The Voices of Summer

My father’s breath

The country where my father was born had already fallen in late summer two years before that Christmas Eve of ’41 when he stood, exposed to the elements, on a tank looking through his binoculars at the church domes of Moscow.

            As he stood there with elbows bent and the glasses raised to his eyes, the sleeves of his tunic with its Waffen-SS sergeant’s bars slid back a little, exposing his forearms in the woollen warming sleeves knitted for him by my grandmother back in Reichenbach in the Vogtland.

            The binoculars, whose lenses every now and then fogged up with his breath and whose thumbwheel he turned several times to readjust the focus before he started wiping the glass with his bare fingers, were held in a pair of enormous gloves, their thick, multi-layered structure the handiwork of my mother over long, lonely wartime evenings in Plauen.

            His knee socks, likewise the product of her hands, pure virgin wool, knitted in Plauen, Reichenbach, and Leipzig in late November when it looked like my father’s tour was about to be extended, fit snugly in his new, amply-cut, half-length, felt-lined boots, their leather carefully oiled.

            Dr. Goebbels had told the women, on their home radio receivers, what my father would be needing for hands, feet, and head.

            That information now fit snugly in their heads.

            And they had busy hands, these women Grandmother, Mother.

            Still, despite all their caring efforts, my father appeared to be getting cold there at his post. It was Christmas, everything white. So now, after he’d already shifted his weight from one leg to the other a couple of times, he stamped his boots faster and restlessly on the steel plate of the turret and finally jumped down and said to one of the sentinels, a Pfc. from Reconnaissance: Less than two weeks now and we’ve got ’em. Get somebody to relieve you here, I’m going over to the tent to warm up. They say there’s Christmas stollen.

The blueberry woods

Now the coffee is ready, and Mother tomorrow’s birthday girl has already taken the good china from the living room cupboard, and I had the impression she walked more softly as she carried the cups, plates, and coffeepot across the room. By the time she got to the table she seemed to be floating.

            I take one of the cups, light as a feather, and turn it over. It floats in my hands like my mother’s soft steps over the floor, but even as I’m trying to figure out the design on the bottom, with its two light-blue, crossed swords surmounted by a royal crown, everyone at the table shouts with one voice telling me to put the cup down, right now. In that instant, with that one outcry, I actually did come very close to dropping it.

            Leave the boy alone, it’s his vacation time, says my grandmother, just now coming into the living room. She’s carrying a heavy earthenware platter of blueberry cake piled into a pyramid.

            Oh sure, you’re always sticking up for him.

            Says my father.

            The last ones for this year, says my grandmother, ignoring my father’s remark. It took us all day yesterday to pick this many for you. But we’ve got our woods, and we can still find some there, she says, winking at me.

            I have to keep quiet and stay in my seat. When the grownups talk I’m allowed to drink cocoa from one of the fragile cups, but carefully, and eat as much as I want of the blueberry cake and daydream as much as I want.

            My father says, They welcomed us with bread and salt. And they threw flowers at our tanks, in the Ukraine. My father’s unit is on the offensive.

            Uncle Rudi says nothing and plays with the big gold ring on his right hand. He’s a hair stylist, has his own shop in Leipzig. He’s rich and he plays the big shot with his ring. Somehow he owes his wealth to several bags of “European human hair” from somewhere booty that he brought back home from the war. His wigs, which he weaves himself and then sells, renting out the best pieces in carnival season, that’s what’s made him rich and a big shot.

            Somehow and from somewhere.

            In the war, he was a sankra driver and not a sergeant like my father. Sankra is short for Sanitätskraftwagen, an ambulance he explained that to me last year when I was starting school.

            While Father talks and Uncle Rudi goes on turning his gold ring, Uncle Herbert is looking under the table. He didn’t wear a sergeant’s uniform or come home with human hair as booty. He has one short and one long leg, and everybody tells him, Well, of course they turned you down. And there’s nothing more to say, because he couldn’t be in the war like my father and Uncle Rudi. His gaze converges under the table with Aunt Hilde’s, his wife, who has a little hunched back when she sits bent over that way on her chair looking under the table because there’s no story here for her to tell, either.

            But I have to stay sitting there, and I’m allowed to eat and drink as much as I want.

            And dream.

            Grandmother pours me another cup of cocoa, unasked, from the big, fragile coffee pot, and I take another piece of the blueberry cake.

            Now my cup is empty, and my grandmother isn’t looking over at me, she’s looking my father straight in the face. I’d rather not drink any more now, and I’m full of cake. Now I’d rather dream.

            At first, I always dream about the things I know; after that come the real dreams. I know that while Uncle Rudi, the hairdresser, and Father, the sergeant, were in their war, the sisters Mother, Aunt Hilde, and Aunt Margarete rescued their ailing mother from Plauen. From bombed-out, burning Plauen. With a handcart over the demolished autobahn. All the way to Reichenbach, where the blueberry woods are and where Grandmother was waiting for them. I’d heard that story at previous family gatherings, but not much more than that, no details, and so I’d rather dream something else now, maybe about the summer just outside, my grandmother’s garden sending its sounds like a gentle call through the wide-open living room window, all the while I have to stay in the room and be quiet.

            Or I’ll dream about the enormous blue moth I saw resting between the spokes of my brother’s bicycle yesterday morning when we got up very early to go looking for the blueberries. And that I caught and put into a box filled with leaves and grass and standing now in a shady spot out there in the garden. Covered with a pane of glass, the cracks in the wooden box sealed with putty.

            But Grandmother said a moth doesn’t need shade, it needs the nighttime, not leaves and not grass.

            Go on out now, says my mother. In the yard if you want, but don’t go too far away.

            As I’m getting up and going out I hear my grandmother say: Your grandfather would’ve turned over in his grave! You refused to attend the gymnasium because they wore such funny caps there, but you joined the SS because you wanted to be a German. It wasn’t good enough for you to be from Poland, a man without a country. A Polack. Then you invade the country where you were born, and a couple more besides. Your grandfather would’ve knocked your block off. He never forgot which side he was on!

            Maybe my mother had sent me out because she knew what was coming whenever Grandmother was that quite beforehand.

            Out in the garden it’s definitely August with its flowers, its berry bushes picked clean by the birds singing above them now. The ripening pears: “Bonne Louise” and “Clapp’s Favorite.” But the crab apples aren’t ripe yet. Sometimes there’ll be one lying in the grass, but I don’t pick it up. The worms pulled that one down off the tree, as Grandmother would say.

            Now I don’t have to sit quietly any longer, now I can run and jump, and I could talk as much as I liked now  if there was someone to listen to me. But my brother is already big and he’s at a summer camp up on the Baltic coast, and my friends have gone to the swimming pool today, and I have to stay around the house because the aunts and uncles have come, and tomorrow is Mother’s birthday.

            Tomorrow is Sunday, and tomorrow we’re going on an outing to the Waldsee. Last summer I saw a water snake swimming across the water there in the middle of the day. We’ll pack food to take along and have a big picnic for my mother’s birthday, the way we do every year. And we’ll go there in Uncle Rudi and Aunt Margarete’s new white sports coupé, the kind of car nobody in our town can afford, only someone from Leipzig who came back with war booty. And if I’ve calculated right, and since Uncle Rudi will have to make two trips anyway because there are eight of us, maybe I can talk him into taking me with him both times. That would make up for having to sit through the coffee hour this afternoon.

            But since there’s no one right now that I could talk to about it, about “bread and salt,” for example, or “European human hair,” or what Plauen might have looked like when it was burning, I walk over to the wooden box I put the moth in yesterday.

            I take off the glass pane and poke around with a twig in the leaves and grass. It was a blue moth with little silver spots on its wings, bigger across than my hand beauty itself, as my mother exclaimed when I showed it to her, sleeping there in the spokes of the bicycle wheel.

            And freedom itself, said my grandmother, who surprised us as we stood looking at it. It needs to be free.

            No, I said, I want to keep it.

            But now that I finally have time to check, I can’t find it. It seems to have disappeared. I tip the box this way and that, carefully spread the grass out on the lawn, brush the leaves apart, examine the chinks in the wooden box, but they’re all tight, the slats securely interlocked, the joints smeared with putty. How it could have gotten out, I don’t know. It’s just disappeared.

            What a day, I say out loud and run back into the house to report the bad news.

            As I come into the room, Uncle Rudi’s unit is in retreat:

            I step on the gas, he’s saying now. Let ’er rip! I take the sankra full speed out on the field where the two guys are down, a bullet shatters my windshield, a fragment blows my left rear tire. I’m out of the cab, pile the two of ’em in back, alley oop! and off we go, pedal to the floor. They both lived to tell about it, too!

            Now no one says anything, and I stand there alone with my news. What is it? hisses my father, and I say nothing, neither does Grandmother or Mother, and I run back outside. I climb up in one of the pear trees, and if there was anyone here now that I could talk to, even if someone had followed me outside, I wouldn’t do anything different. I sit there in silence between the branches, one foot dangling in the air, the other one braced in the topmost crotch. Until it begins to get dark, until Grandmother or Mother remembers me, when it’s too late to matter anymore, and only because supper’s on the table.

Blue night

Since I know how the rest of the evening goes, the day before such birthday celebrations, because it’s always the same, I go to bed without having to be told.

            I want to read a little of the new book about Fury, the Wild Mustang that a schoolmate loaned me over the vacation. A book from “over there,” where he has relatives. Our family doesn’t.

            Downstairs they’ve put on some music, and someone’s singing The Old Black Tomcat Stanislaus. And very late at night, when I’m already asleep and the ones downstairs have had enough to drink, they’ll start singing their old favourites: Off the Coast of Madagascar and We Had the Plague on Board, or: We Want Our Good Ol’ Kaiser Wilhelm Back Again. Aunt Margarete will be screeching on that song, and then when her voice cracks, they’ll all sing Ye Peoples, Hark to the Call, but only that one line of it. And then, all jumbled together, the men’s voices drowning out the women’s: They haven’t got beer in Hawaii, they ain’t got beer; so we’re not goin’ to Hawaii, we’ll stay right here.

            I’m awake again; I’ve been awake for several minutes, ever since they were asking to have their Kaiser Wilhelm back. Grandmother is standing there in front of my bed a few feet away in her nightgown, but when I rub my eyes, she’s not standing there, she’s hovering. She seems to be giving off a blue light. Her feet, in a pair of old slippers, float a little distance off the floor. The blue light radiates from her nightgown, and with every beat of my heart, which I feel quite distinctly now, the light pulses brighter and then weaker again.

            And then I remember the way my mother floated when she carried the coffee set across the living room this afternoon, and I remember one night long ago when I looked out the window for hours staring at the full moon, and it synchronized its light with the beating of my heart, and the light got darker and brighter again until finally the moon split in two, and before my eyes were two full, round spheres, and when I closed my eyes for a moment the moons collapsed into one again, like the light in a TV screen when you switch it off.

            My grandmother is speaking:

            We see the leaves of days that fall from the treetop, but how the trunk forms its annual rings, we do not see … We know the dark of the past by the bright ray that it sends shining light on the future. Our lives are but an echo of the cries our ancestors uttered … You shall lose your freedom and gain it back; this is why I set the moth free today; you and it are of one kind, you need freedom and night, not bread and a house … The world will be split into two worlds for a long time, and both will call themselves righteous. Anger shall be your house and your bread.

            Grandmother is silent. She stands by my bed in her white nightgown surrounded by blue light, and with each beat of my heart, repeated in my pupils, her image pulses gradually away before my eyes. Until her silhouette is only visible in the faintly blue glow of that strange light, until finally it, too, fades away.

The day of the fathers

I feel an itching on my cheek that stops briefly, returns in a different spot, on my forehead, nose, eyelid. Only when it moves to my ear and I hear the buzzing sound and slap at it, opening my eyes just a crack, do I see the fly that woke me up and now flits to the window and then out into the yard. It’s bright morning.

             From the kitchen I can hear the sounds of the day beginning, family members’ voices, and above them a strange man’s voice, yet one that it seems I recognize. Today their voices are especially loud, because today is Sunday and it’s Mother’s birthday.

            I jump out of bed and take my present from the shelf: a picture I painted in school with watercolours, my self-portrait as a Young Pioneer with white shirt and red neckerchief. It really turned out looking like me, and I’m proud and I know Mother will like it and praise me in front of the whole family.

            In the kitchen, picture in hand, I go over to Mother to wish her happy birthday. All the others are sitting around the table saying nothing. I give her a hug. The man’s voice is droning loudly from the radio. But Mother just gives me a little squeeze and lays my present on the table unlooked at. The man’s voice keeps repeating the name “Berlin,” and Mother turns away as if she’s crying.

            I look at Grandmother, Aunt Hilde and Uncle Herbert, Uncle Rudi and Aunt Margarete. They’re all staring at the table top, their backs bent as if they’d been beaten. Only Father is standing off to one side staring blankly at the yellow dial of the radio.

            But now Grandmother raises her head. Her eyes look out toward the garden, then back into the room, and remain fixed on me. She says, Now we’re all captives. They’ve put up a wall in Berlin.

            So what? I think. What’s that wall got to do with me? Today’s Sunday, it’s Mother’s birthday today.

            And now they’re calling up the combat brigades, Father says to Uncle Rudi the hairdresser. Lucky for you again, with that lung of yours. Well, you, says Uncle Rudi, turning his gold ring, didn’t spend five years in Siberia.

            All at once, my grandmother screams at my father abruptly, like one possessed: There you go again! You always had to join up! Oh, I saw you all running around in our blueberry woods with your gas masks on, like a bunch of spooks.

            Come, drink your cocoa, Mother says to me. But I don’t touch my cup. Today the precious china service is not on the table, it’s back in the living room in the cupboard. And Grandmother goes on screaming: You even wanted to join the Party, wanted to be involved everywhere there was something to be had, but they’d never take you there, because you were in the Waffen-SS. You wouldn’t let me pray, wanted to do away with my God, just so you could make a career for yourself. And at your son’s school you had to call attention to yourself: Parents’ Advisory Council, and German-Soviet Friendship, and Chamber of Technology, and the union, and you forbade the boy to wear those pants, the blue jeans that cost me a fortune. That’s what cattle drivers in America wear, you said.

            Grandmother stops, and before Mother can make a move and tell me, Come, drink now, your cocoa’s getting cold, Uncle Rudi the hairdresser says in a low voice: The goatee No one intends to build a wall. So said the old goatee.

            Aunt Hilde and Uncle Herbert remain silent as always, but Aunt Margarete slowly raises her head and says to her husband, in that slightly flippant way of hers: They ain’t got beer in Hawaii, so we’ll stay here. Come on, let’s get going or it’ll be too late. Maybe there’s still some place in Thuringia, or at the Bavarian border. Hurry up now!

            They get up, and my father, whose face has gone white, sits down in Uncle Rudi’s place directly in front of the radio.

            What about our picnic? I blurt out. And your new car, the sports coupé? We were going to drive to the picnic, to the big lake, and walk in the woods, and we were going to go swimming. It’s your birthday today, Mother, and it’s Sunday.

            Then my mother very gently runs her hand, almost floating, over my head and says simply: Maybe later. Another time.

            We’re going too, says Uncle Herbert, and Aunt Hilde gets up from the table, takes her change purse out of her handbag, and lays a two-Mark piece next to my cup: For vacation. You still have a few days. Go to the swimming pool and buy yourself an ice cream or a bockwurst.

            Come, says Uncle Herbert, we’ll take a bus to the station. There’s one in ten minutes from the stop out front. Can I go along? I ask Mother, and she nods.

            Uncle Rudi is at the wheel of his sports coupé and toots the horn again. Aunt Margarete waves for a long time, letting one of her expensive scarves flutters from the car window.

            If there’s still a way out, I think, in Thuringia or at the Bavarian border, maybe they’ll send chewing gum, or the next book in the series of Fury, the Wild Mustang, or blue jeans, so Grandmother doesn’t have to exchange another “fortune” in “our” currency. Maybe they’ll even get rich again. Then I can get  later, when I’m as big as my brother  the portable radio that I’ve seen in my friends’ mail-order catalogue.

            I walk Aunt Hilde and Uncle Herbert to the bus stop. But today’s Sunday and the bus comes earlier. No one gets off, and there’s no one but us waiting at the little shed, so there’s only time to call after them, Auf Wiedersehen, no time to hug each other. But on the bus, Aunt Hilde runs quickly to a window and presses both hands against the glass. For me standing outside it looks as if, in a desperate gesture, they might stay pressed there forever.

            I walk back up the street, past the yard, back to the house.

            Farther down, a few children are playing, two facing each other, arms raised and hands clasped overhead. They’re singing Golden bridge, golden bridge, who made you fall down? …

            They call to me, but now I really have to get something to eat and drink. The day is hot and I’m really lightheaded. Only Grandmother and Mother are left sitting in the kitchen. The radio’s been turned off. Father’s gone to bed, even though it’s not even noon, white as chalk, as Grandmother says, and Mother says, Well yes, he’s in the combat brigade.

            I drink the rest of my cocoa and pick up a piece of the blueberry cake to eat on the way to join my friends.

            Do you think we need to get him back from camp? my mother asks the empty kitchen. And Grandmother says, Let’s wait a day or two. It’s supposed to be such nice weather on the seacoast right now.

            I slam the door and I’m actually about to go out the garden gate, down the path to where my friends are, but then I hear them singing again: Golden bridge, golden bridge, who made you fall down? The goldsmith, the goldsmith, and his fair young daughter … Captured … captured … with chains and bars of iron …

            And now, since none of my friends has spotted me there at the garden gate, I step back cautiously, without a sound, and disappear unseen, back to the broad lawn where everything is still just as it was yesterday afternoon. Even the overturned wooden box in which I’d searched for the vanished moth is still there.

            But then I stop short. I hear the voices of summer so distinctly: the birds in the berry bushes, the wind in the apple trees, snatches of the song my friends are singing on the path down below, everything quite clearly, every sound louder than usual, but strangely separated, as if cut apart by the rasping of a saw blade, each one alone in the world.

             And all at once I realize: Maybe it’s all my fault, because I imprisoned “beauty itself,” the blue moth, in this wooden box, and now we’re all captives my friends, Grandmother, Father and Mother, the aunts and uncles, my brother up on the Baltic coast. Maybe I alone was to blame for this ruined Sunday that should have been my mother’s birthday, with a picnic and swimming in the lake … And I recoiled with a cry like that of my ancestors. I kicked the box with all my might. The wood splintered with the force of the blow. With my other foot I kicked at the upright slats that weren’t shattered, broke them apart with my hands and feet, and stomped around on them until they were nothing but bits and pieces.

            Let them go build their walls anytime they want to, I thought, just not on Mother’s birthday, not on Sunday. Mother should never have her birthday on Sunday again.

Death in Hawaii

Later we were at the supper table, Father was still in bed sick, Mother hadn’t come to the table, and Grandmother had turned the radio back on we learned of the day’s first fatality. The top story on the forbidden news broadcast from “over there” announced that Count Wolfgang Berghe von Trips had crashed on the race course at Monza and died in his burning car.

They just go on with their lives, said Grandmother.

• November 1991 – January 1992