But even superior Nazis are beginning to think discretion is the better part of valour now, and the schools are being evacuated. Martin and Eva play their last game in the bedroom and Martin is stoically desolate in the manner of Tristan bidding farewell to Isolde. But there’s still worse to come for him, still more to endure.
On the very day Eva is skipping onto the train bearing its precious freight of German presumed maidenhood into the countryside, Tante Maria slits a letter from Heimstatt open with her ivory paper knife. It’s Willibald at his most floridly sentimental. There’s even a tear splash on one word, which fortunately isn’t wholly washed away – he’s a careful weeper. Enclosed is the official reply from the educational authorities to his request to allow Martin to jump a year and sit the examination for the eighth grade. Cutting out the bureaucratic introit and the Heil Adolf coda, the theme of this work is negative. According to the regulations, non-Aryan students are not permitted to jump a class. Only thoroughbred Aryans’ athletic minds are up to scholastic leaps like that. So Martin’s cramming has all been in vain, and his schooling is now terminated. Between the stodgy lines you can almost hear the phlegmatic and methodical officials allowing themselves a moderate chuckle. ‘Nice try, Willibald!’
What reproaches Willibald has heaped on Gabi’s head, what bitter ‘I-told-you-so’s’, what countings and recountings of the futile cost, I am too young to imagine. Not that that stops me.
‘And I’m sure you would have passed,’ Tante Maria ruefully assures Martin.
But Martin takes the news of his final dismissal to the wood-hewing, water-drawing underclass quite calmly. ‘Never mind, I enjoyed learning it all anyway,’ he replies with the grace of a downed Luftwaffe pilot emerging dauntless from the wreckage of his plane. (Do I see him stroke his eyebrow with a gesture as coolly elegant as Erwin’s?) ‘It’s bound to come in useful in the future.’ Perhaps he’s also thinking of what he’s learnt from Eva, in which case he’s certainly hit it on the button.
I’ve got my farewells to say, too, since I’m not going with my new school into Eastern Prussia. The principal suggests to Frau Professor Hoffmann that I should, but I’m destined to return with Martin to Heimstatt, which everyone agrees is even safer. All those transactions go on as usual above my head or behind my back or both, but on the last day of school Frau Stadler, who’s always been slack about the morning Hitler salute, tells the class I’m leaving and wishes me well. The boy that sat unknowingly next to half- or full-Jew me all this time gives me his pencil with his name printed on it along one side, and since I can think of nothing else, I give him mine. ‘My father’s been wounded in Africa,’ Ulrich says solemnly. ‘He’s a colonel.’
I’m impressed by both these distinctions, and vaguely wish I could say that Willibald has achieved at least one of them. I wish I knew the etiquette about his heroic father too – should I express condolence as well as congratulation? I’ve no idea, so I only nod respectfully by way of answer. And so we part.
In a couple of days I’m back in Heimstatt, sitting in my old seat in the primary school with the unchanged view of the tide mark on Heini Beranek’s red and pimply neck. Everything seems exactly as it was, including Fritzi Wimmer’s friendly truculence. ‘Back from Berlin, Jew boy?’ he inquires affably, thumping my arm in the playground. ‘What’s it like, then?’ Fräulein Meissner repeats this question in more courteous tones after we’ve all offered Adolf our customary stiff-armed regards. (Her faith seems to have been restored). I’m inspired to describe an air-raid, and give an imaginative eye-witness account of the destruction of a Tommy bomber that in fact I never saw. Respectful silence settles over the class like virgin snow over a field of nettles, and for a few moments I savour what it’s like to be accepted and even admired. Then Fritzi puts up his hand and asks if any of my friends were on the plane. And though Fräulein Meissner scolds him for his cheek, I know from the collusive sniggers all around that I’ve been put firmly back in my half-Jewish place.
So nothing’s changed after all, except that now, owing to my Berlin schooling, I’m top of the class. Or would be if the new principal didn’t ensure I wasn’t. The old principal’s been conscripted. It’s the Russians he’s supposed to be teaching a lesson to now, though I wonder how his racial science expositions are going down on the Eastern Front. From what I heard in Berlin, the Russians just can’t seem to get these theories through their heads. The new principal is well over fifty, and so exempted for the time being at least from military service. He does his bit for final victory though by cooking my grades. The assumption is I must have cheated, or at least got some unfair advantage in Berlin, since half-breeds clearly can’t be more than half as good as the real pedigree thing. So my high grades are altered (‘adjusted’, they called it) and I come out about average.
This is my first experience of positive discrimination, and I don’t like it any more than other people do when they’re the ones that get the raw side of the deal. But I don’t care all that much for grades anyway, so I don’t see it as the scandalous catastrophe that Willibald does. Nor does Gabi – she’s always known that Jews should never stick out, and she’s certainly learnt by now that half-Jews shouldn’t either. So while Willibald rages against the pig-ignorant principal who’s subverted the holy traditions of German scholarship, and Jägerlein, who has mysteriously returned with Annchen and been reinstated, closes the windows that Ilse’s too slow to get to, Gabi sits at the dining room table and broods on further schemes for undermining the educational policies of the Third Reich. Could it be the Third Reich has met its match? Well, it certainly isn’t long before Gabi’s schemes are hatched.
In fact some of them crack their shells so fast, you’ve got to think she’s been sitting on them for months already. Ilse, for instance, slow Ilse that everyone has given up on, Ilse’s going twice a week to Plinden now, ostensibly on shopping trips – after all, what else could she do, now her schooling’s over? (Though what she could possibly buy and how she could possibly pay for it must be a mystery.) But she comes back with no more in her rucksack than when she left, although she’s got a bit more in her head. What she’s got in her rucksack is school books, and what she’s got in her head is learning. Yes, in reality she’s having lessons with two lay teachers from the very school she was thrown out of. The ardent Nazi Frau Professor Förster doesn’t know – at least, Ilse hopes she doesn’t – but Frau Professor Lambach and Frau Professor Zauner are teaching Ilse in their shared apartment near the lake. They share it because they’re lonely widows, both their husbands having given their lives for the Fatherland, or, rather, the Fatherland having taken them for Adolf. ‘The Thousand Year Reich won’t last for ever,’ Frau Professor Zauner says, who teaches Ilse English and French. ‘And then you’ll go back to school again.’ Well, of course a thousand years isn’t for ever, but it still seems a long time to slow Ilse. Besides, she’ll be eighteen next birthday.
In pauses from composing King David or King Solomon, not exactly titles likely to lure a wide public in the Third Reich, Willibald alternately praises the two teachers’ magnanimity and deplores the pace at which Ilse digests their intellectual nourishment. ‘She just creeps along,’ he sometimes sighs, referring to both her physical and mental progress. Then he shakes his head and lets his voice throb in tragic acceptance of what the fates decree. ‘She’ll never go far.’
Ilse’s teaching was arranged by Fräulein von Adler, the pipe-smoking Catholic who listens black. She it was who declared that Ilse’s education mustn’t be neglected. The girl was slow all right, but she’d get there in the end. Now, poking her spit-glistening pipe stem nearly into Willibald’s recoiling face, she announces with a cheerful cackle audible throughout the house that the Tommies are bashing Rommel in North Africa and the Russkies are bashing von Paulus at Stalingrad, while the Amis haven’t even started yet. At this rate Hitler will soon be done for. And so will she be, if she goes on about it as loudly as that, although Jägerlein closed the windows as soon as sh
e saw the salty old woman coming. All the same, Gabi and Willibald grimace at her, twitching their eyebrows grotesquely and glancing at me with almost the same expression that Tante Elsa wore when Eva went prancing about on the lawn upside down in her knickers. And I realise that’s one more thing it isn’t proper I should hear. I’m really getting lessons in discretion here. I’ve picked up a bit of French as well, from Sara who’s learning it at school, and at first I think the Amis Fräulein von Adler spoke of are some kind of friend, though whose I couldn’t tell. That leaves questions hanging in my mind which my growing discretion warns me I shouldn’t put. It’s only later that the picture clears, when Sara tells me ‘Amis’ isn’t badly pronounced French but abbreviated German for ‘Americans’.
But Fräulein von Adler’s not the only one whose help Gabi’s drawn upon. Fräulein von Kaminsky, though unwilling to risk a concentration camp for Martin or Willibald – or probably for anyone else either – Fräulein von Kaminsky knows of a retired Jewish High School teacher in Bad Neusee, a Frau Professor Goldberg, who’s just the person to do some private coaching for us. After all, helping a Jew can’t do her any more harm than being one does.
And then there’s Tante Helga, a friend of Fräulein von Adler. Remember her? Tante Helga was a geography teacher in Vienna till she went blind. On Fräulein von Adler’s recommendation, she came down to live on her pension here in Heimstatt. Frau von Adler apparently told her how beautiful the place was, which seems to me an unusual reason for commending it to a blind person. But apparently Tante Helga agrees, because she goes out every morning with her white stick and turns her face unerringly towards the most appealing view, even when the snow and rain obscure it. Blind or not, she can find London or Paris on a map she can’t see faster than I can on a map I can. Tante Helga doesn’t mind teaching us. Her brother was a socialist and did time in a concentration camp before the war, but she thinks they wouldn’t bother to put her in. Besides, there’s no law against coaching half-Jews is there? (It’s a moot point. As Willibald has already noticed, if they aren’t allowed to go further than the sixth grade, isn’t she helping them evade the law? She leaves that to the bureaucrats, and Gabi’s happy to let her do so.)
And finally there’s Father Schuster, the myopic Catholic priest, and our own church organist. They’re going to teach Latin and music respectively, the latter on a violin that’s too big for me and too small for Sara (Martin and Ilse are beyond such frivolity).
These are the warriors Gabi recruits against the Nazis. Not all of them are volunteers exactly. Frau Professor Goldberg, for instance, the retired Jewish schoolteacher – she’d rather stay hidden in her little apartment in Bad Neusee like a timid mouse, hoping the ethnic cleansers won’t come for her before death in its more natural form does. And the organist is always backsliding and will neither enter our house to give Sara and me his lessons nor allow us to enter his. We have to have them on neutral ground, in the church vestry, which is cold and damp in summer and freezing in winter. No wonder our fingering never gets very nimble. He keeps his mitts on while he teaches us, and hardly ever demonstrates. Sometimes he doesn’t even turn up, and we wait half an hour in the vestry while our feet and hands go gradually numb. It’s clear to me he’s only doing this because he hasn’t got the balls to say he won’t. And Gabi’s ruthless when it comes to what she takes to be her children’s interests. She chivvies her little army and wheedles and badgers them to keep them in the field. You have to be tough to resist her. Conscripts and volunteers alike, she keeps them all up to the mark.
Does she ever wonder if she’s demanding too much, asking people to put themselves on the line for the sake of her half-Jewish children? Never, as far as I can see. Of course she knows she’s running a risk, a full-Jew who shouldn’t even be speaking to a pure Aryan except on official business. But the thought that the others, Aryans and Jews alike, might be running risks as well never enters her head; or if it does, makes no impression on it. Would she sacrifice them for her children’s sake? Yes, she would, without a second thought.
Of course there’s one resource she cannot call upon, one civilian she cannot conscript. Willibald was a dead loss for the German army. She never dreams of recruiting him for hers.
Nor does she expect any help from him in finding work for Martin. Despite all her efforts, Martin’s education is only part-time now after all, and unlike Ilse, he is strong and active. Money has to come from somewhere, and the candlesticks have all been sold. Why shouldn’t he find a job? Besides, that’s actually what he wants. Preferably something technical until it’s time for him to volunteer for the Luftwaffe. If he shows his mettle now, he thinks, surely they’ll gladly take him in the Luftwaffe later. And then he’ll prove to be an unparalleled ace and they’ll award him a couple of iron crosses like Erwin’s. Or a few more. He even imagines the Führer himself pinning them on his swelling breast. Not for him his pusillanimous cousin Robert’s route. He isn’t going to get his boots dirty plodding through all that Russian mud. He’s going to soar above it in the skies, writing his name in vapour trails of glory across the limpid blue. He can imagine Heinrich Schmidt’s crestfallen face when at last they meet again, he with the ribbon of the iron cross decorating his tunic, Heinrich a lowly unbemedalled infantry grunt. Then that superior ironic smile that Martin still recalls with such smarting pain will be wiped off Heinrich’s face for good and all. Why, Heinrich Schmidt, who was once his friend and then treacherously assisted at his alpine humiliation – Heinrich Schmidt will probably have to salute him!
Such are Martin’s dreams, but who is it that goes trudging round the local towns, trying to realise the first at least and get him work? Not Willibald, of course. He’s the one who should be taking the boy round, explaining he’s the son of a pedigree Aryan father who did his best for the Fatherland in Poland etc, etc. and can’t you please find something for him? But Willibald isn’t doing any of that. Not a bit of it. He’s sitting snug in his study and it’s King Solomon or King David he’s helping along, not young Martin. He does occasionally wring his Aryan hands over the poor boy’s fate, but it’s Jewish Gabi who’s ringing the doorbells, going the rounds with Martin, trying to mitigate it. And the problem is, who wants to employ a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old half-Jew? Particularly when it’s his full-Jewish mother taking him round, who legally speaking may be breaking the law, however ‘privileged’ she may be, by even entering those Aryan establishments? Nobody that Gabi can find, until Jägerlein tells her to try the owner of the brick factory in Plinden. ‘He’s a bit of one himself,’ she says, meaning he’s a partial Jew, not a factory fragment. ‘At least, people say he is.’
Gabi and Martin board the Plinden train the next morning, bearing Martin’s school report and Willibald’s discharge letter with them. The first reveals that Martin Brinkmann (mixed race, first degree) has reasonably good grades (for a half-Jew), the other that Willibald is, if not exactly a hero, at least an honourably discharged corporal – as after all the Führer himself was once. And Gabi’s identity card declares of course that she, though Jewish, is privileged because married to a kosher Aryan German, although kosher’s not the word employed. This is all her weaponry. Against it are arrayed obtuseness, superstition, racism, arrogance, bureaucracy, fear and more obtuseness.
The brick factory is near the station. It has three tall chimneys that remind Gabi of incinerators although because of what Fräulein von Adler’s told her she tries not to think of that. She walks steadily towards them. Martin is a step behind, already preparing to be sullen, since this is obviously not a place where his exceptional gifts can be displayed. Arriving at the gates, Gabi asks for Herr Ziegler, the owner and manager. The aged gatekeeper regards her sceptically for some moments, and Gabi feels her heart hesitate. But the man’s voice is quite neutral, and he merely tells them to wait in a little brick office that looks and feels like a little brick cell.
A man with hair as grey as old cement comes in and says ‘Heil Hitler!’ in a voice that sounds
like an old cement-mixer. At least he doesn’t stick his arm out, though. Then he notices that Gabi has only answered with a very fragile ‘Guten Morgen’.
Gabi gazes at him uncertainly. He has hard brown eyes that return her gaze unblinkingly, and she feels she’s looking at two flat stones. But then the eyes glance away and there’s something like a twitch in them, or the shadow of a twitch at least. And instead of telling him the sob story she’s prepared about her loyal German son, unfortunately disadvantaged by his guilty mother’s racial background, who (Martin, she’d mean) nevertheless only wants to serve the Fatherland, she finds herself silently laying all her puny weapons on the desk and then saying in a small, small voice ‘Please, can you give my son a job? Please? Any kind of job?’
Herr Ziegler negligently picks up the papers. ‘Half-Jew?’ he mutters, glancing at Martin again. ‘Hm!’
Martin intensifies the sullen face he’s already put on. ‘Half-Aryan,’ he replies. That’s true too of course, but hardly serves the purposes in hand.
‘Hmph! Bad money drives out good, they say.’ Herr Ziegler lays the other papers down on his desk and starts reading through Martin’s school report with a bulging underlip and furrowed brow. ‘Why shouldn’t it be the same with blood?’
That might not have been politically correct (how could good German blood be weaker than degenerate Jewish?), but Herr Ziegler doesn’t really seem to be interested in ideological debate, and as Gabi keeps winking at her son warningly with her good eye, twitching her lips and puckering her cheek, Martin infers he’s not to initiate one himself.
The Kaminsky Cure Page 14