‘And what would happen the first time she was asked for her papers?’ Willibald demanded. ‘Everything she has is stamped with a J. She’d be picked up at once! And then they’d come for us.’ He never lost sight for a moment of accountancy’s perspective.
‘She could use Tante Frieda’s passport,’ a voice said quietly from the kitchen. The voice was Ilse’s. She was still slowly making something to eat, but her thoughts were not exclusively on the Last Supper. ‘Tante Frieda’s passport doesn’t have a J on it. It’s from before.’ Before the Nazis, she meant. ‘And Mutti looks quite like her too.’ Ilse was afraid of her mother, of her unquiet hurricane energy, of her tainted blood and her supposedly maleficent Jewish curse. But she drew the line both at sending her off to the slaughterhouse and at watching her walk into the lake. Besides, whatever her mother thought about her illness (not the TB, that was cured – the one that slowed her down and made her drag her foot), Ilse herself believed she was going to die soon anyway. So it wasn’t a life or death matter for her if Gabi was caught. It was only death or death – death now or death a little later. ‘Tante Frieda’s things are still in that case in the attic,’ she said now, bringing a saucepan of reheated soup into the room, and a basket of hard stale bread. She hadn’t said so much for weeks.
‘Well …’ said Gabi hesitantly, ‘I suppose we could have a look at them …’ She was discovering how hard it is to just blow out life’s flickering candle.
And so, without anyone actually making an explicit decision, it was accepted that she was going to impersonate her dead sister. Ilse uncomplainingly took the food back into the kitchen and got Tante Frieda’s clothes out of the suitcase where they’d lain for nearly twelve years. Martin worked out his mother’s escape plan. Willibald accepted what he couldn’t prevent, and began composing a suicide note for Gabi in the style of Schiller – some things never change.
‘What shall we tell the other two?’ he glanced up to ask in fretful fear.
‘Let them believe she’s really killed herself,’ Martin said. ‘They’re too young, and anyway the fewer the people who know about it, the better …’ He really should have been on the general staff. He’d got a mind for these things. All those years in which he dreamt of Panzer tactics and Luftwaffe sorties really paid off now. His plan was a masterpiece of impromptu strategy, although it did have the essential benefit of slow Ilse’s passing comment.
Gabi would leave a suicide note of her own (Willibald’s was soon discarded as too literary to be anyone’s but his). She would walk over the intact snow of the garden down to the lake. She would drop her coat there and return to the house, walking backwards in her own tracks. She would wear Frieda’s clothes, take Frieda’s old passport and adopt Frieda’s identity. She would pretend she’d been bombed out of Dresden, and had rescued only the things she carried with her. Nobody could check with the Dresden authorities now, because there weren’t any authorities to check with. The city had just been completely destroyed by the Amis and the Tommies. (That was some post-coital news Martin had had from Lisl Wimmer that very day. Yes, her father must have been listening black.) Martin would then lead her through the slush of the lanes, where her footprints couldn’t be traced, over the mountain to Habersdorf, the next station on the railway line, where there was less chance of her being recognised. There she would take the first train to Graunau and Fräulein von Adler. In Graunau she would look for work in a hospital – that was his daring master-stroke. They were bound to be short-staffed in a hospital so near the front, and nobody would suspect her of being an escaping Jew. She’d be as safe as in the Führer’s bunker – who’d look for a Jew there?
‘What about if someone sees her in the village?’ Willibald asked, broken-voiced and broken-hoped. ‘What about Frieda’s papers? They’re twelve years old at least. Suppose they check them?’
‘They’ll be too busy with the war. The Amis are only sixty kilometres away.’ (More post-coital news from Lisl Wimmer. At least they’d had something to talk about afterwards.)
Ilse sewed Frieda’s clothes to make them more or less fit Gabi’s smaller figure. She emptied Gabi’s bag of everything that could associate her with Heimstatt – addresses, receipts, train tickets. She even cut the labels off Gabi’s sensible but worn underwear and rubbed the old Plinden optician’s name off her glasses case. Gabi wrote her pithy suicide note, and was amazed to see how steady her hand was. Willibald wrung his hands and was not at all amazed to see how unsteady they were. Then Gabi was ready to go. It was ten-twenty when she set out for the lake, eleven-fifteen when she returned from it backwards like a courtier leaving the Emperor’s presence – and certainly she owed it some respect; where would she be without it?
‘Did anyone see you?’ Martin asked.
How could she tell? She’d been too frightened to look, and anyway was so nervous that she’d almost stumbled into the lake by accident. Perhaps, she thought, it would have been better if she had. But she hadn’t, so she carried on, because that seemed now the only thing to do.
It would take them three hours to get over the mountain, and two and a half for Martin to get back before anyone in Heimstatt was up to see him. They set off at once, barely muttering goodbye. On their way they passed four graveyards, the Lutheran, the Catholic, the Catholic children’s and the suicides’, where the remains of Frau Dr Kraus lay in their roughly reassembled bits. Would they have put her there if she’d killed herself, Gabi wondered, or would even that be forbidden to a Jew?
From a saddle five hundred metres above the village, Gabi could look down panting for breath on the lake and the moonlit roof of the nuns’ house below. It was just past midnight. Every window was dark, but a crack of yellow light gleamed at the imperfect edge of the black-out blind on one. She imagined she was looking at the room where Sara and I lay peacefully sleeping. Why she thought we’d be sleeping peacefully is difficult to conceive, but in any case she was wrong. It was not our room, but the bathroom, into whose toilet bowl I was then about to pee.
How could she go on and leave us?
How could she not?
‘Keep going!’ Martin muttered urgently. ‘We haven’t got much time!’
The dim gleam vanished and Gabi turned away.
Along paths covered with thawed and re-freezing snow they clambered and slithered on towards the village of Habersdorf. And all the time Gabi was breathlessly rehearsing the details of the new life she’d taken on, while minor avalanches grumbled menacingly in the mountains above them. I am Frieda Brandt, she whispered to herself. Nurse in Dresden Central Hospital. My age is fifty-four, I am unmarried, I lived in 45 Hauptstrasse, Apartment Three, Second Floor. The place has been completely destroyed. My name is Frieda Brandt …
But what if she met someone from Dresden Central Hospital?
The Habersdorf station lay then, as it lies now, outside the village, and they could approach it without being seen. The ticket office was closed, the platform empty. So far, so good. But here was a challenge for Martin’s tactical thinking. Several people in Habersdorf knew Gabi and she might well be recognised if she entered the waiting-room or bought a ticket when the office opened. She’d better skulk at the end of the platform, then, behind the furthest name-board, and slip onto the train when it arrived.
‘Without a ticket?’ The idea in itself disturbed Gabi, quite apart from the danger of being caught by the inspector. Good citizens just didn’t travel without a valid ticket, even when they were escaping from the Gestapo.
‘There won’t be an inspector on the first train of the day,’ Martin retorted in an impatient whisper. He was usually impatient with women once he was sure of them, and there was none he could be more sure of than his mother. Besides, there’s no denying, master tactician though he was, his own nerves were stretched as taut as Gabi’s were just then. ‘Buy one at Pauchen, when you change trains.’
‘From Pauchen to Graunau?’ Gabi asked anxiously, still wondering about that stretch from Habersdorf to Pauchen that sh
e would have traversed illegally.
‘Yes, from Pauchen to Graunau, for God’s sake!’ came the hissed response. ‘Where d’you think?’
Gabi fumbled for her purse in her bag, to make sure once again she’d brought enough money with her.
‘Don’t stay long at Fräulein von Adler’s. They might be watching her. Get away as soon as you can.’
And then Martin was getting away himself, and she would be alone. She was not a hugging mother, but now she clung to Martin until he pulled himself free with a muttered and, it must be conceded, choking ‘I must go.’ And she watched him fade into the dark. For a time she thought she could still hear his boots crunching and slithering in the snow. Then there was nothing except the occasional whining of the telephone wires beside the empty gleaming rails.
She waited and waited, her feet and hands growing numb with cold. My name is Frieda Brandt, nurse in Dresden Central Hospital. I am fifty-four years old. I am unmarried. I lived in Hauptstrasse 45 …
At seven o’clock the first train arrived. Gabi boarded it like a guilty ghost, slipping into the last carriage while the sleepy under-station-master was chatting to the sleepy engine-driver. As she did so, she realised with a shock that this was the train she should have been on anyway in the company of Constable Bolzner, the six-thirty-five from Heimstatt. So in a sense it was Constable Bolzner who’d failed to keep their appointment, not she. Not that Constable Bolzner would look at it in that light.
The train drew away from the station and Gabi drew herself into the darkest corner of the last carriage. All the time the train was jolting along, she listened in dread for the unhurried sound of an inspector’s voice approaching with routine inexorability down the corridor. Whenever the train stopped, she listened in greater dread for the orderly sound of policemen’s voices and the measured scrape of boots on the carriage steps. She thought of jumping out of the train at every noise, and several times had her hand on the door handle. But Martin had been right; no inspector came. And as to the police, why should they search for her on the very train they knew she hadn’t boarded at Heimstatt?
The sun dragged itself up and surveyed the world with its bleary and indifferent eye. When its cold glaucous light seeped into the carriage, Gabi gingerly lifted the black-out blind and gazed out at a desolation of snow-covered fields and black, leafless trees.
At Pauchen she got down. An elderly inspector, who might have asked her for her ticket, helped her with her case instead and called her ‘Sister’. She thanked him in a voice croaky with fear and waited till he’d turned away before she went to the ticket-office.
Now, she thought, nobody would recognise her. But there she was wrong. Seppi Holzinger, a Heimstatt lad who’d avoided conscription by getting an ‘essential’ job as an engine-driver on the railways, was leaning out of his warm cab and complacently contemplating first the steam puffing serenely from his engine’s boiler, then the early morning passengers stamping their feet and panting their own kind of steam from theirs. He noticed Gabi on the next platform and briefly wondered, before relapsing into his habitual vacancy, what she was doing there so early in the day, and dressed so queerly too.
Meanwhile, after many delays and tremulously having her ticket punched without comment by a blowzy woman ticket inspector with greying hair, Gabi has arrived late in the afternoon at Graunau, where two troop trains are also just arriving, one from the east, one from the west. The train from the east is full of bloodied soldiers, the train from the west full of soldiers going to be bloodied. There ought to be plenty of work at the hospital. Another train arrives while Gabi walks slowly with her suitcase down the platform. This train discharges a slew of refugees from the east, who look as bewildered and bedraggled as the bloodied soldiers now being loaded onto stretchers. She mingles with them as they flow along the platform. The two soldiers standing guard at the station entrance slide their eyes unconcernedly over her face. Only men of military age interest them. They’re looking for deserters, not middle-aged Jewesses. For the first time since she left Heimstatt, Gabi begins to feel she might really escape, but that only transfers her fear from herself to her children and (less intensely, it must be admitted) to her husband. Has her escape meant their arrest? The safer she becomes, the guiltier she feels and the more fearful for them. Perhaps Willibald’s accountancy perspective was the right one after all?
The city’s streets are clogged with army trucks, guns and ambulances, and as she lugs her case through the wheel-churned slush towards Fräulein von Adler’s apartment, she realises she’ll be living with that anguish and fear until either she no longer lives herself or she sees them all again. She’d give herself up then and there, stop the first policeman she sees and humbly confess ‘I’m one of them, I’m a Jew who’s trying to escape,’ if she didn’t see it was too late for that now. Giving herself up would be exposing them – Martin, Ilse, Willibald, and even the other two who knew nothing about it. And then they’d all be done for.
Yes, Willibald was right, but it’s too late to turn back now.
But it isn’t too late to turn back from Fräulein von Adler’s apartment building when she sees it swarming with soldiers. In and out they march, carrying in equipment and boxes of supplies from an open truck past an armed sentry posted at the door. Gabi turns away with a quaking stomach. As she walks trembling off, she glances back over her shoulder at the large window on the first floor, where a bare-headed grey-haired officer stands gazing idly out as he speaks on Fräulein von Adler’s phone.
Three-quarters-of-an-hour and many apologetically polite requests later she has entered the matron’s office in one of Graunau’s hospitals and sits at the desk of a large Mother Superior cradling a crucified Christ on her generous bosom. The Mother Superior places a pince-nez on her nose and reads Frieda’s references of twenty years before.
‘I’m afraid everything else was lost in the air raid,’ Gabi says timidly. She gestures at her case. ‘This is all I have left.’ Which she suddenly realises might indeed be true by now.
The Mother Superior studies first Frieda’s passport, then, removing her pince-nez, Gabi’s face. Gabi’s stomach is empty, but if it wasn’t, it would have emptied then. ‘Yes,’ the matron says, glancing down again. ‘We heard it was terrible in Dresden. Of course we can use you, with your qualifications. We’re very short-handed. Do you speak any foreign languages – French or English? Or Russian, even? We have a ward full of prisoners-of-war here.’
‘French and a little English,’ Gabi says breathlessly.
The Mother Superior nods. ‘We’ve just lost a nurse in that ward, I’ll start you off there. You’ll be working with Sister Brigitte. She’s …’ She doesn’t say what Sister Brigitte is, and Gabi guesses hopefully that the missing predicate is nice or friendly, or even non-political. ‘But you must be tired, after all you’ve been through.’
‘I didn’t sleep at all last night,’ Gabi replies. It feels good to say something true at last, as though that makes the lies all true as well.
‘Have some rest first, then. You can start work tomorrow. I see it doesn’t say what your religion is here?’
‘Aryan,’ Gabi blurts out too quickly.
The Mother Superior glances up at her quizzically, her eyebrows arching towards her spotless wimple. ‘It was your religion I asked about, Sister Frieda.’
Gabi blushes. ‘I, I’m afraid I’m a Lutheran,’ she stammers, as uneasily as if she was confessing her actual race rather than her professed religion.
‘Lutheran,’ Mother Superior repeats in a flat tone that expresses neither doubt nor belief. ‘We’re nearly all Catholics here, but it doesn’t matter. All except Sister Brigitte. She’s …’ But again the Mother Superior leaves Gabi to guess what Sister Brigitte is as she folds Frieda’s references inside her passport and slips them into the top drawer of her desk. ‘We’ll keep these safe in here for now,’ she says as she turns the key. ‘I’ll just show you your room …’
Why did she keep them? Gabi w
onders in a new surge of fear as she follows the Mother Superior down the corridor. Why? Is she going to check when she goes back? To show them to the police?
Mother Superior leaves Gabi in a little room with two beds in it, separated by a thick grey curtain. ‘You’ll be sharing here with Sister Brigitte,’ she says. ‘The prisoners’ ward is at the end of the corridor. Sister Brigitte will explain everything to you when she comes off duty tomorrow morning.’
As she swishes away, Gabi imagines her going to the desk again, unlocking the drawer, taking out Frieda’s passport, poring suspiciously over it, then picking up the phone … She feels like a prisoner at her trial waiting anxiously but fatalistically for the verdict. If it happens, it happens. There’s nothing she can do about it now. One of the beds is made. That must be Sister Brigitte’s. She shuts the door, sits down on the unmade bed, pulls a blanket round her shoulders and waits.
And as she sits there, her eyelids sliding irresistibly down over her glazing eyes, she sees Constable Bolzner opening the door and leading Willibald, Ilse, Martin, Sara and me into the room, each holding the next one’s hand, as though in a funereal dance. ‘Now you’re all under arrest,’ Constable Bolzner says reproachfully. ‘D’you think I enjoy doing this? Why didn’t you kill yourself like you said?’
The Kaminsky Cure Page 25