They Do the Same Things Different There (38 page)

From the attic I’d brought down whole boxes of my past, I’d been through them to find all the best bits. There were photographs, of me as a child, me with my parents, the brother I hadn’t spoken to for years. My wedding day. Janet looked so beautiful. I looked a bit fat.

And things I had forgotten. My Cub Scout badges, one for orienteering, one for knots, one for helping the old folk cross the road. A little medal I’d won at school for swimming. Certificates proving I was a qualified chartered accountant. A prize-winning essay about the great hero Sir Francis Drake. Valentine’s cards.

“This is who I am,” I said to Paul.

“Right.”

“No bows and arrows! Ha! Nothing as exciting as Robin Hood could show his son. Ha!”

“No.”

“I’m no one special. But. Maybe there’s something here that might inspire you.”

Paul didn’t look very convinced. I sort of smiled at him, encouragingly. He sort of smiled back. He put his hands deep into one of the boxes, as if it were a lucky dip, and he pulled out some old postcards from somewhere or other.

“I’ll leave you to it,” I said.

“This is all shit,” he said. Not even unkindly.

“I’ll leave you to it,” I said again. And I walked out of the room. And I closed the door. And I locked it.

“Hey!” said Paul. “Let me out!” He banged his fists on the door. They were heavy fists; Paul was already so strong, stronger than me. But I thought the door would hold.

I went upstairs to my bedroom. I decided I wouldn’t free Paul for a while. It was tempting, he’d be so angry when he got out. But if I wanted this relationship to work, I had to believe in it, give it a fighting chance.

I pulled the string from the bow, and I broke all the arrows, I snapped them in two.

I went to sleep for a while. I don’t know how long.

And at last I went back downstairs. I trod softly, I didn’t want to disturb my son. He had stopped shouting and banging at the door, I hadn’t heard a sound from him for ages. I stooped, I peered through the keyhole. It was hard to see properly, and I could only guess at the expression on his face, but he was holding that swimming medal to his chest, hugging onto it tight, and I thought it might have been with pride and with awe and with love.

No one ever saw her smile. But hers was a face you wouldn’t want to smile—something as hard and as sour as that wasn’t made for smiling, and the contorted effort of it would surely have been too much, it would have given nightmares to the children. The children were already frightened of her, she was what parents threatened them with to get them to behave: “You calm down, or we’ll take you to Frau Loecherbach. We’ll give you to Frau Loecherbach, and she’ll make sausages of you!” But it was a
good
fear; the children followed her around market and sniggered; they’d call her a witch, a troll, they’d say she was in league with the Devil—but never to her face, always out of earshot, only in fun, just fun. A good fear, a healthy and exciting fear, full of adventure and the possibility of magic.

She wasn’t the public face of the restaurant. Charm, clearly, was not her thing. Her husband Alois served the tables, and he was amiable enough, he would joke with the guests as he took their orders and recommended the specials of the day. And her three sons, Franz, Hans, and little Johann, they would help out too, they would bring out the food from the kitchens—great steaming plates of it, of Knödel and Schweinshaxe and roasted Rindswurst. Frau Loecherbach would stick to the kitchens. No one doubted the genius of her culinary skills. But that didn’t mean anyone wanted to look at her.

When you ate one of Frau Loecherbach’s meals, you somehow didn’t want to like it all that much. Because the cook was so displeasing a human being, you wanted her pancakes and her borscht to reflect that. But it wasn’t possible to resist. The food was good. She could do miraculous tricks with a chicken, she could make it fizz with flavour, no matter how dubious the quality of your average chicken to be found on sale in that market square. Her breads tasted light as air. Her soups were rich and thick like steak, and spiced with something you couldn’t quite identify but seemed as familiar as nostalgia itself. To eat at Loecherbach’s was expensive. And these were hard times, and the townsfolk resented the expense. They resented the expense, and they resented Julia Loecherbach, strutting around the town with her hard face and her tight bosom as if she owned the place. But still they came back. And still they wanted not to like her food quite so much that they paid for it dearly. And still they couldn’t help themselves.

No one knew how she had managed to snare herself a husband like Alois. And people wondered why her three sons didn’t leave home. They weren’t exactly handsome lads, Franz, Hans, and little Johann, but they were strong, the girls of the town could net themselves worse; no one quite understood why they didn’t cut themselves free of their ugly mother’s apron strings and set out to find futures of their own. But Julia Loecherbach kept her men close. The gossip said she must have put a spell on them. It wasn’t just the children who thought there was a spot of devilry to her.

By the time the news reached the town that they were at war, the war was nearly over. Still, the garrisons demanded that every man fit enough to wave a sword must join their number. The army would continue its march toward the front the next morning; the towns were expected to give up their men to them then. It didn’t look much like an army. The soldiers seemed like children wearing adult clothes, all baring their teeth with adult disdain, smoking and spitting and swearing the way adults do; there were old men too, squeezed into uniforms too small for them, their white beards now tapered toward sharp martial points. They carried mostly cudgels and sticks. But they were very insistent—they
were
an army, really they were—and the leading officer carried some sort of seal, and said that it gave him authority direct from the emperor of Austria himself, so that was that.

Franz, Hans, and little Johann prepared to go to war. They put their favourite belongings into knapsacks; little Johann took a toy boat his father had carved out of wood for him when he was a child. They all seemed very excited. Alois prepared for war too. He took out the greatcoat his father had worn the day
he
had been called to war; Alois now mostly wore it when the weather turned fierce in the winter, and sometimes killed the chickens in it—but nevertheless it had been part of a uniform, and his father’s uniform at that, and Alois was rightly proud of it. Julia watched her men busy themselves with men’s things, how they laughed, how they swaggered, how they jabbed at each other with sticks and pretended to kill and pretended to die. And she said not a word. And went to the kitchen to prepare dinner.

Frau Loecherbach let it be known that there would be a special dinner at her restaurant that night, and all were invited. People need only pay what they wanted. This was to be a celebration feast. There would be room for all—there would be tables lined up the streets, everyone would be able to eat at Loecherbach, man, woman, child. And, as one, the town came. Because though no one liked her very much, and she never smiled, and she was a witch, still her food was to die for.

“Do you want me to wait tables, liebchen?” asked Alois. And Alois was standing in his greatcoat, and already stroking at the places where he imagined his medals might hang. And his wife told him no; no, tonight he too would be a customer, tonight he would be able to sit back in their restaurant and relax and eat his fill. And the same was true for her sons; tonight would be a busy night, the busiest night of her life thus far, but still she would manage all by herself.

There was no menu. And there was no wine. Instead, the town took their seats and waited, hungry and sober, for dinner to be served. And there was palpable disappointment when at last Frau Loecherbach brought forth nothing more spectacular than a single tureen full of stew, and began ladling it into bowls. There were catcalls. Some men beat against the tables, and they were laughing, but it was an angry laughter, they were soldiers already and feeling warlike and oh so fierce. “Hush,” said Frau Loecherbach, and she didn’t raise her voice, but the sound carried to all of the tables, and everyone fell silent. “You shall eat what you are given, and no more,” she told them, “and you will like it.”

The stew looked unappealing. Thin and watery, and a little bit brown; it seemed to have been made from the dregs of whatever had been in the Loecherbach larder. In one bowl there might float a discoloured lettuce leaf; in another, a chunk of carrot seemed to have considered its stewy surroundings, found them wanting, then chosen to drown itself deep in despair. And here was Frau Loecherbach splashing the liquid into the bowls, still not smiling, still so sour, and warning the townsfolk not to eat until everyone was ready. It all quite took people’s appetites away. No one much wanted to like Frau Loecherbach’s food, and tonight this was going to be easy.

“Now, eat,” she said, and they did.

And they tasted their childhoods.

They might taste the memory of the first pie they had ever eaten, the balance between pastry and meat being just right that first and only time. They might taste the apples they had scrumped when they were teenagers, then lying back on the grass on long summer days that seemed to stretch out before them and promised, faithlessly, never to end. They might taste sauerkraut, or stollen, or schnitzel, they might taste Butterkuchen the way they remembered their mothers making it. They ate not only their favourite meals. They ate the recollections of their favourite meals, the best they had ever been, better than they had ever been, the happiest they had ever felt—when, in spite of all, the world had been so full of possibility; when, in spite of all, they had been in
love
. Long married couples, grown bored and resentful of each other, tasted again their own wedding cakes, and how sweet it had been, and how it had crumbled upon their tongues—and how afterwards they had kissed each other, now husband and wife, now so proud and so grown-up, and had gone to bed, and how together they had made those tongues dance.

They were the best meals, and they were as good as they had ever been, and they were better than they had ever been. Spicier, sweeter, and the portions so much bigger.

Customers begged Frau Loecherbach for seconds. “Fill our bowls again!” they pleaded. She refused: “What you are given, and no more,” she said. She asked them all to settle the bill. And the townsfolk paid all the money they had.

Tonight the women take their husbands to bed, and they make love. And their lovemaking is as sweet as memory too. And, for now, their bellies are full, and warm, and they hold each other all night, and they feel as one—and nothing can separate them, not time, not space, not war certainly—and there is a recognition that if there had once been better times, then there can be better times again. Surely. Surely that makes sense. Surely that is
just
. And when at last they fall asleep there lingers the taste of knipp on their lips and spargel on their breaths and the salt sweat of honest passion on their skin. And the next morning the men get up and go to war.

A few weeks later an army came to town. It was a different army, and the schoolboys and old men wore uniforms of a different colour.

The commander was one of the old men, and on his cheek was a deep scar that he displayed with pride a little too obviously. He told the town that the war was over. There were still pockets of resistance, of course, one must expect that, but the resistance would be quelled, the war was over as far as they need be concerned. They had all been liberated from the rule of a tyrannical emperor who did not love them, and they were now under the rule of another sort of emperor altogether. They were part of Prussia, as they should always have been.

He said too that his soldiers would be billeted at the houses of the conquered townsfolk. And that, in respect of his position, he himself would be billeted at the wealthiest of those houses. That house, of course, belonged to Frau Loecherbach.

Away from the crowds, away from the soldiers protecting him with muskets and swords, the commander looked younger and more awkward. He politely told Frau Loecherbach that he regretted the inconvenience he was putting her through, and that he would do his level best not to get in her way. And he fingered at that scar of his nervously.

“Do you have anyone in the war?” he asked.

Frau Loecherbach told him that indeed she had four men in the army: one husband and three sons, all fighting for their country.

The commander attempted a consolatory smile. “God speed an ending to this damned war,” he said, “and that your family will be restored to you, and then we can all live in peace.”

Frau Loecherbach didn’t smile back. Frau Loecherbach didn’t ever smile. Instead Frau Loecherbach gave a nod, just the one. She then said that she was prepared to let the commander stay in her house, and did so with great gravity and after much consideration. But she said that she would not be cooking for him.

“I understand,” said the commander.

The commander issued instructions to his troops moreover that they must treat the women whose houses they were occupying with all respect and civility, and any reports of lewd behaviour, up to and including rape, would be punished with all severity. And he was a good commander, and his men listened to him, and most of them even obeyed.

It was believed that because the commander was staying with Frau Loecherbach that she must be living in luxury. On the days she went to market the people wouldn’t look at her. Under their breaths they muttered the word “traitor.”

The commander would buy a chicken each week and roast it on the Sunday. Frau Loecherbach could tell from the smell coming from her kitchen that he had found a way to render it devoid of all juice or flavour. But she kept to her room away from him.

When the first snap of winter came on the commander went outside, wearing his greatcoat for warmth, and chopped wood. From the sound Julia could almost believe that Alois had returned to her—or that Franz, Hans, or even little Johann were making logs for the fire. She asked the commander to stop, but he laughed amiably and told her that the exercise alone kept him warm! That it was his pleasure, and his privilege, to make the house a comfort to them both, to do what he could for her. And when Frau Loecherbach went to market that week, her neighbours called her whore and spat at her.