Back to Back

Climbing

It’s strange, such silence on a Sunday. Do you remember what it was like? Thomas thought of all the noisy scolding, the bellowing, the shouting. The standard lamp broken and stamped on, broken china.

Ella nodded, and stretched out full length on the floor of the tree house. I’m glad he’s gone at last.

Thomas put three nails between his lips, holding them there so that he could make a loop in the cord better. The silence was astonishing; only the elm leaves rustled in the late-summer wind. That morning Ella and Thomas had gone swimming in the lake. Ella’s hair was still damp. She was lying on her back with her eyes closed, carefully brushing it away from her face; it fell on the wooden floor, a wreath round her head, and the wind lifted only a few strands into the air. Ella looked like a black sunflower.

Thomas made a second loop, took a nail out of his mouth and picked up the hammer. He hit the nail, but it dropped to the floor.

Ow! Ella sat up, covering her eyes with her hands and groaning: I’ve gone blind, Thomas, I can’t see.

Thomas shook his head; he guessed that Ella was pretending, he knew her. Putting the hammer down, he tightened his lips round the remaining nails, with one hand he touched both of hers — whereupon she lowered them to her lap and laughed at him. You fell for it, you fell for it! She lay down on the wooden floor again and watched with amusement as Thomas searched for the nail he had lost.

Had it fallen right down into the grass? Thomas groped around on the wood, changed to a crouching position, looked under the soles of his bare feet; the nail was nowhere to be seen. Carefully, he took a second nail out of his mouth, held the loop in place and picked up the hammer. Why on earth had Käthe married that man? Perhaps she had wanted to neutralise the disgrace of having children born out of wedlock, get rid of the stigma of her unmarried status? She often spoke of racial defilement, once she had told him and Ella: Your existence was the proof of racial defilement. The term clung to her. An idea like that didn’t just go away after the war. But then she could marry anyone she liked. And who was left? In the year after the end of the war Käthe had come down from her mountain to satisfy her curiosity, and went to the election for the local district association. Anyone who didn’t want to give the impression of having been in favour of the war was tentatively on the lookout for communists. That was where she had first seen Eduard. Later, he had taken her to area headquarters in Freiburg and given her a ticket to travel to the assembly. She first went to a communist meeting after the war; it was some three years later that she and Eduard had got to know each other more intimately after an assembly. Käthe said it had been in Freiburg, just before Christmas when the temperatures were below freezing. It must all have happened very fast. The tiny twin babies who had to fight for survival were born near Berlin a year later. She expected her parents to help out; she herself had neither money nor anyone to look after Ella and Thomas. Although they called it getting engaged, Eduard and Käthe could only clasp hands and promise to meet again before she left, because he still had a wife and family. Did she feel attracted to those who suffered? Did she consider Eduard’s grief as deep as hers? Both attracted and repelled; the strange lustre of his mind lying fallow had probably intrigued her. A man who had once had to endure a mountain of corpses lying above his body? Swept up, stacked like rubbish. The guards had run for it, leaving the place as it was, the liberators were trying to tidy things up and bury the dead. He couldn’t breathe or cry out. Wasn’t it just by chance that someone had noticed him at the last minute? There’s something moving! He remembered that cry, he had told Thomas about it, just once, after a noisy quarrel with Käthe. There’s something moving, he repeated bitterly to himself, using those words as a way of saying where they came from, where he came from, who he was. Thomas had felt sorry for him. Nothing but his arm had been sticking out, and he tried to move it with all his might, squashed as he was by the weight of human bodies, the masses of them in which he was being turned over, the bony, fleshy stink of decomposition all around him. The vehicle sweeping them up stopped, the engine was throttled back just before it reached the edge of the pit. They had to separate the corpses, throwing bundles of bones individually into the mass grave, until he was freed, dazzled by the light, and two arms took hold of him and carried him away from the pit. He couldn’t speak for months afterwards. A man who had fought in Spain and ended up in Dachau, that had impressed Käthe. He was an unusually poor sort of hero. There he sat for months on end, incapable of working, and perhaps he hoped that some day Käthe would find time for a kiss, hold his hand, look into his eyes. Thomas didn’t know anyone who could be as persistently silent as Eduard, for hours on end, days on end, his silence always lasted until the next occasion for a quarrel. There was only one person to whom Eduard sometimes talked in whispers, and that was Ella, if she had not walked past his silent form but steered a course his way and sat down beside him. Then she would smile and dance attendance on him until he patted his knee, and she was quick to comply with the request for her to climb on his lap: Ride-a-cock horse! But after a year or so Ella didn’t like his lap so much, she stopped sitting on it of her own free will, no longer leaned back at her ease purring like a cat. She avoided him, got out of the way of his arms reaching out to her.

The last quarrel between Käthe and Eduard had been early this year, 1957, and it had taken place in the room next to Ella and Thomas’s, so that they heard every word: Käthe shouting that she wanted to go to the theatre, he had never once gone with her, he took no interest in anything and blamed her for throwing money out of the window with her visits to the theatre. Throwing money out of the window? Could there be a finer, better, more important window on the world than the theatre? Whose money was it anyway? Who worked for it? In her indignation Käthe set about exploiting his latest symptom of paralysis in the arms; before his eyes she took a chisel and forced the drawer of his desk open. He had to watch, with his arms hanging limp and useless. She found a mountain of money in his desk, over two thousand marks, a whole bundle of banknotes. Käthe had expected almost anything, letters and pictures, documents and souvenirs of dubious merit, she had even thought there might be some money, twenty marks, fifty, perhaps a hundred. But not this. Ella and Thomas stole out into the corridor and watched the scene, unnoticed, through the open door. A painful scene. Its painfulness seemed to egg Käthe on to act like a monster. She threw the notes at Eduard, they wouldn’t stick to him, his limp arms couldn’t catch them, they sailed to the floor. Beside herself with fury, she shouted at him that he lay there idly like an invalid, had left her to provide for a family of six by herself all these years, didn’t bother about anything, drove away their household helps, left her to do all the work on her own — she had to watch every mark! He shouted at her not to treat him like a small child. She had broken open his desk, he shouted, that was a criminal act, she was a criminal, he had to live under the same roof as such a person, he had rights as well. Käthe could give as good as she got when it came to shouting, but now she yapped, short and sharp: he was the criminal. All these years she’d toiled on her own, while behind her back he was hoarding money like a madman! What kind of money was it, anyway, where did it come from, what was it for? That was nothing to do with her, he retorted, he had a right to that money, he’d worked for it. Oh, worked for it, had he? Käthe snapped back. When and where, might she ask, had he been working recently? Did he think she didn’t know what he got up to, lounging about and doing his friends a favour now and then?

Here he interrupted her; he’d fought and suffered, he said, she didn’t understand the first thing about that, he hissed, she’d better shut up or she’d get to know him better, and not just him either. Not just him? It wasn’t for her to put on airs, she knew nothing about doing friends a service. To which she asked if he thought she was stupid? Doing friends a service? Maybe it had never occurred to him that she too did friends a service, but for free, entirely unlike him. He was not a true communist, he was a greedy scoundrel and an old miser, keeping what was theirs from her and the children. He wailed that he was an injured man, maybe she remembered who it was she’d married, and he added further furious recriminations. Käthe said she had married him for the sake of the twins, hoping at least to give them a father — but he was the kind of father to cheat his own children, he was a crook, a miserable villain, keeping money from them, hoarding it in his desk on the quiet for years. He ought to be ashamed of himself, said Käthe, he could go to hell, get out of there, never mind where to, she just wanted him out.

She put her peach-stone necklace round her neck, picked up one of the banknotes and let the door latch behind her. The play she was going to see began in an hour’s time.

And he disappeared. A few weeks later, his room was empty.

Thomas tied the cord round a small branch and knotted it firmly. He took the other end of the cord and wove it into the hanging roof. Ella had said she wanted a little bench, and this afternoon he was going to build one into the tree house for her, he knew where already, he would use the big fork in the branches for it. But the roof wasn’t windproof yet.

Ella’s voice was unusually flat, it sounded almost casual: I hate Eduard.

Oh yes? Then why were you always sitting on his lap?

Wasn’t.

Yes you were, all the time. Thomas was trying to tie the leafy roof of their tree house firmly in place with the cord. He had woven twigs together to stabilise it. Ella sat up, crossing her legs.

It was from longing. I was thinking about our father. And wondering what he was like. I was sitting on his lap, not Eduard’s.

Really and truly? Thomas shook his head; he didn’t like to think about it. Anyone else would have seen you sitting on Eduard’s lap.

Ella pushed Thomas with both arms, making him bump into the tree trunk. Don’t be stupid — she was furious — you know perfectly well what he did.

Thomas lowered his eyes. He did know. It was just that Ella hadn’t told him. He could still see old Eduard sitting in his big armchair, plucking at Ella’s arm as she was walking past to get her to sit on his lap. Ella’s giggling, his giggling. Thomas saw Eduard’s hands on Ella’s hips, on Ella’s legs, he remembered Eduard, grinning mysteriously, whispering something in her ear. Only later did Ella tell him what it was. Thomas hadn’t liked the way the pair of them sat together, he hadn’t liked the look on Ella’s face as she sat on Eduard’s lap. Come and play, he had asked Ella at such moments to get her off that lap. Once Eduard had told Thomas: You’re Käthe’s darling, Ella is mine.

He’s a poor bastard. Thomas laid an arm on Ella’s shoulder. Let’s forget him.

Poor bastard? Poor? So what are we, then? You’re just saying that because you didn’t come to my rescue!

Rescue? For a moment Thomas didn’t know what she meant.

Didn’t protect me. Ella sniffed. Her eyes were reddened and running with tears.

Thomas put the hammer down and took Ella in his arms. Her crying was infectious, he felt her tears on his cheeks, her heavy breathing against his chest; if she cried it would start him crying as well. And wasn’t she right? Shouldn’t he have protected her, couldn’t he have kept Eduard from whispering those things in her ear, from touching her and looking at her as if she were the buoy to which he could cling and so save himself?

You mustn’t tell anyone. Ever. Ella rubbed her face against Thomas’s throat. Understand? she whispered.

Thomas nodded. She had often made him promise that before. But what he did to you –

Quick as a flash, Ella put a finger over Thomas’s mouth, her eyes were flashing. You know perfectly well what he did, stop asking questions.

Thomas wanted to go on asking questions, he wanted to know more, because what he did know was by no means all. But he sensed Ella’s anxiety and obeyed her without reservations. Her tears made his throat tighten.

Come on, let’s enjoy being nice and quiet here. Ella leaned against him.

He nodded. We’ll sit back to back and you can tell me about our father.

Thomas knew that Ella loved telling stories about their father, stories that she sometimes invented because she didn’t have enough memories. She had been just two when he died, Thomas was only one year old.

They sat back to back in the tree house. Ella closed her eyes. I see him coming out of the fir trees, climbing up the mountain in his black suit, with a hat on his head, it’s a top hat, his dark hair is falling over his forehead, he has a rucksack on his back and his easel over his shoulder. He’s handsome, only I can’t see his legs, they’re blurred. I can see his face, his eyebrows, he didn’t have a beard then. He had to shave it off for the war.

Did he have a gun?

Severely, Ella leaned back and whistled dismissively. You and your gun. No, our father didn’t have a gun. He did sometimes carry his easel over his shoulder. After all, he was a painter.

What did he paint?

He liked painting rocks and olive trees best. Funny, he never painted the sea. I think he didn’t like Caspar David Friedrich. When he and Käthe were living on Sicily he must have kept turning away from the sea.

What’s he supposed to have painted in the war? Battles?

No, he was too nice for that. Our father was a sensitive man. A fine gentleman with fine brushes. She took a strand of her hair and tickled Thomas’s face with it until he turned away. He painted the soldiers. For their mothers. He painted pictures for the soldiers that they could send home. If they had sweethearts they sometimes needed two pictures, one for their mother and one for their sweetheart.

Did he paint murder and death?

Ella turned round and pinched Thomas’s arm. What makes you think of that?

If he painted soldiers at the front they were all either murderers or dead. Thomas had to laugh with the shock of it when it suddenly occurred to him that this version of their father could have seen his models as heroes.

Ready to kill, perhaps. But I think he painted the death out of their faces. Ella assumed a blissful expression. I saw a few of his last drawings in Käthe’s studio, and none of them looked like a murderer or a hero. It’s quite an art to do that in the middle of the war, don’t you think?

I don’t know. Maybe he was a coward. The idea was painful, but it could hardly be avoided.

Our father? A coward? Now Ella punched him with her fist. It hurt, and Thomas raised his arm.

It was enough to satisfy him to see Ella duck away. It would have been brave of their father to paint the soldiers as murderers. It would also have been brave to stay with Käthe in defiance of his call-up papers, to go against everyone’s expectations. What was he supposed to do at the front? What did he want to do there?

Get killed, maybe? Ella whispered thoughtfully. Have you seen those drawings? Perhaps he was doing them on a production line. Photographs and chemicals to develop them are expensive and sensitive, his charcoal could show everything, his pencil too, soldier after soldier. If it hadn’t been for the uniform they’d have been nice brothers and nice sons and nice husbands.

What do you mean, nice husbands? Thomas would have liked to understand what Ella really did mean. Perhaps he could be a nice man some day, the kind of man his father was, perhaps. But Thomas didn’t even know if that was a good thing.

You know what I mean. Men who didn’t want the war.

You’re crazy, Ella. Everyone wanted the war.

Not our father, he was made to go. He hid away in Italy with his beard for too long. They went looking for him, his parents wanted him to give himself up and go to fight.

So then he joined up. . How important to their father had his parents’ opinion been, the opinion of the mindless society to which he had returned from his romantic Italian refuge? It was idiotic, thought Thomas, but he didn’t say anything. He knew that Ella would defend their father, would find reasons for what he did. She loved their dead father, and he was easy to love. Odd that you could go on leave from the front, isn’t it? Someone stands there shooting, or painting people, and then he looks at his watch and says: time to knock off work, I’m going on leave for three weeks.

That was before you were born. I was sitting outside the house in the meadow, catching beetles.

Now Thomas leaned harder against Ella; that was part of their ritual, a gesture of humility in case of doubt. You were only one then, Ella, how could you know about that? It was only a game when Thomas asked her that, he liked this story and had already heard it hundreds of times. It was always the same story, so it must be true, even if Ella had been only a year old when he was born.

I caught the beetles and ate them. Honestly. There was a tickly feeling in my mouth when he appeared among the firs. I called out to him.

How?

Pa-pa! Ella relished the sound of the two syllables, Papa, Papa! She repeated it at length, longingly, just as she must have called to him at the time. Her voice was a little girl’s voice, there were tears of joy in her eyes, of happiness at seeing him again. Thomas looked over his shoulder; Ella had turned her own head that way, and he could see her, little Ella who had known all this, just as she was. What a wonderful father it must have been who came striding up the mountain. Thomas saw Ella’s love, he wanted to believe in it and suddenly find himself sharing it.

Did you know who he was at once?

Of course. Ella’s eyes were sparkling with emotion, she was carried away by her story, by what she called memory; after all, no one else came up that mountain for months on end. The only person we were waiting for was Father. Thomas picked a small leaf off the elm tree and dried Ella’s tears.

Back to back, Ella ordered, and they turned their backs to each other again. It was up to Thomas to ask a question now.

What did Käthe eat, did she just eat beetles too?

On Sundays she went down to the farmyard. No one must see her. They were all at church. There was bread, a can of milk, some vegetables, and sometimes a few potatoes left ready for her on the table outside the house. Ella sniffed: mmm, it was good bread, the farmer’s wife had baked it herself from stoneground rye and there were little linseeds in it, it smelled delicious. I always got the first bit of crust. To stop me crying.

Didn’t Father sometimes send the farmer money?

Of course, the farmer didn’t like strangers and people hiding from the authorities. He didn’t mind whether she was Jewish or a communist, she had no papers and no marriage certificate. He didn’t ask to see her papers, but he got money. When she came to fetch the milk and the bread, Käthe sometimes left pictures on the table for him, pictures of our hut and the fir trees — that was all she had to give. After the war she found a potter’s wheel that no one was using any more down in the village, and dragged it up to the hut. She knew how to make pottery, she sold the dishes and jugs in the market.

Do you remember the spiced biscuits? The first time she took us to school, and afterwards she sent us to the marketplace and the woman in the blue-and-white apron gave us a spiced biscuit each?

Ella nodded. One for the little girlie, one for the little boy, they said in chorus; it was their shared memory. How often, over the last few years, they had reminded each other of the woman in the huge, blue-and-white apron? To them, she was the quintessence of rustic kindness.

I remember about the hare — Ella’s eyes sparkled — I remember how one day she brought a hare. .

Thomas put both hands over his ears, ready to shut out all sound entirely if the story turned out as badly as Ella’s chirping voice suggested.

. . put the skin out to dry in the sun. . cooked with thyme. . with bacon. . pepper. The roast smelled so delicious I waited by the stove to be the first to get a bit. Well, she told me as she took the roast out of the oven, because you’re so greedy we’ll put it out on the balcony in front of the door, and wait until tomorrow, tomorrow is Sunday, we’ll have a Sunday roast! Ella turned indignantly. She was asking for Thomas’s sympathy.

Yes? His hands flapped, there was a scared look in his eyes.

What’s the matter, don’t you want to hear the story?

Yes, yes, I do, begged Thomas, but he was afraid.

Well, next morning I went outside the moment I woke up. And there was the hare, all eaten except for its bones, and the dried roast meat that still had a shine where it stuck to the paws.

Thomas screamed.

Don’t be silly. Ella nudged his back. Guess what, I was crying when I went upstairs to where Käthe and Eduard were comfortably lying in bed under the roof, and she told me, laughing, that it had been the fox!

The fox?

Yes, the fox. So then every evening I thought of the fox coming up our steps after dark, or jumping up from the meadow outside and polishing off our roast with his sharp teeth.

You really believed her? Thomas raised his eyebrows; he had to laugh.

Ella nodded, rapt in her thoughts. Or if not the roast, polishing me off, she whispered quietly. Only now did she seem to be thinking it over. Why ask?

Well, surely the fox didn’t sit at the table, gnaw the roast neatly off the bones and leave the bones lying there! Thomas was in a fit of giggles as if someone were tickling him.

Don’t laugh in that stupid way. Who else would it have been?

Who do you think?

Ella bit her lip. Not the fox? she wondered in a quiet voice. That was mean of them. They just ate it up on the sly, all by themselves. While we were in bed asleep.

We?

The fox was later, after you’d been born. So there. Her voice was brusque; perhaps her feelings were hurt by his doubts.

Come on, Ella, tell me more. Thomas was afraid he had annoyed Ella, and she wouldn’t want to go on with her story. Remember when Father arrived. Käthe had a big belly and I was going to be born.

Yes, but you weren’t there yet. I was sitting in the meadow by myself, catching beetles and putting them into my mouth. I called to him. I couldn’t stand up yet, maybe I couldn’t even walk.

There was snow still lying in the mountains in February when I was born.

It had already melted outside the house, so there.

And the moment the snow melted the meadow was right underneath it?

If you don’t believe me I’m not going on with the story.

Thomas listened hard, but Ella persisted in her silence. He leaned against her back, wanting to hear more. Go on.

No, I don’t feel like it any more.

Go on, please. And I won’t interrupt. Please.

Hard as Thomas might beg and plead, she stayed silent.

He thought of the other stories she usually told, of how she had nearly choked on the beetle scrabbling inside her mouth; it must have got into her windpipe. But then Papa had arrived, turned her upside down and shaken her. Ella knew just what their father smelled like. Sometimes she caught the smell of him in her nostrils, all of a sudden, unexpectedly, it could happen in the tram, the school playground, the kitchen. She knew he was there. Their father had asked Käthe to stop hitting little Ella with her wet nappy. She was only a child, he said, not a cat. She had only just started to walk. She’ll learn to sit on her potty, he said, like any other child. Ella didn’t remember the wet nappy. But she knew about it from a letter that she had taken out of Käthe’s chest of drawers in secret and shown to Thomas.

Who says he’s dead? Fallen at the front, maybe, but he isn’t dead.

There was something that scared Thomas in Ella’s voice; she shifted the intonation of words in a way that took the sense out of them. At the end of such sentences he tried to think backwards in his memory. She believed her story now, every detail of it. He didn’t know whether she was just pretending to him that she could change the world with nothing but her own ideas and assertions, or whether she believed it herself.

Gypsy children, they called us, do you remember? Stinking gypsy children and bastards. Ella laughed.

Thomas turned to her. She had let her hair fall over her face so that he couldn’t see her eyes. Ella-eyes, sparkling green gypsy eyes. It was a good thing the other children at school hadn’t sniffed out the Jewishness in them. A Christian name for the son, a birth announcement by a priest — the invention of a difficult birth, fever while Käthe was lying in, had helped. At school they had been the only children whose fathers were not farmers or war heroes. Whether dead or alive. And who had no capable farmer’s wife or housewife for a mother. The only children who bore their mother’s surname and had no father at all. Later, the priest had wanted to baptise the small children, but Käthe failed to keep appointment after appointment. She always had a new excuse. That probably told the priest that he was being used; two birth certificates within twelve months. Rumours began spreading. The other children’s fathers were beginning to come back that summer. Other fathers were dead or crippled somewhere abroad, or in prison.

I’d love to be a gypsy child, a real gypsy child, sighed Ella. Perhaps that’s what we are, too? One day a gypsy woman came by, begging — and as soon as she had gone Käthe heard babies crying. And then she found us in the meadow outside the house.

Do you think the twins like it in that children’s home?

Abandoned. In her hunger and her hour of need our gypsy mother simply abandoned us outside Käthe’s house.

Thomas moved away from Ella’s back, leaning on the trunk of the elm, and looked at her. We could just go and visit them?

Who? Ella did look up now, in curiosity.

The twins.

Why are you always going on about the twins? Käthe has to work. She’ll be busy at the quarry again by the end of the month. Ella raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. Nobody here needs the twins. Eduard’s gone. We can’t help them.

You imagine being a gypsy child. Abandoned. It’s a fact that the little twins have been in the home for weeks. Baffled, Thomas shook his head. If in doubt, you’re sorrier for yourself than anyone else.

Ella thrust out her lips, offended, and looked at the house. The corners of her mouth twitched, and she wrinkled up her nose, which made Thomas want to laugh. However, she took a deep breath as if to dive underwater and stay there for a long time. Ella’s face distorted painfully, her eyes rolled so that Thomas could hardly see their irises, she groaned from the depths of her throat with an almost animal sound.

What is it, Ella? Thomas put one hand on her shoulder. What’s the matter with you?

Oh! Ella shook her head frantically and abruptly hunched her shoulders forward; she writhed, her head struck the cracked planks of the tree-house floor, and hissing, wrenching sounds poured out of her mouth.

Come on, tell me what’s wrong. Can you hear me, Ella?

Now he saw her tears; she was sobbing, she had red marks on her face, she was weeping uncontrollably.

Aaarrr! He knew that growl of hers; it was the growl of a dangerous beast of prey. But was she playing a game, and if so, what game was it?

I can’t bear it! I think I’m dying, Thomas, hold me tight. Gasping, she clung to his arm with all her might, she was sinking her teeth into his forearm. Ella could turn into an animal from one moment to the next, become another being. When Ella let go of him, she didn’t even notice the blood on his skin from the bite-mark, she dug her nails into his arms, let go and tore her own hair, hammered the floor in front of her with her fists. This is hell, it’s hell!

Thomas knelt down in front of her and tried to hold her head, her fists, but she struck his hands away and punched his collarbone.

Let go of me, Ella shouted at him. He saw a soft tuft of hair in her hand; she had obviously pulled it out of her head — or his. He felt a burning sensation on his scalp.

He was talking to her as if she were a horse now: calm down, lie still, lie still. But Ella took no notice; she drummed her fists, she groaned, she screamed. Then all of a sudden she stopped; Ella looked around her, glassy-eyed, quiet now, she sniffed and shook herself. Thomas waited.

All right now?

She bowed her head; softly, almost reproachfully she said: Nothing’s all right. What’s pain good for anyway? It’s all so pointless!

Thomas had his own doubts, but he sensed that Ella wasn’t expecting an answer to her question.

And it’ll be every month from now on, she went on yet more quietly, I can’t bear it, I’ll go mad, I really will.

That crazed pain of hers — how odd that it came over her so abruptly just when he asked about the twins. Ella loved her imaginary worlds; she soon felt that any sudden distraction from herself was boring, perhaps an injury, a danger.

I’ll make you a hot-water bottle, said Thomas, kneeling in front of her, hands in his lap, and as she did not reply he added: If you like.