E-Book, Englisch, 276 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-903110-47-8
Verlag: Wrecking Ball Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Martin Goodman has written ten books, both fiction and nonfiction, and a theme common to much of his fiction is the exploration of war guilt. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull, Director of the Philip Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing, and is the founder and publisher of Barbican Press.
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1
SYDNEY, 1962
Place a shark in an aquarium and ask it to describe the life of the little fishes it encounters there, and the shark won’t account for its own impact. Similarly, Katja could not know how her shadow drove the world. When her fellow Australian citizens sensed Katja’s approach, they tended to cross the street. That is one reason her portraits of the country contain no people. ‘What was your maiden name?’ Katja had to think a moment. What was her name before she became Birchendorf? It was so far back. ‘Klein,’ she remembered. Her daughter wrote it onto the form she had taken from a resettlement officer. She spelt it her own way and made the name her own. Uwe Cline. She would not be a Birchendorf any more. When Katja spoke to her in German, the girl mouthed English back. In 1951, when Uwe turned thirteen, Katja accepted that she now shared her home with an Australian teenager. When she dyed her hair black Katja took it to be a fashion statement. Uwe buttoned her white blouse tight around her neck and tugged her sleeves below her wrists. She wore black tights under a woollen black skirt even in summer. In a teenage world of flesh and brightness, Uwe stood out. Perhaps that’s what she wanted. Uwe went to secretarial school. She passed shorthand and typing classes with distinction. She found a job and left home. Katja did not hear from her. She waited. In December 1962, Katja stepped out of a taxi and commanded the driver to keep the meter running. The day was mild and sunny. Katja hated the lack of a northern winter. Out on the streets she felt like a penguin in a zoo, dressed in her dark clothes and there to be laughed at. Inside the entrance hall of the apartment block she found her daughter’s name on a mailbox. Uwe had written it like a child, the nib pressed hard on the paper while she concentrated. Uwe Cline. Katja climbed the cement stairwell to the third floor where she pressed the bell on the black door. No one came. She hammered on the wood and shouted Uwe’s name. A woman stuck her head out of the apartment next door. ‘She’s my daughter,’ Katja snapped. ‘I’m her mother.’ She banged on the door again and the neighbour retreated. Eventually the door opened a crack. Uwe stepped back and her mother pushed her way in. Uwe’s hair was lank and unwashed and showed its brown roots. She had been sweating into a pillow. Her cheeks were drawn and her shoulders were thin yet her belly bulged out against her nightgown. She moved to her narrow bed and sat on its edge. ‘Have you got money?’ Katja said. ‘We’ll need your money. I didn’t bring any and I have a taxi waiting. I am taking you home.’ Katja spotted Uwe’s purse on the windowsill and walked across to fetch it. It held a few banknotes and some coins. It was enough. What a nasty little room. An electric ring, a gas boiler, a cracked enamel sink; is this what her daughter’s independent life amounted to? There was a small wardrobe but it wasn’t worth waiting to pack a case. Uwe wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while and the taxi’s meter was ticking. A scuffed pair of shoes lay under the bed. Katja knelt and pressed Uwe’s feet into them. It was a hard job because the feet were swollen, but she managed. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now stand up.’ The girl did as told. A light grey raincoat hung on the back of the door. When Katja held it out, Uwe fed her arms inside its sleeves. ‘Come on then,’ she said. A bunch of keys hung from a nail near the door. Katja pocketed them, and steered her daughter out into the corridor. The bathwater turned grey as Katja sponged her daughter down. She rubbed strands of hair between her hands and then checked her palms, wanting to find them black with dye. Uwe did not have the will to feed herself, but her mouth worked when Katja fed morsels into it. She chewed and swallowed. That would do her some good. Katja kept up a stream of speaking, in what she hoped was a soft voice. Just snippets from her life mostly. She didn’t bother with any of that ‘you’re eating for two’ nonsense. The baby was clearly sucking Uwe’s life into itself. It needed no help from her. ‘Your company wrote me this,’ she said, and read out the letter. The company’s maternity cover was considerate but it was discretionary. Employees needed to stay in touch. The secretarial pool was short staffed. Please be in touch at once. Katja folded the letter back into its envelope. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened to you? Uwe closed her eyes. All Katja could do was wait. Watch and wait for her daughter’s mouth to move. The most figurative painting Katja had ever achieved depicted a clouded sky filled with crows. It was a portrait of her mind at rest. She watched her daughter and inside her head a crow flashed its wings. Each crow is a memory. None lingers. Memories are the opposite of survival. Let one take roost and you die. They had shared too much, this girl and her. They spent winters on the road. Her daughter was never raped. When Katja looked back coldly, she saw that as the main achievement of her life. Her daughter starved but she did not die of hunger. Katja saw to that. And Uwe was never raped. She saw more than a girl should ever see and who knows what she heard, but she was never raped. If it was rape that did this to her daughter Katja did not want to know it, but if that is what she had to know then so be it. Katja had known women who lay down. Some did so in the open and some in hollows among the rubble of war. They had hauled their bodies far enough, but they could not let go. They had a story still to tell. Their heads turned aside to look for the details. Katja became expert at lipreading from mouths that were in profile. The act of absorbing these women’s stories set them free. Katja knew what young women on the edge of death looked like. They looked like Uwe looked now. Uwe had a story to tell and it was Katja’s job to bear witness to it. She watched her daughter’s lips. That’s where the story would come from. ‘You remember that boy on the boat?’ The shapes of her daughter’s mouth were a jolt. She was speaking German. Katja nodded and reached her fingers to lay them lightly on Uwe’s throat. She felt the vibrations of speech as Uwe spoke on. ‘His name was Stefan. We played and we were friends. Then he learned I was Daddy’s daughter and he spat in my face. Well ...’ And she lay a hand on her belly. ‘This is his.’ Her daughter’s voice felt soft, like when she was six years old. ‘I found him. I didn’t go looking for him, well not really, but I found him. I spotted him in a kosher diner. The way he sat with his friends, the way he told stories and moved his hands, it drew me to him. I could see the boy in him. His skin had the same deep tone it had then, his face had that same angular shape, and of course there were those eyelashes. So long and dark. I waited for the friends to use his name. Stefan, one said. That’s how I knew for sure. I followed them back to their workplace. It was easy to get a job there. And it was fairly simple after that to join in with the group of Stefan’s friends.’ What were you doing in a kosher restaurant? Katja wanted to ask, but didn’t. It was too late for challenges. Her job was to listen. ‘Stefan says I planned it all. He says I’m sick. He said my black hair is the biggest lie he’s ever seen. He wanted to shave my hair and push me out in the street. He says my pretending to be Jewish is like a paedophile putting on shorts and a school cap to get into a playground. That’s not true is it, Mutti? I wasn’t pretending. We talked about it. We killed so many Jews. Father killed so many Jews. I couldn’t bring back any Jews but I could become one. That’s the best I could do. Becoming a Jew was the proper Christian thing to do.’ Your father didn’t kill Jews, Katja wanted to say. He wasn’t a killer. And you, you were just a crazy girl with a stupid idea. You should have grown out of it. But she did not say these things. ‘We went to a Torah study group together. Well, I joined the one Stefan attended. He saw how hard I was trying. I never lied. I said how my father was not Jewish but they kept him in a camp because of his association with Jews. That’s what they did do after the war, isn’t it? I said that he died in Dachau. I told how I went from place to place till I was put in Rosenheim. I worked hard at studying the Torah because I had no Jewish family left to teach me the traditional ways.’ What turned you into all this? Katja wondered. Was it the spit of that boy in your eye? Was it all that went before? Was it us? ‘Stefan was preparing to go to Israel. He said he needed a new start and that was the place to go. The old ways were good but there was a new way and we could both find it. We were modern, he said. Modern and ancient both. He believed in free love. It was exciting. In Israel children would grow into the family of the kibbutz. Our children could do that.’ Katja could not grapple with the concept of a kibbutz. Jews went there to work to make themselves free. They built a camp and put up their own walls and installed their own guards. To her, a kibbutz seemed...
