Roots

It’s been thirty-five years. The plumbing and heating have been redone, the old coal stove is gone, but other than that the house seems unchanged. There it is, the cupboard on which the chocolate bunnies, arranged in descending order of height, stood for months after Easter because I couldn’t bring myself to eat them. There the black and white TV on which I watched the Sandman – in both his West and East German avatars – make his appearance every evening before bedtime. (How on earth did they manage to come up with a new story every night?) And there the cuckoo clock I used to impatiently wait for to run down so I could rewind it by the hanging brass pine cone. The hat and coat stand too is still where it used to be, and beside it the barometer with the summer-skirted girl who would come dancing out of her little barometer house when sunny weather was forecast, and her counterpart the umbrella-equipped man charged with announcing gloomy atmospheric conditions. It is not enough to see them, I go around touching, lifting, putting down these bits of memory come alive. My wife looks on with mixture of awe and amusement.

But none of this has prepared us for the discovery of the stash of family memories shut away in a drawer in the living room. Rebate coupons from an era of thrift. Vaguely human-looking wooden clothespins that went out of use maybe half a century ago. Wooden-handled forks and butter knives, dainty teaspoons with elaborate designs. But more than all this, there are the photographs.

My mother radiant on her wedding day, my father more nattily dressed than I have ever seen him, gallantly carrying my mother’s purse.

My grand-aunt whom everybody had loved, imposing and with that no-nonsense look about her even in her youth. Was this before or after her brief marriage, the marriage that was never mentioned in her lifetime and that I learnt of only after her death?

My great grandfather, looking every inch a 19^th century patriarch as he escorts two women out of church.

Then my grandfather, of whom I had only known that he had fought in World War II and come home to die of tuberculosis. Nobody had told me that he had been a member of the Nazi party.

Two men in military uniforms posing with thrown-out chests on the driveway where as a child I used to set out a saucer of milk every evening for the very slightly tame hedgehog. Had these men been Nazis too, enshrined now in their family histories as good sons brothers husbands fathers?

And. And then a postcard – was there only this one or had there been other copies that had been enthusiastically mailed to friends and relatives? – a postcard with a photo of an avuncular Adolf Hitler smiling down benignly at Goebbel’s daughter. My wife and I look at each other and suddenly we both need to sit down.

It is two in the morning when we have finished photographing all the photographs. In the end, I steal a few anyway. After all, this is where one part of me comes from.

Hello, long time no see!

the neighbour mistakes me

for my uncle