Olga, page 7
And the sound! Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, a light tapping, soft hissing, gentle slapping, gradually increasing, faster and faster, until it was vibrating as rhythmically and evenly as a swiftly pounding locomotive. Then it would slow down, only to speed up again or else die away. When Olga Rinke was there—my mother called her Olga and the rest of us called her Fräulein Rinke—I played in the dining room. When I’d been made to go to kindergarten, I had cried for three days, until my mother had told herself that I would be sufficiently socialized in the big household—with my older siblings, my father, who came home for meals, the guests he often brought back with him, the au pair, and the occasional lodger—and that kindergarten wasn’t worth the tears.
Accompanied by the sound of the sewing machine, I would push my train along its tracks, build houses and factories out of wooden blocks, or play at sewing itself by sitting on my mother’s footrest, pushing scraps of cloth over the seat of a stool, and tapping my foot on the floor.
For a long time I didn’t understand that Fräulein Rinke was deaf. My mother tried more than once to explain to me what being deaf meant. But everything I could do grown-ups could do too. So how did it make sense that Fräulein Rinke couldn’t hear? My mother covered my ears with my hands, but Fräulein Rinke didn’t cover hers.
Sometimes I would yell at her because she didn’t answer a question or respond to a request. I didn’t dare grab her and shake her, as I would have if a member of the family ignored me. But I would get louder and louder, while she carried on doing whatever she was doing until she happened to look up. Then she would say, “Ferdinand,” with quiet concern and ask what the matter was, and that would confuse me, and I couldn’t remember anymore what it was I had asked or requested.
When I was five, I fell ill with a chronic middle-ear infection. My ears ached, buzzed, throbbed, oozed, and for days were so blocked that any sounds I heard seemed at best to be coming from a long way off. My mother took me to the ear doctor, who used horrible instruments to pump air into my nose and flush my ears with water, each procedure as bad as the next. Although it was not actually painful, I resisted this aggressive penetration of my head and cried, though my mother had put a sweet into my little red shoulder bag and promised me that I would be allowed to eat it on the way back if I kept still this time. Afterward, for a while, I could hear—until my ears filled up again and the sounds retreated farther and farther into the distance.
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I was often sick, even after the middle-ear infections stopped. I kept getting bronchitis, which would confine me to bed for weeks.
I remember the silence in the sickroom and muffled sounds in the apartment and outside, snatches of my sister playing the violin or my brother playing the cello, the cries of children playing in the garden, the revving of a truck in the road. I remember the play of light and shadow that the branches of the trees conjured onto the ceiling of my room, and the bright yellow light that swept across my darkened room when cars drove past. And I remember the loneliness I felt when I was ill. I read a lot, and enjoyed it, and my mother came up with all sorts of things to occupy my time, making me learn the old German script and pick old clothes apart to be used to make new ones; and she insisted I keep up with what was being studied in school. But I wanted visitors, company, entertainment.
It wasn’t that my mother and sisters and brother didn’t take care of me. But my mother was busy with the housekeeping and, as the wife of a pastor, with the women’s and girls’ groups, and my siblings had school and music lessons and orchestra and choir and sports. They came, sat down briefly on the edge of my bed, and then went. Sometimes my father even came and sat down, broad and heavy, on my legs if I didn’t pull them out of the way fast enough. He would say a few words, then get lost in thought, especially if it was Saturday afternoon and he had interrupted the preparation of his sermon to come and pay me a visit. My need for entertainment was most reliably satisfied by the women who came and went in our house and who liked to come and sit with me.
There was the cleaning woman who told us repeatedly that, ever since knowing people, she had loved animals; but she took me to the church fair, went on the ghost train and chairoplane with me, and read me Grimms’ Fairy Tales when I was ill, with particular relish for the cruel and gruesome ones. The sexton’s wife, who saved her alcoholic husband’s job by doing his work for him and came to us to discuss church business, did not have children; she took a liking to me and lectured me about the curse of alcohol. The female pediatrician we often went to, or who was called to my sickbed, was a mysterious figure: she was the only Jewish woman I knew, and there was an intimacy between her and her receptionist, who had hidden her and saved her during the Third Reich, that I never saw between other women. A friend of my father’s, a Russian émigré, often came to stay with us for days and weeks on end, with the nonchalance with which Russians offer and enjoy hospitality, accompanied by his wife and his mentally ill but kindhearted daughter. As I lay on my sickbed, his wife told me about life in St. Petersburg before and during the revolution and about the exciting journey when Cossacks, hired by her father, brought her from St. Petersburg to Odessa and put her on the ship to France. We were often visited by the sister of my father’s first wife, who would have liked to have inherited and married my widowed father; she tormented me with cupping glasses and enemas and consoled me with an emotional rendition of a Schumann song, a setting of a Heine ballad about two Napoleonic soldiers.
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When Fräulein Rinke was there and saw that no one else was keeping me company, she would pick up something to darn and come and sit with me. She told me tales from Silesia and Pomerania, legends of the mountain spirit Rübezahl, and anecdotes about Old Fritz. Like all children, I could listen to the same stories over and over again.
Some anecdotes told of Old Fritz and his flute. I wanted to play as well as he did. His love of the flute was an incentive for me to practice more regularly and for longer; for a while, my flute was my best friend. Old Fritz had taken the flute on one of his late campaigns, but his hands were plagued with gout and he couldn’t play; even after he returned to Potsdam and picked up the flute again, he couldn’t do it anymore. So he had his flutes packed up and put away, saying woefully, “I have lost my best friend.”
When I was older and was reading about Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver, traveling with Sven Hedin through the deserts of Asia, and with Roald Amundsen to the South Pole, Fräulein Rinke told me about Herbert’s travels and adventures. She left out the war against the Herero: Herbert had traveled to German South West Africa just as he had felt compelled to go to Argentina and Karelia and Brazil and all those places. She told me about the deserts, the mirages, the brushfires on the savanna, about the snake bite, about the swans rising majestically out of the golden water and landing back down on it, about battling through the snow. She didn’t talk about Herbert’s journey to Spitsbergen and Nordaustlandet. When I asked her what had become of him, she said he hadn’t returned from his last journey.
She told vivid stories, and because she always kept her gaze fixed on my face to see if I wanted to ask or say something, I felt she was utterly focused on me. She didn’t sit on the edge of the bed; she pulled up a chair alongside and sat upright, with her hands in her lap.
But Fräulein Rinke didn’t just tell stories. When she came to my bed and I had a fever, she would cover me with another blanket or place a cold, wet cloth on my forehead. Her movements were deliberate; she smelled of lavender; her hands were warm and her dignity soothing. I liked her nearness and her touch, as during fittings, when she held up against me the jacket that was to be made shorter or taken in or, looking for the right place to set the leather patch on the frayed elbow, stroked her hand down my back and arm and, as she let me go, over my head.
Once—I must have been in the first or second year of high school—my mother asked Fräulein Rinke to come and stay with us for a few days and left me in her care. My sisters were away with the choir, my brother was taking a course at the school hostel in the countryside, one of the au pairs who came to us on six-month placements from a school of domestic science had already left and the other hadn’t yet arrived, and my mother was accompanying my father to a conference abroad. She spoke English and French, whereas he didn’t, and, because in those days things weren’t interpreted as a matter of course, he needed her. The conference was about the unity of the churches, which was as important to her as it was to him.
Those were silent days. My mother played piano whenever she could find the time: a chorale in the morning, Mozart and Beethoven sonatas and Chopin études during the day. My sisters and brother practiced their instruments regularly, we played chamber music together, we sang together. After much hesitation, my parents had capitulated to the spirit of the age, purchased a radio, subscribed to a radio magazine, and sometimes put a radio concert on the program for the family’s evening entertainment.
There was none of all this in the days with Fräulein Rinke. When I practiced the flute, it sounded excessively loud and made me uncomfortable, so I stopped practicing. I felt it would be unfriendly to turn on the radio, which Fräulein Rinke couldn’t hear and couldn’t enjoy. We talked to each other, but our talking was not the lively back-and-forth my family usually had at table; it was, rather, a concentrated exchange of information. Often, we ate in silence.
I felt Fräulein Rinke’s benevolence. When I got home from school, she had cooked for me. Meatballs in caper sauce, stuffed cabbage leaves, eggs in mustard sauce, baked pasta. How did she know what I liked? My mother didn’t like to spoil us; she wouldn’t have asked Fräulein Rinke to cook my favorite dishes. Over the years, Fräulein Rinke must have noticed what I’d particularly enjoyed when we ate lunch together.
In the evenings we sat on the sofa, and she told me stories. I would turn toward her, and sometimes she would put her arm around my shoulders and hold me close, and I felt her nearness, her warmth, spoiling me.
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She had started to tell me about Herbert because I was reading travel and adventure stories, and Herbert had traveled and had adventures. Then she told me stories about Herbert because I had reached the age at which she, Herbert, and Viktoria had been playmates. I heard about life on the estate and in the village, the elementary school and the Confirmation class, Herbert’s dog and his love of running, the games they played together, the walks they went on, the excursions in the rowboat. She talked about the organ, which the organist had shown her how to play, and about the books the teacher had lent her because she wouldn’t give him any peace.
As I got older, the conflicts started with my parents, especially my mother. I was reading the wrong books and watching the wrong films; my friends wore blue jeans, smoked, and drank alcohol. I wanted to be like them, to fritter the days away with them at the swimming pool and the ice cream parlor. I didn’t want to go to church every Sunday anymore either, and I started doing less well at school. I felt my parents ought to understand that I wanted to experiment; they felt I was behaving thoughtlessly and irresponsibly.
They weren’t particularly strict, but it was the 1950s, and to them a film with Brigitte Bardot signified vice and a Brecht play communism; blue jeans were not only unnecessary, as I had plenty of proper trousers to wear, but loutish. When, on top of this, I started to doubt the politics of Adenauer, whom my parents voted for in every election, and wanted to talk to them about it, my father saw this as my attacking the world he had helped to build after the horrors of National Socialism. My mother wanted to reconcile us: he only meant well, she said, and I meant no ill. But we didn’t reconcile; we kept having the same arguments over and over again. My older siblings had been smarter; they had avoided confrontation rather than rebelling.
Grandparents can sometimes be helpful in a situation like this: more relaxed than parents, without the responsibility for the children’s upbringing, knowing from experience that conflicts resolve themselves over time and aren’t worth making a fuss about. Mine lived a long way away. But when Fräulein Rinke was there, she would interrupt her sewing and listen to me sympathetically. She smiled and shook her head at the smoking, the alcohol, and the blue jeans. Although my thoughts about politics surely seemed immature to her too, she listened to them seriously, not just because she voted for Ollenhauer, not Adenauer, and had joined the union even as a retiree, but because she didn’t consider the world of the 1950s to be as stable and well-ordered as my father did; rather, she found it full of uncertainty. She also loved Brecht’s poems almost as much as Heine’s.
However, she had no sympathy at all for the fact that I was doing less well at school, and because she had sympathy for everything else, or at least a friendly shrug of the shoulders, I couldn’t brush off her disapproval. She told me how she had wanted to go to the girls’ secondary school, that she hadn’t been allowed to do so, and how she had had to study the syllabus by herself. Learning was a privilege. Not to learn when you were in a position to do so was stupid, spoiled, arrogant. No, the fact that I was doing less well at school was absolutely unacceptable.
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My mother was also worried when I started to become interested in girls. I was not, for the love of God, to fall in love or tie the knot too early. She noted what I was reading: that I was sleeping my way through women’s beds with Felix Krull, seducing Madame de Rênal and Mathilde de la Mole with Julien Sorel, and making a harlot of the maid Katyusha with Prince Mitya, and she was appalled.
Fräulein Rinke liked to hear which girl I liked and why, and how I tried to impress her. She told me how she and Herbert had courted each other and eventually come together. Courting takes time, she said. You don’t have to be married to sleep together, but you have to have courted and explored each other.
I looked at Fräulein Rinke and tried to imagine her the same age as Emilie, the girl I was in love with. She hadn’t worn makeup, she said, just as Emilie didn’t wear makeup. She had worn simple clothes, as did Emilie. She was more powerfully built than Emilie, her face flatter, her hair paler—that much I could figure out for myself, but I still couldn’t picture her in my mind’s eye. It was only later that I saw the photograph of her with Herbert and Viktoria the day before their Confirmation.
I liked that Olga and Herbert had spent a long time courting each other. Emilie was coy, and I had to court her for a long time before she would even let me take her to the cinema. After a year she gave me a first kiss, a quick, light breath on my cheek before she boarded the tram. The next time we met, I put my arm around her after the cinema and she put her head on my shoulder, and we kissed at the bus stop until the tram came. We kept going to the cinema or a concert or the theater, but the smooching afterward was the important part: in the dark, empty schoolyard, in the park by the church, beside the river. We kissed until our tongues burned.
We kept our love a secret from our families and friends. We wanted to keep it to ourselves. But when Olga told me about the New Year’s Eve party Herbert didn’t take her to, that she decided to forgo, Emilie’s and my secrecy seemed like a betrayal. “We don’t ever want to part, we’ll always be together,” sang Heidi Brühl, and I sang it quietly under my breath as I walked home after my evenings with Emilie. I introduced Emilie to my reluctant parents, my curious siblings, my friends, and Fräulein Rinke. When Emilie left me two years later for a student, they all had words of consolation for me—she was a nice girl, but . . . Everyone had a reason why she hadn’t been the right one for me. Only Fräulein Rinke had none. She just said life was a series of losses, and I would learn to make my peace with that in time.
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In my final years at high school, when I was at home in the afternoon and Fräulein Rinke was sewing, I would make coffee for us and sit with her. She told me about the teacher-training college, her first position in Pomerania and her second in the Memel region, the way woman teachers were treated under the Kaiser and in the Republic, and her involvement with the association of woman teachers. She told me about Herbert’s travels and the days and weeks they’d spent together.
“We were more patient than you. Back then, people were often separated for months and years, and only briefly together in between. We had to learn to wait. Nowadays you drive and fly and speak on the phone and think the other is available. In love, the other is never available.”
Although Fräulein Rinke looked back calmly on the separations from Herbert, his longing for the great expanse had remained a source of annoyance for her. In the young Herbert she found this longing touching; in the older, absurd. “The desert—he wanted to dig a well and build factories in the desert of sand, and he wanted to explore the passage and conquer the pole in the desert of ice, but it was all far too grand; and anyway, it was all just talk. He didn’t want to do anything in the desert—he just wanted to lose himself in it. He wanted to lose himself in the great expanse. But the great expanse is nothingness. He wanted to lose himself in nothingness.”
“Did you ask him why—”
“Oh, child”—this was what she called me—“we didn’t talk about difficult things. When we were together, when we were finally together, he was filled with restlessness. He was always filled with restlessness. He was running inside, and I had to run beside him, and all I could do was breathlessly gasp out things I wanted to say.” She shook her head.
By now, when she talked about Herbert, she no longer left out the fact that he had died on a badly prepared and badly led expedition to the Arctic. Nor did she leave out the war with the Herero anymore, and she talked about the First World War, where Herbert would have sought death if he hadn’t already found it in the ice, and about the Second. She believed Germany’s misery had begun with Bismarck. Ever since he had seated Germany on a horse too big for it to ride, the Germans had wanted everything too grand. Although Bismarck hadn’t been interested in colonies, she held him responsible for Herbert’s colonial dreams, and for his Arctic nonsense, and for Eik’s fantasies about Lebensraum, and for the world wars. She thought the reconstruction effort and the economic miracle after World War II had gotten too grand as well.
