To Greet the Sun

by Claus von Bohlen

  *

  When I have fixed us both another drink and we are once again sitting in the garden chairs, I broach a topic that has been weighing on my mind for many years.

  ‘Anna-Maria, there is something that I have been meaning to say to you for a long time: I was very sorry when your husband died. I only knew him a little, but he was a very fine man.’

  Anna-Maria looks surprised, then she smiles.

  ‘Thank you Seu Otto. He was a good man, but it is a long time ago.’

  We sit in silence. After a while I say, ‘There is something else that has been on my mind. I know that Horst’s mother died in childbirth, but do you know anything else about her?’

  ‘Well, she was sent to Brazil from Germany because she got pregnant during the war. She was very young. Her name was Freya.’

  Freya – the blond girl at the end of the jetty.

  Siggi and Freya.

  ‘But why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason,’ I say. I have to look away so as not to betray my excitement.

  There is one other little thing I have been intending to take care of since I left the hospital. I ask Anna-Maria if she knows a reputable lawyer on Santa Catarina. She replies that her daughter Lua is bound to know one. Then she asks, ‘What kind of lawyer?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Any kind.’

  I intend to make a will. I shall leave my house to Anna-Maria and everything else to Pietro. But I’m not going to tell them.

  Chapter 30

  IT IS shortly after midday and the sun hangs over the tropic of Capricorn. The air above Brazil’s Atlantic coast is unusually bright and clear. A flock of scarlet tanagers is circling; they are waiting to gather sufficient numbers to embark upon the long migration north. If the scarlet tanagers were to desist from their manoeuvres for a moment and look down, they would see a VW camper van turning off the main road, away from Blumenau and towards Pomerode. The van is easy to spot: it is decorated with bright, swirling images of flowers. The van’s movement is irregular – it is forced to zigzag left and right in order to avoid the many potholes.

  The van is being driven by a tanned young man with sun-bleached blond hair. He is wearing a freshly pressed white shirt. Occasionally the young man tugs at the shirt in a way that suggests that he is unaccustomed to wearing a collar.

  A much older gentleman is reclining in the passenger seat. He is wearing a dark suit. His eyes are closed and his head is inclined towards the window. When the air is channelled through the open window and onto his forehead, a half smile creeps across the old man’s face. It appears that he is content.

  There are three people sitting on the bench behind the two front seats, two women and one man. The women are seated beside the windows. They are dwarfed by the man sitting between them. One of the women is young and pretty. The other woman wears the black clothing of a widow. She is not young but her bright eyes give her face a certain charm. The large man between them is holding forth in a deep, resonant voice. He does not appear to be speaking to anyone in particular.

  ‘Pomerode was founded by Pomeranian Germans in 1861. Most German-Brazilians speak Hunsrückisch, but in Pomerode they speak Pommersch. It is one of the few places where German is still the first language.’

  The large gentleman leans back and folds his arms, but only for a second. His attention is caught by a sign beside the road. He immediately leans towards the window and points at the sign.

  ‘There, look!’

  The women follow the direction of his arm. The sign is painted a cheerful green; it is decorated with carved wooden flowers and ladybirds. The writing on the sign reads: Seien Sie herzlich willkommen.

  The older lady says: ‘Jorge, please. You are going to crush Marina.’

  ‘It’s ok,’ says Marina.

  ‘It’s only another five minutes from here,’ replies Jorge.

  The camper van bounces over yet another pothole.

  ‘Pietro!’ says Marina.

  ‘Sorry,’ mutters Pietro. He looks over at the older gentleman, who has his eyes closed and is still wearing a contented smile. It is unclear whether he is sleeping or just resting.

  The road snakes between the houses of Pomerode. For the most part, the houses are built of red brick and dark-stained wood. The roofs are also red and their gables are narrow and pointed. The surrounding countryside is green and gently undulating. This could be northern Germany, though only the elderly gentleman whose eyes are closed would be able to recognise the similarity.

  The camper van passes a house with a porch. A boy with pale blue eyes is sitting on the porch. The corners of his mouth are stained red from the rich tomato sauce with which his lunchtime spaghetti was generously garnished. He is wearing the bright yellow football strip of the national team, and on his lap he is holding an accordion. The camper van slows as it passes by.

  ‘Look,’ says Jorge, ‘I told you that they preserved the old traditions here. That boy is playing a German accordion.’

  ‘What a trip,’ says Marina.

  ‘Nossa, that could be a postcard sent from Germany,’ says Pietro. He turns to the passenger seat and sees that the elderly gentleman has opened his eyes.

  ‘Look Seu Otto, a boy with a German accordion.’

  Seu Otto does not respond but the smile does not leave his face.

  *

  The camper van passes the last house and continues along the potholed road, which now begins to switch back and forth as it climbs the slope rising from the meandering Itajaí-Açu river. When the river is a little way below, the camper van turns off the road and into a gravel parking area. Pietro climbs out of the driver’s seat and opens the twin side doors. Anna-Maria emerges first, gingerly placing her foot on the grey pebbles. She is followed by Jorge, who gallantly offers his hand to Marina. There is a sudden gust of wind and Marina attempts to smooth down her summery white skirt. Her movement brings to mind the image of Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway air vent.

  Pietro helps Seu Otto descend from the passenger seat. Jorge reaches into the back of the van and passes Seu Otto his walking stick. Then he pulls out a large plastic bag and passes around an assortment of flowers until everyone has a few to hold. Everyone apart from Anna-Maria; she has brought her own flowers.

  ‘I picked these this morning,’ says Jorge, almost apologetically. ‘They are nothing special, just a few wild flowers from around my house.’

  Then Jorge turns and leads the way through the gate at the entrance to the cemetery. The gravel crunches underfoot as the small party make their way up the footpath and towards the gravestones. Pietro and Marina walk behind Jorge. Pietro’s free hand seeks out Marina’s. Seu Otto and Anna-Maria are walking side by side behind the young couple, but their progress is slower and they soon fall back a small distance.

  The gravel path has been well maintained, but the grass grows high around the gravestones themselves. The path winds around the cemetery. Occasionally the visitors pass through an area of dappled shade cast by one of the cypress trees next to the path.

  Jorge turns to see Pietro staring up at the branches overhead. ‘Cupressus sempervirens,’ says Jorge. ‘The cypress was used extensively in Ancient Roman funerary rites. The bodies of the dead were laid upon cypress branches prior to interment. The cypress is the principal cemetery tree in both the Western and Muslim worlds, but it is not native to these shores. The early German immigrants planted these trees.’

  ‘What is so special about the cypress?’ asks Marina.

  ‘Well, Ovid tells the story of Cyparissus,’ says Jorge. ‘Cyparissus was a beautiful boy and a favourite of Apollo. Apollo gave him the gift of a tame deer. Cyparissus loved the deer above all else until, in a terrible accident, he killed the deer with his javelin while it was asleep in the undergrowth. Cyparissus was heartbroken; he asked Apollo to punish him with everlasting gloom and to let his tears fall forever. Apollo turned the sad boy into a cypress tree. According to Ovid, the droplets of sap on the trunk of the cypress are
like tears. That is why the cypress is the tree of mourning.’

  ‘Poor Cyparissus, what a sad story,’ Marina says.

  Pietro squeezes Marina’s hand and then releases it. He walks up to a bench in the shade of the cypress tree. He kneels on the bench and inspects the bark of the tree, then he picks off a small droplet of golden sap and holds it beneath his nose.

  ‘It smells like pine,’ he says.

  ‘Same family,’ says Jorge.

  ‘So, over tens of thousands of years, this sap would also harden into amber?’

  ‘Yes, I don’t see why not.’

  Pietro rolls the sap between his fingers before pressing it against the back of the bench as if it were a piece of chewing gum.

  Once Seu Otto and Anna-Maria have caught up, Jorge leads the party towards a small group of tombstones at the very top of the cemetery, just a few metres from where the forest begins.

  ‘I love this place,’ says Jorge. ‘The carved tombstones, this gravel path and the cypress trees are like a European cemetery. But the forest which begins here stretches northwest for thousands of kilometers. You could walk from here and not see a road or another town until you reached the Caribbean coast of Venezuela. You would pass through the heart of the Amazon, through the thickest and wildest and most unexplored jungle on earth. You might meet tribes who have not had any contact with the Western world, tribes whose way of life has not changed for thousands of years.’

  ‘You really think there are still tribes like that out there?’ asks Pietro.

  ‘Of course. There are sixty uncontacted tribes in the Amazon that we know about. There must be more that we don’t know about. But the tribes are small, rarely more than a few hundred people.’

  ‘But how do they live?’ asks Marina.

  ‘They live as we all used to live, in harmony with nature. The jungle provides for their needs. Ritual and tradition connect them to the past. They believe that the ancestors live through them, that no one ever truly dies. But what would it be like to see the world through their eyes? I would love to know.’

  *

  Jorge has led the group to a grave. At the head of the large stone slab stands a plinth and on this plinth is a sandstone sculpture of an angel. The angel’s wings are folded in repose and the stone is weathered, but the pensive, childlike quality of the angel’s face is still evident. The angel’s head is bowed and he appears to be holding an object close to his breast. Is it a dove? Or the Holy Book? Impossible to tell. The wind and winter rain have eroded the soft Brazilian sandstone beyond recognition.

  The grass around the stone is knee high. It is healthy grass, shiny like newly washed hair. When the breeze blows, the grass whispers. Occasionally some of the longer blades are blown in front of the plinth, and then the letters that are engraved on the stone are obscured. Jorge bends down and strokes back the blades; he does it gently, as if they were a girl’s fringe. The letters can be deciphered but the dates have fared no better than the object in the angel’s hands. Jorge reads out the name: Horst Teichmannn.

  Anna-Maria places her bouquet of flowers on the flat surface of the stone slab. Pietro follows her and places his bouquet next to hers. Then he puts his arm around his grandmother’s shoulders. Seu Otto, Marina and finally Jorge add their flowers to the growing pile. The bouquets are not tied and the breeze scatters the flowers over the stone.

  After a while, Anna-Maria says to Pietro: ‘It’s sad that your mother couldn’t come today.’

  ‘Yes,’ replies Pietro. ‘But she doesn’t like graveyards. They upset her.’ After a pause he adds, ‘I suppose that’s why she never brought me here.’

  ‘She should have brought you here,’ says Jorge. ‘He was your grandfather, after all. And a wonderful man.’

  Seu Otto is standing behind the others. He shifts his weight from left to right in a manner that suggests that he is anxious to keep moving. After a couple of minutes, he turns away from the group and continues to walk along the gravel path. A few metres further on, he stops and gingerly leans forward to clear the grass from a much smaller grave in the lee of an old tree stump. The headstone is very simple – just a rectangular slab set directly into the earth. The inscription has seen more winters, but the tree must once have protected the stone since the indentations are less weathered. Seu Otto bends down and stares at the weathered indentations. He deciphers the letters one by one:

  Freya Teichmann, geb. 2 Oktober 1929, gest. 5 März 1946

  Seu Otto mouths the name over and over to himself. Freya. Freya. Freya. His finger traces the inscription. When he comes to the ‘6’, he traces it again and again.

  Anna-Maria and Jorge are still paying their respects beside Horst’s grave. Pietro takes Marina’s hand and together they approach Seu Otto.

  Pietro looks at the headstone. ‘This must be my great grandmother’s grave,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know she was buried here. Jorge told me about her; she had a hard life. Look, she was only 16 when she died.’

  Marina notices that Seu Otto’s walking stick has started to shake. He appears pale. ‘Seu Otto, are you feeling alright?’ she asks.

  Seu Otto does not reply immediately. ‘I think I’d like to sit down,’ he says.

  Marina and Pietro help the old gentleman to walk back to the bench in the shade of the cypress tree.

  ‘There’s a bottle of water in the car. Shall I get it?’ asks Marina.

  ‘Yes, please,’ replies Seu Otto. Once Marina is out of earshot, Seu Otto addresses Pietro.

  ‘Pietro, there’s something else I didn’t tell you in the hospital. When Siggi and I swam across the lake it wasn’t just to talk to the girls.’

  Pietro smiles. ‘I thought that something else might have happened,’ he says.

  Seu Otto appears not to have heard. ‘That was the first time I slept with a girl,’ he says. ‘And also the first time Siggi slept with a girl. And her name was Freya.’

  After a few moments, Pietro says: ‘You think that the Freya buried here is the same one that Siggi slept with?’

  Seu Otto does not reply. Incredulous, Pietro continues: ‘But there must have been thousands of girls in Germany called Freya. Tens of thousands.’

  Seu Otto looks at Pietro. He says, ‘When I was in the hospital, I started to think that you might be related to Siggi. It explained so much. I knew that Horst’s mother had been sent here from Germany because she was pregnant. Then, the other night in the garden, Anna-Maria told me that her name was Freya.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Pietro excitedly. ‘And she died in childbirth.’

  ‘But she died in childbirth in 1946,’ says Seu Otto. ‘That’s the wrong year. Siggi and I visited the girls’ camp just once, and that was in June 1944. Siggi died 3 months later, in September 1944. But your grandfather wasn’t born until 1946. Siggi can’t have been Horst’s father.’

  Seu Otto is beginning to tremble again. ‘I hoped so much that, that…’ but he doesn’t finish the sentence. He leans forward and hides his face in his hands. Pietro moves closer to the old man. As he does so, his hand catches on the small, sticky ball of resin that is still stuck to the back of the bench. He brushes it away, then he places his hand tentatively on the old man’s shoulder.

  ‘But Seu Otto, does it matter? Would it change anything? Somos quem somos.’

  After a while, Seu Otto raises his head. ‘Yes… You are right, Pietro. We are who we are. That is what matters.’

  *

  The scarlet tanagers circle high above. They fly playfully now, enjoying the freedom of the open sky and the energy that courses through their young bodies. They are waiting for others to join them; soon they shall depart for warmer climes. But if they were to look down, they would see a young girl with a kind heart striding purposefully up a gravel path, water bottle in hand. They would see a large man and a widow dressed in black, their heads bowed, standing either side of a flower-strewn grave. And they would see a tearful old man embracing the young friend who will always remind him of the dearest com
panion of his youth.

  Copyright

  First published in 2011

  by Old Street Publishing Ltd

  Trebinshun House, Brecon LD3 7PX

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © Claus von Bohlen, 2011

  The right of Claus von Bohlen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–906964–73–3