To Greet the Sun

by Claus von Bohlen

  ‘Well, let me know. Time is running out. I should send out a press release in the next few days,’ says João. He extends one of the sandboards towards me. ‘Ride?’ he asks.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, taking the board from him. I lay it down where feet have flattened the top of the dune. I put my feet into the foot supports and tighten the ratcheted clips. I jump a couple of times until I am on the edge of the lip. The jumping motion throws up the sand from the top of the board and the wind catches it and blows it straight into João’s face. He turns around and spits out the sand in his mouth.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Tá bom,’ he replies, his face still a little contorted.

  I jump once more and land on the face of the dune. The board has been well waxed and I begin to accelerate immediately. I make a couple of speculative turns; the board responds well. I begin to carve more deeply into the sand. The grains make a crunching noise that at times verges on a squeak. It is a very different sound to the hiss of surfing. I continue to dig the edge of the sandboard into the side of the dune. Suddenly something catches and I am thrown forwards. I land face first on the surface of the sand and just manage to protect my face with my hands. My body flips over in a somersault, then I roll sideways a couple of times before eventually coming to a stop.

  There is sand everywhere. In my mouth, my ears, my eyes, my nose. I sit up and spit and snort and rub my eyes, which doesn’t help at all. My neck aches a little but that is all. There is no serious damage. Well, no serious damage to me. But the board’s rear binding is only loosely attached to the board itself. The binding’s two front screws have been torn out of the board and the binding flaps up and down at the front. I look around me but there is no sign of the missing screws. The chances of finding a screw in a sand dune are not high.

  I walk back up the dune carrying the damaged board under my arm. The group on the crest has thinned out. João waves to me. I signal to him with a thumbs down sign. The board is not beyond repair but I’ll have to drive to my father’s garage to use his tools. I need to drill new holes to re-attach the binding. If the old holes show, then I’ll have to fill them with a resin filler, then sand the resin and respray the area.

  I am out of breath when I reach the top of the dune. I show the board to João and explain how I can re-attach the binding. He’s not angry but he wants me to fix the board tonight, otherwise he will lose a day’s earnings on it tomorrow. I start jogging back down the dune to the combi. I must get to my father’s garage before he closes up. If I’m fast I’ll still get to see Seu Otto before visiting hours are over.

  *

  I pull into the dusty parking space in front of my father’s garage. The garage door is already closed and bolted but I see that my father is still attending a client in the little room that serves for an office. I pick up the sandboard and slip into the office. My father is mid-sentence. He raises an eyebrow at my entry but does not stop talking. As I close the door behind me, I hear my father say, ‘If it were me, I’d change all four pads. These ones might still last a little longer, but when your daughter’s safety is at stake…’ The other man mumbles a reply. I cannot make out what he says but he is probably agreeing. My father is a good businessman.

  I have already drilled the new holes when my father enters the workshop. He watches me silently for a bit. My father is not a communicative man. ‘How’s business?’ I ask, to break the silence.

  ‘Too easy,’ he replies. ‘Men with daughters, you can sell them anything if you use psychology. The brake pads on that car were practically new. What a fool.’ My father snorts derisively, then he asks, ‘How’s business with you?’

  ‘So so,’ I reply. I do not like to tell him that things are not going well.

  ‘I hear that you are running a night at Divino? That’s a tricky business. Lots of people go into it just to get laid, but it’s not easy to make money. What are you making?’

  My father likes to talk about money. ‘I’m losing money at the moment,’ I say.

  My father almost smiles. He also loves to be proved right. ‘I could have told you that would happen,’ he says. ‘But you have your sponsorship money.’

  I have explained to him many times that the sponsors give me surfing equipment but they no longer pay me. I don’t know why he can’t remember that.

  ‘I’ve told you before, they stopped paying me,’ I say.

  I start to sand down the new holes. I am careful to scuff the paint as little as possible. Then I position the binding over the new holes and insert the screws.

  ‘You know I can’t help you out,’ says my father. ‘I’m still paying off the loan, and you’re already living in my apartment rent free.’

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  ‘I wish I could help you, but sometimes you have to learn the hard way.’

  I have forgotten to reset the direction of the drill. I attempt to tighten the first screw but I loosen it instead and it comes popping out.

  ‘You have to set the direction of the drill,’ says my father. I move the switch to clockwise and tighten the screws. My father watches my progress. I find it annoying. Then he says, ‘You know I need you to move out of the apartment in a few months. That was our agreement.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. It’s true. He said I could live in the apartment until he could afford to do it up. Then he plans to rent it on the open market. I don’t really want to tell him about Seu Otto, but I suppose he ought to know. After all, it is relevant to his dreams of a property empire. ‘You remember Seu Otto, Vovó’s employer?’

  My father nods.

  ‘He was on the news because he tried to stop two gunmen holding up a store. He got hurt and he is in hospital now. I’ve been talking to him and interviewing him. I want to try to sell his story, if he agrees. It might also help me to get a job when I graduate.’

  My father ponders this. ‘There’s a lot of money in media,’ he says, somewhat vaguely. ‘If you’re clever about it, you could make a packet. But make sure you pin Seu Otto down. Get him to agree to the idea and don’t allow him to back out. Use psychology. Make sure he feels indebted to you. You could make a packet.’

  My father is a good businessman. I know his advice is sound, but still it annoys me.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I say, hoping that he’ll leave now.

  ‘If I’d had the opportunities you have, I’d be a tycoon by now. Like Roberto Marinho.’

  I tighten the last screw. ‘I’ve got to go now. Seu Otto is expecting me,’ I say.

  ‘Well, pin him down,’ says my father. He returns to the office and takes the money out of the till. We don’t kiss or embrace – we never have. When I pull out of the car park he isn’t even watching.

  Chapter 11

  FERNANDA REMINDED me that I would not be able to eat the next morning because of the operation; she said I should eat as much as I could now. I would gladly have followed her instruction but the hospital cuisine was very disappointing. Even the feijão was tasteless and watery. Who has ever heard of tasteless feijão? What an embarrassment. However, the man in the bed next to the window was less discerning. I had been watching him spoon in his meal with considerable enthusiasm and not a little noise. When he saw me put down my knife and fork and push the food tray away, he said:

  ‘Ó Senhor Eisinger, will you allow me to finish your dinner? It is good enough for me.’

  I observed him laboriously lift his pyjama-clad body from his bed into the wheel chair and wheel it towards me. We exchanged dinner trays and he wheeled back to his own bed. He polished off my meal with similar enthusiasm and I wondered how, with such an appetite, he could be so gaunt. Then Fernanda reappeared and collected our trays.

  ‘Seu Otto, you are hungry tonight,’ she said as she saw the spotless plates on my tray.

  ‘Yes, very hungry,’ I said. And that was not a lie, I was very hungry.

  *

  Pietro returned after dinner.

  ‘Seu Otto, comeu bem?’ he asked as he approached
my bed.

  ‘The truth is that I did not eat at all. But it doesn’t matter. I am more interested in what you have been up to.’

  ‘When?’ asked Pietro. ‘You mean now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘while I have been watching the others eat.’

  ‘I went to visit my friend João at the dunes,’ said Pietro, ‘but I accidentally broke his sandboard and had to go and fix it in my father’s garage. At first the nurses didn’t want to let me back in to see you but I said we still had important things to discuss.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘No. But what do you want to talk about?’

  ‘Well,’ said Pietro, ‘I’d like to know about how you graduated from the Jungvolk into the Hitler Youth, and how your parents felt about that. What was your family like? Did you resent having to spend so much time away from home, or did you welcome it?’

  I thought for a moment. Did I want to talk to Pietro about my family? They were not happy memories. When I think about my parents now, I feel that I should have loved them more, that I was an ungrateful child. Did I really want to share these thoughts with Pietro? But then, I could tell him as much or as little as I wished: I could just tell him how things were at the time. There was no need to ‘explore my feelings’, as the psychologists would have it.

  ‘I was not very close to my own parents,’ I said. ‘In fact, that was one of the attractions of the Hitler Youth. It meant I could spend long periods of time away from home. Home for me was always a sad place.’

  ‘You mean you could go to the summer camps in the mountains?’

  ‘Yes. Well, partly. That came later. The first time I really felt that I had escaped from my parents was when we marched all the way to Nuremberg for the last of the great party rallies. That was in 1938. It was quite something.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, for one, it was a huge distance. Remember, I was still only eight years old. Nuremberg was about 500 kilometres from my home. We walked 20 kilometres a day; it took us a month. At the beginning I found it exhausting, though by the end we were much tougher. Hitler Youth Gefolgschaften from all over Germany were marching to Nuremberg for the rally… we bumped into contingents from as far North as Lübeck and Kiel. Often we heard them before we saw them; each Gefolgschaft had their own band and most of the time we sang as we marched. Sometimes we camped in the same places and made friends. Other times we were invited by farmers to sleep in their barns – often they would feed us too. Sometimes we helped them with their farm work for a couple of hours before we left in the morning. We could do in a morning what would have taken them weeks.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment and saw again the rolling countryside stretching from Dortmund in the north, past Frankfurt am Main and Würzburg to Nuremberg. I remembered the long, hot summer of 1938. We marched throughout August and it didn’t rain once. Sometimes we would see the columns of other Gefolgschaften in the distance; the boys’ feet kicked up clouds of dust which trailed behind them. And always there were flags, flags of all sorts: regional flags, Jungvolk flags, Hitler Youth flags, Nazi party flags, all fluttering above the dust and the marching columns. Singing and flags, that’s what it was like in those early years.

  With my eyes closed, one image triggered the next. I thought of the Jungmädel who accompanied us on the march, the girls who were our age and who would graduate to the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, when we graduated from Jungvolk into Hitlerjugend. We spent a lot of the time fighting with the Jungmädel. We did that mostly to impress the older HJ boys whom we were accompanying – they thought we were weak and insignificant and we wanted to prove them wrong. We never got very far; the HJ boys were much more interested in flirting with the Jungmädel than in paying any attention to our boisterous displays.

  It was on that march that I first talked to Christiane. I had seen her before at the occasional Dienst meeting in Bochum. However, she was a couple of years older than me and our paths had not crossed frequently. I found her very attractive – in fact, I was infatuated with her – and yet she had dark hair and light brown, almost golden eyes. I remember finding that very strange. I had been brought up to think that blond hair and blue eyes were a prerequisite for beauty, but she disproved that.

  I remember how surprised I was when I found out that Christiane was a vegetarian; that was very unusual too. The other BDM girls teased her because of it – it was thought that being vegetarian would make you sickly and infertile. They accused her of being unpatriotic – of not wanting to bear children for the Führer. But really they picked on her because they were jealous of her, because the HJ boys paid her the most attention. When the HJ boys in their turn picked on us, Christiane would stand up for us. I suppose that was because she knew what it was like to be a victim. In any case, we adored her for it.

  ‘Seu Otto?’

  I had forgotten that Pietro was sitting next to my bed. I opened my eyes. He was staring at me. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I think it is the morphine. It makes my mind wander. What were we talking about?’

  ‘The rally, but if you are very tired…’

  ‘Ah yes, the rally,’ I said. What a show that was! ‘The rally of 1938 was the biggest yet. Over half a million party faithful had come from all over Germany. When we arrived, the surrounding fields and hills were covered with tents; at night thousands of small fires lit up the landscape. The organisation was astounding; every delegation had been allocated an area in which to put up their tents and we had all been given precise instructions as to where to dig our latrines in order to maintain the highest standards of hygiene.’

  I closed my eyes again. The images came more fluidly when I had them closed. But this time I kept talking.

  ‘I remember the sports track. We spent most of our time watching the athletics competitions there. Even at that age we were crazy about sport. Two years earlier Germany had won almost twice as many medals as the next placed nation in the Olympics. We were very proud of our athletes. To win at Nuremberg meant you were the best in Germany and therefore, probably, the best in the world.’

  I saw the tents on the hillside. I saw the small fires lighting up the night. I saw the sports track and the glistening muscles of the runners. But somehow it felt as if these images were just a facade. The real significance of the rally was much greater. It was at that rally that I saw the Führer. Not just that I saw him; that he looked into my heart. But could I tell Pietro? Would he understand?

  ‘I was part of the parade that marched through the centre of Nuremberg,’ I said. ‘The town was packed to bursting with spectators. It was hardly possible to see the buildings behind all the flags and the wooden tribunes. We started at one end of the town and marched to the other, passing through the Adolf Hitler Platz in the middle. The cheering in the square was deafening. The largest tribune was right in the middle of the square and on it stood Baldur von Schirach, whom I recognised from Marienburg and also from countless posters, and next to him the Führer himself. As we marched past we looked towards the tribune and raised our right arms in the salute, without breaking step. We had practised this many times on the way to Nuremberg, using trees or buildings to represent the tribune.

  ‘Before I had even looked at the tribune, I felt the Führer’s eyes upon me. When I looked up I saw that he was staring straight at me; I can’t tell you what that was like. He was like a God to us. Try to imagine being eight years old and coming face to face with your God – it’s impossible. In that one moment I felt that he looked right through me, that he knew the secrets of my heart. I also felt unbounded love for him, and I wanted to be loved by him, and I knew that he would love me if I pledged my life to him. That was what we had been taught; those were the oaths we had taken. I had already pledged my life to him, and I had meant it, but never so much as in that moment. And I realised with mounting joy that there were no secrets in my heart, or at least no secrets from him. I
had dedicated myself to him. To him, to Germany, to everything around me: to my Kameradschaft, to the jubilant crowds, to the fluttering flags. I realised that I was a part of something much, much greater than myself. It was a very significant moment for me.

  ‘When we gathered again on the other side of the town I was dazed; I think we all were. And that was another strange thing: all of us felt that the Führer had looked directly at us, that he had looked into us. For five and a half hours he had stood there on the tribune whilst Germany’s youth paraded past. For five and a half hours he had looked into our hearts.’

  Lying in that hospital bed almost 70 years later, I am powerfully affected by the recollection of the moment in which I felt the Führer’s eyes alight upon me. Go through me. What I feel now is a brief reminder, a fleeting shadow of the excitement and optimism of those days. We believed in a cause and that gave us a sense of purpose; everything else was secondary to that. Is it too much to say that we were in love with the world back then? Perhaps not. But everything since then has been so different. Personally I cannot complain, I have led a good life, by the standards of today. And yet, when I compare it to those early years, has everything since not rung a little hollow? What has it all been for? Perhaps those are doors best left shut.

  I swallowed involuntarily once or twice. Pietro replenished my water glass before passing it to me. To tell the truth, I was a little taken aback by the strength of these feelings. Why this sudden sense of loss about that far distant world? Well, perhaps I do not usually allow myself to think about the happy times. But Pietro’s earnest curiosity, and his similarity to Siggi, have encouraged me to open the box of the past which has long been closed. Nor should I discount the effect of the morphine which makes it so easy to flow from one buried memory to another. And then I am anxious too, anxious about tomorrow’s operation.