Frankie and Stankie, page 14
Lindenstrasse 1930, and Herr Jacobsen’s mind was gradually, increasingly, becoming infused with unease. The German electorate had just increased the National Socialist share of the vote and he was coming to see that, not only was Hitler inexorably on the way up, but that the man was a sure-fire warmonger, bent on territorial expansion. Along with Marianne, the Jacobsens had three healthy male children, all of an age to make cannon fodder, and he was keen to keep his boys alive.
‘Hitler will make war,’ he said. ‘Germany will once again make war.’
The young ones got easily bored by such talk. They had never been much interested in current affairs. Though they were theoretically young adults, they still played tig in the passageways and teased the maids and hid each other’s shoes. They dressed up for parties and failed to notice that their father was beginning to pore over maps of outlandish and far-flung places.
Of the three boys, the oldest was Otto, though Marianne was the oldest child. Otto was bold, sure-footed and a daredevil. He was the bossy one; the brainy one, always head of the pack. By the time the Nazis had colonised Berlin and staged their book-burning photo-opportunity directly opposite the university, Otto had spent two years there as a geology student. Heinrich was the next one down: the bookworm, the quiet one, a little crushed by his forceful older brother. He had just left school and had started work in a Berlin publishing house, though the timing for book production was perhaps not particularly propitious.
Heinrich, by then, had already been devoted to Irmi for three years – his studious schoolgirl sweetheart and Marianne’s classmate, to whom he was secretly engaged. The engagement was being kept secret, because Irmi’s father, a self-important and stern old tyrant, wanted his only daughter to remain unmarried. He wanted her wholly committed to the needs of his own old age. For this reason, whenever the Jacobsen young had their parties, it was Herr Jacobsen’s job to divert the tyrant by plying him with brandy and cigars. That way poor Irmi could have a little fun – though fun was not an attribute Lisa and Dinah ever came to associate with their prematurely faded and sad-eyed aunt.
Jurgen, tall, baby-blond and beautiful, was sweet sixteen and still at school. He and Marianne not only looked just like each other, but they were soulmates and best friends. Both had prominent cheekbones and large, widely spaced blue eyes. Both were shy, artistic, unpushy and day-dreaming. But their survival strategies began to vary once things took a downward turn.
When the Jacobsens sailed into Table Bay and stepped out into the bright sunshine of Adderley Street under the shadow of Table Mountain, they found it all entzückend. Cape Town – with its plastered eighteenth-century cottages, its reassuringly urbanised ‘black’ population that came in varying shades of palish brown, its touches of Islamic culture, thanks to the numerous descendants of Malay slaves – it all seemed to them not so much Heart of Darkness as Eastern Mediterranean.
They had carried with them their habitual air of Old World confidence and expectation, their total lack of unease. This, though not one of the Jacobsen family had mastered English. They were, after all, Herr Architekt, Jacob Bahne Jacobsen, late of Berlin, home of Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus. Was not Walter Gropius a family friend? Had not Otto Klemperer more than once been a guest in their house? Frau Architekt, Sophie Jacobsen, was, as always, an imposing figure whose bosom could do credit to her discreet displays of heirloom jewellery. Otto Jacobsen was a fine and handsome young man, determined, at once, to continue with his studies in geology. And Heinrich? Well, Heinrich wanted to publish books. There were, natürlich, book publishers in the country? The only thing that irked the Jacobsens was the inexplicable absence of decent coffee.
Jurgen, the family envisaged, would first go to school and make his Abitur. Then he would study to become an architect, just like his father. And Marianne? Well, Marianne was both beautiful and accomplished. She could play Mozart and Scarlatti so charmingly on the piano. Also Schubert and Brahms. Marianne could speak a prettily hesitant French. She painted water-colour landscapes and still lifes. She painted with glazes on Rosenthal china. Marianne, once she had got over that silly infatuation with her boy cousin, would undoubtedly make an advantageous marriage.
Herr Jacobsen was, by this time, coming up to sixty, and his wife was two years younger. They addressed all the people they met in German and, when this failed, they tried French. Frau Jacobsen could not begin to envisage a world in which people did not speak German – or at least a little French. French was the international language, was it not? Why on earth should a person speak English?
Dinah’s mother and her brothers had none of them enjoyed the most rigorous of high-school educations. The boys had been taught in small private establishments by gammy-legged and shell-shocked rejects from the First World War, men whose brains had been damaged by nerve gas. The older boys had got quite used to dissuading their geography master from committing suicide via an upstairs classroom window. They had taken it in their stride whenever the science master was gripped by seizure or by panic attack. One of the masters had paranoid delusions; another was a minor pyromaniac whom they needed, occasionally, to divest of his matchbox. Only then could a lesson proceed.
Dinah’s mum, having been taught by women, had avoided this particular dimension. Her teachers had never tried setting her alight – neither metaphorically nor literally. History had been a dreary business of rattling off endless dates, and she was instantly sabotaged in her attempts to learn English by an aged English pedagogue, a trousered fin-de-siècle Bohemian – more at home in a London salon than in a 1920s Berlin classroom – a woman who chain-smoked through an ebony cigarette holder and announced herself as a one-time bed-fellow of Oscar Wilde. She was not one to tolerate a teenage German sweetie-pie who couldn’t pronounce the English ‘th’.
Each time Dinah’s mum struggled and failed, so the trousered Bohemian simply ordered her out of the classroom to stand in disgrace outside the door. After a while it became her habit to order Marianne out of the room before the lesson had got off the ground. ‘She srew me alvays outside ze class because I could not pronounce ziss foolish “th”,’ Dinah’s mum later told Lisa and Dinah – and she always asserted that the ‘th’ sound could only be accomplished by a person’s sticking his tongue right out of the mouth, clamping it firmly between the teeth and risking the embarrassment of showering his neighbour with spittle. The English ‘th’, Dinah’s mum thought, was nothing short of ‘common’.
One day, when Marianne was just sixteen, she decided that she was tired of standing outside the classroom door, so she went off to get her hat and coat from the cloakroom. Then she walked herself straight home.
‘I’m never going back,’ she told her father, and he was completely on her side. After all, for what should his daughter need more schooling? For what should she require a few vulgar certificates? Pieces of paper, testifying to various humdrum skills, as if she were destined to become some workplace drone. Some office filing clerk.
Once she began to feel a little hang-loose around the house, Marianne was enrolled by her father in a Berlin art school, where she learned to paint rosebuds on bone-china teacups and, after that, he permitted her to take employment at a fashion house designing ballgowns. This is why, among the small collection of youthful memorabilia that fascinated her younger daughter, Marianne could count a slim parchment portfolio of 1920s fashion sketches with little silk swatches still pinned to their edges. The drawings were roughly concurrent with the work of George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, but the men’s minds and talents were otherwise engaged at the time. They were busy chronicling the Apocalypse. They were documenting the violent and sleazy end of Weimar Germany.
It was in the context of the art school that Marianne and Wilhelm fell in love. Wilhelm was the ski-jump champion, Marianne’s own first cousin, grown by then into a curly-haired, square-jawed young man, with a jutting, deeply cleft chin. Wilhelm was also a student at the art school and the two of them had soon become inseparable. That was, of course, until Marianne’s mother had pulled the plug on her daughter’s career. Then it rankled a lot with Marianne as her own time hung heavy, that Wilhelm should be busy with his artist friends, bonding in the painting studios, while she was suffering under the eye of her ever-present mother who constantly found fault.
Sophie Jacobsen had never been one of her daughter’s greatest admirers. She preferred the company of her sons. She considered Marianne skinny and lacking in proper womanly allure. Dinah’s mum could boast none of those attributes with which Frau Jacobsen herself had been so generously endowed: dainty feet, an ample bosom, a voluptuous hour-glass figure and thick wavy hair. Frau Jacobsen could not appreciate that her daughter’s looks were, in fact, happily spot-on for the time. So she was driven to expend futile energy upon hopeless attempts at reform. ‘Marianne,’ she would say repeatedly, ‘sit up straight! Marianne, look at your hair!’ She couldn’t believe that her daughter’s short, wafty blonde hair could ever count as a woman’s Crowning Glory.
Because Marianne could no longer bear to stay at home where she felt herself on the margins of real life, that real life she had so briefly and tantalisingly glimpsed, she took to visiting the great Berlin railway stations where she listened over and over to the litany of destinations and she watched the clouds of steam. She lingered to observe the barges from the bridges over the River Spree and she started to build castles in the air. She fantasised about travelling to exotic faraway places, having no idea how soon these fantasies would become a harsh reality and how effectively they would sever her from Wilhelm.
In Cape Town, Dinah’s grandfather was soon to discover that his architectural qualifications were not recognised by the local rubber-stamping bureaucracy – a circumstance that came as the first blow to his comfortable sense of self. In order for him to practise his profession he would need to do so by devious means and he was duly persuaded into a partnership with a building contractor who presented himself conveniently for that purpose. Herr Jacobsen at once committed more than half his liquid assets to the partnership and he designed one beautiful house which was promptly erected in the elegant suburb of Oranjesicht – at which point the police caught up with the building contractor and unmasked him as a bankrupt and serial con-man. And when the law impounded the partnership’s assets to pay off the bankrupt’s creditors, naturally, it was Herr Architekt’s money that vanished into the pit.
Once the family had stopped reeling from this misfortune, the elder Jacobsens emerged feeling the beginnings of their old age. They had also begun to feel a little unpleasantly foreign and humble. They set their sights a bit lower, then, and decided to sink what remained of their liquid assets into a market-gardening venture which beckoned with all the charm of a peaceful retirement plan. What they knew about the rural life was limited to Herr Jacobsen’s childhood on a Friesian Island dairy farm, but the Cape’s benign Mediterranean climate, its little wine valleys, its profusion of white arum lilies that grew wild over vacant lots, its mass and variety of bright exotic flowers that Malay stallholders offered in the market-place – all these things seduced the Jacobsens into believing that the Cape was, after all, the Garden of Eden, and that a market garden was precisely the downsizing idyll to meet their particular case. The plan was to grow flowers and to produce high-quality honey and preserves. Meanwhile, because many hands were required to get the venture afloat, Otto and Heinrich’s career plans were temporarily placed on hold.
Dinah’s mum, unlike her three brothers, was not a part of the project. Since her separation from Wilhelm and the experience of watching her father embark upon what looked like inescapable decline, she had become much more introspective. Throughout his financial tribulations she had struggled, more than the rest of her siblings, to play interpreter for him and she had found herself ludicrously inadequate. She knew that she would have to improve her English as quickly as possible, and, in the face of her mother’s stern disapproval, she had arranged to live in with a pair of elderly English sisters as a sort of au pair and companion: ‘a servant’, as her mother so kindly put it.
The elderly sisters instructed Dinah’s mum to address them as Miss Connie and Miss Louisa. They had soon become very fond of Marianne and they felt sorry for her misfortune in being so patently un-English. In consequence, they were rigorous in training her up towards English standards of behaviour. They liked to feel they were guiding their protégée in proper English ways.
One day, when Miss Connie had sent Marianne to the post office with a parcel, the clerk had handed her so many stamps that she couldn’t fit them on to the front of Miss Connie’s parcel without obscuring the address.
‘Shall I shtick some of zese shtamps on to ze backside?’ Marianne asked the clerk.
The clerk, a young man, giggled suggestively and made a saucy remark which Marianne, while she understood it in spirit, couldn’t really grasp. She promptly returned, with cheeks aflame, to the house of Miss Connie and Miss Louisa, where she described to the ladies what had occurred and asked what she’d said to provoke it.
The two English ladies, having grown up without recourse to a word for the WC, were quite disproportionately shocked. Marianne had disgraced herself. There was no question about it. She had spoken the unmentionable out loud. They at once began to speculate whether Marianne would ever again be fit for polite society. And Dinah’s mum, having not much idea that her hosts’ manners were out of tune with the times, was more baffled than ever, more mortified by the enormity of her faux pas than she had been before she had sought her hosts’ guidance.
The Misses Connie and Louisa, while much given to amplifying Marianne’s small transgressions, did so always for her edification and moral growth. And, though she found the steady drip of correction lowering to the spirit, she only once lost her temper. This happened on the morning that her mentors accused her of stealing from the cooler. Marianne, they hinted, had stolen the cream.
The English ladies had what Dinah’s mum considered one truly disgusting habit. Each day, they saved the wrinkled skin that had formed on the surface of boiled milk and they kept these pickings in the cooler on a saucer until the Sunday morning. Then, for a special treat, they would spread the accumulated wrinklings on their porridge. Dinah’s mum had always thought that these little gobs of flayed milk looked repellent, like sweat-soaked rags, but the English ladies referred to them as ‘the cream’ and considered them, most mercifully, a delicacy too precious to be shared with those of lower rank in the household.
Then came that Sunday morning when Marianne was sternly summoned from bed and ushered into the drawing room. Miss Connie, as the elder, addressed her first.
‘A certain something beginning with “c” is missing from the larder,’ she said. ‘I think you will know what I mean.’
Marianne made no reply as she stared at the sisters in puzzlement. Then Miss Louisa spoke in her turn.
‘You must be honest with us, Marianne,’ she said kindly. ‘We do this for your own good. Only be honest with us, my dear, and we’re prepared to forgive and forget.’
It was quite a while before Marianne began to catch the sisters’ drift, but once she did, she was furious. She was more incensed by the aspersions cast upon her good taste than by those cast upon her sense of honesty.
‘I?’ she said. ‘I?! Eat zees filsy old rags? Gott ach Gott! Ich ekel mich! Never in my life!’ She shuddered involuntarily and writhed with disgust.
Displacement and loneliness had by now begun to drive Marianne to a contemplation of the spiritual and this was being helped by the fact that Wilhelm’s letters were now few and far between. She began to pore in solitude over The Gospel According to St Luke and, that same Sunday – the Sunday of the cream – she took herself all on her own to Cape Town’s cathedral where, sixty-five years later, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in a spirit of ecumenical tolerance, addressed the nation at the memorial service of Joe Slovo, Communist, atheist and liberation hero.
As she entered, the congregation rose and immediately began to sing what Marianne thought of as the German national anthem. For an instant her spirit soared as she contemplated the marvel of the congregation’s bursting into song like that – and all just for her.
It was ‘Praise the Lord, ye heavens adore Him’, being sung to the tune of ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’, an anthem Josef Haydn wrote after hearing a rendering of ‘God Save the King’ during his visit to London in 1797. And it was hardly Haydn’s fault that his effort should have turned out so much better than its English model; nor that, at that particular historical moment, the tune should have been highjacked to serve the purposes of Hitler’s Third Reich.
When Marianne decided to pay Wilhelm a visit, she docked in Hamburg in the rain. Her first impression, after the balmy climate of the Cape, was of grey winter washing hanging in the grey back yards of even greyer tenement houses. Her second impression was of the ever-present tramp of soldiers’ boots. Wilhelm, when she met up with him, was inexplicably edgy and sometimes openly hostile. The occasions on which he agreed to see her were almost invariably à trois, since he was frequently accompanied by a female person whom Marianne, in later years, always referred to as a mannequin.
The mannequin was given to expensive dress – a fact that Wilhelm saw fit to use as the opportunity to find fault with Marianne’s clothes. Marianne was hurt by this, hurt and bruised by such a change in the man she had assumed that she would one day marry. But Wilhelm was not only punishing her for having left him and gone away. What she couldn’t then know – because his pride would not allow him to admit to it – was that his family had fallen on hard times. His father the judge had been dismissed from his post for refusing to join the Nazi Party and had taken to heavy drinking. His mother, Tante Berthe, with her two boys to educate, had begun selling hen’s eggs, door to door, in a basket strapped to her back. When the time came for Marianne to return to Cape Town, she and Wilhelm didn’t even say goodbye.
