My uncle Paul put it best. We can't afford to lose any more gentlemen. So it was true of my grandfather, Rudolf Garmatz, nicknamed 'Apo', whose name I still haven't deleted from my phone, a thoroughly modern activity that people must perform when someone dies. I don't think I ever will, nor do I want to. Not out of melodrama, but because he should still be alive. It suited him so.The man I was conscious of as my grandfather began quietly, and ended quietly. In actual fact he'd been born in the middle of a storm in 1919. To me, as a small child, he was the quiet one. The first phase of this perceived silence, was because he was so in awe of my grandmother, that he couldn't get a word in, if he wanted to at all. He worshipped her until she died in 1992, and then she left him unexpectedly, and with characteristic panache, alone. For the first time since 1946, the year he met her, he opened his mouth.
Anyone who met him was suitably impressed. Exceedingly well read, and clever enough to have processed his reading, he had the ability to talk to you about anything and always assume you knew what he was talking about, without that awful knack of lesser people, who rub your nose in the slightly less scant knowledge they possess. Perhaps it's because he never assumed to know as much as he actually did. I only ever saw it in one other person, Brian Jacob, a Geologist who, like Rudolf, the world could have done with for a few more years.
Rudolf was a man's - and woman's - man. He could speak as easily to Franconian Farmers as to Paul McGrath or Helmut Schmidt. He could say enough to be interesting but leave showing off to everyone else.
The sheer span of his life, his 90 years, a colleague commented, took in so much of what we call history. He called it his generation's "absence of normality". He remembered the hyperinflation as a small child in 1924, took in a lot more in the years after - the Hitler period, war, the everafter; Some things we knew about, other things, we found in envelopes, were curated over a lifetime: official letters from places no longer existing like Stettin, ending in "Heil Hitler" lie next to postcards from army comrades and drinking pals in Berlin in the early 40s. North Africa, medals, pictures of a dashing man in uniform - he was still regarded as something to look at until well on in his life; Postcards from his girlfriend, my grandmother, a pair of smart, emryonic hippies. Wirtschaftswunder, cars and work, the union work, "Scheiss GEW" as my grandmother thundered. Other stuff emerged from the envelopes - the secret life of a polymath, letters to the asking him demonstrate a slide rule he'd invented for the newly established West German Army. They didn't need it after all - neither did he need them as it happened. He wrote Maths books instead. He loved the creativity of Mathematics like no teacher I ever encountered in Ireland: games, a counting method using your hands like a rudimentary binary code: Leibniz for the playground.
Those yellowed photos and notes you dredge up from a box in the attic of your mind are in death, what you survey as the debris of a lifetime, partly in fascination, partly in horror, partly in joy. To every raised eyebrow, every 'wow', he sits in his chair saying, 'Oh that', or some Teutonic growl like that. No man ever rolled the letter R quite like him, nor did any man play down his own contribution to the world as effectively.
In the last decade of his life, we'd go to his birthdays because we knew - though we tried to ignore it, that not many more might come along. Not that we let on to him. Anyway, if he cared that there weren't, he hid it well. He had the dignity that allows a man to do what he likes, without the slightest hint of self consciousness. As if he didn't mind what people thought, but he'd wear a shirt and tie anyway. The man could drink without the affliction of looking like it was a dirty activity, and give you a great time without you noticing, always with ice cream soaked in Bailey's to sweeten the deal.
When a loved one lives in another country, it's hard to explain, especially to Irish people, how they can be close to you. I'd say in the last weeks of his life "My grandfather's 90, and he's not feeling so well", a look of sympathy would be replaced very soon with a blank stare, as understanding was replaced with 'who-gives a shit', when it turned out he lived several hundred miles away in Hamburg. He might as well have not existed as far as they were concerned. Sure wasn't he foreign?
That's why I was angry when he died, in the midst of a storm, as it happens, peacefully in a hospital in Klein Flottbek. The storm caused a rush of wind to blow the flagpole down outside his, now his son's, home.
It was hard to explain why I'd be upset - "sure wasn't he far away anyway, and you can't be close to just anybody?" For the misty-eyed Irish, not being able to understand the irrelevance of location is as maddening as it is perplexing. They of all people should have understood. To dwell on how the place of my birth let me down yet again, however, wouldn't have been Rudolf's style, which is another reason why I'm not half the man he was. And writing it in a blog would have drawn a whithering response from him anyway.
So as I think about him, I consider many things, some the self indulgent rubbish that bereaved people consider on the way from Miss Havisham to getting up for work: how I'd lost a father figure that no one, not even my own dad could have been - he was a daddy, not a patriarch like Rudolf. The latter outlived the former by twelve years to the hour, living exactly twice as many years.
Other things remembered are tangible. The every morning drive to the bakery, the iconoclasm of calling a bread roll a 'Schrippe' rather than the locally preferred term 'Rundstueck'; cutting up apples at the dinner table, eating cherries by a windmill next to local orchards, and spitting the stones out accross the levee towards the river Elbe and Hamburg. In silence.
After all, why ruin a good moment with chatter?
