The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  When I wake in the morning I hear the tap-tap of Willibald’s hammer as he laboriously reassembles the splintered picture frame he smashed last night. I go downstairs and find him chuckling and talking to himself, bending over the table in his shorty night shirt. The smell of schnapps is still warm on his breath. But when I hopefully enter the kitchen, it is cold, even though the stove’s alight.

  Jägerlein has really gone.

  And Fräulein von Kaminsky’s the next to go, though not because she likes some Frenchman better than us. No, the official educational wind has changed and Ilse, Martin and Sara don’t need her lessons any more. In fact they’re not allowed to have them now. It’s back to school for them –

  6

  Though not for long

  Perhaps it was Pfarrer Kretchmann dropping the word in Vienna that our home was a Polish-Jewish pigsty. Or perhaps it was just some new official establishing his authority, settling his no nonsense arse firmly into his chair. Anyway, the half-breeds’ home schooling has to stop, and it’s back to school for them. But the rule that half-Jews can’t lodge in pedigree German homes remains intact – some things are sacred. So how are we going to manage?

  Willibald says we aren’t and bids adieu to Fräulein von Kaminsky at the ferry pier with tears in his eyes. ‘You suffered the little children to come unto you,’ he begins in a quavery voice, but she cuts him off with the observation that it was actually the other way round and they were hardly little anyway.

  She hasn’t been happy here since he returned from the army. Perhaps it’s his shorty nightshirt that makes her uncomfortable, or the occasional glimpse it affords of his cat’s pelt dangling round his chest. Or his sporadic chuckling and barking in the study, not to mention his domestic histrionics and the occasional readings from King Saul he inflicts on her. The contrast with the Habsburg style must have grown acute. Anyway, she’s not sorry to go. But before she does, she whispers to Gabi, brushing her cheek with her own, that she should ask Fräulein von Adler what’s really going on in the war, because Fräulein von Adler listens black. Overhearing this, I wonder how it’s possible to listen in colours. This is perhaps my first philosophical thought, and like most such thoughts quite irrelevant to what’s actually going on.

  Then away she steams and Willibald mops his eyes with a large white handkerchief, taking care to ensure his grief will be observed. This doesn’t help to advance my siblings’ education, but on returning to the Pfarrhaus he declares that’s quite impossible now anyway and retreats with loud despairing sighs into his study.

  But Gabi has been scrutinising the railway timetable and she says it can be done if only the children can take the three-hours-each-way journey to school. Now they’re older, she decides they can. So up they get at four in the morning, eat a slice of bread and sausage, swallow a milky ersatz coffee, run to the first ferry, wait for the first train, doze in the carriage for two hours and dash the last four hundred metres to their separate schools. (In Ilse’s case it isn’t a dash but a laboured scramble.)

  Six hours travelling a day seems a lot to spend on secondary education and I hope the war will be over before I have to go to Plinden. As things are, I get up three hours later and came home three hours earlier than they do. It’s worth running the risk of being beaten up by Fritzi Wimmer to get that extra sleep. And so far I haven’t been beaten up. I’m still almost insubstantial in the primary school, a mere visiting shadow at the back of the class, and I imagine there can’t be much fun in beating up a shadow. I ought to know better, and soon I will.

  Ilse’s been told she’s slow so often that she’s decided to prove it and gets slower still as the months go by. Now she has to repeat a whole school year, so she’s in the same sixth grade as Martin, though not in the same school; he’s in the State High School for boys while, since future mothers of future heroes need domestic science and needlework, not maths and Latin, she’s in the Plinden Catholic Girls’ High School down the road, where Sara has also just started.

  Sara doesn’t pay much attention to Catholicism. She doesn’t pay much attention to anything these days except Gabi’s anxieties and the contours of her own interior landscape. But this new arrangement suits Ilse down to the ground. She loves the serene sequestered nuns, she places a crucifix over her bed at home, and she joins in all the Catholic rites except communion, which she achingly wishes she could join too. In Lent she eats even less of our meagre rations (Willibald says our plates are full, now that Jäger woman has gone, and maybe his is, but I don’t notice any change in mine). And at Easter she wears black and drapes a gauzy black veil over her crucifix. Anything, it seems, to escape the taint of Jewish blood, the millstone of Jewish history. When Willibald says Grace, which he does in hushed and throbbing tones before every meal, she secretly crosses herself. I’ve seen her at it, as I glance surreptitiously up while my head’s supposed to be reverently down like the others’. Sara’s seen it too; I’ve caught her covertly observing Ilse as I do with her watchful meditating eyes. But Sara doesn’t say so any more than I do; she simply lets it drift down through her burdened mind. Perhaps everyone except Willibald has noticed it – he’s usually too busy performing his own piety to observe anyone else’s. But whoever sees it, no one says a thing. We all still have our secrets, and each of us keeps the others’, the better to preserve his own.

  I soon have another secret too, the secret of my encounter with the champions of the master race.

  Fräulein Meissner arrives at school one Monday with puffy red-rimmed eyelids and pale cheeks. Her fiancé has become one of the dead heroes of the Reich, brutally murdered by a cowardly French terrorist. (The Frogs have paid for it though – ten randomly chosen villagers for one Aryan; Fritzi Wimmer, who tells us so, also opines that ten for one is not enough. Perhaps that comes straight from his father. Then he imitates a machine-gun cutting down a hundred of the Gallic swine.) Now Fräulein Meissner’s ripe fecundity will have to find another inseminator, which might not be so easy if suitable Aryan males keep getting picked off like this first one has been. In the meantime she’s so upset she forgets to say ‘Heil Hitler!’ on entering the class – or is it that her loyalty’s wavering, and she’s having trouble hailing the Führer today? Whatever the reason, I half expect her to take her loss out on me, the shadow creature half-way to that underclass against whose devious machinations her fiancé has fallen so valiantly fighting. But she recovers a brave and melancholy poise and teaches as usual. And she hasn’t marked me out for her revenge either. In fact she seems to treat me with uncommon kindness today. Her voice softens when she asks me to come out and perform simple multiplication on the board, and she says ‘Good!’ as though she means it when I get it right. Perhaps she’s got an inkling of what Adolf has in store for us, or has her hero’s death at a terrorist’s hand made her realise what it’s like to be a victim?

  But that’s certainly not Fritzi Wimmer’s take on things. It seems the day of Fräulein Meissner’s bereavement is the day he’s been waiting for, the Day of Atonement. So at break in the playground, though I’m keeping my usual wary and solitary distance (even from little Resi Hofer, whose eyes sometimes half-smile at me, although their owner never speaks), he comes deliberately up to me, popping bullets through me with his chilling stare, and I know at once with a void opening where my heart should have been that this is the scene we rehearsed on our first day at school and now we’re going to play it out before the destined audience. As I foresaw, he’s not alone. There’s Heini Beranek, who’s got red hair, and Joachim Kübler whose hair’s as brown as mine but his pedigree’s all right, and Fredi Bauer, who’s simply nondescript and since he’s got no character of his own, tags along with the others just to absorb a bit of theirs.

  ‘Jew-boy,’ Fritzi says affably, thumping my chest and shoving me against the wall. ‘Whose side are you on?’

  I’m not sure how to answer this, since in my panic I don’t realise what the options are. Is he talking about some gang in school that naturally I
don’t know about? ‘What?’ I mutter faintly, my breath going suddenly unsteady on me.

  Then comes another thump, and then a couple from Heini and Joachim to let me know what’s what. Then one from Fredi too, when he sees how scared I am. ‘Whose side are you on?’ Fritz repeats, feeling two sizes bigger already with that trio at his back. ‘Are you a German or a Jew?’

  By now a larger group is forming round us with all the ardent anticipation of a pack of dachshunds round a cornered rabbit. I can see the finale of this scene as clearly as the beginning and I wish we’d already reached it, but I sense with dull despair we’ve got to act it out line by line before we can reach the climax and finish it off. As to Fritz’s conundrum, I’m dazedly conscious no answer will do. If I say I’m German, I’ll get beaten up for being a lying Yid; and if I say I’m a Jew, I’ll get beaten up for being a truthful one. You have to hand it to Fritzi – he may well be slow at the three Rs, but he’s all there when it comes to dilemmas. I try the middle path and say I’m both, but of course that’s no good either, because how can a German be a Jew? You might as well say a mongrel tyke can be a pure-bred Doberman.

  So now they’ve got their excuse and the gleeful battering begins. Little boys have little fists, but in Heimstatt they’ve got heavy shoes as well and soon I’m cowering against the wall doing all I can to ward off kicks as well as punches. That hurts, but it humiliates more, and to my own amazement I begin to feel a flood of resentment, which builds until I suddenly flail out blindly and hopelessly with my fists and feet instead of merely crouching down and covering my face with my hands. This makes me more vulnerable and the drubbing gets worse, but I do at least have the satisfaction of feeling my fist thunk into some squashy part of Fritzi’s startled face.

  By that time I’m down on the ground, though. There’s a lot of shouting and cheering going on and my star of futile courage has collapsed into itself. So have I. I’m just crouching there covering my head as best I can and waiting to die, and at the same time noticing how far away the shouting seems now, as though it’s got nothing to do with what’s going on here in the playground, but is happening in some other place and time. There’s the salty taste of blood in my mouth and there are jabs and thuds and slaps all over me, but they seem far away too now, as though I’ve got separated from my body so that nothing really hurts.

  But abruptly, like that storm passing on the mountain last summer, the hail of blows dwindles to a drizzle and then ceases altogether. The cheering dwindles away too and there’s a moment’s utter silence before a voice says ‘What’s going on here? Stop it at once!’ It’s Fräulein Meissner’s voice and it’s a weary voice rather than an angry one. ‘Get up,’ she says now. And as no one else is down, I suppose she must mean me. So I do get up, slowly and ashamedly, as if I know I’ll get the blame for this and probably deserve it.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ she asks, peering into my eyes, and I see her face large and concerned through the blur of my tears.

  Of course I am, but I look away and shake my head.

  ‘Go and wash yourself. And you too, Fritz, your nose is bleeding. Go along, both of you.’

  And through the silent avenue of intently watching faces we go almost side by side towards the boys’ washroom. There’s no one else there and we bend over the two basins next to each other, slopping cold water onto our faces. ‘Jewish blood,’ Fritzi says, wrinkling his nose and nodding at the stuff dripping off my split lip into the diluting water. But I can tell the drama’s over now and this is just the epilogue.

  ‘Half-Jewish,’ I answer, and realise this is only the third time I’ve ever said anything to him, and they’ve all been today. ‘And half-German.’

  That tickles his ethnological fancy, and he grins, sniffing his own blood back up his nose in a long gurgling slurp. ‘No wonder it’s so thin,’ he says quite amiably. ‘Look at mine.’ He daubs a bit of his blood on the side of his basin. I daub a bit of mine beside it. They look the same to me, and perhaps they do to him too, because he quickly splashes water over them both till they trickle away together in a little pinkish dribble.

  The bell is clanging. He jerks his head and I follow him out. And so we return to the classroom almost together, not quite as enemies, not quite like friends. At the end of school I shoulder my bag and walk off, for the first time not slinking away. And nobody accosts me. When I get home I tell my mother I tripped and fell flat on my face, and that’s why I’ve got a black eye and my lip’s all cut and swollen. If she doesn’t believe me, she doesn’t say so. Luckily it isn’t bath night till Friday, and by then my other bruises have all faded.

  That little drama has an unexpected denouement. I’m not a shadow any more, I’m there, I’m substantial, an acknowledged member of the class. Not one that anyone cares about, but still. No one except Resi Hofer anyway, whose lips as well as eyes sometimes half-smile at me now, although still she never speaks. And Fritzi actually nods at me as I pass him near the gate. I’m almost respectable. I’ve got a French terrorist to thank for that.

  But I’m not the only one to have an eventful school year. Ilse’s having some ups and downs as well, and so, more literally, is Martin. Let’s follow chronology and start with Ilse, racial science and the bureaucrats.

  The teachers in the Catholic Girls School are divided in their attitude towards the Führer.

  Some remember him in their prayers, where he’s mentioned in second place after the Pope, perhaps with a halo visualised above his head. Others have misgivings. Still others don’t care one way or the other. The Sister who’s Principal of the school belongs to the third group; or perhaps to the second. At any rate not to the first, because when Gabi humbly petitioned her to admit her two daughters who unfortunately were at once Protestant and half-Jewish (how she’d learnt to be meek and submissive!), Sister Aquinas made no more objection than to steeple her pale blue-veined hands, blink behind her small rimless spectacles, which she wears at the tip of her retroussé nose, shake her head and sigh, ‘Well, we needn’t tell their teachers everything.’

  Not all the teachers are nuns. Biology and history are taught by lay teachers. Perhaps that’s Sister Aquinas’s deliberate choice. Biology and history are ideologically sensitive subjects and it wouldn’t do to have ideological disputes erupting amongst the nuns. They’ve got to live together after school after all, while the lay teachers go home to their separate families, friends and lives.

  But the biology teacher is not only lay, she’s also Nazi. Frau Professor Förster, a German from Bavaria, is a dedicated Party member, and when she marches into the classroom she always clips out ‘Heil Hitler!’, which Sister Aquinas never does. (And Sister Aquinas doesn’t march in, either. She sails. She’s slight and walks with quick little steps so that her habit floats out behind her and her body glides along without swaying or rocking.) Frau Professor Förster is buxom and blonde; she has produced two sons for the Fatherland already and shows no signs of stopping, which is just as well for the Fatherland, considering the Russian campaign has started. Her husband is an SS officer of whom she’s naturally very proud, although what does she know about what he gets up to in the occupied territory of Poland, where he’s been posted for more than a year?

  Now there comes a time in the curriculum when the science of race must be taught more fully than it can be dealt with at the primary level. There’s a lot to this science that primary school youngsters just can’t understand and you’ve really got to delve into it as a teenager if you aren’t going to remain an ethnic ignoramus. The time for that delving comes in Ilse’s first year at the school. And no teacher’s a keener delver than Frau Professor Förster. In fact she sometimes calls the subject the queen of the sciences, which, since it has become the Nazi theology, has a certain plausibility from Frau Professor Förster’s perspective, whatever Sister Aquinas might say about it.

  Yes, race is to Frau Professor Förster what sex is to a nymphomaniac – she just can’t get enough of it. Someone who loves the subject that much is
pretty sure to make a proper job of teaching it, and that’s exactly what Frau Professor Förster does. No half measures for her. She gives Ilse’s class the whole works – chapters from this and paragraphs from that, descriptions of Eskimos and Nubians, American Indians and New Guinea natives, Scandinavian athletes and Teutonic heroes. But that’s only the prelude. Next they’re treated to visual aids (what a lot of planning must go into those lessons, what thought and care!). Beautifully coloured wall diagrams featuring full frontal and profile pictures of the Nordic Aryan (straight, upstanding, intelligent, beautiful, strong and dominant) and the various lower species ranging from the servile Slav through the various types of Asian and Negroid, down to the ultimate depths of the Pygmy and the pernicious hook-nosed Jew. The expressions on those vivid pictures are made to match the description of their characteristics, and Frau Professor Förster, normally a stickler for discipline, allows and even encourages the ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ which the repulsive faces of the inferior races naturally elicit from her superior Aryan pupils. The Jew, Frau Professor Förster warns them, is particularly dangerous because he possesses a certain low and vicious cunning, which the Pygmy for instance and the Gypsy lack. They’re just primitive, while the Jew is actually depraved. That’s why the far-sighted Führer has made such a point of eliminating the Jew from our national life, which he (the Jew, she means, not Adolf) is bent on corrupting and destroying. Then comes a brief but solemn reading from the scripture of Mein Kampf, which no one understands, but everyone listens to as reverently as they would to the Book of Revelations, which in Frau Professor Förster’s world view it very probably is.