The Pegnitz Junction (21 page)

Julius was not so much concerned with Bibi as with Possner. When he helped other people it was because he was helping the firm. His life was his work; his faith was in Possner’s future. I believed in Julius. In one of the books belonging to him – the books that gave me so much trouble on winter afternoons – I read that belief, like love, could not be taken by storm. I knew that Julius lied sometimes, but so do all divinities. Divinities invented convenient fables and they appeared in strange disguises, but they were never mistaken. I believed, because he said it, that we would not live among ashes forever, and that he would give me a new, beautiful house. Because he vouched for Bibi’s genius I had to believe in it too. It was my duty to imagine Bibi ten years from now with a Nobel Prize for chemistry. This was another Bibi, tall and gracious and speaking pure German. She had stopped singing tunes from
The Merry Wives of Windsor
in such an annoying way, she no longer sat like an elephant or laughed with her mouth wide open or held bread on the palm of her hand to spread it with margarine.

If, in this refined and comfortable future, I corrected Bibi’s manners it was a sign that the postwar social amnesty could not go on. In fact, the rules of difference were restored long before the symphony orchestras were full strength, the prisoners were home, the schools were rebuilt. Seeing where Bibi was going, I began wondering where she had started out. Her name, Beate Brüning, was honest and plain. She hinted that once she had not lived like other people and had missed some
of her schooling on that account. Why? Had she been ill, or delinquent? Was she, as well as Silesian, slightly foreign? Sometimes male ancestors had been careless about the women they married. Perhaps Bibi had been unable to give a good account of herself. My textbook of elementary biology in high school explained about the pure and the impure, beginning with plant life. Here was the picture of an upright, splendid, native plant, and next to it the photograph of a spindly thing that never bloomed and that was in some way an alien flower. Bibi’s round face, her calm eyes, her expression of sweetness and anxiety to please spoke of nothing but peasant sanity; still, she was different; she was “other.” She never mentioned her family or said how they had died. I could only guess that they must have vanished in the normal way of a recent period – killed at the front, or lost without trace in the east, or burned alive in air raids. Who were the Brünings? Was she ashamed of them? Were they Socialists, radicals, troublemakers, black-marketeers, prostitutes, wife-beaters, informers, Witnesses of Jehovah? After she died no one came forward to claim her bank account, though Julius was scrupulous about advertising. Whoever the Brünings were, Bibi was their survivor, and she was as pure as the rest of us in the sense that she was alone, swept clean of friends and childhood myths and of childhood itself. But someone, at some time, must have existed and must have called her Bibi. A diminutive is not a thing you invent for yourself.

Of course, my life was not composed of these long speculations, but of sub-themes, common questions and answers. One day new information about Julius came into my hands. As I
stood on a chair to fetch a pair of bedsheets down from the high shelf of a cupboard, a folded blanket and an old jacket belonging to him came slipping down on top of me. I clutched at the edge of the shelf to steady myself and had under my fingers someone’s diary. Still standing on the chair, I let the diary fall open. I read how Julius and an unknown girl – the writer of the diary – had pushed the girl’s bed close to a window one sunny winter afternoon. “No one could see us,” the girl felt obliged to note, as if she were writing for some other person. A bombed wall outlined in snow was their only neighbour. The sky was winter blue.

Now I am free
was my first thought, but what did I mean? I wanted to live with Julius, not without him. I did not know what I meant.

I remembered the new, beautiful house he had promised, with the clock from Holland, the wallpaper from France, the swimming-pool tiles from Italy. I sat down and read the diary through.

On the girl’s birthday Julius took her to a restaurant, but friends “connected with him professionally” came in. After twisting and turning and trying to hide his face, Julius sent her to the ladies’ room with instructions to wait there for five minutes and then go home without stopping to speak to him. “What a bad ending for an evening that began with such promise,” the diarist remarked. Did she live in Cologne? “Two nights,” she recorded, or “one afternoon,” or “one and one-half hours,” followed by “did everything,” then “everything,” then finally just the initial of the word, as if she herself were no longer surprised or enchanted. One dull lonely weekend when
she had not seen Julius for days, she wrote, “The sun is shining on all the rooftops and filling every heart with gladness while I Over the rooftops the sun shines but I My heart is sad though the sun is filling every heart …”

“Helga, are you all right?”

Here was Bibi breaking in – anxious, good, and extremely comic. Her accent would have made even tragedy seem hilarious, I thought then. I began to laugh, and blurted out, “Julius has always had other women, but now he leaves their belongings where I can find them.” Bibi’s look of shock was on my behalf. “…  always had women,” I repeated. “I said I didn’t mind.” The truth was that each time had nearly killed me. Also, the girls were poor things, sometimes barely literate. Looking down at the diary on my lap I thought, Well, at least this one can spell, and I am his wife, and he treats me with consideration, and he has promised me a house.

“Oh, Helga,” Bibi cried, kneeling and clutching my hands, “you have always been kind to me.” She muttered something else. I made her repeat it. “I don’t understand; I don’t keep that sort of a diary” was what Bibi had said.

S
o in the same hour I found out about Bibi and Julius too. Here was my situation: I was pregnant, and I should not have been standing on a chair to begin with. I was ill. I had such violent spasms sometimes that Julius would ask if I was trying to vomit the baby. I had absolutely no one but Julius, and nowhere to go. Moreover, as I have said, I did not
want
to live without him. As for Bibi, when I was feeling at my most
wretched she was the only person the smell of whose skin and hair did not turn my stomach. I could not stand the scent of soap, or cologne, or food cooking, or milk, or smoke, or other people. Bibi looked after me. Once she said shyly, “I know, I know that mixture of hunger and nausea, when all you long for is good white bread.” I remember sweating and trembling and thinking that it was she, it was Bibi, who was the good white bread. I never hated Bibi. I may have pitied her. I knew a little about Julius and I had a fear of explosions. I could have said to Julius, “I know about Bibi and you.” What next? Bibi then departs and Julius and I are alone. He knows I know, which means we live in ruins and ashes forever. All I could feel was Bibi’s utter misery; I saw her stricken face, her rough hands, and then I began to cry too, and we two – we two grown-up war orphans – dried each other’s tears. I am quite certain Bibi never knew I had understood.

It was Bibi who saw me into the clinic where Roma was born. Julius was in Belgium. I asked Bibi to send him a telegram concerning the baby’s name. “I want Roma because that was where she was conceived,” I told her. “Don’t put
conceived
in the telegram. Julius will understand.”

She nodded and said something in her ridiculous accent and went out the door. In a sense I never saw her again; I mean that this was the last I saw of a certain young, good-hearted Bibi. Julius came back before receiving the telegram; perhaps she hadn’t sent it. It was two days before I remembered to ask about Bibi, and another before she was found. She had taken gardénal. She was alive, but she had been in a long, untended coma. The flesh on her legs had begun to alter, and she had to
stay for a long time in the hospital – the hospital where Roma was born – after her skin-graft operations. That was why she wore thick stockings forever after, even in summer.

No one told me, at first. Julius made up a story. He said Bibi had met a young engineer and had run away with him. It sounded unlike her, but it was also unlike him to be so inventive, so I thought it must be true. I sat up against a starched pillowcase Bibi had brought me from home, and I invited Julius to admire Roma’s hands and feet. He said that Bibi’s lover was named Wolfgang, and we laughed and thought of Bibi on her wedding night saying, “Wolfgang, you swine!”

All Bibi was ever able to explain to me later was that somewhere between my room and the front door of the hospital she had asked God to strike her with lightning. She stood still and counted up to ten; ten seconds was the limit she gave Him to prove He could hear. Nothing happened. She saw a rubbery begonia on a windowsill; an aide pushing along a trolley of tea mugs; a father and two children waiting on a bench with the patience of the ignorant. She could not recall whether or not she had ever sent the telegram. She next remembered being at home, in the room Julius had insisted would be in keeping with her new position, and that there she had taken gardénal. The gardénal was in the form of large flat tablets, like salt pills. She said she had “always” had them, even in her refugee camp. For someone who had access to every sort of modern poison at Possner, she had chosen an old-fashioned, feminine way of death. She broke up the tablets patiently, one after the other, sitting on the edge of her bed. She was obliged to swallow so much water that she began to be sick on it, and finally
she heated a little milk on the gas ring. The milk probably saved her.

She had imagined dying would be like a slow anesthetic; she thought death could be inhaled, like fresh air. But it was a black cloak being blown down on one, she told me – like a cape slipping off a hook and falling in soft folds over your hands and face.

B
y the time Bibi was well enough to tell me these things, Julius had forgotten her, and had all but forgotten me. He was in love with no one but Roma, a baby ten days old, named for a holiday. This was a quiet love affair that gave us all a period of relative peace. I don’t believe he visited Bibi once, though he paid for her private room, the skin-graft operations, and her long convalescence. Bibi begged to be put in a ward, for being alone made her feel miserable, but Julius refused. She finally came home to us, because I needed someone; my health had broken down. I had fits of crying so prolonged that my eyelids became allergic to daylight and I had to spend hours lying down in the dark. Bibi worked part time at Possner, looked after Roma, ran the house, and saw that I was allowed to recover very, very slowly.

Julius was now a major, and we moved into the first of our new, beautiful homes. We had a room for Bibi, next to Roma’s. She kept that room for ten years and never once made a change in it. She would not admit any furniture except a bed, a wardrobe, a small bookcase that served as her night table, and a lamp. She did not correspond with anyone. Her books,
concerned with one subject, were called
Tetrahedron Letters, The Chemistry of Steroids, Steroid Reactions
, and so on. I tried to read her thesis but I could not take in “…  washed repeatedly in a solution of bicarbonate of soda, then in distilled water, and dried on sulphate of sodium. After evaporation, a residue of 8.78 …” I discovered that she kept a journal, but it told me nothing. “Monday – Conversation with Arab student in canteen. Interesting.” “Tuesday –
Funtumia latifolia
is a tree in Western Africa. Flowers white. Wood white. Used for matches, fruit crates.” “Wednesday – Heidi dead.” “Thursday – Roma draws Papa, Mama, Aunt Bibi, self, a tombstone for Heidi. Accept drawing as gift.” “Friday – Menses.” “Saturday – Allied Powers forbid demonstration against rearmament.” “Sunday – Visit kennel. New puppy for Roma. Roma undecided.” This was Bibi’s journal in a typical week.

Bibi had no sense of beauty. It was impossible to make her room attractive or interesting, and I avoided showing it to strangers. She never left a towel or a toothbrush in the bathroom she and Roma shared. I sometimes wondered if she had been raised in an orphanage, where every other bed held a potential thief. All her life she used only the smallest amount of water. At first, when she washed dishes I could never persuade her to rinse them. Water was something to be rationed, but I never learned why. She could keep a cake of soap or a tube of toothpaste for months. She wanted to live owning nothing, using nothing. On the other hand, once an object had come into her hands, and if she did not give it away immediately, to be parted from it later on was anguish. Sometimes I took her handbag and dumped it upside down. I would get rid
of the broken comb, the thumbed mirror, the pencil stubs, and replace all this rubbish with something clean and new. But she was miserable until everything became old, cracked, and “hers” again. Most refugees talked too much. Bibi said too little, and that in disturbing fragments. Drink went straight to her head. At our parties I looked out for her, and when I saw the bad signs – her eyes pressed to slits, her head thrown back, a trusting smile – I would take her glass away. Once, during a dinner party, her voice floated over the rest of the talk: “Some adolescents, under difficult circumstances, were instructed in algebra and physics by distinguished professors. A gypsy girl named Angela, who had been in a concentration camp, was taught to read and write by a woman doctor of philosophy whose husband had been shot in the cellar of a prison in Moscow in 1941.”

After that, I came to a quiet agreement with Julius that Bibi be given nothing to drink except when we were alone. I could not expect Julius’s guests to abandon their own homes and their own television to hear nothing but disjointed anecdotes. This was the year when every television network celebrated the anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Roma sat on a low stool with her elbows on her knees and saw everything. We now had a fifth person in the family, a young man from Possner named Michael. Julius had brought him in. Michael must already have decided to marry Julius’s daughter if only he could remain important to Julius while Roma was growing up. I noticed that he thought Aunt Bibi was also someone who had to be pleased. In a way, Michael was a new kind of Bibi. The firm intended to send him to an advanced
course in business management, just as Bibi had been sent to the university.