Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  THAT NIGHT MIKHAIL WAKES UP in his hiding place, the narrow passage into the mountain from which he fled on the day when the snow came. Now the snow is melting again, and he is back here. He has made no further progress at all on his way to Korcziw.

  But now the time has come. He got the message the evening before. It came in with the air drifting through a window opened just a crack. Winter is over, said the message. Time to go.

  And suddenly everything was clear to him. He had only to take the first step. He would go back to Korcziw, whoever were the masters there now—Russians, Americans, Germans, it made no difference. His mother could hide him just as well as the girl here.

  In any case, he couldn’t believe that from now on there would be any other life for him but a life in hiding. As it was now, he thought, it always would be. He had learned to hide. If there was one thing he had learned it was the art of invisibility. Making no sound. Leaving no tracks. He already felt startled by the sight of his own shadow or reflection. He wouldn’t be surprised if there were nothing there at all. Nothing of him. If anyone could manage to get to Korcziw then he could. They wouldn’t even be looking for him anymore. All the same, no one must find him. He knew that.

  By now he was so much at one with his state of concealment, so closely related to it, that he couldn’t believe anything would change even if the Americans came and liberated him. The Americans were masters, too, weren’t they? They, too, would want to know who he really was.

  So who was he really? The only place where that could be decided was Korcziw. And perhaps the dog was still there. Perhaps he had waited. Mikhail felt sure he had waited.

  He filled his lungs with the air coming in from outside. Buds. Earth. Grass. When? he wondered. And as he asked himself that question he already knew the answer: Now. At once.

  Shouldn’t he wait for the girl? Wait for the food she would bring him? He would need his strength, and from now on he would be living only on what he could steal. (He did not know that there wasn’t much left to steal in Germany.) But then he decided to go at once. Darkness would favor his plan. There was still some bread in the kitchen, and he took it with him. Then he put on a lady’s woolen pullover, blue with a cable pattern, without guessing that it had belonged to Hitler’s mistress, slipped into his gray drill jacket with the wreath of sunflowers on the breast, and left the house.

  He had been a prisoner long enough to know that only extreme caution would help him now. He made straight for the bushes, looking for cover, hiding as best he could. But then he saw them. He hadn’t expected them to be waiting for him, ready to pick him up as soon as he left the house. Not just two men either, enough to rout him out and catch him, six or seven of them coming along the footpath toward the house on the hillside. Mikhail pressed close to the earth. Where he lay he could feel the ground shake under their feet, a trembling not to be distinguished from his own. He wished he could disappear into the ground entirely, be one with it, nothing but a place on which their boots would tread without feeling a heart beating there, breath going in and out.

  Then he suddenly knew the only place where he could take refuge, and when they had passed he crawled to the entrance of the tunnel from which he had emerged six months before, the place known only to him, concealed behind ferns and tendrils, and he hid there.

  He had spent all the next day waiting there and keeping watch, well aware that he could leave his hiding place only in the dark. He had seen the restless coming and going of the guards that day. He felt their high state of alert, and thought it must have to do with him. His flight had been discovered. He thought it possible that the girl had given him away. Since finding out that she was the German overseer’s whore he had always been slightly wary of her. He was a man, and convinced that when women belong to a man they are subject to him, and will tell him any secret if required to do so.

  He is freezing. Sometimes he sleeps briefly. He ate his bread early in the morning. Now, in his second night here, it is hunger that will not let him rest. He thinks of the cold roast meat she often brings. The eggs she sometimes fries for him at night. He tells himself he must have one more proper meal if he is going to make it to Korcziw. Moreover, it is terribly cold. He leaves his cave just before midnight.

  All seems calm. He knows the guards have usually already made their round by this time of night. As he comes closer he sees the light in the house, taps on a window, hears a noise behind him and sees that he is surrounded. They’ve caught him. Next moment she arrives. Let go of him, she shouts. Then he hears her say: I don’t know him. I’ve no idea who he is.

  That’s how he always imagined her betrayal. Women. They’ll tell any secret to the man they belong to.

  He is taken to a detention cell in the barracks. At least it’s warm here, and they give him breakfast in the morning. He’s been worse off in his time. So long as they don’t shoot him he doesn’t mind. But he suspects that is exactly what they will do.

  Most of the time he sees fields of barley behind his closed eyelids, bordered by elder and hazel bushes. He imagines dogs hunting among the ears of barley. He follows the waves rippling through the corn as they chase their quarry, a lively movement dying down and rising again and again. He hears the loud barking of the dogs hunting among the ears of corn.

  But then he is suddenly roused by the barking of real dogs. Everything around him seems to be very loud, very agitated. The door of his cell is flung open, orders are shouted. He gets up and follows the guards. But he knows very well that this is about the guards themselves, not him. “Urgent air-raid warning.” He knows what that means, too.

  They run across the barrack yard to one of the bunker entrances. SS men stream up from all sides, each trying to outstrip his comrades. And Mikhail realizes that they are afraid.

  This is the sudden new discovery, a revelation coming into his mind as he runs—the fact that SS men can be afraid—that suddenly gives him the courage to be cunning, the courage of the hare in the barley field deceiving the pack by doubling back, and as the first aircraft appear overhead Mikhail sees his chance. Just before reaching the gateway to the bunker, he turns off into an alleyway between two garages.

  He presses close to the wall and sees, looking back, that no one is following him, hears the mighty sound of the engines above him, the whistling and howling, the salvos of antiaircraft fire. Only now, much too late, does the sharp, acrid artificial mist rise from the smoke mortars by the roadside, and he runs into it to hide. But there is no one left aboveground to whom he matters. They have long since closed the heavy steel gates of the bunkers. Anyone still out here is lost. And Mikhail runs on, coughing and breathless. He knows where he is going, and when the first shock wave flings him to the ground he makes himself get up again at once and run on.

  This attack is not for him. It won’t get him. He will run home at last. No one can stop him. He’s on his way.

  And when he sees that the aircraft in the sky have moved away again, when he can hear nothing but the crackling of fires from the Berghof, he knows that he will make it. It’s now or never. He will be well outside the restricted area by the time the men emerge from the bunkers. Let them look for him. They won’t catch him this time. He’d sooner be dead than their prisoner again, forced to go down once more into their deep tunnels, their world without daylight, the terrible, cramped, dark universe of their mountain, but then he sees the girl running down the path from the Tea House, and hears the second attack wave coming.

  Stopping for a moment, he sees what is flying over the mountain peaks. It is as if the mountain giants themselves had risen and were hailing projectiles down. They show on the horizon, more and more missiles falling from the aircraft. They descend on Hitler’s mountain like a shower of arrows. They will hit it, destroy it, they will leave nothing behind, Mikhail knows that. No one will survive outside the shelter of the bunker complex. And he runs toward the girl. When he has almost reached her the first shock wave catches them both. They fall flat in front of each
other, as if a great god had suddenly descended between them, a god before whom they bow down in the dust, shaking.

  Mikhail is the first to get to his feet again. They are both bleeding from their noses, eyes, and ears. They don’t feel it. He takes hold of her and pulls her up the slope with him. He knows every small rocky projection here, every root offering a firm handhold. He calls out brief orders to her in his own language, and she understands. There are no languages anymore, only the insane bellowing of the mountain as it shakes. As it rears up. And the darkness in which it envelops itself. The darkness of a clear, sunny April morning. A darkness made of ashes, smoke, fountains of soil dispersing as they fall, and artificial mists, illuminated by fires shooting up here and there, after some minutes unfolding into the spectacular glory of a blazing, triumphant conflagration that will leave nothing of what it attacks behind.

  Long, long after the bombers have turned away particles are still falling from the air. They drift in the spring wind, play around the charred tree trunks, dance over the heat of the smoldering fires here and there, and finally settle over the mountain in a grayish-white, powdery shroud. Only then does the full extent of what has happened emerge.

  A FEW YEARS AGO I spent my holiday in Bayrischzell. I had rented a mountain cabin on the grounds of a sanatorium, a small cabin just for me, but near the main building where I would have company, good cooking, and medical treatment. An ideal place for me to be alone yet not alone, independent and yet well cared for.

  I left home in bright sunlight, in a good mood, and with a case full of summer clothes. It was May.

  When I reached Bayrischzell a wall of mist arrived at the same time and stayed on, as if it had made an appointment to meet me there. It was noticeably chilly, the electric heater in the cabin either uncomfortably hot or not warm enough. They always did make you feel the cold lying in wait as soon as you ventured into their sphere of influence.

  I had not expected the silence surrounding me. Is it true that mist swallows up sounds, or do we imagine it? All that I heard when I strained my ears was its soft trickling sound as it constantly dripped gray from the trees. And you do strain your ears when you can’t see anything. Life must still be there somewhere, surely. Mist. There’s a horror film in which evil approaches in a wall of mist rolling over the sea. You watch it coming closer, making directly for you. There’s no escape. As soon as it reaches you all hell will be let loose.

  I had asthma attacks every day. The doctor could do nothing to help me. I told him about my fears. Indeed, I spoke of the most shameful of all the sufferings to afflict me. I told him I was on my own and could not bear to think that if I screamed no one would hear me.

  Why would you need to scream? he asked. Do you feel pain somewhere?

  No, I said.

  The fact was that I was afraid of dying alone. This is surely what all patients confide to their doctors at some time or other. And certainly every doctor has his own little patent remedy for this ultimate complaint with which they approach him. But the prescription he gave me was no use.

  Perhaps it might have helped if I had moved into one of the rooms in the main sanatorium. The cabin, with its back to a wood of tall spruce trees and the famous view of the valley, now veiled in mist, in front, displayed all its terrors to me only gradually. I dared not put on the light because I couldn’t be sure if I might not be seen from outside. Sometimes I thought I heard footsteps stalking around the place. I felt as if someone was there watching me. Someone with his mind bent on me ever more frequently, ever more exclusively. When I opened the front door I thought I heard the steps move swiftly away toward the outskirts of the wood. When I came back I had to pluck up all my courage to enter the cabin, where I encountered a darkness that withdrew before me into the corners of the room, but still lingered there.

  I left early, but while I drove into sunny early summer weather soon after leaving Bayrischzell, the sense of oppression still weighed on me, and even when I stepped into the familiar entrance hall of my own house something of the darkness from which I had fled was there in the corners, and a waiting silence received me, the sounds of my presence echoing in it like something strange and unwanted, as if a victorious vacuum had spread through my house while I was away, and was not immediately prepared to withdraw now. It had been living there. It regarded the house as its property, and spared not a thought for me.

  Only several months later did I have the photographs I had taken at Bayrischzell developed. I had taken them on one of the few days when the mist not only parted a little but to some slight extent lifted. A curious, swimming light had made me take some photographs, with milky swathes of mist playing around the outlines of objects, both giving them a statuesque appearance and veiling them.

  I had a shock when I saw the pictures. For a moment I felt as if someone had been playing a practical joke, a bad one, and palmed pictures from my own life off on me. What I saw was the world after its destruction: a gray-white, ghostly world. Fragments of trees rearing up into a ghostly void. Lonely, abandoned witnesses to an extinction that will not even leave its memory behind. The outlines, at which one could guess, of a house standing in a dead wood like its own memorial. A house I shall never in my life enter again.

  I recognized the ancient images of a fear that has always accompanied me. It has been kept under control, suppressed, banished to the dark corners of my dwellings. But it has been ever present. Always there.

  THE BIRDS RETURN TO LIFE FIRST. They always do. After deluges. After solar eclipses, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes. This is spring, this is spring, this is spring, they say. Test cases bearing witness to the heartless continuance of life, its oblivious triumph.

  So there must be something left outside. I feel as if we hadn’t moved for several hours. When I crawl out of the cave the sun is near its zenith in the sky, but veiled with a red glow as if it lay on the evening horizon. The world is enveloped in thick, yellowish smoke, which becomes more impenetrable the closer it is to the ground. Here and there shattered spruce trees rise out of it, as if out of mists. From afar the hiss and crackle of the fires can be heard, but a blackbird has perched on a hazel bush close to us and is singing and singing. The world at the foot of the cave in which we lie is still intact, but ashes fall on it like yellowish snowflakes, sallow as they settle on the green. Tweet tweet, sings the blackbird. It can’t help singing now that the sun is coming through the haze again.

  I lower myself to the path. Mikhail follows me. I am convinced that we are the only survivors. It is just before two in the afternoon. Sometimes I have to stop when the urge to cough gets too strong. When I glance at Mikhail I see what I must look like; we are encrusted with blood, black as miners coming up from underground. No, like the dead and buried who have risen again. I don’t yet know that I shall soon see the earth open and give up hordes of resurrected, pale, swaying figures who look like me. The Night of the Living Dead.

  I can still make out the path along which I have walked so often. Then we lose ourselves in the new desert just created.

  It is terribly quiet, and in the midst of that silence something suddenly breaks apart. Something creaks. Something explodes. Something falls rattling to the ground. A fire flares up again with an infernal hiss. Broken fragments clink. We are hearing the sounds of the underworld. Our human ears are tormented by them and cannot bear it. They can bear it as little as our eyes can bear what they see.

  We move through the destruction as if through a dream of it, not really surprised; there is a certain strange familiarity in the horror, a familiarity that, amid the ruins, the fragments of concrete tossed about, twisted girders, broken brick and glass, armored doors wrenched from their hinges, shredded power cables, singed scraps of fabric, car parts, charred rafters and doorposts; amid all this immeasurable destruction is the knowledge that we ourselves are uninjured. Here we are, set down in a place of terror as dreamers are, traveling through Hell, as if we had only to wake up to find ourselves back in the intact world of t
he Obersalzberg, the real familiar world of which indestructibility is the salient feature.

  In one of the bomb craters, which are so numerous on the road to the Hintereck that they often touch and overlap each other, I see a car compressed into a lump of metal. I can still make out its Mercedes star. As I skirt the edge of the crater it is so far below me that it looks like a gigantic conjuring trick. As if a giant had bet that he could make it disappear in his clenched fist, just like that, and was now showing us all what was left of it.

  The craters oblige us to perform dangerous maneuvers. We cling to iron posts, clamber over swaying concrete slabs perched at an angle, their center of gravity difficult to determine now. We still think we are the last human beings alive. We are as utterly fearless as the last of humanity would be: in principle invulnerable, like people in a nightmare.

  Coming to the Zum Türken inn, we have to cross a thick carpet of splintered glass. The Zum Türken inn isn’t there anymore. Nor is the HQ of the Reich security service, which was billeted here after they turned the landlord out of the inn. There is no security service anymore. No HQ. No offices. No safes, no telephone network, no typewriters and decoding machines. No card indexes of data concerning suspicious characters. It has all been shredded, burned, laid waste. The lighter particles of debris are still snowing down on us. The heavier particles block our way, mingle with the splintered glass from the hothouse above us on the opposite side of the street, now nothing but a tangle of iron struts, a devastated collection of metal that we will explore in the next few days, making our way into it without caring that we hurt ourselves on broken glass, sharp edges, and pass dangling metal girders that, if dislodged, could bring the whole unstable and confused structure down like a house of cards, just to get at the last few leeks and cauliflowers. For destruction is followed by hunger, greed, and savagery. The last vegetables in Hitler’s hothouses, covered by dust and rubble, will not keep long. Still, we shall be frantic to get at them, not just because we are hungry but because the spirit of plunder will enter into us.