by Tessa de Loo
A week later the daily parade suddenly ended. No more music, no greetings, no generals, no more tarting up. The women lay on their beds sighing. For a time there was almost nothing to eat until the Bishop of Munich visited and negotiated an improvement in the daily ration as an intermediary between God and his sinners. Meanwhile the women were examined for venereal diseases and, irrespective of the outcome, gradually released from captivity. Ilse also left, in search of the authorities who could plead for the release of her fiancé, an SS soldier who was lying outside in the field. Anna was still detained on account of an inflammation that created confusion in the Americans’ laboratories. When it appeared that she was mainly suffering from greatly reduced resistance, she too was put outside the gate.
The stroller in the centre of Spa moves from health, via capital and faith, to the war – back and forth, depending on the buildings and memorials he passes: the bath house, casino, church, the monuments to the fallen. It is difficult to be there in the final decade of the twentieth century; everything breathes of the past.
The sisters landed in front of a shop window with a tempting display of items from the Second World War. Soldiers’ jackets, helmets, kitbags, decoratively embroidered handkerchiefs of the American marine, tins of Emergency Drinking Water, an English parachutist’s folding bicycle, an advertisement of a girl with a doll in her arms and the slogan, ‘That she may never know the horrors of Dictatorship, let’s all pull together for a victorious, prosperous America.’
‘I hate that language,’ said Anna from the bottom of her heart, ‘I never wanted to learn it. That silly people, the one more stupid than the next. Hello baby … And they came to us with their fat backsides and behaved as though they were bringing us culture. They felt they were the rulers of the world.’
‘They were our liberators,’ Lotte said drily.
Anna laughed huskily and pointed to the window with a gloved finger. ‘Those idiots are still being honoured as heroes; yes, you see it, so many years after the war, all American and English things, no German ones of course. My feet hurt, can’t we go and sit somewhere?’
They descended on the nearby café with the view onto the Pouhon Pierre-le-Grand. Lotte felt uneasy.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said hesitantly, ‘why you bear the Americans such a grudge. They didn’t do anything to you.’
Anna sighed impatiently. ‘Because they were mean dogs. Because they impressed us. You mustn’t forget what we had behind us. Then those boys came over … in many ways they weren’t worth a shot of gunpowder, we could have blown them to bits if we had wanted to … each one of us, every wounded soldier was worth more than them … it was dreadful for us …’
‘I don’t understand that,’ maintained Lotte. ‘They did bring the war to an end.’
‘Come off it, those chewing-gum boys, straight out of the middle of Texas!’
‘They could have been in Normandy …’ said Lotte sharply,
‘Oh them? Those two or three Americans who had to perform there. They helped to win the war at the end. The English, the French, the Russians – just think what they have done.’
‘But a lot of Americans were killed.’
‘Ach God,’ Anna leaned back sarcastically in her chair, ‘here come the tears now. What do a couple of thousand Americans signify when millions have died?’
‘It is not about numbers.’
‘You Dutch have a different conception. We had this one. You have to accept that. They utterly disgusted us. We had six years of the war behind us, twelve years of dictatorship. Then those scallywags arrived, who knew nothing about it, those illiterates straight off their farms. Those arrogant, inflated, Wild-West boys, puffed up by gold. What sort of people are they really? They have been there for three hundred years – after they had evicted the Indians. That’s all isn’t it? Am I mistaken?’
‘One people is no better or worse than another people,’ Lotte said in a trembling voice. ‘As a German you ought to know that by now.’
‘But they simply are more stupid,’ cried Anna. ‘They are uncivilized!’
‘There are intellectuals as well.’
‘Only a thin veneer. Look at the masses.’
‘That goes for our masses and yours too. Originally they were all English, Germans, Dutch, Italians …’
‘But it was the real dregs who went over there. Look how they’ve turned out!’
‘They were poor emigrants who had had no future in Europe.’
‘Fine, fine, you’re right …’ Anna raised her hands in resignation, ‘that puts my mind at ease …’
They were sitting opposite each other like badgered dogs at a pause in the fight. Lotte looked outside past Anna – suddenly she could not bear the view of her face any more. A furious, intolerant feeling of enmity inflamed her tongue. Her own criticism of the Americans – the communist witch-hunts by McCarthy, the Ku Klux Klan, the Vietnam adventure, the way they chose their presidents – changed chameleon-like into an absolute, sacred need to defend them by fire and sword. But she did not say another word. Weariness overcame her. Two different planets, she said to herself, two different planets.
It did not escape Anna that her ferocity had an off-putting effect. She abominated herself for her ardour. In an attempt at mitigation she said, ‘You are a Dutch woman, that is quite different. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the ones who were stuffed full of food. Our soldiers were emaciated, ill, they had no nation any more, nothing any more, they were my comrades. You don’t understand that, you weren’t in the military hospital with the German soldiers, in the squalor. If you had experienced it you would see it exactly like that.’
This was the coup de grâce – pre-emptively gagged, even Lotte could not protest any more. And it went on, Anna continued irrepressibly in the way that a teacher repeatedly explains the same thing with infinite patience to a backward pupil.
‘But they did nevertheless liberate you from the Nazi dictatorship …’ Lotte tossed in with a supreme effort.
‘Ha …’ Anna leaned across the table with a cynical laugh, ‘you don’t really think they came over to rescue us? They grabbed our scientists and took them back to America: chemists, biologists, atomic researchers, military professionals. Gestapo people like Barbie were brought in by the CIA. And then you say I must look on them as liberators. They made Adolf Hitler and his SS army the scapegoats – the Wehrmacht generals with their stripes, who have the deaths of millions of soldiers on their conscience, have never been punished. They were regarded as gentlemen. Whoever declares war decently and leads an army is a gentleman. And think about the judges who signed the death sentences, who sent the people to concentration camps – most of them have never been punished.’
‘And what about Eichmann?’
‘Wiesenthal did that. And the judge at the Nuremberg trials, he was an idealist, an exception.’
Lotte was listening and not listening. These arguments were familiar to her. A peculiar feeling of déjà vu distracted her. Where had she heard all that before, the same and yet different? She tried to hear that other voice behind Anna’s voice. Suddenly she knew it: her father had blustered on about the Americans with the same heat. For years. It began immediately after the war, initially inspired by the charisma of Papa Stalin, after his demasking entirely under its own steam. The Yankees!
Liberation: not only from enemy armies but also from anxiety. The contrast made the continuous anxiety, day and night, almost tangible the moment it disappeared. In its place was a general euphoria that did not last long because anxiety still had a last fling from time to time.
A crowd had gathered in the centre of Hilversum to welcome the marching Canadian and English troops who were probably going straight to the radio station, where the Dutch tricolour waved wantonly. Although everyone had kept a close track of the Allies’ advances and setbacks since the Normandy landings, their heroism had remained abstract – now people wanted to see them, embrace them, squeeze them with joy. Lotte
and Ernst were standing on the edge of this force field and waited for the first tanks to appear round the corner. But shots sounded from a building on the other side instead, cutting right through the exuberance. The crowd scattered. Ernst pulled Lotte by the arm into a side street. The capitulation was definitely a fact, but had everyone capitulated? To be shot during the war would have been sad, but it would be a ridiculous, senseless tragedy to become the victim of a frustrated soldier after the war. They decided to go home and so missed out on the spectacle, shown in all the bioscopes, of the jubilantly welcomed liberators amid hordes of women and lanky boys clambering onto the tanks – symbolized by cigarettes and bars of chocolate.
A few days later Lotte saw a column of disarmed Germans filing past – her excitement was tempered by the dull sight they presented, the stuffing beaten out of them. They were jeered from the pavements, abuse exploded like grenades among the soldiers; five years of anxiety and hate were unloaded on the heads of the defeated. A vague feeling of sympathy flared up in her but she caught herself immediately and censured herself.
The Jews in hiding could not be restrained any more. They wanted to go home, they wanted to look for their families. Pent-up impatience and anxious premonitions drove them outside into the freedom that would never be as it had been before the war for anyone and certainly not for them. They had been warned: not all Germans have been disarmed yet, not all Dutch Nazis have been picked up. They stayed inside for ten long days of extreme self-restraint. Only Ruben could not stick it out. He wanted to see his parents’ house, to surprise the neighbours: ‘How glad they’ll be to see me!’ He set off despite all admonitions, ill at ease on a rickety bicycle, stared after anxiously.
Seemingly unharmed he returned. He sagged into a chair silently and sat still; only his eyes moved back and forth in bewilderment behind his glasses. Finally his head sank onto his chest and they realized that he was crying. That was unusual, alarming, after being robust and without shedding a tear for years. Without lifting his head he recounted how the reunion had gone. When the neighbour opened the door at his ring she recoiled with horror and dislike in her eyes. Her first reflex was to shut the door again but he had already stepped inside. He walked into the room as of old; his eye immediately fell on the chair where he had so often drunk a glass of lemonade or warm chocolate milk as a boy. But she did not invite him to sit; she paced up and down with agitation, flinging in his face that all that time she had been convinced the whole family had been taken off to Germany. ‘Mother is still alive,’ he told her, ‘she will be delighted that you have looked after her things so well all those years.’ He pointed absent-mindedly around at the Persian carpets and paintings that his parents had given to her for safekeeping. ‘Your father gave them to me,’ she corrected sharply. ‘I can still hear him saying: Liesbeth, have these things, we have no use for them any more, they are nothing but ballast to us.’ Ruben stared at the portrait in oils of his grandfather, who looked at him disparagingly through a monocle. ‘You had better discuss that with my mother,’ he whispered diplomatically. ‘I have nothing to discuss with your mother,’ she said haughtily. The knuckles of her hands were white, gripping the edge of the table. ‘Listen,’ she blurted out, ‘other people have already been living in your house for years. The world has changed and we have all had to adapt, and now you come here out of the blue thinking that everything will be the same as it was …’ ‘You’re right …’ Ruben went to the door as though in a dream. ‘You’re right … excuse me for disturbing you …’
Little by little the community that had been founded on provisional strategies was being disbanded – one after the other they left Lotte’s mother’s ark. When the machinery for keeping everything going stopped and it had become silent all around her, her body went into cramp. She lay on her bed writhing – first she screwed her eyes closed in pain, then she opened them wide in astonishment. A bitter odour hung in the bedroom. Her soaking sheets had to be washed all the time. The family doctor called an ambulance after he had desperately sought a diagnosis. What an irony: those whom she had managed to keep alive all those years had simply walked out into the lane by the meadows on both feet, while she had to be carried away by orderlies. The cause was found at the neurology ward: an abrupt relaxation in the nerves, which had been giving out the ‘danger’ signal for years but had not been able to produce the associated ‘flight’ reflex.
For her husband the stresses were different. He grumbled about the English, the Canadians, the Americans; he lashed out against the new government; he opposed the rejoicing and glorification of the Western Allies while nothing was said about the grandiose exertions in the east. ‘The western front would not have stood a chance,’ he argued, ‘without Stalingrad, without the eastern front, without the millions of losses in the Soviet army, without Stalin’s indomitability and slyness,’ he argued. ‘The serious danger came from the east, Hitler knew that very well, all Germans knew that – why is everyone silent about it, why is it deliberately covered up in the press?’ During his philippics he was generous enough to give himself the answer, ‘From fear of the Bolsheviks! Ha! Because their actual enemy is Communism, not Fascism.’ He added a further prediction without obligation: ‘That fear will unite them all.’ Shaking with indignation, he put a record on the turntable. Only the greatest composers could calm him – apart from Wagner who had to spend the rest of his life at the bottom of a deep drawer.
2
Long ago they used to sit in a bath-tub together, now they were lying in separate baths in pastel-coloured bathrooms and thinking about the bizarre, painful relationship that was attracting and repelling them. Every day they met in the deserted corridors on the way from the peat bath to the underwater massage or the carbonated bath. Overlooking the water flowing tirelessly from the fountains, they were driven together at the end of the morning by the longing for a cup of coffee in the Salle de Repos. Their penchant for coffee at least they had in common; could such a thing be built into the genes? They met beneath Leda and the Swan and drank their coffee in little gulps. Usually it was Anna who dispelled the heaviness and languor of the après bain by beginning on ‘it’ again.
Anna was outside the gate with her suitcase. It was the end of September, it was raining, it was peace. She had no one to go to. There was only one person she longed for; having decided to go and look for him, she had thought up a plan of campaign for getting as close as she could to his vicinity.
The first phase of it was Bad Neuheim in Hessen, where she would meet Ilse. She was allowed to ride in the back of an open freight lorry, crammed in with sixty released Wehrmacht soldiers. The wind went right through her drenched nurse’s uniform. She clung on to the side of the lorry, shivering and teeth chattering. ‘Go and sit inside, next to the driver, sister,’ urged one of the soldiers. ‘If he gets intimate, call us and we’ll make quick work of him.’ One of them knocked on the cab, the lorry stopped – he explained the reason in broken English. ‘Of course,’ nodded the black American, opening the door courteously for Anna. Inside it was warm and comfortable. He shared his lunch fraternally with her. Each communicated in their own double-Dutch on an unfamiliar wavelength. ‘Where are you going to?’ he asked. ‘I have no one,’ she explained, ‘my husband is dead, my home has been bombed. I have a meeting in Bad Neuheim with someone who can perhaps help me with work.’ Shocked by her own frankness, she looked at his supple brown fingers that held the steering wheel loosely. Who was he? Who was she herself? Where did they originate from? Where were they going to? A former slave from Africa come to Germany via America. A former maid from Cologne back in Germany via Austria, as an ex-prisoner, in the company of an ex-slave from Africa who had been regarded as a potential rapist until a few moments ago. As though he sensed her confusion he laughed with her in an amiable way.
At Bad Neuheim she went in search of the address Ilse had given her, lugging her suitcase. Dawdling Americans spoke to her. They looked at her, surprised to be ignored; most women put up no resist
ance to their lures, only too glad to saunter through the village on their arms and smoke their cigarettes. Anna was so focused on her unapproachability that it took a long time before she discovered that the street she was looking for was right there under her feet. The woman of the house let her in and pushed a letter from Ilse into her hand as though it concerned a state secret. She had already gone to her parents in Saarburg and requested Anna to follow her at her own convenience. ‘How do I get there?’ Anna asked. Saarburg was in the French zone; only the original inhabitants in possession of the correct papers had the right to return there. Anna, as a Viennese, had no ghost of a chance. ‘We’ll think of something,’ whispered the woman, leaving her in a neat bedroom.
An American officer was billeted in the same house, a lawyer from Chicago. She was introduced to him the next morning and discovered that the enormous empire reaching from one ocean to the other, conquered by covered wagon, lasso and rifle, had for once brought forth a civilized citizen by chance who, above all, spoke her own language. ‘I find it so awful, what the Nazis have done to the German people …’ ‘They haven’t done anything to me,’ said Anna dourly, ‘American artillery shot my husband, American bombs destroyed my apartment, Americans took me prisoner.’ But he would not be put off, patiently he dragged in his arguments so as to bring her another perspective. At the same time his lessons in politics and war studies were a veiled form of subtle seduction – Anna, not deaf to the erotic undertone, managed to keep her distance with polite objections during the days of enforced waiting. Bad Neuheim teemed with German soldiers who had lost an arm or a leg; they sat wearily on benches next to each other and stared silently at the passing Americans who had conquered their women as well as their country. Anna recognized Martin in their midst – it cut her to the quick to see them sitting there.
