by Michael Dean
She was nineteen, the first time. It was after a party, upstairs. She was upset about it because she thought she had wasted herself. She was also scared, afterwards, secretly, because even that first time she liked it a lot. After that there were boyfriends, but never for long.
‘How’s so and so?’ her mother would ask.
‘Oh he buggered off.’
The only one who was really memorable was one she didn’t sleep with. His name was Alex and he was a pastry chef. He could talk for Britain, her mother used to say. He was dark haired, with a hooked nose. He reckoned himself as an anarchist and had heard of people called Proudhon and Bakhunin and made out he’d read their books. He used to take Naomi to the Kardomah and talk for hours over a single cup of coffee. Now and again they went to a foreign language film, French or Swedish. Naomi paid for herself.
Then Alex went to Switzerland on holiday. He came back trailing a girl he’d met there. He introduced her to Naomi, flaunted her really. They were obviously sleeping together. When this girl went back to Switzerland Alex tried to get Naomi back, but it was never the same.
Then there was a succession of boys and Naomi worried that she was ‘easy’. Eventually she came to the sensible decision that there was nothing wrong with liking sex. That was her, that’s all.
The job in the lab was getting worse and worse. She had a new boss. He didn’t like women, and made her file difficult. He blamed her when the students cut the Bunsen burner tubes or when Petri dishes got smashed.
A friend of hers had upped sticks and got a job in Norway. Naomi decided to go there too. She liked the idea of Scandinavia, the north. She got the only job she could find, as a chambermaid in a big hotel. Her mother was furious, not so much about the job but because Naomi was leaving home. But by then Naomi was twenty.
She liked being a chambermaid. She lived in a small village on the west coast of Norway, where people were very friendly. The weekly village dance was a big event. Films were sent in six reels from Bergen once a fortnight. It was easy to learn the language.
And her life could easily have been spent in hotels in Norway; she was happy enough there. But she saw an advertisement in the paper for English teachers at a language school in Bergen. Just on the off-chance she applied. The lady who ran the school was impressed that Naomi had got eight O Levels including Latin. She got the job.
She liked it. She thought she had found what she wanted to do. The lady who ran the school was sweet. Her name was Mrs Soltvedt. She was middle-aged, stylish and still attractive. She smoked like a chimney. Naomi smoked heavily, too. All the teachers at the school were girls. Mrs Soltvedt took them all out to tea at the Hotel Bristol and encouraged them to go out with the Norwegian navy officers who came over to talk to them.
She never knew why she left Bergen. It was just one of those things. But once you were in one of these schools it was not difficult to move to another one. After a few months she went to Nice and hated it. She hated the heat, hated the palm trees, hated the south. The food was nice but with language school wages you could only eat once a day.
She met the love of her life in Nice and it didn’t work out. His name was Guy and he was also a teacher at the school. He was the Romeo type, par excellence. In the end he went off with someone else, right under her nose. Then she thought that what she wanted from life was impossible: she wanted a womaniser who would stop being a womaniser and love and marry her. But men were not like that. They didn’t change.
She was in her mid-twenties by then. She moved on to get away from Guy. A school in West Germany, in Ludwigsburg, was looking for a teacher at short notice: someone had let them down. She applied and got the job. She had lived there for three years when, early in 1970, she met Hartmut Plutznick.
*
He was handsome, with his hawk-nosed face but he had a withered arm. He had had polio as a child. He came from a very poor family. He seemed to look up to her; nobody had ever done that before. He certainly wasn’t the extrovert, Romeo type. But Naomi had had enough of them by that time. They broke her heart.
Like her girlhood friend, Alex, the pastry chef, Hartmut was very left-wing. He was a communist though, not an anarchist. Naomi didn’t care. She wasn’t very political, as such. Vague humanitarian feelings about right and wrong led her to vote Liberal every four years. But that was about it.
They got married back in Birmingham because it was less bureaucratic than marrying in Ludwigsburg. Naomi felt she had settled down. This was it. It wasn’t great, but it would do. It would have to, wouldn’t it?
14
At the outbreak of World War II, Julius Reitmann got himself declared unfit for service in Hitler’s army. His lungs were kaput from smoking unfiltered cigarettes. The cigarettes, Roth Handle, were pretty much raw tobacco, but they were the workers’ cigarettes and Julius would not have been caught smoking anything else, because he was a worker. Not that he had ever actually worked, Julius. He’d never had a job in his life, but he did think of himself as a worker, in the political sense.
Throughout the war, Julius continued to slide through life doing as near to absolutely nothing as a human being could. In 1941, aged 35, he had used his Nazi Party connections to wangle a job as a guard at the Rote-Kreuz Barracke in Kornwestheim, in greater Ludwigsburg. This was the barracks where they kept the French prisoners of war. It was near the Salamander shoe factory.
The job was alright at first. Some of those prisoners were stinking rich — capitalist swine. It was Julius’s political duty, as well as expedient, to do a bit of practical income redistribution. So he flogged them a smuggled-in wurst, a few bottles of Dinkelacker beer or a few packets of Roth Handle at exorbitant prices. Later on he grew bolder and took bribes to let selected French officers out for the evening. He chose officers he knew would come back: the soft ones, not the leaders.
Towards the end of the war, things started to get hairy. The little corporal with the half-moustache who Julius thought was from Bavaria (which made it even worse) was going to lose. Everything was going up in smoke. They were press-ganging kids and old men. Who knew what might happen in the future? They might even press-gang honest workers with kaput lungs. Get your balls shot off defending the Fatherland? Nein, danke.
Julius needed money, that was the first step out of the whole bloody mess. He offered more and more French officers an evening out in the town and put the price up. Two hundred Reichsmarks, that was the going rate. You could get a pair of stockings for that.
One of Julius’s best customers was a Free French flyer who had been shot down on the approach to the Ruhr. He had a girlfriend in the town, he’d been boasting about her. Julius knew her name (Berthe) and where he was going to meet her on 5 July 1944 — outside the Saalbautheater in Karlsstrasse, in Ludwigsburg.
So when the Flight Lieutenant handed over his 200 Reichsmarks, that evening, he received in return not a nod and a wink, but a right hook on the point of the jaw, followed by a short left in the solar plexus as he went down. He was built like a middleweight boxer, Julius, he could handle himself.
Julius breathed hard in the warm night air, gave a wolfish grin at the shiny stars and then down at the unmoving form of the French airman. Then he set off on his bike down the blacked-out roads, travelling the 5 kilometres or so from Kornwestheim to Ludwigsburg. There was a long queue outside the Saalbautheater, where there were garish posters for Hitlerjunge Quex, and the Ufa Wochenschau, the weekly newsreel of our boys at the front. Julius spotted Berthe immediately because she looked scared and she wasn’t queuing.
He walked round the end of the queue, so he was coming up behind her, and shouted in her ear. ‘I’m from the Rote Kreuz Barracke Kornwestheim.’
This had the desired effect. Berthe was absolutely terrified.
Julius gave his best wolfish grin; he had his share of success with women, did Julius. He took her firmly by the arm. ‘I’m your new date,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘My name is Julius. Come on let’s queue.’
Ber
the was scared stiff he’d spill the beans about her French airman. She let him take her arm. As they queued, then found two places in the stygian gloom on the wooden seats in the back row, Berthe’s terror increased. She didn’t dare ask what had happened to her French boyfriend.
She thought Julius was Gestapo. She thought she would have her hair cut off for sleeping with the enemy. She thought she would be paraded through the streets, raped, shot. Even when he started kissing her in the dark, clammy-cold cinema she felt only a bit relieved. Perhaps he would kiss her and then cut her hair off, parade her through the streets, rape and shoot her.
Julius had seen the teenage Berthe Plutznick around before, though she obviously didn’t remember him. She was a white-skinned, round-faced, round-bodied dumpling — obliging even by wartime standards.
That evening, in the back row, while the Ufa Wochenschau showed the Führer giving one of his understated little pep talks to troops at the Russian front, Hartmut Plutznick was conceived. The actual second of his conception, 9.30 pm on 5 July 1944, was the third ein of the Führer’s memorable catchphrase — ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich and (bang) Ein Führer.’
By the end of the Führer’s trenchant analysis of topical events, Julius had ascertained that Berthe had her own little house. He got the address out of her, said he would see her there in two hours and left while the Führer was still in full flow, to the disgust of some of the audience.
*
Back at the Rote-Kreuz Barracke, Julius buried his guard’s uniform and his gun, gathered up his cash and a few clothes and biked back to Berthe’s house. It was in Neckarweihingen, just over the Neckar River, on the outskirts of Ludwigsburg. Julius introduced himself to the elderly Frau Plutznick as Berthe’s boyfriend. He explained that owing to certain ‘difficulties’ he would be staying with them for a while.
Old Frau Plutznick, widowed in the first war, proved as obliging in her own way as her daughter. Not only did she not demur — Berthe was still terrified and told her to do whatever Julius said — she helpfully died just before French troops took over the town nine months later. By then camp guard and Nazi Party member Julius Reitmann was missing, presumed dead, in the last-ditch defence of the Fatherland.
But even as Julius Reitmann met his presumed end, there arose one poor old Julius Plutznick with the buggered lungs who had always hated Hitler (Bavarian bastard). Poor old Julius Plutznick from Kornwestheim, that is, who was struggling along on an invalid pension. (‘Fight in the war? Me? I can’t hardly breathe, mein Herr. Listen to my lungs.’)
Poor old Julius Plutznick easily got a Persil Coupon, as they called them, a certificate confirming he was whiter than white and had never been a Nazi. In the rushed and chaotic denazification process that followed the war, he was even classed as Unbelastet (pure as the driven snow) rather than Minderbelastet (a bit grey round the edges). And more. The occupying authorities were politely invited to continue poor old Julius Plutznick’s invalidity pension, even though all record of it had been lost. (must have been the bombing.) And they did.
The pension, however, was small, so the newly invented Julius Plutznick sent Berthe Plutznick out to work at the Salamander shoe factory when it reopened early in 1946. Berthe spent all day sticking soles onto shoes with Ago, which stank so much that the windows of the factory were kept permanently open, causing a permanent draught which gave Berthe a permanent cold. When she came home from work she sneeezed and made Julius’s dinner. That was her life, apart from yielding Julius his conjugal rights.
*
Before she met Julius, Berthe had produced two children by two of several possible absent fathers. They were, in order, little Ursula and little Meinhardt. Then came Hartmut, created in the back row of the cinema during a newsreel programme. Julius’s subsequent conjugal rights, penetration neatly timed between Berthe’s sneezes, produced three more children: Robert, Mario and the youngest, Elvira.
So that was the state of play, at the Plutznick household, when Naomi visited for Sunday lunch in October 1971. Her husband, Hartmut, was already there. He had gone straight to the family home from his computer course in Tübingen, arriving on the Saturday, staying overnight, not stopping off to see his wife in the room they now shared.
15
Naomi Plutznick, née Prince, in a short pink mac and black knee-length boots, stopped outside the run-down Plutznick cottage in Neckarweihingen. The white van was parked outside again, and again it had its doors wide open.
The van belonged to two of Hartmut’s brothers, Mario and Robert. It had ‘Plutznick Spedition: Berlin’ stencilled on the side in red, although it was too small to be a proper furniture van. Berthe Plutznick was very proud of Mario and Robert for starting a furniture business, becoming the second and third members of the family, after the Wunderkind Hartmut, to attempt gainful employment.
The first time Naomi had seen the van, a few months ago, she had peered through the back windows and seen what looked like Sperrmüll inside. Naomi was quite a fan of this useful system: households got rid of unwanted furniture, usually furniture they were replacing because newer styles and colours had come along, by leaving it on the pavement on a day designated by the local council. Anybody who wanted the furniture was welcome to take some or all of it for nothing on that day. If they didn’t, the local cemncil would take it away next day. Naomi had furnished her room with Sperrmüll. Unknown to Himmelfahrt, the Biedermeiers had collected the furniture for his room (apart from the bed) the same way.
The first time she had seen Mario and Robert’s furniture, Naomi had nearly asked them if anything was for sale, going cheap, but some instinct made her clam up. On her next visit, when she saw the van again, she was glad she had said nothing. Exactly the same furniture was in exactly the same place as it had been last time. And it was still in exactly the same place now.
Naomi could think of only one reason why Mario and Robert would want to drive the same lot of furniture backwards and forwards to Berlin (through East Germany) all the time. They were buying and selling alright, but not furniture.
As she knocked on the splintered, mud-spattered, once-white door of the cottage, Naomi hoped that Hartmut would open it. She hoped he would kiss her, show he was pleased to see her. But as soon as she heard the pattering feet the other side of the door she knew it would be Elvira. Oh well, perhaps Elvira had beaten Hartmut to it.
‘Naomi! Naomi!’ shouted Elvira and flung her arms round her English sister-in-law.
Elvira was eighteen but looked five years younger, with her tiny, pinched face, blonde hair bleached almost white and skinny, boyish figure.
‘Naomi! Come up to my room and talk to me!’ she shouted gleefully, sounding much younger than her years, too.
‘I have to say hello to my husband!’ said Naomi, gently. ‘Then I’ll come up!’
As Naomi headed lor the main room, she could hear the sound of Mainhardt’s Jethro Tull LP floating down from the bedroom he shared with Mario and Robert. It was an Ian Anderson flute trill from ‘We Used to Know’ and Naomi stopped for a second to listen, enjoying it. In that second the Plutznick dog, a mainly-Schnauzer stray called Bubale, broke out of the main room and ran ecstatically to her.
‘Bubale!’ cried Naomi, warmed by the sight of the little creature.
Bubale lost all control. He leaped as high as he could up Naomi — about thigh high — turned and yipped excitedly. Naomi bent and scooped him up. Bubale put his hot little snout against her lips and licked for all he was worth. His paws scrambled on Naomi’s pink mac to get a better grip.
‘Pah!’ said Naomi, her mouth suddenly full of licking dog snout. But she still nuzzled the little dog back. ‘Oh you do look pretty, Bubale,’ she said, in English.
Since her last visit, the little dog had been adorned with a cheap red cotton collar threaded through a little leather purse. The purse had the Plutznick telephone number embossed on it in gold lettering and room for 30 pfennigs for a telephone call. Naomi could see the mind of the animal-loving old
man, old Julius, behind this purchase.
Naomi fingered the purse while the little dog panted, now in heaven. ‘So if you ever get lost,’ Naomi said to the dog, ‘someone will find you and phone home. Yes, they will!’
Finally, she put the dog down — by now it needed a wee — and with a small sigh went into the main room. She knew Hartmut would have his stone face on, the one he always had at home, the one that made him look like an Easter Island Statue. And she was right.
He said ‘Grüss Gott’ to her coolly, and nodded.
‘What!’ said Naomi, as lightly as she could. ‘Don’t I even get a kiss! I haven’t seen you for a week.’
Hartmut unrolled himself from his armchair and pecked her on the cheek, before flopping back.
‘Bone idle,’ said Naomi. It came out harder than she intended.
Last time he had come back from his course, three weeks ago, he had slept in her bed for the entire weekend, not even getting up for meals. She had spent most of the time ironing and trying to make conversation before he fell asleep again. Just before he went back, on the Sunday night, she had burst into tears. They had made it up but …
The old man, Julius, gave her a mischievous grin and said ‘Welcome fine lady,’ in English. It was just about the only English he knew.
Berthe ran in from the kitchen in an apron with a huge comic chicken on it, streaming fulsome apologies for the few seconds’ delay in greeting her. She kissed Naomi warmly and hugged her. Gabbling away, Berthe started describing what she had put in the Sunday lunch — a Swabian soup-cum-stew called Gaisburgermarsch. She had got hold of some special sausages, Landjägerwurstchen, and she was cutting them up. The Gaisburgermarsch would be really tasty, Berthe forecast.
‘I bet it will!’ said Naomi, meaning it.