When it comes to us, not only does he acquiesce in Gabi’s home-nursing proposal, he even consults her about which medicines to prescribe for Ilse. She assures him she nursed worse cases during her premarital nursing career and has no doubt of how to handle this one. Ilse, she declares, will be better in no time. Dr Koch is relieved to hear her prognosis. He doesn’t like his patients dying on him and would rather ship them off to hospital, never mind what state they’re in, where they can die on someone else. In fact one of the few Heimstatter deaths he ever personally manages will be his own.
Ilse likes being ill. It suits her temperament. But she doesn’t like being nursed by her mother, however much she needs her care. Gabi institutes a bracing regime: up, fresh air on the veranda; bed, up, out on the veranda again; back to bed and up and out again. Morning and evening, every change punctual to the minute, medicines and temperature-takings on the dot, and lots of good food (relatively speaking), which means that Gabi eats still less of her own diminished Jewish rations.
This discipline is all too much for Ilse. She’d rather just stay in the hospital, assuming they’d have her, put her hands together and leave it to the Lord, which last two things are certainly all that Willibald is doing for her. But a Jewish curse is venomous and she’s heard her mother curse her father. Or she thinks she has at least, late at night in their bedroom next to hers, when in the rising storm of one of their quarrels he suddenly blurted out he’d had enough of looking after her Jewish bastards and she shrieked something incomprehensible in return that Ilse took to be a Yiddish curse. She’d pulled the pillow over her ears, but there was a sullen silence after that anyway, as if her father had been struck dumb. Or even dead. Which Ilse believes is well within the compass of a Jewish curse’s power.
No, however much she’d rather lie peacefully in hospital, she knows her mother would never accept it. There would be persuasion and cajolery, then recrimination and bitterness. And in the end a Jewish curse – and nothing could be worse than that! So Ilse like her doctor acquiesces in Gabi’s prescription and submits to her iron discipline.
Love it or loathe it, though, Gabi’s regime works, and after a couple of months Dr Koch pronounces her much improved, or rather Gabi does and Dr Koch acquiesces. There’s been no let-up on the educational front either, and timid Frau Professor Goldberg, blind Tante Helga and the two widowed teachers from Plinden have been calling to continue Ilse’s schooling. What Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer thinks of a woman like Frau Professor Goldberg, who wears the Jew’s yellow star, calling on a half-Aryan house I do not know. Perhaps he reckons it’s the Jewish half she’s calling on.
Or perhaps that’s why Lisl Wimmer has been calling too. She’s the fifteen-year-old daughter of Ortsgruppenleiter Franz. In fact she calls whenever Ilse’s teachers do and asks, with an artless smile that deceives no one (not even Gabi by now), ‘Could we just borrow a box of matches?’ or ‘Have you got a candle? We’ve run out at home.’ Willibald knows she’s been sent to spy on us, but he always puts on his ingratiating parsonical smile and makes sure she gets a whole box of matches or a couple of candles, which, considering how hard both are to come by and how hard it is for him to part with anything, reveals the depth of his respect for Franzi Wimmer’s authority. Yet his feelings of humiliation and, still worse, desolation at the loss of his property have to be vented, and hardly is Lisl out of the door than Jägerlein’s closing the windows in preparation for the squall of furious and vulgar imprecations that Willibald delivers to the four walls and sometimes to the startled Frau Professor Goldberg.
Personally I like Lisl, who fills out her League of German Girls uniform like a plump and shapely pigeon does its feathered skin. So does Martin. (Like her, I mean.) I know he does, because I’ve come upon them in the back lane by the Wildbach stream. Martin was returning from work with brick dust in his clothes, and Lisl, in her freshly starched blouse, was on her way to a League of German Girls meeting, or at least that’s what she told me. (Martin didn’t tell me anything; he only scowled.) But she had brick dust in her hair and all down the front of her uniform, the top two buttons of which had come surprisingly undone, and Martin was hastily brushing her down. He wouldn’t do that for Ilse or Sara. And when she’s sent into the Pfarrhaus on her espionage visits, Lisl’s bluebell eyes, round as little saucers, glisten more at Martin than at the unwonted and suspicious guests (the Aryans among whom have in any case been primed to say they’re only there to visit Willibald in his dual capacity of Aryan and Pfarrer).
Yes, Ilse’s recovering. But Maria Muellendorf is not. From Berlin comes a letter in Maria’s hand two days before Christmas, franked with the urgent exhortation German Women and Girls! Join the Postal Service! Connecting Front and Home! Information at every Post Office! Gabi ignores this appeal, which after all ignores her too, and opens the letter eagerly, looking rather for comfort and the season’s greetings from her best and only friend. A gasped ‘Ach nein!’ confirms to the ever-watchful Sara what past experience has already suggested, that Christmas won’t be very merry this year either.
Dearest Gabi,
When you have these lines in your hands, you will be very sad. But you shouldn’t be – I’ve only gone on before you, and as we know for certain that Jesus has overcome death, we know we will see each other again. So don’t be sad, Gabi, but try to be happy.
Our friendship has enriched our lives so much. We’ve got so much to be thankful for – our childhood, our youth, and even these hard times that have bound us still closer together. And your children are bound in with us too.
Gabi, follow the path you have to tread. You will never be alone. The King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, who is yet also our brother, will always protect you.
Bless you all. May your children always be able to distinguish what’s important from what isn’t. Being able to go on with school and then go to university is actually not so important, although it would be good if it became possible again one day. Then perhaps Ilse could become a missionary doctor or nurse – but first she must get healthy again. I only hope that Martin will choose a different career from one that brings death and terror to people. It’s too soon to make any wishes for the other two, except that I hope they will find something good and satisfying to do in life.
Gabi, if ever you need any help, ask my father or Gerda. They will always be there for you. But most of all ask Our Lord. It would be nice if the two boys would drop a line to Gerda, it would make her so happy.
With my love to all of you,
And so Maria died secure in that faith that she perhaps suspected – why else would she have preached so at her? – Gabi was losing or even had already lost. She’d gone to hospital for a surgery on her lung which she knew could well prove fatal, and left a pile of farewell letters behind with Frau Professor Gerda Hoffmann.
The suggestion that Ilse might become a missionary doctor is news to me. In fact, I’m not quite sure what a missionary doctor is. Perhaps it’s news to Ilse too. Nevertheless she takes it up. Sickly slow Ilse, scarcely recovered from a bout with the malicious microbes that have just downed Maria, decides to carry the torch that Maria was prevented from bearing and has now passed on to her. Yes, Ilse declares she’s going to study medicine if she survives her illness and the war, which admittedly are two big ifs, and bring light and pills to darkest Africa. That she says anything at all is what’s astonishing, so silent has she become, not what it is she says – nobody takes much notice of that. But Ilse’s ambition nevertheless sustains her recovery just as Maria’s faith consoles her death.
A shame if both prove just to be delusions.
Hardly have Martin and I composed the obligatory lines to Frau Professor Hoffmann (Martin tosses them off in a couple of careless minutes, it takes me all afternoon, but mine are twice as many), hardly has Gabi overcome the first shock of Maria’s death, which feels to her as though a fire’s gone out inside her, than the postman delivers another obituary. This time it comes in a neatly black-bordered en
velope addressed to Willibald in a ceremonious hand which he instantly recognises. Death really is in the air these days. Literally, as it turns out.
‘It’s Harald,’ Willibald mutters as he slits the envelope open, thinking perhaps that since Maria sent her own death notice, it must have become fashionable and Harald’s simply following the trend. ‘It’s my brother.’
Wrong again. It’s Harald’s son Erwin, the Luftwaffe hero. A British Hurricane caught his Dornier over the Channel and now he’s buried in his cockpit at the bottom of the sea, his light brown hair wafted to and fro like gentle seaweed by the chilly ebb and flow of English tides. If life was a novel it would have been Wolfgang that got him, to provide the proper Sohrab and Rustum touch: Wolfgang, Gabi’s cousin Lotte’s and Solomon’s pianistic son, whom they sent away to England before the war. But it isn’t and it wasn’t. Wolfgang as it happens was learning how to jump out of planes just then, not how to shoot them down. No, it was a very English fox-hunting voice that was heard shouting a jubilant ‘Tally Ho!’ over the sputtering radio traffic, and then another equally fox-hunting though older voice commenting ‘Wizard shooting!’ Which last led the German Intelligence officer who monitored it to consider whether the British had developed a secret weapon.
I stoop to read the postmark on this envelope too, which Willibald has let fall from his trembling hands. The Führer Knows Only Struggle, Work and Care, it declares. We Want To Lighten His Burden in Whatever Way We Can.
Once again I am suffering from pronominal puzzlement as well as from a dull and anxious sense of loss. Who are the ‘we’ who want to lighten the Führer’s burden? I assume that Erwin was one of them, but what about us? Where do we stand? It isn’t easy to work out. But anyway the facts are that Willibald has started grieving loudly over Erwin and that Erwin, who’s certainly done his bit to lighten Adolf’s burden, won’t be doing any more. Willibald’s voice is trembling like his hands as he slides the letter back into the envelope he’s retrieved from me. ‘The English have taken our gallant Erwin at last,’ he throbs, making it sound as though every English fighter pilot had ‘Get Erwin!’ printed on his goggles. ‘Our Fatherland has been dealt a heavy blow.’
My puzzlement increases. For one thing, I didn’t realise the Fatherland depended so heavily on Erwin’s survival; for another I’m not so clear it is ours. It’s this second but long-standing perplexity that’s really bothering me now. Our Fatherland? Aren’t we supposed to be secretly glad when Hitler gets one on the nose? At least that’s what Fräulein von Adler suggests when she shares the black news with us that I’m not supposed to hear. But I know better by now than to ask anyone who I should be rooting for in this war, especially at this moment, when Willibald’s subsiding into mournful sighs and groans as he rests his grieving head upon his grieving hands and his grieving elbows on his grieving desk. He seems to take Erwin’s death harder than Maria’s, although Maria was certainly on our side, whatever that is, while Erwin was … well, what?
But perhaps the explanation’s as much Willibald’s love of uniforms as ideological confusion. I know he sometimes takes his old Wehrmacht togs out of the wardrobe, removes the dust cover and brushes them lovingly down. And I remember Erwin’s uniform is quite a bit smarter than his, while Maria didn’t have one at all. So naturally Willibald would be sad that Erwin’s uniform is done for as well as Erwin himself. I know that can’t be all of it, but realising it would be too taxing for my nearly ten year-old brain, I wisely refrain from further speculation.
And Willibald soon puts aside his grief. A couple of hours later, he’s penned a condolence letter that Schiller would be proud of – and he certainly is, because he reads it to us all, pulling out every stop. And by evening chuckles from the study suggest that sorrow has not distracted him from his labours on King David, which is really getting going now. For all I know, Erwin’s death may even have spurred him on.
In the next day’s post a letter from Erwin himself arrives. No, not his own obituary after all, but a Christmas letter written on the day of his death, and somehow posted several days after it. They really ought to sort these things out at the field post offices.
Dear Onkel Willibald,
Many thanks for your letter of 24th November. I’m keeping well, and have lots of work to do. I’ve been acting squadron leader since the beginning of November, which isn’t easy for an officer as young as I am, as you can probably imagine. But it’s going all right, I’ve worked myself in pretty well by now. I’ll be spending the Christmas holiday with the men here.
How are things at the Heimstatt Pfarrhaus? Have the two packets of flour I sent arrived? I hope so. Happy Christmas to you and the whole family, and best wishes for the New Year.
Yours
Erwin
Somehow this posthumously arriving letter affects me more than the news of Erwin’s death itself did. I know I’m going to miss Erwin. I’m going to miss his flour too, because that never does arrive, which means we won’t have any Christmas cake this year. Not that we’d enjoy it with all this grief around, but still. I’m going to miss my elegant cousin, in fact I’m missing him already. All the same it isn’t as though he was Sara or my mother. After all, I only met him once. I miss Tante Maria more, and I keep thinking of her scented handkerchiefs and quiet dainty little cough. That stops me looking forward to Christmas more than Erwin’s death alone would have done.
And it stops Gabi too. The dwarf Christmas tree cut from the stony hill behind the house stands undecorated still on Christmas Eve, and our only celebration is a single candle at its foot. It’s more like Good Friday than Christmas Eve, and the tree might just as well be a naked cross. No one feels much like singing Christmas carols, and the cheap little presents Gabi has secretly managed to assemble lie bare and unwrapped in forlorn forgotten heaps upon the floor.
It’s not surprising really, when you think that Maria was Gabi’s best friend and their lives have been so tangled up together. Gabi wouldn’t even have become a Christian if it weren’t for Maria, and then she’d never have met and married Willibald (although that can’t mean as much to her now as once it must have done). She couldn’t be expected, despite Maria’s exhortation, just to shrug her death off and carry on as usual. Her silent and withdrawn mourning persists for two more days, and the house is like a gloomy cave, which even Jägerlein’s poetic bustle (she recites a lot these days) and Annchen’s vacant cheerfulness can’t warm. But then suddenly one morning there’s a change in the emotional weather, a crackle of fresh energy. It feels warmer inside although it’s just as cold outside. Yes, Gabi’s formed another plan.
She isn’t going to let Maria’s passing pass without her. That would be a kind of treachery, a blanking out of half her life. No, she’s been looking up timetables once more and consulting her credit (there’s still some crystal after all to sell). She’s decided to go to Maria’s funeral, and take Martin and me along as well. After all, we lived with Maria for half a year, we owe it to her. Is this breathtaking chutzpah again or stunning naivety?
At nearly ten years old I can hardly say. She puts the plan to Willibald the next day, which fortunately is a Sunday when he’s tired out from a day’s preaching, and she takes care to keep a gob-stopping mouthful of water handy in a tumbler beside her, expecting him to voice all kinds of vehement objections. But strangely enough he has no objections to voice. All he does is remind her sternly that Jews need permission from the district Authority for travel outside their place of residence. Perhaps he’s calculating that the district Authority, in the person of Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer, will of course deny permission. But if so, he’s wrong again. He ought to know by now that he usually is. Everyone else does.
For reasons we shall never know, Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer sees no objection to the Jewess Gabriella Sara Brinkmann, wife of the Aryan Pfarrer Willibald Brinkmann (that’s how her permit describes her) attending a funeral in Berlin, provided she doesn’t stay in an Aryan home – which is something the Berlin peo
ple can worry about, he can’t look after everything. Is Franzi turning religious in his middle age, or has Lisl dropped a pleading word in his ear – as Martin has surely dropped some honeyed ones in hers? More likely he’s been listening black like Fräulein von Adler, and is paying premiums to insure his future. After all, things aren’t looking at all good on the Eastern Front at present, North Africa’s already gone in the south, and now Italy is wobbling too.
When Willibald hears a permit has already been issued and that Gabi has already phoned Frau Professor Gerda Hoffmann from the post office (which strictly speaking Jews are not allowed to do – is it just the Christmas season, or are they listening black as well?), he discovers a pile of reasons after all why Gabi shouldn’t go, all of them financial, and Gabi has need of two doses of the Kaminsky cure (she swallows one, is about to let fly, but restrains herself and quickly takes another). Yet somehow the battle is halfhearted on Willibald’s side. Not a single book gets thrown on the floor, not a single picture torn from the wall, and neither I nor Sara feel any urge to take refuge behind the kitchen stove. There’s one last lachrymose appeal to the state of Ilse’s health, but Ilse’s actually better than she’s been for years and besides she’d like a break from Gabi. Even Willibald’s histrionic talents aren’t up to pretending she’s hovering at death’s door, and the appeal goes as unfinished as it is unheeded. Yes, Ilse would like a break from Gabi, and so in fact would Willibald. So he surrenders and the battle’s over. It’s only a token battle anyway. The dreary Christmastide is past, and we’re going to Berlin for a week.
Willibald’s concession is as puzzling as Franzi Wimmer’s. Can it be that Willibald is mellowing? Does he too feel Maria’s passing shouldn’t go without a Brinkmann presence at the rites? Does he even want perhaps to show a little (just a little, mark you) defiance of the Nazis?
The Kaminsky Cure Page 16