by Michael Dean
Schiller went to school for a while (1767-73) at the old Latin School for boys in Ludwigsburg, on the corner of Oberemarktstrasse. Later, he was one of the soldiers who washed into and out of Ludwigsburg throughout the history of this soldier-city. Captain Schiller was stationed at the barracks in Ludwigsburg in 1776. His first plays were performed in the theatre of the palace Himmelfahrt had just failed to notice.
But after that, it all went belly-up for Schiller: he was imprisoned by the army for going AWOL to see one of his own plays. He escaped from gaol, but could not go back to his beloved Swabia for fear of rearrest. He found the peace and happy family life that formed the bedrock for his creativity only very late in life.
Schiller looked more miserable the longer Himmelfahrt stared at him. Perhaps he was unhappy that modern theatres find his plays well-nigh unproduceable. The pigeon standing on Schiller’s head crapped a spherical green, white and black pellet on him. Himmelfahrt’s superiority was complete. What was acne compared to that?
Leaving the lyricist of the Ode to Joy to his woe, Himmelfahrt mobilised his knowledge of Asking the Way from at least three of his beginners’ German courses, and asked the way.
‘Excuse me, good sir!’
A young man in a suit and a well-cut light camel overcoat, hurrying through the sunshine in the autumn chill, came to a halt with an indulgent smile.
‘Can you recommend me, where is the route to the Arsenal Square?’
The young man’s name was Norbert Sibulsky. He worked at the City Bank, in Schillerplatz, and was lead singer in a rhythm and blues band called Die Junggesellen, which translates as The Bachelors, though they sounded nothing like the Irish wailers of that name.
Norbert Sibulsky had knocked off for an early second breakfast and a black coffee at Frank’s Grillstube in Seestrasse; slipping out while Sabina Göller had her back turned, so she couldn’t try and come with him. Sabina Göller worked at the next counter to Norbert Sibulsky. She was, Norbert feared, in love with him.
Norbert Sibulsky took Himmelfahrt gently by the shoulder and turned him round. He thought of giving directions in English, but sensed that would humiliate the vulnerable-looking youth who had tried so hard to speak German, even if what came out was a mangled mess. So he spoke slowly in what he imagined was High German, but in fact still had a strong Swabian accent and rhythm.
‘Go back this way here, to Arsenalstrasse. You’ll see Arsenalplatz on the right. It’s only a few hundred metres away.’
Norbert smiled and squeezed Himmelfahrt’s arm. Himmelfahrt thanked him and meandered back the way he had come. He found Arsenalplatz. He had strolled past it a few minutes ago. It was another delicate pretty square, like the one with the statue of Schiller.
Across the square, Himmelfahrt saw a small white sign with black lettering at the entrance to one of the buildings, Sprachschule Stikuta. His stomach tight with nerves, dying for a leak again, and with his jaw starting to ache, Himmelfahrt went into the building and up some winding wooden stairs.
*
On the second floor he saw the Sprachschule Stikuta sign again. Himmelfahrt pushed open the door and saw the only possible familiar face for hundreds of miles. On one of half a dozen chairs lining the corridor sat the elfin figure of Herr Biedermeier, twisting his hands in his lap, again looking even more apprehensive than Himmelfahrt, as he had on Himmelfahrt’s arrival.
‘Herr Biedermeier!’ called out Himmelfahrt, ready to clasp the little landlord to his bosom like a talisman, in relief.
But to his horror, the wrinkled face of the older man convulsed in rage at the sight of him. A torrent of angry, almost screaming, German poured out of him, complete with much expostulation and hand-waving.
Himmelfahrt could make nothing, at first, of what he said, but eventually one word became clear to him. ‘Die Socken’, thought Himmelfahrt, must surely mean ‘the socks’.
A door opened at the end of the corridor and a tall woman in her fifties emerged from an office. A faded blonde, with her hair pulled back in a smooth bun, she was wearing a crisp, white, high-necked blouse with a light brown cameo brooch at the throat and a straight browny-purple tweed skirt, with one pleat in it.
She stepped towards Herr Biedermeier, bending forward slightly, the way tall people do. Herr Biedermeier jumped up at the sight of her, then gambolled round her like a poodle round a lamp post. She said something to the little landlord which clearly meant he was to come through to the office, and gave Himmelfahrt a vague, watery smile which indicated, he thought, that he was to sit on one of the chairs.
She led the elf into the office. As the door shut, Himmelfahrt sat down heavily on the chair he had just vacated. He should not have left his socks in the bathroom, he saw that now. And his shirt was in the bathroom and … My God! Suppose he’s found the towel?
*
Himmelfahrt waited a moment or so, then hopped from one foot to the other outside the office door. He badly needed a leak, but having been bidden to wait, did not dare walk out on his new employer before he had actually met her. He was still debating whether to knock or not when the door opened, nearly hitting him. It now looked as if he had been listening at the door. It occurred to Himmelfahrt to deny it, even though nobody had yet accused him of it. But his shards of German could not form the sentence required.
Bowing obsequiously, Herr Biedermeier reversed out of the office, thanking the woman who was surely Frau Stikuta. Passing Himmelfahrt, who they both totally ignored, the two shook hands vigorously in the corridor, the little fellow pumping the tall woman’s arm as if hoping oil would gush out of her mouth. Still ignoring Himmelfahrt, he turned sideways to keep watching Frau Stikuta as he made his way in a crab-like gait back along the corridor, firing off ‘Auf Wiedersehens’ as he scuttled out.
Frau Stikuta was about to go back into the office, a place by now assuming Fort Knox-like impregnability to Himmelfahrt.
‘Good day,’ spluttered Himmelfahrt, totally rattled. ‘I are new teacher.’
‘What new teacher?’ said Frau Stikuta. But then her face broke into a smile. Speaking in careful, slow and very clear English she said, ‘Oh, you are Mr Hill? The English teacher? Yes! I did not know you can speak German. That is why. Come in, please.’ And she waved Himmelfahrt into the office. ‘Your landlord, Mr Biedermeier, was here,’ said Frau Stikuta, taking her place at the desk, ignoring the fact that Himmelfahrt had just seen the little man.
‘Er, yes,’ said Himmelfahrt, sitting down heavily opposite, replacing the landlord on a chair for the second time. ‘Er, is there a problem?’
Frau Stikuta looked at him curiously and not unkindly, her head on one side. One of her other English teachers, Mr de Launay, was also an Oxford man but he was … well, rather more what one would have expected. This nervous youth looked so at sea. So lost. Mind you, he was not bad-looking, she thought; slim and rather romantic-looking, with his long black hair. Frau Stikuta felt a motherly pang.
‘Your socks,’ said Frau Stikuta in her slow, sing-song English. ‘They drop water on the floor. And your shirt does it, too,’ she added, clearly more in sorrow than in anger. ‘Mr Biedermeier wants you to pay for new linoleum.’
‘Oh God!’
‘But I told Mr Biedermeier … We have a saying, Andere Lἂnder, andere Sitten.’
‘Other countries …’ contributed Himmelfahrt, leaning forward eagerly in his chair.
‘Yes. You learn German. Good! It means other countries, other … customs.’
‘Yes!’ shouted Himmelfahrt, unpatriotically eager to let the British nation as a whole shoulder responsibility for his dripping socks. ‘Yes! That’s it!’
‘Now,’ continued Frau Stikuta. ‘You start with teaching tomorrow afternoon. Here is your timetable.’ She handed over a slip of paper with writing on it.
Himmelfahrt felt a surge of relief that he had not been sacked. He did not look at the timetable.
‘Today you go to the authorities. To the Aliens Office. You have your passport with you
?’
Himmelfahrt nodded, patting the trusty Blue Job, his British passport, in his inside pocket.
‘You show them at the Aliens Office your passport. You show them the Employment Certificate I give you. Then they give you a Work Permit.’
Himmelfahrt nodded enthusiastically, to show he was following.
Frau Stikuta took a form from her desk. It had been filled out in advance. She stamped it with the school stamp, then waved it at Himmelfahrt. ‘Here is the Employment Certificate. It means you work here as a teacher by us.’
Himmelfahrt did more enthusiastic nodding.
Frau Stikuta smiled. ‘Tomorrow at lunchtime your colleague Mr de Launay comes to your room. He tells you everything. He teaches now. Mr de Launay speaks very good German.’
Tears of happiness and relief came to Himmelfahrt’s eyes. He looked at Frau Stikuta for the first time, seeing a plain but benign old lady. He certainly wouldn’t be needing the towel …
Happily unaware of her rejection as an object of Himmelfahrt’s masturbation fantasies, Frau Stikuta handed over a slightly smudged photocopy of a map of the centre of Ludwigsburg, with the Aliens Office marked with an arrow. Then she passed Himmelfahrt the completed and stamped Employment Certificate, confirming that Mark Hill was employed as a teacher at the Sprachschule Stikuta, Arsenal-platz, Ludwigsburg.
*
In his excitement and confusion, that was the last Himmelfahrt remembered of the encounter, until he found himself outside in Arsenalplatz again. He decided to skip lunch and complete the chore of registering with these authorities.
Not eating was an easy decision; Himmelfahrt was poorly. He was weary, his head, ears and jaw ached, there was a high-pitched buzzing in his head. This morning, when he had washed his hair, as he did every day, with anti-dandruff shampoo, great clumps of it had fallen out.
Shivering from the raw cold, he followed his photocopied map to the Aliens Office, a few streets away in Wilhelmstrasse. It was a fortress-like grimy building that said ‘Ausländeramt’ on a small black notice board just inside its iron-studded wooden doors. Himmelfahrt said the word Ausländeramt to himself. He was an Ausländer, a foreigner, an alien even. He rather liked that. After all, he had never felt much at home at home.
He wandered into an anteroom where people were waiting to register. Steering round some Italian workers standing in a tight, sad circle, he sat down on the only vacant chair. Two girls were sitting next to him, obviously together, demurely leaning into each other. One had cropped brown hair, the other one, next to Himmelfahrt, was a curly blonde. Himmelfahrt perked up.
By now, he had picked up the all-purpose portmanteau south German greeting:
‘Grüss Gott,’ he said.
They said it back to him.
‘I am teacher,’ he said. ‘And you are what?’
The girls glanced at each other, smothering a giggle. They were from Finland. As a national priority, small-talk ranked just ahead of asking the Russians to invade. They had no idea why this strange youth required this information. Nevertheless, the blonde girl conveyed that she worked in a bank and the brown-haired one divulged that she was a trainee marketing executive.
Under further remorseless, highly ungrammatical questioning, Himmelfahrt prised out more information; they were Praktikantinen, he dragged out of them, here for a year from Finland for practical work experience. There were twelve Finns in their newly arrived group, he uncovered; ten female and two male, they confessed in conclusion.
Lati Pattilainen, the blonde, had a cute smile which masked a grimace of agony, clamp-like menstrual pain gripped her lower stomach. Next to her, Fredrika Kuusinen was resigned to being confidante and Earth Mother to the other Finnish trainees; that was how it always was. She was registering first and would tell the others what to do tomorrow. She had brought Lati along because Lati was poorly, and Fredrika was concerned about her. Lati’s period had come on while they were sitting there. They had lost their place in the queue, dashing to the Ladies. Incredibly, Lati did not have a tampon with her. Fredrika did. It was always like that.
When they came back from this rescue operation, a weird spotty youth started interrogating them in broken German. If he did not stop, thought Fredrika Kuusinen, she would commit murder before she and Lati were even registered in West Germany.
‘Finland is nice?’ Himmelfahrt demanded to know.
‘Finland is beautiful,’ said Fredrika. She then blathered something quickly, which Himmelfahrt did not understand.
One of the Italians smiled. Himmelfahrt thought the Italian was envious that he, Himmelfahrt, was doing so well with the pretty Finnish girls. What Fredrika had said was, ‘Finland is beautiful. The boys there don’t have spots.’
Himmelfahrt asked Lati, the prettier of the two, the one with bigger breasts, if he could have their phone numbers. He knew from the look on her face that Lati fancied him.
Fredrika nodded wearily. Even though a clerk had appeared in the doorway, waiting for them, she fished a scrap of paper from her bag and scribbled their first names and two telephone numbers on it. There was something dogged about the youth; it would be more efficient to appease him than try to get rid of him. Fredrika Kuusinen rapidly calculated that changing just one digit in each of their telephone numbers was easier at speed than making up two numbers from scratch. She passed Himmelfahrt the scrap of paper with fake telephone numbers, pulled a face and shepherded Lati into the office.
*
Five minutes later another clerk, a middle-aged woman, appeared and brusquely called out ‘Next’. Himmelfahrt followed her into her tiny office and sat down.
‘Your documents, please,’ said the clerk, holding out her hand, while looking down at her desk.
In his excitement at getting Fredrika and Lati’s telephone numbers (especially Lati’s) the Himmelfahrt-Hill name discrepancy had drifted from Himmelfahrt’s mind. It came back to him as he sat down, but he reckoned he could wing it.
He would have been more concerned if he had known how the system worked in this part of West Germany, which was like this: In all matters pertaining to documentation regarding living and working in Swabia, the procedures to be followed by state officials in all cases were clearly laid out in a book of such procedures, given to every state official of every designation at every level. This tome, the bible of the bureaucracy, 800 pages long, had the snappy title of Richtlinien und Erlasse des Landes Baden-Württemberg (Procedures and Protocols of the State of Baden-Württemberg). It was updated every year and was informally known as Das weisse Heft (the White Book).
A passport in one name (say, Himmelfahrt) and an Employment Certificate in another name (say, Hill) is classified as a major discrepancy, possibly a fraud by the foreign applicant. Appropriate action according to Erlass (Instruction) 9431 (dating from 1965) of the White Book, (it’s on page 683) is as follows: ‘The state official is to contact the police on the direct line installed in every office for this purpose.’
And just as the middle-aged lady clerk asked for Himmelfahrt’s papers, a portly policeman came in from having eaten a significant portion of cake and sat down heavily at the table at the police station in Eberhardstrasse, right next to the direct line telephone.
Like any officer there, Andreas Lübke would respond immediately to a direct line call from the Aliens Office. He would call his partner, Gerhard Söderle, and they would set off in the police car at top speed. And as a highly-trained, observant police officer, there is no doubt that Andreas Lübke would recognise Himmelfahrt from Hans-Peter Fauser’s detailed description of him, given only hours earlier.
What then? Instruction 6872 of the White Book (dating from 1953) (it’s on page 431) lays out the procedure regarding police action in the case of discrepancy or possible fraud in a foreigner’s application for a Work Permit. The foreigner must be deported instantly (luggage to be sent on) under police escort, pending clarification of the discrepancy.
The time now was 2.30 pm. The arresting officers and H
immelfahrt would board the next international train out of Ludwigsburg, which was the daily 5.30. The arresting officers would accompany Himmelfahrt as far as the German border, where they would hand him over to Belgian and eventually British police. In the normal course of events, the deportee would be allowed to return to West Germany if the discrepancy was resolved, although that could take months.
However, a charge of desecrating German graves by urinating on them on day one of the deportee’s stay would not do the chances of a return any good. Although admittedly this particular contingency is not specifically covered, even in the eight hundred pages of the White Book.
In short, Himmelfahrt could reasonably expect to be back at the family home in Chingford late tonight; thrown out, brought home by police, disgraced, facing possible (albeit minor) criminal charges, soon to be branded with a criminal record, never to return to West Germany.
‘Your documents, please,’ repeated the clerk, slightly more sharply.
3
After giving Himmelfahrt directions in the street, Norbert Sibulsky continued to walk slowly in the same direction as the young Englishman. A lustrous feeling washed over him as he realised he was not going for a second breakfast at Frank’s Grillstube after all. He was going to make that call. He licked his lips and shut his eyes for a second.
He walked briskly along Schorndorferstrasse to the main post office, strode inside, thrust back the wood and glass wing doors of a telephone booth and went in, folding the doors shut behind him. The booth stank. Norbert glanced through the smudgy glass.
On the post office wall was a curling poster of the sixteen blurred faces of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang. He made a ‘tschuh’ of disgust, instinctively turning away. Contempt for the terrorists rose in him like bile, coupled with disgust at all the prosperous Germans supporting them. Idiots! Crapping in their own nests. The plump citizens of this country were soft with West Germany’s prosperity and security. They didn’t know when they were well off. They had nothing better to do than throw it all away.