Nothing But Fear (12 page)

After the funeral Mother picked up the telephone and rang the bank. They had nothing to live off except the contents of Kleinwanzleben. Everything else was in the form of loans or investments that would be withdrawn. She lied and told Grandmother and Eva that state compensation was on its way – then she looked for a job and found work as a mobile rail secretary, which was all there was to be had. Mother learnt touch-typing and banged away at the typewriter in the new high-speed trains – the D trains – criss-crossing a bombed-out Germany at 120 characters a minute. It was hard work. She did not make enough to support them and constantly had to put up with scarcely
veiled proposals from male travellers. They became her boss for an hour and could contrive to dictate things for her to type like, ‘Can I tempt you to a drink in the buffet car?' or ‘You can earn more in a hotel'. Once in a while they became aggressive – she could see it from their glistening faces when they entered the compartment – and she had to get help from the ticket collector. It was most dangerous in stations at night, and before long it happened. There was nothing but a bag of pepper between her and the attacker who pounced on her in Hamburg, and she flung it in his eyes and fled, pursued by his screams.

It was a heaven-sent opportunity when she was contacted by Tesdorph and the director, Arnth-Jensen, from the Danish Sugar Factories. Papa Schneider had had connections to Denmark because he grew sugar beet seed and had substantial exports – he was one of the market leaders – and now they wanted to help and invited Mother to Copenhagen. She was booked into a hotel, and they held a dinner for her at the smart Wivex restaurant – the company's English manager, Rose, was there, too. The following day she saw the little mermaid and the changing of the guard in front of Amalienborg palace and went to Tivoli. The coloured lights twinkled, people laughed, and the peacock's tail fanned out in the Pantomine Theatre – and Pierrot and Harlequin fought over Columbine. Mother looked at the shop-fronts and went up the Round Tower and looked out across the city, and her first impressions were overwhelming. No ruins, no invalids, no hunger – life was in technicolour, and she couldn't believe her eyes.

A week later Arnth-Jensen took her to one side and said that what they could do for her was to offer her a job at the Danish Sugar Factories. Mother accepted gratefully, travelled home and told them first the good news – that she had found a job – and then the bad news – that it was in Denmark. She would have to be away from them for a time but she could send money home every month. The Danes were a friendly people. It was a fairytale country and everything was as small as in Toyland.

It was 1950. The dust had scarcely settled after the war when Mother arrived in Nykøbing on a scooter – a Vespa – frozen stiff and with her scarf flapping in the wind. She had left Einbeck and driven at 60 kph up the motorway – it was late in the year and wet and cold – until she reached Travemünde. She took the ferry and stood on deck watching the mainland disappear and sink into the Baltic with everything she had known and loved and owned – and her route to Falster was so improbable that it ought never to have happened.

Mother woke up in the Seamen's Mission and got herself ready to go to work at the Sugar Factory. She had been employed in the laboratory but had no idea what was awaiting her. For the only trace of sweetness in Nykøbing was in the sugar that they produced. People looked at her sideways and wouldn't reply when she asked a question. Her boss, Hr Møller, became keener and keener to help her, giving her a hand with retorts and Bunsen burners and charts and insisting on accompanying her back to the hotel so that nothing would happen to her – the workers stood at the
factory gates whistling after her and laughing and shouting words she didn't understand – and she turned him away at the door. Hr Møller changed his tune, became threatening and said that she should watch her step, and Mother hurried inside. She packed her things, put on her coat and took a hold of her suitcase, and then she sat down on the edge of the bed. She covered her face in her hands, shaking and trembling but unable to cry – it was as though she had no tears left. It was no good. She had to stay.

It was a godforsaken hole and so full of hostility that she had trouble crossing the street. Fru Jensen was one of the few who looked after her. Her husband worked on the Orupgård estate. Mother rented a room in their house – it was small and there was no door, just a curtain that you had to draw aside – and she hardened herself and went to the Sugar Factory and gritted her teeth and bore it. She despised these squat, fat people, called them ‘dwarves' in the letters she wrote home every week for as long as Grandmother was alive – and, if anyone had told her that it was here of all places that she would find the love of her life, she would have laughed and shaken her head. Never!

It happened on the Market Square one Sunday, as Father came walking by with two cream pastries in his hand on his way to make one of his usual calls. He was tall and slim and shone like the sun – when I asked Mother why she fell for him, she always replied that he was a handsome man and still had both his arms and legs. Most men of her generation were either dead or invalid – there was no one left in Germany but children and old people – and she determined
to make his acquaintance. This was not so easy, for she could not address him on the street – only prostitutes did that kind of thing – and Mother knew no one who could introduce them to each other. Time passed, the mountains of beet in front of the Sugar Factory shrank, and the steam from the chimney thinned to a trickle. The season was coming to an end. She had to return home not knowing what awaited her there or how they would make ends meet. Then the stroke of luck came and their paths crossed.

F
ather happened to be on his way to a rehearsal with the male voice choir accompanied by the estate manager from Orupgård, while Mother was taking a walk with Fru Jensen, who knew him. So this was Hildegard Voll, who worked in the laboratory. They were going the same way, and Mother and Father spoke German. He was gentle and polite, and there was no ring on his finger. From now on they could greet each other when they met, and Mother made sure that they met often, and she flirted at the grocer's, bumped into him by chance in the park and asked him whether he would invite her along to the company do at the Baltic Hotel.

Mother wrote that she had found the man of her life, and Grandmother was beside herself and burst into tears when she read it – a foreign man in a foreign country, and he wasn't even related to anyone she knew! Mother did not leave at the end of the season. Father invited her back to
Nybrogade for coffee and cream pastries. The place was neat and tidy, and he showed her the pictures he had bought at auction – the country road, the harbour, the bit of forest – and Mother smiled and went across, sat down at the grand piano and flipped the music back to the first page. It was Mozart.

F
armor had worked herself to death and died of arthritis long since, but you could still hear her walking, her stick tapping in the grandfather clock down in the living room – tick-tock, tick-tock. The pains had got worse and worse until she couldn't move anymore and, when Carl was buried, she lay down in her bed and never got up again. Father came by and gave her hot compresses and cold compresses – nothing helped. The doctors had no remedy for arthritis and did not know what caused it – the latest theory was that it came from your teeth – and she was told that her only hope lay in experimental treatment.

They pulled all Karen's teeth out one by one. Her smile disappeared and was replaced by a false one that she could put in her mouth. So she smiled and she smiled while bone and gristle were seared with pain and joints twisted – her hands looked like claws – and, when Father introduced Mother to her and told her that they were to be married, he couldn't tell whether she was happy for them or whether it was just the false teeth. They met just that once. Mother asked how she was, and Karen smiled and nodded and
didn't understand a word she said – either in German or English. There was nothing they could say to each other. Mother tried out her Danish, and then the door opened and in came Leif – Father's older brother, who limped – with Kamma, his fat wife, and their three children. They paid their respects, aloof and cold, as the children shouted and leapt about, and when they ran towards the bed Father shouted ‘Careful!' He took Mother's hand and said goodbye and they left it at that for the time being. Within a couple of days Farmor had taken her false teeth out.

Karen was laid in an urn next to Grandfather. I never got to know her but I missed her, and I sat waiting on the floor in front of the grandfather clock, where she walked again. It had come from her parents' farm, Klovergården in Sildestrup, and every time the hour struck I ran and opened the front door hoping that Farmor would be standing in the street outside. Of course she wasn't, but I had a sense that she was on her way, that she was nearing the house – tick-tock, tick-tock – and that before long she would have caught up with time and would ring the doorbell and say hello.

T
he school test decided whether you were ready to start in the first year – parents lined the walls of the room watching. I sat at a desk among the other children and looked across at Mother, who beamed and was happy, waving to me. We were given a pencil and a piece of paper
with a house and a flagpole, and Miss Kronov, the teacher, gave us our task, which was to draw a flag that pointed downwind – the wind direction was shown by an arrow. I didn't pass. There was nothing wrong with the wind direction, but I had drawn the German flag, and Mother apologized and it was agreed that it would be best if I waited a year.

Mother laughed and sang revolution all the whole way home –
‘Pulver ist Schwarz, Blut ist rot, Golden flackert die Flamme!'
– and soon afterwards we went down to stay with Grandmother in Frankfurt, and she put me in a German kindergarten class. We walked up Kettenhofweg in the morning – I had been given a knapsack – and crossed Mendelsohnsstraβe, where the tram ran, with the baker and the paper shop on the corner, and a little further down the street Mother handed me over in a doorway to a woman with a dark dress and a bun. I was in shock when she fetched me again in the afternoon. The school was ruled with a rod of iron and I refused to return, digging my heels in until in the end Mother sighed and surrendered and bought a year's subscription to the botanical gardens, the Palmengarten, and taught me herself.

We read in the mornings –
Winnetou
and
Kleiner Muck
and
Max und Moritz
– and drew and chose to skip maths and go to the natural history museum and look at dinosaurs instead. It was a couple of streets away and was called the Senckenberg Museum, and I loved it. It was a castle built in the baroque style with broad steps, double doors, tall windows, mirrors and gilded stucco. The skeletons were
gigantic. They looked as though they were walking round the room or crouching with jaws wide open – as if the dawn of primeval time was about to break.

There was Tyrannosaurus and Brachiosaurus – and a raptor that had wings and could fly. On the first floor there were stuffed animals – giraffes and elephants, fish and fowl and mammals watching us from behind the glass. At the very top there were fossils and stones, and Mother held my hand when we got to the Egyptian mummies. We trudged through skulls and human skeletons along the earth's longest story, which lasted four billion years and ended in an ice cream.

After we had eaten lunch I was let off and was free to do what I wanted, and what I wanted was to go the Palmengarten. Just up Beethovenstraβe, past the church ruins and over Bockenheimer Landstraβe you stood at the entrance to another world. There was an explosion of flowers as I walked through the turnstile, and the beds in front of the huge white Tropicarium shone in a thousand colours. There were refreshments on the verandah, where people sat drinking coffee and eating cakes. If you turned right, you came to the botanical gardens and the greenhouses, and I ran off left down to the lake and the boat hire. I rowed on the lake for hour after hour and spent all my pocket money, and when I didn't have any more 50 Pfennig pieces – that was what it cost – I stepped ashore and travelled across the steppes and on from one continent to the next, playing the explorer. There was dry and stony, there was sandy with cacti – and there was humid and thick with orchids. The tropical heat
slapped you across the face in the palm house, where the glass roof rose in domes above a jungle full of steep-sided grottos and waterfalls. Fantastic butterflies floated between the palms, and the air was alive with the chirrup of birds I had never heard before, and I forced my way through leaves and lianas lured on by an Incan treasure.

It was almost impossible to get me out of Palmengarten when evening fell and Mother came to fetch me from the playground where I would be sitting in the climbing frame. It was shaped like an aeroplane, and I sat up front at the controls and was flying to America. It was a long way across the Atlantic. It grew darker and darker, and the playground had long since emptied. Mother stood there freezing and begging me to come down until in the end she succeeded by dangling the prospect of sweets at the exit, but it was closed when we got there. The following day she was ill, was running a temperature, and was sent to hospital. I visited her with Grandmother, and we were told that she had pneumonia and was close to dying. It was terrible. Father came down from Nykøbing to look after us, and I just waited to be given my punishment.

The bedroom at Grandmother's looked out on a yard with garages and a large chestnut tree, where there was an Alsatian that was always barking. This was Pension Gölz. Frau Gölz was a Jew. She was large and fat and wore dresses with large flowery patterns. She sat in her armchair in an over-furnished sitting room where she had her sofa bed, and she rented out the rest of the house. It was the Djugaric family who were in charge of running the place – they came
from Yugoslavia – and Frau Djugaric washed and cleaned in slippers and apron. Her husband was the caretaker and their daughter had auburn hair and was called Dolores.