She stopped when she saw Gerta’s quizzical look.
“What does it matter to me, whether I’m taking care of people or of animals? You know what it boiled down to? Survival. During all those years after the war, the one thing that mattered was to survive. And after a while, not just physically, but also on the inside. Not to die inside and to find something to grab on to. I grabbed on to this here kitchen and Zipfelka, and to all those women in the cow barn who accepted me as one of their own. You see, I found something here that I could hold on to. Whether I’m a nurse in a city hospital, or milking cows in some backwater where the foxes say goodnight, who cares. The main thing is I’ve got my own four walls and peace inside them.”
“And that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Gerta said after a while. “They really took absolutely everything from us. You’re grateful for a pair of beat-up boots, and you don’t even realize you stink of manure.”
Hermína opened her eyes wide. “I stink?” she asked, sniffing at her shoulder, horrified.
“No.” Gerta quickly shook her head. “I meant it figuratively. I mean, except for your hair, which retains the smell. What I’m trying to say is, I graduated with honors; I have a secondary school diploma; and I’d make an excellent accountant, if not something even better. I was good in math, and nowhere was it ever written that I wasn’t supposed to finish business school. And in spite of that, I spent eight years working in a factory where I made wing drills. They took away our future as punishment for acts we never committed. And look at Johanna’s twins. What have they done that they need to atone for?”
The blanket slipped off Gerta’s shoulders as she abruptly leaned across the table, bringing her questioning look and wide-open eyes as close to Hermína as possible. She waited anxiously for her answer. As if Hermína could now exonerate them all from years of humiliation.
“But you see, there’s a difference between us. A small one, but there is. Not that it solves anything or absolves anyone; you’re right about that. Johanna’s children are paying the price—and it’s not fair. But not me. Don’t put me into that mix anymore. I’ve barely paid any price at all because, in fact, they didn’t take my future away. I was actually ready to walk away from it myself. You know, back then, times were rough. I wasn’t interested, although by then I should’ve been. My brother had joined the Wehrmacht, although he hadn’t wanted to, but that was mostly because he didn’t want to go to war, not because he had anything against the Wehrmacht. I guess we were sort of . . . indifferent, that’s the right word. And, of course, we shouldn’t have been. When the war ended, I wanted to go away. My mother was dead, so was my brother, but I just stayed on, working. Again, indifferent. Sort of in slow motion. I didn’t know where to go. Naturally, once they started bringing those men from Klajdovka or Maloměřice into the hospital, I knew that somehow I had to make a move, that I didn’t want to stay there. Partly out of shame, but partly also because of what I was seeing. But again, I couldn’t bring myself to move. I kept on going to and from work, just like you were saying, practically like any other respectable person. Until they grabbed me by the arm and marched me out to the Mendelplatz. My only regret is that I had none of my personal things with me—photographs, my mother’s jewelry, the blouse she embroidered for me . . . just whatever I kept in my work locker. You know, I may not have the life I once thought I’d have, but on the other hand, I have more of a life now than I ever imagined would be possible after the war.”
Gerta’s eyes remained fixed on Hermína, but she slowly drew herself up and leaned back in the chair. This, too, was a fate, she thought to herself. Hermína had lost, but at the same time, she hadn’t.
“And you know what? Back then, what I wanted most of all was to get away. More than anything else. And the only reason I couldn’t do it was because I didn’t know how or where. You know, I worked in the emergency room. I’d be running around, wearing that armband with the black N, and was one of the first people to talk to the men they were bringing in. And during those first few days, right after the war ended, there were so many. More than you can imagine, especially considering the war was over. And we weren’t allowed to give out anything to the Germans—just water or bandages. No anesthetic, no pills, no medical supplies, just damp cloths. They’d be lying in the basement on mattresses right on the floor, side by side, and no doctor would treat them. We nurses knew they’d only been brought in to die as quickly as possible. You can’t imagine what it was like to tell someone with a fractured skull, a broken pelvis, and contused kidneys just to be patient, that everything would be all right. There was someone named Venklarczik from Stiftgasse—I remember it as if it were today. They claimed he’d sold vegetables to the Gestapo. And then the Czechs in his building threw him out of a second-story window and dragged him up the street by his broken legs to make an example of him. Or all those mangled men, beaten black and blue, coming out of Kounic College, Jundrov, and Maloměřice. It would have made you weep to see it.”
Gerta looked away. She stood up, keeping the blanket wrapped around her, pinned under her arms, and checked to see if her clothes hanging over the stove were still damp.
“Shall we have some more tea?” she then asked Hermína. She didn’t want to hear any more about people who had been brought to the hospital from the labor camps. The proximity of her father’s unknown fate caught her by surprise.
Hermína shifted herself away from the window ledge and began to prepare some fresh tea.
“So for me, all of this,” she said, gesturing around the room with her hand, “is a kind of resolution. But I’m not blind. It’s clear to me that they ruined it for us. But on the other hand, not only for us. For the Croats too. And for all the Šenks and the Idas. And all the priests like Father Anthony, who spent years in forced labor somewhere near Želiv before he was allowed to come back and start preaching in Moravia again. And do you know what you can do about it? Summa summarum, not much. Down here, at the bottom of the heap, you have no leverage. And yet there is something you can do. Don’t let yourself be crushed underfoot, and be happy with what you have. With a nice and simple life that’s so insignificant, it’s not worth their while to destroy it all over again. Do you understand? That’s what you can do.”
Gerta envisioned her chair next to the metal table in the basement of the cold warehouse and found it hard to believe that Hermína meant it seriously.
II
If before going to sleep at night she prepared a sandwich and set out her clothes for the morning, she could save herself a good fifteen minutes. She figured that out right at the beginning, because no matter what, even after all these years of getting up early, she’d never been able to adjust to it. Not even when she was still working at the hospital. The night shift, from what she remembered, was still manageable—she would go to sleep just before dawn and get up while it was still daylight—but having to get up in the dark, in the very early morning, was something she never adjusted to. Her mother used to tell her that she had come into the world with the first rays of sunlight, so that every morning she needed to relive the moment of her birth. As long as it was still dark, she was still lifeless and lay in the deepest of sleep, but as soon as the sunlight tickled her eyelashes, her body would go into motion; it would come alive and start to function—she could practically hear the tiny nuts and bolts tinkling around inside her. Ah well, nothing doing. For almost thirty-five years now, she hadn’t been awakened by the sun’s first rays, not on Mondays through Saturdays, and not even on Sundays, since Mass was at eight. There was simply never a chance to catch up on sleep. But she wasn’t about to complain—she, Hermína, never complained. About anything. Because she was in fact content. Yes, it was true that she didn’t like to get up in the morning, but once she’d taken her first gulp of hot tea, and the warmth and sweetness started to spread down her throat into her stomach, she began to look forward even to the biting cold. To her very own biting cold in her very own village of Perná, where she had her very o
wn cottage. She had ended up with everything, lock, stock, and barrel: the chickens, the rabbits, even the garden that produced those glorious, tall Marguerite daisies and, come fall, those honey-sweet Macs that kept all winter. And if she got everything ready the night before, all she had to do was throw on her shirt, overalls, and boots, tie a scarf around her head, toss the piece of buttered bread into her bag, and jump on her bike—purchased back in fifty-two when she’d finally managed to accumulate some savings—and she’d be at the cow barn by 4:00 a.m. sharp. And then what came next was in and of itself a heavenly feeling: to step inside that enormous barn, warm with the breath of the cows, and to exchange greetings with the other women who had already been there working since 3:00 a.m., and then with those who were coming in for the 4:00 a.m. milking. And to give each other an elbow in the rib with Herwiga Lhotákovic when it was particularly obvious that one of the other milkmaids had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that day, or at the sight of the perpetually sour face of head milkmaid Mašková, who came over from Dunajovice every morning. Hermína had fallen in love with the work, and she’d fallen in love with the cows in her milking group, and even the women whom she saw morning after morning, all yawning into each other’s faces before starting their shift. By then, the old manure would have already been cleared away by the women on the earlier shift, and since they’d put in conveyor belts and a fully automated milking system, it went fast—the wet straw and manure were carried away on those belts and dumped into a trailer outside the cow barn. All one needed to do was to shovel it on. After that, it was just a matter of bringing out clean straw in wheelbarrows and spreading the fresh bedding around with a pitchfork, saying a word or two to each cow in a soothing voice as if talking to a child, so that she wouldn’t startle. By the time the milkmaids arrived, everything was already tidy. Then with feeding, it was just a matter of getting around a few wheelbarrows standing in the way full of either silage or clover, which would be tossed into the troughs, and the cows would go after it as though they hadn’t eaten in weeks—such drama queens! She knew the routine well. It was the same each morning. She and Herwiga had two rows of twenty cows each, right across from each other, so they would work their way down the line together. Hermína always started off by walking around her group, saying hello to them and observing their moods as they munched away, swishing their tails. By now, after all these years, she could tell at a glance. Number One was an open book. If she looked up from the trough for a moment, it meant all was well—it was a greeting, a sign that she had noticed Hermína’s presence. Worse was if she didn’t budge and kept on scrounging around with her muzzle, hearing nothing and seeing nothing—that meant she wouldn’t stand still for milking, and when Hermína was first assigned to her, would even kick. But back then, her girl was just a young heifer, still green. The slightest thing set her off. Whereas now that she’d had two calves, she had mellowed, and these days she was just a placid, old cow. She was the one Hermína cleaned up first for milking. She always stood right up front and kept herself clean, not like the others, whose hind legs were covered with manure that their tails would fling up onto their backs. When one of those was having a bad day, the dried cowpat would be crusted over so hard that bits of her hide and flesh would come off with the curry brush. Hermína would always say to them, “If you were smart, then you’d rock forward each time you dropped a cowpat—then you wouldn’t end up covered in crap, and it wouldn’t hurt so much.” Because that, Hermína had noticed, was how Number One did it. Every time she took a crap, she rocked forward a little bit—it didn’t take much—and the cowpat would drop onto the straw and miss her hind legs. And people said cows were stupid. Except that some of them really were stupid, and those were the ones who got all crapped up—and then Hermína would have to spend up to an extra ten minutes cleaning them off, so that sometimes she wouldn’t even be finished by six o’clock in the morning. And then, while everyone else was already done with their snack, she’d just be pulling off her work gloves. They would all then have to move around her with their milk carts and milk cans, the aluminum clinking while she sat chewing on that piece of bread she’d brought from home, listening to Herwiga, who always waited for her. They had learned how to do the automated milking together. At first, they snickered at all the tubes and suction cups that looked like a four-legged spider, with that glass bottle in the middle that made her think of an IV bag until she realized what it was for. But they had stopped laughing pretty quickly—the minute they’d tried to attach the teat cups for the first time, the cows had balked, even though they had made a point of starting with the calmest ones. Rinse udder with water; turn on vacuum hose; attach left rear, right rear, left front, and right front teat cups; initiate suction; hold; insert hose into can; place can between legs; don’t break the glass bottle; and keep the cow calm. The whole process must have taken them at least three times as long as it would have taken had they milked the teats by hand directly into a pail. It was true that their hands were less sore in the evenings, but their backs hurt just as much—and then, just the amount of time that was involved. The whole thing seemed radical. But eventually they got used to it, and in the end, it took them the same two hours to milk twenty cows as it had before. That was provided there was no mastitis. When that was the case, the milking process became a nerve-racking ordeal, and that had remained true to this day. Recently, Number Ten came down with it. Her whole udder became infected, and they put her on antibiotics. Afterward, Hermína expressed from two of the teats a thick, curdlike substance as the cow bellowed and spasmed in pain—she and Herwiga had been forced to hobble her hind legs because she kept on kicking, and their hands were practically shredded. She had managed to squeeze out almost a quart; there was blood in it, too, and the stench was foul. One would think not even the pigs would drink it, but they did, so they brought that curdled slop, along with a can of milk from the other two teats, over to the pigsty. At the time, two of her other cows had calves and were giving colostrum, so she added their surplus to the pail destined for the piggery, and for a while really only had seventeen cows to milk. Her output average dropped as a result, but what could she do? To see those calves, that was always amazing. Every time when they would finally come out, she would cry. The most recent one to calve had been Number Twelve. It had started in the evening, and Hermína had been working the night shift—the veterinarian was gone for the day, as was the manager, so it was all up to the women who were on duty, and they worked hard. Birthing a calf was no picnic. That one came out hooves first, so they tied a rope around them and pulled, trying to help. Number Twelve was thoroughly exhausted by the time the calf finally slid out and plopped down onto the straw beneath her, with the placenta and water bag coming out right after it—the latter burst while still in midair and splattered all over the women who were standing around, soaking them. But afterward, the sight made it all worthwhile. There was Number Twelve, drenched with sweat, her knees still shaky, licking the little one with her enormous, warm tongue as it slowly opened its eyes. Sublime. Now her Number Four was coming into heat—she was all jittery, and when Hermína spread the heifer’s vagina, it was full of mucus, which let the inseminator know she was ripe for covering. They would let this one calve a second time.
Hermína liked the work, even though it was tedious. Not the work as such, obviously—she’d have been just as happy doing something else—but she liked the cows, and Herwiga, and her life here in Perná, where she’d dropped her roots and where, by now, almost no one remembered the circumstances under which she first arrived. Everything around her had settled down, and she finally had a sense of security. And that suited her. She was glad not to have stayed working in the hospital—in any hospital for that matter, even St. Anne’s—because by the time the war was over, she could no longer bear to witness suffering. Maybe it was because of Uncle Kurt, her mother’s brother, who had been in the Volkssturm toward the end of the war and whom she had seen there in late May. There was no way he had recog
nized her. His eyes were already glazed over, and he had looked right through her, but she recognized him. Even though it had already happened several times that, while working there, she’d been assigned to someone she knew, her uncle’s face had seared itself into her mind just like the red circles left by the scorching hot plates that had been placed all over his body. His singed nipples weren’t even discernible in the bloody pulp that was left of his chest. The same was true of his sex, where they had placed a fiery hot plate as well. As punishment for having been a Henleiner. Hermína had known it—they had all known it—but even so, she pitied him, because, apart from his pride in the Reich, the only other thing he probably ever did was raise his arm in a Heil Hitler salute on Adolf-Hitler-Platz. It was possible that during those final days, when members of the Volkssturm were setting up barricades in the streets and running around the city with hand grenades, fear got the better of him and he went overboard—who knew. She had seen all sorts of people lose their minds. Maybe he deserved some degree of punishment, but to such an extreme? Aunt Gudrun, who used to make the best Eintopf stew, had brought him over on a rickshaw, right from their house. They didn’t even have a chance to haul him off to a labor camp; the neighbors in the building worked him over like this first. He died that same night. Amid the chaos and constant influx of newly wounded, for whom they had no room anywhere, she caught one last glimpse of Aunt Gudrun as she waved to her from the far end of a long hallway. By then she must have already known how things had gone with Uncle. Had she then, too, been expelled from Brno, or had she managed to slip away? Who knew. Hermína hadn’t looked into it any further—over those next few days, she barely slept; there was simply no time. And shortly thereafter, she was already walking out of the city, caught in a tide along with hundreds of others like her—a beggar, with only her nurse’s uniform and the handful of belongings from her locker. But she didn’t complain—even though she could have, she didn’t. It was only when she looked at Gerta that she felt regret for all they had been through. In her, Hermína saw what it meant to spend one’s whole life at odds with the skin you were born into, tormented by thwarted ambitions. Cursing her life as it tossed her up and down—each time Gerta managed to dig herself out, someone would knock her back down, and for that, Hermína felt terribly sorry. For all of the random misfortunes in Gerta’s life. There was one time Hermína had hoped it was all finally coming to an end, the time Gerta left Perná with that Karel of hers. The timing had been perfect. She’d just been thrown out of the National Committee. All she did was get up every day, pull on rubber boots, head over to the cow barns while it was still pitch dark, muck stalls, eat something, do the milking, clean up, go home, tend to Barbora, and sleep. She went through the motions like an automaton, completely mechanically. Anything that forced her to break out of that rhythm was cause for celebration. Naturally, Hermína already knew that for people like Gerta, it was better if they could switch off their thinking completely. If only she hadn’t been born a German. If she had fled Brno right at the beginning of May . . . but then again, to where? Or what if she had stayed in Pohořelice? Or run away with Teresa and Ula? Or had pulled herself together and gone back to Brno with Johanna? But at the same time, she needed to keep a roof over her head—after all, there was Barbora. Hermína never needed Gerta to explain any of this, nor had Gerta tried. Back then, she barely spoke at all. It was as if she had become frozen inside, incapable of doing anything that fell out of her daily routine. Up until the day that Karel showed up and lifted her out of it. He returned the blood to her veins, as Hermína could observe on the rare occasions when she visited. Before everything caved in on her again.
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