THE LAST PLEASURE BOAT had glided past sometime before, we could count only about two dozen dinner jackets and evening dresses under the festive lanterns, down below the band was playing for two or three couples self-consciously dancing, most passengers stood together in little groups on deck to take in the evening air over the Elbe one last time before the trip ended. Not a sound to be heard. It had gone quiet here in the restaurant as well, the steps creaked, the waiter came up to serve our coffee, took the empty dessert plates away. Frau Fischer lit a cigarette.
I had tried to describe my excitement when, at the end of my first afternoon in the Hagemanns’ house, I had asked if I could take her to the cinema. And how Klara, no doubt just as excited, answered with a decisive nod of the head and a firm “Friday.” As though it had been settled long ago: from now on she would be going to the cinema only with this boy called Hermann Funk.
My excitement then, a few weeks later, when I had my first invitation from the Hagemanns. I knew the drawing room from my afternoon with Klara, I knew the receptions at the house from Martin’s description, but all the same I can barely remember the evening itself. I can’t even recall Klara there, that’s how excited I must have been. Fortunately, at the time I wasn’t aware that there was a good deal more associated with the name Hagemann than Martin had conveyed to me on our outings. Yes, if my parents had been Dresdeners and I had grown up in the city, I would have known about the family name, would probably have heard it mentioned at home when I was a child.
Among their extended family there was a line of academics, there were landowners, the car-business Hagemanns, Klara’s grandfather had been a cigarette manufacturer. Older gentlemen in their circle still praised the quality of certain brands, the Turkish Mixture, the Pure Virginia, and when they shook Herr Hagemann’s hand they did so solemnly, with dignity, as though they were still expressing their condolences decades after the firm had gone bankrupt and Grandfather had been consigned to the attic. Klara’s father felt uncomfortable in such situations — granted, there were such things as family virtues, hard work, conscientiousness, and an artistic vein, but Herr Hagemann did not possess an estate, nor did he run a factory. It’s possible that his choice of chemistry at the university was meant to give him something of an outsider profile in the family, he had gone to Berlin, had met his future wife in the laboratory, toyed with the idea of going abroad, but then come back to Dresden with his young family after all. Perhaps he would have preferred to live where the name meant nothing, but all the same: if you were introduced to Klara’s father, exchanged a few words with him, perhaps got to know him a little better, you soon sensed that Herr Hagemann felt an obligation to his family name, especially as all the rest of the Hagemann clan had been decamping to the West one by one since the war.
That was his stubborn streak. His secret wish to restore the good name of the Hagemanns. So Klara’s father tolerated it when his colleagues in the laboratory appreciatively called him a “real Hagemann” because in his presence the director of the firm, who was given to violent outbursts, was transformed into an understanding character who didn’t mind asking the son of the cigarette factory owner for advice from time to time. He also put up with it when his name occasionally provoked some skeptical scrutiny.
Herr Hagemann knew what he was letting himself in for. He and his wife had spent sleepless nights going through the pros and cons together, but the final decision wasn’t made until the landed-gentry relatives sent their first letter from the West. His aunt’s childish handwriting seemed to Klara’s father exactly suited to the “yoke” and “knout,” the “demons” and the “bloodsuckers” she was writing about, as though a defeated military commander had dictated his last testament to her in his madness. Herr Hagemann held his breath. As he read the last paragraph, he began to growl dangerously, Frau Hagemann was considering sending her daughters out of the room: their nephew was of course welcome at any time, they said, to escape to the bosom of the family together with his wife and daughters. He remembered staying with them near Meissen, even as a child he didn’t trust his uncle, in fact he was afraid of him, like everybody else on the estate. The oppressive summer days were dominated by fear of running into this unpredictable being, the nephew mingled with the farm workers, went out to the fields with them, hung around in the stables — but the landowner had eyes everywhere. Put yourself in the hands of such people? Of your own free will? Never.
Then there were his good intentions. There was his drive to prove himself. And there was the indulgence toward his daughters, especially the younger one, who had inherited so much from him. You certainly didn’t have to do everything they expected of you today, but he really couldn’t see any reason to complain about the prospect of a peace demonstration. Klara had earmarked that time for the next volume of Balzac, she was complaining about the wasted hours. Her father shook his head, she needn’t make a face like that, and then he felt sorry when she left the house looking miserable. The book was lying on the table. Herr Hagemann had acquired it as a young chemistry student in Berlin, had skipped his practicals, had read from cover to cover all the volumes of the cycle that had appeared in German, and felt quite lighthearted about it, as though he had managed to shake off a whole load of Hagemann obligations he had imposed upon himself.
“Then there was no further contact between the Hagemanns and the family in the West?” asked Frau Fischer.
Klara had never seen her western relatives. She wasn’t allowed to receive so much as a parcel of books from the uncle.
“So there were some limits to his indulgence toward his younger daughter, then.”
I don’t think the threat was ever made openly, but neither do I believe that any of the longed-for new books from the West ever got to Klara. Books she wasn’t allowed to read — no, it was more to do with his fearful imaginings, her father trying to give concrete expression to his loathing of that branch of the family.
In the first summer of the war the parents took their two daughters on a trip to Leipzig, Klara had just started school, Ulli was two grades above her, their father was in the uniform he detested, he cherished every minute spent with his family. His “three women,” as he called them, gave him protection, and protection for him meant the illusion that he was a civilian. So he took his family to the zoo, took them for a coffee, and in the strange city even his daughters forgot for a while that their father was no longer living with them at home. And then — whether it was an idea that occurred to them over coffee or the parents had planned it as a way of rounding off the excursion — they tacked on a visit to the National Library. Ulli thought it a boring idea, even more books than at home, a whole building just for books. She began to whine, she had enough to do with her reading primer at school, here was a whole lifetime of books she would never master, and she saw malevolently grinning authors who enjoyed writing, filling page after page, book after book, and every time they put their difficult-to-read names to a title page they leaned back, stretched themselves at their desks, narrowed their eyes, and trained their sights on Ulli. They filled shelf upon shelf, room after room, while Ulli laboriously formed her letters one by one, wrestling with sentences, toiling away at her exercise books and yet bringing them home every time covered in red ink.
What did her little sister know of the abysses of reading and writing? Speechless, Klara stared at the imposing, shiny row of lettering on the facade. She stood speechless in the entrance hall and was speechless while being shown the catalog, the reference works, the loans desk. And everybody here was carrying books under their arm, all eager to start bending over the open white pages with the black signs, day and night. When you were reading, you no longer even wanted to sleep. Speechless, Klara let her mother drag her away to the train station, she still hadn’t found her tongue when the train pulled into Dresden, at night in bed Ulli talked about the cocoa, talked about the animals, then worked out how many days of the holiday were left and fell asleep.