Nothing But Fear

by Knud Romer

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Of course.’ And then you went in along a passageway to the left, I said, and came to a door with frosted glass, can you remember that? And when you rang, it made a buzzing noise, and Grandmother would let us in. We would go up the stairs – now what was she called, the woman who lived on the first floor, the Jewess?

  ‘Frau Badrian,’ Mother said with a snort.

  And I said that, yes, that’s what her name was. She was nice, and then one storey further up and we were at Grand-mother’s. Can you remember the smell? There was such a comforting, cosy smell in the hall – and the glass door that shivered when you opened it to go into her living room. It was a fine room, elegant, and we would eat dinner, and I loved Grandmother’s cooking. Can you remember her kitchen? It was small, and her pots and pans were old, and the casserole was over a hundred years old?

  ‘Ja, wir haben immer auf unsere Sachen aufgepasst,’ said Mother.

  Yes, I said, you certainly did look after the family’s things. And then I asked whether she could remember the view from the balcony in the bedroom that looked out onto the courtyard where the pension was – Pension Gölz. There was an Alsatian that was always barking and a large tree – a chestnut, wasn’t it?

  ‘They were chestnuts to eat,’ Mother said. ‘ Esskastanien. They don’t have them in Dänemark’. I continued the tour, telling her how walking up Kettenhofweg you went past the house where the mad lady lived who collected all kinds of rubbish and made a huge tip in her front garden.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mother. ‘I sat once beside her in the tram and she stank.’ And I said that she would never move, would she?

  ‘Nein,’ she replied.

  ‘Can you remember,’ I asked, ‘the name of the big street you got to, where the trams went?’

  ‘Bockenheimer Landstraβe.’

  I whooped.

  Yes! That’s what it was called. And then you walked across the zebra crossing and there was a baker’s – I loved Pfannkuchen – and around the corner a small, dark stationer’s with biros, exercise books and paper of all colours. There was a young lady who ran it – and what was the name of the street you got to, the big street that led all the way to Opernplatz?

  ‘Goethestraβe,’ said Mother, and I said, Wow, you’ve got a good memory! And can you remember the ruins of the opera? Mother said that it wasn’t so bad that it couldn’t be rebuilt, and I said yes – and so we came to Palmengarten, the large park, where there was a lake you could take a boat on, and I was so happy there that I rowed all day long. There was a palm house, which was huge and made of nothing but glass and it was as hot as the tropics and humid and full of palms and there was a wishing well – and can you remember the playground?

  ‘Yes,’ Mother said and opened her eyes and looked at me with that cold, steely gaze that I had been afraid of all my life. ‘And can you remember what happened?’

  Yes, I said. I was playing in the climbing frame, which was shaped like an aeroplane, and I was flying across the water and refused to land before I had reached America.

  ‘And then?’ asked Mother, and I felt ashamed and answered that she had waited and waited and contracted pneumonia and almost died.

  ‘Exactly,’ Mother said with an unpleasant smile, and I knew that it would be now, and that I had reached the end of the story and she had not fallen asleep.

  She was awake, and it was the other woman in Mother before me now, looking through her eyes and pointing at the sweets on the bedside table.

  ‘Who put those sweets there?’ she asked.

  It was awful. I couldn’t breathe, my chest contracted.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What are they doing there?’ she asked. ‘Take them away!’

  I went out into the kitchen with them and returned. She was scowling.

  ‘Where is that little box?’

  ‘Which box?’

  ‘That little box with sweets,’ she snapped. ‘Where is it? Wo? Wo?’

  Then I understood.

  ‘But I took it away just now because you told me to,’ I said, ‘and because the sweets had melted in the heat of the bedroom.’

  ‘Where is it?’ she asked, her voice brittle and sharp, and I was forced to admit it – I had thrown them out. She looked at me accusingly – and then got cramp in her legs and began to scream, and the night was spent comforting her and changing catheters because she wanted a fresh one even though the bag wasn’t full, and I stank of my mother’s urine and vomit.

  The day after – I had not slept more than ten minutes at a stretch – Mother lay with her eyes half closed looking as though she was going to die at any moment. I helped her get her pills down. Her throat was dry, and there were a lot of pills, and it was painful. She had to eat something, and I asked if she wanted a little ice cream – it was like the one you could get in Lübeck that she loved.

  ‘Nein!’ she said. ‘Danish ice cream is full of disgusting cream.’

  She was ready to throw up at the very thought. No, that Italian sorbet you could buy in Germany, now that was ice cream! I said I’d be happy to fetch some sorbet for her, and she said, ‘In Dänemark they cannot make sorbet. They put cream in it,’ and then she wanted to be changed, and I took the bag and emptied it down the toilet and fell asleep on the floor.

  Mother was shouting, and I woke and rushed in to her. She was lying there shrieking, ‘It’s my bag! It’s my bladder!’ She was pulling at the catheter. ‘Where is it? Where is it? Give it to me!’ And she ripped the duvet aside and spread her legs, pulling at her underpants and showing me her sex where the tube from the catheter ended.

  ‘Here it is! It is here and it is hot,’ she said, and her eyes dilated and madness and evil shone from them.

  ‘Stop this now, Mother,’ I begged her, pleading. ‘Won’t you stop, please? There is nothing the matter. Won’t you, please?’

  And she screamed, ‘Nein! What are you thinking of? It is my bag! It’s my bladder! You are an evil, evil boy!Du bist ein böser Junge, nein! ’

  With that she sat upright in the bed and took the water bottle and the glass from the bedside table and poured and gulped it down and poured a fresh one and drank, looking at me all the time, her face contorted, and I couldn’t bear it any longer and ran out of the bedroom and down to the living room, terrified that Mother would come after me with her bad leg and kill me. I tried to ring the nurse at emergency but they were engaged. I left a message asking for help on the answerphone and had just put down the receiver, when Mother screamed from up in the bedroom, ‘Ahhhhh! Knud! Knud!’

  I ran upstairs. It stank, and I knew right away that it had happened. She lay on the bed looking like a skeleton in the foetal position, bent and bony – and I reached out to feel the pulse in her throat, and my hand withdrew automatically with a shock because it had encountered that most terrible thing of all, a corpse. Mother had become a thing, had been taken over by nature, which was rotting in her. Her mouth was open, her eyes were open and black and stared at me from far, far away. I could not understand that she was dead and I held her hand and stroked her cheek, her hair. I talked to her as though she were still alive – ‘Süsse Mutti, ich hab’ dich so lieb.’ As I told her I loved her, I almost thought her lips moved a little, and I put my ear to her mouth. Her breath had the sweetness of death. A sudden horror shot through me. She was going to pass on the name Papa Schneider had whispered to her, was going to tell it to me! I put my hands to my ears and did not want to hear it, shaking my head and looking at Mother. Her face was a petrified scream.

  There was nothing peaceful about her death. Mother died a painful, tormented and miserable death. I rang the police, and the doctor arrived and pronounced her in rigor mortis, asking me about the circumstances in order to ensure that no crime had been committed. There had, I told him, but it was a long, long time ago – and then he completed the death certificate. Hildegard Lydia Voll Romer Jørgensen, I said, stressing the Romer. I asked him to allow her to stay where she was for a while. He nodded
and left, and I sat at her bedside holding a wake all night long, talking with her, speaking to myself and swearing I would take revenge.

  In the morning I rang the hospital, told Father and brought him home. He went in to see Mother. I made up a bed for him in the guest room, and we sat down at the dining table. I tried to hold his hand and comfort him and talk to him, but he was not to be comforted or talked to. He had nothing to say. At some point I rang the undertaker.

  ‘Who are you ringing? What are you doing?’ Father asked.

  I didn’t know what to say and just did it all as discreetly as I could to be free of his constant objections, and the undertaker arrived dressed in black.

  His hands were shaking. He was clearly nervous. He took out a folder with the range of coffins – I pointed at the one without a cross – and the urns – I chose the simple one – and the obituary notices – I wanted the largest. And Father ruined it all. He said no to everything, kept asking what the point was and telling me that that was enough now. In the end I arranged for them to come and fetch her as late as possible, which meant at four o’clock.

  The day passed then with Father, who complained about the slightest thing – the tea was too weak, it was too strong, and why had I taken the newspaper up into the sitting room with me, and who had moved the papers on the table.

  ‘Not those plates! And what are the silver knives doing in the dishwasher?’ No, I need not make a bite of lunch, and no, he didn’t want any cake, and the undertaker arrived on the dot and rang the bell. They set up the coffin in the sitting room and asked us to let them get on with it. We went into my old room, and Father started sobbing, making the strangest noises and sounding like a hollow box, and I couldn’t stand it, and now they were carrying her down.

  Someone knocked at the door, and Father and I went down into the sitting room. Mother lay in the white coffin – they had put it where the Christmas tree usually stood – I laid her little pillow under her head, and Father started poking irritably at a ball of fluff in the carpet with his stick and then pointed at the table.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  I didn’t understand and asked what he meant by ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘that thing lying there. What is it? What’s it doing there? And who put it there?’

  It was a bag of tea that I had put on the table. I removed it and then took my place in front of the coffin and stood with my arm around Father’s shoulders until at last he spoke.

  ‘I wonder what the time is now? When’s the vicar coming?’

  ‘But Father, they are only waiting for us to give the word,’ I said, ‘and then they’ll carry her out.’ And I fetched in the undertaker, and he screwed the lid down, and the assistant came in and they carried the coffin out to the hearse.

  It was an afternoon of cloudless, blue sky. A half-moon hung up there, and the undertaker bowed stiffly. They rolled slowly away, the black car with the white coffin, turning the corner, and I looked up at the moon and promised myself that I would think of her every time I saw it hanging in the sky by day.

  We went inside. The whole house smelt of corpse. I drew back the curtains and opened the doors and windows to air it out. Father objected, and I asked if we couldn’t have some fresh air for a few minutes, but he wasn’t having any of it and flew into a rage. Once the worst of the smell had gone, I shut the house up again and we sat down. I asked about the obituary notice, and Father said that it was no one else’s business. I tried to explain that without one it would be as though she had never existed and was neither dead nor alive, as if the whole thing had never happened. He threw up his hands and shook his head.

  Father had always said no whenever I wanted to do anything, and now he was against me putting a notice in the paper saying ‘Our Beloved’. He didn’t want me to use the word ‘Beloved’ or ‘Dear’ – a load of nonsense, he said. And I drafted an obituary for him with nothing but facts and showed it to him.

  ‘Look, Father, is that what you want? She is no one, nothing – she is an object, a couple of dates – it’s as though she died and had no one and nothing at all.’ And he said no, and what was the point, and I was ready to burst into tears.

  In the end I gave up and did it for myself and without asking his permission. I racked my brains to think what I should write, what it should say. I ended up with three little words, written under her name and the dates of her birth and death. They said it all. O süβes Lied. They came from Rilke’s Liebeslied, which speaks of how on the violin the bow brings together two strings to make a single note, and we were one in the most innocent, most senseless purity of music. It was as clear as the black border round a mourning card, and I drove up to the undertaker, where I sat and went through it with him to make sure that he made no mistakes – I would break down if there was any mistake. I pointed out the German β sign, which was the most important and most difficult letter of them all, saying that it was the German sz, and asked whether he knew what that was. He nodded, and I asked once again whether he was sure, and he nodded, and I said it over and over until it was hammered into place.

  When the newspaper came, the Berlingske Tidende, I ran down to the hall to get it and turned to the obituaries, and there it was, Mother’s – O süβes Lied – and it read O Sübes Lied with a capital letter and misspelt with a b. He hadn’t known what a β was, had paid no attention at all – and my head spun, for everything was and would always be in vain. Nothing would ever succeed.

  There could be no question of having a German hymn, said the priest, and Jeg ved en dejlig have was not a hymn and wouldn’t do. I would have to talk to the sexton about getting a piano for the funeral, but he was very doubtful as it would first have to be moved and then be tuned and that would cost 500 kroner. The church was empty, and all the hymns were played too fast to get it over quickly, and the priest did not say it, didn’t say ‘Romer’, despite my having asked him to – ‘and Hildegard… Jørgensen lived through the horrors of the war, and Hildegard… Jørgensen came to Denmark in 1950.’

  The Danish flag hung at half mast outside Klosterkirken, and the undertaker was waiting as we left the church and handed me an envelope containing the cards of those who had sent flowers. They were all from me. Then I struggled out to the car with Father, holding an umbrella over him because it was raining, and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ and ‘Do stop that, will you!’ We drove out to the churchyard with Father complaining all the way.

  ‘Watch where you’re going! Not that way. Look at the way you’re driving! Listen, where do you thinking you’re going?’

  I took the route along the seafront looking out across the sound, and then we were at Østre Kirkegård, walking towards the grave where Farmor and Grandfather were buried, and the gravedigger laid Mother’s urn in the ground and covered it with earth.

  Father didn’t want to have a gravestone. It was no one else’s business. Why did they need to know who was buried there? It was nothing to do with them! There was nothing – just the black and white chippings and a plaque with a number. Then we came home, and I made coffee and laid out two cups and saucers on the dining table. We didn’t say a word. I covered my face in my hands and burst into tears and cried and cried for Mother and Father, for everything that had happened and for the immeasurable loss of everything you hold most dear, and then it was over.

  I went into my bedroom and opened the drawer. It was all still in there – the shells, the fossilized sea urchins, the old ham sandwiches, the fulgurites and the marbles – but I was looking for the fragments of grenade that I had been given by Uncle Helmut. I pieced them together one by one until I found myself sitting there with a complete Russian hand grenade, just as he had said. I filled it full of everything I had inside me – the grief and the despair and the fury – and then I fitted the detonator and walked up onto Højbroen to look out across Nykøbing from the bridge one last time. Then I pulled out the pin and hurled it as far out as I possibly could and closed my eyes and stuck a f
inger in each ear.

  1 All German girls stand by their man. Front and homeland hand in hand!

  2 This Nazi paradise. War, hunger, lies, Gestapo. How much longer?

  3 He is under arrest and will be interrogated. You are to report to the People’s Court and to do so at once. Heil Hitler!

  4 Halle (Saale) 4th September 1946

  To: The Prefect

  Wanzleben Council

  Wanzleben

  Frau Hildegard Voll was the wife of my son, Horst Heilmann. My son was executed on 22.12.1942 on grounds of active participation in the Schulze-Boysen resistance movement. Frau Voll was herself also politically closely associated with my son, Horst, and with Schulze-Boysen, who was the couple’s teacher at the university. Frau Voll unquestionably deserves, therefore, to be supported in her attempts to retrieve the inventory belonging to Dr Schneider, now no longer subject to confiscation.

  I would ask you to provide Frau Voll with every possible assistance.

  Dr Adolf Heilmann

  Council Building Inspector.

  5 These are four famous nationalistic Danish songs. Their titles can be rendered: ‘The stars will shine’, ‘Friends, the map of Denmark see’, ‘Denmark between the oceans twain’ and ‘The rain and the storm have abated’ –trans.

  6 Dear Christ child! I am little Hilde Voll and I live in Kleinwanzleben. I would like a doll’s pram and nuts and apples and peppercakes but also a Christmas tree that we can stand around in a ring and sing o du fröhliche it will be so lovely. But I have no idea where I am going to do my homework so I would also like a desk. But I would also like some Plasticene to make figures with. My bedside rug is all worn could I have a new one? And a little stove. And a book to read. And a new scooter with a rubber wheel. And some sweeties, too.

  7 ‘A Prussian, I. Can you see my colours fly?/Ahead the flag is waving black and white./For freedom did our fathers fight and die,/ That is the message that my colours write./ Never will my heart despair;/One and all we Prussians dare./ In brightest sunlight and in darkest rain/ A Prussian I, and Prussian will remain!’