by Tessa de Loo
Meanwhile, however, she obtained an answer to the question of why her father’s name had had such a magic effect on Frau von Garlitz. She had asked von Falkenau point-blank. ‘Johann Bamberg … yes … wait a minute … I’ll never forget him … an exceptional young person, very dedicated and ingenious, he thought up various improvements within the business to make things work more efficiently …’ He looked at Anna thoughtfully. ‘Outwardly you don’t look like him but in you I detect the same effort and incorruptibility. Alas we were not able to profit long from your father. I remember that he was offered another job … he was a socialist, well yes, that was his affair … an extraordinary person, that Bamberg …’
‘You yourselves had begun to bomb towns,’ said Lotte, who was annoyed at the way Anna depicted the inhabitants of Cologne as victims. When she thought of the bombing of Rotterdam and London her sympathy froze.
‘Yes of course we had started it,’ said Anna.
‘Then you shouldn’t have been surprised that there was retaliation.’
‘We weren’t surprised, we were afraid – just like the Londoners when they were packed on top of each other in air raid shelters. That fear is actually universal!’
‘With the difference that you had yourselves to thank for it. You had chosen the regime that would shrink from nothing to bomb towns.’
Anna sighed. She rested her plump arms on the table, leaned forwards and looked wearily at Lotte. ‘I have just explained to you how the poor stupid people let themselves be blinded. Why won’t you accept that? We still aren’t getting anywhere this way.’
Lotte sipped from her empty cup. She felt the rage rising to her head – she was being lectured here, would you believe! What arrogance!
‘I’ll tell you now in exact detail why I can’t accept it,’ she said angrily. ‘Perhaps then, in your turn, you’ll also understand something for once.’
The water that had lapped against the keel of the boat was scraping beneath their Friesian skates six months later. They were gliding over the ice in a cadenza, hands criss-crossed in each other’s. It looked as though together they made one skater. Frosted reed borders and willows shot past; above them the sun hung low and was slowly turning red. Lotte stumbled over a scar in the ice. David caught her. Twisting on the narrow blades they stopped, facing each other; he kissed her frozen lips. ‘Ice queen …’ he said in her ear, ‘what would you say if we were to get engaged …’ ‘But …’ Lotte began. She looked at him in amazement. He laughed and kissed her on the end of her nose, which was numb from cold. ‘Think about it …’ he said. He grasped her hands and they zigzagged onwards. Mist formed; minuscule particles of water took on the colour of the setting sun. The cold penetrated through her clothes. A line of verse from the song cycle went round in her head: ‘In such a stormy weather, I never would have sent the children out …’
In the dark they cycled back. Outside her home he said goodbye. ‘I wouldn’t want to give you a fright,’ he said, ‘but I’m simply mad about you.’ She blew on her hands, he took them in his and rubbed them warm. ‘I’ll come on Saturday,’ he promised, and then we’ll talk it over.’ ‘No, no …’ she said in confusion, ‘I mean … I can’t on Saturday … let’s wait a little …’ He kissed her cheerfully. ‘Fine … fine … we’re not in a rush …’ He rode off humming, turning round to wave once more.
For days, absent-mindedly, she did the things that had to be done. The as yet unnamed love should last for ever for her; she loved the secrecy, the unspoken and the painful. A concept like ‘getting engaged’ made her nervous. Yet she knew that ultimately she would not say no. Before their relationship accelerated and everyone interfered with it she wanted to harbour ambivalent feelings and the reliable solitude. Perhaps he felt it – she heard nothing from him.
The illusion that the war was turning out well came to an end. In Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter there were clashes between WA men, stirring up trouble, and Jewish gangs; a WA man was killed. As a reprisal, on 22 February, hundreds of young Jewish men were picked up arbitrarily. In the official report there was mention of ‘a murder so horrible and bestial, as only Jews were capable of committing’, but the illegal newspaper Het Parool demythologized the affair: it was a question of manslaughter in an ordinary fight – the dead body had been found with a cosh round the wrist! Lotte’s father brought home a manifesto from the underground Communist Party, exhorting resistance to the Jewish pogroms: ‘STRIKE!!! STRIKE!!! STRIKE!!!’ the working people were urged. The strikes that broke out in various parts of the country thereafter were stopped by the Germans with executions. Calm apparently returned again.
Just as Lotte was beginning to grow restless – it had been ages – she was telephoned by David’s father. In a dull tone he asked if it would be convenient if he and his wife could come round the same evening: they had something to discuss with her. Blood rushed to her head. Why was David sending his parents instead of coming himself? After everything he had said about them? They were received solemnly (the famous singer!). Lotte’s father shook hands in silence. The singer smiled sadly, turning his seducer’s moustache into a stripe. His glance slid over the four sisters. ‘And who is Lotte?’ Lotte nodded cautiously. David’s mother hurried to seize both her hands and squeeze them delicately. Overcome with emotion she clicked open her crocodile skin bag and took out a handkerchief. ‘We did not know that he had a girlfriend …’ she said, moved.
Her husband did the talking after they had sat down. The reason for their visit was a postcard from David from Buchenwald, in which he asked his parents to convey his greetings to Lotte because he had not been able to say goodbye to her. ‘Buchen … wald …?’ Lotte stammered. De Vries swallowed and stroked his forehead in a gesture of despairing resignation. Staring at the floor he explained that David was arrested on Saturday 22 February in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter while he was making music with a group of friends. The Grüne Polizei had burst in suddenly; they had to stand with their backs to the wall. ‘Which of you is Jewish?’ was screamed at them. Without thinking for a second, his head was probably still in the music, David had taken a step forward. Two other Jews in the group wisely kept their mouths shut. He was taken to the Jonas Daniël Meierplein, where rows of companions in misfortune were already waiting. Without a charge, without any form of trial they had been transported to a camp in Germany.
David’s mother sobbed into her handkerchief. Desperately looking round him, the father took heart: ‘You’ll see that after a few months of labour camp the boys will be sent home. The Germans wanted to make an example: think about it, no more disturbances. David is well, he’s done a lot of sport … He isn’t having a bad time there … here, read it …’ Lotte bent over a few miserable lines on the card buried beneath rubber stamps: ‘… I am fine, we are working heartily …’ He had had this card in his hands. It was rather alarming, a card that could leave the camp freely and find the way home while the sender was held in captivity. Yet the full extent of the seriousness did not immediately get through to her. It was so bizarre, so absurd, so senseless, that it could not be comprehended. Automatically she looked at the piano – the sheet music still lay open at the page they had been on. Everything in her resisted the thought that he had disappeared just like that – just like that. Immediately she also clung on to the idea of a labour camp, a sort of scout camp – chopping wood in the open air, planting trees.
‘We are sending him back a card,’ said his father, ‘would you like to write a line?’ ‘Dear David …’ she squeezed into the little space under the fully written card. Her pen stopped, floating above the paper. She felt his father’s eyes on her, driving her pen. She wanted to write in code, something personal, something essential. A line from the song cycle came to her – without thinking it over she wrote a variant of it: ‘… I hope you have only gone out and will presently be home again …’ As she reread the line it suddenly evoked a strong fear in her. What in God’s name had she written down? A quotation from a poem of mourning, an ele
gy. Too late, too late to change anything. She gave the card back with a trembling hand. She could not bear to be in the room any longer. The sight of his parents upset her, but nor could she bear the sympathy of her parents … a world that could let someone disappear just like that took her breath away. She stood up abruptly and went out of the room without polite phrases, out of the house, outside. She sat down on a step at the garden house with a throbbing heart. It penetrated through to her like a slow-acting poison, something that was almost as intolerable as David’s disappearance: on 22 February he would have come to her … if she had wanted that.
For weeks she subjected herself to strenuous self-analysis, put herself on the rack: why had she not gone along with his spontaneous suggestion … why did she have such a need to keep her options open, for the sake of form … if she had wanted to put him to the test a bit, provoke … why all that reservation …? She lashed herself with questions that she could not answer, questions that bit by bit gave her an increasingly monstrous picture of herself, which invariably brought her to the same merciless conclusion.
His father telephoned again. They had received a second card, this time from Mauthausen, with the cryptic text: ‘If I do not catch my sailing ship quickly, then it will be too late …’ He cried desperately, ‘He is imploring us to help, my boy, but what can I do? I wish I could take his place – I am an old man, he has his whole life in front of him.’ Lotte sought for words in vain – when she really needed to find them they seemed not to exist. If David did not survive then the whole idea of justice was an illusion – only arbitrariness ruled, chaos, in the midst of which one person, with all his plans, expectations, hopes, fantasies, signified nothing – nothing. At night the ship with the billowing sails drifted through her dreams. The Loosdrecht Lakes swelled into an ocean – now he sat beaming and tanned at the rudder, then he was in the water again and trying frenetically to haul himself into the boat, holding on to the edge with petrified fingers while she looked on.
She received a recent photograph from his father. Painfully innocent, David was laughing at the photographer. That naïvety had cost him his freedom, perhaps his life. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time – she could not look at the photograph without that thought. Reverence prevented her from tearing it up, again and again she forced herself to look at it. David had cycled out of her life waving cheerfully; that movement of his arm, back and forth, stayed longest with her as though something more was being conveyed, which was of great significance. And what had he been humming as he disappeared in the darkness?
Music irritated her. All those melodies, measures, subtleties, struck her as ridiculous – useless frills, false sentiments. Her voice refused to work in the upper registers, in the lower it vibrated uncertainly. Catharina Metz sent her home: ‘Pull yourself together a bit first.’
4
Where did all the water come from and where did it go to? Anna lay in a shining copper bath-tub. Bubbles of air took off from her skin, a network of scales. Her body lay pale and fish-like in the water. There must be an ingenious system of pipes through which the water flowed from the springs to the Thermal Institute and, via the bath-tubs, was conveyed away again – the body it lapped around for half an hour was merely a way-station. All that water, invisible, flowing inaudibly, like blood in the arteries, the bath-tubs a pumping heart. In how many bottles of mineral water am I lying? she thought.
Long ago this same body sat in a bath-tub on the kitchen floor. Uncle Heinrich drummed mockingly at the closed kitchen door: you must be really filthy if you have a bath every week. It seemed a loaded silence reigned in this bathroom, as though the guests of the past were invisibly present and anxiously ensuring that they did not reveal themselves. How many, which famous dead had been in this bathroom, in this bath-tub? Were their thoughts left behind here, could the silence be top heavy from it? What they had thought wouldn’t have been up to much, she chuckled.
From those unknown dead it was but a small step to Lotte’s death. Shame, rage, sorrow had prevented Anna sleeping the whole night. Yet we are sisters, she remonstrated stubbornly with herself. But didn’t age go together with leniency, with wisdom? If the two of us can’t surmount all those barriers, how do others manage? Then the world will stay in the grip of irreconcilability for centuries, then you can multiply the duration of each war by at least four generations. Of course – Germany had been able to extort the reconciliation with all its money, but one football competition was enough to reveal that the old enmity was still alive and kicking.
Something in the angle of the light, in the green reflection off the tiles, in the peaceful privacy, brought her back to the casino. Lotte was sitting opposite her in a bath on lion’s feet, a dark woman (Aunt Käthe?) leaned over them and poured a thin trickle of cold water down their backs from a blue enamel jug. They took it in turns to shiver, trembling with pleasure. She could see Lotte very sharply before her, with her damp dark hair, her eyes screwed tightly closed – the picture was clear, more lifelike than that of Lotte as she had sat opposite her the previous day. It is still all there, she said full of surprise. Although the bombing had left no tile, no stone of the casino intact, it is still all there in my head; those years in between signify nothing.
What history has subjected us to we cannot weigh on the scales, she thought. Suffering does not separate us, but connects us – as pleasure connected us then. This insight, however absurd it seemed, relieved her. At the same moment the woman in an overall came in to help her out of the bath. She offered Anna an inviting hand. Without strange antics, upright and dignified, she stepped over the edge of the bath and descended below. Like Pauline Bonaparte, assisted by her chambermaid, she grinned inwardly.
They found each other in the coffee-room at the end of the morning. Although the door was always invitingly open, they had never come across anyone in there. Now and then a guest shuffled through the labyrinth of passages but mostly it was quiet and empty – January was the slack season.
‘I slept so badly,’ Anna confided, ‘the whole night I saw the image of that one young man who stepped forward unsuspectingly.’
Lotte nodded absent-mindedly, sipping her coffee and a glass of mineral water alternately. Anna had the feeling that she did not want to go on with it.
‘I don’t want to give the impression that I am bidding against you in terms of the distress that befell me,’ she said carefully, ‘but my husband was killed in the war too, in the same bloody war, after I had gone through years of worry …’
The first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony sounded in the dining-room. ‘Ta ta ta ta … The Wehrmacht High Command announces: The twenty-eighth infantry division on the advance to Russia …’ Anna was preparing a piece of bread for Rudolf. Slowly she spread some butter on it mixed with tears. Old von Falkenau, sitting opposite eating breakfast, watched her pityingly. ‘You mustn’t cry, Fräulein,’ he shook his head, ‘after all, your fiancé isn’t in the infantry! He isn’t in any danger with the signals troops. Anyway, you’ll see, the whole operation will be over in six weeks. Did you think that that nation was going to defend itself? They are glad to be being released from Communism.’ Anna laughed dejectedly. Although von Falkenau, a war-horse with connections in the highest military circles, got his information first hand, no reassurance from outside was adequate to soothe her anxiety. What was one soldier among a million soldiers? – a bit of fluff in the wind over the tundra, in the wastes of a country where the sun rose on one side as it set on the other. It was a nonsensical war, chiefly expressed in huge numbers that far exceeded the powers of imagination: ‘Ta ta ta ta … The Wehrmacht High Command announces …’: thirty thousand Russian prisoners of war, forty thousand, fifty thousand. What happened to them, where did they manage to live? Questions that the practical spirit, at home, posed itself quite innocently while the victory chatter zigzagged outside from the radio through the open garden doors and whipped the roses up into more profuse flower. When a letter eventually arrived
it was already fourteen days old. Meanwhile perhaps Martin had already been killed in action. She went to see the newsreel in the nearby town, she read the paper, but the more efforts she made to assess his chances of survival in relation to the advancing armies, the more she felt a powerless outsider. Sitting at home and unable to do anything – a front that nobody spoke about.
A telegram arrived at the end of October. ‘Please come to Vienna. Immediately. We will get married.’ Her suitcase, containing a home-made wedding dress and an officially authenticated family tree, had been ready for months. She travelled to Vienna in great haste. As she got off she hesitated. For one moment it was as though a strong gust of air was pushing her back inside the train. There he stood in actuality, after having died a hundred deaths in her imagination. He was there, returned from an immensity in which an ordinary person would be lost. Time and space had brought him back here as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. He was flanked by his parents. She envied him slightly for having two parents with whom he could wait for her: look, that’s her now. Father and son both wore suits and hats, Martin’s was crooked, the other’s was straight. The father was slim and youthful, but there was a troubled expression on his face in the shade of his hat brim, as though he were constantly looking into a strong sun. The mother also gave the impression that existence demanded a superhuman effort from her. She pursed her lips together stiffly as though she were blowing up a balloon; she wore her heavily permed black hair like a cap on her head. Between these two people, who seemed to be ignoring one another, Martin stood and beamed.