The sun, streaming through my front window, appears to have cleared a patch on my head: oh, the thermal advantages of female pattern baldness! I wasn’t always so spare up there. But I must say it has been, in general, a boon not to have been a beautiful woman. Because I was barely looked at, I was free to do the looking.
Toller’s book is on the table. Some of his amendments are still wedged into it, where he wanted them to go. I bend forward to collect the ones that have scattered.
Outside, a construction truck beeps into the neighbour’s, blindarsing into a park. The clouds are retreating over the street and the front garden, away from me in my dressing gown in my house, out to sea. In Sydney’s spring they perform each morning, rolling back from us like a tin-lid on sardines. The birdcall is intense. I choose to believe it is joy at the new day, but I know they’re checking to see who has made it through the night.
From this angle in my chair, those clouds will snag on the frangipani in the yard, its branches naked as a gigantic coral, probing the air. If the tree doesn’t stop them the clouds will go on to smother the two electric wires tethering this house to the pole in the street. Water and electricity do not mix. Voices come back to me, or sometimes just injunctions.
The mind is an interesting organ. Spooling and unspooling of its own accord. Or is the brain the organ, and the mind something else altogether, an effect of it, a Scheinbild? Professor Melnikoff tells me that Alzheimer’s patients regress in their memories until the first things they learnt are the last things they forget: ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, the residual civilities of the human, hardwired into the hippocampus. One will become un-toilet-trained, but politely. Thank you for wiping.
But Alzheimer’s, Gott sei Dank, is not what I’ve got. It’s just that occasionally, as on the edge of sleep, an obscure memory pops up, like a slide in a carousel. My friends and the other people slip off it and into the room, they breathe and fidget and open their mouths.
Some memories may not even be my own. I heard the stories so often I took them into me, burnished and smothered them as an oyster a piece of grit, and now, mine or not, they are my shiniest self.
Nineteen-seventeen was the year that I, too, first came across the Independent Social Democratic Party. When Toller was in the sanatorium I was eleven, and in treatment of my own. But it isn’t so much the illness as the recovery that has stuck in my mind. That was when I lived at Dora’s, and my life began, as observer, audience. And as cousin.
That year, scarlet fever swept through our town in far-flung Silesia. Four children died. The proper doctors were all at the front, with my father. Father had volunteered, like so many Jews. He hadn’t been allowed to study law–no Jews permitted till his younger brother Hugo’s time–but the war welcomed them with open maw. In my child’s mind I imagined no harm could come to him, what with all those doctors there.
When I had been sweating for three days, my mother sent Marta for the Sanitätsrat, the town’s first-aid officer. He was a retired butcher with huge hands and yeasty breath. From his trade he had a certain confidence in jointing; he put his thumbs directly into my shoulder, ankle, knee, hip–till I yelped.
‘Here!’ he declared, pointing to the small tent of skin over my hipbone. ‘The fever has lodged here!’
The man opened a case like one for a musical instrument, removing a long glass cylinder. He screwed the needle into it while they held me down–Marta and Mother at my shoulders, Cook at my feet. The Sanitätsrat put his hand on my upper thigh. Cook’s mouth disappeared into a line.
When he finished I saw the full syringe marbling red and yellow-green.
‘We must string up the leg,’ the Sanitätsrat said. He went away and brought back a frame from his shop. It still had meat hooks jangling on it from a triangle of metal. He connected my bandaged foot to a pulley-and-weight system over the frame. This was meant to stretch the infected leg, lest it grow shorter than the other. I stayed in bed for two months, and have since walked with a shift in my gait that has never bothered me once.
My father came home soon afterwards. He had a crippled arm, a wound he was as proud of as he would have been of duelling scars from a university fraternity. He had to learn to do everything with his left hand. Once, at lunch, my mother thought I was mocking his clumsiness and pulled me up sharply.
‘What is the matter with you? Cat stole your manners? Half your soup falls back into the bowl.’
My mouth would only open part way. The pus had lodged in my jaw too, and locked it.
‘So much for our Loquax,’ Mother said. ‘You seem to have worn out the mechanism.’
The family irony: they called the quiet one Loquax. Mother had certain areas of tenderness and whimsy–care of sick animals, silly operetta lyrics, expensive gifts for the servants, elaborate hat trimmings (I remember a toy bird, and–can this be right?–a miniature but entire three-masted ship)–but she was a Spartan at heart. My brother and I were undeserving of our wealth and health, but for our misfortunes we were personally responsible. (This, I have found, is a difficult life bargain.)
In Beuthen a local doctor offered to operate on my cheeks, to snip the tendon and release the jaw.
‘But she will be scarred for life!’ my father cried. In the trap on the way home he worried aloud. ‘We can’t have her scarred as well.’ He meant as well as limping.
In Berlin Uncle Hugo, Dora’s father, found a surgeon with an idea. He would cut me from behind the ears, where the scars could not be seen.
After the operation my parents left me for six weeks at Uncle Hugo and Aunt Else’s, so the professor could visit his handiwork. It was the first time I had stayed away from home on my own.
My head was shaved and wrapped in gauze bandages, over the crown and taut under my chin. The professor had left gaps for my eyes, nostrils, mouth and ears. People ignored me, as though I were a deaf person or a pet: intimacies and arguments were carried on in my hearing.
Children are the only people who can see adults from inside their lives, permitted to observe every small thing, as if their forming minds are incapable of judging what they see, or as if it does not lodge there, somewhere, permanently.
I saw Paula, the housemaid with the strawberry mark on her face, kissing a wooden spoon for practice, long and with longing, her eyes shut. When Dora was at school I touched the mysterious suspenders and clasps she used when she bled, left hanging over the back of a chair. I watched Cook hoard eggs over five days to make a cake for her son’s nineteenth birthday, even though her Michael had died the year before on the Somme.
The apartment at Chamissoplatz was large, and the three of them–Hugo, Else and Dora–seemed to live independent adult lives there, connected by bonds of rational affection and mutual regard, rather than the rule of blood. As far as I saw, they never slept. I could wander the corridors at any time of day or night and no one would reprimand me or send me back to bed; they fully expected that reason and nature would take me there, eventually.
If I came across Else in her study she would turn to me, her hair escaping its bun, floaty and alive, and show me one of her chemical equations. She would explain the beauty of the letters and brackets and numbers, of elements obeying laws. I could watch Hugo pace his room, mouthing an address for court the next day–or was it parliament by that stage?–then stop mid-sentence and move to the lectern to correct it. If he glimpsed me in the doorway he would call, ‘Just who I wanted to see!’ and invite me in to pack his pipe, or play with Kit, the dim and feathery red setter who slept away his days in there. Hugo had no special voice for children. When he spoke to you he made you into your best self.
Hugo and Dora left early, so in the mornings I went in to Else. I sat in her room while Paula helped her dress, one covered button at a time up her spine. I remember once, she turned her head to me, heavy as a flower on a stalk. Paula kept working.
‘Impractical, don’t you think?’ Else’s voice was deep, unexpected, like Dora’s. ‘They should be at the front.’
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I nodded. When Paula was gone she leant in to me. ‘Those buttons,’ she raised her eyebrows at the silly world, ‘are a sign to others that I keep a maid.’
I nodded again.
‘Come on, chatterbox, you need your egg.’
After breakfast Else would leave for the university laboratory and I would moon about. Sometimes I made pictures.
Dora had been given a Schulprämie box camera for topping her year. It sat on a high shelf in her room. She had no interest in it, but it fascinated me: a box with an eye. I held it to my chest and looked down into the small glass. Everything was contained there in rounded miniature: her steel-framed bed and white counterpane, a tottery pile of books on the floor next to it. I sensed the instant layer of protection between me and the world; I could be looking down but seeing straight ahead. Most of all I liked the way it gave me a reason to be looking. Dora let me use it while I was staying.
At first I made pictures of still things. Rhomboids of light thrown onto the carpet by the afternoon. The timpani of copper pans hanging in the kitchen, and their shadow-twins on the chalky wall. Myself in the mirror, the mummy-like head bent over the box, dark lashes fringing the bandages. The camera’s shutter was a lever at the side of the box. It made a long, soft, metal sound, the sound of capture and theft. I owned these moments when I owned nothing at all.
Later I was bolder, asking my subject to hold still. I got Cook’s floury hands on the ceramic mixing bowl and, once, Dora’s face so close I caught the flickering mahogany lights of her iris. A pigeon on my window ledge turned into a grey blur of speed on the print.
When she came home for lunch Dora and I would eat together, just the two of us at table. Every day I had broth and rice pudding through a straw. After a couple of weeks I couldn’t face it any more.
‘Come on, Ruthie, just a little,’ Dora said. ‘It’s not for much longer.’
I looked at her plate. A crumbed cutlet with fried potatoes and kale.
‘Who needs to open their mouth so wide anyway?’ she mused, chewing. ‘It’s probably just a residual thing. Like an appendix. A development from before knives,’ she waved her knife, ‘when people had to bite off huge chunks of antelope. Or whatever.’
Dora had no interest in food. She would much rather talk until her dinner went cold, then abandon it, justifiably, as congealed and inedible on the plate.
‘I can’t eat this mush any more,’ I said.
She glanced at me. I was looking down at her meal. She picked up her plate and marched off to the kitchen, returning with a bowl of broth for herself.
‘You smiling, Loquax?’
I nodded. She looked doubtful. Then, suddenly, full of mischief. ‘Let me show you something.’ She stood up again, placed one elbow on the table and made a fist. I thought she was about to show me a new kind of arm wrestle.
‘Watch this.’
She opened her mouth wide and lowered it over her hand. Staring at me, she put her lips around the little finger, then, one by one, the other knuckles went in. She stopped at the thumb. Took in more air through her nose. It hurt to watch, but her eyes held me the whole time. A twist, an ugly grunt, and the thumb was in.
I was horrified, entranced. Here was my cousin, a woman but not quite, her black eyes full of pain, with a fist, a whole fist, in her mouth.
‘Uugh!’ She ducked and it slid out like a wet ball. Her lips had white stripes on them where they’d stretched.
‘See?’ She laughed, rubbing her mouth. ‘Who needs such a jaw! Why on earth would anyone in their right mind do that?’
I was eleven years old and I’d never wanted to do anything more in my life.
One afternoon she didn’t come home. It was April. I sat on the window-seat, watching the street. The trees held tight their secret green, unconvinced of spring. The doors to the next room were open. Through them came the murmur of men’s voices, a pipe-tap on a shoe. I wasn’t listening. Hugo was there with his friend Erwin Thomas, a colleague from the Ministry of Justice. I watched the street: tram cars shunting along their tracks, and the shifting patterns of hats.
When Dora finally came in I could see her through the gap between the doors, rosy from cold. I didn’t go in to them, but moved back to the divan in the shadows of the room. Like all children, I knew that adult conversation was better if I wasn’t there. Dora held leaflets in her left hand that flipped and fanned.
‘Uncle Erwin!’ She shook his hand. ‘Papa.’
Hugo held her by the shoulders a moment. ‘How did you go?’ He turned to Erwin. ‘Dora has been at the Krupp factory. Leafleting the women.’
Dora had joined the Young Socialists at fourteen, and now the brand-new anti-war party, the Independent Social Democrats. She and Hugo had spent each afternoon that week drafting the leaflet, and I had hung around in the background, listening to them debate every word and idea behind it. I understood little, but enjoyed the warmth of purpose between them. Hugo’s speciality, honed from defending unionists, was criminal procedure. ‘It’s legal,’ he had said over the draft, ‘but I’m afraid that’s no guarantee.’
I caught the seriousness in his voice. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Being legal is no guarantee against arrest these days.’ The war was still on, Hugo explained, so protesting against it could be sedition, no matter how carefully worded the leaflet. Protesting against it at a munitions factory would, at the very least, provoke the authorities. Still, both Hugo and Dora felt it had to be done.
Here she was, though, home again safely, standing on the red rug in her lace-up shoes, looking from her father to Uncle Erwin and back.
‘May I?’ Uncle Erwin asked, extending his hand for a leaflet. He wore a ring with a crest on his little finger.
Uncle Erwin held out the leaflet with straight arms and read aloud: ‘“When the time comes for an end to this criminal war … count on your support as workers united in international solidarity … in the cause of peace…”’ He looked up, bewildered. ‘You’re calling for them to strike?’ He turned to face Hugo. ‘Krupp is a Paragraph 172 essential industry. Such a protest is illegal!’
Erwin was not a real uncle, but a family friend. His father Max, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, had been Else’s teacher at university. The tips of Uncle Erwin’s sandy moustaches were waxed to dangerous, magnificent points. I often wondered how he slept with them. I believe, thinking about it now, that he was a man who felt it was important to do ‘the done thing’. He skied at St Moritz and summered at the family estate in Prussia; he read the current books, precisely because they were current. For Uncle Erwin there was a curriculum for living in which the things to do had been set down by others. The satisfactions and pleasures of life consisted less in doing them than in having ticked them off the list. He sometimes wore a black, astrakhan-collared coat that fascinated me–a man dressed in the soft-coiled underbelly of a lamb.
That day, he had on a tight grey flannel waistcoat, with a heavy fob-chain disappearing into its right pocket. His face was red.
Hugo said nothing and sat down. He had a quality of listening that could turn into a force of silence. Erwin switched to Dora.
‘In a practical, let’s say “materialist”, sense, my dear’–he stroked the flat part of his moustaches with one hand–‘you are asking these women to vote themselves out of a job.’ He looked again at the thin cyclostyled paper. ‘“You are at the heart of the industrial machine,”’ he read, ‘“you have the power to reverse the lever of destruction–”’
‘The union will support them while they are off,’ Dora interrupted. ‘We’re looking at the broader issue here.’
‘If you’re doing that, then, my dear,’ he eyed her, ‘you must know that a vote for peace is hardly a vote for industry.’
Dora was shifting her weight from one foot to the other. ‘I believe,’ she said, ‘you just admitted our economy depends on making machines for war.’
She was seventeen. I had never heard someone so young speak to
an adult like this. It wasn’t just talking back to him, it was the confidence to be calm doing it.
In Erwin’s cheek I watched a bulge rise where his jawbone flexed under the skin. He turned to Hugo. ‘You checked this?’ He held the leaflet out as if it were a contaminated thing.
‘I did. It’s legal. Which is not, of course,’ he smiled at his daughter, ‘to take anything away from her courage in distributing them.’
‘The law’s a fig leaf over power,’ Dora quipped softly.
Hugo unhooked his glasses from each ear and began to clean them. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘I can see why you might have been swept up in 1914. But you must now be brave enough to change your mind. It is time to call for an end to this terrible war.’
Uncle Erwin’s shoulders were high and tight. ‘Our men are out there.’ He thrust his arm towards the window, as though the soldiers were right outside. ‘They are at Passchendaele and Verdun and the Eastern Front. They are dying, and you would make it for nothing!’
Hugo checked his glasses in the light. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I would make it stop.’
Uncle Erwin was coming in and out of my line of vision through the gap between the doors. Dora moved to take the leaflet from his hand but he snatched it away. She glimpsed me but made no sign.
When Uncle Erwin spoke again it was to Hugo. His voice was pained. ‘Do you believe in nothing?’
‘I believe,’ Hugo said evenly, ‘that we are squandering the good name of Germany, along with her blood. The fact that the nation has gone to war does not make those who opposed it at the beginning, and those who oppose it now, traitors.’
‘I am … behind … my country.’
‘And my country,’ Hugo said, ‘is wrong.’
The hand with the ring consumed the leaflet. And through his cheek I watched his jawbone, locking and unlocking.
After Uncle Erwin left I started to cry. I don’t know why–perhaps a reaction to adult anger. Dora and Hugo followed the sniffling and found me. They joked about the built-in handkerchief of bandages on my face, but I have always been ashamed of crying.