That cold wind immediately blows a full gale inside me, and I resent Sara for bringing it on. ‘How can she be?’ I mutter peevishly. ‘The train doesn’t go till six thirty-five.’
‘She’s gone,’ Sara repeats with finality. ‘I heard her.’ And then at last she lies down, as if that’s what she’d been waiting for all those long cold hours.
I won’t listen to that. It makes me shiver. I refuse to let it in. I cover my head with the pillow. But the damage has been done. I don’t go back to sleep, I listen to my pulse thudding in my ears for the rest of the endless night, while images of trains leaving stations and men with Homburg hats getting meekly into humped black cars whirl round and round on the restless carousel inside my brain. I ply God with lots more messages about making all this not happen or putting time forward until it’s all already in the past, or at least sending me to merciful sleep until it’s passed, but He doesn’t seem to be listening now. Perhaps He’s gone to sleep Himself. Or perhaps He’s angry with me. Anyway, I don’t get an answer.
Before it’s light, Sara is up and packing our things. I pretend to be asleep, so that I won’t have to hear her say ‘She’s gone’ again, although everything about her slow and heavy movements delivers the same message. She’s started mourning already. In fact I sense she started on the way here, before we’d even arrived.
‘You’d better wash yourself,’ she says.
No sooner had I come back from the bathroom than Sister Maria Luther enters the room again – I know it’s her because of the quick rustle of her skirt and the cheerful sound of her voice. ‘Breakfast!’ she announces as though that’s all we’ve been waiting for. She’s much younger than the nun who let us in last night, and she’s younger than any of the other nuns too. That’s because she hasn’t retired yet, I suppose, as she leads us to the dining hall. And I indistinctly infer from that a conclusion which I’ve never doubted since, that retiring is a kind of chronic ailment.
Nothing in the dining hall at least leads me to change my mind. Once someone has muttered Grace in an ancient reedy voice, the nuns sit silently nibbling and mumbling their food, working their jaws without pleasure and shooting suspicious little glances this way and that to see who’s got more than her share of food or not enough of piety. But Sister Maria Luther hasn’t been soured yet – perhaps she never will be – and she sets us down at the end of one long table where a couple of withered nuns move silently away a bit as though we’re lepers, which in a sense of course, being Gabi’s kids, we are. I discover that I can eat after all, and the unstale bread and real milk-coffee go down quite fast. Where do they get them from, I wonder. Why can’t we at home? Then I recall with a thump – although I’ve never really forgotten it – that there’s something else we may not have at home just now. Namely, a mother.
Sara has lost her appetite, and despite Sister Maria Luther’s urging doesn’t touch a thing. She nudges her bread across to me, and after a brief struggle with my better self which I know it’s going to lose, I eat it. Then there’s no reason not to drink her coffee too, of course, so down that goes as well. It doesn’t make me feel much better. In fact it makes me feel quite sick. But I drink it all the same. And all the time I’m feeding my face, my mind is contemplating images of Gabi packing her yellow case, of Gabi lying dead in bed, of Gabi walking through the village with Willibald, or without him, going to her destiny with the ferry and Constable Bolzner.
It’s half-past seven by the clock on the wall when the nuns all rise and leave like a flock of wretched crows. The train will have gone an hour ago already, I think. Was Gabi on it or not? Sister Maria Luther leads us back to our room. ‘I know,’ she says brightly, ‘We’ll go for a walk in the garden. It’s not too cold. I’ll just get my things on and then we can go.’ But while we sit silent on our beds, numbly waiting for her to reappear, and the chill wind still finds room to blow through my insides despite my double breakfast, it’s Willibald who opens the door.
His face looks about ten years older than it looked yesterday and his eyes are so full of liquid meaning that my own eyes start to prick at the mere sight of them. He looks at each of us in turn, opens his mouth and closes it again, taking out his handkerchief to mop his leaking orbs instead.
‘She’s gone,’ Sara declares in that same flat tone she used in the middle of the night. It reminds me of the tolling of the church bell when someone dies.
Willibald nods. ‘Your mother fell, went, threw …’ He stammers, gulps, continues, ‘She, er, she fell into the lake.’
He goes on mopping his eyes, but mine are completely dry now, not even pricking. There’s just a heavy hammer covered with cloth that’s beating inside my chest with muffled thuds, reverberating right through my body. It takes me some time to realise it’s my heart. Does he mean she fell or went or threw herself?
‘When?’ Sara asks.
‘During the night.’ His voice is sobbing now and his whole face covered with the handkerchief, which I notice has not been ironed very well. That one couldn’t have come from Pels. ‘She couldn’t face …’
‘I knew,’ Sara says. ‘Ten-past-twelve.’
Willibald blows his nose, wipes his eyes, stands up.
I understand that means we’re going back to the Pfarrhaus now, where I will see Gabi’s body laid out in her wet clothes on the bed. For some reason that comforts me.
‘We’ll go back in the boat,’ Willibald murmurs, which explains something that’s been quietly bothering me ever since he came in – the wet cuffs of his overcoat sleeves. So he’s rowed there along the icy lake and he’s going to row us back, and we’ll sit watching his spindly arms dragging on the dripping oars. Does that mean he’s been searching for Gabi’s body? That she’s not upstairs in bed after all, but still drifting somewhere among the lumbering chunks of ice? I can’t believe that. She must have been pulled out! She must be lying in bed waiting for us to say goodbye! No, I decide, the reason Willibald rowed here instead of walking through the village is that he couldn’t face the villagers in his grief. Yet something whispers to me that that can’t be quite right either – Willibald loves an audience for all his emotions, whether they’re acted or real. Or, as so often, both. It must be he’s ashamed, then. Ashamed of the humiliation his Jewish wife has brought upon him.
Sister Maria Luther reappears. She hasn’t put her coat on, but she helps me put on mine, although I’d rather do it myself. Still, there’s something comforting about the way she smoothes it over my shoulders that reminds me of how Gabi rubbed and patted them yesterday as she said goodbye. She goes silently with us to the boat and embraces us both. She’s no longer cheerful, but calm and consoling, and as she watches us leave, the oars splashing and thumping against the wallowing ice, she looks in her long black dress like the figure of a gentle kind of Death. As we gradually draw away and I keep my eyes on her for fear I might otherwise see Gabi’s body sliding about under the ice, I imagine Sister Maria Luther embracing Gabi in the same way, putting her arm round her shoulder and leading her quietly away. But she hasn’t led her away, and nor has the real Death. Nor will Gabi be floating like a dead fish in the freezing water. She’ll be lying on the bed at home as if she’s just fallen asleep and I’ll be able to see her and say goodbye, now that it’s all over. I feel a kind of wounded gratitude to God after all for making the best of a bad business, although there’s also a nagging suspicion that He could just as easily have made it a much better business instead, so why didn’t He?
But I’d forgotten: the lake does not give up its dead. As soon as we arrive I go upstairs, grief mastering fear, to the bedroom where I expect to find Gabi reclining in a peaceful state like sleep. But she isn’t there. The bed is bare and freshly made, as if no one’s ever slept in it, and suddenly I know I’ll never say goodbye to her. She isn’t there, I keep thinking as I go slowly down again from the empty, empty room. She isn’t there.
Constable Bolzner is there though, and he’s looking almost as unhappy as Willibald. So are Mart
in and Ilse there, pale and silent. And a note on the table that Constable Bolzner now takes up and reads, probably for the tenth time.
It’s a hurried but pithy one-sentence note. I have decided to kill myself rather than be killed in a concentration camp. Gabriella Brinkmann. She missed out the obligatory Sara in her signature. She could have been in trouble for that.
‘What do you know about this?’ Constable Bolzner asks Sara and me, in a tone that’s heavy with both condolence and suspicion.
Sara shrugs. ‘She told me she was going to drown herself if they came for her,’ she says in that same unnervingly inexpressive tone she’s been using since last night.
Constable Bolzner sighs. ‘When was that, then?’
Sara shrugs again. Her eyes are quite dry and she seems so composed that I think for a moment she’s unaffected by Gabi’s death. But of course I’m wrong. Still waters do run deep. ‘Many times,’ she tells Constable Bolzner simply. ‘She said if they came for her she’d just walk into the lake.’ So it’s walking, I tell myself, not falling or throwing. As though that made any difference.
Constable Bolzner seems to be considering whether Sara’s statement if true could amount to aiding and abetting a suicide. But he’s more interested in saving his own skin now than in getting someone else’s, so he lets that drop. Besides, he’s sorry for us too. ‘And what about you?’ he demands of me, who’s now imagining Gabi walking out over the cracking ice, which I see suddenly opening and tilting, tipping her smoothly in and closing like a coffin lid over her head. ‘Where’s your mother really gone? Did she tell you what she was going to do?’ That he appears to doubt that Gabi’s really dead upsets me. As though she’d deceive me like that, letting me believe she was dead when she wasn’t! I shake my head and at last begin to cry. She isn’t there is still all that I can think of. She isn’t there.
Nothing touches Constable Bolzner’s heart more than a child’s tears. He turns away awkwardly and pretends to scrutinise Gabi’s note once more. But it’s having a heart that’s got him in this shit and soon he’s probably considering how deep in he is – and realising it’s pretty deep indeed. He’s followed Gabi’s footsteps down to the lake, he’s seen her coat lying on the shore, he’s inspected the melting ice floes tilting and heaving against each other like clumsy seals gambolling in the slowly changing currents. Willibald is sobbing, and I’m sniffing. Martin and Ilse are pale as ghosts, and Sara’s a statue of inward grief. To cap it all, he’s got that suicide note in his hands. It looks as if the Frau Pfarrer’s gone and killed herself all right, and it’s all his fault. He should have put her in the lock-up last night. He can kiss his chances of promotion goodbye now. Rules are rules and duty’s duty, they’re going to tell him. A view, he’s probably uncomfortably recalling, he put to Willibald last night. A view which Willibald, considering his stern views on the Officers’ Plot against the Führer, ought himself to approve.
But Willibald’s got other things to think about just now. So do Martin and Ilse. While I’m standing on the balcony of the Pfarrhaus turning blue with cold and forlornly gazing out over the ice-grey lake after all for some sign of my mother’s body, while Sara’s sitting dark-eyed in the kitchen with her hands clasped in her lap, while Constable Bolzner’s going unhappily off to make his report – while all this is going on, the other three are wondering silently, each with their own style and degree of fear, where Gabi is by now, whether she’s dead or alive, and whether they can carry their deception through.
Yes, deception. Because Gabi isn’t really dead at all. She’s only playing dead, except that what she’s doing’s –
16
Definitely not a game
While Sara and I are visualising her being dragged by her waterlogged lungs deeper and deeper into the black tomb of the lake, she’s actually chugging along above ground on a local train towards Graunau and Fräulein von Adler, and, if not hale, and certainly not hearty, at least so far she’s whole. She’s become a U-boat, though not the kind that goes to sea. She’s disappeared from view, that is, and surfaced as another person, her long dead older sister Frieda.
Nothing of that was in her mind when she sent Sara and me off to the nuns’ house. She meant to kill herself as she’d often told Sara she would. But she wanted Sara to take me out of the way. I was too young, she thought, to witness her mortal preparations. And Sara – well, Sara had known about this for months, whereas the others had to be prepared from scratch. Besides, who else could take me to the nuns’ house and stay with me? Not Ilse, despite her affinity to nuns of any order, Catholic or Protestant, because she couldn’t go trudging through the snow with her just healed TB and her present unknown illness and halting gait. And not Martin either, because – well, Martin just didn’t do that kind of thing. No, the responsibility fell on Sara as it so often did. She was Gabi’s confidante and assistant, and that would be her final task. No wonder Sara’s later years are spent forlornly searching for the childhood that she never had.
But Willibald and Martin each had different plans for Gabi. Willibald’s was that she should go to Linz as tamely as Frau Professor Goldberg. ‘After all, they can’t do anything bad to you, because you’re privileged, you’re married to an Aryan.’
Whether or not Willibald really believed that, Gabi certainly didn’t. Nor did Martin. That would-be Hitler Youth member, would-be Panzer commander and would-be Luftwaffe ace could read the Nazi mind better than his father. Or perhaps he merely had less of a motive for self-deception. Anyway, he shot his father’s feeble suggestion down like the latest Messerschmitt engaging an antique Russian biplane. ‘You can’t go,’ he told Gabi. ‘Privileged or not. You’d never come back.’
‘I’m not going,’ Gabi assured him. She was still nursing her jaw, and at the same time thinking so it was all a waste of money, then, going to the dentist. ‘I decided months ago.’
‘You must run away,’ Martin said. ‘Hide somewhere.’
‘And I’m not running away either.’ She was speaking as matter-of-factly as Sara would later, but deep below all that calm the waters churned and seethed all right.
Willibald understood perfectly what she meant, but offered no objection. Suicide was bad, but running away might be worse. First of all she’d almost certainly get caught. And secondly he’d be interrogated by the Gestapo. And what about the children? And his Aryan lady friend in Plinden? Every one of them might be interrogated! And the Gestapo wouldn’t be as considerate as Constable Bolzner, you could be sure of that. Of course the prospect of Gabi killing herself terrified him. But it didn’t terrify him half as much as the Gestapo did. He’d prefer her to simply take her chance, go to Linz and get quietly processed by the system, decently and out of sight, since that was what The Authorities required. And after all she was ‘privileged’. But at least if she did kill herself as her sister had done, there’d be no trouble from the Gestapo, no trouble for him, the children or anyone. (And he might eventually be free for his plump Aryan lady friend – did he also think of that?)
‘Of course you must run away!’ Martin insisted. ‘Go somewhere where nobody knows you!’ His strategic thinking was bold, but had it outrun his sense of the practical?
‘And what if she’s caught?’ Willibald almost shrieked. ‘What will happen to us?’ The question was rhetorical. He knew what would happen: Concentration Camp. And he was right. Martin’s scheme was rash, and certainly the safest course was Gabi’s or his own. If she went to Linz or killed herself, the rest might survive. If she tried to escape, she’d probably be caught and then they’d all go down together. From the point of view of accountancy and cost-benefit analysis, Martin’s scheme was faulty and Willibald’s was right. But some people just aren’t born to be accountants.
‘We’ll simply say we don’t know anything about it!’ Martin retorted. ‘And she can pretend she’s killed herself.’ You can see what the Nazis were missing, keeping him out of their ranks. That’s just the kind of quick contrarian thinking they needed just then.
But how did Martin come to be employing it against the very State he longed to serve? Well, there are limits to anyone’s loyalty, and Martin had just bumped into his. Fatherland and Führer, yes. But Mother came in somewhere too. And as for the Gestapo, nobody liked them.
And what was sad Ilse doing while all this was going on? She’d closed her eyes and was as usual praying. There’s no doubt who she was praying to, but what she was praying for is harder to determine. Peace at the last, perhaps, though where and what the last would be, nobody could tell. On the other hand, perhaps she was praying for guidance. Because guidance is what she very soon gave, and where else could she have got it from?
As the minutes passed, Gabi was growing less and less inclined to take the icy plunge. Yes, Martin was right. If she could get away before tomorrow and pretend to be another refugee bombed out of Silesia or somewhere, she might after all last out the final months of the war – which surely couldn’t be so many now? Germany was a nut in a nutcracker, being squeezed between the Russians on one side and the Amis and the Tommies on the other. Surely the Third Reich was going to be crushed soon like a walnut with a rotten kernel? And then she’d be there for her children when the war was over. Could she afford to throw away that chance?
Against that weighed Willibald’s objection that they’d all be killed if she was caught – but against that weighed her sudden lust for life. Or rather her horror of a watery death. If like her sister Frieda all those years ago, she’d had some tablets and a syringe handy, she might have gone upstairs later that night and quietly lain down on the bed. It’s easy to swallow tablets and quite easy – for a nurse at least – to stick a needle in your vein. After all, that’s what Frieda did when the Nazis dismissed her from her job at her hospital in Berlin. But Gabi had no tablets, Gabi had no syringe. Jews weren’t allowed them, even if they’d been there to have. So short of something more violent, her way out of life would have to be through the lake. And that would mean forcing herself not to swim, letting herself sink under the broken ice, sucking water down into her lungs in place of air – and such black and freezing water too, full of fish and weeds! She saw herself thrashing about, splashing and heaving, her body frantically trying to save her while her mind tried to kill. The dread that she might do it badly, that at the last moment her nerve might crack, began to unman her, if that term can be applied to a woman who had more courage than most men. Yes, if only she could just pretend to kill herself and get away with it …
The Kaminsky Cure Page 24