The Kaminsky Cure Read online

  I’ve no idea which of these obscure doctrines Pfarrer Kretschmann may adhere to, since I’ve no idea of the doctrines yet, and I’m never going to go much on theology in any case. All I know is that the Confessing Church ladies oppose them, and that puts them on the wrong side of the Government too. From my observation, it seems that the Confessing Church ladies are pacific while the German Christians are aggressive. Pfarrer Kretschmann’s certainly pretty bellicose anyway. He preached a sermon in Vienna at the outbreak of the war, in which he announced to his congregation that God was on the side of the German nation under its great leader Adolf Hitler, and that He (God or Adolf?) would bless the German arms with victory. Pfarrer Kretschmann was so proud of this that he had it printed and distributed to his brothers in Christ, and Willibald got one too with a fraternal dedication. It’s on his bookshelf, along with a volume entitled The Science of Race, by a German university professor, with pictures of every kind of skull from the most decadent up to the noble Aryan. I don’t suppose my mother’s read either of these works. She doesn’t have much time for that kind of reading. Perhaps she doesn’t have much stomach for it, either. As for me, I haven’t learnt to read at all yet, I don’t even know the alphabet. So all this passes over my head for the present, when it isn’t going on behind my back.

  In the last week of August we’re going up the mountain for a few days, to a hut where Heimstatt’s only meadows are, clinging to a ledge of cliff two thousand metres high. When we come down, Gabi tells me, I’m going to start school. Sara looks at me, then looks away. That gives me a sinking feeling, but there’s the holiday up the mountain first, so I try to ignore it and pretty well succeed.

  This week will be our Indian summer as it turns out, though I’ve no clue yet what an Indian summer is. Fräulein von Kaminsky isn’t going with us. It’s as much as she can do to haul herself up our stairs; she certainly wouldn’t make it up the mountain. Unless, Martin is heard to murmur, we rolled her up. No, she’s going to Bad Neusee for a few weeks, to visit that distant branch of the Habsburg family where she was once a governess and whose name – von Haltenstein – is seldom off her lips. Before she leaves, however, she takes Gabi aside and imparts some severe words of wisdom to her.

  ‘I have watched how you let Martin have his way in everything,’ she says. ‘And I realise it is because you feel guilty. Though why you should feel guilty I do not know, nor why you should feel more guilty towards him than towards the others, just because he’s the eldest son. But mark my words, Frau Pfarrer, you are teaching him never to deny himself anything. At present it is only a piece of chocolate or an impertinent remark’ – here Gabi swallows and feels her cheeks glow, knowing full well what that impertinent remark was and that she even had the temerity to smile at it herself – ‘but later on it will be young women. A boy who cannot say no to a piece of chocolate will not be able to say no to a young woman either. I have not been a governess to the Imperial Family for nothing.’

  What this reveals about the Imperial Family Gabi can only conjecture, but as far as Martin goes, Fräulein von Kaminsky’s warning is prophetic. Gabi will continue in her guilt to let Martin always have whatever extra goody’s going in these times of wartime rationing and anti-Semitic hardship, and consequently Martin will indeed never deny himself anything. Especially young women, when he graduates from chocolate to them – you could almost pick a football team from the products of his future philandering. Which will be exclusively conducted, by the way, with simple blonde and blue-eyed Aryan girls.

  But anyway, here we are at last, going up the mountain. Each of us has a rucksack (Martin’s, of course, not only the largest but the best – or anyway the least bad) and we plod up the path past Dr Kraus’s house, where he keeps his bald wife and a golden-haired lady with her baby. I already know Dr Kraus is not a people doctor like Dr Koch, the village doctor we never visit and who never visits us, but now I’m told he’s a doctor who specialises in rocks. I know there are animal doctors as well as people doctors, so it’s no great surprise to me to learn there are rock doctors too. And for months I cherish a mental picture of Dr Kraus placing a stethoscope on a rock and sounding its heart. The doctor is also an explorer, Jägerlein told me once, and he’s been to many countries. She also said he’s got some pickled snakes in his bedroom, though how she knows that she didn’t say. And now Martin loudly announces that the golden-haired lady who lives with Dr and Frau Kraus is the doctor’s lady-friend, which, since she’s certainly female and if she lives there presumably a friend would seem to me hardly worth saying, if Gabi didn’t look uncomfortable and twinkle her eyes fiercely at Martin before he strides on ahead.

  Dr Kraus’s wife glances down at us blankly from an upstairs window as she adjusts her wig for the day, but his lady-friend, in the garden with her child, smiles at us remotely. My mother tries out a shy ‘Guten Morgen’ as we pass, but it’s a bit too timorous to be heard and anyway the golden head has already turned away. Possibly it only recognises ‘Heil Hitler!’ or the Austrian ‘Gruess Gott.’

  My interest has been tickled by Gabi’s twinkling eyes and I’m about to ask her more about Dr Kraus’s lady-friend when I notice something strange beside me on the rising path. There’s another boy here, as well as my overbearing brother and myself. Who could this be? This boy is a year or so older than Martin, wears brown leather shorts, says ‘Heil Hitler!’ to me, and gives a cheery smile. Nobody has ever said ‘Heil Hitler!’ to me before, although I’ve seen them do it in the village and always wished that I could too, so my attempt to do so now betrays my lack of practice. However, he doesn’t seem to mind, and says ‘Gruess Gott’ now, as they often do in the village when they’d finished sticking their arms out and saying ‘Heil Hitler!’ The boy nods amiably and slips past me towards Martin, who is - where else? - in front, leading the column.

  Ilse tells me as I catch her up that this youth is Heinrich Schmidt and he’s the son of a consultant, whatever that is, in the hospital in Plinden. But what’s he doing here? ‘He’s a friend for Martin,’ Ilse says, as though Heinrich was a new toy for him to play with. But my brother and sisters don’t have friends. Friends are for the village people and Dr Kraus, not for proper Germans like us. Nevertheless Ilse says he’s a friend for Martin, and that means he must be, because Ilse cannot lie. She cannot walk very fast either; in fact she’s beginning to drag one foot a bit. So I soon go on ahead, hoping to catch up with Martin and Heinrich – this friendship business is something I don’t understand. But they’re striding upwards like a couple of our Panzers racing across France, and I have to let them go.

  At the top there’s a wooden hut in a meadow of buttercupped grass, and it’s Heinrich who manages to unlock the door when nobody else can. We can’t see Heimstatt up here, but we can see the icy glacier sheet which once covered the whole land, and the quarry where the village men all work and the other frowning bony mountains round about, which look just as grimly unattainable from here as they did from the village we left four hours ago.

  ‘Where’s the toilet?’ is my immediate and anxious question. A little worm of fear is wriggling in my stomach at the thought of a distant pit lost in alpine mists and still deeper than the one at home. What monsters could be lurking there? Whatever happens, I don’t think I’ll go at night. But my fears turn out to be groundless. The toilet isn’t even an outside job, never mind one hanging over a far-off alpine ravine. No, it’s in a tiny cubicle in the corner of the hut, with a china basin that drains into a cesspool outside, which is covered with the most handsomely vivid green turf of the whole meadow. (There’s a moral in that somewhere, but I’m too young to play at Aesop.) Now I know I’m going to enjoy myself up here.

  Heinrich is funny and daring and has all the best ideas for games, and even Gabi has to laugh at him. Which reminds me – I’ve scarcely ever seen my mother smile, let alone laugh, not even in that crooked way which is all that her divided face can manage. And Martin joins in the general admiration, as though recognising that
here at least he’s met his match. Unable to compete with Heinrich, he seems happy to be his lieutenant and seconder. Heinrich leads us along dizzy mountain trails which he alone knows because, he says, he once lived a whole summer up here. He helps Ilse climb over boulders (Martin would have gone ahead muttering about useless girls) and carries me piggy-back when I’m tired. In the evenings he tells us stories about the mountains, stories he’s heard from his father who apparently has been a great mountaineer. Two Englishmen once went walking up the highest mountain on earth, he says, and were never seen again. But for all anyone knows they might have reached the top and be lying there still, embalmed in the ice. And there they’ll stay for ever. I’m not sure I like that story, at least not just then, while we’re pretty high up a mountain ourselves. But then Heinrich smiles. ‘Until a German finds them,’ he adds. I find that reassuring. We’re in good hands up here.

  ‘Is Heinrich really Martin’s friend?’ I ask my mother as I’m lying tired out in bed on the last evening of this careless week. I suppose I think him too good to be Martin’s friend. I want him to be mine.

  ‘Well, his father was a doctor in a hospital where I worked in the First War,’ Gabi replies evasively. ‘We ran into each other in Plinden a few weeks ago, when I was going to the dentist’s. And so …’

  ‘Did he know Onkel Josef?’ Sara asks from the table where she’s setting out the breakfast dishes.

  ‘Er, no, I shouldn’t think so,’ my mother replies carefully in a voice that Sara hears as uneasy, although things like that are not the kind of things I notice yet. ‘They were rather different …’ First her voice trails off, then she does too, going to the ladder and calling out to Ilse to bring an extra blanket down from the loft, although we’ve got extra blankets galore down here already.

  ‘What did you do in the hospital?’ I ask Gabi. ‘Were you a doctor too?’

  ‘No, a nurse. Like your Aunt Frieda was.’

  ‘Why did Aunt Frieda die, if she was a nurse?’ This dying business makes me feel queasy. Nurses ought to be able to prevent it.

  ‘Oh, something happened,’ my mother sighs and shrugs, on her way now to the kitchen.

  Sara follows her with her pregnant gaze, but I’m thinking of the dentist we go to in Plinden. There’s a dentist who comes once a week to Heimstatt, but we never go to him, just as we never go to see Doctor Koch in the village, but Doctor Wagner in Plinden. I put that down to the superiority of the dentists and doctors in Plinden; only they would be up to the care of our proper German teeth and proper German bodies. After all Plinden is a real town with streets and cars and buses. Obviously they must have better doctors and dentists there. So I believe it’s just better medical advice we’re after in Plinden, which indeed it partly is.

  Sara knows of course there’s another reason too: Plinden’s far enough away and big enough for people not to have discovered my mother is a Jew. But Sara doesn’t tell me that. She probably thinks I’m going to find out soon enough on my first day in school. In the meantime, while everyone else is sleeping on their straw-filled mattresses, she is scribbling in her notebook by the light of a secret torch. When she scribbles like that, her face wears a frown of intense concentration such as Frau Doktor Saur used to long to see on it all last year.

  That night the loudest biggest nearest storm I’ve ever known occurs. We’re woken first by low rumbles of thunder and flickerings of lightning which seem twenty distant kilometres away, but that’s only the overture and it isn’t long before the opera begins in earnest. The sullen rumbles turn into roars and the flickering lightning into dazzling jagged flashes as the storm moves swiftly nearer. Then it decides to put us in the front row, and, huddling by the little window, we all watch it stride and strut upon the stage. Great forks of lightning stab the sombre meadow all around us and we hear the air fry as they sizzle through the night. The earthshaking crash of thunder follows almost at once. Soon hailstones the size of golf balls are thumping on the roof as well. As Heinrich isn’t scared, I’m not either, even when I notice Ilse fingering her golden cross and murmuring a prayer.

  Heinrich tells us the bombs falling on London that night are ten times as noisy, and the whole city will soon be rubble. Gabi says ‘Ach!’ as if she’s shocked, but then says nothing more. Martin says he’d like to see a proper air-raid and Gabi still says nothing more. In fact she seems to want everyone to say nothing more, because then she says we should all go back to bed, the storm is passing and it’ll be a long day going down the mountain tomorrow.

  On the way down next day I slip on a moss-covered stone and sprain my ankle. Gabi binds it up and Martin and Heinrich take it in turns to carry me sitting astride their shoulders. When it’s Martin’s turn, he keeps telling me to stop wriggling and sit still, but Heinrich jiggles and bounces me, pretending he’s a horse. I say I wish Heinrich was my brother, and everyone laughs except Martin.

  As soon as we reach the village, Heinrich takes the ferry across the lake to catch the train back to Plinden, and we all wave goodbye from the pier. His blond hair flutters like a banner against his tanned forehead and he pulls a funny face as he leans over the stern and the ferry bears him slowly away. The evening air is chilly now, which means that summertime will soon be over.

  Very soon.

  When we get home tired and happy, all except Ilse who’s only tired, we find an impressive official-looking envelope in the letter box. While my mother is tearing it open and reading it, one side of her face twitching slightly as she frowns, I discover three things are missing from the house: Brutus the St Bernard from his kennel, the rabbits from their hutch and the wireless from the living room. Jägerlein is in the kitchen, tightening both her headscarf and her lips, and says only, ‘Ask your mother’ when I demand to know where the dog and rabbits are (I don’t care about the wireless). But my mother’s still reading the letter, or rather reading it again, with little gasps of indignant incredulity and despair. Martin is impatiently asking what it says, Sara is watching Gabi as if she knows already, and Ilse is retreating slowly up the stairs, into the quiet haven of her room.

  ‘Where’s Brutus?’ I keep demanding. ‘Where are the rabbits?’ Gabi knows she’s got some explaining to do, but just then she’s in no state to do it. Perhaps she should take a mouthful of water and wait a minute or two, but she’s in no state to do that either. So I have to gather the facts from the shouts of anger she blurts out (Jägerlein has already prudently closed the windows) and the sudden rushes of bitter self-reproachful tears. She shows me the letter, waving it about under my nose, but as I can’t tell one word from another yet, that doesn’t help. Sara tries to fill in the gaps, and gets shouted at for her pains – apparently she’s filling them in wrongly or filling the wrong ones in. At first all I know is that the Ortsgruppenleiter has removed dog, rabbits and wireless, and that they won’t be coming back. The letter explains why, but whenever Gabi starts to tell me what it says, she breaks out into tears of rage and shame all over again. It isn’t till the end of a long unhappy evening that I understand, and the understanding that I carry to bed with me is so heavy that it seems to crush my head into the pillow. I lie there staring out at the mountains looming darkly up outside the window, and in place of any other thought or feeling there’s only a desolated sense of irretrievable loss, a loss not only of Brutus and the rabbits, but of innocence itself. And then a dull and paralysing numbness seeps slowly through my veins like melted lead.

  My mother’s one of those, the race they’re always going on about on the wireless, or were until they took it away, the vermin of Europe, the cunning dirty rapacious Jews. And that means I’m half one too, and so are Sara and Ilse and Martin. That’s why the dog and rabbits and the wireless have all been taken away; we can’t be trusted with them, we can’t be trusted with anything. We might listen to the enemy’s subversive lies on the wireless, and we’d certainly ill-treat the animals and let them mess all over the place. When Willibald was here, it was apparently all right; we could be kept
in line by his stern Aryan discipline. But now he’s away serving the Führer, we’ve become unruly, as degenerate races will, and the laws regarding fully Jewish households must be rigorously applied to our half-Jewish one as well.

  This isn’t Franzi Wimmer’s doing. He’s all for the quiet life and a bit of live-and-let-live. All he really wants is to go on a few parades and throw his chest out to impress the women. No, it’s the work of that substitute pastor that Gabi crossed about Jägerlein’s day off, slope-shouldered Pfarrer Kretschmann. While we were away up the mountain, he trod in a Brutus turd on the path to the door, and that was the last straw. Well, I must admit Brutus laid some big ones. The outraged pastor complained at once to the Ortsgruppenleiter as well as to the Church authorities in Vienna. The Pfarrhaus was like a Polish-Jewish pigsty, he declared (not that he’d ever seen one, and in view of their dietary restrictions it seems unlikely that any kosher Jew would have a pig sty anyway). It stank of dog and rabbit droppings and unswept filth. Clearly when the Aryan Pfarrer wasn’t there, the Jewish racial tendencies bubbled and seethed, and the place had become a disgrace to the village and the Church. It was a wonder, he added personally to the Ortsgruppenleiter, that the local authorities had done nothing about it yet. Some people, he suggested with a meaning look, some people might conclude they weren’t very diligent in the performance of their duties.