Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  Take no notice, says Schorsch. It’s only a nuisance raid. They’ll move away soon. And if they’re making for Perlach and Harlaching again we won’t get hit anyway.

  Eva fetches another bottle from the kitchen. The first explosion comes at the same time as the pop of the champagne cork.

  No need to go so pale, little one, says Eva. That was miles away.

  Mitzi says: I’d really love a good night’s sleep for once. Those Yankee bastards are just trying to soften us up. Sleep deprivation, that’s their game. But they won’t do it, not with us. It’s a notorious method of torture, did you know? Cheers! That’s what I say. Cheers, you Yankee bastards up there! I hope you die horribly!

  As she lifts her glass to the ceiling the whole house suddenly shakes. The china in the cupboards clinks, and Hitler’s Little Church in Asam falls off the wall. It’s a sketch he gave Eva, and is of mainly financial value to her. Art by the Führer, she has told me more than once, will be worth a fortune in twenty years’ time. “My old-age pension,” she calls the little picture.

  I hear something whistling.

  That’s very loud, I say.

  If you can hear them whistling they’ll come down somewhere else, says Schorsch.

  Suddenly there is a mighty, penetrating howl from somewhere very close, a terrible crashing sound—I don’t know how we get down to the cellar. We have to unlock the door to the air-raid shelter first, but luckily the key is hanging from a hook right beside it.

  When it closes behind us, Schorsch says: Damn it, I left the bottle upstairs. Do you have anything to drink down here?

  Oh, do be quiet just for once, says Kathi, his wife.

  The little air-raid shelter is meant to take four people. There are six of us. There are two folding seats against each wall, and we sit crammed together on them.

  They just won’t give up! They keep on coming and coming, trying to kill us again and again! The loud crescendo of the engines dropping from the sky toward us. The whistling, howling, crashing all around. Our little ark, with us inside it, is drifting in the middle of all this racket.

  I look at the faces of Mandi and Schorsch, of Mitzi, Kathi, and Eva, oblivious of themselves, carried away, concentrating entirely on the precious, irreplaceable life within them. Danger places us all on the same level. Whether we like each other or not makes no difference now. As if in a vision, I see us with the eyes through which the gods may view us, examples of a species sharing the common fate of mortality, wanderers between worlds here in this room, a waiting room of death, like every room in which we ever find ourselves. I see it now with eyes unsealed by fear. There is no arrogance in such a gaze, rather the opposite. No one can be humbler than people in a bunker during an air raid. I read in the wide eyes of the others that they know it, too. If eternity is just beginning, then it is beginning now. We don’t know for certain whether we are still on this side of the grave. We have lost our sense of time. Have we been down here several hours or only a few minutes? There are no intervals, no measurements of time amid the roar of destruction. It is total.

  When the all-clear sounds at about twenty to eleven, we sit there motionless for a moment, like passengers in an aircraft that has just landed. Then we slip back into our old roles as if into a familiar garment.

  From the terrace we see fires burning all around. They are brightest on the other side of the Isar, over near the railway station. Next day we shall discover that the worst of the raid was around the food market, and Eva will never get her pale mauve suit now. But flames are flickering up very close to us, too, and smoke rises to the night sky. We can hear the noise of the fire engines now, of rushing water, calling, shouting. Of the men in our party, Mandi has gone off to help with extinguishing the fires at the first note of the all-clear. Schorsch goes on drinking where he left off before the raid.

  Come on, says Kathi, come on, Schorschi, let’s go to bed.

  Oh Lord, says Schorsch. If our bed’s still standing.

  You can leave out the jokes, says Kathi.

  It was a nice evening, she tells Eva, honestly, darling. But tell your Führer we’ve had enough now. Right, Schorsch? You tell him that.

  I will, says Eva.

  But don’t say anything about us, says Schorsch. I’m not a defeatist.

  Of course not, says Eva wearily. I won’t say anything about you.

  Honestly, says Kathi, when I tell Schorsch we’ve had enough, then we’ve had enough. Right, Schorschi?

  Right, or I’ll catch it, won’t I? says Schorsch. I’m not saying just what I’ll catch, though.

  Bastard, says Kathi.

  She puts her arm around his waist, and he leans heavily on her shoulders.

  Let’s go, says Schorsch.

  They move away and out into the night, swaying slightly, making straight for the smoke and the flickering firelight in which the outlines of people running can be seen at the end of the street, and fire engines at the road junction, a platform truck, ladders. A young woman in an unbuttoned coat with nothing underneath but a petticoat is running toward them, both hands pressed to her temples. She stops, turns around again, runs in the other direction, a prey to distraction.

  In the morning we can still see the pillars of smoke, rising black into the gray December sky.

  Beppo was going to come yesterday evening.

  Beppo, she tells me, lost an arm at El-Alamein in 1942. But even with only one arm Beppo’s an amusing sort. He used to be a good dancer; there was no one to equal him. He was Ilse’s favorite partner in dancing class, and Eva herself knows no one can dance like Beppo. He doesn’t want to dance anymore these days. He says your body feels quite different when you have only one arm instead of two. But it’s only his left arm missing, says Eva. It makes no difference to her. The only thing is that she has to lead him with her right arm when they dance. Beppo says he feels as if he were holding a dancing partner made of air in his missing left arm. He can’t describe it, he says. And you feel pretty silly buttering bread with only one hand, not to mention doing various other things. The right hand knows what the left hand does, and if the left hand isn’t there anymore then the right hand doesn’t know what to do. Since he lost his arm Beppo has been living with his mother in Böhmerwaldplatz. But Beppo never misses seeing Eva when she comes to Munich.

  After breakfast we walk to Böhmerwaldplatz. It is in the direction of the pillars of smoke. The smell of burning intensifies as we come closer. From a distance, it is reminiscent of smoldering autumn bonfires. But we soon plunge deeper into yellowish-gray fumes, which envelop us like fog, lying heavy on our lungs. We try not to cough. We hold handkerchiefs to our mouths. When we turn in to Böhmerwaldplatz the sky above us grows darker. People are moving through a shadowy underworld. We can’t see if any buildings are still standing behind the facades. This is no longer a habitable world, and never will be again.

  A man wearing the NSV armband of the Volkswohlfahrt, the public welfare organization, runs toward us waving his arms about. Get back! he shouts. The next moment a facade collapses in a cloud of rubble and dust. We stand there looking at it. As the dust slowly settles the ruin is revealed, dramatic, solemn, emerging from the haze: a doorframe, a section of wall with a hole where the window used to be, and a scrap of torn curtain blowing behind it.

  A woman shouts: Roswithaaa . . . A couple of NSV men run toward the fallen wall and start digging in the rubble. Then they carry something to the ambulance standing on the other side of the square. Roswithaaa! cries the woman.

  Other women are carrying buckets up in pairs. In their flowered dresses, checkered aprons, bright headscarves they still seem to belong to the world that ended last night. The water they are carrying is like a single drop on a hot stone. Still, a man keeps tirelessly tipping it through a window; flames flare up behind the window, and smoke rises now and then.

  You can’t go any farther, says one of the NSV men, this place is in danger of collapsing! Spreading out his arms, he forces us back.

 
; We’re only going there, says Eva, pointing to the middle of the square, where various items are lying. I assume they are mattresses and parts of beds saved from the burning buildings.

  Are you family of anyone here? asks the man from the National Socialist welfare organization.

  Friends, says Eva.

  All right, says the man. But keep well away from those buildings.

  As we make our way through the ruins lying all around, a strange smell that I cannot identify grows stronger. An entirely impossible thought shoots through my head: How, I wonder, can anyone be roasting meat here and now? But there is nothing I wouldn’t be prepared to consider possible at this moment. I am new to Hell. Everyone except me knows what’s going on. They move through the inferno as surefooted as ghosts. I follow Eva, who is making purposefully for the middle of the square, where an empty truck has just arrived.

  I look at the dead. They have been laid side by side on the paving stones, like the kill after a hunt, thirty or forty of them. They are the first corpses I have ever seen in my life. They are disfigured. Many were burning when they died. Others died with their heads, their torsos, a leg torn away. A woman is clutching her baby. They died together. The fire has made a Madonna and Child of them, a statue with a surface resembling dark-stained wood. The woman looks like a death’s head; the flesh has shriveled back from her teeth in the fire.

  Looking for anyone? asks a man from the truck.

  A man who’s lost an arm, says Eva.

  Oh, plenty of people have lost bits of themselves, says the man. That’s why we put them here. When we find something we look around to see whose it is. You’ll have to hurry. I’m about to load up the complete ones.

  Beppo, says Eva, stopping in front of one of the corpses.

  He is one of those who have not burned and whose heads are still in their proper places. Beppo is not disfigured, he even looks happy, as if he had been dancing with an airy partner to the very last.

  Well, if you say he only had one arm already, I can take him with the others, says the truck driver, and when he loads up the dead of Böhmerwaldplatz he starts with Beppo.

  Let’s go home, says Eva on the way back.

  Home?

  To the Berg.

  Where else was I still at home now?

  FESTIVE TABLES ARE LAID in the dining hall of the Hotel Platterhof for the big SS Christmas party. The Christmas tree reaches to the ceiling. It is decorated with tinsel and silver balls like German Christmas trees everywhere.

  At this time there are no fashions in Christmas trees yet, no special designs and themes for them. They won’t be introduced until the fifties, when I shall surprise my family with a new creation every year. I shall begin with a tree of gold tinsel. It will be followed by a tree decorated with wooden figures, a tree decorated with straw stars, then my red-apple tree, until at some point I get to the all-violet tree—violet candles, violet glass balls tied on with violet taffeta bows. The blue spruce that supersedes the Norway spruce will itself go out of fashion, pines and Douglas firs will come in.

  One day I shall wonder where this search of mine for new ideas is leading, and I shall remember a poorly lit street, or rather a street that wasn’t lit at all: I was standing in the dark in front of a shop window, with nothing on display but a few bottles of eau de cologne, and decorated with some silver tinsel on a fir branch. I read the words Johann Maria Farina, Glockengasse . . . Glockengasse, Bell Street. The words themselves have a silvery, Christmasy sound, extraordinarily musical and magical. Something touched me and cast a spell over me once and for all, and it was to fill me with sufficient Christmas spirit for the rest of my life. I would only have to conjure up that picture: the dark street, the little shop window lit faintly from within, the turquoise packaging, the branch of fir, the ornate characters of the script. I can tell, from the surrounding darkness, that it must have been in wartime, and suddenly I know how intense, how irresistible, how once-and-for-all Christmas was at the time. The memory of it has something of the same heartrending enchantment as the memory of an early love.

  And perhaps that was because love did come into it. Although it was a love that had nothing really to do with love itself but with fear, with confusion, with inner conflict, with a sense that I was ruined forever, not morally, but ruined for the life I would otherwise have lived.

  It began with the big Christmas party at the Platterhof. Oh, the terrible charm of a Nazi Christmas! Outside, the dark world bristling with weapons and our enemies, and here inside, in our world of tinsel-decked fir trees, we are crowding close, warmed, enveloped by all the scents of Christmas. It was beautiful. At the back of the hall, on a large, dark, handwoven tapestry, a picture of Adolf Hitler was flanked to right and left by two swastikas, the great Christmas tree stood a little way in front of it, and the piano to accompany the singing was at one side of the room.

  Each of the men got a special Christmas platter: fancy biscuits, cinnamon stars, and a packet of cigarettes set out on white paper napkins decorated with sprigs of evergreen, so that gradually cigarette smoke was superimposed on the Christmas scents, mingling with them and with the smell of leather and masculine sweat to create something that brought tears to their eyes when the first chord was struck:

  Germany, sacred name, they sang, ours for eternity, down through the ages the same, dearest land, blessings on thee . . .

  And they sang: I had a friend, a comrade true . . .

  And when the commander had finished his speech, which dwelt on the darkness that would bring forth light, and the winter solstice that was like a turn in the fortunes of the international struggle facing us—Germany is going through its winter night, he said, to emerge all the more glorious in the end—and when the men felt they were sitting within the heart of that night, as close and warm and as terribly at ease as only a company of men sitting together can be, as close as only such a company can be, then in the exuberance of their unbounded high spirits, their Christmas mood of camaraderie, the sense of well-being warming them to the bone, the defiance filling them as they thought of their enemies and the course of the war, one of them struck up the beautiful old carol “O du fröhliche,” and immediately they all joined in, while the man at the piano spread his hands on the keyboard.

  O thou happy day, they sang at the tops of their voices, O thou blessed day of grace and mercy at Christmastide . . .

  So far, so good. But then they heard themselves suddenly singing the rest of it.

  The world was lost, forlorn, they sang out loud. O be glad, good Christian folk, whate’er betide.

  A carol of thoroughly defeatist sentiments, in fact. But as no one shouted, Stop! they went on singing, and even the commissioned officers joined in. The carol was more than they could resist. And when it was over the man at the piano, one of themselves, began the prelude to the next carol. For a few bars he played the tune of “Silent Night, Holy Night,” and they all felt that they would be incapable of not singing along. But then he changed the key from C sharp major to D major. Something had fleetingly touched them, a memory, a temptation, an emotion, something of all those, and now, glad that it had passed them by and was gone, they joined in their own familiar, politically unobjectionable, ideologically neutral Christmas carol:

  O Christmas tree, they sang . . .

  Eva and I were sitting in the hotel lounge that afternoon having tea and stollen. There was deep snow outside. Now that winter had come to the mountains, and we could walk only on the roads that had been cleared, we went to the Platterhof almost every day for afternoon tea. They kept a table reserved for us in the lounge.

  ( Your usual table, gnädiges Fräulein?

  Yes, the usual table. Thank you, Heinz.)

  Sometimes we were accompanied by Eva’s friend Hertha, who came with her two little girls several times to spend a few days at the Berghof, or by Aunt Fanny and Uncle Fritz, unless they preferred to stay at Schloss Fischhorn. There was more laughter at our table than at any other in the Hotel Platterhof.
We were never as merry, as determined to have fun as here. To keep it up, we needed a little cognac and the sense that others were watching us. Aunt Fanny in particular was mistress of the art of walking the tightrope that allowed her both to figure as Hitler’s mother-in-law and to enjoy the freedom of behavior deriving from the fact that she wasn’t. She joked with the waiters, but ordered them around a little more than was necessary.

  That afternoon before Christmas, however, Eva and I were alone. We could see the Christmas party in the dining hall through an open double door. We hummed along with the carols, exchanging ironic glances. It’s always easy to avoid being carried away if you are not one of the party.

  I think we’ll leave before they all make for the bar, said Eva. That’s when the Christmas celebrations will really begin.

  The Platterhof still had stocks of everything that was unobtainable elsewhere: Italian wines, French champagne, Alsatian fruit spirits, sherry from Portugal, Russian vodka, Romanian slivovitz, Bavarian herb-flavored liqueurs, and beer flowing like water . . .

  Eva signaled to Heinz to let him know we were ready to leave.

  It was always the same:

  The bill, please, she would say.

  The bill? said Heinz. Very good, gnädiges Fraülein . We’ll put it on the account.

  I don’t know exactly whose guest I was. Hitler’s? The Nazi Party’s? I never went to the trouble of finding out. Everything went so smoothly, was taken so much for granted. I am sure that Eva herself couldn’t have said for certain if I had asked her, but in any case she would have regarded such a question as a faux pas. It was one of the questions, one of the countless questions, that were never asked. Eva was very good at not asking questions. It was part of her talent for elegance. She never asked unsuitable questions, just as she never wore unsuitable hats. It was perhaps the greatest talent she possessed, apart from dying. Tact is the virtue of those who leave it to others to decide on the rules of the game.

  As we were being helped into our coats, one of the men suddenly came out of the dining hall and approached us, and I recognized the Obersturmbannführer from Schloss Fischhorn. First he greeted Eva, then he took my coat from Heinz and, without shaking hands, helped me into it himself. I felt his hands on my shoulders and his breath on the back of my neck.