5
Early the following week Jonathan found an opportunity to say, ‘Incidentally . . .’ Ulla was in the middle of throwing away a large bouquet of flowers when he told her of the Santubara Company’s unusual offer and that he couldn’t really see any reason not to go.
Ulla Bakkre de Vaera received the information with indifference. Her response was along the lines of ‘All right for some,’ but barely even that. Eventually she said, ‘Well, you know best,’ and although Jonathan didn’t know what to make of this remark, it set him thinking. Is driving around East Prussia risky? he wondered, as he helped her stuff the flowers into the rubbish bin.
My friend, thou’lt win
More in this hour to soothe thy senses
Than in the year’s monotony . . .
‘You know best.’ What did she mean by that?
•
Although Jonathan had not yet given the Santubara Company a definite yes, he was starting to take more of an interest in the east. He learnt that the landscape there was gently undulating, dotted with dozens of lakes that had formed from dead ice. Winter rye, potatoes, buckwheat. He read a wide range of historical papers and spent a whole afternoon learning about Tannenberg, one battle lost there in the fifteenth century by the Teutonic Knights and another won by Hindenburg in his glorious victory of 1914 (‘He evened the score . . .’).
He read up on how southern East Prussia had voted in the plebiscites. Pro-Germany in 1920! This pleased him. He read statements by the Ministry for Displaced Persons declaring that, from a legal point of view, the country still belonged to Germany. He browsed art history books, reading about Marienburg on the Nogat, not a northern giant by his definition but still a brick building of ludicrous size, to be considered alongside the Marienkirche in Danzig.
Since Jonathan had begun to focus on it he had started to get the impression that the whole of Hamburg was peopled with refugees and displaced persons: Sudeten Germans, Silesians, Pomeranians, West Prussians and East Prussians – East Prussians especially. The woman at the butcher’s who sliced the fat off the meat with a sharp knife, Dr Doysen from the university library, his colleague Rothermund in the editorial office – he actually came from Memel, which the Lithuanians got their hands on completely illegitimately, but no one remembered that any more. Hamburg was teeming with East Prussians, every one of whom must have a story to tell, and it seemed to Jonathan very strange that nobody asked them about it. None of the glossy magazines that clamoured for tales of blood and murder were interested in these stories. Love and peace and harmony were what they looked for with regard to their neighbours in the east.
There was Frau Krumbach, for example, who mopped the stairs every day. It turned out that she was from just outside Rastenburg in East Prussia; she’d left when she was fourteen. Jonathan spoke to her as she scoured the terrazzo floor, and while he gazed absent-mindedly at the empty niches in the stairwell walls (the architect had put them in eighty years earlier to hold paintings, allegorical depictions of the four points of the compass – ‘East, west, home’s best’ – which for some reason had never been delivered) she told him about a lake. She had grown up on its shores; what a beautiful lake it had been. She would walk out of the house in the morning and the lake would be right there, spread out in front of her, silver and winking. Rowing boats, swimming, fishing . . . they’d always referred to it as ‘our lake’.
‘When will we be able to go back?’
Her father had been a fisherman, and in winter he would leave a wooden stake to freeze in the water; then he’d hammer a nail in the top and fasten a rope to it to make a merry-go-round for the children. The ice had been so clear you could see the fish motionless beneath.
Will we ever get East Prussia back? she wanted to know; but Jonathan didn’t know either.
•
The newsagent from whom Jonathan bought his Rundschau every morning – JAPANESE INSIST ON RETURN OF KURIL ISLANDS – was unfriendly at first when Jonathan asked whether he too might be from East Prussia: he thought he could detect it in his accent. Might he be able to tell him what it was like there? The newsagent declined. No, no, he wanted nothing to do with it. Forget it. Those Polacks were incapable of doing anything, and now, to cap it all, we were supposed to help them! After a while, though, he abandoned his cover girls, cheap war novellas and television magazines with the latest gossip about newsreaders and their favourite food, stepped out of his kiosk and told his tale. His father had owned a stationer’s in Heilsberg: pencil sharpeners and notepaper. The Poles had sent him to a camp – never heard from him again – and his mother had died of sepsis. He’d found himself all alone in the world at twelve years of age. He’d roamed around, surviving by begging.
Then the man came out with stories so horrific it really made you wonder why they didn’t get written up in the magazines he sold: labour camp, prison, beatings. And as he recounted his experiences (not without a feel for the drama), a picture formed in Jonathan’s mind: his Uncle Edwin entering the church with his dead mother in his arms and the sun breaking through a stained-glass window, slanting in from above.
The newsagent’s horror stories culminated (by which time several people had gathered to listen) in the description of his escape from Poland in 1948. He had swum across the River Oder. The East German police had immediately sent him back – or rather, turned him in. His own people! Him! To the Poles!
The man grew increasingly agitated. A little dog that cocked its leg on his kiosk was given a kick. Finally he started mocking a television programme about Masuria: the wonderful collective farms the Poles had over there and the terrific factories, and they were such great people, the Poles . . . Those television people should come and talk to him; he’d have a thing or two to tell them. Care packages! Reparations!
By the time he had finished the man had red blotches on his neck, and other memories started welling up from beneath the ancient wound. On Sunday mornings he’d had to weed between the cobbles in front of the church, and the Poles who went to Mass there, Catholics like him, had spat at him. As these words burst out of him he pounded his chest, a martyr through and through.
Jonathan realized he had forfeited his advantage on the suffering front. He stood at the kiosk in his baggy Danish cardigan, tugging at his nostrils, wondering how to get away.
•
He usually visited antiquarian bookshops in search of material about Flemish town houses and city gates in Mecklenburg. Now he went looking for an old Baedeker guide to East Prussia. He sorted through albums of cigarette cards, newspapers, Art in the Third Reich. The extremely nice bookseller told him that there was a very inexpensive reprint of the East Prussian Baedeker and sold him, for a few marks, the handwritten biography of a woman from Königsberg entitled Sunny Days. ‘Otherwise we just throw this kind of stuff away,’ said the bookseller, who was not East Prussian but originally from Bavaria.
Afterwards Jonathan visited the world-renowned Dr Götze bookshop, which specialized in maps of all kinds. Here you could find not only globes of the moon and Mars that lit up inside but also city maps of Buenos Aires and Moscow. This was where Arctic explorers came to equip themselves, where sailing enthusiasts purchased nautical charts of the Kattegat.
A Herr Hofer laid out in front of Jonathan maps of East Prussia – ‘currently under Polish administration’ – with coats of arms left and right, some showing the 1945 evacuation routes. These maps were wonders of precision, with a scale of 1:300,000, showing the Vistula Lagoon and the Curonian Lagoon. All the place names were still in German.
‘Be careful, though,’ said Herr Hofer. ‘You’re not allowed to take German maps into Poland. You could get into trouble.’
Jonathan asked for everything of interest to be packed up (although he turned down recordings of songs from the homeland). He also bought Documentation of the Expulsion, a five-volume paperback collection of first-class atrocities, on special offer. He could give it to Ulla later, for Christmas. He couldn’t carry it aro
und openly, reading it on the U-Bahn, for instance; people would take him for a Cold War fanatic.
He cashed his uncle’s cheque and went to the Oyster Cellar, where all kinds of eccentrics liked to lunch. He ordered a plate of mussels in aspic with sautéed potatoes and leafed through Sunny Days, in which the now eighty-year-old author told of how, as a child, she used to run through meadows whooping with joy. Jonathan wondered why he hadn’t taken an interest in his homeland long ago. He supposed it was because East Prussia wasn’t his homeland: his home was Bad Zwischenahn – the furniture factory, where his uncle’s workers used to let him ride on their shoulders, and the lake, where he had paddled in the afternoons and skated in winter.
A wooden stake frozen into the ice: that would have been fun.
His uncle’s study, where he had lain on the sofa when he had mumps. The top left-hand drawer of the desk, in which he had loved to rummage as a child. The pit of wood shavings he and his friends had tumbled into as children. And a winter morning on the lake, a ball of sun through the fog, more beautiful than anything any artist might paint today.
The longer he thought about it the clearer his ‘homeland’ became to him. But did he yearn for it? No, because he still had it.
•
In the days that followed Jonathan spent hours lying on the sofa, studying the map of East Prussia in a singularly uncomfortable position. He lay on his back and held the map above his head, but it kept flopping down. In the end he spread it out on the table and marked in red felt-tip pen the cultural stops he planned to suggest to the Santubara Company people: Marienburg, Frauenburg, Braunsberg, Heilsberg. It really was unbelievable that the Russians had cut themselves a piece of the Vistula Spit as well. What did the Poles have to say about that?
Pillau: the refugees’ last resort as they fled the victors’ revenge. Jonathan pictured a line of evacuees trudging across the frozen lagoon, the heads of horses that had fallen through the ice still sticking out of the water, low-flying planes of the glorious Red Army roaring past overhead, tracer bullets slamming into the miserable procession. And then there were the overcrowded ships. The carts left behind on the quay, the horses still in harness, hanging their sad heads. You could even see a goat in one of the photos.
Jonathan picked up the written account again, Sunny Days. Homeland? No, impossible, you couldn’t say that any more. It smacked of nationalist propaganda.
•
He didn’t go to visit his uncle, who would only have reeled off endless anecdotes. He didn’t go to Bad Zwischenahn because he was afraid he would be given nostalgic errands to run on his trip. He didn’t even need to go, because the more he thought about not going the more of the old stories he remembered. His uncle didn’t need to tell him anything about East Prussia; he knew it all, including the things he hadn’t told him yet.
He just gave him a quick call, asked about Rosenau and made a note of where it was so he wouldn’t forget, scatterbrained as he was. He learnt that his uncle’s old estate was situated in the Russian zone. Thank God, he thought, in that case I don’t have to go there as well.
One afternoon at half past four he took a sheet of paper and wrote to the Santubara Company. Yes, he would do it; he would go. By now he was quite looking forward to this exotic enterprise. He could visit Italy or Spain later; they weren’t going anywhere.
Five thousand marks plus expenses, which were negotiable. Would they reimburse him for maps and books? It would be good to know.
6
Ulla was seldom home these days; the exhibition was very demanding, she said. From time to time she would stand in the doorway and shake her head at Jonathan. She had nothing against his studies, but when she saw him lying like that on the sofa, a paper cup of lemonade on the table, he looked so discarded – wrecked, even. He kept getting smaller and smaller in her eyes, the dingy room bigger and bigger.
Jonathan registered that she was standing in the doorway, telling him that she really had to go now and wouldn’t be back until late. And as she closed the door behind her, he thought: What did she say?
He stared into space, and had the sense that it was not him doing the thinking – the thinking was happening inside him. Order was being created in his brain as if in a carousel vending machine.
•
When he’d had his fill of pictures and numbers he was suddenly overcome by a feeling that enough was enough. He hauled himself up and went to see Albert Schindeloe on Lehmweg.
‘Is it Tuesday or Wednesday today?’ he asked his friend, who had been planning to spend a peaceful afternoon entering a few select receipts in an accounts ledger and throwing the others in the wastepaper basket. With the two of them alone together Albert showed his nicer side. He was friendly, and when he stroked his fat tomcat it was as if he were stroking Jonathan.
Out of all the stuff hanging, standing and lying around in Albert’s shop – the piano candleholders, the glasses and ceramics, the medals and helmets – there wasn’t a single item Jonathan would have wanted. The little 1930s porcelain figurine on Albert’s desk perhaps: a modern girl standing, rather stiffly, on a gilded ball. He took the thing in his hand, held it up to the light and turned it as people do in films. The figurine weighed surprisingly little; it was hollow.
Albert set aside his confidential ledger receipts and asked Jonathan whether he would dare to take a crowbar and break off the tiles in the stairwell of the Isestrasse building? If the house had been destroyed in the war the tiles would all have been lost anyway. Twenty marks a tile; how about it?
This suggestion was doomed to failure, not least because Jonathan was a person devoid of practical skills. Also, he didn’t want to lose the raised water lilies he ran his finger along when charging up and down the stairs.
The general’s widow probably wouldn’t care either way if someone stole the tiles, Albert said. But Jonathan refused: some reflex prevented him from carrying out this knavery. And imagine the racket! In the stairwell, breaking off tiles with a crowbar! In principle, yes, sure, but no. He’d prefer to fill the empty niches in the stairwell with allegories of the four corners of the earth and add something to the house rather than take something away.
Albert Schindeloe resisted starting another conversation about the Botero; he didn’t want to spoil his own and Jonathan’s good mood.
Their conversation was interrupted by a man who wanted to change a hundred-mark note. He spoke to Albert as if he knew him well. When he heard about Jonathan’s Polish enterprise he advised him to take five-mark coins with him; they counted as small change, he said, so you didn’t have to declare them on entry.
A housewife from Rahlstedt with nothing better to do came in looking for two cups for her set of porcelain – ‘You know, the one with those roses all over it.’ She already had saucers.
Did she mean kitchen porcelain or living-room porcelain? Albert asked her. Or was she, perhaps, in search of a chamber pot?
When she had gone – the two men were pleased that they didn’t have any porcelain with ‘those roses’ all over it – a pensioner entered the shop. In his trembling hand he carried a plastic bag with a Bible and hymnal. Might these be something for Albert? he asked. They were ancient family treasures, very valuable.
Albert leafed through the Bible – a 1904 edition – and read aloud:
I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters . . .
The old man was dealt with kindly, but they turned him away and watched him go with a sort of sadness. Albert blamed the bloody government for this man having to sell his Bible and hymnal; they spent billions on missiles but were constantly cutting pensions! Albert’s worldview derived partly from tabloid newspapers and partly from some obscure Trotskyite pamphlet that he hid under his files whenever anyone entered the shop.
•
At midday they went out for potato soup. The best one was to be found at the Spanish place, which wasn’t actually Spanish at all. This re
staurant was run, pretty dreadfully, by a couple of very German students, and their only satisfying dish was a local German potato soup. The young man poured their beers in a manner that seemed to be saying: Look! I can do this too. He was a bit too cocky. And the famous poster of the German soldier shooting a woman with a child in her arms hung on the wall of the loo.
NO MORE WAR!
•
It couldn’t be a German, people used to say; his cap was all wrong. And as proof of the photographer’s unscrupulousness they would cite Capa’s famous photo from the Spanish Civil War of a soldier falling, hit by the fatal bullet. That had been a set-up, they would say, a spur-of-the-moment thing, taken well behind the front line, with the comrades eating breakfast and splitting their sides laughing.
Back in the days when the Spanish place still had a Spanish owner, all the local dealers used to meet here: Heinzi, the man with the bicycle; Dr Ommel, the clock collector, who was also an expert on chinoiserie and fluent in Japanese; Giorgiu, the glass specialist, who gave everything away on credit and nicked things from his colleagues. The police had been round to see him again recently; people were talking about it.
None of these colourful characters ate at the Spanish place any more because the restaurant had gone downhill. Potato soup isn’t to everyone’s taste.
Jonathan and Albert were still discussing the woman from Rahlstedt and her rose-covered porcelain. She was probably a divorced dentist’s wife whose husband would have to support her for the next fifty years even though things had never been any good between them in bed. The two friends were of the opinion that stupid women really were quite remarkably stupid, a theoretical view unsubstantiated by any practical experience and expressed only when they were alone together.
Towards the end of the little meal Albert took a roll of fifty-mark notes from his jacket pocket and asked his friend if he could bring him back a few of those Polish wooden Jew figurines or some old amber jewellery.
Marrow and Bone Page 4