VII. ILSA

In the autumn of 1967, my mother was a heavily pregnant intellectual diva on a Biedermeier sofa, reading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, one eye trained on Ustica, Bari, Regina Coeli—all of those leprous places with a jail pulsing at their secret core and where Gramsci had written his pieces—while her fellow students’ theoretical flights of fancy never made it beyond Frankfurt. I know, or at least I was told, that within left-wing student groups she was held in a certain regard. But I have no idea whether they liked her, no one talked about that, or not to me anyway, the son of that grand dame of the Revolution otherwise known as Ilsa. She set a tone that, though milder than Lenin’s, remained autocratic enough to scare my father off through the house and out with the left-wingers of Bremen to distribute flyers in front of the gates of the Klöckner plant, participate in marches and sit through panel discussions. Here I must add that she enjoyed a not-undeserved reputation. Gramsci had been her holy pillar long before he became one for thousands of others in the ’70s. Of course, by that point, she’d already gone back to Bakunin and Kropotkin.

In November 1967, after a few complications, her son—I, in other words—came into the world. Thanks to an extremely young midwife and a bad-tempered doctor, she’d almost died in the delivery room because of me, or, rather, my stubborn refusal to arrive, thereby becoming the first in a long succession of women to survive me by only a hair’s breadth. While that delicate creature was being lashed by contractions, I simply lay diagonally in her belly and refused to budge.

My father walked up and down the linoleum halls with a bouquet of flowers which steadily grew more feeble as time went on, at first concerned about the delay, then not knowing what to do, then simply done. Chucking the bouquet into a blue plastic-covered bin, he called a taxi to carry him off. However, as soon as his stricken conscience began to go haywire, he had it cart him back to the hospital. I caused my mother to not only almost lose her mind but also her life—and all that even before my existence had been officially registered. She’s told me that every single year on my birthday, up till today, before wishing me well, which, as a result, has always come out a bit weak, and she still doesn’t know whether she wants me to thank her or if she regrets withstanding that urge to simply drift off, to never wake up, to turn the child between her thighs into an offender while releasing him into a life of endless guilt.

Whether due to a feeling of revenge or a sudden eruption of motherly love, Ilsa did not hesitate, once the worst had been weathered, to name me after Antonio Gramsci. At least my father forbade her from naming me Tonio. ‘Tonio Stöver! Please! You might as well just call him Thomas Mann at the same time.’ She’d never allowed him to say much to her, but, in the end, he prevailed and thus I became Anton. Anton Stöver.

Stepping across her Persian rugs and gradually integrating my father into a bourgeois-Marxist household, for the most part I was ignored by Ilsa. Now and then she gave me a bottle, changed my nappies when she felt like it, smoked one self-rolled cigarette after the other and simply shrugged her shoulders when her mother would throw up her hands and, grabbing a bar of soap, try to scrub her grandchild clean of all that communistic mess. But what could Ilsa do? Her interests were directed less at that little piece of humanity lying on the changing table than at that great humanity-to-come on her desk. In my parents’ house, Revolution was, after all, an awfully common word and nothing changed when it repeatedly failed to take place.

But little Anton Stöver would come into the room every morning with a shrill infant’s laugh. And, at night, while the others were handing out flyers in front of the Klöckner plant, this little counter-revolutionary would cry for Ilsa. But she would just send my father who, for his part, really had no idea what he was supposed to do. I yielded, grew quieter, less demanding and older, allowed myself to be palmed off to creches and nursery schools, then thanks to inadequate growth was held back a year, and then, as a reward for finally being enrolled in school, was given my first selection of Gramsci’s writings (selected by Palmiro Togliatti) in Italian, although I couldn’t understand a word but that didn’t bother Ilsa in the slightest. And so I began to lug that ugly paperbound thing around, for though I was only seven, I already understood that it was not simply a book but my destiny that she wanted to push onto me.

While I was still in primary school, Ilsa, starting with Bakunin and Kropotkin and then progressing to Pico della Mirandola and Thomas Aquinas, steadily moved further and further away from the twentieth century. Antonio Gramsci, however, remained and hung like a shadow over my childhood. I pushed him away, the favourite child, but my hands only pushed through air.

I grew older and even a little taller, learnt how to read and, soon, in Italian too; beginning on my tenth birthday, once a week, I’d be packed into a dark, private classroom of bare wood furniture. I learnt sono sei e siamo siete sano no sono, and discovered that my Gramsci selection was by no means a complete or even organically fragmented one but a beautifully Stalin-true arrangement that Togliatti had put together. And though up to that point I’d been completely indifferent to the book, that intrusion angered me so much that once again I forgot to grow. At eleven I continued to be teased, at twelve I was almost completely ignored.

When at the start of grammar school I was placed with the girls for gym class, I didn’t have any intention of reaching the height of my father, who at six feet seemed entirely unapproachable. But I definitely wanted to outgrow Ilsa by a few inches. At five-foot-six, she had to have given me something, and, in any event, we were related. But names are stronger than genes, and role models—above all, those we don’t seek out ourselves—seal our fate, no matter what we do.

My father, however, had never been a role model. For as long as he lived with us, he was simply a silhouette in the study (that is, when Ilsa hadn’t driven him out of it), a shadow who at 5 a.m. would be out in front of the Klöckner plant to explain to the workers what a fatherless breakfast meant. Later, once I’d begun to avoid breakfast scenarios myself, I realized that he’d wanted to be out of Ilsa’s way and to give space in the communal kitchen to those three, four worshippers she kept but never allowed any closer. Ilsa, the coryphaeus at the coffee machine, was prude and picky and scraped together attention from all sides. In general, she didn’t really like men all that much—even I wasn’t too high on her list. At the same time, she couldn’t do without their adoration. Every now and then she’d toss one of her disciples a crumb of attention, condescend to give a compliment, but only in order to impose a whole catalogue of demands in return.

Later, I hardly wondered when exactly my father left or why. His departure had been too inconspicuous. His yearly existence beforehand had been too inconspicuous. Which is to say, his leaving wasn’t anything new for me—my father had been leaving throughout my childhood. Every few weeks he’d whiz through the downstairs hall of our old Bremen row house, grab his hat off the coat hook and angrily promise that this time he was going for good. This time he wouldn’t be coming back. ‘Are you listening, Ilsa?’ He’d give her another two minutes to beg him to stay, to bring him to his senses, two minutes for her to at least show up in the doorway of the living room. But Ilsa never looked up, not even when the front door clicked shut.

I’d sit with her in the living room, sometimes behind the couch, sometimes under the kitchen table, and pretend to be playing but listening instead to the silence of the space, a silence broken only by the sound of Ilsa turning pages. I’d guess which of her devotees would move in with us, for as soon as one man left, another showed up, I’d learnt that from Karsten, he sat two rows ahead of me and during breaks bragged about how his father had taken off.

When the front door opened again, when after an hour (he could never last longer than that out on the Bremen streets) Bernd would come back into Ilsa’s home, she’d praise him for his punctuality. Then they wouldn’t say another word more about it and his hat would be back on the coat hook just like before.

But even the little respect she had for him was lost in only a few minutes one morning in the late ’70s when two federal criminal police agents from the BKA showed up at our front door. A number plate had led them to this visit, many of which were taking place that autumn, a lot of visits, a lot of number plates, the police had nothing else to do but note number plates from Citroën 2CVs and VW buses. Countless times every day, women in flut-tering shirts and with half-naked kids in their arms would open the door to them and have no idea what had happened. Paediatricians and health-food-shop workers had to deliver alibis. Fathers began to let people borrow their cars less and less frequently.

Ilsa, on the contrary, knew perfectly well what was happening, and the two officers standing in front of our door that quiet morning probably wished they had never rung; they didn’t know if they should take away the whole family at once or never again dare to come here. How could those two poor men help it that, of all people, they had to question Ilsa? Schleyer had been kidnapped, and, as long as Schleyer was away, everyone was deemed suspicious for one reason or another, above all the Stövers, the city’s first communist family. Ilsa set much store by that. And had the two officers not rung at our house, she no doubt would have marched to the office of the BKA-president in order to complain about not having received a visit.

The fact that my father opened the door that morning as Ilsa was busy in the study attending to more important matters, was the last mistake in a whole string of evermore fatal mistakes for which Ilsa could never forgive him. A number plate was read out to him like a sentence, he nodded, admitted it was his, eventually offered the two coffee, didn’t know why the car had been seen at that time and at that place and under those circumstances.

‘Where were you on the evening in question?’ one of the officers asked, and my father couldn’t say. He counted, Friday, Thursday, ‘You’re talking about Wednesday?’ and still couldn’t say.

‘Did you drive your car?’ the officer asked further.

‘Or did you let someone borrow it?’ the other asked, offering him a way out.

‘In which case,’ the first officer said, ‘you’ll have to tell us to whom and, in addition, provide us with an alibi.’

‘At the university!’ my father finally remembered. ‘At a reading group, from eight to ten o’clock.’ He neglected to mention that it had to do with Marx, though it very well might have occurred to the two. Maybe he’d lent his car to an acquaintance, he wasn’t sure, he had to think a moment, and then one of the agents saw me sitting on the bottom-most step and cut off my father’s rambling with the observation: ‘The child surely has a mother.’

My father, hastily and helplessly, acknowledged Ilsa as well as the fact that she hadn’t been at the reading group that night, although she usually was.

Ilsa, without any child on her arm and in a severe existentialist jumper, brought the uncomfortable situation to an end in just a few minutes. Did they intend to arrest anyone, Ilsa asked, had they thought it through? Surely the two middle-grade civil servants had no idea what could happen as a result. They were simply following orders which had been decided elsewhere, thinking things through had never hurt anyone and, in the end, they too had to fear for the system’s stability, the one in which they lived, and lived well, they indeed loved the monotony around them, did they want it to all come crashing down, their savings accounts, their halves of a duplex, their marriages, just because someone in prison had become a legend?

Ilsa erupted, Ilsa performed, Ilsa quoted and vociferated and embroiled the two in a harsh monologue on the effect of prison writings, painted a picture of how martyrs were made and the power they could, oh, what the hell, had to unfold, and wove subordinate clauses of such stupendous length that the poor agents’ ears, when not their noses and cheeks too, were glowing, before dismissing them with the dry observation: ‘You haven’t read a thing, but you’re already bona-fide civil servants!’

My father never recovered from that visit. Ilsa for her part appeared determined not to allow herself to tolerate a person at her side any longer who had buckled so miserably when confronted by the state apparatus, and so the days in the shared flat became numbered. I was standing at the top of the stairs when my father, hatless but with two suitcases, finally left. Ilsa surveyed the scene, then looked up at me. ‘You didn’t even manage to sire a child of normal height. You really were useless, Bernd Stöver!’ she yelled after him, but the door was already shut.