Hermína had observed it all—no one needed to explain anything to her, Gerta least of all. She understood perfectly well, and for Gerta and for all those other women, she felt sorry. But these days, Hermína no longer shared the aversion that Gerta and Johanna felt toward everything here. Because she had managed to start a new life, a fulfilling life. She knew the exact day it happened. It was when Hubert Šenk had said to them that if they wanted to keep on working, they could stay. At that point, she had settled down with Zipfelka for good and, not too long afterward, had been granted a wage and then citizenship. That had resolved everything for her. And not just for her, but also for Zipfelová, who had been afraid she would end up all alone. This way, they both ended up being content. And Hermína was content to this day, even though Zipfelová had now left her. Hermína was content and did not complain. Praise be to God.
III
Gerta, on the other hand, did complain, with good reason. She was living either in the basement of a warehouse or within the four walls of her apartment, and instead of enjoying her life, she was surviving it. In seclusion, keeping in touch with just a handful of others whose lives had been similarly afflicted. She, after all, saw clearly the injustices inflicted on them—and for what reason? Because they had been born into the wrong column. Nationality German. The past was still pursuing them, was ever present; even twenty-five years later it refused to set them free. Gerta was seeing it and living it, as were Johanna, Teresa, and even Hermína. They were all badly off. Teresa, lost in a city where she could never feel at home; Hermína, trying to convince herself that she was happy, working in a cow barn and living in a cottage that was about to collapse on her head; and Johanna and herself, meeting week after week for their walk in the park, growing increasingly older and more decrepit. And the ones she blamed for ruining her life were nowhere to be found. It had always been the hand of the executive arm that had toyed with her, the one not burdened by decision-making. The adolescent boys from the Zbrojovka Arms Factory, even Mrs. Panáčková from the personnel department, who had been the one to inform her that she was being transferred to the warehouse—none of them were individually to blame. They didn’t make the decisions. And the ones who did were too high up for Gerta to reach. She had resigned herself to her discontent and grew more and more bitter, despondent, and lonely, without prospects and, ultimately, without Barbora. Now Johanna, on the other hand, hadn’t resigned herself to anything. She was still fighting. She was battling furiously, and Gerta admired her for it—for her persistence, her relentless faith, and her ongoing hope that her Gerhardt was still out there somewhere and that when he finally came back, everything would be better. Johanna had never given up. Until the day they went to visit a man named Schweiger.
Johanna had written dozens of letters. She wrote to the authorities, to hospitals, to the Red Cross. If she got any answer at all, it was negative. She even wrote to the president but received no response. She had tried everything, and it took years for it to find its way to her, the crumpled piece of graph paper on which there was an address for this man Schweiger. She was practically beside herself with joy—now that she’d found a trace, there was no stopping her. She was bubbling over with exuberance and bubbling over at Gerta, dragging her along to the post office, falling into her arms once she got off the phone, and two days later insisting that she come with her to pay a visit to this Schweiger, on whom she’d forced herself. He hadn’t been interested, she had said, but she refused to be put off. After all those years, it was the first concrete trace of Gerhardt that she had managed to track down, and she wasn’t about to be dissuaded. Her life depended on it.
And he might even know something about her old man Schnirch, Johanna had said as she was leaving Gerta’s that day to rush home and give the twins the news. Gerta didn’t care. She didn’t want to know anything more about her father than what she already knew. As far as she was concerned, he had disappeared from her life with the war, and what happened to him afterward was of no interest to her. In her mind, she’d buried him long ago, and the last thing she wanted was to find out that he might still be alive somewhere—possibly even living nearby. He or her brother. But she accompanied Johanna nonetheless. Who else was going to go with her if she didn’t?
“Supposedly he was in the Kounic College camp until forty-six, and afterward they didn’t deport him, who knows why. For whatever reason, he stayed. And he knows something about the men who were there—in there, and also in the Klajdovka camp, where they transferred him. It’s impossible that he wouldn’t know something. About Gerhardt and about your father,” Johanna was saying just before she rang the doorbell to his apartment.
He was swaying back and forth in his rocking chair, and he smelled. He was quite old already and a little bit unsteady. On his head there remained just a few sparse, white strands of hair combed from right to left across his bald pate. He didn’t look pleased to see them—Gerta took note of that right away. He must have already known why they had come. But Johanna was ecstatic. She thrust a box of chocolates and a mesh bag of oranges into his hands and eagerly settled herself on the sofa by his easy chair—there was no holding her back.
“Polivka,” he said, at first in a slow, drawn-out way, after she had rattled off the reason for their visit.
“Polivka,” he repeated once more, and then, with a sullen look on his face, slowly dropped his head, letting it sink below his shoulders. “It’s possible he was there. You know, I’m old now. And I hardly knew everyone; you have to forgive me.”
This took Johanna aback, but then she blurted out, “But of course you remember him. You worked with him in Hawiger’s rubber factory! Why, he was your foreman. Tall, blond receding hairline, blue eyes. Don’t tell me you don’t remember him.”
Schweiger tipped forward in his chair, his gaze fixed on the palms of his hands as they rested in his lap.
“Oh, that one,” he then said.
“Yes, that one.”
“He was a good foreman,” said Schweiger. “He’d let us go even if we weren’t on break. He was generous. And he didn’t bark at us the way some of the others did. He was reasonable, he was.”
“Well, so you see, he was there too,” Johanna said. “The last time I saw him was in the Kounic College courtyard, you know, where they used to do roll call.”
Schweiger was quiet for a moment, but then said, “So he was there too? You see, I don’t even know.”
Johanna looked dismayed. “But you do know. That’s precisely why they sent me to you, because you know. Because you stayed, and because you know which men were transferred where, and which ones left on a transport.”
Schweiger wheezed and gave a short-winded chuckle. “They left, did they?”
“Or maybe they stayed here. I don’t know what happened to them.”
“Well, yes, I guess some of them did leave, some did,” he said, having settled back down.
“And Gerhardt?”
Schweiger shrugged, saying, “If he was there, it probably didn’t bode too well for him. Same as for the rest of us, missus. Same as for me.”
Schweiger grew quiet and rocked lightly in his chair. Johanna looked helplessly first at him and then over at Gerta. Was it possible that he really didn’t remember anything, that he had nothing to tell her? Gerta was convinced that he was just desperately trying to avoid having to talk. Either to them, or about the camp, or most likely both.
But then he resumed on his own, rocking as he spoke. “Every morning and every evening, we had to line up to be counted. One evening, Polivka was supposedly still there, but the next morning he was missing.”
Johanna stayed quiet for a while, waiting for him to go on. There was a long silence.
“And where did he go?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. Who in that place was going to tell us? Please, it was a labor camp, ma’am. Everyone was glad to go unnoticed, or if noticed, at least not beaten. We tried not to draw any unnecessary attention to oursel
ves. That’s why nobody ever asked about people who disappeared. Sometimes the men wouldn’t even ask about their closest relatives; that’s how scared they were. Who knows how I would have behaved if I’d had someone in there I was close to. But I didn’t; in my family, there were always just girls. And all of them had gone—back then, I had no idea where—but I hoped they were hiding somewhere and that they knew where I was and would wait for me. But in the end, it all turned out very differently.”
Johanna leaned forward so that she could see into his face.
“And you have absolutely no idea what could have happened? Why he wasn’t there in the morning?” she asked slowly and deliberately.
“It’s hard to say. It could’ve been anything, whatever they felt like. They could have shipped him off somewhere, but then after the war, he would have come back. Since he didn’t come back, I’d say there’s no longer any point in looking for him. He’s no longer alive.”
Gerta knew that everybody except for Johanna already believed that, herself included, but no one was allowed to voice it in her presence. On the contrary, Anni and Rudi had to honor his memory: everything he had ever done, the way he had been, and before going to sleep, they also had to say goodnight to him—to Papa Gerhardt, in the form of eight blurry photographs with dog-eared corners, tucked behind the glass of the kitchen cupboard. They had been handled so often that they had practically disintegrated into shreds of tattered, velvety fibers. Johanna had stuffed them under her blouse when they were being expelled from Brno, taking them with her all the way to Perná and then back home again. For as long as Gerta could remember, Gerhardt had always been talked about in the conditional tense, and anything related to him was firmly anchored in either the past or a future, whose outlines were always slightly blurred—perhaps so that when he reappeared, he could easily slip right back into them, start living with them again as though he had never left. Gerta found it a bit perverse, especially when she overheard the twins talking about their father as if he were about to come home from work at any moment, while at the same time they no longer remembered him. Barbora once told her that sometimes Anni and Rudi were scared of him, afraid that he might be living with them as a ghost, watching them—keeping an eye on everything they did. At times, Gerta felt like saying something to Johanna about this business of his legacy or living absence, or whatever it was that she’d managed to create at home—that she was taking it too far. But even the one time she’d made up her mind to do it, she couldn’t find the nerve. To tell her she had to rid herself of the ballast of the past, because if Gerhardt was still alive, by now he would have certainly found her. And this man Schweiger had just said it out loud.
“What do you mean, ‘he’s no longer alive’? What could have happened to him, that he’s no longer alive?” asked Johanna, dumbfounded.
“Anything is possible.”
“Might you know, or might you remember, being that you say he’s dead? Do you know how? Or why? That is, if he really is dead, if they didn’t just send him away somewhere?” Gerta probed further, knowing this was a question Johanna would never ask.
“Oh, come on now. Sent him away, didn’t send him. If they sent him anywhere, it would have been to Klajdovka, and there he would have died for sure. They had that man Kouřil there, and he was a brute. Especially to someone who’d survived the war in as good shape as Polivka had. They didn’t send him anywhere, at least as far as I know.”
“Not even on a transport?” peeped Johanna.
“Not as far as I know, no.”
“So what do you actually know about him? Please!”
Schweiger’s expression darkened, and he started to rock back and forth in agitation.
“Please, you have to understand. Everyone was afraid of drawing attention to themselves. Everyone was afraid of seeing anything. Or of asking anything. Not one of us who was there from the rubber factory asked about him.”
Both women were silent.
“But it’s possible, more than likely, he was hanged. Or shot.”
“My God, why would they do that? What did he do?” Johanna cried out.
Schweiger pulled a folded handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed his brow.
“He may have done nothing at all,” he said after a moment of silence.
“Then why are you saying they hanged him?”
“I’m saying that I don’t know, but it’s possible.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was simply one of those men—and there were a bunch of them—who didn’t have to do a thing. Chance can be a big fat bitch. Or the reverse. Actually, speaking for myself, I’d say the reverse.”
“I don’t understand,” Johanna said, shaking her head. “Can’t you be more specific?”
“I can’t. I don’t talk about it.”
“You don’t talk about what?”
“You came here to ask me where Polivka ended up. And I’m telling you that I don’t know. No one can know, and that’s the answer. And as far as that other one, Schnirch, where he ended up,” he said, nodding at Gerta, “I don’t know that either.”
“Yes, you do know. You suspect something; I can see it in your face,” Johanna exclaimed, and it was obvious that if she didn’t get any more information, she would burst into tears. “You suspect something, so you can’t stop now. I can’t leave here until I find out what it is, do you understand? This is about my husband. You don’t have the right to take whatever it is you might know about him to your grave. Forgive me for speaking so bluntly. But I’m going to keep coming to see you until I find out what it is, understand?”
Schweiger rolled his eyes, inhaled deeply, then loudly blew out air through his bulbous, fleshy nose, but said nothing. Only his eyebrows seemed to sink deeper into his face, accentuating the furrows on his forehead.
“I don’t talk about it, because I don’t know how one says such things. It’s that simple. And besides, I’m really not in the mood.”
“I understand. But I’m not asking you about anything else except for what’s mine to know. About my Gerhardt. Can you understand?”
Schweiger appeared to crumple in on himself—his shoulders slumped forward and sank lower, and he seemed to double over. Like a piece of paper that’s been balled up and then squeezed hard once, twice, three times, to make sure it’s nice and tight.
“Well, as you can imagine, different things went on there. Many men didn’t survive. They were hanged or shot in the back of the head. Toward the end, they preferred doing it that way. It was quicker. For them, that is. Every imaginable offense was punishable that way.”
He gave a dry swallow, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
“Then other things happened that had nothing to do with any offense. Those made you lose your mind. And whoever went crazy was no longer useful as a worker—he just caused trouble, so they’d shoot him. It was that simple. But at least in that there was some logic. If one was careful not to go crazy, one could survive.”
“What would make you lose your mind?” asked Gerta.
“Random chance. Just like that, no rules whatsoever. The ones who were on night-watch duty and couldn’t have women drank, naturally. They drank like animals. And they placed bets. Why call them animals?” he said, more to himself. “You’d never see something like that in nature. In the natural world, logic and order prevail—you kill to eat and to survive. They drank like only men can drink, and they placed bets. During the night, someone would always go missing, and the next morning, it was better not to ask questions. Sometimes they woke people up and made them watch. Sometimes they went to sleep without even cleaning up the mess after themselves. So with some of the men, we knew what happened to them. Then there were others about whom we never found out.”
“And about Gerhardt?”
“Probably, yes. There were rumors. But that time they didn’t wake me, nor did I see anything. So who knows? They could have made a mistake.”
Gerta Page 40