Marrow and Bone

by Walter Kempowski

  ‘These seats are for pygmies!’

  The people behind him were digging their knees into his back, and a miasma of garlic wafted from the row in front. A Caucasian-looking fellow with silver teeth sat down beside him, the type who slaughters lambs by slitting their throats and letting them bleed to death. He wore a black Persian hat and had a shapeless bag on his lap, and couldn’t believe Jonathan had taken the window seat. There was no parleying with this magnificent specimen, whose favourite dish was possibly rancid butter; armrest hostilities were initiated immediately. Hansi Strohtmeyer and Frau Winkelvoss were sitting further forward, near the emergency exit – ‘the predetermined breaking point’, the racing-car driver jested. When Jonathan got up to nip to the toilet before take-off, Strohtmeyer called after him, ‘We’re not there yet!’

  Peace descended as they flew over the Baltic Sea. The civilized west sank away, the barbarous east approached. Jonathan thought about the red-brick churches, his northern goddesses, their chests still facing proudly westwards to this day, as they had for centuries. The old slogan popped into his head – ‘The Baltic Sea is the Ocean of Peace’ – and he imagined ships symbolizing the brotherhood between peoples flying colourful pennants and transporting singing workers from here to there and from there to here amid shouts of Druzhba!; pork cutlets with pommes frites, humanitarian rockets at night accompanied by guitars and songs about the people, who basically wanted nothing to do with war; ploughing through the clayey water, lone submarines lurking in its depths that might quietly, quietly, quietly be creeping towards the skerries of Sweden, land of peace – raise the periscope for a moment, quickly snap it down again – settling into a crevice in the rock where it has no business; open a hatch to release tiny amphibious tanks, lay down depots just in case . . .

  ‘When we have Sweden, Finland will fall into our lap all by itself.’

  At this very moment freighters were embarking from the Scandinavian land of peace, their mysterious cargoes shrouded in brown sailcloth: howitzers with extra-penetrating power, landmines with delayed-action fuses and small rockets any schoolchild could fire, capable of bringing down jumbo jets full of tourists and business people out of the sky. Military equipment bound for allied, peace-loving countries, to help them defend themselves against class enemies attacking them with similar weapons, against states of an imperialist nature that sought to seize, exploit or subjugate them. Jonathan thought of how, at the site of a plane crash, photo-journalists always managed to find a doll with its arms torn off to splash across the front page, and how the headlines always said seven people are still missing and you never heard whether they eventually turned up after all – sitting in a pub, maybe, having a beer to celebrate their survival, or blundering through the reeds, shirt flapping, with only one shoe. In glossy magazines you saw tattered dolls with big, questioning, blinking eyes, not crushed human heads, because the dolls were a way of skipping sublimely over the ghastliness. Pictures of crushed heads and ripped-off hands were deposited in depots. Jonathan wondered whether one day he might use his press card to gain access to these depots on some pretext or other and write a feature on ‘The Pictures They Withhold from Us’.

  •

  Jonathan stared down at the choppy, greenish-grey sea. He imagined how difficult it must be to paddle across this large expanse of water in a canoe at night with your child in front and your wife behind. Escape! Is the pension certificate in the dry-bag? And then an article in the local paper in Gedser: ‘. . . fished out of the icy water, utterly exhausted . . .’

  And then the officials in Schleswig-Holstein, who could only be described as Western cretins or Western cows, sitting there behind their vacuum flasks. ‘Why did you take the risk? All that glitters isn’t gold here in the West either, you know! What in heaven’s name were you thinking?’ You might be prosecuted too, because of the child, whose life had recklessly been endangered: we live in a constitutional state, after all.

  Jonathan imagined that other escape too, in 1945: the great creaking steamships laden right up to the promenade deck with refugees, people piled up in the mahogany dining room like sardines, pea soup and dry bread, the women in headscarves, the little boys in balaclavas: only one suitcase per person; please leave prams on the shore.

  Must I then? Must I then? From the town must I then?

  Leave the horse-drawn carts on the quay as well, loaded with boxes and trunks, items such as wooden bowls for kneading sausage meat, household goods painstakingly hauled over ice-bound roads; leave it all behind, the chest of drawers and the grandfather clock too. But take the little briefcase with the jewellery, Grandfather’s gold watch, amethysts and emeralds that might not even be real.

  ‘We’ll take care of the horses,’ the soldiers say.

  It hurts, though, to leave the two chestnuts behind; they’ve lowered their heads; it feels like a betrayal. They realize they’re being deserted. And the land of the fathers, along the river? That was good soil. They let the pigs and cows on to the threshing floor and scattered feed there for them.

  Jonathan remembered the Soviet submarine that had picked out the biggest refugee ship. Fire! cried the Russian commander, and there was a thump, and the ship, with its promenade deck, swimming pool and mahogany dining room, keeled over on to its side; the dishes slid to the floor, and the cutlery, and no one played hymns.

  Nearer, my God, to Thee!

  It was eighteen degrees below zero. People jumped into the water and were crushed by ice floes. Severed legs, severed heads. And for this heroic deed the Soviet submarine commander received a medal, and today, feeding pigeons in Leningrad, he’s still pleased with himself for doing such a good job. Treasure hunters with robots don’t bother with this wreck; they’d find nothing but bones on the seabed, fifty-five metres down. At best a briefcase with Grandfather’s gold watch, emeralds and amethysts that might not even be real. No gold bars, no Amber Room, nothing for them to bring up but bones; any investment would be a complete waste of money.

  Strange, thought Jonathan, that no one fixes a buoy above the wreck: in memorY of the 5,438 people who died here. Surely it could be done, technically speaking? You have to let things go, he thought, or life would be unendurable. And he pictured his uncle carrying his dead mother into the church, this woman who had breathed her last, who had not even been included in the statistics, who lived on only as a snapshot.

  •

  Jonathan gazed down at the Ocean of Peace. What a pity, he thought, that they don’t announce whether that’s still Mecklenburg down there, or ‘Poland’ already. There was a town – probably ‘Szczecin’ on the ‘Odra’, or perhaps ‘Kohlwietze’ or whatever Kolberg was called these days. A town with a northern goddess enthroned at its centre, which must be brought up out of the depths and into the light for the enjoyment of mankind. It was indescernible right now on account of the poisonous clouds being pumped into the air from the ground. ‘Szczecin’ – there’d been no mention of that at Yalta. The Poles had slipped it in their pocket; it was actually on this side of the Oder. Perhaps this would come back to haunt them one day? Perhaps one day suitcases would have to be packed there again and everything cleared out ‘within the hour’?

  He could see a river too, getting wider and wider, washing yellowish sludge out to sea.

  •

  Now the stewardesses brought a snack, which was up to Western standards: sandwiches wrapped in cellophane and even a bar of chocolate. Jonathan pocketed the chocolate. He’d give the chocolate to Polish children. The coffee tasted slightly odd. As for the stewardesses, they could not be described as stunningly attractive: they seemed to have skipped the Aphrodite phase of their development and lost their figure straight away.

  Two rows ahead of him Frau Winkelvoss pocketed the chocolate as well. Flowery packaging! She would take it back for her boss to show him how touchingly backward they were here. She was having quite a lively conversation with Hansi Strohtmeyer about the head of department who’d dreamt up this PR trip to the eas
t: state-of-the-art V8 engines against a backdrop of dilapidated towns. He was quite a forceful person, who had good qualities too. She repeated what they needed to do first when they got to Gdańsk, and that they mustn’t forget anything, for heaven’s sake. Herr Strohtmeyer wanted to know whether she’d seen the footballer Manni Koch? The bloke who’d missed the penalty? He’d met him in the loos, looked like a perfectly normal bloke.

  Now Frau Winkelvoss turned round and mouthed a question to Jonathan: Everything OK?

  Yes, everything OK, Jonathan gesticulated back. It’ll all work out!

  The Caucasian guy beside him spurned the modern cellophane-wrapped LOT food. He brought out a sausage and a loaf of bread and cut himself a slice against his thumb with his pocket knife.

  9

  Danzig: first Polish, then German, then Free City, then German again and Polish again. The airport in Danzig was a hut with gdańsk painted on it, with no jets rolling past or grotesquely shaped, eager little cars.

  It’s as if Bad Zwischenahn had an airport, thought Jonathan. And Hansi Strohtmeyer said, ‘So what do they do here in winter?’

  One people, one Reich, one Führer! Hitler, wearing an aviator hat, steps out of his Ju 52, riding crop in hand, and schoolchildren everywhere write an essay: ‘The Führer Over Germany’.

  To the planes, to the planes!

  Comrade, there’s no turning back!

  Parachutes slip from the body of the aeroplane, one after another, and the parachutists float to the ground, penknives in the side pockets of their trousers. On Crete, farmers gouged out the eyes of the wounded.

  The woman with the red hat and the child with the pink teddy bear, an incredibly naughty boy. The gruff Polish language – this must have been how German sounded to the French back then, in 1940. The old woman in black was met at the airport by a Russian limousine and whisked past all the checkpoints; the chauffeur removed his cap as she stepped in.

  •

  The luggage took a long time. One man delivered it by hand, pulling the rusty carts along by himself. It made you want to go and help. Sitting in the lounge was like being in a cinema; there was a lot of plywood and linoleum, and you could see the officials at the front nosing about in people’s suitcases, spending longer on the women’s than the men’s. The delegation from Hamburg last, please. The young officials in the plywood cabins checked every page of the passports – what? New York? – wrote down how much money these crazy foreigners were bringing in and made a note of cameras, serial numbers and so on, to prevent them being flogged in Poland or possibly exchanged for valuable goods, thereby disturbing the carefully preserved socialist balance: amber for pocket calculators, for example, or silver foxes that would go to the opera in Frankfurt.

  And sausages.

  The Santubara group was last. They were asked whether they wanted some fuel vouchers. Frau Winkelvoss thought this was marvellous. Nothing against fuel vouchers; at least that way no one could steal their money, and perhaps with these vouchers you got to jump the queue at petrol stations? She bought enough coupons to fuel a round-the-world trip, despite Hansi Strohtmeyer repeatedly signalling to her to stop.

  It was a mystery why they didn’t introduce these petrol coupons in Germany, said Frau Winkelvoss. That way you could provide workers with cheaper petrol and make factory owners and fat cats pay through the nose. Petrol coupons in different colours, then use them somehow to regulate environmental pollution. Each individual Pole was allowed only thirty litres of petrol a month, which was brilliant; they probably didn’t need more or they’d surely get it.

  She whispered conspiratorially, first in Hansi Strohtmeyer’s ear and then in Jonathan’s, about the black-market rate she’d managed to get that summer: a thousand zlotys for ten marks. Hansi talked about how you could exchange money at good rates in Morocco too, but the notes were sometimes forgeries. He followed up with a Helmut Kohl joke featuring an electric chair that failed to do its job.

  He had some Polish jokes as well. ‘ “What’s in this shop, my good man?” “No shirts. You’ll find no shoes next door.” ’

  An hour later Frau Winkelvoss said that they sometimes took a very long time to process people in Hamburg too; and she’d once spent a whole night at the airport in Turkey. In Egypt people were incredibly friendly. But the Arabs in Abu Dhabi, when she was on a stopover there, had given her the creeps. Like characters from the Arabian Nights.

  Hansi Strohtmeyer was playing with a matchbox, throwing it up in the air and catching it. When he got bored he took out a match, split it and used it to pick his teeth.

  After another half an hour Frau Winkelvoss said, ‘The Poles simply can’t organize a thing. I love it.’ She’d taken off her shoes and was doing toe exercises. Jonathan looked at her small firm feet.

  •

  Outside, young people wanting to exchange money waited for them as if they were rich uncles from America; they begged for cigarettes and asked for pocket calculators. A Polish travel expert with a badge on his lapel had also appeared, sent by the Ministry of Tourism to welcome the little crew. It was whispered that this man had once been a general and that he had quite a history – he’d been a general, then he’d done time for something or other, then been released, and now here he was in tourism.

  In the car park stood two fabulous Santubara V8s with extra-wide tyres. They’d been driven across East Germany, and now here they were, washed and cleaned, bang on time. The technicians who came with the cars greeted the racing hero Hansi Strohtmeyer and the comical little woman Anita Winkelvoss, then eyed Jonathan curiously. So this was the man who’d mistaken the great Hansi Strohtmeyer for a chauffeur!

  Strohtmeyer selected one of the two supercars. The technicians would accompany them in the other in case anything should happen.

  The Polish general drove on ahead in a Lada, and the Santubara crew followed in their supercars like members of the master race. You didn’t need to drive fast in these. Jonathan was curious as to what he was about to experience and glad that he’d agreed to come on this well-prepared adventure. He thought of those excessively long American cars, the black Lincoln thingies that pull up outside the Waldorf Astoria and a solitary woman gets out with a white toy poodle under her arm, and all she wants is to buy a box of chocolates.

  In this way they crawled along not to Danzig but to Gdingen, with all the Lada people looking round to see whether there was something wrong for them to be crawling along like that. The tourism general was very sorry that there hadn’t been a single room to be found in Danzig, even though they’d made the booking months ago. There was a Western-standard hotel with a bar and all the trimmings but no vacancies.

  They saw several cars in the ditch and others being pushed. People pushing cars together? Frau Winkelvoss thought it was fantastic the way they helped each other out here. You didn’t get that in the West! They wouldn’t have to push the Santubara, obviously. Like all new cars it smelt faintly of rotten egg-whites; but the digital display on the dashboard was tippety-top, the miniature screen that showed everything was fine, no lights on anywhere that shouldn’t be, no doors open – and ding-dong, all hell’s bells went off if you did anything wrong.

  •

  It would not have occurred to Jonathan to refer to Gdingen, a city conjured out of thin air after the Great War, as ‘Gotenhafen’, the name it was given in September 1939.

  The foyer of the Western-standard hotel was sumptuously decorated with artificial flowers and crammed with massive fake-leather armchairs. A wave of paralytic Scandinavians rolled towards them; they’d come here specially from their squeaky-clean country to get tanked up on the cheap.

  The hotel was pretty comfortable although, as the wheezing tourism general informed them, the swimming pool was closed at night and you had to hand over your passport when you went to bed. You can put up with stuff like that, even if sensitive people do see it as a sort of emasculation and it can prompt outbursts of fury from those who have a short fuse. Hansi Strohtmeyer had ha
d very different experiences in the Sahara. Did they give you fifty thousand zlotys for ten pfennigs here, he wanted to know.

  ‘It’s pronounced “zwotty”,’ said Frau Winkelvoss. She found the Polish banknotes ‘kinda great’. She also found it ‘kinda quaint’ that they had to wait two hours to place a long-distance call, not like in bloody West Germany where everything works and you’re harried from pillar to post. Here you couldn’t call Germany directly, it had to go via the telephone exchange, but it could be worse; after all, they’d only just come from there.

  ‘It’ll be fine.’

  The general said goodbye and wished the crew all the best. If they needed anything, all they had to do was call him. He was shocked to discover that the Santubara Company’s annual turnover was considerably larger than the gross national product of the whole of Poland. So all that socialist drudgery had been in vain, as had the protest that had cost him six years, and acting as an informer, as he was now obliged to do.

  •

  A porter, who – as he put it – didn’t really know whether he was a German or a Pole, led the group over to the lift. It had a grille of wrought-iron garlands and juddered from floor to floor. They were in three rooms directly above each other (on account of the bugging system). The ride in the lift gave them the opportunity to learn that the exchange rate here was one mark to one hundred and fifty zlotys, and you could hike it up to one mark to three hundred and sixty zlotys if you were determined. All wonderful, and so terribly charming.

  The rooms were perfectly normal rooms. You got frayed armchair upholstery in Frankfurt too, and hotel curtains are revolting all over the world. There was even a bar of soap in the toilet and green shampoo that smelt of tar in a little plastic pillow.

  The hand towels had a slightly rancid odour, but at least the television had two channels on offer, which was enough, after all – although it was funny that the people in Dallas spoke Polish here. And everything in black and white! Actually, though, black and white was kind of progressive. We’ve had it up to here with ‘colour’.