Kindergarten (20 page)

“I wanted to see whether I still had the skill. I destroyed so much of what I did at first, but I was determined. It made me fight the effects of the stroke more than anything else. Nothing would stop me. At the beginning of the year, you used to describe scenes for me to draw in your lessons, Corrie, as I began to improve. You were helping me to begin again, although you didn’t realise. This Easter, I knew I would paint again, though I had told myself when I left Germany that I never would, ever again. In February I had a letter from an art gallery in West Berlin asking whether I would be able to help the director there, who was hoping to hold an exhibition of my work. They had collected first editions of all my books, and had tracked down some proofs that still existed, and had an almost complete survey of all my work. They asked if I would be willing to loan them any letters, or documents, or original paintings. I wrote back to him, and said that I had all my paintings, and that I would be happy for them to be on show again, for the people to look at them in the city where they were painted. I laid down some conditions of the way the exhibition had to be arranged.”

They looked at the paintings on the walls around them.

She turned to them both, one after the other.

“I hope you will loan me your paintings—the English ones and the German ones—for the exhibition. They belong to you now, but I would like all the paintings to be together this one time in Berlin.”

She indicated Corrie’s birthday present on the table.

“The exhibition is to be next year, and the arrangements have now nearly all been made, but when the letter came in February I thought, Could I paint anything now, to add to my German paintings, to show that I am not like someone who died forty years ago? Could I show that Lilli Danielsohn is still alive, still capable of painting? So, in the way I told you, I began to paint. In the sun lounge, in the morning light, when you were all out, or at school, I began. I hid everything like a thief. At first I was afraid I would produce nothing I would like to show people, but when I painted the picture of you in the candle-light, Corrie, I was happy. That was the scene I had inside my head that I wanted to show other people. And so I painted more. Then there were the designs and posters for
The Winter’s Tale
. I had become a painter again, and I wished to show my family to other people who had never known them, as I had done before.”

She stood up, opened the door of a cupboard against the wall, near the fir-tree, and took out a large framed photograph. She held up the photograph and examined it closely as she spoke.

“This photograph must be at the centre of the exhibition in Berlin. It contains the source of all my paintings.”

She began to talk to them, quietly and simply, of all that she and Grandpa Michael had kept between themselves, the events that had destroyed her world.

She had come from a wealthy and cultured Dresden family. Her grandfather Jakob Mitscherlich had owned the biggest toy shop in the city, in Prager Strasse, the main shopping street. Her father, a university professor specialising in German Literature, had been wounded, and decorated, in the First World War, and her mother had been a fashionable children’s doctor. It was a large and loving household—she had two sisters and three brothers—surrounded by children, nieces and nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents. In the early 1920s, a young woman, she had gone to Berlin, and achieved her great successes with her paintings, until the rise of the Nazis had made her and her family
Untermenschen
, subhumans, and therefore disgusting. All the apparatus had swung into action against the millions of people who had no right to be treated as human beings, intensifying as the years went by. Those friends who were able began to leave the country, but her parents had decided to stay. Germany was their home. Most of her family, those who wished to leave, were trapped, unable to abandon children, or possessions, or sick or elderly relatives, or unable to get them out of the country. Her family persuaded her that she ought to leave when the opportunity arose after the events of
Kristallnacht
, when synagogues and houses burned, and the broken glass from Jewish homes and shops littered the streets throughout Germany. She had gone to England to work as a domestic servant—she knew no one in England, and her work had not been published there. She carried her paintings and sketch-books, and her parents’ wedding-rings hidden inside a wooden toy, a little doll’s cradle, that had been in her grandfather’s shop before it was taken away from him. Germany was famous for its beautiful children’s toys. She never saw any of her family again. They were lost in the immense, crowded darkness.

When she finished talking, quietly, without bitterness, she handed the photograph to them.

“This is my family,” she said, “the family I had forty years ago.”

There was no one he could recognise in the photograph as being Lilli, so she must have held the camera. They were all looking towards her.

Lilli began to identify who the people were.

The room in which they sat was the same as the one in the painting of the christening scene in “Godfather Death.” The same pattern to the plate, the same candlesticks, the same design on the silver, every painstaking detail of the painting. The scene was a long polished table illuminated by candle-light, just before a meal. The family—Lilli’s parents and grandparents, her sisters and brothers, their sons and daughters, aunts, uncles, cousins, from the very elderly to a small baby—sat around the beautifully laid and decorated table, formal, consciously posed, everyone very still and serious, gazing into the camera. It was like a small ceremony for a leave-taking or a scene of private mourning, its emotions gentle and low-key.

The second sister from the painting for “Fitcher’s Bird” sat half-way down the right-hand side of the table in a simple white dress, her arm around a boy of about five standing beside her, very upright in a dark suit, with a small girl, fair-haired, sitting on her knee. It was Lilli’s youngest sister, Edda, and her two children, Florian and Dorothea, the Hansel and Gretel from the painting in his bedroom.

Lilli’s sister was several years older in the photograph than in the painting, but completely recognisable. All around the table were the faces from the paintings: the Goose Girl, Rapunzel, the Girl Without Hands, the Fisherman and His Wife, Cinderella, the brother and sister from “The Juniper Tree,” the Poor Boy in the Grave, Snow White.

Lilli’s family peopled her paintings; their houses, rooms, and gardens were the settings. All around the dining-room were Lilli’s memories of her family. There were twenty-seven people in the photograph.

He looked at the interiors of the pictures around him, and thought of those in the empty room next door, rooms in which families sat quietly together, the doors closed against the outside world, a world which would force open those doors and destroy all that it found inside after it had taken what it wanted, the silly family jokes of ordinary people, the school-books lying on the table, the unfinished knitting beside the chair, the photographs and pictures on the walls, the letters hidden away in drawers—all the noise and fury of the world reduced to the grief of individuals, families reaching out their arms trying to hold on to each other: Peter and Aline Goetzel and their daughter Lotte with her school photograph under glass and her notepaper with the elaborate letter “C” for Charlotte; the parents of Hanno and Hedwig Gr)nbaum, Ruth and Bernhard; Rudolf Seidemann’s family; Ernst and Madeleine Jacoby, who had hoped their plan of emigrating to America would work, and their three children, Eugenie, Julius, and Lisette; Walter Werth’s mother, Clara, and his twin sisters, Emmy and Doro, who sent him drawings of scenes from home so he wouldn’t be homesick; Stefanie Peters’s parents, and her little brother, who had just learned how to walk; Leonie Matthias; Nickolaus Mittler, his big brother, and his parents; Kurt and Thomas Viehmann’s parents, Katherina and Wilhelm, and the rest of their family; the scores of others, all the family of his grandmother, all the people in all those pictures, the tiny few of the hundreds and thousands of families, all those millions of people, every one a person with memories and individuality, in every one of whom the world existed, like all the people in the book that Jo had been reading in the bath, the visitor’s book from the living-room at Tennyson’s that Mum had started years ago, with the dark green cover and
Unsere Gäste
embossed on it in gold.

Aidan, Eleanor, Lincoln, and Michael came to stay. House in chaos, but cuisine of usual high standard. Jo not quite walking yet
.

Lovely gossipy evening. Music, singing, and talk. Michael and Lilli
.

Safety note: don’t sneeze in the sun lounge. Michael
.

Champagne to celebrate Pieter and Margaret’s fourteenth wedding-anniversary. Questionable vintage, but a very jolly body, but enough of Margaret. The champagne was splendid, too. Margaret, I love you! For God’s sake push Pieter under a bus! Chris
.

They’ve papered the walls at last. Max
.

Now we are five. Welcome to our house, Matthias, from Pieter, Margaret, Corrie, and Jo
.

Dropped in for coffee—stayed for tea! Sal
.

Lilli’s with us now
.

Cadged another tea. Sal
.

An evening of Bach from the Musical Meeuwissens. Margaret’s pregnant
AGAIN
!
Look out the London Philharmonic! Sal and Lilli
.

Jo spoke first.

“Did Sal tell you that story about those hostages in Greece during the war?” he asked.

Corrie shook his head.

“A few years ago, she and Chris were on holiday in Greece. In the northern part. Before the divorce.”

He looked up from under his neatly combed fringe at Corrie and Lilli, seeing that he had their attention. His eyes didn’t leave theirs as he spoke, moving from one to the other, like a small child trying to gauge the feelings and moods of adults by the expressions on their faces, trying to see how he ought to behave.

“It was somewhere very remote, and a lot of guerrillas were there during the war. Because the Germans hadn’t occupied it. One day the guerrillas made an attack. They had done it before, but this time they killed a lot of German soldiers. An ammunition dump or something. The local German commander was so angry that he…”

He paused, thought hard, then altered his sentence slightly, as though speaking the words of a fairy-tale to a child, where the words must always be the same, time after time, as the story is told at bedtime.

“The German commander was furious, and took all his troops to the nearest village. He made all the villagers gather together, and told them what had happened. He said that there was going to be a reprisal. He was sorry. But it was wartime. One male member of each household was going to be executed on the following morning.”

Jo cast around for the right words to follow, chewing at his bottom lip, concentrating fiercely.

“The next part is the strange part. He told everyone to go home. They were to decide amongst themselves who was going to be the one to die in their household. Each family had to decide for itself.”

There was a pause when he had finished speaking.

“What happened?” Corrie asked, at last.

“The following morning, the chosen hostages were all killed. Just as he had said.”

Corrie thought about the quiet talking into the early hours of the morning, deciding who was to be chosen to die. Who had they chosen? Newly born babies who had only been alive for a few days; weak old men, towards the end of their lives? He imagined them, walking, or being carried, towards their deaths, followed by their grieving families.

Whoever had a child, whoever had a mother or a father, whoever had a friend, whoever was capable of feeling love, of forming a tie, of wishing to protect or care for another person, had a weakness that could be exploited, had a hostage in his life, someone he would give all he had in the world to protect from harm.

“On Christmas Eve,” Jo said, “when you were reading ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids’ to Matty, Corrie and I were sitting on the stairs listening.”

Jo looked at Lilli, his face stern.

“The bit I always remember best in that story is the bit when the wolf goes to the miller and tells him to throw flour over his paws to disguise them.” He began to quote from the story: “‘The miller thought to himself, “The wolf is going to harm someone,” and refused to do as he was told. Then the wolf said, “If you do not do as I tell you, I will kill you.” The miller was afraid, and did as he was told, and threw the flour over the wolf’s paws until they were white. This is what mankind is like.”’

He repeated the final sentence.

“‘This is what mankind is like.’”

Lilli thought about what jo had said. As she spoke, her German accent, as sometimes happened when she had a lot to say, became more and more pronounced.

“I suppose I should say something wise, something forgiving and fine to teach you all the goodness in mankind, but I have never been one of those people who believe that those who have suffered experience wisdom as an inevitable result of their suffering, become wiser and richer people. ‘Suffering’ sounds a grand word, as if I were someone special, someone who deserved a special hearing when opinions are expressed, but it is the word which truly expresses the feelings I had. I could never submit humbly in the face of the ‘inscrutable will’ of a God who had a purpose for a chosen people, a purpose in which all things that happened played a part. I raged when I was eleven and my oldest brother’s baby died of a simple childhood illness. I raged when I was sixteen and my old aunt went blind. Why should a baby die? Why should an old woman go blind?

“We were never a religious family. My mother and father were very modern in their outlook, freethinkers. We were like a Christian family who are Christian only in remembering a little special celebration at Easter or Christmas, but for whom the idea of Christianity plays no conscious part in everyday life. I think it might have helped if we had been religious: we would have known that we had something we felt we were ennobled by suffering for. I could, perhaps, have rejoiced at such a death, going to see the unknown face of my certain God. But the faces I wanted to see were not unknown faces: they were the faces I already knew the best in all the world. We felt like people who were persecuted for being Christians, when we knew nothing of what being a Christian meant, and all because a distant relation, of whom we knew nothing, lit a candle in a church once, a long time ago. We were Germans, ordinary people, and then they told us that we weren’t Germans, we were Jews. It would be like being told that you were no longer regarded as being English because you were a Christian, as if the one cancelled out the other.