The Confession E-Book

Christian Bedor

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 182

Beschreibung

Thomas Lehr grew up at the end of the 1950s as the youngest of four children in the school of a small West German village. His parents and the church also taught him strict Catholic upbringing with physical punishment. At first he lived in the world of the Ten Commandments, believed in sincere love, honesty and obedience. For his father, who is headmaster of the school, Thomas has to buy beer and schnapps at the age of ten, which makes him feel guilty. He also learns about his father's long-standing relationship with his class teacher. The father falls ill, can no longer work and wants to die. The family moves. www.muell-zeit-lose.de

Leseprobe

For Ewa

Table of contents

Early days

Scooter

My brother

Flashlight

Vormstein

Pumpkin

Mark

Capri ice cream

The Confession

First Holy Communion

The new priest

The forbidden tree

Bärbel

The new village school

Hahn

The Gymnasium

The small official residence

To Dortmund

Ministrant with Uncle Eberhard

Curriculum Vitae

Publications

Early days

It was Good Friday, 7:15 p.m. in the apartment. My 36-year-old mother was lying on the living room couch when I was born in the late 1950s on the first floor of the rubble stone village school in Kleinenbach. The only village doctor and the midwife helped. At the same time my father, who was two years older, played the organ in the church, which was only a stone's throw away. He practiced for the Easter masses.

After the rehearsal he came home and assumed that I had not yet been born, because the bedding was put on just as it was in the afternoon when he left us.

"When will the child come?" he asked.

"Thomas is back there," my mother replied.

I was lying in a cot in her bedroom. I had four fingers of my left hand in my mouth and sucked on them. It was dark. Noises penetrated my auricles. But that didn't bother me.

My mother never gave me the breast. My 5-year-old sister Marlene was the last one to enjoy it. Unfortunately she chewed the nipples so much that I was denied this tenderness forever.

I can't remember a baby photo, but I can remember the fact that my 7-year-old brother Clemens was a supporter of another little brother before I was born - as he later told me. He therefore engaged in a pillow fight in the nursery with my two sisters who wanted a girl. At the baptism I had contact with Father Seedorn for the first time, but he did not remain in my memory for the following years.

The time without school went by without any incidents. Except for teething troubles. My one year younger friend Peter asked me one afternoon not to get too close to him. Which I then avoided. We stood about six meters opposite each other and the following day I lay in bed with chickenpox.

Peter was the son of the cleaning woman of the school. He mostly wore knee breeches made of light brown leather. And a sweater. Summer shorts. With a shirt. Mostly robust closed low shoes, which were laced at the sides. Peter had a round face, a fine physiognomy. He was good and had nothing slit-origin - just like me. However, he wore a hedgehog haircut. We liked to play together.

In the early afternoon the sky was overcast, a little cloudy. As it sometimes is to the end of winter. I played alone at a puddle in front of the school, pulled connecting channels with the rubber boot heel to the next-smaller pond, thought of Peter and watched the slowly flowing water daydreaming. I was busy. Only good thing it had rained before. My mother had told me in the morning not to leave the house because doctors and other people were coming. It's about school enrollment. My mother didn't make much of a fuss about such examinations or about the appointment. I was briefly and succinctly reminded of this.

I was surprised that no other child was playing in the puddles. I would have loved company so much. My 15-year-old sister Veronika always got up early to take a bus to the nun's school. My other two siblings were now in class.

Peter didn't have time because his father had died. He had been a lumberjack. He was rarely seen in the village. I only saw him sometimes when I visited Peter on the village slope. Mühlenhofs had their own house. Newly built. With balcony. And white house walls. Everything smelled new in it and it formed the final house in a cul-de-sac that led up the mountain. There was a small turning area for cars. The house could be reached on foot via a narrow stairway on the steep slope.

I played in the puddles and looked at the circles that were now formed by raindrops on the surface of the water. Peter's mother had told my mother that her husband had been laid out in the house for a while. A neighbor was on wake duty at the time. When a storm came, she shouted, "Woman, woman, he's blue!"

I was frightened that Peter's father had died because I always thought fathers with young children could not die. I kept thinking they couldn't die until their children were grown.

Besides, I'd never seen a corpse before. I couldn't figure out why a dead man would turn blue in a thunderstorm. Did that also apply to the dead in the graves? The performance scared me very much and I avoided the contact with Peter for several days.

My mother appeared at the window and called me to her house. It was time and I should come, especially since I had to wash and change.

I regretted this, then looked back at my puddle, put both hands in my pockets and went to school. In the bathroom I took off my clothes, washed myself and got fresh clothes from my mother.

Then we entered a classroom on the ground floor, which was now furnished as an examination room. Most of the chairs and tables were on the walls.

Except for a few adults in white coats, there were a lot of kids here with their mothers. Some fathers among them. Some children I knew by sight, but many were unknown to me. That wasn't surprising, because I didn't attend a kindergarten where I could have found more friends. My parents thought the church kindergarten was unsuitable. Because of the nuns.

"Thomas Lehr, please come here," called a nurse standing next to a doctor.

The examination was carried out quickly. Measure, weigh, grasp with the right arm over the head and touch the left auricle with the fingers. The teeth were examined, the left upper arm was scratched. Then my mother helped me get dressed.

The first day of school wasn't exciting. There wasn't a school bag for me. My parents didn't think it was necessary. Some kids had school cones. I don't remember a school photo.

Our class consisted of two vintages. In front sat the I-males and behind them the former I-males. Our teacher's name was Grewen. She was slender, brunette, with a slight silver glance. I fell in love with her after a while. The young Catholic teacher had to teach both classes at the same time. It was her first teaching position after her legal clerkship. Miss Grewen was about 23 years old.

Restlessness often arose in the classroom, but with her austere gaze she immediately stopped it. I found it annoying to sit in this class with the older know-alls on my back. That's why I didn't check in. I felt uncomfortable because it seemed to me that the second graders knew every answer to questions to the first class. That thought intimidated me.

One day I enjoyed sleeping longer and playing with my matchbox cars. My mother was there and wondered at first that I had so much time in the morning.

Around ten o'clock I entered the empty classroom and saw notebooks and pencils on the tables. The knapsacks were next to the benches. My classmates had to be here early. I went outside.

"Are you sick?" asked my classmate Tobias, whom I met first in the schoolyard during the break. He was the son of a better-off family and very hard-boiled. He didn't mind lying or stealing chewing gum.

So in passing.

Tobias was petite, narrow-faced. I was impressed how he moved like a cat in sports. So from now on he was my best friend and I preferred to play with him rather than with Peter.

"No, I'm not sick!" I replied.

"Why do you ask...?"

"We've been here since 7:30!"

I got queasy. I had never been late and had thought that classes would start at ten today. What would Miss Grewen do?

With my knees trembling, I entered the classroom. As soon as it was quiet in the room, she confronted me. I didn't know how to answer their questions. What was I supposed to say? That I was wrong? That's what I didn't feel ashamed of.

"You'll be in the afternoon this afternoon," she said. "Two hours."

My heart pounded in my throat.

I didn't expect such a drastic punishment. What would my mother, who used to be a teacher, say? And my father first?

It is horrible to be publicly punished so exposed and not to be able to defend oneself out of powerlessness and guilt. My friend Tobias would have thought of a plausible explanation at that moment. Probably would have lied and been off the hook. Maybe he would have said something about abdominal pain. Or a squirrel that was rushing around the living room and he should have caught it. His family and he lived in their own large house on the edge of the forest. It wouldn't have been unusual if a curious squirrel had gotten lost on the balcony. Whether it's a lie or a truth. No one could check it out. Tobias wouldn't have taken his breath away. He would have known a way out and got away blameless.

So after I had confessed the misfortune to my mother at lunch, and she was very angry about it, I sat in a girl's class. It was a higher class who had manual work lessons with Miss Grewen in the afternoon. Crochet, knit, sew. I was sitting in the back of the room, getting math assignments and torturing myself with them. At that time I swore to myself never to forget the lesson times again.

What a humiliation. The assignments were exhausting. But the girls with their knitting were kind to me. It was a welcome change for her to have a boy from one of the lower classes with her. They were amazed at my presence and a girl asked me quietly why I had to detain.

When Miss Grewen turned to some students in the front row of the bench to show them more of the art of knitting, another girl sitting near me helped me find a solution. That was a punishable offense. I was very scared. Probably I would get another punishment - and so would the helper! How was I supposed to make that clear to the girl?

But luckily, we weren't caught.

Scooter

On this sunny summer afternoon our Llyod 400 parked parallel to the stone flight of steps. He even had a folding sunroof. He was dark blue and parked so that an adult could walk between him and the stairs. My father, the only one in the family who had a driver's license, apparently had to leave again. Otherwise he would have put the car in the converted pigsty.

With the scooter, which belonged to my brother Clemens, had inflatable tires and no solid rubber tires, I drove back and forth in front of the stairs and the tree row.

Sometimes I would wiggle between the trees or drive behind the building where the schoolyard was fenced. Here there was a large sawdust box which was used in sports lessons so that schoolchildren could learn to jump. When there were no lessons, sometimes small children played in this box. Occasionally, older people also came and played batting ball.

Then the sawdust box was her mark.

No one was on the square that afternoon. In short trousers and a summer shirt I drove over it, lost in thought, and headed back to school to see if my father had come. But I didn't see him. From time to time I drove my scooter between the car and the stairs and remembered journeys we had made as a family by car. Since there was no more room for me in the rear seat, a Dixan barrel was placed behind the front passenger seat so that I could sit on it. My father used to smoke while he was driving. Stuyvesant. For a moment it seemed to me that the aroma of his cigarettes, which I sometimes pulled for him at the vending machine, unfolded in my nose. I longed for him and it would have been nice if he'd come. But I didn't know where he was or when he came back.

While I was circling in front of the house, my mother suddenly appeared in the toilet window and shouted: "Don't drive between the car and the stairs, otherwise you'll break the car! Drive where there's plenty of room!"

She must have been watching me. Maybe we also agreed that I shouldn't get too far away from school.

"Yes, yes, I'll watch it!" I called back.

Then my mother disappeared again. I looked at the window and made sure she wasn't looking. Away from the car I made a few bends, stemmed the leg more strongly against the ground to get more speed, and then ran between the car and the stairs. I could put both feet on the scooter surface.

Due to the sufficient speed, the scooter gave me the feeling for a while that I was weightless and could move quickly without bending a single finger.

In the beginning I made my loops arbitrarily, by approaching the car sometimes from the front, sometimes from behind. I drove circles, ovals, slalom - what the trees were best suited for.

To increase the degree of difficulty, I tried to make the left turns smaller and smaller after passing the front right fender. This became more and more a balancing act. On the one hand I needed enough momentum not to touch the ground with my feet while driving through, on the other hand I could not have too much speed not to be carried out of the bend.

I could brake with the scooter, but I would have had to balance the manoeuvre. First of all the scooter had neither a rear nor a front mudguard - where the brakes were - due to its age and secondly I could not have put my right foot back to brake during the drive through: you lose your swinging balance and could get into a spin.

So I had to trust my steering skills. Several journeys were made until I suddenly slipped away in the final bend on the gravel ground. I fell, hit my knees and shortly afterwards I noticed that my right hand was bleeding heavily. Both knees were scratched.

I cried out in shock and pain and began to cry. My mother must have heard that.

She looked out the window, saw my heavy bleeding hand and came down immediately.

First she said a Band-Aid would do. But after we had arrived upstairs and she had connected me with gauze, she quickly decided to go with me to Dr. Bergmann, who had his practice in his own house.

We took the narrow path towards the church and had to ring the bell privately, because the consultation hour started later. He bandaged my hand, gave me a tetanus shot in the thigh and decided that we had to go to the hospital in Kürstadt.

I told my father to take us there.

My mother and I went home in a hurry. Where my father suddenly came from, I didn't know. There was no phone at school. He said he had been with Miss Grewen - who lived on the edge of the village - and he had talked to her about her exam preparations. My father was her mentor.

The three of us drove to Kürstadt in the Llyod. The wound was burning and very painful. I cried in pain. Now blood came through the gauze. That scared me. Arriving at the hospital, the doctor briefly looked under the bandage and muttered something about an operation: "The tendon of my right ring finger had been severed by the fall because the scooter no longer had handlebar grips. The rubber grips were broken by the constant throwing of the scooter. This had allowed the remains to slide inwards and released the sharp tube ends of the handlebars. I had hurt myself at the right end of the pipe. I yelled more at the hospital. Several men and a nurse in white long coats came to me and wanted to drag me into the operating room. A room I'd never seen before. With a large round lamp on the ceiling, which carried several spotlights. Leather straps were attached to the side of the couch underneath. I only perceived that superficially.

I shouted and braced myself against the tugging of the doctors, who obviously had trouble with me.

A doctor told my parents to talk to me and tell me that it would all be over soon.

The less I would oppose it, the sooner I could have surgery and go home again.

But that didn't help. I kept screaming.

Then strong arms lifted me onto the couch, pushed me down and started strapping me down with the brown leather straps. I fidgeted and struggled, even when they had already tied me so tightly that I felt that I could no longer escape from this table. My parents left the operating room. I can't remember if I asked them for help or if they couldn't stand my screaming anymore.

Then someone pressed a pot-shaped device onto my face, always turning my head, which was not strapped down, back and forth to escape. The pressure was too strong. I only saw the big operation lamp, then a transparent fleece, this coarse grid-shaped apparatus...

Shortly afterwards I smelled something unknown and someone began to count. My powers left me.

When I woke up, I was lying in the back of the car listening to engine noises. We drove. I raised my right arm and saw a huge bandage on my hand. It was the hand I always sucked my thumbs on. Now the doctors had made me such a large bandage that I could no longer use my thumb for it. Only the ring finger was injured. Why did the doctors bandage the thumb? Should the surgeons have heard anything from my parents during the anesthesia? You've been trying to stop me from sucking for a long time. I've liked sucking my thumb ever since I could remember and missed it a lot.

Nevertheless, I wanted to suck my favourite thumb now, but that wasn't possible because the whole hand was wrapped.

I smelled her and I started crying because she stank so much. Then I sucked my left thumb, which didn't taste so good. Besides, he wasn't clean. My right thumb was always clean. Even when I had played in the sawdust box, the upper part of the thumb was always sparkling clean.

I often had a wreath of dirt on the root of my thumb. But that didn't bother me. As long as I could suck my thumb.

It was my father who said the day after my accident: "Well, hopefully you'll stop sucking your thumbs. This would be a good opportunity, as long as it's the bandage."

After the bandage was removed, I sucked on my right thumb again.

My brother

Clemens and I, now eight years old, shared a room that was accessible from the kitchen. One bed each. On my side of the bed stood a large, white wardrobe in which our clothes and bed linen were stored. In the corner - next to his bed - was a four-legged, rectangular table, with a crocheted blanket on it. It was my brother's school desk with a Grundig tube radio on it. In the evening it received English hits from Radio Luxembourg for Clemens on Midwave. That always sounded noisy. Sometimes you had to re-tune the transmitter to receive it better. My brother explained to me that it was not possible to listen to Radio Luxembourg on VHF, because the station was in a faraway foreign country.

For the English hits, you couldn't avoid pressing the Medium-wave-button. Fortunately, I didn't have to turn the knob long on this radio, because it had two scales and two red search marks. So you could always have your master transmitter set to VHF and Medium wave.

Radio Tele Luxemburg with Camillo Felgen and his Novesia gold nut advertising. Because of the noise, it seemed to me that Camillo was somewhere in space. Besides, I always thought the host had something to do with tires. I didn't understand the songs. They seemed strange to me because of the different language.

It was a radio with a magic green eye. His changes indicated whether a transmitter was clearly received. Ideally, the dark green areas formed a narrow cross and released light green fields.

That was fascinating for me.

I spent minutes kneeling in front of the table on a chair - at a very low volume - turning the transmitter knob and watching the movements of this magic eye. I could lose myself and dream.

To the left of the radio stood a wooden table lamp with a lampshade made of transparent foil layers and grasses. From a distance, the grasses looked as if they had been painted on. If the light bulb was lit and you were close to the lamp, it seemed objectlike: both natural and fake. But the eye did not deceive the spirit. The grasses had once