When she had swung him round in a circle, when he stood in front of her again, he said:
— I want to go home with you to granny and grandad.
— Come on, my little boy, come on. Now let’s go to the fair. We could have been together much earlier today. But you had to run off to mass first. Were you afraid that they would laugh at you or that you won’t go to heaven or is there some other reason?
— Perhaps mummy would rather that I was dead. Alfred said it.
Detlev didn’t say anything. Detlev saw his mother in front of him one, two, three, four, five, six, seven times. His mother with her long, warm hair and her soft skin and the hard amber necklace in front of the birthday candles, his mother with the wet apron and the burning hair in the bathroom. His mother with her hair like a queen’s in the train during the evacuation, his mother with her arm stretched out at an angle, his mother in front of the orphanage door, his mother at the fair.
He saw his mother with other women in a row — beside the chemist’s wife, before she died, beside the three hovering women with redcurrants in their hands, beside Sister Silissa and Sister Appia and Mother Cecilia, beside his grandmother, beside Siegfried’s mother, the cleaning woman, beside little Xaver’s mother — she works in the town hall too — beside holy Mrs Weindeln.
— That is mummy. What’s special about that?
The chairoplanes had been set up where the red-draped block for the gauleiter’s open coffin had stood.
— Would you like to go on the chairoplane?
— No.
— Are you frightened?
— No. I’m not frightened.
— Then have a go on it. You can have two rides, if you want to.
The chain was hooked up in front of Detlev. When it started, Detlev was overcome by fear. Odel had said:
— On the chairoplane it’s like being in a dive bomber, you mustn’t be frightened.
Perforated strips of paper rose and fell in a zigzag pattern below the pipes of the carousel organ.
Scheyern revolved. Detlev flew up high, far away from Scheyern. He couldn’t distinguish the houses on the market place any more. He saw the trees beyond the roofs like green mushrooms by the town wall. A boy was hanging in front of Detlev. He flew in front of Detlev without the distance growing larger or smaller. The boy twisted round in the air. A girl was hanging behind Detlev. She screamed. Her face was wet with tears. She kicked out her legs. Detlev couldn’t see his mother any more. The music grew more distant. Inside, in Detlev’s chest, a heavy hammer struck against his ribs.
The music came closer. Detlev sank down in front of the military hospital, in front of the town hall, in front of the orphanage. His mother came up the wooden steps. The owner of the carousel unhooked the chain. His mother took Detlev’s hand.
— We used to eat candy floss at the fairground, it looked like a huge pile of unspun wool. There was chewing gum too.
— What was it like? What did it taste like?
— Sweet. It was like rubber. You could put it in your mouth and chew it until it was soft. You could pull it out in a long string. If you let go, it jumped back into your mouth. You could blow bubbles with it.
— I’d like to have chewing gum.
— Don’t be silly. Chewing gum comes from America. Germany is at war with America. So Germany can hardly import chewing gum.
— You brought me white chocolate once.
— You haven’t forgotten that? The things you remember! That was at the beginning of the war. There’s only white chocolate when there are no cocoa beans from overseas.
White chocolate is a substitute because of the war.
— You said it was something very special. I like white chocolate much more than brown chocolate.
— Now there’s no white chocolate any more.
At the confectionery stall his mother gave the assistant her ration card. He cut out two rectangles and filled a paper bag with yellow sweets for Detlev.
— There isn’t a nice fair in Hamburg at all. It’s only got the dirty, foggy Dom fairground.
— I want to go to Hamburg with you to granny and grandad.
— Granny says: Children who won’t obey don’t get to play. Come over to the swing boat with me.
The boat in the swing boat was like a hat made of newspaper. It was suspended from iron poles. Two men sat Detlev between them.
— I hope you’re not frightened — we want to go right over with the swing boat.
—Don’t make him frightened, we can’t go right over at all.
— What if the men do go right over after all? If our heads hang upside down, we’ll fall onto the market place.
Detlev flew up with the two men, high above the parish church, above Our Lady’s Church, above the orphanage, above the military hospital. He shrieked with the two men as it came down again. He ground his teeth and crouched on the floor when the men swung the boat up again.
— Dive bomber pilots dive down on the town and bomb the town hall and the parish church and Our Lady’s Church and the orphanage and mother and the nuns and the orphanage children and the pale priest and the short priest and Kriegel and Anna and Alfred and Joachim-Devil and Otto. How nice it is, when everything is broken to pieces. Mummy would rather I was dead. Down it goes. Up it goes. Everything is broken to pieces. Nothing is left of Aichach and Scheyern except bare rafters like on the picture with the Führer. And I fly away high above it.
Across the market square below moved three black, flapping, rounded dwarves followed by brown, grey, yellow, green ones. The swing boat braked.
— Let’s leave the fair quickly. They’re coming from the orphanage with the nuns. I want to go away to Hamburg.
— You’ve got no cause to say only bad things about the orphanage.
— I never said anything bad.
— The sisters do what they can to make life pleasant for you. They put an egg in the soup. When you’re ill, they do everything they can to look after you. They even give you brandy and red wine in egg cups to drink, so that you grow strong and healthy. They may be Catholic, but they are good. Don’t worry about silly Alfred with his sheep’s face. His brother Shaky is much friendlier. And you don’t want to live without Frieda at all any more. And Rosi? And Siegfried? How would you feel if you couldn’t play with any of them any more? — My dear brother Vexed has everything he wants, but what he wants, he hasn’t got and what he’s got he doesn’t want, my dear brother Vexed has everything he wants. You’re allowed to go to mass every morning. You see things that no Protestant boy has ever seen before. Mother Cecilia shows you things in the convent that not even a Catholic is allowed to see. You should complain.
Detlev took her arm and pulled her through the arcade, away from the market place and the fair. At his mother’s there was oatmeal cake again.
— Next time, bring a piece for me with you.
Everything becomes even slower. Detlev sees individual parts of movements, hears fragments of words.
Back to back, like the clouds of which his grandfather said:
— These clouds are called fleecy sheep clouds.
sheep blocked the road. Detlev and his mother parted the flock with their hands, with their knees. The necks were bent back, the sheep were pulled by the ears, pushed with their knees. Their hands shone with oil. The bodies of the sheep lifted Detlev’s and his mother’s feet off the ground. Detlev and his mother swam across to the veterinary surgeon’s house.
Detlev picked up the oatmeal cake, which wouldn’t be there if the bird dropping wasn’t there, if he hadn’t come to this orphanage. He held the thick, triangular, brown piece of cake in his hand. He lifted it to his nose.
— Nice cake. Not everyone has cake. Alfred doesn’t have any cake. Granny bakes cakes for me. The sisters don’t bake any cakes — only pancakes, which are three times as thick as granny’s pancakes in Hamburg. The pancakes in the orphanage taste like flattened horse droppings on the road to Steingriff.
The oatme
al cake smelled of dried rabbit skins. The whole street smelled of oatmeal. The air which blew through the veterinary surgeon’s house smelled of rabbit skins.
— The veterinary surgeon has a rock garden. Where there are lizards. If you hold a lizard by its tail, it falls off. Snakes change their skin once a year. Then a snake made only of skin — quite light — lies in the garden. One can even tell where the eyes were.
The stairs smelled of oatmeal too, and the door, the wood of the door, the door handle, the door-frame, the beam on which C and B and M was written in chalk.
It didn’t smell of dried rabbit skins. It smelled of ersatz coffee powder.
The piece of cake disintegrated into crumbly powder in his mouth. His grandfather’s letter was in a yellow envelope. His mother took it out, changed her glasses; she read it out in a loud voice.
— Hamburg-Stellingen, the sixteenth of October, nineteen hundred and forty-two. Dear Lisbeth, as we’ve been having very heavy raids again recently, I think it’s as well for me to send you an inventory of our moveable goods, so that you have some idea what claims you can present to the assessment office if need be. It is, of course, impossible to include everything. Missing, above all else, is the house, and everything that’s closely tied to the house, which can be estimated at around fifteen thousand Reichsmarks. Missing also, are the allotment and the stall and its contents, approximately fifteen hundred Reichsmarks. In addition there would also be the plot of land at about five thousand Reichsmarks. I have an identical inventory with my documents in the air raid shelter. Hildegart doesn’t have one, since she is at greater risk than we are. Your things are included in the inventory. I’ve dispensed with a verification of the inventory, I think they’ll believe us anyway. Let’s hope and pray that we never have to use it. It will at least give you something to refer to, if it should ever be necessary. Affectionate greetings to you and Detlev from your father and grandad. Mother will add a few more lines. Look how nicely granny and grandad still write despite their age.
— What kind of writing is that?
— German or Gothic. At school you learn Latin script. Detlev knew that the priest in church croaked in Latin.
— The Catholic priest sings in Latin, my Protestant granny writes in Gothic.
Detlev remembers every word. His grandmother wrote
— It rained a little during the night. Otherwise it was quiet. Alfred interrogated him. Detlev didn’t remember anything more. He remembered, when his mother had sucked in air, when she had adjusted her glasses, when she had swallowed the saliva, when she had raised her voice, when she had lowered her voice.
— Repeat what was in the letter.
— Did your mother never read you out a letter from your grandad?
— Of course. More often than you think. What is that anyway — a grandad? No one says that here. Are you a Jew?
— My grandad is the father of my mother and my granny is the mother of my mother.
— And the father of your father and the mother of your father?
— That’s not my grandad and it isn’t my granny either.
— Because you don’t have a father. Was your father a Jew?
— What is a Jew ? You don’t have a father yourself. Y ou don’t even have a mother.
— What was in the letter?
The veterinary surgeon called his mother. She went downstairs. Detlev took the letter out of the yellow envelope.
His grandfather wrote in Latin.
— Grandad is Protestant and writes in Latin, in which the parish priest sings and in which the sisters pray in their enclosure.
Detlev read the first sheet once again. He read the second sheet.
— You won’t be interested in that. It’s only figures. They’ll go in one ear and out the other again. They’re just something for me to refer to.
Detlev remembered everything:
A Roman one, then five thousand six hundred, large R, large M, below it four thousand one hundred and fifty, a stroke.
— That means: equals
Nine thousand seven hundred and fifty a curved line to the side of all three numbers.
— Only grandad can draw such a nice curved line.
Along the edges of the documents in his grandfather’s desk behind the enamel windows there were many long, curved lines, also headings twice underlined, three exclamation marks one after the other, two snakes that had tied themselves together.
— What does that mean?
— It means law.
After the curved line was a five, then came something like the two round glass eyes of the gas masks, which lay in their shoe boxes for anyone, for any emergency. Between the round eyes of the gas mask was an oblique stroke.
A one, a gas mask, the word repayment, four, a comma, five, a gas mask, from, one, full stop, seven, full stop, forty-two, then: four, eight, seven, five, zero, three, nine, zero, zero, zero, stroke, four hundred and thirty-eight, dash, comma, dash,
— Chimney sweep, gas mask, coal man, stealing coal, ane hoose afore dwells the butcher, ane hoose efter dwells the tailor, ane hoose further dwells the murtherer.
Settlement, two full stops, Emil.
— When I’m in Hamburg, I’ll visit my uncle Emil, if he hasn’t been bombed out yet. Uncle Emil and Aunty Hilde live near the Catholic church in Hamburg, Grandad showed me the Catholic church. Uncle Emil worked for the customs too. Aunty Hilde has very elegant mahogany chairs.
— You’re mad to buy mahogany chairs with the world the way it is at the moment.
Emil pays thirty-two Reichsmarks rent a month, period, inclusive of mortgage repayment I pay thirty-eight, comma, twenty-one Reichsmarks, full stop, in the end Emil has nothing, dash, I, or my heirs after thirty-eight years have an unencumbered plot of land, semi colon, perhaps you’ll still live to see it, comma, Detlev certainly will I hope, period. I hope he’ll be grateful, period, the charges are further considerably reduced by the produce from the garden, period, I would like Detlev to take up a profession, comma, that makes it possible for him, comma to look after house and garden.
— I want to be a priest.
And that you will be in a position, comma, to keep up the payments your father and grandfather, period.
— Did you read the letter after all? Did you understand it?
— Yes. What did the veterinary surgeon want?
— He’s given me notice.
None of that would have happened, if Scheyern wasn’t there, not the boxes of building blocks in the street in Munich or Donauwörth, the crumbs on his hand, the traces of bird dropping on his hand.
— Mummy, I want to go to Hamburg.
— Haven’t you read what it says in the letter? I thought you wanted to be a Catholic priest?
— But I want to go to Hamburg with you.
— You can’t become a priest in Hamburg.
— There’s a Catholic church in Hamburg. Grandad showed it to me himself.
— Grandad won’t allow you to change your faith.
— Frieda has promised me a prayer of conversion. Grandad has a lot less say than a father. Let’s go to Hamburg. And the veterinary surgeon has given you notice.
— He put it: A woman with a son in the orphanage. An unmarried woman with a son. You do understand. We live in a religious town.
Alfred said :
— You know everything in the letter. You just don’t want to know. Give me the oatmeal cake. Do you know what we did after you ran away from mass? We finished our prayers and then we went to the fair. Afterwards we were allowed to play at mass. Mother Superior brought the toy altar down from the loft. She unpacked all of the mass game and we were allowed to dress up like the priests at Christmas high mass. You could have been practising. But you’d already run out of the real mass.
— There would be no mass game. There would be no holy mass.
Siegfried isn’t standing on the balcony.
Detlev closes his eyes: The buttons on Alfred’s jacket disappear one after the oth
er — no more Alfred at all. No more Alfred’s shoes.
Siegfried isn’t standing on the balcony. Detlev closes his eyes. Siegfried stands behind his eyelids.
Siegfried isn’t there because the cleaning woman doesn’t come to clean today.
The cleaning woman was there. Siegfried stood by the church tower. Detlev stood at the orphanage door. Siegfried stood under the golden letters.
With closed eyes Detlev can see him clearly. He sees the whole of Siegfried’s figure. He sees every detail, the eyes, the circles around the iris, the eye lashes, the nose, the nostrils, the forehead sloping back, the cleft in the chin.
When Detlev opens his eyes, Siegfried has disappeared. When Alfred’s shoes, the buttons on Alfred’s jacket appear in front of Detlev, Siegfried fades away, and the golden letters he’s standing beneath. Detlev still sees Siegfried as he’s looking at Alfred’s jacket, but when he counts the buttons, only the letters of Siegfried’s name remain. Siegfried sat on the steps which zigzagged down to the church square from the girls’ dormitory. A stairway made of building blocks: Three building blocks at the bottom, two blocks in the middle, one block at the top. Detlev sat down on the uppermost building block.
— Why have you come to sit beside me, Detlev?
— You’re called Siegfried. Mummy read me the story. He was very brave. It’s a beautiful name.
— I’m very brave anyway. Siegfried is the greatest hero of our nation. No one else here is called Siegfried anyway. And you want to become a saint or a parish priest?
— Who told you that?
— Everyone knows that.
Siegfried looked straight ahead. He pressed his lips together. He didn’t say anything else.
Siegfried had a small stick. He struck the lowest step with it. Sometimes sand was thrown up. Then Siegfried had forced the tip of the stick between the cobblestones — when he raised the stick for the next blow, sand sprayed up.
Detlev remembers that he had talked for a long time. Siegfried didn’t look at him. Detlev didn’t know if Siegfried was listening to him.
But Detlev knows that he had talked very loudly.
The Orphanage Page 9