The Kaminsky Cure Read online

  I like it in the kitchen. So does Sara. It’s the only place in the big draughty old house that’s really warm in the winter, but it’s also the only place that’s always cheerful at any time of the year. Sara sometimes scribbles her stories there behind the large green tile stove, and listens to Jägerlein when she stands suddenly stock still, gazes absently into the distance and recites one of the poems she learnt in her four years of schooling, or odes of her own that she composes spontaneously whenever the mood is on her.

  Today it’s April and the Führer’s birthday, but Jägerlein is saluting the cuckoo in the woods, not the cuckoo in Berlin. There’s been enough of that going on already in the village, what with the flags and the band and parades of Hitler Youth in their semi-military uniforms and the League of German Girls in theirs, bearing flowers for Führer Adolf. I had that in school this morning too. There’s been an extra-special birthday prayer for Führer and Fatherland, and Fritzi Wimmer was chosen to raise the swastika flag in the playground. His chilled blue eyes drilled into mine as he did so, as though to let me know he hasn’t forgotten, but I glanced away and Heiled Hitler with the best of them.

  ‘Cuckoo, cuckoo, comes the call from the wood,’ chants Mitzi Jaeger, eyes fixed on the washed blue sky outside the steamed-up window. Then she extemporises, waving her flour-coated hands about as though to pluck the bird of inspiration from the cuckoo-laden air.

  All the time she declaims, Annchen stands gazing at her vacant-eyed and open-mouthed, an unregarded streamlet of snot trickling slowly all the way from her red button nose down her chin and onto her pinafore. It isn’t the poetry that’s emptied her eyes, but the genes she was born with. Annchen is retarded like several children in our inbred village, and that’s the only reason Jägerlein’s been allowed to adopt her, although the adoption is quite unofficial. Jägerlein came across her some months ago, dirty and ill-fed, the last of eleven children, playing outside her parents’ house in the damp lower alleys where the snow lies longest in winter and the sun shines shortest in summer. She took the girl home with her (that is, to our home), washed and dressed her; and after a few weeks it became accepted that Annchen was now being brought up by Frau Jäger. She’s been in the Pfarrhaus now for almost half a year, since well before Willibald’s return from his heroic military duties, but as far as he’s concerned, she’s got to go back to her family. Why, Jägerlein doesn’t even have the girl’s ration card, no wonder she’s filching from us. That’s certainly got to stop. Jägerlein says yes, Annchen’s going back. But one day leads to another and somehow she never does make that promised journey back to her parents’ house, and scarcely even knows it when she passes it now, holding tight to Jägerlein’s apron on the way to the shops.

  Jägerlein’s soliloquy is interrupted by Willibald, who storms into the kitchen in full voice himself, demanding to know who’s taken the pen from his desk. Nobody can tell him, but he fixes an accusatory eye on Annchen, who begins to cry. ‘And why is this child still in my house anyway? Doesn’t she have a home of her own to go to, instead of slinking round other people’s houses filching their pens?’

  ‘Ach, Herr Pfarrer,’ Jägerlein answers placidly, rolling the dough out on the table. ‘What would Annchen want with a pen when she can’t even write? Have you looked in the drawer?’

  ‘Of course I’ve looked in the drawer!’ Willibald shouts. ‘Someone’s deliberately taken it, just to spite me!’ He’s glaring still harder at Annchen now, who blubbers even more, which only strengthens his conviction of her guilt. ‘What’s she crying for if she hasn’t stolen it?’

  ‘She’s crying because you’re shouting at her, Herr Pfarrer,’ Jägerlein responds equably as she eases the pastry into the pan. ‘Just like the Frau Pfarrer does when you shout at her.’

  ‘Insolence!’ shrieks Willibald, his voice breaking with fury into an unfortunate falsetto. His eyes are popping and his face has turned that mottled red which gives him the look of a scraggy raging turkey. ‘How dare you speak to me like that in my own house!’

  Sara has closed her notebook and now I retreat beside her behind the stove. Willibald might start stamping his feet and throwing things soon. But this time Gabi appears, holding his pen in her hand. ‘Is this what you were looking for? It was on the carpet by the desk.’

  ‘Well, who put it there?’ Willibald shouts, snatching the pen from his wife. ‘Which idiot put it there?’ But it’s only bluster now, he realises the idiot is himself. The anger slowly melts away, and soon he does too, muttering his way back to the study.

  Jägerlein wipes Annchen’s face on her pinafore and lays the pan in the oven. Soon she’s gazing out at the mountains whose peaks are just visible for the first time this year, and reciting again. But I’m gazing at Annchen’s pinafore, which has been used a few minutes before to polish the bowls which she and Jägerlein eat from. Jägerlein washes our dishes fiercely with hot water and soda, but she never washes her and Annchen’s bowls. They lick them clean instead like a couple of cats, their heads nodding assiduously as they move up and down and round and round the smooth white surfaces. Then Jägerlein gives them a wipe with Annchen’s pinny and places them on the dresser ready for the next meal.

  Next week Jägerlein takes Annchen and me with her to see her French prisoner-of-war. Martin wants to come too, but Jägerlein says no. ‘You’ll only say something to upset him,’ she explains, which is certainly something that upsets Martin. In retaliatory jealousy he says something to upset me. ‘Do you know why Jägerlein doesn’t have a husband?’ he asks, with the sort of sneer that implies I ought to know but of course I’m far too dumb. The existence of the marital deficiency has never occurred to me before, let alone an explanation for it, and I shake my head. ‘He hanged himself from the curtain rail,’ Martin informs me. ‘His feet smashed the window. And they’ve never cut him down. When you’re there you’ll see him still hanging there, with his tongue popping out like this.’ I gaze at Martin’s mime of a twisted head, bulging eyes and protruding tongue, and imagine Jägerlein’s husband smashing the window still with his twitching booted feet. It’s a good imitation, but Martin’s going to find out one day it’s nothing like the real thing.

  I don’t believe him, but yet I don’t quite disbelieve him either, and my own feet begin to drag as we approach the farmhouse in the cramped little valley across the lake that grudgingly yields the only agricultural land around that bottomless pit of dark glacial water. I take a good look at all the windows I can see, but there’s no rotting corpse hanging in any of them. What about the windows I can’t see? I decide I’m not going into any room by myself.

  ‘So this is the little mixture?’ an older version of Jägerlein asks gruffly at the door. She looks me over as though I was a cross-bred calf, then opens the door wider to let me in. ‘Doesn’t look too bad. Are they all like him?’

  At the table in the kitchen sits a middle-aged man in an old uniform with worn dirty boots. His shoulders are hunched as if he’s expecting a blow, and when he hears us at the door he throws us an anxious glance before getting on with what he’s doing, which is shovelling a bowlful of stew noisily into his mouth with a large wooden ladle. The ladle’s too big (I know this problem myself), so he’s sucking the soup off it with hasty gurgling relish.

  Jägerlein pulls out the bench beside him and sits down to watch him eat. ‘Ach, you’re so thin still, François,’ she murmurs, reaching into her bag. François continues to slurp up the stew while she lays something wrapped in one of our cloths beside him. ‘Go on, open it,’ she urges as he pushes the empty bowl away at last. ‘Open it, go on.’

  He has long fingers with broken grimy nails, and he picks nervously at the ends of the cloth. The cloth falls away fold by tantalising fold, and he peels the last corner off to reveal fully a quarter of the cake Jägerlein baked with our flour and margarine rations yesterday. ‘Donke,’ he mutters and starts cramming that too into his mouth. Jägerlein places her elbows on the table, rests her chin on her folded hands a
nd watches our cake swiftly disappearing.

  ‘He’s nearly finished the upper field,’ Jägerlein’s sister announces from the doorway, but Jägerlein barely moves her head. When François has wolfed the last crumbs down, licking them off his fingers and palm, he nods and says ‘Donke’ again. Jägerlein shakes her head deprecatingly, gazing at him with a fond glow in her eyes that I’ve never seen before and which makes me feel slightly jealous. But François only stares down at the table, his shoulders still anxiously hunched. ‘Ja, François,’ Jägerlein says in the soothing tone she uses to Annchen when she’s hurt herself. ‘Soon the war’ll be over and you’ll be going home to see your people again, all your family and friends …’ But instead of seeming pleased for François, she appears suddenly quite sad and sighs.

  This is my first lesson in the sorrows of love, but I’m not old enough to understand it now, and won’t profit from it later when I am. There are some lessons that teach us nothing till we no longer need them. It’s not like that with swimming or maths, why must it be so with love? Well, anyway, it is, and now Jägerlein is stroking François’s forearm shyly as you would a dog you thought might suddenly growl or snap, while I’m beginning to wonder if Jägerlein’s husband might be hanging in the toilet, which my bladder’s pressure tells me I must shortly visit.

  ‘He’s nearly finished the upper field,’ Jägerlein’s sister says again. ‘He’s a good worker, that one.’

  ‘You’re just like my Hansi was,’ Jägerlein tells the Frenchman, ignoring her sister’s commendation. ‘He was always hungry too.’ Annchen looks from one to the other with her empty gaze and begins sucking her thumb. ‘Always hungry,’ Jägerlein repeats, then, without taking her eyes off François, addresses me. ‘No need to cross your legs. The privy’s out in the yard.’

  The Frenchman gets up suddenly, and Jägerlein’s hand starts back as though she’s been stung. He goes out into the yard himself and shoulders a long-handled hoe that’s leaning against the wall. Annchen follows him, her lips making a soft wet cheeping sound around her comforting thumb. And I follow Annchen.

  The privy, I discover, has no window. It’s just a lean-to against the wall, so I don’t have to worry about seeing a corpse dangling from a curtain rail. And as it’s broad daylight and sunny, I’m not worried about a monster coming up out of the depths beneath the wooden plank either, to plant its writhing suckers on me and drag me down.

  Being on the farm’s as good as being up on the mountain last summer, except there isn’t any Heinrich Schmidt. The grass is lush and green, there are two brown and white cows and Jägerlein’s sister gives us a snack of fresh milk and bread with real butter on it, not margarine. I watch the Frenchman hoe the potatoes in the upper field. The bright blade makes a gritty scraping sound as he thrusts it in between the rows and there the slaughtered weeds lie afterwards, already wilting in the gentle sun. Annchen runs after a rabbit that breaks from the plants at the bottom of the field, but its white scut soon bobs behind the hedge and vanishes. She stands suddenly still, restored to her habitual inertia by bunny’s disappearing trick. When I have a go at pulling the dead weeds together with a rake I’ve found, the Frenchman pauses to watch me, and seems about to show me how to do it. But then he appears to change his mind and bends silently to his work again as though after all it isn’t really worth the effort and anyway he might be accused of collaborating with the enemy.

  Towards evening an army truck with regimental signs painted on its mudguards clatters into the yard, and a soldier almost as old as Willibald gets out, strolling across the meadow towards François. The Frenchman sees him coming, and leans on his hoe until the soldier calls out to him, jerking his head towards the waiting vehicle. François trudges obediently back to the farmhouse, places the hoe back against the wall and climbs silently over the tailboard of the truck. Other silent men in drab uniforms are sitting there already, gazing out at us with the look that people have on the buses and trams in Plinden, the absent look of strangers idly watching other strangers while their lives proceed internally behind the peepholes of their eyes.

  Jägerlein waves a hesitant goodbye, but the Frenchman doesn’t respond, and the truck drives off, bumping and rattling over the stones.

  Before we ourselves leave, her sister gives Jägerlein a slab of butter and half a dozen eggs in an old shopping bag, which Jägerlein hangs on Annchen’s passive arm. On the way home I ask Jägerlein who Hansi was.

  ‘My husband.’

  ‘Why did you say François was like him?’

  ‘Because he is,’ she reasonably replies.

  I know that children will be forgiven a candour that adults will not. Children don’t pry. They have no secret motive, they simply want to know. So I ask her ‘Is your husband dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answers absently, apparently still thinking of her François.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When what?’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘Hansi?’ She glances up at the evening sky and calculates. ‘Ten, eleven years ago. Long before you were born anyway.’

  I’m getting interested in death, there seems a lot of it around, and I sense it might even happen to me. But when I ask Jägerlein what he died of, she only sighs and shrugs, as I remember my mother did last year when I asked her why Tante Frieda died. ‘Oh, people die,’ she murmurs.

  ‘Was he ill?’

  She shrugs again. ‘Things just got too much for him.’

  That evening at home I innocently remark that the Frenchman liked our cake.

  ‘Our cake?’ repeats Willibald. ‘Our cake?!’

  He flushes a deep red again and his voice quivers as he denounces Jägerlein for a thief and traitor, feeding the enemy with our rations and (shaking his fist) probably whoring with them too. Gabi’s eyes flicker silent warnings about his language, which he wouldn’t be using if Fräulein von Kaminsky was here tonight instead of visiting her Bad Neusee aristocrats again. Then she tries to shush him, which only enrages him the more. ‘You too?’ he shouts. ‘Yes, you’ve always been on her side!’

  ‘She brought us back some butter and eggs,’ I manage to get in, risking a clip on the ear for justice’s sake.

  ‘That’s enough from you!’ he yells, reaching across to administer the expected clip. ‘Of course she did! She knows I’m onto her! She’s trying to cover it up!’

  He starts from the table and heads towards the door while Gabi follows with the prescribed mouthful of water, flapping her hands imploringly and squeaking inarticulate and unregarded pleas. Ilse sits with her hands clasped in her lap in an attitude of suffering prayer. Sara watches her mother with a face that says ‘I’ll have to deal with this tonight,’ and I try to pretend without any success that this isn’t really happening but, if it is, it isn’t really my fault. Martin opportunely cuts himself another slice of what’s left of the cake.

  Now Gabi’s hanging onto Willibald’s jacket, because he’s shouting out he’s going to search Jägerlein’s room and throw the thieving whore and her baggage out into the street. The brat, he adds, is no better than she is, and he won’t have the Pfarrhaus turned into a den of thieves and harlots even if his wife doesn’t care. With her background she probably wouldn’t mind anyway.

  At that Gabi forgets the Kaminsky Cure, gulps the water down and screams herself. ‘Yes, now you’ve said it, haven’t you? Now you’ve said what you really think!’ But he tears himself free and slams the door against the wall. Ilse judges it time to close the windows while Gabi follows her husband to the kitchen, where Jägerlein already has her coat on and is knotting her headscarf under her chin. A small brown carrier bag stands on the floor between her and Annchen, whose ragged jacket is already buttoned too.

  ‘I’m leaving, Herr Pfarrer,’ Jägerlein announces, picking up the bag. ‘Do you want to look in here before I go?’

  ‘Yes!’ Willibald yells, then ‘No!’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Gabi moans. ‘It’s late, you can’t go.’

&
nbsp; ‘To the farm,’ Jägerlein says. ‘Come on, Annchen.’

  Annchen is snivelling quietly, her mouth pulled into a slack-lipped grimace. She clutches a fold of Jägerlein’s apron in her grubby fist and follows her out of the house.

  Willibald stands there panting sterterously, striking a pose of righteous indignation, but I can see he’s repenting already and beginning to deflate. Meanwhile Gabi has herself flown into a rage, and screams that Willibald should have the courage to act as he feels and divorce her, send her and the children packing and save his own skin.

  That’s just the trigger Willibald needs to set himself off again. ‘And whose children are they?’ he thunders, his throat corded and rigid, his eyes bulging like a hanged man’s (they reminded me of Martin’s imitation), only, unlike a hanged man’s, glinting fire. ‘Tell me that! Whose are they? Whose?’

  Now Gabi is in tears, and covers her face with her hands. Willibald declares he’s got nothing left to live for, yanks a picture off the wall, not a valuable one – we don’t have any – raises it in both hands like Moses with a graven image, and hurls it, also Moses-like, to the floor. Then he strides out of the house, pausing to make some eloquent valediction worthy of Schiller. Unfortunately all he comes up with is ‘The waters will close over my head. I shall never darken this threshold again.’ Even I sense that isn’t top class Schiller, but he delivers it with magnificent presence and stalks out into the night, heading down towards the lake.

  Ilse follows unobtrusively, to grab his coat tails if he actually does attempt to plunge into the icy waters. She’s already picked up the picture and placed it on the table ready for repair. Gabi sinks onto her chair and sobs and sobs. Sara places a tentative hand on her arm just as Jägerlein placed hers earlier on the Frenchman’s, and with no better effect.

  In the pantry, I discover, are the slab of butter and the six eggs from the farm.

  Later on Martin tries to tell me superciliously what whoring is and harlots are, but I only get still more bewildered. In any case, I don’t really care. All I want to know is why Jägerlein has left us. I don’t believe it’s because of my unwitting betrayal or Willibald’s fit – she’s put up with enough of those in the past. No, it’s because of the Frenchman. She likes the Frenchman better than she likes us. I would think that the greatest betrayal of my life if I knew the word ‘betrayal.’ As I don’t, I bleed dumbly instead. It hurts me almost as much as it hurt to learn I was a half-Jew, one of the despised underclass. I go to bed by myself and lie awake staring blankly at the darkening mountains till sleep suddenly ambushes me and carries me captive away.