Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  Gerta didn’t believe that God had his reasons for sending her this child. Maybe God had wanted to punish her, not just with the child, but with everything that had happened this past year. God had permitted her to suffer. First her mother, then Janinka, and finally even Karel had disappeared from her life, Friedrich, too, although she didn’t care as much about that, but now only her father remained. What sort of ghoulish plan of God’s was it to have left Gerta all alone with her father?

  “Why did this have to happen to me?” Gerta asked, shaking her head. “He ruined my life, God.”

  The wind lifted the hem of her skirt as it draped down over her parted knees. Gerta braced her hands against the freezing pillar and with great effort, moving sideways to get around her swollen belly, stood up.

  “I can’t love this child,” she repeated once she was standing and had turned back to the gravestone.

  “But what I can do is try to imagine not that God sent it to me, but that you sent it to me. As a sign, on the anniversary of your death. So that I wouldn’t be all alone. If I can manage to think about it that way, it’ll be easier.”

  The wind overhead was chasing through the needles of the cypress trees and the branches of the hazelnut bushes. They seemed to be nodding. Large snowflakes slowly began to fall and settle on the tombstone as she pulled her coat closer around her and watched their silent, swirling, stately dance.

  XIV

  Winter at the turn of that year was bitterly cold. As if man-made catastrophe weren’t enough, nature added its own. January and February passed, and Gerta barely noticed; she was permanently bent over swaddling clothes and was aware only of the shrinking allotments on the meal tickets that her father, his ration book for race-certified families in hand, would go each week to collect and bring home to her. She had delivered Barbora into a time of poverty. And into a time of fear.

  At night she couldn’t sleep. Behind her closed eyelids, she would see bits and pieces of stage scenery sailing through the air as she had witnessed that time in November, when a siren had caught her by surprise in the city center. She had ducked into a shelter, and once the shocks subsided, she climbed back up the stairs, emerging into a blinding, sunlit afternoon, in which, in addition to ash from the fresh demolition, thousands of multicolored scraps of paper were raining down. Carried by the wind, they danced along Ratwitplatz and fluttered through the bowels of the Czech National Theater, which had been cleft in two, along with shreds of tattered fabrics, sets from never-performed Czech plays, and the fine residue of what had been the house curtain during the time of the First Czechoslovak Republic. The collapsed facade mockingly revealed the red velvet of the balcony box seats, the wide floorboards of the stage that for Brno had once represented the world, and the stucco of the rear wall, the only one left standing, like a silent witness, on the square. For the rest of that day, Brno shuddered with time-bomb explosions, to the left, to the right, far off in the distance, and terrifyingly, unimaginably close by.

  Then in April, day after day passed during which everyone waited anxiously for the American planes to appear and finally liberate the city. The sirens signaled air raids two or even three times a week. Then for a time they would fall silent again, and people sank back into their dejected thoughts about the Reich and the world’s indifference to the plight of a small nation. This was the mood Gerta picked up on in the empty stores when she occasionally had to run out for something. It was a troubled time. Emotions were running high; neighbors were whispering secretively among themselves, women trying to find out what each one knew, Czechs and Germans alike. Their muffled cries resembled the lines of a seismograph recording the rising and falling frequencies of their emotional fluctuations, whether in hope or in tearful resignation, that served as a barometer for that entire tense, nerve-racking period. Gerta navigated it in a strange frame of mind. As if the world’s afflictions had ceased to affect her. The so-often invoked freedom seemed trivial compared to the cup of milk that the Hamšíková woman could get her on the black market. Not even the ubiquitous dispute, would it be the Soviets or the Americans, meant anything to her if Barbora wouldn’t nurse. Only bombs snapped her out of her lethargy.

  By now, she and Barbora had been through air raids too many times to count. In the basement bomb shelter on Sterngasse; in the Luftschutzraum shelter in Akátky forest park that she’d found by following arrows drawn on the walls of the buildings in the Židenice quarter, where she’d gone searching for a black marketeer; in the cellar under the New Town Hall when she was on her way to take Barbora to see Dr. Heinz. Barbora hated it, cried after each blast, and Gerta couldn’t get her to stop. Only at moments such as these did Gerta feel somehow in touch with reality again. She would never forget the panicked, excruciating fear that gripped her when she realized that she could die, and that Barbora would be left on the basement floor at the mercy of the feet of a terror-stricken crowd. Or that Barbora could die too. She held her close and tried to stifle her own tears along with Barbora’s, but to no avail. After the shelter in butcher Šíma’s huge ice cellar was hit, however, and the armor-plated, concrete-slab ceiling collapsed, crushing sixty people, while the apartments in surrounding buildings remained intact, she no longer bothered to leave her home. At the end of the day, not even the safest bomb shelter in Brno had been able to protect them; everyone had died. From then on, she never slept for more than two hours at a time, not at night and not in the day, half-crazed with dread of the next long, double wail of the siren. Usually she just lay awake while the limerick that had seared itself into the mind of every Brno resident went around and around in her head: Get your rest by moonlight, we’ll get you in the sunlight. That was what they used to say back then about the Allied air strikes. And it was true. How many nights had she spent awake with her eyes wide open, staring at the stained, damp wall of her room? And then suddenly, one day it was over.

  XV

  It was April 26, 1945, at around eight o’clock in the evening, when the Red Army officially flooded into Brno. Its arrival was preceded by heated debates on every Brno street corner. Had they reached Hodonín yet, or might they be in Veselí, where one couldn’t get through to anyone by phone anymore, or could they already have come as far as Židlochovice, or maybe even Heršpice? The army’s arrival had also been preceded by air-raid warnings, at first twice a week, then once every three days, then every other day, and finally on April 17, the sirens went off no less than twenty-one times. There had been frantic rushes into the nearest shelters, where several times a building’s German residents had doors slammed in their faces. In the faces of those who still believed in “the final victory” and refused to be evacuated, but also in the faces of those who had tried throughout the war to steer clear of the political apparatus. Although each day families passed through the city with fully loaded carts heading in the direction of Tišnov, toward Jihlava, and then on to the Bayreuth district where evacuees from the Protectorate were being taken in, there were still plenty who stayed behind, fervidly believing in the V-3, Hitler’s secret weapon that he was to deploy on the occasion of his fast-approaching birthday. It was from among their ranks that the Brno Volkssturm recruits were assembled, a pathetic national militia made up of old men who were the only ones not to have been called up to the front line, and to whom the people of Brno promptly assigned the infamous nickname “V-3.”

  Squadrons of feeble or crippled old men fanned out through the city streets, piled up wooden boards and scraps of junk into anti-tank barriers, and dug ditches. Life in Brno began to choke under all the barricades and excavated trenches. Getting around the city became more difficult every day. But it wasn’t long before the already sparse street traffic came to a complete stop.

  On April 12, the municipal authorities decided not to sound the sirens so as not to disrupt the work in the factories; every minute of production for the Reich was precious. The German air-traffic watch on Petrov Hill didn’t announce the air strike, which then decimated several factories full o
f workers. In the hat factory on Cejl Street, not far from the house in which the Schnirchs lived, a bomb landed in the middle of the main hall, leaving thirty women dead. And on Joštova Street, another one fatally struck a streetcar full of passengers, sweeping it off the rails upon which it exploded with such force that the limbs of its wretched occupants had to be scraped off the facades lining the broad avenue for hundreds of feet. The next day, people didn’t go to work. They stayed at home, and offices and certain factories remained closed. Life in Brno came to a halt, and people took leave of each other, saying, “See you after the war.” Then, in the privacy of their homes, night after night, they would unfold a map of Europe and follow the advance of the Allies, switching it out in early April for a map of Moravia, which some days later they switched out in turn for a map of Brno and its immediate surroundings. Suddenly, Brno was on the front lines.

  Her father’s moods fluctuated between states of manic hysteria and total lethargy. He stayed inside his room, glued to the radio. Occasionally, in a fit of spasmodic laughter, he shot out to inform Gerta with glee of one of the short-lived successes of Field Marshal Schörner’s Army Group Center. That they’d blown the Vranov Dam sky high, and the water had poured through the Dyje River into the Morava, which even with all its tributaries hadn’t been able to absorb such volume, so it flooded a stretch one and a half kilometers wide, stopping Malinovsky’s army between Lanžhot and Hodonín. And because the Russians had been intercepted near the Moravian villages of Ořechov and Šitbořice, there was already talk of calling it a Moravian Stalingrad, but this time the outcome would be different. And almost ten thousand Red Army soldiers had already been captured. But then the transmission broke off. The radio jammed; there was static and the sound of clicking; and then it went silent altogether, and with it her father. As Gerta moved around inside the apartment, his door remained shut. On some nights, she could hear him behind it, shouting in his sleep, and on some days, softly sobbing. The last time he appeared in his doorway was after a quiet weekend, when loudspeaker-equipped cars drove blaring through the streets, urging people to return to work and announcing that the shops had reopened, all the while trying to drown out the noise of gunfire and commotion from the nearby battlefront. Her father was confused. Just the previous day, they had heard from the caretaker that four Soviet scout tanks had been sighted near the cemetery and that the Red Army was assembled six kilometers south of Brno. Incredulous, he paced back and forth across the narrow expanse of the kitchen while Gerta and Barbora stayed barricaded behind their bedroom door. And then the city of Brno began to shudder with new detonations. The German army’s destruction units blew up the munitions warehouse in the barracks of the former Pod Kaštany concentration camp. Tonguelike flames leaped at the sky. Gerta could see them even from Sterngasse, and above them rose a column of thick, black smoke. Soon rumors were flying: the German army base and Slatina airport had also been blown sky high, as had the depot by the train station, where they had still managed to deploy explosives, blasting all the locomotives to bits and knocking out the railroad switches. Brno was cowering under clouds of smoke; all was gray, like before a thunderstorm. A film of fine ash settled on the sidewalks and on the leaves of the trees.

  Gerta’s father looked just like the streets. Ashen gray, with parched lips and circles under his staring eyes. He was bone thin, because even the little that Gerta managed to scrape together from the meal tickets he wouldn’t touch. Just as well; at least there was more for her and Barbora, who sucked on her ravenously, eating away at her by day as well as through the sleepless nights, which she spent listening for Little Ivan, the nickname people in Brno had given to the Russian biplane. Every night, during those last days of April, it crisscrossed the sky over the darkened, sleeping city. At first, one would just hear a steady clatter, and then two tiny Christmas trees would come into view, flares that floated slowly down to the ground on little parachutes, illuminating the city that spread out beneath them practically as if in broad daylight. And right behind them, dropping onto the brightly lit targets, fell demolition bombs, two at a time. As soon as the home guard or remaining Gestapo on the Špilberk started scanning for the biplane with floodlights and firing at it, its motor would fall silent, and Little Ivan would quietly disappear into the darkness beyond the city limits. The Red Army was laying its groundwork for the decisive attack, and Gerta wished for it to happen.

  And then it happened, early one morning, after a night interrupted by Barbora’s crying, Little Ivan’s clattering, and the racket made by Volkssturm militia deserters who were ransacking houses, grabbing whatever they could so that by morning they could be as far away from the front lines as possible. Day was just breaking when swarms of rockets began to appear over the city, leaving behind blazing trails, columns of smoke, and booming thunder mixed with the droning of oncoming planes overhead.

  It’s happening, flashed through Gerta’s mind, her stomach in knots and her rib cage shuddering with fear. She flew out of bed as the first bombs fell, grabbed Barbora, who was just waking up, and her emergency bag, and fled from her bedroom.

  “It’s happening!” she shouted toward the door of her father’s room, but didn’t wait, hurrying on, out into the corridor and down to the basement, into the shelter, as she must have done some hundred times already since last summer. But this time would be different. “The Russians are here!” shouted someone from up above.

  Gerta ran straight into the shelter, sat down against the back wall, and with Barbora in her arms and her bag under her feet, waited for the basement to fill up. And to see if her father would appear. He didn’t. Twice more the caretaker opened the door to the shelter, which shook from the falling rockets and bombs, to let in some last stragglers, but her father wasn’t among them. Whenever a silence spread through the basement, the caretaker would go out to look around, only quickly to return, shaking his head, No, not yet. The hours passed. A few times Gerta even nodded off into a light, fitful sleep. Then someone began to bang on the basement door, repeatedly, forcefully, over and over again, until the caretaker opened it and an old man practically fell inside shouting, “The Russians are here; it’s finally over!”

  After almost two days, the inhabitants of the house on Sterngasse staggered out into the daylight. The square around them was destroyed, the streets rutted by the treads of army tanks, and under the windows lay bodies of Volkssturm defenders who had fallen out of their barricaded machine-gun lairs.

  “There’s still fighting up at the Špilberk. They’re driving them north toward Královo Pole and Řečkovice!”

  “The German House was hit; they’ve surrendered!”

  “Frantíšek Šikula and his loyal boys saved the Brno Lake Dam!”

  Such were the snippets of conversation Gerta overheard along with the Russian songs blaring from the radio-equipped vehicles slowly moving through the streets. On the curbs of the torn-up sidewalks sat weary soldiers, smoking and heating up over makeshift fires whatever was left of their meager supplies. The few Brno residents who had joined them, so that at the eleventh hour they could at least feel they’d contributed to the effort of liberating their city, were making the rounds of nearby buildings, going into shelters and basements and bringing up others from their hiding places, just as that old man had brought them out. And then the deep, familiar voice of Levitan, the radio announcer from Moscow, echoed through the streets:

  Moskva govorit, govorit Moskva! The army of the second Ukrainian front under Army General Malinovský, continuing its attack today, on April 26, employing a masterful pincer movement and a frontal assault, has gained control of the large industrial center of Czechoslovakia, the city of Brno, a major transportation hub and a bastion of support for the German defense . . .

  XVI

  During those first days of liberation, Gerta would hear that voice coming from the loudspeaker on the military truck every few minutes. It carried over from Cejl, where Red Army soldiers had moved into the corner building on Bratislavsk
á Street, formerly known as Pressburger Straße, drifted through courtyards and across open courtyard balconies, and floated all the way to her windows, from which she had finally been able to remove the blackout material. The rowdy Russian voices echoed through the empty streets late into the night, disrupting her and Barbora’s fitful bouts of sleep. The last few weeks had left Gerta completely exhausted, from lack of sleep, lack of food, the nightly carousing of the Red Army soldiers, and from work, for which she was collected daily. Early in the morning, the Brno Germans were picked up from their front doors and brought wherever they were needed, to collapsed buildings, first to dig out shelters that had caved in, and then to clear away rubble. More than once, she witnessed mutilated corpses being pulled out. They were buried immediately in the closest parks, because the Brno cemeteries were already overflowing.

  The city had changed. One could see it on every other house, even the one in which Gerta lived with her father and Barbora. The walls facing the spacious garden were pockmarked with round craters left by embedded bullets. The worst to be hit in their quarter were Französische Straße, Köffillergasse, and even Sterngasse, which had lost most of its odd-numbered buildings. A whole row of houses opposite theirs had collapsed. Zeile, or Cejl, and Pressburger Straße looked as if they had been the victims of some demonic counting rhyme. Eeny meeny miny moe, and you are it—every second or third house was missing. Of the corner buildings at the intersection of Schöllergasse and Ponawkagasse, only rubble-strewn lots remained. Entire streets had disappeared from the map of Brno. Gerta was sent to work on Koliště Street and on Údolní Street, of which one entire side, including the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Borromeo, had collapsed. Also destroyed were the Palace of Noble Ladies on Kozí Street, the JEPA department store and Hotel Astoria on Svoboda Square, and one whole side of Fröhlichergasse, in Czech Veselá Street, where three blocks of buildings had been reduced to ruins. Half of Mendel Square, the public spa on Hlínky Street, and most of the houses on Dornych Street were gone. Meanwhile, the large synagogue in the Trnitá district had been burned out, and only a few brick stumps pointing up to the sky were left. And that was just the damage in her immediate neighborhood.