Where we awoke a week before to see Austrian flags flapping in the balmy breeze and my first thought was Does that mean I can go to school again? And just about my only thought, because I was too weak to think much more. As were all the others – even Martin now, who’d just walked forty miles without sleep or food to put his glorious military career behind him. He’s lying in bed resting his blistered feet and blistered soul while Ilse, Sara and I are dragging ourselves to and from the lake gathering armfuls of nettles for our daily soup. Peace has not changed that. In fact we scarcely know what it has changed. I don’t think of Gabi any more, and nor does Sara. As far as we’re concerned, she’s gone. I don’t know about the others.
As we’re struggling slowly back with our daily nettle ration, I lethargically notice an Ami Jeep (I’ve seen a few of them already), jolting along the road. It stops outside the Pfarrhaus. An Ami officer gets out (I’ve seen a few of them already too) together with a nurse. Father’s ill, I think. Or rather, since I know he’s ill, Father’s dying. Something prevents me from telling Sara and Ilse, who are trailing laboriously behind me. Some fear perhaps of being the messenger of bad tidings. Or else the thought that saying it would make it true. We plod on, and I let myself fall back behind them. I don’t want to be the first to see my father dead or dying. Or perhaps it’s only Martin, I now more hopefully think. He’d like a nurse for his blisters. By now Ilse and Sara have noticed the Jeep too, in which the officer is leaning back smoking a cigarette. But they haven’t noticed the nurse, because she isn’t there to be noticed.
She’s inside the house, walking from living room to dining room, from dining room to kitchen. Everywhere she finds is empty and still. As still as the tomb, she apprehensively thinks. At last she pushes the study door open and sees an aged ghost of Willibald sitting at the desk, his heavy head propped on his spindly arms. ‘Ilse?’ the ghost feebly asks, then slowly turns his head. ‘You!’ he now exclaims, startled into not entirely joyful life.
‘Are you all alive?’ is Gabi’s tense but practical response. Only when he weakly nods does her body start to tremble and let go. She could almost love the man again for that one nod. In fact she does try to embrace him, but it’s so long since they’ve touched each other that it feels like two bare branches clashing in the wind, and she’s as relieved as he is when they hear the noise outside and separate. A crowd has begun to gather, through which Ilse, Sara and I are now threading our slow and apprehensive way. Fritzi Wimmer, wearing a black armband as I do, says ‘It’s your mum,’ which makes no sense at all to me. Then the nurse appears at the door. ‘I’m back,’ she says, holding out her arms.
I’m terrified. I’m scared of ghosts. I don’t know what Sara feels, but I do know neither of us move. We aren’t prepared for this, we don’t know what to do. It’s quiet Ilse who saves the day. She walks forward, dragging her foot, and in her low flat voice says, ‘We’ve been picking nettles.’ What she doesn’t say is that she’s just gone blind in her left eye, the moment she saw her mother.
Gabi embraces her awkwardly – after all, there’s quite a crowd now watching – and comes down the steps to Sara and me. I still don’t know about Sara, but myself, I’m no less scared now than I was ten seconds ago. I let myself be held and hugged, but then I mutter ‘Mind the nettles,’ and follow Ilse with them into the kitchen. Soon Sara joins us, and we take longer than we need to lay them on the table. Neither Sara nor I seem anxious to go back to face the resurrection, and neither of us speaks of it. Are we shy, or just incredulous? Both, of course. We’re going through what the disciples went through in the Bible, and believe me that’s not easy.
‘I’ll make the soup,’ Ilse says, and starts washing the nettles. That lets her off the hook, but we’re still wriggling. We know we ought to go back and show some emotion, but the fact is, all we feel is shock. I’m not even sure whether I should take my black armband off or not. How do I know this is the real Gabi that’s suddenly appeared, and not some look-alike impostor? How will I ever know?
Meanwhile Gabi is bidding goodbye to Captain Morris in a mixture of sign language, German and English. ‘Pleasure to be of surrvice,’ he says as he starts the Jeep engine. ‘Hope we’ll meed again some day.’ And who knows, perhaps they will.
This ought to be the end of the story. And in a novel I suppose it would be. Life however’s not so tidy. The guns have stopped firing, yes, and the dead have been buried (or in at least ten million cases not). But among the survivors are the walking wounded, those whose –
20
Scars will never heal
True, we’ve all survived the war, but first of all we’re starving now, except Gabi who’s had solid German soldier’s food for months. And secondly she may have just come back from the dead, but we’re all stunned and disbelieving. She was dead and now she’s not. That takes some getting used to.
At least Martin takes it all in his stride, if that can be said of someone who can scarcely stand for blisters. Not unnaturally he attributes Gabi’s safe return to his own strategic planning; which is more or less true. And not uncharacteristically he assumes that now she’s back she’ll look after all his needs again, except those that only blonde Aryan girls can satisfy; which is also more or less true. Yes, he’s pleased to see her back in his sulky sort of way, but Ilse’s not so sure. She doesn’t really want – as opposed to need – her, and nor does Willibald. Neither of them wants the tornado back in the house, that tempest of energy that exhausts while it saves. Willibald has of course another reason besides peace and quiet why he’d prefer her not to be there, his now not so plump Aryan lady friend in Plinden, with whom in his famished dreams he daily communes. But that’s a reason we don’t know of yet.
As for Sara and me, we’re just numb. We’re the only ones who never doubted she was dead, and initially we can’t believe she isn’t. Is this really her? is my question for a day or two. And when that’s settled, Is she going to disappear again? After about a week I’ve been persuaded she won’t, except in the usual way that people do by getting ill and dying, and I don’t think she’s going to do that just yet. So she isn’t going to simply not be there again one morning when I wake up. Sara, being older, has another and more refined dimension to her doubts. It isn’t physical disappearance that bothers her, but psychological. In fact for Sara Gabi hasn’t really come back at all. She lost her in that nuns’ house at the end of the lake, grieved for her throughout those last long months of war and eventually accepted her loss. What was there is gone and cannot be replaced, and Gabi’s return doesn’t alter that one bit. Because things just aren’t the same. Nothing ever can be quite the same again. Jesus may have been resurrected, but the world’s gone on, and there’s no place in it for Jesus any more. She’s concluded in some deep part of her that nothing good lasts, life is a succession of losses. Heraclitus without the bullshit. Yes, Sara carries loss about with her as Ilse carries her own patent physical disorder, like a wasting disease, a shadow on the lung of life.
So one way or another Gabi must feel disappointed by her reception. But she’s soon got things to do that take her mind off that, because everyone is nearly dying. It’s as though she’s merely exchanged one hospital for another. The worst is still the hunger. The shooting’s over all right, but the starving still goes on. We don’t have relatives on farms, we certainly don’t have money, and the rest of us don’t have energy either. But hunger isn’t all. Willibald’s heart’s so irregular it sometimes doesn’t beat at all for five or six seconds before it switches on again, when it gallops along as though it’s desperately trying to catch up with itself. And Ilse’s gone blind in one eye and drags her foot still more as though she’s had a stroke. People say proper food and medical supplies won’t get through until the autumn or the winter; but the question is, will we? Not that we’re alone. There are thousands of refugees from the camps, from the East, or just from the devastated cities, looking for food and shelter all over Europe, and a lot of them will never find it.
/> Did that long diet of nettles dull my memory, by the way, or is it some need to forget that makes me unable to remember how or when it was that Gabi told us of her escape and life in Graunau? I’ll always remember the story, mind. Just not remember how I learned it. Did she sit down and tell us one day? I don’t know, but I suspect she didn’t have the time. Did she let it out in dribs and drabs? I’ll never recall. Nor will I ever hear it from her lips again in later life. She’s going to pull the shutter down and never look inside that room again. Somehow I absorbed the tale without absorbing how.
Well anyway we lie about listlessly while Gabi surveys the last of our furniture, glass and plate and considers how and where to sell it. And then off she goes at four in the morning, still wearing Frieda’s uniform, which has become a talisman for her, hiking to the farms and villages for miles around, bartering plates and saucers for butter, offering crystal wine glasses for cheese and eggs. At first she only goes to places she can reach on foot, because there isn’t any transport. But as the trains start clanking along again, she travels further afield. Soon our sideboard’s empty, and she’s taking bids for the sideboard itself, and the grandfather clock and the piano from the living room. As she can’t imagine how she’d get them out of the house without Willibald’s having a heart attack, she takes down-payments on them for later delivery. She’s even considered nabbing a few books from Willibald’s library, but something warns her there’s no market in farmhouses for leather bound volumes of Schiller and Hegel. Besides, Willibald would be sure to miss them.
By the time the autumn chill sets in, so does some sort of food supply, and the worst is over. But Gabi’s still selling what she can for the extra vitamins that Willibald and Ilse in particular need. I go with her one day before school starts again – yes, peace does mean we can go back to school – because she simply can’t carry all our wares herself. Martin’s stronger than me and could carry more of course, but he’s far too busy looking after number one to start looking after anyone else. We find ourselves offering sheets and blankets to the very farmer whose fields Martin worked before he embarked on his short-lived military career in the ragtag People’s Army – which, incidentally (the career, I mean; he no longer cares about the People’s Army), his reminiscences ornament with various acts of selfless heroism, just like his father.
The farmer’s daughter’s eyes do a little jig when she hears Martin’s name, but her father shakes his head at what Gabi has to offer before she’s even had a chance to get it out of the bag. ‘No thanks, the only thing we haven’t got is gold earrings for the cows.’ But he gives us six eggs and a slab of cheese anyway. Gabi’s a useful person to know – now. His daughter asks me to tell Martin he should come by and see them some time. By now I’m of an age to sense that ‘them’ meant ‘me’, and to deliver the message when Martin is alone. But this delicacy did not move Martin to reciprocate. He treats girls he’s had like worn out penis gourds and merely tosses his head and gives a sniggering little laugh.
Willibald’s a useful person to know now, too. In fact there are about two hundred people who’ve suddenly discovered how useful. They all want to know him these days, although none of them wanted to a few short months ago. Nearly every day they come, from Plinden, Salzburg and Vienna, and even from what’s left of Berlin and Leipzig. All of them want testimonials, and many of them have written them themselves, so all that Willibald has to do is sign them. Some even come with typewriters in their rucksacks, carbon copies already inserted, in case he wants to add a word or two of his own. All of them are unctuous smilers, bowing to the Frau Pfarrer as they declare how pleased they are that everything’s turned out all right. Even Pfarrer Kretschmann from Vienna, who had our St Bernard and our rabbits taken away, and the widow of Ortsgruppenleiter Franzi Wimmer, who used to spy on us – they too expect Willibald to declare what worthy citizens they were and how they did all they could to help us in the war. Pfarrer Kretschmann cunningly contrives to arrive when Gabi’s out on one of her trade missions to the local farmers, and to disappear before she returns. Frau Wimmer artfully sends Lisl, becomingly got up in mourning black, to make the plea on her behalf, and Lisl drops a few tears as well to remind Willibald of her martyred father’s devotion to our welfare. ‘And how are you, Martin?’ she asks brightly when she’s got her testimonial signed. But Martin’s got another kind of itchy feet, now his blisters are all gone, and he’s anxious to be off to fairer fields where other cherries grow to pop. He answers her in the easy faintly sneering tone of someone turning down used goods.
All this signing tires Willibald out. It also reminds him of that far-off time when he was endorsing copies of baptismal entries for ancestral certificates, those guarantees of Aryan pedigree that many of the current testimonial-hunters needed then to advance their career in the Party whose name today they dare not speak. But, weak as he is, he signs the latter now as readily as he signed the former then. He just likes being fawned on.
Doktor Saur-that-was and her husband come from Vienna too, to get a testimonial for each of them. She’s stopped being a Nazi (who hasn’t?), but doesn’t hide the fact she was one once. She doesn’t know yet whether to believe what the Allies say about the death camps. Might that not just be propaganda? Where did she think the Viennese Jews all went, then, during the war? ‘To labour camps in the East,’ she answers blankly. ‘Didn’t you?’ Some delusions really do die hard.
Her husband is tall and erect, and Martin envies him his two-inch duelling scar. He’s distantly correct, if not courteous too, and seems to think it’s he who’s doing us a favour, not the other way round. He does condescend to mention though that his career suffered because he never joined the Party, and because on legal and administrative grounds (he doesn’t mention moral) he opposed the orders for the transportation of the Jews. They were, he said, ‘irregular.’ Every pedant has his day.
Doktor Saur-that-was is outwardly as good-tempered and genial as ever. But not inwardly. She means to leave her husband at last, she confides when she asks Gabi if she’s got any camomile lotion to spare. (Gabi hasn’t. She hasn’t got anything to spare.) Despite her husband’s devilish legal cunning, the injured wife believes the new regime will be more disposed than the old to grant her a divorce and custody of her new-born daughter. Her resolve is fortified by the thought of this child, with and for whom she imagines she’ll live till the end of her days. Another delusion taking root.
Herr Ziegler, the owner of the brick factory in Plinden, arrives one morning too, driving his own car, which is a novelty these days. He’s had big orders in the past to supply fire-resistant bricks for crematoria in the East. That’s a strike against him, but on the other hand he’s one eighth Jewish, which cancels it out. So a testimonial about how he employed Martin in his hour of need would put him in credit – particularly since he’s got a contract with the Amis now. They wanted bricks too, though not, they say, for crematoria.
And then there’s Willibald’s brother Harald, who hasn’t heard from his son Robert for several months and fears he may have gone the way of gallant Luftwaffe hero Erwin. Onkel Harald can’t come to Heimstatt in person for his testimonial, because he’s languishing in an internment camp, but he does write and ask his younger brother to declare how nice he’s always been to Gabi and the children. Well, it’s true, he sent us all birthday and Christmas greetings, and even let Gabi into Erwin’s memorial celebration. So Willibald sends him his testimonial too. Not that it gets him off a denazification course and heavy doses of Civics 102, an Ami freshman course in good citizenship hastily adapted for middle-aged Nazis.
All the other supplicants are as obsequious as Willibald would be to a Field Marshal, which is about as obsequious as you can get. All except Dr Schmidt, who’s been informed his son Heinrich finished the war disgracefully, sticking out his tongue on the wrong end of a rope. Dr Schmidt doesn’t come to us in fact, although the journey isn’t far from Plinden. No, Gabi goes to see him. So he isn’t strictly a supplicant at all. It�
�s Martin who urges this course on Gabi. A certain hanged face still swings gently to and fro in Martin’s memory, the fair hair flapping blithely in the April breeze as though it doesn’t know the head it grows on is stone cold dead. If Martin’s ever hero-worshipped anyone except himself, despite everything it’s Heinrich Schmidt, and now the time has come to pay his last respects.
Dr Schmidt looks cowed, crushed and ashamed when Gabi calls on him at his hospital. (What it feels like to be able to walk into the place without fear and trembling!) She gives him her polite if cool condolences, and offers to write some words in his favour. All lies, but it helps him keep his job, and Gabi wants medicine for Willibald and Ilse. ‘I was sorry for him in the end,’ she confesses when she returns with a packet of some new wonder-drug called penicillin and the promise of more. ‘Besides, Martin wanted me to go.’ She still can’t refuse him anything, as she couldn’t in the past and will not in the future.
Willibald doesn’t say so, but he also provides a testimonial to his Aryan lady friend in Plinden. She’s not got much to cover up, but still she was a member of the Party and a group leader in the League of German Girls as well. A few kind words from Willibald won’t do her any harm. At least he’s not exaggerating when he declares she provided comfort to him in the war. There’s no one Willibald refuses a testimonial to at all, in fact, and I sometimes think he’d give one to the Führer himself if Adolf only asked him nicely.
The Kaminsky Cure Page 31