My Name Was Five
Page 29
“Impossible,” Mrs. Albrecht said, “where am I to put my son? And my good porcelain? Out in the barn?”
“Porcelain? Why don't you shove it up your ass?” Mrs. Ebner said.
That’s when Mrs. Albrecht slammed her door and turned on her 1000 watt fan.
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In the following days, I managed to get bread from the bakery, now run by Mr. Senf’s oldest son, and more sausages from the backyard. Mr. Albrecht couldn’t sell them anyway; they all belonged to the Russians who kept bringing in animals for slaughter, regularly as clockwork. Otherwise, I spent my time putting the finishing touches on a board game that I was creating for our evening entertainment. Having acquired a pair of dice, a leather cup in which to shake them, and some playing tokens, I had created the game like this:
First, I pasted together pieces of white cardboard to create a panel, 80 centimeters wide and 40 centimeters tall, onto which I copied the world’s continents and oceans from my world atlas book. Then I added all sorts of stopping points, starting with Berlin as #1 and ending with Berlin as #50 as well. A world traveler, I figured, might move to Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, Athens, Istanbul, Warsaw, Moscow, and Baku, and I linked these places with big fat lines. From there, my imaginary traveler moved to Ankara, Baghdad, the Central Sahara, Guinea, the Congo, Benguela, Cape Town, Madagascar, Teheran, and Bombay. And on and on my traveler went, to Darjeeling, then Lhasa, Peking, Tokyo, Sumatra, Central Australia, the Solomon Islands, Hollywood, the Central USA, and Central Canada. A further lap around the globe linked Greenland, New York, Panama, Rio de Janeiro, the Amazon River Valley, Cape Horn, the Central Pacific, Alaska, the North Pole, and Siberia’s Nizhne Kolymsk. Finally, my globetrotter would visit Krasnoyarsk, the Ural Mountains, Leningrad, Lapland, Spitsbergen, Iceland, the North Sea, Hammerfest, Stockholm and return to Berlin.
For days, I had been working on the project, adding little drawings of the Eiffel Tower next to Paris, of bull fighters next to Madrid, of St. Peter’s cathedral next to Rome, of Greek temples next to Athens, of Islamic minarets next to Istanbul and Baghdad, and so on around the world. Before long, my board was covered with Eskimos and igloos, whales, seals, and penguins; skyscrapers, the Statue of Liberty; Alaskan gold diggers and loggers; Red Indians and wigwams; Indian fakirs, snake charmers, and elephants, the snowy rocks of Mount Everest; the Great Wall of China; tigers roaming tropical islands inhabited by head-hunting cannibals; Pacific natives rowing from island to island; Cossacks defending their fortress in Krasnoyarsk; Spitsbergen icebergs breaking into the Arctic Ocean, and Hammerfest, Europe’s northernmost town, bathed in uninterrupted daylight for months on end. With all of this, I got a lot of inspiration and help from Mr. Kalitz and the giant picture dictionary in his living room.
On that particular day, only a few drawings were left: Baku oil fields; worshippers milling around Mecca’s Kaaba; safaris between Saharan oases led by camels; lions, zebras, and giraffes roaming the Serengeti Plain; and shipwrecks in the stormy seas off Cape Horn. Any traveler, my rules said, would move forward depending on the toss of the dice, but could also be pushed back or be stuck in a particular spot, depending on the types of events my drawings illustrated.
I remember it now: It was dark outside and it was hot when my mother and I were playing my game for the first time. Mosquitoes kept buzzing my head, and then our candles, and I had reached Tokyo, #24. That was a lucky break; it gave me a direct plane ride to Hollywood, #28. That’s when I heard voices in front of the house. For a moment, I thought it must be time to go to chapel again, but there weren’t any Russians out there. Looking out the windows, we just saw a man and a woman in the street, holding an umbrella and an aluminum pot.
“Trudchen,” they were saying, “Trudchen,” but not very loud. They were almost whispering.
“My God,” my mother said, leaning out of the window to get a better look. “It’s Liesel and Herbert out there!”
They looked like two ghosts in the candlelight. They were so thin, and I thought of the concentration camp pamphlets the Russians had handed out. Our visitors had ragged clothes, too, and their naked feet were covered with blisters and sores. Uncle Herbert didn’t say a word. Aunt Liesel raised her hands toward my mother.
“Your sister has come, asking for mercy,” she said with her usual dramatic flair and then she collapsed, right there in our room above the butcher shop.
“Walked all the way from Berlin,” Uncle Herbert explained, in a tired but rather matter-of-fact voice. “Followed the ruts made by tanks to stay clear of land mines.”
“They raped her seventeen times,” he added, without the slightest show of emotion.
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My mother gave him a withering look, but said nothing. She made a fire in the iron stove to heat some water. She took a sponge and washed Aunt Liesel’s feet. I knew we didn’t have soap. I thought of Crossen and my father and how useful iodine might be. I remembered Uncle Herbert’s icy coldness back in Berlin and of the terror he promoted there. I pictured him being taken to the KGB office across the street, the Russian equivalent of the Gestapo, and I wondered what my mother would do next. I found out almost instantly.
Someone banged on the front door.
“Personnel check, personnel check,” Mrs. Gronostalski shouted.
We saw the Russian soldiers down the street and knew what was coming. My mother looked at me, pointing a finger first at Uncle Herbert and then at the backyard. I grabbed Uncle Herbert’s hand, we ran down the back stairs, and I showed him to the barn. But he wouldn’t go in.
“I know what they do,” he said. “They set barns on fire and shoot at anyone who comes out. Or they send in the dogs to find you under the hay.”
There was no time left. I pointed to the latrine and raised the side door. The stench was overpowering. And Uncle Herbert, the Greifer, crawled into a mountainous hell of shit and piss, newspaper and big black flies.
By the time the Russians came to our room, I was asleep on top of a big brown blanket. I could feel Aunt Liesel’s hips.
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I don’t remember much of the coming weeks. I felt weak with a headache and all my joints and muscles ached. And I was so hot. My mother said I had a fever of 40 degrees Celsius for weeks and was delirious. Also, my eyes were bloodshot, I had a furry white tongue and dark red spots on my body that turned purple, she said. I only know that I was sweating and my heart was racing and that I had the bed all to myself. Mrs. Holland said my mother should cover me with cat furs, and she even brought some. But Dr. Weiss’s nurse told my mother to forget about the cat furs and keep me cool. That she did, with her fancy Chinese fan and by sponging me a lot. I don’t know who was right. When I was well enough to talk to them, typhus had killed Mrs. Holland and the nurse, too.
But I later did read the pamphlet my mother had picked up at Dr. Weiss’s office.
“Typhoid fever,” it said, “is a life-threatening illness caused by the bacterium Salmonella Typhi, which lives only in humans. Persons with typhoid fever carry the bacteria in their bloodstream and intestinal tract. In addition, a small number of persons, called carriers, recover from typhoid fever but continue to carry the bacteria. Both ill persons and carriers shed S. Typhi in their stool.”
“You can get typhoid fever,” the pamphlet said, “if you eat food or drink beverages that have been handled by a person who is shedding S. Typhi or if sewage contaminated with S. Typhi bacteria gets into the water you use for drinking or washing food. Therefore, typhoid fever is more common in areas where hand washing is less frequent and water is likely to be contaminated with sewage. Once S. Typhi bacteria are eaten or drunk, they multiply and spread into the bloodstream. The body reacts with fever and other signs and symptoms.”
My mother also told me that Dr. Weiss had told her of a new medicine, called antibiotic. It was used in England and America to treat diseases like typhus. Persons given antibiotics usually begin to feel better within 2 to 3 days, and deaths rarely occur. But we didn’t ha
ve such medicine. In the end, in Ziesar, about 1 in 5 patients who contracted typhus died.
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But there was one good consequence: Inside the village at least, there were considerably fewer rapes! That happened because Mrs. Gronostalski taught everyone the Russian word for typhus and lots of people pasted a warning sign on their front doors, saying TIF, using Cyrillic letters, of course. That scared off the Russians. In addition, many women, like my mother and Aunt Liesel, dotted their faces with rose-colored spots, imitating the typhoid rash.
32. Jutta
[August 1945]
While I was still in the middle of my typhoid delirium, I pictured my Uncle Herbert being caught by Captain Lysenko, the KGB man across the street. I knew him well; he was one of the soldiers who played ball with me. I had always taken him to be a dedicated Nazi hunter, given the anti-fascist posters with which he had decorated his office. He had given me one of them–copied by the thousands from a famous Russian artist, he had said. It promised “death to the fascist reptile.”
A Soviet propaganda poster
Death to the Fascist Reptile!
Captain Lysenko also spoke fluent German, unlike any other Russian I had ever met, which had made it possible for me to find out all sorts of interesting things. For one thing, I had learned that KGB stood for Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti or State Security Committee.
More importantly, I had been told how Russian intelligence officers were trained to unmask a liar. They closely watched the people they interrogated: Were they fidgeting, sliding their chair back and forth, cracking their knuckles, crossing their arms in front of their chest, touching their knees beneath the table, checking their watch, bring their hands to their face? All these were sure signs of a liar at work, I had been told. Clearly, Uncle Herbert didn’t have a chance. He was always scratching his nose or wiping something from the corners of his eyes.
Yet things worked out differently. As I learned later, my mother had gotten Mrs. Gronostalski’s help in bypassing the KGB and registering Uncle Herbert and Aunt Liesel as “refugees from Silesia.” And the new man in the Town Hall had found them a room in a farm house on Emil Beer Strasse at the edge of town. For her sister’s sake, my mother had decided not to turn in her brother-in-law.
Also, while my mind was still in a feverish haze, Mrs. Albrecht had relented and had given us the second upstairs room across the hall. That’s where my mother had kept Helmut so he wouldn’t catch anything from me or anyone else. I do recall one thing, however, a visit from Uncle Eddy. He appeared out of nowhere, it seemed, shaking the whole staircase as he made his way up to our room, and standing over me like a giant. My feverish eyes remembered him from Berlin and saw him just like that, complete with his green-gray uniform, the Knight’s Cross on his chest, field glasses slung across his right shoulder, saber to the left, hanging on his belt, along with canteen and pistol, and eyes glittering with evangelical fire. I can still see him now, putting his right hand on my shoulder and invoking the name of the Father Almighty, asking him to pass on his healing power through him to me, just as it had passed from Jesus, his beloved Son, to Peter, the Rock on which the Church was built, and from there on to all the servants of God from generation to generation, right to Martin Luther and beyond, whenever they, in turn, were ordained to serve their Lord. It must have worked. Instead of dying an agonizing death, as I had expected, I was up and about within days. Naturally, I ran to the Town Hall to check up on the news and, as usual, it was nearly a month old.
1945
July 5
Allied Control Council: U. S., British, and French troops to take part in the occupation of Berlin
July 17 – August 2
Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (soon replaced by Clement Attlee) convene a conference at Potsdam on the future of Germany and Japan.
As to Germany, decisions are made on
1) demilitarization
2) denazification
3) trials of war criminals
4) new democratic parties and freedom of speech
5) reparations
6) the importation of food
7) territorial changes (a to c noted below)
a) The Königsberg area of East Prussia is to be ceded to the Soviet Union
b) Polish territories east of the Curzon Line, covering 180,000 square kilometers, are to be ceded to the Soviet Union
c) German territories east of the Oder-Neisse Line, covering 104,000 square kilometers, are to be administered by Poland; an estimated 14 million Germans are to be expelled from these areas, as well as from Hungary and Czechoslovakia
As to Japan, the Allies demand unconditional surrender
As I wrote it all down on my notepad, I saw Werner Albrecht sitting on the Town Hall steps with Jutta Zweig. Most of the time, Werner was now helping his father in the butcher shop. He looked just like the elder Mr. Albrecht, but he weighed a lot less and was, of course, much younger. I knew he was 28; Mrs. Albrecht had said so on the day he came back from Italy.
“Just a week after his birthday,” she had said, “he’s back, he’s home again!”
I knew Jutta Zweig, too; she was the daughter of Aunt Rachel’s housekeeper and had helped in the garden at harvest time. Jutta was only 20 and she was so pretty, with her long chestnut-colored hair and the white dress filled with red polka dots. Looking at her touched some mysterious chamber in my heart, which I could not ignore. I felt jealous when I saw Werner Albrecht hugging her and kissing her, right there on the Town Hall steps in the middle of the day, a mere 200 meters diagonally across from the place where the commandant had made a new home for himself. But I didn’t know at the time what a big surprise was waiting for me later that day.
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That evening, as I had done before, I defied the curfew and climbed the hayloft at the baker’s. As long as there was electric light, I could see through the high windows into the oven room and, if I was patient enough, I could run off with a freshly baked loaf of bread. The entire room, floors and walls included, was covered with light yellow tiles and it was spanking clean. A long table stood in front of the huge oven and Mr. Senf’s son Fred mixed the dough on top of it, just as his father had before he was killed by the Russians. Like Werner Albrecht, Fred was in his twenties as well, and he, too, had recently come back from the war. I knew his routine. He would cut off a pound of dough or so from the big pile, roll it on the table, let it rise for a while, shape it into a loaf, make three decorative cuts on top, brush the top with water to make a shiny surface, and load it into the oven with the help of a long-handled wooden board. Later, he would retrieve the loaves from the oven in the same way he had first inserted them and load the finished loaves onto a cart, ready to be rolled into the shop. But this time, there was more.
I saw Fred take off his white coat. Then he spread a blanket on top of the tiles above the oven and lit a cigarette. And suddenly, Jutta was there. She wore a yellow dress and a big straw hat. I couldn’t hear what they said and I couldn’t breathe. He didn’t move, but she smiled. She tossed her hat onto the cart with the loaves, and her dress slid to the floor. She was naked, and I had never seen a girl before, not like that, but he didn’t move.
I saw her lift her arms above her head, and she smiled. I wanted to touch her breasts. But he stood up, and they kissed, and she was hidden behind him. Then I saw him undress and he lifted her up to the roof of the oven; it was five times the size of a bed. They sat on the blanket and rocked like a chair, but I couldn’t hear what they said. He put his hands on her breasts and his head in-between them. She smiled…..
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I hardly slept that night and it wasn’t the typhus. In the morning, I left early and went to the house of Jutta. I sat on the stone across from her door and waited. I worked on a sentence I would say once she came. When she did, I forgot it.
“Hans, it’s you,” she said, “did you like the mushrooms my Mama brought you?”
No words would come. I st
ared, and she said: “I’ll tell you what. I’m going for blueberries next week with the neighborhood kids, want to come?”
I stared at her hair and the curves of her breasts, and I wondered how soft she was.
“Of course, you want to,” she said, and I nodded and turned, and I bumped into the pharmacist coming through the door. I heard them laughing as I ran.
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I walked to the swamp that day and made a flute out of reeds. I played my flute in the shade that day and had feelings I didn’t understand. I walked around in the fields that day and knocked at the house of Jutta.
She opened the door and looked surprised; once again, I forgot the planned sentence. She smiled: “Have you come to play your flute? Come in and sit.”
“Oh no,” I said, “it’s just…it’s just about the mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms?” She smiled. “Of course.”
I saw her chestnut hair, white dress, red polka dots. I looked at her bare feet, and had feelings I didn’t understand.
“They say you collect them,” I said. “Could you take me when you go?
“Sure,” she said, “be here at six.”
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In the morning, I took the basket and looked at the fog. Then I sneaked down the street and knocked at her door.
“Listen!” she said. “Listen to the birds! That one’s a thrush.”
And we walked through the field of cornflowers and poppies and rye, and the sun came up.
“Today is the perfect time for chanterelles,” she said. “They look like trumpets, yellow and orange and are delicious to eat. They are fragrant, too, but I’ll show you some others as well.”
“That one is a toadstool,” she said, “not a good idea at all. But it’s pretty, isn’t it? Look at the red roof and the white polka dots.”