Rosenheim comprised eighteen boroughs, each with its own Standesamt: births, weddings, deaths. My project, therefore, would effortlessly consume an entire week’s leave. Well, ‘furloughs’, by now, were being audaciously referred to as ‘vacations’. Besides the abruptly available goods and services, there was something unrecognisable in the air. Whatever it was, it was not the return of normality. There had been no normality to return to, not after 1914, not in Germany. You had to be at least fifty-five to have an adult recollection of normality. But there was something in the air, and it was new.
I arrived on the Sunday, and established myself at a guest house on the fringe of the Riedergarten. First thing the next morning, in solemn consciousness of futility, I cranked the Tornax and started on the concentric circles of my rounds.
At five in the afternoon of the following Saturday, sure enough, I was drinking a glass of tea at a stall in the main square, my throat inflamed and my eyes weakly watering at the far corners. After the expenditure of much drudgery, cunning, obsequiousness, and money (those valiant new Deutschmarks), I had managed to peruse a total of three ledgers; and without the slightest edification. The trip, the enterprise, in other words, had been a ridiculous failure.
*
And so I stood there, dully looking out at the peace and freedom of the town. That was undeniable: there was peace and freedom (the capital was under blockade, and there was little peace, and no freedom, in the Russian mandate to the north-east, with rumours of hectare-wide mass graves). And what else? Many years later, I would read the first dispatch from an American journalist posted in Berlin, which consisted of four words: Nothing sane to report. The year was 1918.
In January 1933, when the NSDAP picked up the keys to the Chancellery, a narrow majority of Germans felt, not just horror, but the dreamlike fuddlement of the unreal; when you went outside, you were reminded of the familiar, though only as a photograph or a newsreel reminded you of the familiar; the world felt abstract, ersatz, pretend. And that was what I was a witness to, maybe, that day in Rosenheim. The beginning of the German compromise with sanity. Social realism was the genre. Not fairy tales, not Gothic novelettes, not sagas of swords and sorcery, not penny dreadfuls. And not romance, either (an outcome I was beginning to accept). Realism, and nothing else.
From this certain questions would inevitably and persistently follow.
From above? said Konrad Peters in the Tiergarten — fastidious Peters, who died in Dachau covered in nightsoil and lice. From above, Bismarckian Realpolitik degraded to the nth degree. Combined with hallucinatory anti-Semitism and a world-historical flair for hatred. Ah, but from below — that’s the real mystery. It’s a common slander of the Jews, but it’s no slander of a huge fraction of the Germans. They went like sheep to the slaughterhouse. And then they donned the rubber aprons and set to work.
Yes, I was thinking, how did ‘a sleepy country of poets and dreamers’, and the most highly educated nation the earth had ever seen, how did it yield to such wild, such fantastic disgrace? What made its people, men and women, consent to having their souls raped — and raped by a eunuch (Grofaz: the virgin Priapus, the teetotal Dionysus, the vegetarian Tyrannosaurus rex)? Where did it come from, the need for such a methodical, such a pedantic, and such a literal exploration of the bestial? I of course didn’t know, and neither did Konrad Peters, and neither did anyone in my sight, families, limping veterans, courting couples, groups of very young and very drunken GIs (all that strong, cheap, and delicious Lowenbrau), tin-rattlers collecting for causes, black-clad widows, a moving, threading line of boy scouts, and sellers of vegetables, sellers of fruit…
Then I saw them. I saw them over a great and populous distance — and they were receding from me, walking away from me to the far edge of the square. It was the configuration — that was all. A mother and her two daughters, the three of them in straw hats, swinging straw bags, and dressed in crenellated white.
I hurried after them through the holiday crowd.
‘You’re too old now’, I said shakily (with a fizz of distress in my sinuses), ‘and too tall for ice cream.’
‘No we’re not,’ said Sybil. ‘We’ll never be too old for ice cream.’
‘Or too tall,’ said Paulette. ‘Oh come on, Mami… Mami! Oh please. Come on.’
I bought the girls banana splits in the lounge at the Grand. Their mother eventually agreed to have an orange juice (and I ordered a large schnapps)… When I touched her shoulder, at the foot of the sloping alley, and as I said her name, Hannah turned. Her face took on the stasis of recognition; and then all she did was widen her eyes and raise a white-gloved hand to her mouth.
In a thick voice I was saying,
‘The fancy word, young ladies, is lustrum. Five years. And there’s no other lustrum that changes a person as much as thirteen to eighteen. You’ve changed particularly, Paulette, if I may say so. Your beauty has come in.’
And this was incidentally and providentially true; she had grown five or six inches, and you could look at her now without seeing the long upper lip and the cluelessly staring nostrils of the Commandant.
‘What about eighteen to twenty-three?’ said Sybil.
‘Or nought to five?’ said Paulette. ‘There. What about nought to five.’
A smart shopping arcade adjoined the glassy atrium of the hotel; and I had the expectation that the twins, in the end, would be unable to resist the pressure of the neon lights, the costly materials, and the scents and blooms of the florist’s.
‘Can we, Mami?’
‘Not now… Oh, okay. Five minutes. No longer.’
The girls ran off.
I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs. ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise you’d remarried.’
She straightened up. ‘Remarried? Yes, I’m really good at that, aren’t I? My status’, she said slowly, ‘is widow.’
‘… I’m due back in Munich tomorrow evening,’ I said (I had intended to leave that night, and my suitcase was already in the rusty boot of the Tornax). ‘Can I see you very briefly before I leave? Morning coffee, say?’
She had that flustered look, as if the room temperature was too high for her, and her left knee was bobbing up and down. Most ominously of all, she was repeatedly closing her eyes — the upper lids staying where they were while the lower glided heavenward. And when a man sees a woman doing that, all he can do is mumble something polite and make his way to the door. She said,
‘No. No, I don’t think there’s any point. Sorry.’
I thought for a moment and asked her, ‘Can I show you something?’ I reached for my wallet and extracted a small strip of newsprint. It was an ad I had placed in the personal columns of the Munich Post. ‘Would you do me the honour of reading this?’
She took it from my fingers and said, ‘Lawyer and translator, thirty-five, seeks a) professional tuition in Esperanto, and b) professional guidance in theosophy. Please reply to …’
‘In case your parents saw it. And now I’m thirty-eight.’ I managed not to try and nudge her curiosity by promising an account of the last hours of Dieter Kruger. I just said, ‘You’re too generous to deny me a little of your time. If you would. Please.’
At this point she made a decision and matter-of-factly told me where and when, and for how long. On my asking she even gave me her address.