The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  ‘Is your mother, or is she not, a Jew? Well?’

  Martin hangs his head, then slowly nods.

  ‘Yes, your mother is a Jew! Her name is Gabriella Sara Brandt! Your father is the kind of German that marries a Jew! And you are the product, a filthy half-Jew!’ Each time he utters the word ‘Jew’ the Leader’s lips twist as he injects a little more venom into his voice, a slightly colder sneer. ‘And now you’re trying to creep into the Hitler Youth? Did you think you could hide here of all places? What insolence! Did you think we didn’t know? Did you think we don’t have records of all your sort? And even if we didn’t, did you imagine we wouldn’t smell you out a mile off! Go! Get out of here! Vanish! You’re poisoning our air! Go back to the sty where you belong!’

  Martin stands a moment unbelieving, then finds he does believe it after all. God has turned his face from him again! He feels suddenly heavy and tired, as though the whole mountain is resting on his shoulders. Then, in a silence as deep as the Heimstatt lake he bends down trembling to pick up his rucksack. He feels he’s going to crumple in tears on the ground before them all. But no, he doesn’t crumple and he doesn’t cry. He’s got to go on. He straightens slowly up and slings the rucksack over his back. One of the straps is tangled somehow and he can’t get his arm through it. He has to wriggle his shoulder frantically to get the rucksack properly on, and that brief clumsy violent and ridiculous struggle elicits a suppressed snigger from the ranks of the pure disciplined Hitler Youths – such an indignity of course would never happen to them. At last with a final shrug the rucksack is on and he slinks miserably away – away from the torchlight, away from the flag, away from Heinrich Schmidt, away from every hope of happiness, stumbling over the pitiless rocks in the pitiless dark.

  Soon, he thinks, soon he’ll feel the pain, he’ll know how deep the knife has gone. But just now there’s only the numbed shock of the wound. The pain won’t come till later. Before he passes below the brow of the hill, he glances back and sees Heinrich Schmidt’s face smiling broadly now, about to break out into amused laughter. And then the laughter does break out from all of them, the kind of laughter you’d expect to hear in a restaurant if a monkey came in and tried to order a meal.

  Martin doesn’t know the path. It’s dark and misty. He falls several times and several times has to retrace his steps. And for a long time he hears the words of another song echoing faintly at his back. When Jewish blood sprays from our knives … Then, when he reaches the tree-line at last, the gloomy pines soughing in the rising wind make even his half-Aryan heart uneasy. It’s as though ghosts of the old Teutonic heroes so beloved of the Führer and his pebble-eyed henchman Himmler are striding through the sombre woods and will any minute appear before him, immense and menacing, the vengeful guardians of the purity of the race. What if he died here, lost amongst these cold dense pines? For the first but not the last time, he wonders whether dying there and then wouldn’t be better than going on living, but nevertheless he does go on living, plodding grimly through the darkened threatening woods.

  When at last he reaches the town, the last train has left hours ago. He spends the night huddled by the station and takes the first train in the morning. The ticket clerk, an elderly veteran of the last war, assesses him bleakly and asks why he isn’t still up the mountain with the Hitler Youth. Hunching his shoulders, Martin mutters something about being ill, which the clerk neither fully hears nor fully believes, and doesn’t care much anyway.

  On the train he finds an empty compartment and slouches in the corner by the window. He closes his eyes and sways with weariness, but cannot fall asleep. Heinrich Schmidt is laughing at him behind his sore and weary eyelids, and dozens of Hitler Youths are charging towards him brandishing daggers and chanting When Jewish blood sprays from our knives …

  The train dawdles everywhere along the winding track, but especially as it nears Heimstatt. Then its brakes grind unexpectedly, it shudders to an abrupt unscheduled halt and Martin looks out on reality again. In the trees where the gleaming line curves sharply round the lake shore, he sees the remains of Frau Dr Kraus being shovelled into a body bag. She has spread herself across the track and lost, amongst other parts, her head; which in turn has lost its wig.

  When he learns of Martin’s humiliation, Willibald is secretly relieved the village gossip is so full of Frau Dr Kraus’s self-decapitation that there’s scarcely room left in it for Martin’s humiliation and his own. Nevertheless, behind the swiftly closed windows he loudly threatens lawsuits, police reports and even personal confrontation with the unknown Hitler Youth Leader, who must have acted like that merely out of personal spite for him (himself, he means, not Martin). Then he subsides at last into the sobbing mode and locks himself into his study. King David, he announces later when hunger gets the better of his grief, has been christened with his tears. Yes, that’s the day King David springs off the blocks, if an advance of three lines in two hours can be described so athletically. An inauspicious start. No wonder its lines are limp and halting.

  And Martin’s pillow has been christened with his tears as well. I know, because when I pass the door I hear him sobbing quietly to himself, but not the less bitterly for that. He never mentions this episode of the mountain-climbing Hitler Youths again. But he hasn’t given up. Some day he knows he’ll be recognised and accepted. He has to be. He’s Martin.

  Gabi thinks so too, and she’s been doing all she can to bring it about. There are answers from Fräulein von Kaminsky and Frau Dr Saur-that-was; there’s been a hurried, furtive trip to Vienna, where Gabi stayed illegally in Frau Dr Saur-that-was’s apartment while her tyrannical husband was away in Klagenfurt. Helena Saur-that-was is still a Nazi, but calls herself a thinking one – she’s got a taste for oxymorons. Still, they say that every Jew has an Aryan angel, and Frau Dr Saur-that-was is Gabi’s. Lucky for Gabi that her privileged status allows her to travel without the Jews’ yellow star. Even her angel would never have dared meet an obvious Jew at the railway station and take her into her home. It’s still a risky business all the same, and Willibald delivers scared finger-wagging admonitions when Gabi leaves for Vienna. ‘Six weeks in prison if you’re caught in an Aryan house!’ he declares. ‘A hundred and fifty Reichsmarks fine!’ And that’s the minimum. If it’s the Gestapo that gets her, not the ordinary police, she could be in real trouble, and so could he.

  Helena Saur-that-was is running risks as well. She’ll be in for a fine or prison too if she’s caught, not to speak of expulsion from the Party and whatever punishment her husband might impose on her for breaking the law. But she blithely ignores all that. A thinking Nazi, Gabi’s Aryan angel.

  But only Gabi’s. Adolf Eichmann, as much a stickler for detail in his own way as Helena Saur-that-was’s husband is in his, has been getting down to work in the city, and there are hardly any Jews left there for her to protect by then, even if she’s got a mind to. Just the odd one or two who like Gabi are privileged for the time being by their marriage to an Aryan. Just for the time being. It’s only logical that if the Aryan dies, the Jew loses that protection and gets snapped up and deported, sometimes at the cemetery gates before they’ve even had a chance to put their handkerchiefs away. No point in hanging about, after all. The wheels must keep on rolling for final victory, Dr Goebbels is fond of declaring, and Dr Eichmann is certainly doing his bit to keep them rolling out of Vienna.

  After some time a couple of letters arrive from Maria in Berlin. Then there are several scenes in Willibald’s study, expanding through the whole house as the study runs out of books to throw and pictures to tear down and trample. Next there are several days in which Gabi mainly lies supine and groaning while Sara silently applies steaming towels to her tormented side and Ilse prays in her room. (Martin and I do whatever we usually do, he knowing he’s far above all this commotion, I that I am far beneath it.)

  And then suddenly a sullen peace descends. Meals get cooked again, dishes get washed. For all I know, King David might have moved forward
an inch or two. Christmas has come and we even have a tiny tree cut from the mountain and some cheap presents on Christmas Eve. But Christmas isn’t the reason for this change of mood, goodwill season though it may be. No, the reason is that Gabi’s irresistible force has overcome Willibald’s immovable objections, and her latest educational plan is about to be implemented. Two days after Christmas she announces the news to Martin and me.

  We’re going to spend a semester in Berlin.

  Yes, just when German troops have torn Russia’s heartland open (well, nearly) and shoved the British out of North Africa (well, almost), and the ranter at his cockiest is approving the final plans for the grandiose rebuilding of Jew-free Berlin as Germania, capital of the Thousand Year Reich – just then’s the time that Gabi chooses to send Martin and me to that very capital to further our half-Jewish, or in my case possibly full-Jewish, education right under the Führer’s snotty nose. You’ve got to admit she’s got a lot of chutzpah – or is she so damned naive she simply can’t appreciate the enormity of what she’s up to?

  Why are they always springing surprises on me? (They aren’t always, but this one’s so big it feels as though they are.) Do they think I’m a rubber ball to be bounced off any old wall? I might not like having to face Fritzi Wimmer every day in the playground, but I’d rather face him any day than start at a new school in Berlin, where something tells me Ortsgruppenleiters’ sons will be twice as many and three times as nasty as Fritz – who as a matter of fact I’m getting on all right with now, since our little encounter in the playground. No, Martin may think this scheme is fine, but I don’t like it one little bit.

  But then I realise something: Willibald doesn’t like it either. He’s scared he’ll end up still deeper in the shit, though that’s not how he phrases it, and he’s certainly in deep enough as it is with his Jewish wife and half- (full-?) Jewish kids. Yet strangely enough, his dislike of it has the opposite effect on me, and I begin to warm to the idea after all. A new principle is slowly taking shape in my brain, a principle I must have gleaned from experience: if Willibald doesn’t like it, it’s probably all right.

  ‘What about all the air raids?’ he demands as Gabi packs my case. He’s accepted the decision at last, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try to sabotage it. ‘The British are destroying our cities! That brutal Churchill wants to rase them to the ground!’ Willibald hasn’t got the wireless back, but you can tell he still reads the papers and is a patriot at heart.

  Gabi swallows the mouthful of water that, following the Kaminsky principle, she’s been holding in her mouth for several minutes or so. ‘Maria said they haven’t had a raid for months,’ she answers, straining at the lid to see how much more she can cram in. Is that what she believes, or only what she wants to believe?

  ‘And when the barbaric Russians come … ?’ Now Willibald’s voice is near to tears, and his voice chokes in a sob. He really can turn the tap on at a moment’s notice. The Russians are in disarray a thousand kilometres east of us, but Willibald’s as convinced of the imminent Bolshie danger as any Nazi ideologue. Well, as I said, he reads the papers. He buys one in the village every day. They won’t deliver it to us because we’ve got the Jewish taint. Jews aren’t allowed to read healthy Aryan papers, and healthy Aryan papers would get contaminated if they entered our house. Perhaps they aren’t so healthy after all.

  ‘Berlin is further away from the Russian front than we are,’ Gabi says, pushing in an extra pair of socks. I peep at my school atlas later that night and am relieved to discover her political geography at least is right, though only just.

  I still don’t know what’s really going on, except that Martin and I are being sent to Berlin, where, it now occurs to me, we all really belong. But why us two and not the others? No use asking Willibald – he’s too deep in sentimental and self-advertising grief. And Martin only looks exasperatedly up to heaven whenever I ask him anything. So my mother is the only source. But she’s gone suddenly taciturn and gruff and I see her wiping her eye with the corner of her apron when she thinks no one’s looking. (Sara sees it too, as she sees everything, and buries it inside her.) It isn’t till weeks later that I piece it all together – Gabi’s strategy against the Nazi policy on half-breeds’ education.

  Frau Dr Helena Saur-that-was thinks she has spied a loophole in the new regulations, a loophole which Martin might be able to scramble through into the castle of German higher secondary education. As from this year, half-Jews completing the sixth grade will have reached the finishing line. But if they’re already in the seventh grade, they can continue. Not as far as university, of course – who do they think they are? – but anyway until the end of school.

  ‘The Nazis are just, you see,’ Frau Dr Saur-that-was tells Gabi. ‘They may be hard, but they don’t make regulations retroactive.’ Now that’s a bureaucracy which even her manically tidy husband can be proud of. (Her manically tidy husband, by the way, has recently been punishing her more severely for uncombed carpet fringes and carelessly folded newspapers, and she has shown Gabi her knees, sore and scabby from kneeling on the firewood. Gabi has recommended calamine lotion. Frau Dr Saur-that-was will apply this soothing ointment to her bum as well, though Gabi doesn’t know yet that her husband’s punishments have extended to that region too. No wonder he sports a duelling scar. Perhaps he thinks the one on his cheek should be complemented by one on hers.)

  So if Martin can complete both this year’s and next year’s curriculum in six months, perhaps he could go into the eighth grade next year, just as if he’d been in the seventh grade this year. And then – who knows? – perhaps the regulations will have changed. This anti-Semitism won’t last, Frau Dr Saur-that-was is sure of that. (Has she read Mein Kampf? Has anyone? Can anyone?) The Führer’s far too intelligent not to see what a mistake it is. It’s the Reds who are the real enemy. Her eyes glisten when she mentions the Führer, as a nun’s would when mentioning the Pope whilst discussing some questionable doctrine brought in without the seal of papal infallibility and sure to be rescinded. She’s an incurable optimist – she has to be, living with a husband like hers. How could she face tomorrow unless she believed things couldn’t be worse then than they are today?

  Of course she can’t teach Martin herself, much as she’d like to – she still remembers what she thinks of as his Aryan charm. Her manically tidy husband certainly wouldn’t allow irregularities like that. But perhaps someone else could? There’s no doubt Martin’s got the brains for it all right. If only he can get a teacher. Pity about Ilse, but there you are, she’s just too slow.

  Gabi turns first to Fräulein von Kaminsky, but for all her aristocratic contempt of the Nazis, Fräulein von Kaminsky has no desire to risk her hide for either Martin or Willibald, for both of whom she feels an almost equal scorn. And so it’s Gabi’s oldest friend Maria that’s been willingly enlisted. As a teenager, when she helped convert Gabi, Maria wanted to become a missionary and dreamt of martyrdom among the heathen in Africa, and though her dominating father soon put a stop to that, she now yearns for martyrdom through some act of defiance against the heathen at home. A prudent man although himself no friend of the Nazis, her father would put a stop to that too if he could, but he’s grown frail and his dominance over her has weakened. The indifference of age has drifted over him like ash from a dying volcano, and congealed into a dull grey crust. He’s past caring about anything much any more, except his creature comforts. That’s Maria’s chance, and she’s grabbed it with four hands – her own and Gabi’s second oldest friend, Frau Professor Hoffmann’s. Not only will Martin go to Berlin and be taught by them, but I’ll go as well, and be enrolled in a Berlin primary school, which they have no doubt is far better than the Heimstatt yokels’ academy I’m currently attending.

  But what about Ilse and Sara? Don’t they get a look-in too? Well, if there’s anything Willibald and Gabi still agree on, it’s that they’ve given up on Ilse. Frau Doktor Saur-that-was was right; Ilse is just too slow. Perhaps she’ll go i
nto a Protestant nuns order, or even a Catholic one if they’ll have her, since she seems so popishly inclined, or else just stay at home until something happens – the Nazis pass away, or she does, or she even finds someone to marry her, or … well, something or other. After all, the future’s just a fog – it’s no good peering into it. So’s the present, come to that. Only the past, the fairly distant past of pre-Nazi Germany, offers a view worth looking at.

  Yes, my parents have given up on Ilse, and so it seems has Ilse. Since her expulsion from school, her clock has been running even slower, and no amount of Gabi’s frantic winding can make it gain a second. ‘Say something, Ilse!’ her mother sometimes demands. ‘Why don’t you say something?’ Ilse considers this, then slowly murmurs ‘What shall I say?’ She never was a talker, but now she doesn’t speak at all unless she’s forced to. And that’s the kind of thing she says. Besides, she usually answers so slowly that people stop listening before she’s finished, which she consequently rarely does. The problem is, she doesn’t think she’s got anything to say, except perhaps to God, who appears to have stopped listening too. She’s resigned herself to being a half-Jewish leftover, an object of contempt and disgust to everyone including herself. (Or by the Jewish rules, she’s fully Jewish, since her mother is. That makes her even worse. She tries not to think of that.) As if to emphasise her unworthiness, she walks still more slowly than before and drags her left foot all the time as though it was shackled to an iron ball. She eats more slowly too, and when we’ve finished our scanty war time rations she’s still chewing hers with a vacant look in her eyes, as if she was a sad cow ruminating. Yes, everyone has given up on Ilse, but all the same her race is not yet run. Ilse still has miles to go before she sleeps. Miles and miles.