Frankie and Stankie, page 16
Willem was furious and began to raise Cain. For both men it was antlers locked. And the end result was that poor Marianne was cast out from the beach house, cut off from paradise for ever.
‘And if you must marry him,’ Willem spat, ‘then promise me that you’ll never have his children.’
He sent her a wedding present signed in bitterness, a set of leather-bound Shakespeares in which various pertinent passages had been meaningfully underscored – and she never saw him again. Willem Klopper sold up the bookshop and removed himself from the beach house. Then he moved to Johannesburg, leaving no address.
And, sixty years later, when her mum had just died, Dinah, who was passing through Johannesburg, remembered this story of her mother’s golden time and she suddenly thought, Good Lord. She looked up Willem Klopper in the Johannesburg telephone directory and she found a bookshop listed under his name. It was in Braamfontein, just across the road from the Wits University campus. So with a sudden, ridiculous urgency, she jumped into a taxi. But she found the bookshop cleared of its stock and the door just recently padlocked. There was a newish notice fixed to the door, addressed to the bookshop’s customers. Willem Klopper had ceased trading, it said, just a month before Dinah’s arrival.
Dinah repaired, frustrated, to the university’s staff canteen where everyone knew about the bookshop.
‘Old Dutch guy,’ they said. ‘Great bookseller. Always knew everything. Could get you any book you wanted.’
Willem Klopper had closed his doors and gone off to enjoy his retirement, his well-earned place in the sun. So the meeting was clearly not meant to be and, after some sober reflection, Dinah felt relieved. Because what was she going to say to him? And what would he have said to her? I never wanted you to be born? I can see that you’ve inherited the freckles? Your eyesight’s clearly not up to much – does that mean you’re very good at maths? Dinah hoped that the place to which he’d gone was nothing short of a pretty old beach house somewhere on the Cape’s Atlantic coast.
Marianne and Fred got married on the day before South Africa entered the war. The marriage was a hasty move – a lunch-hour registry affair. The intention was to stop Marianne being declared an enemy alien – and the date of the country’s going to war was fairly easy to get right. Britain had already declared war on Germany two days before. And, since then, the South African parliament had been delaying and prevaricating, its MPs swinging both ways, the margin between the pros and the antis always too close to call. So, for the first days of September, the two party leaders, the generals Smuts and Herzog, were slogging it out, back and forth.
For quite a few Afrikaner MPs, the issue was fairly straightforward. Britain was still the enemy and, as such, it could not be one’s ally. Many were merely anti-British, but some were actively pro-German. And there were those at the far end who, in the near future, would become members of undercover pro-Nazi organisations, hell-bent on undertaking acts of sabotage to undermine the Allied war effort. In debate, it was Herzog who finally lost the argument by overplaying his hand. He was getting close to praising Hitler and this was a lapse that lost him just enough of his more moderate support. It allowed the Smuts camp narrowly to win. So on 6 September 1939, South Africa entered the war.
Just a few days earlier, Fred had persuaded Marianne to give up her job at the Consulate. He’d been appalled and astonished in the first place to find her working there.
‘Are you completely out of your raving mind,’ he’d said, ‘to be working for a crowd like that?’
Marianne immediately did as he said, though she was full of conflicting emotions, because the Consul had always been good to her and she found it hard to see him as the villain Fred took him for. But now she was married, and there was the war and the Consulate had ceased to exist.
Since Marianne’s flat was so much nicer than Fred’s, that was where they decided to start their married life. And when he brought round all his stuff, Marianne found it impossible to believe that it could fit, like that, into one smallish backpack and a medium-sized cardboard box. But Fred liked travelling light. He’d always thought of ‘things’ as existing merely for collecting dust. In the year before taking up his South African graduate scholarship, he had set off on his bicycle from The Hague, with the very same small backpack, to make his way through France and Spain. By the time he had reached the Pyrenees, the Spanish Civil War had forced him back. But all along the way through southern France, whenever he stopped at farmhouses to fill his water bottle, the French farmers would blink at him and go to call their friends.
‘Here’s a crazy boy from les Pays-Bas’ they said. ‘He wants to drink water. Tell him water is bad for the health. People don’t drink water.’
They’d filled his bottle with rough red wine and given him things to eat. Cold duck glazed with black cherries; pieces of preserved goose; globe artichokes; runny cheeses and crusty loaves of bread; things that he’d never dreamed of.
‘How’s that, crazy boy?’ they said. ‘Better than water, n’est-ce pas? Better than salt herrings, no?’
Two of Marianne’s three brothers were interned as enemy aliens on the day after her wedding. And when they emerged, six years later, Jurgen was more handsome than ever, though his cheekbones were threatening to push through his skin, and, thereafter, he never gained weight. His pretty, curly, blonde teenage bride, his young man’s pre-war passion, had, two years earlier, run off into the hinterland with someone he never got to meet and he never saw the girl again. Heinrich no longer had a hair on his head and he’d acquired a whole range of nervous tics. The tics occurred in little sequences of mutters, blinks and snorts, and he was to have them for the rest of his life.
Irmi, Heinrich’s Berlin fiancée, his devoted schoolgirl sweetheart, had been required to stay behind in Germany when the Jacobsens set sail for Cape Town. This was to nurse her dying mother; but her mother was a long time over her dying and she lasted until the war had broken out. After that, Irmi nursed her father, who was speedier in his dying. Her two brothers accomplished their dying without her assistance. They were both killed on the Eastern Front. Meanwhile Otto, back in Berlin, had managed, concurrently with his studies, to become the father of two small boys. He completed his degree in geology just in time for the Reich’s advance upon Russia – and thereby became the only one of Marianne’s brothers to end up at Stalingrad.
Dinah’s mum’s job at the Consulate turned out to be her last. After that, she was a stay-at-home wife. It may have been the norm in the post-war world, but all the same she was always aware that its effect was to ensure she lacked clout. Dinah noticed how reticent her mum was, especially in the company of graduate women; how she would always preface her opinions with a much-used humbling refrain: ‘I am not a clever woman and I have not studied, but…’ Only once she had uttered these protective, qualifying words would she venture a point of view.
Marianne urged her daughters to pass exams and make themselves employable.
‘Zese stupid pieces of paper,’ she would say, quite bitterly at times.
She meant those certificates awarded for levels of achievement in this and in that.
‘All my life,’ she’d say on a sigh, ‘I never had zese stupid pieces of paper.’
Later, when Dinah had hit adolescence, she began to despise her mother for these insistent pragmatic urgings. She liked to think that any studious pursuit should be undertaken for itself alone, for the white heat of knowledge and for the excitement of pure reason. To embark on any such mental adventure merely for pieces of paper – this struck her as shaming and crass.
The rest of her mum’s maternal advice had mostly to do with feet, but Dinah could not focus on these things. Pieces of paper and feet. Instead she took to slouching her way through high school and, before going out, would always cram her feet into four-inch, stiletto-heeled winkle-pickers.
The day that the grandparents appear in the bungalow is also the day on which Dinah’s family loses possession of the two oak thrones. Because the grandparents have Heinrich’s Irmi with them – bespectacled, pale and middle-aged Irmi – to whom the chairs were apparently promised as a wedding present, sixteen years before. To Lisa and Dinah, the grandparents are two remote old foreigners, persons who are more unreachable than the man who the two of them once believed inhabited their dad’s radiogram.
Their dress is incongruously formal in the land of the Sta-prest shirt. Grandmother is wearing a sprigged crêpe dress with starched detachable collar and a black straw hat with pearl hatpin. The hat is set on the impressive cloud of her thick wavy white hair. Grandfather is wearing a long-sleeved Old World linen shirt of exquisite, unfamiliar cut, which is sporting double cuffs and cuff links. His head is bald, his eyes are pale-blue and his moustache makes him look like Bismarck. Both have shiny, well-kept shoes, quality shoes left over from the days before the war. They are shoes from another world.
What Dinah remembers most about that day, beyond the gaps on the floor that are left behind by the disappearance of the Gieseke thrones; beyond her mother’s flush of expectation through the morning; beyond the fine spread of cold meats and salads on the family’s best plates throughout that awkward lunch – awkward mainly because Grossmutter is so patently affronted that the girls will only speak English and don’t dare to speak to her at all – is that Grossmutter embraces Wendy Jones upon first entering the bungalow. She does this because she evidently thinks that Wendy must be Lisa.
Wendy is the only other redhead among the Butcher Estate’s child commune and, although she is paler and more sandy-haired than Lisa, a more Celtic sort of redhead, the girls are inevitably bracketed together as ‘the two little gingernuts’. Wendy, along with Lisa and Dinah, is playing in the living room that day, when the aged foreigners make their entrance, so Dinah is able to watch from her corner how Grossmutter – having first embraced her daughter and been introduced to her son-in-law – then makes a bee-line for Wendy Jones, as the red-headed child who has two hands.
Dinah remembers her own sense of shock in that split second, in that instant freeze-frame. Because it’s immediately apparent to her that, while her mum has told about Lisa’s red hair, she hasn’t told about Lisa’s funny arm. And Sophie Jacobsen, auburn-haired queen of the Wiesbaden obelisk, of 1900, has naturally made the assumption that her granddaughter, her namesake – Lisa Sophia de Bondt – is the redhead with two proper hands.
Then, suddenly, the grandparents are gone – gone off to be billeted with Jurgen’s family in Johannesburg. It’s what they do till the end. And, though Dinah’s parents take their turn, the old man, by then, has already died and Dinah has left the country. So, unlike her sister, Dinah does not witness the slow decline of Sophie Jacobsen, who survives ten bouts of viral pneumonia and lives to be a hundred and four. She lives a life in which, right up to the end, she demands of alien shop assistants – and always, of course, in German – that they proffer brand-name lingerie and brand-name laxatives, items that have been obsolete since 1943.
So Dinah never really gets to know them – never thinks of her mother’s parents as real. Never properly gets to know any of the Jacobsens, to speak true. She’s aware of them as the long-ago players in a version of her dear mother’s life. They are no longer a close-knit family. There’s been too much water under the bridge. Jurgen marries an Afrikaner nurse and connects with up-country families, so that Marianne, his one-time close sister, is occasionally in receipt of the odd surprisingly rural present.
‘Am sending sheep,’ Jurgen’s telegram will say. And the carcass of a whole dead sheep will be delivered off a goods train. ‘Am sending turkey,’ it says another time – but the turkey isn’t dead. It’s delivered, live and squawking, in a crate the size of a telephone box, which must sit out on the bungalow verandah, awaiting the countdown to Christmas. Night after night, Dinah’s thoroughly urban dad will creep out at the first glimmer of dawn and throw a blanket over the telephone box to keep the poor creature quiet.
In the daytime, Dinah chats to the bird, with its strange winged dinosaur look, its scaly legs, its sparse red-and-black vulture’s plumage. And the glazed brown orb on the Christmas platter bears no relation to her feathered friend, so she needs no sweet-talking adult lies to make her think that her turkey has flown away and that this sort of turkey – this golden orb, served with roast potatoes and with legs no longer than pencils – this is another sort of substance altogether, another category of organic matter.
Jurgen and his family live mostly in Johannesburg, in a modest white neighbourhood. Their house is one that, decades later, will be eagerly sought out as ‘heritage’, as an architectural jewel: a colonial workman’s cottage with wooden tracery and rickety shutters and a corrugated-iron roof with ornamental coping that runs along its ridge. At the time of Jurgen’s occupation, it exists merely as a statement that its occupier cannot stretch to a suburban dream-home upgrade. Because construction work is everywhere and the aspirant householder will surely desire a more salubrious location. A suburb where the hacienda style will sit side by side with the half-timbered manor house – where ‘ultramodern’ will coexist with the neighbouring Tyrolean chalet.
Jurgen, Dinah believes, is father to four blond children, but she doesn’t know their names. It startles her to realise that she couldn’t pick them out in a photograph. She would probably recognise the elder of Otto’s two adult sons. He’s a geologist, like his father, whose successful sideline in playing the stockmarket has caused him to retire as a gentleman farmer, a man of means. He has two daughters, Lisa says, and Dinah believes that both of them are currently living abroad. One, Lisa’s told her, is a fashion designer who lives and works in Geneva. But Dinah doesn’t know these women, doesn’t know their names.
Sad-eyed Irmi, no blood relation, is the one whom Dinah fixes on; the one whom she chooses to befriend. And it’s the imagery of Irmi’s wartime stories that sometimes bestrides her own more troubled dreams. Strange, perhaps, because all the Berlin Jacob-sens have their rarely told, whispered stories, their brief and only half-intelligible stories about the last days of the war. Stories of jumping off slow-moving trains; of losing one’s infant children in fleeing crowds; of legging it across farmers’ fields; of running, always running and out of breath – their small, final suitcases gratefully thrown away in ditches – running from the Russian advance.
For Irmi and Heinrich, their reunion in South Africa is sixteen years on since the day they parted in pre-war Berlin. They are thirty-five going on sixty. They make a staid, childless couple and both go out to work. Irmi works as a secretary. Her typing and shorthand skills she has, thanks to her dying mother, because, one day near the end, Irmi’s mother reached under her sickbed and handed her daughter a purse. She directed her secretly to the secretarial college while the tyrant was out of the house.
‘Irmi, the world is changing,’ she said. ‘Make sure you can earn your own living.’
This meant that, once Berlin was under siege, and Irmi was an orphan with two dead brothers, and the family’s assets had gone up in smoke, she was able to get herself decent employment as a qualified shorthand typist. She worked as secretary to an elderly professor at the university in Berlin. When bombs fell on the university, the faculty moved into a cellar and then into another. When her family house was bombed, Irmi moved in with the professor and his wife, whose own sons by then were both dead, and she became their surrogate daughter. Irmi’s house fell in what was soon to become the Russian Zone. And once, after it had already been bombed, its shell caught fire and the house was burned to the ground. Irmi then rashly crept back to it and combed through the ashes and the bits of broken wash-basin in the hope of finding something, some relic of her past, some item of value that she could possibly use for barter.
But the professor’s wife ran mad with terror when Irmi returned with her story of where she’d been and what she’d done. Then and there, she fetched her work box and she sewed a makeshift backpack for Irmi that she fashioned from her only remaining tablecloth.
‘There’s a train,’ she said. ‘It leaves at midnight for Hamburg. Take it, Irmi. It will be the last. Go to Hamburg. Go to the island where your young man’s family have people. The Russians will be at our door in the morning. If they find you, they will rape you. Go, Irmi. Go now!’
Irmi’s story is that the train she was on was end-to-end with maimed German soldiers wrapped in newspaper and rags. They groaned and screamed through the night. Half the train’s upper body had been blown away. A woman had lost her baby on the train and was wailing and pulling at her hair. There was talk that the Russians were taking up the tracks behind them as they went. And when she made it to Hamburg, the city, Irmi says, ‘wasn’t there’. Hamburg, as Dinah appreciates only much later, from aerial photographs, looked at the time like an early Flemish horror painting of the world after Armageddon.
The island was crowded with fleeing German civilians and there was no room in anybody’s house. Irmi was lucky to get part shares in a cowshed. This was something that she did for months. She slept, shivering, on straw. When the war was over, the British authorities moved in and processed her, but everything took time. Dinah is not at all clear about what became of Irmi between her billet in the cowshed and her coming to claim the oak thrones, but at some point she must have hooked up with her in-laws and she’d learned to speak good English. Or it might have been, Dinah thinks, that, since the English ‘th’ had clearly never given Irmi a problem, she had long ago been the better able to benefit from the instruction of the fin-de-siècle Bohemian. Or perhaps the British were on the island for longer than Dinah thinks.
Not that Irmi’s English was much of a help to her on the boat which, for unexplained reasons, she had boarded in Southampton – a Union Castle liner stuffed with post-war British immigrants – and none of them willing to exchange a single word with the daughter of the enemy. Poor bereaved Irmi who, thanks to the man with the egg stains down his shirt, had lost everything she ever possessed, except for Heinrich – bald Heinrich, with his little mutters, shuffles and sniffs.
