Only with William beside her, her hand in his, could she laugh at such an addiction to catastrophe, such persistent expectations of the worst. To him only could she speak mockingly of Eastern-European fatalism, perennial pessimism, this Slavic melancholy of the soul that has touched her forever, made her fearful of the future, doubtful, suspicious of good fortune. He would laugh, and she, the traitor, would laugh with him.
In the photographs of Breslau that Anna has found in Ursula's letters the towers of the Cathedral on the Oder Island have metal roofs on them. Shop signs display the names of
their German owners, Eduard Littauer, Gerson Fränkel, Brothers Barasch.
In one of the photographs, an SA parade marches along Schweidnitzer Strasse. The street is packed with people, cheering, saluting the men on horseback and the marching troops. Anna would like to look at their faces, but they are too small. All she can see are outstretched hands. William's mother, Käthe, could be standing there, waving to the men. Houses are covered with bunting, adorned with swastikas and wreaths. On the other side of the photograph Ursula has scribbled:
Did you know that there are mazes of underground tunnels underneath your Breslau, some still flooded by water? Who knows what's still buried there! The pot of diamonds Göring's servant carried behind the Field Marshal, lest he had a sudden urge to dip his fingers in the stones?
In the next days, when she walks along Wroclaw's streets, Anna carries these pictures with her, noting the changes. The convex art nouveau windows have been replaced by flat panes of glass, the spires of St. Mary Magdalene's church have gone. In the antique stores of the Old Town, German artifacts still dominate the shelves, fill the insides of curio cabinets in Biedermeier style. Miniatures of Prussian officers with reddish beards and sideburns, buttons sparkling on their uniforms, pale glass lamps, oak coffee mills with wrought iron handles. Meissen china plates and cups, calfskin gloves, velour top hats, cigarette cases. “No export,” a note pinned to the red velvet cloth reminds buyers that no object produced before 1945 can be taken out of the country.
To protect national heritage.
The note is translated into German and English.
“Käthe never speaks about Breslau,” she tells her brother who meets her one afternoon for coffee. “I've tried to ask her about life here, but she won't say anything. Must be too hard for her.”
Her brother shrugs his shoulders and downs his espresso. There is a hint of impatience in their conversations these days, and it is growing. She has ordered a bottle of mineral water with her coffee, and she sips it slowly. “Whatever . . .” he says and looks away. Stories of Breslau do not interest him. He
thinks that maybe Canada or William's influence has made Anna too soft, too accepting, that she is forgetting the facts, the evidence of the past. “German skinheads with chains on their fists are waiting for our tourists,” he likes to remind her. “Right across the border. So don't get carried away.” He has already chastised her for noticing the shabbiness of the streets, uncut lawns, uneven pavements. Mocked her sensitivity, which he considers newly-found, a frill.
“People could at least wash the windows and cut the grass,” she has defended herself, pointing to a withering rosebush fighting for space among tall weeds. “Or is this also the Communists' fault?”
“I'd rather have this than police raids on uncut lawns, like they had in East Germany when the neighbours snitched,” he has said. “Face it, Anna. A Pole will never run around with a mop. Life is too short.”
He could have also told her that in Russia it would be even worse, and she wonders which answer would annoy her more. She has promised herself not to judge, but she has already broken her promise.
Dearest William, Stalingrad, of course, is now called Volgograd. I was allowed to walk around, to visit what the military maps indicated as “Haöhe 102,” the sight of the fiercest of battles. At the hotel I was told that in the spring of 1943, as the winter receded, the hill was pink from the blood of the dead. The people were friendly and helpful, even though they knew I was German. The roads are still muddy, and the fields are covered with sun-bleached bones, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, scattered for as far as I could see. Your father, if he is here, is just one of these skeletons. The contours of the trenches and dirt bunkers are still visible in the parched earth. I took pictures of the heaps of bones, arms, legs, pelvic bones or ribs, jaws with teeth. Skeletons with identity tags still attached, lying next to a rusted machine gun. A pair of hobnailed boots, still standing upright, even in decay
A young Russian man, Boris, quite wonderful, with ruddy cheeks and short, blond hair was my guide. Thanks to his
ingenuity and a bottle of Johnny Walker, red label, we had an old jeep to travel through the fields. You would've liked Boris. Short, rugged looking, in black rubber boots, a soft smile on his lips. He pocketed a carton of cigarettes, a roll of American dollars, and a bottle of whisky with style! When I placed the flowers on the Mamai Mound, Boris unscrewed a bottle of Stolichnaya, and we drank straight from the bottle. He told me about a farmer he knows who still has a sack full of German skulls in his barn, and about how he, Boris, played in the bone fields when he was a boy.
Thanks to Glasnost, there will be burials. The Organisation for the Care of German War Graves will bury the bones and restore the cemeteries that the Sixth Army used until the final defeat. In the first months of the battle, the graves were still marked with an iron cross and a soldier's helmet, but by now they have all vanished and will have to be searched for and uncovered. Boris told me that one such site has become a garbage dump and a landfill, another a patchwork of garden plots where the local citizens have erected wooden shacks and lattice fences.
It is the grave robbers, now, who come here. It's good business. An identity tag brings five to ten dollars, an Iron Cross fifty dollars, a Ritterkreuz as much as a hundred. Even a rusted helmet will fetch twenty dollars, which is more than a worker here can earn in two weeks. Before I left, I shelled out more American cigarettes for Boris. Boris gave me the buttons from the army coats, for me and for you. I refused to touch the Iron Cross and the daggers, but the buttons we can keep, nicht wahr? Ursula
“I'd like to see Käthe's old house,” Anna says. It is so much easier to think of William here, a little boy, so far away in the past. Gretchen, his nanny, a thick, greying braid wound around her head like a crown, pouring hot water into a washbasin, laughing and tickling him.
Bei Mir Bist Du Schön
... he remembered her singing, under her breath, her throaty voice lulling him to sleep. Or
Bel ami, bel ami, bel ami.
Gretchen had treasures, wonderful things he was allowed to see. Postcards on which little kittens played with balls of wool. Handkerchiefs with tiny pink and blue flowers in the
corners. Things she brought from places far far away, from village fairs around Breslau where clowns did somersaults, doves flew out of top hats, balls appeared and disappeared in pockets, sleeves, and boxes that, only a moment ago, were empty. Where Gretchen saw a monster woman with a black moustache, and a long white beard.
William's
Oma
always had maids, country girls from around Breslau who arrived by cart, with a basket covered by chequered cloth, smelling of buttermilk. Frieda, Helga, Elsa. William liked their cheerful whistling. They washed the floor on their knees, until the skin of their legs became red and the shape of the floorboards left deep white tracks in it. They laughed when they saw him, and their buttocks swayed as they moved backwards on their knees, like giant crabs, wet floor in front of them shining in the sun.
His
Oma
he recalled had boxes filled with hats. The hats came from Schurz. Some of the hats made her look stern and mysterious. In others she looked distant and very elegant, like an old queen.
He also remembered his mother's fox collar, smelling of perfume, a faint fragrance of jasmine petals. The same smell that lingered inside the wardrobe, among his mother's furs, among her dresses and coats. Before she left the house Käthe wound the fox around her neck, its limp paws with their black claws hanging loose, the fox's mouth snapping at its tail, to hold it in place. The mouth had a spring hidden inside and he liked to play with it, snapping at the maids, pretending the fox was alive.
The maids, he recalled, always talked of the premonition of some end, of something terrible lurking in the dark, waiting to destroy them all. There were signs, they said, whispering among themselves. Bad signs. In Gross Wilkau a calf was born with two heads, foxes were no longer afraid of humans and killed the chickens in broad daylight. Frieda dreamed of fires and floods and teeth falling out. But then they remembered how bad things were, before Hitler. “Riots,” he had heard, “red menace, havoc.” Men in crumpled suits standing on street corners, giving them evil looks, shouting after them, asking how they liked emptying
the chamber pots of the rich. Long, loud whistles, invading eardrums, making the membranes rattle.
Besser ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende.
Better an end with terror than terror without end.
There was a poem he learned, then, from the neighbour's children. So insidious that he couldn't stop chanting it for days. Käthe scolded him all the time, then, but never said it was the poem she minded. His voice, she said, was a problem. It went right through her skull. Gave her headaches. She would complain that he couldn't sit still, ran up and down the stairs, fidgeted at the table, spilled his drinks.
In the poem a spider caught a fly, a sparrow caught a spider, a hawk caught the sparrow, and the chain went on until, at the end of it, a hunter caught a wolf. William could still remember the refrain:
“Please” begged the victim, “let me go,
For I am such a little foe.”
“No,” said the victor, “not at all,
For I am big and you are small!”
“Do you still think we have come from the same place?” she asked him then. He laughed, admitting defeat. No, of course not. Her Wroclaw had little to do with his Breslau.
The house is a short tram ride away, in Karlowice, but Yan insists on driving her there. Anna doesn't know her brother that well anymore, but she can still guess what he must be thinking. This, at least, is a concrete request he can understand, better than these constant comments she makes about how the buildings around them have been modified or transformed. He scowls when she takes out these German photographs to show him the missing globe and the
fin-de-siecle
windows that once decorated the department store of the Barasch Brothers, Breslau's pride. The building still houses a department store, Phoenix; it is shabby inside, with makeshift shelves and crowded, haphazard displays. Right before she left for Canada, Anna lined up there
for four hours, at the butcher's. When she reached the counter she could only buy half a kilogram of fat beef with crushed pieces of bone sticking to it. She was close to tears when she left the store, clutching the bleeding brown paper package, holding it away from her not to stain her clothes.
“Put them away,” her brother says, pointing to the photographs in her hand. There is an embarrassed smile on his face, the one she has seen many times already. He smiles like that whenever she makes what he considers unreasonable or outlandish demands, like refusing to put an unwrapped loaf of bread into the wire basket in a grocery store, or looking for tongs to pick up rolls for supper. She puts the photographs away wondering if her interest in German Breslau is unreasonable or merely outlandish to him.
As they drive, Yan is pointing to street vendors, to streetcars covered with colourful ads, to a new restaurant that has just opened. “Just give us a few years, and you won't recognise the place,” he says. Anna is thinking of Adam's smiling eyes as he ate his pizza, flat and thin but smothered with mushrooms and melted cheese. In his clear, chime-like voice he warned her not to break her leg on the potholes in the pavement.
“So when did they run away?” Yan asks about Käthe and William. Underneath the bridge they drive along, the Oder river is slow and muddy.
“January 1945,” she says. “When Karl Hanke ordered all women and children to leave.”
She would like to tell him more, but Yan changes the subject. He is thinking of opening his own law office, going private. It's impossible to survive on the salary he is making. Adam is growing up; he deserves a better life.
“What do you think?” he asks her, and Anna says it is a great idea.
Karlowice,
Karlovitz,
Anna almost says but stops herself just in time, is a quiet district that escaped the siege of Breslau largely unscathed. Yan parks the car and they walk along the street, past thick, overgrown gardens, in which houses hide behind tall chestnuts and acacias, behind junipers and boxwood hedges. All
Anna can see from the street are tiny towers with metal flags, tiled turrets, white and black triangles of half-timbered walls, the steep red roofs with half circles of windows. The villas are surrounded by wrought iron fences, overgrown with vines.
She is armed with the name of the street and a few photographs she has found among William's things. Three maids in the dining room, holding big Meissen platters. Standing by a long table set with porcelain and family silver, their blouses buttoned up, white aprons starched, stiff, and immaculate. On these platters, William said, were his grandfather's favourite dishes. Veal with mashed potatoes and cauliflower in brown butter, roasted geese stuffed with dried fruit, bowls of sauerkraut and
Eisbein, Wiener Schnitzels,
and vanilla pudding for dessert. Käthe, in front of the house, wearing a long dark coat, a fox collar around her neck. In another picture she is holding William's hand, bending over him, as if listening to a secret. Yan glances at the photographs and hands them back to her without a word.