Nothing But Fear (19 page)

I had made an igloo on our drive and crawled inside, hiding, being a polar explorer in Greenland – Peter Freuchen
had a street named after him just round the corner. It grew later than usual and I had dozed off in the darkness, when I heard someone laughing outside and crawled out to see who it was. A little further up the street stood a creature with a glowing head. Fire burned in its eyes, its nose, its mouth, and on the opposite side of the street I could see another flaming head. They were laughing at me with their triangular eyes and their evil smiles, and I screamed and ran and could hardly believe it – they had wurzels instead of heads and a light burning inside that you just couldn't see by day!

The secret of the sugar beet fields mushroomed. I had discovered something terrifying and I avoided them, averting my gaze and never looking them in the eye. The thickest boy in the class was called Jesper. He came from a farm outside town and wore shorts all year round. He had ringworm and a pudding-bowl haircut and ate pencils and picked his nose in class – and the more I studied him the more I was convinced that he was one of them.

Of course it wasn't long before I ran into him after school. He was sitting on a front step on Enighedsvej carving with his penknife and there were a number of smaller children watching. He looked up and said something or other to me, but I wasn't listening. I couldn't tear my eyes away from what he had in his hands. A wurzel! He had already cut the mouth and eyes.

‘What you starin' at?' he asked and stood up.

I seized the opportunity.

‘You're thick in the wurzel,' I replied and ran off as fast
as I could. He caught me up at once and knocked me down. The children flocked from all sides shouting ‘Bat-tle! Battle! Bat-tle!' while Jesper sat on top of me and gave me a clobbering, pushing my face in the snow until I couldn't breathe and was shouting for help!

Jesper stopped, looked down at me and said what they always said. ‘German pig!' Then he laughed and the others all laughed along with him. I asked whether I could go now and was told that I had to beg first and say ‘Please'. I nodded and raised myself carefully on my elbows, and before he knew what I was doing I had blown in his mouth. His eyes flickered, his arms flailed, and his face went out. Smoke came out of his ears, and then his head fell off and rolled down the street. The children ran away screaming. I knocked the snow off my coat, picked up the wurzel and went home to build a snowman. I put the wurzel on the top and the sight filled me with delight. Then I made a snowball and kept packing it tight until it was as hard as stone.

I
t was my fifteenth birthday, and Father told me to come with him out onto the street, and there it stood. A black 3-speed Puch. It didn't have high handlebars or backrest and had a top speed of only 30 kilometres an hour, and I had to wear a helmet that was yellow and twice the size of my head. I knew I would look ridiculous. ‘Thanks a lot,' I said, and Mother asked whether I wasn't going to try it out. I trod on the kick-start and did a wheelie when I let in the
clutch. Then I drove down Hans Ditlevsensgade and up Peter Freuchensvej and back again, and we went inside and had breakfast.

During the afternoon the doorbell rang – I started, fearing the worst – and outside stood Uncle Helmut. He had come all the way from Oberfranken. He was smaller and more bent than ever and he said
‘Guten Tag!'
and wished me a happy birthday. We went up and joined Mother and Father in the dining-room, and I could see that it was difficult for him to walk.

‘What a surprise!' said Father, and Mother poured him a cup of coffee and a cognac.

He said no to cake. He mustn't be late for the ferry. He went straight to the point and asked whether we could be alone for five minutes, and then he placed a piece of metal on the table. It was the last fragment of the hand grenade that had almost killed him. Uncle Helmut told me about Stalingrad, where they had been encircled by Russian forces and were staring defeat in the face. He was determined to desert because he was done no matter what happened, but he and his company managed to get through, and behind them the German army turned to ice.

I waved goodbye to Uncle Helmut, who hooted and turned the corner – and I never saw him again. As soon as he got home to Münchberg, he went into his clinic and took an X-ray of himself. It was what he was most frightened of. From it he could see that he was dying. He had got cancer – it was the X-rays – but he told no one and ate dinner as usual with Eva and Claus. Axel and Rainer had left home. After
the meal he said
‘Mahlzeit'
as always and dragged himself up the stairs to his room, where he closed the door and sat down with a bottle of wine and a glass of morphine. He began drinking as he wrote in his diary – he was convinced that his forefathers were standing there waiting for him in the next world – and when he had emptied his glass, Uncle Helmut fell asleep.

In the evening I climbed onto my scooter and drove out to the coast to see whether the sea was still there. It was. And there was nothing better than to end it all, standing on the edge of the Baltic, where the island of Falster ended, and to feel the wind buffeting your face. I looked out at the white-tipped waves breaking on the bar and walked along the beach – it stretched as far as the eye could see – looking for shells and fossilized sea-urchins and always hoping to find amber. It was so rare that it practically didn't exist. It was always just a piece of glass or a yellow pod of bladderwrack. Nothing. I kicked up the sand and walked out on the breakwater, stretching my arms to either side and waving them up and down. It made the gulls fly off straight away. They thought I was a bird of prey. And I cursed the place and spat into the wind and felt my own spit slap back on my cheek.

E
ven though I moved away from Nykøbing, I never left it, never escaped from the house on Hans Ditlevsensgade. My parents lived alone with each other and sat listening
to the grandfather clock marking time. It was the only thing that did. All else had ground to a halt. They had no one apart from me, and I was still ‘
das kleine Knüdchen
'. Every Christmas, New Year, Easter and birthday we celebrated together round the dining table, and everything was as it always had been.

The final years Father spent looking after Mother. An operation at a private hospital had gone wrong. They broke her back, and she couldn't straighten up. She walked at first with a stick, then with a Zimmer frame, fighting on and looking to me – her eyes tired and sad – but there was nothing I could do. She was inconsolable.

Mother grew more and more ill, complaining about chronic pains in her back and her bladder. She had a bladder infection that wouldn't go away, and she had to pee all the time and was given a catheter. Her throat was scorched by radiotherapy – she had got cancer of the mouth – and she ate less and less and was wasting away. The doctors could do nothing, couldn't even ease the pain – there was no morphine that worked – and then Mother fell and broke her leg. It was put in traction in a metal splint and she took to her bed, unable to move. They had their meals sent round and Father no longer went out of doors, living in the end in a house of no fixed abode. He didn't know where it was anymore. At times it was in Copenhagen, then it was in Orehoved or on Nybrogade in Nykøbing – and the world shrank into that one stuffy, dark and suffocating room furnished with the beds and the wardrobes from Kleinwanzleben.

One day Mother rang from the telephone in the bedroom to say that Father had been taken to hospital. I took the train down to look after them – it would only be a couple of days and it was nothing to panic about, just an irregular heartbeat. To make sure I could hear her if anything happened in the night, I made up the bed in the room which I had had as a child and which was unchanged at the end of the corridor. And Mother called out for me.

‘
Ach, wie sehe ich aus!
Look at me! How have I ended up like this?' she moaned.

I tried to get her to sit up a little higher in the bed, put a pillow at her back and brushed her hair, which was thin and greasy with sweat. I carefully washed her face, and she asked for her perfume from the bedside drawer, and then I peeled an apple and cut it into thin slices, which I managed to get down her. She even drank a beer. And now her catheter was full, and I changed it, punctured the bag in the bathroom and had to clean up.

I would have given my life for hers, but she did not want it, lying in bed, refusing to drink and refusing to eat. It made no difference what I did, nothing helped, and I spent the evening putting acid-tasting sweets into Mother's mouth because they relieved the pain – she kept asking for her lemon drops – and slowly she turned the screw.

When I went to bed, she began to scream. I rushed into her bedroom. She was sitting bolt upright in the bed saying that she was going to be sick, she was going to be sick, and I ran to find a bowl, hearing her cursing the people, the country, me.

‘Ach! Was seid ihr doch für Menschen? Pisseland, pisse, pisse, pisseland!'

And she threw it all up, the pills and the bits of apple and the beer I had got down her. I emptied the bowl a couple of times and sat by her bedside and said, ‘Mother, you'll have to calm down now', and she lashed out at me – how could she calm down when she had vomited everywhere? I stroked her cheek and told a story to get her to forget herself and her pain and her body and to slowly lull her to sleep by talking.

Can you remember when we used to visit Grandmother, when we turned the corner where she lived? It was Kettenhofweg number… 108, wasn't it? I said the wrong number on purpose to get Mother's attention, and she corrected me, saying,
‘Nein, 106,'
and I said that of course it was 106! And can you remember that the first thing you saw when you came into the hall was the post-boxes?

‘Yes,' she replied. ‘Of course.' And then you went in along a passageway to the left, I said, and came to a door with frosted glass, can you remember that? And when you rang, it made a buzzing noise, and Grandmother would let us in. We would go up the stairs – now what was she called, the woman who lived on the first floor, the Jewess?

‘Frau Badrian,' Mother said with a snort.

And I said that, yes, that's what her name was. She was nice, and then one storey further up and we were at Grand-mother's. Can you remember the smell? There was such a comforting, cosy smell in the hall – and the glass door that shivered when you opened it to go into her living room.
It was a fine room, elegant, and we would eat dinner, and I loved Grandmother's cooking. Can you remember her kitchen? It was small, and her pots and pans were old, and the casserole was over a hundred years old?

‘Ja, wir haben immer auf unsere Sachen aufgepasst,'
said Mother.

Yes, I said, you certainly did look after the family's things. And then I asked whether she could remember the view from the balcony in the bedroom that looked out onto the courtyard where the pension was – Pension Gölz. There was an Alsatian that was always barking and a large tree – a chestnut, wasn't it?

‘They were chestnuts to eat,' Mother said. ‘
Esskastanien
. They don't have them in Dänemark'. I continued the tour, telling her how walking up Kettenhofweg you went past the house where the mad lady lived who collected all kinds of rubbish and made a huge tip in her front garden.

‘Yes,' said Mother. ‘I sat once beside her in the tram and she stank.' And I said that she would never move, would she?

‘Nein,'
she replied.

‘Can you remember,' I asked, ‘the name of the big street you got to, where the trams went?'

‘Bockenheimer Landstraβe.'

I whooped.

Yes! That's what it was called. And then you walked across the zebra crossing and there was a baker's – I loved Pfannkuchen – and around the corner a small, dark stationer's with biros, exercise books and paper of all colours.
There was a young lady who ran it – and what was the name of the street you got to, the big street that led all the way to Opernplatz?

‘Goethestraβe,' said Mother, and I said, Wow, you've got a good memory! And can you remember the ruins of the opera? Mother said that it wasn't so bad that it couldn't be rebuilt, and I said yes – and so we came to Palmengarten, the large park, where there was a lake you could take a boat on, and I was so happy there that I rowed all day long. There was a palm house, which was huge and made of nothing but glass and it was as hot as the tropics and humid and full of palms and there was a wishing well – and can you remember the playground?

‘Yes,' Mother said and opened her eyes and looked at me with that cold, steely gaze that I had been afraid of all my life. ‘And can you remember what happened?'

Yes, I said. I was playing in the climbing frame, which was shaped like an aeroplane, and I was flying across the water and refused to land before I had reached America.

‘And then?' asked Mother, and I felt ashamed and answered that she had waited and waited and contracted pneumonia and almost died.

‘Exactly,' Mother said with an unpleasant smile, and I knew that it would be now, and that I had reached the end of the story and she had not fallen asleep.

She was awake, and it was the other woman in Mother before me now, looking through her eyes and pointing at the sweets on the bedside table.

‘Who put those sweets there?' she asked.

It was awful. I couldn't breathe, my chest contracted.

‘I did.'

‘What are they doing there?' she asked. ‘Take them away!'

I went out into the kitchen with them and returned. She was scowling.

‘Where is that little box?'

‘Which box?'

‘That little box with sweets,' she snapped. ‘Where is it?
Wo? Wo?
'

Then I understood.

‘But I took it away just now because you told me to,' I said, ‘and because the sweets had melted in the heat of the bedroom.'