“Please, tell me.” Johanna grabbed his hand.
Schweiger curled himself up even tighter. His head hung low on his chest with only his chin jutting out, and he was staring down at the white blanket tossed over his knees. His hands were clasped together, fingers intertwined, and from time to time he lifted them and feebly let them fall, striking his thighs. A fall that seemed in keeping with a sense of helplessness that suddenly now, after years of his not having dared speak of it, was spilling out of him, as it should have back then. Johanna squeezed his hand.
“It’s something you can’t begin to imagine. Something you wouldn’t even be able to think up. No normal person could. The helplessness, the inability to influence anything, to prevent anything. The knowledge that you’re just a body to be toyed with. Nothing more. In order to survive and not to go crazy before it was my turn to be picked, I learned to switch myself off. I turned into exactly what they thought of us. I simply switched off. I watched, like they wanted us to, but saw nothing, and then I went to sleep and thought of nothing. Day after day, I did what they told me to, but I didn’t give my body any conscious instructions, let alone think about what I was doing. All I consciously did was to fix my eyes inward on some imaginary black spot during the whole thing, as if I were somehow looking inside myself. I don’t think I can do it anymore, but in the time it took me to rid myself of that habit, I grew old. You can see for yourselves what I look like now,” he said in resignation, spreading his hands.
“And of the various things that used to go on there at night, one consisted of tying a naked man to a chair and setting it at the edge of the top step of a flight of stairs. They bet on red or black. They played cards next to him, and he knew what was coming, and those of us they dragged out to watch, we also knew what was coming. And what one of us had coming as well. Sometimes they didn’t like to get their hands dirty. As you know, back then, whether it was one or a dozen Germans, nobody would miss them. Besides, the only reason we were there was for them to finish us off, anyway. Prisoners were slave labor, and if some Russian or some Czech in one of the camps wiped us out, nobody cared. No one really knew how many of us were in there to begin with, so they came up with those games. For the nights. They would have us line up, as I said. Then they set the one who was tied to the chair at the top of the stairs. Next, they held a pistol to the head of the other one and started to count. Nobody lasted past five. Everyone gave in, everyone pushed the chair down the stairs. Black meant he flew face forward, red that he flew backward, looking at the one who pushed him. Whoever couldn’t bring himself to push would lose his mind. He’d shit himself right there, and they’d both end up dead. The head always took the brunt of it. Down below, they’d just sweep up the shit. And even better was when they tied him by his pecker. Then he’d fly backward, and the only thing slowing him down was this.” He pointed to his crotch.
They could barely breathe.
“They said this could have happened to Polivka. But I didn’t see it. I know nothing about it. Just that the next morning, he didn’t show up. And then this rumor started to go around.”
He let his hands fall into his lap once more, and this time he let them stay there. He unlaced his fingers and wiped his damp palms on the blanket.
“The worst part about it all was that it defied all logic. There were no rules, no way to influence anything. Only one thing was for sure. Somebody was going to get it. Now, can you imagine that your life is hanging only by a thread of random chance? No, you can’t. Nobody can. Because it’s impossible to live that way. It goes completely against nature, against common sense. And that’s why so many lost their minds. Is this what you wanted to hear? Now you know. What did you expect? After all, we’d lost the war, and we were all Nazis, one the same as another. If you were German, you were a Nazi. It’s true that some of them deserved it. But like this? No. And the worst of it was that even people who spent the whole war feeling ashamed of being German, and who had tried to do sabotage wherever they could, they ended up having to pay the price too. Hugo Zimmler, who also worked in the rubber factory, he was one of those. An anti-fascist, but you’d be surprised, he was out there slogging away just like everyone else. In the end, I think he did leave with a transport, once they’d closed down the camps. He was lucky to have survived. I was too. But some weren’t that lucky.”
Had Johanna, in the deepest recesses of her heart, ever conceded that Gerhardt might be dead, then it was strictly having died a hero’s death. While fleeing as he was trying to get back to them, or in an uprising against some Czech brutes or Russian soldiers. Only his pride or his courage could have caused his death, nothing else. But that it had been the result of chance? The extended finger of some drunken camp guard who, now that the war was over, in addition to the back-breaking rubble-clearing work, wanted to make things for the Germans burn even hotter?
Gerta imagined that extended, wavering finger pointing at Gerhardt Polivka or at her father—that finger, which could have moved just as easily a few centimeters in the other direction. Then the lives of Johanna, Anni, and Rudi, and maybe even her own, might have unfolded entirely differently. Random chance, she thought to herself.
Johanna began to sob.
IV
With Mom it was never easy. I spent my whole childhood standing like a little supplicant in front of the hard, blank face with which she reacted to everything, no exceptions. It was the same face with which she reacted to my having to repeat the first and third grades, and then the same face again when I got my apprentice certificate and was hired as a draftswoman by the porcelain factory. Exactly the same. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that Mom was completely without feelings, really tough. And I’m not sure why, but most of all to me. Not that she wasn’t good to me, she was, but for that other face of hers, I had my own private name. I used to call her the mean ice fairy, because a lot of the time, that’s how she was to me. Because of small stuff. Sometimes it was because I hadn’t followed her insanely pedantic rules—because I hadn’t dusted, or neatly arranged my shoes in front of the threshold to the living room—and other times it was just because I’d asked her something about our family. Then she’d become really stiff and frosty, a total ice queen. But it was as if that iciness were reserved just for me. To other people, I mean the few that she used to see, she wasn’t like that at all. Not even to the stupid cat, come to think of it—because when it came to that cat, completely different rules of love seemed to apply than applied to me. It was a sad little thing that the gypsies used to torture, the ones they resettled here out of their caravans, which they’d confiscated and burned. They moved them right onto our street and into apartments around the neighborhood that were supposedly cursed, Mom used to say, because no happiness had ever come to anyone who lived in them—not to the Jews, then later not to the Germans, and finally, after them, not even to the Czechs, who abandoned them to move into the new high-rises in the housing development—that was how Mom always used to explain it to me. The gypsies didn’t seem to care that they were living in cursed apartments, or that these were fancy apartments right near the city center, because they built fires inside using the wood from the parquet floors, until one day a building on Bratislavská Street went up in flames and collapsed. Well, whatever, those gypsies had already poked out one of the cat’s eyes and chopped off its tail before Mom jumped in and took it away from them. Supposedly they had tied its head to its front legs, and it was squirming so badly that it looked like it was about to strangle itself. And it definitely would have been better off, because what was left of it now was pretty gruesome. But Mom didn’t see that and loved it—one could almost say more than she loved me. She smothered it with food, got all kinds of blankets for its bed, and always talked to it very slowly and softly, real soothing like. And sure enough, the cat started to respond to her—at first, it didn’t react to anything at all, just cowered under the bench in the corner of the kitchen and peed. Once in a while, it would move a little way out of its favorite sp
ot, always crouching, and would pee or crap, and then dash right back. Mom never yelled at it, even though the litterbox the cat was supposed to use was sitting right there. And that’s saying a lot, knowing how pedantic Mom could be, which I did. But this business with the cat proved that it only applied to me. Sometimes, I felt I was cursed, as if I didn’t deserve my mom’s love. Then I would desperately wish for another person to love me, a dad. That’s why I was so happy when Uncle Karel started hanging out with us, and later on, when the Agathonikiadises moved in.
From what I remember, Uncle Karel was all around awesome. The two or three years that he used to come around, he would take us out in the car for day trips and stuff like that. Or he’d take us to ride the carousel, when the carnies came to Brno, and one time we even went to the circus. There was a woman in a teeny white dress who walked on a tightrope with her arms held out to the sides, waving these two little paddles to keep her balance. I desperately wanted to be like her and told my mom, but she just rolled her eyes and gave Uncle a grin, and today I can understand why. If my little Blanka were to come up to me and tell me that she wanted to be a circus tightrope walker when she grew up, I’d probably roll my eyes too. For now, she’s still little, but when she grows up, I know she’s going to do something respectable—I dreamed about it—like being a saleswoman or something. You know, a decent job.
Uncle Karel, back in the days when he used to spend time with us, was practically like a god to me—obviously someone high and almighty. I think even my mom used to see him that way, although today I’m not so sure about that anymore. But still, as far as I was concerned, he was the only man I’d ever gotten to know, and he liked me, which I could tell from the way he always used to stare at me really intensely, without even blinking. I think I might have even had a little crush on him—just a childish one, obviously, because I knew he was my mom’s. But I wanted a little piece of him, too, so I would try to doll myself up as best as I could. For example, at school in art class, they taught us how to take a napkin and fold it into a rose. So I took a bunch of napkins from the cafeteria, stuffed them into my tights, so that comrade teacher wouldn’t see and start blabbing about me again, and then when I got home, I made myself lots of roses. I stuck them into my hair using sharp, black bobby pins, and felt I’d made myself really beautiful for Uncle Karel. Later on in the kitchen, they probably had a good laugh over me—it’s very possible. To this day, I remember how those roses began to slide down my straight, wispy hair, and ended up dangling like pompoms on my forehead, until finally one plopped into my soup. When I looked up, afraid that Mom was going to ream me out, they were both beet red with puffed-out cheeks, which really pissed me off. Then that was it as far as being elegant and trying to look pretty for Uncle Karel. But I still went on thinking of him as my dad and used to tell my classmates about him, when they would ask me stupid questions like was my father German too. And then someone started to spread around that he wasn’t my dad at all, but just Mom’s lover, and that nobody would want to marry a stupid German cow like her anyway. And that I was a bastard. When I got home and told my mom, she got really mad, and made me say it again in front of Uncle Karel the next time he came over. And already back then, Uncle Karel proved he was almighty, because suddenly the kids in school weren’t allowed to say those things anymore. Whenever the teacher would overhear something, she would tell them off, even though it was just for show. At home when I told my mom about it, she said that Uncle Karel had made a phone call and had really let comrade teacher have it. These days I have to wonder what he could’ve had on her—there must’ve been plenty, since he was in both the District and Central Committees. That phone call to esteemed comrade teacher Brunclíková must’ve been a doozy.
Uncle Karel also lent us money for a tombstone, I remember. It was right after we’d moved back to Brno. We went to visit Grandma Ručková’s grave, and that was where we made the discovery. That whole day was a big deal. It was the first time we’d ever gone there, and my mom said we had to get dressed up, which only meant that she dressed me in the same clothes as usual, the only ones I had, and put her scarf—the one Aunt Hermína gave her—over my coat, the point hanging down between my shoulder blades and a knot tied under my chin. The ends hung down over my chest, and I was really excited, feeling so fancy. That day we went by tram, and I remember it very well, because it was my first tram ride. I kept that ticket for ages. Mom tacked it up on the wall over my bed and said she was sure that I’d have a whole row of tickets up there soon. I loved that idea. Later on, I sort of got over it—sometimes Mom didn’t have a nail, so some of the tickets got lost, and by then we used to take the šalina—the proper Brno slang word for tram—so often that the feeling of it being an adventure somehow went away. The one thing I can still remember very clearly is the big fight Mom and I had the first time I used the word “šalina” instead of “elektrika.” I don’t even know exactly when I brought that word home from school, where everybody used it a lot. Mom got all worked up, telling me I had no idea what I was saying, and did I even know what it meant. I had no clue. All I knew was that šalina was another word people in Brno used for the tram, and this sent her off the deep end. But then again, how was I supposed to know in second or third grade that it came from German? I was by far the only kid who was even slightly connected to anything German—although then I didn’t even know it. Later on, Mom said that the people of Brno had ruined it all—any good thing that could have existed between them and the Germans. They’d expelled them all and then kept whatever suited them for themselves. Like, for example, that Hantec dialect people in Brno used, which gave me trouble, too, as if I didn’t have enough problems already. They made fun of my language and my accent for almost the entire first two years, but I couldn’t help it. I spoke the way Mom and Granny Zipfelová had taught me, so what was I supposed to do, right? I tried really hard to learn those words of theirs, but then I’d get in trouble at home, and Mom would yell at me. It was pretty awful. Like with that business of “elektrika” and “šalina,” which the Czechs stole from the Germans, turning “elektrische linie” into “šalina.” Get it? E-lek-tri-š-e-li-nie became š-e-li-nie became š-a-li-nie, which became “šalina.” At home, I wasn’t allowed to say that word; it had to be either “elektrika” or “tramvaj.” Both were really embarrassing to use, because only old people said “elektrika,” and nobody ever said “tramvaj.” So at home, I would say “tramvaj,” to get around using Mom’s “elektrika,” and outside, I would use words like “šalina,” “pajtl” for pilfer, “zoncna” for sun, “prigl” for the Brno Reservoir, “mózovat” for mosey, and sometimes even “krchov” for cemetery, like normal people talked. And that brings us back to the cemetery. It was my very first time going by tram, and our first trip to visit the family plot, which was at the upper end of the cemetery, surrounded by trees that looked like tall, thin candles. Mom said they were called thujas—back then I called them toothas—and we strolled underneath them along a sandy path all the way to a low wall, where our family plot was supposed to be. Well, it was there, all right, but the headstone was cracked and lay knocked over by the wall. And the plaque was smeared with old paint that had partially washed away over the years, so what was left of the golden letters that I didn’t yet know how to read was showing through again. Mom, when she saw it, burst into tears and said it was all because of our German name that was engraved there, and that it seemed we’d never be free of. Afterward, Auntie Johanna told her she should be glad the grave was still there at all—that the remains of our ancestors were still buried in that earth—because many other Germans hadn’t been so lucky. Supposedly, Auntie Johanna couldn’t find either her own family grave or the family grave of her missing uncle Polivka anymore—both had been in a small cemetery in Řečkovice, where the locals simply got rid of them because they had German names and they needed more room for Czech graves. And she said the same thing had happened to lots of other German families, that the tombs of their ancestors had bee
n defaced and the graves destroyed. Supposedly, most of it happened right after the war, but it was still happening back then. For all I know, it’s still happening now, although that time is long gone, and these days it’s not the Germans people around here hate; it’s the Russians—even though they’re still quick to put down anything German too. Unless it’s something really special, like the Parnas Fountain on Vegetable Market Square—nobody tore that down even though it was commissioned by Germans—and Trabant cars are a big hit these days. At any rate, Mom finally calmed down a bit, after Auntie Johanna, whom we’d stopped in to visit, had talked to her like that for a while. It was the first time I’d seen Anni and Rudi in three years, but it felt like not even a week had gone by. We hit it off again right away, and from then on, they were back to being like my brother and sister, even though they were a bit older and, by then, they were already really smart. They knew three languages—they had learned Czech, although it still sounded a little clunky; they were learning Russian at school; and at home they spoke German because Auntie Johanna didn’t want them to forget the language their father spoke. She wanted them to be equally fluent in both mother tongues, so that they would be bona fide Czech citizens, as she put it. But according to what they said, they weren’t that at all. At school, the other kids would make life hell for them, and they ended up having to repeat a grade, because their Czech wasn’t good enough and they couldn’t understand the assignments. Anni said she didn’t really mind, because it gave her a chance to get away from that mean group of kids who always beat up on her after school. This way, they’d gotten into a better class, where even though none of the kids wanted to have anything to do with them, at least they weren’t getting beaten up. Back when she told me all this, I didn’t have a clue about that game of Lidice yet—that was still waiting for me a few years down the road—but I thought it sounded pretty terrible. Luckily, we had each other, though, and that was good enough. Every Sunday, we’d go running around in Lužánky Park, or we’d go over to the Polivkas’, or they would come over to us—sometimes the Ainingers came, too, and it was super. But again, back to the grave. In the beginning, my mom had no money at all, so Uncle Karel paid for lots of things, even that new tombstone that we went to pick out—and we chose a small one. It was made out of a cheap, gray marble with salt-and-pepper flecks, and had silver lettering, which was cheaper than gold. I mean, there was just one inscription. Mom had only Grandma Ručková’s name engraved, and it didn’t bother her at all that there were two other people lying under the same stone—her dad’s parents, who had the same last name as we did: Schnirch. She also had my grandma’s name written as Barbora Ručková, which, by the time she died, wasn’t really her name anymore. Except that Mom really didn’t like Grandpa Schnirch, who was a German, which might not have been so bad, but supposedly he was a Nazi. So she never talked about him, and I know practically nothing, except that she probably could never forgive him for being a die-hard Nazi, a mindset with which he’d also infected Mom’s brother, Uncle Friedrich, who had disappeared someplace in Russia during the war. But Grandma, her she loved. Supposedly, she was very pretty, which she probably was, because Mom is pretty too. It’s a shame that we don’t have a picture of her—Mom had to leave everything behind when they drove her out of Sterngasse, where they used to live. So I don’t even know what anyone in our family looked like, which I kind of would have liked to know, since I never got to meet any of them. Anyway, supposedly she was slim and pretty, and had a beautiful voice, and she and my mom loved each other very much. Sometimes I’m envious of them, because the kind of loving relationship the two of them had, well, my mom and I, we have nothing like it. But no point complaining, at least I’ve got Jára, whereas Mom . . . For a while, she had Uncle Karel, but now she has nobody. As far as I can remember, he stopped coming around to see us when I was in about third grade. Mom didn’t know why and didn’t talk to me much about it, so to this day I’m not exactly sure what happened. But it was pretty lousy, because little by little, things at school took a turn for the worse. First came the crap about my not being able to learn how to read and write properly, and then right after that came the Lidice game, and that was horrible. The long shadow of Uncle Karel that had protected us all those years had disappeared. He’d lost his power. That’s when I’d start to wake up all sweaty in the middle of the night, because I had terrible nightmares about poor Uncle Karel. A group of big guys would be playing the game of Lidice with him, while a group of smaller guys would be marching all around him in a circle. They’d either be shouting at him, or they’d be looking at him, sweet as honey. Then after a while, Uncle Karel started to come into my dreams all gray, and skinny, and exhausted, with his teeth knocked out—he’d be working in some quarry. And then finally I stopped dreaming about him, because by then, I had other, more important things keeping my imagination busy, namely the stories Auntie Athanaia used to tell me. Uncle Achilles was all right, too, even though he was older and uglier than Uncle Karel—and above all, he didn’t speak any Czech, only Greek, which of course I couldn’t understand. So I only talked to him through Auntie Athanaia, who had learned to speak Czech pretty quickly. I grew really attached to her back then, maybe because living with Mom wasn’t exactly easy. And I really needed someone who was genuinely nice, and that’s what Auntie Athanaia was. When, after those five or six years, they finally went back home, I missed them terribly. It was immediately obvious that they’d been the ones who had made us feel like a family. When they left, that feeling of shared warmth went with them. Suddenly, everything felt so empty—no more little celebrations that up to then took place all year long, because according to Auntie Athanaia, there wasn’t a month in which there wasn’t something to celebrate. She said that’s how it was in Greece, that life was made up of little festivals and celebrations during which one mostly ate and drank wine. She always had a new surprise ready for us, like at Easter, when late at night all the lights were turned off and we sat, just by candlelight, eating Auntie’s magiritsa soup. It was made from the insides of a little lamb that Auntie must have gotten hold of somehow through her Greek girlfriends in Brno, because according to Mom, you’d never find something like that in any of the butcher shops. Or she would organize a beautiful New Year’s Day celebration, when we would all hold our breath, waiting to see who would get the piece of her vasilopita cake with the golden fluri coin, which would bring that person good luck for the whole year, as well as oodles of money.
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