As they walked out of the barn and back to the house through a gaggle of geese, he explained to the villagers that he had been born here, on a refugee wagon; and Hansi Strohtmeyer, who had arrived in the interim, got to hear that his mother had breathed her last giving birth to him.
The old man immediately understood what Jonathan was telling them and passed the information on. This gentleman was born here, in this village – how extraordinary!
A bottle of schnapps was brought, and everyone had a sip; and over there was the church where the young woman had been laid down all those years ago, and right beside it, just as it was supposed to, ran the road where his uncle’s cart had stood.
•
Jonathan walked over to the church, a red-brick building with whitewashed transoms. It was a church that could easily have stood in Schleswig-Holstein or Mecklenburg (‘Our fallen heroes’). He was approaching it from the back, and to reach it he had to scramble down a slippery, sloping bank. A stream trickled along the bottom, the kind children like to throw stones in, with a concrete slab across it for churchgoers to take a short cut.
As Jonathan was edging his way down the slope he slipped and hit the back of his head. Brightness filled his brain like a ball of lightning.
For a moment he was dazed. Something had changed. For several seconds the terrific blow had shaped the thought and image particles of his brain into lines of sound and stars, indecipherable yet meaningful.
The numbness gradually wore off. No one had seen him, thank God; the others had gone round the front, as this route was too treacherous for them. Jonathan was ashamed that, at the age of forty-three, he had slipped and fallen.
If Winkelvoss had taken a tumble here, with all her scarves and necklaces and trinkets, it might have been amusing, Jonathan thought. He and Hansi Strohtmeyer would have had something to laugh about together for quite some time.
Jonathan teetered across the concrete slab, climbed up the small slope covered in nettles and found himself already standing in the church’s little cemetery. Stretched out in front of him were fresh graves with wooden crosses, faded flowers and wreaths and headstones from the German days, the names chiselled out one letter at a time. Wild bushes – elder, hazel, jasmine and laburnum – grew along the tumbledown wall. Jonathan was quite alone. He stared at a spot on the wall and knew: that’s where she lies. He was neither sad nor happy; he wasn’t even surprised that he was standing here, in a graveyard; he was neither cold nor warm; there was a little sunshine, a little wind. He could have walked on, but instead he stood staring and listening as if mesmerized. He saw the humus-rich soil, the tendrils of ivy, a bumblebee flying back and forth; there were sparrows, an aeroplane, the voices of the others. He also saw before him – and this disturbed him – the picture he had seen hanging on the wall at the Kuschinskis’, the mass-produced painting of the young mother lying in a meadow, lifting her child above her head.
When Frau Winkelvoss called from the road – Hello! Was he dreaming over there, or what? – he tore himself away and walked over to the rest of the group. They’d just seen something wonderful, she said; they’d opened the church door, and a teacher had been sitting in the vestibule with a few dear little children (‘mites’, she called them) preparing for their First Communion. On old benches, just like a hundred years ago.
So children now sat in the vestibule where his mother had been set down back then, beside the board with the black numbers for the hymnal. Jonathan felt no need to see this. What would he have said to the children? Guess what: many, many years ago, this is what happened here?
Here, then, is where she breathed her last, he thought; and he didn’t mind when Anita Winkelvoss grabbed his forearm and gave it a sympathetic squeeze.
•
Jonathan walked back to the car. A kind of numbness had taken possession of him. He couldn’t muster any strong feeling that might have enabled him outwardly to express what had happened here. He felt detached yet completely focused; he was outside himself yet fully present.
Hansi Strohtmeyer was standing by the car, watching him. As he was about to get in, this man, who had driven in a rally across the Sahara and been stranded in a river in South America, asked him, ‘What about your father?’ Only then did Jonathan start to sob. He clutched his head and just managed to flee into the car; he saw before him a young lieutenant in riding breeches, a Wehrmacht lieutenant with a silver Wound Badge. He saw him standing on the shore of the Vistula Spit, scanning the sea with his binoculars – ‘When are they going to come and get us?’ – while behind him the refugee wagons rumbled from east to west and west to east. Jonathan pounded the armrest with his fist and the words kept hammering in his brain: all for nothing! ALL FOR NOTHING! He didn’t mean the death of his mother or of his father, who’d had to ‘bite the dust’, or the sofa beds his uncle manufactured, but the suffering of all creatures, the flesh lashed to the stake, the calf he had seen bound and gagged, the torture chamber in the Marienburg, the shuffling procession of mankind beneath the condemning sky.
It’s all for nothing, he thought, again and again. And: Who’s to blame?
17
As they continued their journey they picked over all that had happened: how nice the old farmer had been; barely a tooth in his head, and they hadn’t actually understood what it was he wanted, but he had been awfully nice. And all the others were nice as well, said Frau Winkelvoss; in time of need, if ever the shoe were on the other foot, she could imagine sticking it out with them.
‘. . . for about half an hour,’ Hansi Strohtmeyer added, but was ignored.
The business with the apples was awfully nice of them too; they hadn’t needed to do that. And that hiding place. What if they’d probed a bit longer? No? They could have got some more details out of them for sure. All the other stuff that must still be waiting to be discovered – buried treasures! They’ll stumble across them in five hundred years, like pots of gold coins from the Thirty Years War.
The graveyard business had really affected him, hadn’t it? asked Frau Winkelvoss. She’d seen him standing there like that and thought: Why’s he standing there? And then she’d known: I have to speak to him right away or something will happen. What she would really have liked to have done was to take a photo of him. That would have been a nice memory.
•
And the children in the church, sitting there, so well-behaved. Frau Winkelvoss, who was a Catholic, told them a curate had boxed her ears once and she hadn’t been back to church since.
When she had finished recounting this experience, she shared the next chapter of her adoption narrative, alternating the story with the route book – ‘After five kilometres, turn left. Watch out for horse-drawn vehicles.’ Initially, she’d wanted to fly out on her own, to Brazil, but she’d never have got through it without her husband. All that baksheesh, slipping hundred-dollar notes into the hands of every judge and every lawyer. The whole enterprise had taken her eight days. Six adults in a Fiat Uno, forty-five degrees in the shade! Ninety-eight per cent humidity, car doors locked, windows up! Gravel roads, huge mud holes. And the people. It was like driving through an anthill of poverty; people living in their own filth.
And then, after a five-hour drive, the orphanage: an iron gate, two honks of the horn, a solitary, disabled black man in the yard, and suddenly the door of the orphanage opened and the children overwhelmed her like a hundred thousand flies, all of them black; they knew perfectly well that when white people came they took some of them away with them. And then an ancient woman had appeared, the founder of the home – ‘They’re just fetching her, the girl. Three months old; we found her on a step.’ Then the child had been placed in her arms, and it had been harder than giving birth to a child of her own. A combination of excitement and bacteria had given her the shits.
Then back to the authorities: photographs, passport office, welfare office, court all over again.
•
Jonathan sat in his corner and saw in his mind’s eye a be
ach, summer, heard the distant sounds of people bathing. And he saw his elegant father on horseback in the dunes, rising in the saddle, gazing off at the horizon. He would be around seventy now if he’d survived – quite conceivable – his mother sixty-five. Jonathan wished he were back on Isestrasse in Hamburg. What was he doing driving around this region? Isestrasse: easy street, breezy street, sleazy street. He didn’t wish he was with Ulla. It was the thought of the quiet room, the Botero hanging on the wall, the washbasin, in front of which he could watch the schoolchildren throwing their sandwiches to the ducks during break, and the thought of his work that filled him with voluptuous satisfaction. The northern goddesses . . . Perhaps he should go to Flanders, or possibly Sweden?
Ulla Bakkre de Vaera – what had she been getting up to these past few days? What did she ‘get up to’, as a rule? What did she do? He remembered Langeoog, where he’d met her in the island bookshop one morning as he was about to buy his newspapers. She’d mistaken him for a member of staff, and he hadn’t disabused her. A black blouse with silver embroidery, and black silk shorts, the seams split open a centimetre up the sides. Did he have the diaries of Novalis? she’d asked. Novalis, on Langeoog, in the island bookshop! And they’d gone to the cafe together, laughing, as if that had always been their intention, even though they didn’t know each other at all. And at night, on the cool beach . . . He’d liked her cynicism, the way she talked about people without inhibition, with a friendly smile, and the way she had taken possession of him right from the start.
•
The car purred on. Hansi Strohtmeyer was delighted by the homeland association’s West German omnibus, which was driving ahead of them, bouncing slightly; it was from Düsseldorf, a superbus with air conditioning and a toilet, a superbus with extra leg room. The trees lining the road waved their crowns in the wind; there was no hope whatsoever of overtaking it.
After an hour the bus turned off to the left, exactly where the Santubara crew wanted to turn as well. A narrow road led into the pine forest, and they came to a sign: BYŁA WOJENNA KWATERA HITLERA – the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s headquarters.
The Magirus-Deutz bus slid noiselessly into the car park, and before all the one-eyed, one-legged and one-armed gentlemen with their red-cheeked spouses could spill out of it, Hansi Strohtmeyer drove past and parked in a special parking space alongside a campervan, from which a dark-haired woman stared out.
•
You couldn’t see much from the car park apart from the huge, half-demolished bunker by the entrance. The Führer’s headquarters! From behind a high wire fence steel rods curved out of the yawning cracks. It was a bit like the zoo, where before you went in you might, with a bit of luck, spot a bear on imitation rocks and hear parrots screeching in the distance.
There was a booth with a hole in the glass for entry tickets – NO PHOTOGRAPHY! – and a board beside it with explanatory texts in five languages. No. 13 is Hitler’s bunker, Bunker 16 is Göring, 19 Keitel. No. 15 isn’t a bunker at all; that was a tea-room, and there was a casino here too. The homeland association’s tour guide informed the Polish cashier that they all deeply regretted the fact that Germans had done so many dreadful things to her motherland, and he needed a group ticket for thirty-six adults and three children; did that qualify for a discount?
Hansi Strohtmeyer was fretting about the campervan; it didn’t fill him with confidence. He wondered whether he should go back again and park the car elsewhere?
No need. Their escort commando’s yellow Lada had already shown up and was parking on the edge of the forest. Herr Schütte was keeping a watchful eye on their precious V8.
Jonathan thought about Claus von Stauffenberg, hero and traitor, Hitler’s failed assassin. He tried to imagine how he must have felt, arriving here with his little pistol on his belt, the heavy briefcase under his arm. The escape may have required even more careful planning than the attack. Tick-tick-tick, the clock against the table leg. Exiting the barracks again without anyone noticing. Using carefully fabricated excuses to get out of there, passing through the security zones, faster and faster, one after another . . . And then his reception in Berlin – all is lost – and instead of shaking his hand and thanking him they put him up against the wall.
Jonathan also wondered whether his father might ever have had business here; and Stauffenberg’s face superimposed itself on his father’s, and he thought: If he had to die anyway, why didn’t he just gun Hitler down then and there?
•
Frau Winkelvoss hesitated a moment before entering. She probably thought visiting this curious site was more of a men’s thing. Two scruffy men who clearly belonged to the campervan snuck past, eyeing her insolently. The woman in the campervan shouted something at them before they could hassle her, though, and it was all right. Frau Winkelvoss regarded Jonathan – his slim, intellectual build, the wonky, spotted bow-tie – and thought of the hour they’d spent beside the lake, and suddenly it struck her that she hadn’t really tried to get to know this person at all yet. She’d always talked to Strohtmeyer, whom she knew anyway, instead of linking arms with this eccentric man who was at home in editorial departments and had been to America at a time when no one had been to America.
As Jonathan prepared to enter the mossy, grass-covered iconic site – notebook in hand, ready to write up his impressions, perhaps even to find an unusual angle – she pushed her way over to him and started talking. Did he really think, she asked him, that the rally journalists would be interested in this Nazi crap? Wouldn’t it be better to leave it out because it would stir up the wrong emotions? All they were really meant to be doing was test-driving the new V8s; what did that have to do with Hitler’s bunker? And then – God alone knows why – she treated Jonathan to a promotional lecture on Sicily, where there were also ruins to be visited, because whenever the country had been overrun by another new culture the pre-existing one had been wiped out and the people exterminated.
Liszt’s Préludes sounded faintly in Jonathan’s head; he saw that officer on horseback on the Champs-Élysées, waving a greeting to the German soldiers as they marched past the Arc de Triomphe. Frau Winkelvoss went on talking. She spoke of unbelievable heat, and Stromboli, 926 metres high and still active. Jonathan found himself thinking about that stooped, doddering man walking up and down here with his German shepherd, the man who had managed to get multitudes of people to slit each other’s throats with bloody knives. A photo he had once seen pushed itself to the front of his mind: winter ’41, three ordinary soldiers lost in a snowstorm and whipping their horse as it tried, beneath their blows, to leap out of a snowdrift. Meanwhile Frau Winkelvoss was praising Sicily’s natural beauty, the flat, undulating landscape; he must go there in spring when it was carpeted with flowers, although the people had cut down all the trees.
Frau Winkelvoss talked and talked, then suddenly woke up to the fact that Jonathan wasn’t speaking. Was he still upset about the business with his mother? she asked. She’d seen him standing there, rooted to the spot, and she’d thought: You have to call out to him now or something will happen. She’d sensed that something unusual was going on.
They walked into the black canyon of trees and a light rain began to fall. no more war! Big admonishing signs to the right and left of the path summoned visitors to a didactic audio-visual presentation, but Jonathan skipped the lecture. He was looking for the original experience – he wanted to touch, feel, inhale the relics of the Third Reich; he was fed up with photos and newsreel footage.
He took a photocopy of the site map out of his wallet – thank God he’d picked the thing up, that way he wouldn’t confuse Himmler’s bunker with Göring’s. And already they were there: concrete cubes to the left and right of the path, with concrete roofs fifteen metres thick, their corners worn away, draped in moss-furred camouflage netting with artificial foliage on top.
Hansi Strohtmeyer elbowed his way over, curious. He did, after all, want to know which bunker had belonged to whom, and the measurements, so-an
d-so many metres high, wide and deep. The fact that beneath the surface layer of concrete, in the ground, there were another six floors where everything was probably still intact: desks, bunk beds, filing cabinets. Nobody dared to go down there because there were thought to be glassmines buried in the earth.
The bunkers had been blown up with many wagon-loads of dynamite, but that had only scratched the surface.
Strohtmeyer wondered whether perhaps speleologists could take a look down there. Venture into the depths with a red rope around their waists to find skeletons in uniform slumped over a field telephone.
After Jonathan had answered his colleague, he was forced to let Frau Winkelvoss lecture him about Sicily some more. The train that circumnavigated Etna resembled an iron sausage; and the rumbling in the volcano’s interior, the puffing and growling . . .
•
Soft, gentle rain dripping from the branches of the trees on to the bunkers, streaming down the walls. Rampant nature, damp now and gleaming; the mosses on the walls of the concrete blocks, the earthen track through the forest, the silence over all: this had to be inhaled through flared nostrils. Jonathan saw the bunkers as standing stones; among them, in the last days of humanity, in the red of the setting sun, the last survivors were gathering.
What must Poles think when they walked around this place? said Frau Winkelvoss. Did they regularly bring schoolchildren here? It was the best history lesson you could come up with.
Strohtmeyer said it was strange: if Hitler had been so sure of himself, why did he build these bunkers? The man who invented the blitzkrieg, of all people, hiding away in these concrete monstrosities. He could have survived a nuclear bomb in there.
Yes, that really was odd. Jonathan was surprised he hadn’t thought of it himself. He decided to write it down and use it in his article. And then, of course, to highlight the parallels with the Marienburg. He’d quote Scharnhorst – what was it again? Anyone who barricades themselves in has already lost?
Marrow and Bone Page 14