by Tessa de Loo
Uncle Heinrich was not against it. Aunt Martha had more difficulty gracefully accepting the departure of an unpaid worker. ‘You don’t know what you’re embarking on,’ she said scornfully, recoiling at the thought of all that work she would now have to shoulder. ‘It will come to nothing, I can tell you that.’ Anna stirred the soup in silence; she had little inclination to get involved in another scene at this eleventh hour. ‘Why don’t you say anything? Do you feel you’re already too good for us? I’ll tell you something: it will work out badly for you there. I can already see the day that you …’ her voice broke, ‘come crawling back here on your knees, begging for a piece of bread. Don’t think …’ Anna sighed wearily. ‘Why excite yourself?’ she said coolly, without looking up from the pan, ‘I’m going to die anyway; you’ve always said so. Surely I won’t get to twenty-one?’
She was enrolled for the new semester. Uncle Heinrich contacted a cousin in Cologne for lodgings and ordered a tailor to make a coat of indestructible material to last a lifetime. In the same way that a bride in her wedding dress and veil is initiated into being a married woman, Anna predicted that this coat would usher in a totally new existence for her. Some days before the departure she was summoned to Jacobsmeyer. ‘I have something awful to tell you, Anna: this job isn’t going to happen.’ ‘You can’t mean that …’ She slumped down in one of the gleaming polished pews and looked at the statue of the Virgin Mary, which suddenly seemed self-satisfied to her. She couldn’t go back any more – she had already stripped off her former existence – that was all she knew. Jacobsmeyer paced up and down in front of the altar, rubbing his jaw. ‘You know what,’ he turned round abruptly, ‘we won’t say anything to your uncle and aunt. I’ll pay for the school. You say nothing, pack your suitcase, travel to Cologne and attend your lessons.’
On the first day of November Anna caught the train at Paderborn. She wore a trench coat made with room to grow, and to go with it a grey felt hat with a brown feather from the summer plumage of a pink-footed goose. Her possessions were in a cardboard margarine box. The train rode through pine forests and towards yellow deciduous forests, through meadows and ploughed fields. She closed her eyes and opened them again, hoping to see something she recognized. The landscape slid by neutrally. Yet she felt that she was coming steadily closer to her birthplace, that the thread which had held her tight for fourteen years had slackened, but it was being gathered in now – in the puff-puffing tempo of the train. But when the train roared into the station the feeling of being on the way home deserted her. The massive presence of the Cathedral right next to the station intimidated her, with its serrated silhouette of pointed spires protruding against the anthracite-coloured sky like a sombre warning. How futile your pleas would be in this outsized place of worship, given that it had already been hard enough to be heard up above from the Landolinus church. She clutched the cardboard box to her belly. And now for Uncle Franz, she said to herself, so as not to be sucked up into the innumerable parallel lines. She dug a carefully folded piece of paper out of her coat pocket. In Gothic letters of almost calligraphic beauty, Uncle Heinrich had written the name of a hospital where his cousin was chief maintenance technician. A passer-by told her in Cologne slang which tram she had to take. She suppressed the inclination to greet everyone when she got on, and passed down the gangway between all these fellow citizens – yes, fellow citizens. But no one noticed her. They were staring outside with a certain resignation, as though they had not personally chosen to ride in this tram through this city at this point in time. The tall façades, the bustle of people, the traffic; the density of life in the city of her youth overwhelmed her. In the village she had always been the daughter of old Bamberg’s renegade son who died young; here, in the overcrowded anonymity, she was absolutely nobody.
As she pushed open the heavy door of the hospital, she had the distressing sense that she was stepping into a city within a city. There were births and deaths in both, in greater concentration here. She waited for her uncle in the foyer on the edge of a leather armchair. The glances of passers-by rested on her just a little too long. Suspiciously, she tried to see herself through others’ eyes. She saw someone in a medieval coat, with a hunting hat and a droll feather and a shabby box on her lap – a rare example of a type that had become extinct in the city long ago. I look ridiculous, she judged. A man in a white coat came up to her. A look of horror slid fleetingly across his face, but he subdued it immediately and shook her jovially by the hand. She tried to remember him from the funeral, hoping to find something from the past in his face, now that she had not yet succeeded with Cologne in that respect. But she recognized nothing – he did not look like her father or Uncle Heinrich or her grandfather. His cheerfulness was definitely not a family trait either. ‘Is this all your luggage?’ he asked, taking the cardboard box from her. Anna nodded silently. She took off the ridiculous hat, so as to have something in her hand, and followed him, ashamedly stroking the feather with her finger.
His house was in the hospital grounds. He left her there in the care of his wife, who welcomed her with a baby in her arms. Aunt Vicki showed her round, chatting airily. She was plump, her reddish-blonde frizzy hair held in check by combs. There was a little dimple in the middle of her chin, which sometimes made her expression look bashful, as though someone were unexpectedly deceiving her, but then an unrestrained laugh brushed her face clean again. Anna walked through the citizen’s house in a fuddle. A room with polished furniture – just for sitting in! The enormous horn of a gramophone gaped boldly at her. A real WC with wash-basin. Hot running water. A bedroom to herself: wallpaper with a medallion motif, a dressing-table with a marble top and washstand, a hanging cupboard – for the clothes she did not possess. The wooden privy at the back on the farm, the pump she washed under, the attic with the worm-eaten floor where she slept – these were abruptly banned to the hazy region of unwelcome memories.
Dizzily she slid between the stiff sheets that evening. Although she had tumbled into a different existence in a single day, she had the feeling of being further than ever from the city that had survived inside her for all those years. The microcosm of a six-year-old, a covered-in city, where life was intact and round and where trusted voices sounded. Aunt Vicki put her head round the door: ‘Schlaf wohl, Anna.’ ‘Gute Nacht …’ she replied hesitantly. Her aunt and uncle’s good nature confused her, accustomed as she was to surliness and suspicion.
At the school for ladies she was the only one who came from the country. No one noticed. She wore her aunt’s dresses; she had always respected High German – her father’s vehicle for distancing himself from his family. Yet she could only half follow the pupils’ conversations; their language referred to an unknown world with its own jargon: an impending engagement, a thé dansant on Sunday afternoon. No thés dansants for Anna, but in the nearby bioscope the magical darkness recalled those vague memories of the theatre in the casino. Heinrich George and Zarah Leander with curls plastered on her temples and a rose behind her ear. Die grosse Liebe, Heimat, La Habanera. The Ufa films were preceded by a newsreel; images of reality acquired the allure of dream pictures. Across the white screen marched lively soldiers. Germany had an army again, it was busy at high speed pulling itself together out of the malaise. Healthy, athletically built boys were sent out by the Reichsarbeitsdienst to drain the marshes or to bring in the harvest. Beaming girls, not wearing make-up, were helping on the farms; they cleaned and polished and looked after the children; they were working as health visitors. They smiled indefatigably, lived in camps and began the day by hoisting flags and singing the Horst Wessel song lustily: ‘Die Strassen frei, die Reihen fest geschlossen’. It was going well in Germany; everyone was helping enthusiastically with reconstruction; it was the end of chaos, poverty, unemployment. There was structure again, a structure which had the colour of ripe corn and a summery sky, of blonde hair and blue eyes. Despite her mistrust of flags and marching songs, her dislike of the screaming Austrian and the warnings that
came out of Uncle Heinrich’s Bückeberg adventure, she was at the same time swept along by the optimism, together with the others sitting close together there in the intimacy of the warm bioscope. The pictures gave a comfortable feeling of confidence. Everything in the world outside was under control, and on top of that they also got a film into the bargain. The total improvement was no surprise to Anna – it coincided naturally with the progressive line that her own life was taking. Germany was climbing up out of the pit, so was she. This was not a sober observation but an impression of the senses, a rising awareness of simultaneous ascent. The bar of chocolate Aunt Vicki shared with her during the performance was the best proof of it: who would have been eating chocolate previously?
Yet Cologne, with its history going back to Roman times, continued to intimidate and disillusion her. The sturdy round towers with battlements that she often passed were subtly indicating to her that fourteen years’ exile on the edge of the Teutoburger Wald amounted to nothing compared with being a Roman tower in Teutonic Germany for nineteen centuries. And the Lippe was no more than a ditch compared with the Rhine. One Sunday afternoon she was walking in a park with her aunt and the pram; a wintry sun cast long white strips between the tree trunks. She still had difficulty about simply not having to do anything on one day of the week: walking about without a purpose, bending over the glittering surface of a pond, lifting the baby out of the pram and holding it up against the blue sky with outstretched arms so that it could waggle its limbs about. On impulse she said, ‘Let’s walk past the casino, where I … where we used to live.’ That ‘we’, said out loud, legitimized the idea: she ought to go to the casino on behalf of her father and Lotte too; they would accompany her and be looking over her shoulder. Aunt Vicki shrugged her shoulders: fine, it was all the same to her. In her innocence, chatting peacefully about trifles, she served as a lightning conductor for the sudden anxiety that clamped Anna’s throat shut. As though she were an indifferent passer-by, she was strolling along the street from which, as a child, she had gone, carried off by hasty family members in the opposite direction. The street that was inextricably linked with the figure of her father walking over the cobbles in a black coat, leaning heavily on his stick and from time to time bringing out his spit bottle and quickly hiding it away again. By then the dark cloud on which he would float away – out of the city, the country, the world – was already hanging over the street, above the casino, the church and the school.
They passed the school; the windows began high up above the ground, it was impossible to see outside through them; passed the church in a merciless nineteenth-century style that inspired fear of the Supreme Being. She stopped a little further on. Her gaze ascended the façade up to the stained-glass windows, it slid sideways down towards the varnished double door with copper bell and small latticed windows. Wherever she directed her gaze it ricocheted back. The building shut her out, denied that she had breathed inside it, that her thoughts and feelings had filled its spaces, that her father and Lotte had been alive there. These walls had once enclosed family life; now they formed an immovable obstacle between her and the others. ‘They have asphalted the street,’ she said disdainfully. ‘There used to be cobbles.’ They walked on, as though it were any street. Everything was normal, the sun was shining, it was winter, 1936 was coming to an end, 1922 was unimaginably long ago. Her first six years, and those who had had a part in them, had left no trace: there was nothing to recall their existence.
The village on the Lippe did not exist any more either. Uncle Heinrich did not get in touch with her nor she with him. Only Jacobsmeyer had a letter from her now and then. When she was twenty-one years old the Court of Justice summoned her to sign the guardianship declaration so that her uncle could be released officially from his responsibilities. It was a long screed. She started reading it cursorily; she understood that her signature indicated her approval of the manner in which he had exercised his guardianship in the past. Did what it said in the declaration concur with reality? She felt hot, she felt cold. She simply could not read any further. This text referred to somebody else, from another life. She looked up from the document in confusion. Opposite her, in a sterile office behind a metal desk, the duty official nodded impatiently at her. She wrote her signature with an angry stroke. This Anna, smelling of soap, clothed in clean citizen’s clothes, put the pen down, pushed the document brusquely towards the official, stood up and left the building. She went down the stone front steps and walked in the city, a city that would have to be reconstructed anew on the sunken foundations of her memory.
The ink on the certificate from the school for ladies was hardly dry before she had a job, as a live-in servant girl with one free Sunday every fortnight. She went into service with the Stolz family who lived in the east of the city in a neighbourhood of small villas, not far from the Bayer industrial complex where Stolz worked as a chemist. She had no notion at all about what it meant to be someone’s servant girl, an organic component of your employer’s household. Her expectation that she would be in charge of the Stolz family’s housekeeping was already belied on the first day, when it became evident that legislative and executive powers were divided. The first, in the person of Frau Stolz, had devised a factory system to enable the household activities to proceed as quickly and efficiently as possible. Ever since her marriage, nine years ago, the skirting boards in her villa in the east were dusted at ten o’clock each morning, on Thursday afternoons the shirts were ironed at two-thirty, on Saturday mornings the windows were cleaned at nine o’clock. She had worked out to the decimal point how long each task required. The elements of the programme slotted so tightly into one another that the executive power hardly had time to breathe in between. As though in a silent film, Anna sped from one task to the next. With a hogshair brush she was dusting the skirting boards – half-way through this the doorbell rang, she put her brush in her overall pocket and answered the door. She resumed her work feverishly after the interruption, which had not been included in the programme. On her daily check Frau Stolz ran her index finger over the half-metre that Anna had overlooked because of the delay: ‘You have not dusted here today.’
That her insistence on unquestioning obedience crushed all forms of personal initiative not only escaped her, she also blamed her subordinate for it. One afternoon she went out visiting. Anna had to iron all the shirts before she returned. It began to rain. Anna looked up, saw the drops on the window, was caught in a dilemma: if she went upstairs to close the bedroom windows she might not finish the ironing in time. She did not dare take the risk. A little later on Frau Stolz stormed in to the room, out of breath. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it,’ she cried triumphantly, ‘I say to my friend: I must go, the windows are open at home, it will rain in. She says: Isn’t there anyone at home? Oh yes, I say, our servant-girl – but don’t think that the idea will occur to her!’
Fran Stolz was convinced that, apart from laying down requirements, which she saw as a form upbringing, she also had a major responsibility for Anna’s welfare. She could not tolerate Anna being alone in her attic room on free evenings, but invited her for a cup of chocolate milk in the sitting-room. She taught her open-work and embroidery, in cross-stitch and petit point. Skills that a young woman had to master, she explained, magnanimously providing Anna with the materials that were needed. They sat there as a threesome like that, Herr Stolz with his newspaper, his wife and the servant-girl united by a piece of needlework. Their daughter, Gitte, a girl of eight with long plaits, was already in bed.
Whenever a speech was expected from the Führer, he switched on the Volksempfänger – the standard issue utility radio set. Anna listened and did not listen. It was the same as the embroidery that she was working on: she did it but her head was not involved. Goebbels spoke first, about issues that fell far outside her field of vision. ‘The plutocracy – the Wall Street Jews want to ruin us …’ tatata, so it went on. This was only the prelude. Marching music, military commands, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil. Then
he himself spoke, directly to his people, too loud as usual, and kept that up throughout the broadcast. ‘I must first of all reassure Mr Minister Eden that we Germans do not in the least want to be isolated and also that we do not feel isolated at all …’ Herr Stolz nodded in agreement. He folded his hands over the curve of his belly and listened attentively. Anna impassively allowed the bragging to drift over her, she waited until it was over, just as you wait for a rainbow to end – meanwhile she continued to breathe quietly. The Führer had become an institution. Everything was being decided and organized at an abstract level, over her head; she had not the slightest influence in it. So she felt entirely indifferent about it. The silent struggle against Frau Stolz’s authority was already exhausting enough.
Over the edge of her embroidery she had already peeked at the walnut bookcase dozens of times, where the books were kept behind glass as though they were jewels. She could not resist the temptation any longer. ‘Herr Stolz, excuse me, may I …?’ She pointed towards the sanctuary with her embroidery needle, ‘… may I read a book one day?’ ‘Of course,’ he nodded to her with surprise, ‘choose one.’ Avoiding Frau Stolz’s staggered look, Anna stood up and went to the bookcase hesitantly. She pushed open the squeaking doors; a delightful smell arose from the bound volumes, many with gold blocking, a smell of thousands and yet more thousands of printed pages, of cardboard covers, of stories that begged to be woken out of their hibernation, of escaping from the foolish, unreal here and now – the promise of infinitely more fascinating worlds than that of cross-stitch and openwork. She read the titles giddily, Frau Stolz’s eyes burned holes in her back. She dared not hesitate too long, took out Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. ‘That is much too difficult,’ sputtered Frau Stolz. ‘Have you read it?’ said her husband. ‘No, but …’ ‘Well then, let her, culture is for everyone nowadays. It wouldn’t do you any harm if you read a book sometimes too.’ Frau Stolz fell silent, and laughed at Anna, to smooth things over. It was not clear whether the smoothing over referred to the humiliating remark from her husband or to the painful fact that she did not read. Anna opened the book and buried herself in it.
