Child of All Nations

by Michael Hofmann

  I didn’t notice how someone carried me into the cloakroom. I suppose it’s a miracle my father found me, because he didn’t give up a hat or coat and so didn’t have a cloakroom ticket. All at once he was there, kissing me and exclaiming: ‘Did you really think your father would have forgotten all about you?’

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you understand how a man might live for something like that, Herr Tulpe?’ asked my father. A little dark-haired man drilled his fingers in my hair, which I don’t like. There was another man there as well, who said: ‘I think it’s best to let sleeping children lie.’

  ‘But it’s only nine o’clock,’ said my father, and paid the bill so that I could go back to my mother. As we left, a waiter said, ‘Au revoir, mademoisellé’ to me.

  We went to the café on the Place d’Armes, where I was allowed to spend ten francs on the slot machine. But I didn’t get any benefit from it, because I wasn’t allowed to turn the crank myself. My father always cranked, and it’s the cranking that’s the fun of it. Machines like that are the greatest thing. A thousand presents are hidden behind glass in little green baubles. Over them is a crane with a pair of mechanical claws. You have to put a franc in the machine to move the crane and pick out a present with its claws, which it hardly ever does, because they’re mostly too low for it to reach. The claws have hardly any strength in them either; it can drive you wild.

  At ten my mother came along. She was crying because I’d been lost and my father hadn’t called. She said his thoughtlessness bordered on callousness. She didn’t want to have a go at the machine either, she just wanted to take me straight home to bed.

  My father squeezed us into a taxi. I was thinking, we could easily have walked home and saved the fare. The taxi driver couldn’t leave because my father was still standing on the pavement. He was holding the hand of my mother, who was sitting next to me on the dark taxi seat. The music was loud on the Place d’Armes, a little boy kept going round the bandstand on a scooter; there were lots of little children sitting on the pavement who were smaller than I was. They didn’t have to go to bed yet.

  My father was saying to my mother: ‘I’ll tell you everything later. I’ve got a little money – don’t ask, it was ghastly. Poor Tulpe is having an awful time of it – delightful chap by the way, you’ll meet him soon. It turns out he was hoping for money from me; thank God I could help him out. That saved his bacon. At that point he remembered he knew a man by the name of Max Popp who lives in Brussels and sometimes comes to Ostende for weekends. What he does then is sit on the pier by your beach and breathe in the healthful sea air, poor devil. Apart from that, he’s not a bad man.

  ‘Thank God we ran into Popp on the pier. He used to own a calendar factory in Thuringia, but now he’s living in Brussels. There’s something a little repulsive about him, but you get used to it. He doesn’t take his drink too well. The red rash is apparently something he picked up at the barber’s. Makes him a bit shy of being introduced to you. He has a most exquisite girlfriend, very delicate, with a lovely face – ow, why did you pull your hand away like that? You scratched me! I’d like to give her a little present tomorrow before she leaves, I’ve no idea what – will you turn your mind to it, Annie? Maybe you’ll think of something.

  ‘I’m just dictating Popp some of my advertising concepts – you know, if something like that comes off, we suddenly stand to make a lot of money. Popp has connections with department stores in Paris and Brussels, and offers them advertising concepts.

  ‘He lives in a tiny rundown hotel. He’s bound to have money – only rich people live as frugally as that. Tulpe didn’t think it was possible that he would come good. Will you excuse me the details now, Annie, I have to go back to the café. And at eleven I’m meeting Monsieur Corbet, our nice porter. A sweet fellow, a real gentleman, and fond of a drink. I asked him out to an Italian restaurant for a good bottle of wine. I think it’s best not to introduce Popp and Tulpe to him.’

  My mother wanted the driver to set off, because it’s awfully expensive to keep a lady idling in a taxi. It’s much more than if it’s just a man. My mother is always cross about the expense when my father gives a man friend a lift home in a taxi, and she has a bit of a fit. But when my father gives a woman friend a lift home in a taxi, then my mother doesn’t say anything at all. Even though that upsets her much more.

  We drove slowly along the Rue de la Chapelle to the port area, where we were staying in a nice hotel – not a shabby little one like Herr Popp. My mother would have preferred to stay on the beach in a little pension, but my father is always set on a proper hotel, where he doesn’t have to take his meals, and where there are porters who will write and deliver letters for him, even though my mother always offers to type for him. That’s why we have our very own typewriter, even though it was very expensive, and only broke down once, after I secretly practised on it.

  But my father almost never asks my mother to type for him. One time he said to her: ‘If a man lives with a woman, he shouldn’t have her working for him. She always imagines she’s suffering anyway. And so he can’t get nervous, or be annoyed about her mistakes or even be matter of fact with her, but only ever respond with gratitude and emotion, and I don’t feel like that. It even bothers me when you sew on a button for me, Annie. Frankly I’d rather have the chambermaid do it. She’ll do it better, and she’ll be happy with a tip, and I can be friendly to her and say thank you, without her coming over all moved and hurling herself at me or bursting into tears. Oh, if only you’d let me do more for you.’

  ‘You’re very unfair,’ said my mother.

  ‘Maybe so,’ said my father, ‘but save me from the ministrations of solicitous females.’

  During this scene, we were sitting in a little café by the port. Women pushed carts of prawns and smooth flat fish that smelled nasty and dripped pale blood. The fish were hung up next to us, like items of laundry out to dry. Fishermen walked over the beach. They wore reddish-yellow jackets – the house of my grandmother in Cologne is that sort of colour.

  There was another café right next door to ours, and beyond that another one. In fact there was a whole line of these little cafés: in front of them were little tables for visitors and little stalls with heaps and heaps of sea creatures. Opposite us, but not too near, was the black railway station. A breeze carried the smells of the locomotives to where we were sitting. The hanging fish stirred, the sky trembled slightly, and was very blue. My scalp felt chilly because my hair was still damp after swimming; my mother’s hair was still wet as well.

  Mama looked as if she’d spent a long time sitting out in the rain. She had unmoving sad eyes. Slowly she raised her hand to clutch the air, then let it fall heavily in her lap.

  I drank fizzy water, which tickled my nose, and bumped glasses with my mother, but she never even noticed. She’d ordered five langoustines. And now she wasn’t eating them. My father picked up one of the pink langoustines and slowly, without speaking, removed one of its black button eyes. I thought that was disgusting.

  ‘Don’t you love me any more?’ asked my mother. Thereupon she pulled out the langoustine’s other eye, and I ran off because a tiny little white puppy was running around on the street. I wanted to stroke it and play with it, and above all save it from the big trucks that were driving past all the time.

  I wished the little puppy didn’t belong to anyone. That was stupid of me, of course. Everything cute belongs to someone. The puppy belonged to the newspaper seller who keeps shouting out: ‘Écho de Paris!’ Later, I was able to visit the puppy at his house.

  My parents called me because they wanted to go. My father paid for the langoustines, even though there were still some left on the plate. My mother seized my hand and marched down the uneven pavement with me. My father dawdled along behind us – we kept turning round to check, and then he walked even more slowly.

  Sometimes my father loves us, and sometimes he doesn’t. When he doesn’t, we can’t do anything about it, my
mother and me. Nothing is any good when he doesn’t love us. Then we’re not allowed to cry in his presence or laugh, we mustn’t give him anything, or take anything from him either. Any steps we might take only have the effect of delaying even more the time when he will love us again. Because he always comes back to us. We just have to hold still and wait, and then everything takes care of itself. There’s nothing else we can do anyway.

  My mother spends more time waiting than I do, because she doesn’t play much, and she has no little friends. Now we’re in Brussels, waiting for my father. That’s what our life is like. It’s always terribly hard to move to a new city, and we almost didn’t make it to Brussels either.

  There were almost no summer visitors left in Ostende. There was an English boy I knew, but he had already gone. We couldn’t go swimming any more, the sea had grown gigantically wild. The clouds came down from the sky, and the waves climbed up to the clouds. When my mother and I wanted to go for walks on the dike like before, the wind kept us pinned to the spot.

  The bellboy from our hotel was going on holiday so we could use the loos in the hotel restaurant for nothing, because the toilet lady had gone as well. Marguerite had gone to her boyfriend, who would keep her warm. She was the one who tidied up our rooms, and sewed on my father’s buttons, and sometimes said to my mother: ‘I feel sorry for all women.’ When I was alone and crying, she went and sat by me sometimes and cried and wrote letters to a French soldier at my father’s desk. She said he wasn’t a soldier, but an officer. I asked my father about that, and he said it was a mistake. An officer was a soldier too. I told Marguerite that, and she was cross with me. Other than that, she was always kind.

  When no more visitors came, she left the hotel to be with her boyfriend, who has a café in Ostende which isn’t for foreigners. She came back to visit us once in the hotel, and she was completely different. She didn’t have a white lace cap and a black dress or a white apron. She had funny blonde curls and a big black hat. And she was wearing a coloured silk blouse – and you could see that underneath she had big snowballs just like my mother. My mother says those are breasts. I pray to God I never get anything like that growing on me.

  *

  Without my necklace, we’d never have made it to Brussels. My necklace was so beautiful.

  My father often loses money – not banknotes, but they’re not proper money anyway. Proper money is round and hard, and being round it often rolls away. The French and the Belgians understood that, and so they drilled a hole through the middle of their centimes. My mother didn’t understand what the holes were for, but I did.

  Every day I crawled around my father’s room collecting the centime pieces. Once I got wedged under the wardrobe. Thank God my feet were still sticking out. Marguerite grabbed me by them and pulled with all her strength. I got a bump on my head, but I was saved. I know there are people who dive in the sea for pearls, which is very dangerous; when I’m grown up I mean to do that too. But, for a child, diving for coins in a carpet is dangerous enough.

  I threaded all the centime pieces on a piece of red silk thread. I ended up having three bracelets of them and a necklace that hung down to my belly button. I jingled everywhere I went, and could feel the weight on my shoulders. I felt like one of those bemedalled old men called veterans that they have hanging around guarding the pictures in museums.

  One evening we were finally able to pay the hotel bill in Ostende. The manager and manageress both came and kissed us goodbye. That left us with just enough money to get to Brussels third class. But at least that was something.

  A chilly breeze blew over the station platform. Our luggage was already in the compartment, including my doll’s kitchen and the big box full of shells and rocks and starfish. Errand boys and porters stood around us, making impatient gestures. My father was rummaging around in his pockets. ‘Give me some change, will you,’ he said to my mother. My mother looked forlornly up at the sky, the bunch of red dahlias in her hand trembled. There was no one we knew anywhere; all the people we knew had left Ostende long ago.

  The conductor was already starting to bang the doors shut, when my father beamed all over his face and tore off my chain of office, and we climbed in. Slowly the train rolled away. Like a king, my father tossed the chain out of the window to the porters.

  While we were travelling we were happy. My father laughed and kissed us and sang a Cologne song that they sing during Carnival:* ‘It could, it could, it could have been all right…’

  To begin with, we were happy in Brussels too. We hired a taxi to ferry our luggage. The railway porters were paid by the taxi driver. The taxi driver was paid by the maître d’ at the hotel. Then we greeted the waiters and chambermaids, who remembered us from old times: they were all pleased to see us.

  But unfortunately something a bit awful happened upstairs. When my mother came to put me to bed, she suddenly turned very pale, and then I felt sick as well, because there was such a horrible smell. My mother called my father, who said: ‘You’re right. There is a bad smell. A decomposing corpse, I should say.’

  My mother thought someone must have been murdered in the room, and didn’t dare open the wardrobe and chest of drawers. My father sniffed the air thoughtfully, then he picked up my cardboard box, which contained all my marine treasures. When he opened it, we all covered our mouths and noses right away. The stones and the shells wouldn’t have smelled so bad by themselves, but I’d also included discarded langoustines and dead crabs.

  My father was very angry with me. But how was I to know those quiet dead things in their pretty shells would suddenly start to smell so infernally? I don’t understand it. Maybe they were still alive and made that smell out of vengefulness. I was so sure they were dead, otherwise I would certainly not have packed them in the box. I wouldn’t treat my tortoises like that, so you see I know how to deal with living things.

  My father hated me, and I was terribly unhappy. My mother had to empty a whole bottle of Fougère Royale over the box before my father agreed to dash downstairs with it into the dark of Brussels, to dump it unobtrusively somewhere. Then my mother and I sat down in the open window, and waited for the smell to leave the room and my father to come back.

  My father came back very late, because he met a policeman on the way. He made friends with the policeman, who helped him hide the package under a park bench, and then the two of them went off together to have a drink. As my father couldn’t pay, he had to call the poet Fiedler, who’s staying in Brussels for the time being, and who doesn’t have any money either. And then Herr Fiedler came along, plus a bookseller who worships my father, and he agreed to lend him seventy francs. My mother and I had fallen asleep sadly in the window when my father made his happy return.

  Night was breaking up over the Place Rogier. Through the early morning mist we could see the glowing flowers that the first of the flower-sellers were putting out. We saw a big wooden roof that hadn’t been there when we’d arrived. Workmen had spent the night knocking it up. Little beads of damp hung in my mother’s blonde hair, making it go even curlier. I was tired, and so was my mother.

  My father was standing behind us. ‘What are you still doing up at this time?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you still cross?’ I asked him. ‘Mama explained everything to me; I didn’t know that dead things can smell so horrible. I never want to smell like that, I want to live for ever.’

  My father was standing behind us. He held my face in one hand, and in his other hand he held my mother’s. ‘You two,’ he said, ‘you’re the dearest things I have in the world.’ Then he undressed me and put me to bed. He dragged my mother away to his room. She would have slept much better in my bed, which was much bigger; I was sure of that. I called out after them to tell them, but neither of them seemed to hear me.

  ‘Kully,’ my mother said, ‘will you telephone downstairs to the concierge to see if a letter’s come, ask them to send breakfast up, and then tell me everything you know about Barbarossa?’

 
My mother is standing in front of her dresser, slowly twisting her hair into a knot. She is wearing a little pink blouse, and she doesn’t look anything like a grown-up, but like a girl who’s come to play with me. I’m still lying in bed. It feels lovely and warm, and my mother says: ‘Who knows how long we’ll be able to live like this?’

  I take the telephone into bed with me and call downstairs. There’s no letter from my father. I order breakfast. Jeanette brings it up, and smiles at us. My mother gives her a silk blouse, because it’s been so long that she hasn’t been able to give her a tip. At first Jeanette refuses, then finally she agrees to take it.

  My mother opens the window. The air is cold, and it smells somehow Christmassy. On the Beau Marché diagonally across from us, there’s a huge shimmering silvery Santa Claus. My mother wants me to eat all the breakfast by myself. We always order one breakfast between two, so that the bill doesn’t get even higher. That’s the only thing we eat all day. We don’t even dare show our faces in the restaurant.

  Mama’s grown very thin. I think it’ll take my father to come back, to make her put on some weight again. ‘Get dressed, Kully,’ she says, ‘and tell me what you know about Barbarossa.’ She sits by the window and doesn’t even notice that I don’t wash behind my ears.

  ‘Barbarossa was an emperor with a long beard,’ I say. That’s the kind of thing I have to learn. I don’t go to school, my mother gives me lessons.

  When I was in Germany, before, I did go to school, and that’s where I learned to read and write. Then my father didn’t want to be in Germany any more, because the government had locked up friends of his, and because he couldn’t write or say the things he wanted to write and say. I wonder what the point is of children in Germany still having to learn to read and write?