Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman

by Friedrich Christian Delius

Genres: Historical Fiction; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

In Rome one January afternoon in 1943, a young German woman is on her way to listen to a Bach concert at the Lutheran church. The war is for her little more than a daydream, until she realizes that her husband might never return. Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, winner of the prestigious Georg Büchner prize, is a mesmerizing psychological portrait of the human need to safeguard innocence and integrity at any cost—even at the risk of excluding reality. More than just the story of this single woman, it is a compelling and credible description of a typical young German woman during the Nazi era.

Release date: January 31, 2012

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 128

Sample

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman

Walk, young lady, walk if you want to walk, the child will like it if you walk, Dr Roberto had said in his funny German with a strong Italian accent,
and, as always when she set off on a walk or to get some things in town, these words that the doctor used to say after her weekly examination, with his persuasive but friendly smile and in that silky voice, danced around her head,
beautiful lady, young lady, healthy lady, moving good, straining not good, and there is nothing more better in Italy for you and the child than the oxygen in the Roman air, and all this for no money, the city of Rome she is glad to offer you and the child her good air,
curious words of encouragement and irritating compliments which were already there before she took her first step outside, as she combed and plaited her hair, and put it up in a bun in front of the small bathroom mirror, thenwith a sceptical expression put on her only hat, a black one with a broad brim, and stroked both hands over her large bulging belly, and could not find anything about herself that was beautiful besides this belly, because when he called her beautiful lady it made her blush each time, in spite of his friendliness and assistance, the doctor had no right to call her that, only he did, her husband, whose return from the African front she had been waiting for week in, week out,
and she tiptoed across the terracotta tiles in the hallway, it was still siesta time, back into her room which she shared with another German woman, whose fiancé had been interned in Australia and who, although almost thirty years old, was known as "the girl" and who worked in the kitchen and helped serve meals, Ilse was still lying on her bed, reading after her siesta,
while she, the younger woman, put on black lace-up shoes, fetched her dark-blue coat from the wardrobe, cast an eye over her bed that had been made and the table that had been tidied and found everything in order, said See you at supper!, shut the door, and walked past the bathroom towards the lift and the main staircase
in the centre of the five-storey building, a hospital and old people's home run by Evangelical nuns from Germany, with a few guest rooms, one of which she was sharing with Ilse until the birth,then afterwards she had been promised a room on the fourth floor for herself and the baby,
in this mission, run by the deaconesses of Kaiserswerth, she had everything she needed and it cost her very little, a doctor and obstetrician, a midwife, sisters, regular meals, a bed, a chair, a small table, a drawer for the letters from Africa, half a wardrobe, a tiny mirror in the bathroom three doors down, a prayer each morning before breakfast, a terrace on the roof in a city where, in spite of the frequent sirens, no bombs fell, and where the winter was a mild affair, predominantly sunny and warm,
and placed her hand on the banisters, here she was surrounded and cared for by ten women in dark-blue habits and white bonnets with frilly trims and bows under the chin, stiffened by Hoffmann's starch, one of the sisters was in charge of the kitchen, one the laundry, one the ironing press, one the nursing, one the administration, and the most marvellous of them all, Schwester Else, was in charge of the entire deaconesses' mission, and they all devoted themselves to the patients, to the mothers with their babies on the maternity ward, here she felt in good hands and was endlessly grateful for everything,
especially grateful that they spoke German here, and that she did not have to make any effort to speak a foreign language in a foreign place, whichshe would not have been able to do, trained as a kindergarten teacher and housekeeper, she felt she had no gift at all for languages, she had not even learnt a handful of words of a foreign language, although she had got the best marks in arithmetic and gymnastics, at school and in the Hitler Youth's League of German Girls she had channelled her curiosity towards biology, to native plants and animals, but never to languages, and thus from morning to night and also now, as she carefully went down the stairs, she blessed her luck
that she was on a German island in the middle of Rome, where even the Italians spoke German, sometimes it was a funny German like Dr Roberto's, sometimes broken like that spoken by the women in the kitchen, but it seemed to her that all of them were making an effort, either because they really liked working here with Protestants, or perhaps because they themselves were dispersed Italian Protestants, brave Waldensians, or because they enjoyed German order or pious orderliness,
and she walked down the stairs, holding on tightly to the banisters, until she reached the entrance hall where three narrow armchairs and a table stood outside the doctor's consulting room, and a vase which always contained fresh flowers, today it was mimosa, three bunches of delicate yellow January mimosa, and after going through the glass door
entered the front hall with a bench and the tiny room for the reception sister, as they called this post in the mission, usually it was Schwester Helga who was in charge of the key and the telephone, delivered post, showed patients to admission, completed the register, and was the person who had to be informed when leaving the house and the care of the ever-obliging, ever-smiling deaconesses,
it was already three o'clock, the afternoon rest was over, and Schwester Helga was coming to do her warden's duty, she knew, it had already been discussed, that the young woman would go alone to the concert at the church on Via Sicilia, and would be accompanied home through the dark streets by two sisters,
particularly as it might be a few minutes after half-past five, when no lamps shone and windows were covered for the blackout to hoodwink the bombers who had yet to drop a bomb on Rome, and the holes and paving stones on the pavement were hard to make out,
See you at supper! said Schwester Helga, See you at supper! the young lady said, stepping through the door, and waited for a moment on the top step, as she took her first breath outside on this bright January afternoon,
Dr Roberto was quite right to praise the Roman oxygen, this air was good for her,the sunlight was good for her, the afternoon sun shone on the right side, her side, of Via Alessandro Farnese, dabbing a little of the precious sun on her face, and making her raise her head so that her hat cast no shadow on her skin and, smiling, she walked past agaves and rhododendrons, up six steps and turned left,
something she could not have imagined nine weeks ago, turning into a Roman street, all alone on a Sunday evening, so confidently and almost without trepidation,
it was nine weeks ago that she had arrived in Rome, so as to be with him for a while at last, with Gert, for the first time since their wedding, and when, the very next day, he had to tell her that he had been ordered back to the army, a sudden, immediate redeployment to Africa, and she had not been able to understand,
only just arrived and immediately alone again, highly pregnant in a dangerous foreign place, it was a shock, at twenty-one almost herself like a child that cannot walk without help or stand on its own two feet, exposed in a totally alien country and a totally alien language,
she looked up past the beautifully moulded window arches and the green shutters of the house that had, years ago, been painted rust-red, up five storeys to the railings of the terrace, searched for the window to her room and, as if it might do hersome good, looked with modest pride in her newly acquired cosmopolitanism at the palms in front, which she loved to write about in her letters, all in all a stately building, surrounded with beautiful plants,
her beloved husband could not have sought out a better refuge, she could not have found a lovelier German island, and the child inside her stirred at these thoughts, she stopped, felt the movements of the little legs and arms, she took this as a sign of consent and responded by slipping her right hand under her coat and slowly stroking her dress and the curved belly,
and, as the kicking and punching abated, she began her walk to the other German island, the church on Via Sicilia, where the concert was to start at four o'clock, it was the trusted route from one island to the other, as the rest of it, the immense city of Rome, still seemed to her like
a sea which she had to cross, checked by the fear of all those things unknown, of the yawning depths of this city, its double and triple floors and layers, of the many thousand similar columns, towers, domes, façades, ruins and street corners, of the endless number of pilgrimage sites for cultured visitors, which she walked past in ignorance, and of the faces of the people in the streets, which were difficult to make out, in these stormy times of a far-off war which was drawing nearer every day,
but where there is fear, faith can help, she could rely on this knowledge, for the Bible was also a help against the opaque, uncanny sea named Rome, for example a verse from Psalms, cited during morning prayer, If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me,
as soon as she recalled this verse she felt comforted and guided and held, and with the encouraging words of Dr Roberto, Walk, young lady, walk, and the certainty of being in exactly the right, the most secure place between the African coast, where her husband was serving, and the Baltic coast, where her parents lived, she quickly reached the first street corner, crossed the junction, stayed on the sunny side, looked at the houses in this area, all of them in those friendly colours which had become familiar to her, between bright ochre and dark, faded and washed-out red tones, three- or four-storey high, bourgeois houses, some with thick black arrows pointing to the nearest air-raid shelter, and a few paces beyond the second crossroads lined with ilex the street opened into
the square whose name she had never been able to remember properly, Cola di Rienzo, that is what was written on the stone plaques on the corners of houses, some prince or politician, she had immediately forgotten what Gert hadtold her more than two months ago, she could not retain all these foreign names in a foreign tongue, it was difficult enough to interpret the gestures and looks of passers-by,
and difficult enough to pull the right face while passing the queue at the bakery, it was shortly after three, the panificio opened at half past three and shut, like all shops, at half past five because of the blackout, a few women were standing on the pavement, as they always did in the morning or early afternoon, she sidestepped them and continued on her way,
flour was scarce, bread was scarce, it cost three lire per kilo, sometimes all they had was yellow corn bread, and last spring, Ilse had said, they lowered the daily ration from 200 grams per person to 150, two or three slices, and this for the Italians who are used to fresh bread every day, bakeries had not been allowed to sell cakes and biscuits for more than a year,
again she thought of how fortunate she was, provided with everything she needed, not starving, and not having to queue like the Roman housewives or their maids, how lucky she was that at this hour she was able to go to church, and even to a concert, and was only vexed for a second by the question of
why there is not enough bread in wartime, and why it is getting ever scarcer, seeing thatever more land is being conquered and ever more victories are being reported, after all the wheat is still growing, and the rye, you can see from the window of the train how all the fields were blooming and ripening, so where is the bread, but that was not a question you could ask, it was a test, it was God's will, he provided the daily bread and allocated it,
while these women stood there and looked relieved that she was not queuing up too, a woman eight months pregnant would be entitled to go right to the front of the queue, and that would have made the wait for the few grams of bread even longer, the semi-hostile glances became almost friendly when they realized that she was continuing to the corner of Via Cola di Rienzo,
where before turning left she looked over to the right, to where St Peter's and the Vatican were only a quarter of an hour away, she did not want to go there now, she was not going to be sidetracked, she had been there once before and seen the Pope on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, together with Ilse she had stood in a crowd of thousands and watched
as the man venerated as the Holy Father sat on a splendid chair and was carried through the church while the mass of people greeted him with rapturous applause as if he were a victor in the Olympia film or the Führer in the weeklynewsreel, and she watched the cardinals walk up and down singing, although the huge din meant she was unable to hear any of the singing or prayers, everything seemed so heathen, so loud, so superficial, more like the theatre than Mass and, as she had not understood anything anyway, and did not like crowds, especially not now with her round belly, they went outside into St Peter's Square and Ilse had sighed Thank goodness for Martin Luther!, she had thought something similar too, but had not dared utter it, Ilse was generally quicker to say what she thought, and the two of them agreed how lucky they were that they were Protestant and were able to forgo such ostentation,
and whenever she caught sight of the imposing dome of St Peter's, either from the terrace of the deaconesses' mission or while walking through the streets, she felt pity for the Catholics who were intimidated by this mass of stone, who once inside this marble fortress became extras, ants, and subject to an apparently infallible pope, it was said that there were four hundred churches in Rome, each one more beautiful and magnificent than the next, but only one of these was the right one, the church in Via Sicilia, and now she turned
left towards the bridge over the Tiber, walked over the unintelligible letters SPQR, and the intelligible ones, GAS, on the manhole covers, past the black arrows pointing to the nearestair-raid shelter, and narrow shops that were home to a hairdresser and poultry dealer, and which were closed in the afternoons, and past the wall-newspapers that were pasted to a house,
she walked this path almost every day, and sometimes, although this was increasingly seldom, when the dealer had fresh produce to display, gutted, bled and plucked chickens would hang head down in the window, right next to reports of victories in newsprint which was still damp with paste,
there were shortages of everything, of bread, meat, paper, it was thus practical to paste up the papers for all to read, Notizie di Roma, the headlines in bold type, mainly consisting of the words vittoria and vincere, announced victories or the exhortation to victory, wherever one came across propaganda the words vittoria and vincere leapt out urgently in black,
she was happy that she was unable to read any of it, and did not have to, even in Germany she had not read the papers, it was better not to know too much, not to say too much, not to ask too much, one always heard bad news soon enough, and the only good news came in letters, anyway, especially now that things did not look so good for the Germans and Italians in Russia,
the victory slogans could be heard and read more and more frequently, but no doubt that was necessary, even she thought it necessary,one had to believe even more in victory now, she desired and prayed for victory too, not just out of national duty, but secretly for the forbidden, selfish reason that he might come home quickly and safely, her husband, who had promised her the Roman delights,
to the little park by the bridge, where old men sat on benches and allowed a little January sun onto their faces after lunch, she felt eyes looking at her belly, her nose and mouth, her figure, she felt protected by her belly and the coat and hat, and yet uncomfortable, it was as if those looks were whips, so she quickened her pace and made straight for the bridge and towards the obelisks, which she could see through the boughs of the trees, of the Piazza del Popolo below the Pincio,
how lucky that you are not blonde, she thought, otherwise they would whistle and make comments, perhaps they see the foreigner in you, Germans walk differently, Germans hold themselves more stiffly, Italians swing their hips more when they walk, although they actually walk more slowly and languidly, this Roman languidness everywhere, Germans dress more sloppily in civilian clothes and are more proper in uniform, one can recognize a German even before they open their mouth, said Frau Bruhns, who had been living in Rome for years, on their recent trip to Ostia Antica,
perhaps these men notice you because they recognize you as a German, as an Aryan, and because they are not fond of us, do not like their allies in spite of everything the two leaders have sworn, every German in Rome will tell you that, or they can see that you are still a little anxious when you dare to wander around the city alone, without a companion, without the language, without any knowledge, into the sea of the foreign city and foreign people, and perhaps they are making fun of you
really, it does not matter what people think, you have to follow your path, towards the Lungotevere and over the river, and know where you belong, none of these thoughts would bother you in the slightest if you had your husband and protector beside you,
looking left and right, watching out for vehicles which flew past the junction on the Lungotevere at dangerous speeds, as they did everywhere here, the only ones still on the roads belonged to the military or were public service vehicles, and they did not want to be held up by pedestrians, she let pass a slow bus and three cyclists who were struggling on the uneven road surface,
before she reached the bridge which bore her name, as Gert had said, Ponte Margherita, the woman had been a queen, and she had not forgotten that fact, you do not forget queens, particularly if they share your name, and if your own husbandlovingly equates you with a queen, high above the famous Tiber,
that sluggish, greeny-grey, greeny-yellow river with a row of houseboats and jetties for swimmers, inanimate and closed off in these winter days, the calm, almost static water reflected the bright, high walls of the riverbanks and the boughs of the trees with single, filthy-brown leaves, beside it well-camouflaged dirty-white and grey-spotted cats sat or lay on the stone banks,
she slowed her pace, looked upstream across the extravagantly wide bridge with waist-high bulbous columns, and thought the view was pretty, she had occasionally crossed the Elbe, the Weser and the Spree, but she had never seen such a majestic river, framed by such fine, bright walls, and which divided the city and yet kept it together too,
she looked downstream to the next bend and the next bridge, just beyond which one might catch sight of the Ponte Sant'Angelo, and found the view even more beautiful, because in this direction you could see, behind the bare trees on the Lungotevere, the palazzi in orange, red and ochre plaster, vaunting their towers, terraces and wide balconies,
and in the middle of the Tiber, she was once again struck with astonishment that she of all people was permitted to live in this worldcity, in this city of all cities, as Frau Bruhns said, she, who had not even learnt Latin, just about knew the names Romulus and Remus, Caesar and Augustus, understood nothing about art, or about the popes, she,
the country girl from Mecklenburg, who like her elder sister had not had any secondary education, the child from the Baltic coast who knew her way around Rostock and Doberan and Eisenach, but was already entirely overwhelmed and out of place in Berlin, she, who had only just turned twenty-one, she on the Mediterranean and in the most important and magnificent city in Europe, the navel of the world, as Gert said, who had shown her the navel of the world at the Forum,
for two months she had crossed the Tiber almost every day via the Ponte Margherita, as if that were totally normal, but nothing was totally normal, especially not in these times, each day was a gift, each of the child's movements in her belly a gift, each verse from the Bible and each glance across the Tiber, and so she told herself again,
just how lucky she was, compared to others, compared to him, her beloved husband, who was needed in North Africa, in Tunis, in the desert close to the enemy, instead of in Rome, where he was also needed and urgently awaited, not justby her, and compared to her two younger brothers, who were also now in uniform, or her father in the admiralty in Kiel, or compared to her mother and three sisters in those ever more frequent, terrible nights when sirens wailed, with injuries, deaths, ruins, fires,
no bombs would fall on Rome, that was certain, it was obvious, the English would not raze the Eternal City and the centre of Christendom to the ground, neither would the Americans, and the splendid matte-red palazzi from the turn of the century, which she passed on her way to the Piazza del Popolo, their windows adorned with arches, their grand balconies and elegant decorative stonework, were not in imminent danger of collapse, if you could trust those people who were well informed about the war and were confident in their opinions,
she could not join in the discussion, she did not want to join in, she stuck to the belief that she was in the gracious hands of God, that was the one thing that remained certain, the one thing she took for granted,
the view of the brick wall in front of the Piazza and the reverse side of the statue of some sea god which towered high above the wall, a powerful male figure flanked by two half-man, half-fish forms, even from behind the almost naked men presented a strange picture, and the one in themiddle carried a sort of huge fork, and when she had walked along here with Gert she had asked why he had a fork in his hand, and, smiling, he had answered,
that's a trident, that's Neptune, the god of the sea, and he's represented by a trident, but you're right, let's call it a fork, he uses it to spear fish for breakfast and shovel them into his mouth, but perhaps the sea god doesn't eat fish at all, it would be like in the Land of Milk and Honey, perhaps he's not allowed to eat any, I didn't pay attention at school, the gods only fed on nectar and ambrosia and drank wine, I'll have to check on whether Neptune ate fish as well,
that was another thing she admired about him, if there was something he did not know, he immediately had an idea where you could find it out,
on the wall, a few metres to either side of the group of figures, fish stood on their heads, a pair on the right and a pair on the left, fat, grinning contentedly, heads adorned with fins, on plinths, bodies and tail fins stretched upwards, looped and twisted around each other, the bodies in contact, the tail fins not touching, but playing with each other in the air, waving over the bodies and heads with acrobatic ease, and the whole thing hewn in stone, fish in love, Gert had said, that's what fish look like when they're in love,
and here, beyond these figures and the fish, Via Ferdinando di Savoia divided, passers-by had to decide whether they wanted to walk left or right along the medium-height wall, past the left-or right-hand pair of lovestruck fish to the Piazza del Popolo, on the gate side or the city side of the magnificent, spacious square, cars and bicycles were directed right into the narrow, one-way street that sloped gently downwards
along which the pedestrian herself mostly walked whenever she went to enquire after letters from her husband or to deliver post at the Wehrmacht headquarters in Via delle Quattro Fontane, the best route to which was by way of Via del Babuino,
but now she chose the left fork, as always when she was on her way to the Pincio and to the church, on the black-grey, greasy paving towards the gate side of the square,
and no matter from which direction she approached, each look, each step was drawn to the massively high obelisk in the centre, a magnet, bordered by four fountains, past which the occasional car drove at a respectable distance,
it was hard to resist this magnet and to avoid walking closer until you were almost at the stepped fountains, upon which stone lions spewed water from their mouths, the same, powerful spurt for centuries, probably, in peacetime and wartime,
she stopped, she did not wish to go any closer and make a detour, she came past here almost every day, and yet she stopped each time, to direct her gaze up at the viewing terrace supported by pillars, and the palms and pines of the Pincio, and then slowly let it fall back down to the bright oval square, and wander around and
focus on the shadows of the three large streets which led to the narrow, sombre jungle of the city centre, and then on to the café on the corner until her gaze alighted on the group of sea gods with the fork and the fish lovers, posing above a semi-circular fountain, at the foot of which three cars were parked,
and each time her eyes would then wander up to the tip of the obelisk, to the cross right at the top, she liked this, and found it comforting that the Christian symbol triumphed over the heathen one, according to the Baedeker guide the Egyptian stone was supposed to be three thousand years old,
could you imagine that, older than Christ, perhaps even older than Moses, now a roundabout circled by the odd tiny car and cyclists in black shirts, this incomprehensible limitlessness made her feel dizzy, the very thought of all those things she would never learn or understand made her feel dizzy,
even the Italian that was spoken around her was as alien as the hieroglyphics on theobelisk, and the Latin inscription on the plinth that Gert had translated for her was, apart from the word CAESAR, as unintelligible as the Egyptian characters, the whole of Rome was full of hieroglyphics and puzzles that bewildered her
like the threshing of the corn at the foot of the obelisk in the middle of the piazza that Ilse had talked about, in summer Mussolini always had lorries deliver crops on the Piazza del Popolo, which were then thrown into a threshing machine, bales of straw and sacks of corn were supposed to demonstrate the connection between the countryside and the city, what a waste, and so she was relieved that at least she understood the cross in this square and could abide by the cross and the churches, even if they were Catholic,
and once again, before she continued on her way, she looked to the left of the twin churches into Via del Babuino, down which she had already walked four times this week, Monday and Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, the street of letters and packages, the street of the signs of life she hoped for, the street of happiness, from where she had returned yesterday with two letters from Gert, received at the Wehrmacht headquarters, full of gratitude after a first glance at his lines and the silent, short prayer: He's alive! Thank you, O benevolent God!, and this is why, of the three streets which ran radially between the domed churchestowards the obelisk, she knew Babuino best of all, her street of happiness and gratitude,
in the first few weeks she often had made part of the journey to Via delle Quattro Fontane by bus, until one day a man, a total stranger, a man of about fifty in a good suit, had touched her bottom, had touched her, the manifestly pregnant young lady, with his groping hand, with an unbelievable nerve, the like of which she had never experienced before,
it thus took her too long to react and scream, which she failed to do because, as she was about to scream, she started to feel ashamed that her body had been defiled, and immediately thought that, as a foreigner, as a suspicious German without the language, she would have been just as unable to explain her screaming to the other people as she would have this brute's behaviour, so instead of screaming loudly she had turned and pushed her way to the door, to get out at the next stop,
a distressing moment, and on Via del Corso too, which she had avoided since, the main street with the upmarket shops, almost cleared out by the war, and a memorial plaque for Goethe, who was called Volfango here, the most distressing moment of her nine weeks in Rome, which she had not told any of the deaconesses about, not even Ilse,
she had only confided in Gert, who tried to comfort her from Africa, that's very rich, he had written, particularly given your condition, unfortunately such sick men did exist, and this sort of thing happened more often in Catholic countries, he had written, but she had been right to get off the bus straightaway,
since that incident she had kept as far away from crowds as possible, out of consideration for the child as well, and in the dangerous sea of the hospitable and harsh, beautiful and uncanny city, had sought out her little islands of reassurance, such as crosses on obelisks or the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, along the side façade of which she now walked towards the Pincio steps, the only one of the over-elaborate, proudly grandiose churches in which she did not feel alienated,
because Martin Luther had once stayed in the convent here, and said Mass in front of the altar and preached, when he was a young monk in Rome, as she knew from Gert, appalled and disgusted by the improvident extravagance, lack of belief and licentiousness of senior as well as ju