by Tessa de Loo
Frau von Garlitz led her into the house. Scarcely had Anna set foot on the landing when various craftsmen who were busy with restoration work on the second floor shook the dust and grit from their clothes – it fell down the staircase onto Anna’s Viennese hat. Hilarious laughter filled the space. ‘Now you know what it’s like here,’ said Frau von Garlitz.
A thorough inventory that same day proved that she had not been exaggerating. As well as the structural problems resulting from years of maintenance backlog, the interior was filthy and threadbare. The smell of an old lady who for fifty years had obstinately demanded that everything should stay as it had been in her youth hung in every room. Rickety suits of armour flapped in the draughty hall and passages – there were whimsical tree trunks with phosphorescent lights that with spooky kitsch woke the unsuspecting passer-by who, half-asleep, had to go to the WC at night. Frau von Garlitz’s bedroom was an urgent case. Since her arrival six weeks ago she had been sleeping in the same night-dress, the same sheets, in a bed whose satin canopy sagged low beneath the dust. Everything was so filthy that you were already infected just by looking at it. ‘My heavens,’ Anna whispered, ‘what a pigsty.’ Frau von Garlitz raised her hands helplessly. ‘I don’t know where anything is, by God nothing, I mean sheets and so on.’ ‘But they must be somewhere,’ said Anna huskily, throwing open the windows. It began to dawn on her that with that one candid, timid gesture the Countess was transferring full responsibility for the decayed estate on to her. ‘How glad I am that you are here,’ she sighed girlishly,
Thus the renovations began. For a year Anna went from room to room with a succession of Polish labourers and cleaning women from the village until all forty-five had undergone a transformation. The German tenants – sent off to war – had been replaced by Polish forced labourers and Russian prisoners of war, housed in the stables, permanently guarded by four armed soldiers. There were no tractors or petrol. At six o’clock in the morning eighty oxen teams manned by Russians, supervised by an agricultural inspector exempted from military service, went into the surrounding fields with rattling carts, where they worked the whole day at an un-Russian pace to fetch in the quota of grain decreed by the Reich. Potatoes, grain, milk, butter, everything had to be handed over, apart from a small ration for individual use. For the castle inhabitants a wall cupboard had been constructed with compartments in which each kept their own store of butter – one hundred and twenty-five grams per week. They had to hand over half to the kitchen for cooking, the other half was for bread. Humanity seemed to be divided into two camps: the one spread everything on one piece and had dry bread for the rest of the week, the other carefully spread each piece with a puritanically wafer-thin layer.
Before the great refit could go like clockwork, Anna had to do battle with traditional ways. Unsure, because she had to direct a complicated, unfathomed household on the basis of the pathetic certificate from the School of Housekeeping for Young Ladies of the Better Circles, she roamed through the rooms in the hope of discovering a domestic structure. She ended up in the wash kitchen where four jovial fat women from the village scrubbed sheets in oval wash-tubs, singing, laughing and chatting. The little procession traipsed from there to the cellar where the sheets were put through the mangle and smoothed with irons that contained a piece of glowing metal. They did not rush themselves, the wash was done in fourteen days, then a new lot arrived and they began all over again. Each day was punctuated by an ample lunchtime break. Mamselle made coffee and baked biscuits. It was really pleasant – it was beyond their range of interests that this sociability could be taking place against a backdrop of forty-five rooms in a state of disintegration. ‘Good Lord,’ thought Anna, ‘that surely can’t go on like this.’
At the back of the wash kitchen she discovered, under a thick layer of dust, an enormous washing machine with a centrifuge. ‘Broken,’ the women waved aside fatalistically. Long elevated transmission belts crossed the courtyard and ended up at a generator in a distillery, where gin was made from potatoes. ‘What’s wrong with this,’ she asked the mechanic, ‘is it broken?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he rumbled, shrugging his shoulders. Anna had the feeling that she was swimming in treacle, in a river of listlessness and indifference. ‘What sort of an answer is that: I don’t know,’ said Anna sharply. ‘Perhaps you could just have a look at it.’ Sighing, with a vacant gaze, the man bent over the machine. A few hours later he had repaired it in spite of himself. The next morning at six o’clock Anna put the washing in the machine; the enormous thing, about a metre across, started to move; a lively wood fire was burning beneath it. On their arrival the washerwomen were greeted with joyful sounds: boom, boom, boom, tch, tch, tch, klop, klop, klop. They blinked nonplussed, and then they were furious. What did this Rhinelander imagine, did she think she could interfere in their lives just like that? They had washed by hand as long as they could remember, it suited very well, there was no need for change at all now. ‘Why should you wash and iron for fourteen days?’ cried Anna above the din. One load was already spun. The sun was shining outside; she hung the washing on the line and hurried back to the wash kitchen. She taught the women how the machines had to be used, ignoring their disapproving looks. ‘You can go and sit next to it quietly.’ Anna trudged back and forth to the line. At the end of the day the washing smelled delightful and had been folded neatly. Everything was ready – thirteen days remained to clean the house. A little revolution. When the women realized that, their rage turned to hate – which gradually melted in the winter when they and their children were ill and Anna brewed camomile tea for them and wrapped them up warmly and drove to town at night with them when they were about to have a child. In this way she compensated silently for Frau von Garlitz’s negligence – it was the nobility’s traditional duty to care for the welfare of the tenants.
Room after room was mucked out. Anna’s amazement at the cobwebs, the dust, the mould and dead insects, which the old countess had collected over the years, soon turned into robust perseverance. There was one room that outdid all the rest: the Emperor’s Room. It had remained a locked sanctuary since Kaiser Wilhelm had spent one night there as the guest of his wife’s former courtier. As soon as they opened the door a musty sour air came at them. They took down the curtains and drapes, they pulled the sheets and pillows from the canopied bed in a cloud of dust and mites, but even when the whole room had been stripped, that penetrating imperial smell still hung there. Finally they unstitched the mattress: maggots teemed where his excellency’s body had rested, gladly jumping out of the horsehair – into sudden freedom. Anna was horrified. It is wartime, she thought feverishly, we can’t throw expensive horsehair away just like that. Suddenly she remembered the still she had seen in the distillery. They crossed over the courtyard with the mattress and toppled the contents into the boiler, beneath which a gentle fire burned. The maggots exploded like popcorn. When no further form of activity could be detected between the hairs the horsehair was washed and dried in the sun. Finally she took the expensive load to a mattressmaker, armed with two litres of gin.
The attic was full of objects that the age had already vomited up years ago. The only valuables Anna discovered were a series of English engravings, old hunting scenes in mahogany frames, which were found a place in the corridors and the hall. A staggering amount of kitsch was found there under the filth, from a period that seemed to have a preference for curls and gilding. They brought everything up into the courtyard for a public sale. The announcement went from mouth to mouth: ‘Everything going for fifty pfennigs’. Polish women from the nearby dwellings crowded forwards in threadbare, shapeless clothes with scarves tied tightly round their pale round faces. They brightened up at the sight of the luxury articles: they fingered the symbols of a rich and carefree existence with shining eyes. After they had hesitated endlessly over their purchases, eventually they rushed off as though someone could take them away from them – a silk-covered tabouret or a tea cosy in the form of a rococo lady.
After the sugar beets had been harvested they were washed, sliced and pressed in a nauseatingly sweet smoke by the Polish women. Then they were made into a syrup; everything was sticky and clinging. Each one got a sack of beets for themselves as payment. ‘May we use the press …?’ they gestured, shyly demonstrating how hard pressing by hand in a cloth was. ‘Of course,’ said Anna, ‘we’ve finished, we don’t need it any more.’ Some hours later Herr von Garlitz came up to her in riding attire. ‘Listen here,’ he called her to order, ‘now what have you done? You have given the Poles the press.’ ‘Yes, why not?’ said Anna defiantly. She was irritated by the fashionable, indolent element in the middle of the hum of activity. ‘Do you think,’ he raised his chin, ‘the Poles would give us a press if we were in Poland?’ He looked challengingly at her and answered for her: ‘They certainly would not do so, precisely because they hate us.’ ‘But after all, we don’t hate them,’ Anna retorted, ‘anyway, if the Poles are so much worse than us, as you say, and I am meant to follow their example and be like them, then that makes us not a whisker better and we have no right to behave as though they ought to obey us.’ He shook his head at the paradoxical reasoning. ‘They are Untermenschen,’ he said with dignity. ‘If they are Untermenschen and we are the Herrenmenschen, as you say,’ she tried to put it diplomatically, ‘then actually I can’t be like the Poles, so shouldn’t I be like us, namely a Herrenmensch?’ The whole idea of Untermensch, Herrenmensch, Übermensch struck her as ridiculous, but she had just enough political awareness to understand intuitively that she could not say that out loud to a lackey of the Führer. Von Garlitz frowned; this dialectic was going over his head. Somewhere he sensed he had been put in his place by a self-opinionated, unfortunately indispensable, member of the staff who impudently deployed her power against his, as employer, over his household. It was all too much for him; shaking the confusion off him he walked away with short, measured steps, his head bent, thwacking a tree here and there with his riding whip.
The excessive work shortened the time between two Feldpost letters. Martin wrote about the beauty of fields full of sunflowers; he had found a case of books at a weekly market; a recipe for borscht followed. There was a strange contradiction between the tumultuous triumphal processions of the Wehrmacht on the radio and the peaceful calm in Martin’s letters in which a rifle shot never sounded, a house never burned. In the autumn he was stationed near Tula. When it began to freeze and knitting needles were clicking everywhere to drive out the tundra cold, Anna sent him a parcel in the blind hope that it would find its way into infinity. Rumours of people who had died in action came ever closer, an anonymous threat that was denied in the newsreels, where the soldiers smoked cigarettes cheerfully in their snow caves. At first it was second cousins, student friends, friends of friends, then it was brothers, fiancés, fathers. But winter had a Chekhovian beauty in Martin’s letters. With his comrades he had come across a farm where there was a grand piano. One grand piano amid endless fields of snow, but badly out of tune from the cold. The family slept on a platform built over the stove. The soldiers hauled the mattress off and combined their strength to lift the piano up. It thawed quickly; there was music night after night. Martin’s courteous apologies were passed over by the farmer: he thought it was more important to hear Mozart and Bach than that they should be warm at night. The more colourful the events being described the more suspicious Anna became.
One of the Russian prisoners carried unusual responsibilities: he had to light the stoves in the castle and keep them going. Day in, day out, he went from room to room with a basket of wood. No one said anything to him – it was punishable to regard Russians as human beings. One day Anna found herself in a room with him. Shy, almost invisible, he did his work as though he had realized that he had no right to exist except as the bringer of fire. She spoke to him, without preliminaries, simply because they were two individuals in one space. To her surprise, he replied in broken German – moreover he appeared to be called Wilhelm: after the German Kaiser had visited the Tsar, all new-born babies had been called Wilhelm. Another godchild of the emperor, Anna grinned to herself. His explanation was full of softly vibrating Russian consonants. After the first introduction, she could regularly be found in rooms where the stove was being lit. They were suffering from hunger in the stables, he whispered, there were shortages of everything. She stole food for him from the kitchen. In the evenings she cut discarded blue checked quilt covers into pieces and made them into handkerchiefs for the prisoners. She collected discarded toothbrushes, remains of toothpaste, pocket combs with a few broken teeth and soap. Wilhelm smuggled the spoils to the stables where they were eagerly put to use. She did not ask herself why she did it; subversive intentions were strange to her – she simply could not tolerate the disharmony between the relative comfort in the castle and the hardship in the stables.
Between stoves Wilhelm brought her up to date with the rumours doing the rounds among the Russians and the Poles, rumours that revealed a world in the shadow of the jubilant newsreels: the German offensive was stuck; precisely when they thought the Russian army had been exhausted by the millions of losses, one hundred living Soviet soldiers came forward for every dead one. And Tula? Anna asked with a shrinking heart. He apologized: the rumours were not that detailed. How did they reach them in fact? Well … he spread his hands with an eastern smile. Where the information came from remained a mystery to her. Had the news been brought by the last flock of birds who pierced the grey sky, or had they had the benefit of a well-trained marathon runner who covered the distance to the Polish border in Olympic time and on the way called in at all the estates where Poles were working?
‘You really are a proper German,’ said Lotte shaking her head,
‘How so?’ Anna was on her guard.
‘A proper, efficient German … as when you solved that washing machine problem … all thoroughly in the spirit of the economic miracle. But what I ask myself …’
‘Yes …’ Anna was nothing if not obliging, so as to explain everything, but also to dispel every misunderstanding.
‘Were the washerwomen ultimately better off in that organized housekeeping of yours? Could they still laugh, sing, gossip?’
‘Pfff …’ Anna shrugged her shoulders wearily. ‘They still got their coffee and biscuits, you know. But you can’t halt progress. In the days of the landlords the workers learned to read and write; more was not thought necessary. Then came the time when the workers refused to allow themselves to be kept in ignorance any longer – I was such a person – they got trained, television arrived, the computer … If you want to go back to laughing, singing and gossiping you’ll have to eliminate technology and the benefits we get from it.’
‘But a lot has been lost.’
‘You mustn’t romanticize it.’
And so they were back again at their old point of difference. They stared outside past the woman with the swan, attempting to organize their thoughts, which were fluttering in the wind in all directions, like scraps of paper, as they retrieved memories.
‘I can well understand that you did something for the Russian prisoners,’ mused Lotte, ‘somewhere you were hoping that the Russians themselves would do the same for Martin if he were taken prisoner …’
‘No …’ Anna pursed her lips, ‘I did it to be helpful, without thinking further about it.’
‘Other motives could nevertheless be hidden beneath it. From the moment the first people in hiding came knocking at our door, at last I had the feeling of being able to do something – as though we were still doing something for David … in the abstract, with each person in hiding we could keep out of the occupier’s hands.’
‘So you had people hiding in the house …’
Lotte nodded.
‘Jewish?’
‘Mostly.’
Anna sighed, and all her curves sighed too.
5
They lunched in a restaurant on Place Albert, with a view onto a colossal angel that had alighted o
n a tall plinth and was observing humanity from there with perplexity. Afterwards they made a small excursion round the town, their daily dose of therapeutic activity. They wandered into a grey granite church with three towers, whose steeples pointed firmly to the sky like schoolmasters’ pencils. For once they were in agreement that it was an exceptionally ugly church. Uninspired, they strolled through the dim space, a leaflet about its history in hand. ‘Built in 1885 in Romanic-Rhine style following the Cologne school,’ Anna read. ‘I didn’t know we exported such hideous architecture then.’ They dawdled by a sculpture that had come from a much older church on the same spot: a group of angels with swords and bishops’ staves. Bored, they walked out of the church into a café directly opposite – a consolation for the disillusioned church-goer. They were both in urgent need of coffee. A fighter jet crossed the sky diagonally, behind the misanthropic steeples, as though it wanted to erase them.
When the Frinkel family, an elegantly dressed trio, came to the door one day in the summer, nobody realized that with this apparently innocent visit, a period in the lives of Lotte’s mother and her family was coming to an end that would never again return. Bram Frinkel, eighteen years old by then, had arranged the meeting; he had remained friends with Koen all those years. They drank something that had to pass for coffee. Lotte’s father put on Bach’s Double Concerto in honour of Max Frinkel, who had acquired a certain fame as first violin in a radio orchestra since his emigration from Germany. The gathering listened attentively; it was as though the guests had come specially to hear the concert. But when the last sounds died the war immediately took its place – in the sudden silence, in the surrogate coffee, in the presence of the Frinkels. ‘You luff muziek …’ began Frinkel, stroking his chin uneasily. These circumstances emboldened him to ask Lotte’s parents for hospitality, in return for payment of the costs, of course, and only for a short time, until a definite solution had been found. ‘All ze Jews from Hilversum haff to assemble in Amsterdam,’ he said meaningfully. ‘You live so splendidly out of the way here,’ continued his wife Sara in faultless Dutch, ‘Max could do his daily violin practice without anyone hearing.’ She was small and vivacious, her lips and nails the same colour as her dress.