Befriended
by Jen Calleja
Illustration by Richard Phoenix
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Reinhardt Vogel, leaving behind his already elderly parents and an older woman he didn’t want to settle for in Germany, flew the coop, became Richard Fogel, and arrived in Sheffield in the 1950s aged twenty. The triumphant anecdote that went with the duelling scar from his schooldays was willingly replaced with a fabricated tale of vaulting a chain-link fence and catching the corner of his mouth on a flailing piece of wire when he was fourteen and growing up in a well-to-do part of the Edinburgh outskirts. Sheffield was only meant to be a stop-off but he fell into lecturing at the university (fell for twenty-two years) and then moved in with a girl who worked there as a cleaner quite late in his life. She had a son from her short-lived marriage to a policeman. He was pleased when he let her move in. He had been a little worried about the kind of house he would choose, whether he would subconsciously pick a tall, grey Wohnung. He was also overjoyed to have an English son, and one that was so wonderful. He was over twenty years older than Audrey and by the time Stephen was eleven he was the same age as his father had been when he was that age: 61. He had been Stephen’s father for ten years, and had baffled Stephen’s biological father with words like ‘consistency’, ‘stability’ and ‘stimulation’, so the chap stayed away. They would see this young and now portly man doing his rounds on the high street and all would be very polite and say hello and he would shake Stephen’s hand and return the nod that Professor Fogel would direct at him. Audrey would ask ‘Y’Alright’ and he would echo it back. This was when televisions made everything look dull, especially the people, walking around doing dull things, never going anywhere. When Stephen was approaching twelve, he asked his father if they would visit where he had grown up: the small farm where he had run around and his mother had scolded him.
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* * *
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Katherine ‘Käthe’ Bach finished school in the summer of 1986 and moved away to the same town in Bavaria that she had visited on a school trip the year previously within weeks of getting her exam results, telling her parents she had got an admin job at an English company through the parents of a school friend. In less than five years, she could get away with telling everyone there she was from Augsburg. She had barely said five words in her first sixteen years in Llangollen, but in Southern Germany the words flowed. She drifted into driving a delivery van, lugging crates of beer to bars all over Munich. After work, she would drink in the bar next to the depot and be the loudest at telling jokes and would hold her loud laugh for minutes on end. Then, when there was a tricky situation with the wife of one of her fellow drivers (a very good friend of hers and a lovely guy) she asked for a job directly from the supplier to drive a LKW all over Europe. Her day spent in the cocoon of the truck’s threadbare deep red velvet cab was heaven: she was serenely at peace from the moment she woke up at 4am to drink her coffee in her small, yellow-bright kitchen in her fresh knickers and wet ponytail, to when she returned home a few days later. The front door opened onto the kitchen, where she would kick off one boot, put her arm out to turn the oven on, kick off the other boot, and then shower while the oven preheated for a pizza. She would eat it while either watching Wer wird Millionär? or playing computer games. Driving was like sitting at a forever roving window. She never really noticed the road, but saw the detail in everything around it. It was like going on holiday but bringing your bedroom with you. The concert stickers on the dash were peeling, in some cases only the sticky residue remained, and the patchwork quilt for roadside naps was perpetually crushed in the passenger footwell by outdated maps. She always had a cigarette on the go, ash sometimes dropping into the can of coke holed up between her navy jeaned thighs. She used her drinks – sometimes sparkling water, no qualms about the odd Helles if she was going to be in the middle of nowhere for quite a few hours – to measure out the time between stops. For the past twelve years she had mainly been sent to France, Holland, Italy, Spain, the Ukraine, rarely to the UK. After coming back from Bulgaria, she had a voicemail and an email follow-up letting her know that in two weeks she would be heading to ‘Vales’.
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Illustration by Richard Phoenix
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* * *
He would have to see if they could find the time, he told Stephen. Audrey would find it hard to get the time off work; she still worked three days a week, even though he told her that she didn’t have to. Stephen asked his mother if she could write a letter to his school asking him to have time off for a family holiday and she frowned automatically, repeating that she didn’t really like travelling, that it would be quite a few hours by train, and could be quite expensive. Richard was looking into what attractions this place had in some tourist guides at their local library when a strange thing happened. He started to feel panicked. He felt wholly uncomfortable. He had perfected his accent and language by watching war films and through befriending an Englishman who worked as the caretaker at the office where he briefly worked when he was nineteen and planning on leaving Chemnitz. The man was making a fresh start after getting out of prison and had ended up in Germany: specifically there. They met every Friday evening for four or five hours and Richard would use up his wages buying him drinks while surreptitiously making notes under the table and truthfully agreeing with him that Germans were odd. When he arrived in Britain he was surrounded by information to absorb – gestures, stances, hairstyles, typical topics of conversation – and soon barely anyone commented that they couldn’t place his accent or that he was ‘very European’. He would lie about where he was born, where he was from, where he studied. He knew that the Dean who had processed his application to join the university would be leaving soon, so he could tell his colleagues of his unusual journeys around a slew of northern universities for short periods of time, never making friends. He visited or had already visited the places he mentioned and looked up older photos and prospectuses for the periods he would have ‘been’ there. He never worried about being called out. We will visit the place where I grew up, he told Stephen while standing at the dresser dusting Audrey’s collection of china figurines while she rehung the curtains after a smack out in the yard.
* * *
A batch of mushrooms was clouding up before a seemingly randomly placed bench in the corner of the play park pointing away from the equipment. All curtains were open, every house immaculately tidy and no one to be seen inside or out. Her house in Munich was similarly situated: in a valley, pines piled up to the sky on all sides. Instead of an all-seeing wind turbine soundlessly turning in the wordless quiet, there were white Monopoly houses emitting puffs of after-effects smoke. There were even more trees piled up on top of the pines, impossibly high, with impossibly placed mining cottages and leaning fields with sheep the size of grains of puffed rice floating like slow-moving cloud cars over the flat-coloured terrain. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t been back to Wales for twenty years, a day in the village felt the same as it always had; like a German Sunday, only the blinds were open.
“Oh, hello Katherine” a woman standing on the pavement fingering flowers hanging over the low wall shouted cheerfully. She had glanced up on her approach, and then looked back at the drooping leaves of the plant. In a mauve overcoat over moss-green overalls was her Auntie Mai. She had been Käthe since moving to Germany, she was only called Kat-trin when visiting the serious atmosphere of an officious Amt.
“Coming in for tea then,” her auntie said, and she turned off down the path to her left.
“Oh, hello Katherine” a woman standing on the pavement fingering flowers hanging over the low wall shouted cheerfully. She had glanced up on her approach, and then looked back at the drooping leaves of the plant. In a mauve overcoat over moss-green overalls was her Auntie Mai. She had been Käthe since moving to Germany, she was only called Kat-trin when visiting the serious atmosphere of an officious Amt.
“Coming in for tea then,” her auntie said, and she turned off down the path to her left.
* * *
He wrote some letters and made some phone calls from phone boxes. I’ll book the tickets, he told them when they asked if they would buy them on the day at the train station. They would take a week off of work and school. A week seemed like a long time off for Stephen. Professor Fogel wrote a letter to his teacher requesting time off for family reasons, and they allowed it. He bought the tickets – which didn’t cost that much – at a travel agents in town. He kept the envelope in his office, in the top drawer of his desk, until the night before they were going away. The envelope felt hot when he took it out the drawer to bring home.
* * *
She drank the tea – the milk overly present in her mouth, thick and sour-tasting – which she tried to mostly suck up with the crumbly biscuits on offer. She had the uncanny feeling of being in a suffocating dream, a quiet nightmare.
“The magnolia’s been doing awfully well in the wet weather, but the wall petunias are getting a little drowned. The post office might be closing and the Christian Centre has stopped selling cake so I won’t bother making so many anymore. Baking’s a bit of a fuss, especially since we had the kitchen made smaller during the renovations a couple of years ago. My wrists get bloody tired from whisking. A few sponge cakes aren’t too much trouble though…”
Her auntie’s voice was very quiet and slow, a gentle hum reverberating around the lounge like a radio playing in another room. Katherine couldn’t remember when her stomach unclenched, or when she sat back against the cushions leaning one unfolded pink arm on the armrest like on the window ledge of the truck. She couldn’t remember where the ham and mustard sandwich with a side of crisps on the small plate in her lap came from, or when the fire was reloaded with wood. She suddenly spoke – her voice deep and unrecognisable and suddenly in English – to say that she didn’t think the traffic through the village was that big of a problem, and that she drove a truck for work that was currently reverse parked into the dead-end by The Old Trout. It was suddenly dark outside, as revealed by the only small triangle of window left showing between the permanently closed curtains. They ate stew with bread and cheese and watched a wildlife documentary. Her auntie chucked her an old patchwork quilt on her way up to bed, shortly before Katherine fell asleep in front of the television’s static downpour in the hot, dark room.
“The magnolia’s been doing awfully well in the wet weather, but the wall petunias are getting a little drowned. The post office might be closing and the Christian Centre has stopped selling cake so I won’t bother making so many anymore. Baking’s a bit of a fuss, especially since we had the kitchen made smaller during the renovations a couple of years ago. My wrists get bloody tired from whisking. A few sponge cakes aren’t too much trouble though…”
Her auntie’s voice was very quiet and slow, a gentle hum reverberating around the lounge like a radio playing in another room. Katherine couldn’t remember when her stomach unclenched, or when she sat back against the cushions leaning one unfolded pink arm on the armrest like on the window ledge of the truck. She couldn’t remember where the ham and mustard sandwich with a side of crisps on the small plate in her lap came from, or when the fire was reloaded with wood. She suddenly spoke – her voice deep and unrecognisable and suddenly in English – to say that she didn’t think the traffic through the village was that big of a problem, and that she drove a truck for work that was currently reverse parked into the dead-end by The Old Trout. It was suddenly dark outside, as revealed by the only small triangle of window left showing between the permanently closed curtains. They ate stew with bread and cheese and watched a wildlife documentary. Her auntie chucked her an old patchwork quilt on her way up to bed, shortly before Katherine fell asleep in front of the television’s static downpour in the hot, dark room.
* * *
It came to the morning of going away. The taxi would be arriving in the next few minutes. Audrey hadn’t liked France, and he wondered what she would make of Chemnitz, especially when it wasn’t in Scotland. The clock struck six. Richard knelt down before Stephen and zipped up his jacket. You can be whoever you want to be when you’re older, but you can never be a different person to the one you were when you were a child. He told this to Stephen and asked whether he would prefer his real father to be his father. There was a merry knock at the door: tap tap-tap tap tap. Stephen said he wouldn’t. Your childhood is where you start, and it is where you return, he said, straightening up and opening the door.