After Midnight (2 page)

I think of the mountains that look like nice, curly green heads from a distance, and they make me think of my hands. I kept on rubbing Liska’s marvelous skin cream in, thinking that would make my skin wonderfully silky, but Algin’s got a magnifying glass, and when I put one of my hands under it I got quite a shock. A freckle on my hand looked like a cowpat. Who wants to look at a thing like that? Magnifying glasses ought not to be allowed.

My name is Susanne. Susanne Moder, but I’m called Sanna. I like it when people shorten my name, because it shows they like me. If you’re never called anything but your full baptismal name, you are often rather unpopular.

Franz could say it more lovingly than anyone. “Sanna.” Probably because he thinks in the same slow, soft sort of way. Will he really come? Does he still love me? In a minute I’ll go to the Ladies and read his letter again.

I wonder what his mother’s up to now? Horrible Aunt Adelheid. Something ought to be done about her; why didn’t I do it? As a child, I certainly
would
have paid her out somehow, and it wouldn’t have been any laughing matter. That cow. When you grow up you accept things much more meekly, you go soft. We always got our revenge for shabby treatment as children, and quite right too!

Aunt Adelheid is totally uneducated, but she puts on amazing airs. She had several reasons for disliking me. In the first place, she disliked me because my father sent me to
secondary school in Koblenz. He was in favour of children getting some learning. I’m not all that keen on learning, myself; didn’t have the right sort of head for it. But Algin did, and you only have to look at him to see where learning will get a person.

Algin Moder’s my stepbrother, and a famous writer, and seventeen years older than me. His real name is Alois, but he changed it off his own bat, because Alois is more of a name for a humorous writer, which he isn’t.

When Algin’s mother died, my father married again. His new wife had me. My mother died young too, but my father couldn’t help it, he was always good to his wives. Then he married for the third time, a sandy-haired woman from Cochem. Well, being a man and the landlord of a pub, my father can’t manage without a wife. This one’s still alive. She’s all right, but naturally she loved her own small children more than the two of us left over from the previous marriages, and being a bit stupid and not very pretty she was determined that at least she’d rule the roost. I didn’t feel really happy in Lappesheim after she came.

Anyway, the whole place would be too small for me in the long run. I’d far rather live in a city. You’re not supposed to say that kind of thing these days, on account of World Outlook and the government. Right-thinking people don’t prefer cities or think they’re nicer than the countryside. And all the poets nowadays write things saying the only kind of Nature you must love is your original natural background. They keep building bigger and bigger cities all the same, and laying main roads over the redolent soil. The point of the redolent soil is that poets have to sing its praises so as to avoid thinking any stupid thoughts, like what is going on in our cities, and what’s happening to the people. You also
need the redolent soil for making films about country life which the public do not flock to see. Heini once explained all this to me and Liska. Liska is in love with Heini. I don’t always understand him myself, but that doesn’t make
me
fall in love with him.

Anyway, I don’t think the provincial governors, the Gauleiters, and high-up Ministers would much fancy spending the winter in Lappesheim, when the Mosel’s full of poisonous-looking yellow mud, and mist weighs down on the whole valley so thick you can hardly breathe. It’s always dark, and you stumble over holes in the roads. The only way to stand it is if you have some kind of business of your own, and you’re always thinking how to improve it. Or if you have a husband and children to annoy you, which at least is better than being bored to death. I don’t want to spend my life there, and neither does Algin, though he carries on in the stories he writes these days as if a right-thinking person ought to clasp every cowpat to his breast.

When I was sixteen, I went to live with Aunt Adelheid in Cologne. She has a stationer’s shop there, in Friesen Street. She’s my dead mother’s sister, and it was my mother who let her have the money for the shop. Aunt Adelheid either has to pay me back some of that money every month or let me live with her free. This was another reason for Aunt Adelheid to dislike me. I’d never have stuck it out there as long as I did—two whole years—but for her son Franz. It is hard to believe he’s her son; she doesn’t love him either. I helped Aunt Adelheid in the shop. I love selling things, and everyone says I have a gift for getting on with customers.

When the Führer came to power, Aunt Adelheid went all political, and put up pictures of him, bought swastika flags and joined the National Socialist Women’s Club, where
she got to meet a good class of person as a German wife and mother.

Then there was air raid drill, held in what used to be the Young Men’s Christian Association hall. Aunt Adelheid went regularly, taking me along, and she made sure everyone else in the building went too and didn’t wriggle out of it. She was nearly the death of frail old Herr Pütz, who lives on the top floor.

Old Pütz is a pensioner, leading a quiet, peaceful life on his own. He has nicely brushed white hair and walks with neat, tottery little footsteps. Aunt Adelheid made him come to air raid drill. That day we had to put on gas masks, which practically smothered you, and then run up a staircase. Old Pütz stood in a dark corner, all shaky, holding the gas mask in his thin little hands and no doubt hoping nobody would notice him. But Aunt Adelheid’s beady black eyes noticed him all right. He had to put his gas mask on, and Aunt Adelheid chased him up the staircase ahead of her. Up in the loft he collapsed. Everyone was horrified, though you could only tell from their fluttering hands and agitated footsteps, because there were no human faces in sight, just hideous masks. Pütz’s crumpled body lay there on the floor in his one good, dark blue Sunday suit, and we could hear him breathing stertorously inside his mask. Aunt Adelheid had put the mask on him wrong, and it was difficult getting his head out again. I thought he was going to die, but he recovered, very slowly. It was like a miracle.

“Pütz,” said Aunt Adelheid, “I hope you realize you should be thankful to me? But for me you’d have been done for in a moment of serious danger.” “Just let me die in my bed,” Pütz whimpered in a voice like a mouse’s squeak, “just let me die in my bed.” “Pütz,” said Aunt Adelheid sternly,
“you have failed to understand the new Germany. You have failed to understand the Führer’s will for reconstruction. Old folk like you must be either ignored or forced to see where their welfare lies!” Later on, Aunt Adelheid campaigned successfully to be made warden of the building. That means that if there’s a genuine air raid she gets a gun, and everyone in the building is under her orders. And she has the right to shoot anyone who disobeys her.

A thousand enemy aircraft wouldn’t frighten me as much as Aunt Adelheid with a gun and the power to give orders. There will be no need for any enemy airman to drop a bomb on Aunt Adelheid’s building in order to kill the people inside, because Aunt Adelheid will do the job for him in advance. Unless Schauwecker murders her first, that is. He’s another enthusiastic Nazi, and lives on the first floor. He looks like a great fat, yellow sponge, and he is the stage manager at the City Theatre. He used to be a member of some sort of organization which got him his job. Then he was going to be sacked, because he was always feeling up the actresses with walk-on parts—he was in charge of them, and could go into their dressing-room—and doing really disgusting things, and he wouldn’t even leave children alone. I know him; he’s an old pig. I was always afraid of meeting him out in the street at night on my own. He wasn’t sacked, just given a warning. But on account of all he’d suffered he became an anti-Semite.

He has a tearful wife, and three children who are all in the Hitler Youth movement. He’s much respected in the Party because he knows a whole lot about the actors and the other people working at the theatre. And
he
was dead set on being warden of the building, and he would have been too, but for Aunt Adelheid. However, Aunt Adelheid
had witnesses to the fact that when a man came round selling lottery tickets in aid of the Winter Relief programme, he had said, behind the man’s back, “I’ve no intention of buying any of that fool’s trash.” This amounted to sabotage of the Winter Relief effort, and Aunt Adelheid had only to inform on him, so she was well able to scare Schauwecker into letting her be warden. He’ll get his own back when the war comes and everything’s in confusion.

Then Aunt Adelheid did something really horrible, something which might have been the death of me. After that I wasn’t going to stay on at her place, and I went to Algin in Frankfurt. He’d been to see me in Cologne, and he’d always been nice to me. Thank goodness he was glad to have me, and I stayed.

Algin’s been all over the place, even Berlin, where he wrote for the newspapers. Then he began writing books, and one day he became really famous. There were reviews of his books in all the papers. They’re novels. One is about a woman who steals things from a department store, but she’s a good person all the same, it was just that there wasn’t anything else she could do. She gets badly treated by one man, he’s a cashier, and then she has an affair with a waiter, but that doesn’t turn out well either.

Algin used to send copies of his books to Lappesheim, and we looked at them too. When November came and the vintage was over and the tourists had gone home, my father used to read half a page every evening. But I don’t think he ever got to the end of any of the books.

They even made a film of one of Algin’s books, and it was shown in Koblenz. Father and I and six other people from the village went to Koblenz specially to see it. When we were in the cinema we felt just as if the place belonged
to Algin, and all the film actors too, and he was responsible for the whole thing. Even the little torches the usherettes carried. The posters outside said, in big, bold letters, “
SHADOWS WITHOUT SUN. FROM THE CELEBRATED NOVELIST BY ALGIN MODER.
” We never really stopped to think if we liked the film, we just felt pleased and very proud, particularly my father. He didn’t say anything, but you could tell how proud he was because he took us all into the Königsbacher Bar afterwards and spent quite a lot of money.

After that he put the book on the little table by the counter in the pub, where he always puts the newspapers, so that his customers could see it. There was an article about Algin in one newspaper, with a photograph of him, and Father had it handsomely and expensively framed and hung it over the settle in the bar.

Algin sent home suits and dresses, and woolen waistcoats and expensive cognac for Father, who knows a thing or two about liquor. Father sent Algin the biggest salmon he caught in the Eltzbach, and the best vintage years of our wine. All the villagers envied us Algin, and the old Forest Supervisor went so far as to tell Father, “Moder, you should be a proud man! Your son’s made good.” Perhaps my father would have been even prouder if Algin had made good as a general, Father himself being a veteran of the Stahlhelm corps, but obviously the times just weren’t right for Algin to get to be a general.

So my father had to content himself with the splendid things the newspapers printed about Algin, all down there in black and white. He
was
content, too, and proud. He even made some sharpish remarks about Father Bender, the only person in the village who had read Algin’s book, and who said that when God had endowed Algin richly with gifts
and talents it was poor thanks to Him to deny the giver of such gifts.

Father Bender’s in protective custody now, for thrashing the parish council chairman’s son because the parish council chairman’s son made use of the church wall instead of a tree or a lavatory. The boy is high up in the Hitler Youth, and as well as being parish council chairman, his father’s an old campaigner, and used to lead a detachment.

Algin’s book is not on the little table by the counter any more, because the National Socialists put it on a black list. Its trouble is that it’s demoralizing and offends against the basic will for reconstruction of the Third Reich. That’s what they said in the Nazi newspaper in Koblenz. My father wasn’t a National Socialist to start with, but he was all for a basic will for reconstruction.

Also, he had to think of his customers, so he hung a picture of the Führer over the settle instead of the framed article about Algin. It annoyed my father to think of Algin writing banned books, after he’d laid out good money on his education. After all, said my father, you have to show respect for the Führer, and the national emblem, and if Segebrecht, who keeps another local pub, has landed himself in a concentration camp, then it’s entirely his own fault. Segebrecht can certainly carry an amazing amount of drink, but he
will
keep putting it back, and it was one day when he was drunk that he painted a swastika on his lavatory floor. When Pitter Lambert came into the bar and asked what the idea was, he shouted at the top of his voice, “To show all the arseholes what they’ve gone and elected, that’s the idea.” Well, no good’s going to come of that kind of thing.

Anyway, Algin
had
made good, as everyone had to admit. I used to think it must be wonderful, and I’d have loved
to be brilliant and successful too, but now I wouldn’t really, not any more, because things can go wrong so quickly, and you never get much fun out of any of it in the long run, either.

When Algin was first famous he thought he’d go up in the world a bit, and he did, and now it’s a burden to him, one he can’t shake off. Since the new government banned one of Algin’s books, he has to be scrupulously careful what he writes, and he doesn’t earn much money any more. His entire life, his whole working day from morning to night, is spent making enough to pay for his apartment and the furniture. Because when he was first famous he rented an apartment with lovely big rooms on the main Bockenheim Road, where the most prosperous people in Frankfurt have always lived, and lovely lush magnolia trees bloom in the front gardens in spring.