Willibald’s at home. He never goes to Plinden when Gabi does. To be so near and yet so far from his plump lady friend would be too painful. Besides, what if they all met in the street? How could he hide his confusion? So Willibald it is who comes from the study where Samson and Delilah have just got their four feet on the blocks, to receive Constable Bolzner after I’ve opened the door and nervously backed off as he considerately shakes the snow off his coat and stamps his boots on the mat. I don’t like policemen, even Constable Bolzner, who’s never done me any harm except by being the reluctant accessory to Jägerlein’s and Annchen’s disappearance. Willibald doesn’t like policemen now either, but he performs a stern ‘Heil Hitler!’ and simultaneously an ingratiating smile, each of which salutations tends to neutralise the other.
Constable Bolzner returns the first salute, if somewhat perfunctorily, but the second not at all. In fact he looks quite glum, which, as things develop, he has every reason to. Glancing over Willibald’s shoulder, he awkwardly inquires if the Frau Pfarrer is at home. ‘I’m afraid,’ he announces on hearing that she isn’t, ‘I’m afraid I have a warrant for her arrest. It’s not a police matter,’ he continues hastily, disclaiming both responsibility and inclination. ‘She’s not being charged with any crime, I mean. Except that, well, it’s only that, er, well, it’s the Gestapo in Linz.’
I feel something like a cold wind rushing through my insides, which have plenty of room for it because they’re so empty. And Willibald must feel the same, because he totters back a pace. Samson and Delilah are certainly going to be blown off course by this today. Constable Bolzner considerately takes the Herr Pfarrer’s arm and guides him to a chair. ‘Of course they may only want to question her,’ he says in that same unconvinced and therefore unconvincing tone that Willibald used to Frau Professor Goldberg.
And then to duty. ‘Er, when will the Frau Pfarrer be back?’
Willibald must know the warrant in Constable Bolzner’s hand is Gabi’s death sentence, but all the same he doesn’t want to divulge her crime of going to an Aryan dentist in Plinden – as if that somehow might make her serve two death sentences consecutively, instead of only one. Or else he’s afraid it would put him on the spot as well. Not to speak of the dentist. ‘Not till late,’ is all he can say. And it’s four o’clock already, and the light is almost gone.
Constable Bolzner looks as though he’s going to settle and wait for Gabi’s return. He takes off his cap and examines the other chairs in the living room with the air of someone who doesn’t quite know whether to ask permission or just plonk himself officiously down.
‘Very late,’ Willibald says. Then, recalling there’s a curfew for Jews and they must be in by eight o’clock, ‘About half-past seven, I mean.’
Constable Bolzner glances at his watch. Three-and-a-half hours to wait, and he likes to have his supper early. You can see he’s thinking perhaps he’ll come back for her after he’s had his grub. He stands irresolutely for a few moments, regarding the faded print of a dramatic Kaspar David Friedrich painting over the mantelpiece and evidently wondering how to form a tactful compliment upon it without seeming insensitive to the other drama now proceeding just outside its frame.
‘Nice,’ he says at last. ‘Very nice. Pretty.’
But art appreciation is the last thing on Willibald’s mind just now, and his response is a practical inquiry. ‘Will you be taking her to Linz tonight?’ he asks in a quavering voice.
Constable Bolzner turns from the painting and shakes his head. ‘No train, is there?’ he reminds Willibald almost reproachfully, as if Willibald’s question revealed a somewhat unfeeling desire to get the whole thing over and done with at once. ‘She’ll have to be, er, detained overnight until the six thirty-five tomorrow.’ He unfolds the warrant and frowns down at it again, pushing out his underlip as he gives it the thorough hermeneutic attention that German bureaucratic documents generally demand. ‘She’s got to be there in Linz by two o’clock,’ he concludes from this examination.
Willibald is thinking of Frau Professor Goldberg getting down at Linz station, politely asking that tall SS officer the way to the gates of hell. ‘Couldn’t she go by herself?’ he asks tentatively. ‘Without anyone knowing? Frau Professor Goldberg did.’
‘’fraid not,’ Constable Bolzner replies regretfully. ‘Our instructions are to accompany her to Gestapo headquarters.’
‘They didn’t say that about Frau Professor Goldberg,’ Willibald protests feebly.
‘Goldberg?’ Constable Bolzner answers. ‘When would that have been? Ah, well, they’ve tightened the rules up since then. Probably some Yids – some people,’ he delicately amends his phrasing – ‘didn’t show up, that’ll be the reason.’ He takes a step towards the door. ‘Not that the Frau Pfarrer wouldn’t show up, of course,’ he adds hastily, anxious not to impute any blemish to her law-abiding character. ‘But, you know how it is, Herr Pfarrer, rules are rules, aren’t they? Rules are rules.’ That’s a tautology he’s going to hear quite often in the future, and one that Willibald in principle approves of. But on this occasion Willibald doesn’t endorse it despite being given the chance to do so, and after a moment’s disappointed and embarrassed silence Constable Bolzner takes another step towards the door. ‘Anyway, think I’ll come back for her later on. Half-past seven, did you say?’ She’ll need to take a small suitcase, tell her. Spare clothes and soap and that. And a packed lunch.’ Now he’s got it off his chest, he seems to be growing less sheepish. Officialdom has spread its soothing balm all over his discomfort. Come on, you can almost hear him telling himself. It’s just another job, after all.
And that’s where Willibald shows what he’s made of. ‘Constable Bolzner,’ he asks in a wheedling yet sepulchral tone from the chair where the policeman has deposited him, ‘Constable Bolzner, couldn’t you make an exception and let her meet you at the train tomorrow morning? Or at the ferry pier, at least?’
Constable Bolzner pauses, hesitating. ‘The ferry pier?’ he repeats dubiously. The train is clearly out of the question.
‘Think how I’ll feel if she’s put in prison tonight and paraded through the village under arrest tomorrow like a common criminal! The wife of the Lutheran pastor! How will I be able to face my congregation in church?’
Is that what really worries Willibald? I gape at him. But Constable Bolzner sees his point. He’s a Catholic and he wouldn’t like to see the Catholic priest’s wife paraded under arrest through the village either. Not that Father Schuster has a wife, of course, although he does have a housekeeper who has a daughter who looks just like Father Schuster.
‘And then you needn’t come back for her tonight,’ Willibald cunningly adds. ‘You must have so many things to do, what with all your duties and everything …’
‘You wouldn’t believe how many,’ Constable Bolzner says with feeling and a nod. ‘And some of them aren’t pleasant, either.’ He raises the warrant in his hand to indicate that Gabi’s little business is one of them.
‘And she could pack her things in peace and say goodbye to her children,’ Willibald continues insidiously with a sob in his voice that’s both theatrical and genuine. You can tell he’s an effective preacher all right.
That decides Constable Bolzner. He replaces the warrant in his breast pocket, and the cap on his head. ‘Got kids myself,’ he mutters. ‘She can meet me at the pier at six tomorrow. Tell her not to be late, though, all right? Otherwise I’ll have to come and get her.’ And he leaves with the relieved and complacent air of a man who, while doing himself a favour, hasn’t made a bad thing worse, but just a little better.
I don’t know what Willibald does next. I suppose he goes upstairs and tells Ilse and Sara (Martin isn’t back yet from his experiments in the brickworks and maybe subsequently in Lisl Wimmer). Myself, I go and sit beside the kitchen stove, hugging my knees and staring blankly at it and simultaneously at something inside me that’s as dark and empty as a cave. And though, there being no more coal, the stove is burnin
g all the wood we can find, I feel as cold and numb there as I would outside in the snow. After I don’t know how long Sara comes and sits beside me, looks at me, then goes and doesn’t sit beside me. Ilse passes slowly to and fro and I know she’s getting the supper ready, although I can’t imagine who she thinks will eat it. Martin returns and sounds sulky at first – has he quarrelled with Lisl or is it just post-coital tristesse? Then he’s as silent as Ilse and Sara. Willibald with moist and red-rimmed eyes has got the yellow suitcase out for Gabi and laid it on the kitchen table with its lid gaping open like a little corpseless coffin. Ilse removes the case with a frown and places it on a chair, as if to say ‘Untidiness won’t help.’
None of this is real, I keep thinking. It can’t really be happening. But the trouble is, I keep remembering that humped car in Berlin and the two men impatiently ringing the bell and then that stooping man with his Homburg hat walking out onto the pavement between them, meekly getting into the car. And I know only too well how real this is, I know it really is happening. I wish that Gabi would come back, and at the same time wish she wouldn’t. I want to see her, but I don’t want to see her go away. The customary access of religion takes place and I start praying to God to make it not happen, or at least to make it all have happened already so that I don’t have to go through it, because I don’t think I can.
And then Gabi does return, with a swollen jaw. One glance at us and she doesn’t need to ask, but of course she does ask anyway. And then she sits down on the nearest chair and nurses her jaw in her hand, for all the world as if that’s the only thing that’s bothering her. ‘Tomorrow morning?’ is all she says. And then she repeats it slowly, with a thoughtful, not an interrogative, inflection. ‘Tomorrow morning, then.’ As if this was a summons she has long expected, and now at last it’s come.
Willibald says in his hopeless voice ‘Perhaps they only want to ask you some questions? Perhaps it won’t be so bad, after all?’
‘Like Frau Professor Goldberg, you mean?’ Gabi asks in a weary tone that shrivels Willibald into silence.
After several minutes of nursing her jaw and gazing into her own dark cave, Gabi shakes her head and turns to Sara, her confidante. ‘Take your brother to the nuns’ house,’ she says quite calmly. ‘Father will ask them if you can both stay there tonight.’
The nuns’ house? She means the retired Protestant nuns, who’ve been living in a hamlet at the end of the lake ever since they were bombed out of their home in Silesia. What are we going to do there? And what’s she going to do while we’re there? Actually, I think I know the answer to the second question, but that’s knowledge I can neither name nor face.
‘Just until tomorrow,’ Gabi says, looking at me as though she’s read my mind.
‘Are you going to go to Linz?’ I ask, knowing that if she does she won’t come back. And if she doesn’t probably. But I try not to think of that.
She shakes her head again. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right.’
‘You’re not going to Linz?’ I insist. I have to get this straight. Linz, I somehow know, is worse than anything else.
‘No, don’t worry, I’m not going to go to Linz. Now you’d better get your things ready.’
I do as I’m told. The fact is, I’m glad to be out of it. Whatever’s going to happen, I’m not going to have to live through it, it will happen out of sight. I’m grateful to God for answering my prayer. I even promise Him silently I’ll talk to Him at other times too, not just when things are bad.
‘I don’t want to go there,’ Sara suddenly and even truculently declares. ‘I want to stay.’ She’s got more guts than I have, but then she’s older too. I just want to play at ostriches and keep my head in the sand until tomorrow morning when everything that has to happen will have happened already. But Sara wants to face the music now, and hear it to the end.
‘No, Sara,’ Gabi says, glancing first at me, then at her. And something in her look persuades Sara to acquiesce. It’s as if they’ve been planning this all along, rehearsing every detail, and Gabi has just reminded her what part she has to play.
I don’t know how or when, but at some time Willibald goes out to the phone box by the post office wrapped up in coat, hat and scarf, to phone the nuns’ house and arrange for us to stay. And some time later Sara and I are walking silently towards the nuns’ house similarly dressed, with our night things in a rucksack, which Sara shoulders although she is a girl. Gabi doesn’t even make much of kissing us goodbye, as though to prove it isn’t really a proper parting. Just a peck on the cheek, like an ordinary good-night. Or perhaps there’s an extra pat on the shoulder as well, a sort of gentle rub. I don’t know, I’m too mixed up to tell. It’s a clear moonlit sky above us, glittering with stars, although down here on earth the snow is turning slushy, and I try to persuade myself that nothing bad can happen on a peaceful night like this, that Gabi will come for us in the morning and everything will somehow be all right.
Of course I don’t succeed.
The nuns’ house smells. It smells of many things, of cleanliness and carbolic, of dried-out virginity like dead leaves, of soured dreams and long frustration, of narrow penny-pinching sanctity. Except in the toilet which smells of something rotten overlaid with the scent of dried lavender, and in the bare and gloomy dining hall which smells of boiled cabbage and ham. (They can still get both.) Not that I recognise all these smells till long afterwards. But they hang around my memory, waiting to be known. And every now and then for years to come, whenever I catch a whiff of one of them, the rest of the sickening bouquet is wafted back.
The round-shouldered nun with grey-whiskery lips who receives us doesn’t seem to like us very much. I’m only doing this for the Herr Pfarrer’s sake, she seems to be saying when she opens the door, although what she actually says is ‘Wipe your shoes,’ in a high nasal bloodless voice. Dressed in something between a nurse’s uniform and a Catholic nun’s habit, she leads us silently down a dimly-lit corridor, and I listen to the shuffle of her steps and the sniff of her nose. Every now and then that cold wind which Constable Bolzner brought with him howls through my insides and I think with a wrench of Gabi packing or not packing her yellow case. And I feel just as sick and numb whether she’s packing it or not, and ask God again to get it over with or make me fall asleep at least, so that I don’t have to think about it any more, because otherwise I’m probably going to scream. What Sara thinks I do not know. Sara is as silent in her own way as Ilse is in hers. But Sara’s silence is a brooding one, while Ilse’s is just passive and resigned. I listen to her steps beside my own and the shuffling nun’s. I’m not going to ask Sara anything when we’re alone again. I know she knows something I don’t know, but I don’t want to find out what. All I want is to be unconscious.
We come to a bare room with two beds in it and a wooden cross upon the whitewashed wall. The aged nun leaves us, sniffing a dewdrop up her broken-veined and beaky nose. Sara places the rucksack on one of the beds and starts unpacking it. I lie down on the other bed fully clothed and turn towards the wall. The wall is cold, the room is cold. Sara pulls some blankets over me. I listen to her still unpacking the rucksack. I’m getting ready to be sleepy. In a few moments if I’m lucky, I will be sleepy, and then soon after that I’ll be asleep. So long as I don’t think about Gabi and her yellow suitcase.
Somewhere behind me sounds the swish of a long dress and the step of quick and lively feet. ‘I’ve brought some food for you,’ a young woman’s voice says cheerfully, but not too cheerfully. ‘Oh, is your brother asleep?’ I make sure my eyes are closed as someone leans over me, and gently pulls the blankets higher round my shoulders. ‘I’m Sister Maria Luther,’ the cheerful voice murmurs now to Sara. ‘You just let him sleep, and try to eat something yourself. I’ll be back in a minute.’
There’s a smell of steaming cabbage in the room, but I don’t hear any sound of knife or fork, and judge that Sara isn’t eating.
I know the nun comes back, because I hear her whispering
to Sara. Later I hear Sara’s bed creaking as she climbs onto it. Then I really am asleep until I wake up much later knowing that I have to pee. Sara is sitting on her bed, the blanket round her shoulders, staring at the window opposite, which would give a view of the lake if it wasn’t covered by a blackout blind.
‘I’ve got to pee,’ I say.
She points me silently down the corridor to where a yellowish gleam slants across the floor. The black-out blind there, I notice, is leaking light out to the enemy, whoever that might be, and automatically I conscientiously press the loose edge back against the window frame. I wouldn’t have made it to an outside toilet like ours, I’d have simply gone outside the door. But this is a real flushing toilet with tiles and everything, and I’d enjoy myself despite the smell of rot and dried-up lavender, if it was any other night but this. All the same, it must have made me a shade optimistic, because when I come back I’m telling myself everything will be all right tomorrow, we’ll find out it has all been a mistake and the Gestapo didn’t want Gabi after all, they wanted someone else of the same name who wasn’t privileged like her. Yes, she’s privileged, I keep telling myself, she’s privileged – that makes a difference. In any case, it’s still pitch dark and that means tomorrow won’t be here for hours and hours yet and I can go on hiding in the soft cocoon of night.
Sara watches me climb still fully-clothed back into bed.
‘She’s gone,’ she says flatly.
Sister Maria Luther, I think she means. ‘What time is it?’ I ask.
Sara peers at the alarm clock she’s brought with us from the Pfarrhaus, and the sight of it makes me want to cry. ‘Ten-past-twelve. Mutti’s gone.’
The Kaminsky Cure Page 23