Gerta Read online

  Quietly shutting the door of her room behind her, she slipped down the hallway and stepped into the dining room, where her mother was just setting down a loaf of bread covered by a blue-checkered dish towel. Her father was sitting at the table, leafing through yesterday’s paper, as he did each morning. It was only on his way to work that he bought the new one at Mr. Folla’s newsstand, which had changed ownership that year, as they discovered from the shop sign that now read “Konrad Kinkel–Trafik.”

  “Good morning,” said Gerta in Czech, at which her mother shot her father a nervous glance before smiling at her and nodding, whereas her father replied in German, glanced up at her mother from behind his paper, gave it a meaningful shake, and dropped his eyes back to the page. Gerta scrunched her lips into a tight pucker, blew her mother a kiss, and relaxed them back into a broad smile. She loved her mother for who she was: simple, kind, with an ample, soft embrace and strong, rounded arms. She was on her side regardless of the circumstances, even these new ones that Gerta didn’t really understand, unlike Friedrich Jr., who seemed to have been born already knowing everything. With his polished Weltanschauung, or worldview, and even in his appearance, he was the spitting image of his father. He had the same lock of hair on his forehead, narrowed his eyes the same way when he smiled, and did the right thing even before his father articulated it. Friedrich was a true Schnirch, and that was why their father looked upon him differently from the way he looked upon Gerta. Because with Gerta, things had been different since childhood.

  Like Friedrich, she spoke both German and Czech, and could sing “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” at her father’s request in a way that set his foot tapping in rhythm in its heavy shoe, from which a tall white knee sock protruded. She even wore a boar’s bristle on her hat with her dirndl to please him, yet she never held the same worth in his eyes as Friedrich, and she didn’t know why. For a long time, she had tried to win over her father, to charm him, before something inside her finally broke. She realized that no matter how hard she tried, she would never be as perfect as Friedrich. In the revolt that took hold of her in the wake of this realization, she tried to refute everything her father had introduced them to and became even more attached to her mother. Around then, their household split into opposing factions, Czech and German, and only she and her mother were on the Czech side. A rift emerged between Gerta and her father. She put away the green dirndl bordered with red flowers and along with it all of her father’s rules. Among them was her father’s ban on speaking Czech.

  It was sometime in the spring of 1939 that he had a long talk with them at home and ordered them to speak only in German. He no longer wished to hear the Czech language. Friedrich complied right away and from that moment on, didn’t utter a word in Czech, not even when he and Gerta were alone together. She, however, found this absurd.

  “Why don’t you speak normally?” she asked, perplexed, when one Sunday at lunch even her mother served in German. She couldn’t believe it—her mother had always spoken exclusively in Czech. “It’s never been like this,” Gerta protested. Not that she objected to the German language; on the contrary, she liked it. Besides, it was as natural a language for her as Czech. She spoke it outside playing games, when they went visiting, at school or even in class, depending on whom she was addressing. She didn’t even think about whether to speak Czech when saying something to her friends or to speak German when she saw her father. Several times her father got angry with her, overhearing her speaking in Czech outside and going so far as to lock her in her room for an entire Sunday afternoon. And several times it also happened that he went into his bedroom and came back with a switch and gave her a thrashing, without even batting an eye. Mother tried to catch hold of his hand, pleaded with him in tears to ground her instead, Mother who then would bring Gerta a warm dinner. A warm dinner served in German.

  Friedrich stepped into the dining room with a groggy Grüß Gott—“Good day.” Beyond the window that looked out onto the unkempt garden of the inner courtyard, there was still the same darkness, although Gerta had already eaten half of her slice of bread, and her father had set down the paper and was finishing his cup of tea. Mother pushed a thick slab of buttered bread sprinkled with chives and a cup of tea toward Friedrich and pointed out, as she did every morning, that he had gotten up late.

  “I hope you make it on time, children.”

  The three of them would then step out into the raw morning together.

  Father would hurry them down the stairwell, but by the time they set foot outside, they were in step, their collars turned up and their hands clasped at their throats against the cold and relentlessly blowing wind. At the corner of Pressburger Straße and Ponawkagasse, they split up. Father turned to go through the park toward Adolf-Hitler-Platz, and Gerta and Friedrich went on to Horst-Wessel-Straße, where their school was situated.

  Gerta’s enrollment in the German commercial academy had been her father’s choice. She would have preferred to attend the small school that had opened just a few years ago and offered an expanded curriculum in fine arts. How she longed to be in one of those studios, sketching designs for the ceramic bowls and pitchers that she had seen lined up along the windows when she and her mother had gone to the open house. Or she wanted to be creating marionettes of fairies and water sprites and sewing clothes for them out of fabrics with patterns that looked as though they had come out of Janinka’s paintings. She saw studios like that there as well. And then others, where there were pedestals on which stood giant human figures made out of white and brown material, fashioned after models as naked as the day God had made them; and then still others, where easels held canvases covered with landscapes, fields, and forests, and paintings of people who looked nothing like people, not even when Gerta examined them for a second and third time, laughing at their angular shapes and faces with two noses. And finally, there were paintings that Gerta couldn’t figure out at all, and not even her mother knew what they were supposed to represent. It was a visit Gerta never forgot, so enthralled had she been by the quantity and variety of art that she encountered there. Nor would she ever forget the aroma permeating that school, which remained in her memory for years to come, with the greatest adventures she could imagine wrapped up in it.

  That had been her wish, but her father enrolled her in the German commercial academy as he had done with Friedrich. It was a complicated time, and the nation needed competent clerical workers, whom her father could then employ in the Oberlandrat office, the newly established supreme regional council, a lower-level branch of the German administration, where he himself worked.

  Gerta didn’t resist. To be an artist, after all, was just a dream, possible to live out only if you were one of the elect, those who knew they never could or would do anything other than serve a higher calling. And Gerta was not among them; she was merely the daughter of Barbora Ručková and Friedrich Schnirch of Sterngasse, who could draw a little bit with charcoal and pastels, do some handiwork that her mother had taught her, and excelled in computation at school. Someone like me doesn’t become a famous artist, she told herself, and in September 1939, she entered the German Handelsakademie, and it was a good thing she did, since they closed the fine arts school shortly thereafter.

  III

  At the very beginning of that first year of secondary school, her father signed Gerta up for the League of German Girls. There was nothing she could do about it. She went, same as the other girls from her class, same as Anne-Marie Judex, the daughter of the city’s Regierungskommissar, the government commissioner, about whom there had been so much talk that year. Gerta avoided her and the others and hid out every day in the applied arts studio until four o’clock, when at the corner of Kotgasse she could meet up with Janinka, whose parents had stopped keeping an eye on her, as they had both been deployed full-time to a bullet factory in Líšeň.

  “It looks good on you,” said Janinka once, when Gerta came running over late, still in her uniform. “But if my parents saw y
ou like this, I probably wouldn’t be allowed to spend time with you anymore.”

  They turned in the direction Gerta had just come running from and set out for the closest bench in the nearby park off Koliště Street.

  “We had practice,” said Gerta, running her hand from her black necktie all the way down the front of the long dark skirt, embarrassed. “If I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t wear it.”

  “But you still go there anyway.”

  Gerta walked on in silence.

  “I’ve started taking art class again,” she then said. “They have their own studio there. They believe that everyone should develop their natural talents. Mr. Kmenta used to say the same thing. I could ask Frau Wirkt if you could come too.”

  Janinka shook her head.

  “They won’t let me if I’m not in the League. And I can’t be in the League. My parents won’t allow me. And I don’t really want to be. I don’t even know what you do there.”

  “Well, you do what you want. I do Art Studio, Chorus, and Sports. I never imagined it would be this much fun. Had my father not signed me up, well, you know.” Gerta shrugged. “At the beginning, I was nervous, too, and my mom didn’t want me to go either. But now I just go to those classes.”

  “I’m not sure,” murmured Janinka softly.

  Eventually they reached the park, ran across the empty street, and made a beeline for the bench. Gerta thought about the concerns her mother expressed early on. While feebly trying to protest to her father, she had said, and Gerta had heard her, “They’re going to brainwash her there.” That was what she had said. Brainwash, which Gerta had thought was strange. Had Friedrich said it, with his closetful of horror pulp fiction, she wouldn’t have been surprised. But her mother saying it to her father? Her father became furious and sent her mother to their bedroom, after which there was silence. In the end, all Gerta knew was that she was supposed to show up at the League the second week of school, so she did. And she did so at her mother’s behest, even though she understood how much it went against her mother’s way of thinking.

  In the end, though, all the girls ended up going there after school. It seemed perfectly normal, and what could be wrong—one went to art class and occasionally rehearsed some German songs and practiced marching in uniform for revues in various parades. Or was there something wrong?

  Gerta wasn’t sure, and this made her uneasy. Sometimes she felt she didn’t belong among them. If only she could just be normal! A normal German girl who was thrilled to stay in the sightlines of their Führerin lady leader and show off what a worthy representative of the League she was. Her schoolmates, for example, had tittered with excitement during those trials held early on, designed to reveal what hidden talents lay within each one of them. Gerta was embarrassed because she couldn’t toss a ball or throw a javelin, wasn’t good at long jump, and was a slow runner. Naturally, she wasn’t the only one to be jeered at by the more competitive girls. But might she have done better had the image of her mother’s troubled face not been before her at all times?

  But then she noticed she wasn’t alone. Over time, it struck her that she wasn’t the only one doodling on blank scraps of paper during breaks, reading a book under her desk, or even staring out of the window into the street for minutes on end. That was how she first ended up in conversation with Karel. This made them the first two to breach what up to then had been an awkward barrier between the handsome young men strutting around in their uniforms, who were actually painfully shy, and the attractive girls in their League uniforms, who, however, had eyes only for Anne-Marie Judex, and ears only for the high-society gossip she brought back to them.

  A slight little girl who had been playing in the sandbox approached the bench on which she and Janinka were sitting. She ran over from the grass to the sidewalk, which offered a better surface for drawing with chalk, a short, fat stub of which she held in her small fist. She squatted on the sidewalk and started drawing numerical figures that she looked barely old enough to know, and sang, “Five, six, seven, eight, Hitler’s little head of hate! Prague, Brno, Paris wail, let the villain rot in jail!”

  Gerta froze. One wasn’t allowed to say such things, for God’s sake. What if someone overheard?

  “Don’t say that!” Gerta shouted at her, panicked.

  The girl looked up with her round blue eyes and asked in surprise, “Why?”

  Gerta turned to Janinka, whose gaze was darting back and forth from one to the other in consternation.

  “It’s not allowed. You could go to jail for that.”

  The child looked at her.

  “And so could your mother, if you keep on saying it.”

  The little girl stood up, brushed the sidewalk grit off her knees, and ran back to the sandbox and the women chatting on a bench beneath a shrub.

  Gerta and Janinka looked at each other, decided they’d better get up, and set out across the intersection back toward Pressburger Straße.

  “And what about your new classmates, what’re they like?” asked Janinka a little later.

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t really gotten to know anyone yet,” answered Gerta indifferently.

  “Maybe in time,” said Janinka.

  Maybe, thought Gerta, but it wasn’t something she felt like discussing with Janinka. No one could compete with Janinka’s place in Gerta’s life anyway, so why should Gerta add to Janinka’s worries, when as of last summer she’d been assigned to a cleaning job at an insurance company, because she wasn’t allowed to go on to secondary school? She was lucky. Because of her weak heart, they hadn’t sent her directly to the Reich as they had many others. This way they could go on meeting secretly for their afternoon walks in the park or along the Zábrdovický embankment by the Svitava River, tucked away behind the rear facades of sumptuous villas. They would sit by the dam, in the shadows cast by the Petersdom and Špilberk Castle, where the sound of rushing water drowned out even the sound of the nearby streetcar, wondering how it was possible that the people of Brno had forgotten about this river, which had been edged out of the sightlines of the promenades.

  Back then, Gerta lived for such moments, and later on also for the short breaks by the window, when Karel would politely come over to keep her company. Who would have suspected that before long, his image would accompany her even on her afternoon walks with Janinka, and would linger in her bedroom in the evenings, so that she could barely wait for the morning? She herself was surprised when she couldn’t keep him out of her mind. It was as if the sense of harmony and inner balance that he exuded kept drawing her thoughts back to him. Who back then would have suspected that he would be the one to hold her so close during dance lessons that the fabric of her skirt, pulled tight across her thighs, would crease? That he would be the one to walk her home and hold her hand under the plane trees, long after the light in her parents’ bedroom had gone out. Nor back then had she ever imagined that he would be the one, some years later, to say he would marry her when the war was over and the Germans had lost, even though her last name was Schnirch. At that she had burst out laughing and protested that he knew perfectly well just how German she was. And finally, she had never imagined that for years this would be the last joyful laughter to come bubbling so freely and easily from her lips. As the memory of a final moment of happiness, it would arc over many long years to come.

  IV

  She had no problem with it, and why should she have; it could only work to her advantage. The fact that she was acting as a cover for Anne-Marie and Friedrich didn’t bother her in the least. She did her own thing, and whether Friedrich chose to spend his time in the Hitler Youth, or elsewhere, she didn’t really care. Besides, she had risen in his esteem and for the first time felt that Friedrich wasn’t looking down on her with contempt. In fact, he seemed to be downright grateful. And the effect on Gerta’s classmates seemed to be the same.

  It hadn’t taken long for Anne-Marie to discover that the youth leader of the Turner gymnasts, who had cut such a dashing figure wa
ving his flag at the head of his division in the parade honoring Reich Protector von Neurath’s official visit, was Gerta’s brother. It was sometime toward the end of November that she sidled up to Gerta in the girls’ bathroom and asked her about him. Gerta burst out laughing at her covetous look, lamely disguised under the pretext of a conspiratorial friendliness, as if she were being sincere. Nonetheless, Gerta proceeded to lay her brother at Anne-Marie’s feet. She introduced them one Friday afternoon at the stadium where Friedrich was training with his division.

  He thus became Gerta’s admission ticket to a clique of girls who up until that moment had excluded her. Not that it helped her to finally feel normal, nor did it manage to dispel the misgivings that she brought to school with her from home, and then carried back home again, but at least she could feel that she was almost one of them. Anne-Marie started sitting next to her on the school bench and, wonder of wonders, resolved to become her best friend. Gerta was tickled, yet at the same time it made her nervous, and she felt uncomfortable. Next to Anne-Marie, she felt like a turnip beside a hyacinth. Every night she smelled her intoxicatingly fragrant bench mate on her clothes and envisioned the delicate wrists, from which dangled golden bracelets, and the carefully manicured bright red fingernails. She understood why Friedrich was so smitten with her, elegant Anne-Marie, always tastefully swathed in dark dresses made of fabrics that hadn’t appeared on the shelves of ordinary shops in a very long time. The girl with blonde tresses falling in loose waves to her shoulders, with pencil-thin black eyebrows arching over her pale blue eyes, and her full lips always meticulously coated with a layer of bloodred lipstick. Anne-Marie easily could have given competition to the beautiful movie star Adina Mandlová had they been in the same room, and she might even have had the advantage, not only in looks, but also in eloquence. She spoke with astonishing ease about her papa’s connections; in his capacity as Regierungskommissar, he sent a chauffeur to pick her up from school every day. She also spoke of dinners with the Reich Protector or the police commissioner, and about the gowns she and her mother wore for each occasion. She was exquisite, living proof of the superhuman realm. Her effect on the other girls in the class was magnetic as she instantly became their arbiter, and each one wanted to spend at least a moment bathed in the glow of her attention. And Friedrich was no different. He had succumbed to her at once.