He had heard on a number of occasions that there were attractive girls in Poland, but so far Jonathan hadn’t spotted any ravishing beauties on the streets of Danzig: they were shot-putters rather than javelin throwers. The beautiful ones are probably in the fish factory, he thought, filleting ocean perch.
Maria was no beauty either; she wouldn’t have been any good for tourism advertisements. She was full-figured, with short, sturdy legs. Her face was puffy, as if she’d been crying a lot recently.
She’s a silent-film beauty, thought Jonathan. She could have been in a Buster Keaton film, riding pillion on a motorcycle, side-saddle, in a beret, her white dress fluttering behind her like a veil. Or the Persil lady, all in black, he thought. He pictured the wall of a house in Berlin, the faded Persil advertisement plastered on it from 1935: it was near the Schlesischer Bahnhof, where the Galician Jews would arrive before going on to open a junk shop in the fifth back courtyard of a tenement building.
•
The house was shaking from the wood-chopping in the basement. The mother came back in again and put on the table, with plates and little silver spoons, some cake left over from Sunday, and Jonathan learnt that Maria was always having strange thoughts – the bicycle, over there, on the other side of the street – that refused to go away. They became an obsession, circling round and round her head, thoughts of devils and the end of the world. As her mother talked about it, Maria lay there listening to her inner voice to see what the netherworld had to say. The outline of her body, the jutting pelvis and narrow shoulders, protruded against the blanket; she had pulled it right under her chin, bundling herself up. Her short curly hair had not been washed recently, and there were bottles of pills on the table, lying around the way they do when a suicide is discovered.
The kettle whistled, and the mother went out again. Jonathan was alone with the girl, and at leisure to examine the floor covering. It was linoleum, with a similar pattern to the one in Isestrasse in Hamburg. He told her that this linoleum covering was probably very valuable; Kolaszewski and so on. It’d be snapped up in the West; the tiles in the stairwell too, fifty marks apiece, you’d just need to find someone to remove them. Then he told her that he was a journalist and that he was preparing a car rally for motoring journalists here in Poland, which he’d never done before and actually found pretty pointless – he couldn’t even drive – but it was well paid. And then he even asked – although he knew such a suggestion was absolutely ridiculous because it could never be put into practice – would she like to come along for the ride in the back of the car, an eight-cylinder Santubara? There was a spare seat; he could arrange it. It might be a distraction for her.
Although she had turned away she was listening. All of a sudden she turned back, propped herself up, looked at Jonathan and asked, ‘Who’s to blame?’
She lowered herself back down and said again, ‘Who’s to blame?’
She knew what she was talking about, and Jonathan knew, but he couldn’t bear this sort of generalization; he had to counter it. You won’t find one person who is to blame for everything that goes on in the world, he thought; you won’t get your hands on him. And he remembered a poster he had seen in the Rocky Mountains, in a souvenir shop, an illustration of American Indians being slaughtered.
Who was to blame? He pictured the child at the airport with the pink teddy bear, and he pictured the gypsy women and the old spectacles in the drawer at Albert Schindeloe’s shop; and his mother in Rosenau, on the church steps, her dress stained with blood.
The gilt-framed picture on the wall showed a young mother lying in a meadow, holding her child above her head, a ring of angels hovering round about.
Outside, through the window – he only noticed it now – you could see one of the needle-pointed steeples of the Marienkirche; and he thought of Münchhausen with his horse hanging from such a steeple, Münchhausen riding the cannonball; Hans Albers – who played him in the film – with his shining eyes, and the ball he held between his knees was the earth. Jonathan wondered whether there was a proverb he might quote at this juncture – ‘Goodness is its own reward’ or some such thing. There was bound to be a proverb that encapsulated all the wisdom of the West, some simple means of banishing bad thoughts.
•
In the meantime Frau Kuschinski had come back in with the flowered coffee pot. She poured coffee into the cups, all of which had a different pattern. The cake was excellent, probably baked with lard. Jonathan had never eaten a cake quite like it. It was accompanied by a little glass of cherry liqueur; the sugar had crystallized in the bottom of the bottle. The silver spoons had belonged to Germans; she still thought about that, said Frau Kuschinski. Exchanged for a piece of bread right after the war by frightened people living in a cellar in the ruins, chased away whenever they showed their faces.
Frau Kuschinski set about doing the laundry, taking items out of the basket, folding and sorting them, all the while holding forth about her daughter’s medical history. She’d been studying German philology, in her seventh term – ‘The comparative in the works of Wieland’. Always lost in thought, even as a child; then, out of nowhere, these strange, sudden moods, obsessing about a bicycle on the other side of the street that’s sometimes there and sometimes not, never a sign of the owner, and about the end of the world in every form; and all the doctors uninterested and uninformed. She should go for a good long walk, they’d told her, she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. And the university kept sending letters asking how long this illness was going to go on, saying that it wasn’t acceptable for her to be absent for weeks on end.
‘What’s going to come of all this?’ said the mother. ‘These stupid, stupid thoughts.’ About the bicycle across the street: sometimes it was parked there and sometimes it wasn’t. Or someone was listening at the door, you could actually hear their head rubbing against the wood. She’d said again and again that her daughter should stop thinking these thoughts, that this brooding was destroying what little happiness they’d managed to build here. First her husband had been run over by a lorry loaded with tree-trunks and now, as if she didn’t have enough to worry about, her daughter was sick.
Who is to blame, of what misdeeds
Are we accused?
Again and again the woman urged Jonathan to drink coffee and eat. ‘Eat,’ she said, ‘eat! Eat some more . . .’ Jonathan had crossed his legs and was holding the cup politely with both hands.
Then she held up the little medicine bottle – O come down, thou precious phial – which had contained the elixir that had, apparently, helped. Jonathan took it from her and saw that the label was already completely worn away. This medicine would help soothe the disordered, swirling stream of thoughts in this young woman’s brain provided it was taken regularly and in the correct doses. It presumably had an effect that was somehow both sedative and stimulating.
Jonathan took a sharpened pencil stub from his jacket pocket and wrote down the name of the medicine in his notebook, promising that he would get hold of some soon in Hamburg. He wondered whether he could somehow work this visit into his article. The pencil had been with him since Vienna; he’d written an article about Viennese coffee-houses with it. Under his window that day they’d been tearing up the road, its entrails on display, pipes and cables of every diameter, and he’d kept on writing amid all the hammering and crashing. The road in Maria’s head was being torn up too; a hot syrupy soup was welling up inside her, forming bubbles, and she put her hands over her ears and stamped her feet to soothe her soul again.
The practical Frau Kuschinski decided it was better if Jonathan took the bottle with him in case he wrote anything down wrong, and Jonathan put it in his pocket.
•
A boy came in. He was Maria’s little brother, and he was happy that they were having cake and chocolate.
‘Who’s to blame?’
He wasn’t the least bit surprised that a strange man called Jonathan was sitting there. Perhaps he mistook him for a doctor, decipherin
g the writing on the little brown ribbed bottle with the white cork.
This is a motoring journalist, he was told, who drives around in a splendid car. Perhaps, if the boy was very, very good, he could go with them sometime? Instead of Maria, who can’t, of course, because she’s sick.
Jonathan confirmed what the woman had said and described what a wonderful car it was, eight cylinders, goodness knows what horsepower. Perhaps the boy could come to the hotel tomorrow, it wouldn’t be a problem for him just to sit in the thing for a while. The boy talked about how someone had jostled him or chased him away and what he’d said to them. This was a bad idea, because Maria propped herself up and cross-examined him closely about whether the man been wearing a checked cap with a peak.
Jonathan listened, although he didn’t understand anything, and Maria lay down again under the blanket, wrestling with her dark thoughts, and the mother stood silhouetted darkly against the window. He sensed that the magical moment had passed. He let the young woman lie on the sofa, her bones jutting against the blanket, let her mother darken the window as she shook out twisted items of laundry, and turned to the child, who – if one could say that of a boy – was beautiful, with a rare kind of beauty. The formula for beauty that no one has yet deciphered. Perhaps Maria too had been this beautiful once, back when she still went skating and didn’t care whether or not people turned to look at her.
Jonathan explained to the boy what a digital display was, then he tore an empty page from his notebook, seized the scissors lying on the table and cut a car, freehand, from the paper. It more or less resembled the wondrous Santubara, and he drove it around the table going brumm, brumm! He had been told on a number of occasions that he was good with children.
It was great, in principle, that the boy wanted to come for a drive, said Jonathan, but of course he’d have to ask first if it was possible. Just sitting in it for a bit, though, he reckoned they could do that, no problem. And then everyone remembered that tomorrow was a school day, so it simply wouldn’t be possible.
Jonathan eventually brought this childish play to an end. He said he would get hold of the medicine and send it, as agreed, once he was back in Hamburg and writing his article. It would take time, though, and would be tricky, because he had to find an unusual angle for the article, and that would require all his energy. Writing wasn’t easy, after all. He stood in the living room with his head touching the too-small glass prism lamp; he shook first the boy’s hand then the woman’s. He would have liked to shake hands with Maria too, but she kept her hands under the blanket, completely absorbed in thoughts of heaven, earth and hell. The scissors! That was what was on her mind. The white paper had been cut to pieces by the scissors – that had to mean something, surely? One knee was sticking out from under the blanket. Jonathan saw this bare knee for just a hundredth of a second, and it was beautiful.
11
The little party had dinner in the green lounge of the Orbis Hotel. The tables were separated by trellises entwined with plastic flowers, and air conditioning blew dust across the plates. What thick crockery they have here; and what about those weird tin forks?
They served a good beer – Okocim – with a cheerful head, as Herr Strohtmeyer put it, and beetroot soup for a hundred zlotys, and smoked salmon for five hundred zlotys, with dekoracja that cost another thirty zlotys. You couldn’t get caviar for five pfennigs here either; you’d have had to shell out two thousand three hundred zlotys per portion.
‘How about that!’ said Frau Winkelvoss. The meal was really quite OK. Granted, the soup was lukewarm and the salmon dry around the edges, but they could remedy that if they made enough of a fuss. The head waiter was summoned. Could these faults be remedied? And because the waiter was a little too deferential the discussion became imperious in tone.
Frau Winkelvoss was wearing a puffy blouse with twenty-six necklaces around her neck and was suffering from stage fright. She was worried about whether things would go well ‘on the morrow’. They mustn’t leave too late. And she was uneasy because she couldn’t call home to find out how her husband and child were. How did he know the women who’d wanted his wallet were gypsies? she asked Jonathan, her tone censorious.
She’d already had one piece of bad news: Herr Schmidt had not yet arrived. This retired gastronome was supposed to inspect the gourmet restaurants that the Santubara directors were convinced lined the route of their tour and check whether they were suitable. Did they serve milk-fed lamb, or pike? During the war in France Herr Schmidt had managed a German Wehrmacht casino, and none of the reserve officers stationed there had ever had reason to complain. He hadn’t been able to conjure up wild strawberries in winter, but there’d always been a little package on hand for the wives whenever the gentlemen went home on leave.
And now the man hadn’t turned up.
This failure could not be laid at her door, however, so Frau Winkelvoss soon calmed down; it was merely the bad omen that troubled her. It didn’t trouble her too much, though. She praised reconstructed Danzig, informing the little group in a whisper that she’d already made a good find: amid the many rings on her fingers there now sat a ring that had not sat there before. It really was awful, she said, the way the West was plundering this country.
Gdańsk! She thought it was good that the city was Polish now; it was a sort of retributive justice. She imagined there were already forces at work again in the Federal Republic of Germany that would reverse this if they could. Extraordinary to think that Günter Grass roamed this city on his scooter as a young boy in shorts.
Like Jonathan, Hansi Strohtmeyer had fallen into the clutches of the gypsy women while sightseeing in the Old Town. His wallet had subsequently registered a one-hundred-mark shortfall. He was worrying about how he would explain it to the border guards when they left the country. This provided a good opportunity to tell him what life was like in a Polish prison; it was no picnic in there, and he would be sure to have to share a cell with drunks who would throw up over his feet.
Once again Frau Winkelvoss objected to the talk about gypsy women; as far as she was aware, there weren’t any ‘gypsy women’ in Poland at all. He should check his wallet again properly; and anyway, why would he do something as daft as handing his wallet over to strangers?
•
The door opened, and a flood of German tourists poured into the restaurant, passing through it into a separate room. It was the homeland association group Jonathan had seen in the Marienkirche. The staff were already waiting for them, and they had barely sat down before the soup was brought out.
‘Thank God we got here before them,’ said Hansi Strohtmeyer, ‘or we’d have been waiting for ever!’
Jonathan made a mental note that perhaps his five-thousand-mark article could include a word of advice about Poles being very sensitive and how, as a German, you must behave in a nice, unobtrusive way in order not to upset them. He’d already noted some tips that might be useful for the rally participants: the opening and closing times of the Marienkirche, but if it really was closed it didn’t matter, he was sure it would be possible to gain out-of-hours admission for a tourist group from the Santubara Company. Jonathan envisioned the rally participants starting with the Marienkirche as a ‘curtain-raiser’ to inspire a sense of the homeland. This would have to be followed by a guided walking tour of the city, which could end at the monument to the Lenin Shipyard workers. He was sure he could engineer the transition for the ladies and gentlemen from Wuppertal and Bremen – a transition from the soulless, affluent society of the West to the old Hanseatic city now known as Gdańsk. The Marienkirche first – or perhaps it was better to dive straight into the country’s problems, pausing reverently in front of the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers? Or have them both at the end?
There’d be a line or two of dates and facts, and perhaps a few statistics. Add those to the description of Danzig’s remarkable restoration efforts, and Jonathan had almost a page and a half already. It might be a good idea to look back as well: Da
nzig in 1939 and 1945; first the jubilation, then the hangover. That was two pages altogether, more or less, and they’d only been on the road for a day.
‘Not too much history,’ the PR guy from the Santubara Company had counselled him. ‘Please, not too much history.’
No, he wouldn’t write anything about Borislaw III and his penchant for gouging out his adversaries’ eyes, but you could hardly skip over Konrad of Masovia, who invited the Germans into the country, or the whole ‘Back to the Reich’ business. Or the brave Polish officials who defended the Post Office, thereby saving Poland’s honour. So, start with the Marienkirche after all. Or have it at the end?
There are times when I still think
Of those days by the Baltic Sea,
When in the grey gorges and chasms
Blossom fluttered on every tree.
The homeland association people at the next table had finished their meal and were listening to a talk with a slideshow: Danzig of old, how stunning this city had once been, how shabby it was now, but you had to acknowledge all the work that had gone into reconstructing it. Sitting there so comfortably around the table, they would have liked to strike up a song in praise of their native land – the one about the pastor and his cow, perhaps – but they didn’t quite dare. It could easily have been misconstrued.
•
Once their little group had eaten its fill for the equivalent of three marks fifty all told, they made plans for ‘the morrow’ and decided on their route. Jonathan insisted that the Marienburg had to be next on the agenda after Danzig, otherwise they might as well stay at home. Then they went their separate ways.
‘It is clean here, you can’t deny that.’
Marrow and Bone Page 9