by I V Olokita
She had never experienced motherhood in her life, only making failed attempts at it. Yet this title, bestowed on her with such a vicious surprise, seemed to please her beyond her wildest imagination.
“Herr Holland,” Klara asked while climbing into my bed, after having put her adopted child to sleep, “What drove you to tell this poor child such a lie?! After all, everybody can see there is no chance on earth I could ever be this boy’s mother!?”
I gave her a silent look. On the face of it, that woman had no obligations to me, and if she acted up to my expectation of her, she should have got out of my house that very moment and never come back. “However, since you didn’t act like an ordinary woman,” I told her, as if she had been reading all my thoughts so far, “you should keep playing his mother as if you have always been.”
Klara covered herself with our double blanket, lying on her back as she used to do in all our nightly rendezvous, keeping silent.
“Have you lost your tongue?!” I asked derisively. Klara has always had her way with words, at least German ones.
“I don’t know whether I should thank or damn you,” she retorted. “Nonetheless, we cannot turn the clock back, or abuse the child’s feelings. Therefore, from now on I’ll take a permanent residence in your house, and have equal rights to it.” She attempted to retaliate.
Startled, I sat up. “A whore will never be on equal footing with me in my house. The very doubt I have about you being as pure Arian as I am will never allow it! Not in this house!”
I lay down again, heaving as if I’ve just run up an entire staircase.
“In this case,” Klara suggested after a short silence, “I’ll just live here.”
I turned to her, smiling, caressing her hair with one hand, my other hand travelling down her curves all the way to her knees. Bringing my hand back to her waist, I whispered in her ear: “Anyway, you were never a stranger in my bed.”
Next morning Klara woke up just like any other mother in upscale Rio, even though she has never been one, and certainly never had the opportunity to be responsible, single-handedly, for the life of a six-year-old child.
“Deus!” her cry sounded all the way from the kitchen. “Deus, where are you?! Your first school day is about to begin, and you haven’t had your breakfast yet!” She received no response. She put down the pan scraper next to the stove, turning the gas off. The fire died out, letting the swelling omelet subside to the bottom of the cast iron pan. “Look what you’ve done, you naughty boy!” she muttered while climbing upstairs to his bedroom. “You’ve just ruined the very first omelet I have ever made in my life!” Klara opened the door, storming in. “Where the hell are you!?” she raged, having not found the boy in bed. “Stop hiding in the closet!” she exclaimed, in a nearly joking tone. Klara sincerely believed that unless she won him over that very moment, she would never find him.
“I’m here,” Klara heard a shy voice from behind the bathroom door, and the little boy appeared, wearing only his underwear.
“Why aren’t you dressed?!” Klara scolded him.
“Senhora Madre,” Deus said, casting his eyes down and covering his naked body with his hands. “I’ve got no clothes. Those I had yesterday are gone.”
Klara looked bewildered at the child in front of her, and suddenly, with no intention whatsoever, she let out a rolling laugh. The harder she tried to suppress it, the stronger it grew, until it possessed the child, as well, and soon both mother and child were holding their stomachs, roaring with laughter.
Chapter 6
Another true story
“One, two, three, four…,” Matilda was counting the ants marching in a single file under the dinner table. Occasionally she missed a couple of ants, treading on them unintentionally, instantly whispering her brief apology to the dying ants and resuming her counting. Matilda used to spend nearly all her days this way. She never bothered to think where those ants on the kitchen floor came from. As for her, they were on a mission from the Good Lord.
As for me, I just laughed at her, whispering to her sarcastically, “It’s so typical of your Lord to create ants: after all, annoying red ants is the perfect addition to another of his mistakes, namely Jews!”
Back then, Matilda was my only companion. I met her a few days after my father had forced me to follow him to Munich. It was the biggest and farthest city from our hometown where he could have found a hiding place. These were also his last days on earth since he did nothing to avoid the German Police, who, in turn, made any possible effort to catch him. Even before my father stopped a lethal bullet during a one-minute firefight in our rented basement on Waldheimstrasse 3, I already had nobody in the entire world but Matilda.
My beloved was as dumb as she could be, and the dumber she got the more her beauty excited me until I could no longer help touching her. She wasn’t as tall as a German classic beauty of those days. Worse, she even lacked golden locks, like those of all her perfect Arian classmates, hers were sandy ones. When excited, her green eyes opened wide, and that was the only distinct feature. Yet only her plain look made her stand out among all the great-looking ones. “Ye Jewish whore’s daughter,” I used to mock her, jokingly, when sleeping with her on the shabby wooden floor of the cellar father left me upon leaving this world. At first, she used to respond by twisting her face with indignation, yet right afterwards she would smile with her ivory-white teeth, displaying her tiny dimples I used to kiss so passionately. Matilda never figured out why, of all places, I made love to her with such a passion on that faded bloodstain, yet she never bothered to pry. She just gave me her endless and boundless love, anywhere and anytime. Our love grew so unnaturally strong exactly because of that place. If she only knew that in the very place where we used to explore each other’s body, my father breathed his last, she, too, would have fled from me. Therefore, both of us kept our silence.
I broke up with Matilda with no display of emotions, during the winter of 1938, when I came home from another mission for the National Socialist Party. The transformation Good old Germany was undergoing was so dramatic it dazzled even the most indifferent ones. I have been one of the oldest Party members, practically one of its founders, and have already made my way to the rank of leaders. My quick promotion made me forget everything except my duty. I was entrusted with an increasing amount of assignments, going on Party missions out of town increasingly frequently, and eventually commanding my own army of subordinates. I also left my father’s basement for a grand uptown house. Yet occasionally, when back in Munich, I sneaked to Matilda’s place by night, and then we would run, hand in hand, back to the basement I have eventually purchased. There we would lie down naked on that blackened stain, now nearly invisible, and I would seduce her to climb over me to let me enter her gently until we fell asleep at each other’s embrace. That ritual of us became my ounce of solace in those days when it became so terribly scarce.
Yet that night, back in 1940, I found Matilda neither at home nor in my basement, so I spent that night, as well as the few days left before my next Party mission, on a futile search. I only saw her again over a year later, when I made the commandant of Udenspul Camp. By then, she was transformed.
“Klaus!” I heard a shout from the Camp’s parade ground.
“Klaus!” it echoed from the mountains, reaching my ears through the wailings of children torn from their mothers, the poundings of the spades digging the mass graves, the shootings from the nearby woods or the train speeding away from the gate.
“Klaus!” I heard the cry for the third time, now followed by a white little hand popping above the crowd to help me spot the crier. “Should I shoot her?” Gustav, who stood by me on the balcony, asked for instructions.
“Hold it!” I ordered, amazed at her audacity. None of the Camp’s dwellers but my direct subordinates could address me by my first name, so I assumed that whoever did so, risking a sure death, must have been very intimate
with me. I raised my hand to push his barrel to the ground. Panicked by my sudden touch, Gustav discharged a shot, laughing quietly and looking at me red-faced.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t mean it.”
I gave him a silent look, turning my eyes at the parade ground again. The bunch of prisoners who just dropped to the ground to save their lives crowded around the bleeding body of a woman in the center of the parade ground.
“Klaus!” I heard the same cry exactly from where the crowd gathered, with a surprising relief.
I could no longer listen to that familiar voice with indifference. “Whoever she may be,” I resolved, “I must find her before her life ends by mistake.” Jumping on my feet, I forced my way through the crowd on the parade ground. I seemed to have lost my breath for a moment, yet right afterwards, when regaining my senses, I obliterated any memory of any other woman I have ever loved.
She stood there, allowing those sub-humans passing by to hide her from my sight with a cloud of dust until I came right next to her. At first, her face seemed nothing like the one impressed on my memory, only her voice faintly reminding me of her good old days. She welcomed me with a smile, revealing teeth less ivory-white than in the old days. Her brown hair gave way to a few wisps the Camp barber had overlooked.
“Oh, none but you can have those dimples!” I remarked, half-smiling, which made her stretch a hand to me. I kept my hands close to my body, to discourage her from coming any closer.
“Don’t you remember me?!” Matilda wondered, her smile vanishing at once.
“Of course!” I confirmed poignantly, “The Jewish whore of Munich!”
She looked down, her eyes immediately growing lifeless, while she walked away.
“I think she wants to get away from me,” I remarked to Gustav, who kept walking by me all the time as if to make up for that long-forgotten mistake he’d made.
“Should I shoot her dead?” he wanted to know.
“Not right now,” I explained. “Bring her to my office in 30 minutes, for a little chat,” I went on, and then, turning around, was hidden by the Camp’s office buildings.
“Come in,” I responded loudly to the knock on my office door.
Opening it, he hurled Matilda inside, making her bounce from my desk with a thud. Then, Gustav turned back and left, turning the door key twice. Like many other intelligent guards of Udenspul, he knew exactly what was meant by “a little chat” with a female Jewish prisoner. This euphemism helped us getting intimate with them, raising no suspicion to our race.
Rising from my chair, I came near Matilda. She rubbed her stomach and eyes, which were cast down.
“How are you?” I inquired quietly.
“Great!” she uttered mindlessly.
“Look at me, Matilda,” I begged. “Let me see how you changed over the years.”
She kept standing still, keeping her eyes down, only moving her lips as if talking to herself. I looked at the stone floor as well, as if to detect what I failed to see under my very nose. “It’s ants! You’re counting ants!” I giggled, spotting the red columns of ants marching right beneath her, between her spread legs. Raising her head, Matilda smiled at me.
“Dearest Klaus!” she exclaimed affectionately, weeping and falling down on me as if fainting. I tried to hold her away from me. Seeing that my hands disobeyed my head, I pulled her closer gently kissing her forehead.
As she told me that evening in the Commandant’s office, she was still looking for me in my house in vain, shortly before she was forced apart from me to the walled-out Jewish Quarter. “Since then,” as she told me, “I never saw again our good old Munich, just walls, overcrowded alleyways, houses in ruins, corpses and train trips from one lifeless spot to another, all the way here.”
“What about your mother?” I wondered, pretending I had any interest in her life.
“She died even earlier,” she reported, her face as dull as if all her sentiments died out. “So, I was looking for you, to bring you some important news,” she confessed. The time allotted for our chat was over, so I rose from my seat next to her. “I was just looking for you to tell you that you’ve become a father!” she concluded, trying to knock on the door for the guard to open it.
“Stop!” I cried, upon hearing the rattling of the key. “Seriously? Am I a father?!” I demanded to know.
“Well, I’m not sure whether you still are, but at least you were once,” she uttered, walking away through the wide-open door.
I sat down at my desk, holding my head with my hands, bewildered. I realized that either the time passing or my career made me forget everything she did and meant for me. Either way, I eventually soothed my conscience that she couldn’t have endured me anyway. Laying back on my chair, I concluded that if it wasn’t for my flesh and blood in her womb, I would have made Matilda that very day sit down in my office to write down the last chapter of her life story.
Chapter 7
It happened under my very nose
“Deus?”
Klara’s call distracted the boy from his homework. She bothered him regularly: as far as she was concerned, all that schooling was a complete waste of time. No matter how much Herr Holland spent on that expensive institution, its effect on Deus, as she saw it, would be no better than that of any other school.
“Yes, Mom?” he replied, raising his head from his open notebook.
“Do you know?” Klara said, suggestively, “when I was at school, I was so preoccupied with studying I hardly had any friends!”
“I’ve got friends at school,” Deus uttered, his tone evidently betraying he was sick and tired with discussing that subject all over again.
Klara chattered on, seemingly disregarding his reply. “I was so focused on distinction at school, I was hardly aware of the outside world. Throughout my school days, I always studied with distinction. So naturally, right after secondary school, I enrolled in a BA course, in music,” she concluded, recalling with proud nostalgia her long gone good old days.
Raising his eyes from his notebook, Deus gave her an intrigued look. Though Klara made occasional attempts to provoke him into leaving his studying a little for some leisurely pursuits, she never revealed her motives for that. Now, that elderly and annoying woman, whom Deus have been calling “mom” ever since he moved in with her under my roof, seemed to have some secret vault opened inside her.
“So what good did it make for me!?” Klara went on, casting down a look of regret.
“What do you mean?” Deus enquired, not understanding what was on her mind and seeing no reason she suddenly lost all her usual joy of life.
“Deus dear,” she exclaimed, approaching the boy, resting her hand on the back of his neck for a moment, and then caressing his hair gently, her mind straying away from her original thought. If there has ever been any human being Klara really loved, it was Deus. Living a life so far from a normal one, she could hardly love anyone. “No wonder it did me no good,” she exclaimed loudly, startling the boy from his chair. “I never got my BA degree, because the war broke and the Nazis took Poland, rounding us up in ghettos and death camps!” Klara recounted. “Has that school of yours taught you about the Nazi atrocities yet?” she asked with an indignant tone, evidently expecting to hear a “no.”
“Yes,” Deus declared proudly. “We had some lessons about WW2 and on how the Nazis came to power and occupied Europe.”
Standing up, Klara withdrew her hand off her son’s head. “Nothing else?!” she wondered. “Is that all your fancy school have taught you about the Nazis?!” she retorted. “Did they teach you nothing about Nazi maltreatment of the Jews?!”
Deus turned around and moved slightly in his chair so he could see her without twisting his neck. “No,” he answered feebly, like an underachiever. “We learned nothing about it. After all, why should we care about Jews?” he gave an embarrassed giggle.
Deus cast his eyes down like a punished puppy. “Had I only known how much it all meant to her, I would have never dared to giggle like that,” he thought. But once she scolded him this way, out of the blue, he made up his mind never to listen again to her stories unless she properly apologized to him.
“I’m Jewish!” Klara confessed in an embarrassed tone.
“And I don’t really care about any of your stories!” Deus gave his mother a typical adolescent’s reply, followed by an insolent look.
Klara kept looking at him for a moment and suddenly raised her hand to slap him so hard it left a large red imprint. Deus watched her slapping him, impassively, teardrops appearing in the corners of his eyes. Overwhelmed with shame, he jumped from his chair, running downstairs to hide from her in the living room. After all, it was terribly childish of a youth at his age, let alone a youth familiar with the touch of a slapping hand, to weep like that.
When left all alone, Klara suspected her reckless approach might have hurt his feelings. For a moment, she entertained the thought that her acts might bring the boy and his father together since, during Deus’ adolescence, she and his father treated the boy practically the same way. “Still,” she had to conclude, “Deus has nobody in the world to care for him but me, not even his father.” Her conclusion made much sense: since his infancy up to that moment, Deus followed her everywhere and depended on her for his daily survival. As for Holland, he didn’t love his son at all, using every excuse to give him a proper beating. Besides, Deus too, just like any adolescent, had his own secret world she hardly knew, and would eventually discover. Once she discovered that world, Klara would realize just how similar were the secrets of herself and her adopted son. Finally, when her contemplation seemed too long for her, Klara forced her high heels off the ground, to join her son downstairs.