At the Siechhof

I had a magnificent view. It stretched from my grandfather’s house, past a coffee cup, a shot glass and the Great Kokel, all the way to Castle Hill, in every sense the high point of any visit to Schässburg.

That was where I meant to go when, as I paid for my first Romanian breakfast, I noticed a narrow lane to my left. It wound away from the river, gently uphill, and seemed so untouched by modern times that it might have led into a village’s past. Here there were still houses clad in timber, here the courtyards were workshops rather than gardens. But most of all I was fascinated by an unusually squat tower with a pointed roof of moss-covered sheet metal. It appeared to belong to a little church standing right beside the railway tracks. I had already noticed it from the train, though it had failed to compete with the greater spectacle of the town’s panorama.

“Stefan cel Mare”, a sign called the lane, even bestowing upon it the dignity of a “Strada”. How lovely, I thought, interpreting the name as Italian under the influence of schnapps. A Stefan beside the sky-blue sea. Or was Stefan himself as blue as the sea?

“Neither,” said Google. Stefan cel Mare was Stephen the Great. A Moldavian voivode. He had ruled five hundred years ago in the country next door, but the Romanians had adopted him posthumously.

“Ah!” I said. “And why would that be? Is there a shortage of heroes in the land of chocolate-beggars and foreign-currency hoarders? Haven’t they got enough with Vlad Țepeș?”

Before Google could answer, Stephen the Adopted and I came upon, at a distinctly hair-splitting angle, the little courtyard surrounding the church, sunk considerably below street level by the passage of a great deal of time. It was one enormous vegetable patch. The church itself resembled a fir tree drawn by a child. The rust-red door formed the trunk; above it sat, as though stacked one upon another, two right angles made of façade and roof, followed by the little tower tapering to a point. All in all, this “tree” was not particularly tall for a church; standing on the low wall enclosing the courtyard, your eyes were already above the level of the door.

Only on the right did an extension disturb the symmetry of the façade, and quite rightly so. A sign explained why:

“Siechhofkirche”, it said, though the word was not entirely easy to decipher. Beneath it:

“It was built in the sixteenth century with an external pulpit from which sermons were preached to lepers.”

Something cold crept up my back. It could not have been an animal, for the crawling sensation was somewhere between my skin and my spinal cord. When it reached the nape of my neck, a little bell rang softly.

It did not come from the church.

“Am Siechhof No. 4” had been the address of one of the witnesses at my grandparents’ wedding.

That was what it said on the marriage certificate in my pocket.

I was trembling a little as I climbed down from the wall and fished the paper out of my rucksack again, where I had put it after visiting the house.

I had to be sure.

Even as I deciphered the registrar’s Sütterlin handwriting for the twelfth time (as though I did not know its contents by heart), a voice suddenly spoke out of the very depths of memory, one I had not heard in decades. It was my grandfather’s, and it sounded as though he were standing beside me. There was nobody there, of course, and yet I heard it quite distinctly:

“Sichoff,” he said, „Mir hun bäm Sichoff gewont“, in the dialect of the Saxons, his mother tongue. Nothing else, but it was enough. As a child I had taken the word for a name without meaning. Now, suddenly, I understood; a church sign and a marriage record were hammering into my ears the realisation of where I actually stood! Here were the fields once tilled, century after century, by farmers bearing my name. And in the courtyard of this church, across the river, at a safe distance from the town, the “Siechen”, the sick, the lepers, had eked out their existence, shunned as the devil shuns holy water.

Who would have wanted to live here, near those pitiable souls? Only those who had no choice, smallholders whose inherited scraps of land lay precisely where they had always lain.

Here, then. Here my ancestors had led their short, arduous lives, tightly intertwined, as farmers, millers, carpenters and ropemakers. In these low, old houses with their tiled roofs that climbed the slope beyond the railway tracks and, to the right, behind the little church where the road led towards the station, crouched down in the meadows as though they would rather not be seen at all by Castle Hill, the seat of power.

Here marriages began to take shape during fieldwork and later perhaps along the railway embankment too; there was no need to cross the river in search of a bride, to where the upper classes owned houses several storeys high. Here a cousin was the best man, his aunt the mother-in-law, and a second cousin the bride.

Memories jostled one another inside me for the best place in front of this stage. Every one of them was looking for confirmation. As I wandered slowly and aimlessly, I could see again my grandmother’s disapproving glance whenever her husband mentioned the Siechhof. She had probably found it embarrassing that he came from here, at least on his father’s side.

I heard the voice of that great-aunt who invariably announced herself on the telephone with “from Schässburg”, as though it were her name. Then there would be a rush to fetch her brother to the telephone, for in those days, in the seventies, a conversation like that could cost the caller a fortune.

I listened fearfully to my mother’s story of the wooden bridge shattered by the waters of the Kokel – and wandered absent-mindedly around the church, crossed the railway tracks, considered many things, but not the possibility of a train.

Then graves brought me back into the bright day.

They lay to my left, on a steep-sided hill, as naturally as a park bench beside a path. The headstones were old, many of them leaning at angles among the trees; that much you could tell from a distance.

Closer up, you could see that the rows of stones reached far up the hillside, hidden beneath canopies of conifers, the lowest ones screened by a dense fence of wooden planks. Stained black, they separated cemetery and road, followed the slope some way upwards, then gradually dwindled into individual slats. Farther on, the fence simply stopped.

If until then the past had merely been creeping up on me, it was now sitting on the back of my neck. A white metal sign gave it a shape:

“Evangelischer Friedhof Siechhof”, it said. Not in Romanian. In German.

I did not know how many cemeteries Schässburg possessed. There had been a good many things to sort out before the journey; this had not been one of them. For me there was only the “famous” cemetery up by the Church on the Hill. Where else would exalted ancestors like mine be laid to rest? Surely not here? At the Siechhof? Among all the other Protestants?

How warm this morning had already become. And how heavy my rucksack suddenly was.

The gate smelled of wood and resin, and the wrought-iron latch was hot. Beyond it stood a knee-high stone well. Grey-brown stagnant water stood in it, perhaps left over from last winter. A few insects were bathing in it anyway. I leaned my rucksack against the well, in its shade.

I had never seen a cemetery like it. A steep slope overgrown with tall grass, kept from sliding downhill by trees and bushes. Narrow paths between the graves, no gravel on carefully raked walkways. The graves lay close together. To climb to the next row, I had to step onto their stone borders.

“Mind where you put your feet!” my mother’s voice admonished me inside my head.

“Don’t worry,” I whispered back. “It isn’t respect I’m short of, only space.”

Soon I came upon the first Theil. The first name and the dates of his life meant nothing to me. Two more followed before, by now in the third row up from the bottom, I found a grave I recognised.

Yes, of course. There had been a photograph among my mother’s effects. It showed the resting place of one of her uncles, his wife and, almost down at the sandy ground, the name of their child, an aunt of mine, who had died aged five, before I was born.

I looked for the spot where the photographer must have stood. Now I had found the right place, and was looking at the real, full-colour version of the black-and-white photograph. Who might have taken it? A brother, a sister of the dead? Were they buried nearby? And who else was here? How many of them had my name?

“This is practically a family reunion!” my mother’s voice mocked, though it sounded just as surprised as I was.

Wait. If she was speaking to me, what about the others?

Were they sitting on the lids of their graves, whispering about the descendant’s curiosity?

Could they, perhaps, even see me?

I did not dare turn away. Slowly, walking backwards, I tried to gain some distance and cover. A tree behind me got in the way. Resin on its bark promptly got onto me as well. I turned sideways, carefully trying to peel my shirt free – and, stumbling, saw another grave.

The sandstone stood as tall as a man, warm grey, crowned with a moss-covered gable, with a massive slab in front as its lid. In the angle between headstone and slab stood half a plastic bottle containing sprigs of pussy willow, without water. It had defied wind and weather since at least Easter.

Above it, carved into the stone yet already fading, I read the names.

Stefan Theil, it said, with Katharina Binder beneath. At the very bottom, the daughter who had died as a child. Maria.

It was the grave of my great-grandparents.

Something squeezed and choked me gently as I compared the days and years, the births and deaths, with what I knew. There was no doubt.

Warmth rose within me, though not entirely comforting. It was mingled with shame before that unknown person who looked after the grave and brought pussy willows, even if only in a plastic bottle, even if by now they had withered. And I – stood here empty-handed.

This detail was one too many. The order in my head admitted defeat. I had been in Schässburg for less than two hours – and had gathered more family around me than I had at home in years.

I had to get away.

Snatching up my rucksack at the well, I hurried through the gate towards the river, towards the centre of Schässburg.

Flowers were needed.