The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  ‘Luftwaffe pilot?’ Erwin echoes with a smile when Martin confides this dream to him. His smile is more rueful than ironic, although he surely knows Martin has about as much chance of becoming a Luftwaffe pilot as he has of seeing Hitler’s willy. ‘That’s what Robert wanted too, at first. But I told him he was mad.’

  ‘Mad? Why?’

  ‘Because as a rule the life of a Luftwaffe pilot on active service is about three months.’

  Then he turns to Lerke and gives her an exaggerated bow and smile. And this time his smile is ironic. ‘Permit me to observe that I am a lifetime exception to this rule.’

  Lerke’s eyes had clouded, but now they clear and she smiles back at her betrothed with all the trust and patient courage of a noble German girl.

  Tante Maria tentatively mentions there are relatives of Gabi’s still here in Berlin. Gabi’s Aunt Hedwig, she means, and some second or third cousins. That’s the first time I’ve heard them mentioned since we’ve been here. As I’ve never met them, they mean very little to me and I don’t mind if I never do meet them – especially as I sense meeting them could be a little risky. ‘I don’t know whether you’d like to see them … ?’ Tante Maria asks Erwin diffidently.

  Erwin doesn’t even need to glance at Robert or Lerke before he answers, sleeking one eyebrow down with his little finger. ‘Perhaps another time,’ he smoothly and regretfully murmurs. But there’s a spasm of embarrassed silence for a few seconds, as though someone has just farted and nobody can think of what to say to distract us from the smelly indiscretion.

  It’s only a week or two after Erwin and Robert have left – Robert to crush the Bolshies in the East, Erwin to subdue the English in the West – that Tante Maria and Frau Professor Hoffmann suggest a Sunday walk in the Botanical Garden, a park I half-expect to be full of lurking Tommies, since Martin told me some parachuted into it after their plane was shot down by one of our heroic German fighters. Martin isn’t keen either (surely he isn’t scared of the Tommies too?), but Tante Maria is strangely insistent, and so he comes along with manifest impatience and sulky ill grace. We reach the gates, but surprisingly don’t go in, for which I’m faintly thankful. I don’t like the idea of coming across some Tommies behind a bush, even though I only half-believe we might, and don’t know if they’d be alive or dead – or, for that matter, which would be worse.

  Instead we stroll around outside the park and down an empty little lane until as if by accident we come across three people, a man and two women, who look pale and worn and down-at-heel. Each of them has a yellow star on their coat. They seem to want to make the star as inconspicuous as possible with their scarves, without exposing themselves to any accusation that they’re hiding them. So these are Jews, the first I’ve ever seen if you don’t count my mother, which for some reason I don’t. Is this how Gabi would have looked if Franzi Wimmer hadn’t taken her star back, I wonder. It adds a bit of colour to their drab and threadbare clothes, but somehow I can understand why Gabi said she’d never go out wearing it. The man raises his shabby hat and speaks to us as if we ought to know him. As I happen to be nearest, I try to brush past this unsavoury and disturbing trio, but ‘This is your Onkel Solomon and Tante Lotte,’ Tante Maria says quietly. ‘And Tante Hedwig. She’s your great-aunt.’

  Great Aunt Hedwig looks like an old woman whose skin has become two and a half sizes too big for her. You can see she might have been fat and jolly once, but now she’s just shrivelled away and her emptied skin hangs round her like the rubbery wrinkles of a punctured balloon. She surveys me earnestly with watery eyes, and I look uneasily away at the other two, who merely seem drab, tired and woebegone. Their eyes are always glancing uneasily somewhere else, over their shoulders, across the lane, or just from side to side. But at least they aren’t watery or fixed on me.

  After some hesitation Martin does a heel-click that Erwin would have been proud of, and we all stand chatting, or pretending to, for all the world like people who’ve just met by chance and will soon be getting along on their separate ways. The chatting is mostly with Martin and Tante Maria. Frau Professor Hoffmann and I remain on the edge of the group. But even so I can tell they aren’t really talking, they’re filling in the time until they say goodbye. Our shoes scrape on the crunchy gravel path and the conversation’s one of coughs and silences punctuated by words, rather than the other way round. Every now and then they look at me and smile and ask me questions in the way that grown-ups do, but as I don’t know how to answer them I only look down and shuffle my shoes in a kind of sulky shyness.

  Martin does better – well, he’s older and besides he’s Martin – and occasionally there’s a minute or two of unconstipated talk. It seems all they’re interested in is how everyone is, and Martin paints a picture of jolly amity and good spirits that takes my breath away. Listening to him you’d think Ilse was on the way to university and Willibald to becoming a bishop. As for himself (naturally he doesn’t get left out), he’s probably going to join the Luftwaffe like cousin Erwin.

  ‘Ach, nein!’ Great Aunt Hedwig murmurs in tearful shock, and there’s a silence just as awkward as the silence that followed Erwin’s oblique announcement that he wouldn’t be meeting these relatives of Gabi’s. Then Gabi’s second or third cousin Solomon, who looks as though he’s out of razor blades, which admittedly are hard to come by in these wartime years, pitches in with a question about Sara, who’s also doing very well according to Martin – for a girl, of course.

  After about fifteen minutes two men appear at the top of the lane, and Gabi’s relatives hunch their shoulders and leave. And still they aren’t really people to me – only shadows of people. But then that’s what they seem to be to themselves as well. Martin gives another exemplary heel-click, but turns his eyes up to the sky as they shuffle off, as though noblesse oblige is all very well, but this riffraff shouldn’t have presumed on it so much. I suspect the trio are as disappointed as we are, like beggars that haven’t scored and are shifting to another beat. Then Great Aunt Hedwig suddenly turns back and, as I’m nearest, clutches both my hands in hers. ‘Remember us!’ she implores me in a wobbly voice and with veiny tear-stained eyes that peer straight through mine into some dark and hidden place in my brain that I didn’t know existed. And that makes me want to cry too.

  ‘Imagine how they must feel,’ Tante Maria murmurs to Frau Professor Hoffmann as she watches them down the road and round the corner, ‘working twelve hours a day making bombs to drop on their own son in England …’

  Frau Professor Hoffmann sighs.

  ‘Son in England?’ I repeat in a voice that’s suddenly unsteady.

  Martin sighs and rolls his eyes heavenwards again, as if my ignorance really is the last straw and his patience is totally exhausted.

  ‘Wolfgang,’ Tante Maria answers absently, her eyes on the two men now approaching us. ‘Solomon and Lotte’s son. He got away before the war. He was going to be a pianist.’

  I’d like to go further into this despite Martin’s obvious annoyance, but the two men are a few feet away now, and each of them is giving each of us a hard inquiring stare, which knocks all the curiosity out of me. Then the nearest one stops, takes out a shiny little bronze badge, flashes it at Tante Maria and mutters the word ‘Gestapo’.

  I feel as though I’ve just stepped into an empty lift shaft, and shuffle my feet on the kerb while Tante Maria and Frau Professor Hoffmann show their papers and answer questions awkwardly, like schoolchildren caught playing truant. It’s not going to stop there, I know, and there’s a definite anxious hush as the functionaries of state security now turn their scrutinising orbs on Martin and me. Martin’s aplomb is clearly out of true as he hands our papers over, which does nothing at all for my own rocky sense of self-possession. I’m scared that something even worse than Fritzi Wimmer is going to happen to me as our papers are suspiciously examined, first by one secret guardian of the Reich, then by the other. Eventually they put their heads together to make one brain, and grudgingly decide ou
r papers are all right. We’re all dismissed with a nod. Tante Maria (still hankering for martyrdom?) is then emboldened to inquire with something approaching sarcasm in her voice whether they really are quite satisfied that everything’s in order.

  ‘There’s no room for you in the cage just yet,’ is the surly reply, and she turns away with mingled flutters of anxiety and triumph.

  These endure until we go on into the Botanical Garden after all, where there are no Tommies lurking anywhere, dead or alive, but lots of proper Aryan people promenading in their smart though wartime clothes, and throwing balls for their proper Aryan children or proper Aryan dogs. ‘Let’s have some coffee,’ Tante Maria suggests, her voice a little uneven and her cheeks a little flushed. ‘Maria,’ Frau Professor Hoffmann says reproachfully, ‘you really shouldn’t go looking for trouble.’ I’m tempted to ask why having coffee would be looking for trouble, although I know full well that isn’t what she meant; but then, glancing at Frau Professor Hoffmann’s frown and Tante Maria’s tightened lips, I find the temptation very easy to resist.

  While drinking the milky and diluted ersatz coffee that was specially ordered for me, I remember that Great Aunt Hedwig wrote about her husband Moritz in her letter to Gabi last year. ‘Why didn’t Onkel Moritz come?’ I ask Tante Maria.

  Tante Maria hesitates, glancing at Frau Professor Hoffmann, and I sense this is another of those questions which are better left unasked. ‘I expect Tante Hedwig didn’t want to mention it …’ she begins uneasily.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, she must have written to your mother by now …’ Tante Maria goes on, throwing an imploring glance at Frau Professor Hoffmann. ‘Er, Onkel Moritz couldn’t come. He’s, he’s …’

  ‘He’s been evacuated,’ Frau Professor Hoffmann declares firmly. ‘To the East.’

  ‘Yes, evacuated, that’s right,’ Tante Maria agrees quickly, as though she’d quite forgotten what exactly it was that had happened to him until then. ‘Evacuated. Now, let’s be getting back home, shall we?’

  I sense with a little twist in my belly that there’s more to this evacuation business than they’re letting on, especially when I notice Martin’s flickering eyes and knowing, supercilious smile. That’s what I felt last year when Aunt Hedwig’s letter came. But I’m scared of discovering what it is. Besides, I realise neither Frau Professor Hoffmann nor Tante Maria want to tell me. So I do not ask. I decide not to think about it either, in the hope that it will just go away, which of course it doesn’t.

  Onkel Karl only grunts offhandedly when Maria tells him on our return where we’ve been and who we’ve met. He’s hungry for his supper and doesn’t want to hear any more about all that, he mutters peevishly. He’s got his nose full of it, he says, which is the pungent if coarse German way of saying he’s sick to death of it.

  On the wireless an enthusiastic voice declares that the new territories in the East are welcoming more and more Germans every day who are coming to help the Führer build the New Europe. And there’s a woman’s voice to prove it, proudly announcing she is one of them and has never been so happy in her life.

  ‘Will you switch that damned thing off at last?!’ Onkel Karl demands with his mouth full, consequently spraying blobs of food onto his napkin and beard. It’s as if he knows the relatives we met today would soon be moving East themselves like Onkel Moritz, and the thought of the contribution they’d be making to the New Europe is spoiling his appetite.

  It’s wurst and potato salad for supper, which reminds me of both Adolf and Brutus, but I eat it all the same, feeling vaguely uncomfortable and ashamed of my clearly poor and inferior relations, and ashamed of myself for feeling ashamed. And so I judge does Martin (only the first kind of shame for him though – he’s never going to be ashamed of himself), because he dilates upon the superior tactics of German aerial warfare with more than his usual know-it-all dogmatism whenever Tante Maria or Frau Professor Hoffmann gently and indirectly wonder what would happen next to ‘those unfortunate people’.

  But the mood soon passes, or rather I soon push it aside, and by Tuesday or Wednesday I scarcely remember the broken, scared and shabby trio, let alone Great-Uncle Moritz whom I didn’t meet and never will. Or if I do remember, it’s only in my bed at night, when sleep leaves cellar doors unlocked and anguished haggard shadows steal upstairs to haunt my dreams. Besides, in another week or two, I’m much more occupied by Martin’s first Aryan romance.

  Which is the first of dozens. Tante Maria has a sister Elsa, who is married to a lawyer. And the lawyer is a Party member. And Elsa has a daughter Eva, who’s all a German maiden should be – still more blue-eyed than Erwin’s Lerke, and still blonder too, a member of the League of German Girls of course, and a star gymnast in her school. It won’t do for Martin and me to call at a Party member’s house, but Elsa can hardly fail to visit her father, and so she does, with Eva in tow. Elsa is somewhat cool to us, as befits a Party member’s wife, but political correctness isn’t Eva’s thing, and she’s all laughs and smiles. She’s got a mole on her cheek which fascinates me, and when she sees it does, she tells me it’s her beauty spot. For some reason that makes me blush all over.

  Eva is younger than Martin, but you wouldn’t know it, and her hormones are as acrobatic as the rest of her. With cake crumbs still on her well-formed lips she slips behind her mother, tucks her skirt in her knickers and performs handstands, cartwheels and somersaults on the fresh May lawn, then arches over backwards and walks crabwise to and fro, giving us, but mainly Martin, a saucy upside-down grin, which enhances the charm of her beauty spot. All this impresses me, and I try walking like a crab too, which nearly breaks my back. It impresses Martin as well, but he wisely avoids any perilous athletic display.

  It impresses her mother Elsa too when she notices, and she tells Eva sharply to pull her skirt down. Her voice has that shade and her eyes that meaning look which Gabi’s have when she urges Willibald to pull his nightshirt down when the girls are about. But Eva, like Willibald, seems unconcerned. ‘That’s how we do it in school,’ she answers pertly, but then she lazily obliges her mother, which is more than Willibald ever does Gabi. But it’s too late, the damage has been done. Martin’s hormones have been set jigging too, and he’s going to dream of fondling those knickered loins for weeks, with one hand fondling his own.

  What does he tell her that charms her up into our shared bedroom on one of her next visits? What does he need to tell her? She probably leads the way. Onkel Karl is dozing in his chair in the garden, his beard lying like a bedraggled fleece laid out to dry over his flabby chest and hilly belly. Tante Maria is deep in earnest talk with Elsa, suppressing her cough with a dainty white handkerchief. I gather, from a few words they drop and a few oblique glances they throw, that they’re discussing Onkel Karl’s declining health. Then Martin whispers something to Eva and Eva laughs beneath her breath, lowering her eyelids and glancing sideways at me, which I feel I have to pretend I haven’t noticed. Then suddenly I’m all alone, sitting in the shade of the elm tree where a moment before there were the three of us. I wait for them to come back, but they don’t.

  That’s boring. After a time I decide to go and find them. I try the rest of the garden first, then the house. Something – an intuition that I don’t like, perhaps – warns me to leave our bedroom till last. It warns me to try the door ever so gently, too, as if I knew it would be locked. But there is whispering and giggling going on inside, and then a silence so profound it’s pregnant. Metaphorically, I mean. I go halfway up the next flight of stairs, which would lead to the maid’s room if there was still a maid to occupy it, sit down, cuddle my knees, and wait. Soon I hear Tante Elsa’s voice calling in the garden. Soon I hear it inside the house, growing worried or suspicious. Then the door softly opens and Martin emerges, looking as though his balls have suddenly grown three sizes bigger, which they probably have. I lean closer to the banister, where he doesn’t see me. Out comes Eva now, doing up the buttons on her dishevelled white blouse. (I
t was crisp enough when she arrived.) She calls out ‘Coming!’ which she very well might have been a couple of minutes earlier, straightens her rumpled skirt, flings her pig-tails back over her shoulders and skips downstairs. Martin follows slowly, with the smug and stately air of a Roman general at his triumph.

  ‘Oh, just playing Skat,’ I hear Eva insouciantly answer her mother’s irritable and possibly accusing query, as first Martin and then I appear behind her. ‘We didn’t hear you.’

  Eva and Martin play Skat quite often in the next few weeks, although I never see a pack of cards. But then, just when they must be getting really good at it, Martin’s fun with Eva has to end, and –

  9

  All his hopes of further schooling

  It seems the Tommies just don’t know when they’re beaten. According to Tante Maria, who sometimes listens black (I’ve dimly got the drift of this expression now), we say we’re shooting down more Royal Air Force planes than the Tommies say they’re sending over. But somehow despite all those enormous losses, the British bombers keep on coming. Two or three times a week we’re down in the shelter now, and occasionally, when there are really heavy Crrumps!, the roof shakes and bits of plaster fall on Onkel Karl’s umbrella, although I’ve never noticed any drips. My stomach curdles when that happens and I realise I’m not the stuff that German heroes are made of. Or at least I would do if I didn’t know already – ever since I met Fritzi Wimmer, in fact, on my first day of school.