He used to go there often in forty-three. It was a tidy village with a few farmsteads, smaller and poorer than Malyn, and the number of inhabitants corresponded exactly to the prescribed parameters: maximum one able-bodied man per three hectares. The village was practically empty, mostly women. There was a pub there he liked to frequent, their local bootleg rye brandy was among the best. A few times, Málek and Levandovský had even joined him. And it was with the two of them that it started, and then, once again, the problem had been dropped into his lap—who else’s?—to solve. What exactly had made them pick Michna-Sergejevka, he didn’t know. As if they hadn’t been aware that no Volksdeutsche had ever lived there, not even before the war, in which case how could they have been murdered, as the justification for the order stated. Even today, he remembered the faces of the girls from the pub, could hear their voices and the soft intonation of their Czech, which after five generations had become mixed with some Ukrainian. Well, their skulls hadn’t exploded any differently from the skulls of others who’d gotten a bullet in the back of their head. Even though he knew them.
They had been the first ones to come back into his mind when he had finally begun to remember. After thirty-three years, in 1977, when he found himself again looking at human torsos without limbs, vacant eyes staring unblinking at a ceiling, shapeless mounds of flesh that lay soaked in blood on the floor of the minibus. They had rolled down the cliff like ripe pears—only two had managed to claw their way out of the crushed metal box. The rest stayed inside until they had been able to cut them out, extracting them piece by piece—but that he had no longer seen; he had just imagined it. That was the moment in which his memory had come back, and the past fused with the present into one clear, lucid, and unadulterated whole, with full awareness of continuity. Suddenly, everything took on contours, and questions were answered in one fell swoop. After those girls from the pub resurfaced, their hair neatly combed the way Gerta used to wear hers, next came the nails, driven into the boards tacked across the barn doors in Czech Malyn; his off-post army apartment in Rivne; the kitchen in Sterngasse; the faces of his mother and father—all of it. Suddenly, it seemed as if everything lay in the palm of his hand. All he had to do was pick a memory, and it would start to play itself back to him, as if it were happening all over again with him as an active participant. After so many years. They thought he had gone into shock. And yet he was fully conscious, more than he had been for untold previous years. He had turned inward, immersed into himself, and had begun to sift through visions, sorting them and making sense of them, recapitulating and analyzing one after another, one by one, in the order in which they arose.
So this was why, after the war, he couldn’t tolerate the thought of Czechoslovakia or the Czechs, who were busy building that nuthouse of theirs behind the iron curtain. Not even his son had been able to convince him in the mid-sixties to go to the Grand Prix—the mere sound of the name Brno was so disagreeable to him. This was why. This was the reason he had been so disillusioned after the war. He had never made peace with it. Never. And just now, it all came together, and he suddenly felt whole, as he hadn’t felt for the past thirty years. No longer was he merely a returnee from the eastern front, whom they had sent back to the Reich with a gunshot wound in his head to die. No longer was he the Friedrich Schnirch who, apart from the name and diagnosis written on the chart at the foot of his bed, knew nothing about himself. At this moment, he was no longer just the one who, during the final days of the war, had gotten up and run away from the hospital so as not to have to confront the fears about which the other wounded men raved every night. In the confusion of those final days, just before the capitulation, he, Friedrich Schnirch, had disappeared, without a single recollection and without any papers. As had so many others.
All this he said to her, to his wife, who had been by his side throughout the rest of his life. He rasped it all into her ear, to the extent that his strained vocal cords would allow. She didn’t even flinch. Not even when he was relieving himself of the burden of Czech Malyn and Michna-Sergejevka. She dutifully took down Gerta’s address and all of the things he had wanted to say to Gerta these past several years but had never found the courage. Not even to find out if she had survived. Throughout the three long years that had been granted to him before his death, the question kept him awake at night, yet still he had done nothing. Because he wasn’t sure. Would he be able to face her if she was alive? His own sister, the Gerta whom he had once so despised? He couldn’t step out of the shadow of his own pride and reach out to her, only to hear that she and their mother, the martyrs, had been on the right side of the barricades. Because, in fact, they hadn’t been in the right. They had not, and it was just an ironic twist of fate that had tipped the scales in favor of the wrong side. The side of the plebs. And the Herrenvolk, the master race, by unfortunate circumstance, found themselves forced back into the narrowest of confines, with no possibility of proving to Europe and the rest of the world the greatness of the idea. The idea of a clean Europe. Europe as a greater place, a realm for the Übermensch, for a Greater German Nation. One for which he had shed his blood and would shed it again. For men who strictly adhered to the principles of order and discipline, and for women dedicated to the concept of nationhood and a higher social interest—for the glory of a Greater German Reich. For the sake of Germany and for the sake of the Führer, who had sought to change the world for the better.
Such were his last thoughts. In his death throes, which lasted only a few hours, he saw the red flag with the swastika superimposed on a white background flying over a new, united Europe. It was glorious. Surrounded by flawless people in a free Germany, he ascended toward the gates of Valhalla. There, until the break of dawn, he cavorted with the Valkyries, all of whom looked like the exquisite Anne-Marie Judex, whose beautiful face had fallen out of his memory for over thirty years. He ate the apples of Iduna that would preserve his youth and grant him immortality until the twilight of the gods, after which an even better world would come—one in which men like him would be respected. Then he descended again, his soul filled with a sense of peace and well-being, conscious of his place in the clearly structured web of order, and he was content. And in such a state he also died. It happened during the night while his wife was breathing peacefully on the couch in the next room and the luminous, serene light of the full October moon flooded the apartment.
VI
Everything was changing again, by now for the umpteenth time in her life. It almost seemed like a farce, but this time a genuinely cheerful one, devoid of irony. Still, before allowing herself to fully believe, she wondered if the Czechs truly had it in them—the capacity to take their destiny into their own hands. But then she gave in to the euphoria, which, considering her age and her prevailing frame of mind, took even her by surprise. The explanation she offered herself was that her life was simply in need of a change. Since retiring, she had fallen into a state of lethargy and, little by little, had come to terms with the notion that the rest of her life would unfold as it had up to now, that nothing would ever change. The only time she still bothered to turn on the television was on Saturday evenings to watch A Kettle of Color, the East German variety show that usurped both existing channels as well as the minds of its viewers. She no longer had the strength to swim against the tide—now that she could no longer vent her disdain to Barbora, whom she saw so rarely, she had grown tired of taking an openly critical stance toward the rubbish they put on. Sometimes she would turn on that foolish Bohdálová, and when that got really kitschy, she just shook her head and that was all. What was the point, anyway? It didn’t matter, not even the movie The Ten Commandments could save this nation. It could hardly compete with those TV variety shows and the brainwashing series of screenwriter Jaroslav Dietl: The Tin Cavalry, The Man in Town Hall, The Woman Behind the Counter, and countless others. Gerta had become resigned a long time ago, perhaps even before she retired, but now that she had practically no more contact with other people, even mor
e so. She had stopped watching the news, since all they ever showed anyway were the Potemkin villages of the Eastern Bloc and the Sodom and Gomorrah of the West, and she no longer felt like getting worked up about it. She had stopped listening to the radio, and she had stopped reading the paper. She had cut herself off from the outside world and had sealed herself within her own four walls, where all she heard were the cat’s mewing and the sounds of her housework. Once in a while, she would borrow a detective novel from the library, exchange a word or two with her neighbor, or stop in to see Johanna, and that was enough for her. In fact, over these past few years, she had been content, because she had finally become resigned to her situation.
And then came another revolution, this time one with no violence, and things took an unexpected twist. It wasn’t immediate—by now she had become far too slow to be able to understand things right away. It took her at least the first full year before she began to process what this new era entailed, apart from getting rid of the Russians, who for the past twenty years had sprawled all over the place and whom she despised. By the time she realized it, a new president had already long been ensconced at Prague Castle; all the borders had been opened, and as Blanka had said, anyone who had a passport was free to go back and forth. And passports were being issued to everyone—no more special permissions, foreign-currency pledges, or exit stamps required. The distance between her and Teresa had just shrunk considerably, mused Gerta. Actually, though, only in terms of the travel from Vienna to here, to Brno. Because when it came to her, between her diabetes, which had caused her to gain so much weight over recent years, and her bouts of nausea, even just a trip to see Hermína had become a major undertaking for which it took her a long time to prepare. Still, it was only five stops by tram to the central bus station, then a forty-minute bus ride to Southern Moravia, then just the walk from the bus stop to the crossroads, and finally up to the church and back down into the village, all of which really took no effort at all. At least at one time it hadn’t. Then the diabetes crept in—at first it seemed that the pills would do the trick, but then she was forced to switch to insulin, and now she was injecting herself twice a day, morning and evening. And she had lost all of her strength. How many times had she woken up in the middle of the night feeling nauseated, and if she hadn’t had a sugar cube handy, who knew how things would have turned out. On the other hand, it was for this very reason that Barbora finally succeeded in getting her a telephone. And indeed, three years ago they hooked up a line for her and installed a phone. Then, up on the wall, she tacked the telephone numbers for the nearest emergency room, emergency medical services, Barbora’s home and workplace, as well as the numbers for the company where Jára worked, and the post office in Perná. This last one she had gotten through the operator, and had then called Hermína on her birthday, for which to this day Hermína reproached her whenever they saw each other. But it was only for show, since they both knew how much it had meant to her. She had ordered her paged by the local radio station: Hermína Herzig. She’d had the post office call the local exchange and request that a public announcement be made asking Hermína to report to the Perná post office in half an hour. Gerta could imagine how Hermína’s heart must have been pounding as she raced down the hill from the parish house to the nerve-racking peal of the glockenspiel that accompanied every public announcement in Perná, while the nosy neighbors stood by their cottage windows and watched from behind the curtains. She couldn’t help feeling a smug sense of satisfaction when Hermína came on the line and announced her name in a trembling voice. “You crazy old girl,” Hermína had said, heaving a deep sigh of relief once she’d recognized Gerta’s laugh on the other end of the receiver. Although this act of folly had cost Gerta a fortune, the truth was that for her it had been the greatest excitement of the whole year. Actually, pretty sad, right? But since she’d gotten sick, nothing had been particularly cheerful. She had long since stopped going to see Barbora, and she didn’t have the stomach to ask Jára if he could drive her over to Hermína’s in that shiny new Lada of theirs. And so once a year, when the weather was good, either in the spring or in the fall, she would head out for a few days to Zipfelka’s old cottage, which never changed.
But to go back to the telephone that she’d been given because of her diabetes—for her and for Barbora, it proved to be an absolute blessing. As a result, their relationship improved dramatically. Making a call was somehow less painful than making a visit. In the brief chats about Blanka, the weather, or even cooking, they could avoid all the topics that might trigger an allergic reaction in one or the other. It started out as an obligatory two or three minutes, which little by little they had gotten used to, but then soon Blanka began to call as well. Time and again the phone rang, and there Blanka would be on the other end, asking about this or that. Usually she needed help with her German assignments for an evening class she was taking. For her, Gerta was happy to remember. And then, from a certain point on, once Blanka was attending vocational school and could get around the city on her own, she would sometimes stop by and visit. And then, wonder of wonders, occasionally, if she had a six o’clock start in the morning or some special event in the evening, she would even sleep over, and Gerta’s apartment began to come alive again. With Blanka’s coming of age, life, movement, and color flowed back into Gerta’s world. And to her great surprise, in the end, it was Blanka who gave her a reason to keep on living.
VII
Gerta didn’t deny that it was her own fault that Barbora showed no interest in either her, personally, or their shared family history. Early on, Barbora had been interested, but Gerta’s response had caused Barbora to put up a wall of self-protective indifference. It had happened when Barbora was still a child, endlessly asking questions about their family and about her father, which Gerta couldn’t bring herself to answer. Instead, she plunged their entire family history into a shroud of secrecy. Taboo. With Barbora, she never found a way to get the words out, and it was hard to say if that had been a mistake, or if in the end it had saved her from greater conflicts. From external ones, but even more important, from internal ones. Like those that Johanna’s children had to contend with. With Blanka, on the other hand, it was different. Something had seeped through already back when she was little and Gerta started talking about the past—long before Jára had kicked her out of their home. By then, Barbora already knew practically everything, except, of course, her father’s name. And Blanka grew up with this awareness and, to Gerta’s amazement, to no detrimental effect. The passage of time, she came to realize, had swept it all away; it was now water under the bridge. For Blanka’s generation, it had all happened so long ago that the events of back then seemed to have nothing to do with them. Young people like her viewed it purely as a tragedy lived through by their grandparents, and as children they no longer had to grapple with the issues foisted onto their parents. For these children, it was simply a matter of history, and not a burden.
Gerta came to this realization together with Johanna, who observed it in her own grandchildren. This even though in their home, they always made a point of emphasizing that they were a German family and that they identified with the German part of Brno. And yet, Johanna’s grandchildren were Czech through and through, and it wasn’t just because of Anni’s husband or Rudi’s Alenka. Even Anni and Rudi themselves, while always respectful of Johanna, had relaxed in their reverence for all things German. Or perhaps they had never taken it to heart to the same degree as Johanna, believing, at least according to Barbora, that it was better to feel at home here and not create additional, unnecessary problems for themselves. So they had adjusted, and now all their children, Blanka and the rest, no longer gave a second thought to the question of where and what was home. And this was why, coming from Blanka, it caught her so by surprise.
When she first heard about it, she thought she would have a heart attack. For a long time, she couldn’t say a word, couldn’t utter even a syllable, as if she had become frozen. Blanka, her eyes sh
ining, was sitting across from her in her kitchen on Stará Street, expectant, most likely anticipating that Gerta would erupt in jubilation. But Gerta remained motionless and, little by little, Blanka’s smile began to fade.
“You’re not happy about it, Gran?” she finally asked, perplexed.
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