Child of All Nations

by Michael Hofmann

  In the hotel my father threw his arms around the concierge, whose name is Anatole and who has a horrible squint and knows lots of things, in particular about the deals that my father makes with Herr Krabbe. Before he sets his name to them, my father likes to discuss them with Anatole.

  Whenever we go anywhere, my mother looks out of the windows at the station as the trolleys full of books are pushed past. She wants to see whether any of my father’s are among them. My father isn’t so interested in whether his books are finding buyers. What’s more important to him is Anatole saying he can’t make head or tail of Herr Krabbe’s royalty statements.

  Herr Fiedler and his wife were standing in the hotel lobby when we arrived. They had thought we might be there. They were just trying to pay us a visit.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said Frau Fiedler. ‘Jeanne Moth is here.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said my mother.

  ‘Oh, how wonderful,’ said my father.

  Anatole brought some Calvados for all the grown-ups to drink. I got a squishy banana. The valet took the luggage up in a lift with the taxi driver. Anatole paid the driver, sat down with us and had a tiny bit to drink. Herr Fiedler drank nothing at all, and my father drank an awful lot.

  Then they talked endlessly about Jeanne Moth. Jeanne Moth is a woman from Germany, who’s not going back there either. She paints and takes pictures, and also she’s been to America. I saw her in Ostende one time. She has terribly wild dark-red hair and a big red mouth. She is restless, runs back and forth the whole time, and laughs and cries and talks. But once I saw her sitting on the beach, all mute and silent.

  ‘She can be quite charming, but mostly she’s enervating,’ says Herr Fiedler.

  ‘That depends on your nerves,’ said my father. ‘I like her myself.’

  ‘Yes, because she stays up all night drinking with you,’ said my mother.

  ‘She can’t leave any man in peace,’ exclaimed Frau Fiedler.

  ‘Oh the contrary,’ said my father. ‘Her instincts are so finely honed, she flirts exclusively with those men with whom she senses she has a chance.’

  Frau Fiedler flushed and got angry: ‘Ach, as if that was so hard, turning some man’s head, if what you are is shameless. A fool will always be found if there’s a willing seductress. Every man is vain enough to fall for that.’

  ‘She does not need to have recourse to crudity to make herself unpopular,’ said my father.

  My mother gets angry too: ‘If you ask me, I think she’s cold and calculating.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said my father. ‘She’s capable of the blindest teenage crushes on the least appropriate subject or object, and of giving up more than she can possibly afford.’

  ‘She rang my husband three times yesterday,’ called Frau Fiedler, ‘and showered him with praise for his latest book. There’s not a writer in the world who’s capable of withstanding that.’

  ‘More importantly, no writer’s wife should be capable of withstanding it,’ said my father.

  But Frau Fiedler was getting more and more excited: ‘She has a bad character.’

  Then all at once Jeanne Moth is standing by the table; her hair is redder than ever. She laughs with pleasure and gives me a kiss, and to Frau Fiedler she says: ‘Oh, my dear, I’m so happy to hear you say that. There’s nothing worse for a woman than to have her good character praised by other women. This morning I thought I was looking so old and ugly, I had dreadful feelings of inferiority, but now –’

  She kisses my father: ‘Peter, my angel, how long is it since we last saw each other? I don’t recall having seen that tie. How’s your work? And when are we going to go for a walk? I have so many things to tell you about, I need your advice… Have I changed very much?’

  She kisses my mother: ‘Lord, am I happy to see you! You look lovely, Annie. You’re as slim as a little girl now. See what disgusting creases I’ve got on my brow. And I’ve got a hole in my stockings as well – I haven’t been able to buy a new pair for days. Were you having a go at me as well? I do wish you wouldn’t. I think your husband is delightful. But he doesn’t care for me.’

  She waves her big grey hat this way and that. I get excited and feel tired. Suddenly it’s as if there were a thousand people in the lobby. She drops into a dark green velvet armchair, which my father has pulled up for her. ‘Just for a moment. I must go. Anatole, aren’t you going to give me a drink? Were you attacking me as well?’

  ‘I don’t hate anyone, and I don’t attack anyone,’ said Anatole, pouring. ‘A little one or a big one?’

  ‘Big one.’ She knocks it back in one gulp: ‘A votre santé!’ Her hand is very white. She has a black ink stain on the thumb.

  ‘God, I’m so glad you’ve come, Peter. Hey, he’s a Norwegian, about fifty, grey hair and sweet blue eyes like a sleepy baby, and he never goes anywhere without his umbrella. What do you think? His wife is terribly nice, a pink ball of suet. I hope she won’t be jealous. But they’ve been married for fifteen years, I just met them in Oslo. Now they’re over in Paris for the very first time, so touchingly innocent. A week ago, I had to have a molar extracted. Does it notice when I laugh? I mean, does it bother a man very much if a woman is missing a tooth, or could you love her anyway – Fiedler? Your new book is magnificent. If you come to the Deux Magots tomorrow afternoon for an aperitif with me, I’ll tell you some wonderful things, and take your picture for a New York magazine. Goodbye, darlings. Gotta dash, mustn’t keep my Norwegians waiting.’

  And suddenly she’s gone, so quickly you’re not quite sure if she was there at all.

  No one speaks. Then Frau Fiedler says: ‘And now she’s making that poor Norwegian woman unhappy. One should really see to it that she leaves France; something should be done about her. She’s a German émigrée, and she has no carte d’identité. Her French visa ran out a week ago, she told me so herself.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ yells Herr Fiedler. His eyes are flashing with anger.

  ‘Ah,’ says my father, ‘I do miss the good old days when nice middle-class women would hit each other over the head with umbrellas when they were jealous of each other – and where less pleasant women would write nice anonymous letters! Nowadays even the nice ones resort to political backstabbing. Politics really seems to have poisoned all manner of people and all manner of personal relations. Jeanne is such a nice girl, sometimes a little over-fond, a little confused and a little prodigal with herself and her emotions. She’s sensible all right, but give her a chance to do something silly, and you can bet she will. But there’s not a mean bone in her body.’

  My father gets up, puts his hat on, offers no one his hand, and goes off. Herr Fiedler picks up his hat and runs off after him.

  My mother is crying. Frau Fiedler shakes her head and says: ‘Well, do you understand what just happened there?’

  Anatole says: ‘Mais oui, madame.’ And then he disappears behind his porter’s desk, and unhooks our key from a blackboard and says: ‘Elle est fatiguée, la petite.’

  I would so like to run behind the porter’s desk, and see all the things that are kept there, but my mother’s crying and I’m tired. I fall asleep in the lift.

  When I woke up, I was lying with my mother in an especially big bed. She was still crying, the chambermaid brought in a big bowl of milky coffee and some croissants, and my father wasn’t back yet. Then my mother telephoned my grandmother, because it was Christmas, and because my father was away.

  At lunchtime Jeanne Moth came running into our room in leaf-green pyjamas and no slippers, and undressed right away and sat in the bath and comforted my mother from there. Later we all got dressed very quickly and went out together with the Norwegian couple to look for my father.

  We found him in the Coupole, even though that’s such a huge café it’s impossible to find anyone there. Everything is muddled together, there are unbelievable numbers of people, and in some cases you can’t even tell if someone is a man or a woman. Everyone laughed, and it was all fine.

/>   My mother had to eat practically a whole turkey, and my father wanted to eat oysters and snails at the same time, and the Norwegians wanted some choucroute garnie, because nowhere has such good sauerkraut as France. And my grandmother always thought of sauerkraut as something German. I had to eat rice and an awful lot of cake. It was Christmas.

  Outside, the clouds turned into pink gold, and sunshine dropped from them on to the hard cold paving stones. Pink and blue lights swam up from the cafés and cinemas and houses opposite, and it got to be a very light evening in quite a hurry, because really it was still afternoon.

  The Norwegian man kept gazing at Jeanne Moth, and she fluttered her eyelashes at him, and gazed back, and didn’t speak.

  ‘I’m just glad,’ said the round Norwegian woman, and caressed my mother’s face with her hand, which was like a pudgy pink cushion. ‘If you come to Paris for the very first time, you’re under its spell and you fall in love. I’m just pleased for my old man that he’s still capable of something like that. And I’m pleased to have a husband who’s attractive to a nice pretty woman like Jeanne. I’m afraid I can no longer manage to seduce one of the thousand faithful husbands who are waiting to be seduced.’

  ‘Well, you have seduced me, Madame,’ said my father and he bought some red roses from a pale woman, and a rattling wooden snake from a short, funny-looking man. He gives the snake to my mother, and I take it away from her immediately, because I’m the one who needs toys like that, so I can play fakir or snake-charmer and circus with it.

  Jeanne Moth wants to leave; she has a big suitcase that she took with her from the hotel, and she hasn’t said why. The Norwegian man picks up his umbrella in one hand and Jeanne Moth’s suitcase in the other. We walk through Montparnasse, which in our language means something a bit like heaven.

  Just in the place where there are most lights shining on the street and the people, Jeanne clicks the lock of her suitcase while the Norwegian man is carrying it. The suitcase falls open, and clothes and scarves and necklaces tumble out. People stop and laugh, and Jeanne laughs as well. Her hair goes wild again, and a moment ago it was really quite tame. And she picks up the things off the ground to give them to the people who are standing around us. The people look surprised and deadly serious, and don’t want to accept anything.

  ‘Never mind,’ says Jeanne, and she throws everything in a heap, and tramples on it, and says ‘Forget it’ to my father when he tries to pack it all up again, and pulls him violently away, and flings the empty suitcase against the wall of a house.

  ‘Jeanne,’ says my father, ‘Jeanne, you’re drunk – be sensible.’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m not drunk, or if I am, then I’m drunk out of sheer sobriety – or the only time I’m sober is when I’m drunk. Leave me be, Peter. I always want to do something good, but I have no patience, and if you want to do something good without patience it turns out bad, and I’m impatient in love and impatient in hate, and I have no patience with life and no patience with myself.’

  After that she doesn’t say anything, none of us says anything, and we head back to the hotel. Once she reaches for my hand, but I’m scared. Far away, where she left her suitcase and her belongings lying, there are now a lot of people shouting, and a policeman stalks into their midst. I can see him, and I want to run back and see what happens next, but my mother holds my hand tight and pulls me along.

  That evening in the hotel Jeanne is suddenly dead, because she wanted to be dead. I don’t know how she did it. I don’t think it’s at all a terrible thing, because what’s the point of living if you could just as well be dead? But the grown-ups thought it was awful, and no one took any interest in me any more. I played with my wooden snake.

  The Norwegian couple left, saying they didn’t like Paris and they didn’t like Christmas either. My father wrote Jeanne’s mother a letter with a shaking hand and a clear brow, and my mother sealed the envelope and stuck a stamp on it, and took it to the post office. And Anatole went and got a doctor and then a whole lot of policemen. Later on, the Fiedlers turned up, and Herr Fiedler said: ‘What a terrible thing, what possessed her to do it? She had so much talent.’ And Frau Fiedler said: ‘Perhaps it’s for the best.’

  Then all at once Jeanne Moth was alive again. The doctor came out of her room and told everyone about it. Pretty soon, she was running around again, and the grown-ups all got excited, but my mother and I were distracted, because just then my grandmother arrived in Paris.

  My grandmother was allowed to take out money from Germany to go to Italy with, and she wanted to take my mother and me to Italy with the money, so that we could be together, and live for three weeks on no money. My grandmother is big and round, with hair like a fat white bonnet. She needs to be kept away from my father, because otherwise she will attack him. She is the only woman in the world who doesn’t get on with my father, and my father is afraid of her too.

  At first, my father didn’t want us to go to Italy, because Italy is friends with Germany, which makes it a dangerous place to visit. But we are émigrés, and for émigrés all countries are dangerous. Lots of ministers make speeches against us and no one wants to have us in their country, even though we’re not at all harmful and in fact just like other people.

  There are also some émigrés who are not writers. Émigrés form clubs or associations where they can squabble in peace. A lot of émigrés want to die, and my father often says that’s the best and only way out, but they are all a bit indecisive and aren’t sure how to go about it, because it’s not enough to just pray: dear Almighty God, please can I be dead tomorrow.

  I mean, Jeanne Moth wanted to be dead, and it didn’t work out in her case either, which shows that it can’t be that simple. In the end, all she came away with were a lot of expenses that she couldn’t afford. Then she carried on living illegally, without a visa in Paris, but even if someone had denounced her and the police had come for her, even then she wouldn’t have been certain that they would have taken out their pistols and shot her dead.

  Most people have to do their dying without help all by themselves, and there’s always the danger that someone might save them. When I’m grown up, I want to be dead too, but there’s a lot of time till then.

  My father said he was killing himself gradually and was doing all sorts of things to shorten his life, including smoking an awful lot of cigarettes with black tobacco in them, and drinking thousands of drinks in all the colours of the rainbow. It doesn’t seem to kill him, but it does sometimes make him laugh.

  Coming from Germany, my grandmother talked about Germany, which makes my father unhappy. My grandmother is well meaning, and always brings presents, but she doesn’t understand about things. I don’t understand about them either, so I’m careful not to talk to her, in case she turns out to be an enemy and denounces us. It seems well-meaning people bringing presents can sometimes be enemies, especially if they live in Germany. My father’s forever saying we mustn’t trust anyone.

  *

  One time in Paris I went in the afternoon with my father to Charlie’s, which is a bar. Charlie is the barman, and a friend of my father’s. There weren’t any other customers; I was sat in a corner, and Charlie was in a hurry to finish a bottle of cognac with my father, because it was too good for ordinary customers, so he was going to fill the bottle with inferior cognac once it was empty.

  My father understood that right away, and I had to keep terribly quiet and not disturb them. Afterwards Charlie was going to take a Pyramidon tablet, but ended up swallowing a fifty-centime piece by accident instead. After that he was crying about how wicked people were, and my father was crying too. They were both inconsolable.

  Then my mother and my grandmother came along. My grandmother wasn’t crying; instead she was giving little coughs of disgust, and wanting to leave on the night train to Italy immediately. And that’s what she did too. My mother and I were supposed to go with her, but we ended up missing the train because of me.

  I went for a lit
tle walk around Paris, and first looked at the thousand bird cages on the Seine, and then outside a bistro I saw a man making huge towers and trees out of one single newspaper. I followed the man until I didn’t know where I was. On the way I got some visiting cards printed for my mother on the street, because I was so curious to see it done, but then I didn’t have any money to pay for them, and I promised to come back later. Because of that I couldn’t have taken the night train anyway.

  In the evening my father was in a state of great excitement, because a friend of his had taken his life. He wasn’t even an émigré but a French cobbler, and he was a big fat jolly man, but he couldn’t stand his wife and daughters because they kept scolding him and laughing at him, and wanting money from him all the time, and telling him he couldn’t drink Pernod. It looks like green milk, and tastes like liquid aniseed cookies, if you can imagine that, but it still isn’t a suitable drink for children.

  First the cobbler was drinking Pernod with my father, and then he had strife with his family, and to annoy them he quickly cut up his hands, and his wife was furious because he’d sat on their best sofa, and got his blood all over it, and ruined it. My father was very upset. I think it would be best if people couldn’t be born any more.

  The following evening my mother and I left the Gare de Lyon on a beautiful train to join my grandmother in Italy. My father gave the conductor some money to treat us well, and there were some very serious agreements entered into. We were to write from Italy every day, and at the end of fourteen days we were to go to Nice and wait for my father there.

  Wagons-lits are the best things in the world, and I prefer the top bunk. My mother was very excited and kept saying, ‘We’re going South.’ I suppose that means she’s never been there.

  In the morning when we woke up, the whole world was different. The sky was three times as big and three times as high as anywhere else, and it was such a brilliant blue that it hurt your eyes. We passed bare-looking mountains with strange black and silver trees growing on them.