Authors: Hugo Hamilton
Three weeks later, I was on my way to Nuremberg again to meet the real Franz Kern. The woman, Frau Jazinski, who had answered my ad in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine,
tried at first to establish my reasons for wanting to meet him. She wouldn’t even say whether he was alive or not. She asked me to give my reasons in writing in the most specific terms. I remained evasive in my next letter, stressing that I had nothing to do with researching war crimes or anything. All I wanted was to pass on a message from somebody, a colleague who had been in Laun with Franz Kern.
Eventually, Frau Jazinski gave me a cautious invitation. I phoned her and set up a date to travel to Nuremberg. She still gave little information about Kern, and I had the feeling that she was acting as a go-between, that it was really Franz Kern who had seen the ad and asked her to vet me on his behalf.
I stayed at the
Pension
Sonne again.
‘Another market survey?’ the owner Frau Schellinger asked with a broad smile. She told me straight out that she liked it when her old guests came back again.
The following afternoon I went to visit Frau Jazinski at the address she had given me, a large house close to the city centre. She answered the door herself and searched me with her eyes. I could see she had her suspicions about me. She turned out to be Franz Kern’s daughter, his only child. She offered me some coffee and told me that her father had just recently come out of hospital and that he was still unwell. With that, she asked me to give the message to her so that she could pass it on to him.
I told her it was personal. I could only pass it on myself. All this was beginning to sound far too clandestine and intriguing. I
wished she weren’t so suspicious and that everything would be more simple. I assured her again that I had nothing to do with war-crimes detection. I had no interest in the holocaust. I would leave that to somebody with a clean slate.
By the time she agreed to drive me over to her father’s apartment I realized that she had been kept completely in the dark. She wanted to find out something for herself before I met Kern. He had told her nothing about Laun. And nothing about the journey home either.
On the way over in the car, Frau Jazinski became more friendly. She began to tell me about their business. They owned a big hi-fi shop in the city centre. She insisted on driving down the street and asking me to look at the shop.
‘My father started this business on his own after the war. It wasn’t easy. Things were very hard for him and my mother. They had to save every
Pfennig.’
How often had I heard that story? She went on praising her father for building up the shop. In the past ten years, with her husband taking over as managing director, the turnover had multiplied a hundredfold, she said proudly. I told her she was in the right business.
She still didn’t know exactly why I had come to visit her father. Franz Kern had consented to see me without telling her why. She was sure it would all come out sooner or later.
I asked her about her mother. She was dead. Almost ten years ago.
Franz Kern lived in the top half of a house. The living-room had a spacious balcony looking out over a large garden. The walls were lined with books. The place was well looked-after.
I was going to be surprised by this meeting. I had no idea what he looked like, no idea what to expect.
Franz Kern was a tall man; even in his late seventies, he was as tall as I was. He stood up from his chair by the window to greet me, grimacing a little with stiffness or pain. I begged him not to get up on my account. We shook hands and he asked me to sit down, pointing with the palm of his hand towards an
armchair. He was a very calm man, who moved around the room slowly on his stick. He was able to close the window on his own, until his daughter came running and told him to leave it to her. Maria, as he called her, went out to make coffee in the kitchen.
Kern looked at me for a long time. He had a likeable smile. You could have nothing against him. He just kept staring at me until I looked away. Old people are allowed to do that.
‘You look like her,’ he said quietly.
I didn’t reply.
‘Bertha…Where did she get to?’ he asked, almost in a dreamy way, still looking at me, but somehow as though he was actually talking to her. And somehow, he wasn’t expecting me to answer. He put his finger up to his mouth to say: Shhhh.
He didn’t want his daughter to know. We sat like mute men looking at each other while Maria brought in the coffee, filled the cups and apportioned the ostentatious strawberry cake she had brought. We sat there without ever mentioning anything. Kern was saying nothing while Maria was there. So we talked about the united Germany – what else? It was like talking about the weather. Maria said how exciting it was for Germany. Kern sat back.
‘At long last,’ he said. ‘At last, we can breathe like Germans again. It’s what we were all running from at the end of the war. This Soviet monster…’
He seemed angry.
‘We saw the tanks, the Red Army tanks behind us as we fled…’
He wasn’t boastful; I’ve met survivors with varying emotions, from anger to indifference. I’ve met survivors who talked about their luck, like a lottery prize. And survivors who claimed credit for their own lives, people who reckoned they were indestructible, as though they had an invincible charm which saved their own necks. They made themselves look like those trick birthday candles which flare up every time you blow them out. It was as if nothing in the perverse logic of the Reich had anything to do
with it; their being alive. There were others I met who had put their trust in God, and thanked God with every mouthful of cake, with every word, for their existence.
Franz Kern was none of these. He acknowledged that he was just lucky, no more. Or can you say that survivors are lucky, he asked. Can you be lucky at the expense of somebody else? In any case, Kern didn’t take his life for granted.
He turned to Maria, his daughter, and asked her if she had something to do in the area. If she wished, she could leave us to talk for a while. She was a little put out. But she left and said she would be back in an hour. I told her I could make my own way back if she liked. But she insisted on driving me back. She was afraid her father might never tell her anything and was determined to squeeze some information out of me on the way home.
‘I’ve thought a lot about luck,’ he said, as soon as Maria was gone.
‘I think we gave too much credit to luck, after the war. It really was made out to be something. We tried to make certain that we could make it a permanent thing; everyone worked hard to ensure that luck was stacked up for themselves. I mean, why should anyone have to be lucky to be alive?
‘Then they try to pass the luck on to their next of kin.’
He nodded at the door where Maria had gone out. He included himself in all his observations. He spoke freely, as though he had often spoken to me before, or as though he had been waiting for years to say this to me.
‘Idiots. Today we take luck for granted, here in Germany, and we don’t know what to do with it. I have never seen Germans so unhappy. This business with the Wall and German unity is not going to make them happier either. I see my own daughter, Maria, strangled by luck.’
Kern stopped talking and looked at me again for a long time, as though he hadn’t seen me for years.
I had come to ask him questions. I wanted to know about Bertha Sommer. What happened? He was going to tell me everything, honestly. Otherwise he wouldn’t have asked me to
come. I knew he would unfold everything in his own way; he had nothing to hide. And there was no need to force anything.
I told him how the diaries of Bertha Sommer had come into my hands and how they ended abruptly after the war, in May 1945. She had taken them up again, years later, but they had become domestic, they talked about happy moments in her life, the linguistic charms of her children when they were small, locks of hair etc. But there were five attempts to write down what she called ‘something very painful’. Some agonizing memory which she could never get rid of or share with anyone. She had written it to her own children, a letter which was not to be opened until after her death, in which she wanted to unfold a ‘heavy secret’. But she never finished it. After a while she must have learned to suppress it.
‘When did she die?’ he asked, sitting up suddenly.
‘August the sixth, five years ago,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry.’ He stared at the floor for a while. ‘I never found out where she went. Where did she go?’
‘Vermont,’ I said. ‘She spent all of her life in America, living in Vermont. As far as I know, she came back to Germany once in the sixties, that was all.’
Franz Kern became even more silent and pensive.
‘So she got to America after all…’
I realized that Kern needed long pauses of silence to assimilate the information and the entirely new perspective it foisted on his life. I had given him an image of Bertha Sommer’s life which he had never imagined. He had thought of every other permutation of her life. He had wished her well as she drifted out of his memory.
‘Did she ever talk about the shooting?’ he asked.
‘She mentioned something.’
‘She wasn’t able to forget it,’ he said. Dreaming again. It was as though he was suddenly back in the past. ‘That’s what the heavy secret was. She couldn’t forget. Maybe if we were still together, she might have got over it. I couldn’t get it out of my head, either. I suppose we were afraid there would be a trial, an
investigation. There was no need for any of that. It was a big mistake. All of it.’
He talked for a long time. Explained everything. The light faded outside. Another feeble wintry evening. Kitchen windows began to steam up everywhere in Nuremberg. TVs came on. Cartoons. News. Football results. People all over Germany sealed into their own luck.
‘It was a mistake,’ he said. ‘They were different times. Everybody had to get away with their own lives. Everybody had a duty to themselves. Every woman has a duty to be a woman. People like Bertha had a duty to survive. There was nothing for her to regret. She had nothing to hide. She was nothing but honesty.’
The phone rang. It looked as though Kern was going to ignore it. I asked if I should answer it for him. It was Maria. I called her Frau Jazinski, giving her the proper respect. She said she was coming over again to make an evening meal. I was welcome to stay and have something to eat.
There was a slight panic. There was a lot that Franz Kern and I had not yet discussed. He was still determined to keep his daughter out of all this.
‘There is no point in her asking me endless questions at this stage. It would turn the place into a war tribunal.’
‘How much does she know?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’
I looked at him with some obvious surprise.
‘She knows about Laun. She knows that I fled from the Russians. That I saved a girl’s life. That I was involved in a skirmish with partisans and rescued a girl from certain death. My daughter is proud of me. As proud as you can be in this country…
‘But she knows nothing about Bertha. She doesn’t know that I loved Bertha. That I would have gone anywhere with her…That I was mad about her…
‘And I never told anyone that I killed two men long after the war was over. Well, maybe it was the twilight of the war. Maybe
the war wasn’t over. Maybe it’s still not over.’
Kern stood up. He grimaced and said he had some pain in his leg that was tormenting him. He made a remark about being told by people that pain and pleasure were the same thing. He wasn’t convinced. He smiled and walked over to an antique bureau, unlocked a small, carved door and searched around for something. He held his stick pinned against the bureau with his knee.
‘I’ve never forgotten your mother,’ he said.
He came over and handed me a locket.
‘This used to belong to her. I think you should have it now. She gave it to me before she disappeared. I never saw her again. I had no idea where she went.’
I looked at the locket for a while. Kern switched on a low table lamp so that I could see better.
‘She got it in France, I think.’ Then he stood looking out through the window into the dark, beyond the reflection of the interior, the table lamp, the furniture of his own living-room, as though he could actually see something out there, as though he could see right back to the Fichtel mountains, to the lake, and the woods.
I handed the locket back towards him but he refused to take it back.
‘No. I want you to have it. I am glad you came. I wouldn’t like to have given it to anyone else.’
He stood looking out of the window or at the reflection of the room. I stood beside him. It was as though the two of us were looking at each other in a mirror.
‘Am I German or American? Or Polish?’ I asked, suddenly.
I regretted asking this almost as soon as I had said it.
‘You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. I understand.’
‘I couldn’t answer that,’ he said, turning around. ‘I wouldn’t know. But it feels like talking to a son.’
I could see that it was all beginning to upset him. His eyes had become watery. I could see how old he was now. He
reached out his arm to place it around my shoulder and I helped him back to his chair.
‘Now tell me about Vermont,’ he said.
He wanted to know everything. Every small detail. He asked me to tell him about myself, what I was doing. Where I was living. He saw that I was still holding the locket in my hand and told me to put it away before his daughter came back.
There were further pauses as he took the whole picture of Bertha Sommer’s life into his memory. It was as though her life had been lived out in an hour, while we were talking. He had spent his whole life searching for her in his imagination. He had settled for vague explanations, imaginary versions of her life which he could live with. It was as though she had suddenly come back to him. He would have to change his whole life again. He had to adjust his past; everything.
‘You look like her,’ he said again, staring at me.