Marrow and Bone

by Walter Kempowski

  Frau Winkelvoss still had a few things to settle with reception. Would it really be necessary for the rally journalists also to hand in their passports and only get them back the next day? Berlin, Paris, New York – they were all so terribly sensitive, and surely it was in the interest of the People’s Republic of Poland that these journalists wrote what a jewel this country was?

  Hansi Strohtmeyer swayed into the bar, where friendly ladies awaited him.

  Jonathan went and sat in the lobby for a while longer. Scarcely had he taken a seat than two Eastern European-looking men came and sat beside him, brought out pearl necklaces from the pockets of their trousers and struck up an unintelligible conversation with him. Jonathan declined to join in. He conveyed to the men that someone somewhere was waiting for him, and they had to let him go. Crossing himself would not have worked this time.

  He went to his room, lay down on the bed and leafed through the typewriter book for a while. It contained illustrations of some peculiar models. It was possible that a great many clever things had been written using these very models, but so, of course, had a lot of nonsense. He regretted not being able to go round to the Kuschinskis’ and bring the evening to a close within the family circle – it was already a bit late for that. His retina released the image it had absorbed that afternoon, of the three people in their little apartment, the flowery wallpaper, the bedding on the sofa and, of course, the knee. It showed that the picture was still intact; it would consolidate itself into something symbolic and stand the test of time.

  12

  The breakfast room was decorated entirely in white. People in sportswear were drinking Sekt; there were two excessively loud Germans with gold badges on their dangling knitted ties and briefcases beside their chairs; secretive Hungarian men with a conspiratorial air and no good reason for being there; a couple of Russian officers crumbling bread between their fingers next to an interpreter in a suit and an open wing-collar shirt. They all seemed to be waiting for something. Perhaps something unusual was about to happen? It was possible. A military patrol evacuating the restaurant? All capitalists step outside! Stand against the wall, feet apart! Like the SS in Łódź looking for black marketeers and racially inferior characters: they’d be taken away in trucks, and soon afterwards – the crack of bullets.

  Jonathan sat down at the only free table – it hadn’t yet been cleared – and stared at the breakfast detritus on the plates. There were cups bearing traces of lipstick, and a large fresh coffee stain.

  He folded his hands under his chin and thought of his girlfriend, Ulla. What a pity she hadn’t come along; he could have discussed it all with her. Frau Winkelvoss, a classic people-pleaser, and Hansi Strohtmeyer – there was more to him than met the eye. More substance than style. How could he ever have mistaken him for a chauffeur?

  Just at that moment the door opened and the homeland association entered in single file. The ladies had outsize jars of instant coffee under their arms to revive those who were particularly grumpy in the mornings. They were nice ladies, mums and grannies who had their feet firmly on the ground. You could tell that the men also had their feet on the ground, although one or two were looking a little wobbly.

  Jonathan observed the waitresses, who were slouching about as if they’d been partying all night; they were reluctant to serve anyone but would make the effort if it became absolutely necessary. It had been a while since their last training course. The Western guest is king, they’d been told; he brings us foreign currency with which to build our socialist state. And so they made the effort, again and again. You didn’t want to lose your job just because you hadn’t put out fresh rolls. There were a couple of promising ones among them who approximated to the European ideal of the beautiful Polish woman, but they all showed signs of having a poor diet. Bad sausages ruin the complexion. They wouldn’t stand a chance in Hamburg. Was there any one among them who could have been assigned to the Santubara crew? Probably not, unfortunately.

  Then Hansi Strohtmeyer appeared, freshly shaved and smelling of Eau de Cologne. A tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and a shirt that was clearly tailor-made, but worn with jeans (these may have been tailor-made too, but surely not). It seemed strange somehow to see him dressed in perfectly ordinary clothes – a racing driver who had crossed the Sahara and whose face bore the marks of his accidents like duelling scars. Jonathan wasn’t surprised when Hansi Strohtmeyer told him he owned a Range Rover and a Mercedes 560 SEC. And an ‘Anteater’ – a Golf GTI that his wife used to go and fetch the bread. So Strohtmeyer owned three cars and a yacht. There was clearly money to be made in motor racing. Which was obvious, really; why else would anyone expose themselves to such danger?

  The table was filthy, Hansi said. ‘Is that our bird?’ he added, meaning the waitress assigned to their table. ‘Come on, love, let’s clean up a bit over here.’ And the girl did, in fact, come immediately; she hadn’t responded to Jonathan’s signals.

  Finally Frau Winkelvoss appeared. She’d just been on the phone to Germany, she said: Herr Schmidt wouldn’t be joining them until later, which was quite a blow. You simply couldn’t rely on anyone.

  She praised the fact that they’d been able to take a shower in this hotel without a problem and was astonished that all the Poles were so friendly. To us Germans! After what we did to them. A third of the population exterminated and all the towns and cities destroyed!

  They ate scrambled eggs, which had been made with condensed milk; it was also irritating that they only had sweet rolls. Frau Winkelvoss took one white pill and one red pill from a packet. She thought it was all wonderful. Condensed milk – why not? Better than nothing, she said, when you considered how little the Poles had to eat under German occupation. Now they were giving away everything they had! Then she asked Jonathan whether it really was absolutely necessary – the Marienburg, she meant. Was anyone still interested in that stuff these days? A fortress? Everyone was sick to death of militarism. Her brother-in-law was in the Bundeswehr; what an idiot! She thought they ought also to show the achievements of socialism; this was a young, up-and-coming country after all. Factories perhaps, or a shipyard? The people all looked so optimistic.

  ‘I’m going to hit the road,’ said Herr Strohtmeyer. Outside the hotel he took delivery of the car, freshly washed, lubricated and tanked with Western petrol, everything ‘tippety-top’ again, and he chatted a bit with Herr Schütte, who brought him up to speed on the latest racing results in Formulas 1, 2 and 3. He’d be driving on ahead to Marienburg, in case anything should happen.

  The Santubaras had thought of everything. On the back seat was a basket containing sandwiches and a bottle of vodka. There was also a woollen blanket and even some change in the glove compartment for the penalty tickets which, as a foreigner, you were almost certain to get in this country.

  •

  Jonathan was the last one down. They were waiting for him.

  ‘About time,’ they said, but everyone was quite calm. As a formality, he was offered the front passenger seat, which had something to do with the assessment of his social status: he was a man of letters, after all; they’d read his story about the Provençal wine cellar. Jonathan declined. This was what he had been expected to do; they immediately capitulated and held the back door open for him. It wasn’t the kind of offer you made twice.

  Jonathan, who had never possessed a driving licence, settled into the back and was quite content. Here he had a little footrest, an adjustable reading lamp and an illuminated ashtray. He could spread out his papers, and he had an armrest too, which was not provided in the front seat of this ultra-modern car. It folded up, and you could install a bar underneath in case of emergency.

  In the front he might have had to talk to Strohtmeyer about races across the Sahara, and Frau Winkelvoss’s hot breath would have intruded on him from behind. Jonathan placed the wonderfully light woollen blanket over his knees, relishing the luxury of it. He would appropriate the blanket, he decided. It could have been me
ant as a gift. He was curious to find out what Strohtmeyer’s driving was like. He’d expected squealing tyres, but the opposite happened: the car purred away. Oh, what a pleasure it was to ride in! You didn’t feel the gear changes at all; in fact, you didn’t have any sense of it being driven – it drove. How many inventions had come together to manufacture this cutting-edge product of human ingenuity: gears, ball-bearings, leverage, hydraulic transmission systems . . . not to mention petrol. And the brilliant concept of filling rubber tyres with air. Jonathan imagined the terrific speed of the pistons pounding up and down in the cylinders, hour after hour, inexhaustible, without making a sound. A slight buzzing perhaps; really more of a hum. He had the absurd idea that he should place his forefinger on the road as a marketing gimmick; the car would roll over the finger without squashing it because he would place it exactly in the groove of the tyre’s tread. . .

  To distract himself he thought a bit more about the amber necklaces he’d seen in Danzig. (‘Bastard!’) He would have to bring something back for his girlfriend, he was aware of that. The four-colour print of The Last Judgement wasn’t enough. Perhaps a coffee-table book about Stutthof concentration camp?

  He watched the city vanish through the rear window; the Marienkirche, reappearing against the backdrop of the reconstructed harbour; a dilapidated factory; ruins with little birch trees growing on them. The abundance of impressions he had absorbed lessened with every kilometre. The gypsy clan shrank; the amber dealer blurred . . . The mental photograph he had preserved of the Kuschinskis remained on top; this would not fade so easily.

  The region they were driving through could have been near Bad Zwischenahn, around the lake, with houses from Schleswig-Holstein: it exuded a cosy sort of atmosphere. It was also a bit monotonous. Unfortunately, Jonathan’s view ahead was obscured by Frau Winkelvoss’s headrest. He shifted his position slightly, and then it was all right.

  Frau Winkelvoss was happy that this trip meant she got four days’ extra holiday. ‘In the sun,’ she said. ‘It looks as if the weather will hold until the next phase of the moon. So you think the Marienburg is worth visiting?’ she asked Jonathan, turning to face him. ‘Is it some sort of ruin? Like those things you see lying along the Rhine?’ What was that river they’d just driven across? she demanded of Hansi Strohtmeyer. The Oder? No, it was the Wisła.

  Jonathan’s education had been sound, and this now stood him in good stead. He recalled that the Wisła – the Weichsel – was the only unregulated major river in Europe, and as a result it was constantly silting up because the Poles were incapable of keeping their waterways in good condition. He also knew, of course, that the Weichsel had had a tragic role to play in February 1945, and he resolved to ask his uncle how he had managed to get across what was in fact a pretty wide river. A picture arose in his mind’s eye of a convoy, grey on grey, stretching into the distance, just a dark line, a sweeping curve: people streaming back into the Reich as, centuries earlier, they had poured into the east.

  Jonathan popped a piece of marzipan in his mouth. With his notebook on his knees he jotted down: ‘Time reference!’ He also wrote that they had been overtaken by a Polish officer on a motor scooter – ‘A Blendax,’ according to Strohtmeyer. He was obviously a man who didn’t stick to the law, as he was going pretty fast.

  People like that eventually fall off those things, thought Jonathan, resolving that if that were to happen he would not permit himself to feel any pity.

  A quarter of an hour later they were stopped. They’d been driving too fast, said the policeman, stepping out of the hedge like a footpad. This was a civilized country, not a place for hooligans. Strohtmeyer cracked open his supply of small change.

  A dead cow in the ditch. Driving for eight kilometres behind a lopsided lorry which, when Strohtmeyer was finally able to overtake it, immediately turned right. Intensively planted gardens on both sides, but scorched fields. ‘What would German nature conservationists have to say?’

  Motorized wheelchairs with yellow canvas canopies; cars with spare wheels on the roof. Jonathan noted it all down, wondering what unusual angle he was supposed to find in his notes and whether he would ever be able to use them.

  The two in front had quite a lot to do. They had to write the route book, which would ensure the rally participants didn’t end up God knows where. Strohtmeyer dictated: ‘Take the 7, direction Warszawa . . . After three kilometres an old barn with no roof tiles on the left; keep going straight on. Two kilometres. Watch out, pot-hole!’ And Frau Winkelvoss wrote it all down. Hansi Strohtmeyer laughed at three-wheeled vehicles, so she lectured him: Why not? Why not drive a three-wheeler? This prompted him to remind Frau Winkelvoss that the object of their current trip was to sell eight-cylinder cars.

  It was idiotic, she said, that the Polish tourism ministry had banned them from marking the route with little Santubara flags. It would have made everything much easier. Now they had to record it all in the route book instead.

  ‘Nought point eight kilometres, row of white willows on left . . .’

  At first Jonathan listened with interest: chickens cross the road the same way all over the world. Hansi Strohtmeyer was smoking aromatic foreign cigarettes, and the smell wafted back to him. He thought of his uncle, saw the heavy cart pulled by the two horses, creaking over the icy road, and on the cart the farmer’s wife who had suckled him. He saw her – bare-breasted, triumphant – as Mother Earth. My mother breathed her last, he thought; but at that moment it seemed to him rather less worthy of mention. So many mothers breathed their last here back then. His uncle’s resemblance to Julius Streicher, the anti-Semitic publisher. How was it possible that two people, one a criminal, the other a good and decent man, could resemble each other so closely?

  And, of course, he thought of Maria – ‘Who’s to blame?’ – and resolved to buy her medicine as soon as he got to Hamburg. He even considered calling his girlfriend, Ulla, to ask her to get hold of a prescription. How strange; he couldn’t recall his own phone number.

  •

  After fifty-five kilometres they came to a road sign, malbork/ nowY dwór, indicating that they should turn right. A break first, perhaps?

  Hansi Strohtmeyer drove the car into the bushes; they got out and took some deep breaths. Jonathan stretched: it wasn’t quite as comfortable in the back of the car as it had at first seemed. They sat down beside each other on the roadside embankment and inspected the food basket. It contained some Dutch biscuits that were ‘unbelievably tasty’, as Frau Winkelvoss put it.

  On a low hill nearby was a windmill with six sails, one of which had broken off. Its door swung open and shut, and in the nearby meadow a stork was poking about, looking for frogs. Standing on one leg, it dragged them out of the moisture and swallowed them alive. In this case, being eaten equated to death by suffocation. You’d slide down the gullet – did it have grooves? – into the stomach, where injection nozzles would leap into action on all sides. The creative urge that had designed this creature had been not human but divine. Here too many different kinds of ingenuity had combined to effect such specialization. The red ‘stockings’, for example – why red?

  It was a dirty stork, incidentally, with an unkempt grey belly. A Polish stork, Strohtmeyer joked, but Frau Winkelvoss would have none of it. She had seen a great many dirty storks in Germany as well.

  Strohtmeyer crept towards the creature; perhaps the bird would allow itself to be stroked. He managed to get within fifty paces easily enough and held out his hand as if he had frogs’ legs in it. But the bird looked the other way and eventually flew off.

  Jonathan stared into the ditch looking for clues. If you were to dig here you’d be sure to find a leather strap, he thought, the harnesses of fallen horses that had slipped on the icy road and never got up again. Or human remains? Any skeletons dug up here wouldn’t be sent to the dissecting room; they’d immediately be put back in the ground – there were more than enough of them around here. Science would not be able to draw any conclusions fro
m these. Perhaps there were some reels of film to be unearthed, hastily buried. Reels that would enable him to watch the trail of refugees crawling through the ice storm. Wounded soldiers standing in the road, hoping for a lift. They plead with the farmers, stretch out their bloody limbs towards them, but the farmers look away.

  •

  Was it the stork that did it? As they drove on, Frau Winkelvoss started telling them the story of her child, who was adopted. Between entries in the route book she talked about how difficult it was to get hold of a child. All told, it had cost ten thousand marks – at least!

  Jonathan followed their route on his German map. He read the pretty village name ‘Marienau’, and shortly afterwards ‘Brodsack’.

  Had he made a note about them seeing the stork? Frau Winkelvoss asked between entries. She turned to face him in her comfortable seat, adapted to fit the contours of the body. After all, his report needed to focus on the positive too. The fact that the stork was allowed to live here and poke about for frogs to its heart’s content definitely compensated for the broken windmill. The German nature conservationists’ toad tunnels had nothing to do with it.

  13

  All of a sudden the Marienburg appeared before them. A sign announced MALBORK. There was the river, which everyone knows is called the Nogat and is, surprisingly, still called that. Beyond it, like a picture postcard, surrounded by allotments, was the Teutonic Order’s greatest fortress, the Marienburg: sacked, ruined, rebuilt, then burnt down and rebuilt again. It looked a bit mottled, but all in all it was intact and unmistakable. It had stood for seven hundred years, noble, proud, haughty. At one time the Order was praised for its strict moral code; later the knights were hated for their despotism, and then the fortress fell; the last Grand Master was forced to flee through the back door.

  ‘Oh, it’s that one!’ said Frau Winkelvoss, who had perhaps heard about it in school during lessons about the eastern regions. Maybe they’d seen a slideshow and drawn coats of arms afterwards. She was pleased she was getting a chance to see this evidence of German history. But forty kilometres outside Danzig? That was a huge detour! Would the journalists be prepared to come? Culture was all very well, but the clients were supposed to be test-driving the cars . . .