by Michael Dean
As they got off the bus, the elf-like landlord muttered ‘Ossweil’, and pointed. Himmelfahrt nodded vigorously. He had been given the address, and knew his new home was in the suburb of Ludwigsburg-Ossweil.
‘Ossweil,’ he repeated, signalling his mastery of this information.
The landlord looked unenthusiastic.
Near the bus-stop, Himmelfahrt noticed a huge sign in English on the concrete wall of a barracks: ‘Flak Barracks. Divisional Barracks of the American Seventh Army.’
‘Flakkaserne,’ contributed the elf.
‘Flakkaserne,’ Himmelfahrt confirmed, deepening his orientation.
Herr Biedermeier shrugged, his lack of enthusiasm turning, Himmelfahrt thought, to apprehension. Still in fretful silence, the little man led Himmelfahrt at a scurry through stolid, suburban side streets. Himmelfahrt continued to chatter down into his fast retreating ear. The faster Himmelfahrt talked, the faster the little man scurried. So they arrived at the Biedermeier household at a brisk trot, with a breathless Himmelfahrt bent forward pursuing his escaping landlord, a pace behind, still talking away.
They went into a prosperous-looking white house with a steep-pitched roof. Like all the houses here, it was at an angle to its neighbours, not in line with them like the houses back home.
Herr Biedermeier breathed massive relief at the sight of Frau Biedermeier, who was twice his size. He scuttled into the comforting bulk of her voluminous pinny and spluttered anguished fast German into her bosom. Himmelfahrt could not separate out a word from the foreign stream.
He was led to a small, dark parlour overstuffed with furniture. There was large-leaved vegetation in one corner. Himmelfahrt was indifferent to nature in all its forms. Was this thing a rubber plant? If so, why?
He was eased down at a table which appeared to have a small rug on it and a glass of white wine was poured for him. But despite these signs of welcome, something was evidently terribly wrong. A knot of fear tightened in Himmelfahrt’s stomach. Still the hosts said nothing, so Himmelfahrt again tried to reach out to these new people, the first in his new life. Flustered, he gulped his wine and brought out a sentence in German at the same top speed and with the same gabbling fluency he had used since he first met Herr Biedermeier.
‘Is a thing inaccurate?’ he said. At least that is what it sounded like to Herr and Frau Biedermeier.
Herr Biedermeier sat down next to Himmelfahrt and put his hand on the younger man’s forearm. Speaking at dictation speed, opening his mouth very wide, he said, ‘Mr Hill, we don’t understand you, when you speak German.’
‘We don’t get a single word,’ lamented the ample wife, moaning in regret, folding her arms across her balcony of a bosom. ‘Please don’t say anything else.’
‘Oh,’ said Himmelfahrt. ‘Er … OK.’
*
Just before he arrived in Ludwigsburg, Himmelfahrt had studied German for three weeks. He had bought not one but half a dozen basic German courses, in books and on cassette. He studied German by starting all of them for up to fifteen minutes at a time, the outer limit of his attention span. Pacing his boyhood bedroom at the family home in Chingford, Essex, tumbler of whisky in hand, he chanted simple German sentences in the voice of Lawrence Olivier in the film of Henry V.
‘Here is the village of Miesbach,’ Himmelfahrt informed his boyhood furniture, with a wave of his arm. ‘Miesbach is a village. Is Miesbach a village? Yes it is a bloody … oh sod the village of Miesbach.’
Himmelfahrt broke off Living German’s catechism about the charms of the village of Miesbach and took a hefty slug of his parents’ whisky.
At least I’ve got a job, he thought. All I have to do now is take out life insurance and tell Mother what it is.
For the last year Himmelfahrt had shut his mind to his entry into the world of work. His parents had blared out to everyone they knew, or had ever known, that their son would soon hold an Oxford degree. They had instigated a piece in the local newspaper about it. It had been shouted loud in the synagogue, while the congregation faced east toward Jerusalem. In return, a last-minute effort on Himmelfahrt’s part had produced a third-class degree in history, a passport to employment.
But Himmelfahrt had yet to use his passport to cross the border into the unknown territory of actually doing something. Washed up at home, drinking heavily, he decided he wanted to travel. So, on a whim, he had answered an advertisement in the name of Mark Hill for a job teaching English to people who did not already speak it.
The school in Germany had telephoned. He had taken the call when his mother was out, remembering just in time that he was Mark Hill, not Marcus Himmelfahrt. Could he come in three weeks’ time? enquired a pleasant-sounding lady from Ludwigsburg called Mrs Stikuta. Somebody had let them down.
So he had been learning clandestine German in his bedroom ever since, knocking back alarming quantities of parental Scotch. And tonight was the night of revelation. He would tell his parents his direction in life. Then he would flee the country.
He had chosen the sabbath meal to tell his prodigal tale, but his resolve was failing. He was silent through piled chopped liver with eggs and onions. And the second helping. Similarly, no word was revealed over a plate brim full of chicken soup. Equally schtum over a Pennine landscape of roast potatoes, shelled peas and roast chicken.
Then, the great announcement, slightly spoiled by a heavy belch: ‘I got a job,’ he mumbled.
‘Oh Marcus, that’s wonderful,’ beamed tiny Gershon Himmelfahrt, from whom Himmelfahrt Junior had inherited his lack of physique.
Gershon was a man for whom all news is good news. A man so benign and unaware of evil, Himmelfahrt thought he was the entire case for the existence of God.
Minnie Himmelfahrt, mother of this her only child, was of tougher fibre. Arguably, she had to be. The permanent vertical worry furrow between her eyebrows deepened to a fault-line.
‘Job?’ she said. And paused. The pause was terrible to Himmelfahrt. ‘Doing what?’ she said, her voice quivering with suspicion.
‘Teaching,’ he said.
‘Teaching?’ she said.
‘Hmmm.’
Minnie stared, unblinking, at her offspring. There was a catch, there was always a catch, life was a catch. Minnie waited for the catch. It came.
‘Teaching abroad,’ mumbled Himmelfahrt, eyes down, stuffing half a chicken into his mouth for comfort.
‘Abroad!’
‘Yuh, ah, er … West Germany.’
‘Germany!’
*
On the evening of his arrival in Ludwigsburg, Himmelfahrt paced his room in the Biedermeiers’ house. There was not far to pace; about four steps by three. The room boasted a narrow, hard bed covered by a strange, white, stuffed object instead of blankets. There was an overlarge, polished wardrobe with mirrors in the doors pushing against a small rough table with its chair. Near the door, a hotplate on a tiny occasional table, hewed from yet another unrelated type of wood.
Ease, though not comfort, was offered by two open-mouthed armchairs, one red, one orange. The heat source was a pockmarked one-bar electric heater which clanked alarmingly when Himmelfahrt switched it on, then threw a narrow band of feeble heat halfway across the tiny room.
This habitation was under the roof, squeezed into the gable of the house. Himmelfahrt had been shown a hatch which, when removed, led to a sloping loft space under the eaves. Food could be put on the rafters there to keep it cool in summer.
Himmelfahrt decided to wash out his clothes, largely for something to do. He changed into his pyjamas and went to the bathroom down the hall. He washed out his shirt and socks and laid them tenderly on the windowsill to drip dry, as the manufacturers had recommended.
He took two yellow tetracycline pills out of the huge, gunmetal tin of 1000 that was supposed to be sold to chemists only, and swallowed them without water. The supplier of the pills was a wholesale chemists owned by Simon Rosenkranz’s father. The tetracycline, an antibiotic, reduced his acne fr
om the coruscating, suppurating, erupting Etnas of his teenage years to an even pimpling beneath and around his beard. Himmelfahrt washed carefully and rubbed the white, astringent Neo-Medrone acne lotion into his face, as if it were face cream.
Back in his cupboard-like room, he climbed under the white thing that he found out later was called a Bettdecken and lay there on his back — with one hand between his legs.
Five minutes passed, wide awake, aroused.
Oh it was no good! He couldn’t stop, not even in a new country. He flung the bedclothes off, put the light on, stepped over the bravely glowing little heater and scrambled frenetically in the backpack. He fished out a faded blue towel, stained yellow across the middle, like a parody of the Swedish national flag.
Himmelfahrt’s masturbation fantasies followed the classic five-act cycle of Elizabethan drama. Act I was the scene-setting, with the story developing in Act II. The narrative then built to a climax in Act III, which was where the towel came in. Act IV was the denouement and Act V what you might call mopping up.
The problem was, he hadn’t even seen a woman in Germany yet. Well, Frau Biedermeier was a woman, but that was just a technicality. No, it would have to be one of his standards from back home.
He applied himself vigorously to the matter in hand. Then he chucked the towel at the hatch door, just missing the glowing bar of the heater.
*
On one of his sporadic attempts to give up wanking, he had driven to Brighton and plunged one of the present towel’s predecessors under the waves. In the afternoon, he had met a Swedish girl. He had taken her to the Downs … but he wincingly drove the thought of her from his mind.
When he drove back into Brighton he had gone to a fortune teller on the sea-front.
‘You will never want for anything,’ the fortune teller said. ‘As soon as one door shuts another will open.’ Then she smiled at him. ‘You will meet a married woman. But stay away. Even though she will love you very much. Stay away, because she is married. One day, though, you will have two sons …’
Two sons. Yeah. Sure. One day. But how?
*
Next morning, with the buzzing of a different country in his ears and a lacerating headache, Himmelfahrt set off into Ludwigsburg. Dapper in blue jacket, open-neck blue shirt with small white flowers on it and flared blue trousers, he fingered the house key in his pocket, symbol of his independence. It was a chill autumn morning. He wished he had brought his mac from England. Never mind.
Walking the strange streets, he went off into a dream world. When he looked up he was completely lost. And he needed a leak. Badly.
He strode briskly to the end of the road. A small blue street sign told him he was in Holderstrasse. There wasn’t a soul in sight to ask the way from. He meandered miserably along Holderstrasse, trying and failing to think his way out of this predicament. Ah! Salvation! There ahead on the left was a patch of open land. Himmelfahrt broke into an uncomfortable run. It was a cemetery.
The cemetery was barer and somehow flatter that those at home. Well-tended graves were covered with gravel. There was just one small bush. Himmelfahrt ran to the grave nearest the bush and bent his knees, hiding. He peed loud, long and steamily, avoiding the grave.
A gesticulating figure came running from one of the houses nearby. The man was yelling something at the top of his voice. You did not have to know much German to know what ‘Polizei!’ meant. Himmelfahrt moaned, zipped up his fly, ran for it.
*
His predicament was worse than he thought, the gesticulating figure — his name was Hans-Peter Fauser — was not threatening to call the police, as Himmelfahrt thought, he had already called them.
The green and white police car was easing past the American barracks, just as Himmelfahrt ran along the side of the cemetery in Gegen-Eich Strasse. The police car then turned into the road parallel to Gegen-Eich Strasse, as Himmelfahrt pounded along opposite it, separated from it by the open square of the cemetery. The police completed one more side of the square before stopping in Gegen-Eich Strasse to talk to the man who had reported the incident.
By that time, Himmelfahrt had reached the end of Gegen-Eich Strasse, and by good fortune turned left not right into Kaltenstrasse, which crosses it. Turning right would have taken him into the arms of the two policemen and the alert witness to his crime.
From Kaltenstrasse, looking left, Himmelfahrt could see the concrete bulk of Flakkaserne — the American barracks — and for the first time he knew where he was. By the time the police were cruising round the cemetery in the patrol car, with Herr Fauser in the back, peering out ready to identify the desecrator of the dead, Himmelfahrt had made his way past the barracks and reached the main road. A bus arrived immediately.
The police car, having dropped Herr Fauser off again at his home, overtook Himmelfahrt’s bus as they both headed into town. He saw them, with no great interest, but the two police officers had no reason to look up into the bus they were passing, so they did not notice him.
*
When they got back to the police station in Eberhardstrasse, one of the officers typed up an incident report and put it in a manila file marked ‘Unsolved’. The incident report was then filed, along with reports of other petty crime. However, although Herr Fauser had seen the perpetrator for a few seconds only, the description he had given the police of Himmelfahrt, which was now on file, was quite astonishingly accurate.
2
Himmelfahrt’s bus rolled along the main road, Schorndorferstrasse, leading to the town centre. It stopped at the lovely Blühendes Barock garden. The garden unfolds in front of Ludwigsburg’s magnificently imposing yellow baroque palace, the Residenzschloss, its elegant clean lines built in close imitation of Versailles.
From his perch high in the bus Himmelfahrt could have seen the Fairy Tale Garden, as it peeped from behind the palace on either side. Opened in 1959, after a leading Ludwigsburger called Albert Schöchle visited De Efteling in Holland, the Fairy Tale Garden showed myths and stories in changing tableaux.
But Himmelfahrt noticed neither gardens nor palace. He did notice how extraordinarily pretty many of the elegant girls were, as they strolled leggily along the street. And he registered that many of the bustling passers-by were dark and short, not tall and blonde as he had been led to believe Germans were. But he was incurious as to the reason, which was this.
Although the palace had been started by a local architect, Philip Joseph Jenisch, and continued by a Viennese, Nette, it was finished when Nette died in 1714 by an Italian, Donato Giuseppe Frisoni. Frisoni had brought many of his small, dark workers over with him from Italy, to work on the palace from 1714 until its completion in 1723. It was their small, dark descendants who Himmelfahrt saw thronging Schorndorferstrasse in the autumn sun, taking a break on the way to their mid-morning second breakfast at a café.
*
The bus crossed the large intersection at Schlossstrasse; the huge main road leading to Stuttgart. Himmelfahrt got off.
He had got off too early, but he could see the city centre from where he was. He dreamily drifted past the police station at Eberhardstrasse. At that moment, the driver of the police car which had been called to the cemetery looked out of the station window. The young officer was Gerhard Söderle. He was working all the hours God sent to save enough money to get engaged to his childhood dream, his only girl, Gisella Herrold.
If he and Gisella were to marry soon, Gerhard Söderle needed some worthwhile crime, so he could work some overtime. He was thinking wistfully, longingly, of a bank robbery, stolen cars, a decent cheque fraud. Idiots peeing on graves would hardly bring the cash to build a little house for the future Frau Söderle and the little Söderles to live in.
Gerhard Söderle saw Himmelfahrt walk past.
*
As soon as he had parked at Gegen-Eich Strasse, Söderle had gone out to the cemetery to hunt the perpetrator. He had left his partner, Andreas Lübke, to talk to the witness, Hans-Peter Fauser. Lübke alone took
down Herr Fauser’s description of the criminal. Lübke was now typing and filing it. But Gerhard Söderle had neither heard nor yet read what Himmelfahrt looked like.
‘Have you finished?’ Söderle said to his partner, as he came into the front office after filing the report on Himmelfahrt.
Lübke was ten years older than Söderle, flaxen-haired, red in the face and overweight. ‘I’ve done it,’ he said, glancing out the window in the direction his colleague had been looking.
But by then Himmelfahrt had passed the window. Ten seconds earlier and Lübke would have seen him and recognised him. He would be in a cell by now.
*
To Himmelfahrt’s indignation the Stikuta Language School’s address was in Arsenalplatz — Arsenal Square. As a true-believing Spurs fan, Himmelfahrt objected to the square being called Arsenal — those scrapers of fluky one-nil wins, usually in the last ten minutes.
But now, for the first and last time, the name of the most boring team in the universe would have been a welcome sight. Although he had glimpsed the language school on his bus ride from the station with his landlord, Himmelfahrt could not now remember where it was.
Ludwigsburg was bigger than he had expected and he had no idea where he was walking. Then he saw the name, not Arsenalplatz but Arsenalstrasse. He said it out loud in the English translation, ‘Arse-n’l Street’, and turned into it. He strode on through the pleasant baroque town, with its high buildings with their concrete facades.
He stopped, blinking in bewilderment, in a lovely eighteenth-century square lined with beech trees. He was face to face with a tall, scholarly, unhappy-looking man. The man was a mouldy green colour, but sort of orange under that. There was a pigeon on his head. The miserable looking fellow turned out to be Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). It said so on his plinth. Himmelfahrt looked at Schiller. Schiller looked at Himmelfahrt. Himmelfahrt looked smug and superior because he was alive, even if Schiller was on a plinth.