His index finger would proudly rest on the German House, the evangelical Red Church, and the Turnhalle Gymnastic Society building at the foot of the Špilberk hill; the German Theater, which had been among the first on the European continent to have electric lighting, with Edison himself designing the light installation; and the Industrial Workers Association Pension Fund building, which everyone in Brno called the Bienenhaus, or Beehive Building, because of the enormous bronze honeybee sitting on top of its cupola, the symbol of the fund, which as a child she always waved to when passing by. And then he would acerbically point out the blocks of the newest buildings: modern gray or white cubes strewn across the hillside of the Jirásek quarter, or the tall high-rises, the afternoon sun beating down on their glass windowpanes that shattered the light into a thousand blinding shards against which Teresa had to shield her eyes. He would frown the same way upon the Cyril and Methodius Savings Bank on the Zelný Trh market square; at the new Avion Hotel, supposedly built on the narrowest lot in Brno; at the new Moravian Bank on Náměstí Svobody; at the Convalaria apartment building with its shops and the Dorotík Café, completed already in time to usher in the Second Czechoslovak Republic; and even the Villa Tugendhat, which the famous architect Mies van der Rohe came to Brno to build. Not for him, let alone for any other acolyte of modern architecture, did her father have the time of day. Works like that, he liked to say, devoid of decoration, with no particular significance, could only have been built by a Czech without an ounce of taste, or by a Jew, greedily turning over every five-crown piece in the palm of his hand. Barbarians, he called them, all those who were in the other camp and who, in the years leading up to the war, were doing better than he was, better than all of them were, the German architects and builders whose company he kept.
Back then, he often came home from their meetings exasperated, because another lot had been snatched up by the Czechs with their purist tendencies, and because Brno, which for years had accommodated both architectural styles, suddenly had no room for buildings that honored the Germanic tradition. He resented them for having lumped him and his colleagues together, relegating them to a suddenly insignificant group of perceived fuddy-duddies, deprived of any power or influence. He resented them because, no sooner had the wind shifted than they started to rewrite history, and suddenly there was no more room for the names of the German architects and builders responsible for most of the city’s public works. They now pretended that the Germans deserved no credit for the city’s appearance. He was angry that their investment in municipal buildings, schools, and universities was being denied, that those who built the City Courtyard, Bergler’s Villa, the Erste Brünner Maschinenfabrik—the First Brno Engineering Factory, which had employed and been a source of livelihood for Czech and German workers alike—were now being forgotten. Even the fact that it had been the Germans who had given the Petrov Cathedral its spires, that, too, was forgotten. The First Republic, in all of its zeal, sought to remove anything German from the face of the city as if it were a carbuncle—and her father, with his visions and unfulfilled architectural dreams, along with it.
Through him, Teresa had experienced this atmosphere whipped into a frenzy of extreme nationalistic competitiveness. And then all at once, as if by the wave of a magic wand, it ended, and her father once again began to receive commissions from the city, starting with the completion of the Ringstraße extension and the grounds of the park and gardens beneath Petrov Hill. Over the course of those first two years, she saw him beaming, full of satisfaction and gratification, pleased that art had prevailed, making it possible for him to start building again. He lived for it, and on Sundays took her along to show her how a construction project was progressing. Later on, she would run over after school on her own, going either directly to his office or to the building sites themselves. Until the day he disappeared elsewhere, because once again he was not allowed to build, and had to leave, this time not just—as her mother’s daily tears attested—for work, but for good.
How different Brno appeared to her now. As if it were still bearing witness to a calamity. The war had long been over, but the empty lots barricaded behind wooden boards covered with peeling posters didn’t seem to suggest that the city had forgotten, even twenty years later. The streets of Brno were full of its traces, on the desolate corners of Bratislavská and Koliště, along the whole stretch of Dornych Street, and even in the heart of the city, where Římské Square, Kozí Street, and the empty public space behind the main train station stood bare. Only here and there odd structures had sprung up, which Gerta referred to as the spawn of the latest crop of graduates from night schools that produced working-class architects whose main instruction was in Marxism and Leninism. What Teresa was seeing during that summer visit in 1968 were the ruins of a bygone time. A battered gray corpse, riddled with holes, from whose gutted entrails protruded, skewerlike, the glass tower of the skyscraping Hotel Continental, in the place where the Šmálka housing development had once been—a shantytown where, unbeknownst to her parents, she had gone roaming a few times. She could see the unsightly sheet-metal market hall that had gone up on one side of the vegetable market, and the massive, looming, boxy buildings that disfigured the once-parklike Mendel Square. And the deserted train station that was to have been the hub of the European railway system. Looking down at all of the squandered opportunities from the crumbling, unmaintained ramparts of Špilberk Castle, she felt like crying.
Only one thing hadn’t changed. The subconscious awareness of every Brno resident that was imprinted with an unwritten map of the city, one passed down from generation to generation, on which the Czech pathways sought to avoid intersecting with the German ones. Human memory is short, but the Brno cliques have remained, thought Teresa as she looked down from the northern side of the Špilberk at the hustle and bustle of the inner city. The Czech residents of Brno still avoided walking down Běhounská Street, or the Rennergasse, which was now completely deserted without a single pedestrian. Instead, they made their way along the parallel Česká Street, which had once been home to Czech shopkeepers, restaurateurs, newspaper offices, and the renowned bookshop founded by Joža Barvič, a Czech patriot from Moravian Wallachia, which had been the first Czech business of its kind in Brno. And even Red Army Square, formerly Adolf-Hitler-Platz, where the German House had stood, gaped empty, as if people were afraid to set foot in it. And almost as if it were being punished for its history, it hadn’t been planted and remained empty and bare, with here and there just a few patches of dried-up grass, and that fountain basin in the middle without any water.
“Apparently that place isn’t even worthy of a piece of carved stone. The statue of the kaiser that still stood there during the war got stashed away someplace. The two allegorical figures ended up under Petrov Hill in Denis Gardens Park, and the only thing left of Masaryk is the pedestal. Maybe what will end up staying is that pathetic cluster of statues they’re planning to install—there was just a picture in the Rudé Právo. It’s going to be called Communists. They say it’s already in the works,” Gerta had volunteered when she realized what Teresa was looking at.
Would she ever come back here, to this refurbished square, where she had once spent long afternoons in front of the German House? Would she ever see it again? Would she be permitted another trip back, and if so, would there be enough time? Teresa asked herself these questions with apprehension, and with uncertainty. Because not even she could say how much time she had left, nor could the doctors, who had found that viper in her intestines. A viper nesting in a lair deep inside her, a lair that, were it to be disturbed, would release a venom that would burn her from within. A tumor that wouldn’t shrink and would now go on growing and become hardier until it was the size of a baby’s head, and by then she would look pregnant. And then at some point, sooner or later, she would die, pumped full of morphine in the Viennese hospital where she’d been going for her medical checkups, usually escorted by the commiserating gaze of the doctors and nurses.
She sensed that she wouldn’t be back and would spend the rest of her days nostalgically looking through old postcards of Brno, which she searched out in Viennese secondhand shops and hung up in ornate, gilded frames on the papered walls of her apartment. Postcards depicting Brno as it once was. It’s disappeared beneath the sediment of time and the oppression under which the people here live, she said to herself as she strained to catch a glimpse of what was now only the slightest glimmer of her youth in these streets whose beauty seemed to have withered away.
XXII
“It wasn’t easy. It was terrifying. I was just as scared then as I’d been on the way to Pohořelice. And then at the beginning in Bergen.”
The hushed German permeated every corner of Johanna’s cramped kitchen, as did the smoke from Gerta’s Mars cigarettes, an indulgence that, since Barbora had moved out, she permitted herself at regular intervals at fixed times to be savored each day. Teresa was chain-smoking her own cigarettes, and Johanna, as the glasses added up, would occasionally reach over and help herself to one of her exotic Camels, a whiff of the capitalist West.
“On top of everything, it was terribly cold. Terribly. At first, we slept outside, because no one wanted to take us in. All of Drasenhofen—in front of which those Russians dumped us—all of Poysbrunn, Ottenthal, and Poysdorf, every single town was still full of those who had come across the border that summer. Some had stayed because by the time they’d arrived, they were already sick—dysentery and typhus were raging there all summer too. People brought it with them from Pohořelice, so they had to stay put; they didn’t have the strength to go any farther. Especially the old people. You’ve never seen so many old people in one place as there were in the homes of those locals who, mercifully, had taken them in. Every single one of them asked me if I’d seen any of their relatives—either near the border or along the way. They were absolutely desperate—they’d lost entire families. Catastrophe. You know what was left for them to do? Nothing. For the ones who hadn’t already died in June, on the way—remember those bodies lying around everywhere?—all they could do now was to die as soon as possible. For strangers, they were a burden. In all those border villages, there are masses of graves, even communal ones, where there’s just a number on the headstone to show how many are buried there—people who’d already been picked up in June from the fields, where they died like dogs. I say it that way on purpose, because that’s how the locals talked about it. They saw how the Russians and even the Czechs drove them as if they were livestock.”
Teresa was still shaking her head in utter disbelief, even so many years later.
“Finally, on the third night in Wetzelsdorf, I slept under a roof again for the first time,” Teresa continued. “Ula begged them because of Dorla, who already had a cold, and in the end, they let us all sleep on some hay up in the attic. In the morning, they gave us goat’s milk and some bread, our first real food in two days. We didn’t take much from Zipfelová, just a small jar of jam, for sugar and strength. They sent us to a cloister in Mistelbach, saying that it was a gathering place for refugees, and they would know what to do with us. We wanted to get to Vienna, but in the end, we agreed with Ula that it might be better to get our bearings first and go someplace where they were prepared for refugees. You know, we had no idea what to expect. We hadn’t really thought it through. We just kept imagining that in no time we’d be in Vienna, either looking for work or at the Red Cross. We never imagined how terrible it would be there in October, so soon after the war. That there would be people everywhere, even worse off than we were. And that neither for them, nor for us, was there going to be any room anywhere. You know what they would say to us along the way? Not just the kids, but the adults, too, when we’d pass by and ask for shelter or food? They’d shout at us that we were scum, gypsies, or that now we finally had what we’d always wanted—and that it was our own damn fault, because of our insatiable Heim ins Reich. Or Nazi pigs—they’d shout that too. There was even one time when a man with a Red Cross badge came over with a camera and started filming us as we were helping to clear out the rubble from the cellar in Mistelbach, to make more room. When I asked him what he was filming, he said it was going to be a documentary film about how the Nazi wives now had to pay for what they’d brought about. You can’t imagine how I felt when he told me that. Here, in this land I’d dreamed of, where I’d imagined that I’d find a new home. Ula held on to me that time—had she not been there, I think I might have even come back. Or I would’ve done something to myself, as so many others did—death was everywhere. If back then I’d been given a choice to live as a Nazi bitch with all of you and Zipfelová, with food and a place to sleep, or to live all alone with nothing in a foreign country, then I would’ve chosen to go back to Bergen. Had it not been for Ula. ‘What were you expecting?’ she’d ask me. ‘Offers of ball gowns and dancing shoes on a gilded platter?’ That’s what she’d say as she’d stroke Dorla’s feverish forehead while she lay on that pile of straw. We were still in Wetzelsdorf then. We had to wait almost a whole week before Dorla was strong enough to go on. I couldn’t answer her. I hadn’t really imagined anything specific. I just thought things in Austria would be better. But that would still take some time; we had to be patient—Ula would repeat that to me as well. Girls, Ula was incredibly brave.”
Teresa paused, taking long, deliberate drags from her cigarette.
“From Wetzelsdorf to Mistelbach, it was only about an hour and a half on foot,” she continued after a moment. “Up on the hill stood the cloister, also quite damaged during the war, but there was a home for the elderly and a hospital. In those days, when we got there, it was bursting at the seams. There was no room for us. They told us that their numbers were decreasing because old people were dying every day, but when we arrived, there were people lying everywhere—even in the hallways, in terrible condition. And inside the rooms, they had put down extra beds on the floors, in the basement, too, which was full of rubble, so they were constantly clearing all that out, stepping over the sick people lying on straw pallets all over the place. It was dreadful. Those days, I kept on crying in total disappointment; I couldn’t help it. It would come over me uncontrollably, in the middle of the day when I’d be doing something like dicing potatoes in the kitchen, where they let us help out for a few days. Or at night, before falling asleep. But Ula kept us both going, Dorla and me. It was awful. And most of all, it made no sense for us to be in Mistelbach. With each passing day, we both felt worse and worse. Old people, sick people, no prospects, people dying every day. It was hitting us harder and harder, until finally it seemed entirely pointless to set out for Vienna, where we were told the conditions were the same, that they also looked upon refugees as Nazis who had fled the Protectorate, or as thieves, or even just as people who would give the locals competition. There was no room to cram us in. Austria was hopelessly overcrowded; people were hungry and full of hatred; and this was where Ula and I had wanted to start our new lives! It was in Mistelbach that we suddenly felt that the whole thing was stupid, such a bunch of nonsense that only a child could have believed it. Then Ula decided that she had to get to those relatives of hers in Řezno—Regensburg—as quickly as possible. So we moved on again, because she couldn’t get there from Mistelbach, we had to get to Vienna. It must have taken all of her strength to convince me to keep going. In the meantime, she stashed away potatoes, one at a time—we would slip them under our skirts and hide them in small pouches that we’d made out of some rags. Raw potatoes and onions, anything we were able to swipe from the kitchen, where we were helping out. It was rotten of us, because nobody there had anything, and we were stealing in order to put away provisions, but we’d heard that people along the way were no longer willing to give out anything. After three months during which the flow of immigrants hadn’t slowed down, they had practically nothing left for themselves—they didn’t even feel sorry for us anymore, and when they saw us coming, they’d go inside and lock their doors. So we had no choice but
to steal. We took what we could, hid it away, and then set off, once more, for Vienna. First, we went to Wolkersdorf, and from there to Floridsdorf, where there was a refugee camp.”
Teresa fell silent, reached for the bottle that was sitting on the table, and poured herself another slivovitz.
“I don’t know if we’d have been better off had we stayed in Mistelbach for the winter, or in some other small village in the countryside. Not that they would’ve wanted us, but where we ended up in Floridsdorf, the misery—if it’s even possible—was even worse. The place was an old factory. It was falling apart, but probably not because of bombs, although there were holes in the roof and the windows were cracked—at first only the wind blew in, but soon, so did the snow. Winter came early that year. They sent us directly there—no way would they let us into central Vienna. So there we were, stranded in the middle of this horde. You’d sleep three across on wooden pallets, that was if you were lucky enough to grab a spot. People would even sleep on the floor, and many of them were sick. Not just with the shits that they’d brought with them from Mähren, but with hypothermia—they’d be taken to the hospital, but often it was too late. And everyone had lice. And everyone had the shits—again, there was dysentery all over the place, and they’d come around once a day with tin cans giving out soup, which was the only food you could get. A serving of watery vegetable soup, and seven ounces of bread per person, and whoever didn’t have the shits yet, they’d get them from that watery soup, even if they were still healthy. And for that entire factory, where there were more than a thousand of us cooped up together, there were only three outdoor latrines. Do you know what that was like? Thoroughly disgusting. Blessed Bergen, blessed Zipfelová. From what I heard from some of the others, who’d also been sent to southern Moravia to work, not everyone was treated as well as we were. Not a night went by that we didn’t pray and give thanks to Zipfelová for having taken such good care of us. Chances are that if it hadn’t been for her, and we’d arrived as malnourished as some of the others, we wouldn’t have lasted. You know, there wasn’t a day that they didn’t have to carry someone out, someone who didn’t make it. And then Dorla caught it. She came down with those terrible shits and got a fever. The doctor there, who’d been expelled from Znojmo, came by and said that it didn’t look good, and he had nothing to give her that could help. Then the next day, people from the Red Cross came back again to hand out more soup, and Ula latched on to them and insisted they take Dorla to a hospital. She was beside herself with despair, and that was probably why she ended up succeeding, because they wouldn’t take just anyone. There was a Red Cross doctor who would visit the camp, and he allowed only the worst cases to be admitted. In the end, they loaded us into a truck, even Ula and me—because I wasn’t about to let myself be separated from them for anything in the world—and drove us to a hospital in the center of Vienna. They kept Dorla there, and we expected them to assign us to some kind of work, and then, once Dorla got better, to send us right back to that same camp. To this day, I’m grateful to Dorla for waiting to get sick until early December, when we were just outside of Vienna, and to Ula, for managing to get us all on that truck. I can’t imagine how we would have survived the winter in Floridsdorf. All we had to wear was just what we had on when we left Bergen—whatever the Red Cross brought in was useless to us. If you weren’t fast enough, you got nothing, and fast was something Ula and I were not. It was only later that we got coats and shoes, when we were already in Vienna, from a charity.”
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