Authors: Tessa de Loo
Back in Saarburg she continued the cleaning. The grousing about the Luxemburgers did not cease. It pursued her into all the rooms like a drill, driven on by revenge, which was overheard by
an old lady who lived in some rooms at the rear of the house. ‘How can you stand it here?’ she said, observing Anna cleaning, ‘You’re surely not going to stay on here doing that for ever.’ ‘What should I be doing then?’ said Anna defensively, ‘I’m waiting for Ilse.’ ‘My God, then you could be in for a long wait. Who knows when she’ll find help. But listen, I’ve got a suggestion for you. I have an acquaintance in Trier, a retired teacher from the grammar school. She is looking for someone to do the housekeeping … not just
anyone
, you understand. Perhaps it’s something for you.’ Anna nodded slowly – her life ultimately hung together on improvisations.
She recognized Kaiserstrasse in Trier from her nocturnal journey in a priest’s wake, and there she got to know a fascinating type of person full of incomprehensible contradictions: Thérèse Schmidt, a narrow, bony woman with thin grey hair held together by a clip, stingy in terms of material things but generous and helpful where the intellect was concerned. It was not apparent that she went to her brother’s farm every day just outside the town, to stuff herself with bread, meat and dairy foods. Without shame she expatiated upon it. It never occurred to her to bring something back for Anna, who was trying to stay alive on two slices of bread a day, some potatoes and a cup of black coffee dregs – the rationing imposed by the French in retaliation for the hunger they had had to suffer. It was much harder to reconcile Frau Schmidt’s rare stinginess with her daily visits to church, Bible study and fervent praying – never had Anna encountered close-up so much bigoted religious zeal. There were a lot of books in the house; her earlier appetite for
reading
returned between the housekeeping tasks. Surprised, the
teacher
drew up a chair when she returned from her daily visit and found her reading. ‘You are not destined to spend your whole life between the stove and the kitchen sink, I could see that right away … What do you really want to do?’ ‘I have no idea …’ Anna
stammered
, overwhelmed by the sudden interest. Her plans for the future extended no further than completing that one mission. ‘Isn’t there something you have always really wanted to do?’ Anna
frowned. Dante slid from her lap but was intercepted in his fall by Frau Schmidt’s narrow hand. The idea of having the freedom to choose a career for oneself was so revolutionary that it paralysed her thinking. She had to let go of her picture of the world in which women were clearly divided into three categories: a broad lower layer containing farming women and servants, a small upper layer of privileged women who had the decorative function of being
civilized
, elegant wives, and the remaining category of unmarried women in teaching, nursing or convents. No one chose for herself, it was something they came straight into – through birth or
circumstances
. Frau Schmidt repeated her innocent question. ‘Well …’ Anna sighed. Her head was light, she did not know if it was from hunger or the thorny questioning. Her thoughts flitted criss-cross back in time, in search of examples for possible candidates to
identify
with, for someone who could say the word for her – thus she landed up in a dark, stuffy, small room where it smelled of
sweating
feet and a dead soldier hung on the wall who had been born to die for the fatherland (such an inevitable, obvious destination again). Opposite her stood a woman resolutely closing the door with her backside and lovingly opening her arms: come here …
‘Child welfare …’ Anna blurted out ‘… I believe I have always wanted to do that.’ ‘I see … but why don’t you then?’ ‘It would be quite impossible,’ Anna said brusquely, ‘I would have to do
matriculation
first …’ Frau Schmidt laughed at her: ‘Is that all!’ From her past in the education system she ferreted out a teacher who was prepared to cram her ready for the state examination. Another woman attended his lessons; Anna could join her. From then on, every afternoon she walked to his house through the centuries-old streets between piles of debris and people collapsing from hunger, worn-out rubber overshoes over her worn-out shoes. ‘Listen, you don’t need to understand,’ the teacher impressed upon her, ‘all you have to do in the exam is to be able to give the precise answers. Read it out of your head.’ Everyone had already been astounded by her memory when Anna recited ‘The Song of the Bell’ next to her
proud father. Now it was the teacher who was breathless at the speed with which she acted on his advice. He rushed her through grammar, the foundations of mathematics, through history,
geography
, German literature. After fourteen days he said: ‘I am working with two dissimilar racehorses here. You run ahead like a madcap, the other can’t keep up. I shall have to separate you.’
Her head was entirely empty – she had hidden the war deeply away, deliberately lost the key. There was plenty of space for the dizzying quantities of information, so agreeably neutral in their capacity as cultural wares. She crammed and crammed, almost fainting away sometimes under the high revs. ‘Are you dizzy?’ the teacher enquired. ‘Yes …’ she said hazily. ‘What have you eaten?’ ‘Two potatoes …’ ‘Good heavens, you should have said so earlier!’ He made her a plate of oatmeal porridge. ‘Don’t be concerned, I get food parcels from the English zone.’ Each day the lessons began with a plate of porridge: first the body, then the mind, was his view. He also pointed out that her overshoes had had it. It did not occur to her employer, who had at least ten pairs of shoes in the same size, to hand over one pair to her. The teacher bartered two bottles of gin for sound leather shoes. At home Anna showed them to her, elated. Frau Schmidt raised her eyebrows without interest: ‘So …?’
On Christmas Eve she went to her brother as usual for an advance on the Christmas meal. She had said before her departure that she wanted a bath when she returned – to cleanse the body before she dealt with the soul during midnight mass. Anna had to get everything ready and heat a large cauldron of water on the coal stove in the kitchen. It was already dark when the bell went
unexpectedly
. A woman was standing at the door, clasping a crying baby wrapped in rags to her, threatening to collapse from
exhaustion
. Anna caught her, brought her to the kitchen and took the child from her, which smelled as though it had not been changed in weeks. She could see the steaming cauldron and the tub from the corner of her eye – everything was ready for the gnädige Frau.
Without thinking about it she filled the bath, unwrapped the child and threw the stinking rags in the passage. After she had washed the baby she wrapped him in a flannel towel.
En
passant
she gave the mother a piece of bread and butter, a boiled potato and a cup of black coffee. Not a word was said, everything
happened
in a hurried sequence of self-evident actions – under the constant threat of the phantom Frau Schmidt, who might come home at any moment. What now, Anna asked herself feverishly, where should they go? The convent! The nuns, those angels of mercy! She slipped a coat on and took the mother and child to the Ursulines, who eagerly took pity on them. A comfortable feeling of synchronicity came over her on the way back: it was the eve of Christmas and there was no room at the inn! Above Trier’s piles of rubble the sky was strewn with stars, she was walking beneath it in her new shoes. Everything was in equilibrium – for a little while.
She came home at the same time as her employer. When a tub full of dirty water was awaiting her there instead of a warm bath, the teacher was outraged. She raised her arms in a grotesque
gesture
; a torrent of accusations descended on Anna. ‘Just a moment,’ she squeezed past, ‘I’ll put a new cauldron on the fire, I’ll clean everything up, it will be done in a moment.’ Frau Schmidt only calmed down when order had been restored and the picture of the kitchen corresponded with the one she had had in mind as she walked home flushed and satisfied from the meal.
During the midnight mass she sat in the pew, smelling of soap and starch, singing, rejoicing, praying lustily. She ranted and raved like an angel of Our Lord with the same voice that was so good at torrents of abuse. Anna watched stoically. On the way home Frau Schmidt said, ‘It escapes me how you could let such a dirty woman and dirty child into my house.’ Anna stopped, looked her in the eye and quoted serenely what the pastor had said shortly before: ‘… because there was no room for them in the inn … and Mary gave birth to her first-born son in a stable … she wrapped him in
swaddling clothes and laid him in the manger …’ ‘You are trying to get out of it by making a pun …’ said the teacher, walking on gruffly. Nevertheless Anna received a Christmas present. No warm stockings, no vest, no milk or meat, but a Latin missal: the
Sacramentaria,
the
Lectionarum
and the
Graduale
–
a silent hint that Anna still had a lot to learn when it came to Christianity.
Frau Schmidt’s altruism lay more in the didactic sphere. Her search for an academy of social work had not been made easy. All training colleges indoctrinated by the Nazis had been shut down; what survived was a reliable Catholic institute in North Rhine Westphalia. The director responded immediately to her
impeccable
letter: she would be visiting the seminary at Trier in March, and would take that opportunity to assess Frau Schmidt’s protégé herself.
As protection from the dust that blew out of the rubble heaps Anna wore a headscarf that flapped in the breeze. The closer she got to the seminary the stronger exam nerves took hold of her. The director, haughty and curt, did nothing to put her at her ease, but subjected her to a cross-examination. ‘Why do you want to be a social worker?’ she asked in a cynical tone, as though a plan so
arrogant
, brazen had never come to her notice before. ‘I want to help people,’ sounded weak. ‘Why?’ ‘Because I want to help people!’ Anna repeated, raising her voice, forgetting all ceremony and polite phrases. An uneasy silence fell. I’ve blown it, she thought, I saw to that in no time. But why does she treat me like a dog? But you stroke a dog’s head, you say: you’re a good dog. Finally she broke the silence penitently: ‘I myself was a child who needed help.’ Again that silence and the scornful, piercing look of the authority who was going to decide her fate. ‘You can go,’ said the woman abruptly. Anna came home dejected. Frau Schmidt dashed towards her. ‘And how did it go?’ ‘I can forget it. It was nothing.’ The teacher sniffed in disbelief. She had her own channels for
getting
objective information; some days later she reported with
triumphant
victory: ‘You made a deep impression on her. At least
that one knows what she wants, she said to the abbot …’ Anna looked up wearily. She did not want to hear any more about it, the teacher was concocting it. But the post proved her right. A
well-thumbed
, damaged telegram was delivered: ‘First semester starts: 1 September.’
Farewell Frau Schmidt, teacher! But before travelling to North Rhine Westphalia she had to make a second attempt. This time she had solid shoes, the sun was shining, she had a lift in a post office van up to the village itself. She got out in the centre; villagers told her where it was. With an armful of flowers plucked on the way she pushed open the squeaky wrought-iron gate. There was an aisle, as in the church, with rows of graves on either side. The oldest at the front: names from the district, mossy, worn away by rain and frost, on crooked headstones and cracked tombstones. Clipped yews and conifers in between and an impressive absence of noise, only
interrupted
by bird song. Further behind were the more recent graves. One stuck out immediately because it was square instead of
rectangular
, and three amateurish wooden crosses stood on it next to each other, as though seeking support from one another. As she began to walk intuitively towards it, a sudden irrational anxiety crept over her: the anxiety that he would still be proved right and would be all about there except in this one spot … that he would laugh at her from all points of the compass for her naïvety. But there was no escape: she had been
en
route
to this pathetic
two-square
-metre plot since her release from the American camp. So, step by step, she approached her disillusionment with diffidence. Each cross bore a name carved out in cuneiform letters – the
middle
one had his. The earth underneath had been covered with
evergreen
sprigs with white roses on top. From whom, whom were the flowers from? She knelt down, laid her bunch of wildflowers there and stared at his name in the hope that something of his presence would manifest itself, but the only thing she could see before her was the tanned soldier who waved to her in the tidy station at Nuremberg: ‘… this bloody hell will soon end anyway …’ If he
was living anywhere it was within her, there was no place on earth where that was as certain as here …
‘What are you doing at my grave?’ sounded behind her, straight through the silence, a female voice. Anna stiffened. She said
carefully
, not turning round, ‘If there is anyone in the world whose grave this is then I am that person. My husband lies here, as it
happen
s
.’ The indiscreet song of a blackbird came from a conifer; there were muffled sobs in between. Anna turned round. A young woman with swollen eyes was staring at her. Although the grave displayed the unpopular attribute of graves all over the world, by remaining proverbially silent, a suspicion arose in Anna that was too awful to be contemplated. There are two others, she reassured herself. ‘Are you Frau Grosalie?’ said the girl in a slurred voice. ‘Yes, yes …’ said Anna curtly, ‘I am Frau Grosalie, but what have you got to do with my husband …?’ The other looked up to the sky as though she were expecting a sign. Anna could not think of anything to say to put it all into perspective. Their gazes crossed fleetingly.