Nothing But Fear (9 page)

It was inconceivable that Mother did not notice – she knew perfectly well what was going on but she did it anyway. Her will was hard as steel and cold as ice and shone out of her cold and steel-grey eyes. She had been through things that were worse, had played her accordion to accompany the apocalypse. It was in 1945 at the end of the war, after Mother had given up any hope of finding her family and had cycled out to the German army outside Magdeburg to find something to eat. She was given soya beans, and they found out that she had been to university, was an academic translator working with English, and that was something they would soon be needing. In no time she found herself part of the
Volkssturm
, the Nazi militia, and set off with the remnants of the 9th Army under General Raegener – 15,000
soldiers, the young, the old, the wounded, going to the Führer's rescue in
Festung Berlin
. But they were cut off by the Russians and there was no escape. Their only hope was to capitulate to the Americans, and in desperation they fought their way out, moving westwards and northwards, and managed to reach the second front. General Raegener, who had a wooden leg, sat in a bunker with his adjutant and with Mother, who played
Guter Mond, du gehst so stille
as the bombs howled and thundered down around them, and then it was over. She got out alive, and when Mother rounded the corner and made it back to Hans Ditlevsensgade and stopped outside our house with her accordion over her shoulders and children and neighbours trailing behind her in a stream of shining lanterns, she sang louder than ever and dragged the final chord out further and further until all of them and the houses, the streets, the whole town, were sucked into the bellows and disappeared, and Mother and Father and I stood alone with each other and celebrated my birthday with a
‘heisa-hopsa-saaa!'

T
here was no television – Mother and Father called it the idiot box. We never went to the cinema – I didn't even know there was one in town – and cartoons were out of the question because they made you stupid. Compared to books, they were trash, immoral almost, and relegated to the back page of the newspapers like the
Phantom
in
The Lolland-Falster Times
. It was language, above all the written
word, that could express intelligence and wit, and when I saw comic books laid out on the table in the library –
Tintin, Lucky Luke, Asterix
– I didn't dare open them. I was afraid that a single peek would be enough, that I would never be the same again, that I would become an idiot, get a harelip, be changed beyond recognition. I borrowed books and read. Otherwise our only entertainment at home was the card games, board games, dice games, and we sat around the dining table in the afternoons playing
Whist
and
Räubers Rommy
and
Mensch Ärgere Dich Nicht
and
Yatzy
. The grandfather clock ticked. Their lives were mine, and I had nothing of my own. But that changed overnight when I got my own radio.

It was a little silver Philips transistor, and I sat with my ear glued to it from the moment I pressed ‘on'. There was only medium-wave and short-wave, and it wasn't very powerful, but I had found a way through. The signals reached Hans Ditlevsensgade, and the world opened up before me. Father asked me to turn it down straight away, of course, and I turned down the sound and lay there at night holding my breath and listening in the dark. The sounds came crackling and foaming in between bursts of Tyrolean and Turkish music as I scrolled the wheel backwards and forwards, always thirsty for more. Voices and snatches of tunes and snips of Morse mingled and gathered into a mesh of weird music, and the next day there were dark circles under my eyes because I had not slept.

My radio gave me my first chance to get away from Mother and Father, to be able to follow my own desires
and decide for myself, and it felt as if what I was doing was forbidden. I hid under my duvet so as not to be discovered and explored all earthly space, listening to its secrets. Radio stations emerged from white noise, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, ORF, Voice of America and ‘This is the BBC World Service'. Unknown broadcasts were constantly breaking in and interfering. Russian newsreaders and military music took over from German folk singers and American news. There was a sea of voices that drowned each other out – and I was on the track of something, was searching without knowing what I was searching for, until it exploded in my ears on 208 kHz: Radio Luxemburg!

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard and utterly impossible to resist. There was music and commercial spots and jingles and sound effects and people ringing in from Amsterdam and Düsseldorf, and the disc jockey – Rob Jones – spoke so fast that you couldn't keep up with his fluid and melodic voice announcing the next number. I heard Sweet and Slade and Wings and Queen and Sparks and couldn't believe it was true, but it was, and I had escaped from the nineteenth century and arrived in 1974. Sweeter than anything I had ever heard, the sounds sparkled and glittered. Nothing was the same anymore, and I couldn't wait for the clock to strike eight and the broadcast to begin.

I lived for Radio Luxemburg in another world that existed only on the radio and at night. This was a far cry from
Ask Århus
and
Record Request
coming out of the transistor in the kitchen or the traffic reports that Father used
to plague me with when we drove down to fetch Mother in Frankfurt – she would visit Grandmother a couple of times a year – and on the motorway I would get bored and begged and bullied him to change programme. The further south we got the better the chance of picking up the American forces station – AFN – and I drank in the sound of the radio hosts and the music and the adverts as if it were Coca-Cola for the few minutes that Father let them play before he groaned and retuned because it was just noise. This was the modern world, and we left it behind us for good and all when we arrived at the Westend in Frankfurt towards evening. There were large chestnut trees and large town houses with casement windows and balconies, and Grandmother lived in an apartment on Kettenhofweg 106, where time had stopped, or had been bombed and blown to pieces and left for dead.

I leapt from the car, gave Mother a hug and kissed Grandmother, and she wept for joy, as she usually did, and we went upstairs with the bags and unpacked. Then we sat down to eat, and I was given ‘
Schinken-Kren
' – pale ryebread spread with fat and covered with thin rolled slices of ham with egg and pickled cucumber with horseradish over the top – and my eyes smarted so much at the horseradish that the tears trickled down my cheeks. Grandmother handed me her damp handkerchief and smiled her lipless smile. Her hands had been ravaged and were covered with the same horny skin as her face. She was still on fire, and the Second World War haunted the living rooms and shivered in the glass door leading out to the hall – to the horror, the
madness, the shame – and when I was sent to bed and lay in the darkness and heard an aeroplane approach and fly over the house, I would be frightened that the war had started again, that the bombs would start falling, and I would search for Radio Luxemburg.

There were golden moments when the signal came clear as a bell. As a rule there would be atmospheric noise, and I'd just found Luxemburg in my bedroom at Grandmother's when the spookiest sound drowned it out. A woman's voice reading out numbers – empty and monotonous and never-ending.
‘Achtung. Achtung,'
she said and counted
‘1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0' – ‘Eins, Zwei, Drei… '
and so on. This was followed by Austrian folk music with a yodeller, and then it all started again and went on. I knew immediately what it was, and a shiver went up my spine. It was the Cold War, and the numbers were a code sending secret messages to spies.

They were everywhere on short and medium wave, German and English and Russian transmitters, and there was a lonely woman's voice saying over and over again
‘Papa November, Papa November'
for five minutes on end while a frantic snake-charmer flute played in the background, and then she started to rattle off numbers in German,
‘406, 422, 438, 448, 462'
– and there were other stations that had names like Papa Zulu, Charlie November, Sierra Tango or Foxtrot Bravo. Some of them had their own signature tune, like the English one that started with the first bars of a folk song before a woman with an English accent read off rows of numbers, or the Spanish station with lousy studio reverb
where you could occasionally hear a cock crow. The scariest of them all played a few notes on a musical box and then after a while a girl's voice would begin reciting numbers in a sweet and innocent German.

What could make anyone use a child to read out messages to secret agents? Where did such things go on? And who were these people sitting with their radios somewhere or other in Europe writing the numbers down? There must be women walking around among us whose job it was to intone columns of numbers, year in, year out without being allowed to tell anyone. Who were they? What was going on? I could go into a trance listening to the numbers weaving between the interference from jamming stations and the music. The voices of the women mingled with the sound of the aeroplane flying over the house on Kettenhofweg and with the fear of the Second World War, of the bombs that never stopped falling and that hit Grandmother every night. These were the nursery rhymes that I heard on the radio and to which I fell asleep during the Cold War.

A
unt Ilse had a hatred of cats, and this she shared with her nearest and dearest, a dachshund and a canary. They meant the world to her – she was childless – and her husband, who was placed well beneath her pets in the hierarchical order, had no say in the matter. His name was Heinrich Jaschinski – or Dr Jaschinski, as he was known – and he was director of the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. It was
never quite clear to me which side of the family Aunt Ilse belonged to, but she was ugly as sin and sour as old milk and devoted her life to making life a misery for everyone else – especially her husband. He was well-to-do and influential and sailed about in a Mercedes as big and black as a battleship, but as soon as Ilse entered the room he would curl up in his shell. Her dachsund would scurry across and bite at his shoe, and, when he tried to ward it off, she would explode.
‘Heinrich!'
And he would wither and disappear before your eyes.

Aunt Ilse was the eldest of three sisters. The others were beautiful and had married early – unlike her. She turned bitter when her first sister acquired a husband, and as the years passed she became more and more eaten up with vindictiveness and hate. No one would have her. And at her second sister's wedding the floodgates of resentment burst. Ilse spilt a glass of red wine down the bride's wedding dress before the service, did so on purpose and didn't even pretend to be sorry. If she could not find happiness, then the least she could do was to ruin it for others, and Ilse turned into a witch.

When at last they managed to find a husband for her, it was too late. Heinrich Jaschinski, whose family came from Stettin and had nothing to their name, only married her so that he could afford to go to university and complete his studies. No one was under any illusions about it, not even Aunt Ilse herself, who made sure they all got what they deserved. She became uglier than ever, pursed her mouth up, tied her bun tighter and stopped shaving the wart on
her chin. She put too much salt in the food, terrified the children and poisoned the atmosphere whenever she could.
‘Ach, Ilsekind,'
Grandmother would say to her with a sigh, but she wouldn't change her ways and was always ordering people about, bitching about them and tearing strips off Heinrich. Then she would scratch the canary and call it
‘Piepmatz'
, her voice as rasping as the biscuits she fed it with.

There were more rules in the Jaschinski household than in algebra, and Mother instructed me in advance in what I was and was not to do and in how I was to conduct myself. I was put into a suit, and it was ‘Yes, Aunt Ilse' and ‘Thank you, Dr Jaschinski' – and the most important thing of all was not to make the canary nervous. That was why you mustn't wear any yellow, for that got it excited. It perched in its cage never making a sound, and I awaited my moment. As soon as Aunt Ilse got up and left the room, I pulled out a yellow handkerchief, waved it about and blew my nose – and the bird went mad. It chirruped and screeched and wouldn't stop, while the dachshund ran round and round barking and biting the carpet. Ilse followed us to the door, ranting and raging, and I held out my hand and said sorry to her husband and saw the shadow of a smile touch his lips.

Aunt Ilse plagued the life out of Heinrich Jaschinski, who died many years before she did. Or rather, he did not die but wasted away, turning to dust, to a ghost – and, as ghosts do, he took his revenge from the grave. The entire family was gathered at the solicitor's, each sitting on tenterhooks waiting for the will to be read out, when a
single woman walked in, took off her hat, sat down in a corner by herself and smiled shyly – and Ilse grew paler and paler with every word that was spoken. Because she had not fulfilled her nuptial obligations – not on one single occasion, not even on their wedding night – he had felt himself obliged to look elsewhere. He disinherited Ilse, and she got only what she was entitled to by law – her jewellery, the house and 8 per cent. His secretary would inherit instead, receiving half his estate. The rest went to the Cat's Protection League.

T
he winter months and the view across endless fields had given Farmor a sense for drama, and to make things even more scary she would light the candles and lower her voice as she related how Carl always used to follow his mother across the courtyard with the candle lantern when he was little. They lived at the tannery, which was situated on the edge of town and was built round three sides of a courtyard. It was a dark and desolate place, and there was every reason to be frightened since it lay right up against the churchyard. Then she would begin her ghost story.