Minden, West Germany, 1952
The staff had cleared the big table
in the officers mess dining room and, as they did every day, polished it until
it shone like a new car. Presently, the three white-coated German stewards came
out into the drawing room and quietly closed the tall mahogany doors behind
them.
It was late autumn, around three
o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in 1952. Out of uniform, I sat alone by the
fireplace, reading Friday’s Daily
Telegraph, and looked up when Jürgen, the chief steward,
stepped forward a little and was waiting to speak.
He was tall, built like a blockhouse,
with cornflower blue eyes and blond hair cropped like a Junker. It was easy to
imagine him in his black uniform and jackboots, and I hadn’t been surprised
when he’d once told me that, promoted from the ranks on the Eastern Front, he
was a troop commander in an SS Panzer squadron. He added that he’d been wounded
and taken prisoner. At Stalingrad he’d said, as an afterthought. They all said
that. We rarely met a veteran who admitted he’d fought the British or the
Americans.
“Everything all right, Jürgen?”
“Alles
in ordnung, sir. We would like to go now, please.”
It felt strange. This man was in his
late thirties, a veteran of the Wehrmacht,
while I, at twenty-one, had been commissioned months ago, and had yet to hear
shots fired in anger. But according to the unwritten rules of victory and
defeat, he now had to ask me for permission to leave. I thanked him and said
they could go and, almost like a drill movement, the group turned in unison and
left the room.
The mess was always deserted on
Sunday afternoons. A few of the majors drank heavily during lunch, and took a
nap. Younger officers jogged through the frosty cabbage fields in the
countryside not far from our barracks, or cycled along the bank of the river
Weser, past the stark silhouettes of coal mines that seemed deserted. Some took
a trolley car and strolled through the city of Minden, or watched a local game
of soccer. Others wrote letters home.
I was about to go back to my quarters
across the street when the front door bell jangled beyond the green baize
kitchen door. Since the staff had gone, I went out into the hallway and opened
the door. Two frail, elderly people, a man and a woman, stood holding hands on the
doorstep. The man took off his fur hat and made a slight, deferential bow.
He spoke in German. “Good afternoon,
sir. I must apologize for this intrusion.”
We shook hands.
“That’s all right,” I said, “what can
we do for you?”
“My name is Helmut Kreig, and this is
my wife, Resi.”
He turned to the woman, and back to
me. “It’s . . . well, you see, Resi was born in this house and lived here until
she went to the university. We live far away and, as you can see, we are old
now. My wife has not seen the house for nearly fifty years, and we wonder
whether we might see inside it once more.”
Krieg spoke hesitantly, in the
softer, less gutteral hochdeutsch,
the southern dialect of Bavaria. It sounded much more agreeable than the one we
were used to hearing in Westphalia. He was clearly an educated man, and with my
school-boy German I could just follow what he was saying, but doubted I could
maintain a conversation for long.
“I’m afraid my German isn’t very
good,” I said, “Do you or your wife speak English?”
Krieg smiled for the first time. “Jawohl!” he said. “Me, my English is not
very good, but Resi still teaches English at the university in Munich.”
His wife, a sparrow of a woman with
sad, anxious eyes, had said nothing, but now spoke in almost accentless
English.
“Let me tell you something, so you
will understand,” she said earnestly. “My family lived in this house for
generations. Vati was a judge, and the mayor of Minden. Mutti died in the 1890s
when I was a girl, but he lived until 1912. A few years before, Helmut and I
had married and settled in Munich, where I was teaching. I was their only
child, but we could not maintain this house, and so we sold it. It was sad,
because I loved it and was so very happy here, but what could we do? It was so
beautiful, but ever since, for many, years Helmut has promised to bring me back
to see it once more.”
We weren’t allowed to let
unauthorized Germans enter Army premises, but I was sure they were what they
claimed to be. Anyway, what could be secret about an officers’ mess? How could
I refuse them?
“I’ll be glad to show you around.” I
said. “Come on in.”
Resi had seemed apprehensive and ill
at ease until then, but now her big, expressive eyes had brightened with the
excitement of a little girl.
She turned to her husband and said in
German “There, I told you! And you said it wouldn’t be possible!”
The man smiled. “I also told you, my
dear, that it is often not a good thing to go back. It could be strange and
different after all these years.”
I took their hats and coats, hung them
by the door, and we walked into the drawing room. To them, I thought, the room
would seem more like a gentleman’s club than her parents’ living-room. Resi
took in the big leather armchairs and couches, the paintings that depicted
battles in which the regiment had fought, and portraits of long dead generals.
Over the fireplace hung a portrait of the young, newly crowned queen, and her
husband, who wore the dress uniform of the Royal Navy. Resi looked up at this
and turned away. Her face was anxious again.
Now they stood, apparently waiting for me to
move on, and I eased open the big dining room doors and ushered them in.
The room was some forty feet long,
and almost as wide. It, too, had a somber masculinity about it. No woman had
been involved in its design and furnishing. The carved wooden table, already
set for dinner, could seat fifty people. Pictures much like those in the other
room adorned the walls between high casement windows with heavy burgundy
curtains. Criss-crossed in front of the unused fireplace were our regimental
colors, two unfurled, gold-staffed Union Jacks embroidered with the names of
past victories from the two World Wars, the Boer War, Crimea, Waterloo.
Resi turned to me. “I would like to
see the ballroom, please?”
Ballroom? There was no ballroom, what
did she mean?
“We . . .we don’t have a ballroom,” I
said.
“Of course you do,” the old woman
said, smiling, “There is a beautiful ballroom through here! I will show you.”
She stepped ahead of us toward a
double door, made of mahogany like the others, but even taller and wider. There
was a tarnished brass key in the lock, which she vainly tried to turn. Beside
her, I drew the door-handle toward me, and turned the key only with difficulty.
We went in. The room was two stories
high, with an elaborate gilt minstrels’ gallery. Dark evergreen trees in the
garden outside shut out the dying afternoon light through its grimy, undraped
windows. One wall was stacked with wooden crates of Army stores, another with
blankets. A rusty bicycle with a buckled wheel lay on the once polished floors
of inlaid oak. Up in the lofty ceiling hung the shattered remains of six
crystal chandeliers.
Resi’s mouth was open, yet at first I
didn’t realize that the sudden anguished wail was hers. The cry seemed to fill the
great room. She had turned and was stumbling back through the dining room, and
her husband and I followed.
“She is very upset,” he said. “I
warned her many times that it might be different. How could she think
otherwise?”
Back in the hallway she had draped
her overcoat over her shoulders and was leaning on the half open door, sobbing
like a child. Her husband hurried forward and took both her hands tenderly, but
she snatched them away, grabbed her coat, and ran down the steps and the
pathway toward the street.
Helmut turned to me as he made for
the door and grasped my hand. “You have been so kind, and I am sorry this has
happened.”
We shook hands and he was gone.
Through the glass of the now-closed
door I could hear her screaming, until the sound of a passing trolley car
drowned her voice.
ooo0oo
