Nothing But Fear (2 page)

In the end Grandfather no longer stopped for them but drove out and back, motivated by routine and by the need to have something to do, and in the evenings he would still
sit at the table and spout a bit about the growing cult of the great outdoors and about the hordes of tourists over the horizon, but he scarcely believed in it himself anymore and had reached the end of the road. He could not keep the creditors at bay and feed the family – they had nothing to live on – so one morning he said what everyone had been saying all the time, ‘They're not coming,' and took the bus on its last trip.

He drove out along the main road towards Gedser and through Væggerløse and past the station, where a young man was standing at the bus stop. It had happened so often before. Grandfather did not stop. Why should he? But this time it was different. The man ran after the bus, shouting and waving his hat. He wanted to get on! Grandfather opened the door, and he climbed aboard and said
‘Guten Tag'
and bought a single ticket and got off at the guest-house.

‘Marielyst Osterseebad,'
Grandfather said in German and wished him a good stay –
‘einen guten Aufenthalt.'
He had practised for years and now, when he needed it, it was, of course, too late.

Grandfather did not know whether to laugh or cry, and he looked out at the dikes with their lyme grasses, the white sand and the green stripes of water and the blue sky. He saw the beach populated with thousands of tourists, swimming and playing in the sand, and the Baltic overflowed in his eyes. Then he turned the bus around, drove back and dropped it off in town – and that was that. He went down and sat on the bench outside the station and there
he remained, following the trains that trundled through, taking his life with them. It was the summer of 1914, and Carl Christian Johannes had given up.

T
he island of Falster actually lay below the surface of the sea and existed in people's consciousness only because they refused to believe otherwise. But, when they couldn't stand upright anymore, when they lay down to sleep, the water rose bit by bit and flowed in over the seawalls, over fields and woods and towns, and claimed the land back for the Baltic. I kept myself awake and saw it coming, looking out of the window at the black expanse of water filling the garden – the fish swimming round between the houses and the trees – and far away the town of Nykøbing sailing through the night like an ocean liner. The sky was full of starfish and I counted myself to sleep. In the morning the tide ebbed, and the water slipped away, retreating as people woke in their beds and got up to spend yet another day persuading each other that they existed and that Falster existed and that it all had a place on the map. The town smelt of sea and fish – the streets were full of seaweed and stranded jellyfish – and sometimes I found a conch or a fossilized sea urchin and put them in the drawer with the rest of my evidence of Atlantis.

T
here was a hole in our house where you could listen and music and voices would come out. This was the transistor radio. It stood in the kitchen and was caked in cooking fat, its aerial held together with tape, and my mother listened to it all day long when Father was at the office. Apart from me it was her only company, and she washed up to the sounds of ‘Record requests', cooked to ‘Karlsen's quarter-hour', polished the silver to ‘That was the day that was' and vacuumed to the sound of the midday concert, a cheroot in her mouth and a glass of vodka at hand. They played Beethoven and Brahms and Tchaikovsky to the accompaniment of a hoover, which ran up and down the music with a rhythmic drone, making long phrases in the hallway and short and powerful thrusts in the dining room where the carpet needed an extra going over. When all was quiet and clean, I was sent to the garage with the hoover bag, and it all got chucked into the dustbin with the rubbish – the music, the coughs, the voices, the applause. I lifted the lid and peered in – a couple of bars of the Pastoral Symphony leaked out, smelling of mould and fermented apples. I slammed it shut, and not a note was left. My father did not care for music.

O
ccasionally it got really cold in winter, and then I knew that Germany was calling. We would soon be going down to visit my mother's stepsister, Aunt Eva, and her
husband, Uncle Helmut, and their three sons, Axel, Rainer and Claus. Mother and Father packed the car full of warm clothes and suitcases and presents, and I hopped onto the backseat behind Mother, who had made sandwiches for the journey. Father would double-check the front door, close the garden gate and peer into the boot one last time to make sure everything was packed as it should be. He squeezed himself behind the wheel with hat and gloves on – his legs were too long for him to sit normally – adjusted the rear-view mirror and read off the petrol gauge and the mileage which was exactly 9874.5, he said, noting the number and the time in his diary. We were two minutes behind schedule for the ferry. ‘Passport, money, papers,' we said in unison, and then Father turned the key in the ignition, Mother lit a cheroot and turned up the traffic report on the radio, and we were off down Hans Ditlevsensgade, rounding the corner and journeying far back in time.

We stiffened when the officer checked us at the border, each becoming the spitting image of the photo in our passport – and for an instant we were smiling in black and white. Then it was over, and the motorway lay ahead. Mother unscrewed the duty-free and drank from the cap. We laughed and sang – and father asked her to turn the radio down and go easy on the vodka. That's enough now! Twenty years before she had left Germany behind for the sake of my father, and she sat clutching her memories, looking out at the houses, the fields, the streets rushing past, and everything responded to her look, gleaming and glinting back at her. Softly under her breath she read out the names of towns on the road
signs we passed and with her forefinger traced in Michelin the route that led home – Hamburg, Hannover, Göttingen, Frankfurt am Main – and it ran like a tear down the road map and came to rest in Oberfranken.

More and more fir trees appeared along the motorway, the hills became higher and turned into mountains, and when we turned off and took the final, dark stretch of main road to arrive in Münchberg the snow would be falling in heavy, white flakes. Mother shook me, whispering
‘Wir sind da,'
and I woke up among hundreds of miles of sweet papers, peered out through the window and wiped away the mist with my sleeve. We drove through the arched gateway, and the headlights lit up the drive to the large house. It stood at the top of a hill looking like a castle with its towers and parkland and ancient trees, and here they lived surrounded by a winter landscape – the Hagenmüller family.

Aunt Eva and Uncle Helmut would be walking down the main stairway, waving to us, the sons standing stiffly in line with their short, blond hair and pressed trousers, bowing and greeting and shaking hands as though they were clockwork.

‘Grüβ Gott, Tante Hilde! Grüβ Gott, Onkel Knut! Grüβdich, Vetter Knüdchen!'

Aunt Eva planted a sharp kiss on my cheek.

‘Na, kleiner Knut, fröhliche Weihnachten,'
she would say, her voice snapping her ‘Happy Christmas' into piercing little splinters. She greeted Father and turned at last to Mother, stepping back to get a good look at her ‘little mouse'.

‘Schau mal einer an, das Hildemäuschen!'

‘Ach, Evamäuschen!'
exclaimed Mother – and they fell into each other's arms and hated each other beyond all saying.

The only one I liked was Uncle Helmut, who was small and round and bent because of the pains in his back. He had green eyes and wore glasses – and I felt as though he could see right through me and was surveying my bone structure and my inner organs when he pinched my cheeks and prodded my stomach to get me to laugh to order, like a doctor getting you to say ‘Aaaah'. I laughed and laughed and could already feel a cold coming on, and Uncle Helmut listened to it, thought long and hard and then pronounced his diagnosis and popped me a sweet from his pocket. It tasted of camphor, and that was good for most things, he said, and we went in together.

Uncle Helmut was a radiologist and spent his days taking pictures of people and telling them whether they would live or die. He came home for lunch and drank a glass of snaps before going back and taking some more photographs. The whole town filtered through his clinic. Strangers and acquaintances, friends and family – sooner or later their turn would come. It was taking its toll on him, and he grew paler and paler from the flash that showed things in their true light, felt more and more pain in his back, coughing and collapsing little by little. After work and dinner were over, he withdrew in silence, trudging up the stairs with a bottle of wine and locking the door to his room in the attic to continue what were called his ‘studies'. No one knew what they were, these secret sciences.

Uncle Helmut believed in spirits and had good reason
to. As a seventeen-year-old he had been sent to the Eastern Front and had marched on Stalingrad. Two millions deaths later he marched back through the Russian winter, losing three toes and his sanity. He saw his parents standing beyond the grave, shielding him from enemy fire and frost, and even though he made it back alive, he never really returned home. He lived in the past with his family, surrounded by ghosts that only he could see, and the hallucination of life before the war was all that remained to him once it was over.

Over the years Uncle Helmut collected ancestral heir-looms and antiques, any item he could get his hands on that had been in the family, and he placed them in corners and on chests of drawers and hung them on walls, turning the house into a mausoleum for the family. It was full of relics from grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents – all the way back to the armour that stood at the top of the stairs and rattled round the house at night as Uncle Helmut sleepwalked, marching on through that eternal winter. For their confirmations he gave his sons signet rings that belonged to the family and placed them between portraits and armour and family silver, and there they stood with no hope of escape, for their fate was sealed with the coat of arms and red wax.

I was envious of them and felt myself cheated of my part of the story, and on one of those days before Christmas Uncle Helmut told me to come up to his room after dinner and I would get something that was better than a ring, and he winked at me. The minutes crawled at a snail's pace, and I thought the meal would never end. The dessert dragged
on and melted on our plates, before he said
‘Mahlzeit,'
laid his serviette to one side, pushed back his chair and rose from the table. He took his wine, went up the stairs to his room and closed the door. I was already standing outside, and the knocking on the panelled door was the beating of my heart. I've had it now, I thought, as Uncle Helmut opened the door and wished me good evening.

It was a welter of books and papers, and shelves lined every wall. He began to tell me about the things in the room – a Samurai sword he had brought home from Japan, Indian prayer bells, the antlers on the wall. He sat down behind the desk, which was covered in parish registers and old photographs. This was where he sat at night, studying and drawing family trees that grew ever more fantastic branches as he drank his way through the bottle. A wreath hung behind glass in a frame above the desk, bound together by a black bow, and he explained that it was a plait that had been cut from his grandmother's hair when she died in 1894. It had hung in his parents' sitting room in memory of her. Uncle Helmut coughed and fell silent, looking me straight in the eye so I knew that now it was coming, and he opened the drawer.

There was no such thing as withdrawal in the German Army, he said – and placed a small piece of metal on the desk. Uncle Helmut showed me the scar on the underside of his arm and told me about the battle that had been the cause of it and about their retreat through Russia. When they needed supplies, they had to send advanced troops out to beat back the SS, who were defending the depots against
their own soldiers. They managed to hold their position for as long as it took the company to run past and to have food, clothes and ammunition shoved into their hands, and then they continued westwards, fleeing annihilation. Uncle Helmut sighed, rolled his sleeve down and handed me the piece of metal. It was a piece of a Russian hand grenade, and now it was mine.

Uncle Helmut was full of fragments of grenade, which came out of his body at regular intervals, and every time we met he gave me a new piece and told me more about the war, until fragment by fragment I pieced the stories together. They were about survival but always ended with a corpse, and the only thing he could do was to drag it out for as long as he could. Sometimes he would come to a standstill, losing himself in the details of a landscape or describing a uniform jacket and counting all the buttons. When I asked who it had belonged to, he answered that the man had been lost in action and gave me the fragment – and there would be no more stories until next time.

Apart from me there was no one who thought much of Uncle Helmut really. Or rather, my mother was fond of him, and I suppose my father was too, but his wife and children weren't. The strongest feeling they had for him was fear, and an oppressive cloud hung over the house. Aunt Eva had married him for his money and because he was one of the few men left to marry after the war, while the sons crept around like dogs with their tails between their legs and agreed with everything he said. For them it was one big act. When they smirked and went about their duties,
when they sat and ate nicely at table, I could see behind their movements the cogs turning round and was sure they were mechanical dolls wound up by fear – fear of beatings, of being confined to their room – and most of the time I kept myself to myself.

It came as a release when Christmas was over and we were to return home. I couldn't wait to get away from the ghosts in that icy house that gave you a cold the moment you walked through the door. Mother and Father packed the car and we said our thank you's and goodbye's and posed out on the terrace for the last time – it was snowing – and Uncle Helmut waved his hand and asked us to bunch up – Aunt Eva, Axel, Rainer and Claus, Mother and Father and I. Then we said ‘Cheese', and he raised the camera to his eye and pressed the button, and I screamed and screamed and screamed, but it was too late. The picture was taken, and I knew that Uncle Helmut would be able to see from it which of us would die.