When they got out on the platform, she forgot to be so elated, and took her grandfather’s hand. ‘Will someone look after us here? ’
Andres Vilde looked up the platform, standing next to their rope-tied, humiliated suitcases. His eyes roved carefully behind their blue-tinted glasses, but his deep voice was reassuring. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘God will look after us, Katrin. We are here because the Germans fought over us, and now they have to do something with us. They think we belong to them; but we belong only to God. He will provide.’
The Germans called refugees like the Vildes ‘Vertriebene’: the driven-out. Katrin became used to this label. They were helped to find lodgings in a house in an outer suburb; she went to a German school there, and Andres Vilde found a job as a labourer in a bakery. There was a shortage of labour, with so many German men at the front.
And so Katrin’s important grandfather, who had worn dark suits with flowers in his buttonhole every day to the university, now worked in a singlet and old trousers at night, wielding a long shovel in the bakery’s hot, floury dimness, taking the rye bread out of the ovens for the Germans to eat at breakfast.
When Katrin saw him there, visiting the bakery, she wanted to like it, but couldn’t. He was a tall, lean man, who had grown strong on his father’s farm when he was young, and he could do the work; but he slept a lot by day, and grew more and more silent, although he still read Katrin stories. He had tried to get a job teaching Maths in a school, but had been told such jobs were only for Germans. His hair and moustache were already mostly white, with only a little of their rusty blondness left. Frau Forster, their landlady, said Andres Vilde was ‘distinguished’.
‘Your grandfather wasn’t meant to do this sort of work, at his age,’ her mother told Katrin one evening; and suddenly she began to weep, and walked out of the room.
Because they had so little space here, in this fusty, cabbage-smelling apartment, Katrin slept on a camp bed in the living-room behind a screen, while her grandfather slept on the couch. The allied bombing raids were frequent, and she waited every night for the droning of the planes, the terrible wailing of the sirens, and the explosions; she would pull the bedclothes over her head, knowing that searchlights were stroking the harm-laden dark, and that soon she would have to get up and go down to the cellars.
On nights when it was quiet and she was meant to be asleep, she would hear her mother and grandfather talking beyond the screen.
Grandfather Vilde’s voice rumbled useless comfort. ‘We have to hope, Leenu.’
‘Hope? ’ Her mother’s voice rose, and Katrin could imagine the red-rimmed, slanting grey eyes, the brown, strictly-parted hair streaked with grey, the wide mouth that once had smiled easily. ‘What have we to hope for, with Arvo murdered by those animals? ’
‘We will go back.’
‘We will never go back. Estonia is finished. We have no home anywhere.’
‘Then we must manage here. The German—’
‘The Germans have made you a bakery hand — and they will give you nothing else. You and Arvo both made it plain what you think of them; do you think they don’t know? They wanted us to be German, and we wouldn’t; we are Balts. And we Balts are to do their dirty work, that’s how they see us. And they are losing this war of theirs, which is a filthy war. What will happen here then? ’
Her mother’s voice, which had risen, now broke, and her grandfather’s rumble went softer, and Katrin heard no more.
But she had heard too much; things her mother had never said to her. They had both told her constantly they would go back home soon, to join her father. Now, pulling the bedclothes over her head, she saw with horror that this had been just a fairy story, to keep her happy. Her father was dead; and she would never see again the carved eaves of their house: never again, her rocking horse; never again, the old storybook towers and wooden houses of Tallinn, or the long, long beaches of the Baltic, with their pearl-coloured distances of sky and water and the thousands of racing, white-capped waves, where she and her friends had paddled and swum and dreamed of mermaids, in the short, mild summers: the magic, grey-green Baltic, like no other sea, where amber came out of the foam, and wizards from the Gulf of Finland brewed up storms, whirling them in from the Arctic Circle.
Crouched there, clenching her teeth behind the screen in Frau Forster’s flat, she began to ask God questions. ‘Who will look after us now Father is gone? And where will we go? If Grandfather and Mother don’t know, who does?’
It was the United States Army and the International Refugee Organisation which ultimately answered these questions. A little over a year later, the Vildes found themselves in the IRO camp in Dillingen-on-the-Danube, in the United States zone of broken Germany.
Die Vertriebenen had a new name now; they were Displaced Persons, and must wait in their camp until the world found places to put them.
They waited for four years, during which she left childhood’s edges. In many ways they were happy years for her; but they drained her grandfather of the last of his prime, and killed her mother. The big old three-storey barracks of mellow red brick on the edge of Dillingen, surrounded by willow and linden trees, became her home. She was fond of it, in the end, and living here was not a suspension of life for her, as it was for her mother and grandfather; it was strange and interesting, like being in a boarding school. She even loved its yard in front, snow-covered in winter, patchworked in summer with yellow grass, where she met her friends under the big willow tree in the centre, and they filled jugs at the taps.
The camp was life. There were many nationalities there, including Estonians, and she now had friends: the children were a secret society in the Camp, where each national group had formed its own community, each having its own school, its own church services, its own community group. Leaders appeared; failures and successes; there were worlds within worlds, in the Camp. Precious commodities were hoarded and traded: chocolate, coffee, soap. They even managed to print their own books, on yellow wartime paper. Smart operators ran rackets, and negotiated with local farmers; the lost committed suicide or went mad; the studious sat with their texts. Surrounded by people at all times, Katrin became accustomed to the lack of privacy, and to group living.
In the great, echoing brick-walled dormitory with its immensely high ceiling, the Vildes like everyone else had their own little living space, with beds and a few pieces of furniture and blankets hung up for privacy. And Katrin had found that it was possible to be private with a minimum of means. As she got older, and her figure began to develop, male faces began sometimes to peep at her through gaps in the blankets, when her mother was out; putting her clothes on under another blanket became second nature to her. She learned now that if she wore certain dresses men would stare at her intently, with expressions that no longer saw her as a little girl, but not as a person either; and they would come and try to talk to her, their eyes probing her clothes in a way she hated. She detested these men, and avoided wearing the dresses; and she flattened her growing breasts under her clothing with strips of cotton binding. She wasn’t ready to be a woman; her hair was still in plaits, and she still took her doll to bed; the one she had brought from Estonia, on the night they had run away. She knew this was silly, at fourteen; and when her mother laughed at her, she pretended it was a mascot. But Lottie was all that was left of Tallinn and childhood; and she whispered to the doll about those times they had shared at home in Estonia, when her handsome father was alive.
Her mother and her grandfather watched her all the time, and forbade her to speak to men, telling her stories of rape. But these warnings weren’t necessary; she had nothing to do with boys, except when she talked to them in mixed groups about the Camp; she accepted the strict moral code of Lutheranism without question, and listened with respect when her grandfather read aloud from his Bible in the evenings in their blanket-room, while her mother sewed.
The Vildes knew that refugees must never lose their pride; must never drop those standards of cleanliness,
dress and morals without which they were truly lost. Look, Andres Vilde said, at what happens to those who let themselves go here: the men who have become drunkards and gamblers and adulterers; the women who have become loose or slatternly. Such people have forgotten what they are, have given up. Katrin saw that this was true, and already she was calmly aware of the whole range of human viciousness; nothing could be hidden here, since the Camp was a peepshow, giving glimpse on glimpse of vice, of inner collapse between the other walls of decency and stubborn hope. Desperate, furtive couplings by adulterers in doorways, or in grass by the Danube; raving, murderous quarrels between husbands and wives who had descended into hells of hate; the frown and bluster of the male or female bully, which must be met without compromise or fear; the dry, empty grin of prostitution; the anxious smiles of old men who fondled little girls: these things were all part of the broken world.
Yet childhood persisted, like the Limbo of the Camp itself. The vocation of DPs was to wait, until they could be offered escape on the converted wartime troop ships: to America, Canada, Argentina, Australia. They must wait for years.
Katrin’s mother was now a woman who had forgotten about smiling. Not all the Camp women were like that; a lot of them were jolly, gathering together in groups and shrieking with laughter. But these women had husbands, while Mrs Vilde still mourned hers, and would do so to the end. There were people who could not be displaced, and she was one of them. Such people had lost interest. True, they carried on; but life was never again a thing to be enjoyed; merely to be endured.
Then, when Katrin was still fourteen, her mother grew ill, and took to her bed behind the blankets, growing steadily thinner over a number of weeks. She was taken away to the hospital in the town, where her father-in-law sat constantly by her bedside, as she slowly became a skeleton woman, calling for water. The doctors said she had cancer of the stomach; but Katrin knew her mother was dying of sadness. Leenu Vilde was still only thirty-eight.
For nearly a year, Katrin was inconsolable. But she was still glad to be here, in Dillingen-on-the-Danube, which was full of consolations. She loved to walk from the Camp past the high, grey ramparts of the yeast-smelling brewery, which was like a medieval castle — past the yellow Gasthaus and all the small houses with shuttered windows, and on through the medieval gateway into the main street of the town, with its old clock tower, its delicatessens and dress shops and bakeries. American soldiers wandered there, and patted displaced children on the head and gave them bars of precious chocolate. She liked the rich Americans, who were always smiling and generous; and in the town, she went with her girl-friends to American films, and sighed over Stewart Granger. This dark, Hollywood-British film actor was Katrin’s first love; in the darkness of the cinema she told herself that he would be the sort of man she would marry when she and her grandfather went to America: the land of their first choice.
But did she really want to leave Dillingen and Europe? How would they ever get back to Estonia then? Lost Estonia had become lost Paradise; it was a landscape that glowed with impossible loveliness, with the crystal, transcendent light of the ultimate North.
Ghosts of Dillingen-on-the-Danube! Ghosts of the Camp! She sat in summer grass so tall that no one could see her, putting poppies in her hair. In the black-and-white photograph Andres Vilde kept, her clear, expectant smile was that of a child at a party; she looked out into marvellous vistas, joyously confident, a child who had known no agonies at all.
In the summer before she turned sixteen, she was filled with a love that had no human object. She loved lost Estonia; she loved the knights in the fairy tales; she loved Stewart Granger; and sometimes she dreamed of a gypsy. She learned singing now, from an old teacher in the town called Professor Broch. Because they were Vertriebene, he charged very little.
And Dillingen waited. It seemed almost unscathed by the War, and by the secret horrors of the ruined Reich. It was a decent, tranquil farming community, its light summer air full of calm and peace. But there was also a strangeness in the air; the scent of a permanent dream, mingling with the scent of lilacs, filling Katrin with hunger. It was a smell like hay, like dust, like pollen, but sweeter than any of these. It was perhaps the smell of distance, and Dillingen was a place of distances: its roads ran far between corn fields and pastures to places beyond the day; past steep-gabled farm-houses near the flat horizon, led on by the weird threads of telephone wires.
In the June of 1950, just after her sixteenth birthday, she went to a dance with her friend Friida, a blonde girl with gullible blue eyes, who was said to go petting with boys by the Danube at night.
The dance was held in one of the big dining-rooms on the ground floor of the barracks. Coloured paper lanterns had been hung around the old brick walls, and a Hungarian band on a small platform at one end played a mixture of polkas, waltzes, traditional Hungarian dances and stilted attempts at American swing. Katrin and Friida were approached immediately, and danced for an hour with a number of different partners.
Then a dark, wide-shouldered young man of about twenty-four appeared on the platform, standing by the microphone while the other musicians remained seated. He was dressed in Hungarian national costume; all in black and white, like Hamlet. The master of ceremonies spoke into the microphone. Geza was the finest gypsy violinist in the Camp and perhaps in Germany, he said, and now he would play a czardas.
Geza Lukacs wasn’t a true gypsy; he was a Hungarian motor mechanic and part-time dance-band musician who had fled the Russian advance on Budapest in 1945 when he was twenty, wearing a strange assortment of German and Hungarian uniforms and carrying his fiddle. He survived in the woods on beans and mushrooms; then he made his way to Vienna and thence to Munich, where he worked in a garage. With the defeat, he had found himself in the Camp.
But for Katrin that night, he was a gypsy; and as she watched him play, the jaunty, suave rhythms of the czardas made her heart falter and her feet tap and the colour mount to her cheeks. Her grandfather would disapprove of Geza when he met him, mistrusting his appearance at a glance; the dark, wavy hair that was too long on the back of the neck, and the loose, slouching way Geza carried himself, his shoulders slightly hunched, like those of an American. And in fact, he was always talking about America: that great Otherland where everyone could succeed, and where he planned to find fame as a violinist. His dark eyebrows arched upwards in a way that seemed to signal a joke.
Head bent in controlled frenzy over his fiddle, hair swinging, Geza Lukacs played faster and faster, while Hungarians of all ages danced their native czardas, and other nationalities clapped in rhythm. The two girls stood directly under the platform as he played, and Friida looked up at him like a worshipper, with her gullible blue eyes. Katrin was too dignified to do that; but Geza caught sight of them both and winked. Then he came to a slow passage, the halting czardas rhythm that maddeningly postponed a return to speed and frenzy; and he looked into Katrin’s face, not Friida’s, with a sudden, sombre question.
Thrillingly mournful, his violin moved on tiptoe, climbing back towards the wildness and joy that everyone knew it must reach; that everyone longed for; that was almost unbearable to wait for.
Katrin was a child of Geoffrey of Monmouth; of Chretien de Troyes; of Eleanor of Aquitaine. The legend had become a cartoon; the sweet self-torment of Heloise and Abelard and the yearnings of the Troubadors had been made safe for democracy: Tristan was played by Stewart Granger. And yet, in that halfway year of 1950, the legend wasn’t dead; it was still dangerously alive, and such things as the far gleam on water, or the scatter of distant light at night, promised a saga of love that was only half physical: the territories of ecstasy. Out there, just past these flashes from the edges of the Otherworld, the unknown beloved was waiting, impossibly pure of spirit, and completely hers.
But the legend and the ecstasy had their price and their casualties, and Katrin’s optimism and capacity for dream — the long fantasy born in the twelfth century and only discarded in the late decades of th
is one — were both her strength and her weakness. New sentimentalities, new capacities for disaster, have replaced the old ones — and the new sentimentalism sees inevitable destruction for a child in poverty, anxiety and privation. But Katrin had come out of the vortex of the century’s greatest disasters with her tranquil hopes, her capacity for joy, her self-respect untouched; Andres Vilde saw to that, holding to the belief that almost anything could be endured if the family endured, if God was trusted, and if discipline and a plain knowledge of consequences were maintained. Faults in the wall would open up elsewhere, if they were to open at all.
Child of the Camp, as well as of the Troubadors; aware in theory of every vice; realistic and even cynical about the inevitable weaknesses of human beings, Katrin Vilde was nevertheless young for her age when she met Geza Lukacs: a disastrous mixture of tough caution and sentimental naivety.
‘Whenever he played that fiddle, I knew what a soul he had,’ she said to me, and laughed. ‘I was such a fool. He did have a soul, but it all went into his playing — the only true part of him. We were going to marry, and then go to America together. Grandfather could come too, Geza said. Geza would play his violin and I would sing and we would all be rich. But two days after I found I was pregnant, he disappeared from the Camp.’
I could reconstruct little of their passion. They would walk by the Danube after dark, on paths that went out of the town; I pictured her lying with him there, in that poppy-grown field that had fermented her childhood dreams — drifting into a narcoleptic trance, while scents of ineffable promise floated across the flatland dark, in the mild South German summer.
Why had she ever trusted him? How had he ever broken into the Lutheran capsule that enclosed her?
But I learned little more of Geza Lukacs, who was swallowed up forever by ruined Europe, and from whom she had never heard again. It was all a long time ago: in the year that she had met him, I had met Broderick in the lane, in my island on the safe side of the world. The Hungarian fiddler’s memory was a dormant illness, I thought, offering us no threat.
The Doubleman Page 20