Marrow and Bone

by Walter Kempowski

  WALTER KEMPOWSKI (1929–2007) was born in Hamburg. During World War II, he was made to serve in a penalty unit of the Hitler Youth due to his association with the rebellious Swingjugend movement of jazz lovers, and he did not finish high school. After the war he settled in West Germany. On a 1948 visit to Rostock, his hometown, in East Germany, Walter, his brother Robert, and their mother were arrested for espionage; a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison, of which he served eight at the notorious “Yellow Misery” prison in Bautzen. In 1957 he graduated from high school. His first success as an author was the autobiographical novel Tadellöser & Wolff (1971), part of his acclaimed German Chronicle series of novels. In the 1980s he began work on an immense project, Echo Soundings, gathering firsthand accounts, diaries, letters, and memoirs of the Second World War, which he collated and curated into ten volumes published over twenty years, and which is considered a modern classic. His 2006 novel, All for Nothing, was translated by Anthea Bell and is available from NYRB Classics.

  CHARLOTTE COLLINS studied English literature at Cambridge and worked as an actor and radio journalist before becoming a literary translator. In 2017 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for her translation of Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life.

  MARROW AND BONE

  WALTER KEMPOWSKI

  Translated from the German by

  CHARLOTTE COLLINS

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1992 by Albrecht Knaus Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, Munich, Germany

  Translation and translator’s note copyright © 2018 by Charlotte Collins

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in the German language in 1992 as Mark und Bein.

  Cover image: R.B. Kitaj, Cecil Court, London W.C.2. (The Refugees), 1983–4; courtesy of the Estate of R.B. Kitaj

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kempowski, Walter, author. | Collins, Charlotte, 1967– translator.

  Title: Marrow and bone / by Walter Kempowski ; translated by Charlotte Collins.

  Other titles: Mark und Bein. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2020. | Series: New York Review Books classics | Translated from the German.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019027201 (print) | LCCN 2019027202 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374352 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781681374369 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PT2671.E43 M3713 2020 (print) | LCC PT2671.E43 (ebook) | DDC 833/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027201

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027202

  ISBN 978-1-68137-436-9

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  MARROW AND BONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Translator’s Note

  Glossary

  For Robert

  For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

  Hebrews 4:12

  1

  On Isestrasse in Hamburg there stands a row of imposing houses from the turn of the twentieth century. They tower behind ancient black chestnut trees, five or six storeys high, grandly built, adorned with stucco tendrils, their date displayed triumphantly on the gable. Decrepit lifts with wrought-iron grilles go up and down in their tiled stairwells. Juddering up and down in these lifts, you feel you could be in Paris – Paris, London or Milan.

  Isestrasse would not have been left standing after the war if the bomb aimers of the Allied air forces had pressed their release buttons a hundredth of a second earlier or later. Firestorms all around, explosions, people buried alive – but Isestrasse did remain standing, and still stands today, with its tiled stairwells and antique lifts, in spite of property speculation and a mania for renovation.

  The street is always bathed in the genteel shade of the huge chestnut trees, and every five minutes a train thunders along the steel girders of the elevated railway. Local antiques dealers would have robbed the girders of their art nouveau ornamentation long ago if such a thing were possible. Cars park under the railway, and a farmers’ market is held there twice a week, selling pallid poultry, Black Forest stone-baked bread and unripe tropical fruit.

  The railway runs in front of the houses, and behind them lies the Isebek canal, a murky, disused branch of the Alster on which tourists potter about in pedal boats.

  •

  In one of these houses lived Jonathan Fabrizius, known to his friends as ‘Joe’. He was forty-three years old, of medium height, a man whose neatly parted blond hair was cut by a barber, not a stylist.

  The best thing about him was his eyes. Neither short-sighted nor long-sighted, unimpeded by astigmatism, he registered all that he encountered. True, his ear lobes were always a little grubby, and he had been known to throw up in a wastepaper basket on occasion, but his eyes were bright and clear, and anyone who had anything to do with him was struck by them.

  ‘Whatever he may be,’ such people said, ‘he’s somehow . . . I don’t know . . .’

  Jonathan had studied a wide variety of things: German language and literature, history, psychology and art. He had climbed the rungs of the ladder, ascending ever higher, right up into the dusty rafters; he had gazed out through spider-blinded window slits across the verdant plain and been visited by clarity and truth. And now here he sat, with his clarity and truth, looking around him. What was he to do with all this refinement? What was it good for?

  He was still enrolled at the university in order to keep his health insurance, but he had abandoned his studies. He earned a living writing newspaper articles and received regular commissions from journals and magazines because editors appreciated the verve of his diction and the punctuality of his delivery. He couldn’t actually live on these commissions; he didn’t have to, because he got a monthly allowance from his uncle, who owned a furniture factory in Bad Zwischenahn that manufactured inexpensive sofa beds of the simplest design for which there were always plenty of takers.

  •

  Jonathan occupied the room at the back of the apartment with a view of the Isebek canal. His girlfriend, Ulla, had the front room overlooking the street. The sliding door that linked the two large rooms – or separated them, depending on your point of view – was blocked off on Jonathan’s side by a battered leather sofa and on Ulla’s by bookshelves and a stereo that poured forth the familiar, old-fashioned melodies Ulla favoured, especially in the evenings: Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E-flat major or the ‘Prague’ Symphony, with that squeak of the horn. Gilt-framed pencil sketches by Du Bois hung over her Biedermeier sofa, and a French lamp with an orange glass shade shed a cosy light on the coffee table.

 
•

  Jonathan possessed neither a stereo nor a seating corner. The big leather sofa, sprouting horsehair from a rip in the seat, was his main item of furniture. This was where he slept, this was where he spilt his yoghurt and this was where he read a wide variety of popular scientific literature to maintain an overview, although he didn’t really know to what end. The manual typewriter with its defective E sat in front of the sofa on a white kitchen table. Beside it were newspapers, books, a saucer full of matches, used earplugs and dirty socks. A naked lightbulb hung from a dusty stucco ceiling rose, and this gave enough light.

  The parquet floor of his room was covered with linoleum. Jonathan had wanted to rip out this abstract-patterned floor covering because, he said, it prevented the wooden floor underneath from breathing. A large section had already been thrown out before his girlfriend discovered that the design on the flooring was an interesting piece of work from the early 1930s by Vladimir Kolaszewski, definitely worth preserving. Ever since, with its ruined flooring, his room had had a rather jerry-built appearance, as if there hadn’t been enough money to finish the job. From time to time Jonathan would stare at the pattern on the linoleum, chewing his nails. He visualized it as a map, depicting roads, rivers and towns, and this served as a stimulus for long imaginative games. What a shame the piece he’d ripped out had been disposed of. He could have framed it and hung it on the wall.

  Hanging there instead was a painting by Botero of a fat child in muted colours. Jonathan had acquired it in the 1960s and paid it off in hundred-mark instalments. From time to time the dealer he’d bought it from would ask him if he still wanted it. Wouldn’t he like to sell it back to him?

  All around the walls books were stacked untidily on the sticky floor, research for an extended feature on Brick Gothic architecture. He had rather lost sight of this undertaking; the magazine he had planned to write it for had not shown a great deal of interest. It was a southern German paper, the editors of which couldn’t tell Stralsund from Wismar. They found the photos of the hulking great buildings rather off-putting: Kolberg, with that bulky, slanted roof? And a ruin as well?

  Jonathan had a wardrobe containing some crumpled jackets; beside it was a makeshift washing area that could be divided off from the rest of the room by drawing a plastic curtain along a thin rod. When Jonathan washed his hands in the soap-encrusted basin he could see out of the window, and his glance would fall on a weeping willow trailing its branches in the murky water of the Isebek canal. No swans swam beneath it, but at least there were ducks.

  The apartment’s remaining rooms belonged to a general’s widow. She was from the east, and seldom emerged from her dark vaults, where she relived memories of a bygone age. From time to time they heard her chesty cough, which she relieved by hawking into the kitchen sink.

  •

  Jonathan’s girlfriend’s full name was Ulla Bakkre de Vaera. She was dark-haired and of Swedish descent. She liked to wear a long knitted skirt with multicoloured horizontal stripes and a men’s worsted jacket, shiny with wear, with a silver workman’s watch in the breast pocket. Ulla had a pretty, round face still unmarked by the years: sweet at first glance, resolute at second. The thing that really bothered her was her left incisor. The nerve had been removed years ago and now the tooth was turning black, a blemish on her girlish features. Every morning she looked at this blemish in the mirror and was momentarily sad. Extraction or a crown? That was the question, and had been for years.

  Ulla Bakkre de Vaera possessed a fine ring, a well-worn cameo on caramel-coloured stone that she had inherited from her father. It dated back to the second century BC, or so it had been claimed for generations, and ought really to have been handed down to a different branch of the family. It was thanks to this ring that she had got the part-time job at the municipal art museum; she was studying art history and financing her studies herself. Although the museum director had received a letter from her father intended to smooth her path, Dr Kranstöver had been on the verge of rejecting her as she sat there in his office – a tad too pretty, perhaps? But then his glance had fallen on the ring, and that had tipped the scales. Ulla got the job. She was allowed to show foreign guests around, edit catalogues and stand discreetly in a corner at exhibition openings, nodding at the director approvingly. One of these days he would take her out for a meal.

  She had also been allowed to help design a children’s corner in the museum, with tactile objects, squidgy carpets and the kind of slide they used to have in shoe shops. Children could draw on the walls with coloured chalk. Alas, these artworks could not be assimilated into the collection as the cleaning ladies rubbed them out every morning, shaking their heads.

  Ulla was currently preparing an exhibition about depictions of cruelty in the visual arts. Her shelves were full of books showing all sorts of Inquisition torture, events from the Thirty Years War, and Goya, of course, his depictions of wartime atrocities. This was also where she kept her alphabetical card index, which comprised everything from disembowelling to the drawing of teeth. It was an anthology of cruelties that left no aspect of human fiendishness unexamined. And it wasn’t all medieval panels. Every day the newspapers also provided material of interest: police in modern armour, blood-streaked victims of terrorism, South Africans with burning tyres about their necks. She must pay particular attention to the Africans, as an artistic rendering of this distinctive form of lynching was only to be expected.

  None of these terrible images left the slightest impression on Ulla. As her studies had taught her, she considered only their formal aspects: the diagonals, for example, connecting extreme martyrdom with salvific objects, or the barely detectable way an artist had used light and shade to create emphasis, conveying a deeper meaning to the observer. The exhibition should not stimulate people’s baser instincts; it should provoke revulsion, together with an energetic determination never to allow such things to happen again in this world. Evil exists in order to awaken good, which was why the exhibition catalogue would be prefaced by Mephistopheles’ famous words from Goethe’s Faust:

  I am a part of that power which would

  Do evil constantly, and constantly does good.

  2

  On a cool morning in August 1988 Jonathan sprang past the cleaning lady on his way up the stairs. He had been to the market to buy a bag of bread rolls and a bunch of flowers. As he hurried up, taking the stairs three at a time, he ran the forefinger of his left hand along the water lily tiles in the stairwell, holding the flowers and the bag of rolls in his right. The flowers were for Ulla, who turned twenty-nine today. She’d put up with him, as she expressed it, for three years now, although he thought he was actually the one who had put up with a lot.

  Ulla was still in bed. She knew it was already nearly ten, and she’d realized that Jonathan had gone out for the rolls. She was still in bed because today that was her prerogative. She was thinking about a doll’s house with a library and smoking room that she had seen in a shop on a nearby street: it could be destroyed at the touch of a button and was intended as a form of therapy through which children could channel their destructive urges. Ulla had always been interested in toys: figures with smoke cartridges at the back, wind-up animals that bared their teeth. People could buy little guillotines to celebrate the French Revolution. She could get hold of one and suggest it to the museum director as an exhibit.

  •

  Now Jonathan was banging about in the kitchen, and shortly afterwards he broke in on the muffled drowsiness of her doze, pulled aside the curtain with a clatter and sat down on the edge of her bed. Congratulations were in order. Jonathan got through the embarrassment of the little ceremony by uttering awkward clichés and stroking his girlfriend vaguely with his right hand, much as one might close the eyes of the dead, while simultaneously laying the breakfast table and setting out the boiled eggs with his left. He had to stand to light the candles and arrange the bunch of flowers, which brought the little ritual to an end.

  He poured the coffee and
shook the rolls out into the bread-basket. Then he extracted her birthday present from his wallet: a tiny Callot etching that depicted someone being sawn into pieces. He gave her the postage-stamp-sized etching and watched her closely to see what she would say about him giving her such a beautiful present. Bullseye! Ulla devoured the quartering with her eyes – ‘Sweet!’ – and leant it against the candle stick so she could look at it again and again. Then she drew her boyfriend down to her and gave him kisses like fiery little coins, holding his head in both hands as she did so.

  When he was restored to freedom he took the post from his jacket pocket and sorted through it. Five letters were addressed to the birthday girl, two to him. She sat up, spread a roll with honey and read the letters, the contents of which were as you would expect.

  Jonathan clumsily opened his two letters with his forefinger. One was from the Santubara car factory in Mutzbach – junk mail, presumably – the other from his Uncle Edwin in Bad Zwischenahn. It contained a cheque for more than two hundred marks and the suggestion that he do something sensible with it on this day.

  ‘Treat yourselves to something,’ his uncle wrote. ‘Enjoy the good things in life.’

  Conflicting emotions prevented Jonathan from showing the cheque to his girlfriend, who was busy with her own letters. He left it in the envelope and quickly slipped it into his pocket.

  •

  Ulla was from an orderly family; she had money in the bank and gilt-framed ancestral portraits. Jonathan, however, was born on a covered cart in East Prussia in February 1945, in an icy wind and sharp, freezing rain on the trek away from the Eastern Front. His young mother had ‘breathed her last’, as Jonathan put it, in the process. ‘I never knew my parents,’ he would say, usually with indifference. ‘My father was killed on the Baltic coast, on the Vistula Spit, and my mother breathed her last after giving birth to me in East Prussia in 1945.’ As far as suffering was concerned, this guaranteed him an unparalleled advantage over his friends.