But all that’s merely been the introduction; next come the fundamentals. What could be more scientific? She flips down the charts displaying the naked skulls, the basis of the facial features by which we recognised the different races. Now the groundwork of racial science stands revealed. The Aryan skull, they see, is lofty and broad-browed, the Jewish by contrast narrow and with a rodential backward-sloping forehead. The ears are lower and the eye sockets close-set. Frau Professor Förster’s own blue eyes, wide-set in her broad bold Aryan brow, survey the class, searching for a good example, one row after another. It isn’t enough to know a science theoretically; you have to see its application to the facts.
‘Ilse Brinkmann!’ she beckons imperiously with one hand, the other resting on her generous hip, so well designed for the parturition of future members of the master race.
Prepared for martyrdom (except it isn’t her faith she’s going to die for), Ilse slowly rises and stands trembling before the class. Her hands are clasped in front of her and her head hangs low. The end of the world could not be worse than this. Perhaps it is the end of the world?
‘Don’t droop, Ilse! Stand up straight!’
Frau Professor Förster snaps open a little oblong black box on her desk, and out come shiny calipers and slithery measuring tapes still more scientific than those that bore mute and unquestionable testimony to Sara’s half-Jewishness in primary school a few years before. Now it’s Ilse’s turn to be exposed and condemned. Frau Professor Förster measures the quaking adolescent carefully: diameter of skull, length of nose, width of nostrils, width of brow, distance between the eyes, proportion of chin to top of head, set of jaw and ratio of sinciput to occiput. They don’t go into that kind of detail in primary school. That’s what the secondary level’s all about, getting down to the very foundations.
‘Now you see how science works,’ she concludes triumphantly at last. ‘All the measurements indicate an Aryan head. If we had an Asian or a Jew here, the results would have been very different. Very different indeed.’
For the first time in her life Ilse in her astonished relief is less than honest. She doesn’t confess the awful truth to Frau Professor Förster, who would find it as hard to bear in her own way as Ilse does in hers. Perhaps she doesn’t even believe it is the truth any more. Perhaps she’s beginning to think like Martin that she really could be Aryan, that the Jewish stain has been miraculously expunged. Perhaps she’s beginning to dream of joining the League of German Girls on the one hand and taking communion on the other, of belonging at last to those from whom she’s been so long a lonely outcast. Perhaps she’s even thinking that the reason Sara’s skull came out as half-Jewish in her very own primary school test (Ilse only found this out by accident) – the reason is that Sara’s father wasn’t Aryan Willibald but Jewish Josef, as Aryan Willibald has indeed so often hinted. Science is objective after all, the instruments don’t lie, and they tell everyone that Ilse’s passed the Aryan test while Sara has not. She goes back to her place with a wonderful giddy lightness in her head, a sense of precarious joy. Ilse is glowing, like a girl who’s felt at last the first caress of love. Yes, it may be autumn outside the classroom, but inside Ilse it is spring. Can summer be far behind?
Back in Vienna the bureaucrats have had their morning coffee. They settle their plump or bony bottoms into their comfortable chairs and open their bulging files. And in the files they discover an irregularity, an infringement of the rules. Laws are changing all the time, mark you. It’s a wonder the bureaucrats can keep up with them. Yes, those people really earn their money. But keep up with them they must and do. And the latest law, an amendment to the Aryan Paragraph, is that half-Jews are now allowed a high school education only till the end of sixth grade, normally the end of their sixteenth year. No exceptions. Even if they’re top of the class, that’s where the gravy train will stop for them. They get off there and work in factory or field, leaving the brainier stuff for their betters. Not that they can be sure they’ll be left in factory or field for long. Half-Jews are still half-Jews even if they’re also half-Aryans. But one problem at a time. Just then in Vienna, it’s the problem of schooling they’re going to solve.
And there’s the anomaly. Poor slow Ilse is seventeen already, although she’s still in the sixth grade. A half-Jew getting education, using up valuable resources, when she’s past seventeen in the sixth grade? Preposterous! It isn’t just the grade that’s meant to count – it’s the age as well of course! Otherwise some of those wily half-Jews would stay in the sixth grade till they were twenty-five! You can certainly see how that crafty Jewish blood works on their character! The half-Jew Ilse Brinkmann must be expelled at once!
So next week when Ilse arrives at school with her head still full of Aryan dreams, she’s summoned to Sister Aquinas’s office. It’s at the beginning of the first lesson, straight after the morning prayer and Frau Professor Förster’s radiant ‘Heil Hitler!’
A man in a suit stands beside Sister Aquinas’s desk, his hair neatly clipped and his glasses stern and trim on the bridge of his nose. Sister Aquinas is steepling her pale hands again, or rather sliding one palm against the other as though the steeple they briefly make as they meet is toppling in an earthquake. Her rimless spectacles are on the tip of her nose as usual, until she takes them off and lays them on the desk, either to see Ilse more clearly, or perhaps to avoid doing so. And Ilse, waiting with butterflies of disquiet fluttering in her stomach thinks nevertheless quite detachedly that she’s never seen Sister Aquinas without her glasses on before and that her eyes looked weak and watery, as though she must be seeing everything through an aqueous blur.
‘Unfortunately it has become impossible to keep you in the school,’ Sister Aquinas announces with a sigh and a glance at the man beside her. ‘It appears that your age was overlooked when you entered school …’ She lifts her hand and the rustling black sleeve falls like a closing wing. ‘However that may be, the current regulations do not permit’ – she hesitates; apparently she doesn’t want to say ‘half-Jews’ – ‘do not permit students in your racial category to remain in school after their sixteenth year.’
Ilse, quiet at the best of times, is quiet at the worst as well. While she’s trying to take this news in, hearing the unsteady thumping of her heart and feeling loss falling like a stone plumb through her body, she’s also wondering what she’s supposed to do now. Say ‘Heil Hitler!’? Go back to her class? Go home? Does that mean she’s got to go to another school? (How she hates being a new girl, and always too old for the class!) Or no school at all? Then the man standing beside Sister Aquinas settles the last point for her. ‘You passed the age limit on your seventeenth birthday,’ he says curtly. ‘Don’t you realise that? You shouldn’t be here. Did you think a half-Jew could stay in the sixth grade for ever?’
Ilse’s lips quiver as she hears that word ‘half-Jew’ (which was also half spat out) and she feels the blood leaching out of her cheeks, but still she doesn’t know what to do. She waits with her suddenly tear-filled eyes on Sister Aquinas’s already watery ones. But Sister Aquinas is looking down as though now she certainly doesn’t want to meet Ilse’s appealing glance.
‘You can collect your books and personal property now and go home,’ Sister Aquinas says quietly, like a judge resignedly sentencing a prisoner he privately does not believe is guilty. ‘Give this note to Frau Professor Förster.’ She seems to want to say something more, but instead she places her glasses back on the tip of her upturned nose, nudges her note pad to the centre of her desk and writes three lines in a fine small hand. Ilse watches the lines crawling across the paper, watches the words half-Jew appearing like a wriggling worm upside down on the page, watches Sister Aquinas’s soft white blue-veined hands fold and seal the note, watches her reach out with it across the desk. Their hands touch briefly as Ilse takes it. Sister Aquinas’s hand is colder than hers. Sister Aquinas seems about to speak again, but again she doesn’t. Instead she gives a wan thin smile of farewell. The man
beside her watches Ilse leave. His lips are pursed and he is making satisfied hand-wiping motions like a surgeon washing up after the neat excision of a malignant tumour.
Almost worse than leaving school and all its illusory hopes is going back to Frau Professor Förster and asking permission to collect her things. Frau Professor Förster is discoursing on the superior power of the Aryan brain today and the noble skull is on display once more. She frowns impatiently when she has to interrupt her flow to read Sister Aquinas’s note.
‘What?’ she exclaims incredulously under her breath. She glances up at Ilse as though she can’t believe her eyes, and glances down to read the note again. Her wide Aryan brow frowns. There is a subdued rustle in the class, the rustle of paper gently pushed away, of yawns stifled and whispers not.
When Frau Professor Förster looks up again, it is with a glare of indignation and hurt, the resentful glare of one who’s been betrayed. ‘Take your things and go,’ she says coldly, and waits in silence, tapping the edge of the folded note against her palm. ‘Hurry up, will you? You’re holding up the lesson!’ The other girls watch Ilse with mystified fascination as she closes the lid of her desk and walks like a convicted criminal out of the room. Probably half of them think she’s pregnant – they’re at that age. After she’s closed the door behind her, she hears Frau Professor Förster’s voice resume, uncertainly at first, as though she’s forgotten what she wanted to say, or even lost confidence in its truth, but then with returning strength and authority.
I will never come here again, Ilse thinks as she walks down the familiar empty corridor, listening to the different muffled voices and varied murmurs as she passes one classroom door after another. The weight of her loss makes her walk even more slowly than usual. I shouldn’t be here. I’m a half-Jew. I shouldn’t be here.
Then there’s the lonely walk to the station, the endless hour’s wait for the next train, the long slow grinding journey, the trip across the lake on the ferry – everyone staring at her, she’s sure, everyone divining her shame – and the fearful dawdling along the lane to the Pfarrhaus. Frau Kogler the midwife glances at her in surprise as she cycles to her next delivery. Dr Kraus’s golden-haired Aryan mistress, airing her golden-haired Aryan baby in a squeaking but Aryan pram, regards her with a knowing look.
That’s bad enough, but worst of all will be explaining to her mother. Ilse knows she’ll have to tell her every detail over and over, live through her shame again and again. The shame of her Jewish blood that after all could not be expunged. How could she have dared to hope she’d escape the contagion? It’s in her body, an inherited disease like original sin. No, it is original sin. She keeps seeing the posters on the walls of Plinden, the cartoons in the newspapers, she keeps hearing the slogans on the wireless we’re no longer allowed to listen to, but which she remembers vividly and thinks she hears muttered behind her wherever she goes. Her father knows it and her mother knows it – that’s what they quarrel about at night when they think no one can hear them. How could she ever have supposed she’d not been tainted by her mother’s blood?
Gabi is elbow-deep in the washtub, which is how she spends much of her time now that Jägerlein is gone, when Ilse appears with her silent hangdog expression. ‘What, you already!’ she exclaims irritably, glancing round at the clock. ‘Why so early?’ Ilse walks silently up to her room and empties her satchel onto her desk. She sits on the edge of the bed and waits, hands clasped in lap, for the storm to break. After a time, when no storm breaks, she unties the red ribbons in her twin dark braids and puts her books away in the bottom of her wardrobe, thinking, correctly, she will never need them again. I will find them there years and years later – Frau Professor Förster’s workbook The Aryan Race, obviously a labour of love, and Ilse’s own neat notes and answers, what a credit to her teacher, her faded ribbons pressed inside the covers.
It isn’t till the washing’s done that Gabi thinks to ask Ilse again what brought her home so early. That isn’t indifference, but distraction. She’s just had her own little brush with authority, as a result of which she’s been seeing stars.
Little yellow ones in fact, and though they’re only made of cloth, they were weighing on her mind like lumps of iron. Authority in her case took the portly shape of Ortsgruppenleiter and innkeeper Franzi Wimmer, who, standing at the proper distance on the second step from the front door (which did at least have the advantage that Gabi didn’t have to smell the beer on his breath), informed her that Jewish persons were henceforth legally obliged to wear a yellow star with the word ‘JEW’ on it, in crooked black Hebrew-like letters, whenever they left their homes. Naturally, those stars must not deface Austrian national dress, which Gabi had in any case long ago given up trying to fit into, but were to be clearly visible on the left breast of such nondescript clothes as Gabi was now permitted to wear. And he gave her four yellow stars (admittedly of poor quality cloth, but after all there was a war on), which she should please sew on forthwith. Not gave, sold. With an official receipt as well. Ten Pfennigs each. Making, he carefully and correctly calculated, forty Pfennigs in all.
‘What about the children?’ Gabi asked him woodenly, feeling the rough-napped cloth between her fingers. ‘Shouldn’t they get half a star?’
The Ortsgruppenleiter, who was fond of children, and even didn’t really mind us half-Jews (and nor did his son, now that we’d played out our scene), protested stiffly that he didn’t make the laws, it was only his duty to see them carried out. The authorities had not yet made a ruling on half-Jews, but when they did, she could be sure he’d inform her. And as a matter of fact, he went on huffily, if she wanted to know (she didn’t, but what choice did she have?), he’d been to some trouble to get those stars for her. He wasn’t supposed to carry stuff like that around, it was meant to be supplied by the local Jewish Welfare Office. But as there wasn’t one in the village (of course not, there weren’t any other local Jews), he’d personally had the stars sent all the way from Linz. The trouble he’d given himself on her account! She could at least be grateful. ‘Heil Hitler!’
He remembered too late that he should never have said ‘Heil Hitler!’ to a Jew; it degraded the national salute. But saying it had become as automatic by now as opening his fly before he peed. He tried desperately to think of some way of recalling the gesture, but, lacking the resources, merely turned haughtily away.
Gabi, conscious both of the undeserved honour and the prohibition against reciprocating, nodded as the painstaking Ortsgruppenleiter marched unsteadily off, no doubt muttering about ungrateful Yids beneath his beery breath.
Well, that had kept Gabi’s head down amongst the washing all right, and all day she’d felt a little hand-sized star burning against her breast although all four of them were actually stuffed away out of sight in her worn and shapeless apron pocket. It took some energy to turn herself on at last and ask Ilse again what brought her home so early. She imagined a teacher was sick, or there’d been some function of the Catholic Church from which Ilse as a Protestant would naturally have been excluded, but when she hears Ilse reluctantly murmur the actual reason, she gasps and slumps suddenly down. ‘This is the end!’ she shouts. (But there she’s wrong.) Then, suddenly shrieking with the sword-thrust of her first gall bladder attack, she slides off her chair down onto the floor.
Ilse thinks that’s the end. Her mother’s dying and she’ll be bound to get the blame, and even get a Jewish curse as well. It makes her still more silent, which in turn makes Gabi think she doesn’t care about either her mother or being thrown out of school. Which does indeed make her blame Ilse in her raging agony. Ilse waits trembling for the Jewish curse, but, thank God, at least that doesn’t come.
Nor do I. Well, not too near. I hear Gabi’s groans when I return home from primary school, and then my father’s tragicomic weeping in the study (he’s only just come in and found out what’s up himself). Gabi shouts at me to keep out of the way, so I creep behind the kitchen stove and for the hundredth time wish Jäg
erlein was there again. It’s Sara of course who eventually applies hot poultices to Gabi’s stomach when she and Martin come home from school, scalding her hands on the steaming flannels. Martin, getting on at once with his latest Panzer design, complains about the basin of hot water and damp towel left standing on the dining room table. He cannot stand untidiness.
Later that night I wake to hear my mother shouting downstairs. ‘I will not wear it! I tell you I will not wear it! Even if I never leave this house again, I’ll never wear it! Never!’ Then there is the sound of Willibald’s voice, in an unfamiliar low and pleading tone I scarcely recognise. What he says is drowned in the splashing of water as Sara refills the basin on the dining room table.
Next day a yellow star has been sewn on the left breast of Gabi’s worn black coat. I think it looks smart, but when I try to tell her so, she snaps back ‘What do you know about it? Just stop staring like that, will you?’
And the day after that the star is off again. Yes, it’s been taken back by poor Franzi Wimmer, who’s discovered he’d misread the rules, and Gabi doesn’t have to wear it after all. Before she’s even had a chance to go out, there he is again, self-important but crestfallen, standing nice and early on that second step below the front door. He’s dropped a clanger he says (or rather doesn’t say, but his body language says it for him). He’s read the rule book again, and it seems that Gabi’s “privileged” because she’s married to an Aryan man, and privileged Jews are not required to wear the Jewish badge of shame. Indeed, and that’s why he’s come so early, they’re not allowed to! She’d better give those stars back at once.
The Kaminsky Cure Page 9