It was not Das Horst-Wessel Leid
The flag high! The ranks tightly closed! Poverty marches and we march with it!
But Ed zittern die morschen Knochen. How the frail bones tremble!
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
I lost count of the number of times I heard the thwacks. It could have been three, it could have been half a dozen, it could have been fourteen… Fourteen!
Why was Herr Tveit punishing his son? – We – in the salon – were all wondering the reasons for it. Although it was true, his son, Aaron Tveit, did not wish to go back to school, but still – to our minds – that could not explain it.
The boy Aaron was – as I perceived him – so young-faced one could not imagine him going to big school. His voice had not yet broken. He seemed such a puny little thing, and yet he had just turned fourteen, and fourteen-year-olds are often capricious. But I never saw any capriciousness in Aaron – only a softly-spoken, almost mute, little boy whom his mother doted upon and his father rounded on with sarcasm and scarcely concealed bile.
As all this was going on, I started thinking about the furniture in Herr Tveit’s study. Though I would not say it to his face, or even behind his back, there was all that rather new and fashionable wood – those sycamore lacquered pieces that I did not especially care for, but such were the times we were living through; we had to put up with these new tastes of which Herr Tveit’s study was surprisingly an exemplar.
Which brought me (as his voice rose and fell we could hear his actual words) to Herr Tveit’s bookcase: I recalled Adolf Bartels and Hans Baumann, followed by, if memory served, Martin Luther, a Trilogy; then, of course, in pride of place, on the bottom middle shelf, his collection of nineteenth song music. Those happy scores which would appear at Frau Tveit’s piano lectern and from which Frau Tveit would cheerfully accompany Herr Tveit as he sang. His at times croaking, frog-marching tenor would echo the house of a Saturday evening in the company of friends. Such friends who might pop round for a spot of afternoon “English” tea or an early evening glass of sherry and would dare to leave one of their pamphlets with Herr Tveit. Indeed, a keen observer would have noticed one such pamphlet on his desk: “Fur Saschen und Adressbuch der Gemeindebehorden, Organisationen und Veriene”.
As readily as I pictured Herr Tveit’s study, I could not help but picture the interview that was being conducted within.
“Now you are fourteen, you should take your punishment like a man.”
The father grimaced and bit his lip.
“You hear what I say, young man.”
The boy looked down at his feet, unable answer.
Furious, the father came around the desk.
As he did, the boy turned and ran into his mother’s arms.
Frau Tveit, who had risen from her perch on the foot stool and now stood at the study door with her back half turned to us, looked at her husband with despair in her lovely eyes.
“What is going on, Derrik?” she asked. “What has the boy done to deserve your ire?”
“The boy has no discipline,” he said. “He must take his punishment like a man.”
The boy screamed.
His mother tried to comfort him. But the boy wriggled in her arms. “Let me go,” he cried. “Let me go!”
“Aaron!”
“Let me go!”
“What is the matter, Aaron?”
The shriek of his high-pitched voice shook our tea-cups; indeed, Fraulein Gerder lost control altogether of her equipoise and let the china slip from her finger and thumb, thus causing it to spill on her long wool skirt that tapered just below the knee which I had been admiring from my own discretionary position on the divan.
“Aaron, “said his mother, “you must not scream. Aaron!”
The boy tore himself from his mother’s clasp and ran past the shocked gathering and up the smooth lacquered stairs to his room.
Frau Tveit looked at her husband whose face appeared to tighten once more in its grimace.
“Your son has become quite ungovernable,” he said for all of us to hear. “I wash my hands of him.”
Frau Tveit was – as we all were – quite speechless.
After a moment Herr Tveit informed his wife that he was going to his meeting of the Saxon club; “she” could attend to “her guests”. (Such indeed were the contradictions and absurdities of Herr Tveit! They arrived in equal measures between our teacups and sherry glasses as he gruffly wished us goodnight).
Frau Tveit I know now was at her wit’s end when she came, quite unannounced, to Doktor Grass’s surgery.
Doktor Grass, who was somewhat near-sightedly perusing a journal, rose nervously to his feet -attaching his pince-nez – as Frau Tveit entered the room with a gloriously restrained sweep of her gorgeous fur-lined coat.
“Frau Tveit, what unexpected pleasure!”
“Oh, Willy!” she cried, as she sat down, already to burst into tears that had Doktor Grass struggling with his own composure.
Hastily he placed his journal face down on the desk and turned all his attention to the distraught Frau Tveit.
In the library behind Doktor Grass were various books reflecting his own tastes and interests – in stark contrast one might add to the tastes and interests of Herr Tveit. Besides tomes by Doktor Freud and Doktor Jung, and many other worthies of the Viennese school, there were the works of Swedenborg, notably his Daedalus Hyperboreus and his Drömboken, and- one gasps at the beauty of it – the lives of the sainted saints. An observant eye would also have noticed several copies of Doktor Grass’ own Ecstatics and Visionaries – a little known but nevertheless distinguished contribution to the science of the mysterious, as well as a very short piece – an eight-page meditation on the subtle but nonetheless disquieting numerology of fourteen.
After the interview (which took place as Doktor Grass recorded in his notebook under a veil of tears) the chauffeur was called and the boy was fetched into the room; his mother kissed him on both cheeks as she left the psychiatrist to his own brilliant devising.
Doctor Grass took a deep breath and sat the boy down. The boy looked at his feet.
Doctor Grass was reminded yet again how young-faced the boy looked. How mute he appeared, and generally shrunk into himself. How it pained Doktor to see such a shell of a boy at fourteen, when he should be out running, jumping, leaping for joy in a way that only fourteen should!
The session between Doctor Grass and the boy went on little more than half a year; one must admit Doktor Grass was a highly qualified doctor of psychiatry – and indeed conversant with many of the techniques of Doktor Freud and Doktor Jung. Even if he had to acknowledge, his colleagues at the Brandenburg and Bernburg institutes, you could not spell it out any more than you could the splitting of fourteen! After due process and indeed careful examination of his conscience whilst, under the pretext of grousing, he strung and paced out the requisite circle in the woodlands of his country estate in the company of his faithful Bavarian Hound, Hanzard, Doctor Grass called Frau Tveit to his surgery.
Doktor Grass spoke for several minutes in hushed tones. Then he pushed an envelope across the table, which he urged Frau Tveit not to open until she reached safety on the other side of the world.
All was now set in motion; steps had been taken to rid them of the curse of fourteen.
Perhaps it was merely coincidence, and not the congruence of numerological associations. Fourteen months later, as under Bruning’s policy of deflation the Weimar government collapsed; Herr Hitler and his Nazi party took over the reins of power, and Fraulein Gerder and I were married; Frau Tveit escaped with her son first to Paris and then, on the record-breaking Siegfried liner, to New York. Mother and son, I later learnt to my satisfaction, settled in Minnesota.
Herr Tveit was less fortunate. Fourteen days after his wife’s departure, a gang of uniformed youths came to the industrialist’s office and took him away in a Mercedes Sedan. Herr Tveit was found in a ditch with fourteen welts on his backside. Even thugs, you see, have their uses in these straitened times.