by Steven Uhly
Lisa sat there, listening to the voices, and noticed that the sun had already begun to set in the west. The wind had died down somewhat, the flag on the café was no longer flapping quite so loudly, many visitors had already set off on the journey back to Lübeck, nobody had to wait for a table any longer. Lisa sat there, she was all eyes and ears. She would deal with her thoughts and emotions later. For the moment it was about reordering everything.
Frau Kramer knew that the girl would not let her go until everything had been said, and so she spoke of her time living with Margarita. She spoke of the hole in the floor, of her decision to risk more to avoid damaging Margarita’s health. She was getting ever closer. And when she had spoken of the birth and the territorial army that had taken her Wilhelm off to the front, when she had talked about their flight from the farm, Frau Kramer and Lisa Ejzenstain had arrived at the place where everything had begun.
“Your mother was still very weak from the birth,” she said, then hesitated.
“We went westward. I had to help the cow, it couldn’t pull the cart on its own through the deep snow. Your mother sat on the seat, trying to protect you from the cold. She’d bound you to her chest and wrapped every blanket we had around her. When we finally got to the main road we saw that we weren’t alone. The road was full of people with carts, transporting everything they possessed. If we hadn’t forced ourselves into the long line we wouldn’t have got anywhere. At least now I was finally able to rest a little and sit beside your mother on the seat. All of a sudden word came that the Russians were approaching. People panicked, they tried to flee across the fields, left everything behind, in a trice the road was full of obstacles. We had no choice but to wait. And then the Russians arrived. They arrived with reconnaissance tanks and utility vehicles and horse-drawn carriages and on foot. They took our cow and hauled Margarita from the cart, she had to unwrap herself from all the blankets, they were laughing and cracking jokes we didn’t understand. But they stopped the moment they saw you and left her in peace. I wrapped her up again and we continued on foot. We just left the cart where it was. Evening came and it grew cold. Our plan was to get to the Warthe and try to take a boat to Posen. But we didn’t make it that far. When night fell the temperatures dropped so sharply that we could barely keep going. But we did. All night long. The following morning your mother wanted to sit down for a rest. I told her, If you do that Margarita you’re going to die, you and your baby. This helped a few times, but at some point she was simply too exhausted. She sat on a tree stump by the side of the road and . . .” Frau Kramer fell silent. She had stopped looking at Lisa, staring instead at the table, without feeling anything but the cold, without seeing anything but Margarita sitting before her, dying.
“I couldn’t do anything, Lisa. I was on the verge of freezing to death myself. I tried to pull her up, but she just sat there, her eyes open, no longer responding to anything.” She raised her head and looked Lisa in the eye. Tears were running down her cheeks. Lisa was sitting opposite her, hearing the flag on the roof, other people’s voices and the swoosh of the sea down below. I ought to cry now, she thought, but she did not, she thought, I ought to collapse now and afterward everything would be different, but nothing happened. She was still sitting opposite her grandmother who was not her grandmother and felt a tug in her diaphragm as if a vacuum were there, as if she had to breathe on it to fill her body, but however much air she took in she failed.
“I unwrapped you and bound you to my chest,” Frau Kramer said. “I took all the blankets from your mother and wrapped them around me. Then I went on and left her behind.” She stopped talking. She had arrived at the start and now she lacked the strength to go any further. She just wanted to sit there and do nothing, she wanted to go far away, to a place without winter, without cold, without death. But opposite her sat Lisa, staring and waiting. So she sat up straight and continued with her story.
“After half a kilometer I arrived at a farmhouse where Poles were living. They took us in, Lisa. Your mother failed to make it by five hundred meters. I’ll never . . .” She broke off and hung her head. It’s not about me, she rebuked herself, but she could not contain her emotions any longer. After crying inside for a minute or two, she lifted her head again and looked at Lisa.
“The Poles saved us. One day I’d love to go back and thank them.” She took another deep breath. Everything had now been told, the rest could wait, she felt utterly drained, as if having taken flight a second time. Leaning back she closed her eyes and felt the wind on her skin, she heard the flag that still fluttered from time to time, and the muffled voices of the other visitors.
When she opened her eyes Lisa was standing beside her chair. The girl bent down, put her arms around her, nestled her head beneath her chin and cried and said, “We’ll go there together, Grandma.”
44
When the general came to the Purim festival Peretz was called Joseph. A good name, Joseph, he said to the chairman of the camp committee, who that day was called Adam, as he was every day. Good for a festival and good for a general. Of course no one was wearing a uniform, they were all just refugees who had found a temporary haven here in the D.P. camp at Schlachtensee.
The rabbi who had invited the general explained the meaning of the Purim festival, he talked about the Book of Esther, about the selfish government official Haman who wanted to have every Jew in the Persian kingdom murdered, King Ahasuerus and his beautiful queen who prayed for the Jews, the wooden ratchets that the people used to make a hellish din and the most outlandish clothes. He did all this with a smile on his lips, and it seemed as if he wished to avoid making any connection between the past and present. Then he introduced the general to the men and women of the camp committee, who had assembled in the canteen. They were standing in a row in the middle of the room, each man and each woman in his best suit, her best dress, two rows of tables along the walls to the left and right, laid festively for a bite to eat worthy of the general and his entourage. Joseph Taggart McNarney, who really was called that, shook their hands in turn as the rabbi announced their names.
“There should be ten, but I see eleven here,” the general said all of a sudden.
“Oh,” Adam replied quickly, “that’s Joseph, he’s a committee member too.”
“I see,” the general said with a smile. “Well, I suppose as the camp’s growing so fast the committee’s got to grow too, hasn’t it?” His bushy eyebrows twitched briefly upward.
“Exactly,” Adam said, trying to hide his relief at the general’s helpful logic.
“But tell me, Joseph. As a representative of the refugees, surely you must know who’s smuggling all these Jews into the camp.” Silence. Joseph gave McNarney a puzzled look.
“General, it’s true that I look after the refugees here in the camp,” he said. “But I’ve no idea how they get here.”
The general smiled, his eyebrows twitched, he said, “Whoever these people are, you tell them that they’ve got to stop. The camp isn’t big enough for this many people.” There was a pause before he continued, “I don’t mean they’ve got to stop forever. Just tell your people that they should try to stop for a while, until we’ve built a new camp.” He gave a friendly nod to his namesake. Then they sat at the tables, young women brought them plates with cold kosher dishes while several men and women standing in the opposite corner of the room played their instruments as quietly as possible.
“If he knew who you really were,” Adam said later to Peretz. Night had fallen some time earlier, General McNarney and his attendants, who had enjoyed a good time, got into their jeeps and drove off through the snow, while for the rest of the people the nicest part of the festival was just beginning, as now they had the room to themselves. The rattling of ratchets could be heard throughout the camp. Most had been homemade. They were never going to celebrate Purim again without ratchets. From outside you could see people dancing in the canteen.
“I’m convinced he knows exactly who I am,” Peretz replied, wat
ching the taillights until they turned into Potsdamer Chaussee and disappeared. He froze in the cold air.
“How can he imagine we’re going to stop?” he said to Adam quietly, still staring at the gate which was slowly closed by two guards. Without reading the words he stared at the bedsheet attached to the outside of one of the gates, and whose writing was now facing the street. In the beam of the floodlights fixed on the gate large letters could be read through the material:
He vaguely recalled that they had put it up months ago, when the Anglo-American committee had visited to decide what should happen with the Jews. Nice men and women who had listened to the survivors’ stories and shed the odd tear of sympathy. Then they disappeared again, back to Cairo and Jerusalem, it was said. But nothing had happened. And in the meantime more and more Jews had come to Germany.
Peretz knew that some camp inmates took the sheet down every month to wash it before hanging it up again. Nobody had asked them to, they just did it.
With a jolt he awoke from his thoughts. He said out loud, “How can he imagine that people fleeing from Poland will all of a sudden just stay there? Are they supposed to let themselves get killed for a time until the Americans can bring themselves to build a new camp? Hasn’t he understood that the only reason they have to build a new camp is because we can’t stop bringing people to safety, not even for a day?” Peretz shook his head. He liked the general and knew that they had enjoyed the sympathy of the U.S. government ever since the American Jews had begun to exert pressure. And yet, between the lines, Peretz had heard something else: the Americans were making every effort to avoid causing the British any problems. The British have declared war on us, Peretz thought, Damn them!
“Come on,” Adam said, taking his arm. “Let’s celebrate.”
45
The director sat behind his desk, a desk that was so large and exquisitely made that Otto Deckert could not help wondering what it signified. Behind the director was a window full of green, he could see trees and shrubs, and beyond this a wall.
The director was a short, slight man with a round, far too large head, ears that stuck out and a thin neck. His hairline was so far back that it emphasized the ball-like nature of his head even more. The director was no oil painting, no Aryan superman. He would never have been permitted to take part in any breeding program.
Otto Deckert had taken a huge risk in coming here. He had traveled across Germany without any papers, permanently on his guard against checks, often hitchhiking, often on foot. He had slept in damp woods and barns, he had told farmers that the Russians had killed his entire family, since when he had been on his way to the only relations he had left. They had believed him, they had given him food and good wishes and sympathy on his arduous road. He had felt lonely and vulnerable, but had learned to hang on in, and this served him well now too.
In Nuremberg he had climbed into an empty goods train and traveled to Munich central station. He had marveled at the monumental new structure and wandered through the large entrance hall with the encouraging feeling that life would continue, that nothing and nobody was going to keep either Germany or himself down, that the Führer would have liked this attractive building.
As he had no money for a taxi, the way south to the neighboring municipality had been long and onerous. For hours he had walked along the River Isar.
Finally, at the zoo, a baker had given him a lift in his delivery van, taking him straight along Heilmannstrasse to the former Rudolf Hess Estate. It was a green area, where important Nazi Party figures and their families had once led tranquil lives, isolated from the rest of humanity. The estate had been built in a forest, which surrounded it like a protective shield, a high wall also dating from the pre-war era ensured that no one could gain entry.
The director did not see him immediately, Deckert had to wait for ages in a bare room before being fetched by an elegant secretary and led past closed doors down long corridors, finally stopping at a massive wooden door at the end of a corridor. She knocked and, when the door opened, took her leave of Otto Deckert with a brief wave of her hand.
In the doorway stood another secretary, an elderly woman who looked him up and down before saying, “Otto Deckert? Come in, he’s waiting for you.” With these words she opened another door, and there sat the director behind his large desk, looking at Deckert and making a sign that he should take a seat on the chair opposite him.
“Tell me your story!” the director said, and Otto Deckert told him about the 11th Army, the Russian campaign, the retreat to Posen, the defense of the city to the last drop of blood, side by side with the S.S., and just as he was about to describe his imprisonment the director said, “We have proved the Torah right, Deckert.”
Deckert had not been prepared for such a comment. He stared at the director and tried to come up with a witty response, without success.
“We have paid, Deckert. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. By attempting to exterminate the Jews in this crude, clumsy way, by shooting every last person in great swathes of Byelorussia and setting fire to it, either to win land for ourselves or leave scorched earth behind, we have brought exactly the same upon ourselves: flight, expulsion, imprisonment, deaths running into millions, large territorial losses, a plundered country. That is the Torah, the Old Testament. What have you got to say to that?” As he uttered these last words the director leaned back in his leather chair, without taking his eye off Otto Deckert. Before the latter could think of something to say, the director continued.
“I’m telling you this, Deckert, to allow you to see your own destiny in a higher context. People who don’t understand the sort of world we’re living in are useless to me here. It’s a world of power blocs and ideologies, these provide the big framework in which every individual destiny is played out, yours included.” He paused to allow his words to exert their full effect on the man opposite him, then said, “Back then we tried to drive a wedge into the existing order. But we failed, or the existing order was too strong for us. This time we have to proceed more skillfully, Deckert.”
Deckert nodded instinctively, not because he agreed with the director, but because he wanted to show him that this was the case, even though he did not understand what he was talking about. The concentrated gaze with which the director fixed him made Deckert nervous and distracted. He tried to reply, to prove to the director that he was confident, assured, but he had the peculiar impression that it was impossible to establish any real contact with this man, for the director just continued to stare at him as if he were sitting in a secret observation room behind a two-way mirror, never to be discovered.
“I predicted all of this,” the director said abruptly, piercing the silence. There was no hint of satisfaction in his expression, only a sobriety, like someone referencing historical facts. He said, “In the autumn of ’44 I predicted that once we’d surrendered the Western Allies would team up against the Soviet Union, and I made sure they had their reasons for doing so, too.” He paused briefly, but only to give Deckert time to follow what he was saying.
“None of them, neither the Yanks, nor the Brits, and certainly not the French, none of them had agents in the east. Only we did.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his broad, deep and exquisitely made mahogany desk with its dark-green leather top, on the edges of which Deckert noticed golden arabesques. “And since then, Deckert, we’ve been in business.” The director leaned back once more.
“Our connections are extraordinarily good. We have first-rate contacts with the government, the parties, the Church, the new army, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the Spiegel, where some comrades work. The Americans listen to us. Their radical anti-Bolshevism is all our doing. A few years ago we convinced them that the Soviets were armed to the teeth. That they could launch an attack at any time and anywhere, in fact several at once if necessary. We persuaded the Americans that they were weak. They believed us at once and started arming like mad. It was us, Deckert, we invented the Cold War. I
n this very office,” the director said, bringing his right index finger vertically down onto the dark-green leather top of his desk, “the Cold War was born.”
The director paused as if to recover from a state of excitement that was not physical, and thus did not manifest itself in his eyes or fingers, but whose origin was purely intellectual, as if for him thinking was something both sensual and agonizing, a burden his fragile body had to bear. Deckert was spellbound by this man, he felt instinctively that the director had attained a state of consciousness which would remain inaccessible to him in this life, and he suddenly felt like a dilettante, a cheap imitation, like a poor copy of an original. How come this had never occurred to him before?
At that moment the director said, “I had come to the conclusion that defective communication between the Western Allies and their Soviet partner was the best way of ensuring that the sharing of information regarding certain methods employed by the Wehrmacht in the east and elsewhere would fade into the background. But it has also proved to be the best means of keeping the division of Germany unstable. The weapons here and in the Soviet Zone are a guarantee that this border will never be taken for granted.” The director paused again briefly, like someone who walks quickly and stops from time to time, turning back to wait for their footsore companion.