by John Jakes
In Müllerstrasse, the sanitary workers—women—clanked the lids of the sewer tanks as Pauli approached. Someone leaned out a window to complain about the noise. The reek of waste filled the drab street. Only the warm hearty smells that blew down from the Norddeutsche Brauerei several blocks away relieved the pervasive stench of dung and dirt.
The bell of the Catholic church on the next street sounded the quarter hour. Pauli hurried down the steps to the door of the cellar flat he occupied along with Aunt Lotte and her innumerable Herren. For a long time, before Aunt Lotte made a decision about entertaining Herren, a corner of the sitting room had been occupied by one or two Schlafburschen, renters who came and went by day and slept behind a temporary curtain at night. Now every guest wound up in Aunt Lotte’s room.
Pauli let himself in. The flat was small, with a painted plaster ceiling that pressed down oppressively. The inevitable yellowing lace curtains masked what few windows there were. Dark furniture crowded the sitting room, where Pauli found his aunt in her best flowered wrapper, together with her visitor, an American who showed up about every six months.
“You’re late, where have you been?” Aunt Lotte said. “You look even messier than usual.” Lotte was forty-three, a handsome and full-bosomed woman with auburn hair like a tight cap of curls, pale blue eyes, and a deformed left foot. Her shoe had a sole several inches thick, and when she walked she exerted enormous effort to avoid listing from side to side. Pauli always thought it was the foot that had robbed her of a good life. Of course she was willful too; very independent and full of herself, which he found strange for someone in poor circumstances.
Intimidated by her question, Pauli didn’t know where to start. Lotte waved her glass. “Well, come on, what’s the explanation?”
“I was held awhile at the police station—”
“Police!” she cried. “My God, what have you done now?”
“Hey, let the kid explain,” said the guest. He rose to pour himself another glass of the champagne he always brought. Phil Reynard traveled through Europe selling Globus sewing machines. He was a gangly, paunchy man who used dye to keep his hair a sleek glossy brown. His German was excellent.
“Explain, then, and be quick about it,” Aunt Lotte said. Pauli told the story.
“Not bad, not bad. Got a reward out of it,” Reynard said, chuckling.
Aunt Lotte poured herself more champagne. “All right, I guess you did the correct thing. It doesn’t excuse the fact that you could have been injured. Don’t make a habit of interfering with criminals, Pauli. One more thing. Tomorrow, if the nature of your reward is open for discussion, ask for money. Now go to bed and leave us alone.”
Pauli walked down the long dark corridor to his room. There he lit the lamp—no electrification for this cellar yet. He shut the door and latched it with a hard push.
As he peeled off his jacket, he wondered unhappily, as he had so many times lately, what had come over his aunt. Until about a year ago they had enjoyed an affectionate, tolerant relationship. Then something began to change her. He couldn’t guess what it was, but it was real, he could even see it in her face, once so ruddy, but now a spectral gray.
He stared around the pathetic room, and his eyes came to rest on the collection of souvenirs tacked to the old wallpaper with its pattern of weedy-looking flowers.
The largest part of the collection consisted of postal cards on which photographs were reproduced, mostly exotic foreign scenes. The Sphinx. A ricksha man at the Great Wall of China. The onion domes of Moscow. An American cowboy on his horse. A spectacular massive rock formation called El Capitan, in a far-off place in America called Yosemite Valley. Scenic and comic postcards were a craze in Germany. When the imprinted information was in English, Aunt Lotte translated it for him. Because of the international nature of her trade, she knew smatterings of several languages. Pauli never tired of studying the photographs.
Two tacks held the small black, red, and gold flag of the failed Revolution of ’48. Hanging below it were streamers of red, white, and blue salvaged from a diplomatic party at the hotel. They symbolized and reminded him of his uncle in America.
He tried not to think too often about his longing to follow his uncle, because the dream was so impossible as to seem absurd. He had a symbol for it, however, tacked up somewhat apart from the other cards and souvenirs. It was a rectangle of cardboard for a parlor stereoscope, sepia-tinted, badly bent at two corners. Another of his aunt’s Herren had presented it to him; a fat American trying to sell huge electrodynamos to compete with Siemens-Halske. On the card, in the dual images, the camera looked out across the bow of a great ship entering the harbor of New York. The huge city loomed in the background. In the foreground a magnificent statue rose from a rocky island. In her upraised right hand she held a torch of freedom. In the crook of her left arm rested a large tablet. Below the rays of her crown, her face was strong and beautiful. She was the first thing seen by new immigrants, the fat American said. Her name was “Liberty Enlightening the World.” She welcomed millions of others; would she welcome him if he sailed there?
He laughed at himself for the ridiculous thought. How could he ever manage an ocean voyage? He was barely surviving day to day, handling backbreaking loads of Ochsenfleisch at the Kaiserhof just to stay alive.
Quickly he made ready for bed, put out the lamp and slipped under the skimpy comforter. The summer night had turned sharply colder. He couldn’t relax, thinking of the morning. Dust from his pillow made him sneeze and bolt up wide-eyed. When he lay down again, noises from the other bedroom bothered him. First Aunt Lotte’s faint cough, then familiar creakings and squeakings, followed by loud groans from the sewing machine salesman. Pauli had lived on the streets long enough to know what men and women did with, and to, each other, although he had no firsthand experience as yet. He’d heard that women enjoyed it, but were forbidden to admit it. Surely Aunt Lotte didn’t enjoy it. She gave no sign of enjoying anything anymore.
2
Charlotte
LOTTE KRONER STARED AT the picture on the table next to the bed. The sewing machine salesman snored softly, one hand with a gaudy sapphire ring thrown over her heavy thigh.
The low-trimmed lamp flickered, making the faded metal plate in the gold frame shimmer. The adolescent girl in the picture had beautiful regular features and thick shining hair that Lotte knew to be red. The girl was her illegitimate daughter, whom she refused to discuss with Pauli no matter how much he questioned her.
She pulled up the down-filled comforter. Sewn and patched in many places, the comforter had come to her in her trousseau, along with all the other linens she still used. Then she hitched herself up so the triangular bolster gave her back more support. Reynard stirred and muttered a complaint. She didn’t care. She had other, deeper concerns, chief among them her nephew. She had very little time to set his life on a better course. Very little time.
As if to remind her, raspy pain seared her throat. She put her fist to her lips to mute a cough, and the spasm passed.
Pauli’s face haunted her, particularly his hurt eyes when she spoke to him sharply in the sitting room. She didn’t really want to be unpleasant, ever. She loved him. Harsh words and angry looks were part of her deliberate campaign to set a distance between them, and thus make it easier to get him out of Berlin. He didn’t understand. How could he?
Another familiar image pushed into her thoughts. Pieces of the lovely blue-gray pottery of south Germany, smashed at her doorstep by girlhood friends the night before her wedding. The breaking of crockery for Polterabend was supposed to keep the evil Poltergeist from bedeviling a marriage. A lot of good it had done for her. Ever afterward, the broken crockery was Lotte’s symbol of her wretched life.
The market town of Aalen lies some forty kilometers east of Stuttgart, in the state of Württemberg in the pleasant green foothills of the Swabian Jura. At the midpoint of the nineteenth century little had changed in the town since the far-off time when a Roman cavalry deta
chment was garrisoned there to guard the imperial frontier.
The roots of the Kroner family went deep into the earth of that little sector of Germany. Swabians were and always had been a prickly, individualistic lot. Hard-working, and extremely protective of every mark they earned.
Württemberg and nearby Bavaria were tinder for the revolutionary fires that were ignited in Paris in 1848 and blazed across the frontier, sweeping all of Germany.
Lotte’s father, Thomas Kroner, owned a small hotel and brewery on Radgasse—Wheel Street—in the town of Aalen. He was a revolutionary ringleader in his district. He rushed off at once to join the demonstrations centered in Baden.
Meantime, a National Assembly convened in Frankfurt. After enacting a few reforms, and struggling toward the unification of many small states, the delegates foundered. They couldn’t agree on the boundaries of a new nation. Nor could they find a ruler for it. When offered the crown of a constitutional Germany, the King of Prussia declared he would not touch “a diadem molded out of the dirt and dregs of disloyalty and treason.”
Thus encouraged, the landed class, the Junkers, stiffened their resistance, and the Assembly dissolved. The following spring, Württemberg erupted again. The grand duke asked Prussia for help, and two army corps under Crown Prince William advanced on Baden. July 23, 1849, saw the final capitulation of the revolutionaries; the end of the great hope for a new, democratically united nation symbolized by the tricolor. The aristocrats had won. Hundreds of “Men of ’48” fled to America, embittered and fearing for their lives.
Thomas Kroner was identified as one of the leaders of the uprising. He had four children and a wife, the former Gertrud Retz. He also had his business to think about. So, despite danger, he refused to run or even hide. The authorities arrested him, tried him, and hanged him three days before Christmas.
Charlotte Kroner was the third child of Thomas and Gertrud. During her father’s detention, her oldest brother, Alfred, was also seized and thrown into a cell. There he was held for forty-eight hours. He was nine years old.
Sadistic prison guards abused the boy with truncheons. The beating broke his left leg. Damage was permanent. Lamed, Alfred Kroner was unable to earn more than a minimal living thereafter. Perhaps out of fear, for the rest of his life he enthusiastically supported authority, and the monolithic German state gradually emerging.
Lotte herself had been born with her foot deformed. Sometimes, she reflected bitterly as she grew older, it seemed as if fate, history—or some malignant heavenly power—had crippled almost everyone in the Kroner family. Lotte was determined to see that a wretched life didn’t cripple her nephew’s mind and heart.
Lotte’s mother had died in 1853. In 1861, her crippled brother Alfred married Karoline Wissen, a young woman from Aalen, who gave him no children.
In 1871, the new German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles following the quick defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. It was the age of Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, who threw violent baronies and city-states and robber fiefdoms into the furnace of nationalism, melted them in the heat of the Franco-Prussian victory, and on the anvil of his will hammered them into the shape of his personal vision—the First Reich.
Alfred’s wife Karoline died in ’73, as the new Germany was rising. Alfred soon married a woman named Pauline Marie Schönau, who bore one son, Lotte’s nephew Pauli, and died not long thereafter.
Lotte had two other brothers. The second oldest, Josef, was the shining pride of her life. On his own initiative, Josef had left Aalen in 1857. He was fifteen. He made his way across the ocean to the American metropolis of Cincinnati, where many other Germans had already settled. In the state of Ohio, Josef developed great skill in the brewer’s trade, of which he had learned something as a boy. He fought in America’s bloody Civil War, striking a blow for the abolition of Negro slavery. After the war he married a good woman and moved to an even larger city, Chicago. From there he sent Christmas gifts to Lotte, along with greetings and news of his family penned on costly engraved stationery. He changed the spelling of his name, just as his German-born wife had; he took out citizenship, and became American in every respect. He was raising his three children under the name Crown.
Lotte’s younger brother, Gerhard, was a baker by trade. After the family hotel and brewery were sold for debts, he chose to stay in Aalen. Pious, wildly unambitious, he baked his Brot and Kuchen in smug provincial isolation. Lotte knew that Gerhard thought her immoral, and considered Josef a dead man because he’d forsaken Germany. She hadn’t seen Gerhard for over twenty years, and wanted nothing to do with him. To Lotte’s way of thinking, she had no family left in Aalen at all.
Lotte’s marriage to a cabinetmaker from a village near Aalen had broken almost as quickly as the blue-gray pottery of Polterabend. She converted to Catholicism to please her husband, a burly man who believed absolutely that a woman owed her whole life to the three K’s—Kinder, Küche, Kirche. Children, kitchen, church. When Lotte showed in various ways that she thought otherwise, her husband used his fist to enforce his viewpoint. One night after eleven months of marriage Lotte simply packed her things, put dressings on her bruises, boarded the local for Stuttgart, and never looked back.
Her ultimate destination was Berlin. Longing to experience the high life of the city, she had placed herself in the path of wealthy gentlemen who would take her to the opera or a fine restaurant in return for her carefully rationed favors. It was one of these who had fathered Christine out of wedlock.
Unfortunately Lotte didn’t have either the perfect physique or the wits to be a highly successful courtesan. To care for herself and her infant daughter, she was reduced to factory jobs, which she hated, and with reason. A man slaved six days a week for a wage of eighteen or twenty marks—if he was lucky. Women usually received 40 to 50 percent less.
As Lotte grew older, it became apparent that she couldn’t do an adequate job of raising her daughter. Christine was a ravishingly beautiful child. She was also headstrong. When she was ten, Lotte placed her in domestic service with a respectable and prosperous family in Ulm, south of Aalen. She prayed that Christine was not too beautiful and willful to stay in their employ, but she never knew, because, as she was doing with Pauli, she went out of her way to make the child believe she was unwanted, thus insuring greater contentment for Christine in her new home. It was after Christine’s departure that Lotte began to drink more heavily.
Lotte’s options steadily dwindled. She despised them all. She absolutely would not surrender herself to a Stift, a charity institution for females who had failed in achieving a woman’s purpose—marriage, children, the maintenance of an orderly home. She refused to consider remarriage, because German men wanted nothing but a servant whom they could dignify with the name wife. A few months before his final condemnation of her, brother Gerhard had made overtures by letter, suggesting that she might come back to Aalen and live with him, his wife, and his growing brood of children. No thank you. Lotte had seen that arrangement in other families; the poor relation, the spinster, became a slave and gave up her independence in exchange for a tiny room, daily drudgery, and a role as an object of pity for the rest of her life.
So, between distasteful jobs, Lotte entered a number of unsatisfactory short liaisons. From these it had been but a short step to her current, one might call it professional, approach.
She wasn’t a streetwalker. Nothing so degrading. By means of well-placed bribes and tips at the good hotels, she made contact with visiting foreigners of a certain class. She enjoyed theaters and cafés in their company, and later entertained them in her cellar flat. Thus she survived.
To shopkeepers and other acquaintances in the district round about Müllerstrasse, she presented herself as Frau Kroner, a Swabian widow of private means. None of her neighbors threw the obvious lie back in her face. The greengrocer even played the game fully, asking solicitous questions about the security of her principal. In reply, she invented other elabor
ate lies.
Pauli’s father Alfred had died in 1881, four years after his wife Pauline bore the boy, and Pauline herself succumbed in ’85. Gerhard, perhaps irked by the various failures and deficiencies of family members, said that his household was too crowded for him to take Pauli in. At New Year’s, 1886, Pauli Kroner, age eight and growing fast, arrived at the Berlin Bahnhof with his few clothes in a cheap valise.
He presented a brusquely worded note from Gerhard, saying he refused to go the trouble of contacting Josef in America. Pauli was transferred to Lotte’s care. She detected a certain spiteful glee between the lines of Gerhard’s note.
Never mind; she joyfully accepted responsibility for Pauli. She was happy for his company; for his energy and good cheer. Of course she soon realized it wasn’t a pleasant existence for him. At Grundschule he was treated like one of the poorest charity cases. Given his books of Latin and German composition, rather than being required to pay for them. Given his breakfast of bread and milk in winter, and his free weekly ticket to a public bath. She saw how the stigma hurt him. She yearned for something better for him.
The trouble was, there was no longer much time. Her mirror told her so every day. She was growing gray and gaunt, and each month her little account book noted fewer Herren. She knew she would inevitably be driven to knock at the gates of the Charité Hospital.
She suppressed another cough, then leaned to the side and groped under the bed, where she had dropped the doily from the bedside table.
Her fingers closed on the stiff old lace. She drew it up into the light and gazed without flinching at the smear now dried to brown.
No, there was not much time left.