by Maisie Mosco
Ben’s being born in Manchester had enabled Christina to fool hers that he had arrived prematurely. And Howard had let his family think whatever it suited them to think – which probably varied from person to person.
One thing was sure, though. Respectability had once more enveloped Christina! Which wasn’t to say there hadn’t been an element of sourness detectable in her references to his sleeping with another woman. Does that perhaps denote that the hefty guy who replaced me doesn’t come up to the standards I set for her in bed? he conjectured as the plane touched down.
If so, it might teach Christina that she can’t have everything – and who’s being sour now!
Karin was waiting in the arrivals hall and blew a kiss when she saw him.
The one they shared when Howard reached her, for which it was necessary for her to stand on tiptoe, implied how much they had missed each other.
“It’s been too long,” Howard said gruffly when they were walking, hands entwined, to where she had risked getting a parking ticket, “and I don’t think I can go on this way.”
Karin’s reply was an eloquent glance, her fingers tightening on his.
It was then that Howard allowed himself to accept that Germany now had a double hold on him. It was not any more just to see his son that he boarded a plane for Munich. The hope that Karin would be there was equally emotive and no less important to him.
When Howard went to collect Ben it was Lisl Schmidt who opened the door.
“Please to come in, Howard,” she said, pleasant as always.
He wiped his feet on the doormat and followed her to the living-room of the substantial house Christina’s father had bought for her when she remarried. This was the first time that Howard had been invited any further inside it than the hall.
Mr Schmidt didn’t offer a penny, though, towards buying the house we lived in in Manchester, he reflected. And I’ll never let what I do for my children be conditional on their pleasing me. Meanwhile I have only one child and he isn’t even living with me.
“Where’s Ben?” he asked, sounding more curt than he had intended. Christina’s mother was a nice woman and didn’t deserve to take the flak. It was too late now, though, for Howard to do what he should have – say to her, “How are you?”
Her husband had died last year, and she was now living with Christina, an arrangement Howard knew was not uncommon in Germany. People here didn’t just leave their widowed parents to get by as best they may. The family outings he had observed in Munich’s squares and parks on Sundays were invariably complete with the elderly, leaving the onlooker in no doubt that Germans had more time, and respect, for their senior citizens than could be said of the British.
“Please to sit down, Howard,” said Lisl, “there is something I must to tell to you.”
Howard remained standing, his stomach performing a somersault – or so it felt. “Is Ben ill?”
Lisl shook her head. “He is in the playroom.”
“Then what is all this about? I only have the rest of today and some of tomorrow to spend with him and the time we’re together is very precious to me.”
“You think I do not know that? Christina, she knows it also.”
“Is Christina at home?”
She gave him a weary smile. “No, and if my guest does not sit down I cannot. I am having trouble with my varicose veins.”
Howard put himself into a club chair, his bulky overcoat which he had not unbuttoned wedging him, and his muffler suddenly feeling as if it was choking him. Perspiration had broken out on his forehead and it wasn’t just due to this overheated room. Something was terribly wrong.
Lisl sat down opposite him, her fingers pleating the embroidered apron she was wearing, and her plump face creased with distress. “Ben, he does not wish to see you, Howard.”
A silence followed during which Howard’s tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth and the part of him that wasn’t numbed took an inventory of the setting in which the indictment was pronounced.
Gleaming white paintwork and a wood block floor. A coffee table, with magazines neatly piled upon it. A sofa, blue like the chairs and the rug. A vase of yellow chrysanthemums on the broad window ledge, and a bust that could be Beethoven, on a corner pedestal. The gloomy oil paintings in ornate gilt frames, that had hung in the Schmidts’ hall. A photograph of Christina’s father atop an upright piano, on which some sheet music was propped.
“Who’s the musician?” he asked as detachedly as he had surveyed the room.
“Your son.”
My son who doesn’t want to see me.
“Ben, he is having lessons. Did he not tell that to you on the telephone?”
Why would he bother telling me?
“He did not put away the music after he has this morning practised,” Lisl went on, adding with a smile, “but for once he has remembered to close the piano.”
The smile did not remain long on her face and a sigh accompanied her next words. “Today he did not just to close it, with a crash he did it. It was fortunate that Christina and Hans they had already left to go to Uncle Ernst’s and Aunt Elsa’s diamond wedding celebration.”
Uncle Ernst the one-time SS officer, Howard registered with the once-removed feeling that was helping him get through this.
“It is a luncheon at their house,” Lisl told him. “All Christina’s cousins have come from other cities, together with their children. There has been much excitement in the family, and Ben’s little brother and sister they have for the occasion new clothing. Ben also, and when you telephoned to tell to Christina that today you were coming – Ben, he has been beside himself with the disappointment.”
Howard said stiffly, “If Christina had mentioned it, I’d have put off my visit until next week.”
“I know that, Howard. Christina also. But it is not for her, she says, to put for you the obstacles to seeing Ben. We had the trouble with him when you came for the visit in December. Then too Ben he was looking forward to a party, when all the children play games together and eat special sweetmeats. It was Hans who gave to him the talking to that his father would be lonely without him at Christmas.”
Chanukah, actually, Howard silently replied. He had brought with him gifts for Ben from all the family. Also a menorah and some little coloured candles.
While Lisl gazed pensively into space Howard’s mind returned to the day he and Ben had spent together in Karin’s flat and lonely described it despite his having his son with him. Ben had played listlessly with the toys sent by his British relatives. In the light of what Howard now knew, “dutifully” was probably a better word.
When evening came Howard had lit the candles in the menorah and had sung for his son the Chanukah songs Jewish kids everywhere sang with their parents on that festival. Ben mustn’t be allowed to forget the traditions from which his mother had removed him, Howard had thought. How else was he to grow up feeling himself part of his father’s family?
What an empty exercise that was in the context of a child’s life, he realized now. And what I’ve become for Ben is the person who disrupts his. Who turns up once in a blue moon and sometimes stops him from doing what he was looking forward to. If we lived in the same town, or even in the same country, and he saw a lot of me… A futile thought.
“I appreciate Christina’s husband giving Ben that talking to,” he said in the same stiff tone that was all he seemed capable of right now.
Lisl replied, “Did you perhaps suppose that Hans, he was poisoning against you Ben’s mind? That has never been the case. Hans will not allow Ben to address him as ‘Father’. He would not think it fair to you.”
A snippet of information that implied Ben wanted to and another stab for Howard, though again it was as if he were anaesthetized.
“Hans is the good father to your son,” Lisl declared.
He could be a paragon of all the virtues and Howard would resent him none the less. Hans not Howard would share the ups and downs of Ben’s childhood, the good times
and the bad. Kicking a ball around the garden with him on summer evenings and helping him build a snowman in winter, like the one Ben mentioned to me the last time I came to Munich. Cheering him on, on his school sports day. And ticking him off when he required it.
Howard cleared his throat and rose. “While I understand why Ben doesn’t want to see me today, I can’t just leave it at that.”
“I did not expect it that you would. It was however necessary to prepare you.”
But there was no such thing. Even if Howard had seen this final blow coming its effects could have been no less devastating.
“The playroom is at the head of the stairs,” Lisl told him, “and I shall let you go alone.”
Howard slowly made his way there, his heart heavy. He could hear on the other side of the door, to which was pinned a cardboard bunny that seemed to be leering at him, the sound of a tin drum being bashed. And who but Ben was doing the bashing?
He forced himself to open the door. What was he afraid of? Rejection had already been dealt him. The drum, together with a stream of German, was hurled at him. A toy truck and more abuse in the language now his son’s followed, and Howard simply could not handle it.
He groped his way down the stairs and out of the house, pain replacing the merciful numbness, his eyes blinded by tears and with him the picture of an angry little boy venting his feelings upon the person he held responsible for his unhappiness.
Had Karin not been in Munich that weekend, Howard would surely have headed for the nearest beer cellar and got himself drunk.
When he walked into the flat, which in some respects resembled an office, she was at her desk compiling a report and switched off the word processor when she saw his face.
“Why is Ben not with you? What has happened?”
“The answer to both questions, Karin, is my son has sent me packing.”
“A six-year-old boy cannot do that to his father.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so myself.”
“And if he does, the father does not have to accept it. Take off your coat, Howard. It is soaked from the rain.”
“I didn’t notice the rain.”
“In Munich it rains often.”
“But I wouldn’t know that, would I?” Howard answered, divesting himself of the soggy garment.
“Your hair is dripping water on to your collar!” Karin went to fetch a towel.
Howard usually took a bus from the leafy suburb in which Christina lived, or hailed a passing cab. Today he had plodded his way to Karin’s downtown flat on foot, seeing and hearing nothing. Like a zombie, he thought now, that deadened feeling with him again.
Karin handed him the towel and draped his coat and muffler on a chair near the radiator, to dry them off.
How could she be so practical when he’d just told her something so shattering? But Karin, he had learned, always kept her feet on the ground. Her life despite her divorce and its repercussions was not in the mess Howard’s was. She was a highly organized person in every respect. One who managed to fit in a lover and two children with the demands of her work.
Why had he put it that way? Well, she certainly fits me into her schedule. But Howard had no grounds for supposing that her kids didn’t come first for her.
She poured him a Schnaps and insisted he drink it at one gulp. But the brandy did not revive his spirits. Nothing could.
“Would you like to eat something, Howard?”
He shook his head. “I ate breakfast on the plane.”
“And you intend it should also suffice for lunch? I have in the refrigerator some cheese and also some sausage –”
“You’re behaving like my great-grandmother used to!”
“Sensibly, you mean.”
“That isn’t what I’d call it.”
Karin sat down beside him on the sofa and took his hand. “If sympathy is what you wish for, I assure you that you have mine. But I would call how you are behaving unrealistic. The situation you have told me of, with Ben, it is not going to change overnight, and possibly it will not do so in the immediate future. I myself would not accept it. Whether you do, or do not, if you want to go on living you will have to eat.”
“All right, Karin! If it’ll make you happy I’ll have a bloody sandwich!”
“And I shall attribute that outburst to your red hair,” she said before departing to the kitchen.
Not only practical, but unflappable, thought Howard.
It took but a trice for Karin to reappear with the sandwich.
Hyper-efficient, too. “Thanks for looking after me,” he said ungraciously. “That’s not what an affair is supposed to be about, though, is it?”
“There is one kind of affair and there is also another kind,” she replied.
“What does that mean?”
“That I have had affairs before you came into my life. But I did not feel for the men what I feel for you.”
Howard put down the sandwich and took her in his arms. “Since I didn’t have so much as a one-night stand between my marriage breaking up and meeting you, I’m not in a position to say the same. But what I can say, Karin, is the feeling I have for you could be love.”
He paused and stroked her hair. “When I said I wouldn’t know if it rained often in Munich – well, what I was really saying was, how often have I been here? My visits to Ben haven’t amounted to more than about four a year. And I sometimes ask myself how I’ve come to care for you the way I do, when the times we’ve been together don’t even add up to the number of trips I’ve made here –”
Karin broke away from him and went to lean against the desk. “Trips you have made to see Ben. Not to see me. And please, Howard, do not construe what I have just said as jealousy of your child. It is not that at all.”
“Then what, exactly, are you saying?”
“What I am saying concerns why I have not bent my life always to be in Munich when you come here.”
“My impression of you isn’t that you’re the sort of woman who plays hard to get.”
“I nevertheless have my pride.”
“And that’s what we’re talking about?”
“Partly, yes. But there is more to it than that. I have known from the start that you have no respect for German Jewry and have found myself being defensive on that account. I made clear on the day we met that I do not find it easy to live here. The attitude of those Jews who would not has turned those of us who do into a community of apologists. Why else would I have told a stranger on a plane my father’s personal reason for returning?”
“I’m finding this difficult to relate to what we’re discussing.”
“Very much related is that if it were possible for you to take Ben to England, you would turn your back on Germany.”
“But not on you.”
A pause followed while traffic sounds drifted upward from the street and a clock on one of Munich’s baroque buildings chimed three. Howard had intended taking Ben tomorrow morning to see the Glockenspiel. The clockwork figures adorning the town hall danced twice daily and were a delight to children. Well, that was now out. And momentarily it was for Howard as if he had no sense of time or place but was isolated with Karin at the point of no return.
“What would your answer be, Karin, if I asked you to marry me?”
She replied unhesitatingly, “That I love you, but I cannot think just of myself. My parents – they are growing old, and my father could not run the business without me. I must also consider my children, whose education would suffer if they were uprooted from their schools and to a country where their basic knowledge of the language would be for them a setback.”
“You have it all worked out, haven’t you?” said Howard.
“To think ahead has always been my way, and this discussion had to take place between us eventually.”
“But there’s only one aspect of what you said that I’m interested in right now.”
“Which aspect was that?”
“That you love me, and for th
e moment the rest can go hang. I want you to come to England and meet my family.”
“Only if you will reciprocate and come to Berlin. Ben also, if it can be arranged. It is time our children got to know each other, Howard.”
Though he had not meant to mention marriage, uttering the words had confirmed for Howard that he wanted to share the rest of his life with Karin. And knowing she loved him was as balm to his soul, after Ben’s rejecting him.
He would not, of course, give up on his son. Nor was he prepared to accept that the hurdles Karin had listed were insurmountable.
Chapter 8
Arnold’s calling her was a rare occurrence for Marianne. When on a blustery spring morning he did so, her reaction was as always somewhat wary.
Listening to his lengthy reasons for not having been in touch, doodling on her notepad and wishing Arnold would get to the point of his call, regret that such was their relationship had its depressing effect upon her. Once,, she’d felt close to both her brothers, and still did to Harry despite the change in him.
The change in Arnold, though, was as if he had erected a wall of pomp between himself and the family. “Cut the excuses, will you!” Marianne interrupted him. “I haven’t been in touch with you, either.”
“Just so long as you understand I haven’t stopped caring about you, Marianne.”
“Nor I about you.”
But Arnold’s caring had its limits. In some respects he and Jake Bornstein were two of a kind. Except that Jake’s narrowness seemed only to apply to his nearest and dearest. Jake would have a fit if his son were gay, thought Marianne, but his attitude to Matthew and Pete was that their private lives were their own. Arnold, on the other hand, applied his personal standards across the board and would, were it in his power, turn back the clock so far as homosexual freedom was concerned.
Matthew remains the skeleton in Sir Arnold Klein’s cupboard, Marianne was reflecting when he said, “So will you do it for me?”