Chapter III: The Pre-War Days

Chapter III: The Pre-War Days

Maria met up with Sigrun the next day in a popular beer pavilion and told her about the visitors.

“So they were handsome?” Sigrun asked.

“Reasonably. For clients — or so I thought when they arrived. I knew they were there to test me, but I presumed they were no more than another set of annoying customers. I had no way of knowing they were sent to invite me to meet some highly powerful men.”

“So they were handsome?” Sigrun asked.

“Stop teasing!” Maria crumpled a paper napkin and threw it at her.

“More handsome than Lothar?”

“It’s not the same,” Maria said. “Lothar is like a brother to me. And if you repeat that in front of him, I’ll tear your hair out by the roots! And I most certainly won’t invite you along.”

“Oh… please, please!” Sigrun squealed. “You need me. Traute will be away in Switzerland and you can’t possibly leave me behind!”

“I know…”

“We’re a team, aren’t we?” Sigrun said.

Of course, they were a team; always had been since childhood. Sigrun had been the only one who hadn’t laughed at the funny way Maria spoke. Every other child in Munich she had met had giggled and poked fun at her. She had never wanted to leave Vienna.

“I hate it in Germany,” she had whined, when mother was busy packing the suitcases.

“Oh, just calm down,” mother had said briefly. How German she sounded, how utterly appropriate for Munich.

“I want to sound like you! They’re always making fun of me…”

Mother remained unshaken.

“You’re a Viennese girl who has a German mother and a Croatian father — wherever he might be.” Father was never mentioned without some kind of a sarcastic remark squeezed in after touching

on the subject, mostly accompanied by a slightly condescending smile. “You should be proud of that.”

“I’m not!”

“And if you don’t like Wienerisch, you shouldn’t play with the Matuschek children day and night. The Haas girls are just one staircase away and they speak perfect Berlinerisch.”

“But I don’t like them!”

“What’s not to like? They are well-brought-up little ladies. You should be thankful that you’d have an opportunity to have conversations in a very nice Berlin dialect, instead of learning new lower-class words every day that even I don’t understand.”

“But they said I’m a crow!”

“You are not a ‘crow’. You are half Croatian. You must learn to stand up for yourself.” There it was, case closed.

Many of the members of mum’s family probably thought she was dumb — so rarely was she willing to so much as open her mouth in the company of anyone other than her mother. Indeed, old Auntie Bertha certainly thought so, and always made a terrible fuss:

“Sabine, doesn’t the child talk yet?”

“She does, and very well, Tante.”

“Well she should by now; she is at least ten years old!”

“I am twelve!” Maria burst out.

“What was that she said?” Auntie Bertha had an ear trumpet, which was ostentatiously lifted to her ear to express not so much her inability to hear, but to signify her disapproval of what she heard.

“She said she is twelve,” mother translated.

Auntie Bertha had never been outside Munich and regarded anyone with an accent as a potential terrorist.

Maria only replied to the questions of the grown-ups, keeping her replies very short, preferring to speak in a whisper. If there were other children in the room, she knew she would become the centre of unwanted attention. They began giggling, or, in cases where they were kids from better homes, whispering to each other and their parents.

“What did she just say?” “What language is that?” “Is she foreign?” “Is something wrong with her?”

Mart Sander

In a couple of minutes, one or another kid would try to imitate her last spoken words and that would start an epidemic of mockWienerisch, resulting in laughter (theirs) and tears (hers). The parents would reprimand their naughty offspring for the sake of appearances, casting ever-so-pitying glances in her direction. She could imagine what they were saying.

“She’s quite a nice little girl, she’s just different from us. She doesn’t have a father like you have. Look at her — she’s not half that bad-looking. Nice long hair. Why don’t you go and play with her? No, you can’t laugh at her funny way of speaking! Now be a little gentleman, go and try to be nice to the poor girl. Just don’t make fun of her… you know… her problem!”

Sigrun was different. She seemed to be immensely interested in hearing Maria speak. She drew closer and closer, and when Maria still refused to say anything, she knocked on her shoulder.

“Who are you here with?” she asked.

Maria replied reluctantly: “With my mother.” She almost managed not to give herself away.

“And what does she do for living?” the dark girl asked.

“She… she is a seamstress,” Maria said. This time her nerves betrayed her: she sounded like one of the Matuschek twins.

But the other girl didn’t laugh. She seemed to go over what she had just heard in her mind, to analyse it as if trying to decide whether what she had heard was good or bad.

“You sound like Fritzi Massary,” she said, with approval. “You know Fritzi Massary? My father has many of her gramophone records. I can sing them all. You know Fritzi Massary? She’s from Vienna!”

“I’m from Vienna,” Maria said, and wasn’t ashamed of herself any longer.

“Now look at you two,” one or another of the ladies said. “You could be twins! What beautiful manes of hair!”

Maria didn’t think they were alike, but she accepted the comment as a huge compliment. Sigrun, the other girl of approximately the same age, had flowing hair of a raven black whereas she herself had dark blond. A couple of days later, when she and her mother made a

day trip to the suburbia to have a picnic with Sigrun’s parents, Maria let the other girl in on the secret of her hair.

“Do you know that when you grow your hair really long, you can talk to God?” she asked.

“How can that be?” Sigrun asked with real amazement.

“Father told me — before he left.”

Sigrun was either too taken up with thinking about talking to God or too well brought up to ask any questions about Maria’s father having ‘left’.

“What did he tell you?”

“Well,” Maria began recounting what had occurred a couple of years ago. “There was this exciting exhibition in Vienna, all about the future. It was a miracle! They said that soon everyone will be flying around in magic chairs and we can walk into a room in Grinzig and step out of it in a second — well, in Munich, and even in a different dress!”

Maria trusted some imagination was allowed, to add a feminine touch to the story. Sigrun’s widened eyes begged for more.

“And then there was the telegraph.”

“But we do have a telegraph in Munich; their office is right next door to our town house!” Sigrun sounded disappointed.

“Not the usual telegraph that has wires and can only send words!” Maria protested. “The kind that is wireless and can send voices and music!”

“Voices and music?”

“Yes! They use long metal poles with interesting decorations fixed on them and these are called ‘antennae’. Somehow, when music is played or when someone speaks to this antenna in one place, it can be heard instantly wherever you are, when you are holding another antenna, even if you’re on the other side of the world!”

“Can you really?” Sigrun seemed very excited.

“Father asked the man,” Maria went on to prove her point, “if he could hear what goes on in America, and the man replied he could, but the antenna would need to be very, very tall. And then he said that if the antenna was even taller, then one could hear sounds from the sky! And who is there to speak from the sky?”

Mart Sander

“God!” Sigrun said breathlessly. She was very proud that she had arrived at this answer all on her own.

“And do you know,” Maria now said in a different, much lower and mysterious voice, “that the ghosts and spirits and the angels can speak to people?”

She half expected, half feared to see Sigrun laugh, or run away in tears — these would have been the typical reactions from other little girls. But Sigrun adopted the new topic eagerly.

“I know!” she said, changing her tone accordingly, to match Maria’s. “There’s the old lady on our street, Madame Orloff, and she can speak to the dead! I know it for sure. When Mathilde’s father died, her mom used to go to the Madame and there the father appeared to her from beyond the grave!”

“These ladies are called mediums,” Maria said.

“Mediums…” Sigrun repeated, trying to understand and memorize a new and very important word.

“These mediums always have ever such long hair,” Maria claimed, even though this was only her theory. “Because the longer the hair, the more they can hear. It’s like when you put every single hair on top of the other, you’ll get an antenna that is so long that no man could ever build such a thing from metal. And then you’ll hear everything much more clearly and perhaps — just perhaps — you’ll hear what God is saying or thinking in the sky!”

Sigrun was so awestruck that she forgot to breathe.

“And that’s why I have decided: I shall never have my hair cut,” Maria concluded. “Because one day I shall be a medium too, and I shall tell people the secrets they have yearned to learn their whole lives through!”

“I shall never have my hair cut again, either!” Sigrun concurred in a minute, very seriously.

This was the moment that sealed their friendship.

Over the years which followed they never lost touch. Maria and her mother visited Munich every year; every year the girls were measuring up their hair to see if it had grown enough to pick up celestial messages. They were both determined that their future should lie in otherworldly business, so they experimented with

everything they read or learnt about. Sigrun’s family were well off; she pleaded with her mother until she subscribed to a special monthly journal that dealt with all things magical — or rather, esoteric and mediumistic. It was fascinating to know and use such exciting words, which in themselves carried the sounds of the other side and the wisdom of the spirits. First, the girls tried their hand at clairvoyance, but with no luck whatsoever. The whole summer was wasted on different experiments which produced no tangible evidence of their powers — at least, nothing that could not be ascribed to wishful thinking, overactive imaginations, or coincidence — and the girls parted with some distress. Then Sigrun wrote to Maria and informed her of her new hobby — contacting the spirits of the dead. Maria could hardly wait for their next visit — she had only rarely come across any books or papers about these matters and she didn’t want be involved in any supernatural experiments with anyone else. The next summer was cut short because of the sudden outbreak of war, but it turned out to be the most exciting and productive of all their summers: they tried to summon a plate spirit, they used an Ouija board and on many occasions they were deeply frightened at what their trials seemed to produce.

It was during this summer, on what she later came to realize had been the very last day of peace in Europe, that Maria experienced something most promising and highly disturbing all at once.

Sigrun had performed one or another ritual she had heard of, absolutely convinced that she would be able to contact the spirit of none other than Goethe (she was seventeen, imagined herself to be madly in love and was passionately reading Werther, finding the answers to all the questions that young people have asked throughout the centuries when in love for the first time). Maria was eighteen, much older and wiser, and she would’ve been contented with any spirit making its appearance. Sadly, however hard they tried to fall into a trance and hear the voice of the great poet in the gentle howling of the night wind, nothing remarkable happened. Maria was no longer afraid of these little séances which earlier had induced pleasurable thrills; sometimes they seemed to have an opposite effect on her, filling her mind and soul with rare tranquillity. On that very

Mart Sander night, such peace swelled forth in her heart that she felt like going to sleep in a very secure and comfortable bed with the purest of conscience. Sigrun noticed that.

“We can’t expect to be making any progress if you sit there dozing off,” she reprimanded Maria. “You need to really, really try; really concentrate… What are these?”

Before Maria even understood what Sigrun had asked about, the girl had pulled a sheet of paper from underneath Maria’s hand. There was some writing on it. Maria had no idea how this had come to be there in the first place, let alone what it was.

“What have you been doing?” Sigrun asked again, lifting the sheet to her eyes in the dimly-lit room and moving it up and down in an attempt to read the faint scribblings.

“I didn’t do it,” Maria said, even though she didn’t know what the paper was showing.

“Yes you did! This was a perfectly clean sheet of paper before we began!”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I placed it there myself, for you to take notes if someone manifested. I clearly noticed that you hadn’t written a single word not ten minutes ago.”

“Well… perhaps I made a note that nothing happened,” Maria supposed, without having any real recollection about writing down anything.

“But this is nonsense,” Sigrun protested, still not sure which way the paper should be held. “I can’t read these! And how could you have scribbled all of that in such short time, without me noticing anything?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t have,” Maria protested.

Sigrun appeared quite alarmed, as she handed the sheet back to Maria.

“Well, you explain it then!” she challenged.

Maria was quite unable to do so — the sheet was filled with strange markings, with an unclear drawing between the lines that resembled a section of a sea map. The symbols looked like letters, but of an alphabet Maria had no knowledge of. The whole composition

appeared very neat and tidy, as if someone had taken great care in the result.

“You really mean to say I did all of this?” Maria asked.

“Well, who else?!” Sigrun exclaimed agitatedly.

“Are you sure these markings weren’t on the paper before? Perhaps on the other side, when you thought you only had a blank sheet?”

“I’m not stupid!” Sigrun raised her voice. “Besides, look at the colour of these letters! Isn’t this your very own new ink pen which you only bought today? I have never used that kind of purple ink in my life!”

All of a sudden she grew silent and stared at Maria with eyes as wide as saucers.

“Maria!” she whispered, and it was barely more audible than the wind in the chimney pipe.

“What?”

“Do you know what you have done? You have just manifested psychography!”

“What is that”? Maria asked.

“Automatic writing, of course!” In a couple of seconds, Sigrun was transformed from a moody girl into a toy bunny with an overwound spring. She was prancing around the room in between repeatedly embracing Maria, who still sat limply.

“You have been contacted! At last!” she chanted.

“But by whom? Certainly not Goethe…”

“That doesn’t matter,” Sigrun refused to be deflated. “We’ve just had our first indisputable manifestation! Let’s have a look together!”

She sat next to Maria and switched on the lights. The magic was gone; the possible proof remained.

In the sharp electric light, the markings seemed even weirder than in the soft blurry duskiness.

“I think…” Sigrun said after a minute, struggling to find a plausible verdict; “I think you made a contact with a foreigner!”

“Do you think this is — Chinese, perhaps?”

Mart Sander

“Chinese, Japanese — who cares! This was obviously a spirit of someone who didn’t speak German. How did it feel, Maria? To have some long dead Chinaman take over your body?”

This new notion scared Maria somewhat, especially when all she could recall was a strange sense of tranquillity, made ever stranger by this new revelation.

Sigrun had arrived at a new idea.

“Maria! I know what this is! It’s a treasure map! Look — this obviously is some mysterious island in the South Seas, and this here — this spot which your hand has obviously stressed to make it stick out — this must be where the treasure is buried!”

After much rejoicing from Sigrun and an equal amount of confusion from Maria, the girls decided that the paper must be carefully copied and then shown around to some prominent men — scientists, historians, professors of strange and probably dead languages. This was of utmost importance and could not be postponed!

Neither of them had any sleep that night.

The news of the war arrived the next morning, very calmly, in a newspaper that was dropped at the house by an equally calm newspaper boy.

“Isn’t that where you come from?” Sigrun asked Maria upon reading the word Serbia in the headlines.

“No. I come from Vienna. My father was a subject of the Kingdom of Croatia-Slovenia.”

“It’s complicated,” Sigrun dismissed the issue. “We won’t get involved.”

How very wrong she was! In no time, the whole of Europe was involved, and then the whole world. Maria and her German mother first entertained thoughts of spending the autumn in Germany, but all at once the war had Germany in its embrace as well. So they went back home, Maria taking with her the evidence of the only successful séance.