My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  The church itself, laid out in the form of a cross and still mostly hidden from our view by all the trees, was attached to the tower on the right. Aunt Rachel’s monastery house was similarly attached on the left. Unlike the other houses in town, hers had yellow stucco walls, some of them overgrown with dark green moss, others hidden behind wooden scaffolding supporting an abundance of green leaves and large clumps of deliciously looking blue grapes. Pigeons were cooing in the gutters and a family of ravens announced our arrival.

  Aunt Rachel must have heard the cawing; she appeared at the door before we could ring the bell. She was surprised that we had come so soon and led us to a small back room that overlooked the garden.

  “You can have this one,” she said, rather abruptly. She hadn’t even said hello.

  There were pretty curtains on the window, and I saw two beds and a crib, a chest of drawers and an armoire, all painted white. Right next door, there was also a bathroom with a flush toilet, a sink, a mirror, and an enamel tub. I couldn’t believe that there was such a thing as hot running water!

  I don’t remember much of what happened next, except for meeting Mrs. Zweig, the cook and gardener, who took us to the kitchen to serve bread and cheese and a wonderful mixture of minced onions and tomatoes, along with a glass of chocolate milk.

  “The Mr. Superintendent, he always sends us cocoa from France,” she explained with a smile.

  “Does he now?” my mother said, and then she put Helmut and me to bed.

  We were exhausted, and I must have fallen asleep in no time. But later that night, I woke up with a start. Perhaps it was because Helmut kept coughing or because my mother was snoring. But my heart was pounding and I felt that I couldn’t breathe. I stared at the clock on the night table and waited for the air raid sirens. The time was just right. And I kept hearing a frightening noise. It surrounded the house and swallowed the trees. It moved across the fields. It was in the air. It was everywhere, and it wouldn’t stop.

  I looked out of the window and saw nothing but darkness. No moon, no stars, not a single searchlight in the sky. My mother woke up and said it must be the humming of telephone wires, and I should go back to sleep. But I hadn’t seen any telephone wires, so how could I sleep?

  City boys don’t know about crickets.

  -----

  The next day, while Aunt Rachel introduced my mother to Erna, the house cleaner, I decided to check out our new surroundings. I started with the second floor, which had a long corridor, with shiny oak flooring, and lots and lots of doors, all of them closed. I opened the first one and found myself in a large room with two windows, shades drawn, half covered with heavy curtains made of fancy brocade, and sun rays making their way past the bottom of the shades to a big Persian carpet in the center of the room. The room, it seemed, was some kind of sitting room, elegantly furnished with all sorts of pieces of furniture, every one of which was made of mahogany, the reddish-brown wood we had once studied in school, and many of which featured elaborate carvings, usually of plants that I could not instantly identify.

  The next room was almost a copy of the first, except that there was a large table in the middle of the room, surrounded by eight chairs, and all the furniture was made of cherry wood. By then I understood what was going on. I inspected thirteen rooms on the second floor and every one of them could easily be identified by a particular theme. There was a bedroom with lacy curtains and furniture of birch, a second bedroom featuring only walnut wood. There was a smoking room, filled with black leather chairs and a black leather couch and a little table with a chessboard standing in-between. Even the pieces were set up, as if they had been abandoned in the middle of a game. One could imagine a “check” or “gardez” still sounding in the room.

  I found Uncle Eddy’s study, too. Two of the walls were covered with shelves overflowing with books; his desk was covered with a large white sheet. The other wall, across from the windows, had two large pictures on it; I had seen them both in Berlin. One pictured Martin Luther; the Great Reformer; the other one showed the Wartburg, the famous castle where he once hid from the Pope, translated the Bible into German, and had many a fight with the Devil himself. Once he threw a bottle of ink at Satan, and visitors can see the splotch on the wall, I had been told, to this very day.

  I had just finished inspecting the music room, complete with Steinway piano and violins and flutes in a glass case, when Aunt Rachel caught up with me. She was not happy.

  “What do you think you are doing?” she yelled. “These rooms are not to be touched until Uncle Eddy gets home! Don’t you ever go up here again!”

  “And wipe that stupid grin off your face,” she added.

  I knew what she was talking about. It had become a habit of mine to laugh at anyone who was attacking me. It wasn’t very smart, but I just couldn’t help it.

  “Come down with me and I’ll give you something useful to do,” she said firmly, and down we went. Aunt Rachel told my mother what I had done and explained to her as well that our room was our room, but the rest of the house was taboo.

  “Except for the bathroom and the kitchen, of course,” she corrected herself.

  “But even there,” she continued, “as you well know, ‘too many cooks spoil the broth.’ It’s my kitchen and I will be the one who tells Frieda what to do. Which reminds me, I got to check out what she’s up to in the garden…” and out the front door she went.

  My mother cried; she always cried, it seemed. I told her what I had found upstairs. And, rather than chiding me, she agreed to be my ally. We decided to inspect the downstairs together, while Aunt Rachel was checking up on Mrs. Zweig and Helmut was still asleep. My mother was so much fun!

  But we didn’t get to see much before Aunt Rachel was back, just two of the rooms. One of them was empty, except for lots of paintings on the walls; we later named it “the gallery.” The other one had ornate tablecloths hanging from all the walls, and there were glass display cases filled with Greek vases and Chinese porcelain and all sorts of pieces of pewter. There were also unopened boxes on the floor in the middle of the room. They had been sent from Paris; the stamps and Uncle Eddy’s return address made it very clear. We called that room “the museum.”

  Like two conspirators, we made it back into our room just before Aunt Rachel entered the house.

  She had a project for me, she said, at least until I was enrolled in school in the coming week.

  “Frieda is harvesting the apples this week,” Aunt Rachel said to me, “why don’t you go in the garden and help her.”

  “First, we fill up the baskets,” she continued without waiting for my response, “then we bring them into the cellar and lay the apples on the shelves along the walls. Frieda will show you, but be very, very careful when you handle the fruit. Treat each apple with the utmost of care. Like a raw egg. There must be no dent of any kind or the apple will rot in no time.”

  I was more than glad to oblige, and the project turned out to be fun, too. For one thing, I learned all about the garden, which was amazingly huge. And I loved climbing the trees. The walnut trees were the best, because their branches were so incredibly supple, as if they were made of rubber. I could climb along the trunk to the top of the tree, then crawl outwards along a branch, and that branch would gradually bend downward under my weight, deposit me gently on the ground, and snap back up to its original place. That was not something one could do with any other type of tree!

  Mrs. Zweig taught me how to harvest the apples without bruising them. She also showed me how to deposit apples carefully on the cellar shelves, where they might, with some luck, last through the winter and even longer, perhaps even until a new harvest came along.

  I didn’t like being in the cellar, though. It made me think of air raids and I couldn’t breathe. It also scared me to realize that there were no reinforcements and supports of any kind. If this house were ever to be bombed, everyone in the cellar would surely be crushed or burned. I made a mental note that this cellar was no
place to be.

  Mrs. Zweig also taught me something else, although, perhaps, inadvertently. While I was sitting in the apple tree, she introduced me to ‘Mrs. Pastor Jahn’ who had come into the garden and who, she said, was the wife of the minister currently taking care of the church. They were living in a tiny two-room cottage on the other side of the church, which I had seen but imagined to be a barn because it was so small and also had a thatched roof. In any case, according to the rules of the local church, I was told, Pastor and Mrs. Jahn were entitled to some of the fruit that the monastery garden produced, but only to the ‘drop fruit,’ which was the fruit that accidentally fell off any one of the fifty trees and was lying on the ground. That’s why Mrs. Pastor Jahn walked though the garden once a day with a basket in her arm. When I heard the story, I thought of all the times my mother had told me to be kind and willing to share. So I violently shook the tree in which I was sitting and a shower of apples fell to the ground, all bruised. Mrs. Zweig laughed and said I was a good kid. I wondered what Mrs. Pastor Jahn would do when nobody was looking.

  -----

  The next day was Sunday and, right after breakfast, the bell called everyone to church. I was surprised that the bell was still there and hadn’t been melted down. In any case, none of us went to the service.

  “Pastor Jahn is boring, nothing like Eddy,” Aunt Rachel sighed and that was it as far as she was concerned.

  “Feel free to go,” Aunt Rachel said, looking at my mother.

  “But allow me to give you just a bit of friendly advice,” she added. “Forget about that Nivea cream and all that powder and lipstick and perfume you are using. People around here don’t go for all that big-city stuff. They are liable to call you a whore.”

  “What’s a whore?” I asked, but neither my mother nor Aunt Rachel would answer me.

  “Well, thanks a lot,” my mother said to Aunt Rachel and turned to me. “Why don’t you go and explore the village, Hansel. I bet it’ll be fun! Today you have all day; tomorrow we’ll have to sign you up for school.”

  Once again, I was glad to oblige, but not before getting some pointers from Mrs. Zweig who was sitting in the kitchen laying out Tarot cards for a woman I hadn’t met.

  “That’s Irma,” Mrs. Zweig said, “she’s in charge of washing and ironing. She also helps with the canning and such, but she’s just visiting today. She’s not working on Sundays.”

  “Now you won’t tell on us about the cards, will you?” Irma said to me. “The Mrs. Superintendent, she doesn’t like this satanic stuff.”

  “Not if you tell me how to get into the castle,” I said with a wink. “My Aunt Lotte back in Berlin told me all about those cards; I think they are neat.”

  I followed their advice and took the shortcut to the castle, right down the narrow path along the brook behind our house. A little sparrow moved before me, darting from willow tree to willow tree as I went, almost like a scout.

  The castle wasn’t anything like the one in Berlin where the Kaiser used to live. There were no gardens, fountains, or statues. There were no people standing guard on polished floors, eagerly outfitting visitors with oversized shoes made of felt, lest they make a scratch. There were no gilded ceilings, fancy tapestry, and fine pieces of furniture. There were no vases filled with flowers, display cases filled with jewelry, or giant windows covered with curtains of lace.

  In fact, the castle that I found was not remotely of the kind I had seen in fairy tale books. There was a giant circle of sixteen houses, tightly joined together like Aunt Rachel’s monastery house, but ranging between two and four stories in height, all made of yellow-painted stucco and capped with steep roofs of reddish clay tiles. If one entered the circle of houses through a tiny unlocked gate, one came face to face with the first of two round towers. This one, the taller one, was almost entirely made of red brick, completely windowless, and topped with a structure resembling a bishop’s cap. And if one dared enter the tower through a tiny wooden door, one discovered it to be hollow, except for a creaky old spiral staircase that swayed back and forth when anyone stepped on it and that, by this very fact, invited naïve little boys to a climb to the very top. And from the very top one could recognize that the entire village, in turn, formed a tightly packed circle, with not a single structure beyond its outer rim. And all around one could see a long summer dying; although it was still warm and there hadn’t been a killing frost. The grass was brown, the fields were being plowed, the red oaks were turning yellow, and cloud-shaped shadows were racing across the land …

  Looking straight down, one could also see that the castle was, in fact, a working farm, with most of the buildings being used as barns. Some were being filled with hay at that very moment; others, just as clearly, were the homes of horses or cows, pigs or sheep. And if one dared, one could retrace one’s steps, climb down to the ground, and investigate the second tower that stood outside the circle of castle barns. That tower was not as tall, but was also made of bricks, with a steep triangular structure at its top, and a stork’s nest on top of that.

  I did all this, of course, and when I opened the heavy door to the second tower, I found it to be just as empty, silent, and windowless as the first. It was emptier, perhaps; there wasn’t even a spiral staircase there. Still, I saw that weeds had invaded the inside; one wall was overgrown with ivy. I heard water dripping, somewhere in the dark. Just then, the sun caught me from behind and made long, scary shadows in front of me. And as it burned away the ghostly mist, I could read the signs someone had scrawled on the opposite wall:

  “This is where Prussian kings fed their prisoners to the rats”

  and

  “This is where Hans Edler zu Putlitz was eaten by rats”

  I took a step to get a better look and almost stumbled over a broken trap door pretending to cover the cellar steps. I looked into the black abyss and smelled dampness and decay coming from below. I stared into the depth and waited and stared some more. I could swear I saw something move. I wasn’t about to stay long enough to make sure. I turned to see the sun sinking lower and lower in the southwest and I saw a quarter-moon rising in the southeast. I heard frogs making scary noises along the brook as I ran home.

  21. Village Idiot

  [September 1944]

  As you can imagine, it takes a while for a city boy to get used to the ways of the countryside. I made new and surprising discoveries every day, even of things that seem so utterly obvious in retrospect. I remember the Monday morning on which we were scheduled to register at the local town hall. Right after breakfast, Mrs. Zweig took a step ladder and a bunch of tools and disappeared into the garden. Aunt Rachel said she would have to go as well to supervise the pruning of the fruit trees. She put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and pulled a huge pile of burlap from a closet.

  “We do that every fall,” Aunt Rachel explained. “Proper pruning makes for healthier trees and bigger fruit next summer. We also wrap the trunks with plenty of burlap; otherwise the rabbits and squirrels gnaw at the bark all winter, which can easily kill a tree.”

  I followed them into the garden and that’s when I first noticed that different kinds of trees had different types of bark and that none of them was endowed by nature with the sooty kind of coat that was common in Berlin. Obvious, of course! Nobody in Ziesar burned the low-grade lignite coal that everybody used in Berlin.

  I remember something else about that day. It had only been 8:30 or so in the morning when I had had the epiphany about the trees, and we didn’t have to be at the Town Hall till 10. That was my chance to sneak into Uncle Eddy’s study and have a look at his massive dictionary. It sat on a little table all by itself and one couldn’t miss it. Given my mother’s unwillingness to explain it, I was determined to look up the word “whore.”

  Unfortunately, even the gigantic book was of little help. For one thing, it offered three answers:

  1) a person who accepts payment in exchange for sexual relations

  2) a person considered sexually p
romiscuous

  3) a person considered to have compromised principles for personal gain

  In addition, the book spoke in riddles. What were sexual relations? What was promiscuous? I looked up the latter and got the same kind of double-talk:

  “Promiscuous,” it said, “having casual sexual relations, frequently with different partners.” So what did all that have to do with my mother putting on lipstick and using perfume and Nivea cream? I knew less than before! So I sneaked back down and asked my mother: “What are sexual relations?”

  “Hansel!” she said, “What on earth makes you ask such a thing? Not now, please, we have to be at the Town Hall in ten minutes.”

  And that was that. Grown-ups were weird. They never gave a straight answer, not if they could help it.

  -----

  The Town Hall was just around the corner on Breite Weg; we had passed it on the day we arrived. I noticed that a special tree was standing in front of it. I could tell that it was special, because it was standing in a raised bed cut out from among the cobblestones and it was surrounded by four small posts which were linked with an iron chain. The arrangement looked just like the exhibits I had seen in museums in Berlin. In fact, there was also a bronze sign.

  “1,000-Year Oak, Symbol of the Destiny of the Third Reich,” it said.

  I got the point. The Führer had promised that his government would last a thousand years, but the oak, of course, was much younger than that.

  “Come on, Hansel,” my mother said. “Take Helmut’s hand.”

  We climbed up the steps and my mother talked to the receptionist about residency papers and ration cards. She also gave her the Bombenschein [bombed-out certificate] which the Red Cross had given us and which proved that we had lost everything. Meanwhile, Helmut and I inspected the hunting trophies on the walls and the shelves filled with rows of pewter jugs and bright earthenware plates. Across from them was a row of wooden pegs; one of them held an umbrella, another one the jacket of an SS uniform, and a third one the associated cap with the skull and crossbones. There was a large poster on the wall as well; it pictured an infantryman moving forward with gun and fixed bayonet, but at that very moment being knifed in the back by a shadowy figure with the Star of David on its sleeve. “The Betrayal of Judas,” the caption said, “A woodcut by Willy Knabe.”