Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman Read online

  where she, with healthy legs, only puffing a little and with a child flailing in her belly, climbed as if she were walking for Gert as well, who was not allowed to do much walking, past an open shop that repaired bicycles, and a white-haired carpenter who was just unlocking the door to his workshop, and who gave her a lengthy, surprisingly friendly look,

  she needed her husband beside her and put all her hope in the injured leg, both of them wished, without being able to express this openly, for the wound to be bad enough for it to have to be treated in Rome, or in a military hospital in Italy, and yet not so serious that it could become really dangerous,

  an inflammation of the cell tissue, the doctors said without knowing of a remedy, the glands swollen, but he could cope with the wound if there was no pain, as long as he was able to sit in the orderly room, it did not get worse, neither did it get any better, he just had to change the dressing and apply ointment every day, was not allowed to move much and could not visit the fabulous Roman ruins at Tunis along with his comrades,

  just recently, more than a year since his deployment in Russia, he had been awarded the lowest of all honours, the Eastern Medal, for his injured leg, an honour so insignificant that it was to be handed out sometime after the war as the metal was required elsewhere, for now the award just consisted of a form letter and the ribbon,

  in truth the wounded leg with its infection ought to be healing in a good military hospital, but so long as he was able to sit and type and telephone in Tunis, his superiors would not let him go, and could one be so selfish on account of a leg on which he could still walk and stand to some extent, betray one’s comrades in Russia and in Africa, withdraw yet another man from the Wehrmacht and thus, she felt the overwhelming menace of such unwanted thoughts, perhaps imperil victory, the victory of the Axis Powers,

  on the other hand, if his leg were to heal at some point, would he not be sent straight back to Russia, or to another bad front, it might mean the end of the fairly safe position in the orderly room in a villa on the outskirts of Tunis, where bombs fell only occasionally, but the enemy is not so stupid as to drop his bombs on districts where there are lots of villas,

  who could tell, perhaps it would actually be better for him to stay on the African coast for the time being, in relative safety, where he had been summoned and ordered and still enjoyed the luxury of cooking himself a tinned sausage once a week in a real kitchen with a gas stove, who had the right to make that decision, you ought not to wish too much for yourself, ought not to expect too much, everything is in God’s hands, we will be patient and entrust everything to Him,

  she told herself whenever she became wrapped up in her own thoughts, and repeated these words again now, to calm herself, to resolve the complicated questions of the advantages and disadvantages of the leg issue, at least for the moment,

  it would be a few minutes before she reached Via Sicilia, she looked along the street which led off to the right and to the human fish fountain, from up here the marble human fish, which she had often gazed upon out of helpless curiosity, could be seen from the side, the water rose out of the mussel shell he held and flowed down, the stream rises and falls to fill, this was not the right fountain either, which Roman fountain had the poet been thinking of,

  why, in the capital of Christendom, were there these strange heathen figures everywhere, such as this human fish, the bird person, the fork gods, why was SPQR on every lamppost and every manhole cover, sometimes with full stops between the letters, sometimes without,

  something Latin, Gert had explained to her, she had forgotten that too, and she did not dare to ask Frau Bruhns something so banal, who in Germany would believe her, Latin on the cast-iron manhole covers she walked over hundreds of times every day, over the sturdy iron with the capital letters S,P,Q,R, strange paths leading back two thousand years,

  she sensed something within her rebelling against the constant obligation to stifle the feeling of longing with her reason and faith, because feelings were forbidden in wartime, you were not allowed to rejoice with happiness, you had to swallow your sadness, and like a soldier you were forced to conceal the language of the heart,

  and the longing for the one who could answer such questions, who could allow her to develop a greater understanding and the appropriate sensitivity for the thousands of details of this attractive and repellent city in the shining splendour of its changing, surprising colours, she knew only too well,

  who could reconstruct for her the ruins of the forums, complete the palaces and temples, translate the language of the stones, who could revive the vast number of fragments of the past, explain the pictures and sculptures of the fork gods and human fish, make the church ornaments radiate their brilliance, reconcile the contradictions between the heathen and the pious with delicate phrases, even in nondescript corners such as here, where your eyes could choose between looking right, down to Via Veneto with the fountain, or left towards a tranquil fenced garden with palms in front of a church for Irish monks,

  she should not allow herself to feel this longing, it was not appropriate for a German soldier’s wife, who ought to be waiting patiently at home, first for the final victory and then for her husband,

  but she was not at home, she was in a foreign place, and carrying a child, she had thrown herself into an adventure, left her home and parents and followed her husband, without realizing that God had another plan for her, and nobody could expect her to stroll through this foreign place with a happy heart,

  but in your distress and fear you can always take refuge in God’s heart, you can have a good cry too, and beg Him repeatedly to give you a strong heart, beg that everything that comes from Him, even the most difficult trials, should be for the best,

  she did not complain, she had not the slightest intention of complaining, she was extremely fortunate, all she was trying to do was to heed his advice, which he had given in his angular, not particularly legible handwriting, absorb all the beautiful things Rome has to offer, behind her secret tears she noticed time and again that it was much more difficult than he said, because out of sheer love he overestimated her and did not want to accept how helpless she felt in this labyrinth of the past, there were too many pasts at once,

  and so, like a blossom that opens prematurely, this feeling of longing burst forth inside her again and again, more powerful than reason and military orders, and not everything that her throbbing heart whispered to her could immediately, that same moment, be held off and silenced by her faith in Him, who brings order and rectitude to everything,

  on the pavement a man in a black shirt was blocking her path, he had turned his bicycle upside down and was trying to fit the chain back onto the sprockets, he did not seem to be having much success, he looked at his fingers blackened with oil and cursed, then he looked at her as if caught in the act and cursed again, she walked around him,

  what comforted her was nature, the greenery in January, palms, cypresses, pines and agaves on a high garden terrace behind a fouror five-metre-high wall, she walked in the street beneath the laden boughs of these powerful trees, the wall must be a metre thick to bear and support all this,

  she crossed to the right-hand side of the street, not because she was worried about an unstable wall, but to gain a better view of the green splendour around the multi-storey villa set on a hill, delighted by the yellow of the mimosas,

  until at the next corner she came to a house whose ochre-brown façade was decorated with four stone putti, four chubby, winged boys hung on the corner wall, two supported and framed a coat of arms bearing the year 1889, below this a ribbon from which another boy hung, his head pointing downwards, holding onto a garland of fruits twice the size of himself, she could make out grapes, oranges, lemons and apples in the stone from which the fourth boy dangled,

  the relief ran from the fourth down to the second storey of the house as far as the top of the balcony railings, which gave the impression of being a net for these daring artists, a cheerful scene, four gyr
ating, dancing putti, there was also something irritating about them with their candidly displayed, pointed genitals,

  in about four weeks’ time, she could not suppress this thought, you will see the sex of your child, she did not want to think about this so explicitly, and dampen the gratitude for the miracle growing and thriving inside her with obstinate, superfluous desires, whether it were a son or a daughter, that was God’s will too, every child a gift, and they were as little agreed on girls’ names as boys’ names,

  and left up the street along the front of the steeply towering, chocolate-box villa, busy with hemispheres, columns, mouldings, recesses and statues, whose roof with its broad balustrades and vase finials contrasted with the soft, late-afternoon, winter blue of the sky, on most windows the matt-green shutters were down, perhaps the palazzo was no longer inhabited or difficult to heat, many rich Romans, people said, had moved to their country houses because of the air-raid warnings and poor food supplies,

  the putti house was from 1889, almost the same year as the birth of her father, who would consider the stone-sculpted naked boys indecent, and find it hard to tolerate an encounter with a uniformed Fascist party member, cursing loudly over his bicycle, as well as the sight of this luxury villa and of Via Ludovisi, into which she now turned,

  she had sometimes tried to imagine her father in Rome, a man who had had to live and grow up in such poverty, with such disciplined, God-inspired happiness, and such unassailable modesty to bring up six children and educate them as good Christians, but a former lieutenant commander and highly devout missionary like him was even less suited to this Catholic, wantonly beautiful excess,

  particularly not in this area around Via Veneto with its gigantic, unaffordable hotels, restaurants and cafés, not even in his naval officer’s uniform, which he had been wearing again since September 1939 to inspect the newly built or repaired warships in Kiel, before they were sent out into the battlefields of the oceans, although he would hardly stand out in this area of the city, in the hotels and the restaurants, because some German authorities had their headquarters here and German officers could occasionally be seen,

  a man in a grey coat stood outside a shoe shop, cleaning his spectacles, but he appeared to be paying more attention to the reflecting pane of glass than to the shoes or his spectacles, a spy perhaps, she thought, the Enemy is listening, but what do spies look like, an Englishman perhaps, or an American, and what do Englishmen and Americans look like, she should move on quickly,

  and just like her father she was not able to pass the luxurious buildings, resplendent with solemn colonnaded steps, magnificent balconies and elaborately decorated windows with opulent sills, without wondering who could afford, or still afford to live, dine or drink the ridiculously expensive coffee here, which was not to be found anywhere else,

  but she had to admit that this was only an assumption, a prejudice, perhaps behind these windows adorned with flowers or beneath the domed tower of the Hotel Excelsior, which she was now approaching, they only drank tea or orange juice or wine, or the commonplace substitute coffee in precious gilt-edged cups,

  every time she walked to church she grappled with the mystery of who might be filling these many hotels in the fourth year of the war, and for whom these uniformed porters, always ready for service and proud of their colours and braids, were opening doors and whistling for taxicabs, there were no foreign tourists, the rich were living in the countryside, what remained were businessmen, the military and party bigwigs from Germany, Italy and Japan, and perhaps spies after all,

  as she crossed Via Veneto a brief glance to the right, where the street wound its way down in elegant curves to the human fish fountain and to the fountain of the bees, and a good, long look to the left, to the far end of the avenue, at the gates of the ancient Roman city wall, there was a distant radiance of venerability in the reddish brown of the ancient tiles,

  a wall that had once been built, as Gert explained to her, to protect the Romans from us, the barbarians, roughly in those centuries in which Feliz Dahn’s A Struggle for Rome was set, which she had read, on Gert’s recommendation, in preparation for her visit, walls were no longer needed these days, today Romans and Germans stood together as close allies in an axis against the rest of the hostile world, and on the way up Via Veneto, past Hotel Excelsior, she encountered elegant ladies

  and gentlemen and made-up young women, and in such proximity to the riddles of that wealth hidden behind hotel walls, almost in contact with them, she felt the joy of a deep gratitude that this was not her world, and that she had a man at her side who was unimpressed by all of this, and a father who had taught her humility,

  because he had always had it tough himself, raised as the third son on a Mecklenburg farm until his own father fell from a horse that had taken fright in a storm and could no longer work, paralyzed in a wheelchair, and so had to sell the farm which owed debts in any case, and soon died, while his mother, depressed by the misery of this ill luck, was sent to an institution for the mentally disturbed and locked up for life and

  from the age of ten he and his two brothers were drilled, one after the other, at cadet school until he, the youngest, because he was perceptibly small, wanted to show himself to be the bravest of all and signed up for the dreaded, notoriously severe navy, and in his marine-blue uniform

  rose to the rank of submarine captain when the Great War broke out, sunk ships for his beloved Kaiser and, with a terribly bad conscience, watched the seamen from the sinking enemy cruisers and frigates plummet into the sea, while many of his closest comrades drowned, one of his brothers crashed as a pilot and the other fell in the trenches in France, and in the end he stood there not only without family and without Kaiser, without whom his life had become meaningless, but also without an occupation,

  married, one child, soon two, and failed just as badly as an assistant gardener as he did as an apprentice at the Mecklenburg hailstorm and fire insurance company, and became seriously ill with unaccountable paralysis until God saved him and appointed him to be a travelling preacher who sought to lead people along the path to faith with the power of his captain’s voice in lectures such as ‘What Does Love Mean?’ or ‘The Deepest Human Value’ or ‘How Do We Cope with Life?’

  and who would have seen nothing but sin here, in the splendour of Via Veneto, amongst perfumeries, jewellers and first-rate gentlemen’s tailors, and perhaps the only thing in the whole of Rome he would have warmed to would have been the painting depicting the conversion of Paul in the Lutheran church in Piazza del Popolo, because conversion and calling, Job and Paul were the central themes of his life, and because he would have been able to equate Paul’s fall from his horse with his father’s fall, the Bible with life, and would have drawn his lessons from this, and

  she, too, the second-born daughter, sometimes felt too Evangelical or too North German or too young in the city they called Eternal, as if being here were contrary to her actual nature, and then she got the feeling that it was not right to wander around as a German amongst the Romans in the middle of the war, just because she was waiting for her husband, to step over the manholes with the letters SPQR and GAS and the black basalt paving slabs,

  and that perhaps it was not right to enter any part of this beautiful, foreign country, or to measure it with military steps or to transform it into a mere parade ground as the German officers had done with such a casualness that it was almost provocative, those officers who posed for photographs in front of the Colosseum or the ruins of the Forum, or sat here at the corner in Café Doney, as if they intended to stay for ever, and who appeared to feel at ease with their glass of wine or beer in the late afternoon, as if they were the masters here and not the guests,

  well-to-do Italians, so far as she in passing could identify them by their clothes, gestures and poise, also sat at some of the tables, never more than four people, as was the case everywhere else, to begin with this had amazed her, because the Italians had always been portrayed as a sociable pe
ople who sat at long tables, took great pleasure in eating and drinking to the accompaniment of mandolin-playing street singers,

  until Ilse told her that Mussolini had issued a directive stipulating that no more than four people were allowed to sit together at a restaurant or café table, because the authorities evidently feared that larger groups might give rise to conspiratorial thoughts,

  so many directives demanding things of you in wartime, and which were no doubt necessary as far as maintaining general discipline and order were concerned, idlers were undesirable, and yet here you saw people who looked like idlers, make-up was frowned upon, and yet in this area you came across made-up women,

  perhaps there were just too many laws and regulations, the number of people allowed to sit at a table, the way you had to greet each other and dress and behave, who had to be hated and who you had to put your hope in, what you had to eat and read and listen to and know,

  at the same time the Italians had been loyal to their Duce, and had rejoiced as they followed him with banners, deployments and conquests in the first missions of the war, it was similar to the enthusiasm of the Germans for their Führer, but for about twice as long as the Germans,

  for more than twenty years now they had shared in their country’s elevation to an empire and the pride this had generated, and they had extolled the uniformed benediction of Fascism from the construction of housing to the punctuality of the trains and the peace and order on the streets empty of beggars and invalids, even in the Via Veneto of the wealthy,

  but the war, Frau Bruhns had said recently, the war is going on too long for them, people only like war if it is young, and for the Italians the war is feminine, la guerra, whereas for us Germans it is masculine, people only idolize young women, do you understand what I’m saying,