Читать книгу A Piece of Me - Beatrix Ost - Страница 13

LIKE SUPERMAN, we overcome time and space. We are sitting in the airplane. Ludwig, my husband, has fallen asleep. He twitches sometimes, like a dog who moves his paw or his leg in a dream, who runs away from something or runs after it. He emits little sounds, as if he were barking, giving a speech. Behind his trembling eyelids a dream plays out. Released from reality, the images flee through imaginary situations, thoughts made flesh spring hurdles, the impossible pulls away from the logical. Wishes become reality. He pulls up one corner of his mouth, purses his lips, then rises with a start and murmurs something incomprehensible. His arm falls heavily to his side. No one else knows him like this. This is almost as intimate as the act of sex. Does he resemble my father? In what way? It can’t just be the moustache over the curl of his upper lip.

Later. We are sitting in a Hertz rent-a-car. Ludwig, having finally escaped the American 55-mph speed limit, drives full throttle. We whiz down the autobahn.

We wanted to vacation in our city, the one we both grew up in, the one Ludwig was born in and never left until we went away together twenty-five years ago. He had looked forward to this trip with great anticipation. He knew some of my childhood stories, those colored by Adi’s fabulous sense of humor, her words, her gestures. The way she dealt with temporal distance and spatial details lent her anecdotes the feel of a movie.

The estate I grew up on lay thirty kilometers north of the Munich city limits, on the little river Goldach—hence its name, Goldachhof. It stretched out for a thousand acres. The property was like an island. One could arrive from any direction and be woven into the insular framework of order—as a visitor, as one seeking protection, as a family member, or as a stranger speaking an unknown language. There they had all landed, or been stranded, and shared life until the next ship sailed. There were few ships back then, so many people stayed for years.

In the dark glass of the car window I see the reflection of a little girl calling me: Do you remember the sirens, 1945?

Here, stop, we have to get off the autobahn and ask directions. I call out, just in time for Ludwig to slow down before the turnoff at the Hotel Erdingerhof exit. I ask a dark-skinned man in a green apron the way. His German is fluent, but one hears a trace of a Slavic accent. He gives us partial directions, then we stop to get the rest from someone else. The second man could be from Turkey, from Egypt or Morocco.

This is Hitler’s nightmare come true, Ludwig says with a grin. Soon it will be as motley here as it is in America.

The wintry landscape is so familiar, greeting me like an old friend, yet everything seems crowded more closely together, the land more developed: more streets, underpasses, overpasses. In between, new housing developments thrust forward, surrounded by rectangular fences. The old walls of a farm surface in the cool light. The stable leans crookedly in the winter air; steam rises from fresh cow manure heaped up behind. An ancient moated castle, regal, painted golden yellow with dark green shutters, is visible between the pines.

The land. Altered and yet easily recognizable, as a whole if not in individual details. Flat northern winter light, sun without shadow. An old love, very warm, slumbering in my bones, climbs forth from childhood: a love of the familiar, of my Muttersprache, my Vaterland. Grand words. One rarely uses them. In fact, never. One is ashamed. And yet when one lives abroad and looks toward the Heimat . . . Another such word. They come up, after all, perhaps just as literary echoes.

Quick mental images alternate with the momentary impressions racing by.

In spring the storks found their messy nest. The horses at the Goldach River drank in their shattered reflection. My father, when he was in the mood, showed me the white trembling heat across the wheat field, the alphabet of the heavens and clouds. Told me that gold lay at the end of the rainbow. In one of Father’s books, Zeus devours his son. My nasty grandmother boxed the chambermaid’s ears. Squares of paper for the loo were cut from newspaper. In the stables one heard moaning and then a window shattering. Card games. Drunken quarrels over money. Sleigh journeys to neighbors across frozen fields, tin canisters filled with hot water beneath one’s feet. Churning butter by hand, the howling of the circular saw from Tafelmeier’s workshop across the courtyard. Total stillness in the den, interrupted only by the yapping of dogs in their dreams and the buzzing of two copulating flies. Grandfather turning pages—Sssschip!—his hand moving a sheet through the air like a blade slicing an apple. The hue and cry when the maypole is finally up. Olga’s voice, in broken German: You best one.

Stop—that’s my schoolhouse! And there’s the stall where Anita left her horse every day.

I am quite beside myself. Now we pull over to the left, past the cemetery. The wall that rings it is lower than I remember and looks freshly painted. Black marble scrolls with gold lettering. Angels cut from white stone spread their garments protectively over the dead and the past. Perfectly straight gravel paths separate the graves.

Just the way orderly German houses protect themselves with garden fences, I laugh.

Here I remember trees and meadows; now there are bungalows with little gardens in front. Thank God the rest of it survived the building boom.

Oh well, says Ludwig. Landscape doesn’t change; cemeteries, definitely not. And the fields of cabbage out there were a local industry, even in your childhood. We are the Krauts, after all.

The old train station is still over there. When we would call in from the farm, the operator would have the train wait a little longer just for us.

The road leads over a narrow bridge. On the other side, a new assortment of houses has been cleanly laid. I have an exact memory of this street, which we children traveled on foot every day between school and farm. This road from the farm to Ismanning is still unpaved. On both sides the embankment falls steeply, dangerously, into the gardens and fields. Slowly, slowly—I want to see everything exactly, enjoy it sip by sip. Thoughts are like champagne bubbles, my mad Uncle Erwin had always said, on his way to alcoholic nirvana.

We reach the tree-lined avenue leading to the estate. Fields border the street on both sides. On the right, our neighbors’ farm, with a little turret like a warning finger. We roll closer, dip beneath the roof of the avenue trees.

Drive slower. Stop!

Before us, on the right, stands a burned-out ruin: our house, or what is left of it. Black charred beams, window frames devoured by fire. Our stately house, the adjacent stables, everything is destroyed.

Tears well up and flood my eyelids. I see my father’s stern face clearly in front of me: Don’t ever smoke or play with fire. Never, you hear me? Never near the stables with your damned cigarettes. His eyes jet from visitor to visitor. A sharp furrow crosses his brow.

The story was told in a warning tone, accompanied by the rap of his walking stick or, when he was telling it at the table, by the pounding of his fist, the rattling of the silver, to lend fear dramatic emphasis. At the end one had to promise to be extremely careful.

It had happened almost twenty years earlier. The screams of the farm lads who released eighty stallions from their tethers, drove them out of the stables. The whinnying, the stamping, the fear in the horses’ smoke-reddened eyes. The farm dog, forgotten, burning on his chain. The granary, full with the fresh harvest, devoured by fire, all scattered up into the night. The insane, raging heat, the firemen who spent a week extinguishing the blaze, who doused the house in the middle of the farm with a constant rain to save it.

This great fire burned down the state horse-breeding operation my father ran in the twenties. He lived in constant fear that it could happen again on his own estate. Someone might throw away a burning cigarette, children might repeat the deadly sin of playing with fire in the hay.

I am completely still. Across the courtyard to the left, the little house where the König family lived stands untouched by fire. Frozen geraniums hang from the window ledges on both sides of the entrance. Next door stands the little chapel where I celebrated my childish Mass, degrading the Virgin Mary to a mere mannequin in my theater of the sacred.

The wind must have blown from the west, carrying the fire from the house to the stables to the cow stall with the hay above. That was why the little house was spared, and the chapel next to it. My father’s nightmare had come true after all, four decades after his death. Did he conjure it forth? Do places have predetermined fates?

Why had the idea of visiting the estate not gripped me two years earlier, when it was still intact in the flat moors? But I, too, would have been a different person. My childhood would not have held the same burning interest for me. And only my mother would have read my father’s letters.

Across the courtyard from the ruins, a woman’s face appears in an upstairs window.

God bless, we call out, and wave up to the stranger. I grew up here fifty years ago. This farm belonged to my father. I gesture in the direction of what’s left of the house.

Mai, you’re nowhere near that oyd, the woman responds.

You bet I am, I say.

The woman shakes her head good-naturedly: Aye don’t believe yaw.

All three of us have to laugh: she down at us, we up to her.

Go ahead, park here, take a gander, she says. Wherever you like. Jus’ look out if yaw go in there where it done burn.

She gestures with her chin across the courtyard. It looks like the aftermath of an air raid, like the bombed-out city houses in my memory.

We sit down on the bench in front of the Königs’ house. There is no one else in sight.

God, it’s quiet here, I say, breaking the silence. A little breeze bundles a few leaves together and blows them into a nervous swirl.

My grandfather Theodor, Fritz’s father—I loved him immensely. He was simply there with me. And when he died it was because he was old, very old. I was richly favored by my grandfather. And that is why I never missed him very much. When you have been greatly enriched you do not feel the loss as keenly as when much is still lacking. I can see that now. My time with my grandfather appears much longer than it actually was.

Here on the little bench I am in the land of Non Sequitur. In memory my thoughts stand on their heads; the unexpected reigns.

The big house stands across from us. The geraniums my mother always loved so much hang down from the balcony over the entrance. The hall smells of horsehair—the stable is built right onto it. The banister ends in a soft curve, just right for sliding down.

Like trembling leaves in a labyrinth of branches, private idioms flickered through our everyday speech. Waterfalls we called “fallwaters.” The glow worms had “explosions,” my mother said. To my grandfather, anger was “katzenjammer.” Hagenreiner’s delivery van was called “Nugelpinne”; that term came from Aunt Julia. Grandmother’s farts were her “howling wind,” that one from Father, as was “freshman bladder,” for when someone often ran to the toilet. “Someone shit in your head” was also Father’s: that meant you had a dumb idea. “Now the light goes on”: one understood. “Don’t be so sanctimonious” was said when someone concealed something. Tattling was forbidden in every case; it was dishonorable. Even I, the smallest, was not allowed to do it.

Petze, Petze ging in den Laden	Tattler, tattler went into the store
Wollt’ für’nen Fünfer Petze haben	For a fiver he wanted tattle galore
Petze, Petze gibt es nicht	Tattler, tattler we’re sold out
Petze, Petze ärgert sich	Tattler, tattler jumps and shouts
Pfui!	Phooey!

When someone was sly he was called a “Holzfuchs,” a wood fox. When someone always knew better, he was a “Klugscheisser,” a smart shitter. If someone had done something naughty, he “needed a headwashing.” If someone got annoyed, a louse was running across his liver. If someone was cunning in money matters, he was surely a Jew. For messiness: “It looks like Russia around here,” or “the Hottentots.” Charming as a Frenchman, cowardly as an Italian. No one was politically correct yet. And when Grandfather did not want to hear anything more out of his wife, Marie-Louise, he turned away and mumbled: Get off my back.