Marrow and Bone

by Walter Kempowski

  Bridge Gate, High Castle, Grand Master’s Palace, Grand Commander’s Dansker – Jonathan could identify everything perfectly. The Madonna was missing, the monumental sculpture on the external wall of the chapel whose smile had greeted the Knights of the Order from afar. The Russians had used it for target practice. Perhaps they would still find little pieces among the rubble, from which the miraculous image could be restored? Surely there were enough photographs of it?

  •

  Jonathan would have liked to have given the picture time to sink in; ideally, he would have settled down there for a while with hat and stick. He asked them to stop, got out and sat on a bench by a snack stand beside the quietly flowing waters of the Nogat. He hummed ‘On the pale shores of the Saale . . .’ under his breath and watched some children playing in the wreck of a car. Frau Winkelvoss stood beside him, stopwatch in hand, and Hansi Strohtmeyer didn’t even get out of the vehicle; he leafed through his motoring magazines, then combed his hair. Having done that, he reached for Jonathan’s pocket camera on the back seat and took a photo of the stand, the Marienburg in the background and Jonathan, dreaming, in front of it.

  They drove over the bridge into the little town. They weren’t here to have fun, after all. The road wound back and forth before Hansi Strohtmeyer finally drove into the castle’s tourist car park. They had scarcely got out before they were surrounded by children wanting biros.

  ‘This is like India,’ said Strohtmeyer.

  Jonathan reached inside his coat, which was hanging up in the car, and took out the chocolate bar he had pocketed on the aeroplane. He held it out to the children and a boy grabbed it. Jonathan was about to say, ‘Don’t forget to share!’, but the boy had already run off, the others at his heels. And that was that. Jonathan nearly ran after them to ensure that fairness prevailed, but didn’t, because he was afraid of making a fool of himself.

  ‘No point,’ said Hansi Strohtmeyer, who’d seen what had happened. ‘They’ll never amount to anything here.’

  The technicians were already there and waiting for them. They seized control of the car: bonnet up, boot open, take a look underneath as well, fill her up from jerry cans of good Western petrol. Strohtmeyer alerted them to a slight knocking sound, and fifth gear was decidedly too loud. Then they spotted a scratch in the lacquer, all the way from front to back. Someone had walked past this technological marvel and scraped a rusty nail along its side. This person had taken revenge because you couldn’t buy cars like this in Poland. Or it had been one of the children for whom Jonathan had brought the bar of chocolate.

  They’d need to take lacquer with them on the rally then, and emery paper. They couldn’t expect a journalist to drive a scratched car.

  •

  Meanwhile, the homeland association – the people Jonathan had first seen in Danzig – snuck up on them in an ultra-modern bus. Average age sixty-seven and a half, with three grandchildren who’d had to promise their grandfather never to forget that all this had once been German. The bus was probably also carrying a stretcher for the ninety-year-old woman.

  A little to one side stood three students and their teacher from Bremen, probably a delegation from the Socialist Pupils Council of the Rosa Luxemburg Comprehensive. When they spotted the old people they fell silent. They wanted to see what sort of fascist revanchism was being played out over here and watched suspiciously to see what would unfold. They’d have to keep their distance from the wrinklies; they didn’t want to get lumped in with ultra-reactionaries. Then back home they would stand up in front of the plenary session and open people’s eyes to what was brewing over here. Incidentally, they had never in their lives heard of the Teutonic Order, nor did they know what the Hanseatic League had been.

  You couldn’t just wander in and take a look at this monument to the Germanic lust for conquest. A policeman stopped them: you had to book a tour, and it was quite a while before a woman who had command of the German language appeared. She unhooked the rope across the entrance, counted her group, and entered the number in a list of statistics. She would hand over the list that evening, and at the end of the month these numbers, combined with other numbers, would end up on the desk of the tourism general, showing whether visitor numbers were going up or hitting rock bottom. Frau Winkelvoss was keeping a list too, noting how long they needed for this stop. She glanced at Hansi Strohtmeyer: what did he make of this nonsense? But Hansi Strohtmeyer was taking it calmly; he was interested in finding out about this fortress. He’d seen the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal, he’d been up the Empire State Building and now he was doing a fortress. He’d seen something like it before, in France, and in Sudan, in the middle of the desert.

  The guided tour was less annoying than anticipated. The invasion of Poland by the German Wehrmacht was not mentioned. Presumably a retired schoolteacher, the guide stuck to the subject. She pointed out original brickwork and neo-Gothic restoration and indicated transitions between old and new, saying, ‘These bricks could tell more stories than I . . .’

  She even knew that it had originally taken six hundred and forty million bricks to build the castle. After the war they’d used at least as many again to restore its bullet-riddled walls. At this point a man from the homeland association stepped forward and showed the ladies the difference between old and new bricks. He knew that the old bricks had been reproduced in Malmö, whereas these here were obviously local. Let’s hope they hold up! The man wrote ‘Malmö cloister format bricks’ on a slip of paper and gave it to the woman: perhaps she would be kind enough to pass this on to head office? The three school-children from Bremen exchanged meaningful looks.

  This interruption threw the tour guide a little off her stride, but she soon collected herself. In the old days women were denied entry. ‘Today, as an exception, we can come in.’ This appealed to her audience; people laughed comfortably, and even Anita Winkelvoss, who had already got bored and turned away, began to warm to her.

  Now she was explaining the machicolation; how boiling water would have been poured down from up there when enemies approached, but there was no need to be afraid now as the portcullis had been raised, a sign that these guests were very welcome. Her humorous tone went down well with the homeland association bus people, who perhaps had been here before, as children, with their school or with the Hitler Youth. Jonathan was rather taken with this woman too; they could use her for the rally, and he needed to adopt the same tone in his article. Broadly anecdotal but finding an unusual angle. Not too extreme, though. There was every chance there would be Christian Democrats among the test drivers as well, possibly even Bavarians; they might get angry with him and write negative things about the Santubara cars.

  The young people from Bremen made a note of the word ‘machicolation’. A typical example of German cruelty: they could use that in the plenary session. Couldn’t she show them more machicolations, they asked the woman; and why in God’s name were the iron bars on the portcullis pointed at the bottom? Had Poles been laid beneath them and tortured to death? They were already looking forward to the underground dungeons and kept checking to see if they were coming up soon – chains on soot-stained walls, mouldy straw in corners.

  Jonathan was intrigued by passive defence: gates, walls, the drawbridge alone. He was impressed by the consistency of the defensive techniques; they had thought of everything. He would have liked to know where the fortress got its water from when it was besieged and how many men had been catered for here. ‘Impregnable’ was the word that came to him. Personally, he wasn’t one to curl up like a hedgehog and assume a position of all-round defence. He saw himself more as a wild gazelle – when danger approaches you run.

  The woman was able to answer all of their questions. She even knew that everyone living in the fortress ate four kilos of meat per day.

  The Old Prussians, the Teutonic Knights, Grand Duke Jagiełło of Lithuania, the Battle of Tannenberg, the first and second division of Poland – she trotted out historical facts like every tour guide in eve
ry country in the world. After the war, with the fortress in ruins, there had been three factions in Poland (she told them this as well): raze the whole thing, use it for building materials or rebuild. The third faction had been victorious, and that was why she had this job.

  It was said of the Prussians that when they retook the fortress in the eighteenth century they immediately tore it down, brick by brick. The Bremen high-school students couldn’t use that for their dissertation; it smelt of disarmament. They only perked up again when they learnt that the Prussians subsequently turned the High Castle into a barracks. And they were clearly delighted to hear that the great refectory in the Middle Castle had been used as an exercise yard. Windows bricked up? Tiles broken off? Vaults smashed? Excellent! Typically German!

  The homeland association was less enthusiastic about this information, and it didn’t sit well with them at all to hear it from a Polish woman. However, the gentlemen were able to point out that the Prussians had reversed it all again. You had Friedrich Gilly to thank for that – he had drawn the ruins and shown the sketches to the Prussian king, who had put a stop to this barbarism and restored the fortress at vast expense.

  Frau Winkelvoss asked Jonathan if he found this interesting. What did he think of it? He did remember, didn’t he, that he was supposed to write an article about it?

  •

  At this point it started to rain. The ladies and gentlemen opened the folding umbrellas they’d brought with them or simply held newspapers above their heads, and the guide suggested they go into the buildings first and tour the courtyards at the end. Thus it was that shortly afterwards they found themselves in the Chapter House – ‘Where all meetings took place,’ as the woman expressed it in her studied German.

  When Jonathan saw the slender pillars and the delicate vaults, he thought of his northern goddesses. Why not follow up with an article about the fortresses of the north? He took out his notebook and noted down: ‘Gods of the North!’ That didn’t really work, though – in German grammar fortresses were feminine too.

  Now the guide was holding forth about the aspects of daily life everyone is interested in. She lifted a brass cover and showed them the opening from which, in winter, warm air had flowed into the room. She also showed them the holes in the wall where you could listen to what was being said inside the church. They were shown the Treasury – empty, of course – where five point eight tons of gold were hoarded in the Order’s heyday: double doors, barred windows. ‘It should be noted that the accounting was very precise.’ The books had not been burnt; they were in Göttingen. The homeland association gave a sigh of relief, whereupon the students permitted themselves to ask when the records would be returned.

  The guide didn’t respond to the youngsters’ questions. She seemed to find the old people more likeable somehow. Perhaps it was because the students kept whispering to each other and looking in the opposite direction. Tour guides aren’t too keen on that.

  In the Treasury Jonathan’s attention was caught by an old bas-relief: the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, and the Holy Family looking for him. Getting lost and being looked for. Those who are looked for are not lost, he thought. And he imagined what it would have been like if he’d been left behind back then, in February 1945. ‘He’ll die anyway . . .’ He would have been raised by strangers, Poles perhaps; and perhaps he would now be trying to earn a living here as a restorer and would get cross about Germans who made disparaging remarks about Poles. Or perhaps fate would have dealt him a different hand, and he’d have had to sell sausages at a snack stand, in which case Germans would have been very welcome.

  They were now entering the Summer Refectory, where there was an exhibition of charcoal drawings by a Polish artist. Concentration-camp images in the style of Käthe Kollwitz: emaciated figures clinging to the electrified fence within the zone of fire; square-jawed SS men with Alsatians doing the rounds and laughing. The homeland association slunk past these testimonies to German history, but the teacher from Bremen perked up. He walked over to the pictures, explained to his pupils what an electrified fence was and told them you could identify an Alsatian owner at fifty paces. One of the pupils held a camera to his eye and photographed the drawings. Was there a catalogue, perhaps? And might the artist be around? They’d really like to have a word with him.

  The ladies and gentlemen of the homeland association were trying to move on quickly, because one of their number had been imprisoned in Dachau and still hadn’t got over it. They hadn’t reckoned on being confronted with this sort of thing here; hopefully he wouldn’t freak out.

  How long is this exhibition here for? asked Frau Winkelvoss, calculating whether the journalists would have to see it as well. Maybe it would have an adverse effect on car sales.

  By now the little group had shuffled on. Everything was explained, even the length of the passageway to the loo (sixty metres). A winged devil pointed the way; winged because one did, after all, have to hurry at such moments. They were shown the latrine, the Grand Master’s Dansker, a building like a little tower. There was a hole in the floorboards through which disagreeable people were thrown into the Nogat to drown. Such people were issued with a courteous invitation, entertained with four kilos of meat apiece, then thrown into the river. When you’ve drunk a lot you shouldn’t go swimming, that’s what they used to say.

  ‘But I suggest you do not believe this; it is only story without proof . . .’

  Jonathan looked down through a hatch into the church. It was still in ruins. In 1945 German soldiers had holed up here to defend themselves along with their ammunition, and the whole lot had blown up.

  The ladies and gentlemen of the homeland association, who occasionally gave each other meaningful looks or suppressed a laugh because certain details seemed pretty far-fetched to them, knew that after it was reconstructed the castle had burnt down again in 1959. They rubbed the woman’s nose in that. Polish television had wanted to preserve the restorers’ achievements on film, and in doing so something had short-circuited and it had all gone up in flames. That was true, wasn’t it? Destroyed more completely than at the end of the war. So the skill of Polish electricians left something to be desired? (This was intended as a teasing remark.) The Polish guide couldn’t help but confirm this; however, she got her revenge with the little cage in the courtyard where the Teutonic Knights had planned to imprison the Lithuanian general Vytautas in 1410. The Knights had thought that Lithuania would lose the battle and they would receive a great deal of money for the release of the Grand Duke, but then things had gone against them. This delighted the Rosa Luxemburg group from Bremen; they were tremendously pleased that the Germans had shot themselves so comprehensively in the foot. They also went up to the guide and apologized for the impertinence of the old revanchist bastards here, belittling Polish workmanship. Not all Germans thought this way. They wanted her to please be aware that there was another Germany too, progressively minded and on the side of peace-loving countries.

  •

  Their visit also took in the Great Refectory and the kitchen, where whole oxen were roasted on spits, coated in clay to retain the fat. Afterwards, they were keen to have a little cup of coffee. Frau Winkelvoss, who had walked the entire tour with a pink clipboard in her hand, marking a slip of paper with plus and minus signs, gave the guide a ten-mark note and alerted her to the rally, during which there were sure to be a few more ten-mark notes like this one. She wrote down the woman’s name so that she and only she would have the pleasure of conducting the forthcoming tour.

  The homeland association ladies handed the woman an envelope full of cash. Would she perhaps be so kind as to pass this on to the fortress administration? It had been such a pleasure to revisit this place from their childhood.

  The castle cafe was reserved for the homeland association, a fact attentively noted by the students from Bremen. They sat down on the wall with cans of Coca-Cola and were pestered to death by the Polish children, who wanted to drink Coca-Cola as well. Didn’t they
realize that Coca-Cola was a symbol of American imperialism? said the Bremen students, miming their disdain.

  In Café Zamkowa there was a little table free, and the three Santubaras were served coffee naturalna, a mixture of infused coffee grounds and roasted barley. Frau Winkelvoss was disappointed: she had such a craving for coffee. But they would make do; after all, there were worse things in the world. Presumably during the war there wouldn’t have been any coffee here under the Germans either.

  Hansi Strohtmeyer commented that the loos in the basement were in immaculate condition. You had to give them that.

  14

  They drove through the run-down streets of the little town of Marienburg and were promptly stopped by a police patrol. The police wanted to know whether the car was actually licensed, and hadn’t they noticed they’d been driving too fast?

  They prowled around the car to see if could find anything else to penalize. They peered through the windows to see who else was sitting there, and Jonathan, innocently studying his German-language map – Christburg, Preussisch Holland, such beautiful place names! – had to show his passport. Trembling, he extracted it from his jacket.

  Hansi Strohtmeyer was forced to decimate the Santubara Company’s stock of change, which he did fairly calmly. The policemen didn’t understand the word ‘receipt’. They did, however, understand that he’d told them to move along, which prompted further negotiations in broken German.

  •

  Having survived this, they drove around the corner and stopped outside a butcher’s shop. Hansi wanted to order Krakauer sausages, kiełbasa Krakowska, which were sure to cost only a few pfennigs over here. But this shop didn’t have any Krakauers, even though it had choice sausages clearly written in German above the door; neither money nor fine words would buy you Krakauer sausages here. The housewives queuing for tripe looked disconcerted, as if Hansi had asked for something indecent. He could have bought some tripe, or pig’s trotters, sawn off, washed and scrubbed clean with a nailbrush. The police car came sneaking along outside. What was going on now? Stopping outside a butcher’s? Were they planning on parking here all day? They had to make a bit more of an effort to respect the law of the land.