Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  So now that you’re here, the message seems to be, climb down and discover the secret of this place.

  Except that there isn’t any secret. All you discover is that there’s nothing there. Nothing except that the mountain is hollow inside. All that hush-hush mystery up above is to conceal only this: a system of subterranean caverns and galleries. A structure of delusion. A profound, internal void.

  Soon I am approaching the first barrier, with peepholes and openings for guns in the wall. No intruder would have survived. They had supplies to last a hundred years: dried milk powder, champagne, medical supplies, oil, cane sugar, wheat flour, nail varnish, liqueur chocolates, Liebig’s Meat Extract, washing powder, shampoo, gramophone records, canned foods, rice, noodles, the German classics, and everything else you need for life underground.

  They were well-equipped, well-fitted-out, fully prepared. It was pleasant here. Blue-and-white-tiled bathrooms. Wooden paneling on the walls. Oriental rugs. Furnishings like those in the Berghof aboveground. A parallel world, and very comfortable. No sunlight, unfortunately. Hitler wouldn’t have minded. He didn’t usually get up until around the middle of the day in any case, he tried to avoid the sun as much as possible. A mole of a man. He had strictly forbidden his mistress to sunbathe. He thought he could go on reigning underground if need be. A mole state with mole subjects. In the end, he couldn’t see what would be so terrible about that.

  I suddenly notice that I have made my way deep into the labyrinth. I have climbed several levels down. Following signposts pointing to the stores and the rooms for the staff personnel. At some point I find myself standing in front of a brick wall. They don’t let visitors any farther in. An old trick: They never show you the innermost catacombs, the deepest dungeon, the final burial chamber, for fear of admitting that there’s no secret at all. The Nazi hideouts in the Obersalzberg have been cleared and are empty, as everyone knows. Not a water tap, not a light switch, not a nail was left. By the time the Americans came it was all gone. Looting is a job to be carried out fast. It has to be done before you yourself realize what you are doing. Anyone as old as I am remembers that.

  I am seized by a fear that the light might go out suddenly and unexpectedly. Suppose the hotel landlady thinks I’ve left already? I was the only visitor. And how will I find the way back? Luckily I see the arrows on the walls pointing to the exit.

  I look at the time. Just five. Closing time in the bunker? I begin hurrying along the passages and up the steep stairs. I hear heavy breathing, my own. Yet I begin to feel that it is separate from me, a noise like the sound track of a horror film. The echo of my footsteps on the stone stairs adds to the effect.

  When I reach the entrance at the top, I see the hotel landlady in conversation with the young man from Göring Hill. There’s something like mocking recognition in his eyes. As if he knows who I am.

  And then I remember. It’s a trick my memory plays. The same mocking glance. The malicious amusement of the knowing smile: Well, well, so we meet again. Don’t you remember me? I remember you.

  I have been afraid of these remarks all my life. I’ve been in flight from them all my life. They are part of the repertory of my anxiety dreams. Someone pursuing me, catching up with me, someone who can destroy every weapon of self-defense I have with a single sentence: I know who you are.

  I dismiss the memory. I control myself. I know it is this place, its curse, that makes me see things that are merely figures from my nightmares. I ought not to have come.

  Haven’t I carefully learned to forget? Haven’t I trained my faculty of forgetfulness, just as other people train their memory? Haven’t I practiced silence as if it were an art, an art to be perfected like any other?

  Must I learn to talk about it now? Now that the last secret is out, the last veil that lay over the past raised? Now, when news has reached me bringing what happened then in front of my mind’s eye again, before that eye closes forever and no one knows any more about it?

  You go a little way down the road and then turn left for Hitler’s Berghof, says the woman.

  Thank you, I say.

  I hadn’t asked her. I know the way to the Berghof.

  NINETEEN FIFTY-TWO WAS A GOOD YEAR FOR ME. The past was long enough ago to be over, and the future began with an engagement to be married, a common phenomenon at the time.

  Dark-haired, tall, a motorcyclist, handsome—the man was a prime catch. A medical student. On course for a future career as a specialist. Just imagine how comfortable, successful, replete with prosperity his life would be. I’d been very lucky.

  Good-looking young men intact in mind and body were rare commodities at the time. And even all the one-armed men, those who had suffered head injuries, the wheelchair-bound, the blind, and those who had had a piece of their minds shot away, they could all find wives. All of us had to be nurses in our own way at the time, in a world full of women whose task was to soothe, heal, and comfort. The nursing profession was highly regarded, and I had taken it up myself instead of continuing to study physics. I wanted to be like everyone else. I didn’t want to be noticed. I didn’t want to be special in any way.

  And my success showed how right I was. I was getting engaged to a future doctor. What more could anyone ask a few years after the end of the war? It didn’t even bother him much that I wasn’t a virgin. I told him that my virginity had been a parting gift to a fellow pupil, motivated by a premonition that he wouldn’t come back. He was generous enough to understand. I might perhaps tell him the truth much later, once we were married.

  I went to Wiesbaden with him, and he introduced me to his parents. They owned a cigar shop near the station and lived above it. Their flat occupied the whole second floor, and the building had suffered almost no damage. That sounds modest enough today, but at the time it was a dream—an almost intact postwar existence. The building where they lived had been spared, and so had their only son. They gave the impression that it had something to do with their own upright character, and the worst threat to their existence seemed to be summed up in the idea of compensation for those who had suffered in the war. They spoke of such compensation with nothing but agitated and quivering indignation.

  The second worst threat was probably me. The forthcoming “official” engagement was spoken of as something inevitable, to be accepted whether they liked it or not if there was no alternative. My future mother-in-law, thin-lipped, addressed me by the familiar du pronoun. Of course we slept apart in their flat, my future fiancé in the living room, I in the bed where he had spent the nights of his adolescence. We hardly dared look at each other.

  Then a significant day came: They asked us out to dinner, to a restaurant with a view of the water-meadows on the banks of the Rhine. It was an evening in July, summery and mild. We sat out on the hotel terrace, and it was so firmly impressed upon me how unusual an occasion this was, and how grateful we should be to my future father-in-law for his generosity, that I knew I mustn’t order anything expensive from the menu, and I decided on meat broth with an egg garnish.

  And for the main course? asks the waiter.

  The waiters even wore white jackets here.

  The young lady only wants the soup, didn’t you hear? says my fiancé’s mother, casting me a glance in which I think I see a trace of approval for the first time.

  But all the same I notice that something is not quite right. The waiter is staring at me.

  Young man, says my future father-in-law, what’s the matter with you? I asked if asparagus was still available.

  Well, well, says the waiter. So we meet again.

  It’s me he means.

  Don’t you remember? he says. We met at the Hotel Platterhof. The Obersalzberg. A few years ago, right? Don’t you remember me?

  No, I say, I’m sorry. I can’t think that we ever met before.

  My apologies, says the waiter. I must have made a mistake.

  He bows slightly, smooth as an eel, odious.

  Asparagus? he asks. No, sir, no asp
aragus left in July. But I can recommend some nice tender French beans with the rump steak.

  I do remember him, very well. I remember the zeal with which he escorted us to our table. Please sit down, gnädiges Fräulein . Of course, gnädiges Fräulein, naturally. His obsequious manner. The scorn and contempt he seemed to conceal behind it.

  The Obersalzberg? What’s all this about? asks the cigar-shop proprietor when the waiter has moved away again. What would you have had to do with Hitler?

  Reinhard, says his wife to her son, sternly, Reinhard, have you been keeping something from us?

  I feel the inner circle of the family closing again, a circle that had only just hesitantly opened to let me in. Now I’m shut outside.

  No, I say. He doesn’t know anything about it.

  So I explain what I was doing on the Obersalzberg. Why I was there. Who wanted me there. And why I stayed.

  I had meant to tell my fiancé at some point or other. Some time when we were entirely on our own and wouldn’t be disturbed. He could have asked me more questions about myself earlier, too. Where do you come from? What were you doing while I was in the army? He never did. I didn’t know much about him either. I knew nothing about the two years he had spent in an English POW camp. Nothing about the time before that. It was as if there were a general prohibition against turning to look back. The cities burned behind us, the wounded screamed, the damned shouted curses at us, Sodom and Gomorrah, the judgment on the cities of the plain— and we stared fixedly ahead, determined to escape into a future where we would be saved. We didn’t want to be turned into pillars of salt.

  I never understood the story of Lot’s wife. I mean, she was the one who deserved to live. Memory and compassion. Emotion and perception. Do you have to abandon all those if you want to get away? How long is it before you can bear to look back? Someone has to be able to say what happened. Now. Is it long enough ago now for me to turn back slowly, and say what I see? But will anyone still listen to me?

  When the waiter returns I rise and go to the ladies’ room. I can hear him asking whether he should keep the soup hot for me.

  Don’t bother, says the cigar-shop owner.

  When I return to the table I hope for a moment that my fiancé will get up and come toward me, perhaps even put his arm around me. But he is sitting with his head bent over his plate, just like his parents. So at least I can pronounce sentence on myself: We’re not engaged any longer.

  Was there something the matter with it? asks the waiter, taking my untouched soup away.

  I have remembered his name, Heinz.

  (Your favorite table, gnädiges Fräulein. And would gnädiges Fräulein like the usual to drink?

  Yes, the usual. Thank you, Heinz.)

  No, it was fine, I say.

  A little later I am on my way to the station carrying my suitcase. I have turned down the offer of an escort. No good-byes. No explanation. Nothing.

  Now I know that I must never, never talk about it.

  ONLY ONCE, a few years later, am I to break that commandment. I shall close my eyes, turn my face away, and speak of it clearly, but almost tonelessly, as if it were a confession forced out of me.

  What did you say? he will ask, the man I would like to love me still if possible.

  I shall repeat what I said. And he will take my head between his hands, and I shall keep my eyes closed and wait for what comes next.

  We’ll never mention it again, he will say. Not a word to anyone, ever. Is that clear?

  And only then will he kiss me. And I shall think that I’ve been lucky with him. I shall tell myself I can’t expect any more. He has passed the test for which he gets me as his prize. That’s more than I could hope for.

  And I stick to his one condition, even if I sometimes still dream of being loved unconditionally. But that’s an impossible, foolish wish for someone like me. Would he stand up for me? Would he be my knight in shining armor if people knew all about me? At times I feel almost tempted to betray myself, just to put him to the test. That small stipulation in our marriage contributes to its difficulties. We shall never discuss it, even in the silence of the bedroom. He will never ask me what it was like. And if I ever, for instance in front of the children, make the slightest reference to it, in so coded a way that only he and I can know what I mean and the children don’t even guess what I am talking about, I shall see his face flush dark red with anger, and know that I could make him hate me.

  So only after his death, when my children are long since grown up, shall I tell them about it, and they will tell me that they knew.

  But how can you? I shall ask. We never mentioned it.

  Exactly, they will say, looking past me as if it didn’t matter.

  Obviously this is how family secrets get passed on.

  And there are the old photographs up in the attic. He even saw Hitler in one of the photos, says my son.

  But why did you never ask me about it? I say.

  We didn’t think it was all that important, says my daughter.

  Oh, I say. Have you mentioned it to anyone else?

  Why should we? says my son. Everybody’s got photographs like that in the attic.

  And suddenly I realize how much time has passed. It will be as if I had spent a hundred years inside the Berg, in the deepest dungeons, the lavishly equipped bunkers under the mountain, in that bewitched, accursed, parallel world without daylight, where a single night is like a hundred years, and a hundred years seems like a single night. It will be as if I had only just climbed out to see how the world had changed in the interval. Children grow up; there they stand, looking at you as if you were a ghost from the past.

  And I shall not know what to say to them. How am I to explain what it meant when a phone call came for me from Berchtesgaden one day?

  CHAPTER 1

  THE TRAINS WERE STILL RUNNING IN THE SUMMER of 1944. I even had a reservation, which proved to some degree superfluous, since the closer the train came to Munich the emptier it was. Not many people wanted to go into the cities at that time. They wanted to get out. As far away from the bombs as possible.

  But I wanted to go in. I knew very well that I was going to survive; at the age of twenty everyone is sure of surviving. It was a great promise, a promise made to me, a most-favored-person clause in the contract of life. Something told me that of any two possibilities, the better must always be intended for me. Sometimes I was quite surprised to have come into the world a girl, as if in that other world before birth there had been a version of myself who failed to pay attention just for a moment, and now had to get by as best she could with being born a woman.

  In fact, being born a woman was a considerably healthier prospect at the time. Of the twenty-two boys in my class who had taken the school-leaving exam with me a year ago, ten were already dead, and the litany of their names, a monotonous chant now running in time to the rhythm of the train passing over the sleepers, came into my mind of its own accord and almost unremittingly: Hans, Waldemar, Wilhelm, Klaus, Otto, Wilhelm the second, Ernst-Günther, Rudolf, Walter, Max . . .

  I suppose they, too, had firmly believed themselves fundamentally invulnerable. Or would they have marched when the order came to march, would they have run when they were told to run—into the gunfire, into ambushes, into minefields? Wouldn’t they have dug themselves in like foxes, coming out again only when it was all over? Hans, Waldemar, Wilhelm, Klaus, Otto, Wilhelm the second, Ernst-Günther, Rudolf, Walter, Max . . . Not one of them would have known the knack of dying.

  When the first bad news began to arrive, pages of death notices in the Jena newspaper inserted by parents describing their pain as “grief and pride,” only occasionally revealing the unutterable depths of misery that had afflicted them—“Our dear big boy,” they might say, or “Our only child, loved above all else,” and then a name that brought back to me all the remembered atmosphere of summer afternoons on the bathing beach or at dancing class—when such news came I had walked aimlessly through the woods f
or hours on end. The wind ruffled my hair, night came on. I wanted to be close to them, to feel what it’s like to be out of doors, without shelter, and with no chance of going home. I began to hear their voices whispering, as if they were in the middle of some old, familiar scouting game to be played only by the dead and those destined to die. I tried to imagine the moment when you assent to your fate. It must come only just before death, I thought. I intended to spend a night in the wood, freezing cold as my friends had been. But then I went home to bed after all.

  Hans, Waldemar, Wilhelm, Klaus, Otto, Wilhelm the second, Ernst-Günther, Rudolf, Walter, Max . . . The staccato rattle of the train going over the railway sleepers was a hollow, ominous accompaniment to that chant. A distant, unreal corps of drummers. It seemed to grow louder as the journey went on, as if something unavoidable were approaching. It had accompanied them, too, on their way east.

  Ernst-Günther was my boyfriend. When the news that he had fallen came I locked myself in my room to cry. But all I really felt was enormous anger to think that he had died before we ever really did it. I think most of those boys hadn’t done it yet. Max might have. Maybe Rudolf. Just possibly Waldemar. Ernst-Günther? If he’d ever done it, it would certainly have been with me. It simply wasn’t fair to let them die before they really knew what it was like.

  I was sorry now that we hadn’t been engaged. If we’d been engaged I might have done it. I probably would have done it. I blamed myself for not being more in love with him. Now that he was dead it wouldn’t have matter if I’d pledged mad, undying love for him. We’d known each other so long. Since primary school. Perhaps it was because I’d really always imagined doing it for the first time with another man some day.

  Nonetheless, I still wanted to make Ernst-Günther a present of myself somehow or other, so I went to see his parents and told them we’d been secretly engaged, we hadn’t told them only because we knew they thought we were too young, but later on we’d certainly have married and set up house together and all that.