After that Racial Science lesson, by the way, Fritzi Wimmer asked me with a mischievous grin when my mother was going to be picked up by the Gestapo. But I said she was privileged and anyway I’d seen the Gestapo picking someone up in Berlin, which was more than he had. That flummoxed him for a while. I even got a bit of credit in the class. None of them have seen what I have. They haven’t even seen an air-raid. But in any case Fritzi’s malice is merely habitual now and almost good-humoured, a piece of routine badinage. I’ve become like the Fat Boy or the Swot, the familiar and uncomplaining butt of genial banter, not the target of deep-seated racial hate.
Nor is Annchen the target of deep-seated racial hate, but she’s the victim of it all the same. Where there’s hate there’s love, which in this case means that Aryans love the Aryan race as much as they detest the Jewish. And the quality of the Aryan race has to be protected from its own mistakes as well as from the malice of The Jew.
As in the case of little Annchen.
It’s the morning after the Führer’s birthday. Little puffs of cloud are playing hide-and-seek with the sun, and clumsy Annchen with her skirt above her fat white knees is sitting cross-legged in the garden, intently pulling petals off a dandelion that has struggled to survive upon that barren stony earth. Behold her stubby nose and open mouth, the light of simple pleasure in her small blue eyes, as she tears the little flower gradually apart. But don’t feel sorry for the flower. It’s nothing but a weed after all, fit only to be rooted out and thrown away. Which, it soon turns out, is what Annchen is as well.
Behold next Dr Koch, unwonted visitor to the Pfarrhaus now that Ilse’s on the mend, entering the garden with a hangdog air, my mother in surprised attendance. Behold Jägerlein following, wiping her rough peasant hands down her spotless apron, a baffled, proud yet suspicious smile upon her rough peasant face. The doctor’s come to see her Annchen – that makes her proud – although she hasn’t asked him to – that makes her suspicious. No wonder she looks baffled as well. This morning Jägerlein has regaled Sara and me and drop-mouthed Annchen with an extemporary poem on white clouds, blue skies and towering mountain tops, recited by the kitchen window as she waited for the iron to heat up.
There will be no recital tomorrow morning.
‘Come here, Anni,’ Dr Koch says in a voice so heavy it makes you wonder how he manages to drag it up out of his chest.
But Annchen is busy with a smaller murder and has no time to pay attention to the prelude to her own.
Then, since Annchen won’t come to him, Dr Koch follows the Mahomet principle and comes to her. He asks her questions like ‘What are ten times twelve?’ and ‘Can you spell Berlin?’ Since everyone in the village knows that nine-year-old Annchen can’t count, read or write, these questions seem otiose. Annchen apparently thinks so too, because she doesn’t bother to respond. But Dr Koch has his duty to do, and what German fails to do his duty, even if he is an Austrian German? He takes out an official form now, unfolds it and places it awkwardly upon his case. Next it’s his rimless glasses he takes out; he unfolds them too and places them awkwardly on his nose. Then out come first his pen and then his instruments, and he’s ready for action.
He peers, awkwardly again, into Annchen’s eyes and ears with a little torch as though he expects to find the answers to his sum and spelling quiz inscribed somewhere in there. He’s even got a pair of calipers like those that measured my supposedly half-Jewish head in school not long ago, but it’s Annchen’s degenerate Aryan skull that gets the treatment now. Down on the form go the damning details while Annchen patiently allows herself to be inspected and measured, turned this way and that, prodded and sounded. During all these operations her eyes remain fixed on the petal-less dandelion she clutches in her podgy fingers; it still appears to fascinate her despite its devastated state.
‘I’m afraid, er, it appears,’ Dr Koch says uneasily to a space between Gabi and Jägerlein, ‘it seems that Annchen ought to be placed in an, er, in an institution.’
‘Institution?’ Jägerlein repeats as vacantly as Annchen might have done, while Annchen herself now obliviously twists the sappy dandelion stem into a ring around her chubby finger.
‘She’d be better off,’ Dr Koch says, addressing the same innocent space. ‘They’ll look after her there, I mean. They’ll be coming for her next week, I expect. As soon as, that is, I mean when the arrangements have been made …’
‘How long will she be there?’ asks Gabi, who naively believes that even in the Third Reich medical institutions are there only to cure people and send them home again.
‘Take her away?’ Jägerlein says, on whom the light is beginning to dawn, or in another sense to fade.
‘Er, I can’t exactly say,’ Dr Koch says – to Gabi, not Jägerlein. ‘They’ll, er, they’ll have to assess her there.’
‘But I’m looking after her!’ Jägerlein declares to Dr Koch.
‘Yes, well,’ Dr Koch says, in the voice of a schoolboy caught beside a broken window. ‘But I’m afraid you’re not the legal guardian at law.’
At law? That sounds bad. Dr Koch might be easy to bully, but the law’s another matter, and Gabi has gone pensive. But the law doesn’t deter Jägerlein. She wouldn’t be working for us if it did. ‘Well I won’t let her go!’ she says defiantly.
Now Dr Koch has folded his form and is packing his instruments away. ‘I’m afraid it can’t be helped, Frau Jäger,’ he apologises, still with the air of a schoolboy standing by a broken window. ‘You see, you’ve only as it were unofficially adopted her. And her parents can’t look after her, so …’ His voice wanders off, or rather fails to wander out, and he seems exceptionally interested in the catch on his case now, bending over to examine it with a professional eye as though it’s displaying symptoms requiring still more of his expert attention than poor Annchen does. Then he straightens up. ‘Some people from the, er, from The Institution will come to take her next week, or … Well, anyway, when they’re ready for her. It will be better for her there,’ he adds as much to himself as to Jägerlein. But neither of them appears convinced.
‘Which institution?’ Gabi asks. ‘Where?’
‘In Gallneukirchen,’ Dr Koch mutters vaguely. ‘Or Hartheim, I think. I don’t know exactly …’ And then he’s gone with his sheepish smile and his hangdog look. He has other calls to make, he explains as he lays his case in his sidecar, though whether they’re of the same nature he doesn’t divulge. But there are plenty more like Annchen in Heimstatt and its neighbouring villages. We listen to the explosive clatter of his motorcycle engine echoing and dying as he drives away, and somehow it doesn’t seem like April any more, but rather like November.
Jägerlein takes Annchen wordlessly by the hand and leads her unresistingly back into the kitchen. It’s no surprise to anyone except Willibald that the ironing doesn’t get done today, the dinner doesn’t get properly cooked, and the dishes don’t get washed. Annchen gets her grub on time though, and licks her plate clean with her usual snuffling relish.
‘Of course she’d be better off in an institution,’ Willibald declares when he’s stopped complaining about his wretched dinner. ‘And there’ll be one less thief to steal our rations.’
Jägerlein and Annchen might have come back, but Willibald’s suspicions have never gone away.
‘Ach, Willibald,’ Gabi begins protestingly with a glance at the open door. But when she sees the veins in her husband’s throat start bulging, his cheeks flushing and his eyes flashing with righteous anger, she takes a mouthful of watery tea and holds it steadfastly in her mouth although it scalds her tongue until Willibald has finished a long minatory diatribe accompanied by heavy pounding of the table. Is it that I’m growing up, or that Willibald is growing tired? His scenes no longer seem to possess that vivid lightning and thunder which they used to have. Or could it be that the plump Aryan lady we don’t yet know about is having a soothing as well as a distracting influence on his racked and anguished soul?
Willibald wo
uldn’t complain so much in the evening if he knew what morning had in store. Jägerlein is gone, and so is Annchen. On the table where stale bread and ersatz coffee should be standing there lies a scrappy pencilled note which in Willibald’s eyes by no means compensates for the absence of his breakfast.
Dear Frau Pfarrer,
Sorry I have not done brekfast. I am taking Annchen away. I hope you will excuse not being here for a wile.
Yours fathfully,
M Jäger
Her little room behind the kitchen has been swept clean and the two beds stripped bare. The old blankets which belong to us are neatly folded on the bottom of each naked mattress.
It’s another sunny spring day, but Jägerlein and Annchen are gone again and I feel it’s cold and rainy.
Willibald, who usually sleeps late, has risen with the lark today – he’s got an early funeral and a wedding to perform, and breakfast was just what he needed to see him through all that. ‘They’ll think we helped her to escape!’ he cries out in alarm when he’s overcome his disappointment. ‘Aiding and abetting!’
‘They’ll have gone to her sister’s farm,’ Martin declares knowingly, while Gabi boils the coffee water in the kitchen, and Ilse, released from the rigours of her tubercular cure into the hardly less exacting demands of everyday life, silently saws at the stale loaf she’s brought to the table.
‘I’ll tell The Authorities!’ Willibald declares, stuffing the note into his clerical pocket. ‘She won’t get away with this, trying to get us into trouble! As if we haven’t got enough as it is!’
‘You know what they’d do to Annchen in that institution?’ Martin unconcernedly inquires as he takes a slice of bread and sniffs at it with wrinkled nose. He’s been learning things in the brick works, picking up the gossip.
‘Whatever they’d do, it’s where she belongs! Why are you late?’ This to Sara, who’s been scribbling in her corner by the stove. ‘Where have you been?’ And then back to Jägerlein’s abscondence. ‘How dare she just run off like that without even making breakfast?’
‘I thought you’d be glad she was gone,’ I sullenly suggest. ‘Seeing she’s such a thief.’ My sense of desolation has momentarily overridden my dominant instinct for survival.
‘Impertinence!’ Willibald roars, swinging his hand. ‘Into the cellar!’ Perhaps his lightning and thunder are still there after all. He certainly clips my ear pretty sharply, and it’s still stinging as I’m shoved breakfastless into the cellar, where there’s no light at all and my only companions are the decreasing supply of coal and the increasing supply of rats, which, unless it’s just the ringing in my ear, I hear scuttling and squeaking in the dark. Oh God, don’t let one run over my feet! I pray in that access of religious fervour that misfortune generally engenders, while overhead I also hear Gabi’s tearful protestations and Willibald’s crescendo yells. These are accompanied by several dull thumps, which I correctly infer are caused by heavy books being thrown. Soon, if the battle continues, I’ll be hearing the sharper crash of picture frames smashing and the tinkling of broken glass. But no, Willibald’s ranting is in the rallentando and diminuendo phase by now; an unaccompanied coda, which tells me Gabi must be applying the Kaminsky cure once more, and I know the opera will soon be over.
I’ve been here before, and I’ll be here again, not that that makes it any pleasanter, especially when a thick moist cobweb brushes like a bat’s wing across my face and clings to my eyebrows. But at least I know what to expect, and I settle down to wait anxiously for the slamming of the front door that by announcing Willibald’s departure to his Christian duties will herald my release from prison. Once he’s out of the way, Gabi will softly turn the key. There really must be something to religion, I vaguely realise, and quietly thank God for it. If it wasn’t for the summons of Willibald’s Christian duties, he might have stayed in all day, and then I might have too.
Willibald doesn’t tell The Authorities about Jägerlein’s defection after all – any contact with Authority turns his knees to jelly – but the Authorities soon find out anyway. No longer than it takes a letter to go there and back, an ambulance with opaque windows draws up outside the Pfarrhaus and a man in a neat dark suit with a Party badge in his lapel gets out, followed by a pleasantly blonde if starchy-looking nurse, one of the three village policemen and a reluctant Dr Koch who looks as though he’s being taken to be shot. But it isn’t him they’re after, it’s harmless Annchen, the weed in the Aryan garden.
‘Where is Keller, Anna?’ the man demands, flourishing an official-looking form and viewing Gabi with cold racial disdain. The nurse is already trotting briskly and inquiringly into the hall, like an eager terrier after a hare. If she had a tail it would be wagging stiffly.
‘I don’t know,’ Gabi says. ‘She went away.’
By now the man is examining the warrant or whatever they call it more carefully. ‘When? Where to?’
Gabi shrugs, perversely reversing the question sequence in her answers. ‘They didn’t say. Last Friday.’
‘They?’
‘Jäger, Mitzi,’ the policeman, quietly remarks, glancing at Dr Koch, who miserably nods. The policeman is Constable Bolzner, one of whose five children is in my class at school.
Now Willibald emerges from the study where King Solomon – or is it King David? – is back on the blocks after several false starts.
The man eyes Willibald almost as unfavourably as he’s just eyed Gabi.
‘Heil Hitler!’ Willibald salutes him with ingratiating rectitude, flapping his arm as he simultaneously bows his head and clicks his heels like a mechanical toy. ‘Brinkmann.’
The man’s arm rises in return with languid disdain as he mutely interrogates Dr Koch and Constable Bolzner. Meanwhile the nurse has started coursing to and fro across the living room and dining room. Soon she’ll be picking the scent up in the kitchen.
‘The Herr Pfarrer,’ Constable Bolzner respectfully explains to the suit. Dr Koch nods miserably again. It seems he’s only got a walk-on part in this act of the drama. Soon it will be a walk-off one, if you can apply that term to someone driving a motorbike.
‘Yes indeed,’ Willibald agrees with both of them, as well he might, and with a certain meek pride. ‘I am the Lutheran Pfarrer. At your service.’
The man steps forward a pace. Now he’s only half a metre away from Willibald. As he’s rather short, he barely reaches Willibald’s chin. But what he loses in height he makes up for in pugnacity. He consults his form again and then addresses Willibald’s puny chest. ‘Where are Keller, Anna and Jäger, Mitzi?’ he demands, grinding the words out like a rusty sausage-slicer. Before Willibald can answer, he turns to the policeman and inquires in the same menacing tone, ‘And what were a German woman and a young German girl, however defective, doing in a half-Jewish household?’
Constable Bolzner shifts his feet and mutters something about the Ortsgruppenleiter, which Fritzi Wimmer isn’t going to thank him for, but the man waves his hand impatiently, turning back to Willibald. By now the nurse is in the kitchen, but the scent must have gone cold because she doesn’t bark or yelp.
‘I have reason to believe they have gone to Frau Jäger’s sister’s farm,’ Willibald announces to the top of the man’s head, standing to attention in the manner of a soldier having the honour to report the whereabouts of the enemy to his commanding officer.
The man examines Willibald’s Adam’s apple for a moment, which certainly is prominent enough to merit some attention, then jerks his head alertly round towards Constable Bolzner once more, like a bright-eyed hawk that’s spotted a lonely sparrow.
Again Constable Bolzner mutters something respectful, which I pick out to be the farm’s address. The dark-suited sparrow-hawk jerks its predatory head back to Willibald’s distinctive Adam’s apple, and his curled index finger’s talon taps him twice upon the chest. ‘They’d better be there,’ he says. ‘They had better be there, my friend.’
And then they’re gone. The nurse smiles quite am
iably as she lollops down the steps, and I imagine her tail threshing happily from side to side. She’s so nice you could almost pat her rump.
‘Willibald,’ Gabi begins reproachfully as the door closes, ‘why did you tell him that – ?’ But she too has been cowed and her tone isn’t what it has been or will one day become again.
‘Didn’t you hear him?’ Willibald interrupts fearfully. ‘They’d better be there. Didn’t you hear it? They’d better be there, my friend. He threatened me, and you expect – ? Besides, they’d have gone there in any case, wouldn’t they? Where else d’you think they’d have looked?’ But this mixture of guilt, rationalisation and fear is all too much for him, and his voice gives way to throbbing moans. Back into the study he wanders, looking as much condemned, or self-condemned, as unhappy Dr Koch looked re-entering the ambulance. I don’t know if he’s able to get back to work on King David or King Solomon, but the way things have been going lately, you could hardly blame him if he doesn’t.
At least his hypothesis was right, as was Martin’s before him. Jägerlein has indeed taken Annchen to her sister’s farm. They’re discovered that very day hiding in the barn, covered by the remnants of last year’s hay that the French prisoner Francois has complaisantly scattered over them. Kicking and howling like a dog, Annchen is dragged off to the ambulance while Jägerlein is charged by the unhappy Constable Bolzner with abducting a minor. Somehow the starchy smiling nurse is able to hold Annchen still enough for the sparrow-hawk to jab a needle into her arm, and the ambulance cruises off as quiet as a hearse.
The Kaminsky Cure Page 19