Borders

by Roy Jacobsen

  This was how they lived their lives, mother and son, each with their own philosophy, slightly out of sync with one other, each with their own awkward sensitivities. When he objected to something or was rebellious, then Our Lord (almost) always managed to get him to link this behaviour with things that had no direct connection with the war or the Pianist. As mentioned, he never complained about the piano lessons or the goose – nor about the Canada theory for that matter – but he did complain about drawing at school. Robert hated drawing, drawing and painting, and he produced no more than a handful of pathetic sketches in all the years he was there.

  “You’re a strange lad,” she said, “not liking drawing. All kids like drawing.”

  “Not me.”

  But she could accept this, regard it merely as an idiosyncratic flaw in a delicate child’s mind, which it is a good mother’s duty to temper, with patience.

  They had an old well in the yard, which was no longer in use, but which they left uncovered, and one evening when her son was romping around with a friend of the same age, she came running up and shouted:

  “I hope you’re not going to jump in!”

  She had got it into her head that he was going to commit suicide and could not see that nothing could be further from his mind, could not see that he was having such a good time that he didn’t even understand what she was talking about, now they were off to the forest to shoot wild boar with a bow and arrow.

  Every so often she would discover that he was allergic to certain food: white bread, apples, marzipan …At other times she would stop him from going to school, it might have been due to something she had read in the papers, a murderer on the loose in Hunsrück or in the Moselle region, or an epidemic which had broken out in Holland, and probably she just needed to have him safe and sound in bed on days that were a little darker than others.

  Any other child – who did not have a missing pianist as a father – might perhaps have demanded an explanation for these incidents, especially if the child was approaching puberty. But not Robert. He considered any mysterious behaviour on his mother’s part a consequence of the cold handshake of war. In some way he was also conscious of the terrible miracle that meant he – despite everything – could thank that same war for his very existence. The trials and tribulations documented here do not mean that Robert felt he’d had an over-protective or unhappy childhood. Only much later in his life does his childhood become a problem, when he realises it won’t let go of him.

  It should be added that Robert Junior had a serious failing, inasmuch as, like his father, he was in the habit of running away from home. He started doing this when he was only five or six years old, he would suddenly disappear into the forest and had to be found by neighbours and teachers and friends. As he grew older these excursions became longer, they took him up to the surrounding villages, occasionally over the borders into Germany and Belgium, he cycled, went on foot, caught the bus, it happened about once every six months, always without warning, and neither mother nor son could come up with a satisfactory explanation, other than it had to be the hand of fate, the boy didn’t actually belong here in Luxembourg, he too was a guest, like the Pianist.

  However, none of the scant information Maria had managed to note (or remember) about the Pianist could bring him back. He was and remained a phantasm, with all the qualities and shortcomings of phantasms. Cota sent a Christmas card for a number of years, pleasant and impersonal cards where he expressed his pleasure that reconstruction work was in progress in Europe, that Robert Junior had begun school, played football and especially that he had joined the Scouts (the aged officer espied the beginnings of a military career here, unaware that the Scout movement in the Ardennes has a much stronger affiliation to the Virgin Mary than to Baden-Powell).

  One year he also sent a large package containing chewing gum and cigarettes in abundance, and mother and son had a good laugh at that because rationing had long ceased.

  “Poor old man,” she smiled. “He’s living in the past.”

  But at that moment the fateful idea of sending him a photograph occurred to her – of Robert Junior. No one can resist the pleading eyes of an eight-year-old who has lost his father. And Robert remembers this photo session – which took place in the rooms of a court-accredited photographer and which must have cost his mother a fortune – as the single most excruciating episode in all their endeavours to trace the Pianist.

  They caught the train to the capital city, the boy was seated in a fashionable studio on the rue du Cure, beside a piece of Flemish oak furniture and a resplendent display of flowers which his mother had hired, and was forced to listen to an endless squabble between her and the photographer about how he should be dressed – as a ragamuffin, in his school uniform, in his Sunday best or perhaps with a football under his arm – and especially about the expression he should wear to best motivate the retired war veteran to start tracking down his father.

  Should he be smiling at all? Maria wondered.

  This question was resolved to her satisfaction by the boy’s terrible mood, and by the photographer, who was given permission to take as many pictures as he wanted, whereafter Maria could choose the one showing the boy’s saddest mien. As for his garb, he was dressed in sports clothes (her idea) and really did have a football under his arm (the photographer’s idea).

  She learned only many years later that Americans don’t have any interest in European football, and then she burst out laughing again, with the same ambiguous indomitability with which she had received the cigarettes and chewing gum.

  “To think we could be so naive!” she said. “Think of all those things we did to find your father. We were so desperate…”

  “We?” the boy might have answered, but he didn’t, and after he himself had a son, he realised that the football idea was not such a bad one. He just shouldn’t have looked so miserable. An open, friendly eight-year-old with a football under his arm has a much more alluring effect on a runaway father than a miserable wretch who weighs like a boulder on his father’s conscience as soon as he casts his eye on his son, no matter whether the father has any interest in sport or not – strange actually that Cota didn’t send them any more Marshall Aid.

  Robert shared the view (in puberty and later) that Cota’s friendly lack of interest – which was not changed by the photograph – derived from the desperate telephone conversation he’d had with Fuller at 12.34 on Sunday, 17 December, 1944, when he made the perhaps militarily correct but nonetheless very unpleasant decision not to go to the aid of his subordinate officer with more than a single lousy battery of S.P. guns (which by the way never arrived, nor is it even certain they were ever sent). Robert could well imagine that some of the same resentment which came in the wake of the recapture of Scheldemunningen – between the Canadians who froze to death in the icy waters and their allies, the British, who bombed the dykes – must also have arisen between Fuller and Cota. With this in mind Cota would hardly be keen to get into contact with Fuller again, ask him stupid questions about a soldier in his – Fuller’s – regiment who was supposed to have played the piano in Europe’s hour of destiny when everyone was under “strict orders” to fight “to the last man”, an order given by Cota himself. Yes, Robert Junior could well imagine that contacting such a haunted subordinate would contravene Cota’s military good sense, perhaps his whole way of thinking with regard to waging war and concluding peace.

  However, he never mentioned to his mother this possible explanation for the lack of response from America. And, as already intimated, he gradually became fairly sick of all the searching and did what he could to cope with, undermine, obfuscate or ignore the project as sensitively as possible. The loss of a father is something mothers know little about. A small boy’s loss of a father is far from identical to a woman’s loss of a man. These two entities have nothing in common. They cannot work together. They need to be kept at a distance from each other. An intelligent distance. But this, then, is how they grew up. Maria
and that American son of hers, each on their own side of an unanswered question.

  4

  Further north in the same small valley, a short stone’s throw away, lies another pink-walled farm from the golden 1800s, on an idyllic beech-clad slope of the type the tourist authorities like to use to convince the rest of the world that the Grand Duchy has more to offer than a shady banking system and a blossoming steel and porcelain industry. Here lived Markus and Nella, a middle-aged couple whom Robert from the age of two or three referred to as Uncle and Auntie, despite the absence of any blood ties between them. However, Markus was his godfather and he carried a “terrible secret”, as he himself put it. His wife, Nella, on the other hand, had no need for any secrets at all, she could dress as she pleased, wash her hair or not, eat titbits all day long despite a growing weight problem, or pick her nose for that matter, at will, because Markus was blind. The “terrible secret” was that he wasn’t.

  He was Belgian by ancestry, as was Maria, from a small village near Stavelot in the Ardennes, and by virtue of his being “neu-deutsch” was enlisted in the Wehrmacht in the late winter of 1941. He was sent to the Eastern Front that same spring and served in the signal corps – with the rank of Leutnant – in General Manstein’s Eleventh Army during the invasion of the Crimea in the autumn of 1941 and through to the raid on Sebastapol the year after. He was wounded in the final stages of the Battle of Stalingrad, lost his sight for a day or two, but then saw it was of benefit to him to have lost it for good and was sent home well before the collapse in the east. He spent the last two years of the war on Nella’s father’s farm on the outskirts of Clervaux and even though she was a good and kind person, she was not much good at keeping a secret when a suitable opportunity to reveal it presented itself; as a result Markus chose to be blind at home as well – “for the time being”, as he called it, or “I’ll open my eyes again when the war is over”, which he told himself, and later Robert, for no-one likes to dupe their nearest and dearest. However, we cannot ignore the fact that it was his blindness which saved him, after peace was declared, from a couple of years in Allied captivity in England, a fate which so many of his “neu-deutsche” Belgian brothers were subjected to.

  But Markus never did open his eyes again, although he had a clear view of how it should happen, preferably on a summer’s morning, he sits up in bed and stares at the window and bursts into hesitant jubilation: “I can see shadows, Nella! Shapes! I can see light! Is that the window…?” After which he would simulate a slow, incredible recovery of the world of the sighted. Instead, though, he accustomed himself to the blind man’s protected existence as a spy. “No-one has a better life than blind men who can see. They have had the veil drawn away from their eyes; the curtain goes up to reveal real actions and people, with all their faults and charming secrets. It is of course sad to see all these things, but I wouldn’t have been without it for a day.”

  This optimism was not always quite so convincing; in particular it lost its shine when the German troops passed by for the second time during the Ardennes Offensive, and it was left to Nella to draw up an escape route through the snow-covered forest, this girl who had hardly ventured beyond Clervaux’s steep slopes. But the couple’s youngest daughter, Marion, a Girl Guide, had. And when the young girl was unsure which path to take, Markus tapped her hip with his white stick, raised his face like a hunted animal scenting the wind and said:

  “Are you sure it’s this way, sweetheart? I don’t seem to recognise this…” Or he feigned the blind man’s panicky intuition: “No, no, not down there, I can feel it in my bones, we have to go up…The wind’s coming from the north, isn’t it? So, it’s this way…”

  By means of this fine interplay between father and daughter, the family had by morning reached the safety of a relative’s house in the village of Boevange, where they lay low for a week before they had to move further south towards Enscherange, which the Germans called Enscheringen, staying at the homes of various forbearing families until the offensive collapsed – that is, in the same month as Maria and the Pianist were holding the fort in Clervaux.

  Even after the war Markus’ blindness was sometimes put to the test. For example, whenever he read a newspaper he had to be constantly on the alert, and not only while reading it: when he was talking to the family he also had to be careful to keep the information he had gleaned by his own efforts separate from the extracts that Marion had occasionally read out to him.

  “It’s just a question of tactics,” he told Robert Junior, who as time went by was to become his confidant, and the kids gradually got used to having a father who asked intelligent and leading questions about what was going on in the world, a subject that never failed to interest Markus, about politics, affairs of state and industrial development, not to mention the tribunals that followed in the wake of the war, and which as far as his commanding officer, General Manstein, was concerned, extended into the 1950s.

  None of the family members thought it remarkable that Markus never dirtied his clothes, tripped over furniture that had been moved, or showed any indecision regarding the weather. Blind people have exceptionally good hearing, they sense everything that we others are dependent on our sight to know – in fact, the blind don’t actually need sight; in addition, once in a while Markus threw in the odd stumble when he realised that it was a long time since he had last tripped, or he feigned surprise when someone addressed him out of the blue. In order to avoid direct eye contact with the people around him he also always wore dark glasses.

  But after his daughters moved out he came up against another problem, as Nella liked neither the news nor reading aloud, and on top of that was mean, and so she often “forgot” to buy useless items like papers, magazines and books. And this is where Robert Junior came in, Markus’ godson and closest neighbour. It was the boy’s job to get hold of suitable material and read aloud to his friend whenever Nella was around. And the reason why Markus eventually let him in on his “terrible secret” was simply the boy’s poor reading skills; the little American was just seven when this not entirely straightforward collaboration began, and doubtless the old man also needed a break from his blindness, a place where he could be himself and enjoy the company of a fellow conspirator. In this way it was actually Markus who taught Robert how to read, in the brief period they had to themselves every day between the end of school and Nella’s return from the draper’s shop she managed in town.

  Markus had trained as an electrical engineer in the Belgian Military Academy, the only form of training that was available to him, he claimed, and in the pre-war years had built up quite a name for himself as an inventor, not least of a vulcanisation process – or a kind of adhesive – which proved very useful to the Belgian army, and later also the Wehrmacht. He helped Robert with his maths and physics homework, he knew Latin, he could reel off the names of all the Catholic saints, and was furthermore a rich source of dramatic tales and curious observations. Being with Markus was therefore no sacrifice for Robert, and he was more than pleased to read aloud everything except the reports of the war tribunals. But he liked their walks even more, especially those in the woods, where Markus could behave more spontaneously, there was no end to his quirky stories, a veritable circus unfolded in the woods, a narrative with many beginnings, digressions and, as a rule, a happy ending, for a child’s credulity can be man’s most effective weapon.

  Every Saturday afternoon they strolled around town like father and son, sat on a park bench or in a brasserie, where Markus drank beer and schnapps while Robert had an ice cream and cakes and read from the daily papers. And on these walks, in full public view, Markus always moved stiffly and awkwardly, almost like a newly blind person, he walked with his right hand on the boy’s shoulder, making remarks about their surroundings in wry, grouchy terms, the reconstruction work, new fashions, people he knew more about than they did themselves, and tourists who had begun to return, the Germans attracting his attention in particular. And even though Robert thus got to
know two people instead of one, he never slipped up and gave away his friend, not even when his mother gave one of her most compassionate sighs and said: “Poor Markus. What a pity he’ll never be able to see the autumn colours again or how beautiful Marion and Josephine are now.”

  “He feels it,” the son said, unruffled, perhaps because of all the simulated interest for the Pianist she had forced on him; moreover, Robert had an increasing sense that something was not quite right about these American origins of his. And in this way he learned to look upon Markus as his only true friend, the one he knew everything about and could therefore tell everything, without reservation, including his growing unease regarding the Pianist.

  5

  Markus had a dog, a mongrel he had acquired on an impulse, as if to put the finishing touches to the “blindness” artifice. But after only a few days he named it Delilah, after Samson’s treacherous inamorata, because she was a contrary and uncontrollable dog who had no wish to be the master’s eyes; she was ill-tempered, scabby, and as mangy as a well-thumbed atlas, and she went her own way – at any rate she avoided everyone else’s. So after a year Markus gave her away, or rather he sold her for a nominal sum to a butcher who claimed he needed a watchdog, to Robert’s great sorrow.

  But one day, walking through town, they saw the butcher beating Delilah with a stick. The dog whimpered and squealed and blood ran from both ears. “It’s my dog,” the new owner said in his defence when Markus intervened. “I’ve paid for it and I can do what I want with it.”