Mistakes
He could only take small, slow steps. He could barely lift his feet. Imagine the surprise of M., his last wife, when one day he simply disappeared from the flat. Imagine, as I did, how she went looking for him, asking around in the shops nearby, in the Chinese restaurant. How she convinced herself that it must have been an honest mistake on his part not to tell her where he was going, that he would be back any minute. Was his bathrobe already there, on the hanger in the hallway, where it would remain for the next ten years?
How she widened the circle over time, haphazardly at first, contacting a friend here, an old acquaintance there, then more systematically with the help of her children: every hospital, finally the police. By the time she rang me, he had been gone for a few days. Mind you, that was a long time ago. No mobile phones, no internet. Reaching someone could take time, especially if you kept believing that there was really nothing to worry about, that it must have been an honest mistake.
Calls first. Then anxious meetings at her house, all his and her children, what to do, who to call, oh, and was his revolver really gone? She couldn’t find his gun licence either. There were tears, there was her hope, there was the prescient silence of us, his children, who thought we knew better when his mistakes were anything but honest.
It was late summer; I remember it was sunny. An obscenely blue sky. I was between flats and life stages. Something very painful and humiliating had happened in another part of my life, but I am not sure if it was before or after he was found. It’s strange how certain parts of one’s life don’t touch at all in memory, as if memory projects lines back in time without being able to capture the simultaneity of unrelated events. Memory decanvases; narrative privileges lines.
I called her often, from somewhere in the city. Phone boxes: imagine them. Small, transparent booths, public yet intimate, potentially visible to everyone, protected by transparency. Explanations were unnecessary by then; she knew why I was calling. “It’s me.” – “Still nothing.” One evening, suddenly: something. He was found in a nearby town. No one ever found out why he had chosen to go there. It wasn’t a town with any biographical significance that we knew of. Perhaps that was why he went there, to hide. He was found in a room in a bed and breakfast. There was a note. There was no revolver (it was found later, somewhere else). I remember taking a taxi to see her after the phone call. It was a warm evening. A young driver of Turkish descent. I do not remember telling him what had happened, what we talked about, but there was kindness, there was tact, there was tenderness. The comfort of strangers. Am I confusing taxi rides in retrospect? There was a significant taxi ride of this kind about half a year later, in winter. I made a note of it. There weren’t that many taxi rides like that in that period. But perhaps there was more than one?
There was sunshine. There was the pragmatism of dealing with death. Encounters with those whose lives he did his best to destroy. Perplexity. M. broke down, she cried, yes, as did her children. I do not remember any of us shedding tears, his sons and me. Me? Relief. Hell, even gratitude. Cold and clear words: this was not a mistake. I cried for her. She was crying for a man she had loved. I began to bury a chapter of my past. (Apparently I am still not done with it.) Many things were over. A lot of things would never happen again. Many things no longer needed to be dealt with. After the cremation I went back to the job I had at the time, during the summer break from university, as if it was a normal day. It was a normal day.
It’s not that everything had been terrible. It’s more that there was absolutely no shared understanding of our relationship between the two of us. He could not let go of having to enforce what he thought was ‘normal’ in a father-daughter relationship. For example, using money to exert power (even when there was no more money). I could not see his helplessness at that time, I only saw attempts to interfere. And this strange silence. The horror that we had both been through remained completely unacknowledged between us. For almost six years after her death, not a single word about her was spoken between the two of us.
Some thirty years after his death I came across his diaries. He had started writing them in his early teens, during the war and up to his first marriage. Get to know your father as a young man, with an incredible hunger for the world after the war – half a personal diary, half a painstakingly detailed record of what was happening in the world, including newspaper clippings. Cheap trips to France in the 1950s, with the lads, in an old car that they decorated with some writing that made them instantly recognisable as foreign (German-speaking) idiots. Kudos for that. Evenings in Viennese cafés, nights in bars that no longer exist.
He was the first in his family to go to university. There were stories of him hiding the seedier parts of his student life from his mother when she came to town to check on him. Accounts of his progress at university, always in fear of his mother when he did not do as well in exams as she expected. Tactical considerations of how to use his father’s help to break bad news to her. University life, superior professors (medical faculty), hierarchies of fear and pressure. Post-war Nazi remnants in people, structures, attitudes. Thoughts about women, many. But I’ll be discreet. Suffice it to say that they gave me access to a much more nuanced masculinity than I ever thought he had. Chauvinistic, still, but more nuanced. Would have been nice to talk to him about that.
There were some aspects I knew. His mother. She was still alive when I was a child, a terrifying woman, just like my other grandmother. Violent, both of them. Two women who had hardened during the war and were unable to change. Their husbands: one disappeared somewhere on the eastern front, the other a kind and quiet man. These women were all hardness and social form, even when they cared for you. Especially when they cared for you. Mothers who constantly require workaround communication, even when you’re over fifty. Mothers you can’t stop running from, but can’t get away from.
But there was also so much that was new in these diaries, so much that did not, could not, become part of what fathers of his generation ever told their daughters, as a truth about themselves, or even just as a joke about the old days. I wish I had found them while he was still alive (but then, oh well). Some things, you know, are really not mistakes, just consequences. Other things, well, you look into the past and see an inkling of what could have been a very different present. Not completely different, but different in important ways. Much less painful. Much less damaging. It makes you wonder, but then again, when you start wondering so many years later, it feels hollow and produces a strangely detached form of melancholy. Not more. But also: not less.
One of my brothers and I went through a lot of our father’s old stuff together. Things had to be moved, decisions had to be made. That was when the diaries appeared. We got lost for a moment in memories, in stories. Those bags full of books when he travelled, do you remember? The back of his car, a Citroen estate, always full of medicine and books. The many things he knew. The insatiable hunger to know more and more. The thousands of index cards on historical events that he would write, usually in the mornings when everyone else was asleep, hunched over his typewriter. How he would never stop lecturing. What we could have learned from him, if only he had chosen not to lecture, but to speak.
At one point we stopped telling our stories and looked at each other. You know, my brother said, it’s all very interesting, but to be honest: I didn’t like the man. He did terrible things to us and I don’t want to honour him by keeping so many of his things. He doesn’t deserve it. In the end we only kept a little. I’m curious as to whether we’ll ever think of that as a mistake.