A women emerges from within and shoos us away. The family
are having lunch, she says. Come back another time.
But we’ve come all the way from the United States, I protest,
from Indiana. I used to live in this house. See, here in my mother’s memoir is
a photograph of it. We’ve come to see the house that holds so many memories for
me. Grumbling, the women—the maid? the cook? the wife?—turns
back into the house. We wait at the gate to see what happens.
Presently the man
of the house, a blond businessman of about 40, approaches. I explain all over
again about having lived here. The man indicates that somebody else came here about five years ago—must have been my brother Peter, making a similar
excursion down memory lane. See, I said, my mother wrote about living here in
her memoir—I show the photo to prove it, then realize my faux pas. The words
are there fairly jumping out on the page: “We loved this place and felt no
compunctions about displacing the owner, Bad Reichenhall’s former Nazi Burgermeister
(mayor).” Er, well, I would sure appreciate it if we could come in and take a
look…
Peeking around him...Oh, yeah, I remember a big walnut tree right there where I
rescued a fallen nestling. We made a nest of cotton for it in a bowl, fed it
ground walnuts, encouraged it to fly, but it fell victim to the Siamese cats;
we buried it over there in the back corner, put a tiny cross on its grave…And
that’s where there were nettles, under the three evergreens at the north end of
the yard—ouch!...And I remember climbing, then falling out of, the apple tree…the
Christmas pageant organized by our nursemaid Elfrieda, where the painted
backdop fell down in mid-performance (it’s captured on home movies)…the cocks
crowing at dawn, and the church bells…taking the “cure” for my sinus infection
at the baths that the town is named for…the big bowls of thin soup served up by
nuns at long tables at my brother’s elementary school…the curved window seat in
my parents bedroom…playing with Gisela, the cook’s daughter who lived with us…
All this I do not verbalize, but the man must feel the
urgency of my mission. He grants us permission to take a quick look around the
grounds, lets me photograph the house from the same vantage point as in my
mother’s book. No entry into the home, sorry. I don’t blame him and, in fact, am
by now somewhat embarrassed.
This never occurred to me: He’s no doubt the descendant of that
Nazi mayor whose house the US Army appropriated after the war with Germany and gave
to our family to live in while my father worked for the CIA in nearby Salzburg.
What to me brings fond memories from the tender age of four or five no doubt
recalls in him the forced removal of his own parents to an apartment over the
corner pharmacy for the duration of our stay, and perhaps that of others before
and after us. Now here’s this la-di-da Indiana lady invading his family’s privacy,
bringing up events better forgotten.
I try to make amends, gushing about what a wonderful house
it was and how happy the memories of my sojourn there. With profuse thank yous I make for the gate, and we slink away for a restorative Bavarian iced coffee.
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