Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  An icy chill spread through Gerta. She was beginning to hate this little man with red spider veins in his face. He was treating her like she was a die-hard Nazi. As if she had stashed something away, as if she owed gratitude for having been beaten, raped, and enslaved, just because she had never harmed anyone.

  “I never harmed anyone.”

  Hanák slammed the palm of his hand down on the table.

  “Every German did, every single one is guilty, you hear me, woman? The Germans were the ones who celebrated the occupation of Czechoslovakia, all of them. I don’t know of a single one who didn’t. Then under the Protectorate, they all rolled around, happy as pigs in shit, and lined their pockets. And every Czechoslovak had to suffer for it, you understand? So now every German has to pay the price. Afterward they can clear out and leave us alone to live in peace in our little Republic. Now, you go downstairs and bring me a demijohn, one that hasn’t been opened, you hear; bring it to me sealed. And then the rest of the papers.”

  Gerta turned around and walked out of the office, forcing herself to remain silent. What point was there in arguing with this self-absorbed midget of a man with boozy eyes? She felt herself choking with helplessness and rage.

  “You know, they don’t pamper them much; you can be sure of that. It’s not like they deserve it anyway, right?”

  Gerta was once again sitting at the desk in her office, leaning back against the hard wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap. She had been observing Hanák for several days now, listening to him talk and bringing him demijohns from the cellar. In the morning, when he first came in, he would be melancholy and subdued; a few times he even called her his little Gertitschka. By noon, with his first cup of wine, his courage began to swell, and he would start railing against all things German. By nightfall, he was seething with hatred and ready to pick a fight. Then he would start to nod off at his desk, and twice now already Gerta had needed to help him get back to the room at the rear of the Rosenbaum house, which he had taken over as his own.

  By the following week, he was calling her Gertitschka even in the afternoons, and a few days later, it became the norm for him to bring his work to her office, over to her desk, where he would sit across from her, setting the demijohn down between them. Other than the occasional deep sigh about being a lonely old man, however, he contented himself with just the demijohn and hours of blather, talking Gerta’s ear off because she was the only person obliged to listen to him. As for the other villagers, he barely even had a chance to get to know them.

  “You know, they don’t pamper them much; you can be sure of that. It’s not like they deserve it anyway, right?” he was repeating one afternoon as he described the current situation in Brno, his assignment before coming to Perná.

  “There’s a camp like that in Maloměřice, another one in Klajdovka, and one in Kounic College, and who knows where else. That’s where they are, and they have to work like dogs. And the reason the Czechs don’t pamper them much is because they’re pissed as hell about everything they had to put up with during the war.

  “From the rumors one hears, it’s basically slave labor for hire. And they don’t have to send them back in good shape. In fact, it’s preferable if they don’t. Teach the bastards a lesson.

  “I saw them doing clearing work. They’re paying their dues, that’s for sure. If someone’s working too slow, he gets a beating. One look, and it’s clear just how they’re doing. I wouldn’t give them a scrap of food myself. Them pigs. Them Germans.”

  Gerta, her hands folded in her lap, listened in resignation.

  “Gertitschka, do you have someone there?”

  She looked up and shrugged her shoulders.

  “You don’t know? Or you do?”

  “I think my father’s there.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “Before they expelled me from Brno, he was in Kounic College. At least I think he was.”

  “There you go.”

  He nodded and reached for the round, heavy, wicker-encased demijohn, picked it up by its neck, and refilled his cup from it with visible difficulty.

  “You want some?”

  Gerta shook her head, so he raised a glass to himself.

  “The reason he’s there is because he deserves to be there. That we’re not even going to discuss. You can go ahead and feel sorry for him. But keep it to yourself.”

  It had never occurred to Gerta to grieve for him. Or to feel sorry for him. Because her father, in fact, was fully guilty, and she herself believed that he deserved to be punished, if not for his shady apartment dealings and his fraternizing with Hitlerites, then for what he had done to her. He deserved it. But what had happened to Friedrich?

  “I also have a brother, but I don’t even know if he made it back from the war.”

  “Well, that’s how it is in almost every family. Everyone lost someone in the war,” he said, shrugging indifferently.

  From behind the door came the sound of voices and hurried footsteps, and almost immediately a pounding on the door. Hanák leaped up from the table, knocking over his chair. Into the room burst two of the Brno harvest brigaders, a young woman and a young man.

  “Jech, up at the vineyard. Jech killed Führeder,” the young man blurted into the room. He was blinking as his eyes tried to adjust to the darkness of the office, while the girl beside him just stared inside, wide-eyed and panting, flushed from having run so fast, her scarf having slipped down from her hair to her shoulders.

  “He killed him, shot him . . . right in the vineyard.” The young man spoke in gasps, propping his hands on his hips and bending slightly forward to breathe more easily. “He’s lying there. We’ve come for you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘killed him’?” Hanák said.

  “Shot him. Hurry!”

  “Why didn’t they take his gun away after . . . after he aimed it at Schnirchová?”

  “Fired it,” Gerta corrected him.

  “Why does he still have it?”

  “For safety, naturally,” replied Gerta sarcastically. “Kratina wasn’t about to take it away from him, and you never gave the order.”

  “Christ Almighty.”

  Hanák clapped his small, round hat down on his head. It matched the suit he had arrived in, but not the checkered shirt tucked into his worn overalls that he had taken to wearing since the second day of his stay in Perná. He raced out the door but stopped short before heading in the right direction, and, perplexed, turned back to the harvest brigaders.

  “Which way is it exactly?”

  Since arriving, he hadn’t ventured farther than the Rosenbaum property and its immediate surroundings. He hadn’t gone beyond the church, and Gerta brought him his food. The brigaders pointed to the road leading up to the church and took off to run ahead.

  Somewhere close to the middle of a row of the half-cleared vineyard that stretched toward Bavory stood a tight huddle of people, and others were crouching down or sitting around. No one was working. Two women at the edge of the group were sobbing loudly; two others sat side by side, a short way off.

  “What in the world happened here?” Hanák called out loudly into the midst of the standing group, trying to get the attention of these unfamiliar people.

  “I’m the new administrative commissioner. What’s happened here?”

  “He had him cut down the whole vineyard.”

  “You mean this dead man here?” Hanák pointed to the frail body of an old man, who lay on the loamy soil among grapevine stems and leaves, his arms flung out to the sides and his face covered by a hat.

  “Over the years, he cultivated the best varieties around here by far. He’d even won medals for that wine of his, Mr. Commissioner,” said a sad old man who was standing over the dead body, holding his hat in his hand.

  “Did anyone call a doctor?” Hanák looked around at the group of bystanders.

  “What for?”

  “To get some first aid, huh?”

  “But, Mr. Commissioner
, he got a bullet through his head. Why would you need a doctor?” queried the old man in surprise.

  “He was German,” piped up a woman who looked to be in her forties, and whom Hanák, as he’d forced his way through the crowd, pushed out of the circle that had formed around the body. Now he looked over at her.

  “My name is Růžková, Mr. Commissioner. This dead man here, he was Mr. Führeder, the best vintner in these parts, far and wide. Before the Great War, he was purveyor to the lords of the House of Dietrichstein, that’s how well-known he was. He was the best of them all, except for Mr. Krumpschmied here. He’s also an expert in every sense of the word, isn’t that so, Mr. Krumpschmied? You’ve also gotten plenty of medals.”

  “Yes, yes,” the old man said. “We had our fair share of rivalry, Führeder and I. But that wine of his, I couldn’t touch it. Something so fine, with just a hint of blackberry. After all, he spent his whole life working on it. He managed to cross Traminer with Müller Thurgau; that’s a blend you won’t find anywhere else. Only here in Perná, in Führeder’s vineyard. That’s why he got those medals, poor soul.”

  “So, can someone explain to me why he’s lying here dead now?”

  “He couldn’t tear himself away from his vines, couldn’t bear to leave them behind. He would have died without them, you understand? So he decided to die with them,” answered Krumpschmied, and then added, nodding, almost as an afterthought, “And do you know, the idea has occurred to me too? That I would take my vines with me to the grave. That row you see there, which stretches all the way down to below St. Anna’s, it’s all planted with cuttings from Greece. My son brought them back for me before the war. Just wait until you see the grapes they yield, big, reddish gold and sweet, much sweeter than the local varieties. And yet they grow under the same sun. I was also thinking I might take them with me to my grave.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Mr. Krumpschmied, please don’t talk like that,” said Růžková, covering her mouth with her scarf and giving a sob.

  “What would the grape harvest be like without you, for God’s sake,” a skinny, sinewy man standing beside her said.

  “Mr. Krumpschmied, you’ll survive this, and your vines will too. Nobody is going to want to deport an expert like you. You’re not going to have to go anywhere. It makes no difference that you’re German; everyone around here knows that you never cared about politics. They won’t make you leave, and as soon as things settle down, you’ll get your vineyard back, you’ll see.”

  “Oh no,” said Krumpschmied with a bitter smile, “I’m never going to make wine again. The new owners have already moved us out into the shed. Now my wife and I are just waiting to see when they’ll send us away on the next transport. They’ve already told us it’s going to happen. But they said I didn’t need to worry about my wine and wanted me to tell them how to go about making it. They said that if I told them, they’d take care of it. And that if I didn’t tell them, they’d plant an apple orchard. Or cherries. Here! On this piece of earth, kissed by God, that produces wine like Führeder’s. This soil, rich with loess from the Pálava Hills. Madmen.”

  Růžková lowered her head and began to sob into her scarf.

  “What’s going to become of Járinka Führederová now? Who’s going to tell her what happened? It’ll be the death of her.”

  “It’s going to kill her, that’s for sure,” one of the other women agreed.

  “And who’s this Jech, the one who shot him?”

  “He’s new around here, sir. He came to take over one homestead, and now he and his family have at least three.”

  “Well, they’re entitled to them.”

  “They took over the Führeder property as well. They own these vineyards now. And they were keeping the Führeders locked up in a storeroom, demanding that they tell them how to make good wine. Führeder finally told them that this was the time to cut it all down, to let it finish drying out on the ground.”

  “So? Then why did he shoot him?”

  Růžková stopped in mid-sob; the skinny man turned his entire body toward the commissioner; and old Krumpschmied snickered. “Na ja, have you ever heard of anyone cutting down a fifteen-year-old grapevine?”

  Hanák blinked in consternation. “What?”

  “He told them to cut down all the vines. He said that was how one made wine, you understand? He destroyed his best vines, Führeder did, to keep them out of the hands of those criminals from who knows where.”

  “In that case, he’s one hell of a saboteur!” snapped Hanák sharply. “He’s a saboteur, and people like him deserve a bullet!”

  “Deserve it?” Růžková turned to him in astonishment. “For being driven out of a vineyard in which he had spent the past sixty years of his life breaking his back, working?”

  “How is he a saboteur? He liquidated his own vineyard, which he had every right to do, since it would have been destroyed anyway in the hands of those godless people. You think the Jechs have a clue about wine? They know shit.”

  “What are you saying, his own vineyard? Germans no longer have the right to own property, or haven’t you heard the news yet? Do you mean to tell me, all of you, that you haven’t read about what happened at Potsdam? Not a single grape in this vineyard belonged to Führeder anymore, understand? He destroyed property that now belongs to the fledgling Czechoslovak state, and that makes him a saboteur!”

  Krumpschmied kept his head down and nodded. Růžková started sobbing again and covered her face with her handkerchief.

  “Man, you don’t get it at all.” The sinewy man shook his head.

  A murmur of dissenting voices rose up from the crowd around Hanák.

  “He should have put up a monument to honor Führeder for all the work he spent his life doing around here, and not have driven him out, let alone kill him.”

  “You can say what you want. As far as the law is concerned, that man didn’t own a thing, and that makes him a saboteur.”

  From behind the group came the clattering sound of a wagon, and several people turned around to look.

  “Here comes Šenk,” said a woman, sitting by the hedgerow.

  Hanák turned to look as well. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s Hubert Šenk. He owns the neighboring fields,” said Gerta.

  “Good, at least he can cart the German off. He can’t stay out here in the sun.”

  Šenk jumped down from the box seat and advanced toward the group. The others cleared a path for him as he slowly walked all the way up to Führeder’s body, sprawled on the ground, and took off his hat.

  “I’m the new administrative commissioner, Hanák.”

  “Šenk.” The farmer introduced himself, nodding. “I’m glad you’re here. Something has to be done about this. These newcomers can’t just get away with it.”

  “Have you lost your mind too? Or haven’t you read the paper since the war ended? Or listened to the radio?”

  “I’ve read it, and so what?”

  “So what would you like to do about it? He was killed for good reason. He was a saboteur.”

  Šenk bent down over Führeder’s body and remained like that for a while, holding his rumpled hat in his hand. Then he turned to Hanák and said, “You’re going to report this. They can’t act this way around here. This is murder.”

  “Murder? What in God’s name do you mean?” retorted Hanák, vigorously shaking his head. “This was, I repeat, sabotage. Sabotage by a German. And even if there hadn’t been a reason, this dead man here’s a German, and you’d better realize that, sir.”

  Šenk stepped right up to the shorter Hanák and said, “This murder, sir, you’re going to report it. And if you in your official capacity don’t, then I will. I’ll file it as a complaint. This is the murder of an upstanding Perná vintner. That’s who Führeder was. That he happened to be a German doesn’t mean shit.”

  The blood rushed to Hanák’s face. He turned crimson with suppressed rage.

  “What happened here, sir, was the exe
cution of a sentence against a saboteur. Retribution for treachery carried out in a vineyard that belongs to the Jechs, understand? As administrative commissioner, I am not going to report any murder.”

  “No record of a property transfer has been submitted to the Land Registry office yet,” Gerta said softly. “Since the Jechs came to the village, they’ve already moved three times. They haven’t decided yet which house they want.”

  “It’s possible that these vineyards, according to some piece of paper signed God knows where and by God knows whom, someone who hasn’t the slightest idea about Perná, no longer belonged to Führeder,” said Šenk. “But as you’ve just heard, they don’t yet belong to Jech either. So now tell me, by what right did Jech shoot him?”

  Hanák’s chin trembled with fury.

  “I repeat,” he blurted with utmost self-restraint, “I will not report any murder. I’m happy to sign a transfer of property over to a Czech. But the only good German is a dead German. Have I made myself clear, sir?”

  Hanák then turned on his heel, rammed on his hat, and set off down the farm lane back toward the village.

  “Schnirchová!” he called out.

  Gerta looked anxiously over at Šenk.

  “Go on, I’ll deal with Jech myself,” he said, at which Gerta quickly set off to catch up to Hanák.

  XX

  The cool, twilight air found them all once again bending over the stubble field, just as on the day before. The children, who that evening also needed to help, were there, as were Ida and Zipfelová, who was doing her gathering along the edges of the field while keeping an eye on Gerta’s Barbora, Edeltraud’s Katty, as well as on Anni and Rudi.

  They continued bending down until the last rays of sun disappeared. Only after it was too dark to see did Zipfelová call out to them, and they came wandering back from the far corners of the field, their knotted kerchiefs filled with stalks of grain, the golden heads packed with kernels. At the sight of eleven full kerchiefs, Zipfelová’s eyes lit up. Even in the dusk, they could see how pleased she was.