“I’ll do the rest tomorrow morning.” Ulli put down the sponge and emptied the water from the sink.
“That’s what it means. It can’t mean anything else. They want to make an example of him.”
One sister was leaning against the kitchen cabinet. The other was looking at the floor. I didn’t know where to put the dish towel.
“If that’s true, Ulli, you know what will happen next?”
“Don’t scream. Yes, I do know.”
“If they put Merker in the dock and turn him into the great Zionist conspirator, then the Kochs will pack their bags. They’ll be off. We’ll never see them again.”
4
ULLI, QUICK, THERE are two real English people here.” Klara peered out into the hall, a couple stood there talking, the sentences flowing quickly, foreign and clear, Klara couldn’t understand a word. The cadence of their speech was what had struck her, a different cadence. Klara in her nightdress hid behind the slightly open door waiting for her parents to move away, her mother went to get glasses, her father had gone ahead into the drawing room, now Klara could take a look outside. The woman was adjusting her delicately patterned stole in front of the hall-stand mirror, the man was fishing a packet of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, perhaps they were talking about Herr Klein, the Super-Tenant, who had just gone upstairs. Klara didn’t even know whether her parents knew English, whether any of the regular guests would be able to converse with the couple.
“Come on, Ulli, or the English people won’t be there anymore,” hissed Klara in a stage whisper over her shoulder, but before her sister could get out of bed the woman had caught sight of Klara in the doorway, she laughed, suddenly she was speaking German: “No, my dear, we’re not real English people.”
Klara nodded. Went red. And shut the door. It was the first time in her life that she had seen émigrés.
She was still a bit embarrassed about having behaved like a small child, Klara confessed to me when we were discussing the new faces that had appeared in the Hagemann circle after the war. A little girl from Dresden who knew foreign countries, foreign languages only from books. At the time Klara even acquired a few words of English to make up for it, so that the following week she could greet the Kochs as though she had grown up in London herself, as the couple appreciatively agreed.
Ashamed she may have been, but she took a particular liking to her “English couple,” and for their part the Kochs never failed to look in on the girls before they went on into the drawing room to greet the other guests, the adults. Herr Koch would stand by the window while Frau Koch sat on the edge of Klara’s bed, only for a few minutes, and yet as the sisters drifted off to sleep there was a faint aroma of cigarette smoke and eau de cologne.
The Kochs alerted Klara to cadences. The mere memory of the sound of a foreign language out in the hall was enough later to make Klara aware when there was a cool atmosphere between guests, when someone was covering up insecurity or close to losing self-control, when the drawing room conversation took a turn nobody had anticipated.
One evening in the summer of 1948 she was at the door when the Kochs happened to arrive at the same time as a man Klara didn’t know. Clearly the Kochs didn’t know who the man was either, for as Klara took their hats and coats to the hall stand, she heard, “My name is Koch, and this is my wife.”
Looking for spare hangers for the coats damp from the light summer rain, she missed the new guest’s answer.
“Sorry, help me a bit here — the philologist, the philosopher?”
“The last living Proust translator, if you like.”
Was he offended? Was he just being modest? Was he joking at his own expense? Herr Hagemann appeared in the drawing room doorway, Frau Hagemann called Klara into the kitchen: “Could you take care of the rest, please?”
Ulli was slicing cucumber; Frau Hagemann took off her apron, washed her hands. “Who’s here?”
Klara shrugged and set about preparing the radishes. Flashing eyes, theatrical voice — but for that mincing walk, the man would have been a frightening phenomenon.
The next day she searched her parent’s bookshelves, in the French literature section she found two volumes with the titles Auf den Spuren der verlorenen Zeit (In Search of Lost Time): opening one at the title page, Der Weg zu Swann (Swann’s Way), she read the name RUDOLF SCHOTTLAENDER. She struggled with the book for two or three evenings but couldn’t get past the first fifty pages. There were passages that remained obscure to her, she came across oddities, expressions she didn’t understand, she could have asked her parents about them, perhaps even the translator himself, but then she was distracted by something else she wanted to read, and soon Proust disappeared under a pile of books on the dressing table: forgotten were the long scene where a lonely young boy falls asleep, the visit of a certain M. Swann, the “bioscope,” the “rooms in winter,” and, in parentheses, the sea swallow so elaborately busy building its nest.
A year later Schottlaender’s name came up again. By this time the sisters were allowed to sit up with the guests for half an hour after they arrived, but the strange man who translated that strange book into German had obviously not appeared again. “A difficult person”—that was all Frau Hagemann would say about it.
“Have you seen what they’re saying about Professor Schottlaender in the newspaper?” asked Herr Koch one light summer evening.
“Quite a problematical case.” Domaschke, the young internist, sprang to Klara’s mother’s aid, knowing she didn’t like making unkind remarks about guests. “If a university professor fails to march on the First of May, is he really obliged to justify himself in writing afterward?”
Herr Koch: “Naive.”
“What do you mean, naive?” His wife sounded irritated.
“I mean all he’s done is give them the material they wanted.”
“You might as well say ‘and played right into their hands’—but after all, they will have started collecting material long before yesterday.”
“Do you mean documents?” Domaschke didn’t dare ask directly. “Do you mean official papers from the past?”
“What do you think? If somebody like that was in a camp without being a political prisoner?”
“Now you’re exaggerating.” Herr Koch laid his hand on his wife’s forearm. “And anyway, Schottlaender was not in a camp.”
“Be that as it may, he had to think of his wife and little daughter. You would have done the same.”
“For me there would have been no question of going to West Berlin, though.”
Klara took up Swann’s Way again. The edition had appeared in 1926, and Rudolf Schottlaender was not yet fifty when Klara heard him calling himself “the last living Proust translator” while she was busy with damp summer coats and coat hangers at the other end of the hall. Had Herr and Frau Koch nodded silently to show they understood what he was talking about? Even if there was not much to connect them, as readers of detective stories, with Marcel Proust, they nodded when Schottlaender looked them in the eye as though subjecting them to examination: “It was only about eight years ago that we were still at full strength.”
Klara was soon reading about Gilberte, who was either frivolous or timorous, reading once more about Swann, a name she had known for a long time but that seemed to her now — as the most commonplace words seem to many people suffering from aphasia — like a new name. She read about acacia avenues, about a forest from which, wearing a sleek fur coat and with the lovely eyes of an animal, a hurrying woman emerges, only to vanish again in the next sentence without leaving a trace.