“Mommy!” I screamed in sheer terror, as loudly as I could, and then I saw her face appear out of the darkness, right above my sweaty forehead.
Back then, it used to happen so often that Mom finally asked Auntie Athanaia not to tell me those stories of hers anymore. But I wheedled them out of her anyway. I had become so obsessed with them that I couldn’t do without them. The steady ticking of the kitchen clock, the shallow breathing of Uncle Achilles coming from the next room, and the soft voice of Auntie Athanaia, who would cradle my head on her knees, stroke my hair, and tell me stories about the gods who lived in Greece on a mountain whose name sounded like the Olympics; about fearless warriors and beautiful maidens, who weren’t afraid to stand up to them; about the sad fates of the children of the gods, like Orpheus and poor Eurydice; about Prometheus, who, as punishment for having given mankind fire, had to spend the rest of his life chained to a rock somewhere in Russia; or about brave Achilles, after whom Uncle had been named. Up until the moment when Mom would come home from work, Auntie Athanaia would manage to tell me lots of stories. But all that came much later, only after I was finally allowed to stay at home with her alone.
Early on, it didn’t seem as if it would ever happen. Mom and I would hide out in our room and sit on the bed, waiting for Mrs. Athanaia to stop clattering around with the dishes in the kitchen. Back then, I couldn’t understand why Mom had let herself be kicked out of our kitchen so easily—after all, it was our house. Except Mom didn’t care. She would retreat into our bedroom, go over to the window, and stare out of it until it grew completely dark. Only then would she go into the kitchen to prepare some food, which we never ate at the kitchen table, but always sitting on our bed instead. Back then, I didn’t understand why everything had changed so suddenly. But I had a feeling it had something to do with Uncle Karel, who wasn’t coming to see us anymore. After he stopped coming around, everything went wrong. Mom stopped smiling. It was as if her lips no longer knew how, as if they’d forgotten how to stretch and turn up at the corners, letting her teeth show and laughter spill out. Maybe it started right around then, or maybe it had always been that way. I don’t know anymore, but the only laughter I ever remember seeing cross my mom’s face was a kind of spastic twitch, during which she would let out two h sounds in a row, and that would disappear as quickly as it had appeared. It was a strange, short laugh, as if she were afraid of being caught and punished, and she was quick to go right back to hiding again behind that unchanging, blank expression that refused to give away any hint of emotion.
For me, it actually came as a relief when my mom finally had enough. I don’t remember anymore exactly when it happened, but one day she simply got up from the window and marched into the kitchen where Auntie Athanaia was preparing some food, and suddenly, without warning, lit into her. I’d stayed behind the door listening, surprised by Mom’s yelling, by the pot crashing to the tiled floor, by the slamming of the cupboard door under the aluminum sink, and by the tears of Auntie Athanaia and the grumbling of Uncle Achilles, who probably hadn’t understood a word. I have no idea how they came to an agreement, since not even Auntie Athanaia was speaking much Czech yet, but from then on there was peace. We stayed out of each other’s way as much as we could, and everything was on a schedule—cooking, laundry, and even cleaning—and we all shared the living room. And if Uncle Achilles wanted to have a snooze, Auntie would lead him away to their bedroom.
And afterward, sometime later on, I remember Auntie Athanaia waiting for me when I got home from school with a warm pita spread with honey—no clue where she got it from, maybe those Greek girlfriends she talked about from time to time. By then I wasn’t needing to go to after-school anymore, didn’t have to wait there until after dark for Mom. By then, we’d already become friends with Auntie Athanaia, me and Mom, who, at first, allowed her to come pick me up from school, and later on, when I was older, to wait for me at home with that freshly baked pita that Uncle Achilles and I were crazy about. But that was only on Wednesdays, and then on Sundays—not something one could have every day.
And it was all because of Lidice, the village the Nazis had razed during the Lidice massacre—the horror that I was always being bullied about, until Mom finally patched things up with Auntie Athanaia and let her look after me. At least Lidice was good for something. Lidice, and then the night I told her that Auntie Athanaia had shown me a photo of her little girl who had died somewhere in Žamberk, when after the end of the war she’d been sent out of Greece ahead of them, ahead of Auntie Athanaia and Uncle Achilles. Back then, I’d asked why they didn’t have any more children—after all, most people had two or three. She looked terribly sad and just shook her head, saying, “Nyet, moya smert, my death.” Maybe that made Mom feel a bit sorry for her, and she stopped seeing her just as someone who had taken over our home. Then every once in a while, she’d even send me in to ask if they’d like some tea or bread with curd cheese. And then, for the first time, Auntie Athanaia baked pita even for us, and Mom and I both really liked it, and after that, we started to sit together and eat at the same table and offer each other food. And then once in a while, we’d even share a meal, and it went on like that, getting better and better, even though every so often the two of them would still get into each other’s hair. I couldn’t stand when that happened. Because, you see, by then I really liked Auntie Athanaia a lot, almost more than my other two aunties, Johanna and Antonia. And that was because she used to stroke my hair and tell me those amazing stories, and she also used to tell me about Greece—that it looked like paradise there, always sunny, and the sea always warm, with everyone swimming in it and laughing happily, and that people spent the evenings dancing together, not like here, where everyone was holed up by themselves at home. When she would tell me about it, I began to feel warm, too, as if I were also under that sun and by that sea, although I couldn’t imagine what it looked like. Auntie Athanaia just called it big, big water, beautiful, and then my mom would call it water that was practically endless, and that covered half the world and was very salty.
Afterward, I tried to drink salty water, but I must have overdone it with the salt, because it wouldn’t dissolve—it settled at the bottom of the cup and was so thick that when I tried to drink it, I felt salt crystals crunching between my teeth. And what’s more, it practically made me throw up. Then that night, after all that, I still got a smack in the head. Mom was really mad, because I’d wasted half a bag of salt, and we already had barely enough money for anything. After that, I didn’t long for the sea as much, even though Auntie Athanaia’s stories still made me feel that wonderful warmth. There was no comparison to what I would have been going through at the same time at after-school. There, the other kids would have been cursing me out again, shoving me into a corner, and making me play Lidice, while the teacher pretended not to see a thing. But she saw perfectly well—I noticed that once, when I caught her looking toward our corner and watching. But she did nothing. The only time she did something was early on, in first grade, when she put me on her lap and made a fuss over the pictures I’d drawn. And at the same time, as if I were stupid, she asked me what my mother did, and did we speak German at home, and did we get together with other people who also spoke German. It was a good thing I never told her anything back then—stupid cow with her beehive hairdo, she wasn’t even good at being two-faced. As punishment, she would then say to me in front of the other kids that I was in the school by mistake, and that I should have been sent to a special school long ago, because a fellow comrade teacher had told her that even in third grade I was still mixing up my letters. And that it was probably because Czech simply wasn’t our language, meaning my mom’s and mine. Back then, they obviously didn’t know how to deal with kids who mixed up their letters, but basic human compassion should have been enough to stop a good teacher from talking like that. This comrade Brunclíková, though, had no such concerns, and who knows, maybe that was what first put the idea of Lidice into Aleš Koteček’s head. Whatever it
was, it got everyone to chase me and play Torture, and naturally I was always the one who had to be tortured, because I had to atone for what we had done to the Czechs and the Jews. Back then, I had no idea what it was all about, and when I got home, Mom didn’t explain anything to me. She just got really upset and became impossible to talk to, and the next day she came to school with me and went right to the headmistress. But whatever it was that she hoped to accomplish clearly didn’t happen, because when she came after work to pick me up that evening, she didn’t say a word, but she must have noticed, as I did, that Brunclíková did something with her lips that looked like she was spitting on the ground in front of us. It was only after we got home, and I was trying to explain it all at dinner, that Auntie Athanaia saved the day. She turned to my mom and begged her not to send me to after-school anymore, saying I could stay at home with her since, after all, she wasn’t even working. And wonder of wonders, Mom nodded in agreement right away. I almost couldn’t believe it, although I saw it with my own two eyes. From that moment on, we became something like a family. It’s hard to believe, but we actually really liked each other and stopped feeling as though we were in each other’s way. And that was how it stayed until the day Auntie Athanaia and Uncle Achilles packed up their things and went back to Greece, because they were finally allowed to go home.
XVII
On this particular day, Gerta didn’t get off at the stop in Židenice but continued all the way to the Brno Central Station. In the late afternoon, she made her way up the Třída Vítězství, Victory Avenue, and across Náměstí Svobody, Freedom Square—places she got to only rarely—searching for a suitable gift for Barbora, who was finally graduating from her place on the school bench, and with a vocational certificate no less, something Gerta hadn’t even dared to hope for. Her Barbora was finally getting a diploma. After the ordeal of elementary school, after having to repeat two grades—following which Barbora still mixed up her letters when she read aloud—and after vocational school, which had required her to travel every day all the way to Letovice, forty-three kilometers away, her Barbora had really done it. She’d earned a vocational certificate and in July would be going to work at the porcelain factory. It had been a rough road with her, no doubt about it, but at least things hadn’t turned out to be as much of a disappointment as they had for Anni and Rudi.
Barbora had never harbored any grand illusions about what she wanted to become. Fortunately, she at least liked to draw and had no greater ambition than to replicate designs from templates onto the smooth surfaces of porcelain cups. And to learn how to mix fusible pigments. And fortunately, no one was particularly interested in a vocational school in the small town of Letovice, which required a round-trip commute of more than an hour and a half each day because there were no boarding facilities.
Things had been much worse for Anni and Rudi, who had only started to learn Czech after the war. They both ended up having to repeat a grade, because apart from Johanna, nobody was willing to help them with a language that was only familiar to them from the jeering of other children. The comrade teachers took great pains to make the Czech language and their classroom experience as unpleasant as possible. Even later on, once Gerta was already back in Brno and would occasionally get together with Johanna, she would hear about all the homework they both had to contend with, and how desperately they struggled trying to learn two languages as similar as Czech and Russian at the same time—not to mention with every other subject, all taught in a language they didn’t yet fully understand. Nevertheless, in the end, they finished primary school with honors, and proud Johanna was already envisioning her twins as students at the Gymnasium—or rather at the eleven-year school, which back then had taken the place of the Gymnasium—and after that, hopefully, even as students at the university. Nothing of the sort. In 1955, applicants of formerly German nationality were as a rule not accepted at such institutions. And Johanna couldn’t find anyone willing to stand up for her children’s right to have a future. With the greatest of difficulty, she finally managed to get them into a secondary school specializing in chemistry in Brno-Řečkovice, where they were grooming a new generation of workers for the Institute of Pure Chemicals that had recently opened in the sprawling Lachema complex. Did anybody care that Anni had wanted to study literature and Rudi engineering? Nobody. And that was even before they knew that neither of them would be allowed to study beyond secondary school. Rudi was drafted into the army right away and, as was to be expected, was dispatched to the most far-flung garrison in Slovak Košice; and Anni, after every one of her university applications had been rejected, was assigned to work at Lachema.
So, in the end, when it came to Barbora and her future, things weren’t so dire after all. They had been fortunate in their misfortune, thought Gerta on that June day as she rode the tram back from the Brno Central Station. In her bag, she had several yards of green brocade; it had cost her a fortune, but Barbora had been wanting the fabric so badly for a dress. They would work on it together in the evenings, so that she’d have something nice to wear when that Jára of hers, who for a while now had been walking her home from school, asked her out. Gerta didn’t particularly care for him. He struck her as a vapid type. True, he looked good in his turtleneck and jeans, for which he must have paid a pretty penny in the Tuzex shop, peering through his fringe of shaggy bangs, but his cool nonchalance vanished the moment she offered him food. The very first time, he had descended on the plate of kolach pastries like a swarm of locusts. When she next invited him for a Sunday lunch, she ended up putting one of her own slices of dumpling on his plate, concerned that six pieces hadn’t been enough for him. Then for the rest of the afternoon, he lolled about on the kitchen sofa, not saying a word, the top button of his pants undone. He only mumbled in agreement or disagreement when Gerta asked him something as he sipped coffee with them, his distended stomach rising and falling in regular rhythm with his breathing—until he fell asleep.
At that point, Gerta looked over in surprise at Barbora, who just shrugged her shoulders and said, “He works on a construction site every day, you know, and moonlights too. I got myself a real workhorse.”
And a real klutz, thought Gerta, watching him from the kitchen window as he pulled two more chunks of bread out of his bag while he waited downstairs for Barbora to finish getting ready to go out for the evening.
On the other hand, maybe he would be good to her, thought Gerta, and she’d keep him in line with those dumplings. And in the end, she was glad that Barbora had managed to find anyone at all. That she had found a way to escape these four walls, behind which Gerta had locked them both away. Unintentionally. She was happy for her, although every time she heard the front door close behind her, she felt an instant panic, and couldn’t relax until ten o’clock, when she would hear the key rattling in the lock. But what mother wouldn’t be worried about her daughter? she told herself, lost in thought about Barbora, the bag with the brocade at her feet, as she sat in the tram that had been stuck for a while now at the intersection in front of the Künstlerhaus gallery, waiting for a caravan of Tatra trucks full of cargo to go by. In the meantime, she glanced out of the window at a banner, fluttering in the summer-evening breeze. On it was a balloon, a round, bright red hot-air balloon rising over a green lawn. Gerta imagined herself in the wicker basket, floating above the pristine landscape of childish shapes and objects. “Kamil Lhoták Exhibition” read the inscription on the banner. Right then, she decided that on Sunday morning, she would come here with Barbora.
Balloons. Bicycles and motorcycles. A solitary, far-flung wooden fort on the outskirts of town. A world that seemed to have sprung out of a child’s fantasy, but with every detail painstakingly rendered so as to seem realistic. They walked through the rooms and peered with fascination into the inner workings of another world. For the first time in a long while, she and Barbora shared a genuine sense of enthusiasm and an experience of pure joy. They went up the stairs into the main exhibition hall and made their way a
long the wall, moving from one painting to the next. And as always happened when in the presence of art, Gerta felt she was in the company not only of Barbora, but also of Janinka, with her fine flaxen hair and in her soiled skirt, the way she had looked in August 1944, the last time Gerta saw her, on top of a heap of rubble amid the bombed-out buildings on Pressburger Straße. She tried to look at the paintings through Janinka’s eyes and wondered if she would have appreciated this technical world, rendered in such a romantically old-fashioned style, she who moved in a world of blazing colors and the most outlandish ornamentations. The world of a kaleidoscope. Or would she have stood in front of Lhoták’s paintings the same way she had stood facing Gerta back then, with a blank, lifeless expression, her heels digging in and eyes staring right through her? The rubble had been crumbling beneath her feet, and the slight hand with pronounced veins had resisted Gerta’s grasp as she tried to lead her down from the wreckage, back to solid ground. She wanted the doctor, scurrying among the wounded who had been dragged from the ruins of the buildings, to examine her, and was then going to take her back to their apartment and wait for her to calm down. The street was full of falling debris, ashes, and scorched scraps of paper. All around them echoed the continuous cries of the wounded and the voices of rescuers and relatives calling out to those who were missing. Not far off lay a person who was missing his leg from the knee down. He was gripping his thigh with both hands—blood was gushing from the stump. His face was a gaping mouth with enormous teeth that would momentarily clench together, only to open again in the next spasm of screaming. The sight made Gerta feel sick, but Janinka seemed oblivious to everything happening around her. She just stood there, shaking, looking down, staring at her tightly clenched fists. She couldn’t remember for how long they remained huddled together in the midst of the chaos and mass of milling people before Gerta spotted a Red Cross vehicle and nurses in white caps who were helping to load up the wounded. She grabbed hold of Janinka and took off running toward them.
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