At around the same time Ulla Bakkre de Vaera was sitting on a restaurant terrace by the Alster with her boss, the imposing Dr Kranstöver. As it was a smart restaurant, there was a live pianist sitting at a grand piano, playing the same sort of thing Jonathan had been listening to in the Kleines Haus. He tinkled away over the sound of the fountain the proprietors had installed on the terrace. How rare it was to be able to sit outside in Hamburg of an evening! And how reassuring that there were people in this world you got on with without even needing to talk much. Ulla clinked the glass stirrer in her cocktail. Suckling pig, as fresh as if it were alive, baked in wildflower honey pastry. She resolved to inspect Jonathan’s room tomorrow morning – it was ages since she’d last read his diary. She would permit herself that treat.
Dr Kranstöver was looking forward to the exhibition, which was now all set to go – with or without Mexico – and kept saying he couldn’t have managed it as well without Ulla. Their collaboration had been a success. Who would have thought it, back then, when she’d sat there in his office? Did she realize she had her ring to thank for this? The moment he saw it, he knew she was the one. He’d be leaving for the south of France in the next few days. He owned a delightful house near the Pyrenees, in the Béziers region where the Cathars were slaughtered; the mild wind drifted through it on bare feet, and once he got there he was going to let himself go. All the wonderful white bread they had down there, the beans and the splendid wine. And then he would embark on the final stage: writing the introductory essay for the exhibition on cruelty, his eighth great oeuvre.
Ah! France. A great people. So sensitive they deemed even linguistic inaccuracies ‘cruel’ – les barbarismes. We, on the other hand, we Germans were so coarse and uncivilized that in our part of the world the weather could be described as ‘cruel’. In our culture this word – so important, so frightening – was trivialized and devalued. ‘It’s cruelly cold today . . .’ The fact that it was possible to say this in German was pretty objectionable. It implied that one could also draw conclusions about other realms of feeling: our capacity for love, for example, which also clearly left a great deal to be desired. Love as the counterpart of cruelty.
Oh, to leave behind all the small irritations that made life so unpleasant here in the north. The journalists with their imbecilic critiques, the general public – all idiots these days – and the people from the town council who went through his expenses: why did he always take a taxi to the museum, and what about the big apartment in Rahlstedt? Was that really necessary when he had an attic apartment in the museum at his disposal?
Dr Kranstöver was working towards getting Ulla Bakkre de Vaera to accompany him to France. Perhaps his large Peugeot, which he would be fetching shortly to drive her home, would convince her to spend a few days with him there. First he would dangle the attic apartment – the penthouse, one might say – before her, tempt her with that. Then he would say: France. He pictured himself lying in a deckchair, surrounded by luxuriant shrubs, gazing at the mountains in the distance; he saw her emerge from the low, single-storey house, step over the mouldering threshold in a long skirt – barefoot, definitely – with a big, live fish in her hand, about to slaughter it with a sharp knife. He would – he must – make this vision a reality.
•
Ulla was thinking about a big fish too but in more concrete terms. Her part-time status had to change; that was what she was working towards. Twenty-nine years old and still not in regular employment! She eyed her boss over the rim of her slender-stemmed glass. He was peering through his half-moon spectacles and prodding at his trout, which stared up at him with boiled white eyes. She wondered whether, like Jonathan, he ever left dirty socks on his desk or yellowing earplugs moulded to the shape of his ear? He didn’t have false teeth, she’d already established that much, so bad breath was unlikely.
And so she said that she wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to design such a clear, compelling exhibition from the mass of material she had delivered. The courage of omission – the energy required to focus amorphous ideas and establish a dialogue between remote concepts! If they managed to get Mexico going as well, the outcome really could be described as artistic – the exhibition itself as a work of art – as it not only did justice to the individual exhibits but also consolidated them into a collage, transforming them into an overall statement of something entirely different. It was borderline genius the way he jumped back and forth to harness the profusion of material and convey a clear, humane insight: that injustice and cruelty should never be repeated in this world.
And so on and so forth.
This compliment put Dr Kranstöver in a cheerful mood, and he related where, when and how he had arranged the other seven exhibitions, counting them off on his fingers, exhibitions that had subsequently become sensations; and he declared that Meckel was an absolute clown, totally incompetent; this work would have been quite beyond him.
Meckel? asked Ulla. Then she remembered – thank God – that this was a man in Bochum who was always causing trouble, and recalled why she ought to disapprove of him. Didn’t he even have a speech impediment?
•
They got to the stewed fruit. Dr Kranstöver was of the opinion that cruelty was a particularly male domain, deriving perhaps from excessive strength or lack of occupation – a phenomenon that did not occur with women, as the normal woman was almost constantly occupied with childrearing and, sensitized by dealing with her brood, possessed a certain empathy.
‘While the man sits by the fire whittling arrows, she suckles the boy . . .’
‘Not always!’ cried Ulla. It wasn’t always like that; she could give examples to the contrary. That Cheka commissar – wasn’t she called Dora? – in Minsk, and Ilse Koch, the Beast of Buchenwald: women. God forbid they ever be let loose! She thought that, when the worst came to the worst, men retained a scrap of fairness right to the end. Just think of female traffic wardens, those strangely uniformed hostesses who hunt down parking offenders. When those women gave out parking tickets you could shuffle about on your knees in front of them, but you’d be banging your head against a brick wall.
‘But, Miss Ulla,’ said Dr Kranstöver, seizing her hand at last, ‘these women are notable exceptions – man-women, whose hormonal balance is disturbed.’
Ulla shook his hand as if in greeting. ‘How would you know what a woman is capable of ?’ she said. She thought of Charlotte Corday, that painting by David of Marat lying dead in his bathtub.
Murder! she thought. Murder is not, in and of itself, an act of cruelty. The question is how it’s done. She reflected that she might need to reorganize her card index after all. Girls in uniform, women against women – this was an aspect she hadn’t yet considered. If she didn’t, she might be accused of neglecting equal rights.
The rest of the evening was spent discussing secondary aspects of cruelty, specific outrages in the idyllic world of the upright citizen: dismissing pregnant women from their jobs, for example, or hit-and-run incidents, a male speciality, callously driving on and leaving someone injured in the road. It was a particularly repulsive manifestation of what outwardly respectable men were capable of.
Pedantry – wasn’t that also a form of cruelty? said Dr Kranstöver. This was something to think about later. He thought excessive pedantry really was quite cruel as well, because it was aimed at the senses. Dotting the legal i’s and crossing the t’s when the whole panoply of life was on offer.
As he said this he was thinking about the attic apartment in the museum with its view over the roofs of Hamburg. He resolved to offer it to this young woman the following morning.
8
Jonathan presented himself punctually at the airport in his coat and spotted bow-tie. He paid the taxi driver and entered the airport building, which bristled with antennae.
The automatic doors slid obsequiously aside, and warm air, tinted with music, billowed towards him. Indicator boards rattled out updates on delays. Jonathan strolled through the bright hall, u
nimpressed by the utopian airs of those trying to book cheap holidays to Tunisia, people dressed for leisure activities, with children called Denis and Jacqueline.
A Turkish man drove past at a leisurely speed in a special vehicle, polishing the floor. He was singing quietly to himself. This, thought Jonathan, must be far more pleasant than tilling a field in the wastes of Anatolia. Nozzles at the front of the machine squirted white emulsion, erasing the dirt that was tracked in from every corner of the world on the soles of people’s shoes. The last surviving insects ran for their lives.
Jonathan exchanged ten five-mark notes at the bank, as advised. He bought some newspapers at a kiosk, and beside him stood the footballer Manni Koch, the man who missed the penalty in the last European Cup, looking for razor blades. That made his day. Bumping into this man made the whole trip worthwhile.
•
In the airport restaurant Jonathan met up with the Santubara Company crew, Frau Winkelvoss and Hansi Strohtmeyer, as arranged. They’d just been thinking: Oh, for God’s sake, this writer isn’t going to make it; he probably reckons it’s not until tomorrow, or he flew out yesterday, despite ‘9.30 a.m. airport restaurant’ being highlighted with red marker pen on the paper . . . They leapt up and offered him their chairs, even though there were two free chairs at the table. Perhaps they were even a little disappointed that he’d actually turned up; it was hard to say.
Frau Winkelvoss was small and radiant. (Jonathan straightened his bow-tie when he saw her.) She was swathed in a frilly blouse and scented scarves, which she had teamed with gold-buckled Russian-leather mercenary boots.
‘Did you order this lovely weather?’
Hansi Strohtmeyer, the powerfully built chauffeur, stood beside her, looking almost shy. Actually, he wasn’t a chauffeur at all – Frau Winkelvoss was amused that Jonathan had been under this impression – but a highly paid test and racing driver. He had been involved in three very serious accidents and was still incredibly fit. He’d been on that super-rally in the Sahara, the one where eighteen people died – lorries, motorcycles, small cars, all piled up – driving past camel caravans over sand dunes shaped by the wind, being filmed from a helicopter. He’d also been stranded in a river in South America.
The two of them were eating smoked salmon, which had been fattened on vitamin mash in Norway, and talking about their boss, who had dreamt up and organized the East Prussia thing. He sent his regards. He’d asked them to tell Jonathan to find an unusual angle when writing about the Poland trip, and had given them an envelope for him containing an advance of five hundred marks, which demonstrated a good understanding of the realities of life. Writers, as everyone knows, never have any money.
•
Jonathan ordered a pie. Frau Winkelvoss, who he noticed was wearing an agreeable perfume, gave him a Santubara folder containing brochures, maps, the plane ticket ‘and so on and so forth’ and his passport with the visa stamped in it. Although she said it was touching how nice the Poles were – kind, hospitable, vivacious – there was something or other she wanted to impress on him, and he mustn’t, for heaven’s sake, do this or that in ‘Gdańsk’. And he mustn’t lose his passport or all hell would break loose. It was immediately apparent that they thought him a likeable loser and would have preferred to hang the ticket around his neck as if he were embarking on the Children’s Evacuation Programme.
Frau Winkelvoss, whose first name was Anita, said she thought they’d have to keep a bit of an eye on him. She even wagged a warning finger.
And so they were off to Poland – to East Prussia, the ‘German regions’. The three of them were looking forward to the tour: it was quite special, because who went to East Prussia these days? They were curious to discover what there was to see there. Polish women were said to be stunningly attractive, but after three years they started losing their figure.
‘They have no idea Germans used to live there.’
Should he buy anything else? Cigarettes? Sticking plasters? Would they be cast adrift over the border?
No, there was no need. The Santubara people knew of special shops in Orbis hotels where Western currency bought you anything your heart desired. Besides, Poles weren’t born yesterday. In the past the two of them had purchased all sorts of things on the black market – bread, butter, sausages, a mountain of stuff for the equivalent of one mark seventy-five; they’d sat in a ditch by the roadside and scoffed the lot.
Don’t forget to bring back some Krakauer smoked sausages. You won’t find a sausage like it anywhere in Europe!
•
Naturally they had arrived too early. They had to wait an hour and a half. Another beer, and another.
See that weird family at the nearby table, with the mentally handicapped child who was drooling? Were they planning on taking him with them somewhere when he couldn’t control his face and wore a leather helmet to prevent him from injuring himself? What must that cost? they wondered. Imagine – and people in India have nothing to eat!
Cream of tomato soup, sirloin tips, cold cuts on a wooden plate. Frau Winkelvoss, small as she was, consumed a whole mountain of yellow, brown and green ice cream; it had a little paper parasol on top that she licked clean and slipped in her handbag. She burped charmingly, and went on talking about ‘Gdańsk’ – what one had to keep an eye out for there, meaning what Jonathan needed to find an unusual angle for, and what she had to keep an eye out for herself.
Adios, Madonna.
It was a beautiful time!
Adios, Madonna.
You’re no longer mine . . .
I see you so happy to be in his arms,
And now I miss you so,
Adios, Madonna!
I was a fool to let you go!
Frau Winkelvoss pushed up her bracelets and lit a cigarillo. She made one last call to Mutzbach, during which she informed them that she had seen the footballer Manni Koch in the cafeteria, the poor lad who had missed the penalty; she’d never have guessed he was so small. How was he supposed to stand up to the big guys? Of course, she also passed on the fact that Jonathan Fabrizius, the oddball writer, had thought Hansi Strohtmeyer was the chauffeur. This was now doing the rounds in Mutzbach.
Jonathan made one last attempt to reach his girlfriend. Their goodbyes had been brief. She wasn’t at home, and he couldn’t disturb her at the museum; she was probably looking through the collection of paintings from the States with Dr Kranstöver. Images of executions in the electric chair, which – believe it or not – lasted up to ten minutes. The painters of these pictures had taken Otto Dix’s shell-shocked ‘shakers’ as their inspiration.
•
Frau Winkelvoss made another quick visit to ‘the little girls’ room’, and Jonathan bought a pack of ten miniature bottles of Eau de Cologne. Then the small group headed to Gate 39, where they had to wait another half an hour.
It was an odd feeling for her, said Frau Winkelvoss, being escorted by two such handsome men, one on either side.
In the search cubicle, Jonathan spread his coat before the policeman like an exhibitionist and thanked the man for doing his job, commenting that it must be incredibly boring. (He didn’t ask whether he’d ever caught anyone; he assumed the policeman must be sick to death of that question.) He tried to spot his bag on the monitor, to see what it looked like in its defamiliarized state. As always when he went abroad, Jonathan regarded the German passport officers with a degree of wistfulness. Soon he would be placing himself under foreign sovereignty, a guest; he would have to hold his tongue instead of being allowed to demonstrate his superiority. When you’d started a world war, murdered Jews and taken people’s bicycles away (in Holland) the cards were stacked against you. Why had he let himself in for this? Could he still turn back?
Jonathan moved away from his colleagues and sat down with his back to the panoramic window so he could people-watch undisturbed. These people, in turn, wanted to watch the jets rolling past on the runway, and those funny airport vehicles, very small but incredibly wide, a
s they zipped about and bustled back and forth, and the border guards’ tank roasting in the sun. The people waiting here for the flight to Danzig looked different from the utopian figures in the main terminal building: not very elegant, more rustic – a bit like Russian matkas flying from Tbilisi to Moscow to sell two kilos of strawberries. They looked outlandish – the English word ‘strange’ came to Jonathan’s mind. There was a Polish child, a huge pink teddy bear under its arm with a voice box that sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’. A man in white leather shoes. A woman in a red hat. Had she been a Canadian tourist wearing it in Munich she wouldn’t have stood out, but here, in this serious environment, it looked odd, even silly. His attention was caught by an old woman dressed entirely in black. Perhaps during the war she’d had to go into hiding? Or had kept a German woman as a slave after the war? Or was she a German going to look at her parents’ estate, where they’d kept Russian prisoners of war in a wooden crate?
All the Poles travelling back to their homeland had something in their luggage that they weren’t allowed to bring with them. In Hamburg they’d been assertive; after all, the Germans had wrecked their country and still hadn’t paid any reparations. Now, with the imminent prospect of encountering the Polish airport police, they came across as simpler, more pious, than they probably were.
•
The LOT aeroplane was parked at the perimeter of the airport as if in quarantine. It had an unfamiliar look to it: it wasn’t a Boeing but a Russian make, similar to a Boeing but distinctly different too. It lacked that finishing touch – Western design, or whatever you’d call it: the fuselage looked too short compared to the tail, and there was a bulge like a double chin under the cockpit. And the seats inside weren’t numbered, so people immediately started pushing and shoving. ‘Sometimes you’ll even see chickens sitting in the gangway,’ he’d been told.
Jonathan shoved his coat into the overhead locker, five-mark coins raining down on him as he did so, and squeezed himself into his seat.
Marrow and Bone Page 6