You find things like this in the toy section of large department stores, where they have shelves and shelves of neatly organized models, representing famous originals that fly, drive, or float. I doubt she found it in Schwerin. She probably went looking in Hamburg in the Alster-haus or in Berlin at KdW, the Kaufhaus des Westens, and found what she wanted. She got to Berlin often. These days she was driving a VW Golf and was on the road a lot. She was a terror behind the wheel, passing other cars as a matter of principle.
When she came to Berlin, it wasn't to visit me in my messy bachelor pad in Kreuzberg but to “chew the fat” in Schmargendorf with her old girlfriend Jenny, eating pastry and drinking Red Riding Hood champagne. Since the changeover, the two of them saw each other often, as if they had to compensate for time lost after the Wall went up. They made a strange pair.
When Mother visited Aunt Jenny — on the occasions when I was allowed to sit in — she acted bashful, as if she were still a little girl who had just played a mean trick on Jenny and now wanted to undo the damage. Aunt Jenny, on the other hand, seemed to have forgiven her for all the awful things she did to her long ago. I saw her stroke Mothers head as Mother hobbled past her, whispering, “It's all right, Tulla, it's all right.” Then the two of them fell silent. And Aunt Jenny sipped her hot lemonade. Aside from Konrad, who had drowned while swimming, and Konny, who had committed a crime, if there was anyone else Mother loved, it was her old school friend.
Since the days when I had occupied that little room in the Schmargendorf apartment under the eaves, not a single piece of furniture has been moved. All the knick-knacks standing about, yet not covered with dust, looked like survivals from yesteryear. And just as all the walls at Aunt Jennys, even the sloping ones, are plastered with ballet photos — Aunt Jenny, who became known under the nom d'artiste of Angustri, sylphlike as Giselle, in Swan Lake and Coppelia, solo or posing next to her equally delicate ballet master — Mother too is plastered inside and out with memories. And if people can trade memories, as the expression goes, Karlsbader Strasse was and is the trading floor for these durable goods.
So on one of these trips to Berlin — before or after her visit to Aunt Jenny — she must have picked out a very special model from the assortment at KdW. Not the Dornier hydroplane Do X, not a King Tiger tank model, not the battleship Bismarc, which was sunk as early as 41, or the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, which was junked after the war, seemed suitable as a present. It was not something military she selected; it was the passenger vessel Wilhelm Gustloff on which she had her heart set. I doubt she let any salesclerk help her; Mother has always known what she wants.
My son must have been given special permission to show off this particular object in the visiting room. At any rate, the guard on duty nodded benevolently when the inmate Konrad arrived, loaded down with the model ship. The sight started a reel of thoughts unwinding in me that soon formed an impenetrable tangle. Is this never going to end? Must this story keep repeating itself? Can't Mother get over it? What in the world was she thinking of?
To Konny, now of age, I said, “That's very nice. But aren't you too old for this kind ofthing now?” He admitted that I had a point. “I know. But if you'd given me the Gustloff for my birthday when I was thirteen or fourteen, I wouldn't have to make up for missing out on this kid's stuff. I had fun doing it, though. And I have plenty of time, right?”
The reproach hit home. And while I was still trying to recover, asking myself whether playing with the damned ship as a model, while he was still a boy and also under his fathers supervision, might have averted the worst, he said, “I asked Grandma Tulla to get it for me. I wanted to see with my own eyes how the ship looked. Came out pretty well, didn't it?”
From stem to stern, the Strength through Joy ship showed itself in all its beauty. From the thousands of parts my son had fashioned the vacationer's classless dream boat. How spacious the sundeck was, not chopped up by any superstructures! How elegantly the single funnel rose amidships, slightly inclined toward the stern! Clearly recognizable the glassed-in promenade deck! Beneath the bridge the winter garden, known as the Bower. I considered where inside the ship the E deck with the swimming pool might be, and counted the lifeboats: none was missing.
Konny had placed the gleaming white model in a wire rack of his own devising. The hull was visible down to the keel. I expressed my admiration, though with a touch of irony, for the skillful hobbyist. He reacted to my praise with laughter that was more a giggle, then whipped out of his pocket a little tin that had once held peppermint drops and in which he now had three red paste-on dots, about the size of a pfennig. With the three dots he marked the places in the hull where the torpedoes hit their mark: one dot on the port side of the forecastle, the next on the spot where I had guessed the swimming pool must be, the third at the location of the engine room. Konrad performed this task solemnly. After applying these stigmata to the ship's body, he stepped back to observe the effect, was apparently satisfied, and said, “Nice work.” Then he abruptly changed the subject.
My son wanted to know how I had voted in the election. I said, “Certainly not for the Republikaner” and then admitted that it had been years since I'd gone near a polling place. “That's typical of you, not to have any real convictions,” he said, but wouldn't reveal how he had voted on his mail-in ballot. Suspecting Mothers influence, I guessed that he might have gone for the PDS. But he merely smiled, and then began to fasten to the model ship small flags, which he had apparently made himself and which had been waiting in another little tin, to be affixed to the bow, the stern, and the tops of the two masts. He had even produced miniature versions of the KDF emblem and the flag of the German Labor Front, nor was the one with the swastika missing. The fully dressed ship. Everything was just right, but with him nothing was right.
What can be done when a son takes possession of his father's thoughts, thoughts that have been festering for years under a lid, and even translates them into action? All my life I have tried to take the right tack, at least politically, not to say the wrong thing, to appear correct on the outside. That's called self-discipline. Whether for the Springer papers or the Tageszeitung, I always sang along. Even had myself convinced by the stuff I turned out. Whipping up hatred, cynically slinging the lingo — two courses of action I practiced alternately without any difficulty. But I never took the lead, never set the direction in editorials. Others picked the topics. I steered a middle course, never slid all the way to the right or the left, didn't cause any collisions, swam with the current, let myself drift, kept my head above water. Well, that probably had to do with the circumstances of my birth; that could explain almost everything.
But then my son kicked up a storm. No surprise, actually. Was bound to happen. Aftef everything Konny had posted on the Internet, blathered in the chat room, proclaimed on his Web site, those carefully aimed shots fired on the southern bank of Lake Schwerin were absolutely consistent. Now he was locked up, had gained respect by winning at Ping-Pong and running a computing course, could boast of passing his exams with flying colors, and, as Mother had shared with me, was already receiving job offers from businesses for later on: the new technologies! He seemed to have a future in the new century that was just around the bend. He made a cheerful impression, looked well fed, and talked fairly rationally, but was still waving the flag — in the form of a miniature. This will end badly, I thought confusedly, and went looking for advice.
First, because I was really at a loss, I even went to Aunt Jenny. The old lady in her doll's house sat there, her head trembling slightly, and listened to everything I came out with, more or less honestly. You could unload with her. She was used to this, presumably since her youth. After I had dumped most of the tangle at her feet, she presented me with her frozen smile and said, “It's the evil that needs to come out. My old girlfriend, your dear mother, knows this problem well. Dear me, when I think how I used to suffer as a little girl when she had those outbursts. And my adoptive father, too — I'm supposed to be the child of real Gypsies, which had to be kept secret in those days — well, that rather eccentric schoolteacher, whose name, Brunies, I was allowed to take, got to know Tulla from her evil side. It was pure mischief on her part. But it turned out badly. After the denunciation, they came for Papa Brunies… He was sent to Stutthof… But in the end things turned out almost all right. You should talk to her about your worries. Tulla knows from her own experience how completely a person can change…”
So I took A24 and floored the pedal to the Schwerin exit. Yes, I talked to Mother, to the extent it was possible to share with her these thoughts of mine that were scuttling this way and that. We sat on the balcony of her eleventh-floor apartment in the renovated concrete-slab building on Gagarinstrasse, with its view of the broadcast tower; down below, Lenin was still standing, gazing westward. Her place seemed unchanged, but recently Mother had rediscovered the faith of her youth. She was playing the Catholic and had set up a sort of home altar in one corner of the living room, where, between candles and plastic flowers — white lilies — a small picture of the Blessed Virgin was displayed; the photo next to it, showing Comrade Stalin in dress whites and genially smoking a pipe, made an odd impression. It was difficult to stare at this altar and not make some remark.
I had brought honey squares and poppy-seed bars, which I knew Mother liked. When I had spilled my guts, she said, “You needn't worry too much about our
Konradchen. He's paying for what he got himself into. And when he's free again, I'm sure he'll be a genuine radical, like I used to be when my own comrades gave me a hard time for being Stalin's last faithful follower. No, you won't see any more bad things happening to him. Our Konradchen's always had a guardian angel hovering over him…”
She displayed “bashed-in windows,” then resumed her normal expression and confirmed what her friend Jenny with unfailing instinct had said: “The stuff we have in our heads and everywhere, all that evil has to come out…”
No, Mother had no helpful advice for me. Her white-haired ideas were shorn too close. But where else could I go? To Gabi, by any chance?
Once more I took the beaten path from Schwerin to Mölln, and, as always happened, was struck by the unpretentious beauty of the town, which, going back in history, invokes Till Eulenspiegel, but could hardly stand his pranks today. Because my ex had recently acquired a live-in boyfriend, a “dear, gentle person, easily hurt,” as she said, we met in nearby Ratzeburg and ate at the Seehof, with a view of swans and ducks, among them an indefatigable diving duck. She ordered vegetarian, and I had the Wiener schnitzel.
She led with the statement, “God knows, I don't want to hurt your feelings,” then proceeded to blame me for everything that had gone wrong with our son. Finally she said, “You know, I haven't been able to get anywhere with the boy for a long time now. He shuts himself off. He's not receptive to love and that kind of attention. Lately I've reached the conclusion that deep inside him, and that includes his innermost thoughts, everything's ruined. But when I take your mother into consideration, I get a sense of what she passed on to her own fine son and from him to Konrad. That can't be changed. By the way, on my last visit your son broke off all contact with me.”
Then she gave me to understand that she wanted to start a new life with her “warmhearted yet smart and sophisticated” partner. She deserved this “modest opportunity” after everything she had been through. “And just think, Paul: at last I've found the strength to stop smoking.” We skipped dessert. Out of consideration for her I refrained from lighting up another cigarette. My ex insisted on paying for her own meal.
In retrospect, my attempt to get advice from Rosi, my son's devoted girlfriend, strikes me as ludicrous, but also revealing of what the future held. The very next day, which was visiting day, we met at a cafe in Neustrelitz, shortly after she had seen Konny. Her eyes were no longer red. Her hair, which before had fallen loose to her shoulders, was now pinned up in a neat bun. Her posture, previously self-abnegating, had stiffened. Even her hands, which before had moved restlessly, as though searching for something to hold on to, now rested on the table, firmly clenched. She assured me, “How you choose to conduct yourself as a father is up to you. As for me, I'll always believe in the good in Konny, no matter what. He's so strong, such a model of strength. And I'm not the only one who believes in him firmly, absolutely firmly — and not only in thoughts.”
I told her she was right about his good core. Theoretically that was my belief, too. I wanted to say more, but she said, as if to bring the conversation to a close, “It's not him but the world that's evil.” The moment had come for me to announce my visit at the juvenile detention center.
For the first time I was allowed to visit him in his cell. Apparently Konrad Pokriefke had won this onetime special privilege as a reward for good behavior and exemplary social conduct. His fellow inmates were outdoors, I heard, working in the gardens. Konny was waiting for me in the corner he called his own.
It was an old dump, this facility, but word had it that a modern replacement was in the works. On the one hand I thought I was immune to surprises by now, on the other I was afraid of my son's sudden inspirations.
As I entered and at first saw only stained walls, he was sitting in his Norwegian sweater at a table shoved against the wall, and said, without looking up, “Well, Dad?”
With a casual gesture. My son, who had caught me unawares with his “Dad,” indicated the bookshelf, where all the framed photos were gone, removed from the wall — those of David as Wolfgang, Frankfurter young and old, the two purported images of the U-boat commander Marinesko. Nothing new had taken their place. I ran a quick eye over the spines of the books on the shelf: what one might expect — a lot of history, some works on the new technologies, in their midst two volumes of Kafka.
I did not comment on the vanished photos. And he didn't seem to have expected any comment. What happened next went quickly. Konrad stood up, lifted from its wire rack in the middle of the table the model of the ship named for Wilhelm Gustloff and marked with three red dots. He leaned the ship against the rack as if it were listing, and then began, not in haste or in anger, but rather with premediated deliberateness, to smash with his bare fist his carefully pieced-together creation.
That must have hurt. After four or five blows, the side of his right fist began to bleed. He had probably cut himself on the funnel, the lifeboats, the two masts. But he kept going. When the hull refused to give way beneath his blows, he picked up the wreck in both hands, swung it to one side, raised it to eye level, and then let it fall to the floor, which was made of oiled planks. He then trampled what was left of the model Wilhelm Gustloff, the last thing being the remaining lifeboats, which had popped out of their davits.
“Satisfied now, Dad?” After that, not a word. His gaze went to the barred window, and remained fixed on it. I babbled something, I no longer recall what. Something positive. “Never give up,” or, “Let's make a fresh start together,” or some such rubbish from American movies: “I'm proud of you, son.” When I left, my son had nothing more to say.
A few days later, no, the next day, someone — the same someone in whose name I have been doing this crabwalk and making some progress — urged me to go online. He said the mouse might lead me to a suitable conclusion. Until then I'd practiced restraint: only what I needed professionally, occasional porno, that was it. Since Konny had been locked up, the ether was silent. And David was gone, of course.
I had to surf for a long time. The name of the accursed ship appeared on the screen numerous times, but nothing new, nothing final and conclusive. Then it turned out to be worse than I had feared. At the URL www.kameradschaft-konrad-pokriefke.de, a Web site introduced itself in German and English, campaigning for someone whose conduct and thinking it held up as exemplary, someone whom the hated system had for that very reason locked up. “We believe in you, we will wait for you, we will follow you…” And so on and so forth.
It doesn't end. Never will it end.