“At home I don’t have to.”
His grandmother looked cross; no, she looked worried. She was biting something back. The old man had finished the contention
with his boots and now he put on a scarf, a fur-lined coat, a fur hat with earflaps, woolen gloves, and he took a list and a shopping bag and a different walking stick, which looked something like a ski pole. His grandmother stood still, as if dreaming, and then (addressing Riri) decided to wash all her amber necklaces. She fetched a wicker basket from her bedroom. It was lined with orange silk and filled with strings of beads. Riri followed her to the bathroom and sat on the end of the tub. She rolled up her soft sleeves and scrubbed the amber with laundry soap and a stiff brush. She scrubbed and rinsed and then began all over again.
“I am good at things like this,” she said. “Now, unless you hate to discuss it, tell me something about your school.”
At first he had nothing to say, but then he told her how stupid the younger boys were and what they were allowed to get away with.
“The younger boys would be seven, eight?” Yes, about that. “A hopeless generation?”
He wasn’t sure; he knew that his class had been better.
She reached down and fetched a bottle of something from behind the bathtub and they went back to the sitting room together. They put a lamp between them, and Irina began to polish the amber with cotton soaked in turpentine. After a time the amber began to shine. The smell made him homesick, but not unpleasantly. He carefully selected a necklace when she told him he might take one for his mother, and he rubbed it with a soft cloth. She showed him how to make the beads magnetic by rolling them in his palms.
“You can do that even with plastic,” he said.
“Can you? How very sad. It is dead matter.”
“Amber is too,” he said politely.
“What do you want to be later on? A scientist?”
“A ski instructor.” He looked all round the room, at the shelves and curtains and at the bamboo folding screen, and said, “If you didn’t live here, who would?”
She replied, “If you see anything that pleases you, you may keep it. I want you to choose your own present. If you don’t see anything, we’ll go out tomorrow and look in the shops. Does that suit you?” He did not reply. She held the necklace he had picked
and said, “Your mother will remember seeing this as I bent down to kiss her good night. Do you like old coins? One of my sons was a collector.” In the wicker basket was a lacquered box that contained his uncle’s coin collection. He took a coin but it meant nothing to him; he let it fall. It clinked, and he said, “We have a dog now.” The dog wore a metal tag that rang when the dog drank out of a china bowl. Through a sudden rainy blur of new homesickness he saw that she had something else, another lacquered box, full of old canceled stamps. She showed him a stamp with Hitler and one with an Italian king. “I’ve kept funny things,” she said. “Like this beautiful Russian box. It belonged to my grandmother, but after I have died I expect it will be thrown out. I gave whatever jewelry I had left to my daughters. We never had furniture, so I became attached to strange little baskets and boxes of useless things. My poor daughters—I had precious little to give. But they won’t be able to wear rings any more than I could. We all come into our inherited arthritis, these knotted-up hands. Our true heritage. When I was your age, about, my mother was dying of … I wasn’t told. She took a ring from under her pillow and folded my hand on it. She said that I could always sell it if I had to, and no one need know. You see, in those days women had nothing of their own. They were like brown paper parcels tied with string. They were handed like parcels from their fathers to their husbands. To make the parcel look attractive it was decked with curls and piano lessons, and rings and gold coins and banknotes and shares. After appraising all the decoration, the new owner would undo the knots.”
“Where is that ring?” he said. The blur of tears was forgotten.
“I tried to sell it when I needed money. The decoration on the brown paper parcel was disposed of by then. Everything thrown, given away. Not by me. My pearl necklace was sold for Spanish refugees. Victims, flotsam, the injured, the weak—they were important. I wasn’t. The children weren’t. I had my ring. I took it to a municipal pawnshop. It is a place where you take things and they give you money. I wore dark glasses and turned up my coat collar, like a spy.” He looked as though he understood that. “The man behind the counter said that I was a married woman and I needed my husband’s written consent. I said the ring was
mine. He said nothing could be mine, or something to that effect. Then he said he might have given me something for the gold in the band of the ring but the stones were worthless. He said this happened in the finest of families. Someone had pried the real stones out of their setting.”
“Who did that?”
“A husband. Who else would? Someone’s husband—mine, or my mother’s or my mother’s mother’s, when it comes to that.”
“With a knife?” said Riri. He said, “The man might have been pretending. Maybe he took out the stones and put in glass.”
“There wasn’t time. And they were perfect imitations—the right shapes and sizes.”
“He might have had glass stones all different sizes.”
“The women in the family never wondered if men were lying,” she said. “They never questioned being dispossessed. They were taught to think that lies were a joke on the liar. That was why they lost out. He gave me the price of the gold in the band, as a favor, and I left the ring there. I never went back.”
He put the lid on the box of stamps, and it fitted; he removed it, put it back, and said, “What time do you turn on your TV?”
“Sometimes never. Why?”
“At home I have it from six o’clock.”
The old man came in with a pink-and-white face, bearing about him a smell of cold and of snow. He put down his shopping bag and took things out—chocolate and bottles and newspapers. He said, “I had to go all the way to the station for the papers. There is only one shop open, and even then I had to go round to the back door.”
“I warned you that today was Christmas,” Irina said.
Mr. Aiken said to Riri, “When I was still a drinking man this was the best hour of the day. If I had a glass now, I could put ice in it. Then I might add water. Then if I had water I could add whiskey. I know it is all the wrong way around, but at least I’ve started with a glass.”
“You had wine with your lunch and gin instead of tea and I believe you had straight gin before lunch,” she said, gathering
up the beads and coins and the turpentine and making the table Riri’s domain again.
“Riri drank that,” he said. It was so obviously a joke that she turned her head and put the basket down and covered her laugh with her fingers, as she had when she’d opened the door to him—oh, a long time ago now.
“I haven’t a drop of anything left in the house,” she said. That didn’t matter, the old man said, for he had found what he needed. Riri watched and saw that when he lifted his glass his hand did not tremble at all. What his grandmother had said about that was true.
They had early supper and then Riri, after a courageous try at keeping awake, gave up even on television and let her make his bed of scented sheets, deep pillows, a feather quilt. The two others sat for a long time at the table, with just one lamp, talking in low voices. She had a pile of notebooks from which she read aloud and sometimes she showed Mr. Aiken things. He could see them through the chinks in the bamboo screen. He watched the lamp shadows for a while and then it was as if the lamp had gone out and he slept deeply.
The room was full of mound shapes, as it had been that morning when he arrived. He had not heard them leave the room. His Christmas watch had hands that glowed in the dark. He put on his glasses. It was half past ten. His grandmother was being just a bit loud at the telephone; that was what had woken him up. He rose, put on his slippers, and stumbled out to the bathroom.
“Just answer yes or no,” she was saying. “No, he can’t. He has been asleep for an hour, two hours, at least.… Don’t lie to me—I am bound to find the truth out. Was it a tumor? An extrauterine pregnancy? … Well, look.… Was she or was she not pregnant? What can you mean by ‘not exactly’? If you don’t know, who will?” She happened to turn her head, and saw him and said without a change of tone, “Your son is here, in his pajamas; he wants to say good night to you.”
She gave up the telephone and immediately went away so that the child could talk privately. She heard him say, “I drank some kind of alcohol.”
So that was the important part of the day: not the journey, not the necklace, not even the strange old guest with the comic accent. She could tell from the sound of the child’s voice that he was smiling. She picked up his bathrobe, went back to the hall, and put it over his shoulders. He scarcely saw her: He was concentrated on the distant voice. He said, in a matter-of-fact way, “All right, good-bye,” and hung up.
“What a lot of things you have pulled out of that knapsack,” she said.
“It’s a large one. My father had it for military service.”
Now, why should that make him suddenly homesick when his father’s voice had not? “You are good at looking after yourself,” she said. “Independent. No one has to tell you what to do. Of course, your mother had sound training. Once when I was looking for a nurse for your mother and her sisters, a great peasant woman came to see me, wearing a black apron and black buttoned boots. I said, ‘What can you teach children?’ And she said, ‘To be clean and polite.’ Your grandfather said, ‘Hire her,’ and stamped out of the room.”
His mother interested, his grandfather bored him. He had the Christian name of a dead old man.
“You will sleep well,” his grandmother promised, pulling the feather quilt over him. “You will dream short dreams at first, and by morning they will be longer and longer. The last one of all just before you wake up will be like a film. You will wake up wondering where you are, and then you will hear Mr. Aiken. First he will go round shutting all the windows, then you will hear his bath. He will start the coffee in an electric machine that makes a noise like a door rattling. He will pull on his snow boots with a lot of cursing and swearing and go out to fetch our croissants and the morning papers. Do you know what day it will be? The day after Christmas.” He was almost asleep. Next to his watch and his glasses on a table close to the couch was an Astérix book and Irina’s Russian box with old stamps in it. “Have you decided you want the stamps?”
“The box. Not the stamps.”
He had taken, by instinct, the only object she wanted to keep. “For a special reason?” she said. “Of course, the box is yours. I am only wondering.”
“The cover fits,” he said.
She knew that the next morning he would have been here forever and that at parting time, four days later, she would have to remind him that leaving was the other half of arriving. She smiled, knowing how sorry he would be to go and how soon he would leave her behind. “This time yesterday …,” he might say, but no more than once. He was asleep. His mouth opened slightly and the hair on his forehead became dark and damp. A doubled-up arm looked uncomfortable but Irina did not interfere; his sunken mind, his unconscious movements, had to be independent, of her or anyone, particularly of her. She did not love him more or less than any of her grandchildren. You see, it all worked out, she was telling him. You, and your mother, and the children being so worried, and my old friend. Anything can be settled for a few days at a time, though not for longer. She put out the light, for which his body was grateful. His mind, at that moment, in a sunny icicle brightness, was not only skiing but flying.
W
HEN I
came back to Berlin out of captivity in the spring of 1950, I discovered I had a stepfather. My mother had never mentioned him. I had been writing from Brittany to “Grete Bestermann,” but the “Toeppler” engraved on a brass plate next to the bellpull at her new address turned out to be her name, too. As she slipped the key in the lock, she said quietly, “Listen, Thomas. I’m Frau Toeppler now. I married a kind man with a pension. This is his key, his name, and his apartment. He wants to make you welcome.” From the moment she met me at the railway station that day, she must have been wondering how to break it.
I put my hand over the name, leaving a perfect palm print. I said, “I suppose there are no razor blades and no civilian shirts in Berlin. But some ass is already engraving nameplates.”
Martin Toeppler was an old man who had been a tram conductor. He was lame in one arm as the result of a working accident and carried that shoulder higher than the other. His eyes had the milky look of the elderly, lighter round the rim than at the center of the iris, and he had an old woman’s habit of sighing, “Ah, yes, yes.” The sigh seemed to be his way of pleading, “It can’t be helped.” He must have been forty-nine, at the most, but aged was what he seemed to me, and more than aged—useless, lost. His mouth hung open much of the time, as though he had trouble breathing through his nose, but it was only because he was a chronic talker, always ready to bite down on a word. He came from Franconia, near the Czech border, close to where my grandparents had once lived.
“Grete and I can understand each other’s dialects,” he said—but we were not a dialect-speaking family. My brother and I had
been made to say “bread” and “friend” and “tree” correctly. I turned my eyes to my mother, but she looked away.
Martin’s one dream was to return to Franconia; it was almost the first thing he said to me. He had inherited two furnished apartments in a town close to an American military base. One of the two had been empty for years. The occupants had moved away, no one knew where—perhaps to Sweden. After their departure, which had taken place at five o’clock on a winter morning in 1943, the front door had been sealed with a government stamp depicting a swastika and an eagle. The vanished tenants must have died, perhaps in Sweden, and now no local person would live in the place, because a whole family of ghosts rattled about, opening and shutting drawers, banging on pipes, moving chairs and ladders. The ghosts were looking for a hoard of gold that had been left behind, Martin thought. The second apartment had been rented to a family who had disappeared during the confused migrations of the end of the war and were probably dead, too; at least they were dead officially, which was all that mattered. Martin intended to modernize the two flats, raise them up to American standards—he meant by this putting venetian blinds at the windows and gas-heated water tanks in the bathrooms—and let them to a good class of American officer, too foreign to care about a small-town story, too educated to be afraid of ghosts. But he would have to move quickly; otherwise his inheritance, his sole postwar capital, his only means of getting started again, might be snatched away from him for the sake of shiftless and illiterate refugees from the Soviet zone, or bombed-out families still huddled in barracks, or for latehomecomers. This last was a new category of persons, all one word. It was out of his mouth before he remembered that I was one, too. He stopped talking, and then he sighed and said, “Ah, yes, yes.”