Читать книгу Czechmate - Michael Condé-Jahnel - Страница 9

Chapter 3 Munich, October 2006

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Bettina dropped me off at the Munich central railway station, from where she continued her five hour drive home to Vienna.

I proceeded to the lower level for local train connections. The sign above the platform switched to ‘S7 Solln – 6 minutes’ as I stepped off the escalator. The previous train had just pulled out. I smiled. The German penchant for precision and accuracy remained unchanged.

“Of course, we’ve been expecting you; you left the Czech border early this morning. Where are you now?”

Edi’s voice, despite his advancing years, still sounded chipper.

“I just got off at the station in Solln. I’ll be at your house in a few minutes, if it’s o.k.”

“Na ja, wunderbar. We look forward to your visit. Do you need any help from the station?”

I remembered both Liesl and Edi having difficulty getting around last time I saw them. It had to be two, perhaps three years earlier. The idea that either of them might be helping me move my luggage was endearing, but hardly realistic.

“No, thanks. It’s just a short distance.”

“Fine then, I’ll ask Liesl to put on the coffee for us.”

They had lived in the same house on Wolfratshausener Strasse for over fifty years now.

As I neared the small blue sign with white lettering proclaiming 175b, I noticed that little had changed. The tall hedge was still grown over, partially hiding the latch on the gate, the tiny front yard displaying wisps of grass, some dandelions and other untamed weeds.

“Just push in the gate – it’s open.”

Edi was standing in the door frame, looking comfortably disheveled in baggy corduroys, rumpled shirt, a few strands of white hair hanging in half-circles from the sides of his head.

“Do you want to take your luggage up, refresh yourself a little first?” Liesl inquired.

“Same room?”

“Please, you know. On the top.”

One piece of luggage at a time was all I could handle up the spiral staircase to the second floor. The aroma of freshly ground coffee was wafting up the stairs and I heard clanging noises from the kitchen. I returned minutes later, my comfort clothes only slightly more elegant than Edi’s attire. I was about to enter the living room, when Liesl materialized, carefully balancing a tray with a white porcelain coffee pot and several cups. Edi was shuffling close behind, holding a tray with baked apple crumble, which looked fresh out of the oven. I opened the door to the adjoining dining room. The square table in the L-corner of the living room, surrounded in a half rectangle by a fixed bench with Tyrolean style carvings, was clad with white/blue checkered tablecloth.

Bavarian colours, how appropriate.

I began placing servings and cutlery, when Liesl waved me off.

“Nein – hands off Michael, you must be tired from your journey; you’re not to lift a finger while you’re here.”

I reluctantly followed her instruction and moved my body along the bench. I had sat here during my first visit nearly fifty years earlier. She filled the cups for everyone and motioned toward the sugar bowl and cream server.

“Help yourself, the apple crumble is still hot.”

The advance of time had not diminished her skills in the kitchen.

“Excellent – just the way I remember it,” I nodded appreciatively in her direction.

Edi had barely swallowed the first spoonful when he looked at me across the table.

“I really want to hear about your impressions being back in Reichenberg. It’s the second time you’ve been back?” he added, before I could answer.

“Yes. Remember, the first time when you were along as well.”

“Yes, of course – we both went with Simon in………” Edi hesitated, not sure of the timing of their trip together.

“In 1998 – now more than another eight years back,” I finished the sentence for him.

“That’s it – thank you. So tell me about this trip – what did you think?” Edi asked again.

“I think it was a sort of closure for me almost,” I said quietly, leaning my back against the bench seat. Edi looked at me curiously.

“It’s hard to put into words – I’ll try,” I added.

I paused for a moment before continuing.

“To begin with, it was an ambivalent feeling. It’s not easy to be back in a place we were driven out of. Although we were spared the worst, all our families lost friends during that time and our parents certainly left behind everything they had strived to build.”

I paused again, stroking the handle of my coffee cup. Edi nodded quietly without interrupting.

“I would walk through the streets looking at signs in a foreign language. I am among people speaking with a harsh Slavic accent, hurriedly passing by buildings and landmarks. Some filled with snatches of my personal memory, flashes of recognition from photo albums and family history. It’s as if there is a constant disconnect between what I see around me and how I would wish to remember it.”

Edi spoke into the long but not uncomfortable silence between us.

“That’s my recollection as well. I mean how I felt when I first went back.”

“Except you did so much earlier, right?”

“Absolutely. My first trip back was in early 1968. I had business in Prague and decided to stay for an extra week. Spent time in Reichenberg and the surrounding area. It was a strange feeling.”

“It must have been fascinating, especially with you being fluent in Czech and able to get the pulse of what was going on at the time,” I interjected.

“Precisely. Remember it was the ‘Prague Spring’, Alexander Dubcek, the emergence of a spirit freed from the doctrines of communism.”

“ Until the Russian tanks moved in later that year,” I added dryly.

“You remember that?” Edi seemed surprised.

“Of course. I was visiting your sister in Bayreuth. August of 1968.”

“You were close to the scene. Just a few kilometers from the Czech border.”

“I remember walking near the old Wagner house. The news must have come on just then. Cars, taxis, even the street car stopped as if frozen to the ground. Car and transistor radios were blaring forth the Russian movements.”

“What went through your mind?” Edi asked.

“The same as what was probably on everyone’s mind. Are they going stop at the German border? Of course, they would. No point risking NATO retaliation. But events of a little more than twenty years earlier were clearly still on many people’s minds. Some, sitting in their cars that day in Bayreuth, had seen those tanks before, just like you and I.”

Edi’s expression had turned blank. He looked as if trying to forget, not to remember.

Another short silence between us followed. Edi was first to speak again – a different, less painful recollection of the subject.

“It was on my initial trip in ‘68 that I first connected with Veronika Juçek at the town library. Remember her?”

“Of course. We met her on our trip with Simon, the last time we were there together. I remember Simon being so impressed with the fact that the old library was in the building his great-grandfather had owned until the end of the war.”

“That’s right – that was special,” Edi remarked.

“The preservation of that library with the thousands of German volumes inside was remarkable. I suspect it’s what led the German government to generously contribute to the new library.”

Edi nodded.

“Exactly. It has become the symbol of reconciling Slavs, Germans and Jews,” he added.

“What motivated you to spend many years following your retirement researching the fate of displaced families, writing articles, collecing every scrap of paper to do with our past in Reichenberg?”, I finally had the courage to ask.

Edi looked at me. There was faint amusement around the corner of his eyes.

“Perhaps nothing very different from why you went back again this time. It was not a master plan I had envisaged. Certainly not. But Bavaria, and Munich in particular, is the high fortress of post-war Sudeten-Germans. Most of us wound up here after the war.”

I waited patiently. That could hardly be the whole story.

“And, yes, there was obviously something more personal to it. It gave me a purpose, a passion for retrieving lost information, reconnecting families, writing my observations about present-day Liberec in the context of what had once been an integral part of my life.”

“I think I understand that today after having been back myself. I would not have years earlier.”

Another pause in our conversation was a silence of reflection, not one of awkwardness.

There is one more thing I’d like to say about the experience I’ve just had,” I added after a moment.

“If that’s o.k., that is.”

“Of course, go ahead.”

“I have often wondered why I cannot recall a single horrific experience during the war or after that, during the escape with my mother. It’s like it was in a file, which has been deleted.”

“I understand your point. But the human mind, like our bodily organs, has a capacity to heal. And healing requires the dark and toxic cells to be banished into oblivion,” Edi responded.

“However, that’s not really my point, “ I continued.

“The real point is that while I feel no link to present day Liberec and everything in it and around it, I do feel a strong connection to the telltales of the past, the landscapes and streetscapes, the per chance encounter with someone I connect with through the past – all that was meaningful, even if it took me several trips back to figure it out.”

“What do you think made the difference this time?”

“Without question, what I read in the family papers my mother left me before going back. Without it – and the few images I have preserved from childhood – there would have been little benefit to being there. These new insights made it all worthwhile, brought a sense of closure as I said earlier, even greater joy with where I am today. So I will treasure this experience.”

“Anything specific you are thinking about?”

“Being in the opera theatre and noticing the plaque and inscription to our grandfather, which appears in my father’s manuscript. Looking up the side of the ‘Jeschken’ and wondering whether I was close to the place where my parent’s footsteps took them across the mountain. Sitting in the dining room of the ‘Zlaty Lev’ and wondering whether some of the guests at my grandfather’s silver wedding anniversary party had been at the same table and who they might have been. Those were the special moments.”

“My God, do I know, more than you might think.”

Edi’s expression had taken on a particular softness, his eyes moist.

“Are you thinking of going back again?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. If I did, I know it would be for one reason and one reason only.”

“And what would that be?”

“A sort of pilgrimage through the same villages and towns, remnants of camps - if anything is still there – through which my mother led us to freedom until we arrived in Hamburg however many weeks or months later.”

“Probably by yourself?”

“Almost certainly – unless either Simon or Natalie would join me. But that’s unlikely.”

“If I was any younger, I would have offered to join you.”

“And I would have gladly accepted.”

Czechmate

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