Necessary Lies(62)
“I’d like to see K?the’s old house,” Anna says. It is so much easier to think of William here, a little boy, so far away in the past. Gretchen, his nanny, a thick, greying braid wound around her head like a crown, pouring hot water into a washbasin, laughing and tickling him. Bei Mir Bist Du Sch?n ... he remembered her singing, under her breath, her throaty voice lulling him to sleep. Or Bel ami, bel ami, bel ami.
Gretchen had treasures, wonderful things he was allowed to see. Postcards on which little kittens played with balls of wool. Handkerchiefs with tiny pink and blue flowers in the corners. Things she brought from places far far away, from village fairs around Breslau where clowns did somersaults, doves flew out of top hats, balls appeared and disappeared in pockets, sleeves, and boxes that, only a moment ago, were empty. Where Gretchen saw a monster woman with a black moustache, and a long white beard.
William’s Oma always had maids, country girls from around Breslau who arrived by cart, with a basket covered by chequered cloth, smelling of buttermilk. Frieda, Helga, Elsa. William liked their cheerful whistling. They washed the floor on their knees, until the skin of their legs became red and the shape of the floorboards left deep white tracks in it. They laughed when they saw him, and their buttocks swayed as they moved backwards on their knees, like giant crabs, wet floor in front of them shining in the sun.
His Oma he recalled had boxes filled with hats. The hats came from Schurz. Some of the hats made her look stern and mysterious. In others she looked distant and very elegant, like an old queen.
He also remembered his mother’s fox collar, smelling of perfume, a faint fragrance of jasmine petals. The same smell that lingered inside the wardrobe, among his mother’s furs, among her dresses and coats. Before she left the house K?the wound the fox around her neck, its limp paws with their black claws hanging loose, the fox’s mouth snapping at its tail, to hold it in place. The mouth had a spring hidden inside and he liked to play with it, snapping at the maids, pretending the fox was alive.
The maids, he recalled, always talked of the premonition of some end, of something terrible lurking in the dark, waiting to destroy them all. There were signs, they said, whispering among themselves. Bad signs. In Gross Wilkau a calf was born with two heads, foxes were no longer afraid of humans and killed the chickens in broad daylight. Frieda dreamed of fires and floods and teeth falling out. But then they remembered how bad things were, before Hitler. “Riots,” he had heard, “red menace, havoc.” Men in crumpled suits standing on street corners, giving them evil looks, shouting after them, asking how they liked emptying the chamber pots of the rich. Long, loud whistles, invading eardrums, making the membranes rattle.
Besser ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende. Better an end with terror than terror without end.
There was a poem he learned, then, from the neighbour’s children. So insidious that he couldn’t stop chanting it for days. K?the scolded him all the time, then, but never said it was the poem she minded. His voice, she said, was a problem. It went right through her skull. Gave her headaches. She would complain that he couldn’t sit still, ran up and down the stairs, fidgeted at the table, spilled his drinks.
In the poem a spider caught a fly, a sparrow caught a spider, a hawk caught the sparrow, and the chain went on until, at the end of it, a hunter caught a wolf. William could still remember the refrain:
“Please” begged the victim, “let me go,
For I am such a little foe.”
“No,” said the victor, “not at all,
For I am big and you are small!”
“Do you still think we have come from the same place?” she asked him then. He laughed, admitting defeat. No, of course not. Her Wroclaw had little to do with his Breslau.
The house is a short tram ride away, in Karlowice, but Yan insists on driving her there. Anna doesn’t know her brother that well anymore, but she can still guess what he must be thinking. This, at least, is a concrete request he can understand, better than these constant comments she makes about how the buildings around them have been modified or transformed. He scowls when she takes out these German photographs to show him the missing globe and the fin-de-siecle windows that once decorated the department store of the Barasch Brothers, Breslau’s pride. The building still houses a department store, Phoenix; it is shabby inside, with makeshift shelves and crowded, haphazard displays. Right before she left for Canada, Anna lined up there for four hours, at the butcher’s. When she reached the counter she could only buy half a kilogram of fat beef with crushed pieces of bone sticking to it. She was close to tears when she left the store, clutching the bleeding brown paper package, holding it away from her not to stain her clothes.
“Put them away,” her brother says, pointing to the photographs in her hand. There is an embarrassed smile on his face, the one she has seen many times already. He smiles like that whenever she makes what he considers unreasonable or outlandish demands, like refusing to put an unwrapped loaf of bread into the wire basket in a grocery store, or looking for tongs to pick up rolls for supper. She puts the photographs away wondering if her interest in German Breslau is unreasonable or merely outlandish to him.
As they drive, Yan is pointing to street vendors, to streetcars covered with colourful ads, to a new restaurant that has just opened. “Just give us a few years, and you won’t recognise the place,” he says. Anna is thinking of Adam’s smiling eyes as he ate his pizza, flat and thin but smothered with mushrooms and melted cheese. In his clear, chime-like voice he warned her not to break her leg on the potholes in the pavement.