Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  Auntie Athanaia was a really neat lady, and she spent a lot of time playing with me and talking to me. She told me that back home, when she was little, they would put a bit of everything on a little altar, an iconostasis, but that later Uncle Achilles forbade it, because they were Communists, so she gave up the iconostasis out of love for him. Or she would show me how she used to dance the kotchari better than anyone in her village, or, come early March, she would tie a Marti ribbon around my wrist that I would then wear all spring until I saw the first swallow. I still remember it all as if it were just yesterday, and how she would talk to me and show me everything. It all comes back to me when I hear those two gorgeous girls who sing songs about Greece here in Brno—songs like “Dále než slunce vstává,” “Beyond Where the Sun Rises”—Martha and Tena Elefteriadu, who only became popular after the Agathonikiadises left. Later, I wrote to them about the sisters. I even sent them a record but just got a postcard back, once or twice. But then again, I knew writing had never been Auntie Athanaia’s thing. Same with me, for that matter. It took me years before I finally wrote to them for the first time, and then our contact kind of faded out again, which was too bad.

  But maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be—people come; people go. And then not too long afterward, Jára came into my life, and it was obvious to everyone why I latched on to him the way I did. As soon as it was possible, I got out of that silent and dreary household of my mother’s. I wanted to start my own family, because, as they say, the family is the foundation of the state, and the mother, the architect of society, right? And it feels good to have a purpose. Besides, I didn’t know what else to do. One thing was for sure: there was no way I could stay stuck in that cold and empty apartment with Mom, trying to figure out if at any particular moment she liked me or didn’t like me, or if she was or wasn’t talking to me. Besides, we kept on seeing each other after I moved out, and it was actually better, because she didn’t give me a stomachache every day, just once a week over the weekend, when she’d come to visit. And it could have gone on like that, nice and peaceful, and that whole business of kicking her out wouldn’t have had to happen, if only she’d been reasonable. If she hadn’t always been lighting into us in our own home—Jára called it emotionally blackmailing us—always coming at us with accusations. She would arrive and go stand by the open window, lighting one cigarette after another, even around the baby, talking, talking, talking, about all the things she never wanted to talk to me about before. And it was obvious that it was just her way of trying to still control me, because she’d always end those litanies of hers with some kind of veiled threat: Did I understand everything now, and was I grateful to her for having banned all traces of the past from my life? Back then, it had really upset me, and it had upset Jára even more. So then, after the Russians rolled in, and Mom started making one scene after another in our kitchen—calling us ignorant, asking if I’d understood anything of what she’d been telling me these past few months, because everything was about to repeat itself all over again—that’s when it happened. He finally just kicked her out. And he was right to do it. She had no business carrying on in our house as if it were my fault that the Russians had marched in. It was as if someone flipped a switch in her brain, and not just once, but several times over. At first, she kept scaring us, saying that another war was about to break out. She even managed to find us gas masks, and then, when nothing happened, she started to ridicule the Czechs, calling them weak, incapable of taking action. Her attitude toward our own people was one of complete disrespect, as if they were just colored pawns in a Trouble game that were constantly being knocked back, never able to make it “home.” She would talk about our nation with absolute contempt, as if she weren’t a part of it. And this came after all those long-winded outbursts, in which she complained that the Czechs had driven her out, and that they had never accepted her! I would stare at her as if she’d lost her marbles. It was as if there were two completely different women living inside my mom. One was the wronged German woman, who had been driven out of her home, and the other was the superior German woman, who looked down at the Czechs living in her community with nothing but scorn. Both women were German. The Czech woman, the one she’d always identified with, seemed to have vanished.

  She almost had a heart attack when Jára told her not to drag politics into our house—that we couldn’t care less. That they could all do whatever they pleased, but that we were busy building a home and raising a child, and whether this, that, or the other one was in power made no difference to us. That we were simple people who liked to do simple things, and not dwell on politics in which we had no say anyway.

  That time, she got up from the table as if she’d been stung, running out to catch the bus one hour earlier than usual. She must’ve gotten offended or something, just because we weren’t interested in sticking our noses into that Russian business.

  Her personality had always been a bit peculiar, and I always felt she used to take things out on me. But that she’d stop talking to me for years—that our communication would be reduced to a card on my birthday and another at Christmas—that I never expected. But that was exactly what happened. And little Blanka first had to grow up before she could bring us back together again.

  V

  He had given it a lot of thought, already long before he lay dying. But it was only on the day immediately prior, when he felt the end was imminent, that he called over his wife and asked her to bend down to him. He then proceeded to rasp into her ear everything that he wished to leave behind for posterity. It didn’t seem to make that much of an impression on her. He had imagined the tears rolling down her cheeks in horror and disgust, but she had just patiently listened and nodded. At that moment, he saw that she was prepared to forgive him everything, if only he wouldn’t die. She must have thought it was his fever talking; she was looking at him with such compassion—prepared for anything. But he felt that this would be the final moment of clarity, in which he could see the contours of the past and the present in sharp focus for one last time, before the fog in which he had been lost for days would descend again. So he took advantage of it and made her take out a pencil and some paper from the bedside drawer, so that she could write down what he was about to tell her. She did it while feigning a smile, for show as it were, as if she were humoring a child, so that it would stop pestering. Very deliberately she picked up the paper and pencil, put her ear once more to his lips, and prepared to listen. He started with Gerta. She had to be told about her existence, and he could see her recoil in alarm even before he had finished his sentence. But as he already knew, at that moment she was obviously ready to forgive him anything.

  So he dictated to her Gerta’s full name, her date of birth, and the street address where he had last left her. On March 23, when he had just tapped her on the shoulder, not wishing to say a more personal goodbye—such was the contempt he and his father had felt for her back then. Then he had set off, eager to test his mettle, excited to put on a uniform like everyone was back then, ready to fight for the Führer, for the Reich. He had joined up with his sights set on the front and on officer’s stripes, so full of anticipation that he hadn’t even noticed that his father was trembling in fear. Not until they were standing in front of the German House and he reached out to shake his father’s hand for the last time. It was only then that he noticed it, along with the bloodshot eyes and the sniffling, to which he’d been oblivious the whole time they had been walking from Sterngasse. Most likely, at the time, he, Friedrich, had been the one doing all the talking. About his prospects, the future, the Endsieg, the ultimate victory. His father hadn’t uttered a word. So he had said goodbye to him, and that was the last time he’d seen him—he, the son with the bright future, in which he was destined to return as a hero. For him, that was all that mattered. And that held true even much later, when he was actually at the front and receiving one promotion after another. He had come out of the Hitler Youth as a second-rank private, and from then it w
ent like clockwork. Lance corporal, corporal, squad leader, sergeant—in Volhynia, for the village of Czech Malyn, that they burned and razed to the ground in July, he was promoted to staff sergeant—and later on, in the autumn of forty-three, after they had wiped out Michna-Sergejevka, he was made sergeant major. One year later, he became first lieutenant. But then it had come. It started with a tingling in his stomach, just as had happened at the very beginning. But back then, he had been a mere private, and in the display of excessive zeal that he had put on for his squad of soldiers, he had barely noticed it. Authority, that was what he had been focused on. So that not one of them would dare to make even a peep when he gave the order to fire. And so that not one of them would notice that even he was gagging on his own vomit, when the Jews would lay themselves down in the pit, their faces to the feet of those already dead, so that their bodies would take up the least amount of room. As far as that went, he was still doing all right. Some of the others had turned into drunken pigs—they couldn’t even walk out of the barracks sober the next morning—and others simply went out of their minds. They no longer even went home on leave, because they couldn’t look their wives in the eye. Not to mention that they would’ve been totally useless anyway, since after six months in the slaughterhouse, most of them discovered they could no longer get it up. He was no exception. But there were those who took it particularly hard. They solved it their own way. Over the course of one month, in their district of Rivne alone, there had been three or four. For the most part, they would shoot themselves right in the forehead, temple, or mouth. But that was simply a matter of Weltanschauung, one’s worldview, he had told himself back then.

  But soon the tingling in his stomach returned—it would come back again and again, increasingly intense and relentless. At some point after the business in Czech Malyn. The order came from above, issued directly to him because he spoke Czech and because that district fell under his jurisdiction. Who knew what made them choose this village. However, in doing so, they had also chosen him, and to this he wasn’t indifferent. At least not afterward. Not that he wasn’t used to that sort of thing. Except up to that point, he had always heard it a little bit differently. First, they were liquidating only Jews, and that was by necessity. More specifically, it was gratifying. They were cleansing the area and liberating the resident ethnic Germans, the Volksdeutsche, from parasites. They were dealing with the first order of business—safeguarding a living space for their own people, ensuring that the Reich had the potential to expand. To this day, he could still summon up that feeling of pride he experienced when their general sector of Volhynia-Podolia was officially declared judenrein, clear of Jews. Clean. Next, they liquidated the Banderites, the Soviet partisans, as well as the Polish partisans in the Armia Krajowa, the underground Home Army. And that was also by necessity; it was the cost of survival. There wasn’t much to think about—either they would get to the partisans first, or the partisans would get to them. In those days, Ukraine was a jungle, and life there was a stake in a lottery game. Mainly because these partisans, unlike them, knew their way around the Volhynian and Podolian forests. And the villages had stood by them—even women and families took them into hiding, although the penalty for this was death. He had been called into service a few times on such occasions as well, but when he’d had to shoot these abettors, he’d turned a deaf ear. He couldn’t understand what had happened, why in Malyn he hadn’t been able to do the same. Maybe because of that cursed Czech language, which was why it had fallen to his unit in the first place. In total, 374 Volhynian Czechs, 26 Poles, and, in the Ukrainian part of Malyn, 132 Ukrainians burned. He didn’t know why it hit him so hard, coming after Mlyniv, where the number of Jews had been 1,118; Sushybaba with 752; Kowel with 799; and those were just the ones that went directly through his hands. The numbers were exact, to a person; their administrative precision was beyond reproach. It must have been that cursed Czech language, coming through the barn doors even after they’d been nailed shut, and from the pigsties, into which they had crammed them in groups of twenty, twenty exactly, so that there was just enough room for them to stand, shoulder to shoulder. When moments before the order was given, he would hear pleas in Ukrainian like Dajtě pomilovanije! Have mercy, please! Or, Help! Don’t shoot! It left him cold, as if he hadn’t heard it. But that Czech language, after Malyn, he would hear it every night, every single night without exception. Smilujte se! We’re meeting the quotas! Why? Mercy! He heard that every night. And meanwhile, earlier that day, he had still been chuckling about how seamlessly everything was proceeding, just as the Kreislandwirt had anticipated. When he and his unit had surrounded the village and summoned everyone back from the fields, they had shown up within twenty minutes. And, after all, who wouldn’t have come, when it was allegedly just a matter of a document check, a routine inspection of the labor force in the village? Anyone who didn’t show up would be putting his family at risk, so everyone came. They stood around on the village square like a herd of oxen, grouped together by family, and waited under the blazing July sun for an hour or two, until the entire population register had been examined, and each individual checked off, one by one. And then with a smile, cordially, since the inspection had gone well—no one had been missing, and according to the inventory list, everyone had met their Wehrmacht quotas—they began to separate them. The women from the children and from the men. Trusting, they didn’t protest; after all, they had nothing to fear, as they were repeatedly reassured. They dispatched the men to retrieve foodstuffs and valuables from the houses and had them load everything onto hay wagons, which some soldiers then transported to Rivne. Next, they ushered them into a barn that was registered as belonging to a Václav Činka. They corralled all the women into a cow barn on a farm belonging to a Josef Dobrý—“dobrý” as in good—and he couldn’t help but smirk as he noted the irony of it. Good Coffin was still going through his head when it began to burn. But then there came those cries in Czech. The screaming, the pleas directed to God, to them, to him—to Friedrich—and all in Czech. Until finally, a stillness set in, permeated by the repulsive, sickly sweet smell of charred flesh and acrid smoke that they left behind as they headed back toward Rivne. And then it began. Nights in which he heard the language of his mother—the common, vile Czech of his vile mother—until finally not even he could walk out in the morning without taking a swig of samohonka, the bootleg brandy that, back then, was used as currency in Ukrainian villages instead of money. A full half year, until orders came to advance on the next Czech village, Michna-Sergejevka.