My father was completely fed up with the heat and beach life. He didn’t know what to do all day with no money, he couldn’t sit in a bar or restaurant. But he made friends with a salesman in the ABC store, who would sometimes sell him a bottle of gin on credit.
In the evenings he had to sit out on the veranda for hours with Boyhood Friend, while glow-worms buzzed around, even though he had no idea what to talk about with him. Most interesting to him were the cheery Negroes, who shined people’s shoes on the sidewalk. He often hung around with them in the daytime.
The first time I saw a Negro, in Belgium, I trailed around after him for hours. In America I saw so many of them, I didn’t even stare at them any more. But to begin with I thought they were terribly exciting, and I wished I could touch them all. I hadn’t known that there were children who were already Negroes.
We drove through lots of towns, most of them were as beautiful as tourist towns in Germany and Austria, but much bigger. All the towns had coloured quarters, where the Negroes could live amongst themselves.
They were always spilling out on to the street; I’ve never known them to stay in their own houses. They make an awful lot of noise. When they hear music play, they start dancing right away, wherever they are, on the street, in a store, in a drugstore. In the evenings, they’re all drunk, and worst of all on Sundays. If they own cars, they have wrecks on Sunday nights, because they drive around like mad and crash into each other.
One time I was in a Negro house in Norfolk. That was terrible.
The jolly Negro shoe-shine man was very sad one day, because his wife had died. She had to be buried by a Negro firm of undertakers. The shoe-shine man didn’t have enough money to pay for the funeral, because he had lent some to his brother, who could only repay him in four days’ time.
My father couldn’t endure so much unhappiness, and so he lent the Negro the money which he’d just been lent himself, by Boyhood Friend. That way, the wife did get to be buried after all.
At the end of four days, we had to go to Norfolk, because we had an invitation. On our way, we passed the Negro walking back to his house, and he told us his brother was waiting there with the money, so he could repay my father. That made my father happy. We gave the Negro a lift back to his house.
My father was keen to see inside a house like that, and so we went in. The Negro opened a door, and started yelling horribly. On a bed there was a hideous black woman not moving. That was the Negro’s wife. She really and truly was dead, and not a ghost.
The Negro hadn’t given the money to the undertakers, he’d spent it on whiskey, to comfort himself. The undertakers said they wouldn’t dream of working for nothing. Even though that’s just what they did, and twice over. They dug up the woman, and put her back where they’d got her from.
That night we didn’t feel like eating anything, but the American people who’d invited us didn’t think it was so bad. The only mistake they thought we’d made was in lending money to a Negro and then going to his house.
Before dinner the guests were given big tumblers full of mint leaves and some liquid in the bottom that you’re supposed to drink. The whole thing is called a mint julep, and it’s a sort of cocktail. My father said it was beyond a joke. Instead of a self-respecting, honest-to-goodness drink, you got given a flowerpot containing a liquid that might be to the liking of the plant that was growing there but was an insult to a grown man. It tasted like sugar water that – at the most – had had a distant view of a whiskey bottle at some stage. Boyhood Friend loved the mint julep and thought it was terribly strong.
In the evening we drove to Ocean View, where we were shown the spot on the coast where the first English settlers landed in America. The water was green and gold with phosphorescence. We toiled up a sand dune and couldn’t see much. All the Americans were very moved. My father sighed, because in those days the English hadn’t needed a visa to come ashore.
Things got tense, and Boyhood Friend didn’t want us around any more. Not one of my father’s plans came off. We received no news, just once from the waiter that our borrowed car needed to be returned. I was never able to find out who it belonged to anyway, but it was someone who was a menace right now because he wanted it back.
Where would we sleep? What would we eat? My father fired off telegrams to Europe that were terribly expensive and didn’t help at all. He kept thinking of the terribly rich people we knew in Holland and who were vaguely related to us too. But they didn’t like us, and we didn’t like them either. They would never give us anything. Why should they?
Then in his desperation my father had an idea, and he thought he would die. He wrote the rich Dutch people a telegram purporting to come from Boyhood Friend, saying that my father had died, and requesting funeral expenses and a crossing for the orphaned girl, which was me. My father said the people would be so happy that he’d died that they would certainly send money, not least to appear magnanimous to the world. The money that came would hardly have buried anyone, but at least it was enough to get us back to New York.
I went swimming for the last time at Virginia Beach. My father said goodbye to the Chinaman who had washed our shirts sometimes, but only those of my father and Boyhood Friend. I always ran around in my bathing costume.
One last time I ran along the beach, further and further. The spidery crabs danced over the sand, the sun shone, the sand glowed. I saw a giant tortoise lying at the water’s edge, stinking, and I saw loads of dead fish.
A dark silent mass was approaching the tideline, and I recognized the nuns from St Paul’s Hospital, and they got undressed to bathe in private. I was astonished, because I had always thought nuns only consisted of wimples and robes.
In a lonely part of the beach I found a bottle of Gordon’s Gin, which my father might have tossed out of the car one night, though maybe it wasn’t my father’s at all. But it was at that place on the shore where we sometimes parked with Boyhood Friend, because it was Sunday, and the boys and girls drank gin, and the wooded roads echoed with laughter and singing and noise. They were people who had come from the city, in search of peace and quiet.
My father had sought peace and quiet from them, and driven us to the shore, to the dunes. More cars followed us like buzzing beetles, one after another. They stopped in front of us, behind us, next to us. They didn’t hoot, we didn’t hear them.
They came silently, and stayed, and left silently, and silently new cars took their place. It was like an automobile show, except it wasn’t lit, so you didn’t get much benefit. I did manage to see something, though, because I secretly crept past some of the cars.
In each car, there was a man and a girl getting all tangled up. My father drank gin, and remarked: ‘Love in the USA.’ And there was me thinking they were trying to kill each other. One time an older naked man got out of his car, but without wanting to go swimming. He just switched off the headlights of his car.
In the daytime, this remote spot was where nuns went swimming. I know them because I once spent three days in their hospital. They were very nice to me. I meant to write to them every day from Europe, and they wanted to take me back, and when I said goodbye they blessed me in their little hospital chapel.
The reason I was in their hospital was because in the forest one time I had accidentally sat down on a very interesting and poisonous creeper. That gave me a rash and a high temperature.
When I was almost better, I wandered through the hospital. I wandered in the direction of some very slow gentle singing. I saw a ward that had only sick Negro women in it, and they were doing the slow singing, as if singing a lullaby to the whole world. At their bedsides sat some quiet Negro men. They rolled their eyes in time to the singing of the Negro women.
One of the nurses told my father that almost all these gentle men had thrown their wives out of the window in an argument. That’s why the women were in hospital, and by singing they were showing their pleasure at still being alive, and the men were pleased with them. All of them were happy.
Later I wondered with my father whether we shouldn’t collect some of the poisonous creepers and pack them into our suitcases for the customs inspectors to touch. But in the end we decided not to, because there are the occasional kind ones, who you have to try to protect.
*
We drove back via Washington, because a boyhood friend of Boyhood Friend’s lived there. Our own Boyhood Friend liked us again, because we were leaving. He was also grateful to my father for having saved him from a precipitate marriage.
Washington wasn’t a city so much as a cake made of sugar icing and white cream. We were allowed to stay with Boyhood Friend’s boyhood friend. His hair was as white as his house and the President’s house.
Earlier, he’d used to be a judge, but only sort of on the side. Really he had devoted his entire life to constructing a giant warship made out of buttons. He hadn’t permitted himself to buy any of the buttons, they all had to be ones he had either lost or found. He had travelled through Asia and America, and looked for buttons on all the avenues of the world. It took him many years till he had enough buttons, but I think he cheated and sometimes tore buttons off his jackets. I’m sure you never find nice buttons on the prestige streets of the world, because rich people always make sure their buttons are securely sewn on. I said that to the man too. He was a little taken aback, but he did at least say he’d found most of his buttons in places he hadn’t wanted to visit.
The button battleship was in a big room made of sea-green velvet. My father and I stood in front of it and gazed at it. The white-haired man walked sadly back and forth. He was proud and tired. He talked and smiled, as if he had already died. He has nothing more to live for now, because the ship is finished. That’s what my father said.
In New York, my father managed to sell some stories to a newspaper. That gave him back his appetite for life, and he came round to America again, and believed we would be saved. I went back to Europe on my own to fetch my mother, while my father was going to stay behind and build up a life for us, and send money soon.
I felt tired on the ship, and I had a sore throat, and I couldn’t receive any letters. One evening, the captain took me up on the bridge, and I stood miles above the water. I spread out my arms and thought they would get so long that I could reach my father with my left and my mother with the right. Now for the first time, we were all three of us on our own.
How would my father manage to stay in America? Who would he talk to if things got desperate? There isn’t anywhere where people like you and tolerate you when things are going badly. And maybe my mother would have starved in Europe before I got back, or died of loneliness.
Now we’re all back in Amsterdam together, and one day we’ll all be together somewhere else.
‘Do you never get homesick?’ an old man asked me, and first I didn’t know what he meant. He explained.
I do sometimes get homesick, but it’s always for different places that I happen to think of. Sometimes I’m thinking of the singing buses on the Côte d’Azur, sometimes of a meadow near Salzburg that was a blue sea of gladioli, of the Christmas trees at my grandmother’s house, of the slot machines in New York, of the giant shells in Virginia, and the snow and sleighs carrying straw in Poland.
But I don’t want to go anywhere if my mother doesn’t come too. It seems I don’t really get homesick then. And much less when my father’s with us too.
Afterword
I first came to Irmgard Keun by way of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth – for all the Roth reasons, if you like. She lived and travelled with him from June 1936 to January 1938, in the middle of her life and at the dog-end of his. (He died in May 1939.) In Joseph Roth biographies, I’d read her very striking and persuasive account of him during those terrible years of exile:
When I first met Roth in Ostende, I felt here was someone who was simply about to die of sadness. His round blue eyes were almost blind with despair, and his voice sounded as though buried under tons of grief. Later on, that impression blurred a little, because at that time Roth wasn’t just sad, he was also the greatest and most impassioned of haters…
Though always denied by Keun (admittedly, like Roth himself, she was an inveterate liar), the persistent on dit is that, at least in part – the generosity, the scrounging, the panache, the drinking, the odd mixture of unreliability and dependability – the character, or perhaps the circumstantial character, of Kully’s father, Peter, in Child of All Nations is supposed to be based on Roth’s. It didn’t matter; I ended up so charmed by Keun that I translated the whole book. On the way, I read – much of it aloud – everything else of hers I could find. I suppose it’s a little like enjoying your round, and buying the golf course.
Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin in 1905; later, she always claimed it was in 1910, the year her brother Gerd was born. The lie served two purposes: it made her appear younger, and it squashed an upstart rival. (The trauma of the arrival of a younger sibling is introduced, then gently shelved, in Child of All Nations.) She grew up in Cologne – where her father worked in the fledgling German petrol industry – and after school took to the stage. For a couple of years she played small parts in provincial rep companies, gaining, it seems, little favourable notice. She was averagely pretty, shy, willing, and not very good. Defeated as an actress, she began to write in 1929, and here she was immediately successful. She was published right away – in her own hyperbolic account, she was offered a contract within twenty-four hours – and her books sold in the tens of thousands at home, and were translated abroad. She was published by Gallimard in France, and prominently reviewed in the New York Times and The Times Literary Supplement.
In a sense, impersonation – mimicry – remained the name of the game. In her early novels, Gilgi, eine von uns (‘Gilgi, one of us’, 1931) and Das kunstseidene Mädchen (‘The artificial silk girl’, 1932), both in the first-person narrative form that remained most congenial to her, Keun gave voice to the Young Modern Woman – now newly and trickily positioned at the crux of work, love and family – much more effectively than she had been able to do as an actress in parts written by others. (Gilgi was promptly filmed, the year after it appeared, while a ‘Gilgi’ as a type of the modern temp soon entered the language of Weimar Germany.) Keun forms part of the wonderful efflorescence of women’s writing in the 1920s and 30s – clever, fast-moving, contemporary, important, and unburdened with the dreary cultural ballast and the turgid intellectual purpose of so many men’s books of the time – that internationally comprised the likes of Jean Rhys, Anita Loos, Rosamund Lehmann, Vicki Baum and later (though she is of their generation, born in 1911) Sybille Bedford. How, Keun’s early books ask, can a young woman ignorant of the German comma laws hold on to her job (scarce enough commodity in those times), without letting her boss make free with her calves (or worse); how in inflationary times and on a small salary can she afford to buy those few indispensable items for her wardrobe; how, without becoming a total tramp, can she have a little fun; how bridge the depressing gulf between her existence and the women’s lives she reads about in the magazines? Doris’s obsession with ‘glamour’ (Glanz – almost more like ‘stardom’) in The Artificial Silk Girl is cleverly half ironized and half lyrically earnest. She is, as Kathie von Ankum notes in her translation, a predecessor of Bridget Jones and material girls everywhere.
After 1933, things abruptly got much harder for Keun. Now married, and with a husband to feed (the unspeakable Johannes Tralow, theatre director, writer and all-round creature, twenty-three years her elder, an early recruit to the Nazi party, before eventually finding his apotheosis on a ten-pfennig postage stamp in the German Democratic Republic), with a third book on the go that wouldn’t behave (Der hungrige Ernährer, ‘The hungry provider’, lost, unfinished, rejected, or most likely all three), she found herself personally, politically and artistically in difficulties. Just as Keun was instinctively anti-Nazi (she would sign letters ‘Heil Hittler’ – yes, two t’s), so the Nazis were just as insti
nctively anti-Keun. There was something about her honesty, her spark, her refusal of indoctrination, her subversiveness that riled them more than political opposition. (And, with their emphasis on racial purity and Familienpolitik – family values – women were important to them.) In their terms, she was ‘immoral’ and a writer of ‘Asphaltliteratur mit antideutscher Tendenz’ (‘urban books’ were often thought of as ‘discreditable’ to Germany for country-sentimental reasons, but also as a handy way of discriminating against their often Jewish authors). Keun was blacklisted, her books removed from bookshops and libraries, and (though she did try later, and rather harder than she would have liked to have done) she was not able to join the Reichsschrifttumskammer, the Writers’ Union, without which she could not publish or work in Germany.
In 1936, Keun went into exile. Her third novel, her first with a child protagonist, Das Mädchen, mit dem die Kinder nicht verkehren durften (‘The girl the children weren’t allowed to play with’), was published by the Dutch firm of Allert de Lange. A fourth – as good, and again with a young woman, Sanna, at its centre – Nach Mitternacht, appeared with Querido in 1937; an English translation, After Midnight, came out the following year. In 1938, there was D-Zug dritter Klasse (‘Express train, third class’), about a compartment full of seven strangers on the train from Berlin to Paris, and in the autumn of 1938 Kind aller Länder.
One could, if one had a mind to, follow her movements in those years, via Child of All Nations: Ostende first (it was at least a little familiar, because she had holidayed there as a child), Brussels, Amsterdam, Poland, Salzburg, Bordighera in Italy (with her mother), Marseilles, Nice, Paris, America. It is striking that those years, of fear, distraction and worry – the prospect of war looms heavily over Child of All Nations, and as something purely destructive, not as the only possible solution to the problem of Hitler – saw her best work. Partly it is the admirable ease with which she wrote, partly the fact that it took work at such a rate simply to pay the bills, but most important, I think, is her exile’s sense of mission, the sense that she had in the Nazi regime an antagonist that she needed to wound and puncture. Four books in three years, with constant changes of abode, with the problems of Roth, with her own alcoholism, with the ongoing divorce from Tralow, with another lover, the Jewish doctor Arnold Strauss – to whom she was initially referred in Berlin, for help with her alcoholism – now waiting for her hopefully in Virginia, and receiving regular begging and stalling letters from her.
Child of All Nations Page 14
