Nothing But Fear (10 page)

It all started when the circus came to Nykøbing in the eighteenth century – and the fact that we were called Romer was because the circus manager was Italian. The horses fell ill, the performance was cancelled, and he was stranded on Falster. He could not buy new horses for the money he could get for the dead. The prices were so low that he kept
them, slaughtered and skinned them himself and set himself up in the town as a tanner.

It was foul work separating skin from flesh and fat to make leather, and knackers were ostracized like prostitutes or hangmen. They were pariahs, and whoever he married, the girl could only be pitied. It was a hellish inferno of rotting carcasses, skeletons, skins and fire. The stench of sulphur rose from the pits from dawn till dusk. There were so many rats that their runs could make the buildings collapse into rubble, and the effluent dyed the river red with blood. They had five children, though love played no part in that, and two of them gave up the struggle in their first year. They called them angel children, and they were better off than those who remained behind on earth.

Their children grew up in a playpen made out of stripped ribs. They played with death and worked as soon as they could walk. There was nowhere for them to go, since the town was forbidden territory – and when the time came to find an apprenticeship, there was nothing for them. They were unclean, outcast and the only option for them was to carry on the family business and take over the yard, and so the knacker's yard went from father to son for over a hundred years, until it was Grandfather's turn in 1898.

Carl did the unthinkable and said no, refusing to take the business on. He did not want to be a knacker, fought against his fate with all the hope and courage and dynamism he had in him, sitting up all night reading the newspapers, keeping abreast of the times, learning about foreign parts and making his plans. He skinned the animals, washed the
skins and dreamed all the while of leaving it all as far behind as possible. When his parents died, he sold the yard, put the contents up to auction – and then he put on his Sunday best and proposed to Karen.

But no matter what Grandfather touched, it went wrong, and everywhere he was dogged by black misfortune. Time and again he was cheated or played for high stakes, and each time he only dug the hole deeper for himself. He spent all he had – first all the proceeds from the sale of the yard and then, when they had been used up, he blew Karen's inheritance. Now there was nothing left, and they were forced to leave their house and home, move out of ‘Bellevue', and all that remained of the knacker's yard were a knife and a kettle – and the candle lantern.

It stood on the table, burning and sending shadows from another century across the walls of the living room. Farmor smiled into the darkness. She had finished telling her story. I could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock – and, as the silence gathered and time stood still and the ghosts waited at the door, she whispered that a curse hung over our family. Then she blew out the candle and was gone. And I had never met her – she died before I was born – and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

Farmor and Grandfather ended up in a terraced bungalow on Søvej, where there was no room for the grand visions of ‘Bellevue' – you had to open the window to see further than the end of your own nose, Carl used to say – and he resigned himself and took a job with Danish Railways. He was shadow of his former self, and when he
crossed the tracks on his way to work, he kept his eyes shut. A train ran over him every time he thought of Canada, of the hotel, of the buses or of Marielyst. There was nothing he had ever believed in that had not ended in failure – none of his dreams had got them anywhere. As if that were not bad enough, he survived long enough to witness the success of others, as business and tourism took off, and Marielyst flourished. It was the worst punishment he could have been given, to see the trains coming and going – to Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Rome – people travelling the world, while he stood on the platform whistling and waving his flag, and was left behind in Nykøbing.

He would have liked to have sold everything, to have taken Karen away with him as far as they could go for the money, and then to have lain down to die at the end of the road – the wish was born of despair – but he bit back the urge, said not a word but clipped tickets and collected his wages. And each day that passed his headache grew. It felt as though everything was bearing down on him, was wanting to get out – all the good ideas, the fine intentions, the rosy prospects that had never turned into anything but dust – and he could not think a thought without it causing him pain. There was a whining in his ears, and he would cross the tracks after work and stay there, waiting for the train – he counted to a hundred, to two hundred and on up – and when he came home he would sit down at the table, eat, kiss Farmor and say thank you, knowing all the time that it was only a matter of time.

It was not until his eyes were popping out of his head
that he gave in to the pain and told Father – something wasn't quite right – and was sent to hospital. It was the worst place in town. The doctors didn't have a clue and came up with a diagnosis that was not simply wrong – it was vindictive. Syphilis. Karen wept, and even though she believed him and knew that it was not possible – he loved her more than all the world – the humiliation was not to be borne, and Grandfather spend his last days being ashamed of something that he had not done. He was driven off to be examined at the clinic for sexually transmitted diseases in Copenhagen, where they only needed to take one look at him to know what was wrong. Carl was transferred immediately to the State Hospital, where they could tell him that he had a brain tumour and three weeks left to live – and those weeks were used by the doctors to carry out a trial. He was injected with chemicals, irradiated and encased in a huge cylinder that spun him round and round and round and away into death.

Carl gave up the ghost in 1949 and was buried in Østre churchyard, which looked out onto the Sugar Factory – to the site where the knacker's yard had once stood. It had long since been demolished. It was an irony of fate that fourteen years later a direct rail route was opened connecting Berlin and Copenhagen – just as he had foreseen. It was christened Fugleflugtslinjen and, true to its name, sent trains straight as the crow flies, right past his grave. But it shouldn't make us sad, Farmor said. It had all ended well. Grandfather had only ever wanted one thing and that was to get away, and now his wish had been granted.

T
he road to freedom was packed with refugees hauling children and old relatives and as many things as they could carry, and Mother felt ashamed sitting in an American jeep overtaking them all. Then she thought of her mother – and of Papa Schnieder, Eva, her cousin Inge – and joy bubbled up inside her. They were alive and in the West! They had survived the war, all of them, and she was on her way home and had been such a long way away that it was almost too good to be true.

Raegener Division had been annihilated by the 2nd US Armoured Division and the 30th US Infantry Division, and Mother crawled out of her bunker on 18th April 1945. She acted as translator during the capitulation and was sent to a camp for prisoners of war. Germany may have fallen to the Americans, but the American GIs fell for Mother. She played cat and mouse with them, stroking an arm here, smiling there and throwing back her hair until in the end they gave her a Red Cross uniform that would get her out of the camp. She didn't bat an eyelid but went straight to the hospital in the sector, Magdeburg-Goslar, and reported for duty as a nursing orderly.

Mother tended the sick and the wounded and the dying, but it was hopeless. She couldn't bear it. For as soon as they recovered, the soldiers were fetched and driven back to the Russians as prisoners of war on the other side of the Elbe. The whole area was going to be handed over to the Soviet Union the following month and the only thing to do was to get away, but she hung in there, waiting to hear
from her family and to find her mother. She set enquiries in motion through the Red Cross, and, when the news came, she could hardly believe her luck. They had been evacuated to Einbeck!

She gave the head of the sector – Mr Plaiter – a kiss and got leave from the hospital. Then she wiped her mouth, picked up her suitcase and persuaded an American soldier to drive her to Einbeck – Papa Schneider was rich, he would be well paid for his trouble, and it was only 190 kilometres. When they drew up in the courtyard, she jumped out. It was Eva who caught sight of her first and shouted
‘Hilde!'
, and the others came running, and she wept and laughed and kissed them and threw her arms around Papa Schneider and asked for her mother. Where was she?

The figure that lay in the bed was a mummy, and she blacked out, broke down, strangling her screams, unable to breathe. Grandmother had been caught in an air raid that hit their house in Magdeburg as she was sorting out the washing in the cellar. The containers full of white gas in the room next door exploded, and she went up in flames. Mother wanted to kiss her, to stroke her hair, but she had no hair and no skin and was seared with pain at the slightest touch, by a breath of wind even. They kept the windows closed and crept around, carefully opening the doors, and every movement was torture. She stared out from under her bandages and her eyes were begging to die. And Mother gathered her whole life into one look –
‘Ich bin bei dir'
– and whispered it so softly that it could scarcely be heard.
I am with you
.

Papa Schneider gave his camera to the soldier who had driven Mother home, and then there was nothing left. His wife, his estate, his land, he had lost it all – and now they were refugees in their own country, and not even welcome at that. They had been brought to this farm outside Einbeck, Kuhlgatzhof – now dilapidated, it dated from 1742 and had belonged to a snaps distiller – where they now lived in what had been one of the living rooms, with table and chairs and one camp bed each. In the room next door they had installed Fräulein Zilvig, who was a churchgoer. And then there was Frau Rab, who stole. The daughter of the Kuhlgatz family lived on the second floor and was married to an artist, Herr Hänsel, and they lived with Frau Dömicke, who was the widow of a doctor and dressed in old-fashioned clothes. Herr Webendürfer had previously been the manager of a fridge factory and had his quarters out in the stable. He had been a student in a duelling club and was always demanding satisfaction and rattling his sabre –
‘Ich verlange Satisfaktion!'
His plump and freckled daughter was called Oda and in the midst of it all she gave birth to a child and squealed like a stuck pig.

‘Ach, Kinder, ihr seid nichts als Vieh,'
Papa Schneider snorted and informed them that they had sunk to the level of beasts.

Herr Hänsel had a servant girl, Schmidtchen, who was a refugee from Pomerania and had a little daughter. She was slow-witted but did her best to make herself useful, fishing in the river and digging for worms in the dung-heap. Then she went off leading a she-goat to have her tupped and when
she returned she stank of he-goat – and so did the stairs, the living rooms, everything – and it hung in the air no matter how much they scrubbed and scoured. It was too much for Herr Hänsel, who could no longer control his urges, and Mother was constantly having to say no and to ward off his advances, which became more and more physical. She didn't give a fig for the artist or for the Expressionist daubs he painted and hung along the corridor outside the toilet. And when she had been to the bathroom she would genuflect before his self-portrait and say,
‘Meister, ich habe gespült'
.

Frau Dömicke's son had suffered brain-damage from shell-fire and was missing a section of his skull. When he took off his hat, you could see the blood pumping round and his brain mass pulsating. He was mad – and madly in love with Eva, who had an admirer at last, but it was the bane of their lives. It ended up with him assaulting her and hauling her behind a bush, but she escaped and ran home weeping and screaming that she wanted to get away, to get back to Kleinwanzleben, wanted everything to be as it had been before!

Mother fetched milk from the nearby farm, Mönchshof – they had ration coupons for three litres a week. To get to the cowshed, she had to pass a goose, which stood chained to the entrance and hissed at her. One day something went wrong and the goose was loose, flapping its wings and beating and biting until the farmhand came running to the rescue. Mother had fainted and was carried back to the farm, where prisoners were airing the place out. They had carried
tables and chairs out into the open and were beating the carpets – and they put her to bed. She had bruises all over her body and was sick and vomiting, but the only medical man in the vicinity was the vet. He told her that she had broken two ribs – and that she might be… pregnant? He beat his arms up and down and laughed – it was only a joke – and gave her morphine. She had had enough of life on the farm.

More refugees kept arriving all the time, from Pomerania, from Lithuania, and Papa Schneider sank into black depression. Mother tried to comfort him, while at the same time she nursed Grandmother, looked after Eva and Inge and struggled on. And she determined that she would get back what they had lost, would go to the East Zone and fetch their things from Kleinwanzleben. So she contacted people she knew. Some of them were now at the top of the party – the SED – and had a say in the new administration, and a mention of the name of Horst Heilmann was enough for most doors to open before her. He had been part of the Communist resistance in Berlin, they said, part of the
Rote Kapelle
. He and Schulze-Boysen and Libertas and the rest were feted as heroes in East Germany – later a street was even named after him in Leipzig.

Mother cycled off and slipped across the border – she was almost caught by two Russian soldiers – and all she had with her were the keys to the house and a bag of ground black pepper for self-defence and with them a letter from Horst Heilmann's father: