The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  Need I point out, Kapriel, that Tante Clara seldom made it through the day? She would usually have to take long afternoon naps. I used the time to go out with the children. When I managed to go out alone with Hans, the eldest child, we’d take the tram into town. The others were still a little too slow for me to be dragging them around the streets. With each visit to the zoo, Hans developed a growing fascination for zebras. He wanted to know everything about them. The ones at the zoo were no longer enough; he demanded books, pictures, and stories all about zebras. The neighbors sent me to the museum to show him the quagga. Do you know what that is? The quagga is a recently extinct species, half-zebra, half-horse, that lived in South Africa. The last of its kind died at the end of the nineteenth century; now all that remains of it are twenty-four stuffed specimens in museums the world over. Well, twenty-three today. It only had stripes on its head and fore end. For a long time, people mistakenly believed the quagga to be a subspecies of the zebra. At any rate, Hans adored them. He never wanted to leave the museum, always wanted to go back. The quagga became one of his little-boy obsessions. Do you know what he told me one day?

  “Quaggas are a little like you, Magda. They’re half-zebra, half-horse.” I didn’t know what he was getting at.

  “Papa says you’re half-girl, half-boy.”

  Such a plain-spoken young thing! How could I be angry with him? After the war, some of the survivors from East Prussia told me of the sad fate of the Königsberg quagga. Just before the Red Army arrived, the museum moved it to a villa in the hope that the Russians wouldn’t get their hands on it. The stuffed animal was standing in a bedroom when the Russian soldiers, drunk as skunks, kicked the door in as they took Königsberg. They almost died with fright at the sight of its big eyes gleaming in the darkness. Furious, they flung it out of the window, pissed on it, and burned it in the garden. There you have it. I think that little scene gives you a good idea of the fate of . . . Well, anyway.

  (At this point, Michel, she got up again and went back into the kitchen looking for something. I heard her turn on a radio or something, no doubt to cover her sobs. Crying over a stuffed half-zebra so many years later . . . you don’t see that every day.)

  Onkel Wolfgang came back from the Ukraine for Christmas 1942. He came back often, but this time he was a changed man. He didn’t speak, just locked himself away in his room. He took no interest in the children. He also seemed to suspect I’d been playing a bigger role in his absence; he had harsh words for me.

  “You think you can take over my home just because I showed you how to drive the Opel, Magda?”

  His voice was calm, cold, and detached as he ate his supper. Clara stared at her plate. The children didn’t say another word.

  “I’m not taking over anything, Onkel Wolfi. I’m just keeping an eye on things.”

  “Well, just remember it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.”

  He would ramble on incomprehensibly. Then sit watching the snow fall for hours at a time. He barely showed any interest in Helga, who turned two on December 28. Shortly after the Epiphany, he told us he was leaving. Clara wanted to surprise him by dressing up as Magda Goebbels again!

  “You’re crazy!” He slapped her. “Will we have to have you locked up again? Get a hold of yourself!”

  She cried all night. I heard her. And I heard him, too. He . . . Well. You know what I mean? He left the next day and Clara was again gripped in a cycle of fevers for the first time since fall 1940. It took me three months to get the house back to normal. When the two of us sang together it helped Clara keep her sanity. But as soon as we stopped for, say, a week, she would start thinking she was Magda Goebbels again. It was as though music brought order to her mind. Order that came undone every time Onkel Wolfi came home on leave.

  Winter 1942 brought with it terrifying news. Stalingrad. Ah, now you know what I’m talking about. That’s just like you, isn’t it? No head for poetry, but when it comes to human suffering, you’re no slouch. A typical man. Calm down, calm down. I’m only joking.

  Summer 1943 was magnificent. My little Helga was walking, Heinrich was chattering away, almost as much as his brother Hans, who was already reading. Hannelore had learned to braid my hair. Lazy days on the beach at Cranz, then the world’s most beautiful sunsets every evening. We had a little problem that summer. Marion the Pole was requisitioned by the Arbeitsamt to go work in a munitions factory in Germany. It was quite unfortunate since he was a good worker. As time passed, there were fewer and fewer men left in Königsberg.

  In late August, I decided to bring Hans and Hannelore to see their first opera. A one-off production of Weber’s Freischütz. Do you know it? No? It’s very German. The music is magnificent. Which theater? Oh, it wasn’t in a theater; it was outside. Yes, indeed. It went with the theme. It was an evening performance, in Heiligenbeil, a small town. The children were dying to go, just the three of us. Some say opera is too complicated for children to understand, that they won’t like it, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Nothing fascinates them more than hearing the Queen of the Night.

  The stage was set up in the forest, at the foot of huge fir trees that swayed in the twilight. There must have been at least five hundred people there. The Freischütz is a Singspiel, with singing and spoken dialogue. It’s better to start children off with a Singspiel; it’s often the recitative operas that throw them. The Freischütz is the story of a hunter, which is why it’s nice to perform it outdoors, in the heart of the German forest. It’s a very complicated story. It’s basically about a hunter who makes a pact with the devil. Oh yes! Another German specialty! He trades his soul in return for magic bullets that never miss their target. Needless to say, the final bullet belongs to the devil and he’ll kill the beautiful Agathe, whom the hunter was all set to marry. It’s the kind of opera that makes you jump with every gunshot.

  The staging left everyone confused. Just imagine, Kapriel: usually the actors fired shotguns—blanks, of course. But this time, since we were at war, and perhaps because there were children in the audience, the director had replaced the bullets with arrows. What an idea! Freischütz meets the Wild West. It might have made sense for William Tell but not for Freischütz. I was scandalized. And as if that wasn’t enough, the performance ran into a problem. The last three arrows that were fired off never came back down again from the trees that hung over the stage. I can still see Hans and Hannelore watching the archer’s every movement, their eyes trained on each arrow, following their trajectory into the black night sky only to watch them, open-mouthed, disappear into the skies of East Prussia! The children wanted to speak to the singers after the show, as did I. I was curious to know how they’d managed to avoid being called up so they could sing Freischütz outdoors. But you couldn’t ask that kind of thing. They were very nice, though.

  “I lost my three arrows,” one of them said. “It’s a real mystery. I shot them up into the sky and they should have fallen behind the trees as usual. I looked everywhere, but no luck. Perhaps I’ll find them in the daylight.”

  Hans and Hannelore were jumping about with excitement the whole way home. The only thing they remembered about the whole story was the lost arrows. Nothing could have been more important to them than those damned arrows! They talked about them for two weeks. That evening at Heiligenbeil reminded me just how much I missed opera, or rather the fine productions we used to enjoy in Berlin. Even today, sometimes I too dream of the three arrows streaking across the East Prussian sky. God only knows where the bloody things landed.

  It was my last trip in the Opel. One week later, the car was requisitioned for the Front. Disturbing letters reached me from Berlin. Bombs were raining down, sometimes in broad daylight. Air raid sirens every night. The letter came that fall. The one I never wanted to get. Fate had it that Tante Clara was the one who opened it. Mama had died in an air raid. Or rather, not in a single air raid but in a series of them. She’d locked herself away in her room with a bottle of German white wine.
When the siren sounded, she didn’t go down to the bunker with Papa. He tried to force her to come, banged on her door, but she wouldn’t open it. He could hear the bombs drawing closer to Charlottenburg. To save his own skin, he had to go downstairs. The house was still standing when he came out of the bunker, but Mama had jumped out of the window. Like Tosca. She’d finished the bottle of wine, then written a note for me and slipped it into the neck of the bottle. Papa sent it to me.

  My Little Magda,

  I can’t go on. I no longer want to live in this world. Try to be happy. Take care of your aunt.

  Mama

  I don’t know who was more stricken: me or Tante Clara, her sister. Clara immediately slid into a feverish spiral. Wolfgang was far from home in the Ukraine. Up until Christmas 1943, I think I spent most of my time staring into the distance. I was paralyzed by pain. Clara wrote long letters to Magda Goebbels. I think she might even have mailed them. She asked her for help at this difficult time. She never got a reply. We would have heard about it. The whole world would have.

  You know, Kapriel, if I hadn’t had the children to look after, I would have gone crazy with sadness. Now one thing was certain: I wouldn’t be going back to Berlin after the war. I would stay in Königsberg, where I had my roots. In February 1944, Wolfgang came back from the front. He was ill. By some miracle, he had survived typhoid fever, proof that God calls only the pure of heart back to him. He was still weak and had to be taken care of like an invalid. Now I was looking after a woman who was burning up with malaria and a man that typhoid had reduced to skin and bones. I don’t think I would have managed without Anja and the cook, Frau Meisel. By June, Wolfgang was doing better, but his illness, or his time at the Front, or perhaps both had changed him. He’d become ill-tempered and paranoid. He was convinced I was filling his children’s heads with all kinds of lies about him, that Clara and I were plotting to kill him. He was raving mad. And Clara wasn’t doing much better. She would sometimes pray for Magda Goebbels for hours at a time. Since she’d heard she was a Buddhist, she made the children meditate in the mornings to strange, disturbing mantras. Anja was afraid of her. One day in the fall of 1944, Wolfgang flew into a rage. I figured he must have raped her; she spent a full day prostrate in her bedroom. It happened while I was at the zoo with the children. Anja was hiding in a closet when I came home. He was still ranting and raving upstairs. I went up to take a look. Tante Clara was lying on the bed in tears; he was standing over her, with no pants on, roaring: “I’ll have you locked up. You’ll give me another son or I’ll have you locked up!” He turned around and saw me standing there. The door slammed shut. Then they fought. More than once. How can I explain it, Kapriel? I wasn’t used to that kind of thing.

  In July 1944, thank God, Wolfgang was sent to Gotenhafen, near Gdansk. It’s only two hundred kilometers from Königsberg, on the Baltic Sea. His illness meant he was no longer any use on the front. He was to be in charge of the ships that docked in the port at Gotenhafen. When, after he left, Clara collapsed into my arms and sobbed “I’m pregnant,” I realized he had raped her.

  It was during a time of absurd calm, given what was happening in the rest of Germany, that the festivities were held to mark Königsberg’s four hundredth anniversary that July. There were celebrations everywhere, along with swastikas, the Reichsmütter parades, the old men from the Volkssturm, and the Hitlerjugend—the only men left in East Prussia! I remember singing Erlkönig with the children at a country fair, this time with a different pianist since Tante Clara was feverish. It’s funny: no one dared say a word about what was going on, no one had the right to doubt a thing. Anyone who voiced his fears was accused of being defeatist and locked up, or worse. And yet that Lied, Erlkönig, clearly announced what was to come, right down to the tempo, right down to the tragic end when the father gallops back to the castle only to discover his child has died in his arms. And how the people enjoyed our performance as we announced their imminent demise. The women thought Hans was absolutely adorable. He sang the child’s part, while I played the father and the Elf King. If I’d known, I’d have chosen something different for the festivities.

  Wolfgang came back every two weeks, ever more somber, ever more unpleasant. I would make sure I was in Cranz when he arrived, leaving poor Clara at his mercy. One day, I came back from Cranz with the children and he was still there. His driver was late picking him up. Clara was almost mad with fever. He gave me that spineless look of his on the way out, then eyed the children. Do you know what he said to Hannelore? I’ll never forget it: “Make sure you don’t end up a monkey like her!” and he pointed at me. He shoved me against the wall, then went outside to where his lift was waiting. Typhoid is a terrible thing, Kapriel.

  In late August 1944, the sky fell on our heads. Literally. Until that point, the air raids had miraculously forgotten Königsberg. Every German town and city was in flames, apart from Königsberg. It was as though there was a problem with the English maps. But on the night of August 26 to 27, the bombs rained down on our city. We weren’t spared after all. After two dreadful nights, the house was still standing, but not everyone on Mozartstraße was so fortunate. You have no idea the din it made . . . You’ll never know, either, and it’s better that way. The first air raid completely razed to the ground the neighborhood beside ours, Maraunenhof.

  During the second air raid, on August 29, Clara became totally hysterical. We were all in the cellar when she got up to run out of the house, looking for Wolfgang. Anja and Frau Meisel tried to stop her, but she was too strong. The noise of the bombs drew nearer. The children were crying. At the height of the bombing, I went outside to find her. The sky over Königsberg was all red; people were running and shouting in the streets. Then, nothing. I made my way toward the zoo, ruins and dead animals to my left and right. It was almost like daylight, the explosions were so bright. Then I came across burned bodies, all shriveled up. Like little children . . . The heat of the phosphorus bombs had baked them in seconds. They were like dolls. There was one, Kapriel. My God, how can I explain it? She was dead, shrunken, burned by the phosphorus, holding a cage that had melted onto one of her arms. She was lying on her back, her finger pointing up into the air, with a budgie on the end of it, wrinkled and dried up. Can you imagine?

  Then the zebra walked by.

  A bomb must have knocked down one of the walls to its enclosure. I’ll never forget the sight of it galloping through the burning ruins, gripped by panic. Then my coat caught fire. I had to rip it off before I became a human torch. The zebra ran in my direction; I was terrified, rooted to the spot. I could feel its breath on my neck. It seemed cold compared to the air around me, then it neighed and brushed against me as it raced toward the town. It disappeared into a cloud of smoke. I went on looking for Clara for another half hour as the bombs fell. When I went back to the cellar, she was already there. Out of her mind. Shaking. She looked me in the eye and said (I can still remember what she told me above the children’s sobbing):

  “There’s a zebra running through the streets. Everything’s on fire. We’re at war, Magda!”

  Yes, I slapped her a few times, I admit it. Three slaps. You would have done the same! Five years of sirens, air raids, ration cards, and flattened cities, and it took a zebra running through the burning streets of Königsberg for her to realize that Germany was at war. The poor woman. The children cried until the next morning. They found the zebra, dead from fear and exhaustion, a hundred meters from the house. We had heard it still neighing pitifully at dawn.

  We had to take in the Neumann cousins at our house or, I should say, at Wolfgang’s house. They’d lost everything in the air raids. They had nothing left but the clothes on their backs. Wolfgang reappeared a few days later, serious and a little more composed this time. We were all in the main living room along with the Neumanns—there were five of them—plus Anja and the cook, old Frau Meisel. Wolfgang explained that the Red Army was at East Prussia’s door. Clara sobbed. We’d just have to trust in the Wehrmac
ht, he said. The final victory was at hand, but we’d need to resist in the meantime. Nobody believed in the final victory anymore, nobody but children and lunatics. Wolfgang tried to sound reassuring:

  “The Germans have a secret weapon they’ll use to wipe them out at the last moment, just as they’re about to strike.”

  The Neumanns listened politely. They wanted to leave for the West. Not wait for Ivan.

  “My father fought in the Great War,” Herr Neumann said. “We’re better off hanging ourselves before the Russians get their hands on us.”

  “The Russians won’t be getting their hands on anyone!” Wolfgang roared. “Anyone fleeing Königsberg will be accused of treason and will pay the price. Aus!”

  He went back to Gotenhafen, just west of Gdansk, the following morning, leaving us there. The air raids had destroyed almost all of the city center, the castle, the cathedral, Königsberg’s seven bridges, the shops. Seven hundred years of German history reduced to rubble in two nights of bombing. Most of the streets were cluttered with debris. Long convoys of refugees made their way along the roads in ox-drawn carts, people from the East, from Memel, who preferred to flee rather than fall into Russian hands. Trains passed by, cars loaded with mountains of furniture. But we weren’t allowed to flee. Hitler had declared Königsberg an impregnable fortress. Fight to the last. That was our order. The Neumanns were far from convinced. They left in late September, on a cart drawn by two horses. Six hours later, they were back. Frau Neumann was shaking. Along the way, her husband explained, the Wehrmacht had stopped them. The message was clear. Everyone was to stay put.

  “I’m going to have a boy, I’m sure of it,” Tante Clara told me one day.

  She must have been three months pregnant. Then I remembered what Wolfgang had told me about how quinine could bring on an abortion, that I was to be careful not to give any to Tante Clara while she was pregnant. I had no idea how she could envisage bringing a child into the world given the circumstances. Especially when she wasn’t really able to look after the ones she had already . . . Everywhere, word had it that the Red Army—known to everyone simply as Ivan—was at our door. If we were to flee, would we have to leave Tante Clara behind? I think her doctors must have warned her about the dangers of quinine. So I had to slip it to her. It wasn’t easy: quinine has a very bitter taste and there was no sugar to be had in town to mask it. I settled on giving her the poison in tiny doses, in everything she took. In her morning chicory (we’d run out of coffee), her nettle soup at lunchtime (you’ve never had it? It’s a cheap wartime meal), and sprinkled over the turbot fillet she’d eat in the evenings. Slowly, the poison took effect. She lost the child after three days, toward the end of September. I was trying to dig up the last remaining potatoes and onions before the frost came when Anja ran out into the garden. I made an effort to look horrified.