A Kind of Woman

by Helen Burko

  “Give me some water, please!”

  The nurse complied, but she ordered Mathilda to keep calm and rest, otherwise she wouldn’t allow Jacob to come and visit her.

  “All right, Nurse. I’ll be calm and rest. Please, don’t be angry with me. I’m so miserable…so lonely…”

  “I know, I know… But you must rest,” the nurse said and left the room.

  *****

  Two weeks later, Mathilda was much better, but the doctors decided she must stay in the hospital until the wound healed completely, which they guessed would be approximately another two weeks. Jacob requested she be allowed to stay until she regained her strength. During this time, Mathilda was allowed to leave her bed and even walk in the garden. Jacob visited her, sat with her on a bench, and talked to her, sometimes until late in the evening. Mathilda looked forward to his visits and, in contrast to the past, loved hearing his views and convictions, which she had once dismissed as “philosophy.” When Jacob left, she pondered continually on what he told her and how he defended her after she deceived him. She reviewed her past adventure during the war and came to the conclusion that Jacob’s opinions were right. His visits, she felt, were only those of a person who understood what she was undergoing and not those of a man who loved her as he once had. Her memory went back to Karl Krackel, and she compared him with Jacob…compared their convictions. For Karl, she had been just an object and nothing more. How blind I have been, she said to herself as she sat on the bench. How right Jacob was about the brainwashing of the paranoid and schizophrenic ideas of the Hitler philosophy. She waited impatiently for his next visit so she could tell him the conclusion she had now reached. Would he believe her? Would he believe this change in her that even she could not understand completely?

  Mathilda recalled her youth, how she had so enthusiastically believed Karl’s every word. He stated that the Hitler Youth needed to be as strong as iron. Perhaps because of that, she was so proud to be a member and swallowed all their propaganda without trying to find logic in it. She blindly believed all the cunning phrases of their minister of propaganda, Goebbels, the name the Russian officer Bunin had given his poodle. She believed the other nations were trying to bring Germany down and that all the people of those nations were enemies of Germany.

  All that now made her uncomfortable, and she regretted what she had been. How many years would have to pass until her country would recover from this catastrophe and again try to conquer the world, and especially try to wipe out the race her husband belonged to? No! It mustn’t happen again! Now she was convinced of that! But how could she make Jacob believe she truly believed her country was wrong?

  How right Jacob was when he claimed it was all due to education and instruction. She had been educated to hate anyone not belonging to her country, to her “supreme race.” Now she felt deep disappointment and ill at ease, as if a worm or a parasite were sucking her blood. The past hung over her like a heavy cloud. Only love of your fellow man should be the criterion! How foolish she had been to shout “Heil Hitler” to the leader who had taught them to kill and debase the dignity of man. And for what? For the sin of not being born “pure Aryans”! And what is a “pure Aryan”? she asked herself.

  Was it true she could not have been otherwise? That now she could view it in a different way? She had known what was going on in the camps and what they were doing to innocent people, poor souls. She could have helped ease their suffering. She could have asked Karl to help them, but she… She had seen and kept quiet, ignoring the atrocities.

  In moments like these, when she admitted her sins to herself, she was seized with a deep longing for her country. She remembered her father, who had been opposed to all that was happening in Germany, who viewed with concern his children so enthusiastically following the lunacy that gripped his country. He was afraid to say anything in opposition and stopped speaking to his children. He had hated Karl but also feared him. Perhaps only Karl’s love for her kept him from turning her father in to the authorities, the Gestapo, as an enemy of the regime. What happened to her father after this horrible war? Was he alive? Was her mother still living? Was she still betraying her father? And what about her brothers and lovely sisters? What happened to all her friends who had supported their leader as if in a hypnotic trance? Oh, my poor country! She mourned for Germany.

  She thought about Karl, another victim of his education.

  How different Jacob was. He was the only one who tried to help her, even though she had acted atrociously toward him.

  Only someone like him could forgive! She owed his race a great atonement for all the crimes her country had committed against them. She tried to find some justification for what happened, but there was none.

  She found it hard to believe such a metamorphosis had happened to her in such a short time. Would Jacob believe it? Did he still love her? These questions consumed and disturbed her.

  Jacob continued to visit Mathilda almost daily. When he appeared, she always stretched out both her hands to him, and he never rebuffed her. He held her hands in his and looked into her blue eyes, convinced that a change had come over both of the women: Rachel Kimmelman, whom he had loved so blindly, and Mathilda Krause, who now realized how she had erred. He sat for hours with her, and they talked about the awful war or just sat together silently.

  Lately, Jacob’s parents hardly saw him. His father had gone to see him in the hospital, but his mother took a long time to recover even after she was told her son was still alive and not badly wounded. She had only one request—that she never hear the name “Mathilda” again. Because of that woman, her only son almost lost his life. She couldn’t understand how her clever son lost his mind over her.

  “Jacob should have been born in a later century, for this one is too small minded for him,” she said to her husband and their friends. “How else can you explain his defending her after she so deceived and fooled him?”

  “What can we do?” Her husband tried to comfort her. “It is said that love is stronger than death!”

  When Jacob left the hospital, his father said to him, “Son, you’d better leave New York and move to Florida or California or some other place. No one is going to hire you after this, after you defended a criminal, a Nazi.”

  But Jacob didn’t want to take his advice. “I’m not moving to any other place. A man cannot flee from himself.”

  “Don’t anger the survivors of the camps, Son. You should hear how they talk against you.”

  “Dad, I’m not afraid of them. I haven’t talked against them. I am one of them. I believe they will come to understand me. I defended Mathilda not because I loved her or still love her—I told you that. My defense of her was just a cry to the world that remained silent when the Nazis began to persecute innocent people. This war has taught me the value of life and who was really to blame for the war. Even the president of the United States, Roosevelt, hesitated and didn’t enter the war immediately against this Nazi beast. The other nations also remained silent, and darkness descended on the world. The sun shone, and God remained silent, because he had perished in Auschwitz together with the other martyrs.”

  Jacob’s friend held views opposite those of his father.

  “You know, your wound is worth a million,” said his friend Eddie. “You have become famous. The lawyer of the twentieth century.”

  “All you think and talk about is money,” objected Jacob. “A lot of the trouble in this world comes from this race after the dollar.”

  “What I mean is, if you stood for president or maybe for the senate, you’d be elected because of your tremendous talent.”

  Jacob did begin to receive all kinds of propositions. He was asked to write his autobiography for a large sum of money. He was asked to be editor of a newspaper. Marriage proposals were sent to him. Jacob refused all these proposals. One thought occupied his mind now: How could he continue to live with Mathilda? Whether he wished it or not, she was still his legal wife. If he wanted to part from her, woul
d he have to divorce her? Was his marriage to this woman lawful from a legal point of view or from a Jewish haiachic point of view?

  When Jacob visited Mathilda, he found no peace of mind. He returned home restless. He paced the large rooms of his apartment and didn’t know what to do with himself. He dreamed of Doris and Lillian and awakened with a fast-beating heart. He gazed for hours at the photographs of Doris and Lillian and then poured himself a glass of whiskey. This enabled him to sleep some more.

  After much deliberation, Jacob came to the decision that Mathilda must return to her own country. She yearned for her home and told him so in each conversation with him.

  When Mathilda finally was released from the hospital and returned to the apartment, his mood changed somewhat.

  The day after she arrived, she asked him what would happen. He didn’t answer her. He understood that even though he might want it, she might not want to continue to live with him as his lawful wife. He scrutinized her and saw her beauty had endured—the same round face, blue eyes, blond hair, and sculptured lips. A little paler and thinner perhaps, but this didn’t detract from her beauty.

  Jacob recalled their meeting that night in the station house at Kiev. How she hadn’t wanted to talk to him and how she had introduced herself as a Jewish woman when he told her who he was. Sitting across from him was a completely different woman. She lacked a little of her former courage. He knew she felt uneasy here. She had become a little more modest. Her pride as an SS officer had completely disappeared.

  He hadn’t touched her since he brought her to the apartment. It seemed to her he was disappointed in her.

  “How do you imagine we can live together?” she asked.

  “You tell me!” he said after she continued to question him.

  Yes, something had changed between them.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “When I was in the hospital, I thought about our life together. Now that I have returned to your home, it seems to me your arms are no longer open to me. When you defended me, I thought you still loved me, but now…”

  Jacob didn’t know what to say. He knew something had changed in his attitude toward her. In spite of her beauty, she didn’t attract him anymore. He asked her, “What do you want to do?”

  “What can I do? How can we live together? You can’t forgive my past, right?”

  “Let’s not talk about the past. We’ve discussed that more than enough and now… Now I don’t know what will happen. Maybe I’ll be able to accustom myself to the new relationship between us.”

  “Look, Jacob,” she said, carefully choosing each word. “You have taught me that in our so-called enlightened world, there are so many people who are incapable of understanding or don’t wish to understand each other, and I know there are many couples who cannot live together for one reason or another and so they divorce.”

  “According to Jewish law, divorce between us is unnecessary,” he told her to emphasize the fact that she wasn’t Jewish. “You have told me repeatedly that you yearn for your home and your family, so I think the only solution is for you to leave America and return to Germany.”

  “Yes, I don’t feel comfortable in the company of your parents or your friends, but I wouldn’t leave you for that reason alone because I still love you. But you no longer sleep with me, so perhaps you are right and that is the only solution.”

  “Will you tell them what happened to you here and that your country has to reconstruct and revise their policies after the bloodbath that should weigh heavily on their conscience?”

  Mathilda burst into tears. Now she knew she could no longer find in him the same man who had loved her so strongly. She had slept beside him the previous night, and when she kissed and hugged him, he didn’t react to her passionate gestures.

  After a night like that, she moved around the apartment as though she were a stranger in a strange land.

  Jacob understood how she felt. He knew that not only his parents, but also his friends looked upon her as a Nazi criminal in spite of the fact that she had been acquitted.

  So Mathilda packed her things and prepared to go back to Germany. Her hands trembled as she folded her clothes and laid them in the suitcase.

  At the last moment, she cried bitterly. “Why do we have to part?” she asked, hugging him and kissing him. He remained impassive during her kisses and hugs.

  Jacob took her to the boat. For a long time, he stood and watched the ship leave the New York dock and recede into the distance. Mathilda stood on the deck and continued waving good-bye with her handkerchief.

  Only when the ship left the dock did he feel something was missing.

  THE END