by I V Olokita
“Sinatra?” she guessed quietly, approaching Deus from behind while he was sitting on the carpet in front of the radio.
“Yes, I did it My Way,” he confirmed as if nothing had happened just a few minutes ago.
Deus loved to listen to radio shows and songs, even though most were in languages he didn’t know. He found the secret ritual they both attended every Sunday afternoon was enough to bond them together.
“What were those Ghettos and death camps?” Deus asked Klara while she was on her way from the kitchen carrying two cups of hot chocolate.
“So, you did listen to me, after all,” she replied, with a big smile.
Deus returned her smile, slowly nodding while Klara placed the cups on the coffee table, taking a seat next to him. “Well, the Nazis had an orderly plan to wipe out all the Jews in the world,” she explained in a tone of an authoritative historian.
“First, they planned to round up all Jews in separate quarters, called Ghettos, detached from the outside world. Then, when they started playing God, they took a step further, isolating the Jews in special camps, out of sight, where they killed them in all kinds of ways.”
Deus moved with a little discomfort at the question he would ask.
“I guess you want to know how exactly they killed them,” Klara guessed his discomfort.
“I do,” Deus admitted quietly.
“Well, the luckiest ones were shot in the head; the less lucky ones were gassed to death, while all the rest were starved to death or killed by other means,” Klara reported cold-bloodedly.
“But they couldn’t have done such things!” Deus defied.
“What things?” Klara responded with irritation. “Killing people?!” she went on, with a yelling tone, wondering why that boy cannot believe her story.
“No,” Deus retorted. “I mean, you cannot kill so many people without any of them revolting. After all, everybody has a fighting spirit, that flame of life which inspires him with hopes for a better future, the same spirit which allows me to keep smiling at the world, despite all these daily slaps in my face!” Deus cried, hiding his face with his hands, sobbing like a child, despite his massive manly figure.
“Lord, you’re wonderful!” Klara whispered, fondling his head. “Oh, please, dear boy, don’t you ever grow up!” Klara begged him quietly, hugging him. “It’s beyond me why that monster of a man was blessed with such a wonderful son!” she went on: it has been many years since she let tears flow from her eyes on her son’s head.
“So how did you survive!?” Deus asked surprisingly, after restoring his breathing. Raising his head from her shoulder, he wiped dry his tearful eyes and gave her a gloomy look.
Klara relaxed her embrace, standing up and pacing back and forth. That question was utterly unexpected, especially at that moment.
“Enough!” she finally commanded. “Turn it off! He’ll be home in a moment, and he mustn’t find out about that.”
Jumping up, Deus turned the radio off. His ears still rang with his father’s slapping when he was caught listening to the radio. It happened on another Sunday, when Mateus was away in the neighborhood church he attended at least once a week. Although it was a few minutes’ walk from home, he carefully avoided walking to the church, always driving there. Showing off his car was his only purpose in going to church, definitely not a belief in anything. “Let them see,” he used to declare proudly, “that Germans are the best,” laughing straight at the parishioners’ faces. Yet that day, Deus recalled, Mateus left home without his car keys or wallet, just walking out. He came home without the alerting roar of the engine, surprising his son and beating him up, merely because the boy dared to defy his absolute ban on non-German music in the house. Remembering everything that took placed on that bloody Sunday, Deus realized his mother’s request was quite reasonable.
“So now, tell me all about it,” Deus demanded.
“About what?” Klara asked surprised, and the living room fell silent.
“How did you survive there?” Deus pressed on.
“Oh, dear child,” Klara exclaimed sadly, hugging him. “If Senhor Esperanca finds out what I told you, he’ll put us in both in hospital for a couple of days. We’d rather let him hear the forbidden music we listen to than the truth I’ve just told you!”
Klara spent the next day’s early morning reflecting on her conversation with her son. While she doubted whether she was right to reveal to him what she had, she nevertheless assumed she must start making her plans, or the boy, if he was indeed Herr Holland’s son as she assumed, might grow up a different person than he is now. If so, she feared he would listen to her no longer. Klara probed the other half of the bed, to check whether the man sleeping next to her was still there. She carefully avoided looking at him at night. Even when he forced himself on her several times a night, she just kept fixing her eyes on the ceiling or the pillow, whatever his desired position allowed her, pretending to enjoy everything he was doing to her. Probing for the man who shared her bed, Klara sensed he was gone, so she got up and went to the bathroom to get ready for the rising day. She truly loved that house, because it evoked so many pleasant memories. At wintertime, the fireplace reminded of her parent’s home in prewar Warsaw, while the bedroom with the double-arched window brought back memories from her grandmother’s summerhouse by the Baltic Sea, where winds used to blow so melodiously all day and night. Yet the bathroom was her favorite part of the house. She had never seen a mirror as large as the one on that wall, and she adored the light pastel floral tiles just as much. Above all, that impeccable, state-of-the-art bidet served as a constant reminder she could indulge in many luxuries other whores could only dream of. Examining herself in the mirror, Klara brushed her hair until it felt pleasantly soft. No matter how strongly she abhorred her face and hair, she still silently thanked her Jewish God every morning for them, remembering that only her hair and face made her stand out among all other camp’s women. The guards used to call her “button-nose,” and the Camp’s commandant used to hug her affectionately when she was stripped for inspection, showing her to the guards: “Look at this Jewess with the golden hair and button-nose,” before making her serve two or three of them every night. Yet this kept her alive, while her fellow Jews were killed off one by one and thrown into mass graves. “So, what can I tell him if he keeps asking me how I survived?!” Klara thought with disgust. “How can I tell that little angel that in order to survive, I had to serve the Germans’ lust?! How can I reveal to him that if I came to the Jewish State, my fellow Jews would have treated me like just another Nazi murderer?!” To banish these thoughts, she looked down, at the fancy floor tiles. She adored them, enjoying treading on them barefoot every morning and evening, even though they reminded her of the commandant’s office in one of the camps she survived. She suddenly recalled just another song banned by Klaus: “No, I regret nothing at all!” she reassured herself with the words sung by Piaf. “By God, I don’t!” she asserted aloud.
“Have you ever thought of killing yourself?” Deus enquired when she told him her whole story that afternoon.
“Only once a day,” Klara joked, smiling at him as if it was small talk.
“So how come you didn’t?” the boy pressed on.
“Since this would have given them victory over me, which I never let anyone achieve!” Klara declared, looking him straight in his eyes. In him, she could already recognize his father’s image trying to emerge from under the gentle façade he put on himself. “That monster is about to possess and doom us both, and I must act! It’s now or never!” Klara resolved, and then, overwhelmed with emotions, burst with a confession: “Deus, your father’s name is not Mateus at all. It’s…Holland. Herr Klaus Holland!”
Chapter 8
A property for sale
She knew there were always evil people, and will always be, therefore she was not one to waste her time on naïve hallucinations tha
t all evil will go away someday. She hated their guts: those hair-styled ladies, whose cheeks blushed red with the blood of the dead ones- those living corpses who used to look up heavenwards, as if wondering why the Almighty cannot stop at once that temporal atrocity. Oh, no, Klara had already realized that the abuses and beatings she received daily were to be a part of her life, a routine she should better learn to live with. She comforted herself, persistently and shamelessly, for every new mark of abuse on her body with the fact she could still breathe and stand on her own feet. Perhaps, it was exactly because she was so different from those women and never came to think like them, that Klara became the embodiment of deliverance for them, a momentary relief they all needed from their own daily abuses. She was a beacon in a dark, stormy sea, or better yet, a magic island impregnable to all enemies. With her permanent smile shining all over her face, one felt secure. “I guess this was also the last thought of all those condemned to the gallows or crematorium,” Klara used to think in those moments. “Those poor helpless things, huddling around me, and then joining the endless line, like sheep to the slaughter; they kept huddling and going away, to meet their doom.” Yet now, she believed nothing mattered anymore. This time, the incessant gush of blood she had just flushed down the drain was not due to any beating in her face or hunger leading to bleeding gums, as it was back then, in the Camp, when her hungry stomach howled days on end desperately. This bleeding Klara knew to herald her end, one suffered only by those facing death. Therefore, a few minutes before her last farewell to her beloved son, who wasn’t her flesh and blood at all, she revealed to him what she had withheld when he grew to become the youth and man she so adored.
“Back then, a train carried me far away, it felt like travelling to an entirely different world, which I can only remember vaguely. However, we have been travelling for many days from that infernal camp where the furnace stacks were relentlessly blowing the remains of my people in the wind to all corners of the globe, like petals,” she recounted, with tears gathering in her eyes, marking black spots on her fair skin. “’You and me have a little problem’, Herr Rosenwasser, the Commandant, told me one day,” Klara went on, her tears vanishing. “’Your loyalty to me seems boundless, I would even say, Wagnerian. Yet you, too, Klara dear, are chosen for extermination like all your fellow Jews. So someday, Klara darling, I, just like the rest of us, will have to answer for what we did to you’. “‘Either way’,” Klara went on confessing, “’tonight I’ll get you on a train away from here’.”
“Where will this train take me?” I wondered. ‘I don’t know’, the Commandant admitted, turning his eyes at the roses which bloomed every morning in front of his bedroom window, indifferent to all the infernal world around them. I hurriedly put on my nightgown, standing by the door. Then he approached me, stark naked, not at all embarrassed to demonstrate his lust. He attempted to give me one last fondling, yet I withdrew, letting his hand only caress my back, slightly tapping on my buttocks. ‘Go away now’, he told me, ‘Godspeed, Dear Klara’.” Clearing her throat a little, she went on: “I never loved any of them,” she declared with a broken voice, and then went on, her glorious smile waning away with every word she betrayed. “Not him and loved even less those I had after him.”
“What about Mateus? Have you ever loved him?” Deus interrupted her with trembling voice as if forgetting his minor role in her life story, hoping she will finally yield to his begging and complete that story she had started revealing to him many years ago, in his adolescent room.
“I hated him the most!” Klara declared, attempting in vain to revive her smile.
“Please, tell me,” Deus begged, “Tell me about my father.”
Klara raised her head, asking the young man sitting next to her to move where she could see him better. “Get me my bag,” she ordered quietly, and he jumped on his feet to obey her. “Here they are,” she said, salvaging two fade-colored photos from the abyss of her bulky side-bag she carefully kept hanging on her shoulder.
Deus smiled, recalling how she always carried that bag with her, even when she was cooking, seeing all his and her life in front of him. “As if it was sown to her side, inseparable even by surgery,” he kept reflecting.
“See?” she interrupted his contemplation. “It’s me and your father, under Jesus the Redeemer statue, on our second rendezvous.”
Deus smiled out of courtesy, failing to grasp what was so unique about that photo. “Well, many couples pose for the camera on their second rendezvous,” he thought.
“Not when it’s between a whore and a john,” Klara remarked loudly and clearly, as if reading his thoughts.
“What about the other photo?” Deus wondered, in an attempt to wash away his embarrassment at what she had just told him.
“Oh, this one is of our first rendezvous, shortly before your father ordered his little army to raze my parents’ home to the ground, uproot its foundations and obliterate any trace of them,” Klara told him, dropping the picture on her son’s leg as if exhausted of all vitality.
“Where was it taken?” Deus asked, terrified as if he had just faced the devil himself. “And what are those uniforms you were wearing?” he kept inquiring. Yet Klara, instead of responding, just closed her eyes, forcing a smile all over her face, and breathed her last.
“They say a picture is worth a thousand words,” I read later in a letter Deus had left me on the commode beside my bed. “Yet I learned that a picture can reveal an entire life story, with all its lies, evasions, cowardice and deception. I found one picture can unfold the story of a man you believed to have known all your life and expose any possible lie he had ever told you.”
Resting the letter on the commode, I lay down. Klara’s death, with all the traces she left in my house and my whole life, kept haunting me back then, the appearance of grief I forced on myself chasing away any thought of returning to normality. “It’s not me, it’s not Klaus Holland that mourns a dead whore,” I kept reassuring myself in such moments. My mind gradually absorbed the terrible truth that no loss of human life has ever moved or grieved me, unless Klara departed from my life, after shining in it for so many happy years.
As for Deus’ letter, I haven’t read it through yet, until this very day.
“Doctor, please look at these two photos,” Deus tried to win the attention of the teacher once he remained all alone in the classroom. “Could you please help me uncover the story behind them?” He pressed on, making the doctor lift up his eyes from his papers he had been collecting into his briefcase.
“Deus, my most diligent student,” Loewenthal, doctor of history, smiled to the youth standing nearby. “Why are you so long-faced today? Where is your usual smile?”
“My mother died a few days ago, leaving me these two pictures which I cannot figure out what they meant,” Deus explained.
“I’m sor…,” the lecturer started expressing his condolences, yet the young man interrupted him unceremoniously.
“Each picture was taken in a different place, country and an entirely different period,” Deus uttered with a sigh. “I see in both of them my father and mother, but, while in the latter one they look as if they know each other, the former one makes no sense at all, as if their meeting resulted from some terrible coincidence.”
Dr. Loewenthal looked straight into the eyes of his puzzled student, stretching his hand to him. “Please show them,” he asked commandingly, and Deus place the pictures in his hand. “Why can’t you ask your father what it meant?” the lecturer asked while examining the pictures, suddenly falling silent. “Oh, I see…,” he started, in a worried voice still not devoid of his self-presumed authority. “You certainly shouldn’t ask your father about it, it’s out of the question!” he concluded, while placing the photos, with shaky hands, into Deus’ stretched hands. “I cannot help you, young man,” he apologized, lowering his head. “My regrets for your mother, and my apologies for letting you down,” he
concluded quietly while keeping arranging the contents of his briefcase, opening and closing it frequently, as if to escape his disgrace.
“Actually, I think I can help you, in a way”. Loewenthal finally recalled what might have saved his face a little, raising his head excitedly, when he noticed his student was already behind the door. “Deus! Deus!” he cried to his student who was walking away down the corridor and stopped to wait for the lecturer to catch up with him.
“There is this professor in the United States who might help you. He used to be in charge of this Nazi War Crimes stuff in the US Army, but he is not doing it anymore. As far as I know, he is currently a lecturer in history in some small college. Some say,” Loewenthal remarked, “he may have gone a little insane as a result of some incident.”
“What incident?!” Deus wondered, immediately realizing this was absolutely beside the point. “How can I contact him?” he rephrased his question.
“I’ll give you his personal info tomorrow. I must have kept it since our last meeting, about three years ago, in some conference he addressed.”
Deus smiled, thanking Dr. Leventhal feebly.
“That picture…,” the doctor recalled, just when his listener was about to leave.
“What about it?” Deus betrayed a surprise.
“All I can tell you about it, judging from first glance, it was probably taken in mid-war, in some Jewish ghetto in Poland. It shows a high-ranking German officer, with a Jewish Policewoman, or a Kapo, of a lower rank. That’s all I can tell you right now, my friend.”
The next day, after the lecturer provided my son with all the information required for his American journey, they went their separate ways. The lecturer went on teaching history to students, while Deus went to my house, only to leave that letter on my commode, and hurry up straight to the airport.
