My son talked for a long time about his little picture gallery, which included an early and a late photograph of David Frankfurter; the late one showed him as an old man and relapsed smoker. One picture was missing. I was already feeling somewhat hopeful when Konny, as if he could read his father s thoughts, gave me to understand that the detention centers administration had unfortunately forbidden him to adorn the wall of his cell with his “really cool picture of the martyr in uniform.”
Mother was his most frequent visitor, or at least she came more often than I did. Gabi was usually too busy with “teachers' union stuff to get away; she's thrown herself into the committee studying “Research on Child Rearing,” on a voluntary basis, of course. Not to forget Rosi: she visited fairly regularly, soon no longer looking tearful.
In the current year I was taken up with the election hysteria, which broke out early and throughout the Federal Republic. Like the rest of the media hyenas, I was trying to read the entrails of the nonstop polls; content-wise, they had little to offer. What did become clear was that the Christian Democrat Pastor Hintze with his “Red Sock Campaign” would give the Party of German Socialists, successor to the East German Socialist Unity Party, a black eye, but he could not save the fat man, who ended up losing the election. I traveled a lot, interviewing Bundestag members, mid-level big shots in business, even some Republikaner, for the forecasts suggested that this right-wing party would gain more than the five percent needed for Bundestag representation. It was particularly active in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, if with only moderate success.
I did not get to Neustrelitz, but I learned from a telephone conversation with Mother that her “Konradchen” was thriving. He had even gained “a couple pounds.” He had also been “promoted,” as she put it, to instructor of a computing course for young delinquents. “Well, you know, he always was a whizz at that kind of stuff…”
So I pictured my son, now with chubby cheeks, teaching his fellow prisoners the ABCs of the latest software, although I assumed that the inmates at the detention center would not be allowed to connect to the Internet; otherwise some of them would be able, under the guidance of Konrad Pokriefke, to find a virtual escape route: a collective jailbreak into cyberspace.
I also learned that a Neustrelitz Ping-Pong team to which my son belonged had played a team from the Plötzensee detention center, and won. To sum up: this journalist's son, who had been convicted of manslaughter and had meanwhile come of age, was busy around the clock. In early summer he passed his university qualifying examinations by correspondence, receiving the excellent score of 1.6; I sent a telegram: “Congratulations, Konny!”
And then I heard from Mother: she had been in Polish Gdańsk for more than a week. When I visited her back in Schwerin, this was her account: “Course I also ran around in Danzig, but mostly I spent my time in Langfuhr. It's all changed. But the house on Elsen-strasses still standing. Even the balconies with flower boxes are still there…”
She'd signed up for a bus tour. “Real reasonable it was for us!” A group of expellees, women and men of Mothers age, had responded to an ad put out by a travel agency that organized “nostalgia tours.” Mother commented, “It was nice there. You've got to give the Polacks credit — they've rebuilt a whole lot, all the churches and such. Except the statue of Gutenberg — we kids used to call him Kuddenpäch, and it was in the Jäschkental Woods, right behind the Erbsberg — it's not there anymore. But in Brösen — I used to go there in good weather — there's a real nice beach, just like there used tobe…”
Then her I'm-not-home look. But soon the broken record started up again: the way it used to be long ago, even longer ago, long, long ago, in the courtyard of the carpentry shop, or the way they'd built a snowman in the woods, or what went on during the summer holidays at the Baltic shore, “when I was skinny as a rail…” With a bunch of boys she had swum out to a shipwreck, whose superstructure had stuck up out of the water since the beginning of the war. “We'd dive way, way down into that old rusty crate. And one of the boys, the one who went in the deepest, he was called Jochen…”
I forgot to ask Mother whether she'd taken her fox along on the nostalgia tour, in spite of the summer weather. But I did ask whether Aunt Jenny had gone with her to Danzig-Langfuhr and other places. “Nah,” Mother said, “she didn't want to go, 'cause of her legs, and what have you. Too painful, she said it'd be. But the route we used to take to school, me and my girlfriend, I walked it a couple of times. It felt much shorter than it used to…”
Mother must have served other travel impressions, piping hot, to my son, including all the details of what she confessed to me, in a whisper: “I was in Gotenhafen, too, by myself. Right where they put us on board. In my mind I pictured the whole thing, all those little kids, head down in the icy water. Wanted to cry, but I couldn't…” Again that I'm-not-home look. And then the KDF refrain: “That was one beautiful ship…”
Accordingly I was not surprised that on my next visit in Neustrelitz, right after the elections, I was confronted with a piece of obsessive handiwork. The construction kit my son had used was a gift, no doubt paid for out of Mothers pocketbook.
You find things like this in the toy section of large department stores, where they have shelves and shelves of neatly organized models, representing famous originals that fly, drive, or float. I doubt she found it in Schwerin. She probably went looking in Hamburg in the Alster-haus or in Berlin at KdW, the Kaufhaus des Westens, and found what she wanted. She got to Berlin often. These days she was driving a VW Golf and was on the road a lot. She was a terror behind the wheel, passing other cars as a matter of principle.
When she came to Berlin, it wasn't to visit me in my messy bachelor pad in Kreuzberg but to “chew the fat” in Schmargendorf with her old girlfriend Jenny, eating pastry and drinking Red Riding Hood champagne. Since the changeover, the two of them saw each other often, as if they had to compensate for time lost after the Wall went up. They made a strange pair.
When Mother visited Aunt Jenny — on the occasions when I was allowed to sit in — she acted bashful, as if she were still a little girl who had just played a mean trick on Jenny and now wanted to undo the damage. Aunt Jenny, on the other hand, seemed to have forgiven her for all the awful things she did to her long ago. I saw her stroke Mothers head as Mother hobbled past her, whispering, “It's all right, Tulla, it's all right.” Then the two of them fell silent. And Aunt Jenny sipped her hot lemonade. Aside from Konrad, who had drowned while swimming, and Konny, who had committed a crime, if there was anyone else Mother loved, it was her old school friend.
Since the days when I had occupied that little room in the Schmargendorf apartment under the eaves, not a single piece of furniture has been moved. All the knick-knacks standing about, yet not covered with dust, looked like survivals from yesteryear. And just as all the walls at Aunt Jennys, even the sloping ones, are plastered with ballet photos — Aunt Jenny, who became known under the nom d'artiste of Angustri, sylphlike as Giselle, in Swan Lake and Coppelia, solo or posing next to her equally delicate ballet master — Mother too is plastered inside and out with memories. And if people can trade memories, as the expression goes, Karlsbader Strasse was and is the trading floor for these durable goods.
So on one of these trips to Berlin — before or after her visit to Aunt Jenny — she must have picked out a very special model from the assortment at KdW. Not the Dornier hydroplane Do X, not a King Tiger tank model, not the battleship Bismarc, which was sunk as early as 41, or the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, which was junked after the war, seemed suitable as a present. It was not something military she selected; it was the passenger vessel Wilhelm Gustloff on which she had her heart set. I doubt she let any salesclerk help her; Mother has always known what she wants.