by Michael Dean
‘A feather!’ Himmelfahrt yelled at the old couple. ‘A feather.’
They looked blank until he mimed writing, frantically. Herr and Frau Biedermeier looked at each other. Frau Biedermeier, with a trace of a smile, lumbered out to fetch the pencil she used for the shopping list.
Himmelfahrt wanted to shout ‘Hurry up!’ but he couldn’t think of it in German, which was possibly just as well. Instead, he shouted into the receiver in English ‘Hold on, hold on. My landlady’s getting a pen!’
‘Calm down!’ said Fredrika. ‘You’ll give yourself high blood pressure.’
Frau Biedermeier appeared with the stub of a pencil; the only writing implement in the house. Himmelfahrt snatched it from her, just remembering to say ‘Thank you’ though it came out in English.
‘OK. Fire away,’ he said on a heavy outward breath, down the phone.
‘What? Oh. Right. There’s a café called Café Kunzi,’ said Fredrika, evenly. ‘That’s K-U-N-Z-I. It’s in Myliustrasse, right near the station, so you find it easily. And two people from Finland, two lovely Finns, will meet you there at eight o’clock tonight. Just not Lati.’
‘Wonderful, wonderful. Looking forward to it,’ blathered Himmelfahrt, writing down the name Kunzi on Fredrika’s original scrap of paper. ‘Yes, bring another friend. Oh and give my best wishes to Lati with the er …’
‘The period pain?’ enquired Fredrika, innocently. ‘Yes, I will. There’s so little you can do about it, you know? But I’ll tell her you expressed your concern.’
‘Er …’
‘Oh, there is one more thing. You must please never phone me here at work again. You see, my supervisor is a horrible old dragon …’ The phone went muffled as Fredrika covered the receiver, translated for Anna and they both screamed with laughter.
‘I promise,’ said Himmelfahrt, solemnly.
Fredrika put the phone down and the two girls fell into each others’ arms laughing. The horrible old dragon joke was even more piquant if you could see Anna Schweinle. She was stunning — the most beautiful girl most people who looked at her had ever seen.
‘So who is going with you?’ Anna Schweinle asked. ‘Can I come?’
Fredrika thought for a moment and looked seriously at the vision who was her supervisor. ‘No, sorry, Anna,’ she said. ‘I promised them two Finns. I’d hate them to be disappointed.’
She whispered her plan to Anna Schweinle. The two of them howled with laughter, so vigorously and for so long that they had to go off to the Ladies for repairs. Only after all that did they get round to dealing with the marketing questionnaires for Frau von Gravensburg. And they were in such high spirits, fuelling each other’s mischief, that they filled in a batch of answers themselves, making up all the information, tinkling with laughter the whole time.
5
John de Launay stood in Himmelfahrt’s room, his head nearly touching the ceiling. He was well over 6 feet tall but not much broader than Himmelfahrt. He was wearing a thick, expensive-looking light brown coat which reached below his knees, and carrying a well-furled, elegant black umbrella.
Looking up, a long way up, past the coat and past the umbrella, Himmelfahrt saw a very round face with a slightly bulbous nose, a clear pink and white complexion and layers of thick, heavy, carroty coloured hair. He was much the same age, Himmelfahrt thought, as himself.
De Launay laid his umbrella tenderly against the occasional table with the hot plate on it. Then he carefully unbuttoned some of the buttons on the apparently endless overcoat and sat down fastidiously in the red, scruffy armchair. Himmelfahrt moved the orange, scruffy armchair over-eagerly close. He was so near, in the over-furnished room, that de Launay did not need to extend his octopus-like arm to its full length to hand over the book he was carrying.
‘This is the book we use at the school,’ he drawled. ‘Except when we give conversation lessons. Frau Stikuta forgot to give it to you yesterday, apparently. You’ll need it this afternoon, when you start teaching.’
Himmelfahrt took the book, giving it a cursory, uninterested glance. ‘English,’ he said, reading the title, ‘That’s appropriate.’ He giggled nervously and tossed the book on the bed.
De Launay raised his eyebrows with a ‘what-on-earth-have-I-been-landed-with-here’ look and said ‘Quite’, very dryly.
In the silence that followed, John de Launay was expecting questions about the job. He was even prepared to talk, briefly and with an air of ineffable bored superiority, about the Direct Method, which basically meant speaking English only during the lesson.
However, unknown to Himmelfahrt, he rather approved of his new colleague’s obvious complete lack of interest in the actual work. Wing it. Do it brilliantly without any apparent effort. It was very Oxford, that. And very 1960s, though still limping past the late ’60s economic crisis into 1971. Just.
Himmelfahrt, as de Launay realised, had not given the job a thought. His heart was racing, his mind was white mist, he was subsumed with excited anticipation at this evening’s date. He was also proud, as the new boy, to be setting de Launay up with a woman. He was, he thought to himself, one hell of a lad.
‘Oh, by the way,’ said Himmelfahrt, with studied casualness, ‘I’ve fixed us up with a couple of birds for tonight.’
De Launay reacted strongly. That is to say, he moved forward a fraction in his seat and raised one eyebrow slightly. ‘You’ve done what?’ he said.
‘A couple of girls,’ Himmelfahrt said, in his best man-of-the-world mode. ‘I hope you’re free. Eight o’clock tonight in the Café Kunzi.’
‘Good Lord! You don’t waste much time, do you? I thought you’d only just got here?’
‘I have.’
‘Where did you meet these girls, for heaven’s sake?’
‘At the Ausländeramt, while I was registering. They’re Finnish. Here for work experience. One of them’s called Fredrika and the other one’s called Lati.’
The second he finished saying that, Himmelfahrt remembered that Lati was not coming, but he couldn’t face going into all that.
De Launay was looking horrified. ‘You are quick off the mark.’ De Launay did not look as if he found being quick off the mark particularly impressive. ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing tonight. I might be going for a drink with a class.’
Himmelfahrt nearly said ‘Can I come, too?’ but resisted it.
He realised how terrified he was of spending time alone in this furniture van of a room. De Launay looked as if he was mobilising that long, articulated body to leave. Panic gripped Himmelfahrt. Frau Stikuta had mentioned on the phone that de Launay had also been to Oxford. Himmelfahrt blurted out some reminiscences of his student days and the two of them started to get on.
They discovered that the second and third of de Launay’s years at Exeter College overlapped with the first and second of Himmelfahrt’s time at Jesus. They did not have any friends in common. That, thought Himmelfahrt wryly, was because he had spent the three years of his undergraduate life in a blue funk, socially. Throughout this splurge of reminiscence, Himmelfahrt had entirely forgotten that he was supposed to be called Mark Hill and could have blabbered out his real name at any time. Just by chance he didn’t.
In the continuing desperate quest to stop de Launay leaving him on his own, he asked about the staff at the language school. And to show his new friend how quickly he had settled in, he asked him in German.
‘Who is it, on the Language School Stikuta?’ he enquired.
De Launay raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Oh, very good! But let’s keep it in English for now, shall we?’
‘OK.’
‘There’s three of us, teaching English. You, me, and Naomi Prince. She’s married. To a German.’ This last carried overtones of warning. Himmelfahrt had clearly established himself as a rake and a ladies’ man in the eyes of his new friend.
Himmelfahrt nodded earnestly, conveying that the new as yet unseen colleague was safe from his irresistible charm and sexual rapaciousness.
‘So what’s Frau Stikuta like then? To work for?’
‘Frau Stikuta?’ de Launay smiled indulgently. ‘Yes. Well, there is a Herr Stikuta. Though we don’t see much of him. He’s at their other school, in Ulm. Doesn’t get over here much.’
Himmelfahrt gave one of his rare smiles. He was relaxing. ‘Frau Stikuta herself is a bit of mystery,’ John continued. ‘For a start she doesn’t appear to be German at all. She has an accent, but nobody can quite place it. The pupils are always asking where she’s from.’
‘She seemed quite decent. I mean, as a first impression.’
‘She’s alright most of the time. Except …’
‘Except?’
‘Well, there needs to be three teachers, teaching English. We’ve been struggling without you, actually, Naomi and I. And for some reason, Frau Stikuta always chooses one of the three to have a down on.’
‘Oh er …’
Himmelfahrt assumed it would be him, who their employer would take against. But not for the first or last time, he was wrong.
6
In plenty of time before his first lesson at the language school, Himmelfahrt crossed the road at Seestrasse, where some obvious prostitutes stood in hot pants and low-cut blouses, trying to attract men in passing cars. He walked briskly away from them, eyes averted, continuing along Mathildenstrasse, into the top end of Schillerstrasse. He glanced across at Schillerplatz, nodding to his new friend Friedrich Schiller, who was still nobly coping with the weight of pigeon dung on his head and shoulders. Then he turned left into Myliustrasse.
This was a recce for this evening. He wanted to locate the café where he and John were to meet the Finnish girls. He spotted it. Café Kunzi was on the right, going in the direction he was walking.
Himmelfahrt sat down in the corner in one of the red plush booths. He thought he would try the white wine.
‘Fräulein,’ he bawled out, as he sat down. That meant waitress, he remembered from the At-the-Restaurant section of all his German courses.
The waiter, an ex-boxer called Fritz Gauss, gave him a measured look but fortunately did not take offence.
‘Herr Ober,’ said Fritz Gauss. ‘Call me waiter, not Miss, because I’ve got a cock and no tits.’
‘Heeerr Ooober,’ said Himmelfahrt. And then, in German, correctly. ‘Excuse me. A white wine please.’
Fritz Gauss was not inclined to go into the ins and outs of which white wine; he brought the second-cheapest. It came in a very large glass. It was stone cold, butter yellow, delicious heady stuff. As was the second glass.
Himmelfahrt wondered, in woolly confusion, whether to look at the textbook, English, before he gave his lesson, but quickly rejected the idea of doing that much preparation. He spoke English, didn’t he? He’d think of something during the lesson. He needed a leak.
When he came back, he gulped down the rest of his wine, thinking with a drunken smile how well things were going. He had a new job, a new friend (that was John), a hot date for this evening. He could be in bed with Lati by tonight. Or maybe Fredrika. (He had again forgotten, in his increasingly befuddled state, that Lati was not coming.) Everything was perfect. Except he was getting a bit dizzy.
‘Herr Ober!’
‘Jawohl!’ Fritz Gauss materialised at his side, like a genie summoned from a lamp.
The waiter prided himself on being a free spirit. The level of service he offered his customers at the café depended entirely on the impression he formed of them. Like many in Ludwigsburg, as in Germany generally, he was pro-British. His fondly indulgent attitude to this latest oddity from the island was anchored in that firm base.
‘A water please,’ requested Himmelfahrt.
‘Mineralwasser? Sofort.’
The mineral water did indeed arrive immediately, lovingly poured by the attentive Fritz Gauss, who then cleared away the wine glasses. So when Frau Stikuta bustled into the café and saw Himmelfahrt at his table, there was no trace of wine anywhere near him.
If she had entered the café seconds earlier, to find evidence of her employee drinking alcohol before a lesson, she would have said nothing at all. But at the end of the next full month of employment his contract would have been terminated, no matter how well he had done in the job. By then a replacement would have been found to slot smoothly into Himmelfahrt’s place. No reason would have been given for the dismissal: he could be dismissed at the end of any month without a reason. That was stated quite clearly in the contract Himmelfahrt had signed, which he did not understand, because it was in German.
But, fortunately for Himmelfahrt, there was nothing to connect the two wine glasses on Fritz Gauss’s tray with the abstemious, mineral-water-drinking Himmelfahrt, as Frau Stikuta made her way, eyes half-closed, down into the pit of iniquity the café represented to her.
‘Herr Hill!’
‘Aaaaggghhh! Oh sorry you made me jump! Hey, Frau Stikuta!’ yelled Himmelfahrt at the top of his voice, delighted at the coincidence of his employer landing at the same café. In his head, he started to compose a German sentence, which would have got him sacked, inviting her to have a glass of wine with him. He got as far as muttering ‘Do you want …’
Frau Stikuta was wearing a thick, green Loden coat, which she had wound completely round her body, mummifying it, as if to seal it off from the corruption and contagion around her. Her face was pale. Her tall figure stooped over him.
‘Herr Hill,’ she said, cutting across Himmelfahrt’s emerging invitation to wine. ‘You have a lesson now.’
Himmelfahrt was getting really fuddled. He wondered who the hell Herr Hill was, then realised it was him. He slowly translated what she had said, in his head, and a superior smile spread across his face. After all, anyone can make a mistake.
‘No,’ he said, in German. ‘Lesson five o’clock.’
To substantiate this, he pulled out the by now crumpled timetable. But even as he glanced at it, a chill of doubt came over him.
‘Fifteen nil nil,’ he read aloud in German. ‘What …?’
‘Fifteen hundred hours is three o’clock,’ wailed Frau Stikuta in English. ‘It is a quarter past three now. The class waits. Please hurry.’
‘God! Yes. I’m so sorry. Just a second. I’ll pay. God, I could do with another leak.’
‘Another what?’
‘Oh never mind. No time. I’ll leave it. Herr Ober! Bezahlen bitte.’
But Fritz Gauss, unnoticed and grinning broadly, was already standing there, with Himmelfahrt’s bill.
Like most people who have been poor, and in her case poor to the point of destitution, Frau Stikuta was obsessively careful with money. To thrust an uncalculated sum at a waiter was barely conceivable to her. But with an important class waiting, a class which included Herr Sinjen, who had contacts in the Regional Ministry of Education, she took out her purse and did just that, for the only time in her life. Frau Stikuta, indeed, waved away the bill when Fritz Gauss proffered it, so missing the itemised wine.
The language school owner and her employee hurried together out into the street and walked along fast, with Himmelfahrt struggling to keep up with her.
‘How did you know where I was?’ panted Himmelfahrt.
‘From Mr de Launay. He says you know this place. He is very sad. He says it is his guilt.’
‘Oh no! It’s my guilt. I’ll do the guilt, alright.’
‘Please?’
7
And so Himmelfahrt entered his first lesson at a run, drunk and without having ever opened the textbook. And he still needed a leak.
‘Hi, hi. Morning all! Hello there.’
‘Good afternoon,’ said a puzzled voice. English humour?
‘Yeah, right. OK. So … My name is Marcus. No, it’s not. Correction. My name is Mark Hill.’
His eye fell on a stub of chalk on the desk in front of him. In a moment of inspiration, he wrote Mark Hill on the blackboard with it, in wobbly letters that drooped downward. Then he turned to face the class, with a glassy sm
ile, looking at them properly for the first time.
There were eight adults in old school desks arranged in banks of two, looking expectantly back at him. Some of them looked puzzled, some amused, but they radiated goodwill to the strange Englishman hopping from foot to foot in front of them.
The three o’clock class attracted a few employees from the firms in greater Ludwigsburg, some on flexi-time and some sent to learn English in the firm’s time, but in the main the office workers came to the evening classes. The three o’clock class consisted mainly of housewives. Six of the class were female, in their twenties or thirties, glossily groomed and elegant. Four of the six were very pretty. Himmelfahrt brightened.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘What shall we do?’
One of the two men, the younger one, said, ‘With Mr de Launay we would start page 34.’
Himmelfahrt noticed that the class all had their copies of English open. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Page 34.’
‘Mr de Launay reads usually and then we read and then he says us the new words,’ said one of the pretty ones, kindly.
She smiled shyly at Himmelfahrt. She was elegant in blue-rimmed glasses, crisp red and white candy-striped blouse and black pencil skirt.
Himmelfahrt smiled back at her, stared at her until she blushed, and finally fumbled for page 34 in the book.
‘At the Hotel,’ Himmelfahrt read to the class. He looked up and stared at the pretty girl again. ‘What’s your name, then?’
‘Gisella,’ she said. ‘Gisella Herrold.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Please …?’
‘OK. Everybody. At the Hotel.’
The class looked at their books, willing the new young teacher to succeed and ready to do their best to help.
Himmelfahrt stopped and ran a hand through his long hair. He pushed his glasses back up his nose, where they had slid when he looked down. Silence grew in the dusty little classroom. He could not go through with this. He had a wild longing to run to the station and get the next train home. Instead, he looked at the page again, and did a theatrical double-take at the dialogue.