by Roy Jacobsen
2
Maria received her son with open arms and a big smile, as robust and feisty as in her prime when she crossed swords over the Latin books and won. She served a sumptuous meal and told Robert that Markus wanted to meet him at his home on the new farm, it was urgent, Léon and Father Rampart had also been summoned and would pick him up tomorrow morning, then she excitedly announced that she had a new job at the Maria Goretti School in St Vith, across the border in Belgium, which meant she could “go back home” to the village of her childhood, Wallerode, and settle in her old home, but not to worry, she wasn’t going to sell the house in Clervaux, because she knew that Robert wanted to be here for the same reason that she wanted to go to Wallerode, but that was none of her business, he was grown-up now…
Robert smiled at these familiar evasions of anything to do with Leni and his fragile bonds of affiliation, Leni who now, by the way, had behind her one of the town’s most successful divorces, not only because she was one of the first women to take such an unnecessary step but because she had “managed”, nonetheless, managed to get somewhere decent to live and hold on to her academic career. But what was she waiting for, the local gossip wanted to know, because time is no friend to a beautiful woman, and now the young men of the town are growing up and entering the danger zone, for Leni is no nun, it is written all over her face. But nothing happens, the years go by without anyone taking the gym teacher’s place and, consequently, also without her losing her self-assured smile and well-deserved good name.
Robert was given an update on the unattainable woman every time he was at home, music to his ears, but the melody was sombre, for after a year or so in Leuven he began to think that Clervaux was too small for him, too restricted, quiet and, yes, narrow-minded, and he began to loosen his ties, with Leni too, he put off writing letters, forgot messages, had a lot on, that kind of thing, but that kind of thing continued, now and then there was Christmas and the summer holidays, which gently returned him to his place in Leni’s body and soul, and he realised that for every year that Leni walked around with her reputation intact down there in the cool tranquillity of the small town, parading the eternal question – “What is she waiting for?” – that the noose was tightening around his own future, he was twenty-five and ravaged by a greater uncertainty than ever.
“What’s the hurry?” he asked his mother, referring to Markus’ urgent summons.
“Probably thinks he’s going to die again,” Maria smiled. “Maybe you’ll be left something. You’ve been his son after all.”
“Didn’t he lose everything in the war?”
“We all did,” she said in her familiar, weary expression, and Robert again had to acknowledge her incredible ability to make him think that he had grown up in affluence. But when did he actually begin to doubt her? Is this something that everyone does, regard the accounts of one’s origins with greater and greater scepticism, or was this his own private failing? Last autumn he was sitting in the reading room one day and leafing through some past editions of Life magazine – to brush up his English – and he had seen in black and white, in an article about the Battle of the Bulge, that Manteuffel’s troops really did come across a piano-playing G.I. in Clervaux’s chateau ballroom, it even said he was the sole survivor.
At a pinch, he could imagine that his mother at some point in the distant past had read the same article and lifted the bizarre idea from there, you don’t make up that kind of thing, it’s either true or it doesn’t exist! And of course she was aware of this. But would this ever end, this toing and froing, from one to the other, still not being able to ask her straight out, it might ruin her life’s work and presumably also be an act of sacrilege against the absolution Father Rampart must have given her, apart from the fact that this type of plain speaking never took place in this house. Now, for example, now he gets up and thanks her for the meal and kisses her on the cheek and says:
“I’m going for a walk to see Leni.”
“That’s very frank of you.”
Yes, he could be frank for he has no intention of going to see Leni. He just wants to stroll around town, which he always does on the first evening he is at home. He puts on a coat and goes out into his town, which, behind shutters and lowered blinds, is preparing to go to bed. Snow is still falling from leaden clouds which are low in the valley now, on the football pitch the goals stick up like enormous croquet hoops from the virgin expanses while the chateau is bathed in light from the three new projectors, and the hills around are swallowed up by the dense night sky.
He crosses the square where the tourist buses usually park and heads for the narrow alleyways, chooses a bar at random, but spots his old principal in there, Crookneck, who had once hesitated to give Maria the requisite approval for her Latin primer, their eyes meet, two nods, but Crookneck looks down, he is old now, there is an empty glass on the bar in front of him, it is refilled and Crookneck laughs too loudly at a remark the landlord makes. Robert goes out again and walks towards Leni’s house, yellow light steals out between the shutters and the window frames on the ground floor, so she is awake, but he doesn’t go in, why doesn’t he go in and find out who he is once and for all, she must know?
There is no answer to such questions. But there is no point leaving now, so the crux is whether he is closer to his or Leni’s house. He is closer to Leni’s house, right outside it, then he turns and goes home, but once there he turns on his heel and goes back to Leni’s. Now the ground floor is dark, but there is a light on in one of the windows upstairs. He stands motionless until it is switched off, then he goes home and thinks no more about why. Crookneck haunts his thoughts, the incomprehensible conversation he once witnessed between him and Markus, as well as Markus’ reluctance to do anything to help Maria in the Latin primer dispute, which was resolved as it had to be, there was probably some kind of explanation, but Clervaux has gone to bed.
Robert has, too.
He cries in his sleep, tosses and turns between the sheets, his heart thrashes around and his limbs shake, but he doesn’t notice. The next morning he doesn’t notice either, or else he has forgotten, sleep has taken it and now it is light and there is more snow, and of course tonight he is going to see Leni, once and for all, if only Markus can find peace.
3
Markus and Nella had moved out of Clervaux to a simple farmhouse with no land on the outskirts of the village of Doennange, in the hills to the west, where there was even more snow. But something else was to make this day extra special for Robert. His mother had gone to meet a solicitor in Meyerode about the inheritance in Belgium, but he found her diary which was usually under lock and key in the bureau in the “library” and was only taken out when her tears could not be stemmed in any other way; now it was in a no-man’s-land between him and her, on a little pedestal table on the landing between the two bedrooms, where Maria in the spring and summer months placed a vase of flowers and otherwise just covered with a cloth. It was impossible to determine whether she had forgotten it in her haste – after confiding to her diary her plans to move? – or whether she wanted him to find it and read it, in the same indirect way that she normally informed him about things that cannot be said, as if to give him a choice as it were, and thereby absolve herself of the possible consequences; and he found himself reacting in exactly the same manner by placing the book unread on the top shelf of the cupboard next to the bathroom, behind some old towels and frayed cloths, to be retrieved if she said it had gone missing, as innocent as an undivulged secret – Here it is, Mama – and to read it only if she never asked about it, whenever that might be.
In a good mood, but also slightly despondent about this eternal game that no-one can win or lose, he had a quick breakfast, dressed and was ready by the time he heard the squeal of the tyres on Léon’s “new” car as it pulled up in the yard.
There weren’t two men in the vehicle but three; the third got out and introduced himself as Erich Beber, Professor of History and M.P. for the German S.P.D. Party, Ha
mburg, a robust, thickset and lively man in his fifties with an eager handshake and military history as his area of expertise, it soon transpired, as he talked constantly about all the time he had devoted to the tragedy of Stalingrad, the most myth-laden of all catastrophes, that was also the reason why he was here, after having corresponded with Markus Hebel on the subject over a number of years, particularly as there were some unclarified issues regarding Beber’s father’s “war neurosis” …And the others realised in the course of the first two or three kilometres, which took them a good half an hour, that Beber must have put a lot of pressure on Markus to have this audience; Robert was more interested in his mother’s diary and irritated that the foreigner was like “most Germans”, a common response in these parts when you meet someone looking for something he already knows, and Father Rampart may have felt the same, at any rate his contribution to the conversation soon lapsed, into a pious smile, and if there was one thing Léon didn’t want to hear about it was the war, so he kept quiet too, and anyway he had his task cut out keeping the vehicle on the road, it was an old army jeep that he sometimes used to relieve the tractor at home on the farm.
So Robert was the only one left to keep the conversation going and he asserted that no-one knows anything about Stalingrad anymore, his peers at the university think it was the war’s turning point, finito, as do most Europeans nowadays, those on the mainland at the very least, while the Americans tend to claim it was Midway or D-Day and the invasion of Normandy, and the British probably think the Battle of Britain was the deciding factor or Montgomery’s El Alamein and the subsequent Sicily landings, and of course here in the forests we have our own little version of the events, of the Ardennes Offensive in 1944 and Manstein’s and Guderian’s Blitzkrieg in 1940, it depends on what kind of turning point you are talking about, that was all there was to it…
Robert didn’t notice the irony in his own voice until Father Rampart gave a polite cough and commented on the dreadful weather and how it might spoil the whole excursion. But it upset Beber that universities were now filled with youngsters who knew nothing about history and who were only interested in unbridled freedom, they would end up making the same mistakes all over again. Why don’t I like him, Robert mused, after all Markus is German too, even though he has managed to cross a few borders in his life, so is Father Rampart, he is from Paderborn and it wouldn’t surprise me if I was from Saarland, in addition to my Belgian half, and that leaves only Léon, no-one knows where he is from, he is from here.
And as for Stalingrad – we were stuck in the snow anyway – Beber contended it was the Sixth Army’s demise that gave Stalin the necessary authority at the Yalta Conference to gain acceptance for the Soviet Union’s role as a superpower, and now we were well and truly stuck. We had to get out and push. But Léon was not much of a hand with the American vehicle, the wheels spun and turned the packed snow into mush and the gear changes required a much bigger man, so the party decided to park the jeep and cover the last two or three kilometres on foot.
Robert knew a shortcut, a firebreak that cut straight through the forest-clad hill like a broad avenue. And Father Rampart had the opportunity to reprimand him for his surly treatment of their guest – “We are not in the habit of saying what we think, think your thoughts, think whatever you like but don’t say it, besides he is not your guest…”
They plodded up through the thick snow for the first kilometre and into the open countryside, into a huge field that led to the other fields that covered the whole landscape, divided up by low beech hedges and the odd hazel tree or a bent oak along the boundaries, and the wind howled across. Father Rampart was panting, his heavy body leant forward into the gusts, his black cassock-tails flapping like raven wings. Beber had briefly put the war on hold and produced a bottle of schnapps, which they took turns taking swigs from.
“What a beautiful country.”
“Yes,” said the others. But Robert was nervously eyeing Father Rampart’s face, which was only very slowly regaining its naturally ruddy hue. The old fellow said he might have to sit down for a minute, but by then he had already toppled over and the others had to drag him to his feet, they stood motionless, gazing across the fields and panting in unison, there wasn’t much to see because of the iron-grey clouds drifting through the valley and obscuring the view of the hills to the north and east where, on the next ridge, the village of Eselborn resembled tiny mounds under the snow and the smoke was snatched from the chimneys like fluttering ribbons and dissolved into nothing.
They started walking again, it was snowing more heavily now, and they made slow progress. Father Rampart did not even have the energy to be annoyed by his own frailty, he had to be half carried and was occasionally given schnapps by his new friend, but as they were squeezing through the last kissing gate in the last hedge before Doennange, Léon suddenly announced from beneath the arm of the panting Father Rampart that he had got married. In the registry office, in the capital last summer, only a civil marriage, halfway between a marriage, which the Lord prefers, and living in sin, this was the compromise that Léon thought he could manage, a halfway house, but now he hoped that Father Rampart could arrange the religious side of the matter some time in the spring, although Agnes had been married before, many have been, she is a widow.
“Congratulations,” Beber said, proffering his hand, while Robert burst out laughing and Father Rampart angrily tore himself free of the supporting arms and gasped for breath. “She’s also expecting,” Léon quickly added, as if to get it all out in one go. “A boy.”
“How can you know?” Beber asked.
“Of course it’ll be a son,” Rampart sighed after recovering his breath. “May God bless you, Léon. You’re a good lad. And, if not, it’ll probably be a girl.”
“Yes, that’s a possibility too.”
As they came to the first farm a farmer appeared from the cowshed and eyed them with a sceptical expression, Father Rampart in particular, who was on his last legs, seeming to hold his attention.
“Oh yes, old Hebel bought the house over there, called Hammer, a year or two ago.”
Father Rampart had to summon up his last reserves, and with the help of Léon, who was thinking about Agnes and that now there was no way back, and Robert, who was thinking about the diary and his mother and Leni and lots of other unclarified issues, he covered the final two hundred metres at a snail’s pace, also assisted by Beber, who dreamily repeated that he hadn’t had the slightest inkling that coming here would be such a wonderful experience, he never went anywhere except to party conferences; true enough once he had gone to Stalingrad and allowed himself to be photographed in front of the grandiose memorial to the battle there, it had been a terrible trip, and it was a terrible monument…
4
There was great confusion as they came into the long stone house, which in a telephone conversation with Robert the previous year Markus had called his “final hermitage”, he was no longer a Cistercian monk, he had to rise from the depths of Clervaux up to the higher land.
Nella received them all of a fluster and with a lot of drama, it was in fact not Markus but she – and Maria – who had summoned them, and Beber hadn’t been invited at all, at least not by her, but just sit yourselves down, it’s too late now, all the roads are snowed under, well, the thing was that Markus had changed beyond recognition, he went out at nights, slept during the daytime, didn’t eat and had all but given up talking; he even claimed he was getting his sight back, and it all started a couple of weeks ago when a small parcel arrived from Russia with a strange cross in it, there must have been a curse on it, at any rate it didn’t look like the ones she had hanging in the house – there was also a letter with it, but none of them could read it and who knows whether it had anything to do with his son again.
Father Rampart took the cross and looked around for a chair, slumped down on the bench next to the stove and announced amid much huffing and puffing that this was a Russian Orthodox cross and therefore harmles
s, to Nella’s relief, but what about the letter, and where is he?
Markus was out, as usual, often he didn’t come home until after it was dark, it didn’t matter, he said, for blind men can see where the rest of us can’t, but she didn’t like it all the same.
She started making coffee and setting the table, Léon was sent out for some briquettes, and Beber, who didn’t have the ability to talk about the war in a casual way or keep quiet about it in the Ardennes way, tried again to involve Father Rampart, who had focused his attention on the bottle of wine Nella had put out, while Robert donned his coat, went outside and found Markus and Delila’s tracks in the snow. He followed them across two broad fields until he reached the beech forest stretching like a white cathedral into the sky as far as the eye could see, where he found the old man sitting on the bottom rung of a Hochsitz, a hunting tower, staring into a bonfire like Prometheus watching over his most precious spoils. Whimpering and dissatisfied, the treacherous and immortal Delila was running around her master and the fire in ever smaller circles until she curled up and settled between his feet and the fire. Markus raised his eyes and stared straight ahead.
“Is it you?”
“It is me.”
Robert offered no explanation as to why he had appeared out of nowhere like St Hubertus’ stag, nor was he asked for one, it was a repeat of the meeting at the ruined mill when the German balloonist took them on board. Markus was living somewhere between dream and reality. He had received yet another confused letter forcing him to turn back time; a Cossack had, through his wondrous circle of acquaintances, come across information about his son’s – Peter’s – fate; the boy had survived all the ordeals of Stalingrad until January 31, when he was taken prisoner along with the other 91,000 soldiers still alive. Paulus and many of his generals had converted to the Russian creed, they wrote fliers urging German soldiers to capitulate and desert and these were dropped over Manstein’s fleeing armies, out of bitterness towards the Führer presumably, towards Göring or Richthofen, or towards Manstein …and were rewarded with a few anonymous years in East Germany; by then Paulus’ Romanian wife had long since died, from grief no doubt, both sons had fallen in battle and he himself held out until 1956, they must have been long years.