by Steven Uhly
When the images faded, leaving nothing but sorrow and pain, without beginning or end, like an eternity that existed because time had been extinguished from it, there was no Sturmbannführer Karl Treitz anymore.
Everything ceased to exist.
9
What luck, Frau Kramer thought, that a storm was blowing outside, that the sky was dark gray like the approach of night, even though the old grandfather clock would have just been striking one in the afternoon. That the snowflakes were dancing wildly, as if trying to make the house disappear behind an incessant glimmer. That her husband had gone out to the stable in good time.
When the contractions started, Herr Kramer had become restless, muttered something about some repairs and left the room in a hurry. She had thought he might react like that, but still, she was astonished to see her silent prediction come true so punctually. Maybe, she considered briefly as she stoked the fire to heat water in the kettle, this reliability—her private name for it—was the most astonishing thing about her husband. For she knew for a fact that it was absolutely spontaneous.
Now she was alone with Margarita. The young girl sat on a rough wooden stool they had fetched from the cellar because it was low enough. Margarita held up her skirts, her hands grabbing the material like a railing she could cling onto. Pain was written all over her face. Although the kitchen was not especially warm, a gleaming film of sweat had formed on her face. She stared spellbound at her bulging belly, the navel looked like a stopper under too much pressure, about to pop at any moment. There was a smell of iron and rust.
The contractions had set in a few minutes previously and now Margarita waited for the next wave. The first had been so strong that she imagined she was being carried by pain away onto a dark sea, without orientation or anything to hold on to. But at the same time she had felt two firm hands close around her shoulders, and a voice right by her ear, a voice like a gentle song, promising something, an end perhaps, an end to everything, or a beginning, she did not know exactly, but the voice kept singing, it was like a buoy she could swim toward as the wave rose, ebbed, then rose again. Suddenly the pain vanished and Margarita returned to the kitchen, to the wooden stool, as if she had been washed ashore.
Frau Kramer knew that it would be a long time before the child made its way out. She had been present at enough births, she had watched her mother give birth, her elder sisters, the women on the neighboring farms where they came from. Her own birth, as she called the birth of her son. The birth of her daughter, which neither she nor her husband ever talked about. Now, as she hurried to fetch clean towels and an old tub to wash the baby in afterward, pictures appeared in her mind’s eye as on a blurred daguerreotype, pictures of screaming women, screaming newborns, bloody pictures full of life, as she disinfected the rusty kitchen shears with vodka without taking her eye off Margarita, who was now sitting there as if listening inside herself, pictures neglected like a long-forgotten album, only opened when things repeat themselves.
Margarita tried to distract herself. She watched Frau Kramer’s assured hand movements, her footsteps from one side of the room to the other, focusing on the click-clack of her clogs as if it were the rhythm to a secret choreography in which everything had been planned in advance and nothing could go wrong and Frau Kramer was the main performer rather than her. But she was afraid, afraid of bursting, cracking open and never being able to put herself back together, afraid of disappearing and having to make way for a strange creature she did not know and which was now tearing away at her with unrestrained violence. Tomasz flashed through her mind, she saw the figure of her dead love like a picture on a postcard, all of this was his fault, he had inflicted this on her, why on earth had she got involved with him? Now he was dead and she had to cope alone with the consequences of her lost happiness. She felt anger fermenting inside her, anger at everything and everyone, she was about to scream with anger when the next contraction began. She screamed.
Herr Kramer sat on a straw bale in the stable, staring at the cow which was ignoring him. He was wearing an old brown anorak and holding a dark woolly hat in one hand. His gaze drifted across the pattern of her coat, dirty white with patches of light brown, the outlines of which were somehow blurred. He tried to identify the lines where the white finished and the brown began, but failed. There was no clear boundary, as if you could only see just before it and just after it but never the line itself. The cow exuded a serenity which did him the world of good. She just stood there, chewing, lowered her head from time to time, never too slowly, never too fast, gathered up a bit of straw, raised her head at precisely the same speed, grinding away languidly and thoughtfully, as if determined to rush nothing. The barn exuded a damp coziness, steam rose from the cow’s nostrils, marking its breath in the flickering light of the paraffin lamp on the ground beside Herr Kramer. Puffs of condensation drifted from his mouth too, both exhalations had own their particular rhythm, it was as if he and the cow did have something to say to each other after all. The wind blew against the barn door, which rattled continually, Herr Kramer could hear wood and metal, wood on wood, metal on metal.
It was only when Margarita screamed that he was awoken from his immersion. If anybody heard her now, it occurred to him, that would be the end of Margarita. If anybody heard her now, he thought, he would have to kill them, he would have to go to war, there would be no other option. He wound down the wick of the paraffin lamp until it went out. Then he stood up, fastened his anorak again, opened the stable door wide enough to slip out, a gust of wind rushed in, all of a sudden snowflakes were dancing around Herr Kramer, and over to the cow, which turned her head. He closed the door behind him and embarked on his first lap of the yard.
Outside the snow swirled so thickly before his eyes that Herr Kramer remembered more about his surroundings than he actually saw. The yard was in total darkness, no light seeped from the house, only the gray smoke rising from the chimney, snatched away in an instant, betrayed the presence of anyone inside. The snow creaked beneath his boots, the wind raged powerfully, generating a constant whooshing and a frequent rustling and crackling in the boughs of the trees. It was the perfect night for the birth of an illegal child of an illegal woman and—Herr Kramer paused briefly—illegal guardians. Out there, beyond the darkness, in the lit-up neighboring farmhouses, in the small and large towns of the Wartheland, there was nobody who could or would give them retrospective permission, nobody to whom he could offer a reasonable explanation. Of course, there was the pastor and a few other families who hid people, and perhaps others who might understand what was happening here. But none of them counted. The only people who counted were those they were hiding Margarita from. Herr Kramer understood them better than he would have liked. Words formed within him, words that he had heard about the Jews for as long as he had been able to think. Parasites. A word which time and again had stolen into his mind ever since Margarita had come to them. Pregnant. Carrying young. Rats. Rats multiply everywhere, they are impossible to eradicate. With a strange, inexplicable pain Herr Kramer felt how appropriate these words might be if only he would admit them, if only he gave way a little. He saw himself standing on a narrow ridge and imagined that, without the unshakeable kindness of his wife, which in the worst moments he called gullibility or naivety, he could fall, perhaps he would have fallen long ago.
In fact only quite recently he had stood on the edge of the abyss, over in town. He recalled, with a mixture of shame and amazement, the market square, the S.S. guards, himself slowly approaching the market where women shouted, each one louder than the next, even though they scarcely had anything on their stalls. The cow by his side had become impatient, she wanted to eat, but Herr Kramer had sat for ages at the foot of the town hall steps without doing anything, almost as motionless as the sentries at the top.
To begin with he had intended to wait for the Obersturmbannführer’s return. But time passed, the sun climbed sluggishly into the sky and the S.S. men waiting in the square, under the noisy instru
ctions of their commanders, filed into squads standing to attention, the Scandinavians here, the Germans there, beside them the Latvians, there were French and Dutch troops too, all volunteers trying to escape unemployment and hoping for rich pickings from the conquered territories. They wore gray uniforms with large sewn-on pockets and white, soft-peaked caps. Instead of a cap, some wore steel helmets, beneath which their small heads looked even smaller. Young as they were, they oozed excitement and optimism. Sub-machine guns hung from their shoulders, and like the helmets, they looked too big. Their voices were bright and when Herr Kramer closed his eyes he might have heard the boisterous departure of children being evacuated to the country, had he ever been present at such an event. But Herr Kramer had never witnessed an evacuation. So he closed his eyes and here and there heard a clear, young voice in which resonated something of the sing-song tone their own son had inherited from his mother.
Armored cars, scout cars, utility vehicles and motorcycle units in dark leather uniforms were stationary or maneuvered between the troops. They were positioning themselves in a large semi-circle around the market, as if their mission were to defend or besiege it. The square was full of men, Herr Kramer had never seen such a large S.S. company, but he was not surprised. They were not far from the front, in the distance a dull rumbling could be heard with ever greater regularity, as if a storm were raging beyond the horizon. But this was a quite different sound.
Himmler’s Hellish Host. The woman who had bought milk from Herr Kramer had called it that. “Look at Himmler’s Hellish Host,” she had said. “Only yesterday they were scrumping apples from my garden, scarpering the moment I came out with my broom.” Now they’d grown large helmets, long rifles and heavy boots, and they wouldn’t scarper anymore, they’d . . . But Herr Kramer saw older men amongst the very young ones, men of his own age, and some no longer looked fit enough to cope with a long march, he thought. All the same they stood there, glancing about silently, gazing into the faces of comrades who could have been their own sons, and saying nothing. Then, as if in response to a telepathic agreement, the S.S. began their retreat: no more cries, no more talking, only marching. It was a quarter of an hour before the last man had left the square via the main street, which led directly eastward to the edge of town, up the hill, through the forest and beyond. Soon nothing more could be heard of the S.S. Now the square looked empty and vast; the cobbles gleamed in the dampness that had refused to take leave of the town all day. In the center stood the market, small and lost.
The square looked like Herr Kramer felt, Herr Kramer thought about himself, thinking in the third person, as if he were communicating with a second person who may have been called Herr Kramer too. He was surprised that, for the first time in his life, he could associate a random image of the outside world with his inner emotional state. The square looked empty and vast. But he was even more surprised to find himself thinking thoughts he had never thought exactly in this way before, even though he sensed that there was nothing new in their content. He? Herr Kramer thought, as if peering over at himself, perhaps from there, in the middle of the market where, in the silence that followed the S.S.’s departure, the women now seemed to be screaming twice as loudly, the empty square like a stage for their raddled voices, worn-out bodies and broad, rustic faces. Over the course of the gradual withdrawal something had happened to Herr Kramer, which Herr Kramer had not noticed until now, something about himself which he was sketching in the third person to a second person using emptiness and vastness, yet at the same time unsure of what he actually meant.
So Herr Kramer was sitting at the bottom of the steps, looking across to the market women, while the cow next to him had become restless and was herself now staring at the women as if she knew exactly what was over there. But Herr Kramer was not yet able to heed the cow’s silent hints, she was thirsty now, too. He saw himself standing amongst the market women, looking back at himself with a peculiar expression of emptiness and vastness, as though at any moment he were about to say to a second Herr Kramer, What’s Herr Kramer doing sitting at the bottom of those steps, Herr Kramer? He’s making a fool of himself, entertaining the absurd idea of flogging a worthless grandfather clock at the market, whereas they only have eyes for his cow as if they knew exactly what’s what. Still Herr Kramer did not budge from his place at the foot of the steps, for he was thinking like someone thinking to a second Herr Kramer, What’s Herr Kramer doing in the market square, he’s sold his cow and the grandfather clock to boot, and now he’s clearing off to avoid being drafted into Himmler’s Hellish Host, how he sticks out like a sore thumb, one single man amongst so many rustic market women, in this entire town, which has turned female now that to a man the S.S. has marched out, there are just the two statues at the top of the steps, barely human, and Herr Kramer there on the market square, look at him staring across here, Herr Kramer!
Something had happened, Herr Kramer thought. His thoughts had never been as lucid as now, but neither had they been as incomprehensible, when Herr Kramer told Herr Kramer that he would advise Herr Kramer to leave his naïve wife, who was causing him nothing but trouble, and the Jewish rat that had crept into their house, to their own devices and save his own skin. That’s all very well, Herr Kramer, Herr Kramer had said. But why? Why, Herr Kramer had asked Herr Kramer. If Herr Kramer wants me to save my skin, then why? There’s absolutely nowhere to go, especially not for Farmer Kramer, an ethnic German, who’s never been anywhere further in all his life than Lübeck, and he only went there because he got married, to the woman he’s now meant to leave in the lurch because she’s naïve and wants to help a Jew on the run have her baby. A Jew of all people, the Herr Kramer with the market women bellowed back, and suddenly they were only two Herr Kramers, Because a decision’s got to be made, Herr Kramer told himself, getting up in his slow, sedate manner. As yet he had no idea what he was going to do, and he felt as if the other Herr Kramer had now detached himself from the throng of market women and was walking directly toward him, only without the cow, which Herr Kramer was leading by the reins and which was delighted finally to be heading in the direction of the aromas that had been making her restless for quite a while. When the Herr Kramer without the cow met the Herr Kramer with the cow, it seemed to them as if they were passing through a mirror, or perhaps that is just how it seemed to the third Herr Kramer, who had not moved, because he had still not reached a decision, because it was not within his competence, and because he would never come to a decision about decisions made in his name. Later Herr Kramer would say, I’ve always been a simpleton, but there was this one incident in my life. And then he would sink into his thoughts, with a distant expression on his face, and he would never get further than this point, for he would never be able to tell it as it was being told now, as Herr Kramer suddenly approached the market alone, unsure as to what he would do, but feeling odd as the only man amongst so many women, old ladies with voices like rust, young girls who, at every conceivable pitch, had already yelled the childhood out of themselves, and amongst so many women, old ladies and young girls shopping at this tiny market that had scarcely anything for sale, as Herr Kramer saw when he came closer.
Now he was round the front of the house. Small and old it stood before him in the nighttime shimmer of the white landscape. The roof was heavily burdened with a dense blanket of snow, the massive wooden door that led straight into the parlor looked as if had been crafted for dwarfs, and even the two kitchen windows, now hidden behind thick wooden shutters, seemed minute. A witch’s cottage, Herr Kramer thought, thinking of the two women inside doing something from which he was excluded. Bringing life into the world. All of a sudden he wished it was a boy, and was simultaneously startled by this wish, which felt as if his son were being born for the second time, as if everything were starting to turn again from the beginning, and at once he knew exactly why he had sold the cow at the market, even though back then he did not know, certain only that he would get no money for the cow, because rather than money pe
ople had all sorts of food and household goods such as beeswax and soap and fat and paraffin, because the women, old ladies, young girls, even ran back home to get more stuff they could offer him. It went on like this until the cart was full, while the cow chewed contentedly on the bale of hay which sat beneath one of the stalls. In the end the people laughed at him when he hitched himself to the cart and could hardly pull it. When, drenched in sweat, he made his way along the bumpy streets, pursued by small children who teased him, calling him donkey, and ox. When he had to take a rest every ten minutes. When he wondered whether he would ever make it home. When he sold the woman who had bought milk from him the grandfather clock for ten reichsmarks. When he struggled past the S.S. checkpoint and saw the looks of incredulity on the young men’s faces. When he almost collapsed with exhaustion. When his wife hurried out to meet him in the dark and the two of them pulled the cart back to the house together. When he sat for ages by the fire, unable to move, while his wife gave him hot broth to drink. I’m proud of you, she had said and, feeling ashamed, he had cast aside the memory of his doubts.
10
The contractions increased in frequency and strength. Frau Kramer, who had been measuring the gaps in between, stopped counting, for now she was able to feel the rhythm that had set in.
Margarita had slipped from the stool and now lay on the floor. She had no idea how much time had passed, nor did she bother to ask. The final push. This was the only thing on her mind as Frau Kramer talked and talked, and tried to make her more comfortable with blankets and towels. She carefully touched Margarita’s cervix and established that it had dilated slightly. But not enough yet.
