Celebration for the dead
Yes, the very next day she announces we’re going to Erwin’s memorial service at his home in Lüneburg. Having seen Maria off, she feels obliged to see Erwin off as well. You have to say she’s even-handed. You could say crazy too.
Frau Professor Hoffmann looks amazed and anxious, and wonders aloud whether that would be wise. I wonder too, but Martin thinks it’s just the ticket. Attending heroes’ obsequies and – who knows? – rubbing shoulders with another Luftwaffe ace or two? That certainly beats burying Tante Maria and humouring anaemic Confessional Church ladies in Steglitz.
‘But Gabi, your racial background!’ Frau Professor Hoffmann protests openly at last. ‘What about the laws …?’
All to no purpose. Surely ‘privileged’ Gabi can attend her brother-in-law’s son’s memorial service, can’t she? If Gabi needs any encouragement, Martin’s given it, and now she’s not to be deflected. This certainly wasn’t mentioned to Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer when she asked permission to attend a funeral in Berlin. She’s got no permit, she’s taking us near Hamburg, a city the Amis and the Tommies regularly sow with their quick-blossoming bombs, she can’t exactly expect to be welcome (she doesn’t ask, she simply phones the night before and tells them she’s coming) and she’s actually running Onkel Harald’s family as well as the rest of us into danger. But she’s taken it into her stubborn head and she’s determined to go. So there we are the following day at the commemoration of a German hero.
Where I meet Onkel Harald for the first time in my life. He’s the fat nervous-looking one with a black armband on his sleeve, and a Nazi badge in his lapel. And there’s Robert, on compassionate leave from the East. Willibald would have enjoyed that smart Wehrmacht uniform, without a speck of Russian mud on his gleaming boots. I wonder if Robert’s glad he took Erwin’s advice and let the Luftwaffe get on with things without him – or is he any better off slogging it out on the Russian Steppes? And that shrinking face is Tante Erika’s, whom I’ve never met before either, the mother who’s proudly sacrificed her son for Fatherland and Führer. At least that’s what it says in the death notice in the paper, a big black-bordered affair beginning In deepest grief and pride …’ For myself, I think I see the grief all right, but where’s the pride? She reminds me of Fräulein Meissner on that morning in school when she forgot to say the morning prayer to Adolf. However, both proud and grieved in the true Aryan tradition is what blonde fiancée Lerke looks. See how high her head is held, how deep the sadness in her long-lashed eyes? You can tell she learnt her lessons well in the League of German Girls.
It’s a private afternoon send-off in Onkel Harald’s luxurious home, Erwin being unfortunately prevented from attending even in a coffin by thirty fathoms of the English Channel, which I know from my science lessons is quite a load to bear. And fortunately for us the Allies have considerately decided not to target Lüneburg today, though it’s unlikely their forbearance has anything to do with Erwin’s final send-off. But although it’s a private do, there are quite a few swastikas around (with people wearing them, I mean) and enough arm-flapping Heil Hitlering going on to make you think you’re at a puppet show, which is not of course to say you aren’t. These people make me want to hide, but Martin mutters to me again that I needn’t shit myself, they’re only tame officials from Onkel Harald’s office. But as I’ve no idea how he knows that, I’m only mildly reassured. There’s an enormous swastika hanging down the whole length of the wall from where the eulogies are delivered. In front of it stands a little table, also swastika-decorated, on which Erwin’s Luftwaffe cap and his iron cross symbolically rest even if he doesn’t. I don’t know what all these people make of Gabi, but I suppose Onkel Harald must have put the word about that she’s his brother’s wife, fresh from another funeral, and she gets a few bows and hand-kisses and muttered condolences from people who’d give themselves a hasty mouthwash if only they knew what they were doing. No wonder Onkel Harald’s looking nervous.
What Gabi herself makes of it, I can’t imagine. She looks pretty uncomfortable, I know that. In fact she looks petrified, like a hare that’s wandered into a pack of greyhounds resting from the hunt, except that a hare wouldn’t shake paws with the greyhounds and ask them how they were. Why’s she doing this, I wonder as I shrink back in the corner. Is it really just to pay her last respects to Erwin? Or does she perhaps want Martin and me to feel that we’re proper Germans after all and can hold our heads up anywhere? If so, her prescription doesn’t work for me, nor, to go by appearances for her, and Martin hardly needs it – he’s always known he is a proper German. So while she makes agonised polite conversation with a Luftwaffe ace and two tame Nazi officials (at least I hope they’re tame), I cower in my corner and pray that no one will speak to me, which fortunately no one does. Martin though is in his element. When someone Heil Hitlers him, he gives it back as though he’s been doing it all his life, and I even overhear him telling one of the swastikas that he’s going to join the Luftwaffe as soon as he’s old enough, earning thereby a congratulatory little punch on the shoulder, which really makes his day. Has he reflected that most Luftwaffe heroes end up like Erwin, and so probably would he? Of course not – he’s Martin!
Unlike Maria’s this party’s a solemn one. Gravity’s the keynote here. We sit on chairs from the living room, dining room and for all I know the town hall, while gravity, patriotism, Führer-loyalty and faith in final victory are intoned by one solemn speaker after another, each revealing in his own way (no woman speaks, of course) how Erwin excelled in all these qualities. I’ve been told by Gabi in a hasty pre-memoriam briefing that Onkel Harald is an Anthroposophist, but we shouldn’t mention it because the Party doesn’t like it. When she explains that this freaky sect believes people don’t really die, but just pop in and out of the spirit world, I think I don’t like it either. It strikes me as about as ridiculous as the contradiction embroidered over Maria’s bed. I saw worms wriggling in the muddy earth of Maria’s grave and I know that baby herrings are probably swimming in and out of Erwin’s eye-sockets by now too. That’s enough for me.
Now Onkel Harald reads a letter out from Erwin’s commanding officer in France. It brings manly tears to portly Onkel Harald’s eyes. Well, to tell the truth, it brings them to mine too, except that mine aren’t manly.
I was fond of your Erwin, it goes, and was very conscious that he did everything that he could to make himself the virtuous officer and gentleman that only Germans can be. I soon came to realise that your son exemplified all those values that characterise a German officer, and that he fully illustrated Bismarck’s observation “Other countries can copy everything else about us perhaps, but not the German Lieutenant!” It is so very sad that Erwin, who though so young was already a Squadron Leader, was not spared to show his remarkable qualities in the higher ranks to which he would undoubtedly have risen. His career was cut short, but it must count for something that he made so many successful sorties in so short a period against enemies as determined as the English are. Erwin always had Walter Flex’s book with him, ‘The Wanderer Between Two Worlds’. But on his last flight, he left it behind. Whilst assembling his possessions, which I trust you have now received, I found he had underlined the following passages marked in it.
Here Onkel Harald pauses in his reading and holds up the worn leather-bound volume itself, which he evidently has received, and reads from it now, instead of from the letter:
It is an officer’s duty to put his men first. Dying first is sometimes part of that.
He takes a steadying breath, turns over several pages, then reads again into the reverent hush:
Do not mourn for us dead. Do you want to make ghosts of us, or do you want to bring us home? We want to sit at your hearth without disturbing your laughter. Please don’t cry for us, you’ll only make our friends afraid to talk about us. Give them rather the courage to speak of us with laughter and smiles. Bring us home, home as it was when we were alive!
These sentiments, which it occurs to me Tante Maria would approve, seem nevertheless to produce the opposite of their intended effect. Onkel Harald’s voice breaks off with a throb, and Erika and Lerke are quietly choking. So are quite a lot of other people – even Gabi, who might be thought to have a different take on German officers, dead or alive. And Martin too – for all he’s trying to make himself seem stern and proud, his eyes look quite dewy to me. And I’m sniffing myself as I recall debonair young Erwin suavely sleeking his eyebrow down with his elegantly curled little finger. As for Onkel Harald’s undisclosed Anthroposophical beliefs – he certainly isn’t behaving just then like someone who thinks Erwin’s just ducked out of his body and popped up in the spirit world. He’s behaving like someone who sensibly believes his son is gone for good.
No, despite the injunction in his final text, there doesn’t seem to be much laughter in Erwin’s commemoration. It was merrier by far at Maria’s, who wasn’t even a German officer, let alone a hero – although, come to think of it, she might well have been a heroine.
That same evening, we’re back on the train to Berlin. Onkel Harald and Tante Erika kiss Gabi on both cheeks before we leave. Tante Erika kissed her when we arrived as well, but Onkel Harald only gave a formal handshake. Perhaps Erwin’s commemoration has unhinged his mind – or at least the Nazi part of it.
Lerke kisses Gabi too. And Martin. And me. She smells nice – a heady blend of damp girlish skin (the room is overheated), mint toothpaste, lily scent and tears. I see that Martin presses her arm as she kisses him, but my hands hang limply down by my sides. I’m not up to that stuff yet. She tells Gabi, who tells us, she’s going to keep a copy of everything that’s been read out this afternoon, as well as all the letters Erwin ever wrote her, and place a different one next to her heart every day for the rest of her life. Gabi blushes when she says ‘next to her heart.’ I’m just able to remember Erwin’s mentioning a French mademoiselle in one of his notes to us a few years ago, and wonder if she’s going to be wearing some of his letters next to her heart too. In any case, I get a nice feeling imagining those folded papers nestling on Lerke’s warm and generous breast. And if I get one, you can bet your life Martin does too.
Our train is very late. While we’ve been visiting Onkel Harald, the Tommies and the Amis who’ve given Hamburg a miss have been visiting Berlin instead, and they’ve been having their own kind of celebration, with lots and lots of fireworks. It takes us hours to get into the station because there isn’t much of the station left to get into. As we’re in one of the rear carriages, we have to get down onto the track in the end and finish our journey on foot, stumbling over heaps of bricks and glass in the cold and dismal light of dawn. As we reach the station, I see the roof has gone except for a few twisted girders and there’s a lot of broken glass and piles of rubble everywhere, and iron pillars tortured into crazy shapes.
But that’s not all. There are neat long rows of people lying peacefully asleep along a cleared space on the platform, with a couple of policemen watching over them to make sure they’re not disturbed. Gabi tugs my arm and hurries us past them, and that’s when I realise they aren’t asleep at all. ‘Don’t look,’ Gabi says, but I’ve looked already and can’t stop looking now. Some of those people don’t have arms or legs any more, and some of them don’t even have faces. Most of them, if they’re still wearing any, are wearing different clothes, advertising the different status they attained in life. Some are, or were, men, some women, a few children. Some are, or were, officers, others ordinary rankers, some well-dressed well-foddered gentlemen like Onkel Harald, others lanky workers in their overalls. One without a head has at least preserved a pair of handcuffs on his wrists - or are they hers? I’ve not yet heard Death called The Leveller, but if I had, I would understand it now. As it is, all I’m capable of thinking is that I’ll be glad to get back to Heimstatt, and I’m thinking that pretty hard. Martin’s looking at these leftovers from the Allies’ party with the same repelled fascination that I am, but what he’s thinking I don’t know. Perhaps he’s working out how many kilos of high explosive he’d need to do the same job on a London station.
Yes, we’re really getting the feel of death here in Berlin. And there’s more of it to come.
‘Come on!’ Gabi says urgently as she tugs me away. ‘We’ve got to see if they’re all right in Steglitz!’
But in Steglitz they’re perfectly all right. They don’t even know what’s happened to the station, although they certainly heard it happening. Onkel Karl looks like a veteran miller from all the plaster dust that’s fallen in the cellar during the night, which his strenuous umbrella-flapping doesn’t seem to have prevented. And he’s still occasionally asking where Maria is, though apparently uninterested in any answer. But the bombs that shook the plaster down have left the house intact. Frau Professor Hoffmann has prepared a breakfast for us, which has the double advantage of being preceded by a shorter Grace and lasting a bit longer, because there seems to be more of it, than is usually the case in Heimstatt.
In the afternoon Gabi makes another announcement to Frau Professor Hoffmann. Now she means to go and see Cousin Lotte and Solomon, and sloppy once jolly Aunt Hedwig ‘while we still have the chance.’
Frau Professor Hoffmann blanches. ‘I don’t think … I mean, I don’t know where they are now,’ she hints, glancing askance at me and then hard at Gabi.
‘I’ve got their address here,’ Gabi says obliviously, rummaging in her large black handbag. For someone who sends out her own ocular signals like a mastful of flags on the battle cruiser Bismarck, she really is slow to spot the signals others hoist. Frau Professor Hoffmann regards her with an incredulous and pityingly anxious look as Gabi unfolds Great Aunt Hedwig’s address. You don’t know? it says. My God, how am I going to tell you?
‘But they’ve moved,’ Frau Professor Hoffmann repeats, glancing askance at me again, and then appealingly at Martin. ‘They’ve … they’ve gone away …’
‘Gone away? Where?’ Gabi considers Frau Professor Hoffmann wide-eyed with amazement, but then comprehension begins to gleam at last like winter sunlight in a leaden sky.
‘Didn’t anyone tell you?’ (Of course not – Maria was too busy preparing to die and no one else thought of writing to Heimstatt.) ‘They were … evacuated last month.’
‘Evacuated?’ Gabi repeats in a voice that has somehow suddenly been hollowed out, lost all its marrow. Since she heard of Onkel Moritz’s evacuation she understands at last that evacuation means deportation. Before, she might have visualised some pastoral retreat, complete with log chalets, fir trees and gallons of free milk. Stranger thoughts did sometimes use to wander through her head in the early morning hours, when the world was remade according to the blueprint of her naive optimism. But not any longer. ‘So it’s too late, then?’ she asks, sitting heavily down and gripping the table edge as though she felt unsteady. ‘Evacuated.’
‘Concentration camp,’ Martin growls with his customary brutal accuracy. And Frau Professor Hoffmann, who took Maria’s death so calmly, now has tears starting in the corners of her eyes.
As usual that makes me want to cry too, cry for that shabby trio we met outside the Botanical Garden last spring. I dream that night of Great Aunt Hedwig turning back towards me in her threadbare clothes with her yellow star, her face two sizes too small for its haggard envelope of skin. I see her hands reaching out towards mine, see her fixing me with her teary eyes, imploring me in her teary voice. ‘Remember us!’ I hear her calling. ‘Remember us!’
And I do.
Next morning, the day of our return to Heimstatt, Gabi takes it into her obstinate head to go and see Great Aunt Hedwig’s and her cousins’ place at least before we leave. Does she somehow hope to find them still there after all, although she knows full well they won’t be, and ought to know they probably aren’t anywhere by now? Or is it rather that she wants to see with her own eyes if there’s some scrap or remnant of her cousins or her favourite aunt lingering somewhere in the Jews’ house where they were removed to in Berlin? A letter perhaps? An old hat? A worn and empty purse?
Frau Professor Hoffmann clasps her hands as though in prayer, or perhaps indeed in prayer, and protests to no avail again. ‘The Gestapo may be hanging about there,’ she warns Gabi. ‘What will you do if they stop you? It isn’t safe.’ But Gabi, who’s blessed or cursed with an optimistic as well as a stubborn and naive cast of mind, answers that she’s got a permit to be in Berlin and she’s ‘privileged’ as well. She still trusts in the rule-following orderliness of the Germans, and believes that the same punctiliousness which keeps the cattle trucks rolling to the East on time will also keep her from being on one herself without a properly issued and duly validated ticket. And in a way she’s right. The liquidation of the Jews is a massacre all right, but it isn’t a riot.
Martin thinks no better of this scheme than Frau Professor Hoffmann does. The last thing he wants after his posturing at Erwin’s memorial service is to be caught hanging round a Jews’ house and be taken for a Jew. So he’s left behind to keep Frau Professor Hoffmann company, which he doesn’t seem to think much more of. Well, she’s certainly no substitute for the lissom Eva, the last female he was alone with in Berlin.
Gabi used to know the city, and I thought I knew my way round a bit too, but somehow everything is different, now that so much has been bombed since each of us was last here, and it’s an hour and a half before we locate Great Aunt Hedwig’s final Berlin address out in Prenzlauer Berg. ‘That’s where your grandfather used to live,’ Gabi tells me, pointing to a narrow plot of rubble where only weeds live now. And a little later, ‘That’s where Josef had his clinic.’ I glance at her in surprise. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard her call the mysterious Dr Stern simply Josef. It’s always been Dr Stern or Onkel Josef before. If I was old enough to think such thoughts, perhaps I’d think she’s got some special reason for wanting me to see his clinic now and hear him called Josef in that mellowed melancholic tone. But all I do is gaze unimpressed at an ugly bomb-damaged building with boarded up windows like an old blind bandaged face.
And then, not far away, we do find Great Aunt Hedwig’s house at last. It’s down a dreary side-street off the main road, along which we hear a solitary tram forlornly clanking. This house is undamaged, but so run-down you’d think the best thing that could happen to it now would be a direct hit from another Allied bomb. As we’re walking towards it on the other side of the street, a humpish and noisy black car draws up. Two men get out, wearing long shiny raincoats and trilby hats. They ring a bell impatiently several times, then, as we approach start hammering on the door.
Suddenly I’m feeling scared, more scared than in any air raid and more scared even than when Fritzi Wimmer accosted me in the playground. And I know Gabi’s feeling scared too, because she’s grabbed my arm as if she wants to crush it. The two men step back and look up, craning their necks, then go back to ringing and hammering on the door. At last the door is opened by a shabby middle-aged man, who begins apologising for the delay, and has his face slapped as he does so. The two men shove him inside, and the door swings lazily shut behind them as though it’s seen all this a hundred times before and is quite frankly bored with the whole business.
Why is it that Gabi can’t move? Why does she have to stand there gripping my arm and watching, when all she really wants to do, I can tell by her trembling, is run away? Has she recognised the middle-aged man? Can this be someone else she knows? Or is it just the need to know beforehand, to see how one day it may be with her? I’ll never know, I’ll never ask.
Then the driver of the car, who’s been gazing vacantly down the street like a horse waiting for its master to return, winds down his window, leans his head out and calls quietly but urgently across the road, ‘Get out of here! Get out!’
I’m not sure if that’s an order or a recommendation, but it certainly galvanises Gabi and she finds she can move after all. She lets my arm go, clutches my hand instead and turns away without a word to the driver, whose head is now back where it belongs, lolling patiently inside the car. And we walk on quickly down the road, but not so quickly it might look as if we’re running away, on towards we don’t know where. For all I know this may be a cul-de-sac, but we’re going to go on walking along it till we slam into the wall. Walking and trembling.
We’ve hardly gone thirty paces though when we hear the men come out and the door swing shut again. Both of us risk a glance back – we can’t help it. The middle-aged man is stepping submissively into the car, removing an old black Homburg hat as he does so. There’s no slapping or shoving now, no violence or abuse. There isn’t any need. You’d almost think he was going of his own accord, it’s all so quiet and calm. As though they’re just taking him out to lunch. One of the men gets in beside him, the other in the front beside the driver. The doors clunk shut, and away rolls the car with a peculiar clattery growl that will prevent me from ever buying a Volkswagen Beetle in the whole of my later life.
And the strangest thing about all this is that I don’t ask Gabi what was going on and she doesn’t tell me. In fact we don’t even mention it to Frau Professsor Hoffmann or Martin when we get back. We never mention it to anyone, ever. We just each know what we’ve seen, and know, when we sometimes catch each other’s eye, that the other knows as well.
We keep our secrets, even from ourselves.
Martin is waiting in the hall with the suitcases when we get back to Frau Professor Hoffmann’s and we’re only just in time to catch our train. It’s a silent journey for the first few hours. Martin munches more than his share of the sandwiches Frau Professor Hoffmann has thoughtfully provided, but I’m not hungry, and nor is Gabi – although she never is in any case when Martin’s around. I keep wondering what will happen if we’re asked to produce our papers. So far on this trip we haven’t been, but that only makes it all the more likely that we will be now. And lacking Gabi’s trust in Teutonic orderliness or Franzi Wimmer’s rustic authority, I keep imagining us being booted off the train and stuffed into a sinisterly humped black car like that one in Berlin.
But the train gets shunted into sidings several times during the night, to let some SS boys go through to get at the Russkies – or so the harassed ticket-inspector says when he appears to punch our tickets – and nobody is interested in checking who we are. ‘They need every able-bodied soldier they can get on the Eastern Front,’ he brusquely tells Gabi when she respectfully asks him if she should keep our papers handy for inspection or put them safely away. ‘They’ve got no time for any of that now.’ And he slides the door shut with the irritated air of one who’s being bothered while he’s doing his significant bit to get those able-bodied soldiers where they ought to be while they’re still able-bodied.
After that at last I fall asleep, and dream of Tante Maria and Erwin whom we’ll never see again. And of Great Aunt Hedwig and Gabi’s Cousin Lotte with her husband Solomon, and the middle-aged man from that house in Prenzlauer Berg as well. All of whom we’ll –