The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  Another uncompleted sentence, but I’m getting used to them. It won’t be long before I’ll know how to finish them, but in the meantime I’ve got other things to worry about, and so have Sara, Ilse and Martin. My greatest worry is the outside toilet with its gut-wrenching drop beneath the wooden seat down to a dark and noisome pit that gets emptied only twice a year. It’s that dark pit, by the way, not any flag-waving, goose-stepping Nazis, that has so far been the terror of my life. In fact I loved and still love the Nazis’ uniforms and their bands and their proud solidity – if only I could follow right behind them whenever they march through the village as the other boys do! But that black pit – that’s pure terror, and doubly pure at night! What if I fall through the hole in the worn wooden seat? It’s big enough. What if something black and slimy slides smoothly up out of it like a serpent of shit to coil itself lovingly around my shivering naked thighs and pull me down under?

  But what’s a worry to me is nothing to them. They can trot out there in the middle of the night without a qualm. No, it’s education that’s on their mind, or rather more on Gabi’s. They can’t go to the nearest High School in Plinden. Not because they’re not allowed to – the authorities see no reason at present why half-Jews shouldn’t get a limited education to fit them for their limited half-Jew roles in the Thousand Year Reich. No, the problem is it’s too far for them to travel by train every day (three hours each way), and although a provident State has arranged lodgings near the school for pupils from far away, it isn’t going to lodge half-Jewish children in real Aryan homes. (Nor is it going to lodge them in half-Jewish homes, let alone full-Jewish ones. All the Jews in Plinden have either left already for one thing, or been rounded up and expelled by the zealous Nazi Buergermeister. And there aren’t any half-Jews there anyway for another – we are a lonely breed.)

  Now that’s a wobble in the orderly arrangements of the Thousand Year Reich: half-Jewish children can go to school with Aryan bluebloods (well, for a time, anyway), but they can’t stay in lodgings with them. What did the Nazis think they’d get up to there? Buggery and fornication with the master race? And who exactly did they fear would be doing what to whom? Never mind, mongrel tykes and pure-bred hounds just shouldn’t mix.

  So there’s a law that all non-Jewish children must attend school, and that means us, because we’re not kosher Jews, even if we’re not kosher Germans either. And there’s a residential regulation that denies Ilse, Martin and Sara (who’s about to start high school) the means of doing so. When Willibald meekly presented this paradox to the authorities, the more lowly functionaries were as usual disinclined to consider it.

  ‘If you must marry a Jew, Herr Pfarrer,’ one observed, raising an eyebrow disdainfully at the very thought of it, ‘you must expect to have problems.’

  But someone at a higher desk, where the file was eventually passed, must have contrived a solution. What are bureaucrats for but to tease out the knots and tangles of their own making? The half-Jewish Brinkmann children of secondary school age would be allowed to receive private instruction for the present, provided they passed the State Examinations; this permission to be subject to annual review. Normally in the Nazi State, private instruction is allowed only on medical grounds – who knows what subversive ideas might be spread by private teachers? But as in this case private instruction would keep half-Jews out of contact with pedigree Aryans, there were sound racial reasons for waiving that rule.

  ‘How could we possibly find the money for private teachers?’ Willibald demanded fretfully, dropping the official letter into his wife’s lap. ‘I’ll teach them myself. I can teach as well as any schoolteacher! Why waste money on a private teacher, even if we had it to waste?’

  He may have exaggerated his didactic powers, but when it comes to saving money, Willibald has no peer. So Gabi saw the money being saved all right, but she didn’t see the education. After a month nothing had happened except further work on Willibald’s epic drama King Saul. He’d been writing this for several years, but somehow it never seemed to get finished. His locked study door leaked a stream of little chuckles and joyful barks when work was going well, together with the smell of tobacco from his long churchwarden’s pipe. When work wasn’t going well, he went out to make a parish call, and came back smelling of schnapps and more tobacco. Whenever Gabi asked when he was going to start the children’s lessons, all she heard was ‘Soon, soon,’ soothing or irritated –

  2

  According to his mood

  So in the end Gabi took things into her own hands. She found a fresh young woman graduate from Vienna University, a Doktor of History, no less, who would be delighted to spend some time in a rural pastor’s home teaching his children.

  Doktor Helena Saur was engaged to a government official with what her parents thought good prospects. Her fiancé was working in Graz that year, and her father wanted her to do something to fill in the time until she was married. The alternative would have been coaching in Vienna, and Heimstatt sounded far more romantic. The fee she requested was room and board plus a paltry sum of pocket money which even Willibald couldn’t gripe at, especially when Gabi raised the amount by selling her dead sister Frieda’s fur coat in nearby Plinden – she’d never liked the idea of wearing her sister’s clothes anyway, although the day will come when she’s less fastidious. So everything was arranged, and Frau Doktor Saur duly appeared in Heimstatt.

  Only one point had been neglected: Frau Doktor Saur was an ardent Nazi, and Gabi had omitted to tell her she was herself a Jew. Gabi had learnt she must fend for herself, and now she was learning how to do it. It wasn’t until a week had passed that Frau Doktor Saur discovered the bitter truth. But by then – cunning Gabi! – she’d grown attached to the children, even, or rather especially, to Martin, who could certainly exert a certain boyish charm when he chose, and she decided to stay.

  ‘I never realised Jews could be so nice!’ she confessed to Gabi in whispered surprise. Whispered because she understood by then the subject was taboo among us. The others didn’t speak of it because they were ashamed. And I didn’t speak of it because I couldn’t – I didn’t even know. And here in 1939 I still don’t know. As far as I’m concerned, Jews are dirty people somewhere far away who the wireless says are bad. They don’t interest me. Not like Brutus does, or my rabbits.

  ‘I thought you were all crooks and swindlers.’ Frau Dr Saur whispered on to Gabi. ‘But you’re not like that at all!’

  What did innkeeper and Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer think of that, a pure German – well, Austrian – girl staying in a half-Jewish house? And a Party member too! It put him in a fix, but now that he’d allowed Jägerlein to remain in the Pfarrhaus, how could he keep Frau Doktor Saur out? A bureaucrat must be consistent! He solved the problem and eased his conscience with another fudge, finding a way between the prickly regulations like a busy ant between a hedgehog’s quills. It was all right for ordinary Aryans, even Party members like the Frau Doktor, to enter the Pfarrer’s house because it was half-Aryan. But it wasn’t all right for State officials to do so because it was half-Jewish. Really the man displayed the wisdom of Solomon, though that’s not how he’d have chosen to describe it.

  He called at the Pfarrhaus the next day, remaining on the second doorstep, to announce this rule to Willibald and to request him to see to its strict adherence. And the following day there stood the Primary School Principal on the very same step, to explain why it would be impossible for him too as a State official to enter the Pfarrhaus. His voice almost choked when he said the words ‘State official’. He’d sweated blood to get his Aryan certificate, without which he could no more teach Aryan children than join the Party, both of which he did, and he was commensurately proud of the status he’d finally achieved. His pedigree hadn’t been unquestionably pure: his great-grandfather had been christened Jakob and had a surname that was decidedly ambivalent as well. Brows had been raised, question marks pencilled in the margin, his file held up for weeks. But in the end the
y’d let it pass. How delicately the jackboot sometimes treads, with what considerate circumspection!

  Those Aryan Certificates involve Willibald in a lot of extra work, by the way. Worthy citizens who want to keep their official jobs or join the Party often have to track down their parents’ and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ baptismal records all over the Reich, and then get the local pastor to authenticate them – all as Willibald frequently complains, without payment to the pastor. A bitter pill for him to swallow, especially when he thinks of his own children’s’ unsatisfactory ancestors, but it’s no fun for the aspiring Aryans either. Imagine how much trailing up and down and across the country that entails for those poor people, from city to city, town to town, village to village! And the fear that they might find a Solomon or a David right at the last godforsaken hamlet when all the rest were spotless! Everyone going back to their father’s birthplace and their mother’s birthplace and then all their parents’ birthplaces – it’s like a re-run of the census of the Jews when Christ was born, only this time the Slaughter of the Innocents is going to be a far far bigger do.

  Frau Doktor Saur turned out to be a lively teacher, and my siblings liked her, even quiet Ilse whose own meagre store of liveliness was long ago used up. Ilse’s developing a kind of religious melancholia. Besides spending hours with the Bible or praying in the gloomy church, she often wanders off into the graveyard to lay flowers on the mounds of all the unacquainted dead – she likes them better than she likes the living. She always wears a gold cross pendant on a chain around her neck. She never plays, she never runs, she scarcely even speaks unless to answer questions. And when she eats, she does so with a slow and inward concentration, as though she’s saying Grace before each bite. In a life of melancholic austerity, Ilse allows herself just one luxury: she has hair ribbons of different colours – red, blue, yellow, green and black – and wears a different colour every day in the braids of her glossy long black hair.

  No one’s realised it yet, but she is quietly splitting up. Her soul’s as divided as my mother’s face, although her own face is going to remain smooth and Madonna-like until the day she dies. The trouble is, she believes what Nazis say about the Jews. And what the New Testament says about them too. Didn’t the Jews kill Our Lord? It’s all there in the Bible. Aren’t they degenerate and dangerous? It’s there in her schoolbooks, in the papers and on the wireless (no cinema in Heimstatt yet). Hasn’t her own mother tried to escape her Jewishness by becoming Christian? But she isn’t really Christian at all; Ilse can see she no longer believes it. Of course not – she can’t escape the taint in her blood, the taint that’s contaminated Ilse’s own blood too. Sometimes, when she glances at her mother’s, well, yes, disturbingly semi-hooded eye, she shivers. There, she feels, there on her mother’s own face, is that cunning and sinister expression which the papers and the posters all depict. Oh yes, Ilse’s soul’s divided all right. She knows the Jews are evil, but she’s half a Jew herself.

  And doesn’t her father fear her mother too, and sometimes even hate her? How often has Ilse, the oldest child, been the silent secret witness of their sudden fierce sibilant quarrels and grimly muttered reproaches, the hissed embittered accusations of this not done or that done wrongly, the habitually frayed tempers of a soured marriage in a sour time? Ever since that day when the Brownshirts came and told them to leave their comfortable parish in Germany, ever since then the pot has simmered, sometimes boiling over, sometimes merely menacingly seething. Once, through the thin wall which separated her bedroom from theirs, didn’t she hear her mother almost shriek out that her father was a weakling and a coward?

  Then once – and this is worst of all – her father, the minister of God, didn’t he call her mother a fornicator with that pig-Jew Josef? And didn’t something break off then and drift up from the ice of frozen memories that lay across Ilse’s mind, some vague wallowing slippery recollection of a look or word that passed between Dr Josef Stern and her mother on one of those visits Gabi used to pay him for the children’s health, when they were still living in Germany and Ilse was supposed to be too young to understand?

  No wonder they were all being rejected and excluded from school and village, and from life itself. God Himself had rejected them. It was His punishment; they must endure it.

  Yes, Ilse’s waters are still and quiet all right; but they are deep and they are troubled.

  But if Martin’s are troubled, it’s not by thoughts like Ilse’s, of the polluted blood that flows in all our veins, still less by indignation at the malevolent madness of the Third Reich. His waters are stirred only by a particular resentment – resentment at the stupidity of those who can’t recognise his worth. Hitler and the Nazis bother Martin only because they bother him. He’s a moral solipsist, and always will be. He’s known he was a genius from the days of his pampered childhood when his parents told him so and spoiled him rotten. He had only to pee in his potty or lisp a new word, for Willibald or Gabi to hold up their hands in astonished admiration. No wonder he admires himself – he’s imitating them. All that’s missing is the global recognition of his superiority. For the rest of his life he’s going to be waiting for his manifest due, or insisting on it, rather.

  To young Doktor Helena Saur, this bumptiousness seemed a nobly assertive Aryan trait, and Martin soon became her favourite. (Ilse she described as slow, and that became her label. Ilse, everyone agreed, was slow, and nodded their heads. Ilse agreed too, and slowly nodded hers.) Our next tutor, Fräulein von Kaminsky, will form a juster view of Martin’s character. Still, the truth is, he was and is no fool. You should see his Panzer designs – he pores over them on the dining room table in every spare moment, sheet after sheet of armoured ingenuity.

  And how is Sara doing, who happens to bear a name the Nazis have decreed all Jewish females must be known by? Frau Doktor Saur tells my mother she can’t make Sara out. In some things she too is slow, but in others very quick. Sara drifts in and out.

  It’s not surprising. She’s the only one of us who’s been to Primary School (for her last year) here in Heimstatt – the others were too old already, and I till now have been too young. As a matter of course she was put at the back of the class alone, from where she was summoned to the front only once, during the Principal’s lesson on the rudiments of racial science. Her head could serve as an example of a degenerate skull, though not quite as degenerate as a fully Jewish one. So there she stood before the giggling sneering class, out came the calipers and measuring tape, and down the damning measurements went in every little ten year-old’s notebook.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ the Headmaster consoled Sara, sending her back to sit behind Leni of the head-lice. ‘And you’re only half-Jewish.’ But she was banished from the girls’ games in the playground, and often had to run, or rather walk, the gauntlet of their taunts. Even Leni was summoned away from her side as they walked fortuitously together down the same lane home from school one day. ‘Don’t go with her, she’s dirty,’ Leni’s mother loudly declared. Leni’s mother, who hadn’t bathed in the public baths for over a year! (Jägerlein says she knows this for a fact, and if anyone does, she should. She’s the one who takes in the money and doles out the soap – she doesn’t earn enough from us alone.)

  Also, Sara has become my mother’s reluctant confidante. No one else will do. Martin’s a boy, Ilse’s too distant, and I am both a boy and too young. Why, I’m too young even to be told of my Jewish taint. Into Sara’s sympathetic if unwilling ear have spilled the sorrows and fears that Gabi can’t keep all to herself. Has some secret about Dr Josef Stern spilled too? Not yet – and yet perhaps not quite not yet. There have been intimations, hints, half-smiles that are at once sad and happy. Her faintly lopsided face wasn’t always so, Gabi has told her. There was a broken heart and that brought on this slight paralysis of her cheek. And how often has Gabi remarked how closely Sara resembles ‘Onkel’ Josef, whom Sara dimly remembers speaking gently to her mother in some large and grand consulting
room in far-off Germany? How often has Willibald told her so himself, holding her chin and moving her face this way and that, and not too gently either, scrutinising her features with eyes that do not smile as at a coincidental likeness, but are troubled rather – narrowed with suspicion or glowing with a smothered anger. Come to that, how often has he said the same to me?

  Just now, Ilse and Martin know as well as Sara what rejection is (my turn will come), but she knows much more than they do what her mother feels and what her father doesn’t. But Sara is too young to carry all this added freight. So she tells herself stories to lighten the load. And when Frau Doktor Helena Saur sees her drifting out of her lessons, it isn’t always mental vacancy but another of her stories that’s she’s drifting into. Secret, all secret; she learnt long ago how to dissimulate and hide. But there’s an old exercise book in the bottom of her wardrobe where she is slowly, painfully, writing them down.

  Sara says she never dreams. And when people talk about their dreams she looks puzzled, as though she doesn’t quite understand. But she dreams all right. She dreams when she’s awake. Her stories are her dreams. And what she dreams are nightmares.

  But now World War Two has come and Poland has gone and Frau Doktor Helena Saur has gone as well, to marry her government official. She leaves us with an unsuspecting cheerful smile. She’ll always be our friend, she says, as she waves us goodbye at the Pfarrhaus door. And so she will be. Especially Gabi’s. But she won’t always be so cheerful. She’s going to discover her spousely duties include combing the carpet fringes and ironing the morning newspaper and the bank notes in her husband’s wallet. And she will be beaten for infringements and made to kneel on firewood.