‘No, don’t take them!’ she screams out in a strangled voice. ‘I’m the guilty one! Not them! Not them!’
Her scream wakes her. The room is empty, the door still closed. The blanket has slipped off her shoulders onto the bed. I must rest, she thinks, shivering in the dusk. Otherwise I’ll only give myself away. She makes the bed and lies down between the sheets without undressing. But now she can’t sleep. I’m Frieda Brandt, the words keep going through her head. Nursing Sister from Dresden. Gabi Brinkmann? Who’s she? I’m Frieda Brandt, unmarried, I lived in 45 Hauptstrasse. I’ve been bombed out and come to work in Graunau … She gets up and goes to the window to remind herself where she is, to ram her new identity into her brain.
In the courtyard below are armed sentries, two ambulances, a black staff car with a pennant flying from its bonnet. Two orderlies are carrying a patient on a stretcher across the courtyard. The patient’s arm hangs stiffly down from the stretcher and Gabi wonders detachedly why the orderlies don’t place it more comfortably by the man’s side. Then she realises his face is covered. He’s dead, then. She feels in her detachment a strange sense of relief that it’s not a living person they’re treating so negligently. As though that’s a good omen for her own fate. She watches the orderlies carry the stretcher past the sentries and through some swing doors. A lamp comes on behind the doors, and a subdued light seeps out into the courtyard like a yellowish fog. One of the sentries mutters something to the other. I’m Frieda Brandt, the ribbon of words unreels in Gabi’s head. Fifty-four years old, unmarried. I lived in Hauptstrasse …And all the time that never-ending fear, stirring quietly in her stomach like a faintly seething swamp.
She eats the last of the sandwiches quiet Ilse made in Heimstatt, and drinks some water from a carafe on the scratched wooden bedside table. When she lies down at last again, she stuffs a handkerchief into her mouth in a variation of the Kaminsky cure, so that she won’t betray herself by blurting something out as she did before in her sleep.
She is awake, washed and dressed long before Sister Brigitte appears at six the next morning.
Sister Brigitte is healthy and young, with thick bouncy blonde hair beneath the starched white cap that perches like a jaunty seagull on its waves. ‘How glad I am to see you, Sister Frieda!’ she declares. ‘Did Matron tell you how short-staffed we are here? The reason is I had to report the last nurse for defeatist remarks. You should have heard what she was saying, you wouldn’t believe it! And now the prisoners are really uncooperative. I’m almost scared of them. No, not really, don’t worry. That’s an exaggeration, I’m always overdoing things, people say. Besides, we’ve got an army unit next door. They’ll take care of them if they get nasty. That’s the first thing you’ll notice about me, by the way – always exaggerating. Mark you, what that nurse was saying – Astrid, her name was, Sister Astrid – you’d hardly believe she was German if you’d heard her. In spite of her name. Absolute disgrace! Come along, I’ll show you round, then I must get my beauty sleep. I’m completely smashed!’
Gabi follows her, her heart congealing in her chest. So that’s what Sister Brigitte is – a zealous Nazi who reports defeatist talk. And their beds are scarcely four feet apart! She follows Sister Brigitte numbly – to the dying room, nearest theirs, to the large and shabby main ward, where prisoners lie so close together that you can hardly get between the beds, to the primitive latrines and the treatment room, where there are almost no medicines or syringes. ‘There are all sorts here,’ Sister Brigitte says with a sort of indulgent contempt for her patients. ‘Russians, Poles, English, French …We can’t do much for them. Either they get better of their own accord or they die.’
‘We’re the only two nurses?’ Gabi asks, glancing round at the forty or so men whose dazed or feverish eyes are silently interrogating hers.
Sister Brigitte nods. ‘And we take it in turns to do the night watch, so then there’s only one of us. That’s when they tend to die, of course. Another one went last night. With a bit of luck we get an orderly to hand the food round, but half of them are too sick to eat it anyway. Frankly I wouldn’t touch it myself even if I was starving, but there’s a war on, isn’t there? We get military rations,’ she assures Gabi with the smile of a happy warrior. ‘The same as our soldiers. Real pumpernickel and wurst. Even real coffee sometimes.’
Today is one of those times. They breakfast on food such as Gabi hasn’t eaten for years and drink real steaming coffee. ‘Where’d you say you come from?’ Sister Brigitte asks. ‘Dresden? Wasn’t that barbaric? It must have been awful for you. They say our men are shooting any airmen they take prisoner now; you can’t blame them, can you? Imagine if you were a soldier who came from there. I come from Munich, myself. You can hear it in my accent, can’t you? Now I must get some rest. See you in a couple of hours, all right?’
When Sister Brigitte has turned in, Gabi is left alone in the ward. Two men are dying of gangrene in the dying room, several more outside it look ready to take their places. Others mutter to her in Russian, French, English. A few in broken German. ‘Vous êtes aussi Nazi, comme l’autre?’ one of them asks, a young Frenchman with an uneven pulse and high fever. She doesn’t answer. And yet she feels better, as though she’s found some friends at last.
Just before noon, an SS doctor enters with a loud ‘Heil Hitler!’ Major Friedländer, he announces himself, surveying Gabi up and down as if she was a new recruit on parade. ‘I don’t know how I got that name, my ancestry’s pure Aryan for ten generations. Some Jew must have stolen it somewhere. I see your surname’s Brandt. Some of them have stolen that name too. What haven’t they stolen?’
Gabi nods and murmurs, ‘Yes, Herr Major.’ She’s used to military doctors from the first war, and her attitude seems to satisfy this one. ‘Most of these prisoners are either too sick to be worth treating, Sister Frieda,’ he goes on, ‘or not sick enough. Let the really sick ones die. The ones that are lightly sick should be returned to the camp as soon as possible, instead of fattening themselves on hospital food. I don’t know why they were sent here in the first place. This isn’t a rest home for malingerers. The few that are in between have a certain scientific interest for me. They’re the only ones I want taken care of. Sister Brigitte will tell you who they are. But don’t bother too much with them. They’re all expendable in the end. They’re still our enemies, remember. Well, I hope we shall work well together. The last nurse we had here was a disaster.’ His eyes, not Aryan blue, but as brown as Gabi’s, hold hers for a moment, then he nods dismissal. ‘Heil Hitler!’
Gabi half-raises her hand in the forbidden salute, but the words just won’t come out. Yes, she thinks as the door closes on Major Friedländer, she should have killed herself. And now it’s too late. This reflection takes her to the dying room, where there is no morphine (reserved for German heroes) but a smell of pain that’s even stronger than the smell of blood and putridity. She mechanically does what she can with what she’s got and is surprised how easy it is to slip back into hospital ways. And all the time she wonders anguishedly –
17
What’s going on in Heimstatt
Where the Gestapo have just been to sort us out. Two bully-boys from Linz, to be exact, who banged rather than knocked on the door just as those others did in Berlin, and barged their way in past shrinking Ilse, shoved Willibald up against the wall and started turning out his desk drawers. Constable Bolzner was a sheepish witness and occasionally caught Willibald’s frightened eyes with a look that said Now see what you’ve brought on yourself. You can’t blame me, you know. And nor did Willibald blame him. He didn’t blame anyone unless perhaps Gabi for not doing the decent thing. He was just scared rigid he was going to be taken away in the black Mercedes outside, which had already attracted the attention of half the village. And even if he wasn’t taken away, how would he be able to face his congregation now? Not to speak of his plump Aryan widow.
After the meatheads had finished with the study, it was the whole house that got the treatment. Every
cupboard ransacked, every bookcase emptied, every desk drawer yanked out and upturned. The place looked as if Willibald and Gabi had just had one of their major marital disagreements, except that Gabi wasn’t here to have one and the pictures didn’t get torn off the walls. It was lucky Martin wasn’t here either, but off at the factory when they searched his room. He might have said something when they pulled the drawers out of his desk, and got a slap across the mouth for his pains. Lucky they didn’t look under his mattress too, where as far as I knew the semi-naked ladies were still awaiting his thrilled nocturnal peeping – unless Lisl Wimmer had taken on that role. But perhaps that wasn’t quite the kind of material the Gestapo were looking for, or would object to if they found it.
Or perhaps they weren’t really looking for anything at all and only wanted to mess us around a bit? Not that Sara or I cared much what they wanted. We were still aching with the loss of Gabi, still numb and dumb, still gazing out over the lake every hour or so as if she was going to arise like Aphrodite from the ice floes, except she wouldn’t be either naked or beautiful and I’d never heard of Aphrodite anyway. So we didn’t care about these two heavies – why should we? The worst had happened already – and we couldn’t comprehend the fear they inspired in Willibald and Ilse, especially after they left us alone and wandered down to the shore accompanied by harassed Constable Bolzner to the place where Gabi’s coat was found. They examined the spot carefully, apparently unaware it had already been covered by a new snowfall, and looked about them as though they expected to see her pop up from behind the nearest tree and light out over the ice to give them a spot of target practice. But it was freezing again, so they soon tired of that. Then, flapping their arms and stamping their feet, which weren’t suitably shod for metre-deep alpine snow, they got back in their car and drove away. Not however before they’d given Constable Bolzner a noisy piece of their mind.
It was my birthday, by the way. I was eleven, but I didn’t feel like celebrating.
Now unhappy Constable Bolzner catches a cold and wastes precious police time rowing up and down the unfrozen passages in the lake, peering hopelessly under lumbering half-metre-thick slabs of ice for a sight of Gabi’s wallowing body. And Willibald is surprised by a visit from Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer, who offers ale-hazed condolences on Gabi’s decease and lets it be known he had nothing to do with the Gestapo visitation of the day before. The black news he’s been listening to must be really black. Willibald would be even more surprised, and scared as well, if he knew of the visit young engine-driver Seppi Holzinger paid to Franzi himself the day after Gabi disappeared.
‘I saw her in Pauchen!’ Seppi began their conversation. ‘On platform five! Eleven-twenty exactly.’
Franzi knew full well who he meant, but he affected chummy hebetude. ‘Saw who?’ he asked. ‘Lots of people in Pauchen, aren’t there, Seppi?’
‘The Frau Pfarrer! Dressed up in nurse’s clothes. Eleven-twenty, it was. I was just taking the Salzburg regular out.’
‘Frau Pfarrer Brinkmann? You can’t have done.’
‘But I did, I tell you! Plain as I’m seeing you now.’
‘How could you have, Seppi? She’s been in the lake since yesterday morning.’
When Seppi persisted, Franzi grew more avuncular. ‘Now listen Seppi, you can’t have seen her, because the woman’s dead, all right? And what would she be wearing a nurse’s uniform for anyway?’
‘Well, it looked like her, anyway,’ Seppi said doggedly.
‘Dare say it did. But it can’t have been her, can it? Look, I’d forget about this, I was you. You go round spreading stories like that, you could get into trouble, know what I mean? Wasting police time, they call it. Don’t want that to happen, do you?’
Seppi Holzinger certainly didn’t. He’d imagined he’d simply get some credit for being a patriotic sleuth, but now that he saw himself getting tangled up in a net of complications, he swiftly reassessed his memory and found it might perhaps have been mistaken. ‘Well, I can’t be sure it was her, I suppose,’ he admitted with a face-saving show of grudging reluctance.
Least said, soonest mended is not a German proverb, nor an Austrian one either, but there’s something nearly twice as long that’s rather similar and Seppi silently applied it then. Later, when the war is over, he’s going to subscribe to a different principle, and will often be heard declaring how he saved the Herr Pfarrer’s family by refusing to answer the Gestapo’s questions about his train-spotting at Pauchen at eleven-twenty on a February day in 1945. Well, Franzi Wimmer won’t be disposed to put the record straight. Did Franzi dissuade Seppi from reporting his Gabi-sighting out of humanity, or merely to further hedge his bets? He won’t be disposed to tell us that either, if ever he knew himself. He won’t be disposed to tell anyone anything.
Soon after the Gestapo visitation Martin announces on his return from his efforts in the factory and subsequently Lisl Wimmer that it’s the crisis now. The final desperate and decisive battle is really approaching at last: the battle at which the Führer will deploy his latest and most devastating weapon, although just what that is he’s not too clear. He announces all this exultantly, as though he’d just left a staff meeting in Adolf’s bunker, rather than a groping tryst with Lisl Wimmer.
Sara and I are shocked by his apparent callousness. He doesn’t mention Gabi once, doesn’t seem to care that his mother has just killed herself – he scarcely seems to notice it even, despite the black armbands he, Willibald and I have on our sleeves, and the black dresses Ilse and Sara are wearing, all of which silent melancholic Ilse has run up or altered on her sewing machine with the help of Fräulein Hofer, who came specially to sew although it wasn’t her day.
Resi came with her, carrying a worn pack of cards, and spoke to me for the first time in all these years. She asked me if I wanted to play Skat. I said no. Not that I thought she was offering me the kind of cardless Skat that Eva played with Martin in Berlin. Though I appreciated her gesture, it made me want to cry again, and I went off to the balcony to have another look for Gabi and let my tears fall unobserved. But I couldn’t keep on crying, because Resi followed me and asked if I’d rather play Black Peter instead. I shook my head dumbly and she stood behind me sending waves of silent compassion into the middle of my hunched shoulders. Then she murmured in a low voice, ‘My dad’s gone too. At Stalingrad.’ I didn’t move – or perhaps I hunched my shoulders a bit higher. ‘Missing believed killed, they said,’ she went on. And then went quietly away. That was my first experience of a girl’s tenderness and it made me feel sorry for her as well as for myself. But I still felt more sorry for me than for her because her father couldn’t have meant much to her since he’d given her away to Fräulein Hofer when she was a baby. And anyway he was only missing believed killed, whereas Gabi was definitely and irrevocably dead.
I’ve been crying a lot these past few weeks, and I’ve spent more time than Sara standing on the balcony gazing out over the lake for a sight of my mother. I even hoped that Constable Bolzner would find her as he poked about in the ice, although the thought of him trawling her frozen body in behind his little boat did give me nightmares.
But Sara’s different. She’s as silent as Ilse and hasn’t cried once that I know of. Every scene in the drama of her life plays on that inner stage of hers, and no one gets invited to the show. She sits behind the kitchen stove, which doesn’t give much heat out now because there’s so little wood to burn in it, never mind coal, and stares at the tiles as if they were speaking to her, whispering some profound message. But what it is I’ll never know. Her notebooks lie almost untouched beneath her mattress.
And as for Ilse – I’ve never seen her cry in the whole of my life. She’s so sad at all times that tears are redundant at any one of them. Besides, I know she’s got a different take on Gabi; she can’t miss her as Sara and I do.
After another week, when the snow’s beginning to thaw, a chief inspector from Plinden appears in Heimstatt and orders the lake to be thoro
ughly trawled, which turns up nothing worth eating or keeping. Then there’s an inquiry into Constable Bolzner’s conduct regarding the disappearance of the Jewess Gabriella Sara Brinkmann, in consequence of which Constable Bolzner is dismissed from the police and simultaneously inducted into the army. That’s bad news for Frau Bolzner and her five children, who are evicted from their comfortable police lodgings, and they look at Willibald as though they hold him responsible for their predicament, which in a sense he is. However there’s bad news everywhere just now and Willibald merely smiles blandly to hide his discomfort and speedily averts his eyes. After all, there’s no point singling out the Bolzners for special sympathy when the news is worse for everyone than anyone supposed. Unless you’re on the Allies’ side, that is, which nobody in Heimstatt is – until, that is, it turns out afterwards that everyone was all along. In fact you could say the Bolzners are lucky; the Eastern Front has dissolved by the time the ex-Constable gets to it and all he does is spend the next six months finding his way home again. Admittedly he doesn’t get his police job back. Orders are orders, they remind him – doesn’t he know it! – and rules are rules, never mind if they’re the wrong ones.
The first material differences that Gabi’s disappearance makes to us are that the house gets tidier and colder and there’s even less to eat. I notice that within a week. Ilse spends hour after weary hour cleaning and dusting the unheated rooms, but they’re as lifeless now as they used to be messy and full of life, even unhappy life. And as for food, somehow it just isn’t there, even in the minimal amount it was before. ‘They don’t have any bread,’ Ilse says resignedly when she drags herself back from the few shops that will serve us. Or ‘They say they’re out of potatoes.’ The truth is, Gabi wheedled and coaxed and begged at those shops to let her run up large debts against the security of Frieda’s dwindling dowry and her own furniture. But now that Gabi’s gone they’re even more worried about repayment than they were before, and they won’t extend our credit. Besides, supplies really are scarcely coming through any more – our boys at the front must get the best – and the shopkeepers think they’d better keep what they do get for themselves, or those who can pay black market prices. All that’s a mystery to unworldly Ilse and she settles submissively down to live or die in grinding hunger.
The Kaminsky Cure Page 26