Child of All Nations

by Michael Hofmann

  When my father wanted to leave, my grandmother wanted my mother to come and live with her. But my mother wanted to stay with my father. Then my grandmother wanted me to live with her, but my parents wanted to take me with them, and I wanted to go with them wherever they went.

  One time, my mother cried and said: ‘But the girl has to learn something; she has to have a proper education, or what’s going to become of her?’ Then she thought of packing me off to Paris to be with nuns.

  My mother cried, and I yelled. And my father said: ‘All right, now quiet down, both of you. Kully, stop yelling, you’re staying with us.’ And then he said to my mother: ‘Come on, Annie, leave the girl be. There’s no need for her to be any better educated than you are – so why don’t you just teach her what you know?’

  On the way to the Grande Place there’s a little street which is chock-a-block with old bookshops. There my mother found a couple of old German schoolbooks that she uses to teach me geography and history. She couldn’t do it without the help of the books, because she’s long since forgotten whatever she learned at school, and that can’t have been much, it seems to me.

  My mother is thirty. When she started going to school, it was wartime. Then what the children mostly learned was to form an orderly crocodile when there was an air raid, and to go down to the bomb shelter in the basement, and also to pack field parcels and make collections for war victims. Other than that, she got lots of days off, because of victorious battles, or because there was no coal, or because everyone was dead from influenza.

  I don’t know why I’m supposed to learn about things like Barbarossa: it’s not as though that’ll come in handy in later life, or anything. Even my mother says if you want to use the things you learn at school, you’re pretty much restricted to being a teacher. And either you won’t have the brains for it, or you’ll have starved to death before you become one. And my mother says that of all the things she needed to know in her life, there was not one that she’d learned at school.

  My mother has lots of important skills. She knows how to roll cigarettes for my father, which are half the price of ordinary cigarettes. She knows how to remove the inkstains that my father likes to leave in handkerchiefs, and she can pack suitcases so that three times as much goes in them as when my father packs them. He would either have to run out and buy a new suitcase, or else give away anything that won’t fit. And then she can do our laundry in the sink in the hotel, and iron it with her little travelling iron, and all without anyone in the hotel noticing. My father mustn’t notice either, because he doesn’t like her doing that. But he does like it when she knits caps and pullovers for us that we look nice in when we go around in them.

  There are lots of other things my mother is good at doing, but she can’t peel prawns as fast as I can!

  Before, my mother and I used to go for a walk every day for an hour before lunch to have some exercise. Now we don’t have lunch, but we still go for a walk so we at least get some fresh air. My mother says it’s almost as good for you as eating.

  Every day we walk down the Rue Neuve to the Grande Place, because my father used to be so fond of that. It is very nice there too. The big houses gleam in the sun like silver and gold, and the flower stalls have the brightest and most colourful flowers in the world. My mother always wants to see all the flowers. She says she much prefers looking at all of them to buying just a few. But when we have money, we do buy some anyway, because of the enthusiastic way the flower-sellers wave and shout to us.

  My mother is very sad as she walks along beside me. She is afraid that I’m hungry, and she is afraid that something might have happened to my father. We can’t write to him, we can’t send him a wire, and we can’t telephone him – we have no address for him at all.

  I say to my mother: ‘I don’t think anything has happened to him,’ and then my mother heaves a deep sigh of relief. But she still doesn’t know what’s to become of us. As we slowly walk along, she doesn’t teach me about Barbarossa, instead she talks about our perilous situation. There are apparently so many perils facing us that it’s very hard to understand.

  Above all, I need to learn what a visa is. We have German passports, which the police gave us in Frankfurt. A passport is a little booklet with stamps in. Basically, it’s to prove that you’re alive. If you lose your passport, then as far as the whole world is concerned you might as well have died. You’re not allowed to go to any more countries. You have to leave the country you’re in, but you’re not allowed to enter a different one. Unfortunately, God made people in such a way that they have to live on land. I now secretly pray every night that in future people might be able to float in the water for years on end, or fly around in the air.

  My mother read to me from the Bible. It says there that God created the world, but it doesn’t say anything about borders. You can’t cross a border without a passport and a visa. I always wanted to see a border properly for myself, but I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t. My mother can’t explain it to me either. She says: ‘A border is what separates one country from another.’ At first I thought borders were like fences, as high as the sky. But that was silly of me, because how could trains go through them? Nor can a border be a strip of land either, because then you could just sit down on top of the border, or walk around in it, if you had to leave one country and weren’t able to go into the next one. You would just stay on the border, and build yourself a little hut and live there and make faces at the countries on either side of you. But a border has nowhere for you to set your foot. It’s a drama that happens in the middle of a train, with the help of actors who are called border guards.

  If you have a visa, then the guards let you stay on the train and travel on. Because our passport was issued in Frankfurt, we can only get visas issued in Frankfurt. But Frankfurt is in Germany, and we can’t return to Germany, because then the government would lock us up, ever since my father told the French newspapers and other newspapers, and he even wrote it in a book, about how much he hates the government. A visa is a stamp in your passport. Each country you want to go to, you first have to ask it to give you one of its stamps. And for that you have to go to a consulate. A consulate is an office where you are made to wait quietly for a very long time and be on your best behaviour. A consulate is like a piece of the border in the middle of a different country; the consul is the king of the border.

  A principal characteristic of visas is that they expire. To begin with, we’re always terribly pleased to get a visa for a different country. But then the visa starts to expire, every day it expires a little more – and finally it’s completely expired, and then we have to leave that country. I must learn about all this. Sometimes it makes my mother cry, and she says how it all used to be so much easier before. But I wasn’t alive at the time when it was all so much easier.

  Anyway, I’m not scared of uniformed policemen or of officials on trains. When we went to Poland, a customs man wanted to take away my doll’s kitchen from me, and he wanted not to admit my two tortoises either. In the end, he even let me blow my nose on his handkerchief.

  Here in Brussels a traffic policeman on the Place Rogier wanted to arrest me because I walked past the cars at the wrong time and because I stared at the policeman who looked so majestic on his white throne in the middle of the busy traffic. There were changing red and green lights, and I found it a lovely spectacle altogether. You’re only supposed to cross the road when the light is on green, but I forget that sometimes, because I like the red light better.

  When I looked at the traffic policeman, the traffic stopped and couldn’t be controlled any more. It was just as well those cars happened not to want to run me over; there was only one of them that did, but luckily its driver was able to restrain it just in time.

  Cars are much more dangerous than lions, and they need to be very carefully controlled because they always feel like charging at people. Lions only do that when they’re very hungry. Lions don’t scare me at all. I think I would
only be very slightly scared if a hungry lion were to charge me. Maybe I would stay just exactly where I was, and talk to him and stroke him. You can’t do that with a car if a car charges you; that’s why I always run away from charging cars. Because a car would like nothing better than to kill you.

  When I was standing in the middle of the traffic, feeling completely hemmed in by trams and enemy cars, the handsome policeman came down from his throne and charged up to me like a lion, pretending he wanted to eat me. I was unable to run away.

  The policeman grabbed me by my arm. His mouth was huge and open. I really did believe he was a lion; panting cars surrounded me, the traffic lights glowed like red and green eyes, the houses were so high, the sky was remote, clouds of fog whooshed down on top of me. And because the policeman was a lion, I treated him like one. I patted the hand with which he was holding my arm, I implored him in French not to hurt me, and not to hold me so tight and not to eat me if he wasn’t hungry, because: ‘Mon père n’est pas chez nous et ma mère ne peut pas rester sans moi. Excusez-moi, monsieur. Je vous ai regardè – vous êtes si beau.’

  At that the lion stopped his growling, and he didn’t want to arrest me either; the policeman turned into a prince who carried me across the road to the woman who sits on the rails. The woman is fat, and she sells nuts from two big wicker baskets. The trams don’t use those rails any more.

  The prince set me down in front of the fat woman. I managed to kiss him quickly first. He bought me ten large walnuts from the woman. Then he went away, remounted his throne, and mastered the traffic again. He was just exactly as he had been before, when I felt I had to stare at him, and so brought the traffic to a halt.

  Now I see him every day. I always sort of wave to him with my eyes, and he smiles down at me. Sometimes I badly want to wave to him with my hand. But I decide I’d better not. Perhaps it would bring the traffic to a halt.

  *

  We pass the Rotisserie d’Ardennoise, where we sometimes went with my father. He would drink some pink wine, or some dark brown beer out of a little silver goblet. Even if you go in there at lunchtime, it’s evening inside, and there are little yellow lamps burning on the wooden tables. Once when I knocked over one of those lamps by accident, it was positively night time at the table, though the street outside was still perfectly bright. Now there’s a giant beast lying outside the rotisserie, with a skin like the ground in a pine forest, all black and needly and rough. There’s blood coming out of its head.

  My mother pulls me away from it and says: ‘That’s a wild boar.’ Do those really exist? Where do they live? My mother says: well, she’s never seen one before either, but she’s sure they do, and that’s what it is. This one is dead, and people are going to eat it.

  Outside another store there are bundles of large colourful birds. They once really existed as well; they flew around somewhere. I would be scared if those birds were still alive and came flying at me. But the birds are as dead as the boar, and they’re going to be eaten later as well. Only not with their feathers on. I should like to know why people won’t eat the pretty feathers and what happens to them, because surely they’re the major part of a bird. Maybe there are factories that are able to convert the feathers into canned vegetables or something?

  My mother says: ‘Sometimes people stuff pillows with feathers like that.’

  That makes me really keen to cut open our pillows, to check whether they’re full of such pretty feathers – and then I’d let the feathers fly out of the window.

  The lady with the bird’s nest comes out of the big Café Monopole. I want to drag my mother out of the way quickly, but she’s already spotted us. I’m a little afraid of the lady with the bird’s nest, because she wants to adopt me.

  ‘Maestro’ – she has always addressed my father as ‘Maestro’ – ‘Maestro, do you not worry what this nomadic existence is going to do to your daughter? Let me have her, and I’ll take that wild bud and develop it into a beautiful blossom of a girl.’ But I don’t want to be developed by the bird’s nest.

  We go back inside the Monopole with the bird’s nest. I would prefer to sit outside myself, but the bird’s nest is afraid of draughts. My mother doesn’t want to order anything, because we don’t have any money – but the bird’s nest does. So I quite simply order a couple of frankfurters for her and a vanilla ice cream for me, and I say very quickly: ‘Thank you so much for treating us, Fräulein Brouwer. Next time, when my father’s here, we’ll treat you.’

  ‘What news of the maestro?’ asks Fräulein Brouwer, and then she says: ‘Ah, such a creative temperament needs space, no family bonds can be permitted to trammel it.’

  We met Fräulein Brouwer on the Moselle once, she was staying at the same hotel as us. She pursued my father, because she knew his books. There isn’t a single woman in the whole world to whom my father isn’t charming. That’s why we often have women buzzing around us that my mother and me aren’t able to shoo away by ourselves; my father just attracts them. Fräulein Brouwer is short and old. She used to be a schoolteacher, and now she has a legacy and open eyes and ears and she wants to take in the beauties of the world. That’s why she keeps going to places where my father is. My mother hates that sort of behaviour. Once she said to my father: ‘The hysterical flattery of women like that is only going to make you even more spoilt than you are already.’

  Fräulein Brouwer always addresses my father as ‘maître et cher collègue’ too, because when she was staying on the Moselle, she wrote a poem about a bird’s nest, which got published in a newspaper. Fräulein Brouwer says she is busy planning her future oeuvre, and that her family have always had a poetic streak.

  She is half German and half Dutch, but her passport is Dutch, which is very lucky for her. My father says it used to be important to have a good name or a good reputation, but that no longer matters – what is important is having a good nationality. And that’s just what we don’t have, and the bird’s nest does. If she were to adopt me, I’d have it too, but I’d rather have my mother.

  I don’t like it when the bird’s nest says to me: ‘Well, Kully, how is everything?’ and acts as though she’s terrifically pally with me. I can tell her I’ve got different pals than her. Nor do I want to be brought up by the bird’s nest. Frankly, I’d rather be naughty, and that way she won’t want to have me any more.

  When we return to the hotel, the hotel manager goes up to my mother in the lobby and says: ‘Madame, we have just received a telegram from your husband in Warsaw. He will settle the bill from there in the next few days.’

  I’m so happy, but my mother is hardly able to smile. ‘From Warsaw?’ she says quietly. ‘From Warsaw…’

  In the afternoon, my mother arranges a rendezvous with Herr Fiedler, because she thinks he may know what my father is doing in Warsaw. She’s also desperate to talk to a grown-up writer again, and borrow some money so that we can go and have something to eat again.

  My mother is always out to borrow money, but when push comes to shove, she doesn’t do it. I can understand that stealing from people is wrong, but I fail to understand why one shouldn’t ask people for money if they have got some. It annoys me when people don’t hand over their money when they have it and we need it. Why do they suppose we go to the trouble of asking? When my father has money, he always gives it to other people who need it.

  It’s wrong to abandon children and animals, or neglect them, but money isn’t something that becomes unhappy or that starts crying if you leave it. My grandmother in Cologne was someone else who always gave money to us, and to other people too. She can’t send us any money now, though, because if she did the German government would lock her up.

  My mother says my father can’t settle the hotel bill from Warsaw anyway, because the Polish government doesn’t allow you to send money out of Poland. My father often tells fibs to get a bit of peace and quiet. We’re happy about that. Sometimes, though, he performs miracles and everything he says comes true.

  My mother i
s crimping her hair in front of the mirror; she wants to have a round curl either side of her face, to make her look beautiful. If she looks beautiful, she feels better about walking through the lobby or talking to people to ask them for money. I’m not like that when I’m asking for money: I don’t mind not looking beautiful.

  I watch my mother test her curling tongs on some newspaper beforehand, to make sure they’re not too hot. She’s just making a face go curly in the newspaper, and I exclaim: ‘Look, Mama, there’s Uncle Pius!’ It’s a newspaper from Switzerland that Herr Fiedler gave us last week, after he’d read it. I don’t like to read newspapers, and my mother doesn’t either. Only sometimes, when I’m not able to sleep. It really is: the newspaper has a big picture of Uncle Pius. My mother looks at it as well, and then her hands shake, and she drops her curling tongs. Under the picture it says: ‘The well-known Viennese doctor recently passed away in Vienna; there were no suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘What did Uncle Pius do, Mama?’

  ‘Oh, Kully, don’t ask – you won’t understand, it’s a dreadful world.’

  I’m very fond of Uncle Pius. He is our favourite uncle; he’s already old and grey-haired. A year ago we stayed with him in Vienna, and we all felt very happy. Uncle Pius laughed a lot, and he was very good to us. Now we can’t go back to see Uncle Pius or Vienna, because the German government has occupied it all.

  We know lots of people who ran away from Vienna, including even some children. The silly thing is that when you run away from those countries, you have to go as you are, you can’t take your house or your money with you. That’s the reason why my grandmother stayed in Cologne. Uncle Pius has a big hospital in Vienna – how is he going to take that with him?

  My father says the German government locked people up who didn’t even steal anything. Who would want to live in a country like that?