Authors: Hugo Hamilton
In October 1985, after my first visit to Czechoslovakia, I stopped in Nuremberg, intending to stay for a few days. The reason was to try and find Franz Kern. If he was in Nuremberg, then I would try and speak to him. I had no address, no contact, no lead whatsoever. What I had planned to do was to make a trawl through the telephone directory and see if such a person still existed in Nuremberg.
I stayed in a guest-house on the outskirts of the city. Every day I went into the city, into the city library, a short walk up the hill from the market square. Nuremberg is one of those fine German cities, restored to its original splendour. In the market square I bought the best of apples. I watched the figurines revolve on the outside of the cathedral. I also spotted a pigeon, trapped in protective netting around the many old plaster statues.
The first day, I copied out all the Franz Kerns and F. Kerns that existed in Nuremberg. I was aware that some Franz Kerns might be ex-directory. Then I took in the outer environs of Nuremberg as well. I had accumulated thirty-five Franz or F. Kerns in all. It happens to be a common name in Germany.
I began to phone them one by one, starting with the city of Nuremberg first. I had prepared my questions carefully: I was apologizing profusely for the intrusion, but I was in Nuremberg in search of a Franz Kern who spent the last days of the war in Czechoslovakia, in Laun. If anyone was to ask why I was looking for him, I would say I had an important but private message for him.
I got as far as ten Franz Kerns before I gave up. Each time, I was met with a slight hostility, sometimes incredulity and more often a short
no.
I spoke to a young Franz Kern who had not
even been alive in 1945. Most of the people I spoke to were women, older women. Some of them were kind, perhaps quite pleasantly reminded of the past. One Frau Kern told me her husband Friedrich was in France throughout the war until he was injured and brought home. She said he was lucky he was injured, otherwise he wouldn’t still be alive. Another Frau Kern said her husband had ended the war in Berlin and spent some time in Russian POW camps. He won’t talk about it, she said, remembering that she was talking to a stranger on the phone. She thought I was a reporter.
Finally, what put me off was the phone-call to a Frau Kern who told me that her husband had been in Czechoslovakia, south, near Brno, for a few years but was then sent to the Russian Front in 1944. He never came back. There was a considerable silence on the phone. She was obviously quite old. I felt terrible, dredging up this grotesque past which people had almost come to terms with.
I decided to leave it alone.
I spent a night in the bars around Nuremberg. You can sit quite happily in a German bar and watch people come and go. Sometimes noisy groups take over. You see men sitting on their own. Sometimes you see two women come in on their own. After a while the waitress will remember you and even acknowledge your presence by bringing up a further beer without you asking for it. They were playing Tom Waits a lot at the time. The owners of the bar had stuck a patchwork of cinema posters on the ceiling, among them some old, post-war centrefolds. Occasionally, you could see somebody distracted from the general conversation glancing up at the brown posters.
I got a taxi back to the
Pension
where I was staying. If I’m right, the guest-house was called Edleman. I came to the decision to forget this search for Franz Kern altogether. I didn’t like the idea of dragging through Nuremberg for days, asking for 10
Pfennig
pieces and phoning from yellow phone-boxes to talk to widows who had lost everything. It was cruel.
Besides, I thought it would be extremely unlikely that Franz
Kern would want to speak to me. I was certain he would refuse to reopen the past and explain it to a new generation totally unconnected with the events and unable to understand the way people felt in the war.
I got to my room, my
Zimmer,
and fell asleep. But I never sleep much on alcohol. Soon enough I was awakened again by a familiar creaking noise. The walls were thin. It was coming from behind me. You can’t mistake that creaking rhythm of a couple in the room next door. Sometimes it was confirmed by a muffled groan. I sat up, driven by curiosity, maybe excitement, maybe anger?
I heard the pace quicken. It seemed to miss a beat and then picked up with renewed speed, sawing to and fro steadily to a racing counterpoint. I heard the voice of a woman pleading. It occurred to me to bang violently on the wall, to stop them, to interrupt at the most vital moment. I thought of covering my head with a pillow. Then it occurred to me to cheer them on, like a supporter. I did nothing and just sat up, a captive audience.
I heard the woman raise her voice:
Ja
…
ja
…
ja
…louder and louder,
Du
…
Du
…until it ended with a clear shout of ecstasy. The final rapture shout was a bit over the top, I thought. Maybe she was faking.
Orgasmus-schrei
…
There was complete silence. I lay back down again. My heart still racing. My eyes open. I could see the white ceiling. I was full of raging desire. Then I felt indifferent. Glad to be alone. Tired. Drunk.
Ready to leave Nuremberg.
Jürgen is not a suspicious man by nature.
He couldn’t be, if he let Anke and myself cycle around Münster on our own for a day. If he never asked any questions about our crash, then he would hardly start probing now about our cycle tour in the country. When he came home from his practice that evening, he said very little. He asked if we had had a good day. Anke kissed him. But as soon as Jürgen went into the kitchen he found something to complain about. It’s often like that; when people raise a small insignificant issue, blowing it completely out of proportion, they must really be getting at something else. Maybe he was suspicious.
He started giving out stink to Anke about the tiny silver jug she had stolen from the cafe during the day. His tirade could be heard in a sort of elevated whisper from the kitchen where Anke worked to prepare a meal. He had found the jug on the window sill. He knew it was new. It almost seemed as though he knew about it before he got back.
Funny, too, that Anke didn’t defend herself at all. As though she was admitting far more than just the jug. By saying nothing, she declared herself guilty to another, under-the-surface, truth. She just hovered around the kitchen avoiding Jürgen’s questions. I heard a pepper-mill grinding.
‘Jürgen, come on! It’s only a jug,’ she said,
‘But that’s just it, Anke. It’s not just a jug. I thought we agreed about this?’
Anke didn’t reply. She began to increase the volume of kitchen clatter by a small but noticeable margin. Jürgen brooded.
Maybe I wasn’t meant to hear all this. I was in the living-room with Alexander, who was pointing at the window, trying to
show me something. He kept saying something I couldn’t understand – you know the way it is when you try too hard-something like ‘Flee, flee.’ I nodded repeatedly and kept saying yes, thinking he was just pointing out of the window or at the window, getting excited about nothing. It was a while before I realized he was pointing at a fly going up the side of the window, hidden from my view at first. I stood up and watched the fly with him. Then he was happy.
I lifted him up to look at the fly more closely. Instead of looking at the fly, Alex began to look at my face, examining my ears, nose, hair, without uttering a sound. When I put him down again he began to jump up and down with excitement. Then he ran around in circles.
I felt I was getting closer to Alex. He was getting to know me.
Outside, Anke and Jürgen were still silently battling it out over the jug. She was laying the table for the meal, saying nothing. She asked him to help. He began to open and close the fridge, endlessly appealing for reasons; making up explanations. ‘What is this innate urge you have to steal? Is it that you want to remember the café? What is it?’ Maybe he had discovered that the jug had become more than a simple ornament to Anke, some kind of symbol or memory of somewhere else, Düsseldorf; events in her life he had not witnessed himself.
Anke reminded him that they had a guest.
Jürgen came in and sat beside me. Alex ran over and threw his arms around his leg. Jürgen took Alexander’s face in both hands and kissed him on the head, quietly, regally. Alex did more gymnastics in the centre of the room until he slipped on the edge of the carpet and fell. ‘Oooh…’ he said, and then smiled at us.
I don’t know how Jürgen could possibly have known what happened between Anke and myself. I felt he must have followed us around all day, into the woods of Münster. He seemed far too good-humoured all of a sudden. He asked how the day went.
‘Fine,’ I said. That’s a lovely bike you have.’
Jürgen raised his palms in a grand gesture of hospitality. It’s all yours, he was saying. Any time.
‘You shouldn’t let her take things like that,’ he said, after a pause, bringing up the subject of the jug once again in a more lighthearted way. ‘She’s a notorious thief. I can’t stop her.’
I felt uncomfortable with Jürgen sitting beside me. Again, he began to offer me his boundless hospitality, saying he would teach me hang-gliding; we could go flying, all three of us, or horse-riding – if only I stayed till Saturday.
Jürgen talked about the events in Germany. The news was beginning to speed up. Germany was moving faster than they could print newspapers. Unity was on the way.
‘It’s an exciting time for Germany,’ he said.
What did he mean by that? I began to read things in his mind that were not there.
All evening, Anke and I behaved as though nothing had happened. How can you behave as though nothing has happened? It seemed as though everything was staged, completely rehearsed and unnatural. Every movement seemed deliberate. If I passed the salt to Anke at the table, I had to do it with less enthusiasm than usual. If she offered the bowl of sliced potatoes, she was doing it with general manners, nothing more. If anything, Anke was ignoring me a little too much, leaning a little too much towards Jürgen.
Everything seemed false. Whenever Anke asked me a question, it seemed as though she was not really interested in having it answered, just in showing that I was still a stranger, still a visitor, and still a friend of the family. We were bending over backwards to show the world, Jürgen at least, that we were not lovers, never had been, never would be.
She asked me things I had told her during the day already. She still wanted to appear as though there were things about me she didn’t know. A normal interest.
Alexander was the only source of real distraction. While Jürgen fed him slowly, Alex shook his head, sometimes losing or scattering the food which Jürgen had just placed in his mouth.
Jürgen was so patient. He kept telling Alex that shaking his head was impractical. I never saw Jürgen get angry with him. He couldn’t. When Alex began to put things on his head, we all laughed out loud together. Alex’s blue fork fell off the table.
Then Alex began to look underneath the table. He was making life difficult for Jürgen but easy for us. Jürgen chased him around with a spoon.
It is impossible to hide. And it’s impossible to act like nothing happened. You have a need to tell. Maybe Anke thought it was better to come clean and bring it all out in the open.
‘On the way home, we were caught in the rain,’ Anke said. It gave me a start to hear her say it. ‘We got soaked. I’ve never got so wet in all my life. There was nowhere to shelter, anywhere.’
Jürgen didn’t seem to hear her. He was just bending down under the table to pick up Alexander’s fork from the floor. Anke looked over at me. She shrugged. I was waiting for Jürgen to come up again and look into my eyes but he seemed to stay down there. Alex went under the table with him.
Anke pursed her lips and sent me a long, glorious kiss across the table. Then she got up to make the coffee.
The strain of secrecy makes you want to blow everything; tell all, never mind the consequence. Why conceal what’s on your mind? Telling makes you honest.
I have always wanted to ask Anke why she married Jürgen. Why she said nothing to me at the time. I always wanted to tell her how much it killed me. But we never discussed that kind of thing. It was as though any analysis would embroil us in something complicated, something tedious. Anything between Anke and myself has always been simple and short.
Once she got married, I had no wish to interfere. I stayed away from them on purpose. But then I found I had shunned the two best friends I’ve ever had.
Anke and I had walked off the red sandy path through the trees until we reached a clearing at the top of a low hill. From the summit we could see the flat countryside all around. The town of Münster lay in the distance on the horizon, like a town in the past, under pillows of dark, fast-moving clouds, the sun occasionally breaking through like orange spotlights. Patches of land were lit up. What is it about landscape that makes you think back, beyond your own past into history? Germany looked ancient. I was thinking timber houses, timber fences, horses and carts, troubadours.
As the clouds moved above us, the bright patches of land seemed to shift too. We stood in sunlight, still unusually warm for October, reviewing this shifting landscape. Anke was holding my hand. We could see Münster under rain; the sky and the land were connected by blue-grey beams of rain. Elsewhere, the sun chased the rain. The sky was full of colour.
Anke pulled me towards her, as if to say ‘enough of this talking’. I should not have been so surprised; she had no need
for an explanation. She kissed. There was something about the shape of her lips, or maybe it’s the taste of her lips, that was so clear; I was able to say I remembered Anke’s lips. Lips never change.
None of this was intended. Afterwards, it seemed completely unavoidable.
Anke placed the side of her face against my chest. Perhaps I thought she wanted the comfort of a stranger, of an old friend. I kept staring out over her head at Münster under a downpour. Something told me that we would soon be under the same downpour. We ignored it.
These are some of the things that came to mind as Anke took my hand and led me back into the trees. I thought of the evaporation which takes place when the sun hits the road after rain. I thought of Anke in Düsseldorf, her apartment, her balcony. I have never separated her from these memories.
Funny. I began to think of horses. It’s happened before. Maybe there is something erotic about horses. The sight of a horse’s eye. The smell of horses. The way they walk. The crunch of a horse chewing an apple. I lingered on apples for a moment, apples left on trees long after they ripen, long after the leaves have withered, gone yellow; waiting for the first substantial storm to clear them all.
Anke found a place among the trees where the sun came through. I was aware that Anke had a look in her eyes that bordered on the ferocious. I was aware that she put her back against a tree; you can feel it when somebody can’t go back any more.
We said nothing about Jürgen. Would it have made any difference? I thought of Jürgen, working in his practice. I thought of the women putting make-up on before their examination. Then I thought of the bikes badly concealed among the trees at the foot of the hill.
I was aware of the smell of rain. And the smell of pine. I was aware of warmth. I was aware that we were free-standing at times, that I held her thigh with one hand and her neck with the
other, that she held on to a branch for support, and that, if anyone had been watching at a distance, they would have seen the top of the tree rocking.
Another squadron of RAF jets flew over the area, not directly over us but somewhere close, maybe two kilometres away, enough to fill the forest with solid noise. We couldn’t hear each other. All I saw was Anke’s eyes; fierce, in pain, in tears, in ecstasy.
The sound of the jets receded. Either that or it merged with the sound of rain. We might have sheltered in the trees, but we ran down to the bikes and began to set off along the road. The rain bounced on the red sand. There were pools along the path with domes of milky brown bubbles from the force of the rain. An orange spray leaped up from Anke’s back wheel. Her hair was washed firm against her skull and in a fringe down over her eyes.