When my father brought these objects into the garden, where Uncle and I weresitting in the sun, we were both amazed, I at the possibilities they implied,he by the fact that so much had not been known to him, even about the person heunderstood best and who had best understood him.
He looked at the photographs, some of them of Henny in her teens, and severaltimes he remarked, not in sadness but almost in wonderment, how 'pretty' shehad been. It was a euphemism: Henny always looked attractive, but she had inher youth been enchantingly beautiful.
As for the contents of the morocco purse, the poems written by Hans to Henny,Uncle only said, in response to my questioning, 'I swear to you, on Henny'ssoul, I have never seen these before. I never knew all this existed.'
Uncle told me to keep the things; he did not want them, and he knew they wouldbe of use to me for the book. But neither he nor I could have anticipated justhow rich the material was, so rich in fact that it provided me with an image ofAunty Henny at least as acute as that of Shanti Uncle.
Her friends write to her and through the tone of their words create a senseboth of their personality and of hers. She writes to them, speaking in a voicethat recreates her presence, and she says things she never said to Uncle.
She talks with pain and clarity about the very matters I would have found itimpossible, had she been alive, to broach.
Indeed, considering the private person she was, I have sometimes wonderedwhether I should, even with Uncle's blessing, and even after her death, haveranged freely over her correspondence, some of which was intended for no eyesother than those of the recipient.
But these letters deal with a period of great historicalconsequence in Germanyand may help to enrich, through their intimacy, our understanding of the livesof ordinary people caught up in the events of those times.
Some of these - for example, the letter from Hans's father to Henny just beforeshe left Germany in 1939, or the Red Cross messages Henny exchanged with hermother and sister in 1942, or Shanti's letters to her from his hospital bed inItaly in 1944 - have been introduced already.
These examples bring me to a second reason for overriding my initialuncertainty about mining the contents of the trunk.
Every even-handed biography of a completed life has to deal with privatematters and to present its subject as fully as possible, even if the subject,when alive, might have preferred to keep these matters obscured - or at leastnot open to the world.
It is to help bring Henny to life that I am flouting what I feel would havebeen her wishes.
But perhaps I am wrong; perhaps, in retrospect, judging the intention of thisbook as a whole, she might have approved, or at least not disapproved.
This whole matter is vexed, and even more so because I loved her and value hermemory.
It was from this collection of paper - printed paper, typed paper, handwrittenpaper, photographic paper - found by my father that day that I began to createfor myself an image of Aunty Henny as she had been, only partly as I might haveenvisaged her, but to a great extent as neither I, nor even Shanti Uncle, couldhave imagined her to be.
Page I, Page II, Page III
|
