Not her brother. Nor her mother. Father had gone away – where to? No one was there. The child was alone. She didn’t think the word – it was much worse: she felt loneliness, as only children can feel it.
The little girls rustled in their beds. One was whispering in her sleep. It was her second summer up here. It would never be any different. Never. Why doesn’t Mummy come here, the child thought. But she would have to take her away with her, because even Mummy was no match for Frau Adriani. No one was. Footsteps? What if she came now? Once Gertie had been ill; then Frau Adriani had come up five times in the night – five times to look after the little girl, and fought almost jealously with her illness. In the end she had conquered the fever. What if she came now? Silence – one of the eight beds creaked. That was Lisa Wedigen, she was always a restless sleeper. If only somebody – somebody – somebody . . . Tomorrow they were going swimming in the lake. The girls always splashed you, if only somebody –
Her hands felt carefully under the pillow, searched the bedding, moved all the blankets. Gone? No. They were still there.
Under the pillow, wilted and crushed, were the two harebells.
Chapter Three
Eggs is eggs, he said –
and grabbed the biggest
1
We bent over the letter and read it together:
Dear Chap,
I still have a week’s holiday owing to me this year, and I’d very much like to spend it with you and your lady friend. I hear you’re in Sweden. Dear friend, would you like to put up your old comrade-in-arms, who gave you a leg-up in the odd shell-hole or two? I’ll pay for my own transport; it hurts me to have to spend money on myself; it’s not my usual way of doing things, as you know. Write and tell me, dear friend, how to get to you.
Can I stay there? Are you staying there? Are there lots of girls? Should I not come? Shall we get drunk on our first evening together? Do you love me?
I enclose a picture of my little girl. She’s almost as beautiful as her father.
I’m looking forward very much to seeing you, and am your good
Karlchen.
Underneath, in red ink, like a mark on a file, there was:
‘Straightaway! Yesterday, preferably! Indescribably urgent!’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘That’s Karlchen, then. Should he come?’
The Princess looked tanned and refreshed. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let him come now. I’ve had a rest, and if he’s leaving after a week anyway? It’s always nice to have a change.’ I wrote accordingly.
We were in the middle of our holidays.
Swimming in the lake; lying naked on the shore, in a sheltered spot; soaking up the sun, so that you rolled home at noon, wonderfully dozy, and drunk on the light, the air and the water; quiet; eating; drinking; sleeping; resting – holiday.
Then the day arrived.
‘Shall we go and pick him up?’
‘Yes, let’s.’
It was a glorious day – perfect weather for laying eggs, as the Princess put it. We went to the station. It was a tiny station; really just a little house, but it took itself so terribly seriously as a station, that it had quite forgotten it was a house. There were two pairs of rails, as every station has to have, and there was the carriage puffing noisily. It wasn’t a train as such, only a single carriage-cum-locomotive. It had put on a little smokestack, to give it some credibility. It pulled in. Hissed. Karlchen.
As always when we hadn’t seen one another for a long time, his expression was equable, friendly, a little foolish, a sort of ‘Ah . . . so there you are . . .’ expression. He came up to us, the shadow of the imminent greeting already visible on his face, and carrying a tiny little suitcase. He was a tall fellow, and his slightly battered face looked ‘youthful and alert’, as he put it.
Hello – this is . . . meet . . . now shake hands . . . where’s the rest of your luggage? When the preliminaries were over, I asked,
‘Well, Karlchen, how was your trip?’
He had fluttered up to Stockholm, he said, in an aeroplane, arriving at noon . . .
‘Was it nice?’
‘Well . . .’ said Karlchen, and bared his teeth in his habitual grimace, ‘there was an old lady who didn’t take to flying very well. Give me a cigarette, will you. Thanks. And they have these little bags . . . She had already used up two of them, and the third didn’t reach her in time, so the man next to her will either have to buy himself a new suit, or have his old one cleaned. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sitting next to her. The rest of the view was very nice. And how does Madam like it here?’
As Karlchen said ‘Madam’, which he didn’t himself believe in, he stiffened and politely inclined his upper body; he accompanied this with a charming gesture, abruptly extending his forearm and then withdrawing it again with the elbow bent, as if he had wanted to inspect his cuff-links . . .
And how was Madam enjoying it?
‘If he wasn’t here,’ Madam said, ‘then I would be having a very restful time. But you know what he’s like – always blathering on – never leaves you in peace . . .’
‘Yes, he was always that way. How nice,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ve left my umbrella on the train.’ We went back to get it. Things don’t disappear in Sweden. The two came to an immediate understanding – it’s strange how, within the first few minutes people often determine the entire future course of their relationship. Here you could sense immediately that the two of them had hit it off: they took Life, and me in particular, less than seriously.
Karlchen was still exactly as he had been a year ago, two years ago, three years ago: as he had always been. He was just raising his head and sniffing a little suspiciously at the air.
‘There is . . . something . . . Something here . . . eh?’ He just said it, pronouncing the consonants sharply, and just thickening the vowels a bit, as they tend to do in Hanover. It had been exactly like that in the war, when we had wandered down the banks of the Danube, and thought there must be something there . . . But there never was.
I trotted along beside the other two, who were deep in animated conversation about Sweden and the countryside, about flying and Stockholm.
We had the Princess between us; sometimes we spoke over her head. I wallowed in their friendship.
To have someone to trust! To be with someone for a change who doesn’t eye you suspiciously when you use a phrase that might perhaps offend his vanity, someone who isn’t prepared at any moment to lower his visor and do battle with you to the death. Oh, people don’t even argue like that – they squabble over one Mark fifty . . . over an old hat . . . over a bit of gossip . . . I know only two people in the whole world who would help me if I knocked on their doors at night and said: Gentlemen, this is my problem . . . I have to go to America – what shall I do? Two – Karlchen was one of them. Friendship is like one’s homeland. We never talked about it, and whenever there was any slight surge of emotion unless it happened in a serious late-night talk – it would be quenched in a bucketful of colourful abuse. It was marvellous.
We had put him up at the hotel, because there were no rooms left where we were. He looked at his room, alleged that it stank like the bedroom of Louis the Smelly, and that it all seemed ‘a bit thin’ . . . but he said that about everything, and I had already picked up the habit from him; he washed, and then we sat and drank coffee under the trees.
‘Well, Fritzchen . . .?’ he said to me. No one will ever discover why he called me Fritzchen. ‘Can you swim here? How’s the lake?’
‘It’s generally about sixteen degrees Celsius or twenty Remius,’ I said, ‘depending on the currency fluctuations.’
He understood. ‘And what are we doing tonight?’
‘Well . . .’ said the Princess, ‘we’re planning to have a very quiet evening . . .’
‘Can you get red wine here?’
I reported on the depressing situation regarding red wine, and how at the Sprit-Zentrale a young man had looked for chablis among the red wines. Karlchen cl
osed his eyes in sorrow. ‘But you can get the wine, Karlchen – as the so-called down-payment for foreigners.’ Unfortunately he didn’t hear that. A girl went by – not even a particularly pretty one.
‘Er . . .?’ said Karlchen. ‘Sorry, what . . .?’ He carried on as if nothing had happened, and nothing had happened. But he had to say it – otherwise he might have burst. Gradually we began to behave like sensible people.
We had known each other a long time, and talked in a kind of abbreviated telegraphese. The Princess got the hang of it surprisingly quickly – but there was nothing secret about it, it was just our complete agreement on the basic issues of life. Both of us knew that ‘things weren’t that great’ . . . and out of scepticism, understanding, inability and strength at the right time, we had produced an attitude that meant we kept quiet, where others set up a wild hubbub. Apart from his reliability, the man’s great assets were negative: all the things he didn’t say, didn’t do, didn’t start . . . We had none of those cultured, post-prandial conversations, in which men pay ghastly tribute to ‘the spirit of the times’, without actually changing their lives one iota. There was no dispensing of literary culture, and no Viennese aphorisms about Death, Love, Life and Music, as you get from Austrian journalists and that ilk . . . it’s terrifying listening, and the first time you hear it, you actually believe that printable twaddle, though there’s not a word of truth in it. But Karlchen was a quiet sort. He blew smoke at the world, nothing surprised him, he was a steady worker at the Lord’s filing-cabinet, and he brought up two children at home, while still remaining his own man. Now and again he would fall in love and sin, and when you asked him what he had done this time, he would bare his teeth in that typical grimace and say, ‘She led me back over the threshold of youth!’ and then everything would be all right again for a while.
Now he was sitting here, smoking and reflecting.
‘We should write to Jakopp,’ he said. Jakopp was the other one – there were three of us. Four, with the Princess.
‘What shall we write?’ I asked. ‘Did you see him? You passed through Hamburg, didn’t you?’ Yes, Karlchen had passed through Hamburg and had seen him. Jakopp was the most crotchety of us. An employee of the Hamburg water-works, he was an orderly type with a passion for dahlias – ‘the dahlia, an orderly flower’, he would say – a playful and eccentric man, who had four hundred and forty-four idées fixes in his head. We were a good team.
‘Where has the Princess got to?’ asked Karlchen. The Princess had gone into town, ‘buying buttons’, in other words, shopping. We never went shopping together because whenever we did, we would squabble. She was gone, anyway. There was silence for a moment.
‘Well, Karlchen, and apart from that?’
‘Apart from that, Jakopp bought himself some pastilles because he smokes so much, and when he smokes, he coughs. You know how it is – a pretty disgusting sight. Now he’s got something to stop him smoking: Fumasolan, the things are called.’
‘Well? Are they any good?’
‘Of course not. But he says that since he’s started taking them, there’s been a remarkable increase in his sexual powers. He resents it rather. Wonder if they gave him the wrong pastilles?’ Jakopp’s life was always like that, and he gave us a lot of amusement.
‘Give me a postcard. What shall we . . .?’ At last I had the answer. We should send him a telegram-card, because a proper telegram was too expensive, although it would have had him delightfully confused and irritated. So from then on we cabled appallingly urgent messages on postcards – starting with the one today:
FLOWN OVER KARLCHEN ALMOST COMPLETELY ARRIVED WIRE IMMEDIATELY TO CONFIRM WILL WIRE STOP GRANNY SADLY FALLEN FROM SWING
GRANDAD
We finished the great work . . . and we were resting quietly from our labours, when the Princess arrived.
She had bought buttons of many kinds; it’s quite bewildering what a multiplicity of wares a woman will find in even the smallest places. She had no money left either, so with a furrowed brow I pulled out my wallet and made rather a performance of it. Then we went and lay in the grass.
‘Do you find it hard to relax, too?’ asked Karlchen, who already felt completely at home. ‘A holiday’s hard work, I reckon. Even doing nothing is a big effort, and you only realise later quite how . . .?’
‘Hm’ we went; we were too lazy to answer. There was a rustle.
‘Put that newspaper away!’ I said.
‘Did you read about . . .?’ he said. And that did it: time had returned.
We had thought we could escape time. But you can’t, it follows you. I looked at the Princess and pointed at the newspaper, and she nodded. We had talked about it the night before; about newspapers, about time in general, and about this time. One often thinks love is stronger than time; but time is always stronger than love.
‘Reading . . . reading . . .’ I said. ‘Karlchen, what newspaper are you reading anyway?’
He told me the name.
‘You shouldn’t read just one,’ I remarked sagaciously. ‘That’s no good. You have to read at least four newspapers, and one of the big French or English ones as well; things look very different seen from the outside.’
‘I’m always amazed,’ said the Princess, ‘what people like us are offered – there aren’t actually any newspapers for us. Those we do have, pretend we have God-knows how much money – no – they behave as if money didn’t exist . . . but they know perfectly well we don’t have much – they just pretend. The things they tell us . . . and the illustrations!’
‘Just a jumble of fantasies. Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep, dear child!’
‘No, I don’t mean that,’ said the Princess. ‘I mean they’re always so terribly chic. Even when they write about being broke, they tell a stylish version of it. They seem to have both feet off the ground. Will a newspaper ever talk about what it’s really like: how you start scrimping on the twentieth of each month, how things get miserable and petty sometimes, how you can rarely afford to take a taxi, not to mention buying a car. Instead, they feed us their ridiculous cult of fashionable living . . . do any of us live in proper flats?’
‘Those people gobble you up,’ I said. ‘And the worst of it is that they set the questions. They mark out the course and build the fences – and you have to answer, and follow and jump . . . you can’t choose for yourself. We’re not on this planet to choose, but to make do – I know that. But you’re just given a whole lot of crossword puzzles to solve: one from Rome, one from Russia, one from America; fashion and society and literature. It’s a bit much for one man, I think.’
‘If you think about it,’ Karlchen said, ‘we haven’t really settled down since 1914. A bourgeois craving? I don’t know. You achieve more when you have peace. An atmosphere lingers – effects go on being felt. Do you remember the insanity in people’s eyes when our money melted away, and you could have bought the whole of Germany for a thousand dollars? We all wanted to be cowboys then. What a time!’
‘My dear chap, it’s our misfortune not to believe in so-called “problems” – only fools console themselves with those. It’s a parlour game.’
‘Work,’ said the Princess. ‘Work helps.’
‘Dear Princess,’ said Karlchen, ‘you women take what you do seriously – that’s your undeniable advantage over the rest of us. But if you can’t do that . . . and such a good-looking young woman too . . .’
‘You’ll be thrown out for that sort of talk,’ said the Princess. ‘Do you understand Platt German?’
Karlchen beamed: he spoke Platt like a Hanoverian farmer, and the two chattered away for a while in their foreign tongues.
What was that she said? I sat up. ‘But you never told me that?’
‘No? Didn’t I?’ The Princess was all innocence. Usually she was a good liar, but now she was terrible.
‘Well?’
The Generalkonsul had been after her. When? Two months ago.
‘Tell.’
‘He w
as after me. Well, you all are. Sorry, Karlchen, all except you. One evening he . . . Well, it was like this. One evening he asked me if I could work late, he had a long “exposé” he wanted to dictate. That happens sometimes – I thought nothing of it; of course I stayed.’
‘Of course . . .’ I said. ‘Otherwise you might even have an eight-hour day.’
‘Leave it out, Poppa, of course we don’t have it, I don’t have it. In my position it’s just . . .’
‘We’ll never agree on that, old girl. You don’t have an eight-hour day, because you haven’t fought for it. And you don’t fight for it – oh, what the hell, I’m on holiday.’
‘Are you agitators allowed holidays too?’ asked Karlchen.
‘Anyway,’ the Princess continued, ‘exposé. When it’s done, he stops in the middle of the room – you know, Karlchen, my boss is terribly fat – stops in the middle of the room, looks at me with this strange expression and asks, Have you got a boyfriend? Yes, I say. Oh, he says, well there you are – and I thought you didn’t have one. Why not? I say. You don’t look as though, well, I mean . . . And gradually he comes out with it. He’s so alone, I can see . . . at that moment he has no one at all, and he’s had this girlfriend for years, but she’s gone off with someone else.’
Karlchen shook his head unhappily, was such a thing possible.
‘Well, and what did you say?’
‘You great twit – I said no.’
‘Oh?’
‘Oh! Should I have said yes?’
‘Well, who’s to say! A good job . . . Oh by the way, I saw a film . . .’
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