Interpreters (10 page)

Another of her hobbies to which we’d be recruited was fruit-picking. Each year, she would pick pounds and pounds of strawberries and raspberries or whatever else was in season. Then she would drive to the old people’s home near her house and deliver them.

‘Ach! They are all so gaga,’ she would sigh as she got back into the car. ‘They sit around all day staring at the television, even if it is not on. Or playing that stupid English bingo game. If they at least played bridge, their brains would have some exercise and they wouldn’t just be sitting there like vegetables. I said that to the matron when I gave her the strawberries.’

‘And what did the matron say?’ I asked, curious to know how other people dealt with my grandmother.

‘I don’t know. She had one of those local accents that no one can understand. So I just nodded my head like this and left.’

My grandmother would keep a punnet or two of raspberries and strawberries, which would form the basis of her
rote grütze.
We would watch with some fascination as she emptied the fruit, wriggling maggots and all, into a saucepan and turned it into the delicious pudding which we’d eat with the top of the milk poured over it. We learned not to think about the specks in the pudding that were neither raspberry pips nor strawberry leaves.

I love to go back to Germany, for there I am a somebody
, my grandmother would say. Each year, she would return to Germany to say goodbye to all her old friends. As the years went by, and more and more of her friends died, Max noted that these by now very old friends probably all dreaded a farewell visit from my grandmother, as it was more likely to presage their own death than hers.

So many times, I have said, ‘Thank God for Hitler,’ for if we had not had to leave Germany because of the Nazis and had not gone to Turkey we would not have had all those marvellous times and opportunities and met so many interesting people. For not only was your grandfather in charge of child health throughout the whole of the country, he took over the responsibility for the medical practice of the colony of exiles, and in time also the entire diplomatic corps of the Allies.

The children of the German embassy came under his care too as they had greater confidence in a European professor than in a local doctor. It happened very occasionally that a Nazi would prefer to have some other doctor. Only one declared quite openly, ‘I would rather have my child die than have it treated by a Jew.’ The poor child died soon after, of meningitis, I think
.

I never met my grandfather, Arthur Rosenthal. Clara once said that a colleague of his in Turkey, for whom he had great respect, had told him that people like him should return in order to re-educate the younger generation in Germany. And so they went back to Germany in 1950, where Arthur took up a prestigious university position. Six months later, he died of a heart attack on a picnic aged only fifty-nine, in the same month that my father qualified as a doctor in London. My father kept a photograph of him on his bookshelf. I used to look at my grandfather’s kindly face, the smile lines around his eyes, his shiny bald head, and examine him for links to my father or to Max. My father never once spoke about my grandfather and would feign deafness if I ever asked about him.

‘Didn’t he like him?’ I asked my mother once.

‘Your grandmother kept your grandfather pretty much to herself as far as I know – I doubt your father ever saw much of him. But I think he loved his father so much, he can’t bring himself to talk about him. That’s the way your
father is – anything difficult or painful, you just don’t talk about it.’

I could tell we were heading for dangerous ground here, so I changed the subject. 

I can’t tell you how happy I was the time I thought they’d come to take my father away. I was supposed to be meeting my friend Helga at a Furtwängler concert. You’ve heard of
Kraft durch Freude?
– well, never mind – and I was looking everywhere for the tickets. I couldn’t find them anywhere. I was too old now for my father to hit me but he used to find other ways of making my life difficult. Textbooks of mine would go missing and I’d be punished at school, or messages would fail to reach me and I’d miss important meetings or find I’d let my friends down. And suddenly there was a knock on the door and I could see through the glass that it was Herr Schering, who lived with his mother at the end of our street, dressed in his SS uniform. We’d see him go home in the evenings in his black uniform and boots and my mother would say, ‘Don’t move – the SS man is coming past.’ Nobody really spoke to him – and his old mother rarely left the house. I was running incredibly late and still looking for my tickets and I didn’t really want to open the door but I thought – finally! They’ve come to get my father. They’ve heard him listening to the BBC. So I opened the door and said, ‘My father’s in the summer house.’ But Herr Schering said, ‘It’s you I wanted to see.’ And he said he’d heard that I’d been presented with a medal recently and that I should treasure it forever. And then he asked me if I was just going out somewhere and I told him I was going to the Furtwängler concert but couldn’t find my tickets. And he said he’d played
with Furtwängler himself. When he’d been a student at the Conservatoire. But that now he didn’t have the time to play the French horn as much as he’d like to – there were other, more important things to do. And then he said, ‘What’s that sticking out of your top pocket?’ And there they were. The tickets. And he held out a pair of thick black woollen trousers and said, ‘I wondered if you’d have a use for these. They’ll need making smaller but I don’t need them, I’ve been issued with another pair and it’s a waste to throw them away.’ And that’s really how I started to sew quite seriously. It was beautiful material. I altered them and made deep pockets with the left-over material and they would have lasted for another twenty years if they hadn’t been incinerated. They lasted longer than their original owner, in any case. A couple of weeks later, our SS neighbour came out of his bomb shelter to look at the damage to his house and a roof tile fell on his head and he died. They took his old mother away and I heard she died in hospital shortly afterwards.  

Ben’s room resembles a small arsenal belonging to someone ready for any means of attack. Scattered over the bright blue carpet are two silver pistols in leather-look holsters, a large machine gun, a gun that fires ping-pong balls, a plastic dagger, a set of wooden swords, some arrows and a broken bow. A naked Action Man lies on the windowsill, its head twisted at an impossible angle, as if recoiling from the sight of its bare rippling muscles and its tiny beige bulge of genitalia.

Max and I used to play cowboys and Indians a lot. He was always the cowboy, and I the Indian. I don’t know why that was. Probably because of the lovely long head-dress I got to wear, with its spiky red, yellow and blue feathers. We played in the garden, around our tepee. Playing inside was too risky. Shortly after our grandmother had presented us with the sets of costumes and accompanying weapons, our mother had come into Max’s room to call us down for supper. Max had leapt out from behind his curtain where he’d been waiting to ambush me, grabbed her round the neck and held a revolver to her head.

‘Hands up!’ he yelled.

‘Christ almighty!’ she shouted, shaking Max off and staggering back towards the wall. We were impressed. She’d got the hang of the game pretty quickly. But then we saw that she was shaking. ‘Don’t ever do that again, do you hear?’ she said, her voice trembling with anger.

‘It’s just a game, Mum,’ said Max, soothingly.

‘Just don’t ever point a gun at me again. Ever.’

‘But it’s not real.’

‘I don’t care. Just don’t do it, do you hear me?’

‘What about arrows?’ I asked, rearranging my head-dress, anxious not to be excluded from the drama.

‘What about them?’

‘Can we shoot arrows at you?’

‘If you must – but from a long distance away and not at my head.’

‘But that’s not fair,’ said Max. ‘You tell me off about the gun and then let her shoot you with a bow and arrow. Arrows are just as lethal. Ask any old Indian.’

‘Well, that’s just how it is.’

‘Then I’ll shoot myself instead,’ he said dramatically, holding the barrel of the gun to his temple.

My mother winced. ‘Put the damned thing down!’ she shouted.

‘It’s not loaded,’ I protested. ‘It’s not even got caps in it. We ran out. And anyway, you’re always telling us not to swear.’

‘Look, I’m sorry. You can keep your guns now that you’ve got them. I just never want to see them. Ever. And never, ever point one at me. Do you hear?’

It wasn’t only guns we had to be careful about. We could make our mother jump out of her skin just by coming up behind her very quietly. As we never wore shoes in the house, this happened a lot. We found it quite funny, watching her literally jump and then clutch her chest as she spun round, but she wasn’t at all amused. When we realised that she was far less likely to agree to what we wanted in the aftermath of a shock, we found various ways of heralding our arrival – singing or calling out – as we approached whichever part of the house she was in.

‘And is your mother still so very unstable?’ our grandmother used to ask, rather too loudly, when she came to stay.

‘She’s fine,’ we’d say, looking round anxiously to check that our mother was out of hearing.

‘Such a shame for your poor father.’

‘She’s
fine
. Really.’

‘After all the stress at work and then coming home to all that.’

We didn’t really know what ‘all that’ meant, but we did know it didn’t sound fair.

‘Mum’s all right. And anyway, Dad normally comes home pretty late.’

When I was about thirteen, and after a particularly disastrous visit, my mother told my father that Clara was no longer welcome in our house. Max and I could carry on seeing her whenever we wanted to and so could my father, of course. But Clara was not coming to Tenterden Close ever again.

‘But Mum,’ I said, ‘you can’t make Dad do that. It’ll hurt Clara’s feelings.’

‘And what about
my
feelings? Can’t there be
one
time when someone thinks about
my
feelings.’

‘But she doesn’t really mean all the horrible things she says,’ said Max. ‘They sound worse than they are. It’s because she’s German.’

My father didn’t say anything but he must have passed the message on. I wondered how he fitted the decree into his comfortable family narrative. Max and I continued to visit our grandmother in Oxford, as did my father, but the guest room remained empty, home only to my mother’s sewing machine and a dressmaker’s dummy we called Natasha. (I think
War and Peace
was on TV at the time.)

My grandmother never mentioned her banishment. It was as if she had never been to stay with us; had only ever entertained us in her own home. Max and I were happy to see her on her own territory where we didn’t have to protect our mother from the upset and outrage she caused. My father must have been annoyed at the inconvenience of having to
travel to Oxford to see his mother but, if that was the case, he never complained.

My grandmother was interested in nothing as much as ‘the Family’, by which she meant both her ancestors and descendants and those of her husband. With the help of an elderly and amenable second cousin, she had managed to draw up an immense and highly complicated family tree which went back to Polish rabbis of the seventeenth century. One of my great-uncles claimed Einstein as a relative but, try as I might, I never managed to find him among the hundreds of names.

I’m not sure my history teacher was expecting a chart covering most of one wall when she set us the task of tracing our ancestors as part of a fifth-year genealogy project.

‘Are you quite sure that’s right?’ she asked, squinting up at the chart and pointing to the names three lines above mine and Max’s.

‘I’m positive it is,’ I replied. ‘I can’t imagine my grandmother making a mistake about her relatives. She’s like the Rose Kennedy of the Rosenthals.’

‘But your grandmother’s mother and aunt were twins.’

‘Yes, identical ones. Even their parents couldn’t tell them apart. They were legendary.’

‘Ah –’ said Miss Harvey. ‘And then two of their children married each other.’

‘They were cousins – yes. It was very common at the time. For first cousins to marry each other.’

‘I see,’ said Miss Harvey, looking no less concerned.

When I got home, my mother smiled as I described my teacher’s disquiet. ‘It’s the biology, not the history that Miss Harvey is worried about.’

‘What about it?’

‘They’d do anything to keep the money in the family, those Rosenthals and Eisensteins. And you wonder why you’ve got so many mad relatives.’

‘I don’t!’

‘Well, maybe you should. Ask your grandmother about Tante Greta.’

‘What about Tante Greta?’

‘Her father was one of the leading anatomists of the time. Another of those over-achieving famous men, of course. But when Greta didn’t grow properly, he just said, “Well, that’s good if she stays small; it’ll save buying her new clothes.” I bet your grandmother didn’t tell you there was a dwarf in the family!’

‘Tante Greta wasn’t a
dwarf
! I’ve seen photographs of her. She was just a very small person.’

‘Dwarf. Small person. It’s all the same.’

‘No, it isn’t!’

And then there was Tante Käthe.
And here
, my grandmother had said as she helped me copy out her family tree, pointing to a gap in the branches with her gnarled index finger.
Put down Hänsel Eisenstein married Eva Rosen 1905 and they had, in 1907, Erik and in 1910, Hilde, and in 1911, Käthe – but don’t bother to write her down
.

I wanted to ask my mother about Tante Käthe, but I couldn’t bear the prospect of her triumphant contempt. Nor did I want to hear too many stories of seriously mad blood relatives, particularly those born in the same century as me.

‘We’re supposed to do both sides of the family,’ I told my mother. ‘For this history project.’

‘Haven’t you got enough relatives on your father’s side?’

‘That’s not the point. I need your side too. Just because you’re ordinary and English and your parents died when you were quite young, it doesn’t mean you’re not interesting. It doesn’t mean I can just leave you out.’

‘I’m really not in the mood to go through all that. Can’t you just make it up?’

‘Hardly!’

‘But that’s what you’re good at – making up stories.’

‘But I can’t make up an entire family.’

‘I don’t see why not.’

And that was that. I never did manage to assemble my mother’s family tree. There were no other living relatives on that side, or at least none I’d ever been told of. And so I made up a small dynasty of Croydon railway executives, Merton brewers and Bromley shoe shop owners going back to the 1920s and Miss Harvey gave my efforts an A minus.