Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  It was the Georgian doctor who saved both of their lives. He came rushing in, moments after Barbora started screaming as if she were being skewered alive, in a cradle that Gerta had pulled out earlier from among the confiscated German items stored in the Rosenbaum barn. It was hard to say what woke her—the perpetrators, after all, stole into the house quietly, and given the not exactly pampered circumstances in which she was growing up, she didn’t startle easily. But the moment the latch on the door clicked, she started from her peaceful sleep that tinged her cheeks pink, and suddenly, it was as if something in her snapped. As if she had received a warning. Something from within or something from above. Some voice from heaven, perhaps that of the Perná Virgin Mary of the wayside shrine beyond the village, to whom Gerta surely would have prayed had she and God not gone their separate ways during the war. She turned her back on him only after he had left her in the lurch so many times—through the endless nights during which he allowed her father to do to her whatever he pleased, or the day she had been expelled from the city, or in the Pohořelice camp. No, never again did she want to hear another word about God. But perhaps with Barbora it was different. Perhaps those two hadn’t parted in anger, because otherwise there was no explanation for why her screaming ripped through the room as soon as Jech and his sidekicks opened the door. How could she have sensed it? Her own Barbora, her very own child, to whom she now owed her life. To her and to Dr. Karachielashvili, whom she never would have expected to appear. He must have been very close by, perhaps right in front of the building or on the village square. That diminutive Georgian doctor with his slight shoulders and shrewlike nose, who spoke perfect High German and on one of the long, pale fingers of his exquisite, aristocratic hands wore a large signet ring. She knew she had won him over when she didn’t take offense at his comments, claiming that in the Czech lands, the Czechs and the Germans were equally uneducated, since they knew nothing about his country. His condescending words didn’t bother her at all. Contrary to his expectations, she straightened up from the pump where she was washing Barbora’s diapers with a stub of grimy soap—that being all there was—swept a few stray wisps of hair away from her forehead with her wet, chilled hand, and proceeded to tell him all he ever could have wished to hear. He just stared at her, this German washerwoman, or whatever he imagined she was, as if she were an apparition. She described in detail where Georgia was situated, the location of Tbilisi, and the course of the Terek River. Having grown up on books by Lidia Charskaya, she knew it all perfectly, just as she knew, from having read Neumann, about the rebellion by the princes Karachielashvili, which she referenced in passing when she asked him about his own background, noting that he bore the same name. And with that, she wrapped him around her finger. From then on, the slight Georgian doctor—whom all the Russian soldiers in the village obeyed to the letter, as at one time or another he had helped get each one of them out of some scrape—instructed them to bring her gifts: bacon, eggs, brine-fermented pickles, a pot of lard, fish. And it was also this Georgian doctor who stormed into the office where she and Barbora were spending the night, keeping watch, just as the drunken Jech with his brother-in-law and nephew were trying to pry open the desk drawers in search of the keys to the barn that held property confiscated from the Perná Germans. And then a shot rang out that had drowned out Barbora’s bawling. The bullet lodged in the wall above Gerta’s raised arms. Barbora briefly fell silent and then started to bawl again. Then Jech began to shout, and next, Dr. Karachielashvili burst in with two soldiers, who struck the intruders from behind, knocking them down, and then rolled around, tussling with them on the floor. Meanwhile, Gerta grabbed her child, ran for the door, and raced back to Zipfelová’s, away from the Jechs, away from her own death, clutching Barbora whose cries were still piercing the otherwise peaceful Perná night.

  XVIII

  A few days later, a new administrative commissioner arrived in Perná.

  Josef Kratina from Brno-Líšeň was typically suburban and a bureaucrat. He arrived with just a small, greasy leather briefcase with straps, wearing a shabby suit and a shirt with a rumpled collar. Across it fell a fringe of stringy, untrimmed hair, which grew in a semicircle around a spreading bald spot. He smelled of sweat and musty old rags. In the office, he settled himself behind the desk, clucked his tongue, placed his hands down on the table in front of him, and proceeded to look around at the walls, into the corners, and at the floorboards. From time to time, he picked up one of the objects that sat in front of him on the table, weighing it in his hand and examining it from all sides. The crystal ashtray that had been confiscated from the Heinzes. The flowerpot that served as a pencil holder. He opened the drawer. Clucked.

  Then he called for Gerta.

  She came in with papers that needed his signature. He signed her clumsy report for the district administrative commission without even reading it and seemed prepared to sign anything Gerta put in front of him. He appeared to be completely indifferent. Before he went out to take a look around and inspect the grounds, he asked just one question: “This all belonged to Jews?”

  Gerta nodded.

  That evening, they were all sitting around in front of the house. Some sat on the ground; Zipfelová and Ida sat on a bench, watching the older children as they ran around chasing the dog and then disappeared after it into the orchard behind the house.

  Ida was crocheting a collar. Zipfelová was just sitting there, resting her hands in her lap and observing the women seated around her. Some were holding a child. Gerta was rocking Barbora. Edeltraud was jiggling a baby carriage, one hand pushing it back and forth as the other rested on her hip, and Johanna was peeling potatoes for tomorrow’s lunch.

  “But Hubert Šenk needs twice that many, and he deserves them, too, not like those newcomers,” Ida was saying to Zipfelová.

  “Sure he does. But what’s to be done? Those new folks will grab as many as they want. And who’s going to go after them to tell them they have to give them back?”

  “They shouldn’t have been allowed to take them in the first place,” retorted Ida, and shot Gerta an accusing glare.

  “Oh, come on now, as if she were to blame,” countered Zipfelová, throwing back her head.

  “No one even asked me,” Gerta said. “By the time Šenk got there, half of them had already been divided up. The Hrazdíras had already been there, and by noon, those new Jechs had theirs picked out as well.”

  “Had you spoken up right away, before starting in about that Schmidt business, Šenk wouldn’t have been stuck here and could’ve gone right over and picked out the six men he needed. Not that they know anything, but at least they can pull their weight, right, Johanna?”

  Johanna nodded.

  “I’m glad we finally got some help. Those two from Brno are handy. Šenk still drives the wagon, but the older one knows how to drive that borrowed tractor, too, so they can spell each other.”

  “We didn’t get any help for the vineyard,” Ula said.

  Gerta looked at her with pity. Every day she listened to Teresa groaning as she twisted and turned, trying to stretch out her back. She and Johanna would take turns working on her, cracking her vertebrae one by one, trying to relieve her pain. Even now she was lying stretched out across the empty bed in the little room upstairs, no doubt silently praying for the one-hundredth time for her stay in Perná to end. She often described to them how she imagined herself living in Vienna, all the things she would do, and how cleverly she would support herself. To their amazement, she didn’t seem the least bit worried about the idea of leaving, come fall, for Vienna, a city already overcrowded and straining under the influx of new arrivals. Gerta, on the other hand, before falling asleep, thought of nothing else but returning to Brno as soon as she had the chance. She suspected it would have to wait until after Dožínky, the harvest festival. Most likely even later, because although by then the bulk of the work would be done, it still wouldn’t be the right time for her to move. Though several months had already
passed since the war ended, it was taking time for emotions to settle. The Perná villagers and farmers were only now beginning to treat the young German women, who had come from Brno through Pohořelice, as if they were human beings, although occasionally it would still happen that they permitted themselves liberties, which under any other circumstances would have been unthinkable. Just the previous week, for instance, Ula had come running back from the vineyard all beaten up. And it was only thanks to Dr. Karachielashvili that Gerta escaped from the drunken Jechs. If they had killed her, no one would have done a thing. That was how it was these days. And although at old Zipfelová’s they had practically everything they needed—a roof over their heads, enough to eat and drink, and someone to look after their children—beyond Zipfelová’s gate, they couldn’t expect to be shown any respect. Whether dealing with the old-timers in the village or the newcomers, they were all too often met by either outright contempt or scornful disdain. Some of the farmers beat their German women; others acted with more decency, like Hubert Šenk for instance, whose behavior under these circumstances could almost be called gallant.

  On the day that Ula had dragged her black-and-blue self back from the vineyard, Zipfelová slit a chicken’s throat, and by the time Ula, sobbing in her room and squatting over a basin as she splashed herself with cold water to wash between her legs, calmed down, a hearty broth was ready. Zipfelová wouldn’t leave Ula alone until she finished off three full servings and then made her drink a cup of lemon balm tea infused with poppy seeds, before sending her to bed. Afterward, at the administrative headquarters, Gerta witnessed how, filled with indignation, Zipfelová took the new commissioner to task, outraged to see him shrug his shoulders with indifference at the grievances she spewed at him. Punish those criminals from Wallachia who are spreading out all over the village and attacking exhausted women. Don’t give them any more property so that they leave, the riffraff. Post a public notice stating that anyone found guilty of a crime won’t get even a thatched-roof hovel in this village, let alone a proper building. The commissioner kept on shrugging his shoulders and cutting her off in annoyance. He hated a fuss and didn’t want to be bothered by anybody. Zipfelová left but took a minute to sit down on the bench in front of the church—the callousness of that petty bureaucrat from Líšeň had left her short of breath. Her legs were trembling, and her heart was pounding, as if she had just been running for her life.

  On the following day, as Gerta prepared the reports for the district administrative commission, she slipped a short declaration among the papers that the absentminded Kratina signed without paying it the slightest attention: Let it be known that whoever is caught or found guilty of inflicting bodily harm on any resident, whether a Czech or a German, will not be given, and nor will his family, any of the confiscated property designated for redistribution. The war is over. The next day, the declaration hung on the door of the administrative headquarters, the door of the church, and the door of the general store that a family from Hrozenkov had opened up in lower Perná.

  Ida stuck her crochet hook into a ball of yarn and tucked both into a canvas bag.

  “There’s guitar playing over at the Schmidt farmstead today.”

  Zipfelka looked at her in surprise.

  “So?”

  Ida stood up and brushed a nonexistent speck of dust off her skirt.

  “The brigade workers are going to be playing guitar and making a campfire. They invited me to come, so I’m going over to have a look.”

  “Now, at night?”

  “Campfires usually are lit at night.”

  Zipfelová looked down at her wrinkled hands folded in her lap.

  “It’s still not safe to go walking around this village alone after dark.”

  Gerta noticed that Ida’s cheeks were becoming flushed.

  “Don’t worry, Mother. You’ll see; I’ll get back just fine.”

  Zipfelová nodded.

  “Is someone going to accompany you?” she said, giving Ida a sharp glance.

  Ida kept her eyes cast down, brushed the last nonexistent speck off her striped skirt, repeated, “Don’t worry, you’ll see, I’ll get back just fine,” and disappeared into the house. In a moment, she reemerged with a knitted shawl thrown over her shoulders, sped past the group of women, called out, “Till later!” and slipped out through the wooden gate.

  “So soon after the war,” remarked Zipfelová bitterly. She closed her eyes, and in the evening afterglow, her deeply furrowed face seemed to fall, her jaw twitched a few times, her chin sank in disappointment, and a tear rolled down her cheek.

  “How am I supposed to stop her, girls?” she said, opening her eyes abruptly and looking over at the women seated around her as they looked awkwardly back and forth at each other.

  “You can’t keep young people dressed in black forever,” Johanna said consolingly.

  Zipfelová nodded.

  “Someday she’s going to want a family too,” ventured Ula, giving a little embarrassed cough, because she didn’t know to what extent Zipfelová considered her son’s death to be a real possibility.

  Zipfelová once again hid her dark pupils behind her closed eyelids.

  “And most likely neither Helmut nor I will be around to see it,” she said quietly.

  XIX

  “You know, they don’t pamper them much; you can be sure of that. It’s not like they deserve it anyway, right?”

  Gerta was sitting at the desk in her office, leaning back against the hard wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap. On the tabletop sat a demijohn of red wine that Hanák, Kratina’s replacement, had brought up from the cellar, into which, over time, she and Schmidt had transferred all that was left of the inventory from the German wine cellars that hadn’t yet been reallocated. All too often by the time they arrived, they were too late; the wine cellars had been looted and drunk dry by the Russian soldiers, and every morning following a rowdy night, for the remainder of June and July, the two of them would walk around together to see which one had been hit this time. By early August, however, they had managed to stow what was left of the inventory in the cool and musty wine cellar at the back of the garden of the Rosenbaum house. This wine cellar had been one of the first places Hanák discovered as he made his preliminary rounds of the unfamiliar village of Perná.

  He had arrived the day after the departure of Kratina, who had left with two truckloads of confiscated furniture, porcelain, Mrs. Pfeifer’s furs, kegs of wine, and bags of grain. Even the bag of walnuts from which Gerta used to nibble had disappeared from her office. The confiscated property that had accumulated in the Rosenbaum barn had dwindled. Most important, the valuables earmarked for either the National Recovery Fund or the district office were gone.

  “Well now, that means everything’s already there,” chuckled Hanák the next day as Gerta described to him in consternation all the things that, according to her records, were missing.

  “Should I report it somewhere?”

  Hanák, who immediately made himself at home in Schmidt’s office, chuckled again.

  “You mean like to Mikulov? Or maybe directly to Brno? You’ll just get Kratina picking up on the other end. Or someone exactly like him. Woman, you are naive.”

  Gerta stood as if frozen to the ground.

  “All the porcelain has disappeared. And the furs. Several bags of . . .”

  “Disappeared? Have you read about what happened to the Jews?”

  Gerta hadn’t read anything in several months. Not since the day that Beneš came to Brno. From then on, decrees were the only printed material she had laid eyes on.

  “They disappeared up chimneys! And how many of them! And how much of their money disappeared! What do a few teacups matter, woman?”

  Gerta leaned against the doorframe.

  “I kept exact records here on Commissioner Schmidt’s orders.”

  “So then, just cross those things out, all right? With a note saying they were transferred to some guy named Kratina from Brno. T
hat way it’s documented, should anyone ever bother to check. Do you even realize, woman, that there’s been a war? And what kinds of things go on during a war? Now tell me, who the hell’s going to care about a few teacups?”

  “Obviously I realize that, sir. If there hadn’t been a war, I wouldn’t be here; I’d be back in my apartment in Brno.”

  “Well, there you are. But you had it coming. You’re German.”

  “I never hurt anyone. And my mother was Czech.”

  “But old Papa was German, right? And did Papa have a clean conscience?”

  “That I couldn’t say, sir. But I have a clean conscience.”

  “But see, that could never work. The two groups have to be separated. You can’t count on someone who resents the young Czechoslovak state to be committed to making that Czechoslovak state strong, right? Where would we end up? Right back where we started, isn’t that so? In this, Beneš speaks God’s honest truth.”

  Gerta didn’t know what to say to this. Was Beneš’s honest truth what she had seen scrawled on the walls during her last few days in Brno—Germans out!—or was it by now something different? Zipfelová didn’t have a radio, and Gerta had no way of getting hold of a newspaper, if any even came to Perná.

  “What’s more, you need to work off everything you managed to squirrel away around here. We’re not talking small potatoes, right? Just think of all that disappeared down your German craws. Paintings and jewels from Prague—there was just something in the paper about that—and all the things you stole from us, the amount of stuff you hauled out of Brno. And then there’s all the stuff individuals hauled away for themselves. You should shut up! And work hard! Work hard, and be grateful that we let you live, do you understand?”