The Bewildering Effect Of Cabbages - Chapter 5

“At school, they used to call Greta Miss Porky.”

“Please. Don’t make it worse than it already is.”

“Well, it’s true. She was pink and round and even wore her hair in pigtails.”

“My God.”

“I just can’t think of a reason why you should want to poke my sister. I wouldn’t have been able to do it, not even for a trillion marks.”

“Well, you’re her brother. It would be odd if -”

“I’m not talking as her goddamn brother, I’m talking as a man.”

“Well, I had a lot to drink, and so did she. These things happen.”

“Not with Greta. The silly cow is in love with you.”

“Don’t be a fool. She’s simply grateful I’m doing the right thing.”

“You’re the fool. I’ve known Greta for nineteen years. You’ve known her for only two days, and one drunken night. She’s convinced that by meeting, becoming pregnant with, and marrying Hugo von Tass she is fulfilling not only her own destiny, but also that of the hitherto rather proletarian Tauben family.”

“I’ve known Greta for more than two days and one drunken night. We met several times in the woods near the camp. What’s the time?”

“You fucked her in the snow, in the forest, stone sober, during the day? I can’t believe it.”

“You don’t need to. What’s the time?”

“Nearly six.”

“We don’t have to leave until ten tomorrow. Let’s go and get drunk.”

“I should take a look at the car.”

“Pigshit.”

“Oh, all right.”

* * *

The sight of his fat cows grazing always gave Dietrich Klotz much pleasure. He was standing on the edge of the road, rocking gently back and forth on the heels of his dirty boots, chewing on a grass stem and furtively scratching his balls with a pocketed hand. His gaze was vaguely contented and did not change until it was too late.

The black motor car was going so fast it arrived almost soundlessly. Klotz became aware of the thunder of wheels on the road, of the screaming engine – and when he looked at the car, it was within spitting distance and rushing right at him. He was on the point of jumping aside when the car’s wide fender clipped his hip, sending him into the ditch.

He ended up with his forehead feeling the warmth of a fresh cowpat. One of his cows mooed in a complaining manner.

“Stop, you fucking idiot. Stop! We’ve run a man down.”

He saw Willi’s eyes swivel to look at his in the slot-like mirror mounted on top of the dashboard.

“He’s okay. He’s up. Look for yourself if you don’t believe me.” Hugo turned on the slippery leather, taking care not to squash the white gardenia in his lapel. The rear window was very small, but it afforded a view of the following oval-shaped tableau: a group of black and white cows, one of them with its head expectantly raised; and in the foreground, a man walking with ill-measured, wobbly steps, appearing to wipe something off his face with the sleeve of his jacket.

Hugo turned back to face the front but the sight of the rushing road made him feel faintly sick. He looked to the side, trying to focus on something distant, and saw a muddy little pond with a dirty swan in the middle, and further away, a red-tiled roof showing through trees and shrubbery. A small boy was walking behind a flock of geese as they waddled towards the pond. Hugo closed his eyes. He had just passed a small farm; he was on the Magdeburg-Bucholz road; he was on the way to his own wedding. There was no use even trying to deny any of that.

* * *

The town of Bucholz is remarkable enough to be totally unremarkable; had it been a village of dullards, a place where nothing ever happened, it would have been much more remarkable. The town’s name emerged briefly in the early seventeenth century, and figures to this day on the pages of history books dealing with the Thirty Years’ War. Sometime in 1633, the staunchly Catholic town of Bucholz was taken by a regiment of Swedish dragoons led by a Baron Wallenrode. The citizens of Bucholz, aided by a score or two of deserters, put up a heroic defense: their musket fire, ragged though it was, routed the first, careless charge of the dragoons.

Wallenrode was furious. He had been seriously troubled by his hemorrhoids for the previous two days, and now had also suffered the indignity of having been thrown by his panicked horse. However, the Baron’s anger did not prevent him from thinking in a cool, military manner. Earlier that day, the dragoons had captured a half-battery of six-pounders, and Wallenrode had the two cannon set up and firing on the town within an hour. One Swabian gunner who refused to cooperate had a rapier pushed up his anus until its point emerged just to the left of his navel; seeing that, the other gunners did as they were told. Three hours later, the town surrendered; by that time over fifty buildings were ablaze.

Baron Wallenrode was pleased with his victory, but he did not forget about his soldierly duties. Upon entering Bucholz, he had his men seize the mayor’s wife, then had her feet glazed with goose fat and placed over a smartly burning fire. Within seconds, the mayor of Bucholz was rolling out a list of citizens who had played a prominent role in the defense of the town – the barber, two teachers, five craftsmen, and a deserter in the rank of corporal. These men were immediately hanged.

It was gratifying to discharge soldierly duties and simultaneously give vent to emotions stirred by his raging piles, and Baron Wallenrode decided to make a victory tour. He put on his best uniform, mounted his horse (his batman had managed to catch it), and set out to conduct a sightseeing tour of the freshly captured town. He came across a mound of smoking ruins that particularly pleased his eye, and decided he would like to stand on its top and survey his new conquest from this satisfyingly symbolic pedestal. He climbed the pile of blackened timber with a proud step, buttocks clenched tightly; at the very top, he put one hand on his rapier’s pommel and turned around smartly on his heel; the mound of rubble groaned and parted. When his dragoons extracted him some time later, Wallenrode’s dress uniform was torn and streaked with soot, and his moustache flecked with foam. Over the next hour, over half of the surviving citizens of Bucholz were killed, the carnage stopping only when the dragoons got too tired of chasing panicked people.

The weary Wallenrode retired for the night. Being a military professional, he made sure guards were posted wherever appropriate, including one in front of his own door. However, he hadn’t counted on the determination of the boy who brought him his washing water (his beard was caked with other people’s blood). The boy had a four-inch nail hidden up his sleeve, and pushed it as far as it would go into Wallenrode’s right eye.

The dragoons felt that this was an unlucky omen. Too tired to kill anyone apart from the water boy, the innkeeper (his name was Kaspar Weld), two maids, and Kaspar Weld’s dog, they spent a restless three hours before striking camp at first light and moving out in search of a new leader.

No one ever knew the name of the ten year old boy who had killed Baron Wallenrode, conqueror of boudoirs and towns alike. Nevertheless, he became, deservedly, the Bucholz legend; and the town square features his statue to this very day. Appropriately, the statue also functions as a fountain; it depicts the boy carrying a bowl of water; the tip of the nail protrudes from between his fingers, clenched around the rim of the bowl. The water is fed into the bowl through his arms, and cascades over the bowl’s rim in a sparkling white fan.

It was by this very fountain, a few paces away from the entrance to the Bucholz Rathaus, which towered over the square in patched Gothic splendour – it was there, on cobblestones polished by centuries of continuous use, that a small group of people was assembled that sunny spring morning.

The assembled group of Bucholz citizens was the cream of the town’s society. It included the town’s respected apothecary, Dr. Hoffman, who held his hands under the flaps of his morning jacket to conceal the nervous twitching of his fingers; the widow Petra Schnadel, owner of the Schnadel Coiffure hairdressing salon; postmaster Hilke, his bald head reminiscent of a mottled melon, round wire-framed spectacles flashing; and also Hilda and Karl Lentz, who owned a confectionery – Karl baked the cakes, Hilda sold them, and both were extremely fat.

The genteel crowd was in a mood of slightly unhealthy excitement. Most of them had been standing there for at least fifteen minutes, a period of time that is marked by the onset of boredom. Conversations that had been started with animation a quarter of an hour earlier were on the verge of petering out; there was much surreptitious, and sometimes ostentatious (postmaster Hilke) glancing at timepieces – personal watches, and the clock on the Rathaus tower (postmaster Hilke. He looked at the clock, inquired loudly whether it was really eleven o’clock, and told everyone that in his post, he took special pains to make sure everything happened on time, which was a blatant lie).

Hilke’s declaration caused a small panic at the edge of a crowd, where the bride was standing together with her nervous parents. Franz and Ida Tauben had been horrified to learn their daughter was pregnant, and had spent hours torturing their imaginations as to what that implied. They were slightly mollified when they found out that the culprit was a young man from a good family; when they heard that he was willing to marry their daughter they were thoroughly relieved, and started thinking that perhaps their daughter’s indiscretion hadn’t been so unfortunate; Greta von Tass sounded better than Greta Tauben. Their anxieties were renewed when several unusual circumstances came to light.

It turned out that young von Tass, an only son, lived alone on the family estate while his parents stayed in Buenos Aires, where von Tass the elder represented the Third Reich as a trade attache. The estate was very near the winter camp their daughter had been at, that January. It had been suggested that the two young people met there and then, not two years earlier as Greta had claimed, adding that she had valiantly resisted Hugo’s assaults on her virginity for nineteen months before surrendering to his charm and skill. Then their son Willi, who, at twenty three, was exactly the age of the prospective son in law, declared Hugo von Tass an excellent fellow and formed a close friendship with him. Having met several other excellent fellows Willi had known, the Taubens felt understandably anxious, particularly so Franz Tauben, who was a dentist and whose profession had turned him into a pessimist. It appalled him to see, almost every day, with how little respect people treated the part of body that let them eat, speak, make love; looking into a wide-open mouth was like looking into someone’s soul, with all the little dirty secrets revealed. Now, as he lifted his gaze from the shiny tips of his shoes, he instinctively felt several pairs of eyes slide away from him. He noticed a couple of people staring at his daughter with open curiosity.

There had been some whispering among the crowd earlier on about the fact that the groom’s parents wouldn’t be present. The groom’s running late started the whispering afresh. The bride’s slightly porcine features were made mysterious by a veil, but a sudden slump of her shoulders and her mother’s frantic rummaging for a handkerchief were telling enough. More heads began to turn, and the situation might have become extremely uncomfortable for the Taubens had it not been for the dietary habits of Klaus Gimmler.

Klaus Gimmler had, that morning, eaten a nearly a kilo of green apples, which manifested itself at this point in time as a loud, squealing fart. Klaus, aged five, had for this occasion been inserted into a pair of ceremonial lederhosen that had been made for him almost as soon as he could walk, and so the fart was more squealy and prolonged than it might have been. It caused a ripple of discomfort among those standing close to Klaus, and sniggers sprinkled with ribald comments among those further away. The person most embarrassed of all was, of course, Klaus’s mother, Eva Gimmler, who twisted his ear so violently that the rheumatic joint on her ring finger made a snapping sound.

There was an anguished yowl from Klaus, and a short, nervous laugh from his father, Friedrich. A short, timid man who longed to be spanked by Eva’s manicured hand but couldn’t bring himself round to telling her so, Friedrich watched his son’s ear redden with a twinge of envy. He felt compelled to engage in a symbolic act of fatherhood, such as patting his son’s head in a soothing manner, and was in fact raising his hand to do so, when a new sound stilled him. Lifting his chin, he looked at the red pointed roofs on the far side of the city square. Throughout the crowd, conversations ceased and there was a general turning of heads in the same direction.

The sound was that of a high-revving, two-stroke engine. It passed along the square’s northern side, muffled by old stone walls, then burst out in the open together with the black DKW. The engine crackled and popped as the driver changed up, engaging the clutch; then it roared again as the car gathered speed for the final dash across the cobblestoned expanse of the square.

The crowd tensed; there was a collective craning of necks. Everyone had expected to see the Taubens’ Mercedes; no one knew that it was, at that moment, being worked on by a mechanic in Magdeburg. The engine note changed again as the driver of the DKW took his foot off the accelerator to stomp on the brakes. The car promptly went into a skid.

The people in the path of the rushing car scattered like frightened pigeons, all of them except one: Una Wolpert. She wasn’t one of the wedding guests – she had taken her rat terrier bitch, Fifi, for her midday walk, saw the assembly, and immediately attached herself to its edge like a hungry limpet. She had discussed in detail all the odd circumstances surrounding the wedding, managing to imply that she, Una Wolpert, was secretly glad she hadn’t been invited. The unexpected appearance of the DKW had brought a rush of colour to her face; she had turned round to face her audience and announce that this was definite proof something fishy was afoot – she noticed she had no one to speak to – everyone seemed to be running away from her – and then the car slammed squarely into the middle of her broad, fat back.

* * *

Hugo was as bewildered as Una Wolpert. After the mad drive on the road, he did not think the car was going particularly fast. He was looking out of the side window, trying to avoid the sight of the waiting people, when the skid started. He was thrown against the front seat, and did not even see Una Wolpert’s big body rise into the air and fall with a sickening thump onto the car’s bonnet, subsequently sliding to the ground in an untidy tangle of limbs, hair, and handbag.

He pulled himself back onto his seat somewhat shakily, and gingerly touched his temple. His fingers came away sticky with fresh blood. He stared at his red fingertips, then reached for his handkerchief. He was vaguely aware of awful gnashing sounds coming from the gearbox as a panicked Willi struggled to put the car in reverse, and of the frenzied yapping of a small dog. It was Fifi – her leash had been caught under a front wheel uncomfortably close to her neck. Willi finally got the car into reverse and popped the clutch. There was crunch; the car bobbed slightly; the yapping stopped.

Some people in the crowd began to shout, and some – to converse.

“Drunken madmen!”

“Are they drunk?”

“I’ll kill them if they are.”

“Idiots!”

“Good riddance. She reported I was drunk to the supervisor.”

“Oh my dear God – the dog -”

“Look! It’s Willi Tauben!”

Hugo opened the door and got out of the car, leaning on the door for support, and everyone fell silent. Everyone realized that there, at last, they were seeing the elusive groom, the mysterious von Tass.

“Willi!” shrieked Ida Tauben, who had only then regained her voice.

Suddenly, in an eerie replay, the sound of a car’s engine reached the square. Echoed by the narrow stone streets of the old town centre, it made those listening feel as if they were hearing ten cars racing towards them.

There was only one, driven very fast – a low-slung, white Mercedes convertible. It sped across the cobblestones and came to a swift and smooth stop behind the DKW.

The man who got out cut an imposing figure. He was short, but looked quite tall in his peaked cap and was dressed in black from head to toe, the open flaps of his leather coat revealing a black uniform decorated with silver flashes on the collar. When Hugo saw him, he felt life return to his legs.

Uncle Bubi had arrived.

* * *

The town of Bucholz, although small, boasts a hospital. Little more than a clinic with a floor of beds, it occupies a big one-story building not far from the town square. It is the very building Kaspar Weld’s inn was housed in; following his death at the hands of Wallenrode’s dragoons, it stood empty for quite a while. Kaspar Weld’s family had died with him, and so there were no descendants to claim the house; after a while, it started to show neglect – or rather, shout neglect, since it was a big property, and it could be seen from any spot in the town square.

The burghers in the town council decided something had to be done. First, a summons for the owner was issued, and nailed to the inn’s front door. When no owner was forthcoming (the summons spoke darkly of overdue taxes and fines), the town council declared the building public property and took possession.

The council members hoped secretly that it would be able to sell Kaspar Weld’s inn to a private buyer. Disappointment followed. A wealthy Magdeburg innkeeper came to inspect the premises, and stayed overnight. His demented howling woke up half the town; the guards found him wandering in the square an hour before dawn. His arms were covered with small stab wounds, as if he had been wielding off attacks made by a ghost armed with a spiky hairbrush. As this made the Magdeburg innkeeper an unlikely buyer, the town council magnanimously gave the inn away to the Franciscan friars, who were unafraid of ghosts and who turned the inn into a hospice. A couple of centuries later the hospice was turned into a little hospital.

Appropriately enough, the room in which Count Wallenrode once sat had been turned into a mortuary. The space previously occupied by the bed was now taken up by a large rectangular pedestal not unlike an altar of sorts – it was covered with a shiny white plastic sheet whose edges touched the floor.

Una Wolpert lay on this white altar, fat arms dangling over the edges, one of her jeweled fingers pointing at the floor. The old gossip’s face was remarkably lifelike; the heavy maquillage she habitually wore day and night masked the greyness of death. Both her eyes and her mouth were wide open, and her whole face seemed to shout – you just won’t believe what happened to me today.

Willi watched his uncle wander round the room, hands clasped behind him under the flaps of his leather coat, circling the room twice before he stopped by the bier.

“You stupid fat cow,” he said to Una Wolpert. He turned to Willi. “You horse’s ass,” he said. “Every time you get laid it escalates into a major drama with a cast of twenty. And I find myself in one of the starring roles, whether I like it or not.” Hauptsturmfuhrer von Tass pondered his involuntary acting career for a while, chewing on his lower lip. Then he said:

“You managed to catch clap the very first time you got laid. You paid for the doctor, but I paid for the prescriptions. I didn’t actually have to shell out money with your second girl, but I had to endure a series of long, bitter, and totally unnecessary conversations with your mother. The third time – ” Uncle Bubi stopped abruptly and turned away from Willi. His stooped, black leather back discouraged questions, and Willi coughed twice before he could bring himself to speak.

“I meant to ask you about that,” he said. “Did you manage to find out anything about Nora?”

He saw the black shoulders stiffen. His uncle was silent; Willi strained his ears. There was nothing, nothing but static that made his ears ring, and perhaps also the sound of very soft breathing – Willi glanced at Una Wolpert nervously. Leather creaked, a boot sole squeaked; he looked at his uncle.

Uncle Bubi’s face was as sad as if the body lying on the bier was his own. He shook his head, slightly.

It was as simple as that. Willi turned to the window, grief squeezing his throat. The window offered a view of the vegetable garden at the back of the hospital. They planted the tomatoes much too early, thought Willi. They shouldn’t have put them next to lettuce – these two don’t like each other. I would kick that gardener out in an instant. Then the vegetable beds blurred, and Willi felt hot, wet sadness spill onto his cheeks. He put his hands on the window sill. It was stone – smooth, hard, and cold under his spread fingers.

There was a nail lying on the window sill, right where the sill met the recessed wall. Powdered in white, it was the length of an average finger; its tip was gently bent. Willi’s eyes traveled up the wall and found the source of the nail and the powder: a black pinhead of a hole rimmed with a white paler than the hospital paint. It must have secured a curtain rod, thought Willi. His uncle’s jackboots creaked behind his back, and suddenly he was filled with insane fury and hate. He didn’t want to show his twisted face to uncle Bubi; he resolutely kept staring out of the window, though the black boots creaked repeatedly and impatiently.

“Look at me, Willi.”

” – ”

“I see. It’s not enough to be stupid, you must be rude as well. I am sure you’ll apologize when you’ve regained control of yourself, so I’m not offended. I did everything I could to help Nora… and her parents.”

The lettuce heads grinned leafily; the tomato plants, feeble as they were, pointed their fingers and jeered. We don’t care, said the plants. Nobody cares, said the slovenly garden. You’re alone, said the world.

Willi looked down at the smooth stone sill – his eyes slid sideways… There were several tiny dark spots on the base of the nail. Or were they floating in his eye, suspended in the ocular jelly?

“You ungrateful bastard,” said Uncle Bubi. “I saved your arse out there right now, and you know it.”

Willi suddenly felt very hot. He braced himself against the window sill, wishing he could put his forehead to the stone without appearing totally ridiculous. He pressed the palms of his hands down, very hard, but his right hand still felt odd. A tremor ran down from his wrist every couple of seconds – it felt like a thin, hot wire being drawn through flesh. His fingers needed to grasp something the way a hungry body needs food. He picked up the nail.

“I wish I could wash my hands of the whole affair,” he heard his uncle say.

He turned around slowly, sliding the nail up his sleeve. From where he stood, he could see Una Wolpert’s silver alloy tooth fillings; her open mouth was atwinkle with fine dentistry. There was an enameled metal basin standing at the foot of the bier.

“I’ll bring you some water,” he said, to no one in particular.

“Jesus Christ,” whispered uncle Bubi.

“I’ll -”

“No. Stay where you are. I’ll fetch a doctor.” The corpse and the bier seemed to be shimmering ever so slightly, as if hot air was rising from the floor around it. The door slammed.

He turned back to the window and let the nail slide out of his sleeve. It tinkled briefly on the sill and rolled in a wide semicircle towards its previous resting place.
for visiting.

Willi stared out of the window and knew that he would never escape this room, that he would carry it around him wherever he went, whenever; that he would now always see the world through old, dusty glass.

He could hear hurried footsteps, many footsteps, falling into rhythm, breaking it, echoing down the corridor. Una Wolpert lay still.

He shivered.

* * *

“What is it holding, in its claws?”

“It’s a snake.”

“How bizarre. Putting a snake on a national coat of arms.”

“It’s a vanquished snake. Vanquished by the eagle.”

“It’s not a condor?”

“I’m not an ornithologist.”

“No, you’re a haupsturmfuhrer of the SS.”

“Don’t get snarky.”

“You got snarky first.”

“Nora, let’s not get into this cross-talk act again. I thought you would be happy about the passports. They’re here for real, do you understand? We’re getting out of all this. Look. Visas. Look. Tickets. Look. Money. Do you understand?”

“Do you want me to suck your cock?”

“…Nnnno. I mean yes. Later.”

“Why? There’s no later. That’s what my father says – or should I say, used to say? What do you think?”

“Nora, your parents are perfectly all right. They are just uncomfortable – shared sleeping quarters, and all that. And they have to perform menial jobs.”

“And perform them behind barbed wire, watched by guards with machine pistols and their dobermans.”

“Who told you that?”

“You did.”

“I said I wasn’t sure – ”

“You were. That’s why, you said, you would do everything to get them out, too.”

“I did. I couldn’t do anything. It was your age that saved you.”

“You know I don’t care that much.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true. My father is a miserable old Jew who poisoned my dog to avoid paying for a veterinarian, and my mother had thrown me out of the house twice by the time I was sixteen. Why should I care? Tell me.”

“Because they are your parents.”

“You don’t know how ridiculous you sound, saying that and standing there in your nice black uniform. You know how the devil promised the virgin that – ”

“Shut up!”

“Calm down! It’s just a story for children. I – ”

“You’ll stay here while I see Strasser to get my leave papers. Don’t go out – is that clear?”

“Yes, yes. Clear.”

“It might take a while. I want to buy him a stein or two. He’ll be getting three months of solitary because of me. It’s the least I can do.”

“Take all the time you need. I’ll stay here, and wait.”

“Till our dream comes true.”

“And our boat comes in.”

“To take us away.”

“For good and for better than good.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

She wanted to watch him from the front room window. She stood to the side, so that she would not be noticed from the street. It was a while before he came into view, and in the meantime she noticed a small nail lying on the floor. Hazily, she remembered a soft tinkle under her armchair as she got up from its seat the other night. Or was it yesterday afternoon? She bent down and reached out.

Yes! It was a small upholsterer’s nail, with a broad, flat head and short, sharp-edged spike. It was black, and glistening with the same bluish sheen as her lover’s gun. She turned it over in her fingers, watching him cross the street below and get into his car. When the white Mercedes convertible became just another car on the rain-slicked street, she turned away.

Everything was conveniently spread out on a side table on the way to the apartment door. She collected her passport and the money and put it away. Her hand hesitated over the airline tickets to Rome – she had another ticket in her handbag, for a Berlin – London flight that left Tempelhof in just two hours’ time. She took the Rome ticket too; it could buy her time, and maybe it was possible to get a partial refund.

She found herself looking at his passport, undecided. She picked it up. He looked boyishly handsome in the photograph. When the spike went in, his face crumpled into a horrible grimace. She kept pressing her thumb until the nail’s tip emerged from the cover, on the other side.

“Hugo,” she heard her own voice say, unexpectedly. She put the passport back on the table, damaged side down, and shook her head.

She picked up her handbag and left, carefully double-locking the door.

THE END

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