by Tessa de Loo
‘Wouldn’t you like to … to …’ Lotte whispered with an ironic laugh in the woman’s direction, ‘I mean … before the meal …’
‘Me? Say grace before the meal?’ Anna draped the salmon pink napkin on her lap. ‘Understand me correctly, I do still believe, in my own way, but I renounced the institution of the Church long ago. Yet I have not forgotten what the Church did for me, then. Don’t underestimate how far Church and society were caught up in one another. Those were quite different times – quite different.’
Jacobsmeyer summoned help from the child welfare agency. They sent a social worker to the farm. Aunt Martha started on about Anna, who was eavesdropping behind the door. All that time her poor aunt had been harbouring a viper: the child did not want to be good for anything, she associated with older men – she was a whore, young as she was. To Anna’s amazement, the social worker encouraged her aunt uncritically in her philippic. Her last hope was flying away. The woman had come to help Aunt Martha, not her. When she had finished letting off steam, the woman said calmly, ‘Now I’d like to talk to the child alone.’ Anna fled back to the kitchen. With a satisfied laugh around her mouth, Aunt Martha came to fetch her. Anna went into the living-room fatalistically – Aunt Martha went outside, confident of her case. The social worker closed the door behind Anna, stood there with her back against it, opened her arms and said, ‘Trust me, I will help you.’
Beneath her gaze, which was signalling that she could see through Aunt Martha, Anna’s resistance melted. She understood that someone was throwing her a lifeline, someone for whom a nod was as good as a wink. A representative from another world who was objective and reasonable and perhaps (she hesitated) also more loving. Outside, she saw her aunt picking pears, right under the window, in the hope of catching something of the tirade that would be meted out to the young cuckoo. Anna relaxed. Was her serfdom really over? Would she no longer be at the mercy of the capriciousness and mistrust of a mentally deranged pear-picker?
She was plucked out of the house as she was, in her farming kit. She had a nourishing meal at Jacobsmeyer’s. He gave her his blessing and money for clothes and waved to her as she rode in a car for the first time in her life out of the village on the Lippe. Up and down hills, through forests that flamed yellow and orange, until a village appeared, its houses ascending high up the slope, to come as close as possible to the ambit of the church towering over everything, and a half-timbered castle with dozens of tiny windows and slate roofs. Leaning against the church was a convent of the Poor Clares. A nun in a black habit hurried through the gate to meet them with open arms.
Compresses of crushed comfrey on the blue bruises, ointment on the cuts in her hands, age-old Franciscan calm, carefully conserved within the thick walls, foaming milk in large mugs, the unselfish devotion of the nuns, who fluttered along the lofty corridors like black butterflies. From her bed she could see the castle of Baron von Zitsewitz – a name from a fairy-tale, like the Marquis of Carabas. She had literally come straight into the lap of the mother church, together with a group of fellow sufferers, chosen ones, emergencies. They were silent about their pasts, as though by tacit agreement. From the nuns they learned the skills with which they would cope in the world later on: sewing, cooking, looking after children and even serving at table. There was a room specially for them where people from outside came to eat at lunchtime, well-fed guinea pigs (Mittagstischgäste), who consumed their experiments with relish.
That even greater preparations were being made beyond the convent wall did not get through to them. There was no radio, no newspaper, only a gramophone with a stock of fashionable popular songs, to which they danced with the younger nuns – beneath the disapproving gaze of a cardinal in purple formal robes whose portrait hung over the fireplace. The tango ‘Was machst du mit dem Knie, lieber Hans’ made Anna most breathless; she circled across the dance floor at a wild pace, her stockings sagging, her partner’s habit clutched against her calves. It was the top hit in the convent until one day Anna listened carefully to the words and discovered that Hans was using the tango as an alibi to drive his knee like a wedge between the thighs of his partner on each upbeat. She warned Sister Clementine, who was swirling round in the arms of a sturdily built orphan girl, a blissful smile on her lips as though she were in the arms of her heavenly bridegroom. The record was put on again; still breathing hard, the nun listened to the words with her eyes closed. She swayed her head gently in time. Blushes slowly appeared on her cheeks, her mouth dropped open. The last sounds left a hideous silence behind. With raised head, Sister Clementine walked to the gramophone and lifted the record off the turntable with two outstretched fingers. Following Hans’s example she raised her knee. Without scruple she brought the record down on it and broke it in two.
Anna’s stained honour had been avenged, but she soon discovered that far greater humiliations threatened it. One of the Mittagstischgäste was a forester, a middle-aged man, with a jagged purple scar precisely in the middle of his bald head, as though a drunken surgeon had undertaken an unsuccessful attempt at lobotomy. Whenever anyone’s eyes fell on it he declared casually that it had been a piece of shrapnel during a night-time patrol. Anna served him with scrupulous respect, All Quiet on the Western Front still in the back of her mind. That pleased him; familiarity would have offended him. One day with an authoritative nod he beckoned her over. He seized her by one wrist. ‘And …’ his eyes shone suggestively, ‘have the nuns let their hair grow?’ ‘What do you mean?’ With vicarious shame Anna thought of Sister Clementine’s cropped head that she had once seen, moved by its vulnerable nakedness. ‘Because soon, when the convents are shut down, they’ll all have to get out of their habits,’ he said with a greasy laugh. ‘Then we’ll really see what they’ve got for legs!’ Her wrist was released. Her serving tray with full dishes was trembling in her hands; she crashed it down on one of the tables to be rid of it and ran blindly out of the dining-room without bothering about the other guests. Her pulse was throbbing at her temples, the clumping of her feet resounded through the lofty corridors. She knocked sharply on Mother Superior’s door. Once inside she forgot all the rules of politeness and, out of breath, blurted out the self-evident expectation that the filthy Mittagstischgast would immediately be dragged out by his pigs ears from behind his piled-up plate, through the corridor of the convent and deposited on the granite pavement, after which the bang of the closing door would resound in his ears for days to come.
‘Gently, shhh, quiet now …!’ The abbess raised her hands beseechingly: ‘What exactly did he say?’ ‘That all the sisters must take off their habits because the convents are being closed. How can he say such a thing?’ panted Anna. Mother Superior walked softly to the door, which Anna had left open, and shut it carefully. ‘Let us pray,’ she said, turning round. ‘How did he get that idea?’ Anna insisted stubbornly. The abbess sighed. ‘That doesn’t concern us, it is all politics. They have all chosen that Antichrist together – he wants to close the convents and churches. Let us pray that it will never happen.’ ‘Antichrist?’ Anna stammered. The forester acquired horns on either side of his scar. Mother Superior put an arm round her shoulders. ‘Adolf Hitler,’ she said gently.
A short circuit in Anna’s head. A photograph, Bernd Möller, Uncle Heinrich, whizzed past each other, contradictory, evil. The champion of the poor and the unemployed turned out to be a destroyer of churches and convents. Her uncle was still being proved right – but did that justify the assault? How could she have been so mistaken? She was ashamed – at the same time she felt contempt for this titanic idealist’s arrogance: how could he do anything to Christendom, or the Church, which had already held out for nineteen centuries? God would intercede personally, she was sure. That’s why Mother Superior said ‘Let us pray’. A strong faith; no attacker would be a match for it. The abbess went to the window and looked outside, a halo of yellow lime leaves around her wimple. ‘What we have discussed here,’ she said calmly, ‘stays within the four walls of m
y room. Never talk about it with the others, you will get yourself into trouble.’ Anna nodded, although she was not afraid of anyone.
The first month of the year 1933 was almost over when Anna looked down below out of a window on the first floor, and saw a gigantic flag flying where two roads crossed at the centre of the village. She recognized the spiders’ legs with the points bent to the right; they rotated before your eyes if you looked at them for long. She hurried irreverently down the broad oak stairs, her footsteps rattling through the staircase. ‘A flag!’ she cried, storming into the refectory where two nuns were laying plates on the table with the precision of draughts pieces. ‘They have hung out that flag, in the middle of the village, and no one is taking it down!’ Mother Superior came in because of the racket, a soothing expression on her face. ‘If I were a boy,’ Anna raised her hands, ‘it wouldn’t be up there any more!’ ‘But you are a girl,’ the abbess reminded her, ‘so behave like one.’ ‘But that flag …’ Anna spluttered, pointing through the walls at the thing that taunted the sky. Mother Superior shook her head. ‘Anna you lack moderation. There are two possibilities for you: either you will become something formidable or you will end up in the gutter, there is nothing in between.’ ‘But the Nazarene said …’ she stammered, gasping for breath, ‘… “because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth” …’ The abbess laughed indulgently. ‘Ach Anna, we could take that flag down, but what it stands for … we are powerless against that. Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich today.’
Annoyed, Anna ran outside. The word ‘powerless’ coming from the mouth of the Mother Superior was an insult addressed to the Almighty. The gate of the convent closed behind her with a crash. The road led straight down to the crossroads. She stopped beneath the flagpole. She threw her head back. It was no more than a piece of cloth. If it rained it would get wet, in the wind it would flap. There wasn’t much left of the provocative character she had seen from the window on the first floor. From close up, as an object, it rated disappointing. She turned round in order to see the convent better for once. But it paled into insignificance, together with the church, the naked treetops, the January greyness of walls and roofs, in comparison with the red-white-black decoration on the spires of the fairy-tale castle. Von Zitsewitz had also hung out the flag.
7
‘They were so good to me …’ Anna took her leave from the nuns. Her education in the convent had been completed, the tuberculous cold treated, she had gained fifteen kilos, a layer of hard skin had grown over her inner injuries. It gave her an unprecedented self-assurance to have been brought back from absolute rock bottom. She returned home, down from the mountain to the river. She would not allow herself to be taken advantage of again. Uncle Heinrich – joy at her return gleamed through his reticence. Aunt Martha – her jealousy at Anna’s rosy appearance, the frustration that she was alive at all, gleamed through her forced self-control. But she kept quiet: the eyes of the world (pastor, child welfare) were directed at her from now on.
During Anna’s voluntary exile a change had crept into the village. Ever since farmers’ sons with their own horses had been able to enlist in Hitler’s élite corps, the Reiter SA, its image had risen to staggering heights. Moreover, he had upgraded the farming classes to the honorary first rank of providers in the Third Reich, the pivot on which society turned, the Reichsnährstand. Former school comrades, brothers and lovers of Anna’s former friends – almost everyone joined the SA. No longer did anyone say: you don’t do a thing like that. Only in the Catholic Congregation of Virgins, to which she had belonged since her confirmation at fourteen, were there some girls who shared Anna’s distaste. The leader of the congregation, Frau Thiele, a teacher in whose class they had all been, had hastily set up a singing group, a dance group and a theatre group, to prevent her pupils going over to the Nazi youth organization, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, BDM, which had beaten her to it. Nevertheless her days as leader were numbered. A decree obliged her to join the National Socialist teachers’ union. A subsequent decree forbade members of this union from being active in church organizations.
Jacobsmeyer took Anna to one side after mass. ‘Listen Anna,’ he looked at her conspiratorially, ‘this time I want to ask something of you. Will you replace Frau Thiele as leader of the congregation?’ ‘I?’ Anna’s voice caught. ‘I’m just eighteen, they won’t take me seriously!’ ‘Shhh,’ he calmed her, ‘I haven’t finished yet. At the same time you and a group of trustworthy girls will join the BDM.’ Anna’s mouth dropped open. He unfolded his plan, smiling slightly. To infiltrate the girls’ section of the Hitler Youth, to bring him reports of everything that went on there and, finally, with God’s help, to undermine the local section from within. ‘You can do it Anna. I’ve known you a long time.’ Anna stared at him with bewilderment. This representative of God, so trusted and reliable in the incense-scented robe in which he had just conducted the mass, would shrink from nothing! It filled her with pride that he had selected her for this mission. At last she could do something instead of remaining stuck in the fatalism that Mother Superior had preached. ‘Will you do it or won’t you?’ Jacobsmeyer asked.
One Sunday she sang and danced for the Catholic Church, the next for the Hitler Youth – in a dark blue skirt with white blouse and brown jacket, the neckscarf through a ring-shaped toggle of plaited leather links. Jacobsmeyer was well rewarded. They received political training and learned how to write press reports. Anna was praised for her ability with the pen. Uncle Heinrich looked the other way, having been put in the picture by Jacobsmeyer. One sunny day in April the headmaster, who remembered Anna as an exceptional pupil, cycled out to the farm. ‘I’ve brought you something.’ He took a thin book out of his briefcase. ‘Will you learn this by heart? The fact of the matter is a big celebration is being organized on the first of May: a play is being staged.’ Anna wiped her muddy hands on her overall and leafed through it quickly. Uncle Heinrich came over suspiciously. ‘The Kreisleiter, the political chief of the district, is looking for a Germania …’ The teacher picked nervously at the lock on his case. ‘she has to be sturdily built and blonde.’ ‘Why our Anna of all people?’ said Uncle Heinrich; ‘There are plenty more blonde girls in the village’. ‘Because she’s the only one who speaks decent German and can recite poetry.’ ‘Yes, that she can,’ boomed Uncle Heinrich, ‘but listen here … Germania! That’s really going too far!’ ‘We’ve got no one else,’ the headmaster pleaded. ‘I am a public servant. I have a family. I must see that it happens.’
There were rehearsals all month long. At the dress rehearsal Anna wore an elaborate wig of long blonde curls. With a straight face she had to recite the most melodramatic verses that ever flowed from a German pen. A soldier from the war with a bloody bandage round his head lay at her feet; he had to be visible from the back of the hall. Anna positioned herself facing an imaginary horizon, ‘All around I see distress in German provinces, no rays of hope, no sunlight … poor, unhappy Germania, all her sons are dying here … the people are laid low there …’ The only acting talent required of the soldier was to be dead in a convincing manner, but the artery in his neck ignored the stage directions and pulsed so firmly that Anna burst out laughing half-way through the elegy. Shaking all over – the curls joining in subversively – Germania stumbled from the stage, her hand over her mouth, as though she might pass out at any moment. ‘What’s going on now,’ shouted the director, at the end of his tether because it was forbidden to fail. ‘I can’t go on,’ Anna hiccuped from the wings, ‘if I’ve got to be serious! In God’s name put a bandage round his neck too …’
But on the first of May, Germania did not desert her role for a moment. She acted with so much dedication that she convinced herself too, not just her audience. Afterwards the Kreisleiter opened the ball. Without giving her a chance to change, he invited her to dance with an authoritative nod of the head. They waltzed over the empty dance floor, her chin on his epaulette, the goddess costume
billowing out, the curls describing a circle round her head. Around them, boys in uniform and girls with garlands in their hair watched in admiration. The Kreisleiter was dancing with her! She was the tangible symbol of something they believed in, unsuspecting that the symbol in question had sneaked inside from an enemy camp. The triumph went to her head. The Kreisleiter held on to her firmly, as though from then on he would energetically take good care of the sorrowful Germania’s fate. Anna felt herself submitting to temptation, allowing herself to be led with her eyes closed, and thoroughly enjoying her new status. Her former one, that of the poor maltreated orphan, was now quite hopelessly outdated. After the celebration she floated home on a pink cloud with golden edges. Uncle Heinrich tore the cloud to shreds with his scepticism. ‘That’s how they get young people to do their dirty work,’ he said disdainfully, ‘the seducers. Now even you see how they do it.’
The district section of the BDM sent a young woman with expertly pinned-up hair to the village to introduce morning gymnastics to the local section. From then on they had to gather on the square by the church at the crack of dawn, she announced, not to start the day with Our Father, but to hoist the flag, sing the national hymn and the Horst Wessel song. After that they would do morning gymnastics for a healthy and supple body, pushing up, swinging round, bending the knees, arms raised, bending over. She lectured them in a high-pitched urban accent. The charitable farmers’ daughters observed her silently and full of inner resistance. How could they combine all these rituals with their work on the farm, which had already begun while it was still dark? Anna’s eyes narrowed. When the woman had finished she stepped forwards out of the circle. ‘I invite you,’ she said, ‘to start the gymnastics with me at five in the morning on the farm. You can pump water, feed the chickens and fifty pigs, give the calves water, and during the milking you can raise your arms up high and bend your knees, while the animals are content beside you.’ The circle burst into relieved laughter. The leader laughed along with them, shocked; she rearranged something in her hairdo and hastily disappeared. Nearby yet unseen, Jacobsmeyer recorded her first success. There was no more mention of morning gymnastics.
