The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  ‘We did what we could for them,’ Gabi apologises uneasily, as if Mother Superior is blaming her for all their deaths. She knows she should be thanking her for her subtly coded message and the protection it implies, but she senses indirectness is the order here, words that don’t incriminate, that leave no evidential trace.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Mother Superior answers, gazing away out of the window as she absently touches the crucifix on her breast. ‘Perhaps – I sometimes think – you even did too much. In such a world as this, I mean, perhaps it’s better if they go to heaven sooner.’

  Does she really believe in heaven? Gabi finds herself wondering. What does she think it’s like? She examines the dimples Mother Superior’s pince-nez has left on her nose but finds no answer in those shallow pip-shaped indentations.

  Mother Superior sighs and shifts her chair back to get at a key hanging from a ring at her ample waist. ‘I’m storing some basic medicines in that cupboard in the corner,’ she says more briskly now. ‘I want you to have a spare key in case something happens to me. We must think of such things now. Hide it somewhere and tell the English chaplain where it is, in case something happens to you. But don’t tell him anything more than that. The less everyone knows, the better.’

  When she leaves Mother Superior’s office Gabi doesn’t know at first whether her fears have been lessened or increased. Major Friedländer’s been asking questions, but Mother Superior’s put him off. He might ask further questions, but the war isn’t going well. She’s been entrusted with a key to the medicines in case something happens to Mother Superior, but she must tell Chaplain John in case something happens to herself – so perhaps something will. No, she finds as she walks across the courtyard, her fears have not been lessened. Her quietly churning stomach tells her they’ve been boundlessly increased. It can only be a matter of time now before she’s discovered, and then – she glances at the currently indifferent sentries at the door, who give her a familiar nod. Unless the Amis capture Graunau first. She prays to the God she no longer believes in to let the Amis get there soon.

  And how is she going to translate what Mother Superior wants her to say to Chaplain John, she wonders anxiously as she enters the prisoners’ ward. Her English isn’t up to it. ‘There are many medicines in the box in the room of the Mother,’ is the best she can manage. ‘The key stands in my yellow case. The yellow case is in the room of the nurses.’

  But Chaplain John seems to understand. At least, he nods his head several times and murmurs, ‘Oh yes, very good.’

  But seeming’s not enough. She’s got to make sure. So she leads him to the room and points to the yellow case under her bed. Chaplain John murmurs, ‘Very good,’ again, but there’s a puzzled and even mildly apprehensive look in his eyes, as though he’s wondering what she’s really up to. Can it be the bed he’s contemplating, not the case beneath it? There’s no time to resolve this matter in her lame and halting English because the sirens have started and they can already hear the drone of Ami bombers.

  Down to the basement they scurry, leaving the bedridden patients to gaze up at the shuddering ceiling with anxious eyes and wait for it to fall.

  Mother Superior must have a line to God, or perhaps she’s been listening black, because this raid is the beginning of the battle for Graunau, and the raids are almost continuous now.

  Soon the Amis’ artillery starts ranging on the city’s walls as well. Only in brief lulls can Gabi and Sister Brigitte go up to check the bedridden prisoners and give what little care they can. The walls shudder, the ceiling snows grey plaster over the patients and their beds, food is irregular and meagre, but deaths are not. Yet the hospital somehow stands intact. Are the Amis considerately leaving it alone? Or is it just haphazard marksmanship?

  Outside in the city, buildings collapse and the dead pile up. No time now for individual burials, one of the sentries says; paraffin-soaked corpses are burned in rubbish tips en masse. The Russian crutch-dancer seems to have gone right off his head, screaming ‘Deutschland kaput! Deutschland kaput!’ all the time now, and his comrade choristers have to hide his crutches to prevent him from hopping with his war cry out into the courtyard, where the sentries might well shoot him.

  Sister Brigitte’s pretty face grows every day more tense and haggard under the constant bombardment, her clear complexion grey and smudged. Her Aryan confidence leaches clean away, and she sits with her head in her hands in the darkened basement while the ground shakes beneath her, addressing muttered prayers to God now, not the Führer. And Gabi? Gabi has retreated into a cave deep inside herself, where she lives alone with the dank cold smell of fear. She listens to the thudding of her heart, which mimicks the thumping of the shells and bombs, licks her lips and swallows, waiting trembling for the end.

  And all the time the hospital loudspeakers keep up a flow of patriotic hymns, punctuated by stirring announcements of new German victorious withdrawals and pledges of ever firmer German resolve. The last of these comes one evening a week later, when the loudspeakers play Deutschland Über Alles and Major Friedländer’s solemn voice declares:

  ‘In spite of our forces’ glorious resistance, the enemy has made a temporary advance. Without doubt the enormous losses inflicted on him will weaken his strength and the coming counter-attack will throw him back in disorder, but in the meantime Graunau must be prepared for a siege. Bridges and roads leading to the city will be destroyed, to halt the enemy’s progress. Our forces will fight with fanatical resolve to defend the city. Please go into your shelters at once and await further announcements. Graunau will remain German for ever! Heil Hitler!’

  But Sister Brigitte does not proudly raise her resolute Aryan head at this brave talk. It droops still more, in fact, like a flag of surrender. Is she thinking of her boyfriend fighting and possibly dying fanatically at the front, or remembering Sister Astrid, the nurse she shopped for defeatist talk?

  For two days there’s no more food and not much water, but there’s still plenty of gunfire and bombing. Two more of the bed patients die and have to be carted down to the courtyard in the dark by the four men who can still lift them. What happens to them after that nobody knows, but next morning they’re gone. Then Father Johannes, emerging in a brief lull like a dusty badger from his lair in the other wing, announces Major Friedländer has gone too.

  ‘Where to?’ Gabi asks with a sudden small hope flickering in her chest.

  Father Johannes shrugs, ‘Disappeared,’ and returns to his lair as the sirens start their wrenching wail again.

  Yet another disappearance.

  But the very next morning there comes a silence that goes on and on, almost more menacing than the barrage they’ve grown used to. No one can say when it began, but after dawn everyone is listening to it with raised heads, waiting for it to be broken by another barrage still worse than all that they’ve endured so far, or perhaps by the rattle of rifle and machinegun fire and the shouts of the attacking Amis. But the silence holds and holds. And holds.

  Eventually the Frenchman Roger clambers upstairs, out into the dazzling light of the courtyard. The sentries are gone. He walks cautiously and with weak unsteady steps to the hospital entrance, and sees white flags floating over the ruined buildings of the city, and not a soldier in sight.

  ‘C’est fini! C’est fini!’ he croaks down into the basement. And one by one they come out blinking into the bright May morning sunlight to view the ravaged countenance of peace.

  They stand about in the courtyard, uncertain and uneasy.

  ‘Where are the Amis?’

  ‘Why don’t they come?’

  ‘Are they going to leave us here till we starve to death?’

  ‘All they think of is themselves.’

  Some talk of going out into the city to look for food, but they’ve been locked up so long they’ve lost the habit of freedom, and besides they’re too feeble to wander far and might get lost or even shot by some idiot on one side or the other. Chaplain John cautiously enters the Ge
rman soldiers’ ward and finds it full of hungry wounded men who wear the subdued look of prisoners already, although they are not yet. A nurse rises from her desk at the end of the ward, and then sits down again. Unsure of the etiquette now, she continues counting out tablets into symmetrical little heaps on a metal tray as though nothing has changed. ‘Very good, very good,’ Chaplain John murmurs reassuringly and leaves, as uncertain as she is.

  Meanwhile his services are required for another patient dying in the prisoners’ ward. It’s an English airman with a broken back who’s never spoken since he’s been there and now departs with wildly gleaming eyes and an incoherent flutter in his throat. Chaplain John murmurs a prayer so generalised it will do for any creed or none, and Gabi notices that Sister Brigitte is sniffing back tears as she closes the Englishman’s eyes. Tears for the Englishman, the Fatherland’s defeat, her past behaviour, the likely fate of her German lover, or just the damned perverseness of the world? All five, perhaps. It’s a lot for her to deal with.

  As for Gabi, she suddenly gives up. She sits outside on the courtyard steps, her leg shaking uncontrollably as if she’s got Parkinson’s. And some muscle in her paralysed cheek keeps flickering uselessly in unison with her leg. She’s eaten nothing for two-and-a-half days, but feels as heavy as a corpse. They’ll all be dead, she’s thinking. I’ll go there and open the door and walk in and they’ll all be dead. And every time the words sound through her head, she sees a different picture of our deaths. She sees us shot, she sees us hanged, she sees our emaciated corpses lying on bare boards, she sees us laid out on our separate beds in the Pfarrhaus. She screws her eyes shut to squeeze the pictures out of her mind. But it’s like closing your fist on water. They slip away and immediately come flowing back. She almost wishes the guns were still firing, so that she could suffer the endurable fear for herself instead of this unendurable fear for us which has taken its place.

  And then at last the Amis come.

  The first American she ever sees is a giant black soldier driving a camouflaged Jeep at eleven minutes past twelve that morning (she glances at the watch she keeps pinned to her uniform). Next to him sits a white officer who would appear a giant as well but for the black soldier beside him. As the officer climbs out of the Jeep, unfolding himself and stretching, another Jeep follows, from which four more giant Ami soldiers casually remove themselves, carrying carbines as if they were golf clubs and they were off to play a round. They hitch their weapons onto their shoulders, lean back against the Jeep, adjust their helmets to a rakish angle and, feeding wafers of chewing-gum from coloured wrappers into their mouths, survey the silent prisoners who cautiously survey them back. The officer drags a cigar out of his tunic pocket, inspects it, rolls it between his fingers, sniffs it, bites off the tip and spits it to the ground, then finally lights it with a heavy metal lighter. He draws several deep breaths on it, examines the glowing end to make sure it’s really going, then exhales a long blue funnel of fragrant smoke. ‘Any you guys speak English?’ he drawls at last.

  Chaplain John nods, clears his throat and confesses that he does.

  ‘You a Brit?’ the officer inquires, narrowing his eyes behind the haze of blue smoke that’s drifting up over his face. His tone suggests he might be harking back to the War of Independence.

  Chaplain John admits he is. As the Ami doesn’t answer, John further confides that he’s a chaplain.

  ‘Chaplin?’ the Ami says. ‘That your name? Like Charlie?’

  ‘My profession,’ Chaplain John corrects him mildly, and then corrects himself. ‘My vocation.’

  ‘Profession, huh?’ the Ami repeats, ignoring Chaplain John’s more refined job-description. He considers Chaplain John for some seconds, then shoves himself away from the Jeep with a sigh. ‘OK, Mr Chaplain, d’you wanna show us around?’

  Despite its syntax, John correctly interprets this sentence as more of a command than an inquiry, and the tour begins.

  ‘So what happened to your arm?’ the Ami asks as they head into the prisoners’ ward. ‘Krauts cut it off?’

  It’s not until the following day that the Amis’ medical team arrives to take over the hospital. In the meantime the Russian crutch-dancer has died, toppling backwards down the stairs and fracturing his skull. ‘Deutschland kaput!’ he’d been crowing triumphantly as he hoisted himself precariously up on his crutches. ‘Deutschland kaput!’ He’d reached the top stair when his crutch skidded on a wet patch from the rain that had leaked through the Ami-damaged roof.

  The medical team swiftly assert victors’ rights and the German patients are transferred to the prisoners’ ward, while the prisoners are transferred to the more commodious Germans’. Nobody objects to this arrangement; but Sister Brigitte and the few surviving capable prisoners, who by now have eaten three square Ami meals, spend half the day cleaning the floors and making the beds before the Germans arrive. This generosity is too much for Gabi, who has more to forgive than the prisoners, and she takes no part in it. Besides, she’s thinking of Heimstatt.

  ‘You could help, Frieda,’ Brigitte remonstrates. ‘It’s for our boys, after all.’

  ‘They’re not my boys,’ Gabi coldly replies.

  ‘What d’you mean, they’re not your boys – ?’ Brigitte starts indignantly.

  ‘I mean I’m Jewish. And as a matter of fact my name’s not Frieda, either.’

  Poor Brigitte. She’s just got too much to deal with now and can only stand and gape.

  A Captain Morris appears the next day. Father Johannes and Mother Superior have spoken to the Amis’ Catholic padre, who studied in Heidelberg before the war and speaks German like an American. The padre has spoken to Captain Morris. ‘As a polidically purrsecuded purrson, you have top prioridy,’ Captain Morris, who speaks English like an American from the Bronx, tells Gabi.

  Gabi doesn’t understand his swift delivery or nasal accent, let alone the words it decorates, and merely smiles and shrugs.

  ‘We’ll take you back to Heimsdad tomorrow,’ Captain Morris continues.

  ‘Heimsdad tomorrow’ she does after some effort understand, and at once she feels the returning traveller’s panic sink its claws into her heart. What will she find when she arrives? She almost asks Captain Morris for a week’s delay to prepare herself, but she doesn’t know how, and besides she knows she can’t prepare herself however long she waits.

  The next morning Father Johannes shakes her hand with one of his and plucks his beard with the other, while Mother Superior clasps both her hands in both of hers and tells her to come back and see them all when she can. Chaplain John, having only one hand, extends that to her formally and remarks he always thought there was something funny going on, which bemused Gabi ascribes to the eccentric English sense of humour. Captain Morris drops her battered yellow case into the back of the Jeep, and Gabi suddenly finds she’s crying as they drive out of the courtyard and she waves a jerky goodbye, bouncing over the holes and displaced cobble stones. Can it be she’s actually sad to leave them all, even Brigitte, who half-waves back among the ex-prisoners and blinks her still bewildered eyes but hasn’t dared shake her hand and perhaps still doesn’t want to? Or is it just the agony of anticipation, dread of the looming unknown? They’re already passing the gutted railway station when she remembers Mother Superior’s key still tucked into the little pocket inside her case. Now she has a reason to return, and that is strangely comforting, Or perhaps not so strangely, she reflects. By now that might indeed be all she’s got left in the world.

  The road back to Heimstatt leads through scenes of desolation or summery peace, depending how the war has cut its swathe. One village a grimly smoking ruin, the next smiling in the fragrant May sunshine, with placid women leading placid cows home from their placid fields. Children stare or wave or sometimes jeer. Only the men are missing. In the towns the roads are clogged with trucks from different armies, the Russians mainly heading east, the Amis mainly west. But here and there lorries push wildly against the national direction, like
frantic ants that have lost their way. The opposing allies view each other warily, like bear and buffalo lowering their heads at the same watering-hole.

  It’s in those towns and cities that Gabi sees the true harvest of the battle. Their homes destroyed, people sit apathetically on rubble at the street corners, hunched over their salvaged belongings, watching the conquerors’ procession with numbed and hungry eyes. Some of the older ones are begging, but shamefacedly and by fits and starts. They’re new to this trade and haven’t learnt it yet. Perhaps they never will. Those that learn it best are the young girls in flimsy frocks who cluster round the Amis’ trucks whenever they halt, giggling and begging for cigarettes and chocolate. Some are getting a stern cold brush-off. Others are getting everything, even nylons, and perhaps giving something as well. But hardly any of them beg from the Russians.

  They reach Linz in the evening. Captain Morris drives up to the fanciest hotel, which a few short weeks ago would have thrown her out if she’d dared so much as show her Jewish face inside the door, leans over the reception desk, blows a funnel of blue cigar smoke into the aged clerk’s face and orders the best room for Gabi. In the long soft twilight she stands on the balcony and looks out over the city where the former Gestapo Headquarters’ once racially pure portals are being contaminated by young black soldiers chuckling in their slow honeyed voices as they swing in and out, dumping boxes of Gestapo files onto a waiting truck. There goes Gabi’s file, which is still open, did she but know it, and there goes Frau Professor Goldberg’s, which is closed. There goes Fräulein von Adler’s, who’s just been found alive in Mauthausen Concentration Camp, there goes blind Tante Helga’s, who will never know how close she came – a few more weeks and she’d have gone there too. And there go Ilse’s war-widowed teachers’ files, Frau Professor Zauner’s and Frau Professor Lambach’s, whom the Tommies have just found alive in Belsen, but only just alive. Naïve though Gabi is, the irony might not be lost on her, did she but know what was going on. But she merely gazes out over the city in abstracted ignorance thinking fearfully of Heimstatt, which she’s bound to reach tomorrow.