The Girl from Krakow (32 page)

“So, evolution isn’t always progress?”

“Just ask the dinosaurs.” Rita smiled.

Dani was not satisfied. “Then why did evolution produce us, higher beings, humans with language, culture, religion, meaning?”

“Doesn’t seem so hard to explain.” Rita waited a moment, then went on. “Humans are a pretty puny bunch—just hairless apes, after all. No big teeth, not very strong, can’t fly. We don’t even run very fast. Not much to make us the ‘higher’ beings. Once we left the jungle, we had to start struggling to survive against mastodons, lions, hyenas, wolves. The only trick that would work was ganging up to protect ourselves from them. Without that we would have become extinct. So, there must have been very strong selection for anything—especially gestures, grunts, signs—that made it possible for people to gang up, to cooperate. That’s how language, and culture, emerged by natural selection.”

“And everything else about humans comes from that, does it?” Dani sounded unimpressed.

“Is there a better story? One that involves God—Adam and Eve, maybe?” Rita challenged. There was no immediate reply, so Rita went on, “My story certainly explains religion, tribalism. In fact, it explains Nazism.”

“How’s that?” Magda asked.

“The ideas that make cooperation in your tribe possible are just like any other parasite, only they invade the brain instead of the liver, say. The brain parasites survive and spread because of what they do to and for their hosts—us. So ideas that make us band together, especially against strangers, are going to be encouraged by the same forces of evolution that made it possible for us to kill off the woolly mammoth, right?” The others nodded, Dani grudgingly. “Give natural selection a couple of hundred thousand years. It’s sure to find ways to make you hate strangers who might be threats to survival. Better safe than sorry. Hate all strangers. The best way of making you hate strangers who just might hurt you is the way religion does it. It even gets you to give up your life for some greater cause—protecting your tribe from the strangers.”

Magda was thinking. “Back to the rats and cockroaches for a minute. If humankind were ever to kill itself off and the rats or the cockroaches end up the dominant species on the planet, Darwin tells us that won’t be any reason to think rats or roaches are the best, just the ones who happen to be able to survive on the detritus we end up leaving behind. Right?”

“Exactly.” Rita was pleased. Magda had understood. “Nazis, Aryans, the master race, whatever they call themselves, are people infected by the temporarily dominant brain parasite. If they win, if their ideas end up making civilization, culture, or even humanity extinct, all it will show is that being savage sadists is a way of life suited to our time, but not all time.”

Rita paused, but they seemed still to be following, so she took up the thread. “That brings up the Nazis’ second huge misunderstanding of
Herr
Darwin. He never thought that there was anything morally good or right or best about surviving, or even becoming the dominant species in an environment. There is nothing in Darwin that says might makes right. Nothing! So the two things the Nazis think they take from Darwin aren’t there at all. No master race, no progress, just change. No glorification of violence or overlordship as morally right.”

“Go on; tell her the rest.” Dani turned from Rita to Magda. “She thinks that Darwin showed there’s no right or wrong, no meaning, no purpose to anything.” Dani smiled as if revealing a bit of scandalous gossip.

Rita took the challenge. “You see, Magda, Darwin showed that purpose in nature is an illusion. Whatever looks planned and organized to attain some end is just the result of blind variation that gets filtered by a passive environment—whether in nature or culture.” Here she looked at Dani. “Denying it is turning your back on science. Meaning, purpose, that’s just wishful thinking. Something we can’t afford. We can’t waste time wondering what this war means in human history. Human history doesn’t mean anything. The war is just a catastrophe no different from a new ice age, only happening much faster, more like the Black Death.”

Dani finally remembered the news Magda had come with. “So, the Jews fighting in the ghetto against the SS are engaged in a struggle for survival that means nothing?”

Rita had to answer the question. “I am afraid so. When you add up all the human actions that make up history, who wins and who loses doesn’t reveal meanings. The path is just blind variation, Darwin’s process of selection operating on history.” She stopped for a moment. “What is the cosmic meaning of the fact that Jews are finally fighting the Wehrmacht in Warsaw? There is none. Can we stop ourselves searching for it? No.” The other two were silent.

As she carried the last dishes back into the kitchen, Rita wondered what ideas were parasitizing her own brain. Which ones were selected because they caused her to act in ways that just happened to preserve them, even to spread them?

For the next three weeks, every other day or so, Magda would stop at the kitchen and summarize the teletype’s report. The news about the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was never good, often painful, and finally tragic. The only benefit that emerged from these three weeks was the bond it forged with Magda Halle, and later, a decent set of documents for Dani.

Magda brought the last report to them on May 17. “It’s over. The Wehrmacht’s been using flamethrowers for several days, setting fire to everything. The Germans estimate the number of people killed by the fires was about six thousand. Another seven thousand killed, either fighting or by collateral damage. And now they’ve taken the last fifty thousand out.” Rita thought back to her night in the ghetto. Could there still have been that many people in it?

Dani asked, “German casualties?”

“Officially, sixteen dead, eighty-five wounded. But in a month of fighting
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
well, that’s probably a lie.”

“And we sat here, in cozy Krakow, doing nothing.” Dani began to weep. The other women did nothing to stop her.

A week later Magda brought in a Leica 35 mm and took a picture of Dani. “We can’t have Rita doing all the marketing and running all the errands. So, I am getting you a
Kennkarte
. Got five hundred zloty you can spare?”

“
Gewiss!
”—German for “Sure!”—“Nothing else to spend my pay on cooped up in here,” Dani replied, smiling gratefully. When she came back into the kitchen with it, Magda was already gone. Rita had been quicker to find the money.

A week later Dani had papers. “They are real
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
or as real as the
Generalgouvernement
can make them!” Magda grinned. “But you’ll have to go to the
Polizei
to register for Krakow. It’s just down in the main square. Do it early in the morning before the real Nazis have slept off their boozing.”

PART V

ENDING

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A
lmost a year later, Rita left for Germany. By the spring of 1944, the
MussNazis
in the office knew not just that the war was going to be lost, but that the defeat was going to come not on Russian soil, but probably in Poland, and perhaps even in Germany itself.

In late March the
Grossdeutscher Rundfunk
announced a tactical withdrawal west of Lemberg. That meant the occupation of Karpatyn by Soviet forces. There was nothing to cheer Rita or Dani in the news. For them Karpatyn had simply become a location on the map, nothing more. But Lempke and the other accountants in the Tax Inspectorate were continually aware that the Eastern Front was washing back toward them. A tide that had gone out with a rush was returning inexorably toward the sand castles they’d built along the Vistula River. Each of the officers was making longer and longer visits back to Germany, taking larger and larger bags with them as they left, returning with smaller and smaller valises.

One morning in April, Lempke called Rita into his office, a very unusual step. Magda was at her desk in a corner, typing columns of numbers. She did not even look up.

“Fräulein Trushenko”—he was still calling her that after fourteen months living under the same roof—“soon I return to the Reich. I propose to send you to my family in Heidelberg.” He looked up, smiling at his generosity. Rita did not know how to react. Her face remained immobile. “Don’t you understand? A chance to get away from the war, to live in Germany, perhaps permanently if you measure up.” She nodded. It was enough assent for Lempke. “We have a large house. Six children. My wife cannot cope with it all. You will be housekeeper. I will secure travel papers, some ration coupons, and rail tickets. You may leave”—he looked at the calendar on his desk—“next Thursday.”

All she could say was, “Thank you very much.” All she could think was,
My God, leave Dani?

“Well, you don’t have to go,” Magda was musing. “You could just melt into the Polish population, go back to Warsaw or somewhere else. But you won’t be able to stay here. He’ll dismiss you in a minute if you decline the post.”

Dani was nodding her head. “A
Volks-Deutsche
would never turn down an offer like that. You’d raise suspicion immediately. You don’t have a choice. You have to go.”

Why was Dani taking this line? Surely they meant too much to each other. The thought of losing the only person still alive that Rita loved made her feel that she was drowning. She found herself gulping for breath. Meanwhile, that very person sat beside her coolly calculating what Rita had to do, apparently without a thought to how it would tear them apart. Was this a signal? Was the comfort she had given Dani wearing off? Certainly Rita craved Dani as much as ever. Might her lover have even begun to think of what they had found in each other as wrong, unnatural, repugnant? No. That couldn’t be. She reached out for the reassurance of Dani’s hand, and it came to her grasp willingly.

But Dani was going on, piling up reasons Rita didn’t want to hear. “You’re much safer in Germany. When the Russians come, people with
Volks-Deutsche Kennkarten
are not going to be safe. Working for the Germans, you’re really going to be in danger.” Rita was going to interrupt, but Dani preempted her. “Sure, sure, it’s crazy, but just try convincing a commissar standing between you and a dozen soldiers. He won’t have time to check your true identity with whoever got you your forged papers.”

“They aren’t forged.”

“All the worse.”

“But what about you, Dani?” Rita was succumbing to her logic now.

“That’s another thing. If you go to Germany, maybe you can find a place for me. That’s the only way we’ll both have a chance.”

It was only later that the penny dropped.

Magda and Rita were sharing a cigarette in the kitchen. “You looked so bowled over this morning,” Magda said, “when Dani told you to go.”

“Yes. I can’t understand why she’s so eager to get rid of me. I see the logic, but there was an urgency, a hardness that I hadn’t seen in Dani before.”

The smoke came blue from Magda’s nostrils as she breathed out. “You really don’t see, do you?”

“What?”

“She needs you to go.” Rita stared at her. “Until you leave, she can’t do what she has to do. That’s why she’s forcing you.”

“What are you saying?”

“She can’t leave you. But she needs to do something in this war
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
I’m not sure what. Maybe join the Home Army. Whatever it is, she can’t do it till you are gone. In Germany you’ll be safe, and you won’t be able to stop her. That’s why she wants you to go.”

“And how do you know all this? Did she tell you?”

“Not in as many words. It’s a guess, but I think a good one. You’ve seen how restless she’s been, how terribly bitter, since the ghetto uprising in Warsaw last year. She takes risks in the street. I’ve seen it. Tearing down proclamations, pulling faces at Germans. She asked me too many questions about where the
Kennkarte
I got for her came from. Last week she brought home a Home Army leaflet she found in the street. Imagine if Lempke had seen it!”

“Anything else?” Rita was becoming convinced.

“One more thing. Really scary.” Magda put out her cigarette. “Something putting both of you at risk, and maybe me. She goes to confession too often for a Jewish girl.”

“You think she is becoming a believing Catholic?”

“No. I think she is asking priests how to make contact with the Home Army. If she asks the wrong one, all three of us could become passengers on a freight train.” Magda left the kitchen.

Lempke handed Rita her tickets and travel permits on a Monday morning and left Krakow on the sleeper to Berlin that evening. She was to leave for Heidelberg the following Thursday morning, third-class coach through Dresden to Berlin, and Berlin through Leipzig to Heidelberg.

As she put the Darwin volumes in her case—the same case she had arrived with over a year before—Rita could see how little she had accumulated in twelve months. Now, with the few bits of clothing and personal effects folded away, the room looked unoccupied, forlorn. Dani had kept her distance all afternoon and into the evening. Rita looked around the room for what she might have forgotten. A quiet knock on the door. Dani came in. Her eyes were red, but she was not crying. Rita closed the case and took it off the bed. They settled at each end of the small bed, like two schoolgirls, knees forward, legs bent, easily within reach of each other. Nothing was said. Instead, as slowly as they could, they let their two bodies share the bittersweet farewell—brief touches, distracting caresses, then fingers of one hand searching deep while the other played across a breast. A long while later, their bodies found themselves lying on their side, heads resting on each other’s thigh, succumbing to
la petite mort
over and over.
Why can’t the real death come now?
Rita thought. She’d welcome it. When they had their fill, they slept, too exhausted for words.

Both women woke with a start very early in the bright morning. By mutual but unspoken agreement, they made love one last time. It would be the last thing each remembered. After, Rita rose. Dani remained in the narrow bed, most of her body emerging from its covers, letting the perspiration cool from her chest and thighs. Rita watched Dani’s nude body as she slowly dressed, a kind of seduction in reverse.

The train, mainly full of lightly wounded troops and a few officers on leave, crossed into Germany just after noon. The smell in the compartment was a mixture of disinfectant, wet wool, and strong tobacco. Helmets on the baggage racks clicked against one another and sometimes slid along the shelf from one side of the compartment to the other as the train negotiated a curve in the track. Rifles had to be moved as legs stretched and crossed, sometimes in a single orchestrated movement. There were no “
Heil Hitlers
” as men moved in and out. Even the sole officer in the compartment was not demanding salutes, but buried himself in a small volume of dense
Fraktur
print. Goethe? Schiller?

Rita was the only civilian in her compartment, and she had not been called upon to show her papers once she left Krakow. Instead, heels clicked as she handed over her ticket and travel permit. The soldiers were overly solicitous—“By your leave” and “Please excuse,” “Mind if I smoke” and “Will you have one too?” They were hardened by the front, but young enough to still be softened again in the company of a woman. Rita was unable to summon up any hatred for them, taken one at a time. A private with a bandaged right hand needed her to fish out a cigarette and light it. With another soldier, she exchanged seats so he wouldn’t have to clamber over her on his crutches. A third told her more than she needed to know about how he would spend his leave in Lubeck.

Mainly Rita studied the contrast in landscape as the train moved farther and farther toward Dresden. Germany was different from Poland. The farm fields were larger here and planted with grain, not potatoes. The herds and flocks seemed bigger too.
Ironically
, she thought,
in Germany there was more
lebensraum
—living space—what the Germans made the war to acquire.
As she left Poland, small statues in the fields honoring the Madonna disappeared. Woodlots became more common. She had half expected tractors and mechanical reapers, signs of German efficiency, but the farms were no differently equipped here. Still, towns came thicker and faster, buildings stuccoed white with distinctively narrower Protestant church steeples instead of the rounded, crenelated turrets favored by Polish church and nobility. In every town the train raced through, there were shops facing the station, and automobiles.

Dresden materialized outside her window as the tracks and sidings began to multiply and spread away from her vantage point on the slowing train. Rich, clean, bustling, untouched by war, the classic buildings marred only by the long red banners with the swastika shouting its domination from between Ionic columns. The train slowed smoothly and almost glided into the terminal. Alas, she thought, no time to explore. Rita had to find the express to Berlin. Leipzig was much closer to Dresden, but a
Volks-Deutsche Mädchen
didn’t qualify for the direct connection. She would have to journey through the capital on a third-class ticket.