Читать книгу A Piece of Me - Beatrix Ost - Страница 15

GRRRRRR! Get off my back, grumbled Grandfather Theodor, mostly to himself. He towered above on the stairway landing. A green satin vest showed beneath his suit jacket. From the buttonhole to his vest pocket swung a gold chain with boar’s teeth, weighted with an eagle’s claw at the end, where the round gold watch casing sank into the red lining.

The stairs creaked beneath his feet, crrrk, crrrk; he grew toward me with each step. When he arrived at the foot of the stairs and stood next to me, I barely reached his waist.

Get off my back, he said again. This time he winked at me, gesturing upward and over his right shoulder with his chin. So I knew he meant Grandmother, whose dress I had just caught a glimpse of, or the air between us.

What’s up? he asked with a friendly grin, taking my small hand in his big, paper-dry one.

Something new, Grandpapa!

At the end of the hallway, tied-up boxes and leather suitcases were piling up. The front door stood open. Umer, the Hungarian coachman, hauled another load of luggage into the dusky house. His woolen trousers were deftly tucked into his riding boots. Looking about the hallway in search of unused space, he skillfully heaped his load into a gap in the mountain of suitcases that had gathered there. Politely tapping his gray cap, he took a little bow. I tapped my forefinger to my forehead, and we both smiled.

Grandfather and I strolled slowly through the hall, to the front door. Our curiosity had been whetted. Just at this moment Aunt Julia and her daughter, Alexandra, stepped through the doorway. They were the family members we knew little about. No one had ever mentioned them until a letter arrived, revealing their place: Julia had married a cousin of my mother’s. The desperation described in the letter was harrowing. They had been bombed out of Breslau, forced to leave everything where it stood. Only at the last minute had they managed to save themselves and a few suitcases from the Russians.

How horrible, my mother had said, making a sorrowful face. My God, those poor things! And on top of all that, Oskar is dead!

Alexandra was two years older and a head taller than me. Right away I noticed how beautifully she was dressed. Dark blue coat with cherry buttons, a red cap perched over her ear, black patent leather shoes. Oddly, she looked at me with only one eye. The other listlessly observed the unpacking of the luggage. Later she showed me that the second eye was glass. She took it out of the socket, rinsed it with water, and deftly stuck it back beneath her eyelid. Now I knew. My child brain spun a tragic war story. I did not believe she had got unslaked lime in her eye. No, no, the eye was pawned. It was waiting for her to claim, like all the other things. Should she find her way back to her old life, she could trade in the glass eye for the real one.

Aunt Julia, in a veiled hat and high heels, glanced nervously about her and peeled her gloves from her hands.

I must look dreadful after the long journey, she apologized.

The little group looked about in embarrassment.

Grandfather bowed stiffly: Honored.

G’day, she replied. Alexandra, too, said g’day, instead of God bless. She spoke Prussian and was thus, like her forebears ever since the war with Prussia, one of the Saupreussen—the Pig Prussians, as they were called in Bavarian. A string of Prussian word beads followed. Finally my mother appeared, her hearty greeting shooing Grandfather’s awkwardness into the dusk of the vestibule. Prior to their arrival my mother had planned how to situate everybody. They got the Yellow Room. Olga, our Russian cook, was ordered to clear the jars of preserves from the floor and the armoire. Thus were Aunt Julia and Alexandra given a little foothold in our house.

Alexandra’s arrival marked the start of an endless drama about hair. Long, or short? Alexandra wore a practical pageboy; I had braids woven around my head. My mother loved my coronet hairdo, but Aunt Julia felt short hair was more practical. My mother went along with her, and to my horror, I, too, received the chop! But as soon as my hair was cut off, it became apparent that it would have to grow back to a certain length after all, so the unruly tufts could be decently combed back.

If only you hadn’t cut them off! Now the stringy mess is forever getting in your face, my grandmother hissed.

Alexandra had the stricter mother. It was never, What do you want? Just, Do this, do that. Hair got cut when she said. End of story; no talking back. Quite unlike my mother, whose philosophical contribution was: Really, it’s just hair.

Yes, and if it were curls? Well, then! clucked my grandmother.

Upstairs on the second floor of the great house were the Blue Room, the Green Room, and, next to it, the Yellow Room. There was also a drawing room, and next to it my parents’ bedroom. Then the room I shared with my sister, Anita, plus a linen closet and the only toilet. Atop a steep staircase sat the majestic attic, with a round window pigeons flew through just as they pleased. They built their nests in the beams under the roof. Beneath them their droppings piled up. When you opened the attic door, dust and feathers flew at you with the draft. Right at the start of the morning, before the sun came up, we could hear the pigeons’ amorous cooing coming from the floor above.

All the way downstairs on the main floor was an office and, next to it, the room where the lads slept: my brother, Uli, his student friend, Georg, and Dieter Brün, who had saved Uli’s life. Across from that was the only full bathroom in the house. Then there was our spacious kitchen with its pantry, adjacent to the large dining room, and beyond it, the cozy wood-paneled den with its tiled stove, in whose crevices the dogs slept.

Provisions were difficult to come by in the city, and the bombings became increasingly frequent, making it too dangerous for my grandparents to remain in their home. So they, too, moved to the farm, into the Green Room. A string of tobacco leaves dangled from corner to corner to dry.

Grandfather lifted me up. Along the ceiling of his room, I was to tie red ribbons between the clusters of leaves, to ration them out for the season so he would not become too extravagant before the next harvest. From this point to that by Christmas, up to here by Easter, and so forth.

My grandmother hated the smell and opened the window all the way. You can’t breathe in here, she fumed.

That was the moment Grandfather Theodor lost his otherwise end­less patience. Get off my back, he grumbled, muttering further heresies through silent lips as he trundled off.

Then there were the Brüns. General Brün—tall, blond, with beau­tiful blue eyes, erect gait, and ever-helpful manner—settled in to the Blue Room with Auntie Brün and their twelve-year-old son, Peter. The other son, Dieter, stayed downstairs with Uli. Dieter and Uli were both nineteen, and both already veterans. They belonged to the Kinderenthusiasten, that youthful excitement Hitler had hoped would conquer Russia for him. Dieter had carried the wounded Uli through a snowy minefield to safety. That was in Murmansk, in Russia.

Oh, we must be so infinitely grateful to Dieter, my mother mused. So when the Brüns arrived in an open cart and stood homeless at our door with a few suitcases and boxes, the Osts took them in without a moment’s hesitation.

We called Mrs. Brün Auntie. She looked so friendly with her blue eyes, her blond curly hair, her rounded figure. But I somehow knew better; I saw her hidden side. Auntie was short-tempered. Her hand was quick to fly out and land audibly on the cheek of the sinner Peter, often merely because he was a little slow. Snatches of Peter’s screams would carry downstairs, and a little while later he would appear with a red imprint on his cheek. But my mother excused Auntie. Somehow she could understand her. They had lost everything, lost the roof over their heads, all but lost their minds.

Mrs. Brün told the story of the bombing of Berlin. One night, wrenched from the marrow of her dreams, she found her house in flames. All she could do was wrap herself in a wet blanket, drag Peter out of bed, find her way to the back stairs, flee to the street. The glaring heat all around left only one escape route. She joined the fleeing mass of people who had mindlessly found their way together. Sobs, shouts, barking dogs, and the whistle of the falling petrol bombs. Then, somewhere, an open bomb-shelter door: a hand, a dry coat, a place to sit down.

My mother accompanied Mrs. Brün’s story with her eyes wide open in fear and sympathy, making us all doubly horrified at the unfolding catastrophe. In the subsequent silence I asked whether she could tell the story once again, for me, to give me an exact idea. I always asked the same when fairy tales were read to me. I couldn’t hear them often enough; they were horrifying and fascinating in equal measure.

The tales and the voices flowed into one another and made Peter, who had experienced it all, a hero. But Peter never talked about it. Nothing made it to the outside, not a word slipped past his lips. He did not want to relive the terror, and when I pressed him, iron silence.

The things that boy has been through, my mother said, running her hand through his tufty blond hair.

Red spread from his throat up his cheeks, into his ears, burned there for a little while—the fire of embarrassment. She drew Peter to her breast, held him there, and finally, finally, released him from public scrutiny.

I quickly took his hand, tugged him along to go play. His embarrassment made him docile and willing to participate in one of my fa­vorite activities: sliding down the banister. He had to catch me at the bottom.

Well, all right, just once, he said, casting a bored look down at me from his twelve-year-old height. After one catch, he turned and left me standing there. He strode outside, looking around the courtyard for the older boys, who called him Pig Prussian. He would rather be with them.

The house was now bursting with people. A shelter for the shelterless. Sometimes a queue built up at the door of the one bathroom. Whoever could not wait ran through the door at the end of the hall, to the stables, and found a place to squat. One had to be alert lest one frighten the beasts and receive a kick, or a moist snort from a curious nose. I always went to my favorite, the calmest one, a brown workhorse with thick bunches of hair on its haunches.

In the mornings Justa, the Yugoslavian chambermaid, trudged upstairs, her face contorted from sleep, the hair at the nape of her neck a stringy mess. She knocked at each door, and regardless of whether one answered, she brought in a pitcher of hot water, carried it to the washstand, and, oblivious to anyone in the room, fished around under the bed for the chamber pot, or looked for it in the night cabinet, to take it downstairs if it was full.

Once a week Aunt Julia organized baths for everyone. Alexandra and I waited, each with a large sea sponge in hand, until we were allowed to climb into the tub. Then one of the mothers scrubbed us. When the bathwater took on a gray tone it was replenished. On bath days everyone had to keep the wood stove going so the next person could enjoy a hot bath, too.

Then the holidays arrived, and the bathtub turned into a fish tank. There the carp and trout were kept fresh. I dangled my chin over the rim and watched them flapping their gills. In this narrow space I could touch their slippery skin. Their round glassy eyes glided along the white porcelain like marbles. In a perpetual circle, an oval, they searched for the outdoors, for green reed-grass, for the blue mirror of sky. They opened and shut their carp mouths. What were they thinking about? The delicious pond lettuce, the teeming grubs, the swarms of plankton, the mossy stones, seeds, gnats’ wings?