Child of All Nations

by Michael Hofmann

  ‘But the hairdresser always rubs some stuff in her hair to make it grow.’

  They didn’t understand me at all. I couldn’t speak any more, because all of a sudden the words in my head hid themselves. They all thought I was telling lies, or I was ill. A doctor was supposed to come too. My mother was in church, I wasn’t lying.

  There are always secrets. I have a secret too, because I wanted to use the Polish cold to make raspberry ice and I broke seven glasses in the process. It happened this way: I was allowed raspberry syrup in my room because I had a temperature. I saved the raspberry syrup, and then I secretly collected glasses from all the hotel rooms that were left unlocked. I was so desperate to make raspberry ice. I filled seven glasses with raspberry syrup and stood the glasses outside on the window ledge because overnight everything turns to ice. By morning, the night had shattered my glasses.

  I didn’t want to bring it up: people never believe that things are perfectly capable of breaking by themselves, they would all have thought I was fibbing. At least I had some pink ice – you couldn’t really eat it, but it was nice to look at. I wanted to sell it and give my father the money for the broken glasses. But then I thought I would try and eat it, though unfortunately it didn’t taste as nice as I’d hoped. I held individual pieces up in the sun, like glowing pink diamonds, and they slowly melted. My whole bed felt wet, and I got up and sat in a chair, and stopped feeling ill.

  My parents came in with the doctor. I told him right away: ‘I’ve broken seven glasses.’ He held my head and looked at me and said: ‘She’s completely restored, and has no temperature.’ My mother threw the broken glasses in the wastepaper basket.

  I hope my father isn’t cold in Poland. Maybe Uncle Genek will treat him to a coat. Because the thing is our winter coats are in pawn in Salzburg. In Salzburg, I was almost killed by the Duke of Windsor.

  When we went to Poland, we still had our coats. And then we went to Salzburg. It was sunny and the air was warm, and the snow on the mountain peaks was far away. We were glad to get to Salzburg. In Lvov there wasn’t any more snow, it was all dirty grey slush.

  My mother got really annoyed one last time in Lvov. We went with one aunt through the Jewish market, past tin and rusty scrap iron. The whole market was rusty scrap iron, the sky was yellow. And everything was broken. Broken beds, broken prams, broken wheels of prams, broken lamps, broken screws. Everything was rusty, even the people were broken and rusty.

  Then we saw my father walking through the rust with Manya. She was carrying some red roses. My father bought six rusty nails and gave three of them to Manya. She laughed, her face glowed pink under her green lacquered cap. My father looked very serious. First he looked at Manya, then he looked at my mother…

  My mother didn’t want my father to give Manya rusty nails; she told him he should throw them away. My father said: ‘Rusty nails are lucky.’

  I’ve now got a collection of thirty rusty nails, but they’re not bought, I got them off loose toilet doors. I’ve also got a couple of old bolts for toilet doors – I don’t know whether they’re worth anything or not.

  My mother wanted to get out. My father wanted to get out as well, he always wants to get out. In a breakfast bar he had a lot of nut brandy to drink, which sometimes poisons him. These breakfast bars don’t offer breakfast at all, but all kinds of eating goes on in them at noon and night time. A thousand filled rolls filled the bar, which was way too small.

  Uncle Genek and the aunts seemed to like us less. The winter was over, everything was over, our visas were over too. We left without any money. Our relations gave us a little brown suitcase. We thanked them heartily.

  We had to travel a day and a night to get from Lvov to Salzburg. We were hungry and opened the little brown suitcase. I was so impatient to see what was in it. My throat felt like an endless tube full of hunger.

  The night sprinkled starlight into our apartment. I wanted to eat, we all wanted to eat something. But the suitcase had nothing in it but strings of dried mushrooms which we couldn’t eat. They didn’t even look nice when you hung them round your neck. My mother said quietly: they’ll keep, she might be able to make soup from them one day.

  We arrived in Salzburg feeling very hungry and tired. We had hoped to be merry. Some men were going to come and give my father money. They wanted to make films out of his books.

  I was in a cinema once, and I saw Shirley Temple. That’s the name of a little girl who’s pretty and poor, but really she’s perfectly all right. My father said: ‘That kid’s worth millions!’

  Millions is a lot of money. If you put a coin on the ground and more and more coins on top of it, till the pile has reached the sky – that’s a million.

  I can jump around and be merry anywhere, I don’t need money for that. But it seems grown-ups need money to be merry. They have a far harder time of it than children, if you ask me.

  We wanted to sit in the café Bazaar and see the colourful Englishmen in their Tyrolean hats. There are no Tyroleans in Salzburg, only English. My mother didn’t feel like going to the café Bazaar. She felt like wandering over water meadows by the river, stroking blossoming shrubs, and sitting on a bench.

  My mother and I spend a lot of time sitting on benches. We open our mouths to let the sun shine into them; then we eat the sunshine, and our bellies feel full of warm happy life. My father didn’t feel like eating sunshine. He wanted to sit in the café Bazaar and drink slivovitz, which he finds more warming than any amount of sunshine.

  We were standing on a bridge, the river looked so jolly. All at once my mother ran off to the white mountaintops, and to a friend of hers who was waiting for her in the café Glockenspiel.

  My father doesn’t like glockenspiels of any kind. He went to the café Bazaar with me. As long as there’s a lot of ice on the mountains, there’s not much to be had in cafés. Instead I had Linzer torte. My father drank very sweet black coffee and a lot of slivovitz, which smells of plums. We were on the lookout for famous actors and film producers with lots of money. Not one came – only a waiter, who wanted my father to pay the bill.

  I had to stay behind and wait. My father went off; he was going to fetch our coats from the hotel and go with a policeman to take them to the pawn shop. I had to sit in the window and look at the pictures in a magazine. It always makes me terribly tired, having to sit quietly alone. Suddenly my eyes just seem to fall asleep.

  All at once everything turned completely horrible. Some people knocked over my table and me with it. My face was in the ashes and dirt, and people rushed madly up to the window, squashing me. I had completely stopped moving. I didn’t even cry, because I thought I must have been trampled to death. There were so many shoes all round me.

  Suddenly all the shoes were gone, the waiter picked up the table and put it back, found me and put me back too. At first I yelled that I didn’t want to be put back, because once again people were coming running up to me. They wanted to sit me down on a chair, and touch me. They brought me cake. But I fought back, I kicked and spat, and threw cake at them.

  My father came back, I recognized him. ‘My God,’ he cried, ‘what happened?’

  I screamed: ‘I’ve been trampled to death.’

  He sat me down on his lap. ‘Are you injured? Does something hurt?’

  ‘No. I told you: I’m dead. They trampled me to death.’

  ‘But Kully, you’re alive, you’re moving around. What are you doing with that piece of cake?’

  ‘I want to throw it at the people and kill them in return for trampling me to death.’

  I was dead, but my father wouldn’t believe me. Tables danced and trees came; I wanted to break them, there was iron in my hands – and then I flew very far away.

  Opposite the café Bazaar is a shop that sells dirndls, and loden coats and loden trousers. That was where the Duke of Windsor went in to buy something. Everyone wanted to see the Duke of Windsor for themselves, and that’s what the mass running was about. It was my misfortune to
have been sitting directly in the window.

  Later on, my father pointed out the Duke to me. He doesn’t look like much, if you ask me. I can’t understand people knocking over small children just for a sight of him. He used to be a king, apparently, and he really belongs in England.

  The policeman was paid from the money that my father got for the coats. There was enough left for us to go to the Augustinerbrau in the evening too, to buy radishes and salt pretzels in the cobbled streets of the monastery and fill big jugs full of beer at the fountain. I didn’t drink any, I was only allowed to carry the jugs, and walk around singing in the big hall among the tables.

  My mother was cross that my father had taken away the coats. I thought it was silly of my father not to have taken away my coat too, because it was stolen later, at the border in Buchs. And now we can’t go back to Salzburg to pick up our coats, because there’s a dangerous new regime in power.

  That’s why my mother and I are in Amsterdam. But we have to leave here too, because the police won’t let us stay as our visa stamps are no longer valid. And my father still isn’t back. Herr Krabbe did give us some money once, but not enough. We couldn’t quite pay for the hotel.

  The Dutch queen has a jubilee, and Amsterdam is preparing a carnival for her. The city is fluttering in yellow. Everyone is playing music; a man stood in front of our hotel and ate fire – I saw that with my own eyes.

  Christmas is coming soon. What am I going to give my mother? She wants to die sometimes, then she’ll have quiet and not be afraid any more. But then she doesn’t know what will become of me. I don’t want to die yet, because I’m still just a girl. My mother would like to be a chambermaid and work and earn money. But the various countries won’t let her be a chambermaid.

  The world has grown dark, because of rain and war. Herr Krabbe knows all there is to know about war. War is something that comes and makes everything dead. Then there’ll be nowhere left for me to play, and bombs will keep falling on my head.

  Herr Krabbe has stopped coming to see us. I rode into a gracht on his bicycle, but only the bicycle went in. There are no railings on the grachten, it’s quite easy for that to happen. It was a particularly lovely gracht on Rembrandtsplein, beautiful flower barges were floating on it like gardens in the water.

  I’m glad I didn’t fall in as well. I once saw a rat swimming in a gracht near the station. The rat was a witch, and it was after me. On the whole Herr Krabbe was pleased that his bicycle went in without me, but he wasn’t really pleased.

  My mother is in bed, because she’s ill. She doesn’t want to sleep with me any more; she wants to lie on the ground at night so I don’t get infected. She still loves me, though. I’d love to sleep on the ground once in my life; after all, I spend so much time sitting on it. We have a grey carpet in our room, and it’s as soft as a mown meadow.

  When the telephone rings, my mother has to get up and go to the other side of the room in her blue nightie. In Amsterdam, they don’t have telephones installed next to the beds. I asked Herr Flens about it, and he explained. People often want to be woken in the morning, and so the telephone rings to wake them. And they shouldn’t just be able to pick up the receiver and stay in bed, they should have to get up.

  Herr Krabbe said the hotels would shortly invent something that would sprinkle cold water from the ceiling over their guests. We don’t care anyway; we don’t need waking, we can sleep all the time.

  My mother is lying there, so hot and so quiet. She says: ‘We’re finished.’ I went and sat next to the old liftboy in the pink jacket. We asked ourselves: ‘What shall we do?’

  My mother didn’t want to play anything with me any more. Normally we play all the time. We play: how many beds have you slept in? Or: how many trains have you been on? Or: how many good friends have you got in the world? Then we each take a piece of paper and a pencil and make a list. And whoever comes up with the most names is the winner. Three times my mother forgot a train from Prague to Budapest and a train from Lvov to Warsaw that we took with Manya. Then she forgot the bed in Bruges which was made of iron and had golden knobs, and where we had to lie so close that we didn’t know any more which was me and which was my mother.

  Beneath us there was a bar where people were dancing, and we thought our bed would start dancing too, or the floor would crack open, and all that laughing and shrieking would come into our room. For the people under us, our floor wasn’t the floor, but the ceiling of the room they were in.

  It was cold. My father sat on our little bed, sometimes on my leg, and spilled red wine over us. We were trying to go to Ostende then, but our travel money was only enough to get us to Bruges, and my father wanted to look at the churches there, and the dying quiet and the bewitched life.*

  The old liftboy says: ‘We’ll have to wire your father.’ He lends me money for the telegram.

  Now I’m going to the central post office; I know the way. There are crowds of people standing around everywhere, because the queen is riding by. I wouldn’t mind seeing her myself, maybe she’ll be wearing a big crown. But I don’t have the time.

  On the street there’s a big German shepherd dog lying next to a beggar. The German shepherd has a picture of the queen strapped to its back, and on that she’s certainly wearing a crown.

  A man has painted his face all white. He crawls around on all fours, people sometimes give him money for that. I mustn’t lose the money for the telegram. I wouldn’t mind crawling around on all fours for a living.

  Everywhere there are stalls with grapes, peaches, oranges and cake. I would so like to buy something. A lot of people are begging; probably they don’t have any money either.

  On the Damrak there’s a little red box, with puppets jumping here and there and speaking – it’s a play. In the distance there are people shouting and calling: ‘Here comes the queen!’ Little horses pull carriages with big wardrobes made of gold and jewels. Music comes out of them. Music everywhere.

  The nicest thing of all are the chestnut horses standing opposite the post office. They belong to the soldiers. I think I’m not allowed to feed the horses. One of them has a pink plaster on its leg. Maybe it got a little crazy and fell down; I should like to take a closer look. I’ve often fallen down myself, then my mother sticks plasters on me.

  Opposite the post office is a sentrybox, which has a horse in front of it and a soldier mounted on it. The sentrybox is so big that the horse and man can walk in there.

  I sent the telegram myself. I let the official help me. Now my father knows that without him we’re sick and will surely die.

  I think I’ve done something awful, but they were so sweet – the two guinea pigs. Maybe my mother will be pleased and recover her health.

  I still had some money left over from the telegram. As I came out of the post office, I saw a very poor little boy, who had a white guinea pig, and then another one that was brown with black flecks. He showed them off to everyone, and sometimes got given some money. I terribly badly wanted to have the guinea pigs. I gave the boy all the money I had left. The boy even said they would have guinea pig babies. That way I’ll have a hundred guinea pigs one day, and I can sell some. At last we’re going to have money.

  Now my mother’s asleep. Her face is back to normal. Something awful happened. All at once my mother was not my mother any more. I thought she was the war and a bomb and about to blow up. I walked into the room, and she jumped out of bed, screamed and gave me a slap. She talked very fast and heatedly and wildly. I wasn’t even able to tell her why I had been out for so long.

  She thought my guinea pigs were rats, I wasn’t able to explain anything to her. She flew to the telephone on the wall, she called all the people we know, and was furious with them; her eyes kept getting bigger and blacker. I didn’t cry, I felt too scared.

  She pushed all the bell-pushes in the room, yelled at the chambermaids and the room-service waiter. The waiter was to bring a shedload of food, and wine and cigarettes. She wanted to smoke – normally s
he never smokes.

  She said she wanted to die, and then she picked up the telephone and called some more people and yelled at them. Her lips were trembling, her eyes kept getting more and more furious.

  I sat huddled under the desk so she couldn’t see me. One of my tortoises crawled past, my mother seized it. I wanted to scream – I thought she was going to hurl my tortoise out of the window or smack against the wall.

  All at once my mother looked at the tortoise in her raised hand, and her face went all small and tired-looking. She set the tortoise very gently on the ground, dropped on to her bed, and was asleep right away. Now I didn’t feel afraid any more, I tucked my mother in so that her cold didn’t get any worse.

  My guinea pigs crawled off under the wardrobe. I wanted to play with them, but it was best not to bother them if they were going to have babies. That was something Herr Fiedler told me once, that you had to leave animals alone when they were going to have babies. I wonder why my tortoises don’t get any babies, when I leave them alone so much of the time?

  My mother is still asleep. I am very quiet. I’m playing with little silver balls on the carpet. You can’t pick them up, they are like the most beautiful beetles in the world. Before, they used to be in the thermometer that was on the bedside table. Wherever you have a thermometer in my experience, you have sick people.

  I wanted to break the thermometer, to see what was in it, and what makes it climb up that little tube, and then I broke it by accident – I cut myself a tiny bit. And suddenly the silver fever was running around the carpet in little balls.

  Now my mother’s going to get better, now I know what fever is. Now the carpet has fever, we’re never going to have fever again, and I can play with the silver fever-beetles. Everything is lovely, and my father’s coming back soon.

  My mother’s asleep, her hair is all golden, a pinkish gold is shining into the room. Maybe I’m gold as well. Outside trams and motorcycles drive past. If I shut my eyes, it feels as if they’re here in the room with me.