Yesterday in the cemetery, at six o’clock, there were lovers standing motionless, like a tree. I had to step off the path; snow came over the tops of my boots. I saw candles burning in little hollows on some of the graves, and Christmas trees on the graves of children. What shall I do when I have to bury the family? Uncle Theo speaks of buying a plot, but in the plot he has in mind there is no room for me and he knows it. I should have married, and when I died I’d be buried with my in-laws — that is what Uncle Theo says to himself. When you speak about dying he looks confused. His face loses its boiled-egg symmetry. Then he says, “Cheer up, Hilde, it can’t be so bad or they would have found a way to stop it by now.”
He was a guard in the prisoner-of-war camp. I forgot to mention that. In fact that was how he got out of his own camp; they were so desperate that they asked for volunteers from among the anti-social element — the thieves, the pimps, the black-marketeers. Most of them went to the Eastern front and died there. Uncle Theo, undersized and elderly, became a guard not too far from home. Even there he got on well, and when the Russian prisoners broke out at the end, they did not hang him or beat him to death but simply tied him to a tree. They told him a phrase he was to repeat phonetically if Russian troops got there before the others. Luckily for him the Americans turned up first; all he has ever been able to say in a foreign language is “Pro domo sua,” and he must have learned that phonetically, too. He hardly went to school. Uncle Theo was able to prove he had once been arrested, and that turned out to be in his favour. Now he has a pension, and is considered a hero, which is annoying. He was never a member of any party. He does not go to church. “Pro domo sua,” he says, closing an eye.
Uncle Theo applied for war reparations in 1955. He offered his record — destruction of porcelain factory, unjust imprisonment, pacifist convictions, humane and beloved guard in prisoner-of-war camp — and in 1960 he received a lump sum and a notice of a pension to follow. He immediately left for India, with a touring group composed mostly of little widows. But he decided not to marry any of them. He brought us a scarf apiece and a set of brass bowls. It was after his return that he wrote “O Lasting Peace.”
One last thing: without my consent, without even asking me, Uncle Theo advertised for a husband for me. This was years ago, before he had his pension. He gave my age as “youthful,” my face and figure as “gracious,” my world outlook as “modern,” and my upbringing as “delicate.” There was too much unemployment at the time, and so no one answered. Eleven years later he ran the same notice, without changing a word. The one person who answered was invited — by Uncle Theo — to call and see if he wanted me. I saw the candidate through a fog of shame. I remember his hair, which sprang from his forehead in a peculiar way, like black grass, and that he sat with his feet turned in and the toe of one shoe over the other. He was not really a fool, but only strange, like all persons who do not really intend to go through with the wedding. My aunt, my mother, and my uncle stated my qualities for me and urged him to eat fruitcake. My mother had to say, “Hilde has been so many years with the tourist office that we can’t even count them,” which knocked out the “youthful” bit, even if he had been taken in by it. It was a few days after a Christmas; fresh candles were lighted on the tree. The candidate turned his head, swallowing. Everyone wanted him to say something. “Won’t the curtains catch fire?” he asked. I’m sure Uncle Theo would have picked up the tree and moved it if he had been able, he was that excited by his guest. Then the man finished eating his cake and went away, and I knew we would not hear about him again; and that was a good riddance.
“You are so anxious to have this apartment to yourselves,” I said to my family. “You have made yourselves cheap over a peasant who sits with one foot on the other. How would you pay the rent here without me? Don’t you understand that I can’t leave you?” At the same time, I wanted to run out on the balcony screaming “Come back!” but I was afraid of knocking the flowerpots over. I’ve forgotten why I wanted to mention this.
An Alien Flower
My daughter wept when the news reached us here in Cologne that Bibi had died. It was the first loss by death she had ever experienced, except for that of our old brown poodle, and it affected her to the point of fantasy. She accused me of having murdered Bibi; of having treated her like a servant; of having been jealous of her brains and her beauty (her beauty?); and, finally, of having driven her out of our house with my capricious demands, my moods, and my coldness.
Everyone knows what it is like now to be judged by spoiled, ignorant children. Of course we never considered Bibi a servant! That is a pure invention. From the very beginning — when we were, in fact, her employers — she ate at our table and called us Julius and Helga. There were hundreds of thousands of girls like Bibi in those days, just as poor and alone. No person was ever considered to blame for his own poverty or solitude. You would never have dreamed of hinting it could be his own fault. You never knew what that person’s past might be, or what unspoken grudge he might be hiding. There was also a joint past that lay all around us in heaps of charred stone. The streets still smelled of terror and ashes, particularly after rain. Every stone held down a ghost, or a frozen life, or a dreadful secret. No one was inferior, because everyone was. A social amnesty had been declared.
Bibi must have been in her early twenties then. She was a refugee, from Silesia. In the town she named as her birthplace everyone had died or run away. She had no friends, no family, and no money, but she must have been given some sort of education at one time, because she had been accepted in high school here, in the terminal class. How she got in is a mystery. There was no room for anyone, and students were selected like grains of sand. People of all ages were trying to go to school — middle-aged men, prisoners of war coming back and claiming an education. In those days, so many papers and documents had been burned that people like Bibi could say anything they liked about themselves. Still, she had passed some sort of entrance examination — she must have. She had also found a place to live, and she supported herself doing sewing and ironing and minding babies — whatever she could find. We had her Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, for housework; three evenings a week. Her dinner was part of her wages, but as the evening meal was nothing but soup she did not have to give up her ration tickets. After she had been with us for a while, one of her teachers told Julius that Bibi was brilliant. Yes, brilliant. Without any real culture, without … But brilliant all the same. As soon as Julius was certain it was true, he found a part-time job for Bibi in the first research laboratory they were establishing then at Possner. Possner was looking for bright young people with a promising future and no past. It was an incredible stroke of fortune for someone in Bibi’s situation. She stayed at Possner on that part-time basis until she published her thesis in 1955. (Possner sent her to the university.) After that she went on to a much, much better job. From the time she met Julius, Bibi had nothing but luck.
Her thesis was called “The Occurrence of Alkaloids in the” — in the something. In a word beginning with “A.” I could look it up — there must be twelve copies or even more down in the wine cellar. “The Occurrence” was nearly a book — eighty-two pages long, not counting the pages of thanks and the dedications. Julius has a whole page to himself: “To Doctor Engineer Julius Lauer, of the firm of Possner (Cologne), my Heartfelt Gratitude.” The copies are well bound in that brown paper that imitates bark. Possner must have paid.