My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  “My God,” the woman said, “they are going to parachute right into us!”

  Parachutes, each sparkling with a thousand lights, it seemed, hung overhead, motionless. The train stood in a landscape as bright as day.

  “Christmas trees, just Christmas trees,” the lieutenant said.

  I woke up with a start and felt so hot. I was breathing much too fast. I took my pulse while watching the fluorescent dial on my night table clock. One hundred sixty-two.

  In retrospect, it is easy to say that I should have talked to someone about all those dreams and flashbacks of mine, but in those days I was too afraid that others may think I was crazy. And maybe I was. Consider the fact that I did talk with my good old teddy bear! I have no idea how Aunt Martel had gotten a hold of him and how she had kept him all those years, but there he was. I remember being taken aback, because by then Teddy had no eyes and the whole body, really, had turned into a mere pile of tattered rags. But at 19 years of age I took him anyway and kept him with me at night. We talked a lot. That seemed better than listening to the radio and silly songs like Bully Buhlan’s “I still have a suitcase in Berlin.” It had become a great hit, which made no sense to me.

  -----

  At about the same time, I enrolled at the Free University of Berlin. England’s King George VI had just died and his daughter Elizabeth, then age 25, had become Queen. I remember listening to the burial ceremonies on our radio after coming home from my first semester classes and being shocked by the way the English were pronouncing Latin phrases. They acted as if Latin were part of the English language and even the Archbishop of Canterbury seemed ignorant of the way Caesar actually spoke the language. Truly shocking, I thought.

  As I said, I set out to study economics and law, a prerequisite for joining the Foreign Service, which I had decided to do. I intended to become a diplomat and help banish war from the earth forever! I was very serious about my plans, but my law professor made fun of me and said that I might just manage to become Ambassador to Liechtenstein. For one thing, he said, I didn’t speak enough languages, which caused me to enroll in Spanish and French. For another, he said, I wasn’t a Count or Baron or Duke and my name didn’t even have a “von” in it, but by long-standing tradition, all of Germany’s good Foreign Service jobs went to members of the former nobility, despite the fact that all those titles had been officially abolished decades ago.

  But I was determined to give it a try and immersed myself in Spanish and French, along with Roman Law and Adam Smith, Frédéric Bastiat, and John Maynard Keynes. Even my extra-curricular activities came to serve my new goal. At the Student Union, a new building financed by the Ford Foundation, I joined the Esperanto Club, where I listened to a lecture given by a man calling himself an Esperantist.

  Esperanto, I learned, is a language designed to facilitate communication among people of different lands and cultures. It was created by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof (1859-1917) and first published in 1887 under the pseudonym ‘Dr. Esperanto’, meaning ‘one who hopes.’ Unlike national languages, Esperanto allows communication on an equal footing between people, with neither having the usual cultural advantage accruing to a native speaker. No more trying to communicate “uphill” for one side.

  “Esperanto,” our speaker said, “is also considerably easier to learn than national languages, because its design is far simpler and more regular than such languages. Esperanto is phonetic: every word is pronounced exactly as it is spelled. There are no ‘silent’ letters or exceptions. Even more than its vocabulary, it is Esperanto’s grammar and rules which makes it exceptionally easy. Unnecessary complications have been eliminated: there is no grammatical gender, the word order is relatively free, etc. The rules have also been simplified as much as possible: there is only one verb conjugation, all plurals are formed the same way, a prefix can be added to any word to change it to its opposite (good/bad, rich/poor, right/wrong), and so on. Thus, after perhaps 30 minutes’ study, one can conjugate any verb in any tense.”

  Having once struggled with Latin, English, and Russian, I was fascinated. I took home with me The Sixteen Rules of Esperanto and knew them in no time. I quickly learned the vocabulary as well, which was not surprising, given the fact that about 75 % of Esperanto’s words come from Latin and Romance languages (especially French), about 20 % come from Germanic languages (German and English), and the remaining 5% come from Slavic languages (Russian and Polish) and from Greek (mostly scientific terms).

  “For a native German speaker,” my introductory book said, “we may estimate that Esperanto is about five times as easy to learn as English, French or Spanish, ten times as easy to learn as Russian, twenty times as easy to learn as Arabic or Chinese, and infinitely easier to learn than Japanese. Many people find that they speak Esperanto better after a few months’ study than a language they learned at school for several years.”

  Although I was prepared to quarrel with the numbers in the previous paragraph (how could one possibly come up with them?), I did find the language as easy as advertised. Within a couple of months, I could read Brecht, Gibran, Shakespeare, and Dante in Esperanto! Once I fell asleep using Esperanto to ponder Dante’s fires of hell.

  Outside, the Mongols poured gasoline on the railroad ties. We could smell the pungent odor through our open windows. A lot of soldiers appeared and formed a circle. The chariots and horses made a circle, too. We saw them fire their pistols and rifles and submachine guns into the air. And then something exploded, and a giant fire burned in the middle of the street. Soon, we felt the heat of the fire, even though the road was wide and our curtains were mostly drawn. None of us seemed to breathe. The fire reached for the sky and soon the sky shone brilliant red, like sunset in hazy summer. A hot wind came up; to the east, beyond the gardens, we could see the silhouettes of houses in flames. Down the street, sparks shot up above the roofs and rained onto the sidewalks below. Smoke billowed through all the window frames and the pub at our corner wasn’t there. There was a smell, like tar burning. I wondered whether that was the smell of phosphorus.

  “Contact with phosphorus, you’ll have it one of these nights,” Mr. Eisler said, “and the only thing that will save you from terrible burns is having a sponge ready and a pail full of water nearby. Or you might drape your heads in wet towels as you sit in your shelters. Always remember: Phosphorus hates water.”

  Quickly, I got up and parted the curtains in front of the balcony door. Flames mirrored in the big factory windows across the street. I opened the doors, climbed onto the bench, and looked down. A stream of dark figures flowed along the center of the street, with hundreds of torches held high and an eerie sound of drums. Pauline stood next to me on the balcony. And the cats, those Struwwelpeter cats, lifted their paws and implored her not to light the matches.

  “Father has forbidden it,” they cried, “meow meoh, meow meoh.”

  Then her dress caught on fire and the apron, then a hand, the hair, the entire child!

  I woke up with a start and felt so hot. I took my pulse. One hundred sixty-two.

  A scene from the Struwwelpeter book

  42. Hypochondria

  [March – October 1952]

  Going on twenty years of age, I wasn’t entirely naïve. I could see what was happening with the nightmares and all. I had heard people talk about this sort of thing, and I wasn’t that much different from everyone else. We had all lived through the war. Having just come back to Berlin, it was not really surprising that my mind would become preoccupied with images of war. It was only natural and the solution was obvious, at least to me: I had to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and confront the ghosts trapped in my mind!

  Accordingly, I decided to forget about classes for a few days and visit the old places of my youth. I took the subway in the other direction and emerged on a street all too familiar. The heaps of rubble were gone. So were the black facades along the canal. Someone had planted new acacia trees. I walked to the empty lot where our house had been and sat down in
the middle of the yard that wasn’t there anymore. The old oak tree was gone, too, along with the goldenchain trees, the garbage bins, and the tall concrete wall. In my mind, I pictured the air-raid shelter door at the bottom of the side-house, also gone, and I thought I heard a flock of sea gulls, circling our balcony somewhere in the sky. I smelled the dust, just as I had those many years ago, and I remembered Dieter as he had been, frozen at the same size as on the day the Hitler Youths decided to torture us. And then a lightning bolt flashed through my head.

  I could actually see the concrete wall, right there in front of my eyes, and all those beer bottle shards glistening in the sun along its top, daring me to escape. I felt the trunk of the oak against my back and also the pain in my arms and legs, spread out, as they were, and tied together with the rope on the far side of the tree. And I saw them pull out their pocket knives and, standing six feet away, hurl them at the tree as close to my body as they could. To the right of my head, under my arm pit, between my legs, the knives came––and missed. And I felt my heart in my throat, missing a beat now and then, and fluttering like a bird caught in a trap. And as if I were watching a movie, I saw Mrs. Nussbaum talking to my mother on the sidewalk where her store window lay in a thousand pieces. I saw myself stepping over huge slivers of glass, each one like a sword, threatening to cut me in half if I fell. I saw the lace curtains coming out of the broken windows, like ghosts waving their arms. And the ghosts looked at me with their fiery eyes and their eyes turned into those of the Mongol Khan whose crescent sword sparkled in the sun. I tried to get up and run, but my legs were still tied to the tree, and I saw bayonets stabbing our pillows and mattresses and then my mother’s clothes. I tried to speak, but my voice was gone. They were holding a knife to my throat after they found my little gold coin with the red ladybug on top that Dieter had given me for good luck, way back in Berlin.

  It seemed that no more than a few seconds had passed, but suddenly I felt so hot and my pulse was racing. I felt dizzy, too, as I stood up, and a scary blackness filled me, moving from the back of my head into my eyes and down through my chest to my arms and legs. I felt wobbly as I walked back to the street, but I was not going to count my pulse.

  -----

  I took the back road along the gardens to look for my old school. At the corner I came across a movie theater that had never been there before. They were advertising Maria Schell, starring in Elizabeth I. The school, miraculously, was intact, but it seemed to have shrunk. At first, the building seemed abandoned, but the doors were open and there were carpenters and painters working on the second floor. They were listening to a radio; someone was singing When the red sun sinks into the sea at Capri. I found our classroom. The iron bars were still in front of all the windows, but the picture of Frederick the Great was gone. I sat in seat number Five. I had to sit because just then my heart skipped a beat and I felt scared about that. I remembered the day my name changed to Twenty, then Thirty, and Fifty-two. I could almost feel the sting of the Yellow Uncle, as I turned the handle of the teacher’s closet to look for the cane, but the closet was locked.

  I remembered another day when the closet had been filled with gas masks, and we had each gotten one of our own, and Mr. Eisler had warned us of British terrorists who were ready to attack us with incendiary bombs and poison gas. I could still hear his voice:

  “Picture yourselves trapped in a smoke-filled room or in an air raid shelter, with, say, mustard gas leaking in. Before long, the percentage of oxygen declines and once it’s gone below 15, you are dead!”

  I remembered how I had watched the firemen later that day on our street as they pumped air into the cellar of the collapsed house next to the burnt-out church and how the bells had rung when the tower fell.

  “A sign of God,” Mr. Joseph had said.

  And I remembered how we had feared the day on which we, too, would be trapped underneath, sitting in the dark, wondering about the rescue workers on the outside getting too tired to go on, wishing that time could stop before there was nothing left to breathe. Was I still breathing? I had to pinch myself to prove that I was. A workman came by and asked what I was doing.

  “Just leaving,” I said, and my heart jumped.

  -----

  Quite automatically, I took the way home towards the canal, as Dieter and I had done, home towards our house that wasn’t there anymore.

  “Nothing to fear now,” I thought. “No more Hitler Youths threatening to drown us in the canal, lest we hand over our favorite toys. No more dead bodies floating under the bridge and scaring us with the thought that we might be next, drowning in a cellar trap one night when the whistle bomb hits and the water pipes burst.”

  And there it was, the Elsensteg! I paused in the middle of footbridge across the canal and glanced along the watery road to the east. New trees had been planted and brand-new houses had replaced the burned-out shells of long ago. I had the feeling of time having stood still, as if a film of my life had been rewound to an earlier age. A swarm of sea gulls came from underneath the bridge and circled before my eyes just as they had on that fateful day. And a lightning bolt flashed inside my head, my hands gripped the railing, and my feet refused to move.

  I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets. The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth; and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. Red-and-yellow tongues flickered along the plane’s wings; bullets stitched their way across the bridge. One plane, a burst of thunder, a single cry on Dieter’s lips. I saw his head, half gone, half turned into a bloody mess. I saw the flutter of his hand, his body jerk, snow turning red. There was no solid ground beneath my feet, I could not breathe, my mind was numb, my body turned to stone. I couldn’t move; my words, they wouldn’t come.

  A second streak of lightning flashed inside my head, I thought I’d fall like a bolt-struck tree. I shut my eyes, I opened them; I heard gulls fly overhead in rage.

  -----

  And so I gave up. I had been wrong. I had been foolish to take the bull by the horns. I had been stupid to visit the old places and reminisce. I should go out and be with people, I figured. My thoughts went to Helga. I knew where she was. We had written to each other, but still hadn’t met since my return to Berlin. My mother had been terrified at the thought of my crossing the border to visit Helga in East Berlin. Helga, on the other hand, had let me know that the Conservatory people were very strict; she had to practice her music twelve hours a day without letup. She couldn’t be distracted by selfish things, she had said.

  I decided to give it another try. To my surprise, Helga accepted my invitation to go to the theater and agreed to come over from East Berlin. We hugged and kissed at the S-Bahn [city railway] station and, suddenly, all was well with the world.

  I had tickets for the Schiller Theater to see Wilhelm Tell. The show turned out to be a splendorous affair. The building was new. We liked the marble columns, the chandeliers, the soft red seats, and the atmosphere of so many people dressed up in lovely clothes. I wore a brand-new suit myself, a dark blue one, and a bow tie. Helga was beautiful. She wore a glittering evening gown of emerald green. Her black hair was cut in bangs across her forehead. It was long and straight on the sides and in back. She reminded me of Cleopatra.

  “I love you,” I said when I handed her the corsage.

  “I have missed you, too,” she smiled and took my hand.

  We looked at the pictures of Switzerland in the lobby and read the words of the Rütli oath that was taken when the country was founded.

  “We shall be a united nation of brothers,” it said.

  We sat in the very center of the audience. The lights dimmed, a hushed silence, the curtain rose. The stage setting was magnificent. The snow-capped mountains looked so real…Hermann Gessler, the tyrant, placed the apple on top of the little boy’s head and told Tell to shoot the apple from his son’s head with his cross-
bow.

  “What is the matter with me?” I thought.

  My heart beat fast and strong inside my throat.

  “Just a story, just make-believe,” I said to myself. But my mind drifted to another time, the day the Chain Hounds had come into town and I had run into one of them in the middle of the street, standing legs astride, just like Gessler on the stage, and holding a pistol.

  I could see him now, jamming the muzzle against the soldier’s forehead, and I saw the man rise to his knees, then to his feet, the pistol following, his eyes closed, waiting, I presumed, for the last sound he would ever hear.

  Suddenly, I felt the barrel of that rifle at the center of my forehead. I felt the cold metal and I saw him grin and stare at me, without mercy, with those fiery eyes of hate. I felt my heart in the middle of my throat, beating away the last seconds of my life…

  With an eye on my wristwatch, I counted my pulse. One-hundred forty-two. But I hadn’t been cautious enough. Helga looked at me, worried. On stage, Gessler had reached the narrow mountain pass. There was no way for him now to escape Tell’s second arrow. The tyrant rode past the wall of Alpine rock; it looked so real.

  “Are you all right?” Helga whispered.

  “Of course,” I said and noticed the bow tie in my lap. I opened another button of my shirt; I was so hot, and my heart skipped a beat. There were lightning and thunder on the stage. Hailstones were bouncing off the rocks, sounding like machine-gun fire.