Lost

My brother squatted on a white blanket and laughed into the camera. That was during the war, my mother said, the last year of the war, at home. Home was the East, and my mother had been born in the East. As my mother spoke the words “at home” she began to cry, as she so often did when the subject of my brother came up. His name was Arnold, like my father’s. Arnold was a happy child, said my mother, looking at the photograph. She didn’t say any more, and I didn’t say anything either, and looked at Arnold squatting on a white blanket and being happy. I don’t know what was making him happy, it was the war after all, and besides that he was in the East, and he was still happy. I envied him his happiness, I envied him the white blanket, and I envied him his place in the photo album, too. Arnold was right at the front of the album, ahead even of my parents’ wedding pictures and the portraits of the grandparents, while I was way at the back. And Arnold’s picture was quite big, while most of the photos I was in were small, not to say tiny. Snapshots taken by my parents with what they called a Box Brownie, and apparently this box thing could only make little tiny photos. You had to look at the photos with me in them very carefully to recognize anything at all. For example, one of these tiny snapshots was of a pool with several children in it, and one of them was me. All you could see of me was my head, because I didn’t know how to swim then, and I was sitting in the water, which came up almost to my chin. And my head was partly hidden by a child standing in the water in front of me, so that the minuscule photo with me in it only showed part of my head right above the surface of the water. And what’s more there was a shadow on the visible part of my head which was probably made by the child standing in front of me, so that the only bit of me you could really see was my right eye. While my brother Arnold looked not just happy but important even when he was a baby, in most of the photos from my childhood I am either only partly visible or sometimes not really visible at all. One of the times I was not really visible at all was in the photo of my christening. My mother held a white cushion on her arm, with a white coverlet over it. Under the coverlet was me, which you could tell because it had been pushed aside at the bottom of the cushion and the toes of a baby foot were peeking out. All subsequent photos taken of me in my childhood continued this tradition, one way or the other, except that in later photos the foot was replaced by a right arm, or half a profile, or an eye, as in the picture from the swimming pool. I would have accepted my truncated self in the family album, if my mother hadn’t made a habit of reaching for the album to show me the pictures in it. Every time, the little tiny Box Brownie photos that showed me or rather various parts of me were leafed through hastily, while the photo of Arnold, which seemed life-size to me, was the object of endless contemplation. As a result I usually sat next to my mother on the sofa looking as miserable as I felt, and staring at cheerful and un-miserable Arnold, as my mother got more and more upset. I was still a small child when I became accustomed to my mother’s tears, and I didn’t spend any time wondering why Arnold’s face made her cry so often. And the fact that although Arnold was my brother, I had never seen him in the flesh, didn’t bother me in those first years, particularly because I was quite happy not having to share my room with him. At some point my mother explained what had happened to Arnold, inasmuch as she told me he had starved to death during their flight from the Russians. “Starved,” said my mother, “starved in my arms.” Because she herself had been more or less starving during the long trek from the East to the West, and she had no milk to feed the baby, and nothing else besides. When I asked if nobody else had had milk for the baby either, she said nothing, nor did she answer all my other, more detailed questions about the flight and my brother starving. So Arnold was dead, which was certainly very sad, but it made it easier for me to deal with his photo. Happy, easygoing Arnold even struck a chord in me, and I was proud to have a brother who was dead and still looked so happy and easygoing. I mourned Arnold and was proud of him, and I shared my room with him and wished him all the milk in the world. I had a dead brother and felt I had been singled out by fate. None of my playmates had a dead brother, let alone one who’d starved to death while fleeing the Russians.

Arnold had become my friend, and would have stayed my friend if my mother hadn’t asked me one day for something she called a “discussion.” She had never asked me to have a discussion before, and my father had never asked me to have one either. In my entire childhood and first teenage years, I was never asked to have a discussion or anything resembling one. My father communicated with brief orders and instructions on how to do things, and my mother did talk to me now and then, but mostly it was talk about my brother Arnold and it ended in tears or silence. The discussion began with my mother saying that I was old enough now to know the truth. “What kind of truth?” I asked her, because I was afraid it might be something to do with me. “It’s about your brother Arnold,” she said. In a way I was relieved that it had to do with Arnold again, but it upset me, too. “What about Arnold?” I said, and my mother looked on the verge of tears once again, which made me ask spontaneously, but unreflectively, whether anything had happened to him. My mother settled that one with an irritated glance. “Arnold,” she said without further preamble, “Arnold isn’t dead. He didn’t starve either.” Now I was irritated too, and also a little disappointed. I should have kept quiet, but I asked my mother, again without thinking, what Arnold had died of instead. “He didn’t die,” she said again, her voice flat. “He was lost.” Then she told me the story of how Arnold got lost, some of which I understood and some of which I didn’t. The story was of a piece with Arnold dead of starvation, and at the same time it was a completely new one. Arnold had in fact endured starvation on the trek from East to West, and my mother had in fact had neither milk nor anything else for the child. But Arnold hadn’t starved to death, he’d got lost and my mother was finding it difficult to give a clear picture of the reason why Arnold had disappeared. At some point—this much I understood—during the flight from the Russians, something dreadful happened. My mother didn’t say what it was, she just kept saying that something dreadful happened during their flight from the Russians and that not even my father had been able to help her, nobody had been able to help her. Thousands of people had made the trek toward the West, and for a long time it had looked as if they would get through it more or less unharmed and keep putting a little more distance between themselves and the Russians. But one day, when they had just left a little farming village west of Königsberg, the Russians had suddenly appeared without warning out of the morning mist. They had neither seen nor heard anything all night long, no sound of engines, no sound of marching boots, no calls of “Dawai! Dawai!” Yet the Russians were suddenly there. Where there had been an empty field a moment ago, thirty or forty armed Russians were standing, and they broke into the moving column of fugitives to choose their victims exactly where my mother and father and Arnold were. They realized at once that something dreadful was going to happen, and as one of the Russians had already put his gun to my father’s chest, my mother just had time to put her child in the arms of a passing woman, who luckily wasn’t detained by any of the Russians. But the speed and panic of it all were such that she had no chance to exchange a single word with the woman, not even to call out little Arnold’s name to her, and the woman disappeared immediately in the tide of refugees. The dreadful thing, said my mother, didn’t exactly happen after all, since the Russians didn’t shoot either her or my father. That had been the first thing they had feared, and that was why she had pushed little Arnold into the unknown woman’s arms. But then, according to my mother, something dreadful did happen. “But something dreadful happened after all,” she said. She started crying again when she said this, and I was sure that she was crying about Arnold, so to comfort her I told her that she’d really saved Arnold’s life and she didn’t have to cry, to which my mother said that Arnold’s life had never been in danger. Neither had my father’s, and neither had hers. Something dreadful had been done to her by the Russians, but they’d had no intention of taking her life or those of her family. They’d only been intent on one thing. But she’d been too quick in fearing for her life and the life of her child, and if she were honest, she’d been too quick to give the child away. She hadn’t even been able to call out Arnold’s name to the woman in the panic and confusion, and all the woman had been able to do was clutch the child to her and keep running. “Arnold’s alive,” said my mother, “but he has another name.” “Maybe he was lucky,” I said, “and they named him Arnold again,” at which my mother looked at me with such incomprehension and sadness that the blood rushed to my head and I was ashamed. But I’d only said it because I was angry at Arnold. Because I was only just beginning to understand that Arnold, my un-dead brother, had the leading role in the family and had assigned me a supporting part. I also understood that Arnold was responsible from the very beginning for my growing up in an atmosphere poisoned with guilt and shame. From the day of my birth, guilt and shame had ruled the family, without my knowing why. All I knew was that whatever I did, I felt guilty and ashamed as I did it. For example, I always felt guilty and ashamed at meals, regardless of the food that was set in front of me. If I ate a piece of meat, I had a bad conscience, and it was just as bad if I ate a potato or dessert. I felt guilty to be eating, and ashamed to be eating. I absolutely knew that I felt guilty and ashamed, but I could not explain to myself why the innocent child that I was should be shamed by a piece of meat or a potato or should feel guilty. I was just as baffled about why I had to feel guilty when I listened to the radio, rode my bicycle, or went for a walk or an outing with my parents. Yet the walks or outings with my parents, which always took place on Sundays, weighed on my conscience and triggered a great sense of shame. When I walked along the main street of our town with my mother and father, I felt ashamed that I was walking along the main street of our town with them. When we drove out of town in the black limousine which my father had bought himself when the business was going well, to head for the Teutoburg Forest which lay nearby, I felt ashamed and guilty that we were heading for the Teutoburg Forest. When we’d finally got there and were walking along the same old path to the so-called Bismarck Tower, I felt ashamed and guilty that we always chose the same old path. And of course once we did finally get there and climbed the Bismarck Tower to take in the view of the plain and the distant spire of the church in my hometown, I felt ashamed and guilty all over again. The walks and outings I went on with my parents were regular penitential processions of shame and guilt. My parents also seemed depressed and tormented and I always had the sense that they dragged themselves out of the house every Sunday as if on orders. And yet they would never have considered giving up the Sunday outings, since the Sunday outings served first to replenish strength for the work week and second were required by Christian respect for the Sabbath. All the same, my parents were incapable of enjoying freedom or relaxation even in sudden bursts. At first I put this inability down to the combination of their Swabian-pietistic and East Prussian origins. For I knew from stories told me by my parents that neither the pietistic Swabian nor the East Prussian is in any way equipped to actually enjoy either freedom or relaxation. But then I realized that their incapacity for freedom and relaxation was all tied up with my lost brother Arnold and the dreadful thing that the Russians had done to them, my mother in particular. And I imagined that the spoiled outings made me more miserable than my parents, since they were convinced that man was not put on earth to go on outings but to work, which meant that the outings were more or less spoiled to begin with. I, on the other hand, loved outings and would have been happiest if there was an outing every day. Admittedly not the ones that I went on with my parents. I developed such antipathy for those that my parents could only make me go along under threat of punishment. The most wonderful punishment they held over me was house arrest. But I only attained the bliss of Sunday house arrest after I’d managed to develop a special form of travel sickness, which proved effective even on shorter outings. Its chief symptom was a physical inability to tolerate movement, but it made a certain distinction between me moving my own body and things moving me. When I moved my own body, during our neighborhood walks, for example, I usually got dizzy and had to sit on a bench. If I was the one being moved, I had to throw up. Mostly I had to throw up when we were on outings in the new black limousine, whereas when we were driving in the silver gray Ford, the Humpback Taunus as it was called, I never had to throw up. The old Ford was the only vehicle in my childhood that didn’t make me feel sick. But of course my father sold it again as soon as his business began to do well, first to buy an Opel Olympia and then the black limousine with the shark’s teeth. In the Opel Olympia I had thrown up not regularly, just frequently. Whereas I threw up regularly in the black limousine, which meant not only that I was often driven back home, pale and exhausted, with my clothes all dirty, but the car had to be thoroughly cleaned and aired out after each failed outing before it could be occupied again. Eventually my parents decided to stop using the car for Sunday outings but to take the train that ran between our town and the Teutoburg Forest, and hence was known as the Teutoburg Forest Train. I still had to throw up in the Teutoburg Forest Train, but the carriages were filled with wooden seats, and besides I could retreat to the toilet if there was time. My parents would have had no problem coming to terms with me throwing up regularly on the Teutoburg Forest Train, if it hadn’t been for the other passengers, who took the brunt of my vomiting if I couldn’t get to the toilet and threw up on the floor or the benches. Eventually my parents gave in, and I was allowed to spend Sundays alone at home, and those are some of the happiest memories of my whole childhood. Actually it was the first fifteen minutes after my parents left when I felt completely happy and free. After the fifteen minutes were over, a feeling of anxiety and loneliness set in, which I tried to escape by all sorts of diversionary tactics. One was to sit at the open window in the living room with my eyes closed and try to recognize the makes of the passing cars by the sound of their engines. In time I became so good at this game that I guessed most of the cars before they’d even reached our house. It has to be said, however, that the majority of cars back then were variants on the base models of Volkswagen or DKW. It was harder with foreign cars, but only very rarely did I fail to identify the strange engine noise, open my eyes and follow a car that I’d never seen before. My win ratio in this game reached about 90 percent, closely followed by my boredom, so I switched to a self-imposed requirement of fifty cars per Sunday, after which I would have to find some other form of relaxation. This other relaxation consisted of staying glued to the radio, which resulted in my sitting hour after hour in front of the illuminated display, constantly changing stations. Listening to the radio bored me; staying glued to the radio bored me even more. In some way I already knew as a child, long before the arrival of television, that the radio was no television. The radio didn’t satisfy me, it only distracted me from the sense of oppressive anxiety in the house until suddenly, in mid station change, I stumbled on someone talking Russian—or what sounded like Russian. Naturally I was astonished that there was a Russian station on East Westphalian Radio, but I also knew from my parents’ stories that the Russians were capable of anything. Although I didn’t understand a word of what the Russian on the radio was saying, I listened greedily to the strange sounds. And the longer I listened to the Russian’s words, which sometimes sounded like orders or instructions and then slipped into a kind of melancholy singsong again, the more it seemed that not only could I understand individual snippets of the speech, I also imagined that what the Russian was saying had something to do with me and my family. Naturally I wasn’t sure, but as I sat in my Sunday solitude by the radio, I was pursued by the recurrent thought that the Russian was talking about the infamous and dreadful thing that had been done to my parents, and especially my mother, and that the airwaves were now full of this infamy and dreadfulness. Luckily my father’s financial success allowed him to acquire a television, so that I could extricate myself from the disturbing force of the radio and particularly the Russian station. And it was my father, who had no objections to my spending my Sundays alone for hours in front of the radio, who found it unendurable that I should spend those same hours in front of the television. Yes, he had bought a television, but he couldn’t stand it being switched on. And if it was switched on, then it could only be switched on with his permission, which could be revoked at any moment. The television could only be switched on when my father gave his permission, but when he did give his permission, he did it so unwillingly, sometimes even angrily, that the pleasure of watching television was immediately spoiled. Besides which, from one second to the next my father could decide that the television must be switched off because he had something to say. It was absolutely impossible for him to say anything to me while the television was on. And naturally my father, who normally said very little to me and could look straight past me for hours without ever addressing a word to me, always had something to say to me while the television was on. In the process of which he not only couldn’t stand to have the television on, he also could not possibly turn off the television himself. Instead, he said, “Television off “or just “Box off,” and I immediately leapt from my chair and switched the machine off. The conversation that then followed was nothing but instructions about new things I had to do. Either it occurred to him that the yard needed to be swept, or it was a question of carrying a cardboard box of discarded clothing or household things up to the attic; or a letter needed to be posted or a form delivered to the local authorities. I often thought my father did nothing while the television was on but think up tasks that still needed to be done. As soon as he sat down in front of the television, his mind went into gear and pondered what might still need to be done, so that it was never possible for me to watch a broadcast all the way to the end, even in bits, in his company. The only time my father liked television was in the company of his older sister Hilde, who had been a widow since the war and visited us regularly. If my father judged television’s usefulness by the formula “If you’re watching, you’re not working,” my aunt considered it an invention of the Devil, which put man in the position of being able to conquer time and space and simultaneously robbed him of his own four walls and abandoned every corner of privacy to the world and its impulses. Aunt Hilde was one of the greatest media teetotallers I’ve ever known. The only periodical she was interested in was a weekly called Our Church. The magazine was brought right into our kitchen–living room every Thursday by volunteers from the congregation with the cry “Church notes” and laid on the table. Even the local newspaper aroused her suspicions, and what interested her most in the church notes was the list of old people’s birthdays and the weekly Bible selection. The weekly reading in particularly commanded my aunt’s special attention. While she simply absorbed the details of the old people’s birthdays, she studied the current weekly reading all over again every day and did exactly what the editors of the church notes hoped would be the result of their paper: she made the church notes weekly lesson her own, and for as long as the week lasted, she would read and ponder it. Aunt Hilde had her own established place at the kitchen table, as did the church notes. If a visitor saw the church notes lying open on the kitchen table, he knew that my aunt was visiting. My aunt also used to spend her evenings reading the church notes and pondering the weekly lesson, which wasn’t a problem until the day the television got bought. It didn’t just disturb her reading, it was also an invention of the Devil. But it also made her curious, which delighted my father, whom nothing amused as much as the temptations to which his pious sister felt herself subjected. My aunt solved the conflict insofar as she sat with her back to the television when it was on. She didn’t look at it, but she listened. And as she listened, she also watched my father, my mother, and me watching the television. While my parents weren’t bothered by being watched by my aunt watching television, I always felt she was not just watching me but seeing right through me. My aunt watched me and I was ashamed that she was watching me. When she turned her back to the television, she made it into a radio, which was apparently more acceptable to her religious sensibilities. Radio was allowed; television was a sin. She followed the voices, but she didn’t want to fall under the power of the images. My aunt shielded herself from the images, and the images worked their way into the unprotected remainder of the family, i.e., mostly my mother and me. My father was immune to the images in that the only thing working in his brain was an extensive, image-proof program for organizing and assigning tasks as they fell due. My mother and I, on the other hand, ended up in front of the TV set as often as we could, and preferably when my father wasn’t in the house. In any case we only enjoyed these hours in front of the TV so long as no intimacies occurred on the screen. The moment an intimate scene came on, we both froze in front of the TV and the room was filled with such embarrassment and shame that we hardly dared to breathe. Even the most harmless scene with a kiss in it made me long for the film to move on and the threatening scene to dissolve. But deliverance often didn’t come then either, and the sense of shame lingered after the intimate scenes had vanished from the screen. It was enough that the two of us were together in front of the TV for the blood to rush to our faces. We sat glowing hotly in the darkened room and didn’t dare move. When we sat in front of the TV we felt ashamed, even though I have no idea of what. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the intimacy on the TV, and what we were ashamed of was our intimacy in front of the TV. Perhaps it also had to do with my brother Arnold. When the atmosphere became too oppressive, my mother switched the TV off. Without uttering a word, she would leap to her feet, press the button, and leave the room. I didn’t object, I was pleased she’d turned it off and I didn’t have to feel the blood pulsing in my head anymore. The silent TV made me feel better, but even better was my mother’s leaving the room and finding something to do elsewhere in the house. The more she found to do in the house, the less she could be overcome by shame and guilt. And to tell you the truth, almost all my mother did was find things to do in the house. Just as my father did nothing but busy himself with business. My father, who began by running a lending library, then moved on to a food store and finally a meat and sausage wholesale operation, clearly found his relaxation in work. The lending library flourished for only a few years. TV and cheap paperback novels put an end to it. The grocery store flourished for a bit longer, but it didn’t satisfy my father. He didn’t want to sell sausage by the gram, he wanted to sell it by the kilo and the hundredweight. As a food store owner he himself was a customer of a meat and sausage wholesaler. When he found out that other food store owners were also unhappy with the wholesaler, he decided to become a wholesaler himself. He got all the relevant data from the local office of trade and industry, went to evening classes for a time, then took the qualifying exam to trade as a wholesaler. The food store was leased out, the food store owner’s apron hung up on its nail and replaced with a two-piece suit. My father used his contacts with the other food store owners in the region who were his former colleagues and now became his customers. They trusted him, because he had been one of them, and he didn’t let them down. It wasn’t enough to supply high-quality products, according to my father, you also had to know how to listen to people’s concerns. When he made the rounds of his customers, it was first and foremost to talk about their concerns. The order books seemed to fill up almost by themselves after that. The food store owners had a lot of concerns. A food store owner’s life was one long concern. Or so it seemed to me back then, when I went with my father on his tour of customers and was able to listen in on his conversations with the owners. One of the chief concerns was spoilage of supplies. People who bought from the food stores wanted fresh produce. But what was first and foremost fresh produce to the customer was first and foremost perishable produce to the shop owner. If the customers stayed away, the food spoiled. If less produce was laid in, there was the risk of not being able to supply the customers’ wants. So more supplies were laid in again and along with the supplies came the worry about the spoilage of the supplies. The food store owners were working constantly against time. The clock ticked on, and with every passing minute the lettuce wilted, the bananas browned, the sausage discolored, and the mold ran riot. If customers didn’t come, the food store owner stood there in the middle of his perishable produce and watched it perishing. Most store owners my father visited were both frantic and depressed. Many of them had stomach problems, which meant that they could only indulge sparingly in their own offerings. With others, it was the heart, with some, the nerves. I cannot remember a single store owner I ever met who didn’t have health problems. Another problem was the competition. “Competition is the life of business,” my father used to say once he was back outside one food store and on his way round the corner to visit the next. But when he was in the store listening to its owner complaining about the other owners, he didn’t say, “Competition is the life of business”; at most he said, “Life is a struggle” or some such thing. Yet another problem for the owners was the customers. “No customer, no turnover,” was my father’s comment when they complained. But sometimes the owners retorted that a customer was no guarantee of a sale. Because customers, especially customers in food stores, were nothing if not choosy, likely to be quite sensitive, often tight with their money and, as if all that weren’t enough, incapable of making up their minds. He could take it, one of the owners said, if a customer insisted that what he wanted was one hundred grams of cervelat and he expected it to be one hundred grams exactly. But it made him ill when the customers just stood there in front of the counter, unable to make up their minds. There were customers, said one owner, who deliberately tried to make him ill by not making up their minds. Just when he thought they’d decided for the beer sausage, for example, as opposed to the blood sausage, they would recant and say no to the beer sausage without getting anywhere near saying yes to the blood sausage or anything else for that matter. They pestered him relentlessly while other customers had to wait just to be served. It had even happened to him, said one owner, that one customer had complained so loudly about another hopelessly indecisive customer that the former had left the shop in a huff while the latter still kept standing paralyzed in front of the sausage counter, bringing the entire operation to a halt. But worst of all were the ones who first couldn’t make up their minds and then spelled out their wishes in ten-gram units, fifty grams of beer sausage on the one hand and fifty of cervelat on the other, although he should know that it could also be less, forty grams, for example, but didn’t have to be, which drove him absolutely nuts. He sometimes saw himself as a druggist, having to measure out such hyper-fine quantities of sausage or cheese on the scales. The owners’ melancholia made such a deep impression on me that without ever being aware of it, I transferred this melancholy onto the goods themselves and viewed particular foods as something depressing until I was quite grown up. I was particularly moved by produce that was fresh and therefore perishable; years later I was still amazed by how downcast I could become in front of shelves of vegetables or a display of fresh sausages. A display of fresh sausages, on the other hand, could bring my father to euphoria. Particularly if they’d been supplied by him. But it was also because he came from farming stock that meat and sausage were not just the remains of a slaughtered animal, but something absolutely alive. In contrast to the owners who dealt in all kinds of foodstuffs, it was the so-called fresh meats that raised his spirits. One of his favorite dishes was a fresh cutlet. A fresh cutlet to him was as fresh as fresh air or fresh water. Better even than a fresh cutlet to my father was a fresh pig’s head, which of course appeared on the table only twice a year, once in spring and once in fall; my father collected it himself from one of the farmers who supplied him, and brought it home. When my father arrived with the fresh pig’s head (fresh meaning just severed from the pig), still bloody and all wrapped up in grease-proof paper, all members of the family had to gather in the kitchen to look at it. As far as I was concerned, one pig’s head was like any other, but to my father each pig’s head was unique, and sometimes after he’d set the pig’s head down on the table, he even said, “This time it’s a particularly fine pig’s head,” with great satisfaction. When I asked my father what distinguished a particularly fine pig’s head from a less fine one, he said that a particularly fine pig’s head was symmetrical, whereas a lesser pig’s head was asymmetrical. By extension, according to my father, you could extrapolate from a pig’s head to the pig in its entirety, and a fine head was connected inevitably to the body of a fine, that is to say muscular, pig with an even distribution of fat. The pig’s head came with pig’s blood. Pig’s blood was almost as important to my father as the pig’s head. “Pig’s blood is the sap of life,” my father said, and if it had been up to him I would have been raised on pig’s blood, not milk. The blood was transported in tin cans and had to make the journey from the farm to my parents’ house at top speed. If my father was held up it fell to me to fetch the blood from the farmers. Transporting the blood would not normally have bothered me, particularly since I loved visiting the farmhouses because you always went past all the animals before you got to the living quarters. Where it became hard was that the blood to be carried home was poured into the cans directly from the pig. I had seen often enough how milk got from the cow into the can, but I had never imagined how blood got from a pig into the can. The blood got from the one to the other in such a horrible way that I watched it once and on subsequent blood transport duty I stayed in the farmer’s kitchen until the can was full. The one glimpse I had of the animal, stabbed, twitching, squealing wildly, with a fountain of blood jetting from its carotid artery, upset me so much that I only took part in the ritual feasts of the pig’s head reluctantly after that, and would have avoided them altogether if my father had allowed it. I would also have found the feasts of the pig’s head easier if they had involved only one meal each time. But in some miraculous fashion my mother knew how to get so many meals out of one pig’s head that we could live off it for ages. It proved itself a veritable horn of plenty, which released an incredible variety of dishes: pig’s cheek and pig’s tongue, pig’s ear and pig’s muzzle, pig’s head broth and pig’s head spread. It could all be smoked or grilled, boiled or roasted, dried or preserved, and was further enhanced by the use of pig’s blood, which you could add to soup and make sausage with, and which could even be baked or boiled down and put into preserving jars. Truth to tell the spring pig’s head lasted almost all the way to fall, and the fall pig’s head lasted into the New Year, so that we lived off pig’s head and pig’s blood products virtually all year round. But the feast of feasts was the pig’s brain, which came to the table the same day my father brought the head and I brought the blood home. This was in some sense our version of the farmer’s slaughter-day celebration; guests were invited, and this also made it a significant occasion for my father because it reminded him of slaughter days on his parents’ farm. My father should have inherited the farm and become a farmer himself, and at least on the day when he and his family and his guests gathered to eat the pig’s brain, he felt himself to be one. “Brains make you smart,” he said, which made it quite impossible for me even to hope that I might be delivered from having to eat the pig’s brains, for in my father’s eyes, if I was lacking in something it was an adequate supply of brains. He could sometimes be generous and let me off having to eat blood soup or blood pudding, but when it came to brain, he was deaf to all compromise. I must also admit that although the sight of the brains made me feel ill, I actually liked taking part in the evening feast when they were served, because it was the only time things in my parents’ house were so gay and relaxed. In some way, the dinner of pig’s brain intoxicated my father and his guests with merriment. Particularly when the guests were friends of my father who came from the East as he did and should have become farmers too, dinner could be accompanied by never-ending laughter, and I would try to get the soft mess of brains down my throat unchewed as quickly as possible and would have no idea what they were laughing about, because pig’s brain dinner produced conversation about virtually nothing except eating, and when it wasn’t about eating, it was about killing animals. Most of my father’s acquaintances slaughtered animals themselves or had once done so, so every one of them had tales to tell about slaughtering. Naturally it wasn’t all about slaughtering pigs, but mostly about slaughtering smaller animals, hens, rabbits, ducks, geese and doves, because these could be slaughtered on their own even if you no longer owned a farm and lived in a rented apartment. The laughter that was unleashed by the tales of slaughtering was neither mean-spirited nor bloodthirsty, more peaceable. There was hearty, eye-twinkling mirth when, for example, somebody told the story of the headless chicken spouting blood that leapt into the lap of his grandmother who was dozing in a garden chair. Whereas I occasionally had nightmares after these dinner conversations and spent the night helplessly chopping heads off chickens, wringing pigeons’ necks, cracking rabbits’ skulls, and sticking knives into pigs’ necks, the pig’s brain dinner acted as a tranquilizer on my father, so that this man who was otherwise so choleric and prone to rages had such a forgiving look in his eyes that I thought I would never have to be afraid of him again. My mother, on the other hand, was quiet and withdrawn as always during the pig’s brain dinners. She did seem to be happy that my father and their guests were so relaxed, but even I could feel the strain she was under as the hours of rare high spirits passed. And the feast evenings almost always ended the same way: at a certain point my father and the guests began to speak softly and eventually stopped speaking altogether. They sat beside each other mute and didn’t say a word. My mother would also spend the next few days being uncommunicative and almost mute herself, as if she were doing penance for the good dinner and the laughter with a vow of silence. My father did his penance in work. The more my mother seemed liable to be paralyzed by the burden of memories, the busier my father became. Having been through the experience of losing house and home twice, after each of the two world wars, and having arrived empty-handed in East Westphalia after the second, he had now built himself an “existence” for the third time. He could have lived in peace, but there was no peace. He rebuilt the house. The moment the food store had been transformed into a meat wholesale business, he set to work remodeling. He did it so fundamentally that the new house was nothing like the old house at all. The timber-framed building that had once been the coach and mail stop for the town was gutted, its walls removed right up to the rafters. The straw and clay filler was taken out, and some of the rafters too. The house got steel girders and smooth plaster. The windows were changed from casements to ones that tilted, and they never got frost flowers on them anymore, the way they used to in years past, because they were double-glazed. The wooden front door with its iron handle became a glass door with a brass surround. The house had once been my childhood labyrinth, with long corridors, deep built-in cupboards, and unexpected stair landings, behind which more corridors stretched away, leading to other connecting doors and landings. It gave me pleasure to roam through the house, just as it gave me pleasure to go and see the attic crisscrossed with rafters and wooden braces—my magic forest, but also my place of terror. The attic must once have served as a storeroom and warehouse, because there was a trapdoor set into the floor, with a wooden winch fixed above it to haul up heavy loads. When I opened the trapdoor, I could see into a room I’d never been into, and which appeared to have no other entrance. I would have had to let myself down on the rope to get into it. It was way below me, lower than the floor below the attic. Maybe lower even than the ground floor. It was in semidarkness, and I couldn’t make out how large it was. I would have given anything to know if there was a door to the room, but I didn’t dare ask my parents. I didn’t even dare tell them that I’d opened the trapdoor and looked down. The attic got rebuilt too and turned into living space. The rebuilding took away my childhood labyrinth, straightened it out, gutted it, let the light in. The corners, nooks, long passageways had disappeared along with the built-in cupboards, connecting doors, and unexpected stair landings. Naturally the trapdoor went too, and with it the only entry to the hidden room. Yet curiously the area under the trapdoor was the same size after the reconstruction that it had been before. Not one square meter had been gained, and I was convinced that the room still existed, even if it was unfindable and impenetrable. After the rebuilding was finished, my mother had a breakdown. The doctor diagnosed strain and ordered her to go on a cure. The treatment lasted several weeks, and on weekends my father went to visit my mother in the clinic, while I was allowed to stay and guard the house. After one of these visits my father told me that my mother was doing better, but she was far from well. One reason for her illness was certainly all the exertion involved in the rebuilding. The real reason, however, was that she had never got over the loss of my brother Arnold. At the same time, according to my father, she felt that I, on the other hand, had got over the loss of my brother very well. I had got over it so well, in fact, that for years my mother hadn’t trusted herself to tell me the truth about Arnold. At which point I told my father that my mother had told me the truth long ago. “Arnold,” I said, “didn’t starve to death, Arnold was lost.” When my father didn’t react, I repeated, “Arnold didn’t starve to death, Arnold was lost.” My father still didn’t react and seemed to be turning thoughts over in his mind. Perhaps I should have told him that I hadn’t felt any loss at all. When you came right down to it, I hadn’t lost anyone anyway. I had only learned that my parents had lost and yet not lost someone. And when I had discovered that Arnold hadn’t starved, but had just been lost, the only loss I could be said to have suffered was that I’d lost a dead brother, who’d died what’s more while fleeing the Russians. Now I didn’t have a dead brother, I had a lost one. That was hardly a plus for me. But how could I explain this to my father? And before I could think about it any further, my father said, “We’re looking for him.” “Who?” I said. “Arnold,” said my father, without noticing how mad my question was. “Have been for years.” I didn’t say anything to that, so my father explained that he and my mother had already spent years searching for Arnold with the help of the missing persons service of the Red Cross, but that they hadn’t wanted to burden me with this knowledge. And now, after all these years, they really had found someone who might be Arnold. “You’ve found him?” I asked, and even as I uttered the question, I sensed the old sick feeling return. “Perhaps,” said my father. “It’s not certain. For us to be absolutely sure, we’re going to need your help.” I had never heard my father speak like this to me before. He was talking to me as if I were a friend. Or at the very least a customer. He wanted to ask me for something. My father had never asked me for anything. He had only always said what had to be done, and then I did whatever that was. He hadn’t ever had such a long conversation with me either. The tone in my father’s voice made me uneasy, I felt faint, and I wished I could have given way to my old habit and thrown up. It would be necessary, my father said, to undergo various tests to establish our relationship to the boy in question. And I would have to submit to these tests as well. “How did you find him?” was what I wanted to know, and I imagined us soon not being three but four together at the lunch table and I wouldn’t just have to share dessert, I’d have to share my room as well, or even move out of it altogether to make space for my big brother. For the Arnold I knew from the photograph was an infant, but he’d been born before the end of the war, and was therefore several threatening years older than I was. “We told the missing persons service when and where Arnold was lost,” said my father, “and that there’s a noticeable cowlick in his hair on the right side of his head. Subsequently we received word from the Red Cross that one of the foundlings entrusted to them has a noticeable cowlick in the right side of his hair.” This piece of news, according to him, had raised hopes in both him and my mother that Arnold had been found. Already at this point my mother was more or less sure that the child in the foundling home, who didn’t even have a name, but was identified by the Red Cross simply as foundling 2307, was her child. Naturally they wanted to see the child with the pronounced cowlick on the right side of his head at once, but the authorities wouldn’t permit it. To put it in a nutshell, many children had got lost as they fled, and arrived in the West without parents. And one of the official experts had told them that again and again most parents would identify as theirs any child who could be considered a possibility on the basis of the first flickers of evidence. Some parents, according to the expert, only needed to be told that the child in question was blond or brunette, and they would identify it as theirs. And there would always be some despairing set of parents who wanted to see a child who would turn out finally not to be theirs, which meant that they’d already had to confront some of the foundling children with a stream of possible new parents, which led to terrible disappointments, particularly for the children. But in our case, my father said, the pronounced cowlick on the right had only been the beginning. During an appointment at the relevant search bureau they had showed him photos of so-called foundling 2307, and both he and my mother had immediately recognized their son Arnold in the child, even if the child in the photos was almost a young man. But in such matters, said my father, it was instinct that talked, not intellect. Besides, foundling 2307 not only had a pronounced cowlick on the right, he had, according to information in possession of the search service, been on the same trek that my father and mother had been on as they fled the East. Moreover it had not only been the same trek, it had been the same day, 20 January 1945, when the boy was laid in an unknown woman’s arms. And this without the woman’s finding out the boy’s name. The woman hadn’t even been able to get a good look at the face of the person who laid the child in her arms, for the latter had been almost entirely veiled in a shawl This was not so much against the cold, as that all young women had wrapped themselves in shawls back then so as not to be recognizable as young women. My mother wrapped herself in a shawl too. The first people the Russians threw themselves on, said my father, were young women. Which meant that they saw through the shawl trick quite quickly and consequently chose women with covered faces to throw themselves on. These could also turn out to be old women. According to my father, in principle no woman was safe from the Russians, be she young or old. And what this told me was that my mother must not have been safe from the Russians either. Most likely the Russians had thrown themselves on my mother too, but I wasn’t really clear what exactly it meant when the Russians threw themselves on someone. My father said that the boy had not only been on the same trek and handed over to an unknown woman on the same day that my mother handed Arnold over to an unknown woman. The boy didn’t just have a certain resemblance to the photo in the album, he also resembled my father and to some extent my mother. Admittedly the resemblance to him and my mother was not so great that you could conclude a family relationship without any other evidence. But the boy had an absolutely astonishing resemblance to me, his putative brother. This resemblance was so strong that my mother and he himself were utterly convinced on that fact alone that the boy must be Arnold. The authorities, on the other hand, said my father, were far less convinced that the boy must be Arnold, even if the expert on the case could agree on the basis of photos that the boy in the foundling home looked astonishingly like me, his putative brother. “The boy,” said my father, “looks as if he were carved out of your face.” An idea which made me so physically queasy that although I didn’t have to throw up, I got some kind of stomach cramp that reached up to my face, shot through my cheeks, and ended behind my forehead. It was almost as if I were feeling the cuts as Arnold was being carved out of my face, and the cuts were turning into a rain of blows and stabs of pain that ran through my face and caused me to grimace. What’s there to grin about, said my father, who had no idea of the pain I was feeling and saw only the rude boy in me. The companionable conversation between friends or with a customer metamorphosed into the usual father-son conversation, in which he told me that after my mother had finished her cure and things had been organized at home, we would be visiting an institute to undergo the necessary tests that would confirm our relationship with Arnold. The stomach cramp had relaxed meanwhile, but I still suffered from facial twitches, especially when I was under stress, which not only brought on an involuntary grin, but also brought tears to my eyes. It was this last that made my father send me to the doctor. He diagnosed a trigeminal neuralgia which was more or less unbeatable, as its causes were unknown. In the worst cases they would paralyze the trigeminal nerve, but that could entail a disruption of the entire facial musculature, which was why it was not recommended. In the doctor’s opinion, the best thing to do in my case would be to wait. Maybe one day they’d discover the cause of my affliction, and perhaps the affliction would go away of itself. It would not be the first time that a trigeminal neuralgia disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. The trigeminal neuralgia didn’t disappear, it continued to plague me at lengthening but nonetheless regular intervals with attacks that were like a surge of electrical current. I had no need to search for causes, I as sure that my facial twitches were connected with Arnold, and in particular with what my father called an amazing likeness. I didn’t want to look like anyone, particularly not my brother Arnold. The supposedly amazing likeness made me feel less and less like myself. Every look in the mirror grated on my nerves. I didn’t see me, I saw Arnold, and he was getting less appealing all the time. If only he had starved to death during the escape. Instead he was interfering in my life. And in my appearance. I longed for a Third World War so that he would starve to death after all. But the Third World War never came. Instead my mother came back from her cure, and was as sad as before. Her mood lightened a little when my father said that a plainclothes policeman would be coming to visit that afternoon. The plainclothes policeman came accompanied by our local policeman, Mr. Rudolph, who was a sort of friend of the family, and gave my parents help with anything to do with the police, for which my father rewarded him with regular parcels of meat and sausage. The plainclothesman had come to take our fingerprints, so that they could be compared with Arnold’s. He pressed our fingers one after the other onto an inkpad, and then pressed our blackened fingertips onto a special index card. The man operated with practiced efficiency, and the whole procedure was over disappointingly fast. I had expected more from the visit of a plainclothesman. The only noteworthy thing was that I was allowed to get my fingers dirty in the presence of my parents, and that my parents got their fingers dirty too. But my parents wouldn’t allow me to have my wish of keeping my fingers black and going to school that way. Even before the plainclothesman was all the way out of the house, my mother was scrubbing the ink off my fingers with a nailbrush. The next test was a blood analysis. Just as our fingers were to be compared with Arnold’s, so was our blood. About six weeks after our family doctor took the blood samples and sent them off, my parents got the results. The letter came from an Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Münster and contained the results of both the fingerprint and the blood comparisons. The information about the fingerprints, which were no longer called fingerprints but bacciform finger patterns, was all couched in words such as “diverse central pockets,” “double loops,” “ridges” and “whorls,” all scored against a special complexity index. My father tortured his way through the written calculations and finally read out to my mother that his complexity index was 34, hers was 43, and mine 30. but that foundling 2307’s was only 28. “Only 28,” he said, while my mother said nothing and saw disaster beginning to loom. But disaster stayed its hand, when it turned out that 34,43, and 30 by comparison with Arnold’s 28 wasn’t all that serious, although it was serious. The letter closed with the words: “The parental connection of the petitioners to foundling 2307, based on the bacciform finger patterns, is unlikely, but no more so than the connection to the legitimate child of the petitioners.” The legitimate child of the petitioners was me. And if you followed the results of the tests, I was just as unlikely to be my parents’ child as Arnold was. My parents, on the other hand, insisted that I was certainly their child, so foundling 2307 must be their child as well, for if their being the parents of 2307 was no more unlikely than their being my parents, then the fact that they were not just probably but actually my parents must mean that they were also definitely or at least almost definitely the parents of Arnold a.k.a. the foundling child. I was confused, I couldn’t follow what my parents were saying, and all I could think was that I was in the process of becoming as unlikely as Arnold once had been. But while Arnold was threatening to become more likely with every test, every test was making me less and less likely. I didn’t want to become unlikely, I wanted to stay who I was. I didn’t want to share with Arnold, not my room and not my food. But I wanted to change places with Arnold even less. Luckily the results of the blood comparisons calmed me down in that the expert opinion stated that I, the legitimate child, was “possibly and even probably positively” the issue of both my father and my mother, whereas foundling 2307 was “possibly but not probably positively” the issue of my parents. The “possible but not probably positive” finding on Arnold increased in my mind to an unmistakable “highly unlikely.” My parents, who to begin with were depressed by the report, managed over time to construe it to mean “highly likely” or even “more or less certain.” My mother in particular allowed time to erode “possibly but not probably positively” until only “possibly” was left, and placed all her hopes on the subsequent tests, from which she expected a final confirmation of what was in truth no more than a theoretical possibility of a blood relationship with foundling 2307. Although the responsible youth service that was appointed to represent foundling 2307 advised against further tests by alluding to the probability of negative results, my parents relied on what they perceived as “overall positive results” to commit to a so-called “ruling as to anthropological and biological heritage and descent.” To achieve this, all sorts of my parents’ and my structural bodily characteristics had to be compared with foundling 2307’s, which was first of all time-consuming, and second of all dragged my supposed brother Arnold into the tests as well. The youth service, which was skeptical that the ruling would be positive and wanted to spare its ward a disappointment, told my parents that foundling 2307 had already had to undergo a comparable biological testing as to heritage and that it had come out negative. The boy had had high hopes, and the procedure had left him psychologically scarred. They would therefore only agree to a pictorial comparison; all further tests would have to be approved by the Juvenile Court. The pictorial comparison required photos of my parents, of Arnold, and me. The photo of Arnold in the album was the only one in existence. My mother unstuck it from the album with a heavy heart. If it were to get lost, Arnold in his entirety would be lost too. No usable photo of me existed, so I was sent to the photographer. The photographer owned the only photographic business in town, and was responsible for capturing the likenesses of all the inhabitants. He documented the results of his labors in a showcase which he had built in front of his shop, and which was one of the fixed stopping points I always aimed for when I was pedaling round town on my bicycle. I played my own form of roulette in front of the showcase, which consisted of making a bet with myself that went “I bet I know three of the people whose pictures are on display.” Sometimes I raised that to four or five people, but only when I could be sure that the photographer had filled the showcase with class photos or pictures of all that year’s first communion or confirmation groups. When the display was nothing but wedding photos or family shots, my chances sank, but often enough I recognized at least one or two people. If I lost my bet, I punished myself with one more ride round town on my bicycle. If I won my bet, I rewarded myself with the same extra ride round town on my bicycle. What I didn’t want was ever to appear in the showcase myself. I had always seen the showcase as a kind of pillory that exposed people to the whole world, right at the moment when they thought they’d reached a particular stage in their lives: confirmation, boyfriend/girlfriend, bride and groom, parents with children. I don’t know what exposed them, since they were obviously the opposite of exposed, dressed in their best with their hair done. And yet I could see time eating away at them, the children growing up, the parents getting old. When I looked into the showcase of photos, I understood that people have to die. And that wasn’t all: I often saw them as already dead: hair styled to death, dressed up to death, photographed to death. I didn’t want to be put in the showcase and until now, nobody had had the idea of sending me to have my picture taken. My parents had been perfectly satisfied that bits of me turned up in existing photos, and sometimes almost none of me at all. Now everything depended on my being as clearly visible as possible, which meant, among other things, that I was stuck into a white shirt with an open collar and my father ordered me to get a short haircut that turned me into a sort of inmate of a camp. I was shaved almost bald and then photographed from all sides. The Anthropological Institute which set up the testing had expressly indicated that the ears must be clearly visible and that a picture of the ears from behind would be extremely helpful. To come up with a picture of the back of the ears for the institute, a photo had to be taken of the back of the head, which was particularly demanding for the photographer because this was the first time he’d done one. While he took the front and side shots quite routinely, he went to great pains with the back of my head and took an entire series, all differently lit. I only endured the taking of the regular photographs by turning rigid, but the never-ending photographing of the back of my head was torture, as I felt it was somehow the weakest and least appealing part of my body. A person usually lives with the back of his head without actually being conscious of it or paying it any particular attention. The back of my head was an extremely problematic part of my body to me, because since earliest childhood I had always been trying to let my hair grow over it. I thought the most wonderful thing was to have long hair at the back, and I was happy when it reached my collar or grew down over it. The longer my hair, the better I felt about myself. For my father it was absolutely the opposite: the longer my hair, the unhappier he was with me. If my curly baby hair was allowed to reach almost to my shoulders, the limits of my father’s tolerance shrank year by year thereafter by several centimeters. The older I got, the shorter my hair had to be. I had gradually reached matchstick length, and any idea that my hair could touch my ears or my shirt collar was long gone. But as time went by, not even that was enough for my father, some inner gauge had established the limits of his tolerance at front-line-soldiers’ or rather camp inmates’ hair allowance. It wasn’t easy to impose, even the hairdresser pleaded for a “short stylish cut” from now on and recoiled from the all-over head shave. It was the necessity of having photographs for the tests that first allowed my father to achieve his ideal in hair length and have my head shaved down to the skin all around. The shots of the back of my head certainly number among the most painstaking photos ever taken of me. Whether they influenced the comparative pictorial documentation, I cannot say. After about six weeks a letter reached my parents from the Anthropological Institute working under the instructions of the youth service; Professor Friedrich Keller from Hamburg let it be known that comparison between foundling and child listed in petition was hard since only one photo of child listed in petition was provided, as very young infant, and aforesaid photo still revealed only the most general characteristics of all babies, while on the other hand the area of the ears, which was always exceptionally clearly defined even at that age, was invisible, since child’s face was framed in a woolen jacket which completely covered the ears. Only now did my parents notice that little Arnold had been photographed with his ears covered up. Nobody was thinking about his ears back then, said my mother. The photo had not been intended for a forensic examination, but as a memento of the child’s first birthday. Nobody had focused on his ears, including the photographer. The man had come with all his equipment from Gostynin, the chief town in the district, to Rakoviec, where my parents’ farm was, just for this, and had even brought the white woolen blanket with him, but he didn’t have ears on his mind either. Now they were missing and were making the investigation harder, which gave me a certain schadenfreude, since it was finally Arnold’s fault that I had had to undergo the torture of having my whole head shaved and the back of it photographed. I was obliged to sacrifice every hair on the back of my head, while nobody had even bothered about Arnold’s ears. To my mind, Arnold was a case of “easy come, easy go,” but I didn’t say it out loud, because my parents were already crushed by the first sentences in the report. My mother especially, who had been able to think of nothing for weeks but the arrival of the official findings, went into a kind of state of shock when my father read her the first sentences. She looked down, propped her head in her hands, and seemed cut off from all communication. Only a trembling of the head betrayed her agitation. Fortunately the professor’s next pronouncements sounded a little less pessimistic; he wrote that my photos and those of my parents “gave a relatively good insight into the hereditary structure of the family.” Among other things, he could deduce from the photos that both my parents revealed “a high flat forehead.” In foundling 2307, on the other hand, he detected “a lower forehead with a pronounced curve,” which would have argued against any possible relationship if he had not detected the imprint of this same structure on the tubera frontalia, as he called them, of the forehead of the “brother of the child named in the petition,” i.e., me. This, according to the professor, could indicate “a common hereditary structure,” although it didn’t guarantee it. In addition, Professor Keller noted a “moderately wide, somewhat slit eyelid formation” and concluded that this slit formation of the lids bore no resemblance to my father’s or mine, but did resemble my mother’s, which he described similarly as “moderately wide” and “somewhat slit.” “You resemble each other,” my father said to my mother, who finally lifted her head from her hands and looked at him. He read her the section about the eyelid formation again, sat down beside her, put his arm around her, and held her to him. My mother kept silent, but I could see the trembling of her head gradually lessen until it stopped altogether. The comparison of ears that ended the official report came out much less optimistically than had been expected, based on the fact that the foundling’s ears were quite different from both my parents’ and mine in more ways than one. What struck Professor Keller about foundling 2307 in particular was the “pronounced inward curvature of the helix.” He further noted “the lack of protrusion of the helix in the region of the upper curve of the ears,” which depressed my parents, although they took it in without saying anything. I, on the other hand, was relieved that no pronounced upper curve of the ears or anything similar had been noted on me. The so-called downward angle of the earlobe in comparison with the overall size of the ear also appeared to be greater in foundling 2307 than it was in my father or my mother. In contrast, the downward angle of my earlobe compared with the overall size of the ear was not noticeably different from foundling 2307’s, according to the report. In consequence, it was Professor Keller’s conclusion that despite some shared features, it was not possible to speak of a measurable family resemblance in foundling 2307. Thus from the perspective of biological heritage, it was “highly unlikely” that Arnold, the child named in the petition, was identical with foundling 2307.