Marrow and Bone

by Walter Kempowski

  •

  Jonathan went over to the window. Down below men were loitering in the car park, tampering with parked cars when the parking attendants weren’t looking. They didn’t dare approach the two V8s with their double-injection engines; one of the two technicians was standing there holding a pair of pliers.

  A traditional sailing ship lay in the roads; a little further out was a warship, which, if Jonathan wasn’t very much mistaken, was the peace warship from Hamburg. Jonathan thought about the Westerplatte peninsula. His uncle had talked about German soldiers who were still hiding in a bunker there ten years after the war ended, living on their provisions, finally staggering out into the open like axolotls.

  It occurred to Jonathan that his uncle looked like Julius Streicher, the publisher of the anti-Semitic Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer. How peculiar . . . right down to his moustache and riding breeches.

  But he was a thoroughly good man.

  •

  ‘We’ll meet at three o’clock, then,’ they’d said. After he had ‘freshened up’, as Frau Winkelvoss put it, Jonathan took the lift downstairs. In the foyer he exchanged two five-mark coins with an inexperienced man for an insane quantity of zlotys. The man extracted each note individually from his trouser pocket, scrunched up in a ball, and suddenly Jonathan was a kind of Croesus. When the others arrived they said, ‘What? You’ve exchanged money already?’ And: Five-mark coins? They hadn’t thought of that. Even though they’d been to Egypt and Morocco and eaten watermelon in Mali for Five pfennigs a slice, this had not occurred to them. So Herr Fabrizius wasn’t that removed from everyday life after all! The receptionists behind the desk were whispering and pointing at him, but this had nothing to do with the illegal financial transaction; it was on account of his bow-tie, which they found comical. Better get in the back and write that down straight away; it’d go down well in the article.

  The technicians handed over one of the cars to Hansi Strohtmeyer, and the man, whose name was Herr Schütte, explained to him the digital display on the dashboard, the tiny screen with symbols for seat belts, doors and headlamps, and the little integrated computer: how long you’d been driving, how many kilometres, how many kilometres per litre and so on, not forgetting average consumption.

  In the car, which had been washed yet again, they drove along an avenue into Danzig. On the left was the Lenin Shipyard – ‘We’ll take a look at that crazy Solidarność monument too; maybe that’s something for the cultural programme?’ – and, on the right, Gründerzeit villas, which had presumably been homes for coal merchants or even shipowners. ‘What? Refugees?’ said the shipowner’s wife in February 1945. ‘No, we can’t take them in.’ And three days later they were forced to hobble westwards themselves. As they rolled past the villas, overtaking crowded trams and lorries with lopsided cargo beds, the computer registered everything worth knowing – facts you didn’t actually need to know, but which had a calming effect.

  •

  SOPOT, Jonathan read on a road sign. A picture of ‘Zoppot’ from his geography textbook flashed through his mind: a beach pavilion with a jazz band. If he were a Pole, and if he’d had any say at all in what happened back in the year of patriotic victory, he would have distorted the German place names beyond all recognition. Sopot? Anyone could tell it had once been called Zoppot. He would have called the place Klatschi, or . . . what was ‘sunshine’ in Polish? He would have started with that somehow. Sopot: it was too unimaginative. Jonathan found it disappointing.

  The Marienkirche rose up unexpectedly over the roofs. There she was, the northern goddess, more delicate than expected; graceful, not bulky. Number seven in Jonathan’s collection of churches. And then, in an instant, she was gone.

  Where, he wondered, was the Polish Post Office in which the brave Polish postal workers had died? That must be around here somewhere. And the street Hitler drove down? Flowers, flowers, flowers. We welcome our Führer. Sieg Heil!

  •

  They bypassed the Old Town, with the Marienkirche and her lovely sisters, and parked in front of the Orbis Hotel; the technicians’ vehicle had already arrived. You could buy whisky here, and men’s heads carved out of gnarled lumps of wood. It was reasonable to assume that there would also be Krakauer sausages.

  They split up, as they each had their own idea of what constituted a stroll around town and there was no point in following one another around the whole time.

  Frau Winkelvoss instructed Jonathan to do a nice write-up of everything that crossed his path. She went to the phone to pick a bone with the asthmatic general from the Ministry of Tourism, as certain things had been promised to her that had not materialized.

  Strohtmeyer had already disappeared.

  Wasn’t the Gauleiter of Danzig called Forster?

  Jonathan went straight to the Marienkirche. If he was arrested and deported by the police on account of the illegal zlotys or his German-language map, at least he wouldn’t have missed northern goddess no. 7. They would have done better to finish it off with one big tower instead of all the little ones, Jonathan thought, circling the old red walls. A mason was hanging from the top of the roof ridge, pasting over some cracks.

  Then he went into the house of prayer, mingling with the sailors and the schoolchildren, the housewives and the German homeland association people; he walked around it three times, at first with his head tilted right back, the way strangers do in New York, then glancing to the left and right to see if there was something magnificent waiting to be discovered.

  ‘Look, Mummy, that’s where the astronomical clock used to be!’ he heard a seventy-year-old woman say to a decrepit old lady, supporting her with a firm grip under the arm. The two women were with the homeland association group; the old lady had wanted to see the walls of her home town once more (inexpensively) and then die. She hadn’t thought she’d ever get there again.

  Jonathan took snaps of the whitewashed arches with his pocket camera. It ought to be open at the top, he felt: a glass roof. Even then, though, it would still be closed. The way to heaven is closed, he thought. He had similar ideas standing in front of the Memling painting, The Last Judgement, that elliptical circuit of good and evil. The archangel in the middle with the scales in his hand, and, up above, the intercessors to the left and right of the triune God. The intercessors on the left, thought Jonathan, when do they pack up and go over to the other side? They need to do it in good time, otherwise they’ll plunge with the damned into the maw of hell. He also pondered the picture’s strange history: destined for Holland, captured at sea and brought to Danzig, stolen by Napoleon and brought to Paris, then transported back again on a lumbering horse and cart. How many paintings had gone missing during daring actions like these? The Reformation, the Iconoclastic Fury: altars hacked to pieces and thrown into the flames. Perhaps the greatest art was long gone, and we were making do with pale imitations? What sort of people must they have been to hack Gothic and Romanesque altars to pieces? Medieval SA men, probably. Depictions of hell: something else for his girlfriend in Hamburg. Had she thought of it already?

  Jonathan bought a four-colour print of the Memling for Ulla. He also photographed everything two or three times, just in case. Unfortunately there was no ‘literature’ at the entrance from which to discover how high, how wide, how old his goddess was. He was, however, able to find a guide who informed him that the Marienkirche was the biggest brick-built church in the world: 105 metres long, sixty-six metres wide, with a surface area of 4,115 square metres and room for twenty-four thousand people. The homeland association group certainly didn’t stand out in this vast space. They were huddled in a corner, debating whether they might dare to sing a song here, something from the old days. ‘Take Thou My Hand, O Father’ – surely that would be quite innocuous. Best not, though; they might break the laboriously knotted threads of rapprochement. Best to wait a bit longer with a thing like that.

  •

  On the way out Jonathan sacrificed a thousand-zloty note – he had made one last
circuit specifically in order to determine whether that was a lot of money or a little. Twenty-seven marks fifty, he had worked out; but, as he realized outside, this was, unfortunately, a miscalculation. Then he strolled through the reconstructed streets. There was something not quite right about the restored city. The houses looked just like the old photographs, absolutely correct, but it was as if they were standing on the seabed, like the houses in Vineta. Nor did it help that they’d shot the television adaptation of Buddenbrooks here.

  When Jonathan stopped to look at jewellery in the window of a souvenir shop near the Green Gate, an impeccably restored Renaissance structure, the gypsy women surged forward, one quite old with big gaps in her teeth, one younger and one adolescent girl. These three outlandish individuals probably lived off hedgehogs baked in clay on an open fire. They made a beeline for him and pressed him hard – ‘Chair-mun? Oh! Chairmunny is beeyootiful country . . .’ – and wanted to show him a trick; he liked a bit of fun, didn’t he? He was to give them his wallet to hold, just for a moment, and in a few seconds it would have more money in it than before. This was the trick they wanted to show him, if he knew how to have fun, and they assumed he did, because he looked so funny in his pretty bowtie, and was Chair-mun, as well . . .

  Jonathan shrank back. He leapt into the souvenir shop, where he was safe for the time being. Through the shop window he watched the women take up positions a short distance away, ready to intercept him when he re-emerged. There were several of these female money-multiplication troops about; the Polish police observed them but didn’t stop them plying their trade. Didn’t they know that foreigners were being pestered here? What kind of impression did that make?

  Jonathan sat down with the friendly proprietor, who laid out antique amber jewellery in front of him and praised it insincerely. He didn’t want to name prices up front; they could do that later. The objects in question were fist-sized lumps of milky amber set in silver, necklaces of polished oval pearls that got bigger and bigger, and all manner of brooches. ‘Never mind the price, we’ll work that out. We’ll come to an agreement, don’t worry.’ He didn’t have any of those Polish wooden figurines, but if Jonathan gave him some money he could get hold of them.

  The proprietor spoke good German. He’d just been to Hamburg, he said; he had a branch there. A friend of his came in, and naturally they spoke to each other in Polish – about old watches from the Nazi era, perhaps, square things with luminous dials, or silver that the Germans had stolen from the Jews and then had to leave behind. Jonathan sat in the corner, almost unheeded, taking it all in. He made a mental note of a few things for which he would later find an unusual angle, as had been drummed into him by the Santubara people. A small boy brought a pot of coffee and biscuits, and Jonathan was offered some too. Tourists came in and had the mickey taken out of them; there were time-wasters who just wanted to look around a bit and foreign men with gold teeth and wads of notes in their pockets. Jonathan would not have been surprised if Albert Schindeloe had shown up.

  Finally, a decrepit man entered the shop. He let first the owner and then Jonathan peer into his shopping bag, which had books in it.

  Jonathan took one out. It was in German, entitled:

  The Typewriter

  and the History of Its Development

  – a small-format book with lots of illustrations. Inside the cover was a purple stamp:

  HERMANN BINDER

  KRAKAU

  ADOLF-HITLER-PLATZ 5

  Jonathan felt this was worthy of note and bought it for a handful of zlotys.

  He would, of course, have liked to buy the lump of milky amber, but he didn’t have three hundred and sixty marks, which is what it turned out he would have to pay for it. Anyway, how would he have got the thing across the border? And for that price he could buy something similar in Hamburg.

  To purchase his liberty, he picked out a little brooch instead, put a few zloty notes on the table and left the shop.

  Outside, the three women pounced on him, wanting to show him the money trick they had promised. He kept them at bay by crossing himself, even though he wasn’t a Catholic. It was a spontaneous action, and it had an immediate effect. The women shrank back; one of them cried, ‘Bastard!’ and they reconvened a little way off. Never had they experienced such a thing. So now he was a German swine, and a crafty one at that.

  •

  Jonathan strolled a while longer past the rows of reconstructed houses, up on the left, down on the right, past people queueing for fish and sugar, approaching sparse groups of tourists. ‘Yes, that’s it! Exactly!’ cried former Danzig residents, praising the ersatz architecture of the old alleyways; that lion, which an official restorer was in the process of scrubbing clean again – wonderful! We used to ride on it when we were children. Well, on the statue that was there before, which looked exactly the same. Must take a photo, send it home to show our sons, who strangely can’t muster any enthusiasm for the old homeland.

  They haven’t been able to resurrect the corpse, only transform it, Jonathan thought, into a figure that belongs in a waxworks exhibition. And what a shame you can’t reconstruct human beings: the figures of the saved whom Memling sent to heaven, for example, or the ones in the jaws of hell, the fallen. Bring the damned and the blessed back to life and lead them naked through the alleyways with ropes around their necks, signal to them – it’ll be all right – and get a signal from them of what it’s like over there. But they’re not allowed to speak.

  •

  At the Artus Court he was stopped by an elderly woman. She looked German, but she definitely wasn’t from Germany. She looked like a friendly pub landlady, and Jonathan didn’t for one moment think she was about to beg from him. The woman had an empty medicine bottle in her hand; she told him her daughter was sick and she couldn’t get this medicine anywhere in Poland. Might Jonathan get it for her and send it when he returned to Germany?

  Jonathan looked at his watch. It was half past four, and he wanted a coffee, so he asked the woman where she lived. Perhaps they could go there, drink a coffee and discuss it?

  The woman hesitated for a moment; then she put the little bottle in her pocket, said, ‘Please, follow me,’ and marched off. Jonathan walked behind her, looking at her thin legs, the darned grey stockings, and thinking that his mother would now be about the same age as this woman. This morning he had been sitting in the Isestrasse eating a couple of bread rolls with honey. Now he was having an adventure, the kind that would make a good story later on.

  10

  The woman’s name was Kuschinski. She lived in an old building, its gable adorned with stucco tendrils and a date, triumphantly displayed. The wall above the facade was peppered with holes from machine-gun fire. Washing hung from windows embellished with decorative columns.

  The lift, which had a wrought-iron grille and had once been very grand, was nailed up with planks of wood. They climbed the stairs – the walls of the stairwell were tiled – to an apartment door with a padlock and a long row of nameplates. Someone was chopping wood down in the basement.

  A blast of stale air billowed out at Jonathan as the woman opened the door. Three families and assorted subtenants lived in the apartment. The room she took him to – he ducked on entering – had been crudely divided off, as you could see from the stucco ceiling; a small grey room with the lights on. It was crammed full of department store furniture: a wall unit with matching table (doily, vase), television (doily, wooden deer), fridge (doily, glass bowl) and a tiny glass prism lamp hanging from the ceiling. In the corner stood a basket full of laundry.

  A gilt-framed picture hung on the wall, and under the window was a flowered sofa with bedding on it from which someone had just emerged: the sick daughter.

  •

  Jonathan took it all in in one go. It seared itself on his retinal memory. He sat down in one of the flowered armchairs, fiddled with his bow-tie and thought: I’m just going to sit here for a while. He felt as if he belonged. The bedding on the sofa
. . . When he’d had mumps his uncle had let him lie in his office. If Hansi Strohtmeyer were looking for him right now, or Frau Winkelvoss, they could just go on looking.

  The woman went out to make coffee, proper coffee, she told him, from the West, Lampertheim, sent to her by one of her uncle’s cousins who’d stayed there after the war and married a German. An engineer or something; they were doing well. She came straight back in – wearing slippers now – and took half a bar of chocolate out of the cupboard, which she broke up and put in a little bowl: Western chocolate. Then she went out again, and it became apparent that she would keep popping in and out all the time.

  People were talking loudly in the kitchen. The woman seemed to be being hauled over the coals by the other tenants for bringing someone home: what was she thinking, dragging all sorts back here, and, to cap it all, a German! And then making coffee for him, expensive pure ground coffee! A door slammed, and a man yelled from the adjacent room that he had a nightshift, and if they didn’t quieten down right now he’d beat them all to a pulp.

  After a couple of minutes the woman came back into the room accompanied by her sick daughter. Would it be all right for her to lie down again in here? She was sick, and they didn’t know what would become of her. The daughter was a young woman, and her name was Maria. Wearing a baggy dressing gown, she stood in front of the gilt-latticed glass in the wall unit and ran her fingers through her curls. Then she turned to Jonathan, who had risen to his feet. She held out her hand and asked whether he had seen the bicycle on the other side of the street. It seemed very odd to her that it was parked there. Surely it must mean something. And how had he happened to stray in here? Presumably he was making a study of how well people lived in Poland.

  Later Jonathan was unable to recall what else she had said. He remembered that she had shaken his hand; he knew that hers had been limp and clammy, that she had gone on talking and had lain down again on the sofa without further ado, slipping under the blanket in her dressing gown.