn her into a child again, exposed without protection to the loneliness of a strange place.

  Yet her eyes had stubbornly insisted on their old right to drink, and since the days in which the voracious monster had swallowed Europe as rapidly as a hyena eats its unexpected prey, Regina knew that people who do not want to damage their relationship with the black God Mungu forever should never fight their eyes.

  Even during the short time that she did not know who was going to pick her up at the station in Zurich and what she was supposed to do except stand next to her suitcase and look for the unknown rescuer whom her father had announced, she felt secure in her tremendous amazement. The station platforms were as clean as the trains that arrived and departed. There were people with smooth faces standing at the windows or sitting in dining cars on velvet-covered seats at tables with white tablecloths and in front of well-filled plates. Those people were talking to one another as if it was not important to them to suppress hunger, and some only opened their mouths to laugh. This carefree attitude, which she watched through shiny windows, turned by the reflection into a fiery ball of colors that she had forgotten existed, fascinated her most. She was just about to notice that the people around her on the platform—men in shiny shoes of real leather and women in shimmering nylon stockings under light-colored, bouncing dresses of weightless material that went to their ankles—were distinguished by the same lightheartedness. At that moment a woman in a blue silk dress and matching jacket and white gloves of angel’s skin touched the yellow puffed sleeve of Regina’s dress and again turned her, even though she would celebrate her sixteenth birthday half a year from now, into a child, who in a whirl of relief believes in fairy tales once more and knows for all eternity that a single touch can bring a person from the sleep of death back to life.

  In the prickly, melodic pattern of a language that tickled Regina’s ears and made her consider whether she had ever heard a similar one or not, the splendid queen said, “I am Margret Guggenheim and you m
ust be our little charge from Germany.”

  Regina did not know this word and was thinking hard if charges usually had to be giants and whether she, therefore, seemed little to the woman. She tried to open her mouth without looking as silly as she felt. She was glad when she could at least move her head and nod. Very slowly, as if she had to scan the distance first, she extended her right hand.

  After a while, which seemed very long to her and in which she silently followed the scent of roses in full bloom that emanated from the blue dress, she let her stiff body be pushed into a taxi. Yet even in the soft upholstery of the car she remained as stiff as a dried-out tree and the numbing confusion had her so firmly in its grasp that every breath became embarrassing to her. Regina found it impossible to clearly capture even a single picture although she knew that she had to do just that to report to her parents about a world in which cars had the color of flowers, people the appearance of knights and princesses, and even the dogs on their thin leashes of supple leather seemed freshly washed and looked as if they had never experienced what hunger might be. As hard as Regina tried to understand, to answer questions, and to put the splendor of satiety in her head and store it, she could not remember anything but the name of her rescuer.

  The taxi drove up a steep hill and stopped in front of a house in the midst of a small garden, in which high, flowering trees and thick green hedges blocked the view from the windows. The blue sovereign with the singing voice laughed and said, “You have made it, child.” She gave the taxi driver beautiful silver coins, touched Regina’s shoulder again, grasped the small brown suitcase that was held together by a rough string with a white-gloved hand, and pushed Regina into a corridor that was very bright and smelled of heavy hyacinths that were blooming toward their decay.

  Even after the first two hours in this house, which Regina could not determine to be a castle or only a mirage, she was unable to say more than yes and no, and, frightened by the possibility of unpleasant misunderstandings, had to concentrate on not answering too quickly or especially too slowly.