in practical terms prevented it from being connected to municipal services. An electricity cable was installed thanks to the kindness of a neighbour, but his generosity didn’t stretch to a water pipe. Mother liked to repeat his words, No man alive is going to go digging up my courtyard. Needless to say, his ‘courtyard’ consisted of piles of rubble overgrown with weeds and nettles.
For years I watched her from the windows, still too small to take on the chore of going to the water pump several times a day; in those days it used to be down by the crucifix, so that in the neighbourhood we called that spot ‘at the cross’. Pumping water was strenuous, even for men, but for Mother it was a welcome opportunity to exchange a few words with the bleeder on the cross. Then she tramped back up the street carrying the full buckets, with a defiant fag between her lips.
In the mood of piety prevalent in the nineties, after the war, the municipal council had the inspiration of changing the name of our street to The Way of the Cross. But the insight prevailed that the name was too grand for a cul-de-sac which turned into a muddy creek, especially when heavy rain made the septic tanks overflow. But they did see fit to discontinue the free water from the pump. Fortunately, Mother was able to solve the problem beforehand; just how, she didn’t want to say; but one day workmen turned up, dug a duct out to the street, knocked massive great holes in the walls, and the water flowed. It took much longer to patch up all those holes, and for years they let in the draught and the dust. Then Mother got hold of a loan and a ‘Normalisation Project’ popped up on our agenda, which meant doing away with all the gaps and blemishes in the house. Unfortunately, things got bogged down before the end. It would have been quite contrary to Mother’s nature to have at least consulted someone when setting the priorities; one result was that the reinforcement of the load-bearing walls lost out to an extension of the upper storey. We also got a lovely new façade, it’s just a shame that it started to crack so quickly and peel off. Our ground-floor ceiling was so unpleasantly low that you could touch it with your arm outstretched, though nothing could be done about that; it had already been dark inside because the windows were so small, and you needed to turn on the light during the day as well; but the result of the extension was polar night. The money from the loan ran out much faster than expected, of course. When making the major alterations, the tradesmen ingeniously found other small things that absolutely needed doing, so there was no money left for the new staircase up to the first floor.
‘That’s all right, I can wait, I’ve got a heart,’ the contractor consoled us. And then proposed: ‘Look, it’s fine if you just pay me for the material…’
So, that same day, the workmen demolished the old staircase which led nowhere. But they didn’t come the next day and no one answered the phone at the number given in the telephone directory.
As a temporary solution, we placed a ladder against the wall of the house. As with most temporary solutions, this one proved to be long-lasting. But Mother soon stopped using it after she lost her balance, fell and broke her arm. Not only did she no longer climb up to the upper storey, but from that day it ceased to exist for her.
When I started Year 12, she summoned the courage for the desperate step of joining a ‘lonely hearts agency’. After several dubious offers, she hit a bull’s eye: a retired German industrialist of Jewish origin by the name of Jakob Steinhammer. They began corresponding, facilitated by the agency, because Mother didn’t speak German. The first letter was accompanied by a photograph of a greying gentleman with a neatly-trimmed moustache and metal-rimmed glasses on a slightly crooked nose. When he visited us, three letters later, we realised the photo hadn’t been quite up to date and that Mr Steinhammer had made the acquaintance of Mr Alzheimer. But the wheels were turning and scenes of salvation spun before Mother’s eyes.
Reduced mainly to smiles and gestures of mutual enthusiasm, the rapprochement didn’t go smoothly. But soon a one-way ticket arrived nevertheless, and Mother didn’t vacillate; the offer of marriage involved me joining the newly-weds as soon as I finished high school. Mr and Mrs Steinhammer settled down in a country house in green and peaceful southwestern Germany. Mother wrote to me almost every day and soon showed great skill at inserting mangled German expressions into her sentences, which most foreigners take years to master. She enthusiastically described all the wonders of the house with its underfloor heating, gold-plated fixtures in the bathroom, wallpaper with life-size woodland animals, or the breakfasts they had at the nearby lake. Never mind the spelling; she evidently had enormous potential for assimilation. I must admit, I too started to feel I was becoming German.
All the more because all my clothes soon had German labels. Not one of the garments and pieces of apparel which arrived in the parcels, from shoes to sunglasses, would have been my choice in a shop, but I told myself it was a different country and a different taste, and I had to get used to it. Mother didn’t choose them either, but rather Uncle Jakob, who was better informed about fashion in Germany, and even more importantly about the difference between quality merchandise and junk. Mother illuminated each individual item with an assurance of the quality of the material, its water-resistant qualities or the enormous saving made due to the excellent value for money.
Mr Steinhammer was unable to have children–a consequence of his internment in Auschwitz, but to have a son as an heir was his great unfulfilled desire. The death of his wife had left him alone in the world, since he’d lost all his relatives in the concentration camps together with the fortune his family had gained through manufacturing mine-shaft frames; but he was able to regain and redouble this fortune after the war owing to his business talent. Now he was looking forward to my arrival so he could enrol me in university. My studies, of course, would be to prepare me for a position in the management of the firm, because he remained its majority shareholder.
And no sooner had Mother settled in and got up the courage to leave the house by herself and was entering the local supermarket one day, than a frenzied dog came bolting around the corner and went like a projectile for her buttocks, as if it had been waiting just for her–as if it had been sent down to Earth with exactly that mission; it sank its teeth into her several times and disappeared again in a flash, just like it had come.
The wounds healed relatively quickly, but something in her heart shifted irreversibly. When they brought her back from hospital, she wouldn’t hear a word about staying. No pleading and promises would help, nor pointing out the difference between what she had there and what she said she wanted to go back to, nor the fact that no such incident had been recorded in the area for decades. She interpreted this last aspect as a sign from God showing her where she really belonged. Until her last days she remained broken and timid, always more or less on pins and needles, but passive, forever awaiting the next blow of fate.
But rapid flourishing and abrupt end of the Steinhammer episode was nothing compared to what had happened a few years earlier, straight after we returned from Gabrek’s for the second time. The boy I sat next to in class was called Božidar. Also an only child, from even poorer circumstances than mine, he had a hard time keeping up with lessons. I whispered him the answers in tests. We didn’t meet outside of school, but since our way home was in the same direction we usually walked together. There was one hundred metres of poorly illuminated footpath down to the first intersection and compacted snow had turned it into a veritable ice rink that day. It was 24th December and the Christmas-tree vendors were selling off the last of their wares cheaply in front of the school. Božidar pushed off with one leg and skated in front of me to the very edge of the cross street, where he turned to wait for me. At that instant the cabin of a large truck and trailer appeared from behind the building on the corner. I only just managed to yell Watch out! before the truck, winding around the tight bend, collected Božidar with its veering rear end and sucked him under its wheels.
Even today, that is the only plausible version of the event for me. According to the forensic report, Božidar died from a skull fracture caused by a blow to the back of his head and can’t possibly have been run over by the wheels because the weight of the trailer, loaded with sacks of potting soil, would have crushed his body.
