Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  Gerta walked along the main street from the upper end of town down to the train station with Jarka and Jenda. On the Náměstí Osvobození, Liberation Square, people were standing around in small groups, looking at a monumental statue of a soldier holding a firearm raised victoriously in the air. His face had been smeared with blue paint. And that, thought Gerta to herself, is just about the extent of what’s going to happen here.

  “I always thought Kuřim was liberated by the Romanians, wasn’t it?” said Jenda, turning to Jarka and shaking his head, perplexed.

  “Yeah, by the Romanians,” Jarka replied, shrugging her shoulders.

  Later on in the train, Gerta’s bottle of milk accidentally spilled on the floor, and the people around her made a fuss of crossing one leg over the other or, if they were standing, of taking a dramatic step backward, grimacing as if this were the worst possible thing to have happened that day. Gerta couldn’t understand it. At the same time, already that morning at the Brno-Židenice train station, there had been two armored carriers and a tank, atop which sat a few young men smoking and looking down at several of their pluckier cohorts, who were collecting signatures. Otherwise nothing was happening. Could everyone have already forgotten the war? It hadn’t been that long ago! Surely these people around her couldn’t keep on acting this way—as though getting to the lake in time for a late-afternoon August swim or keeping spilled milk from getting their shoes sticky took precedence over the tanks in the streets and the fighter planes at the Brno-Tuřany Airport.

  And yet, very possibly, they could, as Gerta discovered over the following months. People could act as though nothing had happened at all, or they could act as if the whole thing had happened by invitation, as they officially voted to do a few weeks later. And finally, they could even act with complete indifference. A total lack of interest. Like, for example, her own daughter.

  The night that the news had come over the radio, Barbora had already been moved out for a long time. She was living in one of the new housing developments in Brno-Žebětín with that couch potato Jára and little Blanka, and was completely indifferent to what was going on. Gerta was all alone with her fears and her nightmares. She would wake up from them in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, convinced that another war was about to break out. That, once again, she and others like her would be running downstairs to take cover in basements and to pray that the worst thing to happen to them would be that they crap in their pants.

  Plagued by such misgivings, she visited Barbora throughout the rest of that summer and fall. And in her fear, she spoke to her daughter more openly than she ever had before—together they even laid bare all the secrets that Gerta had at one time preferred to forget. The past no longer lay as an obstacle between them. Through their conversations, it had been reunited with the present, and Gerta hoped that now, from the broader perspective of their family history, Barbora would understand her fears.

  But Barbora ignored her, and not only her, but also their shared past, which no longer held her curiosity with unanswered questions, and even their present, which interested her even less than Jára’s belching. She would just stare at Gerta with a totally blank expression, and finally Jára ordered her and her political gibberish out of their kitchen. In that instant, it was as if a gaping rift had split open between them, across which Gerta could no longer see into her own daughter’s soul. Into the mind beneath the once-teased hair, which these days fell limp and was tucked behind her ears—into the mind of her own flesh and blood, for whose sake over the past twenty years she hadn’t given up.

  Gerta returned home and went through the following months as if in a dream. Russian and Polish soldiers were encamped around the perimeter of the city. They took over the barracks on Šumavská Street, at the Brno-Tuřany Airport, and in Židenice. They became a part of the city, part of its population—suddenly one heard Russian even in the shops. Even in the factory. A new deputy director came in. And from there, the effect began to trickle down, lower and lower, until it found its way to her, right to her desk in her office, where next to her typewriter she cultivated Christmas cacti. In the windowless warehouse to which they transferred her, they no longer bloomed the following year. The cadre credentials of a Czechoslovak citizen of formerly German nationality—who to this day kept in touch with members of a closely monitored German minority and maintained suspicious relationships abroad—didn’t suit the profile of a secretary in the personnel department, who had access to sensitive information that could be at risk of being misused. Gerta the spy, in the service of imperialism. But she didn’t find it amusing. She ended up back in the warehouse, from where she had diligently worked her way from assembly line production to the planning department, all the way to the administration building. They had taken advantage of all her skills, even her German, which came in handy for processing orders from East Germany, as well as her stenography and her advanced typing speed. Over the course of all five years that she worked in the administrative office, there hadn’t been a single complaint. Yet all it took was a slight shift in top-level management, and the factory caved in like a house of cards. And Gerta’s card landed her deep in the bowels of the warehouse where, in 1970, she found herself alongside Lída Kořínková, who, when she wasn’t drinking, was fast asleep. Alone, isolated from everyone, in a warehouse where nobody ever went. Alone at home, too, because nobody ever came there either.

  When the war ended, Gerta felt that she hadn’t deserved what had happened to her. That she hadn’t been even remotely the cause of what people were taking revenge on her for. But as she sat in that warehouse over the winter of 1970, in her company-issued quilted vest, beneath a single lightbulb that flickered erratically by the ceiling, she felt that this time they were finally going to succeed in destroying her for good. Her world had imploded, and a profound emptiness flooded her very core. All she had left was time, which ticked away slowly, minute by minute, inside the cold warehouse. Early on after she’d been forced out of Brno, the pain had been physical. Her whole body ached, first from that nighttime march and later from working in the fields, and internally, from the degradation inflicted on her by that soldier. Yet there had always been a reason to go on fighting: Barbora. But what about now, in the face of yet another unmerited degradation? What was there left to fight for, now that Barbora had cut her out of her life? For this, Gerta had no answer.

  PART IV

  The Present Past

  I

  A storm was brewing. The bus was traveling along the causeway between the two newly created lakes that had replaced the village of Mušov and now spilled out below Perná. Through the window, Gerta watched the slender aspens, freshly planted along the shoreline, being buffeted by the wind. It threatened to pull them up, root balls and all, held them pinned to the ground, tossed about their juvenile crowns, and tore off their early-spring leaves, which went swirling in a wild frenzy over the surface of the lake.

  The bus swerved in a gust of wind, and Gerta wouldn’t have been surprised if, along this open stretch, it were swept off the road. They would be flung over the guardrail into the choppy waters of the adjacent lake, and as the cabin of the bus slowly filled with water, they would descend lower and lower toward the sunken houses of Mušov. Maybe they would land in front of the Felbers’ mill or on the roof of the Freisens’ farmhouse, which used to stand somewhere near here, by the crossroads from where the road then curved down toward the center of the village. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the farmyard jammed with the trucks and armored cars that had been parked there by the Russians and the Romanians during the first few days of liberation. She vividly remembered the small groups of soldiers leaning back against the bullet-riddled walls of the buildings and smoking, turning to look after them as they went by in Šenk’s buggy, heading toward Perná. But that time, they’d been considerably farther down, judging by the position of St. Leonard’s Church, whose walls and steeple still stood against the gray sky at her eye level, rising above
the water’s bleak surface. The whole village had been flooded as far as the hilltop with the church, which was now slowly falling into disrepair—like a mute witness—like an outcry of helplessness.

  “You should have seen how the people fought against it,” Hermína said, shaking her head disapprovingly. By then, Gerta was already sitting in Zipfelová’s kitchen beside the blazing stove on which Hermína was heating up a kettle of water for tea. She had left Brno behind in all of its May Day frenzy. It had begun to festoon itself near the end of April with red and red-white-blue tricolor flags and was teeming with white paper peace doves that dangled in the windows of shops and apartments. They never hung in Gerta’s street-facing windows. She refused to honor a nation that reminded them on a daily basis of their own weakness, nor would she honor those horrible days of liberation. Nor, for that matter, the Big Brothers of that nation, if only because of how one of them had treated her personally. Not that they were all like that, of course. Privately, on such occasions she would always in her mind thank Dr. Karachielashvili, whom she still remembered. But that was it—even throughout the fifties, when Barbora used to come home from school with a dove that she had painstakingly cut out of a quarter sheet of white paper and would beg Gerta, sobbing, to stick it in their window like all the other families did. Like comrade teacher said to do. Yet it wasn’t true that all the other families did, and Gerta would then point out to Barbora other windows where the view wasn’t marred by a dove. Not even in their building were all the windows decorated. Out of eight parties, barely half. In spite of the reminders that the caretakers posted on the hallway message boards in red block letters: REMEMBER TO DECORATE YOUR WINDOWS! Gerta hadn’t forgotten, as she would emphasize to Mrs. Šedová when she ran into her on the stairs. Gerta didn’t decorate on principle, and finally even Šedová made peace with there being only a single dove poised to fly from the Agathonikiadises’ window. Back then, it had been Mrs. Athanaia who had given in to Barbora’s pleas and put up the dove. To this day, Gerta wasn’t sure if it had been out of gratitude to the Republic or purely out of her fondness for Barbora.

  The storm had caught up to them right at the bus stop. By the time she ran all the way to Hermína’s, she was soaked to the skin, right through to her vasilka undershirt.

  “Here, have some linden tea. It’s from that tree behind the little shrine where Zipfelová used to go every year to give thanks,” said Hermína, handing her a large cup of hot tea with steeped leaves at the bottom.

  “What happened to all those people?” asked Gerta, holding the brown earthenware cup in both hands.

  “I’m not sure. I heard some of them got apartments in one of those new housing developments on the outskirts of Mikulov, and others probably moved in with relatives. Last year at the fair in Dunajovice, some people were saying they’d be moving into a state farm near there, where they’d put up some new units too. Everyone was griping about it, you know. They forced them all out with eviction notices, and there was nowhere for them to go and object. It was like trying to talk to a wall. Well, you can imagine, in this Republic, who can you turn to for anything when word comes from the top? No one. So they moved them out. I still remember all those trucks loaded up with beds, wardrobes, and comforters passing by Perná on the way to Mikulov. And then basta. They opened the floodgates, and two days later there was nothing left, just the two lakes and the church in the middle.”

  Gerta shook her head in dismay and said, “More expelled people. The idea of home means nothing in this Republic. They take homes away from people to punish them or just like that—for no reason. Because it came from the top. From some desk.”

  “Hopefully there’ll be some advantages too,” Hermína said. “They’d always had problems with the Dyje River. Don’t you remember how often we used to have to go over there and help out when it flooded?”

  “I do remember. But after all these years, I thought they finally had a handle on it, didn’t they? They built those two mills and put in those basins along the banks. From what I remember, the people in Mušov weren’t worried about it. And they had the biggest volunteer fire brigade by far.”

  “Well, maybe so. But what’s done is done. And not everyone was that upset about it. Most of the people there had come from somewhere else too. After all, before the war, it was mostly Germans who lived there. Zipfelová used to say you couldn’t get by without speaking German. And that the water had always caused problems. Remember what she used to say about marsh fever?”

  “No.”

  “That the people in Mušov came down with it every year. They caught it from those three shallow fishponds that used to be on the village square near the statue of St. Florian. Supposedly, that came here all the way from Italy or someplace. Anyway, those ponds were a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and every summer, during the hottest days, just when there was the most work to be done in the fields, the whole village, one by one, would get sick with varying degrees of fever. Whoever had a fever every day would get over it the soonest and could go back to work after a few weeks. Some had a fever every other day, and the ones who had one every third day were the worst off of all. It would take them forever to get rid of it. That’s why they ended up filling in those ponds on the village green with dirt. Afterward, supposedly, they finally had some peace.”

  Gerta shook her head skeptically.

  “I’m selling it the way it was sold to me,” Hermína said. “Every village around here has a story. And wherever there are still some locals left, the stories live on. Even if only behind closed doors, like here in Perná. Just you wait. If Herwiga Lhotákovic stops by tomorrow—she’s from Dobré Pole and married into these parts—she can tell you what it was like to be in Mikulov with the Croats. It’s not all that different from what we lived through ourselves. Because the Croats, you know, sided with the Germans.”

  Gerta pulled the blanket closer around her shoulders. “You really feel at home here now, don’t you?” she then asked.

  Hermína hesitated for a moment, before saying, “Yes. There’s no other place where I feel at home. Not even in Brno, not since my mother died and then later my brother on the front lines. Those first few years, I somehow forgot about trying to find him, you probably remember. I was somehow, how should I put it . . .”

  “Not yourself.”

  “Not myself, exactly. Same as all the rest of us who ended up here—after all, you know it as well as I do. Sort of homeless. No sense of direction.”

  “No drive.”

  “And then suddenly it dawned on me: Zipfelová was my home. She was such a good woman.”

  Hermína got up and went over to the window. Behind the glass windowpanes, the rain was coming down in ropes. They seemed to lash into the broken stems of the irises, their blooming heads lying on the drenched earth in surrender.

  “She needed me as much as I needed her.”

  Gerta picked up the kettle and poured some more hot water over the linden leaves.

  “When she died, I thought I’d have to start all over again. That I would have to move. Into the apartment block on the state farm that Jech was having built at the time. Or somewhere else entirely. But on the contrary. It was better for him to let me stay in an old and run-down place than to move me into the new housing he was preparing for the tractor drivers and for some other fellas. So he was the one to arrange it, and he made sure I could call this place home for good. So now this is my home. And finally, it’s also in part because of the people. With the war long over, Zipfelová wouldn’t let them send me away. So for the ones who came after I did, I was considered a local. To be perfectly honest, I’m actually grateful to Jech. I have a house, a job, and I have friends. And neighbors.”

  Quiet filled the room. Gerta wondered in silence if she could take Hermína at her word.

  “Hermína, are you really happy?”

  Hermína leaned back against the window ledge, folded her arms under her bosom, and said, “Yes.”

  “What did you actua
lly do during the war?” Gerta then asked.

  It was the first time she had ever asked anyone this question, which lurked in the back of everyone’s mind, but which everyone, herself included, tried to ward off as much as possible, to avoid having to confront the past.

  “I was a nurse. A registered nurse. I worked at St. Anne’s University Hospital, on Annagrund Street. Right up until the end of the war. That night, they brought me to Mendelplatz straight from the hospital.”

  “Hermína, can you really be happy when you imagine that you could still be working in a hospital? That you could be living in Brno, going to and from work like any other respectable person? That you might have had a husband and kids, or that you could go out to the movies every week? And instead, here you are, mucking stalls and milking cows.”

  Hermína gave a short laugh. “There you’re wrong, my dear. I don’t muck stalls anymore. I don’t even bed them. I’m a milkmaid. And now that they’ve introduced the milking machines, girlfriend, you can’t even begin to imagine. You just scratch the cows behind the ears, pat them on the back, attach the milking cups, and then all you have to worry about are the tubes and the hoses—you just have to make sure nothing’s blocked. It’s great! Hanka Horáková was saying that the cows give less milk because they miss the human touch and don’t get to know their farmer anymore. But I haven’t noticed them being particularly stingy.”