Barbora jolted her out of her reverie, grabbing onto her thigh and rubbing her face into the coarse material of her skirt. If they were going to stay here tonight, she had to stanch the flow of memories flooding over her and get to work. She needed to seal the windows in at least one of the rooms, so that they would have a place to get settled and sleep without catching a cold. For now, that was all she was going to fix. Who knew how it would all still turn out. Karel might reappear tomorrow to tell her that, as a German, she wasn’t entitled to an apartment after all—her case had simply been overlooked, and now she had to leave the Republic. And all of her efforts would have been wasted.
II
To get to Kuřim by train took almost a full hour. One hour to get there and one hour to get back. She should be grateful. Barbora had been accepted to a preschool, and Gerta had gotten a job. She had even been allocated the apartment. And she owed it all to Karel. Without his help, she wouldn’t be leading this life. It was only the staggering salary deductions that not even he could do anything about. Plain and simple, Gerta Schnirch, now Schnirchová, was still German in nationality, even though Karel Němec of the Regional National Committee was looking out for her. Nevertheless, he apologized to her and kept running his fingers awkwardly through his short, wavy hair as he told her what her salary would be. She should have gone to work at the Zbrojovka Arms Factory, as he had offered. There he could have had more of an influence, he said.
The Zbrojovka Arms Factory? The stupefied expression on her face implied that unless she had gone crazy, he surely had. The vision of a truck with the Zbrojovka logo on its side flashed through her mind, a group of juvenile boys jostling around in the back, dirty, dozing off, hungover, but still holding on to their weapons, their rifles erect, Medusa’s enraged maw. With disgust she recalled individual faces, the pudgy one, who ordered her back to the marching column after the night in the barns near Pohořelice, or the one who had been shooting at the elderly Liebscher couple. She shuddered with revulsion as she thought of it. Shuddered at the mere idea of the factory, which, during the first month after the war, had coughed up so many pseudo-heroes, defenders of the homeland. Not one of them—if she remembered correctly, the subject had been hotly discussed all over Brno before the war ended—had undertaken to do a single thing. They had continued to work efficiently, going home to their mamas every night, and once a week receiving a very handsome paycheck. The salary they brought home from the Zbrojovka Arms Factory, where up to the very last minute they were busy assembling weapons piece by piece for the Wehrmacht, was more than anyone else in Brno earned. Klement Gottwald’s appeals from Moscow calling for sabotage or a strike went unheeded; throughout all six years of the war, there hadn’t been even a spark of resistance. Not one of them had lifted a finger, those heroes. They were all too busy licking the boots of their German bosses. And yet in the end, they got back at them for those premium paychecks, those generous food and cigarette rations, not to mention the company vacations that Zbrojovka employees were entitled to back then. Once the war was over, they paid them back good and proper. Once the purses of their German masters were empty, they wasted no time waging their own private little war. To a man, they wiped the collaborator’s egg off their faces and, to cleanse their own consciences, made everyone bleed, and did so thoroughly, thought Gerta, so that everyone could see just who the Zbrojovka boys were. How could she go to work there now, among individuals in whose faces she might recognize the ones who shot at them, firing into the crowd of people as they were being expelled from the city? She couldn’t forget how they beat the elderly to death when they could no longer walk, wrested from people anything they could grab, gold teeth, earrings, even their suitcases, leftover torsos of all they had once possessed. It wasn’t yet that long ago. She refused to work at the Zbrojovka Arms Factory even if it meant that she would be locked up for social parasitism.
Karel looked embarrassed.
“It’s not that easy to find you a job. I wanted you to do something that would be at your level. The Zbrojovka needs competent administrators.”
Gerta had shaken her head in a flat refusal.
One month to the day after Barbora started attending the kindergarten behind the church in Zábrdovice, Gerta got on the train at the Židenice station and headed to Kuřim to start a job for unskilled laborers in a machine-tool factory. From that day on, every morning she made the long trek up through the town of Kuřim to the gate of the factory complex and punched in her time card exactly as the siren signaling the start of the workday went off.
She was assigned to a place next to a machine in Hall Nine, and her job, just like that of all the other women in overalls with red scarves tied around their heads, was to pick up a piece of metal and place it in a mold, piece after piece, time after time. The room droned with the noise of the machines and was lit by weak fluorescent-light tubes that stretched along the side walls of the cavernous space. At the wail of the siren signaling the end of each workday, she made her way to her locker, where affixed to the inside of the metal door was the first photograph she’d ever had taken of Barbora. Barbora at the age of five.
Day after day, Gerta picked her up, always the last child left in kindergarten, and Barbora would throw herself sobbing into her arms, while the kind teacher just sadly shook her head. But still, Gerta would tell herself, anything was better than having to look into the faces of those who amid shouts of “Raus!” had once chased her out of the city.
III
That short-lived period with Karel was the most beautiful time she had ever experienced in her life so far. Stolen bits of happiness, slivers of moments he would store up for her over the course of a day, flashes of bliss in his arms, all that had come back. She hadn’t dared to hope it could ever happen again. But it did. And now almost two years had passed, two full and happy years since that sunny September day around noon, when she was getting ready to go out to the fields to help with the sowing of winter rye. She was just pulling the coarse material of her overalls up over her ankles when she heard Zipfelová calling for her from the yard. She quickly slipped into her still-warm rubber boots, threw a scarf over her shoulders, and ran outside. Squinting against the glare of the midday sun, she could barely make out the figure standing by the gate, so she brought her hand up to shade her forehead and peered again.
“Gerta, hurry up, now. Oh, there you are. You’ve got a visitor. He’s from Brno.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Zipfelová.”
Gerta walked up to the stooped figure of old Zipfelová who was supporting herself on the picket fence. On the other side of it, on the grass, stood a gleaming blue car with the figure of a man leaning against it. Zipfelka straightened up from the fence and on her way back into the house gave Gerta a conspiratorial wink.
“What are you doing here?” said Gerta when she got to the fence. She leaned on it in the same spot where Zipfelová had stood and stayed put. Safely inside the yard behind the fence, a bird who had grown accustomed to its cage. He took notice.
“Are you going to stay behind that fence?”
Gerta gave a nervous laugh, shrugged, and slipped through the half-open gate to the outside. Karel held out his hand.
“It’s nice to see you,” he said, taking into both of his hands her right hand, which she had extended to him.
“Really?” A sarcastic smile flitted across Gerta’s face.
“Really. Why, you’re not happy to see me? After such a long time?”
“I never would’ve expected you.”
Karel smiled and leaned back against the car.
“I look terrible, as you can see. All I do is work,” she said, and with an apologetic gesture, indicated her work shirt and the overalls tucked inside her boots.
“I know. I expected as much.”
Gerta felt pathetic, as pathetic as she had felt back then. Except even worse, because at that time she had at least been attractive. Now, she was standing here before him with a scarf over her shoulders in a work s
hirt and overalls, her rubber boots caked with mud and manure. A working machine that had long ago lost all traces of femininity. For the first time in five long years, she tried to see herself through another’s eyes, and what she beheld was a disheveled woman from a cow barn, who woke up day after day, grateful for this demeaning job. A slave grown used to her shackles. A woman who might have been his wife. Who was he actually living with these days?
“You expected as much? How come?”
“I knew what you were doing. Shall we take a little walk?”
Gerta stood sheepishly fingering the ends of her scarf.
“I’ve got to get out to the field; they’re waiting for me.”
“We can go together. I can explain why you’re late. They certainly won’t mind if they hear it from me.”
Gerta laughed out loud. “I’m not so sure about that.”
She looked over at the gleaming car behind Karel, took in his elegant suit, and all of it together, along with the fact that he seemed surprisingly informed about her situation, was making her uncomfortable. She peeled herself away from the fence and set off alongside him in the direction of the most remote village houses. She kept quiet.
“Why did you stop working for the National Committee?” he asked abruptly.
She turned her head toward him and studied his profile. It hadn’t changed, only hardened. She found him as attractive now as she had back then.
“I was classified as socially unreliable. After all, I’m still a German, right? Even though I’m a Czech citizen. Who knows what I might have committed in my official capacity.” She laughed.
Her laughter sounded so unnatural, distorted. Even she was startled and fell silent. The bitterness settling deeper and deeper inside her could apparently break through even when she wasn’t expecting it.
“How do you know that I used to work for the National Committee?”
Karel turned to face her. “Some papers you stenographed found their way into my hands. Speeches made by Šling and Životský, and even that atrocious transcription of Ďuriš’s address.”
Gerta burst out laughing again.
“Are you kidding? You call it an atrocious transcription? He’s a gem, that minister of agriculture, Ďuriš. The ministry couldn’t have picked a better speaker. They almost locked me up for that, in case you hadn’t heard. That’s when my social unreliability showed its true colors. After all, who but a displaced German woman would want to portray a Communist big shot in the worst possible light, right?”
Karel was nodding with an amused grin. “I heard, I heard. Supposedly, it was a big deal, and even the Ministry of Information came out to investigate.”
“A full carload of them showed up and tried to put me away,” Gerta affirmed sarcastically.
That late–Indian summer day two years ago came back to her. It was the first wine festival celebrating the Pálava grape harvest to be held at the foot of the ruins of the Orphan’s Castle, where it was said that the Turners once also held their assemblies. The festival grounds were full of people. Children were milling among the adults who were sipping out of small wineglasses, blinded by the afternoon sun and deafened by the music blaring from the garland-festooned grandstand. Gerta was wearing new nylon stockings that she had recently received as a bonus for her lightning-fast transcriptions of speeches made by various political officials. She kept bending down to examine them, running her hand over their silky finish, unable to get enough of them. As if wearing them would allow her to step into a better time. Now, two years older, she couldn’t help but laugh at her own naive expectations.
“I even made up a special symbol for that yeah, right? of his. He used it in every single sentence, and ended every sentence with it. His only coherent statement was when he turned Perná and its surroundings over to the folks from Moravian Hrozenkov and Halenkov as a thank-you for their efforts. The rest was all yeah, right?, and from the transcript, it was impossible to tell if he had actually said it or if I’d been trying to ridicule him. So they all showed up to check me out.”
“But they couldn’t find anything.”
“They even brought along a stenographer from the Ministry of Information who confirmed that it was in the original transcript, and not just in the typed-up copy. And then he testified that he didn’t believe that I had manipulated the speech, but that—and now get this—it was most likely an authentic transcript of the speech given by the minister of agriculture, who, furthermore, was commonly known as not the most, shall we say, gifted speaker.”
They both laughed.
“I’m not sure why, but somehow it stuck to me after that, on top of the German thing. That Ďuriš business was tacked onto my file, which was marked Not reliable for political assignments, and then Hanák left, and when he did, so did I. The only option left for me here was to work in the fields.”
The dry grass rustled under their feet. The air smelled of the wildflowers growing in the fields that had lain fallow that year. In the distance, the Pálava hills with the ruins of Děvičky Castle dominated the gently rolling landscape.
“How did those transcripts get into your hands?” asked Gerta.
“Through the Regional National Committee. I work for the Regional National Committee in Brno. I returned right after the war.”
“I see.”
“That’s where I found out that they hadn’t expelled you.”
“But they had.”
“Not out of the Republic.”
“Not out of the Republic, but out of the city. Out of our home and out of my life. And that’s how I’ve turned into what I am now. In the summer, I work out in the fields. Come winter, I’ll be assigned back to the cow barns. They expelled me out of absolutely everything.”
“Well, later on, that action was acknowledged to have been a mistake. You heard about that, right?”
“No one informed me, but I did hear about it. And then nothing more happened. Or did it? Is that why you’re here?” She turned to him, cautiously expectant.
“I’m not sure what you mean. Everything is in order, at least officially speaking. The whole question of deportation was coordinated with the Red Cross, according to what was agreed on and signed at Potsdam, and it’s been carried out more or less accordingly. The one mistake was that undisciplined action, but nobody could have prevented it after the war; it was the spirit of the time. You don’t have to agree with what happened; after all, it was your skin. But from a global perspective, it was inevitable, even if it got off to a somewhat chaotic start.”
“I don’t know how much you know. But when it comes to what you refer to as ‘the one mistake, that undisciplined action,’ I was in the thick of it. And if everything is officially in order, then where, for example, is Helga? Or where is her child buried? Or what happened to the ones who ended up in Pohořelice, in that camp? Where are they buried? I remember them stacking dead bodies against a fence. I wouldn’t call that everything being officially in order, would you? Some hundreds of people, if not thousands, didn’t survive. And on that march, blindingly drunk teenage boys were shooting at us. I’m not sure one can simply call it a mistake, or just shrug one’s shoulders and say it was done in the spirit of the time. I would have expected a little bit more.”
“You’re exaggerating. It wasn’t that many, at most a hundred, maybe two hundred people. They died of dysentery. They obviously underestimated the sanitary conditions. Given how emotions were raging at the end of the war, my feeling is that it’s a fairly negligible number. Podsedník conducted an inspection the very next day, and everything was quiet. It was just in Pohořelice that there were some sick people lying around.”
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