Grandfather’s House

Schässburg welcomed me with sunshine and warmth. As the train emerged from the shadow of the final tunnel and rumbled heavily towards the station, there was nothing to be seen but what mattered most: the castle hill in the brilliant backlight, filling the entire frame of the train window.

Dazzled, I stepped down onto the platform, slowly because of the high steps, perhaps even a little ceremoniously. So here I was, in this small town in the vast nowhere of an East otherwise unknown to me, a town I had heard more about than all the great cities of the world put together.

Schässburg. More than 800 years old, founded by Transylvanian Saxon settlers, first mentioned in German as „Schespurch“ in a papal letter of indulgence in 1298, christened Segesvár by the Hungarians and Sighișoara by the Romanians. Home to my grandfather, who had been born in the nineteenth century, survived two world wars, raised five children, my mother among them, and, at the age of 95, still assured me, his grandson, that he intended to live to be a hundred. No problem at all, his doctor had promised him. Then, in a Munich nursing home where he was meant to be recovering from a routine procedure, left by the nurses beside an open window and, a few days later, dead from pneumonia.

I had been too late then, too.

And how much too late I had come here.

I couldn’t bring myself to step straight out onto the station forecourt. I needed to prolong my arrival and urgently blow my nose. How fortunate that there was a station café here as well. A cappuccino accompanied me as I gathered my first impression, which is, after all, the most important one, and gathered myself.

I surveyed the forecourt, melancholy and thoroughly caffeinated, gradually preparing myself for whatever might come next.

To the left stood sheds that nobody seemed to need any more, a factory that no longer produced anything. Ahead of me was the „Restaurant Pensiune Café Chic“. It introduced itself in yellow illuminated letters, beneath which a second sign, in neon red, advertised „Hot Pizza“, without bothering to supply the first of those two words with electricity. On the wooden terrace outside, potted plants were withering on artificial grass, while plastic tables shaped like halved tree trunks laid claim to rustic charm.

But to the right, just beyond the taxi rank, began the Strada Libertăţii, my very first destination. The Germans had called it Bunergasse when my grandfather lived there, at number 8.

What would he think, I wondered, if he could see me now, when I was his grandson only in memory? If he could see me, almost exactly twenty years after his death, leaving a few lei on the station café table and striding along his street, counting down the house numbers and shaking my arms as I went, to help the caffeine circulate. Or perhaps the emotion.

At the first crossroads, on the left, stood the hotel I had booked. I left it standing there. My rucksack wasn’t so heavy that I needed to put it down first.

The Street of Freedom was not straight. It swept round in a broad curve to the left (please don’t read anything political into that). I followed it, gradually drifting towards the middle of the road as I walked, wanting to catch sight of the house as early as possible.

The house of my forebears, which I knew was now occupied by young people and in which there had been no room for me when I had enquired from Germany; the house whose address my grandfather had given as his residence when he married, in November, 86 years earlier, as recorded on an official document.

I had brought a copy of that document with me, inside a plastic sleeve, hoping it might establish me as someone who could not simply be refused admission – because of course I had no intention of seeing the house only from the outside.

But from the outside I saw it now: a neoclassical cube with a tiled roof, its façade terracotta and white, its windows picked out in a red the colour of wine. A wrought-iron gate to the left of the house led into the greenery behind it.

The young woman who did not open immediately when I rang the bell was equally slow to understand my English. She seemed to think I was trying to get myself a free room by pretending to know the owner. Then I spoke German and showed her the document – and at once she was all warmth and enthusiasm. Of course I could look around the house. Where would I like to begin?

„Here,“ I said. „Right here, beneath this doorway, on this very step,“ and added silently: across which my grandfather had carried his bride.

To the left, a staircase led down. Cellars don’t get renovated; they were the most likely places to look as they had in the old days. I descended, my guide following me.

The party room I found brought my own youth closer than my grandfather’s. Dark varnished walls, the remains of candles melted onto bottles, sagging corduroy sofas, Marlboro ashtrays on a grey-green glass table. It smelt like a party when it’s time to leave.

What else was there? A laundry room, a drinks store, a billiards room and a bar improvised from wooden pallets, upon which a little sunshine fell through a cellar window, forming a small patch of light that drew me back upstairs into the brightness of the ground floor.

The largest room here, a dormitory, still revealed that it had once consisted of two stately rooms, their windows decorated with stucco and facing the street. How much space people had allowed themselves in those days! At the back of the house, towards the garden, there must once have been an enormous kitchen, a pantry and an equally enormous bathroom. Now there were bunk beds here too, crooked constructions of black-anodised aluminium.

The woman seemed to guess what I was thinking.

In Ceaușescu’s time, she explained, the house had been considered far too large for a single household. Partition walls had been put up, the kitchen divided in two and the rooms at the front turned into four little chambers. At least two families had lived here, with separate rooms for parents and children. In that respect, the present arrangement was actually closer to the original.

„But of course it isn’t the same,“ she added, almost regretfully.

At the rear, several steps led down into the open air. There had once been a garden here, large enough to provide fruit and vegetables, perhaps even to keep a few small animals. Now the ground was covered in concrete, carelessly and incompletely. Space had been spared only for a vine and two fig trees, but they bore no fruit, although it was harvest time.

Grey were the slabs beneath my feet, rough and cracked, and as warped as the façades of the Eastern Bloc monstrosities, that alleged architecture, rising immediately beyond the garden. The slabs on the ground and the walls behind them seemed almost to merge into one another. How many old buildings must have fallen victim to the new? How strange that the boundary between the dreadful and the beautiful ran so precisely along this line!

I said what I was thinking, and the woman agreed.

„Yes. That was an incredible stroke of luck!“

I didn’t understand at first. She explained.

Not far away, down by the river, they had begun demolishing the old houses. No sooner had a few been torn down than the wound was filled with new concrete, and within a remarkably short time socialist ugliness was towering over the dust of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One house followed another. They had just destroyed number 6 – number 8 would have been next – when the outrage stopped from one day to the next.

„How come?“ I asked.

They had shot the dictator. Just in time.

I remembered the television pictures, the announcement of the death sentence against Ceaușescu and his wife at Christmas 1989, and that peculiar, dismissive flick of the condemned man’s hand at the moment the verdict was pronounced. The gesture had shocked me and, at the same time, moved me. I had often seen my grandfather make exactly the same movement, and had taken it for a fatalistic response typical of the region, a way of finally accepting some insignificant mishap. But here the matter was rather more serious: Ceaușescu’s crimes, an entire system that had collapsed, been overthrown – and yet that single gesture was all he could find to express in the face of his impending execution.

Suddenly I was standing at the front entrance again. I had been unaware of retracing my steps, and the young woman had accompanied me in silence. She seemed to sense how deeply absorbed in thought I was. Then I became aware of the silence myself. I was about to break it by thanking her and saying goodbye when I noticed some markings on the wall, scratches in the plaster, picked out in colour, roughly at shoulder height. They looked like flood-level marks of the sort I knew from Regensburg or Passau – but the Danube flowed through those places, after all!

My companion had followed my gaze and once again spared me a question. They were indeed flood marks, she said. The Kokel was no peaceful river. In 1975 it had burst its embankments and broken records that had stood for centuries.

Once again television images surfaced in my memory: apocalyptic floods, brown, thickly surging masses of water rising to the roofs of an old town I did not know. I sat as a child on the safety of our sofa, between my mother and her parents, unable to understand the horror in their eyes.

They had been required, she continued, to reproduce the original colours and ornaments as faithfully as possible whenever the house was repainted. Nicola, the owner, could tell me more about it. He would be there that evening and again on Sunday – if I wanted to drop by once more.

„Yes, perhaps I will,“ I said, with no intention of doing so.

I thanked her warmly, once again standing on the step, with one foot still in Grandfather’s house and the other already back in the present. I couldn’t manage to walk away without turning round, so I gave a little wave, but by then the door had closed.

From the corner two streets further on, the sign of a bar glinted towards me. I turned in its direction.

There was coffee, water – and schnapps.