Every time our parents had a secret mission, or something else was going on that we were not supposed to know about, we were taken to Schlossberg, where our grandma lived with Uncle Remigius, also known as Uncle Dittl, Aunt Erna, and our cousins. I was never very excited about the trip, but going there was always a welcome change from being at home.
Grandma Sophie was my old man’s mother, and she was just as mean as he was. She not only terrorized the grandchildren who lived in the same house and her daughter-in-law, but also tried to control everyone in the neighborhood and their children.
All day long, she sat by the window so she wouldn’t miss anything—or anybody. She always kept the sheer curtain close so she could watch without being seen. In the evening, she didn’t turn on the light. She sat there in the darkness, watching the street until late into the night, and didn’t go to bed until everything outside was quiet.
Grandma seemed to know everything about everybody. She was convinced that it was her duty to keep an eye on the “low-class people,” as she called them, and that they should be thankful for what she was doing for them.
When some of the neighbors became desperate and were short of money for groceries, they sometimes asked Grandma for a loan. In return, she went into their homes and took something valuable as collateral—usually something worth far more than the few bucks she had lent them for bread and milk. If they couldn’t pay her back by the next payday, she sold the item to somebody else at a considerable profit.
I often wondered why nobody told her to mind her own business and stop spying on the neighborhood.
Whenever one of the neighbors’ children passed the house carrying a shopping basket, Grandma would open the window and call out, “What are you going to buy?” Or, “Where did you get the money to buy all that?”
Other times it was, “Who gave you those new clothes? Who paid for them?”
It was really embarrassing when she leaned halfway out the window and yelled, “Tell your mother she shouldn’t let you run around so dirty!”
Grandma bragged constantly about her perfect family and her high standing in society. She said everyone in town respected her opinion and that she upheld the highest moral standards. To maintain those standards, her thirteen children had been raised with a strong hand—and beaten with a leather belt my grandfather, a shoemaker, had made especially for whipping them.
After one of her routine lectures, the old witch, as I called her, would explain that only strict rules and punishment could give children the discipline they needed. My father, she said, had become the man he was because of it. She was especially proud that, at sixteen years old, he was already famous for directing a forty-five-piece instrumental orchestra and a sixty-voice choir in Riffingen, a town close to Schlossberg.
“You useless kids,” she called us, “don’t deserve a father like him. Neither one of you even plays an instrument.”
Then she would turn to me.
“And you—you are too stupid and lazy to attend the Conservatorium, with that beautiful voice you inherited from your father.”
What she didn’t know was that I had made a decision very early in life. Out of hatred for my father, I would never learn to play an instrument, and I would never become the opera singer he always wanted me to be.
I hated Grandma’s constant expectations almost as much as I hated my father’s. In the helpless way of a child, I swore that someday I would pay her back for all her evil. I decided I would not attend her funeral when she died.
That would hurt her more than anything.
Her greatest wish was that everybody would attend her funeral service, listen to the priest praise her, and then stand around her grave in tears. Nigg and I agreed that, if the old pretentious holy witch had her way, she would probably demand that the Pope himself declare her a saint and come to speak at her grave.
Even with all the bad things at Grandma’s house, being there was still better than being at home.
Uncle Dittl and Aunt Erna’s children—Sylvia, Serena, Tanya, and Remigius, whom everyone called Miggele—lived upstairs. Sylvia and I had been born the same year and were both eleven. We liked each other and understood each other, even though we could be rivals at times.
I didn’t feel like playing with her dolls or joining in games of house, Mama and Papa, or anything like that. I liked watching them play, though. Sylvia and Serena never understood why I didn’t want to join them. Sometimes I wondered about it myself, because my girlfriends at home asked me the same thing. They said I wasn’t any fun to play with.
Sometimes I wondered if there was something wrong with me.
On Sundays, we had to go to their church in Flochberg, down the hill. Going down was easy enough, but coming back up was another matter. My muscles would grow weak, I would become breathless, and I had to stop and rest several times.
Aunt Erna gave me one of Sylvia’s old Sunday dresses to wear. I didn’t mind because they were nice dresses. Wearing one made me feel the way I had when Lella called me “a little princess.”
For Sylvia and me, the most important part of Sunday was the walk down the hill to church. We made sure everybody saw us.
We ignored Aunt Erna’s warnings to walk and behave like young ladies. Instead, we swung around and twirled so our skirts flew up into the air. Serena, always obedient to her mother, would tell Aunt Erna that we were showing off.
Sylvia and I would just look at each other.
I would get scared.
Sylvia would start giggling.
I was always amazed when I saw other children who weren’t afraid of their parents. I couldn’t understand it. That certainly wasn’t the way things were at our house. My father answered disobedience with the black rubber hose he kept in the laundry room.
These relatives were Catholic, which meant we spent a lot of time on our knees when we went to their church.
“This is the last time I’m going to this church,” Nigg always complained. “My knees hurt.”
The kneeling bothered me too.
After church, Aunt Erna would be waiting for us with a big Sunday meal. She went to the early service so she could get home in time to start cooking for the family.
Uncle Dittl started teaching Miggele to fly when he was only ten years old. I liked my uncle, and sometimes I found it hard to believe that he and my father were brothers. Uncle Dittl was almost always in a good mood and hardly ever beat his children. Once in a while he gave them a smack, but that was about it.
When Uncle Joseph, my father’s other brother, showed up at the airport club, things became exciting. He called himself “the Count from Bollstadt.” Whenever Uncle Joseph arrived in his big Mercedes, a crowd seemed to gather around him. Slightly embarrassed, I would stand back and watch as people joked and laughed, sometimes even calling my uncle nuts.
I never knew exactly what to make of him.
If he wasn’t wearing his SS uniform, there were the blinking golden Rings on both hands or something else about him that attracted attention. He seemed to enjoy being noticed, and people certainly noticed him.
And he usually had something special for the children hidden in his car.
One time, he opened the trunk and it was full of little baby rabbits—gifts for my cousins.
Those weekends never came often enough for me, and when they did, they flew by much too fast.
Soon we had to go home again, back to our ordinary no-good lives. Back to working. Back to obeying. And back to receiving what my father liked to call his “beneficial lectures.”
That was his name for the beatings.
I didn’t understand it then, but I had learned to be an observer rather than a participant.
When a child grows up never knowing what might bring anger, punishment, or humiliation, watching becomes safer than joining in.
I learned to study faces, voices, and moods before deciding what to do. Other children could simply play. I first had to make sure it was safe.
Standing on the outside and watching was not shyness; it was a habit I had learned in order to protect myself.