by Tessa de Loo
Frau Schmidt’s altruism lay more in the didactic sphere. Her search for an academy of social work had not been made easy. All training colleges indoctrinated by the Nazis had been shut down; what survived was a reliable Catholic institute in North Rhine Westphalia. The director responded immediately to her impeccable letter: she would be visiting the seminary at Trier in March, and would take that opportunity to assess Frau Schmidt’s protégé herself.
As protection from the dust that blew out of the rubble heaps Anna wore a headscarf that flapped in the breeze. The closer she got to the seminary the stronger exam nerves took hold of her. The director, haughty and curt, did nothing to put her at her ease, but subjected her to a cross-examination. ‘Why do you want to be a social worker?’ she asked in a cynical tone, as though a plan so arrogant, brazen had never come to her notice before. ‘I want to help people,’ sounded weak. ‘Why?’ ‘Because I want to help people!’ Anna repeated, raising her voice, forgetting all ceremony and polite phrases. An uneasy silence fell. I’ve blown it, she thought, I saw to that in no time. But why does she treat me like a dog? But you stroke a dog’s head, you say: you’re a good dog. Finally she broke the silence penitently: ‘I myself was a child who needed help.’ Again that silence and the scornful, piercing look of the authority who was going to decide her fate. ‘You can go,’ said the woman abruptly. Anna came home dejected. Frau Schmidt dashed towards her. ‘And how did it go?’ ‘I can forget it. It was nothing.’ The teacher sniffed in disbelief. She had her own channels for getting objective information; some days later she reported with triumphant victory: ‘You made a deep impression on her. At least that one knows what she wants, she said to the abbot …’ Anna looked up wearily. She did not want to hear any more about it, the teacher was concocting it. But the post proved her right. A well-thumbed, damaged telegram was delivered: ‘First semester starts: 1 September.’
Farewell Frau Schmidt, teacher! But before travelling to North Rhine Westphalia she had to make a second attempt. This time she had solid shoes, the sun was shining, she had a lift in a post office van up to the village itself. She got out in the centre; villagers told her where it was. With an armful of flowers plucked on the way she pushed open the squeaky wrought-iron gate. There was an aisle, as in the church, with rows of graves on either side. The oldest at the front: names from the district, mossy, worn away by rain and frost, on crooked headstones and cracked tombstones. Clipped yews and conifers in between and an impressive absence of noise, only interrupted by bird song. Further behind were the more recent graves. One stuck out immediately because it was square instead of rectangular, and three amateurish wooden crosses stood on it next to each other, as though seeking support from one another. As she began to walk intuitively towards it, a sudden irrational anxiety crept over her: the anxiety that he would still be proved right and would be all about there except in this one spot … that he would laugh at her from all points of the compass for her naïvety. But there was no escape: she had been en route to this pathetic two-square-metre plot since her release from the American camp. So, step by step, she approached her disillusionment with diffidence. Each cross bore a name carved out in cuneiform letters – the middle one had his. The earth underneath had been covered with evergreen sprigs with white roses on top. From whom, whom were the flowers from? She knelt down, laid her bunch of wildflowers there and stared at his name in the hope that something of his presence would manifest itself, but the only thing she could see before her was the tanned soldier who waved to her in the tidy station at Nuremberg: ‘… this bloody hell will soon end anyway …’ If he was living anywhere it was within her, there was no place on earth where that was as certain as here …
‘What are you doing at my grave?’ sounded behind her, straight through the silence, a female voice. Anna stiffened. She said carefully, not turning round, ‘If there is anyone in the world whose grave this is then I am that person. My husband lies here, as it happens.’ The indiscreet song of a blackbird came from a conifer; there were muffled sobs in between. Anna turned round. A young woman with swollen eyes was staring at her. Although the grave displayed the unpopular attribute of graves all over the world, by remaining proverbially silent, a suspicion arose in Anna that was too awful to be contemplated. There are two others, she reassured herself. ‘Are you Frau Grosalie?’ said the girl in a slurred voice. ‘Yes, yes …’ said Anna curtly, ‘I am Frau Grosalie, but what have you got to do with my husband …?’ The other looked up to the sky as though she were expecting a sign. Anna could not think of anything to say to put it all into perspective. Their gazes crossed fleetingly.
‘I will explain,’ said the girl. She scratched her chin. ‘He was billeted with our neighbours. We got to know him over the fence, my mother and I. Right away we found him sympathetic … both of us …’ In this way she shyly introduced her story. Martin was making contact with Anna in an unorthodox manner via the last female being he had seen before his death – via her he was telling his wife the details. Only now did his abstract death – ‘the heroic death of your husband’ – become something that had happened to him at a specific moment in a specific place. At one moment he had still been alive and could see, hear, smell, talk, laugh – a moment later his mortal remains were being gathered up. In a dull voice the girl recalled the day concerned in September 1944. The office where she worked in Prüm had been closed because the whole district had become the front zone and all traffic was shut down. She was obliged to stay at home. She was sitting on the bench in the garden when the officer waved hallo to her and called out that he had received an order to go to the Westwall with his men to take possession of a bunker full of signals equipment. She sprang up from the bench: ‘Could I have a lift with you to Prüm?’ she asked on spontaneous impulse. ‘I’ve left a bag of things at the office.’ He shook his head: ‘The roads are not safe, the Americans are shooting at us from all sides.’ But when she urged him and pleaded with him to take her along he gave in. ‘Well, if you absolutely insist.’
They set off; the lorry navigated a woodland path. Something exploded in the distance now and then, leaves and berries trembled in the air, then everything went quiet again. ‘My goodness,’ she cried suddenly in a panic, ‘I’ve forgotten the key!’ Martin made light of the mistake: ‘You don’t really need a key, you’ll see, there are no windows left in that house, you’ll be able to climb in.’ ‘That may very well be,’ she said stubbornly, ‘but I would rather fetch the key.’ She prepared to get out, he stopped her: ‘It’s perilous to walk back alone.’ But she would not be dissuaded. An immovable belief in the indispensability of the key obliged her to go straight back. She said goodbye, got out and walked back the way they had come.
Half-way through the afternoon the signals technicians returned to the village. Three of them wrapped in canvas like mummies, six others unhurt. The villagers thronged together, the girl stood there among them in confused desperation and asked the survivors in an apologetic tone for an explanation, not suspecting that they were already weighed down by heavy feelings of guilt. One of them gave the account, with a hanging head. The lorry was approaching a village. Martin was sitting up front – as she knew – between the driver and a soldier. The others called from behind, ‘Stop for a moment, we want to pick a few apples.’ There was an orchard on a slope, red apples glistening defiantly in the sun. ‘We can’t stop,’ Martin had said, ‘if we stop we will be an easy target for the Americans.’ But the men whined ‘Just for a minute’ and Martin, good-natured as he was, did not persist. ‘Hurry then!’ he capitulated. Six soldiers jumped out of the lorry and ran into the orchard like six rascals. They forgot the war, they shook the branches and collected apples until they were startled by an explosion below. The cab with the three who stayed behind blew up before their eyes, hit by shell fire.
The girl listened to him speechless, staring at the three prosaic parcels, and saw before her the men she had sat with fraternally a few hours earlier. Meanwhile the men’s baggage had been
assembled; in Martin’s suitcase there were a pair of pale blue children’s shoes and a silver evening purse among the books. Only the sight of his personal possessions now conveyed the full magnitude of the disaster to her. She turned her back on the scene in a flood of tears. Meanwhile someone took his chance in the commotion – when she had come to herself and turned round again the shoes and evening purse had disappeared.
Anna nodded slowly. ‘The hero’s death of your husband …’ Killed for a handful of apples. It connected to that one apple that had brought disaster to mankind. Martin had trudged through the steppes of Russia and the fields of the Ukraine, he had survived the cold, an attack by partisans, a fatal illness, he had been spared throughout the whole war so that he could die on the outskirts of a farming village in the Eifel for a handful of apples. However absurd and senseless this death seemed, it was one that nevertheless suited him: he had died while giving others pleasure. She could recognize him as he had been in this. He had suddenly come close to her in the story of his death. ‘Are the flowers from you?’ she said gently. ‘My mother and I,’ the girl assented, ‘bartered butter and eggs in Trier for those roses.’ Anna turned round. The other graves were neglected; the square one with the three crosses was a lovingly maintained island amid overgrown tombstones.
The girl insisted on introducing Anna to her mother, who shook her hand emotionally. ‘Your husband was such a good man …’ she sighed, dabbing her nose. Then she prepared a reception for the widow as though she were a long-lost member of the family from America. Everything edible that could be found in the house and garden was put on the table, prepared with fragrant herbs. Anna understood that it was a celebration meal as well as a memorial meal. He was dead but she was alive – thanks to her paranormal obsession with the key. ‘The thing that I don’t understand …’ said the mother at the departure, ‘is that the SS buried them and put the crosses on top, but our pastor has refused to bless them because they are SS. Now is that Christian …?’
‘At least you had a grave you could go to,’ said Lotte coolly. She was disinclined to get carried away by the story of Anna’s pilgrimage to the grave of her SS officer.
Lost in thought, Anna looked at her. ‘How do you mean?’
‘There was no cemetery at Mauthausen.’
Anna stroked her painful legs. For some days she had believed in the illusion that the pain had been diminishing through the soothing influence of the baths, but now it suddenly returned in all its ferocity. ‘I went to Auschwitz a couple of years ago,’ she said. ‘Six thousand people were gassed there each day. I stood there, where all of them had gone, and remembered the beautiful summer of 1943. Martin came, we went swimming in the lake, we went over to the island, wonderful weekends for us alone. I did not know that it was my last supper. That millions of people had gone this way at that time when I had been experiencing a bit of good fortune in my life … I could not cope with it, it was so dreadful …’ She massaged her knees. ‘But whether or not I was fortunate, they had not been helped …’
That was a truism. Lotte was silent.
‘I did not believe it at first,’ Anna continued. ‘I saw the pictures on television for the first time in the fifties. Do you know what I thought? The Americans have collected the corpses out of the towns they themselves bombed and thrown them on a heap in a concentration camp. I could not believe it.’
‘When did it finally get through?’ said Lotte sharply.
‘It began with a big exhibition, “The Jews in Cologne from Roman Times”. The truth slowly trickled inside there. You must understand: politics did not interest me. I was completely obsessed with my work, there was nothing else.’
‘Wir haben es nicht gewusst, we had other things to do,’ Lotte railed scornfully.
‘Yes … no …’ said Anna irritated, ‘you didn’t hear anything about the Jews in everyday life. I don’t recall anyone ever saying anything about it.’
Lotte stood up, overcome by a dull sense of futility. A nurse came in and requested them to get dressed. Closing time was approaching, the staff wanted to go home.
The inescapable family connection was continuing to claim its rights whether they wanted it to or not. Something was still forcing them to go on rowing against the current, towards each other – the one in active pursuit of conquest, the other as a passive victim of a maddening sort of affinity to which she could offer no resistance.
That evening they dined together in a small restaurant on the Avenue Astrid. It was Saturday; they did not have to be at the bath house at the crack of dawn the following morning. They went on to the Relais de la Poste in search of a little bit of Saturday night ambience and made themselves comfortable on the leather settees from the thirties, a time when they had still been young and did not know what was hanging over them. They drank coffee with Grand Marnier. The jukebox filled the space with velvet evergreens from the fifties.
‘Life goes on, they always say …’ Anna sipped from her glass. ‘When we have suffered a great loss, the other person gives us a clap on the back and says: chin up, life goes on. A cliché and at the same time a bitter universal truth. Our towns lay in rubble, our soldiers were dead, crippled, stripped of illusions. As a people we acquired the collective guilt for the greatest mass murder in the history of mankind. We were economically and morally bankrupt … and yet, somehow or other, life went on. I threw myself into studying, my work. Everyone went to work, my God …’ She emptied her glass in one gulp and laughed to herself. ‘The whole reconstruction was one big occupational therapy!’
Lotte stared absently into her glass. Memories of the dreary peace drifted past. She did not want to think about it, and precisely because of that she thought about it.
Ernst was working too. He was taken on by a violin-maker in The Hague who had rheumatism of the hands that obliged him increasingly to leave the work to him. They had moved into a small flat behind the workshop – Ernst earned a post-war pittance, like many others. Obsessed with his new responsibilities as husband and future head of a family, he stirred himself to ever greater productivity: five days a week he repaired violins, on the other two he made new ones that he sold. Seven days a week Lotte was alone with the thoughts marriage was supposed to have released her from. She paced about the room, wrenched from her family – a painful déjà vu. Where had she come to, had she wished for this? She dreamed of a large old house with high ceilings, a house that would reconcile her to the loneliness of the marriage, a house that she would recreate as a home. The dream drove her through a criss-cross of streets and canals. Autumn came, winter, the dark façades warded her off, the lit-up rooms shut her out – only the little match girl was missing. It was as though she were still doing penance, in the form of an eternal roaming, homeless, without relatives, the just deserts of someone who was neither one thing nor the other, a hybrid, treacherous on both sides.
Perhaps it was music that was missing. What had happened to Amelita Galli-Curci? The Exsultate, jubilate? The St Matthew Passion? She found a singing teacher, but already at the first lesson it seemed that not much was left of her voice. She wore herself out apologizing to the teacher – with great nostalgia she mentioned everything she had sung before, but when she saw the doubt in the other’s eye she began to doubt it herself. What had happened to her voice, which had once effortlessly filled the water-tower from top to bottom? Her vocal chords were like dried out rubber bands that crumbled between the fingers.
If she wanted to hear music she had to visit her parents. But there the dislocation filtered through the façade of normal family life. Her mother, who held the thing together with an artificial cheerfulness, had developed an obsession with eating, to forget the hunger and everything else. She had lost almost all her children at the same time as the people in hiding left. Something seemed to have developed secretly between Jet and Ruben since she had lain in bed with concussion and he had read aloud to her for hours to kill time. Theo de Zwaan had long ago known how to melt Marie’s Cinderella-heart.
Mies had gone to live above the hat shop shortly before the war. They had all married and were living independently. Invited by Bram, Koen had gone to America, which had enjoyed almost mythical popularity since D-Day as a country of unlimited possibilities. The two youngest who were still at home could not concentrate at school and were boisterous and unruly.
Lotte also could not bear to watch her father being so cheerful, now that he had his wife almost to himself. He had been stopped in the street by an older gentleman who stared at him flabbergasted. ‘You’re still alive! Are you really Rockanje?’ He nodded suspiciously. ‘Once upon a time I gave you an injection …’ cried the other enthusiastically, ‘straight into the heart – a desperate act because I had already given you up!’ Lotte’s father, who remembered nothing about it and had heard everything about his sick-bed second-hand, thanked him in bewilderment for his sturdy intervention and went home with a spring in his step. He felt as though life had been given to him for a second time and this time he decided he wasn’t going to let anyone hold him back from really enjoying it. (The great disillusion was still awaiting him: Father Stalin was still a man of irreproachable behaviour.)
The war was regurgitated somewhat poisonously, for a moment, and an ugly crack would have appeared in his reputation if Sara Frinkel had not made a forceful appearance. A Jewish dinner had been organized. The Frinkel family, not yet departed for America, was also invited. Ed de Vries said during the meal, in that loud manner with which he had always known how to attract attention as a singer-entertainer, that the Rockanje family had swindled him out of a box he had given to them for safekeeping containing valuables worth half a million. Indignantly Sara Frinkel had cried, ‘How dare you!’ across the table. ‘You take those words back immediately, old rat. How did you get that into your head? You didn’t have a sou! Don’t make me laugh, you with your half a million in a box, about which you said: I’m coming to bury a few knick-knacks. I’ve got your measure: you’re trying to get it back on the insurance. That’s your business but don’t think of dragging the Rockanje family through the mud!’