The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  Not a bit of it. No, none of that. Willibald is indeed quite happy for us to go, but his reasons are more personal. Pfarrer Willibald Brinkmann, upstanding Lutheran minister and fervent moral preacher, Pfarrer Willibald Brinkmann has got an Aryan lady friend, a sympathetic feminine Aryan ear to pour his troubles into, a cushiony feminine Aryan breast on which to lay his weary or for all we know lascivious head. (She’d better like dead cats in that case, or anyway dead cats’ pelts.) And she’s a Nazi, too, a Leader in the League of German Girls. His mind is naturally occupied with other things than Maria’s obsequies, and quite frankly, as far as he’s concerned, the further Gabi goes and the longer she’s away, the better.

  But I don’t know this yet, and nor do any of us except Willibald. What I do know is that it’s the fag-end of the year, we haven’t seen the sun for months, the lake is frozen, the windows are iced over, the snow’s piled heavy on us like a solemn shroud – and Gabi, Martin and I are setting off towards the Jew-free city of Berlin once more. At least that’s what little Dr Goebbels thinks it is, strutting proud as a crowing if limping bantam before his Führer at a Nazi big-wigs’ meeting. But he’s wrong, he can’t even get that right. No wonder Adolf’s magnetic glower is beginning to look glum.

  Which, to my surprise, is not at all how Frau Professor Gerda Hoffmann looks as, quite illegally, she settles Gabi as well as us all in with her in that comfortable Steglitz district I know so well. On the contrary, except for her black dress, she behaves like someone preparing for a wedding, not a funeral. And the other mourners behave in the same way when we join them next morning at Onkel Otto’s house. There they are, all members of the Confessing Church, smiling and laughing, recounting episodes from Maria’s life and leading Onkel Otto about by the hand. He seems happy too, carrying his furled umbrella everywhere with him, ready for the next air-raid.

  ‘Where’s Maria?’ I hear him ask his remaining daughter, Elsa, who alone appears a bit down in the mouth – almost, in fact, as if she wishes she weren’t there. His query causes me to look apprehensively around. I haven’t seen a dead person yet and didn’t expect to meet one in the form of Maria today. But Martin tells me in an impatient mutter not to shit myself, the old boy’s simply lost his marbles. He’s had a stroke and doesn’t know what’s going on any more.

  Does Gabi reflect that Maria’s letter enjoined her to ask Our Lord as well as Onkel Otto if ever she needed anything? Obviously Onkel Otto is too absent now to pay her any heed, assuming he might once have done so. Does she wonder, despite the presence of all those Confessing Church ladies, if Our Lord is absent too?

  To Elsa, whose Nazi husband is ‘too busy’ to appear, Martin is the soul of courtesy, bowing and heel-clicking like a von Haltenstein, or like dead Erwin. ‘And how is Eva?’ he politely inquires, and learns that she is well. Is there a touch of frost in Elsa’s reply? At any rate, she turns away and Martin looks a little chilled. After a swift embarrassed greeting she turns away from Gabi too, and goes to sit stiff and awkward beside her docile father.

  Gabi asks to see the bedroom we shared during our educational sojourn a few months ago. It’s tidy and spacious, the wintry sun peers wanly into a room more comfortable and elegant than any in Heimstatt. ‘You must have enjoyed it here,’ she remarks a trifle wistfully to both of us, but it’s Martin who vigorously nods his head.

  Some time later we go into Maria’s room, which remains just as she left it. There too it’s all smiles and happy reminiscences, and several ladies smelling of scent and good breeding say they remember me although I don’t know them from Adam or I suppose I should say Eve. Gabi whispers to me that they all belong to the Confessing Church, and – don’t I remember? – they used to visit us in Heimstatt while Willibald was away subduing the treacherous Poles, though that’s more his way of putting it than hers. I falsely nod my head and turn awkwardly to read the contradiction Maria had embroidered on a little cloth hung on the wall above her bed. I’ve read it before, and it’s always puzzled me:

  We dead aren’t dead, we’re by your side.

  Unseen, unheard, we have not died.

  For some reason quite apart from my respect for logic, all that trusting faith makes me certain Maria isn’t really by my side at all. And when I later see the flower-covered coffin in the nearby church being serenaded by a choir of Maria’s co-religionists (Joy oh Joy! Eternal Joy! Jesus takes our cares awoy) and then being borne out and lowered into the grave, I feel certain that’s where she is now and where she’ll always be until she’s rotted away and isn’t anywhere at all any more. That’s the day I discover Death is real and full of maggots, and nothing will ever be quite the same again for me. The second of January, nineteen forty-four, to be exact.

  Gabi discovers something too, today. She finds out that air-raids really happen when the sirens start moaning soon after we return to Onkel Otto’s, and the wireless reports large enemy bomber formations heading towards Berlin. Down into the cellar we go, where Frau Professor Hoffmann whispers composedly to Gabi while Onkel Otto opens and shuts his umbrella, flapping it irritably as the ground trembles with gunfire and the thump of distant bombs, and whitish plaster dust drifts down over us like Erwin’s missing flour packets being sifted through a sieve. ‘Where’s Maria?’ he unconcernedly asks Gabi. ‘When’s she coming?’

  She doesn’t tell him. Nor does she tell him she’s thinking of attending another –

  11

  Celebration for the dead

  Yes, the very next day she announces we’re going to Erwin’s memorial service at his home in Lüneburg. Having seen Maria off, she feels obliged to see Erwin off as well. You have to say she’s even-handed. You could say crazy too.

  Frau Professor Hoffmann looks amazed and anxious, and wonders aloud whether that would be wise. I wonder too, but Martin thinks it’s just the ticket. Attending heroes’ obsequies and – who knows? – rubbing shoulders with another Luftwaffe ace or two? That certainly beats burying Tante Maria and humouring anaemic Confessional Church ladies in Steglitz.

  ‘But Gabi, your racial background!’ Frau Professor Hoffmann protests openly at last. ‘What about the laws …?’

  All to no purpose. Surely ‘privileged’ Gabi can attend her brother-in-law’s son’s memorial service, can’t she? If Gabi needs any encouragement, Martin’s given it, and now she’s not to be deflected. This certainly wasn’t mentioned to Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer when she asked permission to attend a funeral in Berlin. She’s got no permit, she’s taking us near Hamburg, a city the Amis and the Tommies regularly sow with their quick-blossoming bombs, she can’t exactly expect to be welcome (she doesn’t ask, she simply phones the night before and tells them she’s coming) and she’s actually running Onkel Harald’s family as well as the rest of us into danger. But she’s taken it into her stubborn head and she’s determined to go. So there we are the following day at the commemoration of a German hero.

  Where I meet Onkel Harald for the first time in my life. He’s the fat nervous-looking one with a black armband on his sleeve, and a Nazi badge in his lapel. And there’s Robert, on compassionate leave from the East. Willibald would have enjoyed that smart Wehrmacht uniform, without a speck of Russian mud on his gleaming boots. I wonder if Robert’s glad he took Erwin’s advice and let the Luftwaffe get on with things without him – or is he any better off slogging it out on the Russian Steppes? And that shrinking face is Tante Erika’s, whom I’ve never met before either, the mother who’s proudly sacrificed her son for Fatherland and Führer. At least that’s what it says in the death notice in the paper, a big black-bordered affair beginning In deepest grief and pride …’ For myself, I think I see the grief all right, but where’s the pride? She reminds me of Fräulein Meissner on that morning in school when she forgot to say the morning prayer to Adolf. However, both proud and grieved in the true Aryan tradition is what blonde fiancée Lerke looks. See how high her head is held, how deep the sadness in her long-lashed eyes? You can tell she learnt her lessons well in
the League of German Girls.

  It’s a private afternoon send-off in Onkel Harald’s luxurious home, Erwin being unfortunately prevented from attending even in a coffin by thirty fathoms of the English Channel, which I know from my science lessons is quite a load to bear. And fortunately for us the Allies have considerately decided not to target Lüneburg today, though it’s unlikely their forbearance has anything to do with Erwin’s final send-off. But although it’s a private do, there are quite a few swastikas around (with people wearing them, I mean) and enough arm-flapping Heil Hitlering going on to make you think you’re at a puppet show, which is not of course to say you aren’t. These people make me want to hide, but Martin mutters to me again that I needn’t shit myself, they’re only tame officials from Onkel Harald’s office. But as I’ve no idea how he knows that, I’m only mildly reassured. There’s an enormous swastika hanging down the whole length of the wall from where the eulogies are delivered. In front of it stands a little table, also swastika-decorated, on which Erwin’s Luftwaffe cap and his iron cross symbolically rest even if he doesn’t. I don’t know what all these people make of Gabi, but I suppose Onkel Harald must have put the word about that she’s his brother’s wife, fresh from another funeral, and she gets a few bows and hand-kisses and muttered condolences from people who’d give themselves a hasty mouthwash if only they knew what they were doing. No wonder Onkel Harald’s looking nervous.

  What Gabi herself makes of it, I can’t imagine. She looks pretty uncomfortable, I know that. In fact she looks petrified, like a hare that’s wandered into a pack of greyhounds resting from the hunt, except that a hare wouldn’t shake paws with the greyhounds and ask them how they were. Why’s she doing this, I wonder as I shrink back in the corner. Is it really just to pay her last respects to Erwin? Or does she perhaps want Martin and me to feel that we’re proper Germans after all and can hold our heads up anywhere? If so, her prescription doesn’t work for me, nor, to go by appearances for her, and Martin hardly needs it – he’s always known he is a proper German. So while she makes agonised polite conversation with a Luftwaffe ace and two tame Nazi officials (at least I hope they’re tame), I cower in my corner and pray that no one will speak to me, which fortunately no one does. Martin though is in his element. When someone Heil Hitlers him, he gives it back as though he’s been doing it all his life, and I even overhear him telling one of the swastikas that he’s going to join the Luftwaffe as soon as he’s old enough, earning thereby a congratulatory little punch on the shoulder, which really makes his day. Has he reflected that most Luftwaffe heroes end up like Erwin, and so probably would he? Of course not – he’s Martin!

  Unlike Maria’s this party’s a solemn one. Gravity’s the keynote here. We sit on chairs from the living room, dining room and for all I know the town hall, while gravity, patriotism, Führer-loyalty and faith in final victory are intoned by one solemn speaker after another, each revealing in his own way (no woman speaks, of course) how Erwin excelled in all these qualities. I’ve been told by Gabi in a hasty pre-memoriam briefing that Onkel Harald is an Anthroposophist, but we shouldn’t mention it because the Party doesn’t like it. When she explains that this freaky sect believes people don’t really die, but just pop in and out of the spirit world, I think I don’t like it either. It strikes me as about as ridiculous as the contradiction embroidered over Maria’s bed. I saw worms wriggling in the muddy earth of Maria’s grave and I know that baby herrings are probably swimming in and out of Erwin’s eye-sockets by now too. That’s enough for me.

  Now Onkel Harald reads a letter out from Erwin’s commanding officer in France. It brings manly tears to portly Onkel Harald’s eyes. Well, to tell the truth, it brings them to mine too, except that mine aren’t manly.

  I was fond of your Erwin, it goes, and was very conscious that he did everything that he could to make himself the virtuous officer and gentleman that only Germans can be. I soon came to realise that your son exemplified all those values that characterise a German officer, and that he fully illustrated Bismarck’s observation “Other countries can copy everything else about us perhaps, but not the German Lieutenant!” It is so very sad that Erwin, who though so young was already a Squadron Leader, was not spared to show his remarkable qualities in the higher ranks to which he would undoubtedly have risen. His career was cut short, but it must count for something that he made so many successful sorties in so short a period against enemies as determined as the English are. Erwin always had Walter Flex’s book with him, ‘The Wanderer Between Two Worlds’. But on his last flight, he left it behind. Whilst assembling his possessions, which I trust you have now received, I found he had underlined the following passages marked in it.

  Here Onkel Harald pauses in his reading and holds up the worn leather-bound volume itself, which he evidently has received, and reads from it now, instead of from the letter:

  It is an officer’s duty to put his men first. Dying first is sometimes part of that.

  He takes a steadying breath, turns over several pages, then reads again into the reverent hush:

  Do not mourn for us dead. Do you want to make ghosts of us, or do you want to bring us home? We want to sit at your hearth without disturbing your laughter. Please don’t cry for us, you’ll only make our friends afraid to talk about us. Give them rather the courage to speak of us with laughter and smiles. Bring us home, home as it was when we were alive!

  These sentiments, which it occurs to me Tante Maria would approve, seem nevertheless to produce the opposite of their intended effect. Onkel Harald’s voice breaks off with a throb, and Erika and Lerke are quietly choking. So are quite a lot of other people – even Gabi, who might be thought to have a different take on German officers, dead or alive. And Martin too – for all he’s trying to make himself seem stern and proud, his eyes look quite dewy to me. And I’m sniffing myself as I recall debonair young Erwin suavely sleeking his eyebrow down with his elegantly curled little finger. As for Onkel Harald’s undisclosed Anthroposophical beliefs – he certainly isn’t behaving just then like someone who thinks Erwin’s just ducked out of his body and popped up in the spirit world. He’s behaving like someone who sensibly believes his son is gone for good.

  No, despite the injunction in his final text, there doesn’t seem to be much laughter in Erwin’s commemoration. It was merrier by far at Maria’s, who wasn’t even a German officer, let alone a hero – although, come to think of it, she might well have been a heroine.

  That same evening, we’re back on the train to Berlin. Onkel Harald and Tante Erika kiss Gabi on both cheeks before we leave. Tante Erika kissed her when we arrived as well, but Onkel Harald only gave a formal handshake. Perhaps Erwin’s commemoration has unhinged his mind – or at least the Nazi part of it.

  Lerke kisses Gabi too. And Martin. And me. She smells nice – a heady blend of damp girlish skin (the room is overheated), mint toothpaste, lily scent and tears. I see that Martin presses her arm as she kisses him, but my hands hang limply down by my sides. I’m not up to that stuff yet. She tells Gabi, who tells us, she’s going to keep a copy of everything that’s been read out this afternoon, as well as all the letters Erwin ever wrote her, and place a different one next to her heart every day for the rest of her life. Gabi blushes when she says ‘next to her heart.’ I’m just able to remember Erwin’s mentioning a French mademoiselle in one of his notes to us a few years ago, and wonder if she’s going to be wearing some of his letters next to her heart too. In any case, I get a nice feeling imagining those folded papers nestling on Lerke’s warm and generous breast. And if I get one, you can bet your life Martin does too.

  Our train is very late. While we’ve been visiting Onkel Harald, the Tommies and the Amis who’ve given Hamburg a miss have been visiting Berlin instead, and they’ve been having their own kind of celebration, with lots and lots of fireworks. It takes us hours to get into the station because there isn’t much of the station left to get into. As we’re in one of the rear carriages, we have to get down on
to the track in the end and finish our journey on foot, stumbling over heaps of bricks and glass in the cold and dismal light of dawn. As we reach the station, I see the roof has gone except for a few twisted girders and there’s a lot of broken glass and piles of rubble everywhere, and iron pillars tortured into crazy shapes.

  But that’s not all. There are neat long rows of people lying peacefully asleep along a cleared space on the platform, with a couple of policemen watching over them to make sure they’re not disturbed. Gabi tugs my arm and hurries us past them, and that’s when I realise they aren’t asleep at all. ‘Don’t look,’ Gabi says, but I’ve looked already and can’t stop looking now. Some of those people don’t have arms or legs any more, and some of them don’t even have faces. Most of them, if they’re still wearing any, are wearing different clothes, advertising the different status they attained in life. Some are, or were, men, some women, a few children. Some are, or were, officers, others ordinary rankers, some well-dressed well-foddered gentlemen like Onkel Harald, others lanky workers in their overalls. One without a head has at least preserved a pair of handcuffs on his wrists - or are they hers? I’ve not yet heard Death called The Leveller, but if I had, I would understand it now. As it is, all I’m capable of thinking is that I’ll be glad to get back to Heimstatt, and I’m thinking that pretty hard. Martin’s looking at these leftovers from the Allies’ party with the same repelled fascination that I am, but what he’s thinking I don’t know. Perhaps he’s working out how many kilos of high explosive he’d need to do the same job on a London station.

  Yes, we’re really getting the feel of death here in Berlin. And there’s more of it to come.

  ‘Come on!’ Gabi says urgently as she tugs me away. ‘We’ve got to see if they’re all right in Steglitz!’

  But in Steglitz they’re perfectly all right. They don’t even know what’s happened to the station, although they certainly heard it happening. Onkel Karl looks like a veteran miller from all the plaster dust that’s fallen in the cellar during the night, which his strenuous umbrella-flapping doesn’t seem to have prevented. And he’s still occasionally asking where Maria is, though apparently uninterested in any answer. But the bombs that shook the plaster down have left the house intact. Frau Professor Hoffmann has prepared a breakfast for us, which has the double advantage of being preceded by a shorter Grace and lasting a bit longer, because there seems to be more of it, than is usually the case in Heimstatt.