Apocryphal (that means being of doubtful authenticity, Des) or not, it is said that one day an excited young man came to Alexander Dumas (author of 'The Three Musketeers', remember?) with the most superb idea for a novel.
"You have a good plot?" Dumas asked. "A plot that is full of excitement; characters that breathe; settings that bedazzle the eye; and a suspense that is truly unbearable", the young man said. Dumas grabbed him by the shoulders and cried, "Good! Now all you need to make it a novel is 200,000 words".
I was again reminded of this apocryphal story (of doubtful authenticity, Des, remember?) when a reader emailed me "I feel a novel coming on" after having read through the 'My family tree is more like a bonsai' post.
I already came up with a great title - "Grave Expectations" - but I doubt I can cobble together the necessary 200,000 word. I put the following story through an online word counter and it comes to barely fourteen hundred words, so you may want to embroider it a bit in your own mind:
As I wrote elsewhere, no-one ever emigrates because of the success they've enjoyed at home. No one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off." The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is because they've cocked everything up in their own. Being just nineteen years old, my opportunities for cocking things up had been rather limited; in fact, my only cock-up until then had been that I allowed myself to be born to parents who were so dirt-poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of fourteen.
That this cock-up happened at all is entirely due to my older brother who was born in December 1932, just two months after our parents had got married. It must've been the most overdue shotgun wedding of the day! Those were the days before birth control, and my oldest sister followed eighteen months later. That should have been it but Hitler's war machine demanded that German women produce more cannon fodder, and so a second and third sister - presumably destined to nurse the returning wounded soldiers - were born in 1940 and 1942.
That should definitely have been it but then Hitler started giving out the Mother's Cross. Had the war lasted another five months, my mother would have been awarded a bronze Mother's Cross for me and been on her way to a silver one, but was awarded with scorched earth instead.
The immediate post-war years are one big blur - you don't remember much when all you can think about is food, or rather, the lack of it - but I do remember when my oldest sister died the same year I started my schooling. It was never much talked about and only later, when I was almost an adult, did I hear the downcast-eyes-hand-in-front-of-the-mouth whisper that she had died following a botched-up abortion.
By that time my old but then still young nineteen-year-old brother had already left what we euphemistically called 'home' but was little more than a daily unfolding disaster, which he had escaped by living with his girlfriend's parents which is the last time I saw him until thirty-two years later - and of which later - but I heard of him ten years later.
That was when I lived with my by then already divorced mother and my newly acquired stepfather, and my brother's girlfriend - by that time engaged to be married to my brother - stood on our doorstep, bunch of flowers for my mother in her hand, and promptly dissolved into tears. My brother had been transferred by his employers to another town where he had met another woman and had promptly married her after having sponged off his fiancée's parents for more than ten years. I didn't start to learn English until I had decided to emigrate to Australia several years later, but had I known some English words then, the word "b*****d" would have been the mildest one to describe my brother's action.
As I wrote, I never saw him again until thirty-two years later when I flew back to Germany to attend my father's funeral in January 1984. Luckily, I was at the time working in nearby Greece and had already flown back the year before to sit with him for a week even though he no longer recognised me. And neither did my brother who not even shook my hand at the funeral which, given the importance of the German handshake, tells you more than I want to tell you here. I did, however, shake hands with my two remaining sisters with whom I stayed in contact through the obligatory Christmas card. Those were the days before the internet which came even later than the German Reunification which, if it hadn't happened already, finally destroyed what little was left of our family.
As part of the reunification, the government of the new Germany undertook to pay reparations to those who had left their properties behind when they fled Russian-occupied East Germany for the West. My father didn't live long enough to see it happen but my stepmother, whom he had married after his divorce from my mother, was suddenly a rich woman, as were her two children who would be her inheritors.
By this time I was safely back home in Australia where I had just bought "Riverbend" when my youngest sister urgently contacted me to join the fight over my father's inheritance. Apparently, there was such a thing as "Pflichtanteil" which gave all surviving children a legally guaranteed portion of the inheritance even though my stepmother was the sole beneficiary in our father's will. The knives came out and my younger sister also came out to Australia for me to sign over my share to her since I wanted nothing and wasn't going to join into the fight. She was gone as soon as she had my signature. That was the last I heard from that sister except for a bill from her solicitor for 'my' share of his fee.
The last time I heard from my other, my oldest surviving sister was in December 2005 through her palliative nurse Marco Dörner who had been by her side as she slowly died of brain cancer, just sixty-five years old. In a letter which she dictated to Marco, she wrote, "Rückblickend hatte ich kein gutes Leben, im Grunde genommen war es eigentlich Scheiße!"
Then, through the internet, in an idle moment I typed my brother's name into the search engine and was immediately confronted with a 'Letter to the Editor' written - in German, of course - by some malcontent signed with my brother's name and - most helpful! - an email address. Letting bygones be bygones, I fired off an email, "Are you my brother?" I didn't have long to wait for an affirmative reply, after which we continued our brotherly love-ins on a more or less regular basis, including some face-to-face conversations through WhatsApp.
I remember when at one time he wrote that he was going through a bad patch domestically and wanted to divorce his wife. He was scared, including of losing half his superannuation, and could he come out to Australia and stay with me? I knew no more of my brother than of my neighbour next door - less, probably! - but what little I knew of him told me that he was such a typical Ur-German that he would have made Göring look positively cosmopolitan, and no amount of brotherly love, even if I could have drawn on any, could ever make me live with him.
Strangely, in later years his selective memory denied any of this ever having happened, but I continued to assure him that he hadn't outlived me yet by sending him regular links to my blog posts, to which he eventually objected - not to the 'outliving' bit but to the blog posts since, as he had pointed out to me again and again, he could read no English and was not about to learn it - and our contact went dead.
While my brother's memory seems to be selective, his son's is absolutely hyperthymestic. I don't know what prompted him to write to his 'Uncle Peter' in Australia some fifty years ago, but it was such an imbecilic letter that I refused to reply. While none of my kin have much going for them, we all seem to have above-average intelligence and I could not believe that my brother's son could have written something so stupid.
With no contact with my brother and wanting to renew it, in recent months I searched for his son's email. Having found it, I wrote, "Good to find your email address. How are you?" His reply was almost immediate, "Danke, good. Ich nehme an, das war Deine Antwort auf meinen Brief, den ich Dir vor 50 Jahren als kleiner Junge geschrieben habe. Dann sprechen wir uns also etwa 2075 wieder. Bis dann." Touché!
That's all the contact I have had bar a letter from the German embassy some years after the fight over my father's will. It seems my sister's solicitor had sent them his bill for 'my' share of his legal fee with instructions to collect from me. I told them that not only was I now an Australian citizen and no longer answerable to them but also thought that their remit was to represent the German government in Australia and not act as debt-collector for some suburban solicitor in Germany.
With my limited schooling, I never read Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" until I was well into my retirement. Its opening line really spoke to me: "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". I think I put that on the flyleaf of my novel "Grave Expectations".
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