“After.” But she had hesitated, as if wondering what I wanted to hear.
The apartment was on the second floor of a large dark block – all that was left of a workers’ housing project of the nineteen-twenties. Martin had once lived somewhere between the bathroom window and the street. Looking out, I could easily replace the back walls of the vanished houses, and the small balconies festooned with brooms and mops, and the moist oily courtyard. Winter twilight must have been the prevailing climate here until an air raid let the seasons in. Cinders and gravel had been raked evenly over the crushed masonry now; the broad concourse between the surviving house – ours – and the road beyond it that was edged with ruins looked solid and flat.
But no, it was all shaky and loose, my mother said. Someone ought to cause a cement walk to be laid down; the women were always twisting their ankles, and when it rained you walked in black mud, and there was a smell of burning. She had not lost her belief in an invisible but well-intentioned “someone.” She then said, in a hushed and whispery voice, that Martin’s first wife, Elke, was down there under the rubble and cinders. It had been impossible to get all the bodies out, and one day a bulldozer covered them over for all time. Martin had inherited those two apartments in a town in Franconia from Elke. The Toepplers were probably just as poor as the Bestermanns, but Martin had made a good marriage.
“She had a dog, too,” said my mother. “When Martin married her she had a white spitz. She gave it a bath in the bathtub every Sunday.” I thought of Martin Toeppler crossing this new wide treacherous front court and saying, “Elke’s grave. Ah, yes, yes.” I said it, and my mother suddenly laughed loudly and dropped her hand, and I saw that some of her front teeth were missing.
“The house looks like an old tooth when you see it from the street,” she said, as though deliberately calling attention to the very misfortune she wanted to hide. She knew nothing about the people who had lived in this apartment, except that they had left in a hurry, forgetting to pack a large store of black-market food, some pretty ornaments in a china cabinet, and five bottles of wine. “They left without paying the rent,” she said, which didn’t sound like her.
It turned out to be a joke of Martin Toeppler’s. He repeated it when I came back to the parlor wearing a shirt that I supposed must be his, and with my hair dark and wet and combed flat. He pointed to a bright rectangle on the brown wallpaper. “That is where they took Adolf’s picture down,” he said. “When they left in a hurry without paying the rent.”
My father had been stabbed to death one night when he was caught tearing an election poster off the schoolhouse wall. He left my mother with no money, two children under the age of five, and apolitical reputation. After that she swam with the current. I had worn a uniform of one kind or another most of my life until now. I remembered wearing civilian clothes once, when I was fourteen, for my confirmation. I had felt disguised, and wondered what to do with my hands; from the age of seven I had stuck my thumbs in a leather belt. I had impressions, not memories, of my father. Pictures were frozen things; they told me nothing. But I knew that when my hair was wet I looked something like him. A quick flash would come back out of a mirror, like a secret message, and I would think, There, that is how he was. I sat with Martin at the table, where my mother had spread a lace cloth (the vanished tenants’) and over which the April sun through lace curtains laid still another design. I placed my hands flat under lace shadows and wondered if they were like my father’s, too.
She had put out everything she could find to eat and drink – a few sweet biscuits, cheese cut almost as thin as paper, dark bread, small whole tomatoes, radishes, slices of salami arranged in a floral design on a dish to make them seem more. We had a bottle of fizzy wine that Martin called champagne. It had a brown tint, like watered iodine, and a taste of molasses. Through this murk bubbles climbed. We raised our glasses without saying what we drank to, other than my return. Perhaps Martin drank to his destiny in Franconia with the two apartments. I had a plan, but it was my own secret. By a common accord, there was no mutual past. Then my mother spoke from behind the cupped hand and said she would like us to drink to her missing elder son. She looked at Martin as she said this, in case the survival of Chris might be a burden, too.
Toward the end of that afternoon, a neighbor came in with a bottle of brandy – a stout man with three locks of slick grey hair across his skull. All the fat men of comic stories and of literature were to be Willy Wehler to me, in the future. But he could not have been all that plump in Berlin in 1950; his chin probably showed the beginnings of softness, and his hair must have been dark still, and there must have been plenty of it. I can see the start of his baldness, the two deep peninsulas of polished skin running from the corners of his forehead to just above his ears. Willy Wehler was another Franconian. He and Martin began speaking in dialect almost at once. Willy was at a remove, however – he mispronounced words as though to be funny, and he would grin and look at me. This was to say that he knew better, and he knew that I knew. Martin and Willy hated Berlin. They sounded as if they had been dragged to Berlin against their will, like displaced persons. In their eyes the deepest failure of a certain political authority was that it had enticed peace-loving persons with false promises of work, homes, pensions, lives afloat like little boats at anchor; now these innocent provincials saw they had been tricked, and they were going back where they had started from. It was as simple to them as that – the equivalent of an insurance company’s no longer meeting its obligations. Willy even described the life he would lead now in a quiet town, where, in sight of a cobbled square with a fountain and an equestrian statue, he planned to open a perfume-and-cosmetics shop; people wanted beauty now. He would live above the shop – he was not too proud for that – and every morning he would look down on his blue store awnings, over window boxes stuffed with frilled petunias. My stepfather heard this with tears in his eyes, but perhaps he was thinking of his two apartments and of Elke and the spitz. Willy’s future seemed so real, so close at hand, that it was almost as though he had dropped in to say goodbye. He sat with his daughter on his knees, a baby not yet three. This little girl, whose name was Gisela, became a part of my life from that afternoon, and so did fat Willy, though none of us knew it then. The secret to which I had drunk my silent toast was a girl in France, who would be a middle-aged woman, beyond my imagining now, if she had lived. She died by jumping or accidentally falling out of a fifth-floor window in Paris. Her parents had locked her in a room when they found out she was corresponding with me.
This was still an afternoon in April in Berlin, the first of my freedom. It was one day after old Adolf’s birthday, but that was not mentioned, not even in dialect or in the form of a Berlin joke. I don’t think they were avoiding it; they had simply forgotten. They would always be astonished when other people turned out to have more specific memories of time and events.
This was the afternoon about which I would always say to myself, “I should have known,” and even “I knew” – knew that I would marry the baby whose movements were already so willful and quick that her father complained, “We can’t take her anywhere,” and sat holding both her small hands in his; otherwise she would have clutched at every glass within reach. Her winged brows reminded me of the girl I wanted to see again. Gisela’s eyes were amber in color, and luminous, with the whites so pure they seemed blue. The girl in France had eyes that resembled dark petals, opaque and velvety, and slightly tilted. She had black hair from a Corsican grandmother, and long fine lashes. Gisela’s lashes were stubby and thick. I found that I was staring at the child’s small ears and her small perfect teeth, thinking all the while of the other girl, whose smile had been spoiled by the malnutrition and the poor dentistry of the Occupation. I should have realized then, as I looked at Willy and his daughter, that some people never go without milk and eggs and apples, whatever the landscape, and that the sparse feast on our table had more to do with my mother’s long habit of poverty – a kind of fatali
stic incompetence that came from never having had enough money – than with a real shortage of food. Willy had on a white nylon shirt, which was a luxury then. Later, Martin would say to me, “That Willy! Out of a black uniform and into the black market before you could say ‘democracy,’ ” but I never knew whether it was a common Berlin joke or something Martin had made up or the truth about Willy.
Gisela, who was either slow to speak for her age or only lazy, looked at me and said, “Man” – all she had to declare. Her hair was so silky and fine that it reflected the day as a curve of mauve light. She was all light and sheen, and she was the first person – I can even say the first thing – I had ever seen that was unflawed, without shadow. She was as whole and as innocent as a drop of water, and she was without guilt.
Her hands, released when her father drank from his wineglass, patted the tablecloth, seized a radish, tried to stuff it in his mouth.
My mother sat with her chair pushed back a few respectful inches. “Do you like children, Thomas?” she said. She knew nothing about me now except that I was not a child.
The French girl was sixteen when she came to Brittany on a holiday with her father and mother. The next winter she sent me books so that I would not drop too far behind in my schooling, and the second summer she came to my room. The door to the room was in a bend of the staircase, halfway between the pharmacy on the ground floor and the flat where my employers lived. They were supposed to keep me locked in this room when I wasn’t working, but the second summer they forgot or could not be bothered, and in any case I had made a key with a piece of wire by then. It was the first room I’d had to myself. I whitewashed the walls and boxed in the store of potatoes they kept on the floor in a corner. Bunches of wild plants and herbs the druggist used in prescriptions hung from hooks in the ceiling. One whole wall was taken up with shelves of drying leaves and roots – walnut leaves for treating anemia, camomile for fainting spells, thyme and rosemary for muscular cramps, and nettles and mint, sage and dandelions. The fragrance in the room and the view of the port from the window could have given me almost enough happiness for a lifetime, except that I was too young to find any happiness in that.
How she escaped from her parents the first afternoon I never knew, but she was a brave, careless girl and had already escaped from them often. They must have known what could happen when they locked that wild spirit into a place where the only way out was a window. Perhaps they were trying to see how far they could go with a margin of safety. She left a message for them: “To teach you a lesson.” She must have thought she would be there and not there, lost to them and yet able to see the result. There was no message for me, except that it is a terrible thing to be alone; but I had already learned it. She must have knelt on the windowsill. The autumn rain must have caught her lashes and hair. She was already alien on the windowsill, beyond recognition.
I had made my room as neat for her as though I were expecting a military inspection. I wondered if she knew how serious it would be for both of us if we were caught. She glanced at the view, but only to see if anyone could look in on us, and she laughed, starting to take off her pullover, arms crossed; then stopped and said, “What is it – are you made of ice?” How could she know that I was retarded? I had known nothing except imagination and solitude, and the preying of old soldiers; and I was too old for one and repelled by the other. I thought she was about to commit the sacrifice of her person – her physical self and her immortal soul. I had heard the old men talking about women as if women were dirt, but needed for “that.” One man said he would cut off an ear for “that.” Another said he would swim the Atlantic. I thought she would lie in some way convenient to me and that she would feel nothing but a kind of sorrow, which would have made it a pure gift. But there was nothing to ask; it was not a gift. It was her decision and not a gift but an adventure. She hadn’t come here to look at the harbor, she told me, when I hesitated. I may even have said, “No,” and it might have been then that she smiled at me over crossed arms, pulling off her sweater, and said, “Are you made of ice?” For all her jauntiness, she thought she was deciding her life, though she continued to use the word “adventure.” I think it was the only other word she knew for “love.” But all we were settling was her death, and my life was decided in Berlin when Willy Wehler came in with a bottle of brandy and Gisela, who refused to say more than “Man.” I can still see the lace curtains, the mark on the wallpaper, the china ornaments left by the people who had gone in such a hurry – the chimney sweep with his matchstick broom, the girl with bobbed orange hair sitting on a crescent moon, the dog with the ruff around his neck – and when I remember this I say to myself, “I must have known.”
We finished two bottles of Martin’s champagne, and then my mother jumped to her feet to remove the glasses and bring others so that we could taste Willy Wehler’s brandy.
“The dirty Belgian is still hanging around,” he said to Martin, gently rocking the child, who now had her thumb in her mouth.
“What does he want?” said my stepfather. He repeated the question; he was slow and he thought that other people, unless they reacted at once and with a show of feeling, could not hear him.
“He was in the Waffen-S.S. – he says. He complains that the girls here won’t go out with him, though only five or six years ago they were like flies.”
“They are afraid of him,” came my mother’s timid voice. “He stands in the court and stares …”
“I don’t like men who look at pure young girls,” said Willy Wehler. “He said to me, ‘Help me; you owe me help.’ He says he fought for us and nobody thanked him.”
“He did? No wonder we lost,” said Martin. I had already seen that the survivors of the war were divided into those who said they had always known how it would all turn out and those who said they had been indifferent. There are also those who like wars and those who do not. Martin had never been committed to winning or to losing or to anything – that explained his jokes. He had gained two apartments and one requisitioned flat in Berlin. He had lost a wife, but he often said to me later that people were better off out of this world.
“In Belgium he was in jail,” said Willy. “He says he fought for us and then he was in jail and now we won’t help him and the girls won’t speak to him.”
“Why is he here?” my stepfather suddenly shouted. “Who let him in? All this is his own affair, not ours.” He rocked in his chair in a peculiar way, perhaps only imitating the gentle motion Willy made to keep Gisela asleep and quiet. “Nobody owes him anything,” cried my stepfather, striking the table so that the little girl started and shuddered. My mother touched his arm and made a sort of humming sound, with her lips pressed together, that I took to be a signal between them, for he at once switched to another topic. It was a theme of conversation I was to hear about for many years after that afternoon. It was what the old men had to say when they were not boasting about women or their own past, and it was this: What should the Schörner army have done in Czechoslovakia to avoid capture by the Russians, and why did General Eisenhower (the villain of the story) refuse to help?
Eisenhower was my stepfather’s left hand, General Schörner was his right, and the Russians were a plate of radishes. I turned very slightly to look at my mother. She had that sad cast of feature women have when their eyes are fixed nowhere. Her hand still lay lightly on Martin Toeppler’s sleeve. I supposed then that he really was her husband and that they slept in the same bed. I had seen one or two closed doors in the passage on my way to the bath. Of my first prison camp, where everyone had been under eighteen or over forty, I remembered the smell of the old men – how they stopped being clean when there were no women to make them wash – and I remembered their long boasting. And yet, that April afternoon, as the sunlight of my first hours of freedom moved over the table and up along the brown wall, I did my boasting, too. I told about a prisoner I had captured. It seemed to be the thing I had to say to two men I had never seen before.
“He land
ed in a field just outside my grandmother’s village,” I told them. “I was fourteen. Three of us saw him – three boys. We had French rifles captured in the 1870 war. He’d had time to fold his parachute and he was sitting on it. I knew only one thing in English; it was ‘Hands up.’ ”
My stepfather’s mouth was open, as it had been when I first walked into the flat that day. My mother stood just out of sight.
“We advanced, pointing our 1870 rifles,” I went on, droning, just like the old prisoners of war. “We all now said, ‘Hands up.’ The prisoner just –” I made the gesture the American had made, of chasing a fly away, and I realized I was drunk. “He didn’t stand up. He had put everything he had on the ground – a revolver, a wad of German money, a handkerchief with a map of Germany, and some smaller things we couldn’t identify at once. He had on civilian shoes with thick soles. He very slowly undid his watch and handed it over, but we had no ruling about that, so we said no. He put the watch on the ground next to the revolver and the map. Then he slowly got up and strolled into the village, with his hands in his pockets. He was chewing gum. I saw he had kept his cigarettes, but I didn’t know the rule about that, either. We kept our guns trained on him. The schoolmaster ran out of my grandmother’s guesthouse – everyone ran to stare. He was excited and kept saying in English, ‘How do you do? How do you do?’ but then an officer came running, too, and he was screaming, ‘Why are you interfering? You may ask only one thing: Is he English or American.’ The teacher was glad to show off his English, and he asked, ‘Are you English or American?’ and the American seemed to move his tongue all round his mouth before he answered. He was the first foreigner any of us had ever seen, and they took him away from us. We never saw him again.”
That seemed all there was to it, but Martin’s mouth was still open. I tried to remember more. “There was hell because we had left the gun and the other things on the ground. By the time they got out to the field, someone had stolen the parachute – probably for the cloth. We were in trouble over that, and we never got credit for having taken a prisoner. I went back to the field alone later on. I wanted to cry, for some reason – because it was over. He was from an adventure story to me. The whole war was a Karl May adventure, when I was fourteen and running around in school holidays with a gun. I found some small things in the field that had been overlooked – pills for keeping awake, pills in transparent envelopes. I had never seen that before. One envelope was called ‘motion sickness.’ It was a crime to keep anything, but I kept it anyway. I still had it when the Americans captured me, and they took it away. I had kept it because it was from another world. I would look at it and wonder. I kept it because of The Last of the Mohicans, because, because.”
The Moslem Wife and Other Stories Page 12
