Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

by Anne Raeff

  When he’s sleeping, he looks dead already. His face looks like a pigeon’s picked almost clean by vultures. He doesn’t eat anymore, except for what they give him with the IV and the marzipan and chocolate I bring. Yesterday I brought back a wild assortment of goodies from the Bremen Haus and we had a feast, just the two of us. He ate a whole bar of Lindt and half a box of fruit-shaped marzipan.

  “Every so often Dr. Kiesslinger would give us chocolates and marzipan that the rare guests would bring for an insane relative,” I began my story once again while Tommy was still enjoying his marzipan fruits. “They always brought chocolate or marzipan for the men and flowers for the women. Dr. Kiesslinger would thank the guests for the gifts and promise to serve them with dinner, but he never did. Instead, we gorged ourselves on such delicacies late at night in our dark basement. It was all for the patients’ good since sugar could set them off, cause violent displays, interfere with medication. They had to be very strict about dinner, very regimented. Like an army. Even towards the end of our stay, an old woman arrived dressed all in black, Dr. Kiesslinger told us, with a box of chocolates. How she got her hands on such luxuries, no one knew, but the patients’ relations were all very well-placed, influential people. In fact, they were so important that, in order to stay in their good graces, Dr. Kiesslinger hung out a big Nazi flag that billowed in the mountain breeze from the front porch. There was also a flag in the dining room and in the ballroom, where patients inclined to dancing waltzed clumsily and tirelessly night after night.”

  “Were you ever able to leave the basement?” Tommy asked.

  “Sometimes when there was a full moon, we would climb out the window and walk around the woods. Karl collected little pieces of wood, which he carved into animals—wild boars, squirrels, birds. Our basement was full of them. I liked the wild boars the best. We would see them sometimes, though rarely, plunging in between the trees, tusks pointed at the ground. Towards the end, when food was especially scarce, Dr. Kiesslinger and Karl hunted them down in the night. Then we feasted on wild boar and potatoes for a week. But mostly we stayed inside. For four years. Four years of books and books and listening to insanity through the floorboards.”

  “I would have killed myself,” Tommy said adamantly.

  “It went by quickly. You wouldn’t think that it would, but when I think back on those years, I don’t remember being bored. We had so many books, and then Karl began teaching me everything he knew about medicine. If it hadn’t been for the war, I would still be an uneducated skeptic from the Second District. There were anatomy lessons and chemistry lessons, and Dr. Kiesslinger brought us rats and birds to dissect. And then Natasha died. That wasn’t her real name, but we called her Natasha for some reason. She was an industrialist’s illegitimate daughter, and when she died, Dr. Kiesslinger carried her into the basement himself. We used vinegar to preserve the corpse; we cut Natasha up, examined her insides, and, when we were finished with her, sewed her back together. I was good with my hands, Karl said. I would have made a good surgeon. We cut open her hand so that I could see the tiny, delicate bones like in Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson. It was beautiful—all the little bones fanning out from the wrist. Karl tried experiments on her heart. He removed the valves and replaced them with wooden ones he carved himself. We cut her heart in half to see what was inside. We examined the brain. I remember Karl joking about how he wished he had a live body in order to do experiments on the brain. That was always his greatest interest. We laughed about that at the time, so far away was such a possibility from our minds, not knowing that at that very moment a doctor of the Third Reich might have been carrying out such a cruel experiment on my sisters or one of Karl’s many cousins from Salzburg.”

  “And you and Karl?” Tommy asked.

  “Karl and I?” Sometimes it seemed as if Tommy was only interested in the parts of my story that contained Karl.

  “Yes, Mrs. Mondschein. Cooped up the way you were for four years, did something finally happen?”

  I couldn’t speak because of a bitter mixture of sadness and anger. My throat closed up, and I could feel tears forming in my eyes and rolling down my cheeks while Tommy held my hand and said, “I’m sorry, I was only asking.” We sat that way a long time—tears falling from my eyes, Tommy holding my hand. He asked whether I wanted to listen to music, but I shook my head.

  “It happened, didn’t it? I’m sorry, Mrs. Mondschein, to bring it up so suddenly.”

  “Suddenly? No, that’s where it fits in the story, and to think I almost got away with not mentioning it.” I laughed a little and Tommy gave me a Kleenex to dry my eyes.

  “Do you think he thought about Bruno every time?” Tommy asked.

  “No. There are all kinds of love.” And that made me start crying again. “Have you ever loved a woman, Tommy?” I asked.

  “Loved, or made love?”

  “Both.”

  “I love you, Mrs. Mondschein, ridiculous as it may sound. If I were healthy and you were young . . .”

  “My father always used to say, ‘If my grandmother had wheels, she would be a trolley car.’”

  “So, you were imprisoned in the basement for four years. That brings us to 1942, right?” Tommy said, ignoring my comment.

  “Yes, 1942. That was when they turned the place into a convalescence home for maimed soldiers. Well, for some it was a convalescence home and for others it was a place to die. Mostly they were pilots who had been shot down—burn victims, amputees, the paralyzed, the brain- damaged, the shell-shocked. There were a lot with shell shock. Dr. Kiesslinger needed help. He was a psychiatrist with only three nurses on staff, but the Reich could not provide him with more help—doctors and nurses were needed at the front.

  “From the basement we heard the hysteria level rising—the doctor screaming orders at the nurses and the nurses screaming while trying to carry a paraplegic to the toilet. One night, Dr. Kiesslinger came down to the basement in tears because his patients were dying from infections and his beloved insane were afraid of the new residents. They all hovered in a corner watching while the wounded soldiers screamed obscenities at them all.

  “After we had calmed Dr. Kiesslinger down and Karl had given him some advice about the infections and the paraplegics, Karl said that we had to figure out a way to help. Here we were, an experienced hospital doctor and a trained nurse (unorthodox as the training might have been) hiding away like rabbits while there were sick people who needed attention. I reminded Karl that they were Nazi soldiers, to which he replied that that was merely a twist of fate. So when Dr. Kiesslinger brought us our dinner the next night, Karl told him to go into the village and buy us new, countrified clothes. Our plan was to arrive the next morning, simply knock on the front door and say we had heard they were in need of a doctor and a nurse. And so we came, offering our services. I was actually wearing a Dirndl—you know, those Austrian dresses with aprons and silver buttons. Karl faked a limp and said that he himself had just returned to his native village from the front, where he had been hit by shrapnel and lost his leg. ‘This is my wife,’ he said, ‘the beautiful Inge.’ I could hardly keep from laughing every time someone called my new name.”

  “Wasn’t it dangerous?” Tommy asked. “You didn’t have papers, and what about when they brought more soldiers?”

  “They always came on Wednesdays. Very orderly and on schedule to the end, they were. So on Wednesdays we disappeared, went to visit our elderly parents, we told the soldiers—the ones who could comprehend. But no one cared, really. The insane hardly noticed our existence and the soldiers were too tired.”

  “Didn’t you feel like traitors, healing the enemy?”

  “They didn’t seem like the enemy,” I said. “They seemed like wounded animals that we had rescued from a trap. And strangely enough, they never spoke of politics. No talk of the Führer or the Jews or the Reich. T
hey talked about women they had slept with, Russian women mostly—soft, warm women who spoke words they could not understand, gave them vodka to drink, and asked for money.

  “There was only one who talked of the horrors of war. He was a young, shell-shocked soldier who took to waltzing with the original patients, preferred to eat his meals with them in the kitchen, and was always trying to get me to show him my breasts. ‘How would it hurt you to take off your shirt and just let me have one look? Just one look!’ he would beg. Now I see I should have done it because how would it have hurt me? It was such a simple request, and it would have made him so happy.

  “His name was Ignatz, and there was not much physically wrong with him. All he had suffered were bullet wounds in both thighs and both calves—self-inflicted wounds. They had sent him home since he was incapable of coping with the circumstances of war. His discharge papers said something to that effect. He used to hobble after me like I was his mother, holding clean bandages for me as I unraveled the old ones, pushing my supply cart. Karl used to laugh and call him my suitor. He followed me from bed to bed, telling me stories, horrible stories about trainloads of Jews being shipped from the ghettos to special camps. He told me about officers who used Jews for target practice. He told me about bodies piled high as the Stefansdom. He asked me if I had ever been to the top.

  “The funny thing is that I thought he was an anti-Semite. He told me the stories, pulling on my dress, laughing. Only now I know he wasn’t laughing, but crying. I don’t know why I never recognized his laughter as the eerie weeping of the insane. I told Karl about Ignatz and his strange stories, and Dr. Kiesslinger transferred him to the South Wing. A week after his transfer, he was found hanging from the ceiling, the patients of the South Wing using him as a tether ball. There was a note pinned to his suit. ‘I am not the one who is crazy,’ it said.”

  “So you didn’t know anything about what was going on?”

  “Nothing. When we first went into hiding, Dr. Kiesslinger would bring us the newspaper, but all of us, including Dr. Kiesslinger, soon tired of Nazi propaganda and lies. And still we could not recognize the truth when it was staring us in the face. We knew that things were bad, that everyone was in jail, but we could never have imagined the truth. And then you must remember, I didn’t want to leave. It was my time with Karl and his time with me. We wanted to prolong that. Both of us did, I think.”

  “So what happened? Who betrayed you?” Tommy asked.

  “Betrayed us? That’s much too dramatic a word for what happened. One day, after two hard years, some soldiers arrived with supplies. We didn’t know they were coming, and there was no time to hide since we were in the middle of an appendectomy. One of the original patients had appendicitis, and I was assisting Karl with the operation. We had just finished, but before we could wash our hands, one of the soldiers, an especially diligent one, asked for our papers. We requested his permission to wash our hands first, which he very gallantly allowed us to do. He watched us scrub them clean, taking an especially long time, although I don’t think either of us was thinking about how to get out of our situation. We just scrubbed. When we finished, we turned to him and said we had no papers.

  “‘Why?’ he asked.

  “‘We are Jews,’ we said, and he chuckled.

  “I’ll never forget that chuckle. It was as if he were laughing about a witticism he had heard at the theater. After the soldiers had finished unloading the supplies, we were taken away in their jeep. Dr. Kiesslinger tried to protest. ‘How can I run this god-forsaken hospital without them?’ he yelled. He had tears in his eyes. ‘Do the best you can,’ the soldier who had discovered us said and chuckled again in that same nonchalant way. ‘The war is almost over.’

  “We were taken to some kind of military offices where orders were given to send us to Pribor. Why Pribor, I will never know. Why not Auschwitz? Did they take pity on us, or was it a glitch in Nazi efficiency? Later, we found out that at that time—it was 1944—they were sending everyone to Auschwitz, so when we arrived at Pribor, there had been no new prisoners for months and our arrival was met with the excitement that a small village experiences when the traveling circus rolls into town. The prisoners leaned on their shovels watching us being led to the commanding officer’s headquarters. I felt for a moment that I was a politician coming to give a speech to a starving people. I wanted to wave and say something hopeful.”

  “Weren’t you scared?”

  “No, not then. That would come later, after they separated me and Karl. First we had coffee with the commanding officer himself. We all sat at a table and a very thin young woman brought in coffee and little cakes.”

  “You had coffee with him?” Tommy asked, like I had said I had kissed him.

  “Yes, he told us that most of the interesting people had died and there was no one left for him to talk to. We talked about medicine first. He was fascinated by Eastern medicine and philosophy and told us that he meditated for at least three hours a day. He said he could regulate his own heartbeat and that he had taught some of the male prisoners to do it, too. Apparently the survival rate of his students was much higher than that of the other prisoners. (Later I came to doubt he ever had the slightest interest in Eastern philosophy, that the thought of Eastern philosophy had just popped into his head and he thought it would be amusing to mention it.) Karl very calmly replied that the survival rate would improve much more if they provided the prisoners with enough food and warmth.

  “‘That is against our principles’ was the commanding officer’s calm response.

  “‘What principles?’ Karl asked him.

  “‘We are trying to exterminate the Jewish race, not sustain it,’ the commandant said simply.

  “‘Exterminate?’ Karl said, and I could see the veins in his neck throbbing as they did whenever he was upset.

  “‘It was a pleasure talking to you, Dr. and Mrs. Mondschein. I’m sorry that we cannot continue our conversation,’ the commandant said abruptly, and he kissed my hand, saying, ‘Küss die Hand, gnädige Frau.’ It was then that they separated us. Karl was taken to the men’s barracks and I to the women’s, but only after going through the usual procedure—my head was shaved, my clothes removed, my body disinfected, my arm tattooed, my body clothed in prisoner’s garb. I was assigned a bunk and told that in the morning I had better be ready to work. ‘Arbeit macht frei,’ the prison guard told me and laughed. Of course I had no idea at the time that that was the slogan at every concentration camp.

  “In the barracks, everyone was lying on bunk beds, too tired and too miserable to move or talk. I stupidly smiled and nodded a greeting as I passed each one on the way to my own little space in a middle bunk. My immediate neighbors stared, pressing their bodies against the wall as far away from me as possible. That night and for three nights after that, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed awake, hoping to hear someone cry out in her sleep or moan or weep or toss about fitfully, but all I heard was an occasional weak cough.”

  “No one talked to you?” Tommy asked.

  “No one talked to anyone. It was like living in a world of deaf mutes. They all stared straight ahead, and when our bread was brought, they devoured it like retarded children eating cake.”

  “Did you ever see Karl?”

  “Every once in a while I would glimpse him from a distance while we were out working. On those days I was ecstatic, ready to jump up and down or waltz around with joy. Of course I didn’t. It would have been the ultimate cruelty.”

  “Are you sure they didn’t speak to each other? Maybe they hated you because you were still healthy.”

  “At first that’s what I thought, but I watched them vigilantly. I was the first one up in the morning; I watched them with the regular efficiency of a scientist, and all I noted was that every once in a while, they would ask each other for help using a subtle movement of the hand or an almo
st imperceptible nod. At first I knocked myself out trying to chop as much wood as possible so that there would be less work for them. I soon realized our work was never finished. In the mornings, we had to carry the dead on carts to the crematorium. Our camp had once been a very efficient work camp, a rubber factory actually, and it still was, although it only operated on a small scale by that point. The Germans were running out of supplies and money. Only the strongest men worked in the rubber plant. Otherwise, the orders were to ship everyone to Auschwitz, to empty the camp as quickly and efficiently as possible. And the women were in charge of wheeling to the crematorium those who would not need to be shipped to Auschwitz. Everything you have heard about the smell of burning flesh is true.

  “Then, at about mid-morning, when we were good and tired, they made us run races, the guards placing bets on us, screaming, ‘Run, you little whores.’ Sometimes they shot into the air to scare us into running faster, and sometimes they fired to kill. I never won a race because I didn’t want to give them that satisfaction. I just made it a point to come in second or third. The slowest ones, the ones who could hardly stand up anymore, were weeded out and packed into the train that left each afternoon promptly at one o’clock—for Auschwitz.”