to them. It was like a kind of duet.”
“But what about the elephant?” Karl interrupted again, not troubling much to hide his impatience. “I mean, how come this elephant was in your garden in the first place? Where were you living? I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you are right, dear,” she said. “I was getting ahead of myself, rushing on too quickly.” She thought long and hard, collecting her thoughts, before beginning again.
“It would be better perhaps if I start again, I think. A story should always begin at the beginning. No? My own beginning would be a good start, I suppose…
So, I was born on the ninth of February nineteen twenty-nine, in Dresden, in Germany. We lived in quite a big house, a walled garden at the back, with a sandpit and a swing. And we had a woodshed where there lived the biggest spiders in the whole world, I promise you! There were many high trees, beech trees, where the pigeons cooed in summer, right outside my bedroom window. At the end of the garden was a rusty iron gate with huge squeaking hinges. This gate led out into a big park. So, in a way, we had two gardens you might say, a little one that was ours, and a big one we had to share with everyone else in Dresden.
Dresden was a wonderful city then, so beautiful, you cannot imagine. I have only to close my eyes and I can see it again, just as it was. Papi – this is what we all called our father – Papi worked in the city art gallery restoring paintings. And he wrote books about paintings too, about Rembrandt in particular. He loved Rembrandt above all other artists. Like Mutti he loved listening to the gramophone, but he preferred Bach to Marlene Dietrich. He loved boating best of all, though, and fishing too, even more than Rembrandt or Bach. At weekends we would often go boating on the lake in the park, and in summer we would take a picnic and the gramophone with us, and we would have a picnic by the shore, a musical picnic! Papi loved musical picnics. Well, we all did.
Every holidays, we would take a bus into the countryside, to stay with Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti on their farm – Aunt Lotti was Mutti’s sister, you understand. We would feed the animals and have more picnics. Papi built a tree house for us on an island out in the middle of the lake – which was more like a large pond than a lake, when I come to think about it – and it was fringed all around with reeds, I remember, and there were always ducks and moorhens and frogs and tadpoles and little darting fish. We had a small rowing boat to get across to the island, and plenty of trout to fish for in the stream that ran down into the little lake – so Papi was happy.
Sometimes when the harvesting was done, we’d all be out there in the field of stubble long into the evenings, gathering the last grains of golden corn. And whenever we could on summer nights, Karli and I would sleep up in the tree house on the island. We would lie awake listening to the gramophone playing far away in the farmhouse, to the owls calling one another. We would watch the moon sailing through the clouds.
We loved the animals, of course. Little Karli loved the pigs especially, and Uncle Manfred’s horse – Tomi, he was called. Karli would go riding on Tomi with Uncle Manfred every day out around the farm, and I would go bicycling on my own. I went off for hours on end. I loved freewheeling down a hill, the wind in my face. It was our dreamtime, full of sunshine and laughter. But dreams do not last, do they? And sometimes they turn into nightmares.
I was born before the war, of course. But when I say that, it sounds as if I knew there was going to be a war all the time I was growing up. It was not like that, not at all, not for me. Yes, there was talk of it, and there were many uniforms and flags in the streets, lots of bands marching up and down. Karli loved all that. He loved to march along with them, even if the other boys used to taunt him. He was so small and frail, and suffered greatly from asthma. They’d call him ‘Pegleg’, because of his limp, and I hated them for that. I would shout at them, whenever I felt brave enough that is. It was not only the mockery in their faces and the cruelty of their words that I hated so much, it was the injustice. It was not Karli’s fault he had been born like that. But Karli did not want me to stand up for him. He used to get quite angry at me for making a fuss. I do not think he minded about them nearly as much as I did.
I think I have always had a strong sense of justice, of fair play, of what is right and what is wrong. Maybe it is just natural for children to be born like this. Maybe I got it from Mutti. Who knows? Anyway, I always recognised injustice when I saw it, and I felt it deeply. And believe you me, there was plenty of it about in those days. I saw the Jews in the streets, with their yellow stars sewn on to their coats. I saw their shops with the Star of David daubed in paint all over the windows. Several times I saw them beaten up by Nazi stormtroopers, and left to lie in the gutter.
At home, Papi did not like us to talk about any of this, about anything political – he was very strict about that. We all knew about the terrible things the Nazis were doing, but Papi always told me that our home should be an oasis of peace and harmony for us in a troubled world, that it only made Mutti angry or sad or both to talk about it, and that little Karli was far too young anyway to understand about such things. Besides, Papi would say, you never know who’s listening. But down on the farm on our holidays one summer – the summer of nineteen thirty-eight it was – Mutti and Papi, Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti, got into a long and heated argument. It was late at night, and Karli and I were already upstairs in bed. We heard every word of it.
Uncle Manfred was banging the table, and I could hear the tears of anger in his voice. “Germany needs strong leadership,” he was saying. “Without our Führer, without Adolf Hitler, the country will go to the dogs. Like Hitler himself, I fought in the trenches. We were comrades in arms. My only brother was killed in the war, and most of my friends. Is all that sacrifice to be for nothing? I remember the humiliation of defeat, and how people starved in the streets after the war. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. Make no mistake, it was the government in Berlin, and the Jews, who betrayed the Fatherland and the army. And now Hitler is restoring our pride, putting things right.”
I had never in my life imagined Uncle Manfred could be this angry. Mutti was furious too, and called him ‘ein dumkopf’ – in English this means a fool, or a fathead. She was saying that Hitler was a madman, that the Nazi regime was the worst thing that had ever happened to Germany, that we had many dear friends who were Jews, and that if Hitler went on the way he was going, he would lead us all into another war.
Uncle Manfred, who was ranting now, and quite beside himself, replied that he hoped there would be a war, so that this time we could show the world that Germany had to be respected. Then, to my utter surprise, mild-mannered Aunt Lotti joined in, calling Mutti ‘nothing but a coward and a lousy Jew-loving pacifist’. Mutti told her in no uncertain terms that she was proud to be a pacifist, that she would be a pacifist till the day she died. Through all this, Papi was doing his best to try to calm things down, and said that we were all entitled to our own opinion, but that we were all family, all German, and that we should stick together, whatever our views. No one was listening to him.
The argument raged on for most of the night. To be honest, at the time I didn’t understand much of what they were talking about – only enough to know that I was on Mutti’s side. Karli understood even less, but we were both so upset and surprised to hear them being angry with one another, and shouting like that. When I think about it now, I realise I should have been more knowledgeable about what they were saying. But I wasn’t, not then. I was just a teenage girl growing up, I suppose. Yes, I hated all the dreadful things I’d seen the stormtroopers doing in the streets, but the truth is – and I am ashamed of this now – that I was far more interested in boys and bicycles, than in politics – and more in bicycles than boys, I have to say.
I do not think I understood just how serious the argument had really been,
