Child of All Nations

by Michael Hofmann

  ‘Don’t cry, Annie,’ says my father. ‘Everything’ll be all right. I know, the times are worse than they’ve ever been. Really, I suppose I ought to murder you and Kully, and then kill myself – you’re quite right. But you know I have absolutely no sense of responsibility. If there’s war, then our prospects are zero, because the German publishers here won’t print any more of our books. Don’t even ask how I’ve been. And by the way, I don’t think there will be war.’

  My father no longer has a suitcase, but in a corner of the room is a big grey sack, from which he pulls sheets of paper covered in writing. Oh, I’m so relieved. At last we have the novel Herr Krabbe has been waiting for! My mother is twittering happily like a bird.

  My father wants us to go straight back to the hotel. My mother is to type everything up, then call Herr Krabbe, give it to him, and try all she can to get some more money out of him. My father doesn’t have any money left, but he wants to try and borrow some from the fat woman.

  ‘Stay in the hotel for the time being,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry about a thing – I’ve thought ahead. Tomorrow morning I’ve asked a Dutch man to call you in Dutch and posing as an employee of the Amsterdam Bank. That will favourably impress the hotel, and soothe the nerves of the poor old management. You won’t have to do anything, Annie, except stay on the phone and say “Yes” and “Thank you” at intervals, and at lunchtime ask the porter how long the Amsterdam Bank stays open. That will gain us time. Once the acute threat of war has abated, we’ll have a better idea what to do.’

  My mother is laughing, her eyes are big and blue. My father puts the seven passports away, because I’m not to play with them – not that I would have done. I am allowed to squeeze the tubes of paint out on the floor, though.

  My father pulls coats out of the sack. ‘Here’s a sheepskin coat for you, Annie – I took it from Manya, who owns four furs. Manya is in Brussels too. Don’t be jealous – she’s there with Genek, they’re back together. If you live with a volcano, be prepared for high temperatures. Indifference comes to a boil, and before long it’s love once more.’

  I get a coat too; it’s from Madame Rostand, who crocheted it herself out of multi-coloured wool. It makes me look like a sofa cushion.

  ‘Were you going to cheat on me, Annie?’ asks my father. ‘Did you allow that French coffin-maker to write you love letters? And squeeze hands with that young Dutch Romantic? I only wish you wouldn’t be so abysmally stupid, Annie. You know you belong to me, and no one else. It’s not in a man’s interests to give a woman advice about love, but I’ll make an exception for you: remember, Annie, that the only women who should take lovers are empresses or she-devils. Empresses, because they’re in a position to have a bored or boring lover put to death; and she-devils, because they can induce a man to kill himself at the proper time.’

  ‘But I haven’t done anything,’ says my mother, very piano, I think they call it. ‘I love you, I was dreadfully lonely without you.’

  ‘I know you haven’t done anything, Annie, otherwise I would already have thrown you out of the window.’ My father bangs his fist against the wall. I’m frightened and try to hide.

  ‘My God, the child,’ says my mother. ‘Give some thought to the child and what she’s going to make of all this.’

  ‘Oh, Kully,’ calls my father. He picks me up and throws me high in the air. ‘Either the child will understand what I’m saying – in which case, it’s not going to damage her. Or she won’t – and then at the very worst, it won’t help her in later life.’

  He plops me back down on the ground, and offers my mother some rum. She doesn’t want any, so instead he makes her a ham sandwich. He tells her to take a bite of it, as if she were a little baby. Meanwhile, I am eating everything on the table in a completely grown-up and responsible manner.

  My mother stands up. She wants to take me away and get to work on the manuscript. My father looks at my mother. ‘Annie,’ he says suddenly, ‘is it true? I have the sense that I said goodbye to you a little too passionately in Brussels. Is it true, Annie?’

  My mother says: ‘Yes.’

  My father pulls my mother down on the bed and sits next to her. Both are sitting perfectly still and astounded, like two plants under a shower of rain. What’s going on now?

  ‘We’re going to have a baby, Kully,’ says my father.

  I don’t know why we should have a baby now, all of a sudden, but my parents say there’s nothing to be done about it. And it will cost money, money we don’t have.

  I am always afraid my parents might give me away one day. Frankly, I’d rather they gave away this new baby. I say: if push comes to shove, then they could just deposit it with Herr Krabbe at the publisher’s.

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ says my father. ‘The girl has some good ideas. A little nearer the time, Annie, you should go and see Krabbe; I know he’s getting harder and flintier by the day – extraordinarily interesting, by the way, to observe the process of rapid petrifaction that so many people are going through nowadays – but I fancy he won’t be equal to a woman in your condition. His other authors haven’t put him to that particular test, so far as I know, so it’ll be a new one on him. Don’t worry yourself about it, Annie, everything will be taken care of, everything will be fine – I’ll find a way. Even if they turn out to be Canadian quintuplets* – well, perhaps it’s time to revive the idea of a trip to America.’

  Everything’s fine. My mother’s laughing, my father’s here. The promised baby is taking its time, and the war seems to be taking its time too. Perhaps it got lost somewhere on the way.

  My mother doesn’t toss and turn as much at night as she used to, and she doesn’t scream in her sleep. There was one night before my father came to Amsterdam, when it was still Sunday on the street outside, cars were whizzing and people were singing, lights in the sky glittered into our room. I was lying in bed, but I wasn’t sure if I was asleep or awake.

  My mother sat bolt upright; I could only see her back, which was like a wall of pink silk. Sometimes a little light flickered into our room, the telephone kept purring next door. Down on the street, a man was whistling a tune. My mother trembled: ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear that whistling? That was the Horst Wessel Song* that someone was whistling in the street – here in Amsterdam.’

  I don’t know the song she means, but I wonder why it would make my mother so frightened and sad. I couldn’t find her face any more, it was so far away. Then in my mind I changed my mother into a tree, because a tree is calm, a tree is unafraid. A tree doesn’t get hungry, or cry. It doesn’t laugh, and it doesn’t talk. I turned her into a tree so that she would stop trembling. After that, I was able to sleep.

  When I woke in the morning, I didn’t wake her at first, but then I was scared she might be stuck as a tree. I combed her hair, pinched her big toe and changed her back into my mother.

  We’re going to go to Paris soon, and then we’ll be somewhere else. And if we’re somewhere else, we’ll be one step further and happy. I always wake up long before my mother. I see the grey morning at the window. I raise my hand, waggle my fingers, and project shadows on the wall – hares and rabbits and giraffes.

  Sometimes there’s a bang on the street, but I can’t tell if it was a gunshot or an exploding tyre, because I’ve never heard a gunshot. My father has a revolver he can shoot with. If we’re ever really stuck, he’ll shoot us with it. Then at least nothing more can happen to us. Probably you smell bad when you’re dead, just like my dead sea creatures did, but that doesn’t matter because we won’t be able to smell ourselves.

  Grown-ups were trying to tell me how it’s possible to go to heaven. I hate it when people have such a low opinion of children that they think they’ll believe anything they’re told. What person in their right mind would stay in the world with worries and strife if he could be in heaven instead, and it not even cost any money?

  Nor do I believe that bad people go to hell. Bad people are much too canny to do bad things if they kne
w they would go to hell as a result. My father was talking to some Dutch people once, and he said: ‘It might be nice for a change if they started preaching that all the good people will go to hell, and all the evil people will go to heaven. Then the good people would go bad, and the bad people wouldn’t have any victims any more. Perhaps the world would be a more peaceful place as a result.’

  That made the Dutch people angry, and they said they were implacable men of faith, and they called my father a heretic with no fear of God, and who would end up contaminating my soul too. My father said it was all right to be implacable or to have faith – but a combination of the two was as disgusting as anything he could think of.

  ‘As for fear of God? Why? Why not trust in God? I’d rather my little girl worshipped matchboxes or liqueur glasses than that she be afraid of God. Everything that’s wrong with the world begins with fear. I don’t see why people have to think of God as a modern dictator, who makes people run around in circles in muzzles and handcuffs. All that mess in Germany could only result because the people there have lived in fear for ever. No sooner is a child born than fear of its mother and father is instilled in it. And then it has to honour its father and mother as well. Why? Either you love your parents, in which case you honour them as a matter of course, or you don’t love them, in which case your honouring them isn’t going to do them a blind bit of good. First a father demands that his child be afraid of him. Then there’s school and fear of the teacher, fear of God at church, fear of military or other superiors, fear of the police, fear of life, fear of death. Finally, the people are so crippled and warped by fear that they elect a government that they can serve in fear. Not content with that, when they see other people who are not set on living in fear, they get angry, and try in their turn to make them afraid. First of all they made God into a kind of dictator, and now they don’t need Him any more, because they’ve come up with a better dictator themselves.’

  I’m not afraid of God. And I’m not afraid of my father either, even though he has a bad temper sometimes. I know he’ll always be good again.

  *

  I am glad I don’t have to go to school any more. You really don’t learn anything at school, I find. The Dutch children I know are much bigger than I am. But I can speak much better English, Polish, French and German than they can. Only their Dutch is a bit better than mine.

  I can also follow the exchange rates in the newspaper, and convert guilders into zlotys, and zlotys into Belgian francs. That’s the most important aspect of mathematics. You must know that having ten dollars is a thousand times better than having one mark. The children here are really dim, not to know that.

  The other day they had an atlas which was full of pictures, not real pictures but drawings of various blobby shapes in blue and green and pink. Those were meant to be countries, and the children were supposed to study them for school. In reality, all those countries look nothing like that, and most of them I’ve seen for myself, so I know. And I expect we’ll get to see the remaining ones in time too.

  The children don’t believe me when I say I’ve been on a sleigh in the Carpathians with my father and a Polish hunter, and have lain on a fur in a hut and eaten bear steaks. Nor do they believe what my English friend writes from London, which is that the fog has grown so thick and black that he could break off a piece of it and pack it in a parcel to send me.

  I can read very loud now, because I’m always reading from the newspaper to my mother as she gets dressed. I don’t like newspapers, because they are usually full of nasty things: about unattended children falling into boiling water, or seventy-year-old men who are crushed by lorries, or women who are driven demented and chop up their families with an axe.

  My father says the extermination of one’s family is a silly modern fad, like painting your fingernails scarlet. He doesn’t like bright red lacquered nails on women, because they look like bleeding chunks of meat and put him off his food and drink. He once told a lady the only way he could stand her red fingernails was if she set them off with a ruby in her belly button, which the lady refused to do. Mind you, I don’t see how you can fix a ruby in your belly button anyway.

  It’s almost Christmas again. Here in Holland Christmas isn’t such a big deal, because they have something called Sinter Klaas beforehand, where children get given presents and walk around with lanterns in a procession and sing. If we’re still here at Sinter Klaas, I might join the procession this year. I could buy myself a lantern and all. Now that my father’s here again, I can always find money under his bed. There is Dutch money which is so small you almost can’t see it. But it’s pretty valuable, you get quite a lot for it.

  My father is still staying at that dangerous fat woman’s house. She now has those red-lacquered fingernails because my father kisses her hand. He doesn’t say anything about her nails, because she always buys him rum and lets my mother stay with him sometimes, and a woman like that is able to take some liberties. My father always kisses women on the hand. My mother used to object to it, until my father said: ‘A man who doesn’t kiss other women’s hands won’t kiss his own wife’s feet.’

  In Germany we always spent Christmas at my grandmother’s, which was lovely. There was a Christmas tree set up in the dining room with lights and gleaming balls, and a white star on its very tip. We sang a song together, and everyone thanked everyone else for their presents.

  Then I was allowed to eat as much cake and marzipan as I wanted. My father got restless, and wanted to go to a pub and drink a glass of beer, because he doesn’t like being shut up inside people’s flats. But all the pubs were shut. Also, the trams weren’t running. I suppose my father didn’t really like Christmas that much. He doesn’t care for singing.

  The lady with the bird’s nest once expressed surprise at that, and said: ‘Where there’s singing, join the throng – only bad people have no songs.’

  Then my father said that was exactly the throng you shouldn’t join, because where there was singing there was the greatest danger. People singing together was halfway to murder; there wasn’t a war that didn’t start with singing.

  When it was Christmas last year, we took the Pullman train from Amsterdam to Paris. I’m not so keen on Pullman trains; they’re so expensive, we don’t really know how we came to be on one. Nor can you run around in them, because they really just consist of a restaurant. They don’t have any compartments or corridors.

  But it’s true that customs inspectors are more considerate with the luggage on Pullman trains than on normal trains. It’s also easier to get a Belgian transit visa on them. Also, all the railway employees know us. My father has some great friends among them. They come running up to his table, and bring him something called Marc de Bourgogne, which is a kind of cognac that is supposed to give him a foretaste of Paris.

  Even on ordinary trains, my father likes to sit in the dining car, but it’s not so easy there. Especially on French trains, they want people to eat up and clear off. They don’t like you to sit for hours over your food. It makes my father mad when people start sweeping up around him, and I can understand his irritation, because it makes everything dirty.

  My father is an especially good friend of one of the Pullman waiters, because they were together once when some famous politician from Catalonia or Pentagonia was travelling on the train as well. All at once there was a huge bang. Everyone thought a bomb must have fallen on the politician. He probably thought so himself, because they have a lot of that sort of thing wherever it is he comes from.

  But then the chef de train had to apologize profusely, because it was only a heating pipe that had blown up. My father loves it when things like that happen. The waiter was very amused as well.

  For Christmas the waiter gave my father a big wooden Christmas tree he carved himself. It wouldn’t fit in any of our suitcases, and so my father had to carry it under his arm. There was no question of giving it to anyone or leaving it somewhere. Of course the waiter knew perfectly well that the tree wouldn�
�t fit into any of our suitcases. If he didn’t see it, he would know right away that we didn’t have it any more.

  Sometimes my father hates the tree and says how the best friendships can be ruined by presents: it was best if I never gave any presents to anyone, ever. It’s difficult getting rid of stuff anyway; that’s why we have so much luggage.

  Old shoes are the most trouble. You can’t wear them any more, because they’re already too broken, and you can’t give them to anyone either. On two occasions, we just left them behind in the hotel room. That was really very stupid of us. Both times, a boy came running up to the train with the shoes, and we had to give him a tip, with money that we didn’t really have to give.

  What’s best with things like that is to wedge them under the hotel mattress, when usually they’ll only be discovered when the train has gone. But you can only do that if you haven’t left a forwarding address at the hotel, because otherwise they might put them in a parcel, and you might even end up having to pay duty on them.

  That happened to us once in Italy, with a pile of completely filthy and torn shirts. Of late, I’ve taken to secretly dropping things like that in some corridor somewhere. It makes me feel as nervous as if I was stealing. Even when what I’m doing is actually the opposite.

  When we arrive in Paris, my father is always so happy that he starts dancing at the Gare du Nord. Paris is his favourite city in the whole world. Other places my father can stand for four weeks at the most, yet he can be in Paris for three months, but then that’s it.

  Really the only time we’re happy is when we’re on a train. No sooner have we arrived in a city than we feel this terrible panic we may never be able to leave. Because we never have any money, we feel imprisoned by any hotel in any city, and from the very first day we think of our liberation.

  The last time we arrived in Paris, it was snowing silently and softly. We took a taxi to our hotel on the Boulevard Saint Germain. The Place de la Concorde gleamed with silvery light. Outside the cafés stood little iron stoves; people sat on light wickerwork seats round them and drank red, green, blue or brown drinks. My father wanted to go out immediately.