The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  This experience convinces him he’s not cut out to be an Aryan hero after all, and he soon decides to be a Nazi victim instead, which at least is what he really is. Yet the heroic role still tempts from time to time.

  But that is not the only battle being waged.

  There is the siege of Graunau, for instance, still to come. And even sleepy lethargic Heimstatt is due for its brief flurry of excitement.

  Yes, it looks as though an SS battalion really is going to defend Heimstatt heroically and of course fanatically till their last breath and probably ours. First a couple of motorcycles appear in the village, then a column of armoured cars and trucks. These people are the right stuff all right, they have death’s heads on their helmets, and Fritzi Wimmer assures me as I weakly watch some of them drawing up outside the Pfarrhaus that each one of them has killed a hundred Ivans with his bare hands. I’m not entirely reassured by that. If it’s true, I imagine the surviving Ivans will want to get their own back when they come, and I don’t have the strength to run away.

  Some of the soldiers tramp into our house, and a colonel says ‘Heil Hitler!’ and he’s making his headquarters here so where’s the kitchen? Willibald, to whom these brief remarks are addressed, attempts a weak ‘Heil Hitler!’ in return, gives a feeble smile of welcome and mentions both Martin’s absence at the front and his own part in the glorious Polish campaign. But the colonel doesn’t seem to be too interested and brusquely tells his orderly to get some coffee going. Willibald withdraws meekly back towards the study, but is curtly informed that’s been requisitioned and he can use the maid’s room instead wherever that is. Soldiers come rolling in phone cables, setting up a wireless receiver near the piano in the living room and arranging map boards on Willibald’s desk. The colonel’s orderly brings him real coffee in next to no time, which leaves the scent of paradise all over the house and even brings a gleam into Ilse’s and Sara’s lacklustre eyes. The colonel shouts down the phone with his mug in his hand, sits at Willibald’s desk, pores over the maps, goes to speak in a high-pitched sing-song tone on the wireless microphone, then idly runs the backs of his fingers up and down the keys of the piano. Unaware of her ambiguous status, he addressed Ilse as ‘Madam’ when he sees her, but doesn’t seem to notice the rest of us.

  Willibald’s so weak now, he can scarcely manage the stairs down to the kitchen and Jägerlein’s empty room, where he sits, then lies on the bare mattress, folds his hands together on his chest and closes his eyes. However this is not death or resignation, but conservation of his strength, and when it’s time for nettle soup and a cube of bread, he struggles into a sitting posture with a sort of weary alacrity that turns out to be well-founded since the colonel’s orderly has given Ilse half a sausage, which she’s laboriously cut into slices you can see through. The sausage lasts three days, which is about half what the SS battalion does, but only makes the pangs of hunger worse. There’s a kind of headache we have now which Sara later christens the starving headache. Each of us feels as though there’s a tiny place three inches behind the eyes, which someone’s slowly splitting open with a hammer and wedge. And whenever we move we’re dizzy, so we scarcely move at all.

  Meanwhile the resolute and relatively well-fed soldiers are busy felling trees across the roads into the village and setting up machine gun nests at every corner. The armoured cars snarl up and down the single passable road, chewing up the surface and spitting stones and mud out behind their heavy wheels. Inside the Pfarrhaus, the colonel shouts down his phone and the wireless receiver crackles in the corner of the living room. Late every night when work is done he lets his fingers idly brush across the piano keys, sending tinkling sounds drifting through the sombre rooms, sounds we haven’t heard since Gabi left off playing years ago.

  One evening when I return with a late-cropped bunch of nettles in my arms, I see Franzi Wimmer, who’s been keeping a low profile since the SS moved in, approaching the colonel as he smokes his evening cigarette outside in the market place. Franzi isn’t wearing his Ortsgruppenleiter’s uniform, nor is he carrying the drink very well that he’s clearly been imbibing. ‘Vienna’s fallen, Colonel,’ he says companionably if thickly.

  The colonel turns slowly to survey Franzi with an up and down look that should have knocked him cold sober, but unfortunately doesn’t. ‘And who are you?’ he inquires in a level tone, which reminds me of a bayonet being slid out of its scabbard, a sound I’ve grown quite familiar with in the last few days.

  ‘The Russkies’ve occupie’ Vienn’, I said,’ Franzi answered blurrily. He takes great care not to sway on his feet, but does so anyway, and speaks now with laboured distinctness. ‘’s all over, isn’t it? ’s all over.’

  ‘I asked you who you are,’ the colonel says with a distinctness of his own that isn’t laboured at all, but definitely menacing.

  ‘Wimmer. Or’shgruppenleider Wimmer. Ad your shervice.’ And Franzi makes a slurry bow, which he compounds with a slack-lipped leer. ‘For wha’ tha’s worth now.’

  The colonel examines the glowing tip of his cigarette and apparently decides that that at least is not worth much. He drops the cigarette on the ground, grinds it with the heel of his polished boot, turns his head a fraction and raps out ‘Sergeant-Major!’ Then he turns back to Franzi and addresses him in tones of icy amiability. ‘So you’ve been listening to enemy lies, my friend? And spreading them abroad?’

  ‘Nod ad all,’ Franzi answers airily, waving the charge away with a floppy hand. ‘Vienna’s gone, know for a fac’. So why don’ you jus’ give up? By the way, know whose house you’re shtaying in?’

  The sergeant-major now appears running, and crashes to a bone-jarring halt before the colonel. ‘Sir!’ he snaps out in a whiplash voice.

  I think I’ve heard enough of this conversation, and hurry with my nettles through the back door into the Pfarrhaus. Which makes me dizzy, but I’m used to it.

  It seems hours later that a volley of rifle shots echoes across the lake and back again. But it isn’t long after that that the colonel quietly closes the front door behind him and we hear the slow reflective tinkle of the piano keys in the living room once more, up and down, up and down, above the frantic splutter and crackle of the wireless receiver. Guessing from this that Franzi didn’t get the chance to tell the colonel he was staying in a racially tainted house, I feel that now it’s safe to fall asleep.

  The colonel might not have heeded Franzi’s counsel to give up, but at dawn the very next morning he’s making one more of those heroic strategic withdrawals. The phone cables are wound onto their little drums again, the wireless set loaded onto a truck, the map boards all packed away. The colonel clicks his heels and bows to Ilse as he departs and apologises for the inconvenience. ‘Necessities of war, Madam,’ he murmurs regretfully. ‘Heil Hitler!’ The orderly leaves two slices of stale pumpernickel behind on the kitchen table.

  The tree barriers are shoved aside, the machinegun nests dismantled, and soon the motorbikes, the trucks and armoured cars are gone. So in one sense is Franzi Wimmer. But in another he’s still there, lying crumpled against the bullet-pocked back wall of the Ortsgruppenleiter’s office.

  Why is it that I can think That’s taught you one, hasn’t it? at the same time that I’m feeling truly sorry for Fritz and Lisl, and even for Frau Wimmer, all three sobbing and wailing as neighbours carry their dead father and husband away? Perhaps it’s because I think that Gabi’s dead as well and they deserve what’s come to them, whereas we definitely don’t. But in fact Gabi isn’t dead at all, she’s –

  18

  Hanging on in Graunau

  And if she felt like a hare among the hounds at Erwin’s memorial service, here she feels more like a sheep in wolf‘s clothing, surrounded by a pack of rangy wolves. Every night she stuffs a handkerchief into her mouth to prevent herself from screaming in her sleep. And every night she dreams the same dream of Constable Bolzner entering the room and leading us all away to prison and death. Why didn’t you kill yourself?
Constable Bolzner asks her reproachfully every night, and every night her stifled scream awakes her, gurgling in her parched gagged throat.

  It’s better in the daytime. She’s more in control. And there are the prisoners to keep her occupied, sheep in sheep’s clothing, amongst the wolves like her. Do some of them realise she’s kin to them? Do they scent the hunted sheep beneath the lupine clothing? She doesn’t know. But some of them may have sensed she’s not a Nazi: John, the English chaplain who’s lost an arm somewhere or other, Alain, the Frenchman dying of gangrene, and Roger, his older friend. They were in the Free French forces and Major Friedländer refuses to treat them – he thinks they should be shot. Then there are the few Russians, whom Major Friedländer refuses not so much to treat as to notice. Some of them catch Gabi’s sleeve when Sister Brigitte isn’t there and whisper words she can’t understand, nodding fearfully at the door as if they expect Hitler himself to walk in – or is it Stalin? Another, a one-legged man with shoulders humped round the pads of his crutches, whispers ‘Deutschland kaput!’ and nods vigorously as though he’s crazy, before swinging swiftly away.

  It’s the English chaplain John who gives Gabi her first lesson in hospital air-raid precautions when a lone American plane strafes the whole place, military barracks and hospital together (you can’t expect them to be too picky). Another doctor has taken over while Major Friedländer’s on leave, a young man just out of medical school, and he has prescribed morphine for Alain, who’s muttered hoarsely to her that he is a poet. At least that’s what she thinks he said. Or could it be pilot? The warning siren is just beginning to wail as Gabi hurries to the dispensary to get the drug before someone countermands the order. Sister Frieda Brandt she signs for it at the little window as distant anti-aircraft guns begin to hammer at the sky. And she wonders at the ease which practice has given her in masquerading as an Aryan nurse. Carrying the precious vials back, she reaches the middle of the courtyard at the very moment the American pilot two hundred feet above her arrives at his superior view of the place and presses the trigger regardless of the red cross painted on the roof. She clutches the morphine protectively to her breast and stands transfixed as the ground kicks up all round her, chips fly off the bullet-spattered walls and an empty ambulance has a row of jagged holes punched through its roof. At the same time a dark shadow swoops across the courtyard with a whoosh of air, and a split-second later she hears the clatter and roar of the departing Mustang’s engine.

  The English chaplain hurries out from the wall he’s been crouching against and pulls her into its safety with his single hand. ‘No need to give them target practice!’ he exclaims, words whose tendency she understands even though she doesn’t fully get their meaning. ‘Watch out, he might be coming back!’ Her fingers are curled tightly round the morphine vials and suddenly her whole body is shuddering, her heart bounding in her chest like a springbok hunted by a pride of lions.

  The morphine will last as long as Alain does, she later thinks (but is mistaken), the other patient having died already. Unless Major Friedländer notices the prescription and cancels it when he returns. But he always passes the dying-room by without a glance at the patients, never mind their records. The ones he’s interested in are those he gives his experimental drugs to. They seem to do no better than the rest. In fact, they get worse, but that doesn’t stop him giving them the drugs. ‘Science learns from failures as well as successes,’ he tells Sister Brigitte, who looks puzzled and even uneasy but continues doling out the drugs. Doctor knows best, especially SS Doctor.

  It’s strange how as the weeks pass and she’s not discovered, Gabi begins to feel, not just more secure, but as if she actually is the person she’s impersonating. There’s no pause before she answers when ‘Sister Frieda!’ is called, no sudden lurch of panic when Mother Superior makes her rounds, the crucified Jesus lulled on her expansive bosom, a sheaf of forms rustling in her hand, the pince-nez firmly clipped upon her nose. It’s almost as though Gabi has shed her past like a snake its skin, and now this new one will be all she has. Sometimes she imagines herself living like that for years, for all her life perhaps, and being buried in some Lutheran cemetery, a second Frieda Brandt. And yet she knows her security is fragile and temporary, sooner or later the truth will out, and the safer she feels, the greater the risk she’ll let down her guard, make some chance remark and suddenly betray herself. So she still sleeps with a handkerchief stuffed in her mouth, which makes her throat as rough and dry as sandpaper.

  And the dream still visits her three nights out of four. But now it’s changed. Now Constable Bolzner marches straight past her because he doesn’t see she’s there. No accusation, no reproach. Just the four of them following him hand in hand, disappearing behind an iron door that clangs shut and awakens her as her scream used to before. It’s not discovery she fears now, she realises, but the fate of her family. Did the police and the Gestapo believe she killed herself? Did they interrogate Willibald and the children? Torture them, even? Send them to a concentration camp? Suppose she survives and they do not? Every time those thoughts occur to her, as they do at least ten times a day, her stomach curdles and she knows she should have taken her sister Frieda’s path, or like Fräulein Goldberg tamely gone to Linz.

  If only she could get news of them! If only she could unburden herself to someone! If only, she sometimes madly thinks, her confidante Sara was there! She’s been past Fräulein von Adler’s on every one of her half days off duty, but the sentries still stand there and there’s not a civilian in sight. And she dares not inquire in case Fräulein von Adler has been arrested and they’re watching the house. Besides, the growing confidence with which she’s Sister Frieda Brandt in the hospital evaporates outside, where there’s always the chance some casual visitor from Heimstatt or thereabouts might chance along and recognise her. She keeps her head lowered and hurries back to the hospital.

  Where on her seventh day off she’s met by Mother Superior who still has her papers and passport (that is, Frieda’s) locked up in her desk drawer. Oh God, this is it! Gabi thinks as Mother Superior asks her into her room. They’ve found out. She feels she’s gulping for air as though she’s suffocating. But Mother Superior is alone – that’s reassuring – and she closes the door before she speaks. ‘Sister Frieda, you look so sad, and you must be very lonely. You have no friends here in Graunau? No? Perhaps – you lost everything in Dresden, after all – perhaps you’d like to talk to Father Johannes?’

  ‘Father Johannes?’

  ‘It sometimes helps to talk when things are on your mind,’ she says with the placidity of one who knows that clichés only become so because they’re true. ‘Yes, Father Johannes, our confessor. Of course he’d never divulge whatever you told him,’ she adds, holding Gabi’s gaze. ‘That is between you and God.’

  ‘But I’m not a Catholic.’

  ‘I know,’ Mother Superior says, looking as if that isn’t all she knows. ‘That doesn’t matter. It’s just if you want to talk to someone, that’s all. Only if you want … You could say whatever was on your mind to him, I mean. If anything is on your mind? Father Johannes is a German from Latvia, you see. He talks to the Russians as well. He’s not …’ She hesitates for several seconds, not as though she’s lost for a word, more as though she’s wondering whether to risk saying it. ‘He’s not like Sister Brigitte,’ she says at last, looking Gabi straight in the eye again. ‘He doesn’t share her …interests.’

  Gabi promises to think about it, and she does. By now she knows what one of Sister Brigitte’s interests is, but surely that can’t be the one Mother Superior was alluding to. On her afternoons off, Brigitte, as she asks Gabi to call her now (and she calls Gabi Frieda), paints her lips a brilliant red and powders her face, which is hardly what the Führer expects wholesome and natural Aryan women to do, and even puts bright red varnish on her nails. It’s the same on her alternate Sundays off – Sabbatarianism’s certainly not her thing. And when she returns late at night, her face looks different, wi
th rosy cheeks and a glistening light in her slate blue eyes. She lies on her bed with a mysteriously satisfied and dreamy smile that perhaps makes Gabi remember distant Sunday afternoons with somebody called Josef Stern.

  Presumably that’s an interest Father Johannes doesn’t share with Sister Brigitte. But Gabi’s sure it’s not his chastity Mother Superior was getting at. It must be his political views she had in mind. And so after two nights in which Gabi repeatedly dreams of that iron door clanging shut behind the four of us, she forces her trembling body to Father Johannes’ door in the German soldiers’ wing of the hospital. The German soldiers, she notes as she passes the wards, get rather better treatment than their captive foes. But that, she supposes, is what it’s all about.

  She has to wait. After five minutes or so, a young soldier with a bandage round one eye comes out. He’s sniffing his nose and rubbing the other eye with his wrist exactly as though he’s been crying, except that German soldiers never cry. He walks past her with hunched shoulders. Already another two young soldiers are waiting beside her on the bench, keeping a shy, respectful distance from the nursing sister. ‘You’re next, Sister,’ one of them politely says, nodding at the open door.

  Father Johannes has a samovar in his room, as did Gabi’s father in the palmy pre-Great War days of old Berlin. Somehow that gives her the confidence to speak. She never could keep her own counsel for long, and now Father Johannes becomes to her here what Sara used to be in Heimstatt. Out her pent-up story floods with scarcely a pause for breath. As she rushes not very coherently on, Father Johannes, who’d be no balder if he was tonsured, but has a compensating thick grey beard, leaves his desk and comes to sit beside her, tufty eyebrows raised like perfect prickly Roman arches. She ends in tears, sobbing that she must have caused the death of her own husband and children.