Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  Johanna and her children used to gather with the other Germans on Sundays, after church. It had taken her a while to get to them, but finally she had found them. One year after she and the children had returned. That had been in forty-eight, after almost a full year had passed during which she could finally stop living in constant fear of being expelled. At that point, she made the decision to leave the haven that Frau Zipfel had so unselfishly made available to them in Bergen. Some of the other women made the same decision as well—each one for her own reasons. And some hadn’t made the decision at all. For Johanna, there was no choice. As soon as it was possible, she had to try to find Gerhardt, who had stayed behind in some part of Kounic College. She set out for the unknown. To a city where she no longer had a roof over her head. Or a job. But she had no regrets, even though she hadn’t yet managed to find him. This, however, was through no fault of her own, but rather because no one would give her access to any information. No one was willing to tell her anything. Überhaupt nichts, nothing. All the civil servants avoided her questions as if she were trying to unearth a state secret. The only certainty she had was that of her last memory of him. May 1945. Standing in front of a fence with barbed wire across the top, trying to catch a glimpse of Gerhardt during roll call in the Kounic College courtyard. And she had succeeded.

  In her grief, she had received a great deal of sympathy from everyone in the German club, which technically wasn’t allowed to exist as a club, because Germans were officially banned from congregating. Even the practice of their faith, which had brought them together, was forbidden to them. Or at the very least, strongly discouraged. But they couldn’t eradicate her; she had succeeded in making her own inroads. Among people who had been left with nothing, and who no longer had anything to lose. And it was among these people that Johanna and her children found themselves toward the end of the 1948, back when Mass was still being celebrated at the Brothers of Charity on Wiener Straße, now known as Vídeňská Street. She would never be able to thank Father Augustus enough for all his support, which had helped to relieve her anguish. Or the Heissigs, the Grübers, the Mattls, and all the others with whom she would gather there. Their faith in shared traditions and in God carried her through all those years during which, without Gerhardt, she had become a mere shadow of herself. Now, at least she had their Sunday gatherings to look forward to.

  Johanna didn’t blame anyone for wanting to shed their former life. In the long run, it was probably better that way. Vielleicht. Maybe. She, however, couldn’t do it, for the simple reason that she had chosen to continue living in the past. Attached to Gerhardt. And also because switching coats had always gone against her grain. She especially had no desire to switch out hers, brightly adorned by her faith, for Gerta’s drab gray one, under which she was barely even visible. The truth was that in the end, regardless of their differing points of view, they were in the same boat. They had both learned to live in seclusion. Fearful of the world. There was just one small difference between them. Gerta’s seclusion was absolute and final. She had locked herself away in it alone, to give Barbora the chance to live a life different from her own. The only person allowed to encroach on Gerta’s seclusion was most likely Johanna, and perhaps Antonia and Hermína. Johanna’s seclusion, on the other hand, although outwardly the same, was actually full of people. People who didn’t pretend they weren’t German. Who didn’t pretend to have stopped living and breathing in harmony with God’s world and their own conscience. Johanna’s seclusion was full of others who bore their destiny alongside her and her children. And whenever she pictured their procession, bathed in heavenly light, led by the benevolent Father Augustus and his two altar boys, enveloped by the fragrance emanating from the softly clinking censers, she felt certain that for herself and for her children’s futures, she had made the right decision.

  XX

  She arrived unexpectedly, appearing overnight, accompanied by Hermína. Suddenly, there she was, standing in the doorway with a big smile. The first thing Gerta noticed was the gleaming gold tooth in the upper row of incisors. It was just as conspicuous as the black hole it had replaced, and with which she remembered her.

  “I decided to have the old days gilded,” said Teresa, in German, with a laugh.

  Gerta stood with her arms spread out between the wings of the door and couldn’t budge. She stared at her as if she were an apparition, until finally even Hermína laughed as she stood next to Teresa, looking like her poor relative: thickset, wearing—although it was summer—a gray checkered fleece skirt and bulky gray stockings that covered her rotund calves, which in turn protruded from black felt, fleece-lined booties, one with a broken zipper on the instep. Teresa flung herself into Gerta’s arms, and as if it were just yesterday, the familiar scent of Teresa’s strawlike hair filled Gerta’s nostrils, just as when she used to breathe it in, night after night, more than twenty years ago. A tear rolled from the corner of her eye down across her temple.

  “No crying, girl.” Teresa grabbed her by the shoulders. “You can cry after I leave. Now, we’re going to celebrate! At nine o’clock tomorrow morning, I’m heading back. Not a minute later. So don’t waste any time. Throw on something decent, and let’s head out!”

  Hermína shook her head, saying, “It’s like she’s thrown off her chains—the whole bus ride, she couldn’t stop talking about how they confiscated her Tokaji at the border. Have you ever heard of such a thing? She was bringing us Tokaji wine! Supposedly so we could celebrate! And now she thinks she’s going to run out and buy another bottle.” Hermína twirled her finger next to her temple. “So at least I grabbed a slivovitz at home, and then she still insisted that I bring a small demijohn, too, the one young Krumpschmiedová gave me,” she said, lifting her other hand in which she was holding a bulging mesh bag. “It’s a Riesling, pure poetry. If she saw the empty shelves everywhere, she’d have a heart attack, don’t you think?”

  Gerta still couldn’t utter a word.

  “Get yourself dressed, and let’s go,” Teresa said, giving her another shake, and only then did Gerta move to let them pass into the entrance hall. She then rushed to feed the cats and pulled on a polyester dress with a matching scarf that she used to wear on Sundays to take walks by the river, so she wouldn’t look so out of place next to chic Teresa. The way Hermína did. Teresa had changed. She had grown lovelier and softer, and now, dressed in a blazer and a knee-length red skirt of Diolen fabric that was narrow and fitted, not wide and pleated as was the current fashion in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, she looked as if she had stepped out of a magazine. So simply lovely, as if it were the most natural way for a woman to be. Gerta felt almost ashamed, both of herself and of Hermína—over the years, their femininity had completely withered away. Had the iron curtain really cast them to such opposite poles?

  She wound the scarf she had folded into a sash around her head to hide her unstyled hair. She regretted how minimally she took care of herself. On the other hand, why bother?

  “Where does Johanna live?” Hermína called to her from the other room in German.

  “A few stops by tram, about twenty minutes on foot, whichever you’d like,” said Gerta, coming out of her bedroom.

  Teresa was sitting at the kitchen table. In front of her was a trim black handbag with fine, delicate handles. Gerta had never seen one like it before.

  “Would you mind if we walked? It’s been over twenty years since the last time I was here,” said Teresa.

  So they set off from Stará Street and took her down Bratislavská, past vacant lots, which, boarded off behind plywood panels plastered with layers of peeling cultural posters, all these many years later continued to be reminders of the August air raids during the last full year of the war. As they crossed the Sady Osvobození, or Liberation Gardens, which just a few years earlier had been obsequiously renamed Stalin’s Gardens, Teresa surveyed the white building of the new Janáček Theater.

  “Where is Zeman’s coffeehouse?” she finally asked. “A
t the end of the war, it was still standing there.”

  “They tore it down. First, they let it fall apart, and then they tore it down. An example of the bourgeois individualism of the First Republic. The theater, on the other hand, is for everyone. So now we have a theater here.”

  “Well, maybe that’s not so bad, right? That place was pretty expensive anyway, wasn’t it?” ventured Hermína tentatively.

  They went on, making their way slowly along the footpath and looking over at the newly constructed building. Above their heads swayed the branches of linden and hornbeam trees that were interspersed with rows of rustling silver birches. Their footsteps fell softly on the carpet of birch catkins and linden blossoms. Then the venerable trees in front of them parted, and into view came a monumental statue of a soldier victoriously holding a raised weapon in his hand, menacingly pointed in the direction of where the German House once stood.

  “So they tore that down too?” asked Teresa, her eyes scanning the empty horizon of the Náměstí Rudé Armády, or Red Army Square. Gerta tried to see the square through Teresa’s eyes, and it again appeared to her just as desolate as it had the first time, when she had seen it after the war.

  Gerta nodded, saying, “Supposedly, they blew it up right after the war, the minute we were gone.”

  They ran across the street, over to the park. Slowly they walked around its perimeter, keeping to the edge of the grass. Right in the middle, exactly where the majestic brick German House with its high, neo-renaissance facade used to stand, was a circular concrete area with an empty basin for a fountain. There was no water spraying out of it, and clusters of dead leaves and litter rolled around on the bottom.

  “Not that it’s hard to understand why, but still, that building was gorgeous. This stubble field bears no comparison,” said Teresa. “Did either of you ever go to the theater there?”

  Hermína nodded. “I used to be in the amateur troupe. We put on shows like The Blue Bird. I’ll never forget that, you know, all those people in the audience clapping. They’d stand up, and you’d step forward and back and then bow. It was wonderful. Although one did see some uniforms in the seats.”

  “You used to act?” Gerta said, turning to her in surprise.

  “My mother would take me. She started going, and I went with her. First, I was a child actor in The Magic Satchel. And then I did Schiller. You should’ve seen me. I was fabulous!” she declared with a laugh.

  “I believe it,” said Teresa, grabbing Hermína by the arm.

  They turned their backs on the park and continued past the churches of St. Thomas and St. James, then down along May 9 Street, where they could hear the clanging of the tram coming from the upper end of Česká Street.

  “It all looks so strange here,” said Teresa, glancing around at the flaking facades, the peeling lacquered display windows, and decrepit shop signs. “In Vienna, it’s finally gone—it’s been about ten years now. Right after the Declaration of Neutrality. There’s no trace left of the war anymore. But here, it’s as though it still has some breath left in it.”

  “Do you really think so?” Hermína asked incredulously.

  “Yes,” said Teresa, motioning to the other side of the street, where a partly collapsed wooden fence stretched along the right side of a block where, still during the war, a department store that boasted the first escalator in the Republic had stood.

  “So tomorrow we’ll have breakfast at the milk bar opposite the train station,” said Gerta. “Then you’ll see something really world-class. You’re not going to find something like that anywhere else, not even in Vienna.”

  “What’s a milk bar?” asked Hermína.

  Gerta gave a short laugh. “You’ve never seen luxury like this. Counters filled with delicacies in a beautifully decorated hall, with tables and chairs on spider legs, just you wait. Barbora and I went right after it opened—we almost couldn’t eat, we were so taken by how beautiful it was.”

  They crossed the Náměstí Svobody, and slowly made their way up Zámečnická Street toward the Rathausplatz, which after a brief interlude during which it was called the Dominikánské Náměstí, was given a most horrendous name, derided by all of Brno: Družby Národů—Friendship Among Nations Square. Once upon a time, Gerta had stood here with Barbora, then just a few months old, clasped tightly to her chest, listening in dismay to Beneš as he delivered his inflammatory speech. Had she known back then what lay ahead of her, would she have done anything differently?

  They continued on, walking up the middle of the street, where, still during the war, tram tracks had run, past the boarded-up Church of St. Michael, through the narrow Dominikánská Street over to Šilinger Square, and from there up to Špilberk Castle. They let Teresa stand there for a while, observing her in silence as she leaned against the crumbling edge of the parapet and looked out over the city.

  “It’s almost as if it never happened,” Teresa finally said, slipping between them and linking her arms with theirs, as together they made their way back down toward Úvoz Street. As they slowly descended toward Mendel Square, not one of them had the courage to break the silence. Overhead swayed streetlights suspended transversely across the roadway, coming on one after another as the darkness spread from the castle behind them through the city. When several streets later they rang a doorbell next to the name Polivka, there was a long pause during which nothing happened.

  “She doesn’t have a phone?” asked Teresa.

  Gerta erupted in a short burst of laughter, and Hermína began to explain to Teresa how it was with telephones in Czechoslovakia. Where she lived, in Perná, there was one telephone at the firehouse and another one at the National Committee, and now there were plans to install a telephone booth in the soon-to-be post office.

  “Well, here we’re a little better off,” said Gerta as she rang the doorbell again. “But even so, seriously, almost no one has a telephone at home. There’s a long wait to get a telephone unit. Then another long wait for them to hook it up. And finally, they’ll only hook it up if they consider you to be politically reliable. And that’s a category to which neither Johanna nor I belong. Let me run up and see if there’s a light on in the apartment.”

  Gerta dashed up the stairs. On the second floor, a door off a courtyard balcony was just opening. In the doorway stood Johanna, wrapped in a pink nylon dressing gown. She stepped over to the balcony railing and looked down.

  “Johanna! Teresa’s here!” Gerta called up to her.

  XXI

  Teresa remembered a different Brno. The city of her childhood and adolescence, in which she knew every church, every park, and every tram intersection like the back of her hand. The city in which she had moved around her whole life, even during the second half, when she was already living in her new home. In her dreams and fantasies, she was always back in Brno. The street corners and the trees lining the sidewalks would seem as real as when she leaned against them before she had been expelled.

  Teresa’s Brno had served as the backdrop to her steps. Her father used to call it the pulsating city of grandiose visions. A city that had defeated Olomouc in asserting its dominion over Moravia and was in constant competition with Prague, as to which city was the real heart of the Republic. A city that would soon stand alongside Paris, Berlin, and London. It rushed forth in leaps and bounds to embrace the fledgling First Republic and the new Europe with its redrawn borders. So her father had said. Many times prior to and even during the war, she walked with him through the streets, and he taught her to look at them through his eyes—he had knowledge to share about everything, and because of him, she learned to understand their city.

  But that was long ago, and now, as she stood once again on the hill in the courtyard of Špilberk Castle, with Hermína and Gerta at her back, looking down at all of Brno spreading out below her, she realized that she no longer understood the city, that she no longer belonged in it. This city for which she had yearned for over two decades, and to which she had compared everything. It was
like being reunited with a sibling whom one hadn’t seen for years. An awareness of the bond remained, but the mutual understanding had evaporated. Brno was no longer her city; it was no longer her home, and this realization was a bitter one.

  Instead of the city with model streets and bustling squares that she had preserved in her memory, sprawling before her was a gray mass littered with mutilated buildings and ruins—a dusty conglomeration of residential blocks and new, space-devouring housing developments that spread defiantly up the sides of the Brno basin, which had once held the old town and its outskirts so cozily nestled between the bends of its two rivers. Such was the city that her father had once shown her from this very spot. His arm outstretched and his index finger extended and bobbing along the horizon, he had pointed out everything from features of the landscape to the most conspicuous buildings, and visions that only he, an initiate of the Association of Moravian Architects, was privy to and that he conjured for her with a dreamy look.