The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  And so does Gabi. Every week our rations are cut a little more, she says. Especially hers, because her coupons are stamped with the shameful J. ‘The Jew should not be eating German food at all,’ the bantam Goebbels is reported recently to have declared. (He was looking a bit scrawny himself in the greyish paper of The People’s Observer, which Willibald still occasionally smuggles home from his pastoral visits – or is it from his Aryan lady friend?) ‘He’ – The Jew, that is – ‘should count himself lucky to get even half a German’s rations.’

  Yes, Gabi sees that things are really breaking down. But she wonders if they’ll break down fast enough for us. I come across her one evening in the kitchen debating with Sara, or rather with herself in Sara’s presence, whether the war will end before we do, and what she’ll do if they come for her. I don’t know what that does to Sara, but it makes my stomach churn a little till I think of something else to do.

  And suddenly Christmas is upon us. The leaves have all fallen and gone like the disappearing people, the sun has disappeared too behind the mountains (but at least that will probably be coming back), the lake has frozen and snow has fallen a metre deep. The Ivans have nearly come too – they’re almost at the Danube. And the Amis and the Tommies as well – they’re nearly at the Rhine. At this rate, Fräulein von Adler says, rubbing her blue and chilblained hands together gleefully by the stove – at this rate final victory must be near. But whose victory does she mean? Theirs or ours? And I’m still puzzled as to which is which. Besides, ‘Will we live to see it?’ Gabi asks anxiously in one of those quiet asides that I’m not meant to hear but nowadays listen to intently. Our rations have been cut again, and having an extra cube of meat now counts as hoarding. You could be put up against a wall and shot for that, Fritzi Wimmer tells me, especially if you’ve got a J on your coupons, which means you shouldn’t be having any meat at all – as indeed Gabi isn’t. No wonder she’s doubtful whether she’ll last out.

  Even Fräulein von Adler, who can lay her hands on anything, says she hasn’t had any tobacco for weeks, not to speak of coffee, and if she smokes her tea, what’s she going to drink? But she still listens black and tells us what she hears. The black news doesn’t please Willibald, while Gabi dares not believe it. ‘Our beautiful German cities destroyed by that barbarian Churchill!’ Willibald exclaims, shaking his fists at the skies from which – or rather from their neighbours north and west – the Tommies’ bombers rain destruction down. And in church he still faithfully recites the prayer for Fatherland and Führer – I’ve seen it in his hymn book – Bless our German people in Your goodness and strength, and keep the love of our Fatherland deep in our hearts. Bless especially our Führer and Commander-in-chief in all the tasks he undertakes … Does he pause to think what tasks the Führer’s undertaking now? If he does, it doesn’t stop him asking for God’s blessing on them. But then Willibald’s still such a patriot. He keeps his uniform lovingly pressed and brushed in the wardrobe as a bride might keep her bridal gown. And sometimes, I’m soon going to discover, he takes it out and puts it on, like a woman reliving the most wonderful day of her life.

  We sit down hungry to our meals and get up from them hungry. But Willibald still murmurs Grace and thanks God for the reduced rations He allows us, which seems pretty generous of him (Willibald, I mean). Gabi asks us what we’d like for Christmas, but the question’s as perfunctory as the teacher’s ‘Heil Hitler!’ in school. I’d just like more to eat, but I know I won’t get that. Sometimes I think we’re starving, which only shows I don’t know what starving is. Yet. Only Martin seems to get enough, but he’s got Lisl Wimmer to thank for that. Her uncle’s the butcher and the Wimmers don’t go short – well, nothing like as short as we do anyway. She often meets Martin as he’s coming home from the brickworks, and as there’s no Frau Professor Goldberg to teach him physics now, he’s got more time to pursue anatomy with her. Her father doesn’t seem to mind. He really must be listening black as well and thinking it’s time to put peace feelers out. And Lisl does that excellently. I’ve seen her at it in the lanes. She may not be as lithe as Eva, but she’s every bit as willing. It’s her mother who’s the unbending ideologue. She’s taken to snooping round at mealtimes now, to check if we’re eating on the black market as she is, though how she thinks we’d pay for it, Gabi declares, is beyond all comprehension.

  Whatever we might like for Christmas, what we get is refugees. Nature really does abhor a vacuum, at least it does in Heimstatt – for every person that disappears another seems to turn up. And many of them turn up in the rambling old Pfarrhaus, people who used to know Gabi and Willibald in the days before the Nazis and find it expedient to know them again now. Willibald gets a letter from one or two of them almost every week, asking if there’s room in Heimstatt because their own place has been flattened by the Amis or the Tommies or is getting within range of the approaching Ivans’ guns. And a week or two after the letters, or sometimes before them, the letter-writers come themselves, with packed and labelled suitcases just like Frau Professor Goldberg’s. But for them this really is a holiday, a holiday from war. No bombs, no guns, no barbarian hordes. Not yet, anyway. The fact that ours is a half-Jewish household doesn’t seem to faze them now, however much it may have in the past. Very generous of them. Onkel Karl and Frau Professor Gerda Hoffmann do not appear though, the only ones who might deserve a place. Onkel Karl doesn’t because he’s died without taking in that Maria’s died before him, and Frau Professor Hoffmann doesn’t because she’s been evacuated to Bavaria with her school.

  Yes, after so many years of emptiness the pages of Willibald’s Visitors’ Book could all be filled up by now, if he bothered to put it out and the visitors bothered to write in it. Which of course he doesn’t and they wouldn’t anyway, in case by some strange chance our boys really do turn the war around as the Führer keeps promising, and the Thousand Year Reich does somehow survive another year or two.

  But I’m feeling crowded, even if the Visitors’ Book’s pages aren’t. The Pfarrhaus may be large, but we’re retreating like our boys in the east and west, consolidating our forces. First one room’s given up to a refugee, and then another. Sara’s had to move in with Ilse, and I’ve had to move in with Martin. It’s like being back in Berlin again, except that Martin hasn’t found a way of getting Lisl inside our room yet and locking the door with me outside. Then we give up the living and dining rooms, withdrawing into the kitchen for our meals. Willibald has to fight a politely desperate battle with Herr Professor Schumacher, his retired high school mathematics teacher from Berlin, to preserve his unimpeded right to his own study. Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer, who’s getting more and more affable the nearer the Ivans come, says between beery belches that he’ll procure us some beds for all these refugees, and anyway they won’t be here long, it’s only a temporary measure until the front gets stabilised. Not a word about the laws concerning Aryans and Jews. He’s even abandoned his old stand on the second door step now, and advances quite amiably if cautiously inside, which for him of course is an ideological retreat. And true to his word, ten beds do appear on the back of a truck on Christmas Eve, which (Christmas Eve, not the beds) we celebrate on our own in the kitchen with a two-foot-tall fir branch stuck in a bucket of sand. There’s nothing special to eat, in fact there’s nothing much to eat at all, and we give and get no presents.

  Yes, things really are breaking down. ‘Perhaps next year,’ Gabi says wistfully, as if next year was a century away. Sara’s given up her little black ribbon in memory of Rolf, the von Haltenstein would-be author. She took it off her lapel on the anniversary of his death. But she might as well have kept it on; it would have saved her trouble later.

  The refugees have all brought their ration coupons with them (they’d rather leave their clothes behind than leave their coupons) and get what food they can in the village, guarding it jealously and casting suspicious glances at what the others manage to bring back, whether openly in their string bags or concealed in their rucksa
cks. All except Herr Professor Schumacher, who has a mouthful of gold-filled teeth and, having once been Willibald’s teacher, now undertakes to teach Martin in return for Gabi’s cooking his dinner. He goes out to the market place each morning and returns without a glance at the others, handing his provisions directly to Gabi.

  It’s she who set up the deal. She may no longer expect to get through the war herself, but she does hope her children will, and she isn’t giving up on their education. That at least is where she means to beat the Nazis, whatever victories they score elsewhere. And Herr Professor Schumacher is persuaded to help her by the offer of coffee and baked potatoes served in the dining room while he instructs Martin in the subtleties of calculus. I don’t know how things are going on the calculus front, but they certainly aren’t running smoothly in the kitchen. Herr Professor Schumacher hands over a few half-frozen potatoes and some coffee beans each day, with the request to use them for his dinner. Being a mathematician, he counts them out, the same number each time, and requests Gabi to bake the potatoes for his dinner and make two cups of coffee with the beans. I get the job of holding the coffee mill between my knees and grinding the beans with the crank. It’s like grinding little pebbles. The dust that comes out just about fills a medium-sized teaspoon. Herr Professor Schumacher complains that the anaemic liquid he’s later served is too thin, and hints that it doesn’t represent full value for his beans (he always counts the number of potatoes on his plate as well, and at least is satisfied on that point). There’s even talk of discontinuing Martin’s lessons. But Gabi takes to secretly grinding his baked potato skins with the coffee powder, and Herr Professor Schumacher is mollified.

  Martin isn’t the only one to get some education out of the refugees. There’s another musician from Vienna, Frau Schneider, a singing teacher friend of our Nazi friend Doktor Saur-that-was, who professes to know nothing of Frau Trifallner, our opera-singing teacher at school. She practises her tonic sol-fa to Herr Professor Schumacher’s intense irritation every evening in the living room. Down Frau Schneider sits at the untuned piano and out pour her penetrating scales, regardless of who else is there or what they’re trying to do. If Herr Professor Schumacher objects, she merely tosses her head, mutters something not quite under her breath about Philistine German mathematicians, and resumes her thrilling, ringing notes. Gabi has persuaded her to continue the violin lessons for Sara and me which lapsed after our return from Berlin and the reluctant organist’s conscription. (He’ll be returned wounded from the Eastern Front, although five frostbitten toes won’t come with him. But his fingers will all be there, saved by the mitts he used to wear when teaching us in the church vestry.) Frau Schneider isn’t much of a violinist, and she doesn’t find either of us apt pupils, but in return for her vesperal possession of the piano and her tonic sol-fa, she perseveres.

  And then suddenly in the New Year the refugees are all going, moving further west as though by magnetic polar repulsion as the Ivans do the same a hundred miles to the east. Apparently we aren’t so safe here after all, the war might roll over us, and there are even rumours that an SS Regiment is coming to set up its headquarters in Heimstatt. That would certainly bring the bloodthirsty Bolshies down on us – there’s nothing they like more than killing our Teutonic racial knights. Unless, according to separate warnings from both Herr Professor Schumacher and Frau Schneider, it’s ravaging our women. I think ravaging means knocking them about and wonder why it’s only women the Bolshies knock about until Fritzi Wimmer enlightens me.

  Herr Professor Schumacher and Frau Schneider are the last of our refugees to leave. They haven’t been on speaking terms because of their musical differences, but they are of one voice when it comes to the dangers to Ilse and Sara from the Russian barbarians our boys are so fanatically resisting for the sake of world civilisation in general and Europe in particular. They think of nothing but plunder and rapine, Herr Professor Schumacher mutters through the splendours of his gilded dentition (meaning the Russian barbarians, not our magnificent boys), and he glances so significantly at Sara and Ilse that they have to lower their eyes. Frau Schneider’s voice is deeply thrilling as she whispers tales she’s heard on every side of streets littered with the bodies of ravaged girls, and urges Gabi to take her own daughters to the safety of the heartland of the Reich, where she herself is going and where she’s sure she’ll always be protected. And then they both are separately gone, with their rucksacks, their cases and their ration coupons. Why don’t we go as well, I begin to wonder. It doesn’t sound as though we’ll get along with the Ivans. Perhaps Willibald wonders too, but not Gabi. What would a Jew be doing heading into the heartland of the Reich? Or a half-Jew, for that matter? Others may find someone to protect them there, but not a Jewish woman, even a privileged one, or her half-Jew brood.

  Nor does she give much credit to all those scary tales. She thinks her girls, not to mention herself, whom Herr Professor Schumacher and Frau Schneider seem to have overlooked in all their warnings, haven’t done so well by the Germans that they can’t afford to take their chances with the Russkies. But Willibald seems more receptive. Perhaps he’s been softened up already by the stories his Aryan lady friend’s been feeding him – as a leader of the League of German Girls, she’s bound to be an authority. Is that the reason I come across Willibald dressed up in his corporal’s uniform a few nights later, when Gabi’s already gone to bed and I’m on my way to pee in the freezing outside toilet? Does he fancy himself heroically defending his hearth and home to the death, alone against the raging Cossacks, or does he mean to leave us in the lurch instead and join our boys in the decisive battle for the German heartland, which evidently isn’t going to take place here in Heimstatt? Or is it just nostalgia for his glory days in Poland? Whatever it is, there he stands fully uniformed in front of the mirror in his study, sucking in his belly and pushing out his chest. But push and pull how he will, neither of those organs seems quite the right shape for a military hero.

  ‘Are you going to join the army again?’ I ask as he turns and sees me sleepily regarding him.

  He seems caught between anger and embarrassment, demands why I’m spying on him like that and warns me not to tell Mutti as it would only upset her. My question hasn’t been answered, but I sense it would be unwise to put it again, so I go and pee, and the thought of Willibald in his uniform distracts me from the fears that still occasionally beset me in that cold dark outhouse with its bottomless pit. On my return I see the study door is firmly closed.

  The next day all the hospital beds are removed and sent to a military hospital in Bad Neusee, where they’ll bear the weight and blood of our wounded heroes now, and we’re entirely on our own again. Half the schoolteachers have gone with the refugees and school is closed. ‘For the duration of the emergency,’ Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer announces, looking as though he suspects the emergency might last as long as he will.

  Martin is still working at the brick factory, which is still turning out fireproof bricks, Gabi’s wearily trying to make frayed ends meet and Willibald, his uniform neglected if not forgotten, spends hours on what he calls his pastoral visits. But the rest of us have nothing to do. Which is just as well because we have almost nothing to eat either. Ilse moves slowly about the house like the wraith of a drag-footed nun, Sara spends long hours staring into space with her notebook open in front of her, and I myself decline into listlessness and apathy.

  Things really must be breaking down indeed – Frau Wimmer’s given up spying on us now, and because there are hardly any trains, Fräulein von Adler’s given up visiting from Graunau. Doktor Saur-that-was has written a letter from Vienna (it took two weeks to arrive), saying she thinks everything will be all right in the spring, but what she means by everything nobody knows – is she talking about the war, Gabi’s racial categorisation, or her unhappy marriage? The snow keeps falling dense and wet, as though it too is tired of everything, and just wants to flop down and sleep. Fräulein Hofer and Resi still call on us every Satur
day, but Gabi has apologetically to tell them she can no longer give them their milk-coffee as we’ve neither milk nor coffee. Not even powdered milk or ersatz coffee. I watch them uncomplainingly eat their stale unbuttered bread, which Fritzi Wimmer tells me is mixed with sawdust now, and drink a glass of warm water. Fräulein Hofer looks pale and sometimes winces, but when Gabi asks what the matter is, she merely shakes her head. Everyone’s just waiting for the war to be over.

  Or nearly everyone. The Gestapo in Linz are –

  15

  More interested in Gabi

  Whose teeth are killing her. So she decides that despite the expense she just has to go to the dentist in Plinden, who long ago has fathomed she’s Jewish but treats her anyway after his receptionist has gone home. Of course there’s an extra fee – danger money, he calls it, and he’s right. He could go to prison for that, and Gabi to Auschwitz, which it turns out is just where the Gestapo mean to send her anyway.

  So she’s out of the Pfarrhaus and out of the village when Constable Bolzner, the policeman who had to arrest Jägerlein for abducting her own Annchen, comes sheepishly along in the snow to arrest Gabi now for being a Jew. Yes, for some zealots the only thing that matters now is the total extinction of the European Jew. Never mind if despite all their fanatical courage our boys aren’t winning the war, never mind if the walls are crumbling and the Ivans are battering at one gate and the Amis and the Tommies at the other – that’s ultimately not the point. Purify the race, eliminate the vicious Jew, and write our glorious page in history! Victory may not be ours, but the lasting honour will! And so the methodical bureaucrats who make up the lists have at last selected Gabi to follow Frau Professor Goldberg to oblivion. It’s time to complete the sacred task and get rid of the privileged Jews, now that all the others have been dealt with.