by Michael Dean
When Berthe rolled back to the kitchen, Naomi sighed. The other family members’ welcome had been so much warmer than Hartmut’s. Her husband continued to stare ahead with glacial superiority. She knew this was how he felt about his family, but dammit, she was making an effort, why couldn’t he? Then she gasped. There was a gun on the sideboard. A pistol.
‘What’s that?’ she said, scared but realising this reaction was what the old man wanted. ‘I hope you aren’t going to shoot my husband!’
Old Julius chuckled. ‘No need!’ he said. ‘I keep the boys in order with my fists. You see this.’ The old man flexed biceps which still would not have disgraced a middleweight boxer. ‘One cuff round the ear. That’s all it ever took with any of them. Mainhardt, Hartmut, Mario … er …’
They both laughed because Julius couldn’t remember the name of his other son.
‘Robert,’ supplied Naomi.
‘That’s it. Robert,’ chuckled the old man. ‘One cuff round the ear!’
The old man made to cuff Hartmut. His son stared at him with such blazing hatred and contempt that Naomi and Julius both looked away from him. Julius picked up the gun.
‘Be careful!’ said Naomi, again dropping into the required role. She even gave a little feminine squeak.
‘Have no fear,’ said Julius, bravely. ‘A pistol from the war,’ he added solemnly. ‘It was often in action, I can tell you.’
Julius always veered between hiding his Nazi past and hinting at unspecified valour and derring-do in the war. But the action this gun had seen was not what Julius was implying.
Julius had buried his own gun at the Rote Kreuz Barracke in Kornwestheim on that memorable evening in July 1944, just after siring Naomi’s husband. This one was a Colt 45 automatic. Julius had pinched it from an American soldier while the newly arrived Ami was swimming naked in the Neckar in May 1945. Later he had got hold of a couple of spare clips of bullets for it.
‘It’s not loaded, I hope,’ Naomi added, after the second or two it had taken her to recall how to say that in German.
‘Of course it’s loaded,’ said Julius. ‘Look.’
Julius had been waiting for this. There was a field at the back of the house, with the outside toilet in it, then allotments for miles. He opened the window, pointed the gun out of it and fired. The bang sounded loud and there was a dinging sound. Julius had hit the roof of the outside toilet. He pretended not to notice, and nobody else did.
The trick had the desired effect. Naomi gave another decorous little feminine scream.
Hartmut yelled ‘For heaven’s sake! Are you stupid, or what?’ And then, under his breath, ‘Old git.’
Julius heard the last bit and clenched his fist at him. Hartmut shrank back despite himself. The old man had given him too many beatings for the fear ever to go completely.
Reacting to the sound of the shot, Berthe ran in from the kitchen and Elvira ran down from upstairs. The older sister, Ursula, was unconscious and the bang didn’t penetrate. Robert and Mario were shooting up the shit they scored from Berlin and wouldn’t have stopped if war had broken out. Mainhardt, reeling drunk, had turned the Jethro Tull LP up and taken another slug of Korn from the bottle. If one of his family had shot another one he wasn’t that bothered.
The old man waved the pistol over his head. ‘That showed them!’ he yelled. ‘That woke them up!’ He grinned at Naomi and Naomi grinned back at him. ‘Come, my daughter,’ he said suddenly, warmly. ‘You are always welcome in this house.’
‘I know I am,’ she said.
And impulsively she went over and kissed the old reprobate on his stubbly leather cheek. Old Julius had tears in his eyes as he hugged her tight round the waist with the arm that wasn’t holding the pistol. She put her head on his shoulder for a second.
The old man growled at his son. ‘If you don’t make her completely happy I’ll kill you.’
Hartmut shifted uncomfortably in his armchair.
*
Ursula could not be roused to consciousness for Sunday lunch. A cursing Julius had gone upstairs to fetch Robert and Mario and the three of them had hauled the drunken Mainhardt down the stairs, like a sack of clinker. It was clear which of them had annoyed Julius the most during this manoeuvre: Mario bore the clear outline of a red hand on his cheek where Julius had slapped him.
Finally settled at table, Naomi surreptitiously straightened her dress. She was far from happy, but it was at least nice to be the most attractive woman in the room, for once. All the brothers, especially Mario, looked at her like a woman, when they thought nobody was looking.
Naomi was wearing an oatmeal wrap-over dress that buttoned diagonally down one side. She couldn’t wear really waisted clothes but this was nipped in a bit, so it showed off her figure nicely. It had been heavily reduced in Rackhams’ Christmas sale last year. Naomi thought it was one of the nicest dresses she had ever had. Heaven knows what she was going to do when it wore out. She wished the Germans had a Sperrmüll system for clothes.
Next to her, Hartmut was wearing his best brown suit, a white shirt and a fashionable wide reddish-brown tie. Coupled with his supercilious expression, the clothes were saying not that he had made an effort for Sunday lunch, but that he felt superior to everything around him.
*
When he left school, Hartmut had worked at Salamander as a storeman, running stock control on card-index files. It was a job where his withered arm and inability to grip with one hand didn’t matter. He wore a brown overall. Sometimes he forgot his lunchtime sandwich and Berthe went over from the factory floor to the stores to give it to him. Her son would see her coming and dive into the stores to get away from her.
Hartmut was diligent, efficient and more intelligent than the people he worked with. He made his colleagues fully aware of that. He drank rarely and sparingly (always beer, wine was bourgeois) and was so innocent of drugs he thought Mario and Robert were drunk when they were full of heroin or amphetamines or the latest brightly-coloured uppers and downers from the Berlin Zoo area.
He had joined the Communist Party, the KPD, as soon as he left school, but had the sense to shut up about it when the trade union sent him for retraining on their new computer programming course in Tübingen. Being a KPD member was not illegal, but it would have lessened his chance of getting a job.
Hartmut ate with an inelegant shovelling motion, using his right hand only — though in fact he could hold a fork lightly in his withered left if he wanted to. He tasted nothing that he ate; he hated food. He ignored his beer, which was in a sort of beaker that reminded Naomi of her job in the science lab. There were only two proper beer mugs and Berthe had given them to Julius and Naomi. Julius was already on his second half-litre of the local beer, Dinkelacker, and was ominously red in the face.
Naomi was sincerely praising the Gaisburgermarsch, savouring every mouthful and asking Berthe in detail how she had prepared it. Berthe, unused to all this attention, or any attention at all, was blushing and answering as well as she could.
Mario and Robert were having a muttered conversation, comparing arresting officers in the manner of connoisseurs. Robert and Mario’s favourite arresting officer was Sergeant Heuss, who had been nicking Mario since he was nine and always had a cheery word for him. Sometimes he even recommended a good pro bono lawyer. Mario thought he was much better than Gerhard Söderle and Andreas Lübke, who the brothers called Nazis because they were efficient and did not believe the lies Robert and Mario told them.
Naomi noticed that Robert and Mario, but particularly Robert, were yellow from jaundice brought on by sniffing solvents. Robert also kept dozing off for seconds at a time — that was from the barbiturates.
Once, she had found Robert’s Identity Card on the floor. It gave his profession as musician. So when she handed it to him she had innocently asked him which instruments he played. He didn’t play any instruments and he didn’t sing. It was just that nobody put drug dealer down as an occupation on an Identity Card.
; She remembered one visit when Robert had fallen asleep in the locked outside lavatory and the entire Sunday afternoon had been spent devising ways of getting him out. Frau Plutznick had been in hysterics in case he was dead. Nobody could use the toilet for hours and Naomi and Elvira had crept off to go in the field. While they were away, Julius had shot the lock off, narrowly missing the unconscious Robert. An ambulance had been called to take him to hospital.
*
Naomi noticed a motto embroidered on a sampler on the wall. She burst out laughing. You saw that kind of folksy home-made artwork in some of the more twee pubs in the Swabian villages. It usually said something like ‘There’s a hole in my bucket’ with a knitted picture of a little boy with a holed bucket to illustrate the point.
This one, though, was a political slogan which was around a lot as the election came nearer. It was an anti CDU/CSU slogan — against the right-wing Christian Democrat and Christian Social Union alliance led by Rainer Barzel and Franz Josef Strauss. It mockingly asked God to protect the house from the two them.
Naomi read the motto aloud and laughed again. ‘Du lieber Gott, beschütz dieses Haus’ — Dear God protect this house — ‘Von Barzel und Franz-Josef Strauss’ — From Barzel and Franz-Josef Strauss.
‘Did you put that up?’ Naomi said to Hartmut, nodding at the folk-art political slogan, realising even as she spoke that this attempt at levity was all wrong.
Hartmut did not deign to reply.
‘I made it,’ said Elvira, shyly. She was pleased at Naomi’s interest and not all offended by her laughter.
‘I think it’s beautiful,’ said Naomi.
‘I think it’s shit,’ growled Hartmut.
Naomi plunged in, knowing it was wrong, caring yet not caring, wanting at least to get to the bottom of things with Hartmut.
‘I thought you would have approved,’ she said, edgily. ‘The CDU and the CSU are the class-enemy, aren’t they? I mean, they belong to the right?’
‘Frau!’ said Hartmut, in that mock-exasperated, patronising tone he used when he knew something and he thought she didn’t. (At the beginning he had used it when she made mistakes in German, but these days she was usually right about matters like the subjunctive and the genitive — ignored in Swabian dialect — so Hartmut steered clear of language issues altogether.)
Hartmut nearly left it at that, but his frustration with time spent at the family home tipped over. He put his fork down, picked up his beaker of beer, sipped and plunged on.
‘The aim,’ he explained patiently, ‘is not for this party or that party to win. The aim is that the whole shit system comes down.’
‘By the whole shit system you mean democracy?’ said Naomi.
Hartmut rolled his eyes in the manner of one provoked to the limit by idiocy. ‘Yes. Wife. I whistle at your English democracy.’
Julius was smoking a Roth Handle between mouthfuls of food. On hearing, through a drunken haze, the word ‘English’ sneered at, he shot Hartmut a warning look.
‘And what would you replace English democracy with?’ said Naomi.
‘With rule by and for the workers.’
‘What all of them? There’s millions of them. Who takes the decisions? Who is the government?’
‘The Party of course.’
‘So you have an unelected dictatorship, like in East Germany?’ Her face was tight with tension.
‘Elections are not necessary. The Party is the workers and the workers are the Party.’
‘So you think workers are better off in East Germany?’
‘I know they are. It is the workers’ paradise of East Germany. That is what it is called.’
‘So the workers in East Germany have more money than they do in the west? There’s no pollution? You know that. You’ve been everywhere.’
‘I do not need to see everything for myself. Because I am in the Party. I have only two eyes but the …’
Naomi finished it ‘… party has a thousand eyes. Yes, you say that every time.’
Everybody round the table tittered. Nobody was really following this discussion, but if Hartmut and Naomi were having a row they all wanted Naomi to win. Even the dog, Bubale, went to lay on her feet.
‘I have only two eyes but the party has a thousand eyes,’ intoned Hartmut.
It was time to stop, to let it go. She didn’t. She’d had enough. ‘You know, when I actually see you with a worker, you are always rude to them.’
‘Me? Rubbish.’
‘You are always rude to waiters.’
‘Waiters are not workers.’
‘So you decide who is a worker and who isn’t, do you?’
‘Ach!’ Hartmut went back to his dinner, signifying the end of the conversation.
Tears pricked Naomi’s eyes. Her memory flashed back then, as it often did, to the time she had first made love with him. They had been going out together for three months and were having a row, as usual. She was afraid he was going to dump her, like all the others had.
‘You think you are better than me,’ he had said, in Café Lassas, over a coffee.
‘No!’
‘You think you are better than me because you had a better education.’
His eyes bored into her from that handsome hawk-nosed face. In those days he was still smoking. He started to struggle one-handed with the cellophane on a packet of Roth Händle. She took the cellophane off the cigarette packet for him.
‘I don’t …’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’m better …’
To prove it she took him back to her room and let him make love to her. He was inexperienced but she showed him what to do. Sometimes the ones who started inexperienced were the best, once they got going. It had been a while since she had made love and it had been a great relief.
They got married a few months afterwards. Naomi had wanted them to find a flat together, a flat with a bathroom. Hartmut had told her thousands of workers did not have bathrooms. He moved in with her, staying whenever he felt like it, more often staying away.
He had never paid a pfennig in rent, nor contributed anything to her food and household bills. So she was poorer than ever. He also, increasingly, tried to control how she spent what little money she had, to the extent that her main pleasure, going to the cinema, was increasingly being forbidden to her as ‘a waste of money’.
And now, in the middle of a row over a subject she couldn’t care less about, politics, over Sunday lunch with her new family, Naomi suddenly realised what Hartmut wanted, even if Hartmut didn’t realise it himself: As part of the great equalisation process, the fine English lady with the great education was to be brought down to the level of the masses.
She was not to have a bathroom. Nobody was to have a bathroom.
*
When the meal was over, Naomi was happy enough to escape to the room Elvira shared with Ursula, at the child’s pulling insistence. Ursula was still unconscious on the floor. Mind you, she usually was. Naomi shrugged and decided to ignore it.
The room was an Aladdin’s cave of books. Books on the floor, books on the bed, books on shelves. There were also some square brown parcels on the floor, looking suspiciously as if they contained books. Naomi had a real itch to look at the titles, pick herself out something to read. One of the disadvantages of living abroad and being dirt poor was having to read what you could get hold of, not what you wanted to read. But little Elvira was obviously worried and that came first.
‘Elvira, why have you got all these books?’ said Naomi, gently.
‘I joined a book club,’ confessed Elvira. ‘I saw an advertisement. They gave me a free book. But now they won’t stop. Nobody knows. I find the postman outside every day and when he has a parcel I take it to my room.’
‘But how do you pay for these books?’
‘I can’t pay,’ wailed Elvira and tears rolled down her undernourished looking cheeks. ‘I haven’t got any money.’ She nodded at the mute accusation of uneven piles of invoices. The child had obviously tried to sort
them out, but given up.
‘I must think,’ said Naomi, more to herself than Elvira.
She cleared a book-free space on Elvira’s folding camp bed, sat down and lit up one of her HB cigarettes. Elvira waited, perfectly still, calm now a grown-up was going to tell her what to do.
In fact, Naomi had no idea what to do, but was thinking of people who could help. This would be a tall order even for John, clever though he was. Aaah! Frau von Gravensburg! She would know what to do. And she had so much energy.
Frau von Gravensburg had been coming for conversation lessons for two years now. She and her husband Michael, a design engineer, were among the closest friends Naomi had in Ludwigsburg. She was ITT’s head of marketing, based at the Böblingen branch. Naomi often went for meals at their lovely flat in Grünbühl and they had taken her to art exhibitions and concerts as far away as Geneva, tactfully paying for everything. The von Gravensburgs were Austrian and felt themselves outsiders in Swabia, far more than Naomi did. Frau von Gravensburg was amusingly acerbic about the ‘pig ignorant Swabian peasants’ as seen from the height of her Austrian aristocratic connections.
Naomi finished the cigarette. Explaining to Elvira what she was doing, she started gathering up every invoice she could find.
‘Where did you get this book offer? Which magazine?’
‘It was a magazine for girls, Naomi. I can’t remember what it was called.’
Naomi started to look for magazines, in the squalid bedroom, but there was a crashing commotion from further along the landing. They heard the distant waterfall of Julius roaring at his family. Naomi could make out the word Dieb (thief). There were thuds as various family members in varying states of awareness were hauled down the stairs by combinations of other family members.
Then the door burst open. Julius stood, breathless, in the doorway, red in the face, dribbling slightly, sweat soaking his indeterminate coloured shirt at the armpits. He glanced at the unconscious Ursula, then ignored her.
‘Downstairs, Elvira. Quick. Naomi, please come downstairs. Sorry, Naomi …’
‘What’s happened?’ asked Naomi.
‘I’ll tell you downstairs. Aaah this family of mine. This band of pigs.’
