Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  “Jesus Christ, give me a hand!” a man shouted toward her shoulder. He was approaching her with his hands behind him, each one gripping a handcart. He rushed past her in the direction of the rubble. She followed him all the way to where a crowd of people were either standing about or scurrying over the debris, shouting and pointing, coming together and then dispersing, hoping the mountain would open up and surrender its innermost treasures. Alive or dead. Or some remaining survivors, still trapped down below, waiting for someone up above to notice that their home had disappeared beneath a mound of rubble. Gerta’s chest grew tight at the thought of those below not even knowing whether it was over or if the horror was still raging. Not knowing if they would stay buried under the rubble, or if someone would find them before they used up all their oxygen.

  Gerta took off, running in the direction of Pressburger Straße, and then kept going straight ahead to where Janinka lived. What if Janinka was buried underground, wondering if anyone would come looking for her?

  Gerta ran and tried to see down the full length of the street. Janinka’s building wasn’t far. But she couldn’t see anything. Soot kept falling, making it impossible to see; the entire street was full of it. Not to mention the smoke from the building she had just passed, whose weight had collapsed into the courtyard behind it. The residents were bringing out one body after another; none of them had even been covered yet.

  Gerta was out of breath by the time she reached the corner of Schöllergasse. The silhouette she was able to make out through a wall of dust and smoke gradually took on contours. The house on the corner with Konrad Kinkel’s newsstand was gone, swallowed by a wave that had swept away the front part of the house clear across the intersection, all the way to the mouth of Pressburger Straße and practically to Gerta’s feet. The next two houses weren’t standing either. Schöllergasse had become a funnel, its cone overflowing with debris. From the other side of the street, she heard the helpless wail of a fire-truck siren.

  Gerta fixed her gaze on Janinka’s house. It was standing next to a corner building that had caved in and was missing an exterior wall, making it look naked. But it was still standing. Except that it didn’t have a bomb shelter in which the Horn family could have hidden. The bomb shelter was in the building next door. Gerta aimed straight for the rubble and cautiously began to clamber up the mound. She scrambled over fragments of wreckage, bricks, beams, and broken roof tiles, splintered bits of furniture, and household items, everything piled up to the height of the second floor, where the building stopped. All that remained were shaky remnants of collapsed walls that jutted upward. Every time her foot slipped on the loose debris, she felt the sharp edges of the stones scrape the soft, untoughened flesh on the soles of her feet. She used her hands, pulling herself up on protuberances. Then suddenly a pair of knees appeared right in front of her face and blocked her way. She tried to stand up but faltered, and had this person not grabbed her arm, she surely would have fallen backward.

  “Don’t go any farther; it’s still crumbling,” he said, and gruffly gestured for her to go back down.

  “Let me go!”

  “You can’t go there right now; it hasn’t been stabilized. I’m telling you, it’s still coming down.”

  “Janinka could be somewhere in there.”

  “If she’s in there, we’ll find her. Wait down there.”

  “I’ll help.”

  “You’d better go find some clothes. Wait down there,” he repeated unyieldingly, giving her a nudge while steadying her at the same time so that she wouldn’t fall.

  Gerta turned her head in the direction that her body was now facing, and, unstable as she was, fell onto her rear end and slid down for a stretch on the loose dirt. The soiled nightgown had again ridden up to her waist. She quickly pulled it back down over her bare stomach to hide her swollen belly. She looked around in dismay, to make sure no one had seen her, then shakily stood up and gingerly continued making her way down. Others cut across her path, shouting instructions at each other: forward or backward, push or toss, hold on or let go. The din of voices, the constant wail of the siren, the occasional screams—it was earsplitting. Then something exploded. At the deafening blast, Gerta instantly dropped into a squat on the rubble. Something struck her shoulder, and her head was showered with debris. Then there was silence. She looked up. All around her, people were as covered in soot and dirt as she was. They were shaking their heads, trying to remove the dirt. Some were already rising to their knees; others had turned onto their backs and were sliding down.

  A man’s voice from up above shouted, “The gas blew!”

  Gerta was struggling to get down as everyone returned to action. She felt a dull twinge in her shoulder, but she could move it without pain; she must have been struck by a rock or a piece of wood. The lacerated soles of her feet were more painful. Then, just as she reached for a beam to steady herself, she saw the tip of a foot underneath. It was sticking out, covered with dirt, filthy, with a disjointed big toe. A foot that made it look as if someone below were doing a handstand.

  Gerta froze. Janinka’s foot wasn’t that big, but a foot that size could have belonged to her father. She reached out and touched it. It was soft and warm. A real human foot. She screamed. She turned to the left and to the right and kept on screaming, looking around for someone in charge, who, unlike her, would know what to do. From over to the right and from down below, people were advancing toward her. Within moments, some men had formed a close circle and had pushed her to the outside, telling her to get out of the way.

  Gerta forced her way back into the midst of the huddle around the foot, reached between the bricks under the beam, pulled out a handful of rubble, tossed it behind her, and, working around the men’s legs, tried to help clear away the dirt from the discovery.

  “This one’s beyond help,” someone else shouted. “Go back down!”

  Gerta didn’t move; she stared at the toiling bodies, mesmerized. One slipped and tumbled, coming to a stop only when his black boot was practically on top of her.

  “Jesus. Get out of here; didn’t you hear? You’re in the way; you can’t help here!”

  “Who is it? I have to know who it is,” said Gerta, close to tears and not budging.

  Just then from beneath the beam, where the foot and part of the shin were now exposed, a small avalanche of pebbles came loose, so that a part of the other foot was also uncovered. One of the men grabbed hold of it and gave it a yank. Out from the debris came a stump no longer attached to a knee. Gerta felt sick. She turned her face away and clambered back down as fast as she could, holding on to her stomach with both hands while tumbling and sliding the rest of the way down, until she landed on the hard pavement of Pressburger Straße and finally came to a stop.

  On the sidewalk in front of the nearest buildings sat people, leaning back against the facades. Some sat with their heads hanging down; others reached out with imploring gestures to anyone who was hurrying by. From Koliště Street came people with stretchers to take away the wounded. They left the dead bodies. Around those, people were gathering. Gerta knew many of them by sight and also recognized some of the bodies over which they were bending. All around, one could hear wailing and the calling out of names, some of which Gerta recognized as well.

  “Janinka Hornová!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

  No one answered. The only responses were other names.

  “Janinka Hornová!”

  The woman beside her shook her head. Gerta crossed over to the other side of the street where more wounded people were sitting against a building. She walked past them quickly, peering into their faces.

  “Janinka Hornová!” Her voice broke. She was terribly afraid that she might be calling out in vain. She kept going until she got as far as the Ponawkagasse intersection, where the noise level suddenly subsided. The farther away she went from the epicenter of the calamity, the more slowly people were moving. They were no longer cutting in front of each other in their frenzied
scurrying. Instead of the shouting and turmoil near the wreckage, here, apart from the moans of the wounded and the concentrated work of the stretcher-bearers and medics, a sense of calm prevailed. If Janinka was here, there was no way Gerta could have missed her. She turned around and headed back down Pressburger Straße, toward the Horn family’s building. She walked slowly, her arms crossed, her hands resting on her shoulders. She stepped carefully, protective of the painful, scraped-up soles of her feet, her legs weak at the knees.

  Then she saw something very strange. On the mountain of rubble, bobbing up every so often above the other heads, was a small head with flaxen hair. Gerta hastened her step, threading her way through the crowd that now, closer to the wreckage, had become dense again, and jumped up onto the sidewalk, stepping over the legs of the wounded. Then she saw her. A slight figure hopping from one foot to the other on top of the rubble heap, moving up and down, a few steps up, step-slide-step-left, step-slide-step-right, then several jumps down. She was moving in a peculiar dance, clearly to the rhythm of some inner music, holding the hem of her long, soiled skirt between her fingertips and wagging her head from shoulder to shoulder. Gerta stood still in astonishment.

  Janinka had just completed a rotation and with her gaze lowered and a slight smile playing on her face, made several even jumps. Then she squatted down, stood back up, and remained standing there for a while, her head hanging down. Gerta kept her eyes fixed on her until she climbed all the way up to where she was and grabbed her by the hand. Janinka turned toward her, and the slight smile vanished. She scowled and shrank back, angrily snatching away her hand, freeing herself from Gerta’s grasp. Out of her mouth came a guttural sound as her lips twitched. She frowned and stared right through Gerta with a look of bitterness, but also emptiness, an emptiness Gerta had never seen before.

  XII

  Mugwort. On shadowy waste heaps, by roadsides, in the underbrush, along banks and embankments, in the sultry heat of summer. Clusters on rigid, angular, branched stems on purplish hollow stalks. Lobed lower leaves, four to four-and-a-half inches long, smaller, sessile upper leaves. The undersides white with fine, downy hairs, feltlike. Flowers—small, yellow or yellowish-brown. The base of each bloom nestles inside a greenish funnel, and when the blossom drops off, what’s left is a small green bun riddled with pinprick dimples. One heaping teaspoon of the delicate blossoms tipped into a porcelain cup—the water on the stove is already bubbling.

  European yew. How much is fifty grams of needles? A handful, not more. It’s poisonous and can be lethal. Fifty grams, no more, preferably less. The fine needles cover the yellowish-brown mugwort blossoms in the bottom of the cup. The steam from the kettle on the stove is rising. The water comes spurting out in a cascading swirl and fills the porcelain cup. The water level rises, and the needles and blossoms twirl in a wild, death-bearing dance. One cup four times a day. For one whole week. And every evening, a mallow root drizzled with twenty drops of lemon juice inserted into one’s body and left inside overnight, until the bleeding begins, until the womb is cleansed. Don’t fear the cramps; don’t fear the nausea.

  What could have gone wrong? Why hadn’t she succeeded in evicting this goblin? Was it the missing lemon? But where now, five years into the war, could she find a lemon? She had managed to acquire the European yew and mugwort; she had managed to procure a mallow root through a woman who dealt on the black market, but a lemon, there simply was none to be had. Lemons were beyond the reach of even the black-market profiteer.

  Gerta was desperate. She was terrified. She was at her wits’ end, dying of fear. Never, not even during the air raids of the previous few nights, had she been as terrified as she was these days. These weeks. Weeks upon weeks, while her womb remained occupied, as new life already pulsed through the openings of her pores, shifting, turning over, swimming, making sure she knew it was there.

  Later on, she regretted the blows. The blows to her stomach that had only made her feel sicker and seemed to have had no effect whatsoever on the life by now deeply rooted inside her. They only hurt. She gave in. The goblin growing inside her had won.

  XIII

  Gerta made her way up the street where the sanded road inclined. She walked, looking down at the ground; she had no desire to look around. Instead, she turned her gaze inward and was rummaging among memories. In front of her eyes, her feet in black shoes with separating soles were moving in alternating steps, but all she saw was her father’s face, contorted in one of his nighttime spasms, and his sweat-drenched body, rocking back and forth through her half-closed eyelids. Since the time a giant drop of sweat had rolled off his round, bald head right into her eye, she had preferred to look aside. That time the salt had spilled into the white of her eye, and it had stung like hell. In between her father’s heavy panting and his Look at me! Look at me! commands, she had tried to rub her eye, but as his thrusts became harder, the pressure of her fist just caused a deeper, duller pain. By the next morning, his expression had shriveled into a mournful grimace that hardened into an ugly scowl whenever she inadvertently glanced his way.

  Gerta walked along the street, turned the corner, and followed the wide curve of the cemetery wall toward the entrance that faced a snow-covered field. She was alone, and the city lay far behind her. She found it hard to walk. By now, her stomach was heavy, her back sore, and her feet swollen and stiff. It was easier to shuffle than to pick them up and take proper steps, so she shambled along, wobbly, breathing heavily. She couldn’t wait to be free of it, for the moment when she could expel it from herself.

  Today she wanted to honor the memory of her mother. At the end of November, it had been exactly two years since her mother had left her. She would never forget those final hours. She had kept her warm with her own body, had held her burning hand when she was delirious with fever, had hugged her whenever she called out her name. Gerta hadn’t left her side for even a moment. Her father and Friedrich, on the other hand, had sat nervously at the kitchen table, waiting for it finally to be over. During those last few days of her mother’s life, they ran off at every opportunity, to go to work or to meetings, to fetch the paper or to listen to the radio; anything took priority over the process of her dying. But for Gerta, it had been the most important time of her life. Otherwise, she never would have discovered how brutal her father had been to her mother. It took a while before she connected the red welts across her mother’s back with the frenzied cries that would invade her dreams. How was it possible that she hadn’t noticed it sooner? Gerta’s eyes filled with tears.

  In the gatehouse beyond the cemetery’s wide entryway sat an old porter. He was resting his head in his hands and looked as if he had nodded off. Gerta turned left, leaving footprints on the snow-covered path between the graves. No one had yet walked there that day. All around her rose tall cypresses. She found herself in a place where there were no signs of any war happening. Far from the bombs that had been dropping on Brno since the summer, far from the fear brought on by each darkening night, far from the shortages, the poverty, and the empty shops. Far from the uncertainty and the anxiety, and also far from the absurd, maniacal euphoria of Hitler’s speeches that her father was still tuning in to on the radio. We will obliterate their cities! would come booming from her father’s bedroom. But the louder Hitler’s proclamations, the more one could hear the panic in his voice. How long did her father’s optimism last after such a broadcast? One hour? It was ridiculous, and by the time the hour passed, he himself felt ridiculous. His shoulders would slump; he would hang his head and flee his home, where his daughter, her belly as big as a drum, had locked herself inside her room.

  But here there reigned a graveyard silence, disturbed only by the soft swish of the branches of the aspens and poplars along the cemetery wall, the majestic swaying of the cypresses, and the flickering of two or three votive candles that some of the wealthier families had left for their dead. One couldn’t even find candles in regular shops anymore. Gerta came to a stop in the lee of a thicket of
several bare hazelnut bushes in front of the Schnirch tomb. What a joke, burying Mother here of all places, in the Schnirch family plot.

  Here I am, she greeted her mother in her mind. She stepped right up to the tombstone on which there were three names engraved alongside three photographs.

  “Gertrude Schnirch, b. Leitzmann, died 1931. Leopold Schnirch, died 1922. Barbora Schnirch, b. Ručková, died 1942.” Her mother smiled at her from an oval frame, looking just as she remembered her from the years before the war. As if nothing in between had really happened. Gerta sat down on a low stone pillar and tenderly ran her hand in its knitted mitten over the glass. She wiped away a few ice crystals.

  “I can’t love this child,” she said softly.

  In the silence of this place, her voice sounded strange. She drew her shawl more closely across her forehead and tucked in the ends on either side of her neck. Her mother in the photograph kept on smiling. Gerta knew what she would tell her. That God had his reasons for sending her this child. That she should stop worrying and put herself into his hands. And that every life was deserving of love. And that a mother’s love for her child was a sacred duty. And a natural one, Gerta, don’t you forget. The first time you hold that bundle in your arms, helpless and entirely dependent on you alone, you’ll feel something you’ve never felt before. It will rise up inside you and overflow, sweeping away all your misgivings.