One day, it was an evening in autumn and we had just moved from abroad to Oberkulm, where my seven years younger wife wanted to open a small Café after my retirement, we received a visit from my uncle Hans-Ulrich, as unexpected as unannounced. He brought me a bottle of port wine and two brothers, whom he said he had found in his attic.
They couldn’t have been my brothers, if only because of their age, because the two boys, who shyly looked around the entrance hall of our new house without moving from the spot, seeing not much more than moving boxes, some open and already half cleared out, others still closed, were around twenty, while both my father and my mother had been dead for more than thirty years. And if they could have been: How had they ended up in the attic of my uncle?
Neither could they have been his brothers, for Hans-Ulrich, called Hämpel, had seen the light of day during World War II, on June 18, 1941, to be precise, the very same Wednesday Joe Louis defended his title as heavyweight champion of the world against Billy Conn in New York by sending him to the mat with a terrible punch in the 13th round. He was my mother’s (Hämpel, of course, not Joe Louis) half-brother, ten years younger, the child of my early deceased grandmother and her second husband, the Muttikiller, but that’s another story.
„My brothers?“ I asked, completely dumbfounded, holding the bottle of port in one hand and with the other still shaking Hämpel’s hand, which he had held out to me in greeting.
„Yes, your brothers,“ Hämpel replied, „I’m going on a long trip and I can’t take them with me.“ With that, he let go of my hand and walked past me down the hall into the living room. The two young men followed him.
„Rahel…“ I called up the stairs, „Can you come downstairs? We have company.“ Rahel…?“ One of our dogs was barking somewhere upstairs.
When I came into the living room, Hämpel was sitting on the sofa, the only piece of furniture already unpacked and set up because there was nothing to assemble, and my new brothers were kneeling on the floor, busy screwing together a bookcase.
I walked up to them and was about to tell them they didn’t have to, but Hämpel interrupted me. „Just let them do it – it’ll keep them busy,“ and he continued right away, „I don’t have much time, but if you were going to eat anyway, I won’t say no.“
„I don’t know,“ I replied, „we were actually planning to order something later, but maybe…“ At that moment Rahel stepped into the living room. „Don’t make it complicated“ she said to me (she thinks I always make everything complicated). „Of course I can cook something“.
„I’m Rahel, Walter’s second wife,“ she said, holding out her hand to Hämpel.
„Pleased to meet you,“ Hämpel said. „These are Walter’s brothers, and I’m his uncle, Hans-Ulrich.“
„Do you like spaghetti?“ said Rahel to the two brothers, who meanwhile had already screwed together and erected the first bookcase. They seemed to be very skilled. And quick. They nodded and set to work on the second book rack.
„Do you have wine?“ asked Hämpel. „I think so, in the basement. I just have to find the right boxes.“ I followed Rahel into the kitchen, which in this old house had not yet been incorporated into the living room. „He says they’re my brothers. And he wants to leave them here,“ I whispered as she opened a cardboard box and miraculously removed from it a large pan perfectly suited for cooking spaghetti. „And where are we going to get spaghetti from? Did you do any shopping on the way here?“
„They can help us set up the furniture,“ Rahel replied, as if nothing I had just said surprised her, „and later they can be waiters in our Café.“
„But they’re not my brothers“ I said. „They could be his sons. He has two sons….“ Then it occurred to me that that was equally impossible. His sons had to be around 50 by now. „Or his grandchildren…“. One of his sons, I thought I remembered, had married and had a family. But how should his grandchildren have ended up in his attic, and where were their parents, that he now wanted to drop them on me?
„Get the wine from the cellar“ said Rahel. „And before you do, ask your new brothers to unpack the dining room table and a couple of chairs so we don’t have to eat on the sofa the five of us. The boxes are labeled“. „They’re not my brothers“ I replied, but Rahel just laughed and turned on the gas.
While I was looking in the cellar for the boxes with the red wine (and, unlike my wife, I opened all the other boxes first, until I got to he one with the red wine), I tried to remember when I had seen Hämpel for the last time.
Hadn’t he contacted me at some point when I was stationed in Turkey (or was it Iran?). He was retired by then (he had worked as a journalist for the Tagesschau) and apparently traveled a lot. So it couldn’t have been in Iran, because he wouldn’t have been retired back then. So it must have been in Turkey.
I remembered that he intended to visit places that you can’t easily visit in Turkey, and that he planned to deal with critical issues, and on both of those he wanted information from me, and I was a little worried about that at the time because as a diplomat you can easily get into trouble for giving information to or being associated with an investigative journalist. Today I’m a little ashamed that I didn’t really help him, as I remember it. I don’t even remember whether he came to see me in the end or not.
What I do remember clearly and distinctly, as if it were yesterday (they say that the long-term memory gets better with age, while the short-term memory is permanently cleared out, as if it had to move from day to day into a new consciousness in which there is less and less space), are his regular visits, which he paid as a student at the University of Zurich to his sister (my mother) in Höngg.
Most of the time, as if by chance, he roared in on his Vespa just before lunch and was happy to stay for the meal. Maybe my mother had invited him every time, in any case his visits were always a fun diversion for me and my sister, because Hämpel was a lively, original and funny spirit, and not least because after lunch, before he drove back to the university, we were allowed to take a spin on the back seat of his Vespa.
When I finally found the box of red wine and walked up the stairs and into the living room with two bottles, my new brothers had already set up the dining table and five chairs, and my wife called from the kitchen for me to please come get the spaghetti.
As we ate dinner, a lively conversation developed, mostly between my wife and Hämpel. We talked about his travels, my mother and the other three siblings (Hämpel was the youngest), of whom only one sister was still alive, also about his time in television and at the end briefly about his two sons, but although my wife, unlike me, is very curious and is not afraid to ask awkward questions, there was, strangely enough, also from her no attempt to clarify the identity of the two brothers (that they were brothers, one could see at first glance) who were chewing their Spaghetti in silence.
At some point Hämpel got up from the table and said: „I have to go.“
At the door he first hugged me briefly and then my wife quite intimately and for a long time. Afterwards he held her by the upper arms, looked deeply into her eyes and said to her: „Take good care of Anton and Paul. They have no one but you now.“
After a brief but heartfelt hug with Anton and Paul, he opened the front door and disappeared into the darkness of the night. I know this seems forced now and doesn’t really sound believable, but I would be a fool not to mention it: Before I closed the front door, I heard the sound of a Vespa being kick-started.
The rest of the story took many more years to unfold, but it is quickly told. Where Hämpel’s journey led after the visit, we never learned. The only thing that could be learned was that he had vacated and sold his house a few days before he came to visit us. Where he spent the few years until one day his obituary appeared in the newspaper, we do not know.
My wife managed to realize her dream of owning a Café. Anton and Paul, who were either twins or brothers born within the same year, built the Café themselves and furnished it according to my wife’s wishes, they also ran the Café together with my wife and made it a place where people to this day always like to stop for a moment and enjoy a piece of the special cream cake which my wife can bake like no one else.
Meanwhile, I, who had always feared that the Café would mean that I would have to continue working, sit at a corner table, completely unmolested by the guests, and write little stories like this one.
(Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator from a german Blog entry, dated January 23, 2021, in „Walters Wunderbare Welt“)
walters wunderbare welt 