by Tessa de Loo
After their stay in Vienna he was posted to Dresden. It was autumn. Anna, who had already sewn and knitted a suitcase full of baby clothes, was still not pregnant – Hannelore was. She had got married in the spring and since then had been living in Ludwigslust in Mecklenburg, from where she kept up a nostalgic correspondence with Anna. Frau von Garlitz, who sympathized with the ups and downs of her staff, prepared a parcel of fortifying foods for the welfare of the mother-to-be, and sent Anna with it to Ludwigslust. Once again she was sitting in a train to Berlin with a suitcase. Involuntarily she thought back to the day she had travelled to Cologne in a trench coat with a hunting hat on, her possessions in a cardboard box. She felt slightly ashamed as she thought back to her provincial naïvety, the long way she still had to go then, from pig muck to table silver on damask. She jerked out of her reverie as the train slowed down abruptly and stopped; then it continued wearily on until they were riding into Berlin with jolts and blasts. A grey steel wall rose up outside the window of the compartments, without beginning or end, like the precursor of a tunnel. But the wall was moving … it seemed to be made of smoke, grit, thick smoke. The train rolled backwards, then it drove hesitatingly into the station. Anna got out, still used to the unblemished neutral atmosphere inside the compartment.
It happened to her at that moment, just as it did to hundreds of fellow passengers: as soon as they set foot on the platform their reflexes took control of their sense of direction, they scattered, everything around them was on fire, the roof was cracking as though it would give way at any moment. Someone pulled her away from collapsing wood or steel, the smoke stung her eyes, her throat, she walked blindfold away from the fire … air raid warning, someone pushed her into a shelter. There she became part of a trembling, sweating tangle that was listening, huddled together, to the screaming and rumbling; the ground shook, the tangle shuddered with it, buildings, trains, people, everything would perish into dust, a ridiculous, communal downfall without meaning. For a suitcase of sausage and salt pork.
It took three days and nights to reach Spandau in the west, from the eastern part of the city where she had arrived. Three days and nights in an inferno, sometimes dragged into a shelter at the very last moment by someone whose face she never got to see. Someone gave her something to drink; she stumbled onwards, tripped over an electricity cable; a wall collapsed somewhere; she cowered, too tired to be afraid. Then it was night again, wailing sirens, a shelter, dozing off with exhaustion, going on further through the stage set of a horror opera; somebody gave her something to eat. Berlin-Spandau? Always the same question in the chaos – she was standing on a disintegrating map whose edges were being incinerated. Did Spandau still exist or was she on the way to a smoking heap of rubble? Why did the bombing go on day and night – did Berlin, did Germany have to be removed from the face of the earth?
Suddenly she seemed to find herself at Spandau station with her scorched suitcase. It was still there: a bulging train was on the point of departing for Mecklenburg. Someone lifted her up and shoved her inside through the window, followed by the suitcase. The train started off immediately. Dazed, she sat down on her suitcase; she seemed to have survived: it left her feeling indifferent. She made the journey in a state of semi-consciousness – she could not fall over, propped up as she was between other overtired bodies. They reached Ludwigslust in the middle of the night. She was the only one who got off. She wobbled towards the vague silhouette of a house in the pitch dark. Her trembling hand found the bell with difficulty. A light went on in the passage, the door was opened, someone appeared on the threshold, saw what was standing on the step and closed the door in shock. And she was in the dark again, collapsing from exhaustion. It was cold. A primitive fear crept over her, stronger than during the bombing, direct and ensnaring – the anxiety of being refused, shut out for ever like a piece of dirt, like a creature that (an orphan who …) did not deserve to live. She began to beat on the door in agitation. ‘I come from Berlin, please …’ she moaned, ‘open the door. I only want to sleep, please …’ But nothing happened, the house shunned her. ‘This is a person, a decent person, who only wants to sleep …!’ Beneath her hammering fist the door moved open. A blanket lay on the tiled floor in the passage. She stumbled in, fell down on to it and slept without a glance at her slow-witted benefactor. The following day she had just enough strength to complete her mission. Unrecognizable in a disguise of soot, scratches and tears, she handed over the suitcase to Hannelore who was oblivious to bombing raids, floating on her pink cloud of blissful waiting. In her spotless home, organized for the coming event, the sausages, pork and hams were a perverse, animal element, emerging unviolated from the suitcase – in honour of the new life, stained by death. Anna looked at it and burst out in a joyless, overwrought laugh.
‘Ach, Berlin …’ Anna sighed. ‘I happened to be there a couple of years ago with a friend. We rode through the city on a bus. She suddenly cried: “Look, the Anhalter Station!” I saw a splendidly restored station but a second later it was on fire. It was burning before my eyes … just like then … and everything caved in … “Is anything the matter?” my friend asked. I had a light-headed feeling, hissing in my ears. “It’s on fire …!” I cried in a panic. It was the first time that I’d remembered it – I’d not thought about it any more, it was so awful. I had suppressed it for forty-five years.’
‘How is it possible,’ said Lotte pointing at Anna with a piece of Ardennes ham on the end of her fork, ‘that they could send you into a burning city with a suitcase of meat?’
‘Frau von Garlitz didn’t know, none of us knew. It was the first big bombing raid on Berlin, at the end of November. Your liberators lit up their Christmas trees above the city and threw their carpet bombs down below. Systematically, no square metre was to be spared. But something always remains standing … Me, for example.’
Lotte stopped chewing at the cynical ‘your liberators’. However hard she tried to imagine a burning Berlin, Rotterdam always appeared, or London. Berlin remained abstract, a point on a map.
‘Martin wrote a letter to Frau von Garlitz: “I forbid you to send my wife out in such circumstances.”’ Anna laughed. ‘But those were different times. The longer the war lasted the more important food became.’
Lotte endorsed this with a full mouth, in front of a salad so richly garnished that someone could have lived off it for a whole week in the hunger winter.
Lotte had not yet got down to guilty feelings, swallowed up by the Moloch of housekeeping. Endless stirring of buttermilk porridge in gargantuan pans; next to them stood buckets steaming with washing; two meters further on the iron was glowing ready. Her mother, the linchpin of the constantly expanding family, was ill; a tumour had been discovered in her uterus, which had to be removed immediately. Before the operation she took three of her daughters – Marie, Jet, Lotte – to one side: ‘You must promise me something – if anything goes wrong with the operation … and I should suddenly not be there any more … then you will take over the care of the people in hiding. I’m worried that Pa is in a state where in a bad mood he could put them all out on the street. He threatened it again last time … it’s getting too much for him …’ She looked pointedly at them one by one, almost solemnly. ‘I have calmed him down again … managed to conceal his attacks from everyone … They shouldn’t have to put up with that extra strain …’
They stared at her in shock. The thought alone took their breath away. All three immediately understood that their mother’s anxiety was far from unwarranted. They had known him a long time. At certain times he needed rows, preferably at the children’s expense, his greatest competitors. Why not one day at the expense of the people in hiding? Of course they were his too, but his position was ambivalent in relation to them. When an appeal had been made to him on their arrival, he could not permit himself to refuse. Didn’t he have a name to keep up? As a music lover – the Frinkels, Grandfather Tak, Ernst Goudriaan? As a Communist – Leon Stein? A pure impulse from the hear
t, which couldn’t be helped – as with their mother – was out of the question for him, although he had his sentimental moods, of course, provided he had the exact background music to help him.
When the patient came round from the anaesthesia, Jet, Lotte and their father were standing either side of the bed. She lay between the sheets, pale and worryingly delicate, the chestnut brown hair with grey streaks in it dull on the pillow. Her gaze was muzzy, as though she still dwelt in hazy spheres of non-existence. She grasped her husband’s hand with unexpected strength. ‘Take good care of … of everyone,’ she whispered. It was something between a plea and a command. Lotte walked round the bed and stood next to her father and nodded on his behalf, her eyes shut tightly, as though presenting a guarantee of everyone’s safety from the notorious mood swings of the master of the house. He stood in anguish beside the bed, waiting until he could honourably escape from the hospital, the death palace stinking of ether, where he had only turned up in the interest of exceptional self-sacrifice.
When she came home she was a shadow of her former self. She had seriously lost weight. Nothing seemed to remain of her original vitality, that mysterious primeval strength. With a forced laugh she made her way through the room, seeking support from the edges of the table and the arms of the chairs. Thrilled that his Eurydice had indeed returned from the underworld, her husband put on Gluck’s Orfeo for her, but that was his only contribution to her recovery.
Eefje had received a piece of blue velvet on her birthday, to make dolls’ clothes. She had hidden the valuable gift deep in a secret drawer in her bedroom. One day she opened the drawer and grasped thin air. She looked in the other drawers with a thudding heart, the whole bedroom, the house. She did the rounds of all the residents, crying in disbelief and disappointment. ‘Have you seen my material?’ became a rhetorical question that seemed to symbolize for them everything about what was lacking because of the shortages. Eventually she tossed back her plaits and pushed down on the door handle of a room she had not so far included in her search, because the prohibition on entering had been strictly maintained for years, even in the war: her father’s electro-technical sanctuary. From the threshold she looked with bewilderment at the still life on the workbench. Between fittings, screws, lamps, flex and fuses, lay a packet of butter amid fresh bread, cheese and liver, like a pheasant by a seventeenth-century master. He looked up, wiping the crumbs from his mouth, trapped. With his mouth full he shouted: ‘How did you get it into your head to come in here just like that?’ Hastily he began to pack the bread and cheese away. ‘But I am looking for my velvet material,’ she whimpered. Right opposite her on the wall hung a map of the world with little flags indicating the Allies’ progress. The map was mounted on blue velvet fixed to the wall with tacks. ‘My material, my material …’ she pointed in astonishment. Her father followed her trembling finger with raised eyebrows. Was a more glorious purpose conceivable for a piece of material than to serve as the background for the Allied victories? She turned her back on him and ran down stairs sniffing. She told Jet and Lotte, busy in the kitchen, what she had seen, tripping over her words, not realizing that the greater crime was not pinching her material but the secret enjoyment of bread and butter and cheese while everyone else went hungry.
The origin of these delicatessen was cleared up at the next hospital checkup when Lotte accompanied her mother, and the doctor took her aside to express his surprise and concern about the patient’s extreme underweight – after all, her husband had taken away a stamped card authorizing extra food rations on the day he had fetched her. It was almost unbearable to know this; she confided to Jet but kept it a careful secret from everyone else. It had a paralysing effect on them both. It is true they had known that the boundaries of his egoism were flexible and reacted seismographically to his tempers and needs, but that there seemed to be no boundaries at all was so shocking that it went beyond their comprehension.
‘I’ll go and get the rest of the coupons,’ said Lotte, ‘at least if there are any left.’ For the first time she felt a crack in her self-control. Calm thoughts, tactical strategies became impossible. She was not herself any more, in a manner of speaking, or perhaps at last she was now herself. Grimly, she set off upstairs, invaded his sanctuary without knocking. There he sat … he was smoking a home-grown cigarette and looked up interrupted from reading an underground newspaper spread open on the workbench. It seemed as though two broken wires at the top of her skull made contact … as though twenty-one years had evaporated … She saw a dark figure standing in the doorway of a classroom, his black wings tightly folded … ‘How dare you …’ his voice intoned in the distance, ‘… to two children who are weaker than you …’ It was merely a glimpse, an echo that came and disappeared, but left a strong emotion behind it. ‘How dare you …’ she said with a trembling voice, ‘to mother, who is so weak …’
‘Just come in once again,’ he said, ‘and knock first.’ There was a short circuit between the two wires … she took a step forward and held out her hand ostentatiously. ‘Give me the rest of the coupons that were meant for mother …’ Raising her voice she added: ‘Immediately!’ He began to laugh in disbelief. ‘Where in God’s name did you …’ he said stupidly. ‘You know very well what I am talking about.’ She wanted to injure him as he sat there and played the innocent – too cowardly to come out with it. But her contempt was even greater than her hate. This had to be settled quickly and efficiently, then she would have nothing more to do with it. The map hung behind him framed in blue velvet. Little flags everywhere, stubbornly stuck into it as though they concerned personal victories. Germany, flag free, apparently had nothing to do with the war. Germany was a vacuum, an absorbent hole into which her gaze disappeared. How many ways were there for you to hate yourself?
He laughed in her face. ‘Give those coupons back,’ she said icily, ‘otherwise I’ll tell everyone what a scoundrel you are.’ The grin disappeared from his face. He stared at her as though he was seeing her for the first time, overwhelmed, still not ready to believe it. Then the realization began to move up his neck in a red flush; angrily he pulled open a drawer beneath the workbench, rummaged about randomly in it and pulled out a mostly used sheet of coupons. He came at her with it threateningly. Lotte did not move a muscle and stood where she was – she felt no trace of fear. If he asked for it she would squash him like a flea. He pushed the sheet of paper into her hand angrily. ‘A proper Kraut …’ he hissed, ‘as you see, after all those years … still a proper Kraut.’ She had just enough strength to get to her bedroom, apparently composed. In a false scent of perfume and expensive soap she fell down onto her bed. Her heart was throbbing in her head. How did he know how to find her weakest spot so mercilessly … perhaps because he himself in effect was half … She was nauseated. With closed eyes she lay there until the knocking in her temples was less and the drone of English bombers got through to her, flying to the east. How many ways were there for you to hate yourself?
When no one was expecting him any longer the barber turned up with the news that an address had been found for Grandfather Tak and his daughter: a miller who lived in a remote spot on the polder. If it had been for the old man alone they would not have accepted the offer, but everyone breathed a sigh of relief at the thought of being free of the daughter, who believed herself to be too beautiful for this planet and all imaginable worlds. Marie took her away late in the evening by bicycle. Lotte followed the next evening – the old man who weighed nothing sat behind and anxiously held onto her hips. It was freezing, the frosty meadows reflected the light of the moon. Bent, pollarded willows formed a guard of honour either side of the narrow path, of long-dead greybeards who were welcoming Grandfather Tak into their ranks. But he was still alive and sighed nostalgically. ‘Ach Lotte, would you believe it … if I were young I would kiss you here in the moonlight …’ Lotte turned round laughing, the bicycle swerved dangerously. ‘If you say any more naughty things,’ she threatened cheerfully, ‘we’ll end up in the d
itch.’
With regret she handed him over to the miller, who stood in the doorway like an apparition in his long white underwear. It was an unreal, disturbing transaction. Grandfather Tak leaned over and kissed the back of her chilled hand. The last she saw of him was his little bald pate shining in the moonlight, because he thought a keppel, such as his Persian son-in-law wore, humbug.
The news of what happened to him subsequently reached them indirectly and in crumbs. There was one constant: the rapid decline of the thread of the old man’s life. His daughter suffered from claustrophobia in the flat, frozen no man’s land where her charms were wasted; she had bitten her manicured nails until they bled. When the miller was visited by his family she beseeched them to rescue her from dying of boredom and to take her with them to the inhabited world. They yielded to her despair. That was how she landed up in a village street. She took up a provocative pose by the window. At least ten times a day they asked her to move away from there because she brought not only herself into danger but also them and the chain of people who had taken care of her in the past. But for Flora Bohjul to be seen was an essential of life; she would rather give herself up and be interrogated in a risqué striped prisoner’s uniform by a charming commandant than let her days slip through her fingers between pillar and post in a horrible anonymity smelling of cabbage. She slid out of the house and reported to the Ortskommandantur, confident that she was inviolable through her marriage to a Persian Jew. When this news reached the miller he threw the old man out of the house in the dead of night, fearing that she would squeal. Torn out of his deepest sleep he wandered displaced through the meadows. The guard of honour of pollarded willows offered him hospitality again, but he could neither see nor hear anything – the only thing his organism probably desired was a warm bed. No one knew how long his freedom lasted that night. In the dawn light he seemed to have walked into the hands of the Germans, exhausted and numb with cold. To save themselves the formalities and the problems of transport, they put a permanent end to his weariness with a few bullets, in the back garden of the villa where they were billeted.