Child of All Nations

by Michael Hofmann

  My mother was so excited she couldn’t eat any breakfast in the dining car. I was terribly hungry. All the time my mother was pointing out things to me that I could see perfectly well for myself. Spring flowers were blooming in little gardens, and the sun was almost white.

  We got off the train at Marseilles to go to a hotel near the port to meet a Swiss friend of my father’s, who is very rich because, rather than write books, he sells watches. My mother was to persuade him to start a literary magazine with my father as editor, and give him the money for it. But in our experience rich people have always turned out to be really tight-fisted and mean, and never hand over their money, which I suppose is how they got to be rich in the first place.

  We climbed down white terraces to Cannebieère, and walked in silence. The world was new, people here lived faster and brighter lives. In the harbour, the sea glittered like blue ice; our hearts thumped, we felt so happy it scared us, and the air had the wild and damp smell of the bottom of the sea.

  Behind frail crooked houses blew scraps of brightly coloured laundry, Negro soldiers passed us in red caps, a small grey donkey pulled a big cart, dirty children played and leaped like rubber balls, and when a ship hooted in the harbour, I thought it was laughing. My mother said: ‘I feel happy.’ She looked so tiny under that gigantic big brilliant sky.

  In Paris, the sky was sometimes like a blanket, and when I looked at a cloud, I could pull it down to me in my imagination, and let it warm me, but here there were no clouds, and you could never reach the brilliant blue sky with the white sun, so I shivered. I don’t think I felt this cold even in Poland.

  Outside the restaurants there were baskets piled high with oysters and strange sea creatures I didn’t know. Some of them were maybe plants, but as with everything like that, I expect it looks nicer than it tastes. I saw a lot of damp little hedgehog-like things in the baskets; some of them had been cut open, and their insides were all red. I asked my mother to taste some of them for me, but she wouldn’t, she didn’t know how.

  We sat in the hotel restaurant, which consisted only of bare glass walls, like an aquarium, so we could see the harbour and the ships. Waiters carried big glistening fish this way and that, and a little wizened brown man from the hotel management gave my mother and me sticky sweets because he knew my father.

  My father’s Swiss friend was there as well. He was thin and dried out and had a small brown leather purse with a zip. My father would have known right away that a man like that wouldn’t give money, not to start a literary magazine, and not for anything else either.

  I kicked my mother under the table a bit, but she didn’t understand, and wasted a lot of time quite needlessly on that silly man. She ordered bouillabaisse, which is a kind of soup that’s made out of the Mediterranean; all the creatures in the Mediterranean float around it in a hard-to-identify way, and some of them of course are poisonous. When people have had enough of life, they can choose to die either by mushrooms or bouillabaisse, but in either case I think they have to order it specially from the hotel kitchen.

  Some young Americans were sitting at the next table, drinking champagne, and waving their hands and talking loudly all at once. The Swiss man kept looking at my mother with his ill-looking green eyes. He wanted to be nice to her and treated her to a bottle of Vichy water, and said: ‘You must have been very beautiful when you were younger.’

  All at once my mother became silent and annoyed. I couldn’t understand why, and nor could the Swiss man either. The white sun was suddenly burning red. It dropped into the sea, which caught fire and burned with wild flames.

  The Swiss man was reflecting sadly. He was sad about all the money that a literary magazine would cost, and that he had no intention of parting with so much. He wanted to treat my mother to a second bottle of Vichy water and press her hand consolingly, but my mother didn’t feel in the mood for that. The flames in the sea turned golden red. Her hair gleamed like the song sung by a man on the street. The singing beat against the high windows, and asked to be admitted.

  The sea extinguished the sun, and turned shiny and black. The little tan hotel manager brought my mother a large bouquet of yellow mimosas. Their soft scent wafted across the table, my mother was happy again. That night, when my father telephoned from Paris, she stroked the earpiece.

  The following evening, we left for Italy and my grandmother. ‘Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom?’ asked my mother. ‘That’s where we’re going now.’ And we did go there, but I didn’t see any blooming lemon trees.

  Ventimiglia is the Italian border, and I straight away lost my temper with the Italians. What they like to do is take travellers’ passports and disappear off with them into a gloomy station hall. What for? At first I thought they wanted to steal our passports. My mother was so worried, her hands were cold and slippery.

  We wanted to go straight on to my grandmother, in Bordighera, but those Italians made us miss our train. They gave us back our passports, but you just knew they would have liked to keep everyone’s passports. I wanted to scream and stamp my feet, but my mother told me I mustn’t do that on any account.

  Then it got wonderful like in a fairytale book. We drove to Bordighera in a horse-drawn carriage. It was cold and dark, and our coachman gave us blankets to cover ourselves with. The horse was brown and tired, and kept stopping. And when it did trot along, the carriage didn’t want to go, and kept lurching and almost falling over. My mother wanted to protect me by keeping firm hold of me. We couldn’t yet speak any Italian, but my mother was happy that the coachman addressed her as ‘Signora’.

  We drove past more bare-looking mountains. When I saw a dark green tree with live oranges hanging from it, I fell right out of the carriage, but I didn’t hurt myself. I ran over to the tree and touched the oranges and still couldn’t believe it. Otherwise I would have picked some. The coachman had let the horse run on, and my mother had to shout for a long time before he made it stop. I ran after the carriage, and by the time I was sitting in it again, the horse was being bolshy again.

  In Bordighera we went first to the station, but my grandmother wasn’t there. We needed to find her, because we didn’t have any money except for the Bottom Dollar. The Bottom Dollar was a ten-dollar note, which my mother kept in her knickers for emergencies, and must never be spent.

  Then we had to look for my grandmother in the hotel. The horse disliked corners, and didn’t want to turn left or right, but only go in a straight line. That meant driving past sea cliffs, almost as far as Ospedaletti, whose lights we saw glittering in the distance. And a little way above it was a glimmering garden of stars and light. That was San Remo, the coachman shouted out over his shoulder.

  After a long time and a difficult search, we found my grandmother in a hotel my father would never have set foot in, because it was a family-run pension where they rang bells when it was mealtime.

  It wasn’t easy for me to pick up Italian in Bordighera, because to begin with I encountered almost no Italians. Almost all the people there were German, and they spoke German too. The nearest most of the Germans got to speaking foreign was that they said German words with a French or Italian accent.

  I paid very close attention, but what I learned first in Bordighera was not Italian but Berlinian. That only came to light later, and I really wasn’t to know, because Berlinian was completely foreign to me; it’s quite a different type of German from Kölsch. In Poland I once had the experience of speaking very good Polish, only to learn that it wasn’t Polish at all, but Yiddish. It’s not hard to speak a foreign language; what’s harder is identifying which one it is. To this day, I have the hardest time keeping my Chinese from my Japanese.

  Those people in Bordighera who weren’t German were ancient Englishwomen, who always wanted to grab me when I was on my way to play, and ask me about Hitler. I don’t know the man, but my father doesn’t like him. When I’m grown up, I expect I’ll find out what’s wrong with him.

  What I do know is that Hitler
belongs to the Germans, but the Italians have one of their own, called Mussolini. The Germans in our Italian pension were forever praising and admiring Mussolini. In return, the Italians praised and admired Hitler. My mother sometimes praises the children of other mothers, and in return the other mothers have to praise me. They usually manage, but I know they often don’t like me much.

  My grandmother doesn’t like Hitler much either, but she’s afraid of him. She always has to go home to Germany, and then she might be locked up, for having been with us. She’s never able to speak out. Germans are not supposed to speak out; they’re supposed to listen to the radio instead.

  My grandmother was always speaking to my mother in whispers. At first I really thought they were secrets, and I wanted to hear them. Yet they weren’t secrets at all, but stuff like butter being very hard to get hold of in Germany. And before that, my grandmother would say things like: ‘Oh, Annie, it is really high time we had a frank exchange.’

  And then they talked about butter for Lord’s sake, and just for that we had to travel so far and meet in Italy. Sometimes I’m not sure whether I don’t understand grown-ups, or if they’re just too stupid for words.

  My mother saw silk nighties in Bordighera and dreamed about them because they were so lovely and such good value. She loves my father, she loves my grandmother, and she loves me. But right after me she loves silk. And sometimes she loves silk more than she loves us people.

  My grandmother needed all her money to get us through the days, and she didn’t want to buy any silk nighties. My mother wanted to change the Bottom Dollar, because you could get so many lire for it. And she wanted to do it secretly.

  She gave it to a German man who was our neighbour at table, and had a friendly face with surprised eyes like blue marbles. He drank Chianti, the Italian wine, out of straw bottles, and it made him ill so that he had to drink Fernet Branca afterwards, which is an Italian digestif. He was always smiling a gentle bold smile, and spoke very little and rather unclearly.

  My grandmother had got into conversation with him, because he was from Cologne as well: a dentist, who wanted to enjoy a peaceful holiday, and who liked complaining with my mother about the bad meals at our pension.

  Because he spoke favourably about Hitler, my mother at first didn’t want to get into conversation with him, but because of my grandmother she couldn’t criticize Hitler either, and also because Italy is potentially dangerous. And my grandmother found him so innocent and touching and confidence-inspiring. She wished my mother could have found a husband like that, especially once he suddenly stopped drinking Chianti.

  In the evening, my mother gave the touching gentleman her ten-dollar bill, because he asked to have it so that he could go and change it for her in the morning. He kept looking at my mother with trembly eyes. My grandmother was pleased because he obviously found my mother so beautiful and attractive. I didn’t like him myself, because he was as shaky as an old fruit-machine. Even when he was sitting perfectly still, he was doddering away to himself. If it wasn’t his head that was doddering, it was his eyes. He was an ugly doll, a stupid fruit-machine.

  When we returned to the pension at lunchtime after a morning by the sea in the hot sun, the blue-eyed man had skedaddled to France – with our ten-dollar bill. To begin with, my mother didn’t want to tell my grandmother, because it was a secret that she gave away the note to be changed to buy silk, and my grandmother wasn’t supposed to know.

  My mother is much more frightened of my grandmother than I am of my mother. That’s why she sometimes tells lies to my grandmother, but not to me, while I never have to lie to my mother. But if she kept on being strict with me, and scolding, well, then maybe I’d lie too.

  My grandmother can’t do anything to us, she has nothing but her sometimes stern words and the stern bonnet of her white hair. She never hits us. And often she’s friendly and kind.

  My mother couldn’t stand it any more, and she told my grandmother all about the Bottom Dollar, and then my grandmother got angry with my mother, and with Hitler, and with the man who had skedaddled. They spent almost all the time talking about the man and the ten dollars, and I’m afraid I got a bit bored.

  I played by the Mediterranean; the beach isn’t sand, but beautiful white pebbles, as shiny white and smooth as the sun. The sun sends down swords from the sky, but it isn’t warming. And the plants here are warlike plants. Giant cacti grow on the rocky cliffs, their prickly leaves are dangerous. You can kill someone with them if you hit them with them.

  The leaves of the palm trees are sharp green swords. The oranges and lemons look like golden cannonballs. The whole town is like a fortress stuck up on rocks. Some rocks sprout out of the sea, where the bright little café is, where the waves boil white and foamy between. In the middle of it is a tiny wooden hut, which is the WC – there isn’t one in the café itself. Until then I had always thought the most unpleasant WCs were in Poland.

  Some cacti have single flame-red or violet blossoms in between their grey-green spiny leaves. The leaves of olive trees are silvery metal plates. In amongst them are the crazy yellow flowers of mimosas, like luminous grapes – the polleny flowers reach across every path, and each individual blossom is a tiny feathery ball.

  I collected an awful lot of white stones; they were so white they sometimes frightened me. I know the animals felt the same way about things. I never saw any birds flying. There were never any sea creatures washed up on the beach. I never saw any little fishes swimming in the sea; on all the blossoms I never saw a single butterfly.

  The whole world was far too beautiful and big and poisonous, and I sometimes froze like the white stones. My mother and my grandmother both got ill, because they couldn’t tolerate the climate. The sky was so far away, the sun was so far away, there were never any calming clouds; everything was so hot and icy, hard and smooth. Far out to sea we saw occasional battleships swimming by.

  All the purpose in my grandmother’s eyes was quenched when she left to go to Genoa and then to Switzerland and back to Germany. Her mouth was so feeble and withered she could hardly kiss us with it. Her tears were pale and yellow; before that she had always cried good healthy pink tears when she said goodbye to us. My mother could only cry when it was too late, and the train was already moving.

  *

  My mother and I got on a big shiny pink bus to Nice that barrelled along the edge of precipices, on a road that always looked too narrow for it. Giant rocks bore down on us from one side; they wanted to break loose and smash everything in their path. And on the other side there was a sheer drop down to the sea. I covered my mother’s eyes because she couldn’t stand the sight, yet she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  The bus had a radio which sang songs, so we could have flown into the glittering blue sea on a song. Then we would have rested for all time on the seabed, charmed and trapped, because you know it’s not possible to open car doors under water. I wasn’t at all afraid, because the people on the bus were so merry that you could tell nothing bad would ever happen to them.

  At the border, green Italian soldiers did their trick of collecting everyone’s passports again, and disappearing with them. If borders weren’t always dreadful places, this border might have been a jolly, bright one. Because there were jolly-looking stalls on the roadside, children were playing, flowers grew out of the cliffs, the radio in the bus was singing and fiddling as softly as the sea. From afar towns glittered at us that were already in France.

  In front of us and behind us there were lots of private cars. Three men were arrested because they had money on them. And to think that we’re always afraid we’ll be arrested because we have none.

  When we arrived in Nice, it was already dark. We went straight to the hotel where my father had told us to go. It was bang in the middle of the town, on a big square. It had green and cream furniture, and very pretty notepaper. We were tired, and went straight to bed.

  That night, the world started to scream. It screamed: our bed was ful
l of screaming, the whole hotel was full of screaming, the screaming grew louder and louder, the whole world was screaming.

  My mother and I sat bolt upright in bed. We forgot to breathe and we forgot to talk and we forgot to ask questions. When I thought I had been screamed to death, I fell asleep. But I woke up again, to my surprise, and it was morning. The world was quiet again.

  A fat dark jolly woman brought us our breakfast and laughed. That was Suzanne from Savoy.

  The world hadn’t screamed at all; it had just been a show of a thousand cockerels in the square in front of the hotel. Each one had wanted to be louder than all the others. The demonstration went on for three days and three nights. The world was as noisy as if it was a slaughterhouse.

  The Germans were just starting to help themselves to Austria, but in Nice it was Carnival. Carnival is a little bit like a war. You don’t have the feeling that all the Carnival people like each other very much. Everything’s called a battle as well: the battle of flowers, the battle of confetti.

  Tightly pressed together, there was an endless procession of people walking down the Avenue de la Victoire, and the stalls selling bags of coloured confetti went on for hour after hour. People were throwing the confetti in each other’s faces as hard as they could, preferably so that it would hurt. They stuffed confetti down each other’s necks, and the mush of confetti on the ground grew deeper all the time.

  Once, my mother cried because our shoes were torn and we were no longer able to withstand the horrible Carnival smoke. We were wading through masses of confetti with other people, forming a kind of tired creeping human snake. I almost suffocated, because a sailor aimed a bouquet of mimosas and violets at me and caught my mother in the eye. That hurt her.

  When at last we could take refuge in a restaurant, my mother ordered a peppermint tea. She took off my shoes and poured the confetti out of them. That didn’t really help at all. I’ve still got confetti coming out of me. In the café, my mother wrote seven postcards to friends in Germany. Confetti will keep on pouring out of me – our hotel rooms are full of it.