The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  The old priest takes her hand, pats it, then hastily lays it down as if recalling his vows. ‘It may not be so bad,’ he says, huffing and wheezing. ‘They may all be all right.’

  This doesn’t reassure her. In fact it reminds her of Willibald. ‘But who will manage to get them food, now I’m gone?’ She’s grasped the practical realities all right. ‘Couldn’t you write to them in Heimstatt and find out what’s happened?’

  Father Johannes fingers his beard with a bemused look as though wondering what this hairy excrescence is up to growing out of his chin like that. ‘Their mail might be opened,’ he says, glancing up to heaven, or possibly just the ceiling.

  ‘I could go and ask a Lutheran minister here?’ Gabi suggests doubtfully. ‘They might have heard something.’

  ‘No, no! Some of them are German Christians,’ Father Johannes replies hastily, with an emphasis on ‘German’ that makes it sound like blasphemy. ‘Besides, you might be recognised. No, you must stay here in the hospital. In fact, you must come to mass every Sunday.’

  For a moment Gabi wonders if this is a subtle play for her conversion to popery, and considers telling Father Johannes she no longer believes in any god, Catholic or Protestant. After all, she plausibly reasons, if God existed, Hitler wouldn’t.

  ‘It’s for your own good,’ he goes on. ‘God will forgive you. You mustn’t stick out, you know. You must be like all the others. Then they won’t suspect you. Who would expect to find a Jew taking Holy Communion?’

  Gabi has known about not sticking out since her childhood, and Father Johannes’ argument strikes home. After all it’s only an extension of Martin’s ploy in sending her here to Graunau in the first place. ‘But my family!’ she starts sobbing again. ‘I must know what’s happened to them!’

  ‘Shh! Shh!’ Father Johannes murmurs, glancing towards the door. ‘We must find another way.’

  ‘And I’ve already told Mother Superior I’m a Lutheran!’

  ‘Mother Superior will understand. In fact I think she understands already.’

  And so next Sunday Gabi takes her first communion with nurses and soldiers in the makeshift Catholic chapel of the military wing in the hospital, which, incidentally, the Americans are now only ten miles away from (they can hear the guns). Lucky for her, she can follow the others and doesn’t bungle the rituals. And the wafer and wine don’t taste too bad either. She even makes a decent show of crossing herself.

  But Catholic rituals are not the only things she’s got to learn today. She must also find out when the singing has to stop.

  Returning to the prisoners’ ward, she finds the English chaplain John holding his own customary service, to which today for some reason a few of the atheistic communist Russians are peripherally drawn. Those who can still walk, that is. They stand on the edge of the group watching the peculiar rites of their capitalist allies with dark attentive eyes. And at the ragged and fairly tuneless rendering of Abide With Me which concludes the service, some of them start humming the melody in voices that suggest they could be members of the Russian army choir.

  Somehow one thing leads to another and before long a regular allied concert gets going, each nation singing its national folk songs. Frère Jacques which everyone seems to know is followed by a monotonous English dirge about a bachelor and the foggy foggy dew, which Chaplain John ostentatiously does not join in and Gabi finds incomprehensible as she goes about her nursing duties. She assumes it concerns the notoriously rheumy English weather. What the French or Russians make of it she cannot guess, but they certainly seem as mystified as she is. Then the Russians start on a predictably melancholic song in which the two army choir singers let themselves go like tragic opera stars.

  Suddenly the door crashes open and Major Friedländer makes an entrance in full voice himself, although it’s not a very tuneful one. The other voices die away like guns on Armistice Day, except that peace is the last thing on Major Friedländer’s mind. ‘Sister Frieda! This is scandalous! Why are you permitting these prisoners to sing their national anthems? Don’t you know the Führer has expressly forbidden it?’

  ‘But they’re not their national anthems, Herr Major,’ Gabi timidly answers. ‘They’re only folk songs.’

  ‘How do you know what they are? Besides whatever they are, they’re not to sing them, is that understood? It’s a kind of resistance! If they’re well enough to sing, they’re well enough to go back to work.’

  Gabi nods submissively. ‘I’m sorry, Herr Major.’

  Major Friedländer approaches her now and addresses her in a low gritty tone. ‘I shall be watching your conduct very closely from now on, Sister Frieda. This is not what I expect from a German nurse. It’s not what I expect at all.’ He nods twice to drive the point home, turns and leaves the ward. He’s so angry, he forgets to say ‘Heil Hitler!’

  And Gabi realises her guard has slipped, she’s nearly given herself away. Major Friedländer has only to start asking questions about her papers and she’ll be done for. She continues her work mechanically, her head reading temperatures and registering pulses while in her stomach the sickening drums of fear pursue their soft insistent beat. And the silent glances of the prisoners express a kind of guilty sympathy, as if they’re thinking of the previous nurse, Sister Astrid, who’s now a prisoner herself, but in a concentration camp.

  The national singing stops, but the vernacular groaning of the dying carries on. The Führer hasn’t forbidden that – quite the contrary, he’s all in favour. And it’s Alain the poet or pilot whose groans are worst, awakened as he is from morphined dreams to find there’s no more morphine to be had, and consequently no more dreams.

  ‘Let me hear a French poem,’ he begs in a pain-thickened voice – or that’s what Gabi thinks he begs, and subsequent events bear out her hypothesis. ‘If I’m not going to see France again, at least let me hear a French poem.’ There are tears rimming his eyes, which slowly overflow and trickle down onto his grubby pillow (the laundry gets done once a fortnight now, if that). He tries to sit up. Roger, his older friend, assists him. Others gather round the bed and help. Then Roger recites a poem, which he says is called L’automne, in a low voice that sometimes wobbles but never quite breaks down. Gabi thinks she might have learnt it by heart at school – it sounds familiar, anyway.

  Before the last verse, Alain’s eyes have closed, and so have his tear ducts. So, in fact, has everything else except his bowels which last a little longer. But Roger continues as though Alain is still listening, down to the last line: And summer passes as a friend departs.

  They lay Alain gently down and Gabi closes his eyes, holding her breath with professional detachment against the putrefaction of his gangrene and the stench of his shit. Then she notes the time of death on his record and summons the orderlies to take him away. Roger goes with him until the sentry bars his way at the courtyard door. No one knows where Alain’s buried, or if he’s buried at all, but that’s not surprising – the gravediggers can’t keep up as the air-raids begin in earnest and the rumble of artillery fire grows steadily louder like an approaching thunder storm, except the skies are clear. Clear, that is, of everything except American planes which strafe and bomb the city every day and almost every night.

  The prisoners are locked in, but those that can walk stagger into the basement when the bombs start falling closer. The bedridden have to take their chance upstairs. ‘They haven’t got much chance anyway,’ Brigitte says with a resigned shrug. Her half-day outings have ended, but she’s almost as happy as before. When they’re both down in the basement, she leans her head close to Gabi’s and whispers that her boyfriend’s been sent to the front, ‘But when he came back, we’re going to …’ The rest is lost in a shattering explosion that makes the walls shudder and she covers her head with her hands.

  Gabi’s frightened in the air-raids, which are far worse than anything she went through in Berlin. She tries to soothe her thumping heart by telling herself they mean the war will soon be over. But what use
will that be if they kill her first? She wants the bombs to fall, but not on her. She’s caught between begging God – yes, she too invokes that great myth now – to end the raids and begging Him to make them worse so that it will all be over before Major Friedländer can catch her out.

  After the next raid the roof is on fire. It’s the prisoners who put out the flames. The guards are too busy looking after their own damage to bother with the prisoners unless they’re trying to escape. The one-legged Russian almost dances on his crutches when he sees the sooty hole in the ceiling of the main ward. Two bedridden prisoners are cut and burnt, but they’re past caring now anyway, and past caring for. Roger finds some paint somewhere to paint a larger red cross on the tarpaulin that they stretch across the scorched and broken roof tiles. Major Friedländer doesn’t like it – perhaps he’d rather they were all incinerated – but Mother Superior provided the ladders and tarpaulin, so he only huffs and scowls. Lucky for Gabi, she herself is not on duty when he makes his rounds, and it’s Sister Brigitte he sees shouting at Roger and pantomiming haste to make him get a move on. Perhaps this scene of Aryan womanhood controlling a racially inferior male mollifies the SS officer’s indignation.

  The thunder of the guns creeps nearer and so do the refugees – endless harassed columns of them straggling through Graunau before the advancing Americans. The men are old and round-shouldered, the women gaunt and anxious, the children puling and scared. All of them are shabby. They don’t look much like the master race now. ‘Deutschland kaput!’ the one-legged Russian keeps whispering to Gabi, thumping his crutch gleefully on the floor, nodding and winking manically before swinging away. ‘Deutschland kaput!’

  Flu breaks out among the refugee children, and their distraught mothers have to leave six of them behind in the hospital while they themselves are chivvied on by officials who don’t want them in the place when the siege begins – there isn’t enough food as it is for those who are needed there to throw the enemy back from the Thousand Year Reich’s proud three-rivered city. But the children aren’t admitted to the German soldiers’ wing – the last thing the commanders want is a flu epidemic among the convalescent cannon fodder needed for the coming battle. So into the prisoners’ ward come the sickly children. It doesn’t matter if they spread their bugs round there. In fact it might be an advantage.

  The children are kept in the far end of the ward, away from the contamination of the prisoners and the broken ceiling, but some of the prisoners haven’t seen a child for four years and the walking wounded cluster round them like iron filings round a collection of pretty magnets. Sister Brigitte and Gabi try to shush them away, but it’s hopeless, they are always drawn back, and eventually the two nurses realise they can use the prisoners to do the simple work they have no time to do themselves. Chaplain John empties a chamber pot, Roger makes a bed, one of the Russian singers sponges the children’s faces and hands.

  One by one the children recover from the flu, and one by one they fade away from malnutrition and the flu’s pneumonic complications. And in the dying-room another prisoner gives up the ghost to untreated gangrene.

  As the children grow weaker and more feverish, the prisoners devise ways to amuse them. They make shadow animals on the walls with their hands and tell them stories they don’t understand. The Russians clown about, the English try cat’s cradle with a piece of string. Roger the Frenchman recites French nursery rhymes. Some of the children smile, others regard them forlornly with frightened hopeless eyes. When all else fails, the prisoners hold the children’s hands and stroke their hair. Only when Major Friedländer appears do they grudgingly retreat, but they advance again as soon as he is gone. And even Sister Brigitte connives at their strategy. She can’t deny they’re good for the children. As for Major Friedländer, his stony face shows pity and dismay as he bends over the dying boys and girls, and Gabi thinks she detects doubt in his veiled eyes at last. Providence shouldn’t be letting this happen to Aryan children, she can see him thinking. Especially when racially inferior specimens manage to survive.

  So Nazis too suffer crises of faith.

  The children’s lungs clog up, their fever rises and they struggle for breath. Roger is the most adept of the prisoners and soon Gabi and Brigitte gratefully allow him to make the hot poultices and lay them on the children’s fragile chests. All to no avail. Their breathing becomes faster and shallower, their cheeks more flushed, their eyes more glassy. Major Friedländer comes round twice a day now and the prisoners know when to make their strategic withdrawals. ‘Herr Major,’ Gabi tentatively suggests, thinking of her own children and what she’s brought them through before, ‘if oxygen was possible?’

  ‘D’you think I haven’t thought of that, Sister Frieda?’ Major Friedländer snaps. His temper’s getting tauter by the day. ‘All the oxygen here is reserved for military use.’ And yet he breaks or bends the rules to order a couple of cylinders in from the stores where they are being preserved for the revival of adult Aryan cannon fodder. Saving the children has become his mission, as though the future of the Aryan race depended on their survival, and his mission improbably unites him not only with his two nurses, but with his despised prisoners as well. He scarcely glances at the progress of the patients on his experimental drugs now, most of whom in any case are dying faster than the ones that aren’t.

  Brigitte loses her habitual casual indifference and works herself almost to death nursing the children all the way to theirs. But it’s Sister Frieda who Major Friedländer notices has the surer touch. ‘You seem better with children than with prisoners,’ he says abruptly to Gabi. ‘Did you work in the children’s ward in Dresden? Was Professor Braun still there when it was bombed?’

  ‘Er, I’m not sure,’ Gabi murmurs, flustered. ‘I … I don’t remember, I mean.’

  ‘Not sure?’ Major Friedländer’s tired eyes harden slightly. ‘You don’t remember?’ He views her coldly a moment, then turns away. Gabi’s stomach churns. She thinks of Frieda’s papers in Mother Superior’s desk drawer. She sees the outdated passport with its not very resembling photo. She sees Major Friedländer half-sitting on Mother Superior’s desk, studying the photo with an interrogative frown, his high peaked cap thrown arrogantly on her empty chair. She sees him picking up the phone …

  But other things preoccupy the Major’s mind just now. Even with oxygen the children keep dying. First the young ones go, then one after another the older ones as well. They are too thin, too weak, too frightened perhaps, to cling on for long. Even Hansi, the oldest at six, is slipping painfully away. Roger has become his special friend. Scared of the oxygen mask, Hansi won’t wear it unless Roger holds his hand. When Major Friedländer finds the Frenchman by Hansi’s bed, he orders him curtly and even suspiciously away. What could a treacherous Frenchman want with an Aryan child? Nothing but mischief. But Hansi struggles to pull off the mask and whimpers feebly when the Frenchman’s gone. ‘That’s the denial of life you see there,’ Major Friedländer observes grimly. ‘Tie him down.’ But instead Sister Brigitte marches Roger firmly back under Major Friedländer’s nose and places Hansi’s wasted burning hand in his. Now Hansi accepts the oxygen, but life itself is just too much for him. Major Friedländer humphs! and turns away, his face itself a mask behind which who knows what is going on. And who knows what is going on for that matter behind Sister Brigitte’s narrowed eyes?

  The oxygen hisses peacefully into Hansi’s nose, but Hansi’s lungs have had enough and so has Hansi. He dies a couple of hours later, his frail hand still clasped in Roger’s, oblivious of the continual window-rattling crrump-crrump! of shell fire, at which the prisoners, those that are conscious, cock their ears to estimate how near the Amis are by now.

  While the oxygen cylinders are rolled back into the storeroom, the children are laid out in white (well, nearly white) hospital gowns, awaiting transport to the graveyard or wherever they’ll be put. In each one’s stiffening clasped hands a makeshift wooden cross is placed, made by the atheistic Russians of all p
eople, out of laths that fell from the damaged roof. And Chaplain John holds his single arm out over them and commends their souls to the Lord, who certainly hasn’t done much for their bodies.

  This is a funny old war, Gabi might think if she was given to the English style of humour and didn’t have more pressing things to think about. One of which is how we all are –

  19

  Back in Heimstatt

  If indeed we all still are there, or, come to that, are anywhere at all. She visits Father Johannes after the next Sunday mass, at which she almost feels she now belongs. So much so that she wonders as she kneels at the communion rail why in her youth she’d agonised with Maria about becoming a Christian. These faiths are all the same, she thinks as she sips the wine. A bit of ritual, a bit of prayer, a bit of hymn-singing and some obscurely sacred book. Choosing which one to follow is no different from choosing which dress to wear, and she never cared much about that anyway. In fact, if she had time or interest enough to pursue the analogy, she’d say she was a nudist now as far as all that went.

  Father Johannes’s samovar is bubbling and he offers her tea, but nothing in the way of news. All he can do in that direction is pluck at the strands of his beard as if at a hairy harp and murmur that it’s too dangerous to ask, and anyway he’d heard that whole area was now a battle zone. That’s hardly comforting, and she’s still got Major Friedländer’s suspicions to deal with here in Graunau.

  A few days later, Mother Superior calls her into her office again, and as usual on such occasions Gabi’s stomach flips over. She half-expects to see Major Friedländer there, examining her passport (that is, Frieda’s) with a supercilious and cruelly knowing smile. But Mother Superior is alone again, her placidity unruffled. ‘If anyone asks for your papers, Sister Frieda, just say that you left them with me. I have unfortunately mislaid them.’ She raises her hand. ‘Yes, I know. Major Friedländer. He has been asking certain questions, but I think I’ve set his mind at rest for the present. The war, you know, is not going well. Even the children …’