He gets out of bed and surveys the line of hedge on the other side of the window. There is no sound from Sophie and Karl so he does a little light unpacking. He too has bought Ute a present: a beautiful little clay pipe he bought in a Turkish shop near the station. No doubt she’ll have something to smoke in it. He lays out his things on the windowsill as though he is dressing it: a scarf for his throat, a small bottle of schnapps, and the journal. He wedges his clothes between his palms and drops them onto the floor of the wardrobe.
He has already decided to give Ute the journal of his time in Ireland. If not on this holiday, then he will leave it to her when the time comes. Just before this trip he reread it for the first time in decades. He reread it with a old man’s heart, knowing all the things he didn’t know at twenty-odd. He realised that what it needed was a dose of retrospective realism. He couldn’t change what he had written at twenty, nor would he want to, but he just had to point up the self-delusion in it, the folly.
He is past writing anything these days. It’s not that there’s any physical impediment; no arthritis in the hands, nothing like that. Somehow he just can’t make the time to form his thoughts into sentences on a page. He can still talk, though, if it’s into a little machine.
At lunchtime, they visit the pub where Ute is working part-time behind the bar. The moment she sees them she makes straight for Oskar. That’s my girl, he thinks. When she speaks, he notices that her German is a little off-key. He wonders how soon that would have happened to him, had he stayed.
‘How are you, you old rascal?’ she says, punching him in the solar plexus.
‘Careful, Ute.’ Good old Sophie.
‘Oh, he’s solid steel,’ Ute says, punching him again, not so hard this time. Her hair is purple, her skinned tanned despite the climate. She is brown and purple, peat and heather, like her pots. He catches her hand and eases the loose package into it. She rips off the paper and waves the little meerschaum at her friend behind the bar. Then she takes Oskar’s face in her hands and kisses it. One. Two. Three. A man with a crumpled mouth looks up for a second, then returns to his pint.
‘So, Ute, what have you planned for me?’
‘I’m taking you for a walk this afternoon. I’ll call for you when I finish my shift, take you up on the cliff.’
‘That would be lovely,’ Sophie says.
‘Oh, I’m not taking you two. No offence, it’s just me and the old man.’
Tape One: 14 August 1999
My name is Oskar Müller (but, of course, you know that). Born Berlin 1919, in the autumn. You told me that made me a Libran. I don’t know if that is illuminating for you. It means nothing to me. I have been married twice. Generally speaking, I don’t count the first time. A couple of years after the war, I married a girl from Bremen. It was short and poisonous, no more than a month or two, and I remember her no better than the others for having married her.
I met your grandmother a year or two later. Rosa would have hated your hair, by the way. She liked things to be how they should be. She was sweet, and she was my salvation. In the early days, after I decided to study architecture, there wasn’t much money. She worked hard, too, at her teaching. In those days, we tried not to think too much about the past. By the time we were able to cast the occasional glance over our shoulders, it was too late really to come to terms with it. As for our own children, they showed surprisingly little curiosity about how life had been for us during the war. I think your uncle Rolf jumped to his own conclusions. He never asked me anything at all about the war, or what I did or didn’t do. Perhaps he just assumed I must have done something dreadful. Sometimes I think that’s why he went off to Africa: to flay himself for what he feared I might have done. Your mother, if she thought about it at all, seems to have assumed that whatever I did in the war must have been skilled, workmanlike, honourable. Sophie has always considered me beyond reproach.
With two such sensible children, I was delighted when you came along. You were always trouble, Ute. Poor Sophie was in despair most of the time. You were incomprehensible to her. No sooner had she told herself that she’d found a tree that you would never manage to climb, than you’d be stuck at the top like a wild kitten. I’ve always loved you for it, and I wasn’t surprised when you told them you were off. What were you, sixteen? Sophie almost managed to catch up with you but then she lost you again on the edge of an autobahn as you hopped into that lorry. Poor old Karl, he didn’t know what to tell the boys at that place he went riding. All their kids were thinking of sensible careers. War-proof things like physiotherapy. And there you were, off to Ireland to make pots.
My birthdays have been much marked since your grandmother died. Each one that comes, Sophie packs everything she can into it, in case I keel over on my next walk. She won’t even let me have cream in my coffee any more, for God’s sake. Which is how this visit came about. Last month, as you know, I turned eighty. Sophie suggested Ireland. Somewhere you’ve never been, she said, go visit Ute. I almost laughed out loud. Sophie loves so much to control and curb. Just think what she used to do to the honeysuckle! I just can’t resist leaving her in the dark at times. So, here we are in Ireland and your mother has not the slightest idea that I’ve ever been here before.
That evening, Ute leads them to her house, weaving all over the road on her bicycle as she rides ahead of the car. Sophie is clutching the steering wheel with her driving gloves on. Karl is asleep. The place is below the level of the road, half hidden behind a high bank of nettles. She shares it with a young man with a beard and a fisherman’s sweater. She says he’s a poet, and maybe the eyes do look a little mad, always flicking up to the clouds like he’s lost something up there. His name is Finn and he touches her a lot. Even the sharp prickles on her head seem to relax a little when he’s around. Oskar’s little sparrow is in love.
Tape One, continued, 15 August 1999
I notice that paint has come into fashion in Ireland now. The pink house next to the yellow, rubbing shoulders with the green and the blue. There was none of that when I was here. I moved from hard and bright to dimly lit. Life had been so noisy, then someone switched the sound off.
Oskar is walking on the cliff road with Ute. They don’t say much to one another. Just as he is wondering if she has listened to the first part of the tape yet, she leads him off the road they have walked every other day. They cut off at the crossroads and take the low road to the beach. Ute sits on a rock, skimming stones, while Oskar props himself up beside her on his shooting stick. What a strange sight they must make: Ute all cropped and dyed and himself bald as an eagle. Of course, she asks him the obvious questions. Why did you come here? Were you shot down? Were you hurt? Were you sent here, perhaps? He asks himself why it is often the wayward child who becomes interested in family history?
I was interned here for over four years in the Curragh, G-Camp. There were airmen, mariners, too. The people who picked me up were part-time soldiers and were rougher than they needed to be. The officers who brought me to the camp in the back of a car, they were fine. I was dressed in civilian clothes and it felt like a Sunday outing. When we arrived at the camp, I was shown into a room where an Irish officer with a ruddy complexion told me to sit myself down. Even though I hadn’t planned to, I told him the truth: that I’d jumped.
‘Good lad,’ he said.
To him, it seemed a reasonable thing to do, to desert from the Luftwaffe. I wondered at the time how neutral he thought he was. He just licked his pencil and wrote down what I said.
‘We’ll keep that under our hats,’ he said then. ‘Best to keep the other German lads in the dark on that one.’ They signed me in as Konrad Ritter, just in case anyone might have heard of me. So, throughout my time in the camp, I wasn’t Oskar Müller at all. Losing your name has a strange effect. You start to become someone else. You realise that things are easier to change than you supposed. That helped, after the war was over. I was already more adaptable than other people. I understood that life comes in phases.
As for the camp, there was lots to eat but little variety: potatoes, meat, eggs, bacon, cabbage. Tea and sugar were in short supply, but there was milk and plenty of terrible bread. Time out, yes. Tennis tournaments, a little gardening, cinema now and then, and dances in the local towns. No shortage of girls to dance with, either.
Even so, I was never really at ease. I always worried that someone would guess the truth about me, or that someone knew all along and was waiting for the right time to pounce.
The first week I was in the camp I had a visitor: an official fellow from our Legation in Dublin. He was standing with his back to the window when they showed me into the room and I couldn’t see him very well. There was just this voice, and at first I thought the game was up; it was quite the opposite, in fact. He told me it was a pity I couldn’t have managed to stay out of trouble a little longer. ‘No one in Berlin seems to know anything about you,’ he said. He congratulated me on staying out of Athlone (which was where the Irish put the spies). He assumed my task must have had breathtaking significance, and I played along. He wanted to debrief me but I sent him off with his tail between his legs. He went away thinking there was something he didn’t have the clearance to be told. After that, I was Konrad Ritter, the spy they didn’t rumble. It gave me some kudos with the other internees and a more comfortable cover story. Better a spy than a deserter. Joachim had told me so much about Dresden that it was easy for me to talk plausibly of life there, in a superficial sort of a way. I lived in Joachim’s house, went to his school, met my girlfriends in the same parks and cafés. I was just lucky, I suppose, that there was no one to contradict me.
Konrad Ritter or not, there was always the chance that someone would recognise me. In my nightmares, it was always a member of my own crew. I had barely given them another thought until arriving at G-camp. Perhaps it was the other men who put them in my mind, but once I was in the Curragh I thought of them every day. I was desperate to know that they made it home safely. On bad days, I examined all the worst-case scenarios. My greatest fear was that they’d been caught in a spotlight over England, shot down because they’d missed the extra gunner. Then, twenty years on, I was on a street in Frankfurt on my way to do a site survey and I saw Willy coming towards me. He crossed the road to avoid me. I thought that was interesting, that he was the one who felt ashamed.
I formed comradely enough friendships with some of the airmen in the camp but there was always a gulf between us, because, of course, everything I pretended to be was false. They took me under their wing on the basis that, whatever else I was, at least I was better than the sailors who had to be dragged from the sea by the Irish like drowned rats. But Ute, I haven’t told you the reason for all this. I haven’t told you about Elsa Frankel.
He talks about Elsa: how they grew up together side by side; how they were only two years apart but it might have been ten until they reached their middle teens and fell in love; how, even then, it was impossible to be together except in the secret places they discovered by the lake, in the woods. A little uneasy at how much he is revealing, he gives the tape to Ute. That night, he sleeps badly. It’s not his bad shoulder or the grinding of his heart that’s disturbing him. It’s that he simply cannot remember Elsa’s face. The young man he once was would never have believed such a thing possible. He would have been horrified to lose that face.
The next day, Ute doesn’t go to work. She has arranged for Sophie and Karl to spend a day at Ballymaloe and Oskar tries not to show how glad he is to be free of them. Ute doesn’t say much at breakfast but he notices how she is gentler with him, quieter. She packs a picnic and they go off in her little car. After half an hour or so they turn inland from a little harbour. A little further on, she stops and they walk a half kilometre or so off the road through a tunnel of fuchsia. At the end of the tunnel, there is a stile, which he negotiates stiffly, and beyond that a field where wildflowers surround a stone circle. Ute seems to find in the profusion of wildflowers there evidence of some spiritual richness in the land itself. It amuses him, this faith in nature.
The fact that Elsa was Jewish is everything to Ute. It seems to absolve him of the responsibility of his generation. She refuses to believe that, when the war ended, he simply went back home to Berlin and made no further effort to find her. She cannot accept that he allowed that to happen.
‘But I knew,’ he says, ‘that I must leave that all behind me.’
‘After it all came out about the things that had happened – the camps and all the rest of it – did you not have the urge to tell people about how you tried to find her?’
‘Tell them what?’
‘That you didn’t agree with all that. That you tried to change things.’
‘Change things? How? By running away? I did nothing to change things.’
‘You wanted to, though, didn’t you? I mean, clearly you didn’t support what they did.’
‘Perhaps, if I hadn’t known Elsa, I would have been the same as the others.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Have you ever heard of a hausjude, Ute?’
She shakes her head, and he can see the word makes her wince.
‘Even the most rabid anti-semite would have known someone they considered not quite as bad as the others, not quite typical. A kindly shopkeeper, perhaps, or a schoolfriend. Who’s to say that Elsa Frankel was not just that, my own personal hausjude?’
‘But you stepped outside it all. You threw yourself out of a plane, for God’s sake. Just after bombing Belfast. You couldn’t stand being part of the regime. You were against everything they stood for, and you had to find Elsa Frankel.’
‘Maybe I just didn’t like war. Maybe I wanted to sleep in a soft bed for a change, get away from the smell of men cooped up together. Don’t assume that I was any better than the others. Perhaps I was just more fortunate because I knew they were wrong.’
She looks glum. ‘Let’s go,’ she says.
For a moment he wonders, too, what explanation there could be for the profusion of wildflowers in this meadow. Flowers don’t grow like this in Germany any more. They’ve been crowded out by supermarkets and petrol stations. Suddenly, he feels rooted to this little meadow with its ancient stones and stubborn wildflowers. It feels, for a moment, as though to step off this land would be to lose all memory of how he’d seen things when he was twenty.
Sophie and Karl are late back from their day at the cookery school. They are curious about what an old man could have to say all day to his granddaughter. Sophie seems a little nervous as to what they might have in common. That night, Oskar hears Ute tapping away on her computer. The noise of it keeps him awake, so he gives into wakefulness and takes out his little Dictaphone. He wonders if they can hear him, mumbling away to himself. They’ll probably think he’s finally lost his marbles.
It was just after Easter – not long after Joachim was killed. My mind was turned inside out by his death. The bus picked us up at the Hotel at about 1900 hours to bring us out to the airfield for the final briefing. We didn’t know for sure until then whether it was definitely Belfast. The Etappe, we called it. Staging post. I don’t think I really made my mind up to jump until the very last moment.
Years later, I was watching something on television with my grandchildren. You may even have been there yourself, Ute. It was a comedy film and they had a way of making a drink seem to pour itself back into a glass, a custard pie fly back off a face. It came back to me then, sitting on a couch in Sophie’s house watching television with her children. As soon as I jumped out of that plane, I wished that I could fly upwards again and land back where I had started. I was elated to have tumbled free of the plane, but I was terrified too.
The next morning, getting out of bed is an effort. Ute is like a little current of electricity, energising them all. She has already been down at the pottery and has dropped by to leave them in some fresh bread and milk. When she finds Oskar sitting alone in the breakfast room, she closes the door behind her.
‘I have such exciting news for you,’ she says. ‘You’re not going to believe who I’ve tracked down.’
He knows, of course, but the girl is speaking as though it is all just a soap opera, and it irritates him.
‘Why?’
‘Wouldn’t you love to know how her life turned out? Where she went, who she married, what she did? Were there children? Oh, a hundred questions.’
‘Ute, I jumped. I didn’t risk my neck in sabotage or revolt. I jumped. I don’t even know now whether I did it for Elsa Frankel. Maybe I did it to get away. What had I hoped for? I hadn’t even thought about it. I hadn’t even done the most basic planning. No provisions, nothing. I’d deliberately left behind my emergency rations, my maps. God knows why, I can’t remember now. I was pathetic, useless. I was arrested almost as soon as my feet touched the ground. I had no chance of finding her anyway.’
‘I’m sure it’s the same person. Got to be. Right age, in or around, German Jew, ended up in New York.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No more.’
She flinches and he regrets being so firm with her. ‘I’d rather leave it be.’
Tape Two, 18 August 1999
When the time came to leave, they gave us next to no notice at all. Even those who had local girlfriends were marched onto the train and sent packing as soon as the war ended. I still wanted Elsa, of course, but I was too guilty and shocked by the pictures from the Nazi’s own camps, the KZs, to feel worthy of her, even if I’d had the option.
It was a long way home; the boat to England, and then a sealed train through England to the coast and across to Ostend. From there, we got a train to Brussels, where they held us for a couple of weeks. Everyone said there was no point in going back to Berlin, that there was nothing there. But I had to see it again.
A Parachute in the Lime Tree Page 19
