The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  Willibald, who used to mutter peevishly about his meagre rations, now eats what little’s set in front of him without a word of complaint. He even forgets to say Grace sometimes, and Ilse even forgets to remind him. Well, there isn’t much to be thankful for. After our meals he wanders off to the study where we hear no more of those little barks and yelps of delight which I’ve come to associate with dramatic composition. And when I go in, I find him sitting with a closed book on his desk, staring at the window as blankly as the window stares back at him. Something tells me this isn’t mourning for Gabi, but nothing tells me it’s quiet terror that she’ll be caught and so will he. He’s so scared in fact he’s even stopped making those pastoral visits to Plinden where unbeknown to us his Aryan lady friend resides. In any case, if her situation’s at all like ours, she won’t be quite so comfortingly plump as she used to be by now.

  In a month or so there’s even less grub. Supplies have dried up completely, and that decisive battle still hasn’t happened yet, though Martin maintains it’s only a matter of weeks now. The war will be over by the summer, he declares. I don’t ask who will win. In fact I can’t imagine what winning will be like, whoever does the winning. Will it mean the schools will open again? Will there be more food, or any? Or will there be nothing but victory parades and further exclusions? War was all I could remember a year ago, and it’s all I can remember now. The peace I was born in, uneasy as it was, lies well below my memory’s horizon. No, war is all I’ve ever known, and I’m beginning to think that win or lose, it’s all I ever will. Not that I care much anyway, now that Gabi’s gone.

  And if the war isn’t going well for the Führer, it certainly isn’t going any better for us. Sara’s been in a decline since my mother’s disappearance and so has just about everyone else except Martin. Ilse laboriously cleans and washes and Sara and I slowly help her. She also cooks what there is to cook which isn’t much. Warplanes drone overhead quite often, but unchallenged and so high we scarcely see them, and all we do is listlessly glance up then look away. Sometimes their wings make long cottony vapour trails like ethereal railway lines, sometimes they glint a moment in the sun. And speaking of the sun, though that’s just reappeared above the mountains and the last snow is beginning to melt and it’s definitely spring again, no one’s making daisy chains or gathering early flowers.

  Not that we aren’t gathering something. We’re gathering nettles from the lake shore in fact, whole armfuls of them – Ilse, who can scarcely walk now, Sara and me, who are almost as slow as she is. Nettles have become our meat and drink, our daily sustenance. A large saucepan full of them boils down to a few spoons of greenish soup, which tastes like … well, nettles. And it goes through your gut like prefabricated diarrhoea. We also get the odd kilo of frozen potatoes and an occasional loaf of stale bread, which, if it isn’t mixed with sawdust, certainly tastes as if it is. Ilse religiously cuts the bread up into as many little cubes as she can and distributes some to us at every meal. Each of us guards his own cube and sizes up his neighbour’s with apathetic yet greedy eyes. Cubes with a crust on are at a premium. We think they contain more nourishment. At any rate they need a bit more chewing, and that keeps the digestive juices running a bit longer.

  I don’t realise I’m withering away, but the others realise they are. We lie about a lot, because we haven’t got the energy to do anything else. Sara’s latest exercise book sometimes lies about too, but she scarcely ever writes in it. She just keeps it there with her for comfort, I imagine.

  It’s a strange thing to starve. You don’t realise it’s more than just being very hungry until it’s too late, you’ve given up and become an aching, hollow-eyed, lethargic spectator of life, no longer interested or participating in the show. I think our eyes are getting larger, but actually it’s our faces that are getting smaller.

  Yes, we’re starving by now, Willibald, Ilse, Sara and I. But not Martin. As his brick factory has no more supplies, it’s stopped working and so has he. However Herr Ziegler, his gruff employer, has become quite friendly as the war runs down, and finds him other work on a farm ten kilometres away with an old friend of his. Farms mean food, and Martin stays there all week and most weekends, feasting on meat, milk, butter, eggs and cheese, or so it seems to us. On the few Sundays that he visits us, he doesn’t seem to notice we are starving, though he does once bring a bit of cheese with him. Yes, the farmer gives him enough to eat, and he’s got a daughter who’s probably giving him something as well. He’s all right, and he’ll stay all right till the Fatherland’s final call to arms and glory goes out even for him.

  Ilse notices he’s stopped wearing his black armband. He says he lost it somewhere on the farm, but when she offers to make him another, he doesn’t answer and she doesn’t insist. Insistence never was one of her stronger qualities, and starvation certainly hasn’t nourished it. But I wear my armband all the time, and so does Willibald, although you’d scarcely notice it since he wears clerical black anyway, just like an undertaker. We’re going to wear black for a year, and so are Ilse and Sara. At least, that’s my understanding, although a year seems an immeasurable time to me and I can’t imagine it ever ending.

  All the same I can’t deny we’re getting used to Gabi’s death. I’ve stopped gazing out over the lake for a glimpse of her body, and I don’t think I’d want to see it now anyway, since I know it wouldn’t look very nice after two months in the water. Sara stopped gazing before I did – after all, she’s older. We seem to feel nothing any more, in fact, and do nothing either, except drag ourselves down to the lake to gather nettles and mumble the bits of bread we get with the consequent watery soup. Sara tells me we’re all going to die soon and asks me to burn her notebooks if she dies first, but I’m not sure I’ll have the strength to light a match. As for myself, I don’t think I’m going to die – but only because I’ve just about stopped thinking altogether.

  Sometimes Ilse gazes at Sara and me with her luminously sad brown eyes as though she’s got something on her mind and is about to tell us what, but then she turns away. Once, though, when we’re pulling nettles up by the lake, she does ask, ‘Do you really think Mutti’s gone to heaven?’ Her voice seems to express some doubt as to her eligibility for that distinction. Both Sara and I bridle at that and we snap back, insofar as we’re capable of snapping, ‘Of course!’ Although I don’t believe in heaven at all, and haven’t since Tante Maria’s funeral, I’m quite sure that if there is one, Gabi’s earned her place in it. I don’t know whether Sara believes in heaven, but anyway she’s just as snappy as I am towards Ilse’s imputation. Ilse seems unaffected by our unusually energetic acerbity and only murmurs ‘Yes,’ absently, and then a moment later sighs ‘Yes’ again, as she looks down at the bundle of nettles in her arms. As though we’re welcome to believe that if it makes us happy, but as for herself …

  She has very drawn cheeks now, and her olive complexion has gone sallow, as though the blood beneath her skin has drained away. And yet she seems more peaceful than she was before. Is that what makes me guess she doesn’t really miss Gabi? It’s not just her question; it’s the sense that she feels relieved even though she’s starving. Relieved of the strain of all that nervous energy, that bustle and push, that anxious concern, those perpetual swings between hope and despair which constantly and obliviously battered at the walls of her introverted quietude. Not to speak of course of a Jewish curse.

  In the village Franzi Wimmer has stopped wearing his Ortsgruppenleiter’s uniform except on important official occasions, and there aren’t many of them happening now. He’s trying to revert to the role of genial innkeeper, although there’s nothing to be genial about and not much more to keep in his inn. Even his zealous wife, whose features have grown still more sharp and edgy, and soon will grow yet more so, has stopped spying on us and mutters ‘Gruess Gott’ when she meets people in the lanes, instead of barking out ‘Heil Hitler!’ In fact ‘Heil Hitler!’ seems to be going out of fashion. You hardly ever hear it these days. And
Lisl sometimes leaves us half a loaf of bread when she drops by of an afternoon, looking forlorn and wan and hoping to glean a bit of news about Martin, who doesn’t seem as keen as he used to be, now that he’s off working on the farm.

  But she’ll soon have more to think about than that. The final battle really is about to be joined and it’s time for the inauguration of Martin’s glorious military career.

  The Führer’s birthday’s fast approaching and so are the allies from east and west, although they haven’t exactly been invited to the party (which will be the last occasion by the way that Franzi Wimmer wears his Ortsgruppenleiter’s uniform, although he isn’t going to be invited either). It’s time for Adolf to do something to stem the tide at last and so the rallying call goes out for every German who can carry a pitchfork to fight fanatically in the last, ultimate, final, truly decisive battle of the war. Though not fully Aryan, Martin ranks high enough to serve as cannon fodder in this ‘People’s Army,’ so he gets his summons too. A soldier in the German army! Throwing the barbarian hordes back, side by side with his resolute Aryan comrades! What could life offer to compare with that?

  Nothing, Martin thinks, and nor apparently does Willibald when he hears the news. Martin doesn’t mind that it’s not the Luftwaffe or the Panzer regiments after all whose colours he’s been called to. The point is, he’ll prove himself a hero and get accepted at last in the Aryan Reich. And then even his runaway mother will be tolerated as well (acceptance is too much to hope for, even he recognises that). The Holy Grail hovers before him and he reaches out for its flickering gleam through romantic mists of self-delusion.

  As does Willibald. On the morning of Martin’s departure, he delivers a throbbing speech on the German soldier’s sacred duty to defend hearth and home, as he in his time has done and others in their time before. If it weren’t for his present infirmity he’d be marching along beside his son. Hindenburg gets a mention after himself, and so does Frederick the Great. Martin’s in good company all right (and so of course are they). Then Willibald embraces Martin theatrically on the doorstep for Ortsgruppenleiter Wimmer to see what patriots we are and wipes away a manly tear, though unluckily Franzi isn’t there to enjoy the show. It’s all too much for Willibald though, and he totters backwards, waving feebly as Martin strides away to death or glory. Resolute Martin doesn’t look round at the hearth and home he’s off to defend, and so fails to observe his father nearly collapsing in Ilse’s arms, which are in no state at all to support his gangling frame, however emaciated it may be.

  This People’s Army has no weapons yet and no uniforms, not to speak of training, but they’ve got some food and they’re going to inflict a decisive defeat on the International-Jewish-financed Mongol-Slavic-Bolshevik hordes by means of sheer German (or half-German) determination and valour. Now that things are running down, nobody seems to bother about keeping half-Jews in their place, which just lately has been outside the Third Reich’s armed forces. But then half-Jews always were a tricky category at the best of times, since they were also half-Aryan. At the worst of times they’re trickier still. So the policy now is: let them in.

  Some weeks ago in the Plinden cinema Martin saw a newsreel of the Führer inspecting blond young lads about his own age or even younger and clapping them on the back with a paternal smile as he sent them off to fight the Russian tanks with their pitchforks and shovels. How Martin had longed to be one of them, receiving the ultimate accolade from the Führer’s own hand! Now he can thank imminent defeat for getting his chance at last. Never mind that there was something forlorn about the Führer’s expression, as if he knew the game was up. It’s true his cheeks were drooping, one arm seemed to hang listlessly as if it had grown tired of the whole business, and his face sagged between bidding farewell to one young hero and greeting the next, as though his mind kept wandering off to something else altogether and it wasn’t Eva Braun. But still he was the Führer, the Fatherland’s Guide and Protector, the Man of Destiny, the Defender of Europe, the Saviour of the World and quite possibly the Universe.

  The young heroes do a bit of drilling under n.c.o.s brought out of long retirement who are chiefly wondering where they’re going to throw their uniforms and rank badges away when the Russians come. They give their orders in a world-weary and cynical tone unless a young officer happens along (and there aren’t many of them left now), when they sharpen up their act a bit. After that the recruits are loaded onto lorries and taken somewhere near the front. They know it’s the front because they hear the Crrump! of artillery all the time and see columns of victorious German troops hastily and unaccountably heading in the opposite direction. Surely our boys haven’t lost their way? No, they’re making a strategic withdrawal of course, after inflicting untold casualties on the Ivans, who have nevertheless managed to make a slight and temporary advance. The Ivans will doubtless all be wiped out in no time, but the haggard faces of the triumphantly withdrawing troops don’t quite fit our young heroes’ picture of a strategic withdrawal and some of them feel queasy in their valiant stomachs. If our boys on the Western Front are making strategic withdrawals with the same rapidity as they are here, they’ll be bumping into each other’s arses before long.

  Soon the young heroes are issued rifles and a few rounds of ammunition and given a bit of instruction how to use them. The world-weary n.c.o.s have become resigned and hopeless now, like trainers who know their fighter can’t win but push him into the ring regardless and place their bets upon the other man.

  The bold confidence with which Martin joined this ragtag army is beginning to ooze away. It leaks out altogether when they come to a devastated town five miles from the front where soldiers from an SS regiment are digging in and have hanged a couple of deserters about Martin’s own age on the nearest convenient lamp-posts. One of the corpses looks familiar although he’s beginning to go off by now – he’s been there three days, an awed voice mutters. Martin feels compelled to look more closely despite a not quite equal compulsion to look away.

  The blond-haired corpse swings gently to and fro in the balmy spring breeze like a sack fastened at the neck or a cloth puppet – except that what he looks like most of all is a very dead young human being. The last time Martin saw such light blue eyes, such fair hair flapping languidly upon its broad Aryan brow was on a mountain at sunset. But then the owner’s eyes weren’t popping like that and his head wasn’t lolling all the way to one side. He wasn’t sticking his tongue out either.

  For two days Martin’s subdued unit is moved forwards, backwards and sometimes sideways like a pawn in a sloppy chess game while some general tries to make up his mind which gap in the porous front it might be used to plug. At one place in the dusk their lorries pass a straggly line of skeletal figures in filthy striped uniforms and wooden clogs. They’re marching, or rather stumbling, towards the rear, marshalled by SS guards. When one of the walking cadavers falls and does not rise, a guard shoots him once in the back of the head.

  By now Martin feels he’s learnt more than enough about being an Aryan hero, and to go by the crushed silence in which they plod, on foot now, past the charred and ruined witnesses of war, so have the rest of them. They all know full well they’re going to melt away when the chance comes, but Martin keeps getting a feeling like a rough hemp rope tightening round his throat whenever he thinks of that dangling corpse, whose owner must have melted away too soon or not quite fast enough. He tries surreptitiously pressing his fingers and thumb against his windpipe and finds it even more painful than he’d feared. Which is it worse to face, Russian tanks or SS nooses? His stomach cringes. War wasn’t meant to be like this, it was supposed to be all painless victories in which only the other side got hurt – Bang bang! You’re dead! – then thumping drums and waving flags.

  But he doesn’t have to make an anguished choice between the horns of this dilemma. The solution comes of its own accord. Before they’ve gone much further forward, or it might be sideways for all that Martin knows, they are confronted by the flo
oding sludgy tide of a whole army in retreat – battalion after battalion of exhausted, glum, torn, wounded and defeated men with dark eyes haunted by what they’ve seen or done. The untested tyros view their broken but experienced comrades with despair instead of lordly scorn, and as if by common consent falter, halt, turn and join the throng. It’s like a disappointed and unruly football crowd pouring out of the stadium where their team’s just lost, except they’re desperate, not just disappointed, and what they’ve lost is definitely not a game.

  Soon the soldiers are joined by fleeing civilians, humping rucksacks, lugging cases, pushing prams. And the world-weary n.c.o.s are themselves transmuted into rankless, badgeless and sometimes toothless old men in civvies, merging with the widening flood of refugees. Shell-fire is close behind them and the curdling whine of the Ivans’ rockets. Sometimes there’s the distant rattle of small arms fire as well, at which the pace of the rising flood first hesitates, then increases. Martin has never heard the whirr and clank of Russian tank tracks, but he’s listening for them all the same and thinks with gasps of panic that he hears them every other second.

  But it isn’t tanks that come to pay them a visit, it’s strafing fighters, at first far-off harmless humming ladybirds, but then suddenly close and furiously angry wasps. Down they swoop, sending bullets and cannon shells crashing into the ground, and then they’ve soared away before you even know if you’ve been hit or not. But that’s only to swing round and swoop down again. Martin’s stomach’s in revolt, and so are his watery legs as the earth shakes with explosions and people all around him scream out in pain or terror. He throws himself on the earth like everyone else and moans to God to save him, a personage he’s previously invoked still less frequently than I.