said? My knowledge of German came courtesy of the summers I had spent at my aunt’s in Kerkrade. There we spoke of Prussians, not Germans. My aunt ran a stall that sold coffee beans in a town where the border between the two countries ran down the middle of the street. Our side was Nieuwstraat and across the road was Neustrasse. Her customers stood with their feet in Germany while their hands counted out coins in the Netherlands. There were no language barriers to be crossed. Everyone spoke the dialect of the Ripuarian Franks, whose drawling caravan of words had left deep tracks across the Rhineland in the fifth century.
I was five years old and carrying a cured ham in my apron to deliver to a Prussian who had asked for a sjink. ‘Come straight back, you hear!’ I remember the bustle of the crowd, the ham growing heavier and heavier. Two drunken miners pointed at my apron and burst out laughing. ‘Bit young to have a bun in the oven … ’ I lost my way. Three hours later, they found me in a back garden on the German side of the street, ham and all. The lady of the house saw me playing there with a serious expression on my face. What else is a five-year-old to do under the circumstances? She called to me and I ran into her arms. Though she was German, she spoke the same Kerkrade slang as my aunt, in the same seemingly indignant tone. ‘Hey, ma li’l angel … and who might you be?’ Since that first foray across the border I returned home from every summer holiday with a Rhineland accent, much to the horror of my mother, who set about replacing all my Germanisms with the Gallicisms of Maastricht.
Kaninchen sind verrückt danach. I rolled the words around my mouth as I followed Heinz upstairs to the attic. The staircase bore our weight like an old beast of burden, groaning as it took us from landing to landing. On each one he halted, put down my suitcase for a moment and then took hold of the next banister before creaking on, step by step.
‘Have you been fencing long?’
‘Since the Olympiad.’
Heinz turned and frowned at me. The Berlin Olympics had ended only weeks before.
‘I mean since the 1928 Games. In Amsterdam.’
‘Ah, I see. You should have seen our Games. The Olympiad to beat them all. There was a torch relay for the Olympic flame. They had invented a new electronic system for the fencers to tell them when a point had been scored.’
I searched for daylight on every floor, but all I saw were hallways lined with closed doors. The higher we climbed, the more ominous the atmosphere became. Not a bad smell exactly, just the stale air of unused rooms. Once this house had been built in preparation for a life, enough life to fill ten rooms, a kitchen, and a ballroom. The staircase had borne the weight of a young master of the house as he carried his bride upstairs. Children had slid down the banister. But the decades wore on, bringing evenings when someone climbed the stairs never to come down alive. A room was kept dark, a hush descended on one floor and then the next, till silence reached the bottom stair. This house had been empty for a long time; I could feel it. Sometimes a house never recovers from such a blow, a fresh coat of paint can only give it the air of a jilted lover who feels all the more disconsolate for having dolled herself up. It’s better left as it is, with its cracks and smears, the greasy imprint of a hand that reached out in haste on the way from the dinner table to the ballroom, the loose handle of a slammed door. The wallpaper on the attic floor was in tatters. Had a cat been locked away up there? A child? The heat was stifling.
‘Has von Bötticher lived here all his life?’
‘No.’ Heinz put my suitcase down in front of a small door and sorted through his bunch of keys. ‘He hails from Köningsberg. After the war he moved to Frankfurt, and then he came here. But these are matters that do not concern you.’
The room was more pleasant than I had expected, sunny with a small balcony. Olive-green wallpaper, a high three-quarter bed, a small paraffin heater, and a desk with an inkpot. The sound of birds cooing was very close. Heinz opened the doors to the balcony and two pigeons made a U-turn in mid-air.
‘I have other things to attend to,’ he said, backing out of the room. ‘There is nothing more I can do for you at present. My wife will bring you something to eat later. You’ll find water at the end of the hall if you wish to freshen up.’
He clattered down the stairs, leaving me behind with the birds. I started to unpack my suitcase. The linen cupboard was lined with dust and I sacrificed a sock to clean it out. I had to fill this room with my sorry caseful of possessions and fast, or things here would never turn out for the best. I flicked away a dried-up fly that had strayed witlessly onto the bedside table and perished there. War and Peace took its place. I put my fencing bag in the corner, hung my coat on the hook. The letter was at the bottom of my case, sealed in a large envelope made of stiff cardboard. Nothing but the name of the addressee on the front: Herr Egon von Bötticher, a name like a clip around the ear. I stepped into the sunlight, but the cardboard was giving nothing away.
I considered it, of course I did. If I had read the letter that day, perhaps things might have been different. But I knew from experience that the discovery is never worth all the trouble. The speculative excitement buzzing around your brain as you steam open an envelope soon fizzles out when you clap eyes on its contents. A handful of statements about someone else’s humdrum existence, what good are they to anyone? And then there’s the ordeal of resealing the envelope, the problem of torn edges, the anxiety and the shame. I laid the letter aside.
Muffled expletives drifted up from the garden. The shadow of a man edged across the lawn with what looked to be a ball on a leash, a ball that was refusing to roll. This turned out to be Heinz, with the biggest rabbit I had ever seen. I took a closer look—yes, it really was a rabbit. Its ears were enormous, as were its feet. It seemed incapable of steady progress and settled for the odd jump, backward or sideways. Heinz’s patience was clearly wearing thin and after taking a good look around, he gave the creature an almighty kick. Just as I was beginning to wonder whether anything in this house was normal, amenable or even remotely friendly, there was a knock at the door. I opened it and we both got a shock, the woman in the hall and I. No, it wasn’t her—her nose was wider than my aunt’s and her eyes were blue. But if she hadn’t been carrying a tray laden with food, I would have happily fallen into her arms. No matter what kind of woman she would turn out to be, at that moment I decided I liked her.
‘Hello dear, I’m Leni.’
She kicked the door shut behind her and put the tray down on the desk. I saw sausage rolls and dumplings sprinkled with icing sugar, but I didn’t dare touch anything. Leni took a chair and sat down at the window, leaning on her sturdy knees. She heaved a deep sigh.
‘So, here you are stuffed away in the attic like an old rag.’
‘It’s a nice room.’
‘Come now, it reeks of pigeon shit. The air up here’s enough to make you ill.’
‘I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Well, you’d better tuck in before you do.’
Her whole body shook when she laughed—cheeks, breasts, belly, the flesh on her forearms exposed by her rolled-up sleeves. If she hadn’t been sitting on them, her buttocks would likely have laughed along too. I started to eat.
‘The master’s an odd ’un, all right,’ she said bluntly. ‘No need to look at me like that. Like you haven’t already twigged. We’d been out of work for six seasons when he bought Raeren. We’d always worked at Lambertz, the biscuit factory. When we were laid off, we hoped Philips would open a factory in these parts. Rumours had been doing the rounds for five years but Heinz said there was no point in waiting any longer. Since then we’ve been in service with von Bötticher. An odd ’un, and no mistake.’
