One of my most vivid memories of that time is the flooding that was brought on by days of incessant rain. Little by little, the Regnitz began to stretch out and pour itself over the edge of its narrow bed. More and more puddles, bigger and bigger ones, extended over the flood plains—to the delight of us children, the multiethnic, ghettoized offspring of former slave workers. When the rain stopped momentarily, and the sun came out, we were allowed to go outside barefoot. We jumped through the puddles, shrieking with joy, the water warm in the summer sun, the puddles soon running together to form a small lake. The tranquil little river, the provider of water for our vegetable beds behind the tower blocks, was gradually transformed into a mighty raging torrent, racing across the countryside, brown and threatening, at incredible speed, dragging dead chickens and uprooted trees along with it. Spellbound, we watched the wonderfully scary spectacle from a safe distance, but one morning we woke up and looked out of the window to find water standing in our yard. Overnight it had crept up on us unnoticed and, as shallow and harmless as in the flood plains a little while before, it was now standing between our houses and licking softly at our doorsteps.
From then on, I didn’t dare sleep at night. I lay awake, listening to the noise of the rain that never let up. I saw the water rising in the gloomy yard, I saw it reaching our windows, I saw it pushing in the window panes and breaking through our bedroom door. I knew the Regnitz was coming to fetch my mother. For so long she’d been saying she couldn’t go on living, that she wanted to go into the Regnitz. She said it almost every day. Now, the Regnitz was coming to her. It was coming to take her, to lift her out of her bed while she was sleeping, to release her from this life that she could bear no longer.
I don’t remember how much time had gone by since the flood—maybe it was two years, maybe less—but in any case the Regnitz had long since gone back to being the small, friendly little river that it always had been, when my mother walked out of the flat and never came back. They found her body on the edge of a sandbank where we children had always played in summer. The current had washed her up on this small island, not far from the place where she’d left her coat on the bank.
She was born and grew up by a sea, but she couldn’t have been a swimmer. A person who could swim would find it hard to drown herself in a quiet, harmless river. But maybe she didn’t drown, maybe her weak heart had already stopped after she’d taken her coat off that October night in 1956 and walked into the cold, black current.
The sea where she grew up was the shallowest sea in the world. So shallow, that it seemed possible to wade across it from one end to the other, right over to the other side, to Kerch, where you could throw yourself at last into the wild waves of the Black Sea, the waves of that sea that in 1944 carried my parents on a German warship with its plundered human cargo first to Romania, and then to Germany. From Mariupol alone, my mother’s hometown, the German Nazis transported 60,000 people to Germany as forced labourers over the course of the war, around a quarter of the whole population at that time.
An unknown Russian author must have been referring to pre-revolutionary multicultural Mariupol when he wrote:
Outside the window of the Hotel Palmyra wet snow was falling. One hundred paces beyond is the sea, which I can hardly describe as roaring. It gurgled, it wheezed, that flat, insignificant, boring sea. The unremarkable little town of Mariupol hugging the water, with its six Russian Orthodox churches, its Polish kościół and its Jewish synagogue. With its stinking harbour, its storage sheds, with the tattered big top of a travelling circus on the beach, with its Greek tavernas and the single dull lamp hanging in the entrance of the aforementioned hotel.Did my mother love the flat, boring, insignificant sea? Did she swim there? Was it the ideal sea for someone who couldn’t swim: a paddling pool, a sea for children, for family holidays on the wide, white sandy beaches in the southern summer heat, with a water temperature of over thirty degrees? Did she gather mussels on the beach, gaze at the screaming seagulls, lie in the sand? I look for her picture there and I can’t find it. Of course, I’ve never seen her in a swimsuit either. I couldn’t imagine her in such a garment and she’d probably never owned one. The times she lived through in Mariupol were not times for seaside fun. She was born into a time of post-revolutionary chaos, of civil war, of terror, of expropriations, of cleansings, arrests, into the biblical famine that Ukraine suffered during the enforced agricultural collectivization. People tottered through the streets as if drunk and then randomly fell to the ground. In the evening, the corpses were gathered up and thrown onto horse-drawn carts.
In past times, the people of Mariupol called the Sea of Azov their mother provider. The shallow sea boiled whenever great shoals of sturgeon and zander swam past. Then, when these had been fished to extinction, there remained only the tiny goby fish, which people tried to catch by dipping pillow cases into the knee-high water in front of them. When there were no more gobies either, everything and anything was eaten. Wallpaper paste, the soles of shoes, dogs, cats and human corpses.
The Azovstal steelworks was already in operation at that time, the largest steel plant in the world, twenty kilometres long and thirty kilometres deep. A monstrous showpiece of early communist industrialization, it belched its unfiltered poison into the world for almost a century, a twenty-kilometre stretch of smoking hell. Maybe those lovely white sandy beaches had never existed in Mariupol. A German author who travelled to Mariupol a few years before for a German-Ukrainian writers’ conference had to turn back. He couldn’t breathe. The Sea of Azov can hardly breathe now either. For many years, it’s been dying a slow death, choking on zinc and ammonia, on agricultural pesticides, on filth from the harbour and on the heavy oil from leaking, sinking tankers.
How should I picture this sea today? What would its waves tell me, if they could speak and I could hear them? They’ve seen Mariupol destroyed three times over. The first time by revolution and civil war, the second time by the German army, the third time now, this summer, by the bombs of a Russian madman bent on domination. It feels like a third attempt on my mother’s life. She knows the Mariupol devastated by war: stones from ruined houses heaped up in the streets, furniture slowly burning in houses whose façades had been ripped away, the incessant screech of sirens. No drinking water, no electricity, no food. Cats and dogs being eaten once again. The abandoned, starving dogs gnawing in turn at the human corpses lying in the streets. Thank goodness she doesn’t have to go through all that again. History repeats itself. It doesn’t move in a linear fashion, but goes round in circles.
I’m told the town is saturated by a penetrating, persistent smell of putrefaction to this day. On account of the continuous air raids, they cannot bury the many dead. Their bodies are slowly decomposing, exposed to the air. It’s as if the town is condemned to this smell for all eternity. Mariupol—the name a blessing and a curse. A town whose name was previously unknown has now attained world fame as the Mater Dolorosa of embattled Ukraine.
Between 1960 and 1992, the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal was built in Germany and incorporated that section of the river Regnitz where my mother lost her life. In my mind, a few drops of the Franconian Regnitz have been flowing each day since then into the Sea of Azov. Very gradually, with the waters of the Danube, my mother is returning to her old world. The drops from the Regnitz reach the Black Sea via Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, pass through the Kerch Strait, and end up in the Sea of Azov, the sea where my mother might once have swum, whose waters still disturb the shores of Mariupol.
