Marrow and Bone

by Walter Kempowski

  •

  The next morning Jonathan decided to pay a visit to the general’s widow. East Prussian, eighty years old – perhaps she could provide him with some background information that would be useful for his article. He pictured the sleigh rides this woman might have gone on as a child to her uncle on his neighbouring estate: rosy cheeks, wolves perhaps running behind the sleigh, and then the horses stumble, and the beasts sink their fangs into the bellies of the noble animals and warm blood gushes forth.

  He knocked on the door, and after a while it was opened. The general’s widow was a gaunt woman with pale-blue eyes and a crown of white curls framing a girlish face cross-hatched with wrinkles. She was not in the least surprised to find the young man, who could have come to see her long ago, paying her a visit on a Wednesday morning at quarter past eleven. She let him into her dark suite of rooms, offered him a cracked 1950s armchair, sat down on the couch, which was covered in books and newspapers, and put her feet up. A crudely tinted, large-format photograph of her husband in his general’s uniform hung above the sofa, and in front of her, on the little crescent-shaped table, stood a portable typewriter that looked as if it had probably come from the Wehrmacht supply room. She had clearly been writing something; there was a piece of paper on the roller, and the cigarette she had set aside sent a vertical column of smoke up into the air. Beyond the sepulchral living room the other rooms, glimpsed through open sliding doors, conveyed a sense that someone had just been in there searching for weapons.

  •

  Jonathan was extremely courteous. He informed her that he too was from East Prussia, sort of – Rosenau, perhaps she’d heard of the place? During the evacuation he had, as it were, ‘lost’ his mother, which was to say that she had breathed her last, or rather bled to death, after his birth. He asked after the health of the esteemed general’s widow, who had borne seven children with scarcely a problem: merchants, bankers, a clerk in an industrial firm, and Jonas, the golden boy, who was married, lived in California and asked her for money from time to time. He would have liked to address the general’s widow, as she sat there looking at him, as ‘Excellency’, or at the very least ‘Madame’, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Those blue eyes, that crown of white curls . . . although smoking like a chimney didn’t really go with the teenager look.

  To give the old lady time to focus on the past Jonathan said how wonderful it was to be living here in the house on Isestrasse and how strange that the two of them had never exchanged a word before now. Such a thing would never happen in southern countries, he said, crossing his legs. In southern countries people were much friendlier. Recently, on Lake Garda – how he’d enjoyed that! – the people had invited him to join a funeral celebration: such natural good cheer! They’d offered him wine and cake, even though the Wehrmacht had shot thirteen men from the village in a nearby railway tunnel. Hamburg was more aloof: it seemed it was unheard of here to show consideration for other human beings. The other day he’d asked a man at a phone box if he had any change and had been completely ignored.

  As he was talking he let his eyes wander round the room. Good grief, what a mess. Beside the sofa stood a glass cabinet full of china, its cracked pane taped up with sticking plaster. There were some little paintings on the wall that were really not bad, technically sound – an avenue, a lake with trees and swans – and then there were van Gogh’s inevitable sunflowers mounted on compressed cardboard.

  Who’s going to inherit all these pictures? thought Jonathan. He wondered why the lady didn’t just take one down and give it to him. You don’t need pictures any more when you’re that old!

  The general’s widow probably thought he’d come about the rent; that he wasn’t able to pay it. She lit a new cigarette from the butt of the old one and heard instead that Jonathan had to – and, of course, wanted to – go to Poland, East Prussia to be precise, and was gathering general information about the region. Books didn’t tell him the things he needed to know about local customs, superstitions. No doubt she had invaluable knowledge to impart. His generation was completely uninformed about these matters.

  The general’s widow took a sip of coffee, which was surely cold by now, from her stained cup. The saucer remained stuck to the bottom. ‘Dear God, yes, East Prussia,’ she said. But before telling him that she was currently in the midst of writing it all down for her grandchildren she complained that the foliage outside her window, the trees on the street, stopped the sunlight getting in. She felt like a night owl! Her only consolation was that every other house had chestnuts outside; only hers, number 13, had a plane tree. So hers was the exception! This plane tree reminded her of the park on her uncle’s estate – Heiditten, 1938 – where she’d spent so many wonderful days.

  ‘All chestnuts,’ she said in her deep voice. ‘One after another. My house is the only one with a plane tree outside.’ It was nice, but a bit crazy too, she said, and typical of Hamburg City Council. Her life had been full of special things, crazy things. In East Prussia, back in ’45, the people on the neighbouring estates had been killed by Red Army soldiers. Only she was spared. The soldiers had been about to start their looting; they were already pointing the gun at her when an officer of the guard came along with his staff, threw those fellows out, moved in with her and protected her. It was a blessing, of course, that she could speak Russian.

  Along he came and lived in her house. There was roasting and frying and piano playing in the evenings. And then he’d more or less conducted her out. ‘You can’t stay here,’ he’d said, and had driven her in a car across Polish territory to Stettin. She could still see him standing there at the border. Incredible: she still thought about it today.

  Her husband had had an inkling early on of what was in store for East Prussia. His realism had not been clouded. Imagine: he’d bought this house in the summer of 1944, transferred crates and crates of books and paintings here and all the silver. Her cousin in Bonn had rescued nothing but the clothes she stood up in. Not a single item. Whereas she had rescued pretty much everything.

  Crazy.

  On the windowsill, where an ancient bouquet of flowers was scattering its petals over dead flies, stood frames full of photographs: the highly decorated husband, the children and she herself, a young woman with a crown of blonde curls. Yes – this young girl was, without a doubt, the general’s widow, sixty years ago.

  Jonathan stared at it in amazement. A powerful yearning rose up in him for a time when white manor houses gazed out over golden fields of corn, and a young officer came riding up and was expected at the gate.

  On the writing desk lay an old photo album, bound in faded green velvet with brass corners and clasps. The general’s widow asked him to pass it to her. She leafed through, explaining the pictures to Jonathan, who came to stand beside her: the whitewashed house, covered in vine tendrils, with the donkey cart in front; her sisters in little sailor dresses; her father out hunting with Hindenburg.

  Then she told him stories. Her upbringing had been strict: unheated bedrooms in winter, but on birthdays her mother would tie a ribbon around her arm with a big blue bow. If you were wearing a blue ribbon, everyone knew that today was your birthday.

  The general’s widow went on like this, lighting cigarette after cigarette, each from the butt of the last, and Jonathan thought: What a shame no one’s interested in these stories nowadays. He wasn’t interested in them either, but he did think it was a strange situation, him sitting here one Wednesday in August, in the room of a survivor, an ancient relic. The younger generation listening at the feet of Age – though not indefinitely, of course. He must drop it into his next conversation with Albert Schindeloe that he was always chatting to old people; it was important to look out for them, after all.

  One story followed another. Time passed. Finally the grandchildren were counted off – one married in Canada, one a lawyer for Bayer in Leverkusen – and Jonathan wished he were far, far away. In his room, on his nice leather sofa. What on earth had he been thin
king of, letting himself in for this?

  ‘Do go to East Prussia, Herr Fabrizius,’ said the general’s widow, rising to her feet. ‘It’ll be a journey you’ll never forget.’

  •

  With the visit concluded Jonathan went back to his room and threw himself on to his sofa. It was curious, he thought; she’d been drawing a pension for forty years now, not to mention compensation for her losses during the war. How many generals’ wives were there, all of them drawing pensions? It was extraordinary that the national economy could afford it. Then he considered that other people received pensions and benefits too, and that ultimately the recipients of these pensions and benefits went out and spent the money. They used it to buy cigarettes, for example, or coffee, or immersion heaters; and those merchants used it to pay the wages and salaries of their employees, who in turn bought cigarettes and coffee and got themselves a new stereo.

  So who loses out in the end? thought Jonathan, getting tangled up in his own reasoning.

  7

  Jonathan would have liked to spend his last evening sitting quietly with Ulla listening to the Piano Concerto in E-flat major and browsing through one of her neatly compiled cruelty folders (the positioning of the feet of the Crucified!), but for some reason it wasn’t possible. Ulla was restless. She was prowling up and down beside the wall unit and glancing out of the window, almost as if she were expecting someone. She said she had to work anyway; she had to go through everything with Dr Kranstöver again at the museum at eight o’clock to make final preparations for the exhibition. There were more testimonies of acts of cruelty than you would think. Cannibals in Africa and Central America; people being flayed alive; she must send a telex to Mexico. Cruelty? The subject was infinite.

  •

  Jonathan decided to go to a piano recital. The pianist Stepanskaya was playing Chopin and Debussy at the Kleines Haus, which was just right for this evening.

  Ulla had the record Children’s Corner; it had long been part of her evening repertoire. She also had a record of Chopin’s Études, and it was hard to believe ten fingers were enough to create such a din.

  Jonathan would be spared that this evening: various Chopin Nocturnes were on the programme but no Études. It also included the beautiful ballads in G-minor that made you think, oh, I could play this too, and then suddenly got incredibly complicated. This music should be played to young people who otherwise preferred to ruin their hearing in discos, to prove to them that classical music does have its charms.

  •

  The organizer had arranged for real candles to be placed on the theatre’s (rather battered) grand piano, and Stepanskaya was wearing a yellow silk dress which she had spread out far behind her. As she sat on her stool, collecting herself for a moment, her dark hair fell forward, making her appear desirable although she was quite advanced in age. Then she raised her head, wrung her hands as if in prayer and suddenly pounced on the keys.

  That intimate space, the atmospheric lighting, the mostly refined audience leaning in slightly to get closer to the music or leaning back as if the enharmonic changes were fanning them with a balmy evening breeze: Jonathan took it all in. There were students with prominent Adam’s apples accompanied by their girlfriends, and little girls who would, it might be hoped, find piano lessons more palatable after this; there were very old people with hearing aids, thinking of their parental homes – Mother, ah yes, how beautiful she was; and Father would stand beside her at the piano – ‘Chant sans paroles’ – turning the pages. Towards all of these people the molten music flowed along prepared, receptive channels.

  This is Western culture, thought Jonathan. He hoped the people sitting to the left and right of him could tell that he too belonged to Western culture and was contributing to it with his work, beyond the waving wheatfields of music, from one intellect to another. That he was not above travelling to East Prussia purely out of interest and possibly being mugged by someone who took a shine to his watch.

  He listened to the music, testing his memory to see whether he recognized the chords and runs. Why don’t I own a house beside a lake? he wondered: white, behind a copper beech tree, with steps leading down to the water, the bottom one sculpted by little lapping waves. He would sit on a white bench in front of the cool white house, and the open windows would spill forth the music he was listening to now, music you could no longer really listen to with a clear conscience. In the deserts of Africa refugees drag themselves through the sand, plagued by hunger and thirst, only to end up living on rubbish tips in the cities.

  •

  Sitting so close to others in the confines of the small room made it hard for Jonathan to concentrate and allow himself to be transported. These people hadn’t all come for the music; they were already familiar with it. They had come to wallow in their own memories and to experience something that might become part of history, so that one day they’d be able to say: I was there, I experienced it – the concert when Stepanskaya played those beautiful, melancholy moonlit runs, up and down, sent them out into the concert hall, then collapsed over the keys. She was rumoured to be incurably ill.

  It made Jonathan uncomfortable, this physical proximity to people who smelt of old cigar smoke or exuded clouds of powder and perfume and were fervently hoping Stepanskaya would meet her maker that night. In front of him a child even demanded, quite audibly, to sit on its mother’s lap – ‘Mummy, is it nearly over?’ Yet he also found the proximity to these people appealing, people whose minds were now creating images to go with the music, like an interior film playing to the score of F-sharp minor and A major. These were people of intellect, not the kind who holidayed on the Cornish cliffs and said afterwards, ‘It was nice.’ People who cared about culture and made sure it didn’t die, who were prepared to pay fifteen marks to hear compositions to which they could, in part, have hummed along.

  •

  Unlike the concert-goers to his right and left, Jonathan did not see moonlit nocturnal forests. He regretted that the score wasn’t on a moving band above the curtain so he could follow whether it was about to go up or down. Instead, he accompanied the music with thoughts about Chopin’s blood-spitting latter years. A monk’s cell shaped like a coffin, in a damp monastery on Majorca. Exploited by the locals, rain all day and all night, then travelling on to London – such foolhardiness.

  He also thought about George Sand, that incorrigible trouser-wearing woman who initially tended to Chopin before leaving him in the lurch. Did she also give a two-fingered whistle on certain occasions?

  As the mortally ill Stepanskaya hammered out the melancholy chords, Jonathan was walking through the damp Carthusian monastery with the blood-spitting composer, filled with foreboding. Perhaps he would be murdered in Poland? His skull split by an axe; or a knife to the stomach? He saw himself lying spreadeagled on the ground in a forest, throat cut, a Central European sacrificial lamb.

  •

  Then it was Debussy’s turn, with his underwater music. Despite the fact that he had been a savage hater of Germans, the audience loved him. ‘Clair de lune’ . . . This was the memory of summer evenings with no mosquitoes, evenings when you didn’t need to go back indoors to fetch a blanket or think about the office tomorrow; evenings spent, instead, recalling long-forgotten memories. If one ignored the ridiculous occasions for which Debussy created pieces of music – ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ – these impressionistic sounds were indispensable to the soul. It was a pity you couldn’t hang them on the wall like van Gogh’s sunflowers.

  One of the pieces Ms Stepanskaya played was called ‘The Sunken Cathedral’. According to the programme you could clearly hear the cathedral ascending from the depths, little by little, finally rising up in glory before the eyes of mankind.

  •

  The woman stopped playing, and the rhythmic applause began, interspersed with occasional cries of ‘Bravo!’ in acknowledgement of her playing so energetically despite her treacherous heart defect. Twenty years of practising scales, memorizing all t
he Nocturnes, Schumann, Debussy, Mussorgsky, and soon to be pushing up the daisies. Those well-trained hands forcibly folded by the corpse washer. First the flesh falls away, then the maltreated sinews . . . There might have been some who were sorry the virtuoso had not been carried off stage to her deathbed like Lipatti, or – better still – collapsed as she played, up there in the candlelight, her life ending with a clashing chord. ‘I was there, I saw it happen . . .’

  As this had not come to pass, they applauded. The pictures in their heads vanished, and Western culture evaporated. Now they had to hit the road, so off they went into the open air to catch the next U-Bahn or steer the car through the traffic out to the blessed suburbs, where they switched on the television and watched the late-night news.

  •

  Jonathan was placated by the fact that others were also jostling to get out into the fresh air, faster than seemed fitting for such a velvety evening. And then he realized: isolation – me here, you there – is what characterizes Western culture. Yet it’s in doing things together that we overcome our loneliness.

  Temporarily, at least.

  As Jonathan mounted his bicycle he resolved that he would keep on with his work. He wouldn’t just bring his northern giants to light, little by little, he would do all sorts of detailed work as well. Provençal fences, bridge parapets of 1920s Chicago, why Wittgenstein boxed the ears of the pupils in his village school, the significance of the semi-quavers in Robert Schumann’s diaries . . . and East Prussia. He would write an article about the region that would blow people away. It wouldn’t be suited to witty authorial readings in the local accent, it wouldn’t languish in the archives of the homeland associations, a testimony of attachment to the native soil; instead it would be picked out of the monotonous expanses of text in the daily newspapers. Have you read this? people would say. Fabrizius has written about Masuria.

  •