Somewhere in Germany Page 7

  When Mrs. Guggenheim led her through the house, she felt as lost as a Kikuyu child who steps on a wooden floor for the first time and is afraid of getting hurt. The big rooms with curtains on which flowers were whispering, light wallpaper, and dark furniture made Regina silent. The many pictures on the walls, demanding like the demons in the dark nights of Africa that were hunting down the sun and never let go of their prey, and the long rows of books with dark leather backs and gold inscriptions in big glass cases, confronted her eyes like a storm and made her unable to distinguish shapes and colors.

  In a kitchen with white tiles there was a woman, dark-haired, with two thick braids around her head, in a black dress with a flowered apron. She had very white teeth, but when Regina started to thank her for her smile, the furniture began to whirl around and the one big white refrigerator changed into two powerful giants.

  Regina was soon sitting on a small sofa with a cover that resembled moss in a forest after the first night of the long rains. The windows around her were as big as doors. The sun rushed in and drove the white pictures within the center of a bright fire into a dance of light. As soon as even the tiniest sunbeam made the pictures even lighter, the white became as transparent as glass and caught the colors of the vanishing rainbow.

  “Utrillo,” Mrs. Guggenheim said. “Have you heard of him?”

  Regina shook her head. She heard Mrs. Guggenheim laugh and say, “You will learn about that here if you have eyes.” Regina made an effort to laugh, too, but was again unable to move her lips. Even her fingers were stuck to each other. She reluctantly took the glass that Mrs. Guggenheim held out to her and only then noticed how thirsty she was, and she was amazed how the water, as white as the pictures, tasted sweet and sour at the same time. She happily drained the glass in one gulp, heard herself swallow, then wanted to apologize and put the glass on the table, but held it undecided in the air because she had to think about the sequence of her actions first.

  “Not on the table,” Mrs. Guggenheim called out, warning her, and closed her eyes for a moment as if she expected great pain.

  She hastily held out a newspaper to Regina the same way Regina did at home for her brother when he had eaten too quickly and was retching. Regina noticed too late that she too had begun to get sick and bit her lower lip.

  “Do you want to freshen up, child?”

  “Yes,” Regina whispered.

  “I will show you the bathroom,” Mrs. Guggenheim said.

  She led Regina into a brightly tiled room with a big washbasin, shiny silver faucets, and green towels with a white trim, stood for a moment undecided, pulled a chocolate bar out of the pocket of her blue skirt, handed it to Regina, nodded at her, and quietly closed the door.

  Regina did not dare turn the faucets. She also could not imagine that she was allowed to use the towels or the soft white paper that was dangling from a silver holder next to the toilet. For a while, she only stood there and stared at the small window with the tiny curtain. She was even afraid to use the mirror. Her helplessness made her furious and made her throw all caution to the wind.

  With a suddenness that incensed her even more, she tore open the silver foil and smelled the chocolate. She had wanted to lick one corner of it, the way she had done with Greschek’s chocolate, just to get a taste and then to keep the treasure for Max, but her tongue and teeth refused to obey her. She discovered too late that nothing was left of the chocolate. Struck by the fact that she had succumbed to her greed at just the moment when she had been thinking about the needs of her family, she started to cry.

  A few minutes later, Mrs. Guggenheim heard her sobbing, gently opened the door, and led Regina out of the bathroom.

  “Come,” she said, “lie down a little bit. This is all too much for you.”

  On the bed, with its duvet of yellow silk and pillows that had the same scent as the hyacinths in the corridor, lay a long white nightgown with lace and next to it a little black and brown cloth dog with a round belly and a tiny wooden keg at its red collar. Regina was so surprised that she only touched him cautiously as if she first had to find out whether he was alive or not, but she had not yet forgotten how to feed her ears with imagination.

  While she swallowed the laughter in her throat like her tears earlier, she already heard the dog bark. When she noticed that he also winked with his right glass eye, she realized that she had been asleep with open eyes the entire time. Her hosts had expected a child and had gotten her instead. The Guggenheims most likely were as confused as she was.

  Relieved and amused, she took off her dress and put on the child’s nightgown that was too tight for her. She only wanted to lie down for a moment to think, but she immediately fell asleep, and therefore did not meet George Guggenheim till the next morning.

  The small chubby man, with the first signs of balding and eyes that betrayed calmness and at his best moments the wit of a skeptic, was a well-known personage in his native town. He was on the board of the Zurich Jewish community, a lawyer by profession, and above all a man of understatement. People who did not know the name George Guggenheim, which happened rarely in Switzerland and hardly ever in Zurich, would have drawn the wrong conclusions from his demeanor and frugal way of life, and never would have gotten the idea that he was immensely wealthy. His modesty and strictly middle-class lifestyle made him popular with friends, colleagues, clients, and the people who worked for the many charitable organizations on whose boards he had served for many years. He was easily able to establish contact with people who talked on an educated, tolerant, and humorous level similar to his own temperament.

  Since he did not interact or have any experience with children, they frightened him unless they looked at him out of a frame and were painted by Cézanne, Renoir, or Picasso. He had, therefore, only very reluctantly given in to his wife’s wishes to host a child from Germany because this had all of a sudden become fashionable among the rich families of the Zurich Jewish community. George Guggenheim did not approve of fashionable trends—not in art and even less in charitable causes.

  When Regina sat at the breakfast table this first morning—pale, thin, and with dark rings under her eyes that touched him and reminded him in a disturbing way of the pictures of Otto Dix—George Guggenheim had to fight against an embarrassment that was normally unknown to him. He wanted to be polite and cordial, but could only think that it was probably customary to talk to children about school. Thinking back to his own childhood, this seemed to him as silly as it was commonplace. He considered whether he should ask his intimidated guest about her parents and Germany, but the first question struck him as inappropriately curious, and he also felt the typically Swiss reluctance of those years to speak about Germany.

  Even though he could clearly see that Regina had a roll with jam on it on her plate, he passed the jam to her. She looked at him with consternation as if he had already said something wrong. When the doorbell rang and his wife got up from the table, he took the silence as an unwarranted provocation. George Guggenheim pulled his chair closer to the table, coughed slightly, and asked with a determination that he considered as exaggerated as ridiculous, “Who are your favorite authors?”

  Regina had not expected the taciturn man to speak to her anymore. She was startled, dropped her roll onto the plate, and hesitated with her answer because she doubted, after her experiences in German class, that he had ever heard of Dickens and Wordsworth.

  While she hurriedly swallowed the last bite, she fumbled with her dress and unhappily wondered which German writer she could name without making a fool of herself because she did not know any more than merely his name. At that moment she was saved by her memory that in school they had just read The Tailor Makes The Man and with much more enthusiasm had learned by heart the ballad of “The Feet in the Fire.”

  “Gottfried Keller and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer,” she said, relieved.

  “My, my. Our Swiss writers. I would not have expected that from a child.”

  “I am not a child,”
Regina heard herself say. Her skin immediately started to burn, and the muscles in her face became rigid. She was terribly ashamed because she was not used to being forward and bold. Above all, she could not explain to herself what caused her to let her tongue run away at such an uncertain, alarming moment. Embarrassed, she stared at the spot of red jam on her plate and kept her head lowered. Suddenly a deep sound reached her ear.

  “Great,” George Guggenheim burst out laughing. “Wonderful! You don’t even know how afraid I was of you. In my nightmares I only saw chocolate fingers smeared all over my paintings.”

  “Your beautiful pictures,” Regina wondered. “I don’t even dare look at them too closely.”

  The sentence marked the beginning of a friendship that lasted only three intoxicating months, but changed Regina’s feeling and thinking as definitely as the arrival in Africa and the terrible death of all familiarity after the departure. On this morning, after the silent breakfast, George Guggenheim pushed open the door to a world that Regina never would have discovered with such intensity without him and for which she would be grateful to him all her life.

  The connection to a teacher, whose patience was only surpassed by his passion to share with her what was most precious to him, was instantaneous. At the very beginning, the giver presented the recipient in an African way. He entrusted her with a secret that she kept locked in her heart like the gentle, always reassuring memory about the small, hidden, mischievous jokes that united her with Owuor across two continents.

  “Come along,” George Guggenheim said. “I want you to get acquainted with Zurich. And do you know where we are going to start? I will show you where our Gottfried Keller was born.”

  They walked past clean houses adorned with the respectability of their owners, bursting forsythia branches, impatient daffodils with nodding heads, and freshly washed children on roller-skates, down the spring-intoxicated Restelberg. In spite of his compact build, George Guggenheim was a fast walker and Regina had trouble staying at his side. Once, she forgot that she was no longer a child and skipped up to the sky and back. A blessed moment long, he lifted both feet off the ground.

  “Do you ever eat ham?” he asked.

  “Never,” she said.

  “Is your home kosher then?”

  “But no,” Regina laughed, “we just don’t have any ham.”

  “Neither do we. My wife comes from a religious family and we have a kosher household. Didn’t you see the two refrigerators in the kitchen?”

  “Yes,” Regina replied, “when I got sick yesterday and the furniture began to whirl around me.”

  “You know what kosher means.”

  “No pork, and milk never together with meat.”

  “Right. That is why there are two refrigerators, clever Miss. One for milk and butter, and one for meat. And kosher means a lot more than that. No cheesecake for desert if you have eaten meat before, no cream sauce like my mother used to make, no venison, no shellfish, no butter under cold cuts, and never any ham. Remember that and shake your head if a religious man ever asks for your hand in marriage.”

  They were standing in front of a butcher shop. Regina could hear her stomach talk when she saw the sausages, schnitzel, sandwiches, grilled chickens with brown skin, and bacon in the display case. She finally understood the meaning of the land of milk and honey in the German fairy tale in which sausages hung from the trees and grilled pigeons were flying overhead.

  She felt the sharp stab of a troubled conscience when she thought of her father, how thin he was, and how he used to love to eat in the good days, but George Guggenheim did not give her any time for guilt. He pushed her toward the counter and greeted a robust salesgirl in a white apron. She laughed and asked, “For the little one, too?” George Guggenheim impatiently nodded and instantly both had in their hand a roll with ham protruding from the edges, and both were chewing.

  “My wife is never to know about this,” he whispered and looked like the cloth dog with the keg at its neck.

  “Never,” Regina promised.

  “Do you keep other secrets as well?”

  “Yes,” Regina giggled, a second roll in her hand, and talked about Owuor in Africa and about her father, with whom she spoke Swahili when nobody was around.

  “Why did he return to Germany then if he lets his heart talk in Swahili?”

  “Because he wanted to work in his profession again,” Regina said. She was not talking fast enough to suppress the final sigh and felt that she had betrayed her father.

  “He had to come back,” she repeated.

  “I can understand that,” George Guggenheim said. “Yes, one has to understand that,” but Regina noticed that he had not understood anything at all. After that incident she talked as little as possible with him about her father.

  When she became aware that she was describing the meals at the George Guggenheims and how much and how quickly she was gaining weight in far greater detail than what really occupied her so much, namely the new fascination of the pictures, she began having a hard time with her letters home. She knew only too well how much her father distrusted imagination and all knowledge beyond logic and professional advancement. For the first time in years she remembered an incident at the farm.

  She had tried to paint a picture. Even though she knew that she had not succeeded, she had had fun choosing the colors, mixing them, and creating magic on paper, but her father had hardly looked at the picture and only grumbled, “You are able to read; why do you want to paint?”

  When Mrs. George Guggenheim told her, “The pictures are originals” and informed her about their material value, she dared even less to mention Renoir, Cézanne, and Utrillo in her letters. She was certain that her father would not hold in high esteem a man who spent his money on pictures. She only mentioned the frequent visits to the theater after a performance of The Devil’s General and wrote so extensively about the “decent German” that she felt disloyal and dishonest again because she pretended that only this aspect had been important to her and she did not mention at all that the genius, language, and atmosphere of the play had carried her away.

  Staying with the Guggenheims had made Regina obsessed with the theater and pictures. She lived in feverish expectation of the performances, just as she had done as a child with the books of Charles Dickens. She learned about life based on deception from Ibsen’s Nora, and about the love of life and confidence in one’s own character from Goethe’s Egmont. She was hardly able to bear A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the imagination and beauty of the language were almost too powerful for eye and ear.

  The Guggenheims took her to gallery openings and taught her to have patience with pictures she did not like. On Sundays they took her to museums in Bern and Basel where she saw the glowing colors of Franz Marc and Marc Chagall for the first time. Maurice Utrillo remained her passion. She had the motifs explained to her over and over again, listened to stories about his life, and became devoted to seeing and comprehending.

  When Regina was going to bed one night, George Guggenheim had had the pictures in her room changed. Instead of the two etchings by Picasso, two landscapes by Utrillo hung on the long wall opposite the window. She sat in front of them, the little cloth St. Bernard on her lap, and knew that this was her first declaration of love. She surmised, not without sadness, that in the future her escape from the miseries of the world would no longer always take her to the forests of Africa.

  When George Guggenheim realized that Regina was interested in history, he no longer permitted her to see Switzerland solely as a paradise of pictures and benefactors, of full plates and secret ham rolls. He told her about the Jewish refugees who had come to the Swiss border in deadly peril, had been sent back to Germany by the officials, and had perished there. He also angrily told her of rich Jewish families in Switzerland who had been afraid that too many refugees would enter the country; how he had tried to fight the narrow-minded, barbarous behavior of the well to do; and how little he had been able to accomplish.
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br />   “Be glad that you were too young in idyllic Africa to learn about death and destruction,” he said.

  Regina told him about her grandparents and the two aunts who had been murdered in Germany.

  “How does one live in this Germany?” George Guggenheim asked.

  He looked at her doubtfully, but she returned his glance and said, “Well, everyone there was always against Hitler and did not know anything.”

  “You have grown up very fast.”

  “I was born a grown-up.”

  In mid-June George Guggenheim visited his mother in Lugano and took Regina along. Sunshine, blue sky, the lake with its white swaying life, the mild evenings, the splendor of the flowers, and a lightness that intoxicated all senses rivaled for the illusion of unending happiness. The three of them drove to the mountains, sat on meadows, talked to flowers and cows, and had picnics at the lake. Regina borrowed Renoir’s eyes so that the beauty would dissolve into light and shadows. Only at night, under the enormous down comforter with the red and white checked cover, did she realize that she had forgotten her family and had to atone for it because her shame did not know about the benefits of mercy.

  With old Mrs. Guggenheim, from whom the son had inherited his sense of humor and talent for giving, Regina went into the cool town with its narrow, winding streets. She ate ice cream in all flavors and drank in a never-before-experienced cheerfulness with colorful sodas; she indulged her tongue with cake, her palate with spices, and her nose with the smells of this summer of abundance; and in a store with dark wooden panels she was allowed to choose two kinds of fabric—one of them with blue and white checks, the other dark red with white flowers. Within two days, an Italian tailor, who sang even when speaking, sewed two dresses with tight bodices and long, swinging skirts. They went down to her ankles and turned the bambina who had come to the tailor’s shop into a signorina. Regina savored the word and tasted vanity.