I was sick again. The dogs were howling in my chest. At breakfast time I could not even eat the porridge. I looked at the ring of milk around the rim and smelled the warm steam coming up into my face, but my eyes were blurry and I couldn’t breathe. My father said I was trying not to go to school. He was a schoolteacher once and he knew when people were making things up, he said, and if I was really sick I wouldn’t have to prove it. But when it was time to go to school, my legs were soft and I couldn’t walk. I heard Franz say that my face was white, so then my mother and father had to help me up the stairs, one either side. And halfway up my head dropped down on the step in front of me and I felt the cold wood on my forehead. I heard the sound of buzzing in my ears and the sound of my mother calling me from far away. Then I fell asleep.
When I woke up again my father was gone. Only my mother was there sitting on the stairs waiting for me to come back. She asked me if I was ready to go on and then she helped me the rest of the way up to bed. She stayed with me and sat on the bed repairing a jumper, pulling a blue woollen thread across the elbow. Some boys in school had leather elbows, but we had dark blue elbows. She told me stories to make the howling go away. So I lay there watching her, and sometimes I fell asleep and woke up again later, only to see that she was still mending the same spot and telling the same story, as if no time was going by.
She told me about the time there was a big fire in Kempen. She was afraid of fire, she said, because her sister Lisalotte’s hair once caught fire on a candle. When you see something like that happening with your own two eyes, when you see it happen to somebody else it’s much worse and you remember it more than when it happens to yourself. She can’t forget the time people came to set fire to the synagogue and she hopes I never have to witness something like that with my own two eyes. That was the time Germany was sick and took a long time to get better.
My mother had to leave school early and go to work. Onkel Gerd had no more money once he lost his job as lord mayor. She got a job in the Kempen registry office and had to learn typing and filing names in alphabetical order. She remembers people coming in to find out if their grandfathers or grandmothers had ever been Jewish. She remembers how happy one old woman was, how she had tears in her eyes and put her hand on her heart when she found out that she was one of the lucky ones. Other people were not so lucky. Every day, they came to make sure they were not Jewish. Every day, Ta Maria wondered if the Catholics would be next. It wasn’t long afterwards that the Nazis closed down the convent in Mühlhausen and wrote dirty words all over the classrooms.
My mother had long plaits at that time, down to her waist, like two dark ropes. But Ta Maria said it was time to cut them. It was time to grow up and look like an adult. So one day she stopped being a girl. She asked the hairdresser to give her the Olympia Roll, because that’s what all the women were wearing in the films, but, by then, her hair had already been cut too short and she had to wait for it to grow again. She says it’s funny how you can get so upset about something like that, how important those things can be and how you can sometimes cry more about little things than all the big things put together. She had to wear a hat and Ta Maria promised to go down to Krefeld with her and make up for it with new shoes.
My mother says she was at work when the trouble happened and saw nothing herself. She only heard about it later from her youngest sister Minne. But she smelled the smoke in the streets that afternoon. The synagogue was on fire and the fire brigade was standing by, doing nothing. Men in brown uniforms had gone around to the Jewish houses and Minne saw them going by with red batons. She said the curtains were flapping out through the broken windows and there were books lying on the pavement. Somebody’s private letters were flying around in the street like litter and there were children walking around the town with black and white ivory keys that belonged to a piano.
Onkel Gerd said they could not be part of this. You couldn’t watch something like that. People in Kempen blew their breath out slowly and thought how lucky they were not to be Jewish. That same evening, they all went to the big Catholic procession in the town where hundreds of people quietly passed through the Buttermarkt square with candles and torches, praying and singing hymns as if they needed to be especially close to God from then on.
The next day Ta Maria brought my mother to Krefeld, but you couldn’t buy anything that day. When they entered the shopping street they saw shoes thrown out on to the ground. The Germans would regret this one day, Ta Maria said. It was not so long ago that they were wearing newspapers around their feet. And now there were shoes lying everywhere on the ground and people stepping over them. You could smell the leather. For a moment it even looked like a shoe paradise where you could just pick them up and try them on. This was the city where my mother’s mother sang at the state opera house. Now people were stopping to look through the broken shop windows. A man with a clapper board was walking along the pavement advertising ladies’ stockings as if nothing had happened. It made no sense. Expensive shoes. Brand new. Some of the best quality. Some still in their boxes, or only half out, on display. Some other boxes trampled flat, and the thin, blue-grey paper that goes to wrap new shoes blowing up and down the street as if nobody cared, as if nobody needed footwear any more, as if they hated shoes.
I couldn’t breathe very well. My shoulders were going up and down trying to get air. My mother stroked my head and listened to the howling in my chest. She prayed that I would get better. She smiled at me and said everything would soon be fine again, because her oldest sister Marianne was coming with her daughter Christiane. And Tante Marianne was very good at helping people breathe. She helped people in Salzburg when it was hard to breathe.
For days and days my mother was cleaning the house. She polished the stairs and every piece of wood in the house was shining. She put fruit in a bowl on the table and baked a cake. Tante Marianne was going to get my room. It had no wallpaper any more, only pink plaster and some long cracks, but my mother said it looked clean and friendly, and that’s all that mattered. And as soon as Marianne walked in the front door, she would see the old oak trunk that came from their house on the Buttermarkt and think she was at home.
My mother put on her blue suit with the big white collars. She put the big number 4711 on her wrists and wore the green Smaragd snake. We put on our best clothes, too, with no blue elbows, and kept looking out the window until Tante Marianne and Christiane arrived in a taxi with suitcases. Then my mother dropped her apron on the floor of the kitchen and ran all the way along the hallway smiling and crying at the same time. Tante Marianne was smiling and crying, too, as they embraced and stood back to look each other up and down.
‘ Ja, ja, ja ,’ they kept saying. And then, ‘ Nein, nein, nein .’
They could not believe their own eyes. They shook their heads and wiped their tears and embraced each other again. Ja, ja, ja , and nein, nein, nein , and ja, ja, ja , until Tante Marianne turned around to look at us. She knew our names from letters and photographs, but she had to kneel down and look at us properly, one at a time. She knew everything. She knew about Maria’s picture of my mother with the arms going all around the walls. She knew that I slapped the schoolteacher. And she knew about the mashed potato on the ceiling.
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