Chaperoned

by Dora Heldt

  I saw him through the open window, standing on the ladder, filling in cracks on the wall. He turned around when he heard us come in. The ladder wobbled, and I held my breath.

  “Don’t go falling down, big man.” A giant of a man with a beard, dressed in blue overalls, appeared next to him and gripped the ladder tightly. My father smiled at him and steadied himself against the spot on the wall he’d just filled in.

  “As if I could fall off a ladder! I’ve got impeccable balance, so don’t you worry about me.”

  The giant looked at him skeptically.

  “Hi Christine, Dorothea. This is Onno, the electrician. Onno, this is my daughter, and Dorothea, the one painting the restaurant after we finish.”

  Heinz brushed his hand over his forehead, wiping putty all over it in the process. The light gray color made his eyes look very blue. Dorothea looked at him, fascinated.

  “Heinz, you have something on your face.”

  “Occupational hazard.” He climbed down from the ladder carefully. “You can’t do hard graft without getting a bit dirty. I’ve been filling in the holes so you’ll have a smooth surface for painting. You wouldn’t believe how bad the wall looked—it was filled with craters. But you know what it’s like when people do a rush job. They don’t waste time on the preparations. The workmen couldn’t care less.”

  I looked for the filled-in patches on the wall, but could only see the one with his handprint in it. Maybe that had been the crater.

  Besides us and Onno, two other workmen occupied the room: a young guy who had the same company logo on his overalls as Onno, and an older one standing at a table with Marleen, flipping through a color catalog. My father wiped his hands on his jeans and took Dorothea and me by the arm.

  “Girls, let me introduce you to the team so you know who’s who. You already know Onno; he’s the head electrician. They’re sorting out the lamps and so on. He’s a nice guy, doesn’t talk much, but then that’s not what he’s paid for. He likes Schlager music, too. And he knows Kalli.”

  “We play cards together, Kalli and me.” Onno held out his hand to us and made a slight bow. My father looked at him approvingly.

  “And that’s Horst, Onno’s assistant.”

  “Morning.” Horst shook our hands too and bowed. My father and Onno looked on contentedly.

  “We don’t know that guy over there with Marleen. He’s from the mainland, Onno says, so I guess he’s the painter.” He lowered his voice. “He looks like a hippie, I’m not sure…”

  On closer inspection, the hippie was in his early forties, had broad shoulders, narrow hips, and shoulder-length blond hair that he’d tied back. Dorothea was gazing at his back, and then his behind.

  “Hmm…”

  We all looked at her. Her expression betrayed her thoughts…to me, at least.

  “Dorothea!” I tried to make my voice sound reprimanding, but failed.

  My father nodded in agreement. “You see, Dorothea, you’re looking at his trouser pockets, too. I hope he doesn’t have drugs with him.”

  “He’s not from the island, in any case.” Onno scratched his head and stared at the hippie’s pockets too. The owner of the pockets now sensed the four pairs of eyes focused on him. He said something to Marleen and turned to face us.

  “There you are.” Marleen came over. “Did everything go okay?”

  I smiled. Dorothea fixed her stare on the foreign-to-the-island hippie, and my father and Onno stood close behind us looking firm.

  “Has something happened?” asked Marleen hesitantly.

  “Not yet…” Dorothea said lasciviously. My father pushed in front of her.

  “Marleen, we should really know who we’re involved with here.”

  “What do you mean?” She looked confused.

  I gave Dorothea a nudge, trying to pull her gaze away from her prey.

  “No, of course nothing’s happened. It’s just that my father and Onno wanted to introduce everyone to us, but they don’t know this gentleman.”

  By now the man had walked over to us. I could read Dorothea’s mind: he looked even better from the front than behind. She had that special look on her face.

  “Oh, okay.” Marleen was relieved. “I thought Onno already knew him. This is Nils Jensen, my interior decorator. Nils, this is my friend Christine, her father Heinz, and Dorothea, the set designer who’ll be working with you, and Onno Paulsen.”

  Nils smiled widely, shook all our hands, and looked at Dorothea for a long while. “But we do know each other,” he told Onno. “I always used to work for your firm in the summer holidays. My father is Carsten Jensen.”

  Onno shook his hand.

  “You were smaller and your hair was short back then. I didn’t recognize you. Hi.”

  My father wasn’t willing to give up his skepticism quite so easily. “And your father knows you’re here?”

  “Dad!”

  “Heinz!”

  Nils looked first at Dorothea and me, then at my father.

  “Of course he does. I live with him.”

  “Aha. Well, perhaps we can meet him at some point.”

  Now, even Onno was giving his new friend a confused look. Nils was unruffled. “I’m sure he’ll come by at some point. After all, he’ll want to know what I’m doing to his old stomping ground.”

  “You’re not doing that much,” Heinz said, “you’re just drawing a few pictures.”

  Marleen took a deep breath. I decided that was enough of the introductions for now.

  “So, Dad, it’s nearly midday. Do you still have things to do here, or shall we go and look around the town and buy a newspaper?”

  “You’ll have to ask my boss.” He smiled at Marleen with his filler-smeared face. “If she says I can clock off, then I can head out with you.”

  Marleen nodded, relieved. “Sure, go. Onno knows the score, and Nils can discuss everything with Dorothea. You two take your time and have fun.”

  Dorothea tore her gaze away from Nils’s and looked Heinz up and down.

  “Are you going like that? You’re covered in putty.”

  He rubbed his hands off on his jeans. “Should I get changed? It’s not that obvious. Is it? Christine?”

  I pulled him toward the door. “We’ll stop at the apartment on our way. See you later.”

  “I hope this Nils is clean,” my father whispered as he held the door open. “He looked at Dorothea so strangely. We’ll have to keep an eye on him. Did you notice how big his pupils were? You need to wash your leg before we go out. Or put pants on.”

  I contemplated asking Nils if he had some drugs on him after all. He might need them.

  A Good Friend

  * * *

  Two hours later we were sitting in the beachside Surf Café with two ice creams and the sea in front of us. I had rushed my father along at the speed of light. We’d bought a newspaper, and on the way to the kiosk he’d noticed that some of the street names were similar to those back home in Westerland. He got into a discussion with the kiosk’s owner in which he claimed that the names had been stolen.

  “It’s like a poor man’s Sylt here.”

  I left the shop pointedly and sat down outside on a bench to have a smoke. Heinz didn’t come out for another quarter of an hour, then sat down next to me on the bench and explained that the owner was named Helga and had given him a tourist guide to Nordeney. And she wanted to spend New Year’s on Sylt. My father had offered to give her the guided tour.

  “A very striking woman,” he said admiringly. “She wasn’t born on Nordeney, she moved here. Hey, something smells smoky here. Shall we move on?”

  Out of fear of being barred from the local shops, I upped the tempo. We walked past numerous shops. I showed him the post office, the bank, the bakery, but didn’t let him go into any of them. My father got quieter, then started to limp, then came to a complete standstill.

  “My hip hurts. I shouldn’t be walking this fast.”

  “Shall we get an ice cream?” I had a
stitch in my side. He took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  “Oh, yes. Pistachio, with cream.”

  “Can you manage to walk along the beach a little? Then we can go to the Surf Café and look out over the water.”

  “Of course. Walking on the sand is always fine. And we don’t need to rush along like we have been.”

  We walked along the water in silence. My father linked his arm with mine and looked blissfully out at the sea.

  “They do a good beach here, anyway. It looks just like at home.”

  I felt a little calmer. At the Surf Café we got a table in the sunshine and ordered pistachio ice cream with cream, and coffee, too. My father was impressed with the friendly service and commented happily that the ice cream was two euros cheaper than in his favorite café in Kampen.

  “It’s not bad here.” He looked around, content. “Not bad at all.” He started to eat, clearly relishing it. “And they have good ice cream, too.”

  Once he’d polished it off, he unfolded his paper and started to read. I looked out at the sea and wondered whether Dorothea would start something with the handsome hippie. The signs were all there. I resolved not to be jealous. Especially as long-haired blonds weren’t my usual “prey,” as Dorothea would put it. Even though he did have a great butt.

  “Tell me, Christine…”

  I jumped, feeling like I’d been caught thinking naughty thoughts.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s nice that we’re on vacation together, don’t you think?”

  I looked at my father. He had green ice cream on his nose and a little cream on his chin. He laid his head to the side and smiled.

  “Did you have a good childhood?”

  “Are you already finished with the paper or something?”

  “There’s not much in it. And we can talk, can’t we? People don’t talk to each other enough.”

  “So now you want to talk about my childhood?”

  “I just wanted to know if you had a good one. Mine wasn’t so good, after the war and all. It was a bad time, and we didn’t have much. But you all had a good upbringing. We had a lot—a lovely home, a car, holidays, cake every Sunday.”

  I remembered how my father had been when I was a child. He had taught me to swim, written me a letter just after I learned to read, repaired my bike for me, mobbed the umpire when he sent me off after a rough foul in a handball tournament. I really had had a good childhood. My emotions got the better of me, and I grasped his hand and squeezed it.

  “Yes, Dad, I had a lovely childhood. I should thank you for it, I know that…”

  “Oh, don’t be silly.” My father shooed a wasp away from his ice cream. “It’s fine. Do you think your brother and sister had a good childhood too?”

  “My…oh yes, of course. Why?”

  He reached for his paper again. “I just wanted to ask. In Bochum a forty-year-old woman stabbed her parents and cemented them into the carport. She said it was the justified punishment for her catastrophic childhood. How awful. But everything’s been fine with you guys so far, right?”

  I decided to daydream about the beautiful butt for a little longer.

  Without any more sentimentality, we drank another coffee. I read the story about the Bochum daughter and was just thinking that I had no idea how one would go about cementing one’s father when Marleen called.

  “Christine, where are you?”

  “We’re sitting in the Surf Café having an ice cream. By the way, do you still need to put concrete down in the restaurant?”

  “Huh? What makes you ask that?”

  “It was just a joke.” It wasn’t a particularly good one, but it was worth it just to see the look on my father’s face. “What’s up?”

  “Kalli Jürgens phoned. He wanted to know if Heinz was already here, and said that you could both go by if you’d like to. He’s at home.”

  “Dad, do you have Kalli’s address?”

  “Nope.”

  I bit my lip and refrained from commenting. Marleen had heard.

  “He gave it to me. It’s Kiefernweg seventeen.” She explained the route to me. “Take your time, we can meet for dinner this evening. I’m making fish. Have fun with the boys.” She giggled and hung up.

  I looked over at one of the boys in question. “Did you get the gist of that? Kalli phoned.”

  “I guess that was Marleen.” He looked past me, clearly in a huff.

  “Dad, Kalli phoned up at Marleen’s. And the thing about the concrete was a joke. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t joke about things like that.”

  “No, you’re right. So would you like to go to Kalli’s?”

  “Fine with me.”

  I gestured to the waitress and pulled my purse from my bag. My father never paid when he was sulking.

  My father and Kalli had met in Hamburg in the fifties. They had both cut their ties with the provinces and were seeking adventure in the north. But the adventure side of things didn’t really work out, unless you count a job in the dockyard and a double room at the YMCA. Kalli and my father decided to go the extra mile and rented an apartment together.

  “You could say we were one of the first communes.” My father always said this with a cheeky look on his face, brushing a hand through the little hair he had left. “Those were the days—we had such wild times.”

  I often thought that those were probably the only moments he wished he smoked. A casual cigarette would have made him look much cooler.

  When I was thirteen, the legend of my dad as a hippie died. That was when Hanna, Kalli’s wife, told us that the apartment consisted of two old kids’ rooms in an apartment belonging to a widow. After her daughter moved out, Frau Schlüter hadn’t liked being alone, so she rented rooms to Kalli and Heinz, cooked for them, and did their washing and ironing. Alcohol and visits from women were forbidden, but they did play canasta together every third evening. With canapés and pickles.

  Half a year later, my father joined the army and Kalli went to work for customs. But their bond survived. After all, wild times like those bind you together forever.

  Kalli and Hanna lived in a red house surrounded by lots of land. My father stopped at the gate and looked at the front garden.

  “They don’t have any hydrangeas. And hardly any roses. But there’s sea buckthorn everywhere.”

  I pointed at the wall of the house. “There are some roses. And it’s a really nice garden.”

  “Really? I’m not so sure. We have more roses, in any case. But Kalli never did have a green thumb. Even back then.”

  As I rang the bell I pictured a young Kalli repotting Frau Schlüter’s African violets.

  “May I remind you that Mom does the gardening?”

  “Well, she never mows the lawn.”

  Kalli opened the front door.

  “Heinz.”

  Kalli held his hand out toward him, and my father grasped it.

  “Kalli.”

  Kalli put his other hand on my father’s shoulder.

  “Man, Heinz.”

  “Kalli. How long has it been?” Untiringly, they kept shaking hands.

  “Heinz, after all these years.”

  “I know!”

  They were real men. Tough men. But I was the child, so I got a hug.

  “Christine, my dear, you’ve really grown up. I can still remember you spitting up on my only suit when I burped you. Half an hour before church. That was Volker’s confirmation, I think. Is that right, Heinz? You lent me your jacket. Oh, but you were a cute kid, Christine.”

  “Your son and I are the same age, Kalli. I wasn’t still being burped when I was fourteen.”

  “No? Then perhaps it was the christening. How time flies. Come in, come in, I’ll make us some coffee.”

  We followed him into the living room. Kalli cleared a pile of newspapers, papers, and mail from the sofa and took a woolen blanket, cycling helmet, and some shoe polish from his chair.

  “Have a seat, I’ll
be back in a moment.”

  “You can tell he’s lost without Hanna,” whispered my father. “I don’t think it’s usually this messy here.” Hanna was still staying with their very pregnant daughter Katharina, whose baby was due any day.

  He reached for a magazine and started to flip through it. I looked around the living room. The furnishings were so similar to my parents’ that it could easily have been their place. A three-piece lounge suite on the right with a low coffee table in front of it, then to the left a wall unit with a built-in TV cupboard and bar, then a dining table with four chairs, plus the ever-practical sideboard. Presumably the drawers and cupboards contained tablecloths, vases, and carafes that were never used. The usual assortment of family pictures hung on the walls. In the middle, one of the whole family thirty years ago: Hanna in the center with Kalli behind her, a teenage Volker on the right, and ten-year-old Katharina on the left. My siblings and I had given my parents exactly the same kind of photo for their golden wedding anniversary. Next to it, I recognized Katharina’s wedding picture, Volker in his marines’ uniform, and various baby pictures. I wondered when my father and Kalli had last seen each other.

  My father threw the magazine back onto the pile, wrinkling his forehead. “It’s full of recipes. Seriously, the kind of things he reads!”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Oh, quite recently. When he and Hanna were in Denmark and they came to Sylt on the ferry. Just after we’d paved the driveway.”

  “Dad, that was ten years ago.”

  “Really? Well, there you go. And the driveway still looks good; there’s not a paving stone out of place. That firm did a great job, you know.”

  Kalli had come back with a tray. Three cups without saucers, an already-opened packet of cookies, and the jug from the coffee machine, the contents of which looked very pale. He put the cups down on the table and poured the coffee. We watched, fascinated, as the coffee powder settled on the bottom. Kalli cocked his head to one side.

  “That’s strange. Where did all that powder come from?”

  “You have to put one of those filter bags into the machine. Didn’t you do that?” My father stirred it cautiously.