Crabwalk Page 18

Then I heard about the option of playing Ping-Pong in the recreation area, and learned that he shared a cell with three other youths — ”pretty screwed-up, but harmless.” He had his own corner, with a table and bookshelf. Distance learning was also available. “That'll be something new!” he exclaimed. “I'll do my university qualifying exams behind prison walls, proctored indefinitely, so to speak.” I didn't particularly like to see Konny attempting to be witty.

  When I left, I saw his girlfriend Rosi waiting to take my place. She looked as though she had been crying, and was dressed all in black, as if in mourning. A general coming and going was characteristic of visiting day: sobbing mothers, embarrassed fathers. The guard who checked the gifts fairly casually allowed me to bring in the photo of Wolfgang as David. Before me, Mother had no doubt already been there, perhaps with Gabi; or had the two visited Konny one after the other?

  Time passed. I was no longer feeding Dolly the miracle sheep with high-cellulose-content paper, but was hot on the heels of other sensational stories. Meanwhile one of my short-lived relationships — this time it was with a photographer who specialized in cloud formations — happened to come to an end, without any hue and cry. Then another visiting day was marked on the calendar.

  We had hardly sat down facing each other when my son told me that he had made frames for several photos, which he now had behind glass and mounted under his bookshelf: “The one of David, too, of course.” He had also framed two photos that had been part of his Web site material; Mother must have brought them at his request. They were two images of Captain Third Class Aleksandr Marinesko, which, however, as my son said, could not have been more different. He had fished the images out of the Internet. Two Marinesko fans had claimed separately that they had the true likeness in their frames. “A comical quarrel,” Konny said, and pulled the two pictures, like family photos, out from under his indestructible Norwegian sweater.

  He lectured me in a factual tone: “The round-faced one next to the periscope is on display at the St. Petersburg Naval Museum. This one here, with the angular face, standing in the tower of his boat, is supposed to be the real Marinesko. At any rate, there's written evidence indicating that the original of this photo was given to a Finnish whore who serviced Marinesko regularly. Marinesko had a thing for women, as we know. Interesting to see what kind of traces a person like that leaves…”

  My son talked for a long time about his little picture gallery, which included an early and a late photograph of David Frankfurter; the late one showed him as an old man and relapsed smoker. One picture was missing. I was already feeling somewhat hopeful when Konny, as if he could read his father s thoughts, gave me to understand that the detention centers administration had unfortunately forbidden him to adorn the wall of his cell with his “really cool picture of the martyr in uniform.”

  Mother was his most frequent visitor, or at least she came more often than I did. Gabi was usually too busy with “teachers' union stuff to get away; she's thrown herself into the committee studying “Research on Child Rearing,” on a voluntary basis, of course. Not to forget Rosi: she visited fairly regularly, soon no longer looking tearful.

  In the current year I was taken up with the election hysteria, which broke out early and throughout the Federal Republic. Like the rest of the media hyenas, I was trying to read the entrails of the nonstop polls; content-wise, they had little to offer. What did become clear was that the Christian Democrat Pastor Hintze with his “Red Sock Campaign” would give the Party of German Socialists, successor to the East German Socialist Unity Party, a black eye, but he could not save the fat man, who ended up losing the election. I traveled a lot, interviewing Bundestag members, mid-level big shots in business, even some Republikaner, for the forecasts suggested that this right-wing party would gain more than the five percent needed for Bundestag representation. It was particularly active in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, if with only moderate success.

  I did not get to Neustrelitz, but I learned from a telephone conversation with Mother that her “Konradchen” was thriving. He had even gained “a couple pounds.” He had also been “promoted,” as she put it, to instructor of a computing course for young delinquents. “Well, you know, he always was a whizz at that kind of stuff…”

  So I pictured my son, now with chubby cheeks, teaching his fellow prisoners the ABCs of the latest software, although I assumed that the inmates at the detention center would not be allowed to connect to the Internet; otherwise some of them would be able, under the guidance of Konrad Pokriefke, to find a virtual escape route: a collective jailbreak into cyberspace.

  I also learned that a Neustrelitz Ping-Pong team to which my son belonged had played a team from the Plötzensee detention center, and won. To sum up: this journalist's son, who had been convicted of manslaughter and had meanwhile come of age, was busy around the clock. In early summer he passed his university qualifying examinations by correspondence, receiving the excellent score of 1.6; I sent a telegram: “Congratulations, Konny!”

  And then I heard from Mother: she had been in Polish Gdańsk for more than a week. When I visited her back in Schwerin, this was her account: “Course I also ran around in Danzig, but mostly I spent my time in Langfuhr. It's all changed. But the house on Elsen-strasses still standing. Even the balconies with flower boxes are still there…”

  She'd signed up for a bus tour. “Real reasonable it was for us!” A group of expellees, women and men of Mothers age, had responded to an ad put out by a travel agency that organized “nostalgia tours.” Mother commented, “It was nice there. You've got to give the Polacks credit — they've rebuilt a whole lot, all the churches and such. Except the statue of Gutenberg — we kids used to call him Kuddenpäch, and it was in the Jäschkental Woods, right behind the Erbsberg — it's not there anymore. But in Brösen — I used to go there in good weather — there's a real nice beach, just like there used tobe…”

  Then her I'm-not-home look. But soon the broken record started up again: the way it used to be long ago, even longer ago, long, long ago, in the courtyard of the carpentry shop, or the way they'd built a snowman in the woods, or what went on during the summer holidays at the Baltic shore, “when I was skinny as a rail…” With a bunch of boys she had swum out to a shipwreck, whose superstructure had stuck up out of the water since the beginning of the war. “We'd dive way, way down into that old rusty crate. And one of the boys, the one who went in the deepest, he was called Jochen…”

  I forgot to ask Mother whether she'd taken her fox along on the nostalgia tour, in spite of the summer weather. But I did ask whether Aunt Jenny had gone with her to Danzig-Langfuhr and other places. “Nah,” Mother said, “she didn't want to go, 'cause of her legs, and what have you. Too painful, she said it'd be. But the route we used to take to school, me and my girlfriend, I walked it a couple of times. It felt much shorter than it used to…”

  Mother must have served other travel impressions, piping hot, to my son, including all the details of what she confessed to me, in a whisper: “I was in Gotenhafen, too, by myself. Right where they put us on board. In my mind I pictured the whole thing, all those little kids, head down in the icy water. Wanted to cry, but I couldn't…” Again that I'm-not-home look. And then the KDF refrain: “That was one beautiful ship…”

  Accordingly I was not surprised that on my next visit in Neustrelitz, right after the elections, I was confronted with a piece of obsessive handiwork. The construction kit my son had used was a gift, no doubt paid for out of Mothers pocketbook.

  You find things like this in the toy section of large department stores, where they have shelves and shelves of neatly organized models, representing famous originals that fly, drive, or float. I doubt she found it in Schwerin. She probably went looking in Hamburg in the Alster-haus or in Berlin at KdW, the Kaufhaus des Westens, and found what she wanted. She got to Berlin often. These days she was driving a VW Golf and was on the road a lot. She was a terror behind the wheel, passing other cars as a matter of principle.
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br />   When she came to Berlin, it wasn't to visit me in my messy bachelor pad in Kreuzberg but to “chew the fat” in Schmargendorf with her old girlfriend Jenny, eating pastry and drinking Red Riding Hood champagne. Since the changeover, the two of them saw each other often, as if they had to compensate for time lost after the Wall went up. They made a strange pair.

  When Mother visited Aunt Jenny — on the occasions when I was allowed to sit in — she acted bashful, as if she were still a little girl who had just played a mean trick on Jenny and now wanted to undo the damage. Aunt Jenny, on the other hand, seemed to have forgiven her for all the awful things she did to her long ago. I saw her stroke Mothers head as Mother hobbled past her, whispering, “It's all right, Tulla, it's all right.” Then the two of them fell silent. And Aunt Jenny sipped her hot lemonade. Aside from Konrad, who had drowned while swimming, and Konny, who had committed a crime, if there was anyone else Mother loved, it was her old school friend.

  Since the days when I had occupied that little room in the Schmargendorf apartment under the eaves, not a single piece of furniture has been moved. All the knick-knacks standing about, yet not covered with dust, looked like survivals from yesteryear. And just as all the walls at Aunt Jennys, even the sloping ones, are plastered with ballet photos — Aunt Jenny, who became known under the nom d'artiste of Angustri, sylphlike as Giselle, in Swan Lake and Coppelia, solo or posing next to her equally delicate ballet master — Mother too is plastered inside and out with memories. And if people can trade memories, as the expression goes, Karlsbader Strasse was and is the trading floor for these durable goods.

  So on one of these trips to Berlin — before or after her visit to Aunt Jenny — she must have picked out a very special model from the assortment at KdW. Not the Dornier hydroplane Do X, not a King Tiger tank model, not the battleship Bismarc, which was sunk as early as 41, or the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, which was junked after the war, seemed suitable as a present. It was not something military she selected; it was the passenger vessel Wilhelm Gustloff on which she had her heart set. I doubt she let any salesclerk help her; Mother has always known what she wants.

  My son must have been given special permission to show off this particular object in the visiting room. At any rate, the guard on duty nodded benevolently when the inmate Konrad arrived, loaded down with the model ship. The sight started a reel of thoughts unwinding in me that soon formed an impenetrable tangle. Is this never going to end? Must this story keep repeating itself? Can't Mother get over it? What in the world was she thinking of?

  To Konny, now of age, I said, “That's very nice. But aren't you too old for this kind ofthing now?” He admitted that I had a point. “I know. But if you'd given me the Gustloff for my birthday when I was thirteen or fourteen, I wouldn't have to make up for missing out on this kid's stuff. I had fun doing it, though. And I have plenty of time, right?”

  The reproach hit home. And while I was still trying to recover, asking myself whether playing with the damned ship as a model, while he was still a boy and also under his fathers supervision, might have averted the worst, he said, “I asked Grandma Tulla to get it for me. I wanted to see with my own eyes how the ship looked. Came out pretty well, didn't it?”

  From stem to stern, the Strength through Joy ship showed itself in all its beauty. From the thousands of parts my son had fashioned the vacationer's classless dream boat. How spacious the sundeck was, not chopped up by any superstructures! How elegantly the single funnel rose amidships, slightly inclined toward the stern! Clearly recognizable the glassed-in promenade deck! Beneath the bridge the winter garden, known as the Bower. I considered where inside the ship the E deck with the swimming pool might be, and counted the lifeboats: none was missing.

  Konny had placed the gleaming white model in a wire rack of his own devising. The hull was visible down to the keel. I expressed my admiration, though with a touch of irony, for the skillful hobbyist. He reacted to my praise with laughter that was more a giggle, then whipped out of his pocket a little tin that had once held peppermint drops and in which he now had three red paste-on dots, about the size of a pfennig. With the three dots he marked the places in the hull where the torpedoes hit their mark: one dot on the port side of the forecastle, the next on the spot where I had guessed the swimming pool must be, the third at the location of the engine room. Konrad performed this task solemnly. After applying these stigmata to the ship's body, he stepped back to observe the effect, was apparently satisfied, and said, “Nice work.” Then he abruptly changed the subject.

  My son wanted to know how I had voted in the election. I said, “Certainly not for the Republikaner” and then admitted that it had been years since I'd gone near a polling place. “That's typical of you, not to have any real convictions,” he said, but wouldn't reveal how he had voted on his mail-in ballot. Suspecting Mothers influence, I guessed that he might have gone for the PDS. But he merely smiled, and then began to fasten to the model ship small flags, which he had apparently made himself and which had been waiting in another little tin, to be affixed to the bow, the stern, and the tops of the two masts. He had even produced miniature versions of the KDF emblem and the flag of the German Labor Front, nor was the one with the swastika missing. The fully dressed ship. Everything was just right, but with him nothing was right.

  What can be done when a son takes possession of his father's thoughts, thoughts that have been festering for years under a lid, and even translates them into action? All my life I have tried to take the right tack, at least politically, not to say the wrong thing, to appear correct on the outside. That's called self-discipline. Whether for the Springer papers or the Tageszeitung, I always sang along. Even had myself convinced by the stuff I turned out. Whipping up hatred, cynically slinging the lingo — two courses of action I practiced alternately without any difficulty. But I never took the lead, never set the direction in editorials. Others picked the topics. I steered a middle course, never slid all the way to the right or the left, didn't cause any collisions, swam with the current, let myself drift, kept my head above water. Well, that probably had to do with the circumstances of my birth; that could explain almost everything.

  But then my son kicked up a storm. No surprise, actually. Was bound to happen. Aftef everything Konny had posted on the Internet, blathered in the chat room, proclaimed on his Web site, those carefully aimed shots fired on the southern bank of Lake Schwerin were absolutely consistent. Now he was locked up, had gained respect by winning at Ping-Pong and running a computing course, could boast of passing his exams with flying colors, and, as Mother had shared with me, was already receiving job offers from businesses for later on: the new technologies! He seemed to have a future in the new century that was just around the bend. He made a cheerful impression, looked well fed, and talked fairly rationally, but was still waving the flag — in the form of a miniature. This will end badly, I thought confusedly, and went looking for advice.

  First, because I was really at a loss, I even went to Aunt Jenny. The old lady in her doll's house sat there, her head trembling slightly, and listened to everything I came out with, more or less honestly. You could unload with her. She was used to this, presumably since her youth. After I had dumped most of the tangle at her feet, she presented me with her frozen smile and said, “It's the evil that needs to come out. My old girlfriend, your dear mother, knows this problem well. Dear me, when I think how I used to suffer as a little girl when she had those outbursts. And my adoptive father, too — I'm supposed to be the child of real Gypsies, which had to be kept secret in those days — well, that rather eccentric schoolteacher, whose name, Brunies, I was allowed to take, got to know Tulla from her evil side. It was pure mischief on her part. But it turned out badly. After the denunciation, they came for Papa Brunies… He was sent to Stutthof… But in the end things turned out almost all right. You should talk to her about your worries. Tulla knows from her own experience how completely a person can change…”

  So I took A24 and
floored the pedal to the Schwerin exit. Yes, I talked to Mother, to the extent it was possible to share with her these thoughts of mine that were scuttling this way and that. We sat on the balcony of her eleventh-floor apartment in the renovated concrete-slab building on Gagarinstrasse, with its view of the broadcast tower; down below, Lenin was still standing, gazing westward. Her place seemed unchanged, but recently Mother had rediscovered the faith of her youth. She was playing the Catholic and had set up a sort of home altar in one corner of the living room, where, between candles and plastic flowers — white lilies — a small picture of the Blessed Virgin was displayed; the photo next to it, showing Comrade Stalin in dress whites and genially smoking a pipe, made an odd impression. It was difficult to stare at this altar and not make some remark.

  I had brought honey squares and poppy-seed bars, which I knew Mother liked. When I had spilled my guts, she said, “You needn't worry too much about our

  Konradchen. He's paying for what he got himself into. And when he's free again, I'm sure he'll be a genuine radical, like I used to be when my own comrades gave me a hard time for being Stalin's last faithful follower. No, you won't see any more bad things happening to him. Our Konradchen's always had a guardian angel hovering over him…”

  She displayed “bashed-in windows,” then resumed her normal expression and confirmed what her friend Jenny with unfailing instinct had said: “The stuff we have in our heads and everywhere, all that evil has to come out…”

  No, Mother had no helpful advice for me. Her white-haired ideas were shorn too close. But where else could I go? To Gabi, by any chance?

  Once more I took the beaten path from Schwerin to Mölln, and, as always happened, was struck by the unpretentious beauty of the town, which, going back in history, invokes Till Eulenspiegel, but could hardly stand his pranks today. Because my ex had recently acquired a live-in boyfriend, a “dear, gentle person, easily hurt,” as she said, we met in nearby Ratzeburg and ate at the Seehof, with a view of swans and ducks, among them an indefatigable diving duck. She ordered vegetarian, and I had the Wiener schnitzel.