‘That’s different,’ Martin counters once more. ‘That’s a culture. There is no culture around sniffing food. And we don’t sniff each other either, do we? When I introduce you to my wife, you’re not going to start sniffing her, now are you?’
The laughter rushes in a Mexican wave around the table. Martin begins to sniff at Gregor like an animal, keeping the wave going. It’s an aspiration of their time, to laugh, to enjoy the lightness. Perhaps even the peak of their culture, sitting alone watching somebody on YouTube eating marshmallows for seven minutes running.
Mara takes a detour in the conversation. She turns the discussion towards football and the recent World Cup.
‘Amazing,’ she says. ‘Two months after the World Cup is over and the German flags are still up on the balconies everywhere.’
‘You’re right,’ Gregor says. ‘Never seen so many German flags in my life before.’
‘All made in China,’ Martin points out. ‘I’m not joking. They couldn’t keep up with the demand here and had to send for more from China. They have the production facilities over there to make flags quickly.’
‘In the USA,’ Gregor tells her, ‘they think nothing of having flags on their lawns all year round.’
‘To remind them of what country they live in,’ Martin adds.
‘Is that why you wear those sunglasses, Martin? They’re like big American cop sunglasses,’ Daniel says.
Martin gives Daniel a menacing glare over the top of his sunglasses.
Juli puts her arm around Daniel with exaggerated protection.
‘We had forgotten what country we were living in,’ Mara thinks, ‘until the World Cup came to Germany.’
‘Dreamers,’ Daniel cuts in. ‘Pack of dreamers. With a team like that.’
‘Ah now, Daniel,’ Gregor argues. ‘We didn’t do that badly.’
‘Ploddy,’ Daniel reinforces, with the assurance of a football commentator. ‘Methodical and lame. No imagination. We didn’t even deserve to get to the semi-final.’
‘We were always dreamers,’ Martin agrees. ‘You’re absolutely right there Daniel.’
He takes his sunglasses off completely at this point, then pauses.
‘The Germans have always been the world champions at dreaming. For years, we were forbidden from having our own dreams. Only American dreams. Capitalist dreams, Communist dreams. Rock and roll dreams. Greek island dreams. Biggest dreamers on the planet, the Germans. You should be glad, Daniel, that at least now we’re dreaming about football again.’
They pause and think about this for a while.
‘Still a crap team.’
Mara looks away into the sky.
‘Such a fantastic day,’ she says, this time with a tiny, free note of joy releasing itself from her voice. ‘Thorsten, can we not take a break for a while and come back to the apples later when it’s cooled down a bit?’
It’s not really all that hot, just the idea of exhaustion descending over them. Looking up at the sky over the roofs of the farm buildings, there is only one feathery cloud to be seen, a vague white streak, like the wipe of a cloth left on glass. Even though it rained a few nights ago, it’s only a small relief and the landscape is burned out, hoarse and silent, waiting for water.
In the orchard, everything is quiet, a long sustained note stretching into the afternoon. The air is humming in there now. The fruit gatherers have fled and left everything behind them. The ladders. The long poles. The rake leaning against the tree. The wheelbarrows and the boxes and the lines of sacks, full and bulging with red apples. The birds and the insects and the beetles on the ground sneaking back to have a look at what is left, once more reclaiming the place for themselves.
Seventeen
Looking back now, Gregor feels more like an invented character, swept along a predestined narrative. He wishes he could go over his own life with an omnipotent hand, to intervene at vital moments.
It was the year of the hornet sting. Late November, when Daniel was still only five, Gregor received a letter from home. The sender’s name on the back of the envelope was Maria Liedmann, with an address in Nuremberg.
Gregor was out recording in a studio that morning, so the letter lay on the table unopened, with Mara staring at the female handwriting, wondering what was going on. At first she felt the excitement of discovering that Gregor might have an aunt or a cousin still alive. But then it also revealed that Gregor was hiding something.
She stared at the letter, took Daniel to school, went to work and remained inside her own world, unable to get it out of her head. When she got home it was gone.
‘The letter,’ she asked quite innocently. ‘Who is it from?’
‘It’s nothing,’ he answered.
How could he have thought he might get away with this? She pursued it, naturally, but Gregor went mute as a stone. For a man who could make up good stories for children, he seemed more and more incapable of speaking to adults. She could ask as many questions as she liked, but he sat in front of her, strumming chords on his guitar in answer. Rather than explain things, he sat with Mara in a kind of meaningless twilight, plucking the strangest of notes while she continued to place words in his mouth, as if he came from a different country where it was only possible to communicate through music.
‘Are you hiding something from me, Gregor?’ she asked.
‘Speak to me, Gregor, please,’ she begged him, before breaking down at last in tears. ‘It’s very lonely for me sometimes, when you don’t speak. I never know what you’re thinking, Gregor, unless you say something.’
‘I can’t talk about it,’ he replied. ‘Trust me, Mara. It’s nothing. It’s from the past and I don’t want to go back there.’
She sat wiping the tears with the sleeve of her woollen cardigan over her hand.
‘What am I to think, Gregor? If you say nothing, then you give other people the right to speak for you. If you don’t explain things, then I will start imagining things that might be untrue. Please, Gregor, tell me what it is.’
‘It’s a letter from the past, Mara,’ he repeated. ‘That’s all I can tell you. It’s a long way back in the past, before we met.’
He refused to say any more. Got up and went over to kiss her. She didn’t resist his embrace, but she gave only a half-smile and her eyes were full of questions.
The following evening, she searched for the letter, turning the whole apartment upside down. Finally found it in the bin outside in the courtyard. Smiled at neighbours and explained that she had accidentally thrown a pay cheque out with the rubbish. Found the tiny torn-up pieces of truth at last and salvaged them with great care, bringing them up the stairs to reconstruct as a real-life jigsaw. Later, while Gregor was playing in a bar, Mara put the letter back together, patiently gluing each portion down on a clean sheet of paper, matching the words up with the eagerness of an archaeologist.
It had come from Gregor’s mother. Maria Liedmann.
‘Your father is dying,’ the letter said. ‘This will be his last Christmas.’
She felt the shock of the words in her stomach. It was bigger than any revelation about a secret lover. He had not broken the silent pact in the railway station after all. She was thrilled to find out that Gregor’s adoptive mother was still alive, but the reasons why he had concealed this from her scared her. Afraid that she no longer understood the man she was living with.
What great emptiness did he construct behind himself? It was easier to deal with no knowledge whatsoever than it was to know that there was something which he was suppressing.
‘Why is he denying everything like this?’ she asked Martin on the phone. ‘Why doesn’t he want to talk about his mother, the woman who rescued him and brought him up? How can he turn his back on her?’
There was something fascinating about deceit. This was an infidelity. Though it had nothing to do with sexual deception, it contained all the subterfuge and secrecy that goes along with being unfaithful. No giveaway signs in the bedroom. This was more about
family detective work, about the longing for knowledge, the wish to know everything about him.
For the moment, she kept it to herself.
‘Do you still love me?’ she asked him.
‘Of course,’ he said with some humour. ‘Goes without saying, Mara.’
But since the letter had arrived in their midst, there was some stronger affirmation required.
Was he incapable of integrating in a family? The trapdoor opening up again and taking the ground from under his feet? The disability of an orphan, unable to trust the human trade of giving and accepting love?
Did he find it hard to return that invisible substance that passes between people and which is impossible to measure? Are there people who have no talent for love, just as there are those who cannot sing, or dance, or balance a plate on a stick? Some devastation in their history. Some coldness in the heart. People who have had that precious substance withdrawn from them at one point or another. Those who have found no way of expressing it or receiving it. Was love nothing more than a sign of insecurity? Some form of self-preservation or human investment, dressed up as virtue in movies and books. She had been told by poets and revolutionaries at the university that unconditional love was a myth. Like the lost half of a tea set, like sabretoothed tigers, like Major Tom drifting away into space. But wasn’t it impossible to live without love, like living without breathing, without water, like trying to survive on a loveless planet without trees?
Mara decided to go to Nuremberg herself. There had to be some reason why Gregor was denying his own mother. She wanted to see where he had grown up. This was her chance to imagine his childhood at last, the house, the surrounding streets and shops, the school and the traffic lights where he must have crossed over on his way home every day. She wanted to see the stairs he walked up, the hall door, the surname on the bell. Stalking a living ghost made her feel light-headed with excitement, something she had not felt in years.
She told Gregor that she would be away for two days, visiting her sister who was ill in Köln. She left Daniel with Martin and his wife, Gisela, and drove to Nuremberg with the address she had taken from the letter. A neighbour informed her that Frau Liedmann had gone to visit her husband in hospital. It was too late to come back and call again, so she had to leave it to the following day, and even then she was afraid to ring the bell this time. Afraid of this tidal wave of information which would emerge from the meeting.
She waited until Gregor’s mother came out. Followed her to a nearby café. It was December by then, just before Christmas. The Christmas markets were open and one of the streets was blocked off from traffic. There was snow falling and Gregor’s mother wore a grey woollen coat with imitation fur around the collar. She had on a pair of short brown boots with rings of beige fur around the top. She slapped some of the melting snow from her coat with her gloves and put them away in her handbag, which was kept inside a reusable shopping bag. She opened the buttons of her coat and left her hat on, a purple cashmere hat in the shape of a sugar-coated jelly sweet. With the straw grey hair under the hat, it was possible to imagine her as a small girl, with red cheeks. She seemed nervous and ate her piece of cake, a cream-filled tart with strawberry mousse, in a slightly furtive way, glancing around her first to make sure she was not being watched. Other women greeted her curtly, hardly even looking at her, as though ‘good morning’ meant ‘stay where you are’. Frau Liedmann remained very much on her own, and maybe there was a hint here of Gregor’s solipsism. She consumed the cake in a mechanical way, looking away into the street where the cars were hissing through a lacklustre shower of white, frozen rain.
Mara waited until Frau Liedmann was finished with the cake, then worked up the courage to make a discreet approach. After all, it was Gregor’s mother who had made the first move, sending the letter.
‘Frau Liedmann,’ she said in a quiet voice, smiling. ‘We got the letter. I am Gregor’s wife, Mara.’
There was a shocked exchange of looks between them. It had the effect on Frau Liedmann of being caught by the police, something she had been expecting all along and almost wished for so that it could be over at last.
‘There is nothing wrong, Frau Liedmann,’ Mara reassured her. ‘I don’t want to alarm you. It’s the letter. We got your letter.’
‘Gregor,’ was all that Frau Liedmann could utter.
‘He doesn’t know that I’ve come here,’ Mara said, and maybe that was an important initial connection, a conspiratorial friendship between these two women, two mothers. ‘He cannot find out about this. Gregor is like that, you know, very fixed in his mind about things.’
‘Can we go somewhere more quiet, maybe?’ Frau Liedmann said politely, again searching around, glancing at other people for permission almost.
They walked a hundred metres through the snow to another café where they sat down in a corner. It seemed important to her not to be overheard. Did Frau Liedmann feel that her background did not match up to those of other people around her? Some inadequacy in the black market of confession and gossip and home truth?
The waitress brought better coffee this time and they sat looking at each other with Mara doing all the talking, filling in the absent details. They had a five-year-old boy, named Daniel. Gregor worked as a musician, as well as teaching music part-time. She didn’t tell Frau Liedmann that Gregor had told everyone that his adoptive parents were dead, only that he had started a new life.
‘You have a son,’ Frau Liedmann said. ‘That makes me very happy.’
There was emotion in her voice. Mara searched in her handbag for a photograph, a picture of the three of them together on holiday in Spain that year. Frau Liedmann looked at it for a long time, while Mara told her that it was just after Daniel had been stung by a hornet, which explained why he looked a bit sulky. Frau Liedmann swallowed the image, unable to connect to it across the time gone by.
‘I’ve never seen him with a beard before,’ she said.
She took off her coat at last, and her hat, adjusted her hair and examined the photograph once more in greater detail.
‘You’re welcome to keep it,’ Mara said, but Frau Liedmann placed it on the table in front of her, propped against a small can of milk, perhaps not fully sure if it could really belong to her.
Eighteen
They fell into conversation and agreed to address each other informally as Mara and Maria. That alone made Mara feel like a lost daughter returning home. She was brought back to the house where Gregor’s mother prepared something to eat. Surrounded by antlers, they sat looking through the photographs and Mara rested for a long time on one particular image of Gregor as a boy, trying to teach the dog to jump through a hoop. His curly hair rising up in a wave on top of his head. His eyes looking at the camera. It was almost too much to absorb in the space of one afternoon. And yet she wanted to see more, everything. Another picture of him with his own head concealed under his jumper and the dog’s head under his arm as a joke. A further picture of Gregor and his mother standing on the steps of the house beside Uncle Max.
Why had all this been so hidden? Why had Gregor erased this part of his life with such brutal determination? Was there nothing from these tranquil family moments worth keeping?
‘He told me about that dog,’ Mara said. ‘Fritz was his name, am I right?’
‘That’s true,’ Gregor’s mother said.
‘Didn’t he have a big war going with the postman?’
‘That dog was a terrible nuisance. My husband hated him because he used to bark in the forest and chase all the wild deer away. The postman was terrified. Very nervous man, after the war. I don’t know how many official letters of complaint we received over that dog, and the postman had to deliver them himself.’
‘He was run over in the end, wasn’t he?’
‘The truck driver gave Gregor some money to get a new dog. But he never did.’
‘Why not?’
‘The postman still believed he was alive. Gregor had this funny idea of tellin
g him that the dog was locked up in the back.’
‘So he lived on in the postman’s imagination.’
‘Until I blurted it out one day. The postman asked me where the dog was and I told him he was long dead. Almost a year later. Imagine. And Gregor blamed me. Said I killed the dog by telling the postman.’
The two women scraped over the details like two historians, sharing knowledge, exchanging facts and eccentricities, a well-informed jury examining things from opposite viewpoints. At times it seemed like they were not even talking about the same person. Again and again, there were trademark features which they both recognised and made it feel like an odd reunion of complete strangers. And maybe there was not too much harm done by the fact that Gregor had denied his adoptive mother, as long as Mara could engineer the reconciliation.
‘Gregor hates shopping,’ she said. ‘I buy all his clothes for him because he can’t bear being inside a shop.’
‘He picked that up from his father,’ Gregor’s mother replied.
‘Funny,’ Mara said. ‘Gregor thinks shop assistants are like hyenas, stalking customers, preying on the partner. He physically pulls me out of the shop and I feel like a shoplifter being arrested.’
But there was something more serious to be discussed.
‘His father was very good to him,’ Gregor’s mother said. ‘He would like to see him again before he dies. He’s forgiven him.’
‘For what?’ Mara asked.
‘He threatened us with a hunting rifle. Just before he ran away. My husband doesn’t hold that against him any longer. If only he would come to see us.’
These new facts began to overturn everything. Gregor’s mother spoke about the bond between father and son. How her husband had helped Gregor to bring home an injured hawk and encouraged him to nurse it until it could fly again. How he explained to him that hunting was not always about killing but also about conservation. There was a tone of regret in her voice as she explained why she had to leave Gregor in care so often, before her husband came back from captivity. She even had a second job cleaning offices at night to keep things going.
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