Lord of the Cherries

by Kathrin Schmidt

Translated from the German by Susan Vickerman 

It was in the times when, day in day out, the only thing I cared about, looking back now, was being an Exemplary Child of the German Democratic Republic; the times when our schoolbooks contained a verdict on the previous war, but only as a thing long in the past – a past which surely couldn’t have been the one our parents had lived through, at least not in the mind of  the Exemplary Child of the German Democratic Republic with perfectly knotted neckerchief, cheerfully patriotic mother and father, and a leather satchel containing an apple, round and red, and a slice of buttered bread. In those times, Herr Barz, the school teacher in the village of Sodern, was preparing himself for a final act, the nature of which remained unforeseen by anyone who was close to him.

The fierce heat of that shimmering and, right from the start, intense summer has blurred my memory. The shadows of the past have obscured things; what I did and didn’t see. A child will block impending pain before its onset, hiding it behind the ‘thirteenth door’, like in the fairytale. The child’s parents will take care to lock that door, and keep the key at their bedside. The child in the other room may then sleep peacefully. Quite rightly, the child will eventually start asking questions, and begin to build up a picture from the answers. And quite rightly that picture will fill out with ever more detail and end up framed on the wall: an altarpiece of Virgin and Child that shows who the martyrs, wrong-doers and victims are. Like the schoolbooks, the picture might offer some ‘verdicts’, which will cause that child’s own children to speculate… 

Each year we would suspend the Lord of the Cherries among the green foliage of early summer. We’d make his hands and feet out of rags and leather scraps, loop necklaces of tinkling milk-bottle tops over his straw head, fetch the black hat of some elderly relative from the cellar, and string the ugly creature up. Our Lord of the Cherries hung there in the breeze, the object of other kids’ envy and jealousy: it was such brilliant fun. They’d call him ‘Worzel’ or ‘Lump’, but he was our God, beckoning to us from the cherry leaves. His wizened brown gaze heralded the start of June. When it rained he looked like a sad, bloated bag. In better weather, dried-out and lighter, he transformed in the breeze into a cheery peasant who could coax the very chirrups out of starlings. His fingers, made out of braided electrical cable, had grown as long as his whole form. We’d done that on purpose. Through him, we too had grown. In among the branches, we had become little gods ourselves. He was hanging there for us – we who were trying to follow in his image. 

This all took place every year in the garden of Herr Barz the teacher, entirely on the initiative of us children. Barz’s own plump, cheerful offspring were the stars, in this world of starlings and sticklebacks. They invited us in; they had open house, and their garden was our favourite place. Ten-year-old Hanne, whom I sat next to at school, and four-year-old little Karl, whose eyes converged to a point about twelve inches from the tip of his nose. The rest of us – we were sometimes five, but typically a foursome, usually me and our nearest neighbours Christina, Gerhard and Ralf – had no idea what was really going on. We’d be handed out spicy biscuits and apples, and didn’t particularly wonder why it was only ever on birthdays that our own parents would invite the other children round and give them sweets. Barz the teacher, a silent, serious man, didn’t really match his cheerful children. They took after their mother who was as plump and cheerful as they were. Their mother was the only person in the world who could look little Karl in both eyes. Her own eyes converged to the same point before her nose, hence when mother and son looked at each other at close range her eyes met little Karl’s pupils. In such moments Karl would be very still, and his round eyes would begin to swim. His mother would dry them with the sleeve of her blouse, then move away, and Karl would be alone again and dependent on his right eye with which he saw the world, while the left eye remained dully half-closed, only having any purpose when under his mother’s regard. Sometimes we tried to force little Karl’s eyes to look into our own by holding either a stick or a finger vertically in front of our noses and squinting at him, but using this method we couldn’t actually see Karl ourselves. When the time came for the Lord of the Cherries to be strung up, we took him along. He watched the procedure with wonder. Wooed by our teacher’s cherries, we gave the Straw Man on high our devotion.

Our parents said nothing. But the teacher’s family seemed to be excluded from any little social meet-ups. While they didn’t try to make us stay away from the teacher’s garden, they never sent us there, even though on Sundays they ideally liked a bit of slap and tickle after the midday roast and would bribe us with money for the movies or with apple pie (provided we stopped moaning and bickering) so that they could withdraw to the bedroom for a while and get on with it. We didn’t disturb them. We would trail into the teacher’s garden and sprawl below the fruit trees, whether they were just blossoming, or the fruit was ripening, or else was dangling, mature, among the leaves, or due to a frost was no longer to be had.

More than twenty years after that summer in Sodern, the locals began to speak up about having stayed silent, saying things hadn’t been how they looked. That deep inside, those “cheerfully patriotic parents” of the past had always been bitter, and distanced from the state; that when they’d received awards from the hands of the district secretaries, their smiles had actually been for show only. The knot of the children’s neckerchief by no means perfect – its slackness just cleverly hidden, that’s all, through all those years of childhood. The apple round and red, but the sandwich tasteless. And Bartz the teacher, despite his taciturnity, was secretly respected. In 1956 he had come home from the Bautzen prison – a place that threatened them all, had they spoken freely. He’d been a serious man of few words, one of the city’s sons whom the occupying forces had seized and interned ten years earlier for being a member of a Christian party which was not, at least at that time, deemed to be a friendly ally. Eight years after his disappearance, his elderly parents were notified that he was in Bautzen for spying for the American secret service. At this, they gathered up their courage and wrote letters of petition, which went unanswered. Meanwhile, our (only-pretending-to-be) “cheerfully patriotic parents” were chewing timidly on their tasteless sandwiches and adhering to a ‘truth’ that went only as far as the country’s borders, then stopped. Barz the teacher, whose return was scheduled for a sunny day in May, was going to have to spend a further year doing unpaid work in a furniture factory before being allowed to work with a primary school class again. According to our parents he probably hadn’t spied at all, otherwise he certainly wouldn’t have been permitted to teach children. In the end Barz the teacher must have come to the view that what had happened to him was due to an error made in the heat of whatever the latest (and by no means last) fray had been.

Years later he was still thanking his plump, cheerful wife for taking him on after his belated return; even for agreeing to the wedding, which had been attended by only a few locals. His cross-eyed wife’s plumpness was what he’d longed for on his terrible Bautzen nights. The teacher’s plump, cheerful wife recounted this more than twenty years after that summer. She told it with sadness to Hanne and Karl, who suddenly recollected how their father, when he thought he was unobserved, would push their mother’s pumpkin breasts apart with his head and try to clutch her backside. In the tenth year after Hanne was born, that summer in Sodern, teacher Barz, silent and serious, had become a quite normal, ordinary man who was able to sleep well again, and speak the way other people spoke. On his curriculum vitae, with which he applied to a high school that took pupils through to the school-leaving certificate, he wrote of “oversights” and “disorderly periods”; of  his “own errors” and the “educational time in Bautzen” which had turned him into a committed supporter of the State System.

When I recall that summer in Sodern, Christina is missing from the picture. Gerhard and Ralf were there, with their perpetual grins, but Christina had gone to Hungary with her parents. Back in May she’d told us she wanted to bathe in Lake Balaton. When she returned, the event giving rise to this story was long past. Christina’s return from Lake Balaton ended up taking some time: Czechoslovakia, which was between us and Hungary, had become a theatre of war where some sort of conflict was playing out. “Friendly” neighbouring countries had sent in tanks because, as we heard at our breakfast tables, “the Czechs are never satisfied” and “are a danger to us all”. Christina was forced to return via Ukraine and Poland since no tourist trains were running through a warring country; she was therefore missing from the little tableau we formed that morning, entering the garden near the beds which Hanne and little Karl thought their father would be weeding. He was nowhere to be seen. The holidays had started and we were intending to sprawl under the fruit  trees and watch our Lord of the Cherries swaying in the breeze. Little Karl reached the tree first. Jabbing his plump finger up at the branches, he spoke just a single word. There. Barz the teacher was strung up, a mighty Lord of the Cherries among the foliage, his eyes wide open; to the future turned, as our national anthem ran. Meanwhile somewhere in Ukraine, Christina was travelling through history on a hard wooden bench. The cheerfully patriotic parents made us forget the whole thing, and these days, their verdict on how it all was has become set in stone.