by Roy Jacobsen
Robert realises that something has happened in this house during the last few hours, which has nothing to do with him and which he doesn’t want to have anything to do with either, he is content to miss the railway man in silence, he is used to this, missing a man in silence, and afterwards Albert is never mentioned again, except for once when Maria, in reply to Nella’s impertinent question about what had become of the war hero, mumbles with an apologetic blush, there was nothing wrong with him, no, there wasn’t. But, as already mentioned, Robert’s disappearances have come to an end. He hasn’t run away for more than eight months, hasn’t even considered it.
7
Maria was tetchy and absent-minded for a month after the break with the flawless Albert. Work on the Latin primer came to a standstill, and now and then her son heard her groan in anguish that she had absolutely no talent for writing: “At my age it’s sad to have to admit that my time has gone…”
But the new lodger is accepted precisely because of this inertia. She is a former pupil of Maria’s, her name is Leni and she comes from the tiny village of Dorscheid, south-west of Clervaux; she is one of the gifted poor children who have benefited from Maria’s small-scale philanthropy. Now she has completed her studies in Germany and returns just at the right time: her primary reason is to take a job at the school in Clervaux as Maria’s closest colleague, but she needs a place to stay and accordingly joins Maria in writing the Latin primer.
It is a lively and constructive domestic arrangement, for as long as it lasts, because Leni soon falls in love with the energetic gymnastics teacher, gets married and moves into his house in the early autumn of the following year. But before that she manages to get the primer moving. She is a sleepy, intelligent and ironic person who can paint the world around her with such incisive language that Robert sees it in a different light. She has wide hips, great ambitions in life (with regard to what never becomes clear), she is hard-working and lazy by turns and not afraid to tell Maria that such and such chapters are “too boring”, “too weak”, “have to be reworked”, and Maria takes on board the criticism to such an extent that when the book is finally finished, Leni’s name features on the title page as co-author.
If there is anything wrong with her at all it would have to be the overwhelming erotic force she fills the small home with – she lives a grammatically correct life and is, as mentioned, ready to start a family. Robert falls profoundly and slavishly in love with her, peeps through the keyhole when she is having a bath, which she often does, for Leni is scrupulously clean; he listens to the creaking of her bed, greedily sniffs the air where she has been and scowls at her guests – especially the males – who now make their way to his home in great throngs, threatening to transform it into a self-important academic common room.
Maria is slightly uneasy about all this vitality, but only slightly, because the railwayman is forgotten, and she enjoys walking along the street with her new lodger, arm in arm, they are two young friends, sitting in cafés and attending the concerts that are occasionally held in the restored chateau – and Robert has his own ideas about what is going on in her mind; or the two ladies take part in meetings of the local history society, an organisation consisting of war veterans, historians and ordinary people with the Ardennes Offensive on the brain, who never tire of discussing its minutiae and its significance for world history, and especially the battle’s moral implications, an activity which may well be justified, since the man who was behind the carnage here, General Manteuffel, stated, as late as in 1974, that the offensive was based on a correct analysis by Hitler: “Neither Hitler nor his Chief of Staff could shut their eyes to this last throw of the dice…”
Included among Leni’s chattels was another sensation, her brother Léon, nine years older than her, whom the war had treated exceptionally badly. Before Léon made his first entrance, Maria drew her son to one side and whispered in his ear something about a war neurosis, but Robert never detected a sign of any mental afflictions in Léon apart from a permanently vacant smile, long periods of silence and a tendency to say: “Remember: I was never afraid!” as soon as the subject of war was broached, and it sometimes was, in a natural, chatty way.
But this was all Léon had to say about this European Calvary. And one of the reasons Robert got on with him so well was doubtless Léon’s scorn for the Americans and the British and the Germans (and the Canadians!), and the fact that he viewed his own tiny little country with great disquiet, especially this new idea of having a radio station broadcasting in English, the only language uglier than German. Léon spoke only Letzebuergesch and French in emergencies – if he had to ask the way, confess to Father Rampart or read Les Oiseaux du monde, a ten-volume work about birds, his great and quite possibly only passion apart from Leni and her career.
Léon drove round with a wheelchair in the boot of his car, which he had no need for, as far as Robert could see, and he walked with a stick which, likewise, he didn’t appear to need, even though he had a bad limp or else couldn’t really decide whether he had one or not. He still lived on his family farm in Dorscheid, which he ran with a previous house help – “the lovely Agnes”, as Leni called her – and with whom – it was rumoured – he lived in sin. While Léon’s explanation of the arrangement was that he didn’t love her and therefore could not allow her to enter holy matrimony.
Agnes and Léon didn’t have any children, but she had two sons from an earlier marriage, two boys it was claimed Léon didn’t notice, or if he did he brought them up with strict discipline and self-denial. But to Robert this seemed more like a confused love of isolation; Robert was the only person who was allowed to go to Dorscheid and study this half-family from the inside and he was therefore asked many questions about them, which he soon learned to answer with: “I don’t know.”
Agnes’ sons were called Max and Remo, they were born in the prosperous years after the war and were in their early teens when Robert got to know them. They were talented at sport and very popular with the girls at school, moderately endowed in academic respects and in many ways enclosed in their own inseparable world, like twins.
Leni said that Léon didn’t exchange a word with the boys for the first three years they lived in his house. But when they were seven or eight years old they suddenly exhibited an interest in birds. Léon took them into the fields and pointed at the sky and told them the birds’ Latin names, which they retained in their small heads, to Léon’s cautious delight. He showed them how to take photos with a sophisticated camera, taught them how to identify rare species and to hate the Belgian bird-catchers who sneaked across the borders every spring and autumn to do whatever they wanted in our forests.
“The birds don’t recognise any borders,” Léon said. “They have the same name everywhere. We have to respect that.”
As a result of an affair – or a connection – which no-one mentioned by name, he had managed to acquire a small car, a Triumph, in which he increasingly often drove to Clervaux to visit his sister and her interesting hosts, his sole friends if the truth be told, apart from Father Rampart, the priest in Rodershausen, who hasn’t been introduced yet but soon will be.
Sometimes Léon also crossed the border, especially into Germany – to revisit places he had seen in more challenging times, as he put it – and once he took along one of the “twins”, Remo – there was only room for one passenger in the car so they had to toss for it. They visited a wetland by the Rhine and studied herons. They splashed around in a public swimming pool, camped in a tent and wandered around the large meadows with binoculars and a camera. The trip passed without incident, but on the way home Léon stopped at the memorial cemetery at Daleiden. Here, in an out-of-the-way wooded area with a wonderful view of the Our Valley and the Luxembourg forests, the Germans can in embarrassed silence honour their comrades who died in the offensive of 1944–45. This is where Léon is said to have fallen to his knees by one of the graves – bearing the inscription “Jochen Berl” – and, sobbing with emotion, pleaded
with both God and the devil to expel the insanity that still raged in his wretched head.
This scene had given Remo such a shock – he told his brother about it as soon as he got home – that a new silence ensued between Léon and his stepsons, a silence which remained unbroken until they started at secondary school, when he gave them each a racing bike superior to any others, on which they won many trophies, in Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands.
People said that Léon had been very bright as a child, that ever since his birth he had been attended by hopes and privileges, but that the war and “the war neurosis” had destroyed all this brilliance, so it was left to Leni to become the first academic in the farming family. However, Léon accompanied her along the way, helped her through her studies with encouragement and small amounts of money on the few occasions he had any, he pushed and pressurised her and learned enough about what she was doing to be able to keep up a kind of dialogue. In this way, not only Leni but Léon, too, became involved in Maria’s Latin Primer for the Upper Secondary School.
This was their rallying point, a shared interest which did not focus on themselves. They argued most about the choice of texts. Maria had a soft spot for Caesar, Cicero and Tacitus, arguing that the pupils could learn a little bit of history alongside the magical language, because the past is indubitably longer and more important than the future. Leni, for her part, wanted a greater proportion of holy scripts – the Jews and the Greeks can say what they like, Latin is the language of God! – Clervaux’s namesake is moreover the seat of an age-old clerical tradition. Léon and Robert, on the other hand, were novices who wanted to translate cartoons into Latin: Donald Duck and Tintin – an idea that was later realised, though unfortunately not by our heroes, and which made no contribution of any value at all. Robert probably only took part so that he could sit next to Leni at the large dining-room table when the editorial team held meetings, which often ended with a few glasses of wine at which time his right thigh could rest against Leni’s left thigh for half an hour of bliss without anyone else noticing.
“Latin is the mother of all languages,” Maria pronounced, while Léon in a moment of clarity opined that it was a dead language and should be taught for that reason – the language of the dead must be respected and kept alive. Before blushing deeply.
Father Rampart held his trembling, alcohol-afflicted hands over the whole project, as its spiritual custodian. He had been an army chaplain – or maybe it was called a padre – in General von Vietinghoff’s Army Group until he had to lay down arms in northern Italy at the end of April 1945. But Rampart spent fewer than two weeks in Allied captivity, as so many soldiers on the victorious side could testify that he had interceded on behalf of, and presumably saved the lives of, a large number of Allied P.O.W.s in the course of the Italian campaign. It was also said that it was his idea to evacuate the art treasures from Monte Cassino (and put them in the Vatican for safekeeping) before the monastery was razed to the ground by the joint action of the attacking and defending forces, even though there are many others who claim credit for this act. As a token of gratitude for his efforts – if we are really to believe this story – he was allowed to seek refuge in Reims during the summer of 1945, on a study tour financed by the Vatican.
Father Rampart was originally from Paderborn, a German in body, but not necessarily in soul, and he didn’t want to go home again after the war and his stay in France, what suited him was an irregular white spot halfway between: Luxembourg. Now he resided in Rodershausen, a small border town in the Our Valley where Robert had got to know him on one of his excursions. There were more of these again now, but they had changed character and all of them ended up in Rodershausen, at Father Rampart’s, it was as if the priest was also working as a border guard, much to Maria’s relief.
“I don’t have a father,” Robert once gave as a vague reason for his sudden and irresistible desire to roam the forests.
“We all do,” Father Rampart purred. Then instead they embarked upon a subject Robert didn’t wish to discuss with his mother or Markus, or with any of his classmates: the other sex, which was a mystery to both of them.
Father Rampart never talked about the war, but liked talking about politics and national affairs and especially about everyday and spiritual matters, baking cakes and the Holy Trinity, which he loved to discuss using baroque metaphors. He drank his wine, and also beer and schnapps when Markus was around, he read the scriptures and forgave sinners with great forbearance in accordance with his own take on the poet’s precept: “It does not behove a priest to accuse and persecute but to defend the guilty once they have been sentenced and are atoning for their sins.” His sermons were often slightly wide of the mark with regard to both the occasion and the theme, and there was something improvised and very un-German about them. Occasionally there were complaints about him; after all, he was German, and who knows whether he was in hiding here? But he had many supporters and Father Rampart’s position was as secure as a man’s can be, knowing as he did every single stupid little secret that exists in such a small community. And he supported Leni’s view of the texts the primer should contain.
8
The only person who didn’t participate in the production of this book was Markus, which was strange because he was the best Latinist of them all, with the possible exception of Father Rampart. When he was asked for advice he declined to get involved in even the most trivial discussion of the matter, giving his blindness as a pretext. Robert soon suspected this had something to do with Léon. Markus was always absent when Léon was present, and if they happened to be in the same place, Markus immediately scented the presence of the stranger and discreetly slipped away while Léon for once lost his inscrutable war smile and became sheepish, like the time when he came up with a profundity about the Latin language. Robert once confronted Markus with this, but the blind man gave him short shrift:
“Don’t waste your time thinking when you’ve got nothing to think with.”
Maria, for her part, had a perfectly rational explanation for this mutual antipathy.
“Some people simply don’t like each other. Just think of us and Alois” – this was the lodger who wanted hot milk every morning and had nothing but contempt for the intellectual life of the house.
Actually, no real problems arose because of the bad blood between Markus and Léon, except of a practical nature, such as at Christmas or at birthday parties, or when, finally, they marked the completion of the manuscript, not to mention when it was accepted after a relatively lengthy correspondence with a French publishing house – the happiest day of Maria’s life (except for when she met the Pianist!). It was duly celebrated with a brace of geese, gallons of wine and a reluctant piano recital by Robert, with Markus sitting silent and withdrawn at the centre of the noisy assembly, entrenched behind his dark glasses, with Delilah at his feet growling and irritably gnawing at a bone.
There were never any problems with Nella in this regard. She viewed the whole book project with supreme scorn and preferred to bring the conversation down to a more sensible level:
“Why don’t you ever bring that Agnes along, Léon?” she asked. “They say she is so pretty.”
This was a subject they never discussed, so Léon hadn’t devised an appropriate response, which meant that Leni had to come to his rescue.
“We’re all very fond of Agnes…” she mumbled evasively.
“Yes …we are,” Maria said, without adding anything further.
“So perhaps we could say hello to her one day?” Nella continued.
“I’ve been thinking about this, Maria,” Father Rampart broke in, “and I’m glad we included the bit about Varus, the Prussians would like that, because it’s going to come out there too, isn’t it?”
“Mm, I suppose so…”
“Perhaps we can go and visit you both,” Nella persisted. “Marion could drive us, we never go anywhere…”
In situations like this Léon goes bright red in the face, he stam
mers something incomprehensible, and after a cue from Father Rampart the others start discussing the weather and the crops and the war in a natural, chatty manner while Markus dons an enigmatic smile.
As mentioned, Leni moved out at roughly the same time as the manuscript was completed and took with her the greatest life-giving force Robert and his mother had experienced since the war. Then came an absurd decision by the staff at the school – Maria’s own colleagues didn’t want to have her primer on the list of approved books, the old one was good enough.
The decision exploded like a bombshell in their depleted home; a Latin book is surely the least controversial thing in the world one could imagine, a secret mission for the modest and the cautious, and carefully chosen for that reason. Maria might not have believed it, but she could not accept it either.
“You have no idea what this book means to me,” she said. “It has to work, otherwise it’s the end of everything.”
Robert looked at her in surprise. She went on:
“Why is he doing this to me? I don’t understand – why is he doing this?”
It was the school principal she was referring to, who had most of the staff in his pocket and with whom she had never had any differences, as far as she could remember.
Robert became very depressed about all this, first the loss of Leni to a gym teacher, “a baboon with a hairy back”, then his indomitable mother going to pieces. Obviously he gave her his wholehearted support, but only when they were alone together, because he was at an age when it is not that easy to fight a battle on behalf of a spurned mother. And he became even more concerned when she suddenly felt a need to revisit her childhood home in Wallerode in the Belgian Ardennes. She had left her village “for good” as a teenager, when her parents died, and all she had left there now were two old aunts and a niece, whom she visited every third or fifth year, with or without Robert, and almost always because of a funeral, even though it was less than thirty kilometres away. But there was a border in between, and borders are like habits.