Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  “Wait, please, have a look at her, examine her, please, check her. See if anything’s the matter. Please,” she called out to them. One of the nurses motioned her closer, and Gerta managed to prod Janinka toward her. But no sooner had the woman tried to touch her than Janinka doubled over and began furiously screaming and savagely, hysterically flailing her arms. Even Gerta recoiled in fright.

  “Stop it, stop it,” the nurse shouted at her as other people began to close in—a driver and a man with a Red Cross band on his arm. They grabbed Janinka around her waist and by her legs and carried her into the vehicle. All Gerta saw was Janinka’s body stiffening in a spasm and then convulsively beginning to shake all over.

  “Let me go with her,” she shouted.

  The nurse pushed her away from the narrow back footboard as she helped up a man with a bleeding wound on his forehead.

  “The hospitals are overflowing. You can’t come.”

  “Where are you taking her?” cried Gerta.

  “To the Brothers of Charity. You can come by tomorrow. What’s the girl’s name?”

  “Jana Hornová. Will you remember?”

  “Yes, Hornová. Are you family?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Tell her family to come by and ask for her tomorrow. At the Brothers, understand?”

  Gerta nodded fervidly, her path obstructed by another pair of passing wounded, each helping to support the other. Then the vehicle drove off with Janinka in it.

  It had taken Gerta over a week to track down Mrs. Hornová. On the first of September, Gerta spent the whole afternoon waiting in the passageway of their building, and when she saw Mrs. Hornová come in, she ran over to her, eager for news about Janinka’s condition. At the sight of Gerta, Mrs. Hornová’s face seemed to turn to stone. But that no longer deterred Gerta. She vividly remembered how, as the war progressed, the cordiality of her mother’s longtime friend had gradually evaporated. “And who can blame her?” Gerta’s mother used to say to Gerta, when Gerta couldn’t understand why Janinka wasn’t allowed to come over anymore.

  “Is she better?” she cried out.

  Mrs. Hornová, at that moment, was standing by the entrance to the passageway, and Gerta slowly advanced toward her.

  “Is she better? Won’t you please tell me?”

  Janinka’s mother just kept on standing there, staring at her with a stony expression. She looked Gerta’s rotund figure up and down, her eyes narrowed to slits and her lips compressed into a hard, straight line.

  “Please, Mrs. Hornová, how is Janinka?”

  Mrs. Hornová made a few quick steps in her direction, moving simultaneously toward Gerta and toward the building’s entrance. Gerta carefully stepped out of her way.

  “She is dead,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Janinka died. The day after the air raids.”

  Gerta stared at her in disbelief.

  “Janinka is dead, do you hear me? She’s dead because of people like you. Like your father, like your brother, like you. You disgusting, disgusting slut.”

  Gerta stepped back with a gasp.

  “Don’t you ever, ever come into my sight again, understand?”

  With that, Mrs. Hornová spun around and disappeared behind the door. Gerta backed slowly away until she bumped into the wall of the passageway. Janinka, dead? Nonsense, she kept repeating to herself, still catching her breath. Nonsense. She couldn’t be dead—she had seen her. Being lifted into the vehicle. In convulsions. But one didn’t die from that. Gerta slumped down against the wall and dropped into a squat, keeping her knees apart, allowing her protruding belly to rest between them. Tears were streaming down her face. She wasn’t sobbing. She wasn’t even sure if she was crying. She was chased away from Janinka’s doorstep once more, this time by both parents. They weren’t about to tell her where Janinka was buried, Nazi slut that she was.

  Since that time, since that unusually cool month of August of the next-to-last year of the war, Gerta thought of her friend whenever she was in the presence of art. And on that day, at the Kamil Lhoták exhibition, also. As she and Barbora were leaving the exhibit, she felt as though Janinka were right there with them, large as life. As if she were walking alongside her, quietly, as had always been her way. Then for a while, she seemed to recognize her in every woman they passed, even in that dark-haired lady with the teased updo and distinctive black eyeliner, who was being helped out of her luxurious fur coat by an older man in the museum cloakroom.

  XVIII

  Had she only imagined it, or had it really been her? It was distinctly possible that she’d only imagined it, as for that matter she so often did. Maybe the nightmares and hallucinations were coming back again. It would be nothing unusual, given the regularity with which they typically came on. She practically expected them by now. She, Jana Rozsývalová, had already grown used to them. The only thing she could never be sure of was the exact moment in which reality would change into delusion. She would be thinking that what she was hearing and seeing was the same as what others were experiencing, only to discover that she’d been locked up again because she’d been raving. Madness, how tender that word coming from Josef’s lips had once sounded, just after the war, which they had lived through in that place together, each a victim of their time. These days, he would just brusquely rap on her bedroom door and slip medications he brought home from work into her mouth. He was good; he always knew what was wrong with her and how best to help her. Josef. Today, comrade Physician in Chief, Josef Rozsýval. And she, comrade Mrs. Physician in Chief, Jana Rozsývalová, housewife, who from time to time would go mad. Naturally, she wasn’t officially a housewife—their socialist state, to which she and Josef were so devoted, would never tolerate such a bourgeois anachronism. But she did receive a disability pension; Josef had seen to that. So now, had she truly just imagined it, or had it really been her, Gerta Schnirch from Sterngasse? Was it even possible that it could have been her? Nonsense. She would have to tell Josef that the delusions seemed to be starting again.

  After all, back then, her mother told her that Gerta had disappeared, along with her newborn child. She had disappeared, like most of the Brno Germans. She had even heard that she had died, at least according to the caretaker in her building. Just after the war. Just before she, Janinka, had been released.

  It never occurred to her to question it and to go searching for her. Not after all that had happened. All because of the Germans. Even if she’d had the opportunity back then, she wouldn’t have gone looking for Gerta. Because of her family: her father, a die-hard Nazi, and that brother of hers in his Hitler Youth uniform. He’d been wearing it the last time she’d seen him when he made her stand at attention behind their building and Sieg Heil while he groped between her thighs. Afterward, he had chased her all the way back home, the pig, Mr. Deutschland. Or had she made that up as well? No, certainly not, after all, the delusions hadn’t started until after the war. Yes, definitely, not until after the war. Which had been brought on by the Germans, by people like Gerta and her family. Why had her mother ever let her be friends with that girl? Supposedly, Janinka’s mother had once been close to Gerta’s mother, whom Janinka could barely remember. Except what people used to say about her, that Schnirch kept her under lock and key, and would beat her with his belt for every Czech word she said—that much she did remember. But people would say anything.

  Still, if it actually had been Gerta Schnirch, where would she have materialized from? Being German, she would have been expelled from the city, after all! Although if Janinka were to look around, she’d notice that a few Germans had remained. Indeed, even those like Morawczik, or these days rather comrade Moravčík, who was now a party member with Josef and accompanied him to meetings. Josef didn’t remember him; he hadn’t lived on Bratislavská Street back then, but Janinka remembered him very well. And, God knew, he was certainly no anti-fascist, as he had tried after the war to make everyone believe. He must have paid a pretty penny—how else wo
uld he ever have gotten his hands on a waiver?—but whatever, he’d still managed to turn his coat in time. But Gerta, how had she wheedled her way back here? That was, if that woman at the exhibition had really been her. She had looked old, very old. And that young woman with her, she could have been her daughter, that girl her mother had told her she had managed to get herself pregnant with toward the end of the war. Who knew whom she might have been willing to sleep with, just so she could stay in Brno. That was so typically German, to do whatever it took to maximize personal gain, stay put, and remain masters of everything, lapping up as much as they could for themselves, hanging on to property that they’d stolen from the Jews whom they’d murdered, those German monsters—if only there were a way to get back at them. Pay them back in kind, bastards that they were. Or at the very least, do back to them what they had done to her, Janinka. That was what she would wish on her, on Schnirchová, prancing around with her daughter at her side, as if nothing had happened. How was it that someone like her could have a child, whereas she, Jana Rozsývalová, wife of the physician in chief, couldn’t? How was that possible? Because of them, those German butchers, who had poked around inside her and then left her, with only the scars on her thighs and a gutted womb to weep over. Tears started rolling down her cheeks.

  Had it not been for Josef, she never would have made it to the end of the war. Her life would have been snuffed out by a higher-than-usual dose of sedatives. The Germans had done a thorough job of cleaning up after themselves before they fled. As it was, those last six months of the war hadn’t been worth living anyway. She hadn’t even been aware of being alive. It felt as if one morning she woke from a dream to find herself in a ward for the mentally ill. All she could remember were the laughing faces of some of the staff members, shouting that the war was over. And then all around her, the bodies, lying inert on beds or sitting moaning on the floor, wrecks of human beings. And Josef, seated by her, his head resting against the headboard of her bed, asleep. God, how glorious it had been back then to wake up, go back home, and have Josef. It never bothered him that they gouged her out as much as they had. The bastards. He moved in with her family, married her, joined the party along with her father, and from that time on, they’d led a good life. They were given a brand-new multigenerational home in the posh Jirásek quarter. And a company car. And Josef, the hospital errand boy, which he’d become after they shut down his department at the onset of the war, rose through the ranks to become physician in chief. And deputy chairman of the Regional Committee of the KSČ, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. But his wife hadn’t borne him any children. And then a bitch like that, like that German woman long presumed dead, goes parading past her, putting her kid on display.

  Or had it not been her? Was it starting up again? Was Janinka again seeing things that others weren’t seeing? Maybe the image of Gerta only existed in her mind, and in reality, there had been no such person in the Künstlerhaus. And furthermore, what would she have been doing there, since, after all, she’d been expelled, and she was dead? And it served her right. Both of them, her brat as well.

  XIX

  She couldn’t live the way Gerta did. She couldn’t bear it personally, nor could she pretend in front of her children that everything was in perfect order. That the world was their oyster. That they had nothing to fear from it. Nothing at all. Nichts. And that she could let them leave the nest and carry on as if no one would try to do them any harm. She couldn’t pretend that their ancestors, her parents and her parents’ parents, and Gerhardt’s parents as well, had all come from purely Czech roots. Besides, by now her children were too grown and too German to buy such a story. Ihre Kinder waren Deutsche, her children were German, plain and simple, and there was no way she could talk them into believing that they weren’t. Or that nothing had happened. When the natural ease with which they were used to moving back and forth between Czech and German households had disappeared from their lives. When in the end, the Germans themselves had all disappeared, and for good. And when they personally witnessed the way in which they had all disappeared. She couldn’t tell them stories, when back then they had both been marching the whole length of the way beside her—first to Pohořelice, and then on to Bergen, today Perná. Following that first night, Anni hadn’t spoken for three whole weeks—ghastly, schrecklich. Anni knew perfectly well what had happened to all the Germans. Nothing doing. Even had she wanted to, she lacked the ability to paint a prettier picture of the world around them. Maybe because she knew she couldn’t fool them. Maybe because she didn’t want to. Vielleicht. Maybe. And maybe, according to Gerta, because she didn’t have enough strength to spare them the heavy burden that she herself carried around like a monkey on her back, na ja. Gerta had said this to her once, after they had put the children to sleep and had stayed sitting up together in her kitchen with its windows that looked out onto the courtyard balcony. Johanna had asked her for advice on how to carry on—she was tired of fumbling in the dark, always asking herself how best to guide her children’s lives. With no Gerhardt, whom she’d really needed by her side in those days, to point them in the right direction, to help them make decisions. But he wasn’t around. She was all alone, ganz allein. So she turned to Gerta, thinking that she, too, must be grappling with the question of how best to help Barbora deal with everything. Except that Gerta wasn’t concerned. Not in the least. Gerta always knew right away how to handle anything. She had a precise gauge for assessing what was good or bad. This had always made Johanna envious—for her, making a decision had always been such a struggle, whether due to being afraid or overly speculative, she was simply incapable. And the same had held true back then, when she’d been grappling with the dilemma of whether, when it came to her children, it was better to let them blindly play the game of chance or reveal the world to them exactly as it was. Back then, Gerta told her that she could stay in her isolation if that was what she, Johanna, wanted. She could remain in perpetual mourning for Gerhardt, for dirndls and for Christmas Stollen filled with raisins, but if she kept her children locked away in that isolation with her, then it was purely out of cowardice, out of fear of being stuck in it all alone. That time, she, Johanna, had broken down in tears. If only it had been Gerhardt steadying her by the elbow, and not Gerta, who at that moment herself seemed embarrassed and upset. Had Gerta been right back then? Had she raised her children to honor their family traditions, their German heritage, respect their father, and stay away from the Czech world, just to avoid being left with it all by herself? She couldn’t discern the truth; she felt as if she were blind. She knew that she could make things easier for them. If she were to impress upon them the need to be respectful toward all those Stalinist comrade teachers and comrade foremen in the rubber factory, where Rudi had taken a job to get away from chemistry. If she were to urge them to practice self-discipline and self-restraint. To think positively even about people who reviled them just because of their heritage. She knew that with enough willpower, she could force it upon them. But how could she encourage them to have a relationship with people who had expelled them and who had imprisoned their father, nicht war? She couldn’t do it. Whatever the reason, whether out of cowardice or out of respect for their traditions, the thought of it made her feel sick inside. So she had raised them as Germans living undercover in a foreign country. This was how they talked about it among themselves at home. To the point that sometimes Johanna would even get frightened. After all, to this day, speaking German on the street was forbidden. If anything were ever to happen to her children now, she wouldn’t survive it. And she would have only herself to blame for having cultivated their sense of otherness. She was especially concerned about Rudi. He had a temper and he was strong, and he carried her grief for his lost father within himself. She had seen him countless times try to step up and fill his father’s shoes. In his desire to please her, he was willing to take on the impossible. In her darkest nightmares, she would see him caught up in a brawl because someone called him a “Deutschak,�
� a derogatory term he couldn’t stand. Johanna would then see them taking him away and would see herself standing behind a glass wall, through which neither her cries nor the pummeling of her fists could be heard. She would then wake up from such dreams in the room she shared with her two grown children, in whom she had been the one to keep the past alive. The past and their German heritage. Every Monday and Thursday they would review German together. She had written down all the poems she remembered from her childhood in a hardcover notebook, and this was what they used as study material. Instead of doing what Gerta advocated, which was to forget, as quickly as possible, the language that in this Republic brought them nothing but trouble. Gerta wanted her child to blend in. To stand solidly on her own two feet so that it wouldn’t even occur to anyone to knock them out from underneath her—because Barbora herself would have no sense of why anybody should. Gerta had scrupulously hidden from her anything that had to do with her ancestry. And so far, it hadn’t occurred to Barbora to ask questions. But for Johanna, this was unacceptable. She couldn’t allow her children to forget their origins. To forget the German language. To bury, along with everything else, even Gerhardt himself. She didn’t want them to blend in. She wanted them, on the contrary, to be fully aware of everything that was in any way connected to their lives. And to own it with pride. In honor of Gerhardt. So that one day when he returned, he would be proud of them. And he would praise her, Johanna, for how she raised his children. All alone and yet so brave. And independent. Johanna’s eyes filled with tears as she imagined Gerhardt returning to her someday. A hundred times she had imagined the look on his face when he would first step into their one-room apartment off the courtyard balcony, and the twins would rush to embrace him and greet him in his mother tongue. In their mother tongue. Auf Deutsch, in German. And how he would then look at her when he realized that she had succeeded—she had preserved in them a faith in their values, in their society, and in their own German people.