And the days go by, at once dreary and fraught, oppressive days of waiting, of feeling bereft and anxious. But sustained with hope. One autumn evening his father finally reappears — or rather the shadow of his father. Otto Keller is not even an enfeebled double of powerful Clemens Dunkeltal but a pathetic imitation. He has shrunk into a grimy fugitive, grown very thin, ill-shaven, the look in his eyes that of a hunted animal, a vicious beast. Franz observes with dismay his king of darkness overthrown, drained of his power, shorn of all magic. Can he even sing any more with his poor lanky stooped body? What has become of the night sun that resounded voluptuously in his chest? Has he swopped that too, like his name, his watch and so many other things, for food or false papers? But the joy of seeing him again, still alive, outweighs the mortification of finding him so reduced. The child stays with him as much as he can, expressing with his eyes what his lips dare not articulate: not to worry about any of this, that most of all he still loves him, perhaps even more than before. Yes, more, because pity for his father now outweighs the fear Dunkeltal used to inspire in his son in his days of glory. And at least now his father does not go away any more as he did when he had important responsibilities. He remains most of the time locked in their room, only rarely venturing out and always after nightfall.
Such are the thoughts of the child who, beguiled by the masterfully constructed conceit of his mother, still has no understanding of events and innocently lives his life cut off from reality, despite all the brutality this reality brings to bear and he has to suffer. But hunger and destitution seem almost easy to endure with his parents reunited. And then there is a great project in the making: the plan is to go to a distant country across the seas. The name of this country, which he often hears mentioned by his parents in the evenings, has the brightness of a promise, the beauty of a dream, the magic spell of a secret: Mexico.
Mexico — this for all three of them is their secret, their hope, their future.
One night his father returns very happy from one of his discreet outings. He has procured the money and papers necessary for his journey. He is at last equipped to set off for Mexico ahead of his wife and son who will rejoin him as soon as he can bring them over without danger. He proudly shows Augusta-Thea his new papers in the name of Helmut Schwalbenkopf, and this avian surname amuses him. ‘Schwalbenkopf, swallow’s head, now that’s a good omen for undertaking this perilous migration!’ Then he adds with a peculiar smile, ‘Ah, good old Helmut …’ and he goes on to recite in a playful tone a verse from a poem by Eichendorff:
‘If you have a friend in this world, don’t trust him at this hour, though with friendly eyes and smiling mouth, he is planning war in perfidious peace.’
Franz listens to him, a little bewildered, and taking his hand asks, ‘Please sing, father …’ As his newly effected transmutation into Helmut Schwalbenkopf has put him in a good mood, his father sings mezza voce a Schubert lied that deliciously thrills the child.
Note
Schwalbenkopf, Helmut: born 1905 at Friedrichshafen, Bade-Wurtemberg. Baker.
Married in 1931 to Gertrud Meckel, born 1911.
Two children: Anna-Luisa, born 1934, and Wolf, born 1937.
Enlisted in 1939, sent to Poland, where he is wounded, and later to Russia, where he is taken prisoner. Freed in 1946, he returns home.
Back in Friedrichshafen, he discovers his wife and two children have died and his bakery was destroyed in the bombardment of the city at the end of the war.
Reduced to vagrancy in his own city, one evening in March 1947 he disappears. No one knows what has become of him. Some people assume he committed suicide, but his body has never been found. Maybe he threw himself into the lake, whose waters are the most secret and inviolable of graves.
Fragment 6
His father has gone away again, on a very long journey this time. And the waiting resumes, even more tense than last time. Thea, who retains her pseudonym of Augusta Keller, once again girds herself with patience but under the stress of tiredness and anxiety, increasing as the days go by, she becomes harsh and irritable. She stops coddling her son and begins more and more often to scold him. Suddenly she thinks he is too dreamy, lazy, that he has outgrown childhood and it is high time he put it behind him. She takes over the father’s fault-finding and severity towards the boy.
It is true that Franz is already nine years old but he is in no hurry to join the ranks of adults. As he gets older he begins to have a better understanding of their behaviour, their pleasures and worries, but without any insight yet into their implications. Nor does he attempt to deepen his understanding of the obscurity of grown-ups, for the little he is able to puzzle out does not seem very appealing. He has a sense of something small-minded, wretched even on occasion, about their preoccupations as well as their satisfactions. And besides they are not very reliable. For years they go quietly about their business, then suddenly drop everything, abscond, change their name as readily as they would their shirt, and ultimately flee to the ends of the earth.
That is not the worst of it: adults are capable of destroying everything, burning everything — houses, bridges, churches, roads, entire cities. He has seen this and he still lives in a landscape of ruins. But apparently there is even worse madness than this: the destruction not only of cities but of entire peoples. This is beyond young Franz’s comprehension. He has heard some incredible stories and above all seen photographs at once mesmerizing and blinding to look at: piles of skeletal bodies like bundles of pine wood thrown in a heap, living-dead with enormous haunted eyes sunk in black holes, children so thin and ragged they look like little old men, their bald heads too heavy for necks reduced to the size of a rhubarb stalk. And far from offering any explanation and helping him to confront these revelations that provoke mental combustion and leave his mind prostrate, in shatters, his mother refuses to discuss them. She even persists in denying the evidence, going so far as to denounce the news as lies and the published photographs as fakes. And she declares with as much conviction as rancour that it is precisely because of all these slanderous untruths spread by the victors that her husband was compelled to flee. And she says she cannot wait to go and join him, to leave for ever this country she once so loved but that has lost all greatness since being orphaned of its Führer. Franz does not know how or what to think. It is hard for him to identify the boundaries of reality, to distinguish truth from mystification. He detects a strong whiff of bad faith and dishonesty in his mother’s acrimonious words but he is still under Thea’s influence and what she says carries weight, for better or worse.
Similarly, he asks himself questions about his father, whose name, like those of his friends Julius Schlack and Horst Witzel, has been extensively cited in the course of trials being held since the end of the war, but so monstrous are these questions they are checked by a wall of amazement. His father is declared a ‘war criminal’. The enormity of the term makes it inconceivable; Franz is unable to grasp exactly what it means. He is all the more unable to do so because in his heart of hearts he does not really want to understand, so frightened is he of having to deal with a truth he suspects is ghastly. Is Dr Dunkeltal’s crime his failure to overcome the typhus that killed thousands of the patients in the camp where he worked? This seems unfair to the child, incapable of daring to imagine any offence other than incompetence. In the face of everything, he retains a prestigious image of his father and wants to see him again, to hear once more the deep soothing sound of his singing. No, Franz certainly has no desire to emerge from the state of ignorance natural to childhood, is in no hurry to throw himself into the cruel fray of the adult world. Besides, he has not had his full share of childhood. Illness robbed him of a very great part of it, war and the exodus spoilt the rest. And this lost part distresses him, causes him pain, like an amputated limb that continues to send twinges through the amputee’s body. So rather than upset himself by probing the accusations against his father, he prefers to look towards the eclipse of his own past and peer into the strange black hole that swallowed up his early childhood.