by Michael Dean
‘Bloody hell!’ he said, loudly.
The class laughed. Himmelfahrt brightened.
‘Menschenskind!’ translated Gisella Herrold in the same tone Himmelfahrt had used, addressing the whole class.
Himmelfahrt smiled and nodded at her. ‘Menschenskind!’ he said, exactly as Gisella Herrold had said it, with a pretty good Swabian accent.
The class laughed again, delightedly. One or two applauded their English teacher’s progress in the local dialect.
Himmelfahrt gathered himself, then read the text aloud to the class — in various different voices. For the character of Mr Fry, Himmelfahrt did his favourite imitation, Laurence Olivier as Henry V.
‘Good evening,’ belled out the baritone of Himmelfahrt as Laurence Olivier as Mr Fry. ‘The day before yesterday we engaged a suite by telegram.’ And here a dramatic pause and a smouldering glance in the direction of Gisella Herrold and the woman next to her, who conveniently was another of the pretty ones. ‘The name,’ he boomed out and here a long, hammy, dramatic pause followed by a shattering shout ‘IS FRY!’
This got enough laughter to set Himmelfahrt on a roll. He plonked himself behind the teacher’s desk for the role of the Reception Clerk at the hotel. He decided to play the Reception Clerk as Frau Stikuta, who was in the office, next door.
Frau Stikuta listened at the classroom door to most lessons. She would certainly have had her ear to the door jamb at a new teacher’s first lesson, but as soon as she had returned from hauling Himmelfahrt out of Café Kunzi, an apoplectic Herr Biedermeier had arrived with fresh complaints about his new tenant. The gnome-like landlord was in full gibbering flow, so Frau Stikuta missed Himmelfahrt’s all too recognisable imitation of her, which would have limited his teaching career to something under five minutes.
‘We have kept suite number 35 for you,’ fluted a falsetto Himmelfahrt as Frau Stikuta as the Reception Clerk. ‘It consists of a bedroom, sitting room and bathroom. It is very pleasant and comfortable. Will you register, please?’
The class, after a second’s amazed silence started muttering ‘Frau Stikuta’, some even pointing at the door, where they expected the language school owner to be, tittering with slightly apprehensive laughter. Himmelfahrt stood, then ran round the desk to resume the role of Mr Fry.
‘Will you have us called at half-past seven tomorrow morning?’ enquired the world’s greatest living actor.
Himmelfahrt then ran at top speed back behind the desk and wiggled to suggest the voluptuous Reception Clerk, who was also the language school owner.
‘I’ll make a note of it. Would you like morning tea at the same time?’ Himmelfahrt as Frau Stikuta as the Reception Clerk gave a gynaecological hip wiggle, patted ‘her’ hair and fluttered ‘her’ eyelids at Mr Fry.
The second of the men in the class, the tall, intellectual-looking, floppy haired Dieter Sinjen, seemed in danger of both seizure and rupture from laughter. He was half off his chair with one hand on the floor, convulsed with mirth.
Himmelfahrt ran round the desk again. But he encountered a problem. Mrs Fry was to speak the next line. Himmelfahrt, old trouper that he was, rapidly rejected Frau Biedermeier as the model lor Mrs Fry because her voice was too similar to his Frau Stikuta, Reception Clerk voice. So we will never know if Herr Biedermeier, sitting six feet away behind a plaster partition wall, would have heard and recognised the imitation, when he paused for breath.
Sesame Street had been going for three years and was a smash hit in West Germany, as everywhere else. One of the pretty women in the class had toddlers who loved it. So when Himmelfahrt said the next line of the dialogue as the Cookie Monster as Mrs Fry she shook her head in wonder, laughing daintily in amused disbelief and identified the voice, out loud.
‘Ja! Cookie Monster!’
‘Yes, certainly,’ said Himmelfahrt as the Cookie Monster as Mrs Fry, indicating that Mrs Fry (or possibly all of them) would like morning tea, as the Reception Clerk had so kindly enquired. ‘What time is breakfast?’
Himmelfahrt ran at top speed behind the desk again, banging his hip on its sharp corner, yelping and shouting ‘Oh bollocks!’
As he was by now in a state of hysteria and exhaustion, with his voice going hoarse, confusion set in and Laurence Olivier started to answer instead of Frau Stikuta. But he soon put that right.
‘Breakfast is served from eight till ten in the breakfast room,’ said Himmelfahrt as Frau Stikuta as the Reception Clerk, helpfully. ‘Or we can send it up to you if you wish,’ they all added.
He ran round to the side of the desk again.
Sir Laurence Olivier: ‘I think we’ll have it in our room.’
Frau Stikuta: ‘Very well, sir. I’ll call a page to take you up.’
Sir Laurence Olivier: ‘Thank you very much.’
At the end of the performance an exhausted Himmelfahrt slumped across the desk. The class applauded. Dieter Sinjen gave a finger-in-mouth whistle. Himmelfahrt, his breath coming in heaving wheezes, stood to take a brief and modest bow.
8
Outside, limbs weary and voice hoarse but on a high from his lesson, he remembered noticing a Teachers’ Room when he had dashed in from the café with Frau Stikuta. He could go in there. Oh, wait a minute. There was another lesson. He pulled his creased and torn timetable out of his pocket. Yes, there it was. 1700. That is five o’clock. Dr Brenner. Must be conversation if there’s only one. That’s alright then.
Himmelfahrt strode briskly to the Teachers’ Room. There, sitting at the table, he saw a short, squarely built woman with brown hair in flick-ups, wearing a red pullover with an enamel brooch with the letter N pinned to it, pleated grey skirt and black knee-length boots.
‘Oh, hello!’ she said, smiling warmly, turning to greet him. ‘You must be Mark, the new teacher. I’m Naomi.’
‘Hi!’ said Himmelfahrt. ‘Hi, hi.’
‘I thought they might send me to meet you, when you arrived,’ she went on. ‘They usually send me to meet the new teachers. I think they sent John because I’m a girl, so Frau Stikuta thought it wouldn’t be proper. Mind you, I’ve just got married, so I think she might have risked it!’
‘Have you? Congratulations. Anyone nice?’
Naomi laughed. ‘He’s alright. It’s alright. It’s just … sort of … alright. I’ve been married for eight months now. I’m really Frau Plutznick but I still keep the name of Prince with English people.’
‘Not surprised. From Prince to Plutznick. Was that wise?’
Himmelfahrt wondered if he had given offence, but Naomi laughed genuinely enough. ‘Yes, it’s a funny name, isn’t it? When I was growing up in Birmingham, I never expected I’d end up Mrs Plutznick, but there you are. But what about you? You arrived yesterday, didn’t you? What did you do on your first evening?’
Naomi looked expectant, ready to be interested, ready to be amused, ready to laugh. Himmelfahrt liked her.
‘Oh, I er found my way to Seestrasse,’ he said, in his man-of-the-world voice, remembering the prostitutes he had seen in the street there. ‘Just until I find something better, you know.’
Naomi laughed. ‘I say, that didn’t take you long, did it! How did you even know about Seestrasse?’
‘Oh, you know …’
The man-of-the-world shrugged suavely, implying innate antennae which led experienced men like him unerringly to what all men needed.
‘How’s your room, by the way?’ She was changing the subject, but not prudishly, just keeping the conversation going.
‘You mean the Biederzimmer?’
‘The what?’
‘The landlord is called Biedermeier. So I call it the biederroom — the Biederzimmer. It’s tiny. Minute. I’ve seen bigger packing cases. The plumbing in the bathroom is late medieval.’
Naomi laughed again, genuinely amused by him. ‘Oh I know, it’s a problem,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got a shower at all, would you believe.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Himmelfahrt. ‘What do you do, run a
round in the rain?’
Again, even as he spoke he worried that he had offended her, but again she laughed wholeheartedly. ‘No. I wash in the sink. The same one I do the pots in. And I cook on two hotplates. But I manage. Hartmut, my husband, has moved in with me now, so it’s a bit cramped. He’s not there all the time, though. He’s away doing a computer course in Tübingen at the moment.’
‘Ah, I see.’
There was a moment’s silence between them, while they just looked at each other, smiling. Then John de Launay came in, carrying English Book 1 and a pile of laminated white cards with pictures of vegetables stuck to them.
‘Hello, John,’ said Naomi, in the same warm tone she had used with Himmelfahrt.
‘Hello.’ John was grinning, twinkling, carroty hair bobbing. ‘Mark, what on earth have you done to the three o’clock class?’
‘Oh … er … Have they complained?’
‘Complained? Lord, no. They’re in a state of complete hysteria. What did you do with them?’
‘We did a dialogue called At the Hotel. I tried to liven it up a bit. Instead of booking a room, Mr and Mrs Fry reveal themselves to be Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in disguise. They blow the hotel up, because hotels are bourgeois.’
Naomi threw her head back and laughed. John twinkled and grinned.
‘Well,’ said John. ‘Whatever you really did, they liked it. They’re my old class, you know. I asked one or two of them if they’d enjoyed the lesson and they said it was a lot of fun.’
‘Thanks, John,’ said Himmelfahrt, truly grateful.
John was beaming at him in the avuncular manner he now used with Himmelfahrt once his initial frost in Himmelfahrt’s room had thawed. ‘There is one other thing, though,’ he continued, gently. ‘Frau Stikuta wants a word.’
‘Oh no!’
‘Your landlord is here. I gather he’s in a bit of a state.’
‘Oh Jesus! What have I done now?’
‘It’s probably something unimportant,’ said Naomi, sympathetically. ‘German landlords can be a bit fussy sometimes.’
‘I don’t know about that!’ teased John, twinkling. ‘He’s foaming at the mouth.’
‘Oh God!’
*
Himmelfahrt tapped at the office door and went in. Herr Biedermeier had spent the main gale of his rage on Frau Stikuta, who looked bored and weary behind her desk. The little man was now sighing gently and wringing his hands. He gave Himmelfahrt a stony look, as the youth sat down next to him.
‘Does a problem exist?’ said Himmelfahrt.
‘Our heater is kaput,’ said Herr Biedermeier.
Himmelfahrt shrugged, disclaiming responsibility.
The elf wagged a finger at Himmelfahrt, gibbering with rage. He had a leather bag with him which Himmelfahrt thought was a school satchel. In fact, it was a toolmaker’s bag, Herr Biedermeier having been a toolmaker in Essen, before the war. The landlord plunged downwards into this bag and pulled out the heater from Himmelfahrt’s room.
‘Kaput!’ he shouted, triumphantly.
He plunged down again and pulled out a blackened element. ‘Look!’ he screamed at Himmelfahrt.
Herr Biedermeier shoved the element towards Himmelfahrt. Frau Stikuta’s eyes rolled upwards in her head. This was evidently not the first appearance of the defunct element and the heater, repaired evidently by Herr Biedermeier.
‘You left the heater on,’ confirmed Frau Stikuta in a bored voice. ‘All the time …’
‘Sorry,’ said Himmelfahrt.
This did not appease the infuriated elf who was gibbering, Himmelfahrt thought, about the cost in time and money that this carelessness had wrought.
Frau Stikuta rose to her full stately height behind the desk. The almost papal authority of her crisp white blouse and tweed skirt silenced the landlord. She bade Herr Biedermeier a polite but firm farewell and the little man scuttled out.
Himmelfahrt was about to launch into a tirade of expiation in broken German but Frau Stikuta cut him short.
‘You have now another lesson, Herr Hill,’ she fluted, just a little wearily, in English.
‘Oh God!’ Yes, there was this other lesson!
Himmelfahrt clapped a hand to his forehead theatrically and Frau Stikuta smothered a smile. He pulled the disintegrating timetable out of his pocket and tried to read its runes again. Frau Stikuta led him to the lesson.
9
The lights were on in the classroom and Dr Brenner was sitting waiting; a compact, long-faced man in a tweed jacket, starched white shirt and brown tie. His fluffed white hair, although quite thick, made him look an old man to Himmelfahrt.
Dr Brenner stood as Himmelfahrt came in, smiled, extended his right arm fully and shook hands firmly. ‘Brenner,’ he said, looking Himmelfahrt directly in the eye.
‘Hello,’ said Himmelfahrt, evading his gaze. ‘I’m Mark Hill.’
They sat down. Himmelfahrt wondered what was supposed to happen next. He needn’t have worried. Dr Brenner took control completely.
‘I am Manfred Brenner. I am medicine doctor. And I tell you from my past,’ said the white-haired man, smiling. ‘And if a do a mistake you tell me, please. By Miss Prince, Frau Plutznick, she tells me every time I do a mistake. That way I learn much. We agree?’ Dr Brenner’s pale blue eyes beamed challengingly at Himmelfahrt.
‘Sure!’ said Himmelfahrt, generously. ‘You do a mistake, I tell you. It’s a deal!’ He thought of writing the mistakes down, but he had left his black ring binder with paper in it back in the Biederzimmer.
‘Good. I do not come from this part of Germany,’ began Dr Brenner, who had obviously come prepared. ‘I am from a part called Elsass. You know Elsass?’
‘You mean Alsace? Between France and Germany?’
‘Yes, but it is German, so you must say Elsass because that is the German name.’
‘OK. Elsass.’
‘Good!’
‘Thank you.’
‘Ever since the time of the Bronze Age, peoples fight about Elsass. It has never had independence. It always belongs to one side or the other. Even sixty years after Christus. You say Christus?’
‘I say Christus.’
‘Good. Even sixty years after Christus came Elsass into the fight between Germany and France.’
‘Right.’
‘After the Thirty Years War went Elsass to France. The influence of Germany and Austria becomes ever weaker in Elsass and so when Elsass becomes German again 1871 were the Germans unwelcome and hated.’
Himmelfahrt looked suitably sympathetic.
‘I am born in Elsass, in Strasbourg, 1907. French and German peoples live there. We German peoples felt ourselves German, you understand. When Germany would win at football or so, we cheered. But when we played football as childrens on the street the French childrens come and they shout at us “Vive la France, merde la Prusse, die Schwaben müssen zum Ländle raus.” You understand? You speak German?’
‘I’m learning it, Dr Brenner. I understood that. It means the Swabians have to get out of … er … the area. Get out of Elsass. Go on. This is very interesting.’
‘Then came the war. You know, I was eleven when it finished …’
‘That’s the First World War?’
‘Yes, of course! And 1 still remember end November 1918 when the French soldiers come to Elsass, playing their songs, the “Marseillaise” and the “Sambre et Meuse”. They come past our little house in the Weissturmstrasse. It means the white tower street. And all the French Elsass peoples were shouting Hooray! But we German Elsἂsser were not shouting Hooray!’
‘I can imagine.’
‘And the French President, Poincaré, he spoke against us Germans. And the other, Clemenceau, he said, “There are twenty million Germans too many in the world.”’
‘Did Clemenceau say that?’
The old man gave him a hard stare. ‘Yes!’
‘Oh, right. Sorry!’
‘After the First World War there was a commission
in Elsass. Triage-Kommission heisst sie. And they decide who can stay and live in Elsass and who must go. This commission, they look at everybody who has letter D for Deutsche on the Ausweis … On the …’
‘Identity card?’
‘Yes. The Elsass-Lothringer they got the A on the identity card.’
‘The who? Sorry.’
‘The people from Elsass-Lothring whose parents and grandparents were … reinrassige Franzosen.’
‘Er … Pure French?’
‘Yes, but if you have foreign ancestor you have B or C on your identity card. And if you have D for Deutsche on your identity card, this commission investigates you and they can throw you out of Elsass. Even childrens born in Elsass as me. One hundred thousand peoples they throw out. Just because we have D on the card.’
‘I mean that’s really … What can I say? It’s horrible, Dr Brenner.’
Himmelfahrt touched the old man lightly on the arm. It was getting dark outside. He heard the wind in the trees in Arsenalplatz.
‘Yes, horrible,’ agreed the old man. ‘I was twelve years old. They take our house, our money. We have nothing. We could take pro person a … a Zentner. It’s … doesn’t matter. It’s not very much. Just because my father was not from Elsass, because he was Swabian, from southern Germany. Here.’
‘Terrible.’
‘Yes. There was a bridge leading out of the town. The Kehler Rheinbrücke it was called. And we walk over this bridge with nothing, my mother, my father, me. Like all the peoples they throw out. We don’t even know where we are going.’
‘Look, Dr Brenner, if this is upsetting you I think we should stop. I …’
‘No, no, Mr Hill. You are very kind but I want to tell you this. When we walk over the bridge, there come … kids … They shout things to my parents and all the others and us childrens. They shout … Beleidigungen …’
‘Insults?’
‘Yes, they insults my parents. Shout … filth to them. And they have … shit with them, you know. Animal shit.’
