Nothing But Fear (5 page)

It was a task that could have no end. Father bore the world on his shoulders – there was always something or other to worry about – and his moods rose and fell with the barometer that hung on the wall in the living room. Arranging his face into earnest furrows, he would tap the glass. When the needle showed fair, his face lit up, but it wouldn't be long before he was tapping again and thinking about low pressure and rain and lightning strikes. He spoke of the October storm in 1967 as though it was an
episode from the Bible. Summer brought the danger of fire – he hoped it would be wet – and winter awoke anxiety about frost damage and snow, and he never wanted a white Christmas. ‘Shhh!' he would say and hold his breath, his forefinger pointing heavenwards, when we got to the most important bit of the news – the weather forecast.

Father came home for lunch on the dot of half-past twelve and sat down to a hot meal, and in the evening I would hear the car drive up Hans Ditlevsensgade and come to a halt in the garage. Then the front door would open and close, and Father would call ‘Hello there!' and hang up his hat and coat in the wardrobe. We would hurry up into the kitchen, where Mother would be beaming and saying
‘Ach, Väterchen!'
and kissing him on the cheek and loving him beyond all saying. We laid the table in the dining room, where everything had its allotted place and stood on the table in systematic order – the porcelain, the napkins, the salt and pepper, the vases full of flowers – and Father had eyes in the back of his head. When I opened a drawer in the sideboard to take out the knives and forks, he was on to it in a flash.

‘What do you want?' he'd ask, and then he would shake his head and tell you what to do and how. ‘The forks are in the top middle drawer. No, not there, the middle, at the back.' And so it would go on. Father pursued his insurance business at home and went into the minutest detail. It was impossible to do anything right – and he would forever be adjusting the grandfather clock even though it kept perfect time.

To move was in itself to challenge providence. ‘Careful!' he would say before you had even taken a step, and if you asked him for something – never mind what – he would say no. For him there was nothing worse than a draught. ‘Shut the door!' he would shout as you opened it, and, when you closed it behind you, he would ask you to do it again – and do it properly. Father always thought there was something not quite shut. ‘There's a draught,' he would say and would walk around testing the air, checking the windows, drawing the curtains, until every last hole was plugged and all movement ceased. The floorboards creaked, the doors groaned, the walls had ears, and I was silent and careful and did as he said. I longed for the day when he would stop it and just let things be, but that day never came.

There was no chink in the iron control that Father exerted over his surroundings. If he so much as glanced away, everything would disappear, never to be found again. All he ever did was to keep checking, reassuring himself that reality really did exist, that everything was in place and happened at the right time. When he spoke, it was to state accepted truths – ‘They say… ', ‘What people do is … ' – and all he expressed were self-evident truths. For him all talk was in one sense a telling, a kind of counting, and when he wanted to recount something it turned into a catalogue of prices and shopping lists, inventories of our possessions – the centrepieces, the bronze clock, the carpets – balanced against what they had cost. And that was a long story. In the most literal sense what he did was register life. For him it consisted of facts and figures, and he would observe that
it was cloudy, or that it was late – that was just how things were. Afterwards he would sit and write it all down in his Mayland diary, duration and location, income and expenditure, price of petrol, mileage, time and temperature. He counted the days and added them together, smiling each time they added up to a year he could draw a line under, and the diaries were set side by side on a shelf, where they provided accounts of every year from 1950 onwards.

Father watched over us twenty-four hours a day and 365 days a year. It felt as though our lives would collapse about our ears if he relaxed for one moment. After dinner he would begin all over again, brushing the crumbs off the tablecloth and putting the cutlery back in the sideboard. He counted the knives, the forks, the spoons and locked the drawer. Then he took the key, returning it to the bureau and locking that too. He ranged things in order, put things away, turned off anything that was lit, pulled plugs out of sockets to prevent short circuits, and placed the silver candlesticks in the washing basket – just in case. He checked the radiators, which had to be set at 2½ precisely, went out and closed the garage doors and the garden gate before locking the doors to the house – the front door, the garden door, the cellar door and the doors to the utility room and the garage – and then he hid the keys to make sure no one could break in. Once he had finished locking up and checking lights and packing the house away for the night, he would kiss Mother and me goodnight and lie down in bed. Then he took the key of keys and placed it in his pyjama pocket, drew the duvet over him and, with a mind at ease in the knowledge
that all was secure, he would click the lamp on the bedside table, and the last light in the universe went out.

F
or some reason or another, I decided on ham sandwiches, and that was what I took with me to school. I wouldn't have anything else. There was something wrong – I could feel it quite clearly – and they began to talk behind my back and laugh at me and move away from my table when we had our dinner break. I didn't know why and did my best to fit in, but it got worse and worse, until finally there was someone who pointed a finger and said it to my face. It was my ham sandwich. Instead of being cut lengthways with crust around each slice, it was cut across with the crust on the ends – and that was not how you did it in Denmark.

Mother sliced bread the way she was used to doing in Germany, and I could not bring myself to tell her. I went to school with my alien ham sandwich and chewed my way through the lunch break, but after a while I stopped taking it out of my school bag at all. I left it there, tried to pretend all was as it should be and after school I cycled round trying to find a place where I could throw my packed lunch away without being noticed.

This wasn't as easy as I had thought. There were either too many people or too few, and I was sure that someone would see me through the window if I threw it into a garden. There was always something that held me back, and at last I chucked the package of sandwiches in between
some bushes and cycled on. But I knew straightaway that my mother would walk past that very spot and find it, so I turned around, fished it out and took it home with me.

Even before I got past the garage it was more than I could bear. I parked my bike and ran up the cellar steps shouting ‘Hiya!' to Mother. She was standing in the kitchen, and I looked at her, my face wreathed in smiles for fear of discovery. My guilty conscience was smouldering in my school bag. I went to my room and carefully opened the drawer of my desk – it was the only place that I could call my own and that could be locked. I held my breath, laid the packed lunch in the drawer, closed it as quickly as I could when I heard my mother calling from the living room,
‘Knüdchen! Håndewaschen! Essen!'
and obediently went to wash my hands before eating.

My mother would sit at the table with her cheroot and a beer while I ate. She looked knotted and tense and almost always sad. The only thing holding her in place was her will, and she locked herself inside herself and clenched her fists until they looked like hand grenades, the knuckles shining white. I would have given my life to make her happy, would often take one of her hands and stroke it and tell her about my day. We had played football, and I had gone up to the blackboard. Susanne had got braces and the twins were sending out invitations to their birthday… And it was all lies. For the day had been spent being a German pig, hiding in the breaks, hiding my packed lunch, my bike, my clothes. For everything I had they poured scorn on, even on her name, jeering and sneering, ‘Hildegard! Hildegard!' You
couldn't be called that! I was never able to bring myself to tell Mother and diverted her as best I could. And she would look at me and slowly open her hand, and into its palm I placed what I had and hoped that it was enough.

M
other was alone in a foreign country and as lonely as a body can be. Ever since she was little, all she had known was the loss of those she loved, one by one, and nothing – not even the vodka bottle in the kitchen cupboard – could console her. Her father, Heinrich Voll, was taken to hospital with appendicitis in 1924 and died on the operating table. He was an eye specialist, a gentle, happy man, and between him and Grandmother had been a marriage of true love. Their photograph stood in a silver frame in the living room at home, and showed them sitting on a slope looking across the valley, Grandmother beautiful, Heinrich in uniform. When the First World War broke out, he served as a medical officer and, when he was on leave from the front, he told her about the fox cub he had found in the woods and cared for, about how it had got well again, how he had set it free. After the war he opened a private practice in Halle an der Saale, and Mother would run round the place, playing in the apartment they had next door and popping in when he didn't have any patients. They would laugh together. Those were happy days – and in the twinkling of an eye her heart was wrenched from her. Her father was dead, she was six years old, and there was no greater misery on earth.

They stayed in the apartment, Grandmother and she, and would have had nothing to live off had it not been for the pension the doctors allotted them – 300 Deutschmarks a month – perhaps to salve their guilty consciences for the operation that had gone wrong. But inflation swallowed most of it up, the money became worthless, and, even though Grandmother rented out the practice and later more and more rooms in the house, things could only go from bad to worse. When at last they found themselves crammed into the smallest room that was left and could see no other way out, Grandmother took off her ring and surrendered to Papa Schneider, who had proposed to her. And one day she came home in tears and told Mother that she was being sent away for a time to live with his cousin in Biebrich.

Aunt Gustchen lived with her son and his wife and their two daughters in a little town on the outskirts of Wiesbaden. They were sectarian Protestants and belonged to ‘The Church of the Confession', and there were only two things that interested them – the gossip from the parish council and their eternal war against Catholics and the archbishop in Mainz. Despite the fact that they owned vineyards by the Rhine, they didn't drink and would never even taste the wine. When we visited them once a year, it was just like stepping into an undertaker's.

Her son was a giant. Stooped and bowed under a weight of faith, he sat in the low-ceilinged room with his stick-like wife. Their daughters wore flounced dresses and now and then peeked sideways out of the corners of their eyes, their glances fluttering like sparrows pecking crumbs off the
tablecloth. We would sit down round the table for coffee and fold our hands into steeples and say grace in time to the ticking of the clock.

Vater, segne diese Speise
.

Uns zur Kraft und Dir zum Preise!

‘Father, bless this food we eat. It brings us strength, Thy praises meet.' The house was riddled by Pietist madness. It sinuated itself in ivy and evergreens, Jesus hung on the wall weeping, and there were crucifixes everywhere and needlepoint in frames cross-stitched with Bible quotes in Gothic letters. Father would be fidgeting in his chair, trying to make room for his legs and doing his best to fit in, and I would look across at Mother and think of all she had gone through – and whisper ‘Satan' instead of ‘Amen'.

It was a chilly and sombre and joyless place. It was hard to imagine what it must have been like to lose your father and say goodbye to your mother and arrive here with a suitcase in 1926. Aunt Gustchen had a bun at the nape of her neck and a hairnet, wore buttoned black dresses and had never been young. Her mother had been a church warden's daughter from Thüringen and had been possessed by the devil – she was an epileptic – and Gustchen learned the fear of God at her mother's knee. She lived her life on the lip of the grave with her hands folded and a cross round her neck. They ate stale bread, scrimped and saved, never throwing anything away, despite being comfortably well-todo, because wastefulness was a sin. She pounced upon the least sign of enjoyment and hounded the slightest pleasure – it was cheap to dress up and sinful to smile, while laughter
was evil itself breaking the face into devilish grimaces.

Mother was sent to Sunday school and infected with lice. Her long fair hair was chopped off and her clothes were exchanged for an ugly black shift that rasped against her skin. She was given a prayer book, and they were always praying, following the church calendar on their knees. A year of birth, death and resurrection passed. And then another. And Mother kept waiting to hear from Grandmother and couldn't understand why she had not long since sent for her. She was sure that letters were not being passed on to her but were hidden away somewhere, and she dreamed of escape and cried herself to sleep so as not to wake Aunt Gustchen, who lay beside her in the bed, snoring with eyes wide open.

Mother had felt that she had been forgotten by the whole world, so when at last the message came it was as if a coffin lid had been lifted to let the sun stream in. She was to go to Kleinwanzleben and rejoin her mother and live with her stepfather! She had never met Papa Schneider, and now she took her suitcase and set off by train, thrusting her head out of the window to relish air and speed, and rushed to meet her mother at 100 kilometres an hour. At the station she was met by a servant girl, and together they walked through the streets and out along the country road until they reached the manor. It was surrounded by fields and had long red barns on either side and black timber framing and towers with steep roofs, and on the largest of these there was a clock. They crossed the courtyard and rang the bell. Papa Schneider opened the door, and Mother summoned up her
courage, gave him the broadest smile she could muster, reached out her hand to this complete stranger whom she was about to make her father and said,
‘Guten Tag, Vati.'