Somewhere in Germany Page 8

  Regina, who had never been interested in clothes before, said “The New Look” to her image in the mirror and realized that her body also started to show that she was no longer a child.

  On her return to Zurich she found a letter from her mother.

  Sunday, on my birthday, of all days, the currency reform took place. The good mood was gone. But you cannot imagine how life has changed. We could not believe our eyes when we went out on Monday morning. All of a sudden the butcher has cold cuts, and Mrs. Heckel next door has fruit and vegetables and is suddenly quite friendly, asking me what I want to buy.

  The stores in town are full. There are dresses, hats, baby clothes, plates, pots, light bulbs, thread, furniture, and lamps; everything you can imagine. One can even buy cigarettes and coffee now. But we no longer have any money. The old money is gone and everyone got just forty marks per person. We have no idea how things are supposed to go on.

  Unfortunately we did not get the forty marks for you, even though we said that you would come back soon. Your dear father now wants to give up his safe judge’s compensation and become an attorney. I am trying every day to talk him out of this nonsense, but you know how stubborn he is. I am looking forward to having you back. Maybe you will be able to talk to him.

  Reality had caught up with Regina. She did not fight it. She even welcomed her longing for Frankfurt and agonized over and over again if Max would still recognize her, how big he might be, and what he might be able to say already. She saw his big, black eyes and already smelled his skin after he had just been bathed.

  Utrillo and Renoir were already in the process of losing their colors. The Guggenheims were talking of a farewell present and wanted to know what Regina would like to have. She asked to keep the small stuffed St. Bernard, and wished for a bar of chocolate and a ball for Max.

  The ball, as blue as the lake and as red as the poppies in Lugano, was lying on the luggage rack of the train. Regina was wearing her new, checkered dress with the long, swinging skirt. Mrs. Guggenheim had packed a big basket with fruit, breads, cakes, and chocolate for her. Regina knew that she would not touch anything and would bring everything home. She was as embarrassed and helpless as at her arrival.

  “Thank you,” she stammered, “and not only for the food.”

  The whistle was announcing the train’s departure when George Guggenheim passed a package through the window. He laughed and said, “So that you won’t forget us.” Regina saw him winking but was too excited to return his last greeting.

  To prolong the anticipation she only started to open the package when the train drove into Basel. There was a box with a book about Utrillo, photographs of all of his paintings that were hanging in the Guggenheims’ house, and, tightly wrapped in a light blue napkin, a roll with ham. Regina broke into tears.

  6

  THE BATHTUB HEATER, which was behind the curtain in the bedroom, was old, hard to operate, too expensive because of its inadequate airflow and enormously high coal consumption, and had only been used once, when Regina had a severe flu. The kitchen, with a big flowered washbowl on an iron stand, therefore, also served as a bathroom. The soap was on the windowsill, and the towels were draped over the stove. Only Max, who was being washed between bed and table in a small zinc tub, for which he had grown deplorably big for some time now, did not have to leave the house for a bath. The rest of the family used the public bathhouses.

  Else went to a bathhouse in the inner city on her free Wednesday afternoons and was gone till evening. She did not consider the large expenditure of time a sacrifice since she was able to cleanse her body and soul at the same time. The bath attendant had been sent to Hochkretscham on a farm work program during the war and she always had a sympathetic ear for Else’s longing memories of her native village. Most of the time she also had leftover pieces of soap to put in the practical little bags in which they were collected and that one was able to buy again lately without having to give up the soap, which one needed so desperately, in exchange for them.

  Walter, Jettel, and Regina went on Saturdays alternately to the shower baths at the Merianplatz or the Hallgartenstraße. At the latter, an old brick house offered the possibility of taking a full bath in bathtubs that were definitely up to pre-war standards. Until her visit with the Guggenheims, it had never occurred to Regina that healthy people could take a bath at home.

  After the currency reform, the shower baths were more popular with the Redlichs than the previously loved full baths. In contrast to Else, they liked walking there but did not care for the destination. The way to the Merianplatz led through the Berger Straße, which had recovered remarkably fast from its wounds. It was the heart of Bornheim, was called “Bernemer Zeil” again, just as before the war by the much-envied inhabitants of the quarter with their many connections, and had many small stores that held the promise of a beginning prosperity.

  For two weeks now the dry goods store at the big intersection displayed fabric, needles, thread, and even a few packages of nylon stockings with wonderfully transparent covers. The grocery store next door, its window up to a few weeks ago only decorated with a yellowed photograph of the employees in the founding year, now featured coffee, chocolate bars, and boxed chocolates, which alone made every detour worthwhile.

  The household goods store no longer offered wooden spoons and, above all, no more steel helmets converted into saucepans. Instead, there were gleaming, very expensive dream kitchen utensils made of new sheet metal. Even the undertaker on the other side of the street was showing off the changes and miracles of the times—instead of an empty picture frame decorated with a black crape band, there now stood in the window a coffin crafted of excellent oak.

  Seeing such splendor and, especially, thinking that it might someday be within reach of the majority of “average consumers,” pushed the newly revived imagination to euphoric heights. Ever since the changes in Frankfurt’s business life, Jettel had become unusually peaceable during the Saturday shower bath excursions, which seemed to have the appeal of the enjoyable family outings of former times. She only rarely complained about the things she did not have and when she talked about the future, it was without the otherwise inevitable allusions to lost happiness and wealth left behind in Africa.

  The first Saturday in August of 1948, however, differed painfully from this beautifully optimistic scheme of things. Between the bedding store with its extraordinary eiderdowns in the window and a laundry that had recently switched from liquid soap to a real detergent, Walter stopped and said that he now had prepared everything so that he could establish himself as an independent attorney.

  He thought that the time and place for his message had been cleverly orchestrated, and as if he were just about to fulfill one of Jettel’s long-held wishes, he put a hand on her shoulder and laughed. Regina did not even dare look at her mother and closed her eyes.

  Since her trip to Zurich she had come to fear those smoldering fires that suddenly erupted into a blaze much more so than before she had come into contact with lightness and abundance. But when she finally looked at Jettel, who had not even shaken Walter’s arm off yet, she immediately became aware of an impending change in her family’s life. Regina recognized, amazed, that her mother, like a Masai warrior in a decisive battle, had obtained new arrows for herself.

  “That is fine with me,” Jettel said quietly. “I don’t care. But where are you going to have your practice? After all, there are no offices available.”

  “I know. In the beginning, it will have to be in the apartment. Mrs. Wedel has no objections. I have already talked to her. She even encouraged me.”

  “Not with me. And if I have to personally throw every client out. You do not open a law practice in three rooms.”

  “Many start with less these days.”

  “They do not have a small child. Max needs his own room.”

  “Jettel, after ten years of emigration you cannot be presumptuous enough to insist on a child’s room when the founding of our existence i
s at stake.”

  “You have an existence and we have everything we need to live.”

  “Too bad that you have never told me how happy you are, Jettel.”

  “Well, I am telling you now. I don’t have any big ideas. I only need a little bit of security. And there is no use to keep on talking. We are only going to have a fight.”

  In no other situation of her life had it ever occurred to Jettel to avoid a fight. Because she thought highly of her own spirit and courage, she often provoked the storm even before Walter did and considered it the only constant in their marriage. It was one of the rare instances in which Walter and Jettel were in agreement.

  To achieve his goals he, too, needed the open war with loud words and illogical accusations, Jettel’s stubbornness, and Regina’s conciliatory attempts at mediation. But Jettel did not respond to pleas or threats and Walter felt betrayed by even his daughter when Regina said, “This is strange; all my life I was told to pray that you would not lose your job and now that you have one you don’t want it.”

  The silent war was long and oppressive for all. In the Höhenstraße, the Iron Curtain, which everyone was talking about at the time, descended between the kitchen and the living room. When Jettel finally became aware that she had turned herself into a very unhappy prisoner through an approach that she disliked intensely and that contradicted her passionate nature, she signaled the start of the peace negotiations everyone had been longing for.

  As suddenly as she had become silent, she now talked to Walter again. She shouted; cried; implored; called him a cruel father; and threatened first suicide, then divorce, and finally, triumphantly, that she would return to Nairobi, take Max with her, and marry a rich farmer. She had expected anything but Walter’s relieved laughter and him taking her in his arms and saying, “Thank God, my Jettel is her old self again.” Pouting, but also flattered, she gave in and sighed, “Go ahead; open your damned office here then.”

  “If you are going to be hungry for just a day, I will pack your suitcases myself,” Walter promised.

  He also made a promise to Mrs. Wedel, who he believed—rightly—had played a decisive role in Jettel’s late change of mind. “As soon as I can, I am going to move out of your apartment and you can move in again.”

  At the beginning of October he started as an independent attorney and one hour later he received his first client. She was the daughter of a tobacco store owner whose business was in the house. She wanted to have her husband, who was missing in the war, declared dead and did not know how. That night, Walter put the first fees his new independent profession had earned him on the table—a pound of bacon, which was still considered the most stable currency, half a pound of real coffee, and a pack of cigarettes.

  Jettel was not embarrassed about her enthusiasm and could not be drawn into any conversation about the most recent past. She brewed the coffee, even though Monday was still the day for ersatz coffee, finally sang Carmen’s signature aria, drank two cups in a row, and said, “If necessary, I can occasionally write a letter for you. After all, I used to work for the best lawyer in Breslau.”

  “And just don’t forget to mention that he called me the greatest idiot of all time,” Walter said. He beamed as if Jettel had ever been able to appreciate his sense of humor. Max instantly learned the new word and said first to his father, then to his mother, and finally to the picture of a policeman on his plate, “Idiot.”

  His linguistic development, in combination with a strongly developed awareness of his irresistible charm, progressed as quickly as the law practice, and in retrospect turned Jettel once again into a Cassandra with an absolutely infallible sense for catastrophe. Walter had considered the difficulties of working undisturbed in an apartment with a curious two-and-a-half-year-old, but he had never anticipated his son’s enthusiasm for strangers in general and for his father’s clients in particular.

  Only for a short while did Max limit himself to the traditional habits of his age group, such as showing his toys to friendly adults and luring them into the spell of innocence and blind confidence. Unpleasantly fast he began to try out his atypical vocabulary on them and to enjoy the sweetness of applause. Max greeted clients with either the question, “Do you want to get a divorce?” or the statement, “You won’t get away with that.” He reacted to any attempts to remove him from the center of the action with the kind of persistent howling that went even beyond the modest scope of what Walter had expected for his work. Jettel could not have asked for a better ally than her determined son to get the apartment free again. After two months Walter gave up.

  At the bar association he learned about a colleague who was looking for a partner for his practice, which was described as well-established and very reputable. Attorney and notary Dr. Friedhelm von Freiersleben lived in the once-renowned West End and received Walter in an imposing old residence that had survived the times as safely as its main inhabitant on the second floor.

  He was sitting in a dark green leather chair in front of a desk of extraordinarily fine mahogany, wore a jacket of mixed gray and white tweed, and annoyed Walter right away because he not only looked like an English colonel, but also had the habit, widespread in British military circles, of speaking of “your people” when he talked about Jews.

  Other than that, Friedhelm von Freiersleben talked very little about his practice and too much about the Jewish friends he somehow had lost track of to his amazement and great regret. Walter thought about his howling son and that he needed a filing cabinet, typewriter, telephone connection, and room for a typist. He suppressed his pride, instinct, and revulsion, and agreed to bring Jettel for coffee the following Sunday afternoon.

  “It has always been my rule to look at my partners’ wives,” Friedhelm von Freiersleben laughed, “for a wife tells you more about a man than a thousand words.” He kissed Jettel’s hand and called her “a small feast for the eyes,” told her about his father’s estate and that his sisters had already ordered their linens from Paris in the thirties, invited her to his summer house in Kronberg, gave her a long-stemmed rose when they were leaving, and asked her to see to it that her “talented husband,” for his own benefit, came to a quick decision.

  Walter was so completely convinced that his wife had succumbed to the advances of a man whom he could not imagine ever seeing eye-to-eye with on any important point that he got stomach cramps on the way home. Trembling and with his face chalk-white, he had to lean against a wall next to the destroyed opera house and he knew that he would never be able to look into a mirror again without blushing if he agreed.

  Jettel declared that Friedhelm von Freiersleben had an evil eye and bad breath, and she had always disliked long-stemmed roses. In addition, the coffee had been terribly watery, tasted of roasted chicory, and was clear evidence that he had to be a con man.

  “That whole to-do with the little summer cottage,” she groused. “You cannot fool me. My mother always used to say that. I have never heard of Kronberg. I bet that place doesn’t even exist. If you work with him, you will make us all miserable.”

  Walter nodded so unhappily that Jettel did not take the time to play any more of her trump cards. Instead she asked, not without real sympathy, “Why don’t you talk to Maas? He is from Frankfurt. Maybe he knows someone you could get together with.”

  It was one of those rare occasions in his marriage when Walter, without objections, gratefully and instantly accepted Jettel’s advise. Karl Maas was horrified when he heard of Walter’s visit with Friedhelm von Freiersleben, called him a sleazy fraud, and reported that he was a passionate anti-Semite and had already been a fervent follower of the Nazis when nobody else was taking them seriously yet, but the Nazis had not accepted him in the party because of a dubious great-grandmother in the East. For this reason Friedhelm von Freiersleben had also, in spite of the general indignation in judicial circles, survived the denazification trials as “not involved.”

  “You have more massel than brains,” Maas told him. “At least yo
u could not have asked me at a better moment. If it is true that there is a lid for every pot, I have exactly the right thing for you. An attorney just started in the Neue Mainzer and he could most likely use an associate. A decent fool like you. His name is Fafflok and I know you will like him. He is from the East.”

  They shared the same language, the same concept of integrity and duty, tradition and responsibility, the same wit nourished by a harsh tongue and soft heart, the same reluctance to show emotions, and the same view of the landscape and the rough, warm people when they looked back to Upper Silesia.

  Fritz Fafflok was tall and very slim. At first glance he seemed smaller than he was because of his bent shoulders. This alone corresponded to his credo in life. In everything he was a man of understatement who did not betray his experience, intelligence, or extensive professional knowledge. His eyes spontaneously revealed his kindness; his self-conscious gestures that did not have anything awkward about them expressed his modesty. Tolerance was not part of his vocabulary, but it was one of the basic requirements of his soul. He was a Catholic and he honored his faith the same way that Walter honored his. Fafflok was from Kattowitz, and knew Sohrau, the Princes’ School of Pless, and Leobschütz. He was not embarrassed by the word homeland. He used the regional expression for Saturday and said half-ten instead of half-past-nine when the clock showed that time of day. His wife used the Silesian names for the sausages and cabbages she bought at the butcher shop or greengrocer’s store.

  After the Poles arrived in Kattowitz, they let Fafflok, who during the last years of the war, after having been injured, had attempted to defend those who were displaced and enslaved in court, keep his apartment. Walter did not have to know anything else. With the exception of Karl Maas and Greschek, Fritz Fafflok was the first German Walter met in Frankfurt who did not talk about his inner resistance and the many Jewish friends he had helped. Rather, he said, “I knew about all of it.”