Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  The young woman gets up from her deck chair now and turns to the rather older woman who has joined her.

  I don’t want to go in the least, Eva, she says. I’d rather stay here with you.

  But you must, says the older woman. The chauffeur’s waiting. Your suitcase is in the car. You’ll be back in a few days’ time.

  Goodness, do you want to get rid of me? asks the young woman. I wonder why?

  She means to sound lighthearted, but it’s easy to see that she is unsure of herself.

  Don’t make jokes, says Eva. Give Gretl my love, and mind you behave! Listen, it’s all men there, they’ll try to turn your head. I don’t want any complaints—don’t forget you’re upholding the honor of our family, so watch your step, understand?

  When she’s in the car, turning back once more to look at her cousin, she sees her racing up the great flight of steps at top speed, as if expecting something that she absolutely must not miss.

  She really did want to get rid of me, thinks the young woman.

  It’s a longer drive than she had expected, and when they reach Zell am See her chauffeur has to ask the way to Schloss Fischhorn, which comes into sight only a little farther on, at the southern end of the lake and to the left of the road to Bruck.

  She had imagined something Austrian and Baroque in nature, something lighthearted in the Habsburg style. A little lakeside castle, Eva had said, which suggested pastel colors, Mozartian merriment.

  But what she actually sees is a darkly forbidding citadel of gray stone rising above the valley. It could have been formed out of the dreams of men who regard themselves as invincible. That’s how they want the world. They want it the way you see it from the castle tower: land tilled and cultivated for them, land governed by them, land over which they hold sway from such citadels as this—stern, fortified, pitiless. These are men born a few hundred years too late, soon to be swept away, but over the distance of the light-years they look as if they had settled within these walls forever. As if they were masters not only of the Salzach valley, of the Pinzgau, but lords of the whole world, that’s what it looks like.

  The guards at the lower gatehouse wave the car through, and the young woman is let out at the bottom of the stone steps up to the main castle gateway. There she stands, slightly dazed from the drive over winding roads, which made her feel sick several times. Low clouds hang over the valley. A fine drizzle is falling.

  She fills her lungs with a deep breath, trying to stabilize her circulation. She looks up at the walls and the tall lead-glazed windows, wondering what awaits her behind them. She would give a good deal to be able to get back into the car and return to where she came from. This is the way a new pupil stands outside an old and venerable boarding school, hesitating to go in. The well-tended turf, the landscaped park extending over gently hilly terrain, with old trees and carefully clipped brushes, it all fits this interpretation of her situation, and so does the riding school exercise ground that can be made out from here, the silhouettes of riders trotting in harmony, the stable buildings stretching out along the hillside.

  Come along, says the chauffeur.

  At least he carries her suitcase for her. Two uniformed men emerge from the castle gateway to meet them. Her chauffeur, who wears the same uniform, comes to some understanding with them. She can’t follow exactly what they are saying. He hands over her suitcase, and if she is not much mistaken he is handing her over, too. He goes back to the car without any good-bye.

  This way, please, say the two men, indicating that she is to go first.

  When she steps inside the tall entrance hall, paneled in dark, almost black wood, the only familiar feature greeting her is the big black swastika on its red and white banner on the wall. Of the various doors standing open, from which a babble of male voices reaches her, she chooses the largest, a double door. She looks around before going through the doorway, but cannot see the two men with her suitcase. Young men in uniform pass her now and then, carrying trays with bottles and glasses and ashtrays, although she cannot see where they are coming from and where they are going.

  The room into which she hesitantly ventures, almost expecting someone to turn her back, suggests a hall in a hunting lodge, its walls densely covered with trophies and pictures of the chase, crossed spears over the fireplace framing the head of a wild boar with huge, straight tusks as if they were rammed into its invisible flanks. The benches running down the longer walls of the room, as if in a chapterhouse, are unoccupied. The men are standing around the room in groups, smoking cigarettes, brandy glasses in their hands, deep in conversations of muted agitation. The scene is more like a kind of interlude than anything else, the sort you might see during a break in a political congress, where the participants debate with each other in galleries and corridors, in anterooms, forming groups as if by chance to negotiate the real subject of the conference. Their eyes pass over the young woman and look away from her again, as if they had noticed her only inadvertently.

  She goes through a door that would usually be concealed but is standing ajar, and enters a kind of game room. A billiard table stands in the middle of it, surrounded by several men, once again smoking and commenting on the frame being played by two older men. One of them has a limp. Nonetheless, he moves around the table with remarkable agility, his stiff leg tapping out a syncopated rhythm on the wooden floor. He is the player dictating the course of the game, holding the spectators spellbound. There’s no doubt that he is in charge at this table.

  She need not fear being noticed here, and makes her way across the room like a dreamer looking for the way out of this false reality. She stops by one of the poker tables and lightheartedly picks up the cards. She can already feel the satisfaction of invisible spirits roaming reality, giving off just a few sparks to show they’re really there. When she puts the stack of cards down again they change position. Something shifts, the pack fans out, the top card presents itself to her line of vision.

  As if this were the signal recalling her abruptly to reality, she suddenly hears the footsteps of the man with the limp behind her.

  So what are we doing here, young lady?

  All at once there she is in person, highly visible, the card still in her hand. As she quickly puts it back, the man with the limp can see for himself what she, too, has seen. The image is burned into her memory for all time. It is the Hanged Man; she knows about the tarot pack, and that this is one of the twenty-two great arcana. Except that he is hung up not by his feet but by his neck, from a piece of wire that has dug deep into the flesh. The hook from which he is hanging, an abattoir hook, a butcher’s hook, rises above his head like a question mark, replacing the aureole around the Hanged Man in the tarot pack. She wonders, but only briefly, why they are playing with photographs instead of ordinary cards here.

  Times of trial, she thinks automatically. Caution. Danger somewhere close. She knows the meanings of the cards. A neighbor in Jena once dealt out the tarot pack for her. It’s a game, she thought, only a game, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything. But she knows that here and now she cannot rely on the borders of reality.

  You’re expected, as far as I know, says the man with the limp. Not here, though. The ladies are up on the second floor. Didn’t anyone tell you?

  No, she says. I don’t know my way around here at all.

  Well, you’ll soon learn, says the man with the limp, and it suddenly sounds like a threat. Now she sees that she is in the center of a circle, surrounded by men. Their faces express an interest in her, although she does not really understand why, and it seems a moment too long before they step aside to let her through. When she leaves the room she has a feeling that they are sitting in judgment on her. She hasn’t the faintest idea what the verdict may be.

  Going upstairs to the second floor, she reaches a broad corridor full of chests and heavy Renaissance cupboards. She can’t imagine what is kept here. Why in the world would anyone need so many cupboards? The doors along the corridor on both sides are clos
ed. Should she knock? Or should she open them and walk in? Neither idea seems right. The loud creak of the floorboards under her feet makes her feel awkward. It also prevents her from making full use of the only one of her senses which is helpful at the moment. She tries finding her way by sound. She thinks she can hear voices behind the doors.

  All the same, she decides to turn around, and reaches a wing of the building with an open door at the end, leading into a room. After the gloom that has surrounded her since her arrival, this room seems flooded with light and air. For that reason alone it attracts her. And now she can hear the laughter coming out of it. Women’s laughter.

  The two women are sitting on a tall four-poster bed covered with rugs, a four-poster with a wine-red canopy, and one of them is her cousin Gretl.

  There you are at last! cries Gretl. We were waiting for you.

  She pats the bed beside her as if the new arrival were a dog she is inviting to jump up and join her.

  Make yourself at home, she says. This is Frau Höss.

  The name means nothing to the new arrival. She doesn’t know it. She won’t even remember it. Only a kind of faint echo of the name will stick in her memory, clinging there with little barbed hooks, and she will suddenly feel them years later at a chance touch, when she is unable to remove them. Where did I hear that name before? she will think at that later time, seeing a black-haired woman under a wine-red canopy, looking at her with an expression that seems to say: You see, you’ll be one of us, too!

  She remains standing.

  Sit down, do, says Gretl.

  She rests her buttocks on the edge of the bed, but is still really on her feet, since it is so high and she is so short that if she sat down she would lose contact with the ground, which she is reluctant to do. During the days she is to spend at Schloss Fischhorn, she will not succeed in relaxing even for a few moments. There will always be something about the place to make her feel she should be on her guard, and never again will she leave any place as happily as she left that castle.

  How’s Eva? Gretl asks her. Is she feeling calmer now?

  Yet she knows perfectly well that the two sisters telephone each other daily. Each of them always knows how the other is. Among other things, the new arrival has to discover that when questions are asked the answers do not matter. Not in this place. It is one of the lessons she is taught promptly in swift succession.

  Vinegar? says Frau Höss

  She appears to be picking up the thread of a conversation interrupted by the young woman’s arrival.

  Cider vinegar, says Gretl, a glass a day.

  You drink it? asks Frau Höss.

  What else? says Gretl.

  I was only thinking, says Frau Höss.

  One’s not meant to think, says Gretl. Thinking makes you ugly. Cider vinegar makes you beautiful.

  The new arrival’s sense of not knowing the rules here grows stronger. Except for her, they all seem to know what is going on and what regulations you have to observe so as not to make yourself conspicuous.

  I don’t know where my suitcase is, she interjects.

  Oh, don’t worry, says Gretl, nothing goes missing here.

  Thereupon she turns back to the black-haired woman. The young woman thinks the two of them look like bosom friends from whose pact of intimacy she is excluded. Later she will learn from Gretl that they met only at lunch that day, and have no idea what to make of each other.

  Oh, I’m so glad you’re here, Gretl will assure her.

  But without Eva she is curiously distant to her cousin. After copious assurances that it’s just so wonderful for them to have each other, nothing more will come of it.

  Nonetheless, Gretl helps her to find her way around the labyrinth of suites of rooms and corridors and locate her room on the top floor, where her suitcase is on the bed. She wonders who occupies the other bedrooms. Except for the chambermaid, she will never see anyone in the corridor, and she isn’t sure which would be worse: to be all on her own up here, or to have complete strangers just the other side of both her bedroom walls.

  In the night, she will hear voices. The sound of booted footsteps. The creaking of a door. If this castle were inhabited by ghosts, that is just what it would sound like.

  That afternoon they have arranged for her to go for a walk with Gretl. She waits for her in the entrance hall. She has had nothing to eat since breakfast on the Obersalzberg, but she doesn’t dare ask for one of the pieces of cake she sees carried past her now and then. Once again, she gets the feeling that she is invisible, and if she isn’t invisible then she ought to be, as if the director of this drama had not foreseen her presence here.

  Undecided, she looks at the suits of armor standing around the walls while Gretl keeps her waiting. Gretl is one of those women who are never punctual.

  She suddenly thinks she sees the living eyes of alert and suspicious warriors looking at her from behind the closed visors. Going up to them, she tries to see behind the iron masks, looking far in, into the very depths of the souls once enclosed there, souls that had to escape through the slits and hinges of the helmets, or perhaps were obliged to stay inside them and watch what went on around them, unredeemed, full of a mad blood lust, full of a desire to avenge their own death agonies, full of an uncontrollable craving to be part of life and present in it still.

  Just as, having lost her timidity now, she is putting a hand out to one of the visors and trying to raise it, the eyes of the knight in armor suddenly flash. She flinches back, and a reproachful, indignant, metallic sound comes from him. He sways on his plinth, and for a moment she fears he is about to fall on her. She knows at once that she has gone too far, and already she can hear footsteps hurrying up, and a woman’s cross, angry voice:

  Whatever are you doing? Don’t you know not to touch things here?

  I’m sorry, she says.

  She can’t explain to this woman why she was so startled. Only later will she be able to account for it by thinking that just as she was raising the visor the clouds outside parted, and a ray of afternoon sun shone through and glanced off the helmet as it moved.

  I do apologize, she says.

  The woman, approaching her with a click-clack of high heels, is no taller than she is, and has the plump, coffeepot shape of many women over fifty. She wears her iron-gray hair pinned up in a wreath on top of her head. Everything about her is rounded, apple-shaped, including her face, everything is full and firm, her tubby figure squeezed into a tight-fitting, almost ankle-length black dress that reveals all the outlines of her body. The feet under its hem are surprisingly small, and her small shoes so delicate that you wonder how they can carry the weight of that body so nimbly.

  At the moment when she reaches the young woman Gretl finally arrives.

  Mama, she says, emphasizing the second syllable, this is Marlene. You remember.

  She speaks in a tone of voice indicative of earlier discussions. Well, she’s here now, Gretl’s tone of voice indicates, and you can’t do anything about it.

  She ought not to be touching things, says Mama. Have you met my son yet? she asks by way of a greeting.

  No, says the young woman.

  Find your husband, Mama orders, and as Gretl immediately sets off she adds: And don’t forget he doesn’t hear well!

  I know, Mama, says Gretl.

  Poor boy, says Mama Fegelein, turning to the young woman. Did you know he sacrificed his eardrum to the Führer? He was standing right beside him when the bomb went off. It’s always the best who bear the brunt of it. That’s life. And as for the Führer—no, unthinkable. It injured his eardrum. In my view those criminals ought to be wiped off the face of the earth. What do you say? Men who think so little of human life! If you ask me the death penalty’s too good for such scum. Ah, here comes my boy! The Führer’s sent him home for a few days to recuperate from his terrible experience. I can tell you, the Führer’s like a father to him. Well, he has no children himself. I always knew something great would come of my boy. A moth
er senses these things, believe you me.

  As the young woman watches him approach, followed by Gretl a few steps behind, she looks for some mark, some distinguishing feature to allow her to recognize Hermann Fegelein again among all the other SS officers.

  He looks remarkably handsome. As do they all.

  He is so tall that in other company he would tower above most of the men, but not here.

  He has a bored, haughty expression on his face. Just like the rest of them.

  So she will know him again only from the fact that Gretl keeps her conjugal gaze bent on him, a gaze in which anxious skepticism mingles with a frenetic willingness to agree to anything at all. Among all the men here, he is the magnet attracting Gretl’s eyes.

  And his mother’s eyes, which are without any skepticism whatsoever.

  This is Gretl’s cousin, she shouts in his ear.

  He looks at her with complete indifference.

  Take care of her, he tells his mother sternly. It sounds like an order of some magnitude, curiously enough intended not for Gretl but for his mother. The task is apparently of such import that her husband thinks it will be beyond Gretl’s capacities and sense of responsibility. As a result, Mama Fegelein attaches herself to the two cousins on their walk in the park and does not move from their side all evening, or over the next few days.

  Do you ride? she asks at supper, which the ladies take separately from the gentlemen in what is called the breakfast salon. Besides Mama Fegelein, Gretl, and Frau Höss there is a girl of twelve present; the young woman cannot work out whose daughter she is. She has been trying for some time to understand who they are talking about around the table: Paladin. October. Semiramis. These persons are discussed with great warmth and intimate knowledge. Then she realizes that they are horses.

  No, I don’t ride, she replies.