by Anne Raeff
“Nor mine,” I said and we both laughed.
“Mrs. Mondschein, could you prop me up on these pillows? I feel the need to be upright.” It was easy to move him because he was so light and the distance was not at all far. Then, there he sat, upright. “Now, Mrs. Mondschein, let’s continue with your story before I fall into another coma.”
“I think we have finally come to Clara’s birth. The last three days of my pregnancy I did not leave my bunk. I decided that since I had come that far, it was my duty to protect the baby. I had not expected to be able to carry her to the end and during those last couple months, I waited for something to happen. I would awaken in the middle of the night, my heart beating violently and I would feel for blood, but my hands always were dry and then I would feel her kicking softly as if to remind me that she was still there, still planning on going through with it. The other prisoners brought me food and water and the guards ignored my absence from work. I am sure they had orders from the commandant because they were very efficient about keeping track of us, recording the deaths in a leather-bound ledger and counting and recounting us throughout the day.
“The night of Clara’s birth it snowed and the usual sound of the guards marching back and forth outside the barracks was muffled by fresh snow. I concentrated on those muffled footsteps through the long night of labor. The other prisoners stood around my bed as if they thought they could create a human wall to protect Clara and me from harm. They did not touch me, nor did they speak, but they stood three rows deep around my bunk. When a woman grew tired, another would replace her. It got closer and closer to dawn and I knew that if I did not deliver before the guards woke us to begin our long day, we would both be lost, so I pushed and pushed, biting my own hand to keep myself from screaming.
“When Clara emerged, the women washed her as well as they could, and one of them—she had red hair and for some reason I thought that it was because she had red hair that she was chosen—bit the umbilical cord in half with her front teeth. After that I slept and when I woke in the morning, Clara was sleeping on my breast. Outside, the camp was covered with snow and I watched the prisoners cutting wood and shoveling, working slowly, like sleepwalkers. In the evening the prisoners brought bread and, since my body was too undernourished to produce milk, I chewed the stale bread and spit it directly into Clara’s little mouth. The next day, though I was afraid to leave Clara alone in the bunker, I went back to work because I was more afraid that my reprieve could be withdrawn at any moment and that the guards would come for both of us.
“And then, not even a week after Clara was born, the Russians arrived. We had no idea they were coming, no idea that we were so close to the end because even I had come to believe that there would be no end, that this would be our lives and then, sooner rather than later, we would die.
“Everyone was afraid of the Russian soldiers. The women hid under their thin blankets, refusing to meet their liberators face to face. Some of them had to be dragged out into the sunlight, kicking but not screaming because they were still mute. It took over a week for them to begin talking again, slowly and simply at first like small children, uttering only nouns like bread or soap or tree and then adding more words each day as if they were rediscovering the world. They took their bowls of soup from the Russian soldiers with trembling hands and huddled in faraway corners, eating as fast as possible in order to be prepared for the Russian attack, which they had no doubt would come when they least expected it.
“Karl and I were the lucky ones again—the only surviving couple at Pribor. When the Russians had secured the camp, they opened the gates of the men’s compound first, and the men stumbled across the snow-covered field that separated us from them. We watched them walking from behind our barbed-wire fence. They spread out along the field as if they were trying to free themselves of each other. Some of them were too weak to make it through the snow and they collapsed in the field and the Russian soldiers carried them back to their bunkers. Karl was ahead of the others. He was stronger and, though he did not walk quickly, he walked steadily. Every few steps, he looked back to see how the others were doing and he paused a few times as if he were thinking about going back to help them, but then he would begin walking again. When Karl had almost reached the end of the field, the Russians opened the gates to the women’s compound and we flowed out, like an oil spill, seeping through the gates and then bobbing at the edge of the snowy field, looking for familiar faces, waiting. Karl saw me then and he lifted his arm to let me know he had seen me and I lifted Clara as high as I could and stood there, holding her high in the air until he reached us. Then I handed Clara to him and she looked so small in his arms even though he was so thin a summer breeze could have toppled him.
“It was almost too much for the other prisoners—our intactness, Clara. They avoided us and we avoided them, yet sometimes I noticed women furtively glancing at Clara as they walked by us slowly, heads down. The soldiers were afraid of all of us, afraid of the way you could see the outlines of our skulls in our shaved heads and the way we munched our bread, hunched over like small rodents. On the first day of our liberation the soldiers made us a huge meal—real soup with meat and potatoes and lots of good black bread—and they made us drink vodka with them. Karl warned us all to stick to one bowl of soup and to avoid the vodka. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the soldiers. ‘Why don’t you drink for us.’ He tried his best, but many of the prisoners could not stop themselves. They had one bowl and then another and then another, and they stuffed themselves with bread. ‘Please.’ Karl pulled on the young soldiers’ sleeves. ‘Don’t give them any more to eat.’ But they thought he wanted more and they brought us more bread and they took long swigs of vodka and they sang mournful Russian tunes into the night. The prisoners sat and watched the Russians silently as if they were a movie.
“And then at around midnight their shriveled stomachs began exploding; the vomiting started and the gasping for breath and the writhing on the ground and clutching. The soldiers, all of whom were drunk, dashed from prisoner to prisoner, pulling them up onto their feet, slapping them on their backs. One soldier turned a woman upside down and shook her, mouth to the ground as if he thought all the poison would flow out of her like blood flowing from the neck of a butchered lamb. Sixteen of us died that first night, and in the morning the hungover soldiers wept when they saw what they had done. Karl told them that it wasn’t their fault, but they didn’t understand what he was saying.
“That first week more of us died, mostly of diarrhea. You cannot imagine the smell. We dragged the bodies over to the edge of the running field and left them there because no one had the energy to dig graves. And after a week, the Russians told us they had to move on. They were heading north to Poland. ‘Who is going to Poland?’ they asked. ‘We can take you.’ But no one wanted to go to Poland, so they gave us bread and water and pointed us west, and those of us who were strong enough started walking west. The rest stayed behind, waiting for the strength to leave. I wonder how many of them ever found it.
“We started out together, but Karl and I were able to walk faster and longer than the rest, so we kept having to stop to wait for them to catch up. Karl tried carrying some of the weakest ones, but they screamed with pain when he picked them up, complaining that they could feel their organs swishing around inside them like a balloon filled with bile as he walked. ‘Not so fast,’ they yelled until he was hardly moving at all.”
“So they felt that, too,” Tommy said.
“You can feel your organs?” I asked, surprised because I suppose I had not believed them. I had thought they were just too tired to move.
“Even when I shift from lying on my right side to lying on my left side, I can feel them all shifting with me, piling over to the other side. And they make a horrible glug-glug noise, which is much worse than hearing your own heart beat. That’s why I can only lie on my back now.”
“I’m s
orry.”
“Sorry for what?” Tommy asked.
“For not believing them.”
“I wouldn’t have believed them, either,” he said.
“We kept with them all day and we slept near them, but not among them, that night. They all huddled together as if they weren’t ready to give up the overcrowded barracks we had suffered in for so long. Karl thought we should sleep among them so as not to set ourselves apart, but I couldn’t. ‘I don’t want to disturb them in the night if Clara needs something,’ I said, but we both knew it had nothing to do with Clara.
“We were up at the crack of dawn, anxious to get as far away as we could from Pribor, but it was impossible to rouse the others. We poked at them and sprinkled water on their faces, but they just looked up at us for a few brief moments like opium addicts. We shouted, clapped our hands, but they refused to budge, so we left them there under the trees. Sometimes I dream I return to that place and find their skeletons picked white by birds, and I gather all their bones and put them in a burlap sack and sling the sack over my shoulder and start walking down the road towards the west. Then I wake up thinking that we should just have buried them right there. It was a beautiful spot.
“After having walked at a very brisk pace for only two hours, we came upon a village but were afraid to enter it, so we hid behind some trees until it had been dark for a very, very long time. Then we tiptoed slowly and very quietly through the town. The stone buildings seemed to move towards us as if they were inviting us inside. There was a smell of somewhat distant manure and wood burning that made me want to run up to one of those thick doors and bang and bang until an old peasant woman let us in and asked us to sit around a table near a fire and fed us thick slabs of black bread and poured us glasses of sliwowitz. But we were still afraid of food and trusted no one. I imagined the three of us tucked in under an eiderdown comforter, falling asleep as soon as our heads hit the pillows and then waking up in the middle of the night clutching at our stomachs, choking on bloody vomit, and then seeing the old peasant woman washing the sheets in a cast-iron cauldron full of boiling water while her sons dug our graves. So we walked on until we spotted a horse-drawn cart in the distance coming our way.
“I think we walked like this for three or four days and then we had neither food nor water left. If it had been just Karl and me, we could have walked longer, but we couldn’t keep on starving Clara and decided that at the next village we would have to ask for help. We chose a very modest house towards the end of a little lane. It appealed to us because, unlike the other houses in the village, this one was not decorated with little painted flower pots waiting for spring flowers. I don’t know what we thought the lack of flower pots symbolized—perhaps that the house belonged to someone very old and crazy. Perhaps we thought the war might have passed the occupant by as he sat in a chair by the fire.
“You can imagine my surprise when a young, beautiful woman opened the door. She neither smiled nor frowned when she saw us, although I imagine we were quite a frightening little group. She spoke but, of course, we didn’t understand Czech, so we smiled and made cups of our hands, asking for water. She kept talking in a soft, toneless voice as if she were reciting a prayer out of habit rather than out of faith. We made cups of our hands again, and I held Clara up for her to see because I wasn’t sure she had noticed that we had a baby with us. I pulled back the thin blanket from Clara’s face. The woman recoiled from Clara, so I covered her face quietly and held her to my breast. Up until that moment I hadn’t thought about what she looked like, and if you had asked me to draw her, I wouldn’t have been able to render a likeness. Perhaps it was a kind of defense mechanism that my brain had conjured up so that I would not be frightened of my own creation. She looked like one of my favorite Vermeers at the Met—a portrait of an embryonic young woman with a very high forehead and skin so translucent it has a greenish hue. Have you ever seen it? It doesn’t have any objects or cloths or windows or maps in it—just the head of a woman, her big round eyes staring right out at you.”
“I’m sure I’ve seen it, although I can’t seem to find the image. I just see that woman with the jug,” Tommy said, staring up at the ceiling as if he were trying to see the young girl up there.
“From that day on, I could see the blue veins at her temples and the gray-green puffiness around her eyes, and my love for her took a leap, from being catlike, with me instinctively picking her up by the neck and removing her from danger, to human. It was as if I could sense Clara’s sadness and I wanted more than anything else to protect her from it, yet at the same time I wanted to hold on to it because Karl and I were too tired to feel sadness ourselves and would have walked and walked without stopping, without eating, until we came to a place where the people made us stop. Whether they put us in another camp, shot us in the back, or offered us éclairs and hot chocolate, we wouldn’t really have noticed a difference. Only Clara kept us from walking off the edge of the earth.
“So we followed the young woman into her house, and we sat on wooden benches by a fire, only there were no thick slices of black bread. ‘The Russians,’ she said and opened up all of her cupboards so we could see that there was nothing inside. Then she said some more things we could not understand and we all laughed about not being able to understand, and then she went to the kitchen and brought back a huge bowl filled to overflowing with robust wild mushrooms. She set the bowl down in front of us so we could examine them, and then she took the bowl away. After about ten minutes, she came back with the same bowl only now, after being cooked, the mushrooms looked meager and sickly. The woman gave us two spoons and watched silently as we ate, turning away when I fed Clara the already chewed mushrooms from my own mouth. We ate slowly, one limp piece at a time, not only because there was so little but because it tasted so good.
“‘What if they’re poisonous?’ Karl asked when he had finished half his mushrooms.
“‘Then we will die,’ I said, and we both laughed because it seemed so ridiculous to have survived everything and then to die from eating mushrooms.
“We left a small portion and offered it to the woman, but she declined, which made us suspicious again, but we finished them all anyway. After our meal the woman made up a pallet of eiderdowns and pillows for us on the floor near the fire, gave us a bundle of old but clean clothes, and boiled water for our baths. We took off the layers of rags in which Clara was swaddled. Her little body was covered with yellowish blisters and Karl punctured them all with a sterilized knife, and then we washed out the wounds and wrapped her in a clean towel. Even then she neither cried nor flinched; she just lay quietly while Karl worked and the woman watched us without speaking. Karl and I took our baths in private.
“Taking that first bath was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. I hadn’t seen myself in all that time and expected the worst, expected my skin to be bored through by parasites and my flesh to be filled with tiny eggs. I thought if we were starving to death, we could eat those eggs and they would burst open in our mouths like caviar. But there were no eggs, no insects, just dirt and a scaly red rash that lingered for months and only started itching that day I took my first bath and discovered it. Karl had it too and said it was from the cold and malnutrition and that it would go away, which it did, eventually.”
“You know, I haven’t had a bath since I’ve been in the hospice. Do you think I should request one?” Tommy wondered dreamily as if he had said he hadn’t been to the beach in a long time.
“You could get pneumonia again.”
“That didn’t stop you and Karl.”
“No, it didn’t, but your case is different,” I said feeling immediately bad about using the word case.
“You’re right. I sometimes forget that I am not like you, but like your fellow prisoners, and now I have interrupted you again. So were the mushrooms poisonous?” he asked as if he hoped they had been, but knew
they hadn’t.
“No, they weren’t poisonous, although I couldn’t sleep that night and was aware of every strange pang and rumble in my stomach. Once I was sure I couldn’t breathe and woke Karl up to tell him. ‘It’s just the weight of all these covers,’ he said and fell back asleep. And in the morning we weren’t dead at all.
“We had planned to leave in the morning, but when we opened our eyes, we were not alone. About fifteen villagers, women and old men, were standing in their coats at the edge of our pallet, staring down at us.
“‘What do you want?’ Karl yelled and they backed up slowly, as if we were dangerous animals that needed to be subdued. Then they started whispering to each other, and we lay there, immobile, while they whispered. Finally, one of them stepped forward. He was an older man and he took off his hat and asked us in very bad German where the Russians were. We told them we didn’t know. Then the old man went back to the huddle of villagers and told them what we had said, and they whispered some more until finally our hostess led them out of our room so we could make ourselves ready for the day. As we put on our new old clothes and washed Clara’s wounds, we could hear them in the kitchen. Their voices had turned from whispers to yelling.
“I was sure they were planning our deaths and envisioned us hanging from a tree, but Karl insisted they had no reason to kill us.
“‘As if that has ever made a difference,’ I replied. ‘Maybe they want to do their patriotic duties, one last hurrah before the Russians come.’
“‘Can’t you feel their fear?’ Karl asked.
“‘No,’ I said because it was impossible for me to feel any fear but my own.
“‘Let’s try to talk to them,’ he said calmly, and we went out to join the villagers in the kitchen. The old man told us about what had happened when the Russians came through their village. They had taken more than food and he nodded sadly at the women. It was time to leave, they told Karl. They had packed a cart with the few things that remained. They wanted to know whether we were heading west and, if so, whether we could be their guides.
