Interpreters

by Sue Eckstein

  So, after the breaking off of relations with Germany and the entry of Turkey into war on the Allied side, the members of the German embassy had to leave Turkey. On the day they were being transported away, my husband was called to the commercial attaché, whose child had a very high temperature. He was among the leading Nazis in Turkey and his office was the headquarters of spying. As my husband was about to leave the house, the attaché said to him, ‘I thank you for your help – perhaps I can do something for you in Germany – I have influence, if you should have any relatives there.’ To which my husband answered, ‘They have already been killed, all of them.’ Tante Louisa had committed suicide, Sofie had died in Theresienstadt and Renate had been transported away from there to we knew not where and we never heard of her again, though we tried for many years to find out what had happened to her. We were informed exactly by the Jewish Agency what was going on in Auschwitz and elsewhere. The gassing and all the other horrors. The attaché then asked, very embarrassed, for almost no one in Germany knew much about what was going on in Auschwitz or any of the other camps, ‘May I ask for your bill?’ My husband only said ‘Your money is too dirty for me!’ and turned his back on him and left.

  Max and I would go to see my grandmother every couple of months, together when we were younger and then separately when my grandmother announced that we were quite old enough to survive the train journey on our own – surely we were no longer such little babies? She was very good at organising people. The first time I went to stay with her on my own, she said, ‘Ah, Julia, now you are here as my guest, you can do whatever you like for the next four days. First we will go to the Pitt-Rivers Museum and then we are going to go swimming. And then, after supper, we will look through the photograph albums.’

  My mother hated us making the journey to Oxford, though she never tried to stop us. She would stand in the drive, grim-faced, not waving, watching the car drive round the green and out of the cul-de-sac towards the station. She had an unnerving ability to foresee death and destruction in the everyday. If she heard an ambulance’s siren just after we left the house for school, she would be filled with an overwhelming sense of doom that would only lift when a few hours had passed without a call from Casualty, or from our schools querying our absence. How we used to laugh at her when she told us about the sirens.

  ‘Why don’t you drive us to school, then?’ we’d ask, always keen to avoid the long walk and the groups of children from the local primary school who would knock off my grey felt hat and throw Max’s navy cap over the privet hedges whenever they got the chance. Why we didn’t just carry our hats or shove them into our satchels and avoid this ordeal, I still don’t know.

  But my mother could rarely pull herself out of bed in the morning before we left for school.

  When we arrived in Oxford, one of us would manage to distract our grandmother in the kitchen while the other would creep into the sitting room to ring home and announce our safe arrival. Until we learned to do that, we would be exposed to a line of questioning that always filled me with a deep unease.

  ‘Can I use the phone to ring Mum, please?’

  ‘Is she still so very nervous?’

  ‘Not really. She just likes to know we’ve arrived safely.’

  ‘And all those medicines she was taking?’

  ‘I don’t think she’s taking them any more.’

  ‘So perhaps now she is able to look after your father again properly.’

  ‘I think he can look after himself, really.’

  ‘Yes, but if she isn’t working, that is something useful she could do, no?’

  ‘She is working, some of the time.’

  ‘Yes, but not in an important job such as your father’s.’

  ‘It is, in a way.’

  ‘I can imagine she’ll be busy now, preparing your father’s supper. He must be so tired when he gets home from the hospital. So phone her quickly and don’t talk for long and then we’ll eat. And afterwards, Max, you and I will play chess.’

  I imagined my mother alone at home, putting down the phone after my call, making my father’s supper which would usually be ruined by the time he eventually came home, watching television, wondering what her mother-in-law was saying about her, while Max and I sat in our grandmother’s cosy house listening to her stories of ‘former times’ and eating dumplings, wurst and rote grütze.

  ‘Come, Julia. Why the long face? Nothing wrong at home?’

  ‘No, everything’s fine.’

  My grandmother moved from Germany – where she and her husband had returned some years after the war – to England in the early ’60s. She bought a house in what must have once been quite a pleasant, semi-rural area of Oxford not far from two of her favourite second cousins who had been in England since the early 1930s. Very quickly, it was encircled by new streets, houses and flats. Gradually the trim verges began to sprout more litter than grass, the neat curtains in the windows were replaced by pieces of material draped over string, and by the time Max and I were in our teens the little shopping parade opposite the house was deserted apart from a tobacconist’s with a permanent grille over the window and a convenience store which boasted a display of brightly coloured plastic fruit and vegetables and little else. Some architectural quirk meant that the parade acted as a wind tunnel, and, every time we went there, plastic bags and chip wrappers would be dancing in the currents of air, lending a festive atmosphere to the otherwise bleak concrete surroundings.

  Going shopping with my grandmother was a kind of mild torture. She had a very continental attitude to queuing. Max and I would spend much of our time smiling apologetically at large, fierce-looking women in tight crimplene slacks with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, or pockmarked teenagers who would find their place in the queue taken by a tall, gaunt, foreigner in her late seventies who appeared not to notice that they existed. If the checkout girls were too slow, my grandmother would declare very loudly, ‘Ach, these stupid shop girls! I haven’t got so much time to waste,’ leave her basket of unchecked-out goods on the end of the conveyor belt and stride out of the shop.

  Every day, whatever the weather, my grandmother would swim in the local outdoor pool, only reluctantly going to the indoor sports centre when it closed for the winter months. Until Max and I learned to ‘accidentally’ leave our swimming things at home, we would reluctantly swim up and down the pool a few times, shivering, while my grandmother, resplendent in a pink bathing cap sprouting yellow rubber flowers, did her twenty lengths. Whenever the bitter winds stopped whipping up ripples on the grey water and the rain clouds cleared, we’d be joined by a handful of other swimmers, who quickly learned to give my grandmother a wide berth as she ploughed up and down, oblivious of any oncoming traffic. Her lengths completed, she would haul herself up the steps, and walk slowly but purposefully to the changing rooms like one of those ancient, wrinkled Galapagos tortoises.

  Another of her hobbies to which we’d be recruited was fruit-picking. Each year, she would pick pounds and pounds of strawberries and raspberries or whatever else was in season. Then she would drive to the old people’s home near her house and deliver them.

  ‘Ach! They are all so gaga,’ she would sigh as she got back into the car. ‘They sit around all day staring at the television, even if it is not on. Or playing that stupid English bingo game. If they at least played bridge, their brains would have some exercise and they wouldn’t just be sitting there like vegetables. I said that to the matron when I gave her the strawberries.’

  ‘And what did the matron say?’ I asked, curious to know how other people dealt with my grandmother.

  ‘I don’t know. She had one of those local accents that no one can understand. So I just nodded my head like this and left.’

  My grandmother would keep a punnet or two of raspberries and strawberries, which would form the basis of her rote grütze. We would watch with some fascination as she emptied the fruit, wriggling maggots and all, into a saucepan and turned it into the delicious
pudding which we’d eat with the top of the milk poured over it. We learned not to think about the specks in the pudding that were neither raspberry pips nor strawberry leaves.

  I love to go back to Germany, for there I am a somebody, my grandmother would say. Each year, she would return to Germany to say goodbye to all her old friends. As the years went by, and more and more of her friends died, Max noted that these by now very old friends probably all dreaded a farewell visit from my grandmother, as it was more likely to presage their own death than hers.

  So many times, I have said, ‘Thank God for Hitler,’ for if we had not had to leave Germany because of the Nazis and had not gone to Turkey we would not have had all those marvellous times and opportunities and met so many interesting people. For not only was your grandfather in charge of child health throughout the whole of the country, he took over the responsibility for the medical practice of the colony of exiles, and in time also the entire diplomatic corps of the Allies.

  The children of the German embassy came under his care too as they had greater confidence in a European professor than in a local doctor. It happened very occasionally that a Nazi would prefer to have some other doctor. Only one declared quite openly, ‘I would rather have my child die than have it treated by a Jew.’ The poor child died soon after, of meningitis, I think.

  I never met my grandfather, Arthur Rosenthal. Clara once said that a colleague of his in Turkey, for whom he had great respect, had told him that people like him should return in order to re-educate the younger generation in Germany. And so they went back to Germany in 1950, where Arthur took up a prestigious university position. Six months later, he died of a heart attack on a picnic aged only fifty-nine, in the same month that my father qualified as a doctor in London. My father kept a photograph of him on his bookshelf. I used to look at my grandfather’s kindly face, the smile lines around his eyes, his shiny bald head, and examine him for links to my father or to Max. My father never once spoke about my grandfather and would feign deafness if I ever asked about him.

  ‘Didn’t he like him?’ I asked my mother once.

  ‘Your grandmother kept your grandfather pretty much to herself as far as I know – I doubt your father ever saw much of him. But I think he loved his father so much, he can’t bring himself to talk about him. That’s the way your father is – anything difficult or painful, you just don’t talk about it.’

  I could tell we were heading for dangerous ground here, so I changed the subject.

  IX

  I can’t tell you how happy I was the time I thought they’d come to take my father away. I was supposed to be meeting my friend Helga at a Furtwängler concert. You’ve heard of Kraft durch Freude? – well, never mind – and I was looking everywhere for the tickets. I couldn’t find them anywhere. I was too old now for my father to hit me but he used to find other ways of making my life difficult. Textbooks of mine would go missing and I’d be punished at school, or messages would fail to reach me and I’d miss important meetings or find I’d let my friends down. And suddenly there was a knock on the door and I could see through the glass that it was Herr Schering, who lived with his mother at the end of our street, dressed in his SS uniform. We’d see him go home in the evenings in his black uniform and boots and my mother would say, ‘Don’t move – the SS man is coming past.’ Nobody really spoke to him – and his old mother rarely left the house. I was running incredibly late and still looking for my tickets and I didn’t really want to open the door but I thought – finally! They’ve come to get my father. They’ve heard him listening to the BBC. So I opened the door and said, ‘My father’s in the summer house.’ But Herr Schering said, ‘It’s you I wanted to see.’ And he said he’d heard that I’d been presented with a medal recently and that I should treasure it forever. And then he asked me if I was just going out somewhere and I told him I was going to the Furtwängler concert but couldn’t find my tickets. And he said he’d played with Furtwängler himself. When he’d been a student at the Conservatoire. But that now he didn’t have the time to play the French horn as much as he’d like to – there were other, more important things to do. And then he said, ‘What’s that sticking out of your top pocket?’ And there they were. The tickets. And he held out a pair of thick black woollen trousers and said, ‘I wondered if you’d have a use for these. They’ll need making smaller but I don’t need them, I’ve been issued with another pair and it’s a waste to throw them away.’ And that’s really how I started to sew quite seriously. It was beautiful material. I altered them and made deep pockets with the left-over material and they would have lasted for another twenty years if they hadn’t been incinerated. They lasted longer than their original owner, in any case. A couple of weeks later, our SS neighbour came out of his bomb shelter to look at the damage to his house and a roof tile fell on his head and he died. They took his old mother away and I heard she died in hospital shortly afterwards.

  Chapter Ten

  Ben’s room resembles a small arsenal belonging to someone ready for any means of attack. Scattered over the bright blue carpet are two silver pistols in leather-look holsters, a large machine gun, a gun that fires ping-pong balls, a plastic dagger, a set of wooden swords, some arrows and a broken bow. A naked Action Man lies on the windowsill, its head twisted at an impossible angle, as if recoiling from the sight of its bare rippling muscles and its tiny beige bulge of genitalia.

  Max and I used to play cowboys and Indians a lot. He was always the cowboy, and I the Indian. I don’t know why that was. Probably because of the lovely long headdress I got to wear, with its spiky red, yellow and blue feathers. We played in the garden, around our tepee. Playing inside was too risky. Shortly after our grandmother had presented us with the sets of costumes and accompanying weapons, our mother had come into Max’s room to call us down for supper. Max had leapt out from behind his curtain where he’d been waiting to ambush me, grabbed her round the neck and held a revolver to her head.

  ‘Hands up!’ he yelled.

  ‘Christ almighty!’ she shouted, shaking Max off and staggering back towards the wall. We were impressed. She’d got the hang of the game pretty quickly. But then we saw that she was shaking. ‘Don’t ever do that again, do you hear?’ she said, her voice trembling with anger.

  ‘It’s just a game, Mum,’ said Max, soothingly.

  ‘Just don’t ever point a gun at me again. Ever.’

  ‘But it’s not real.’

  ‘I don’t care. Just don’t do it, do you hear me?’

  ‘What about arrows?’ I asked, rearranging my headdress, anxious not to be excluded from the drama.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Can we shoot arrows at you?’

  ‘If you must – but from a long distance away and not at my head.’

  ‘But that’s not fair,’ said Max. ‘You tell me off about the gun and then let her shoot you with a bow and arrow. Arrows are just as lethal. Ask any old Indian.’

  ‘Well, that’s just how it is.’

  ‘Then I’ll shoot myself instead,’ he said dramatically, holding the barrel of the gun to his temple.

  My mother winced. ‘Put the damned thing down!’ she shouted.

  ‘It’s not loaded,’ I protested. ‘It’s not even got caps in it. We ran out. And anyway, you’re always telling us not to swear.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. You can keep your guns now that you’ve got them. I just never want to see them. Ever. And never, ever point one at me. Do you hear?’

  It wasn’t only guns we had to be careful about. We could make our mother jump out of her skin just by coming up behind her very quietly. As we never wore shoes in the house, this happened a lot. We found it quite funny, watching her literally jump and then clutch her chest as she spun round, but she wasn’t at all amused. When we realised that she was far less likely to agree to what we wanted in the aftermath of a shock, we found various ways of heralding our arrival – singing or calling out – as we approached whichever part of the house she was in
.

  ‘And is your mother still so very unstable?’ our grandmother used to ask, rather too loudly, when she came to stay.

  ‘She’s fine,’ we’d say, looking round anxiously to check that our mother was out of hearing.

  ‘Such a shame for your poor father.’

  ‘She’s fine. Really.’

  ‘After all the stress at work and then coming home to all that.’

  We didn’t really know what ‘all that’ meant, but we did know it didn’t sound fair.

  ‘Mum’s all right. And anyway, Dad normally comes home pretty late.’

  When I was about thirteen, and after a particularly disastrous visit, my mother told my father that Clara was no longer welcome in our house. Max and I could carry on seeing her whenever we wanted to and so could my father, of course. But Clara was not coming to Tenterden Close ever again.

  ‘But Mum,’ I said, ‘you can’t make Dad do that. It’ll hurt Clara’s feelings.’

  ‘And what about my feelings? Can’t there be one time when someone thinks about my feelings.’

  ‘But she doesn’t really mean all the horrible things she says,’ said Max. ‘They sound worse than they are. It’s because she’s German.’

  My father didn’t say anything but he must have passed the message on. I wondered how he fitted the decree into his comfortable family narrative. Max and I continued to visit our grandmother in Oxford, as did my father, but the guest room remained empty, home only to my mother’s sewing machine and a dressmaker’s dummy we called Natasha. (I think War and Peace was on TV at the time.)

  My grandmother never mentioned her banishment. It was as if she had never been to stay with us; had only ever entertained us in her own home. Max and I were happy to see her on her own territory where we didn’t have to protect our mother from the upset and outrage she caused. My father must have been annoyed at the inconvenience of having to travel to Oxford to see his mother but, if that was the case, he never complained.