End of the World in Breslau Read online

  THE END OF THE

  WORLD IN BRESLAU

  THE END OF THE WORLD IN BRESLAU

  Marek Krajewski

  Translated from the Polish by Danusia Stok

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  MacLehose Press

  an imprint of Quercus

  21 Bloomsbury Square

  London WC1A 2NS

  Originally published in Poland as Koniec świata w Breslau

  by Wydawnictwo W.A.B. Co Ltd, 2006

  Copyright “Koniec świata w Breslau” © by Marek Krajewski, 2003

  Published by permission of Wydawnictwo W.A.B. Co Ltd

  English Translation Copyright © 2009 by Danusia Stok

  The moral right of Marek Krajewski to be identified as

  the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue reference for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 906694 06 7 (HB)

  ISBN 978 1 906694 07 4 (TPB)

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses,

  organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s

  imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Designed and typeset in Octavian by Patty Rennie

  Printed and bound in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  THE END OF THE WORLD IN BRESLAU

  NEW YORK, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20TH, 1960

  TEN O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  The black cab-driver, James Mynors, increased the speed of his wipers. Two arms greedily gathered large flakes of snow from the windscreen. The wipers worked as a singular metronome which accentuated the rhythm of Chuck Berry’s rock’n’roll hit, “Maybellene”, flowing from the radio. Mynors’ hands danced on the steering wheel, nonchalantly pushed and pulled the gear stick, and slapped his knees and thighs. The song made not the slightest impression on the glum passenger who, with one cheek pressed against the cold window, moved the newspaper he was holding this way and that so as to catch the light from passing street lamps and shop windows. When Mynors turned the volume up to maximum, the passenger shifted to the centre of the back seat. The eyes of the two men met in the rear-view mirror.

  “Turn it down and stop jumping about at the wheel,” the passenger said with a strong German accent. His gloomy, bloated face, shaded beneath the rim of his old-fashioned hat, took on a malicious expression. “We’re not in Africa, on some banana plantation.”

  “Motherfucking racist.” Mynors’ words were drowned out by the happy chorus; he turned the volume down and drove into a side street of pseudo-Victorian, one-storeyed houses. There was not much light here. The passenger carefully folded his paper and slipped it into the inside pocket of his coat.

  “There, on the corner,” he muttered, trying to see through the dirty curtain of snow and rain. The car drew up at the place indicated. The passenger grunted his disapproval, opened the door and sank his shoes into the muddy slush. He unfurled his umbrella and, panting heavily, approached the driver’s window.

  “Please wait for me.”

  Mynors rubbed his index finger against his thumb in response and lowered the window a little. The passenger pulled a banknote from his wallet and slipped it into the driver’s hand. A merry voice distorted by a peculiar accent came from behind the window:

  “You can walk back, you old Hitlerite.”

  With a contemptuous and controlled skid of its rear wheels, the cab waltzed on the slippery road and sped away. The driver lowered his window – Chuck Berry played at full volume in the quiet street.

  The man slowly climbed the steps to the small porch, stamped his snow-covered shoes and pressed the bell. The door opened almost immediately. In the doorway stood a young priest wearing thick, tortoise-shell glasses and sporting a Chuck Berry hairstyle.

  “Mr Herbert Anwaldt?” asked the priest.

  “That’s me. Good evening,” panted Anwaldt in annoyance as he watched the cab turn the corner. “How am I supposed to get home now?”

  “Father Tony Cupaiuolo from St Stanislaus’ Parish,” Chuck Berry introduced himself. “I was the one who telephoned you. Please come in.”

  The familiar click of the lock, the familiar parlour filled with books and the lamp with its green lampshade. Missing were only the familiar smell of cigars and the familiar host. The troubled Father Cupaiuolo hung Anwaldt’s sodden coat and hat by the door and clumsily shook off the sticky spittle of snow from his umbrella. Instead of the smell of Cuban cigars, Anwaldt’s nostrils drew in the sharp odour of medication, the pitiful stench of a bedpan, the penetrating smell of death.

  “Your friend is dying,” the priest declared.

  Anwaldt inhaled a deep gulp of nicotine. From a bedroom on the first floor emerged a young nurse. With apparent revulsion, she carried the enamel containers that the sick man had filled a moment earlier. She glanced at Anwaldt. He sensed immediately that she felt the same towards him as to the bedpan she held out in front of her.

  “Do not smoke in here, please.” Heartfelt indignation almost burst the buttons of the housecoat that tightly hugged her breasts. Anwaldt, counting on just such an effect, inhaled even deeper.

  “Mr Anwaldt, your friend is dying of lung cancer,” Father Cupaiuolo whispered reproachfully. “Smoking tobacco in his house is ill-advised.”

  The nurse went into the bathroom, so Anwaldt decided to abandon his smoking and threw the cigarette into the fireplace. He looked at the priest expectantly.

  “My dear sir, your friend’s nurse telephoned me today asking for the last rites for the sick man.” Father Cupaiuolo drew in his breath and gathered his confidence. “As I’m sure you know, the sacrament of confession is one of them. When I sat down beside him, ready to hear his sins and bless him on his last journey, Mr Mock told me he had one terrible sin on his conscience which he would not confess until you were here. He will confess only after he has spoken to you. You come practically every morning – I could have waited with confession until tomorrow, but he insists I hear it today. Salus aegroti suprema lex,† and for a priest too. Go to him now. He will explain everything.” Father Cupaiuolo looked at his watch. “Please don’t worry about the cab. I fear you will not be going home today.”

  Anwaldt made his way upstairs but, halfway up, he turned back. Father Cupaiuolo watched in surprise as Anwaldt approached the hat-stand and pulled a newspaper from his coat pocket. Tilting his head, the priest read the German title. “What can Süddeutsche mean?” He pondered for a moment and let his memory flick through the small exercise book he had once filled with German vocabulary – “Deutsche means German, but süd? What does that mean?”

  The priest put aside these musings on the German language and, as Anwaldt reached the top of the stairs, returned to the problems of his Puerto Rican parishioners. The sound of retching and gurgling sanitary appliances came from the bathroom. Anwaldt pushed open the bedroom door a crack. A streak of light severed the bed in two. Mock’s head was resting on the summit of a mountain of white pillows. Next to the bed stood a drip and a bedside table cluttered with medicines. Slender little bottles with parchment-like hoods stood alongside squat jars full of pills.
Mock lifted a hand perforated by needles and aimed an ironic smile at Anwaldt.

  “See what a malicious old man I am. As if it wasn’t enough that you were here this morning, I call for you in the evening too.” The hiss of Mock’s breath fell a tone deeper. “But I’m sure you’ll forgive me when I say I wanted to show off my new nurse. She alternates with the one you see here every morning. What do you think of her? She finished nursing school a week ago. Her name is Eva.”

  “Worthy of the name.” Anwaldt made himself comfortable in the armchair. “She would tempt many a man with her apples of paradise.”

  Mock’s laughter whistled for a long time. The flaccid skin across his cheekbones tautened. Beams of car headlights glided across the bedroom walls and briefly drew from the semi-darkness a framed map of a city encircled by a broad, mangled ribbon of river.

  “What brought the biblical comparison to mind?” Mock looked intently at Anwaldt. “The priest, no doubt.”

  Silence descended. Sister Eva choked and spluttered in the bathroom.

  Anwaldt hesitated, nervously twisting his fingers, then spread out the newspaper.

  “Listen, I wanted to read something to you …” Anwaldt began to search for his glasses and instead found his cigarette-case. Remembering it was forbidden to smoke, he put it away again.

  “Don’t read me anything, and go ahead and smoke. Smoke here, Herbert, go ahead and fucking smoke, one after another, and hear my confession,” Mock caught his breath. “I told you about my first wife, Sophie, remember? This is going to be about her …”

  “Exactly … I wanted …” Anwaldt said, and stopped. Mock was whispering something to himself and did not hear him. Anwaldt strained his ears.

  “Thirty years ago, it was a Sunday too, and snow stuck to the windows just like it does today.”

  † The well-being of the sick is the first priority.

  BRESLAU, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27TH, 1927

  TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

  Snow, swept along by gusts of wind, stuck to the windowpanes. Mock stood at the window looking out at Nicolaistrasse, covered in tyre tracks that criss-crossed the snow and mud. The clock on the Town Hall struck two. Mock lit his first cigarette of the day. His hangover returned with another wave of nausea. Images of the previous night teemed before his eyes: the theatre-variété and the three inebriated policemen – Commissioner Ebners, with his bowler slipping back to the crown of his head; Counsellor Domagalla smoking his twentieth Sultan cigar; and he himself, Counsellor Mock, pulling at the crimson velvet curtain which separated their discreet alcove from the rest of the room; the owner of Hotel Restaurant Residenz with a servile smile bringing them pot-bellied tankards on the house; the cabby trying to calm Mock as he forced an open bottle of schnapps into his hand; his twenty-five-year-old wife, Sophie, waiting for him in the bedroom, throwing back her hair, spreading her legs and looking stern as he rolls in, dead drunk. Mock calmly extinguished his cigarette in the horseshoe-shaped ashtray. He glanced fleetingly at the waiter coming into the parlour.

  Heinz Rast, a waiter from Schweidnitzer Keller, was carrying plates and dishes. Placing them on the table, he cast an eye over the gathering. Franz Mock he already knew; overawed, he had approached Rast’s boss, Max Kluge, a few days earlier to order a grand dinner in honour of his brother. With Rast himself he had not been so humble, and had argued over every pfennig as they sorted out the menu. Today the waiter had also met his wife, Irmgard Mock, a dispirited woman with gentle eyes who took the enormous thermoses of food from him and stood them on the coal cooker.

  “The corned brawn with caraway is excellent. Speciality of the house, cold, in aspic,” the waiter commended, unable to conceal his admiration for the shapely blonde with dreamy, slightly absent eyes who casually passed a crystal cigarette-holder to the college boy sitting next to her. The boy dug out the smoking cigarette end from the holder and turned to the stocky, dark-haired man of over forty standing at the window:

  “Uncle Eberhard, please come to the table. The hors d’oeuvres are served.”

  The dark-haired man kissed the dreamy-eyed young woman on the hand and sat down next to her. Franz and Irmgard sat opposite them. The college boy was planted awkwardly at the head of the table. Rast, hastened by a gesture from Franz, hurried into the kitchen and brought in five stout bottles of beer with E. HAASE engraved on their porcelain caps. He opened three and poured beer into the narrow tankards. Then he settled down in the kitchen and, through the closed door, listened to the conversation at the table.

  “You shouldn’t have spent so much on this grand dinner. Irmgard is such a good cook – her dishes could be the boast of Schweidnitzer Keller,” – a calm bass voice, the sucking in of beer froth and a sigh of relief.

  “We couldn’t let a lady like Sophie eat our Sunday black pudding and sauerkraut. Here we have something that is eaten in higher … society,” – a nervous baritone, stammering at every word. “Thank you for finally agreeing to come and visit us. It is an honour for a simple foreman.”

  “I assure you, Franz, I’ve seen ladies lick the grease off bowls,” – a melodious, quiet and almost childish voice. “Although I come from an aristocratic family, I rid myself of class prejudice when I was at the Conservatory …” – a note of impatience. “Besides, I don’t understand this ‘finally’. As far as I know, nobody’s ever invited me here before.”

  “Erwin, you’re taking your final school exams this year,” – the bass voice, the crackle of a match, smoke exhaled through nostrils. “What are your plans for the future?”

  Rast stirred the bouillon and filled the soup dishes. On a large platter he arranged some asparagus and poured over it some melted butter. He opened the door, carried all this into the room and announced merrily:

  “And here is something hot: bouillon with egg yolk and asparagus.”

  Eberhard put out his cigarette. His nephew studied the Trebnitzer embroidery of the tablecloth and said slowly and emphatically:

  “I want to study German at university.”

  “Ah, interesting,” Eberhard poured spoonfuls of the bouillon into his mouth with evident satisfaction. “I remember you wanted to be a policeman not long ago.”

  “That was before I discovered Heine’s poetry.”

  As Rast reached for the plate of aspic to take it away, Franz Mock grabbed the waiter by the wrist and sliced off a sizeable piece of brawn with his fork.

  “I’ve paid for it so I’ll eat it,” Franz Mock’s face grew pale and he made Rast think of a drunkard who, in one movement, had turned a table upside down in his restaurant. “I know a simple foreman on the railways cannot be a role model for his son … But I’ve told you so many times – be a railway engineer; you’ll earn lots of money, go to Zoppot every year … But you won’t listen to me and insist on studying some Jew … ”

  “Papa, I’m a poet,” Erwin cracked his knuckles nervously. “I want to do the thing that I love …”

  Irmgard signalled to Rast to leave the room. Rast grabbed the plate with what remained of the aspic, but Franz Mock held his hand back once again.

  “‘I love, I love …’” Bits of meat and spittle landed on the Trebnitzer tablecloth. “Are you some sort of queer, or what? Poets are all queers, or dirty Jews. And what sort of poems do you write? They’re all about stars and machines. Why don’t you write a love poem to a woman? I know, I know … That new German tutor of yours … He’s the one who’s trying to turn you into a queer …”

  “Franz, stop, or you’ll remember this for a very long time.” Irmgard’s eyes threw daggers first at her husband, then at the waiter. The latter tore the dish with the remainder of brawn from Franz Mock’s hand and hurried into the kitchen. He melted some butter in a huge frying pan and arranged slices of potato on top of it. He stood a pot of mutton in thick sauce on another hob. Silence descended in the dining-room. It was broken by the voice of a spoilt child:

  “Ebi, you were interested in Latin literature yourself once. You wanted to b
e a professor. Does that make you a homosexual?”

  Rast carried in a tray with the next course.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, mutton in herb sauce, roast potatoes, celery salad and sour cherry compote.” Rast efficiently gathered up the plates, hastened by Irmgard’s angry eyes. He repaired to the kitchen and glued his ear to the door: nothing but the penetrating clatter of knives and forks.

  “My dear,” – a calm voice – “Surely you would know that better than anyone.”

  “Uncle Ebi, what is wrong with studying literature?” – the uneasy tenor rising occasionally to a falsetto – “Explain to my father that there’s nothing wrong with it. You of all people know how many sublime moments poetry can give us, what ecstasies it imparts … You studied Horace yourself and you wrote an article about him in Latin … Our Latin scholar, Rector Piechotta, values those comments of yours a great deal …”

  “I think,” – the hiss of gas from a bottle being opened accompanied the hoarse voice, strained by the dozens of cigarettes smoked the previous day – “that education and the career one pursues do not always go hand in hand, as you can see in my case …”

  “Stop, Ebi, and speak like a normal human being,” – a suppressed burp. “You left behind all that nonsense and chose to work as a policeman. Get to the point: what is best for the boy – poet or railway engineer?”

  “Go on, tell us,” the child indulged herself. “We’re all waiting for a solution to this interesting dilemma.”

  “Engineer.” A mouthful was gulped down loudly.

  Rast sprang away as Erwin all but demolished the door as he fled the room. The boy thrust a cap onto his head, wrenched on his somewhat too tight coat and ran into the street.

  “Here is the dessert, ladies and gentlemen: Silesian poppy cake.” Rast served cake and coffee. As he removed the untouched chops from in front of Sophie’s bust, he noticed that her hand holding the cigarette-case was shaking. He looked at her and understood that this would not be the end to this unpleasant dinner.