Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  Teresa lifted the glass of slivovitz to her nose, breathed in the aroma, and went on.

  “Vienna was overcrowded. Beggars everywhere—I mean people like us—on the streets, in the parks, on benches, in collapsed buildings, people looking for work and for food or people who were completely out of it, lost, just standing around, waiting to see if someone would give them a handout. Nobody did; there was nothing left to eat in Vienna—there wasn’t even enough for the residents themselves, let alone for the refugees. They couldn’t feed us. Just from Brno alone there had been over ten thousand people who had come to Vienna along the Brünner Reichsstraße, the Imperial Road, and people were arriving from all over—from the Protectorate, from the Sudetenland, from Hungary—and Russians, the place was crawling with them. They were terrible too—don’t think the women there were any better off than they were here, at the end of the war, in Brno—they were up to the same old tricks. On the other hand, later on . . . later on, it came in useful.”

  Teresa threw back the shot glass, and the slivovitz disappeared down her throat, past the even row of teeth in which the golden one gleamed.

  “I have no problem telling you about it, because it’s very possibly the only reason we survived. Without my Russian friend, by the end of that first winter, we might’ve already been pushing up daisies. Keep in mind, the Austrians were the only ones getting ration books, and what did that give them? One-third of what we were getting toward the end of the war—barely enough to survive. And the refugees? We got nothing. There simply was nothing to be had. You had to hope that you’d run into a Red Cross food truck to have a chance of getting any food at all—more of that watery soup, sometimes a runny Eintopf stew. Ula and I used to go over to the Südbahnhof, but if we got there late, we were out of luck. Still, in the end, we got lucky after all, because that’s where my Russian spotted me. He could have helped himself to it for free had he waited to jump me somewhere in the dark. After all, it was the daily norm, as we all know. But instead, he offered us bread and lard, and then another time it was sugar, or dried fish. Who the hell knows where he got his hands on it all. But I for one didn’t care. For three eggs, which he gave me one time, I would have done plenty more. By then, I no longer gave a damn about anything—nothing, except for that god-awful cold and that unbearable hunger. You turned into just a body that didn’t think, made up of just a stomach that gnawed on you so badly that you couldn’t sleep at night. Probably the only time I felt like myself was when we’d be standing in line for soup, or when we’d gotten hold of some potatoes that we’d cook in tin cans over a fire in the park, where together with some others, we’d burn benches, branches, or bits of timber—there was plenty of that all over the place. In the meantime, they found us some rooms in these small camps—really more like shelters for refugees who were allowed to stay in Vienna. They sent us to Postgasse Four, where later we also brought Dorla. First, though, Ula and I had to shave each other’s heads that they then smeared with some foul-smelling, mercury-based delousing ointment, which they’d already applied to Dorla in the hospital. Then they gave us fresh, new clothing, after which we looked ghastly. It was so humiliating, that business with the hair, but we had no time to dwell on it. In any case, I couldn’t understand that Russian of mine at all—I looked awful, but he kept coming back anyway, until one day he disappeared.”

  Teresa gave a faint smile.

  “Ula tried several times to get a permit so that she could go on to Regensburg, which was in the American zone. Had she wanted to leave, though, she first would have had to go back into one of those detention camps outside Vienna, where neither of us wanted to go for anything in the world. After that, she finally gave it a rest for a while, and I was glad, because all through that first December and January, I don’t know what I would have done in Vienna without her. I thought about going with her, thinking that it didn’t really matter whether I was in Regensburg or Vienna, but truth be told, she never asked me. She imagined that once she got to her relatives, she would be reunited with her husband, and then they would either go back, or start over somehow. I’m not exactly sure. All I know is that I didn’t figure into the equation, and probably all my yammering about Vienna had given her the sense that I was at peace with my future prospects. Well, back in Perná I had been, but that feeling disappeared into thin air like a puff of smoke the minute we crossed the border.

  “For a while, everything stayed the same. She ended up leaving two years later, on one of the last transports, because it took forever before they finally gave her an Ausweis identity card, and the certificate of good health that the Americans required. Then, in forty-seven, she and Dorla packed up their things and left for Regensburg, and that was that. By then, I already had a job, if one could call it that, and earlier they’d already moved us into an apartment that belonged to a certain Frau Wojanczik who lived on Herringgasse. She had to turn her spare room over to us, and she wasn’t happy about it, but back then, nobody was. We were rabble, the dregs of society, women from who knew where, with who knew what for a past. At the same time, we were wondering about her past—she was such a crotchety old crone. She never spoke to us, just occasionally snapped at us when she didn’t like something, and in the end, we were right. One day, we found her slumped over among burning candles with photographs of her sons in SS uniforms and Hitler, scattered all over the place. Poor Dorla was the one who found her, that’s what bothered us the most, but after that, things got better. We reported it right away, so that we wouldn’t be blamed, and instead of throwing us out, they moved in three sisters from Troppau—from Opava—along with their old mother. They took over that second room. I don’t know how that old woman survived the journey, although they told us they’d been transported from Opava to Vienna in a cattle truck—they’d even been allowed to bring fifty kilos per person. But all along the way, the Czechs and the Russians picked through everything, so that by the time they got to Vienna, they were pretty much in the same boat as we were: empty-handed. Later on, we found out that one of them had lost a baby along the way, that her husband had fallen in the war, that their father had been sent to a labor camp near Ostrava, where they had good reason to be worried about him—they never heard from him again. Meanwhile, as for their grandparents, they hadn’t even survived the journey from Opava. Of the entire family, there were just the four of them left, and it would have been only three if they hadn’t stopped the eldest one from slitting her wrists with a broken piece of mirror. One would hear stories like that from just about everyone.”

  She poured herself another slivovitz.

  “Let’s have your glasses,” she then said. With a shaky hand, she refilled all the shot glasses. “Then Ula and I found ourselves some work. Actually, up until the early fifties, when I got my proper citizenship, we refugees, by law, weren’t allowed to be employed except as unskilled laborers. In the beginning, Ula and I helped with rubble clearing, just to get some food, and that went on for a while, right up through the summer of forty-six, when they brought me in to help in a hospital kitchen. Ula went to work in a factory just outside Vienna, where she commuted every day. Our pay was a joke, but at least it was something and it helped with the household, although most of it went to food anyway. The things we’d hear back then, you can’t imagine. To the Austrians, I was just a Czech slut; even the stupidest cow in the hospital looked down on me. I didn’t dare do a thing about it. I was supposed to be grateful that they’d even let me stay in Austria, taking food out of their mouths. That legendary Viennese heart of gold I’d heard so much about, well, I never found it. As for Ula, they used to call her a Rucksackdeutsche—a German tramp with a rucksack—which was pretty funny, seeing as back then we didn’t even have any summer clothes yet, still just the winter ones that we’d gotten from a charity, let alone anything to put in a rucksack. I don’t know what those people imagined we would do to them that made them hate us so much. But they couldn’t stand us, and they made it very clear. Dorla got it from her classmates, an
d we got it from anyone whose path we crossed. My Brünnerisches German always gave me away, that soft accent of ours—I couldn’t get their Wienerisch past my tongue. No sooner would I open my mouth than they could immediately tell I was Czech. They can tell to this day, and they act accordingly. You can’t imagine the faces they make. In the meantime, though, I’d say that I’ve managed to make a few acquaintances among the Viennese Austrians. But the only people I can really call friends are the ones who came to Vienna because they were driven out of the Protectorate. Like Traude Fröhlich from Bergen, whom I ran into one day on an excursion up the Mühlberg, from where you can see as far as Rassenstein castle. They were also deported, as you probably remember. In spite of the fact that they’d been farmers in Bergen since Maria Theresa’s time, and had headstones in the cemetery dating back that far to prove it. It didn’t matter that they were never mixed up with politics; they were expelled, just like us, and now their farm belongs to Jech’s son-in-law, some guy named Kocman.”

  “He turned it over to the JZD, too, right at the beginning, just like Jech. Now they just have that house behind the church with the garden that goes all the way down to the fishpond,” said Hermína.

  “It wasn’t easy for Traude either. But at least she knew how to sew and embroider, so soon word got around that she could fix anything, even if she had nothing to work with. Today she’s got her own Singer machine and sews at home and lives pretty well, even though it’s all under-the-table. That’s something that, to this day, we’re still good enough for. Outwardly they hate us, yet if we can be useful to them, they overcome their distaste.”

  Teresa’s face twisted into a grimace.

  “Now, these past few years, there’s been a lot of talk about integration, and how successful it’s been. Nonsense! Although it’s true that now we have the Landsmannschaft—a welfare and culture society for Germans born in the eastern part of what was formerly the Reich—so that’s at least something. But otherwise, to this day, we’re just the rabble that wandered in, and in terms of a pension, what do you think I’ll get? Jack shit, because my pay is a joke, and it doesn’t look as if it’s going to get better anytime soon. Unless I marry well. But that’s not so easy either, to meet someone there, when all the locals are trying so hard to avoid you. For them to accept me as an equal Austrian citizen, which on paper I’ve now been for a few years already, most likely I’ll have to be dead. To this day, no one gives a damn about us, and they make it obvious, again and again. It can’t be helped. People belong in their own country, and today I regret how it all turned out. I regret that I didn’t stay here with you, although—hell—what more could I have expected here? I never even learned to speak Czech properly. So I don’t know. Home is neither here nor there. Somehow, I just seem to be stuck between places and memories. Some life, wouldn’t you say?”

  She looked around at the others. Hermína was nodding off in a rocking chair in the corner of the tiny kitchen; Johanna, her head propped up on the tabletop and her eyelids drooping, was looking back and forth between Teresa and the empty demijohn; and Gerta was taking a drag on what was left of a smoldering cigarette butt.

  “Girlfriend, had you stayed here, you wouldn’t have done yourself any favors,” Gerta finally said after a long pause, so softly as to be almost inaudible.

  For a long time afterward, she kept on thinking back to Teresa’s visit, heartened by the promise of next year—the wine harvest in Perná, when they planned to spend a whole week with Hermína at Zipfelová’s house. But man proposes, God disposes. One night, shouting coming in through the window that opened onto the courtyard pulled her from her sleep. At first, she couldn’t make out the words; still groggy, she threw a knitted shawl over her shoulders and went over to the window to look out. On the opposite balcony, a man was standing and shouting. Gradually all the lights in the apartment block started to come on, one by one, and from somewhere in the distance came a droning rumble.

  “For fuck’s sake, turn on your radioooooooooos!” he was shouting over and over.

  And as Gerta in her kitchen did just that, the empty room filled with the familiar voice of the radio announcer:

  Yesterday, on August 20, 1968, at approximately twenty-three o’clock, the armies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Polish People’s Republic, the Hungarian People’s Republic, and the Bulgarian People’s Republic crossed the state borders of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. This happened without the knowledge of the president of the Republic, the chairman of the National Assembly, or the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia calls on all citizens of the Republic to remain calm and not resist the advancing armed forces, because the defense of our state borders is impossible at this time. The presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia considers this act to be contrary to all principles of the relations between socialist countries, as well as a violation of the basic norms of international law.

  XXIII

  That day nobody did any work. Inside the manufacturing halls and in the administrative offices, time stood still. The few who even bothered to show up at the factory crowded into the administration building, where they sought out either friends or relatives who worked in one of the offices, and huddled around the wireless receiver. Even in her office, they were packed in like sardines, since half of the planning department had come down from Floor Five to see Jarka Humpolíková, whose husband worked up there. Jenda, sitting by the file cabinet, on top of which sat the receiver, was flipping between channels, hoping that when one stopped broadcasting the news, he’d pick it up on another. They were all as crestfallen as Zipfelová’s chickens after a downpour. From time to time, they managed to shake it off, and then an intense discussion would erupt in the room, until Jenda found another broadcast, free of static interference.

  The Soviet news agency TASS is not offering any commentary on this event. This is because there is nothing it can say. This intervention was ordered by neither the government, nor by parliament, nor by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Naturally, some individual still could do so. Retroactively . . . but let’s hope there is no such person to be found in Czechoslovakia. There is nothing more for us to do at this time except to say that any statements made by TASS are unsubstantiated, that in spite of all the tanks in the streets and all the planes in the sky, we can all remain calm. History will vindicate us. And in doing so will vindicate freedom, humanity, and socialism with a human face. Friends, you are listening to Czechoslovak Radio. We will continue to inform you about the developing situation as long as it remains in our power to do so.

  That time, Gerta, standing behind them as they were all turned with their gazes fixed intently on the radio receiver, couldn’t suppress a snicker. Jarka glanced up at her quizzically, then immediately dropped her eyes again, as if standing in front of her and the other listeners were not just a radio receiver but editor Jeroným Janíček himself. “History will vindicate us,” he had said. Well now, that was something Gerta couldn’t wait to see, just whom history would choose to vindicate. In case that naive man behind the microphone didn’t know it, history had a way of vindicating the victors. And to suggest that now, on the brink of war with Russia, those Czechoslovak stuffed shirts would come rushing back to the city in late August, abandoning their ROH trade-union dachas, ready to storm the military warehouses and grab some weapons and confront their Red brethren—well, that was extremely, but extremely, optimistic. Gerta knew how it would end. The same way it had ended last time. Everyone would have a mouthful of what they were going to say, and then very quickly they’d fall in line and oblige their new masters. And afterward, they’d be more Catholic than the pope, heroes as submissive as lambs. She wondered what might be going on right now in the halls of the Zbrojovka Arms Factory. Were the same brave champions still sitting on the committees, the ones who back then ha
d driven her out of the city shouting, “Raus”? By now, they certainly also had to know what was coming next. They surely remembered the same charade, except back then, it played itself out in brown. Now they’d have a chance to do it over, this time in red. Gerta felt herself making a face. Not one of these people here right now, not a single one of them, would do anything in the end. And as if to prove her right, no sooner had the three o’clock whistle gone off than the men sitting on the floor around the radio receiver slowly stood up, stretched out their arms, cracked their backs, and then quickly dispersed, each to their respective home. To make sure they got back in time to go swimming with their wives in Srpek Lake just outside the town while it was still sunny.