The Kaminsky Cure

by New, Christopher;

  Then the sun declines behind the mountains for its annual snooze, and winter comes to Heimstatt with its frosty icing. So do hefty cardboard cartons from America with CARE stencilled neatly on their sides. The cartons contain tins of powdered milk, dried egg, tinned butter and spam, all paid for by kind Episcopalian or Presbyterian ladies in strange-sounding places like Oregon and Ohio, Memphis and Minnesota. We’re the only people in the village to get them because we’re the only Nazi victims and we’re Lutherans as well. Every one of these packages requires an effusive letter of thanks, which Sara has to write since she’s now by far the best at English. Gabi wants to keep the packets coming – they’re what’s putting Willibald and Ilse on the road to recovery, and also putting flesh on Sara and me. Every time Gabi slits one of those packets crisply open with the carving knife, she imagines a dozen rich old ladies in a large and cheerful church hall, packing it with the goodies that sustain us in benighted war-ravaged Europe. She multiplies that dozen by a hundred million (demography is not her strongest suit) and concludes that America is a land full of milk and honey and teeming with a billion generous people anxious to share their good fortune with the rest of the world. So begins her American Dream.

  For the moment we are the lords of the village. Gabi can buy in any store (or could if she had the money), sit on any bench and enter any inn. That’s an exhilarating feeling after the last seven years, even if she thinks she’d better still be careful. After all, how long will this last? She can’t believe the leopard’s changed its spots. As for me, I sense that if I felt vindictive I could probably kick Fritzi Wimmer full in his Aryan crotch and get away with it, even though he’s still wearing a black arm-band while I am not. But actually I like Fritzi, and he likes me. I’ve even given him some spam from one of our CARE packets, which he said tasted just as good as wurst. So far from being vindictive, I’m only glad I’m back in school now, in the first class of Gymnasium. And Sara’s back in her Catholic school as well. Admittedly, we have to make that daily three hour railway trip to Plinden. We could stay in lodgings during the week now if we wanted, but it costs too much and anyway Gabi’s trust in the new order doesn’t reach that far. It’s almost as though she thinks some Plinden Nazi might still be lurking there to gas us while her back is turned.

  Martin and Ilse aren’t back in school though. They’re too old for that now, so they’re getting special preparation to take the University Entrance Examination. Ilse’s recovered her sight, but her leg’s still gammy and she’s in the Neurological Insitute in Bad Neusee, which contains a hundred or so raving, twitching, shell-shocked soldiers, but welcomes her with open arms as well, as if she was quite the proper Aryan now. Not that she’s getting any better. Multiple sclerosis is suspected, but no one quite knows what that is or how to tell you’ve got it, let alone what to do about it if you have. Gabi visits her every day, bringing her books to study and undertaking half the nursing although there are nurses aplenty and Ilse would rather lie alone in peace. She tries in her meek and mild way to persuade Gabi to stay in Heimstatt, unsuccesfully of course. Nearly everything she does is unsuccessful, and she assumes it always will be. It’s a reasonable assumption.

  But everything costs money, and there are all the debts that Gabi’s run up at the shops. She might seem welcome anywhere (though what they really think she doesn’t know), but still they want their money. And now that we’re no longer outcasts, they think we must be able to pay our way as well. The bills keep turning up insistently on Willibald’s desk, and he keeps shouting she must pay them. (One of the changes peace has wrought is that we no longer close the windows when he shouts. But then his voice is pretty feeble now.)

  ‘How can we pay them on your money?’ Gabi asks.

  ‘That’s right, blame me for your extravagance!’

  You can tell he’s getting better. He’s even well enough by now to take an occasional trip to Plinden, where he says he’s again got parish business, though Plinden still isn’t in our parish.

  While worrying over her nagging financial problems, Gabi’s glance wanders one day across the CARE packages that stand neatly stacked along the kitchen wall. We’re getting more of them just now than we can use, and she’s storing them against the rainy day when they stop coming, as, despite her trust in the wealthy Episcopalian and Presbyterian ladies’ generosity, she fears eventually they will. And then lightning strikes her with a revelation as blinding as St. Paul’s. We have what the villagers have not – foreign food. And they have what we have not – money. The conditions of trade are present, and trade must duly flow.

  So a shop is set up in the disused outhouse by the kitchen, as far away from Willibald’s offended gaze as possible. Prices are fixed, Sara and I become assistants and hey presto we’re in business. What a tin of spam or dried milk fetches in times like these! And as for a tin of butter! Taking the money and giving change does wonders for my mental arithmetic too. Just about everyone in the village has bought something before a week is out, even Dr Kraus’s former mistress, now his present wife, and Father Schuster’s housekeeper with the little girl who so resembles Father Schuster. So long as the CARE packages keep coming we’ll be coining in the money.

  And Gabi’s doing her best to make sure they do keep coming. The letters she gets Sara to write are models of ingratiating effusiveness, if that’s a thing you want a model of. Whenever Sara tries to tone them down, Gabi insists on retaining the humble superlatives that she believes rich Episcopalian and Presbyterian ladies (and what’s the difference, Sara sometimes wonders) lap up like cats do cream. This may improve Sara’s English, but it doesn’t help her self-esteem. She feels she’ll never be able to say thank you again for the rest of her life without squirming inwardly and curling up her toes. But the CARE packages do keep rolling in, and trade is certainly flourishing.

  Willibald feels uncomfortable about all this. He knows there’s something off-colour about selling goods that charity’s bestowed on us, but on the other hand he enjoys the medicines and other benefits of Gabi’s trade, one of which is that the tradesmen have stopped dunning him. Sometimes he talks darkly about Christ and the money-changers, but he makes no Christ-like move to drive them out of the temple. Generally he sniffs like one who disapproves, but smacks his lips over the occasional schnapps and other goodies which Gabi buys him off with. He’s secured his moral position by pretending to be above this sordid commerce, to have nothing to do with it, but he downs the penicillin as fast as he can when bronchitis camps on his weakened lungs a few weeks into winter.

  Rudi Fischer, a man I think I’ve never seen before, is the first prisoner-of-war to come back to Heimstatt. He’s been starving too, because he says the Amis who captured him had neglected to order food for all the prisoners they were going to take (or else they hadn’t meant to take any prisoners at all), and they certainly weren’t going to give them any of their own. But hunger seems to have sharpened both his lust and his wit, unless he was already endowed in head and loins with something keener than the usual Heimstatt portion. In next to no time he’s shot his pent-up seed into his wife’s receptive womb (she has twins exactly nine months later) and coined a new name for the Pfarrhaus – The Good Shepherd Emporium. I’m not sure I like it when Fritzi Wimmer tells me this, and Willibald certainly doesn’t when I tell him. In fact he shrieks imprecations, first against Rudi for his blasphemy, then against Gabi for provoking it. Luckily Rudi’s a Catholic, so he won’t mind a Protestants’ curse. And Gabi’s used to all his trade tantrums by now, so she doesn’t take much notice either. And later on that evening Willibald sits peacefully drinking schnapps in his study, now that penicillin’s cleared up his lungs, barking like an excited puppy as Samson and Delilah limber up once more on the literary starting blocks.

  But prisoners-of-war and CARE packages are not the only things the Amis send us. They also send us soldiers, black and white.

  The black soldiers are at one end of the village and the white ones at the other. Considering they’
re all Amis, they don’t seem to mix much with each other. In fact it’s a bit like it used to be amongst us with the Aryans and the half-Jews. Is that perhaps why the Nazi racial theory gets inverted, now it’s out of favour, and it’s not the white soldiers that the children and the young girls of the village mostly cluster round, but the black? Adolf would be turning in his grave if he knew. Or his remaining teeth would anyway, which I believe is all that’s left of him by now.

  Sara has succumbed to this polar attraction too, and fallen in a kind of love with a black sergeant who sometimes takes her about with him in his Jeep. This sergeant is an army photographer and takes pictures of Sara for his paper. He also tells her stories of New Orleans where he was born and of New York where he lives. Sara’s interest in this American is not like Lisl’s in Martin, nor is his like Martin’s in Lisl. Her hair is never mussed, her blouse is not unbuttoned. That’s not Sara’s way, and it’s never going to be so. Apparently she reminds the sergeant of his daughter in Harlem, but what is he to her? Does she tell him in her uncertain English the things she can’t or won’t tell us? Sara never says, and no one thinks to ask. I do notice he’s got melancholy eyes, though that’s not the word I use (‘He looks down in the dumps,’ is what I say) and gives her chocolate which she sometimes passes on to me.

  Her letters to the Episcopalian/Presbyterian ladies get neglected, her schoolwork isn’t properly done, and her stories, the stay and succour of her life till now, lie untouched like outgrown dolls, except they aren’t so bulky, underneath her mattress. I take a look one day. I’m getting a bit more interested in them now, although I’m getting much more interested in the magazines that Martin still keeps beneath his mattress. I tell myself I need to find out about these things, it’s part of growing up. But I know I’d still do it even if it wasn’t.

  But Sara’s stories – my God, one of them’s in English! She started learning English in earnest with Franz von Haltenstein, I remember, who told her he was going to America after the war if he was still alive. And I knew she was getting good at it – how else could she write all those thank you letters for the CARE packages? But I never realised she’d got this far. She’s actually composed a story in that awkward language where they always put the verb in the wrong place! Why is she making it so hard for herself, I ask her when she catches me trying to read it?

  She doesn’t seem annoyed. It’s as if she’s discarded all her stories now she’s found this black American, and doesn’t care what happens to them any more. ‘I decided when Mutti died’ (that’s how we still speak of Gabi’s disappearance), ‘I decided to learn English properly, so that one day I’d never have to speak German again.’

  It isn’t just the Amis who’ve arrived in Heimstatt, by the way. There are –

  21

  Soldiers from the other armies too

  First Cousin Robert turns up in civilian clothes he’s begged or stolen somewhere on his tortuous odyssey from the Eastern Front. And a day or two later Second Cousin Wolfgang arrives in a British paratrooper’s uniform. He’s got a week’s leave from Berlin, where he’s interrogating captured Nazis and looking for his parents on the side. He’s found some Nazis who’ve never heard of extermination camps or claim they haven’t anyway, but of his parents all he’s found so far is their former neighbour, who kept the silver coffeepot for them in case they ever returned, together with the receipts for the jewellery they had to surrender before they surrendered themselves. Rings, wristwatches, necklaces, bracelets and brooches, each piece neatly in its proper category. And in the official files, the date on which they and Great Aunt Hedwig were transported to Theresienstadt: December 14th, 1943.

  The four veterans (Willibald includes himself) sit on the upstairs balcony overlooking the tranquil springtime lake and swap military stories which perhaps only Wolfgang has no need to embellish or distort. I hang about watching the sometimes cloudy windows of their souls. Willibald, performing his hackneyed tale of how he shamed a German officer in Poland, gazes into everybody’s panes with a theatrical intensity which makes you glance uncomfortably away. Robert, recounting what he’s seen done but never done himself, stares fixedly across the lake as though he doesn’t want anyone to look through his panes. Martin, telling some fiction of how he saved a wounded comrade from Russian machine-gun fire and was nearly shot himself, looks hopefully into every pane except Robert’s, seeking a glimmer of that admiration which he considers his due and cannot live without. Pianistic paratrooper Wolfgang says only how scary it is to jump out of a plane with a parachute on your back and a rifle strapped useless to your leg while people on the ground are popping away at you as if you were a clay pigeon. But he avoids no one’s panes and laughs about it as if after all it’s only a joke. And I realise that the windows to his soul are as limpid as the soul itself.

  Then the schnapps goes round, which Willibald usually reserves for Willibald alone. I want to know what clay pigeons are, but Wolfgang is telling Robert he’s sorry about Erwin, and Robert is telling Wolfgang he’s sure his parents will turn up soon. There were lots of people in the camps, he says, it’s bound to take some time before the inmates all get home, especially if they’re in the Russian zone.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Wolfgang agrees hopefully, and there’s a little silence, in which I could make my clay pigeon inquiry, except that I’ve been put in mind now of that shabby wretched trio that Martin and I met outside the Botanical Gardens in Berlin three years earlier. And that makes ornithological research seem somehow inappropriate. ‘Remember us!’ I hear Great Aunt Hedwig’s imploring voice again, and suddenly I know that Robert’s encouragement is empty and Wolfgang’s hope unfounded. Martin and I, who last saw Wolfgang’s parents and Great Aunt Hedwig, have seen the last of them as well.

  Another round of schnapps, then Wolfgang plays upon the untuned piano which only Gabi knows is mortgaged to the butcher, and says he’ll never be a pianist now, because he hasn’t got the technique and it’s far too late to get it. Never mind, he might take up composing, and he gives us a piece called Reverie that he’s been working on in his spare time. I haven’t heard the piano played since that SS colonel ran the backs of his fingers up and down the keys just after having Franzi Wimmer shot, and though the piece is quite beyond me, I do recognise that Wolfgang’s playing is a cut above his. Wolfgang’s piece makes my eyes prick as I remember Lotte and Solomon and Great Aunt Hedwig once more. And perhaps it does Gabi’s too, because she comes in from the kitchen with floury hands, sits down a moment in unusual quietness, and then goes out again, brushing her eyes with the unfloured knuckles of her wrists.

  Soon Wolfgang has gone back to Berlin in his khaki uniform and ballooning cherry-coloured beret, and Robert has started on the next leg of his odyssey, which he completes about the time his father is released from his denazification course at last and the tedium of Civics 102.

  It isn’t long before the Ami soldiers are on their way as well, off to share Vienna with the Ivans, who apparently are not so friendly now. So Sara’s going to lose her black sergeant too, just as she earlier lost Franz and Gabi. The Amis leave before dawn one chilly April morning, and Sara gets up secretly to make her sad farewell. She stands outside the Pfarrhaus to wave to the sergeant, but for a long time the sergeant doesn’t come.

  Truck after truck grinds past, first the white troops, then the black, and she’s almost given up, rigid with frozen tears when at last the sergeant’s Jeep appears. She’s afraid he’s going to drive past without noticing her, but at the last moment the Jeep stops while the other vehicles growl by. Out steps the sergeant to take a final picture of this teenage Austrian village girl, and then he helps her into the Jeep, drives her slowly through the village and helps her out the other end. Before he drives away he gives her a last chocolate bar and scrawls his Harlem address on the wrapper. She stands forlornly watching till the Jeep’s red tail light fades like a dying cigarette and disappears.

  Another departure, another loss.

  She comes back with
deeply hollow eyes, and Gabi’s furious. So is Willibald when he gets up as usual three hours later. So there are still some things they can agree upon. Sara doesn’t speak – she’s too full of loss, if emptiness can make you full. And she doesn’t eat the chocolate either. But she tells me I can if I peel the wrapper off without tearing it and give it back to her. It’s not the first time I’ve done well out of her poor appetite. She smoothes the wrapper out and keeps it in the pages of her stories, which she now takes up again like a disillusioned voyager returning home.

  A few weeks later a picture arrives through the post. There she stands by the Pfarrhaus door, small and thin for her age, bereft and sad. Her eyes look startled as well, because the sergeant used a flash, which she’d never seen before. She places the photo next to the wrapper in her exercise book and lays it on the desk beside her whenever she writes in it. As though to remind herself of what she has been and will never be again.

  And then I hear Jägerlein’s voice on the stairs one May morning, a morning which is apparently the anniversary of the Nazi surrender. She’s back and she’s reciting that poem about the cuckoo calling in the woods that I first heard from her lips in Annchen’s company, when I was nine or ten. It almost makes me think that things are normal again, although I’m still not sure what normal is.

  Jägerlein moves back into her old room behind the kitchen and tells us how much she still misses fat Annchen and skinny Francois. She even asks Gabi to describe all the French prisoners she nursed in Graunau, in case one of them might turn out to have been hers. But Gabi isn’t good at describing French prisoners and doesn’t remember anyone called Francois.

  Jägerlein sets to work, washing, cleaning and cooking. On Sundays she goes to listen to, or at least attend, Willibald’s morning sermon. ‘Who else will, if I don’t?’ she asks Gabi, who somehow never finds the time to go herself. The answer’s eight or nine. I wonder if she’d still go if she knew what we all know about how Annchen was discovered on her sister’s farm.