Paul Brodowsky

Amidst the Ground-elder

I’ve only ever seen my father cry once in my life. It was in a small wood,

the countryside was hilly, beech trees, tall thujas, a nettle patch, the

earth overgrown with ground-elder that had spread profusely in this

well-fertilised soil, thin-leafed, light-green ground-elder, growing in the

shade and covering everything like graveyard ivy. We wandered around

this scrubland, my mother, my father and me, their youngest child, me

always between them in my adolescent, twelve-year-old body, the three

of us in a park-like hilly landscape on the edge of O., somewhere in the

north east of Poland. At some point my father stopped, in the middle of

a patch of ground-elder, he no longer knew where he was, he stopped

and doubled over, this small, strong man, and gave out a snorting noise,

a wheezing, a noise that at first I couldn’t place, and then his breathing

was accompanied by an almost childlike high-pitched tone, this tone,

this snorting reminded me of his fits of pent-up anger, an anger that built

up in the unread piles of Heimatbriefe des Kreises T., “Land der dunklen

Wälder”, an anger that spilled out suddenly in crumpled but never torn

newspapers, but which generally stayed locked inside his strong, tense

body, my father, who folds the newspaper, the editorial, my father, who

although he reads the Spiegel does not want to give it his support and

who therefore always sells the magazine on to his colleague D. on

Tuesdays, my father, who crumples up the Frankfurter Allgemeine with

a mixture of disbelief and impatience, as if he wanted to change what

was written there, to jumble up the letters, who folds the paper down to

a sixteenth, a thirty-second of its size, who from where he is he lying

throws this pressed together newspaper on to the living room table, jumps

up from the couch, and then paces vigorously up and down in the living

room and in the dining room next door and at the same time shifts the

furniture, the studded leather dining-room chairs, the three-piece suite,

chair by chair, inch by inch, so that the marks left by the chairs are visible

in the pile of the living-room carpet, the sleepless nights, my father, who

tosses and turns in bed, at three, four o’clock at night, who falls asleep

on the couch during the day with the newspaper over his face or chest,

who wakes up the moment the radio is turned off, only then did I see the

buckled old man, standing before me in the ground-elder, my rhythmically

sobbing father, tears running down his cheeks and dripping from his

trimmed grey beard down on to the profuse all-covering vegetation.

 

My father had had this beard cut before the trip, he had asked my mother

on the morning of one of the last workdays before the holidays to cut his

bristly grey hair the next day, before he drove to the Institute, generally

just before being cut it was so long that it started to curve over his upper

lip as if it had a will of its own, my father, who would put the soup bowl

down and then wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, with a napkin,

over his lips, to get the bits and pieces of the fish soup, the vegetable

or pea soup out of his beard, rubbing small pieces of salmon or carrot

into the fabric of the napkin, when he had his beard cut he would have

a makeshift barber’s apron hung over him, the same one that was hung

over us children when we were subjected to the hair-cutting procedure

we hated so much, or was it a large towel, in spring and summer my

father would sit down on the kitchen chair naked above the waist, the

beard hairs would descend onto his hairy unshorn chest, onto his mighty

belly, his thin legs. My mother would cut his beard and his hair or what

had not yet fallen off my father’s vigorous, well-formed skull, the two of

them would talk to each other all the while in soft, almost tender tones,

interrupted every now and then by the short, warning grunts my father

gave out when his hair got caught in the scissors.

 

A few hours before we stopped in the ground-elder, the word

Achottachottachott had taken on a new colour for me, since that day in

the ground-elder it is no longer only connected with songs, “Land der duhunklen

Wälder/ über weite Felder/ lichte Wu-hunder gehn”. Achottachott

was a word I knew from my father, for me the word had always had a

homely sound to it, although my father only used it at special moments,

never at the rare moments of real fear, Achottachott was no everyday

word, it was always a word that evoked the homeland, something from

earlier times, my father was a professor of Experimental Physics, he used

to travel to China and America, he held slide talks, he would be picked up

in a car, a car with a chauffeur, as he liked to emphasise, to go and speak

about Japan, a Far East Society in Upheaval in Plön or Preetz at scientific

associations or was it evening classes or Rotary Clubs or some other

educational institutes, before such an audience a word like Achottachott

would never have passed his lips. At most he would use this word in the

family circle, alongside words like Striezel for a plaited bun or Zagel for a

tail, would you like Zagelchen, asks my father, we are sitting at the dining

table, we’re having trout, swallowing dry bread to stop the bones getting

stuck in our throats, I’d prefer not to have any trout, my grandmother,

says my father, always gave me Zagelchen, there are no bones, he says

and pushes the pieces of flesh he has carefully picked from the fish’s

tail on to my plate. In our family Achottachott, Striezel and Zagel led a

shadow existence, ground-elder ran riot at the shaded end of our garden,

spreading through the hedge into the neatly arranged beds, emerging

from the small strip of trees that separated the gardens belonging to the

terraced houses from the ring road, my mother spent hours digging up

the tangled roots and tipping bucket-loads of them back over the hedge,

on the far corner of the newspaper table that was always overflowing with

Heimatbriefe des Kreises T., in the bookcase stood two thick illustrated

books that had been published in the nineties with historic photographs

of O., prominent on the spine of these illustrated books was the German

name T., the name this place gave itself shortly before 1933, previously

it had been called M., which the nationalistically minded local population

felt sounded too Polish, so they gave first the county town, and then in

1933 also the district, the artificial name T., the books consisted mainly

of black-and-white photographs of T. or M. or O., as both district and

town have been called since 1945, almost all the pictures had been taken

before 1945 and showed a picturesque small town on a lake, enclosed

was the facsimile of an old town map.

 

On the morning of the same day, in other words before we started

wandering around what had once been O.’s cemetery, my father had

explained something he had never talked about before, the three of us

went to visit the place where, according to my father’s information, his

parents’ house, their butcher’s shop had stood, which as a twelve-yearold

I knew from his stories, the black pudding, the liver sausage, now

there was a kind of gap between the buildings, a sandy lot between

houses where a few cars had been parked, behind that was a stream,

in my memory at the far end of the gap there are some green reeds. I

also remember the long stretched-out lake, and an Abbau, the name

my parents’ dialect gave to individual farms or small collections of

farm houses, an Abbau, which formerly had had its own village name,

something that ended in -itten or -itzko, since then the place has

disappeared off the map, for hours we looked for this Abbau to the east

of O., on the other side of the lake, eventually on a piece of fallow ground

we found a cluster of apple trees overgrown with lichen, some hand-hewn

foundation stones, still lying in rectangles, the odd tile, or was that the day

I refused to come along, remaining behind in the house where we were

staying, and it was just that my parents described the search in a very

lively way.

 

Not far from the gap between the houses, the place where my father

had lived as a small boy, in the morning we walked over the small town’s

large square, the sun was shining, my father pointed to a house with

some steps at the front leading to a raised ground floor and recounted

an episode he had witnessed as a six-year-old boy, my father had

never before spoken about it and later I never heard anything about this

episode again, much unlike certain other stories about his early sense

of achievement, which he told over and over again, the lung of a bird, air

bags on the sides. There at the front, said my father, as we walked over

O.’s enormous market square, always keeping an eye out for traces, for

remembered buildings, old lettering on houses, over there in that house

there was a small general store, or some other kind of shop, and once

as a young boy, half as old as you are now, he said to me, two uniformed

men led away a shop-keeper. I can remember how the shop-keeper held

his cheek, my father said. Held his cheek and said Achottachottachott,

as he was being marched off, according to my father. I cannot remember

whether my father said what time of day it was when he had observed

this, but when I imagine this scene, or remember how I imagined this

event as a twelve-year-old, it is bright daylight, or it is early evening,

“Land der dunklen Wälder/ und kristallnen Seen”, we used to sing at big

family occasions, baptisms, confirmations, silver-wedding anniversaries,

sitting around the dinner table with the garden table as an extension, the

children at a side table, actually our living-room table covered with white

linen, the illustrated books showing the bathing place, frontal views of all

the buildings around O.’s market square, black-and-white photos of small

town shops and stores.

 

Only a few hours later we walked over O.’s abandoned hilly cemetery

overgrown with ground-elder, my mother and I either side of the weeping

man holding him up, we had found a kind of clearing, stone crosses,

instead of ground-elder there was grey-green grass swaying in the shade,

a kind of heroes’ cemetery from the first world war, my mother and me

in the main railway station in Kiel, in the concourse turned rusty black by

fumes from the diesel locomotives and probably also by smoke from the

earlier steam locomotives, she presses a ten-pfennig coin into my hand

and tells me to put the coin into the slit of a lead-sealed tin can which a

man dressed in grey clattered at regular intervals and then shook once

with a jerk, the three of us stumbled up the hill, making our way through

beech trunks and unkempt thujas, over gravestone kerbs, which appeared

to me strangely small, made of stone, overgrown with nettles and bramble

tendrils, until my father eventually stopped, this is where it might have

been, the grave of his father, a butcher who died of blood poisoning

following an accident at work shortly before the war, or on the eve of the

war, as my father used to say, and me sitting there in the shop window,

said my father, holding a black pudding in one hand, a liver sausage in

the other, I was an attraction, me a small, sturdy boy in the butcher’s

window, people came because of me, to look at me in the window, now

my father had stopped, my mother took a stick, or she had a newspaper

with her which she had rolled up specially, at any rate she wiped clean

a surface about the size of a grave, my father began to cry, under the

bent stalks of the ground-elder I could recognise the gravestone kerbs,

the stalks lay across the cleared surface, my father cried for the first time

in his life, or to be more precise, he made a noise I did not immediately

recognise as crying, a rapid, high-pitched sound, like stifled wheezing,

which I have never heard before, either from him or from anyone else.