by Knud Romer
It had a red stamp on which a cherub was singing and printed on it the words Gloria in excelsis deo, 5 Pfennig. It was strange to think that Mother had been so small. I was thinking about Hildchen Voll as I picked up the box that lay right at the back, lifted the lid and was struck by a thunderbolt. There it was, the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, the buried treasure – and it was death. The Iron Cross. The black cast-iron cross was inlaid with silver with crossed swords and a swastika in the centre. It was Mother’s – and then I heard the key turn in the front door.
For years I thought they were right, that Mother was a Nazi, and I was ashamed and defended her. But it wasn’t true. Mother had been decorated by General Raegener – this was after the war – and she was given it for rescuing hundreds of German soldiers from Russian deportation. It was Uncle Helmut who told me. When I finally plucked up the courage to ask Mother, she said that she had wound the head of the sector for the Red Cross round her little finger – a Mr Plaiter – and he got himself drunk on gin, declared his undying love and promoted her to ‘Chief clerk’ for the ambulance service, as she had asked him to. Then she organized the escape, using the ambulances to smuggle soldiers from the hospital over the Elbe and into the West. She had not been able to save Horstchen but she had managed to ferry as many others to safety as possible – and it was deadly dangerous, for they could have rumbled her at any moment. When the military police came for her, Mother nodded and fetched her coat. But they were only asking her to report to the American high command. She was not arrested. They didn’t say what it was all about, and Mother took a gamble and went. It was General Raegener who had sent for her. He was a prisoner of war, and there was something he wished to talk to her about. He walked into the visiting room with his wooden leg, shook hands and said thank you – and then he took out a box and handed her the Iron Cross Second Class.
It was hidden away in a box with the black-white-and red ribbon of the order. She never took it out or discussed it with anyone. I had only seen her wear it once and that was in 1967. It was the World Fair in Montreal. Mother and Father were on their grand tour to Canada and saw Niagara Falls and visited the Lions Club in Chicago on the way back. Shortly after this they were excluded from the local branch in Nykøbing – it was not ‘international’ enough to be able to accept a Nazi, as they put it – and Mother hit the roof when they returned in the evening from the Baltic Hotel. She went across to the bureau, took out the box and pinned on the Iron Cross. Then she left the house, Father standing in the hall in the light falling from the living room – and I tried to prevent her, to get her to leave it be and to stop. But it wasn’t her anymore. She couldn’t hear a word anyone said but walked up Grønsundsvej to Højbroen, over the bridge and all the way through the town wearing the Iron Cross and singing ‘Das Preuβenlied’ all the way:
‘Ich bin ein Preuβe, kennt ihr meine Farben?
Die Fahne schwebt mir weiβ und Schwarz voran!
Daβ für die Freiheit meine Väter starben,
Das deuten, merkt es, meine Farben an.
Nie werd’ ich bang verzagen,
Wie jene will ich’s wagen:
Sei’s trüber Tag, sei’s heitrer Sonnenschein,
Ich bin ein Preuβe, will ein Preuβe sein!7
Father was at a loss as to what to say or how to explain it. At dinner not a word was said about it, and Mother served us Maccaroniauflauf. She could fall to pieces at any moment. I walked on eggshells, supported her as best I could, nodding and playing along. That was quite right, and yes, of course. Whenever I wanted to go out, Mother would ask ‘Wo gehst du hin?’ and I would have to say where and promise to be back before long and, if I was late, she would be beside herself – where had I been? I hurried home and shouted ‘Hi!’ on my way up the stairs from the cellar, hoping she was in a good mood. Her voice was full of reproaches, she was worried, and even the most ordinary things became artificial, felt awkward, sounded like lines rehearsed. She transformed everything around her into a tragedy, and we took up our roles and appeared in her performance, while the dining room, the table, the paintings were all just props. If one of us had spoken out of character and told the truth, hell would have been let loose. We were possessed by an evil spirit, and Father sat at the dining table and asked for the salt and in desperation tried to think of an insurance scheme that would make it go away by itself.
But it wouldn’t. Mother dreamed of settling accounts and had once seen the camp leader from Arbeitsdienst walking along by a railway station. She pretended she hadn’t noticed her. What was she to do? Hit her? Spit at her? There was no such thing as justice. Mother did not believe in God. She hated him and drank extra strong lager and smoked cheroots and quoted Trakl. In silence above the site of the skull open God’s golden eyes.
‘Schweigsam über der Schädelstätte öffnen sich Gottes goldene Augen.’
And she would blow smoke at the ceiling and tell me how he had been acquitted after the war – Manfred Roeder, the state prosecutor who had murdered them all! He had personally ensured that those ‘milksop’ prison sentences for the women had been transmuted to the death sentence – for not having reported what was going on to the police. Even for Liane, and she was only nineteen. After the execution he rang Horst Heilmann’s father to inform him – with contempt – that his son had been annihilated.
‘Ihr Sohn ist ausgelöscht.’
And they sent a bill: 300 Reichsmark. Roeder had been doing his duty, the state prosecutor maintained and dismissed the case in 1951. The hangman was able to retire to his villa in Hessen and continue working as a solicitor, even becoming the chairman of the local parish council.
Rote Kapelle had never existed, said Mother, and she could have taken the next train to Glashütten and slit his throat. It was the Gestapo who had invented the Communist spy ring in order to rid themselves of opponents of the regime. Roeder extended the web that was spun around the story and got the tribunal to believe that they had been agents and traitors to their country and deserved the death penalty. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the Soviet intelligence service. The radio transmitter didn’t even work.
‘Ach!’ Mother sighed and stubbed out her cheroot.
And Schulze-Boysen had only sent one solitary message to Moscow, a blanket greeting to all friends.‘Tausend Grüβe allen Freunden’.
Once the season got under way, the smoke billowed out of the chimney of the sugar factory The air smelt sweet and the snow fell to earth in sugared drops that tasted of boiled red sweets called ‘Kings of Denmark’. I went around with my tongue stuck out, loving the snow and hating it. Fear rose inside me as softly as the snow that floated down and transformed the town into a great white battleground, where there was a good chance I would be attacked and clobbered. My head, my ears, my trousers would be filled with snow, I would eat snow in the breaks – and on the way home from school they would be lying in wait.
Tractors drove through the town with mountains of sugar beets. The children ran after them, waiting for some to fall off so that they could play with them – or sell them for a couple of crowns if there were enough. They would grow like mountains in front of the factory, and people would walk with their nose in the air, saying, ‘It smells of money.’ When they had parties, they became drunk on Blue Nykøbing lager and sang ‘I come from Falster, where the wurzels grow, and they grow, and they grow and they grow! They grow and they grow – and they grow and they grow – and they grow and they grow and they grow!’ It was nothing but wurzels from dawn till dusk.
One day Mother and I were shopping at grocer Olsen’s. He was standing behind the counter and suddenly clutched his head and said, ‘Oh, me wurzel hurts.’ It suddenly struck me that they had wurzels instead of heads, too, and maybe this was just something that no one had told me.
I had a good look when I was at the baker’s on Solvej, but Susanne smiled the same as always, and when we were out buying cheroots at the kiosk, I couldn’t see anything unusual about the thin lady in fr
ont of me. And so I spent the rest of the day studying heads and looking for clues that might give them away – roots, traces of stalk. A lot of them did resemble wurzels when you took a closer look, and I grew more and more sure that I was right and felt queasy when the tractors drove past me on the street. I imagined that they were heads loaded on the trailers, and out on the fields they stood in earth up to their necks and they grew and they grew and they grew until they were harvested.
I had made an igloo on our drive and crawled inside, hiding, being a polar explorer in Greenland – Peter Freuchen had a street named after him just round the corner. It grew later than usual and I had dozed off in the darkness, when I heard someone laughing outside and crawled out to see who it was. A little further up the street stood a creature with a glowing head. Fire burned in its eyes, its nose, its mouth, and on the opposite side of the street I could see another flaming head. They were laughing at me with their triangular eyes and their evil smiles, and I screamed and ran and could hardly believe it – they had wurzels instead of heads and a light burning inside that you just couldn’t see by day!
The secret of the sugar beet fields mushroomed. I had discovered something terrifying and I avoided them, averting my gaze and never looking them in the eye. The thickest boy in the class was called Jesper. He came from a farm outside town and wore shorts all year round. He had ringworm and a pudding-bowl haircut and ate pencils and picked his nose in class – and the more I studied him the more I was convinced that he was one of them.
Of course it wasn’t long before I ran into him after school. He was sitting on a front step on Enighedsvej carving with his penknife and there were a number of smaller children watching. He looked up and said something or other to me, but I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from what he had in his hands. A wurzel! He had already cut the mouth and eyes.
‘What you starin’ at?’ he asked and stood up.
I seized the opportunity.
‘You’re thick in the wurzel,’ I replied and ran off as fast as I could. He caught me up at once and knocked me down. The children flocked from all sides shouting ‘Bat-tle! Battle! Bat-tle!’ while Jesper sat on top of me and gave me a clobbering, pushing my face in the snow until I couldn’t breathe and was shouting for help!
Jesper stopped, looked down at me and said what they always said. ‘German pig!’ Then he laughed and the others all laughed along with him. I asked whether I could go now and was told that I had to beg first and say ‘Please’. I nodded and raised myself carefully on my elbows, and before he knew what I was doing I had blown in his mouth. His eyes flickered, his arms flailed, and his face went out. Smoke came out of his ears, and then his head fell off and rolled down the street. The children ran away screaming. I knocked the snow off my coat, picked up the wurzel and went home to build a snowman. I put the wurzel on the top and the sight filled me with delight. Then I made a snowball and kept packing it tight until it was as hard as stone.
It was my fifteenth birthday, and Father told me to come with him out onto the street, and there it stood. A black 3-speed Puch. It didn’t have high handlebars or backrest and had a top speed of only 30 kilometres an hour, and I had to wear a helmet that was yellow and twice the size of my head. I knew I would look ridiculous. ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said, and Mother asked whether I wasn’t going to try it out. I trod on the kick-start and did a wheelie when I let in the clutch. Then I drove down Hans Ditlevsensgade and up Peter Freuchensvej and back again, and we went inside and had breakfast.
During the afternoon the doorbell rang – I started, fearing the worst – and outside stood Uncle Helmut. He had come all the way from Oberfranken. He was smaller and more bent than ever and he said ‘Guten Tag!’ and wished me a happy birthday. We went up and joined Mother and Father in the dining-room, and I could see that it was difficult for him to walk.
‘What a surprise!’ said Father, and Mother poured him a cup of coffee and a cognac.
He said no to cake. He mustn’t be late for the ferry. He went straight to the point and asked whether we could be alone for five minutes, and then he placed a piece of metal on the table. It was the last fragment of the hand grenade that had almost killed him. Uncle Helmut told me about Stalingrad, where they had been encircled by Russian forces and were staring defeat in the face. He was determined to desert because he was done no matter what happened, but he and his company managed to get through, and behind them the German army turned to ice.
I waved goodbye to Uncle Helmut, who hooted and turned the corner – and I never saw him again. As soon as he got home to Münchberg, he went into his clinic and took an X-ray of himself. It was what he was most frightened of. From it he could see that he was dying. He had got cancer – it was the X-rays – but he told no one and ate dinner as usual with Eva and Claus. Axel and Rainer had left home. After the meal he said ‘Mahlzeit’ as always and dragged himself up the stairs to his room, where he closed the door and sat down with a bottle of wine and a glass of morphine. He began drinking as he wrote in his diary – he was convinced that his forefathers were standing there waiting for him in the next world – and when he had emptied his glass, Uncle Helmut fell asleep.
In the evening I climbed onto my scooter and drove out to the coast to see whether the sea was still there. It was. And there was nothing better than to end it all, standing on the edge of the Baltic, where the island of Falster ended, and to feel the wind buffeting your face. I looked out at the white-tipped waves breaking on the bar and walked along the beach – it stretched as far as the eye could see – looking for shells and fossilized sea-urchins and always hoping to find amber. It was so rare that it practically didn’t exist. It was always just a piece of glass or a yellow pod of bladderwrack. Nothing. I kicked up the sand and walked out on the breakwater, stretching my arms to either side and waving them up and down. It made the gulls fly off straight away. They thought I was a bird of prey. And I cursed the place and spat into the wind and felt my own spit slap back on my cheek.
Even though I moved away from Nykøbing, I never left it, never escaped from the house on Hans Ditlevsensgade. My parents lived alone with each other and sat listening to the grandfather clock marking time. It was the only thing that did. All else had ground to a halt. They had no one apart from me, and I was still ‘das kleine Knüdchen’. Every Christmas, New Year, Easter and birthday we celebrated together round the dining table, and everything was as it always had been.
The final years Father spent looking after Mother. An operation at a private hospital had gone wrong. They broke her back, and she couldn’t straighten up. She walked at first with a stick, then with a Zimmer frame, fighting on and looking to me – her eyes tired and sad – but there was nothing I could do. She was inconsolable.
Mother grew more and more ill, complaining about chronic pains in her back and her bladder. She had a bladder infection that wouldn’t go away, and she had to pee all the time and was given a catheter. Her throat was scorched by radiotherapy – she had got cancer of the mouth – and she ate less and less and was wasting away. The doctors could do nothing, couldn’t even ease the pain – there was no morphine that worked – and then Mother fell and broke her leg. It was put in traction in a metal splint and she took to her bed, unable to move. They had their meals sent round and Father no longer went out of doors, living in the end in a house of no fixed abode. He didn’t know where it was anymore. At times it was in Copenhagen, then it was in Orehoved or on Nybrogade in Nykøbing – and the world shrank into that one stuffy, dark and suffocating room furnished with the beds and the wardrobes from Kleinwanzleben.
One day Mother rang from the telephone in the bedroom to say that Father had been taken to hospital. I took the train down to look after them – it would only be a couple of days and it was nothing to panic about, just an irregular heartbeat. To make sure I could hear her if anything happened in the night, I made up the bed in the room which I had had as a child and which was unchanged at the end of the corridor. And
Mother called out for me.
‘Ach, wie sehe ich aus! Look at me! How have I ended up like this?’ she moaned.
I tried to get her to sit up a little higher in the bed, put a pillow at her back and brushed her hair, which was thin and greasy with sweat. I carefully washed her face, and she asked for her perfume from the bedside drawer, and then I peeled an apple and cut it into thin slices, which I managed to get down her. She even drank a beer. And now her catheter was full, and I changed it, punctured the bag in the bathroom and had to clean up.
I would have given my life for hers, but she did not want it, lying in bed, refusing to drink and refusing to eat. It made no difference what I did, nothing helped, and I spent the evening putting acid-tasting sweets into Mother’s mouth because they relieved the pain – she kept asking for her lemon drops – and slowly she turned the screw.
When I went to bed, she began to scream. I rushed into her bedroom. She was sitting bolt upright in the bed saying that she was going to be sick, she was going to be sick, and I ran to find a bowl, hearing her cursing the people, the country, me.
‘Ach! Was seid ihr doch für Menschen? Pisseland, pisse, pisse, pisseland!’
And she threw it all up, the pills and the bits of apple and the beer I had got down her. I emptied the bowl a couple of times and sat by her bedside and said, ‘Mother, you’ll have to calm down now’, and she lashed out at me – how could she calm down when she had vomited everywhere? I stroked her cheek and told a story to get her to forget herself and her pain and her body and to slowly lull her to sleep by talking.
Can you remember when we used to visit Grandmother, when we turned the corner where she lived? It was Kettenhofweg number… 108, wasn’t it? I said the wrong number on purpose to get Mother’s attention, and she corrected me, saying, ‘Nein, 106,’ and I said that of course it was 106! And can you remember that the first thing you saw when you came into the hall was the post-boxes?