CHAPTER 14

STORY OF LENKA

In September I had to retake the exams I failed when I had gone through my pregnancy and termination. All the studying I had done back in Kraslice when I was avoiding spending time with Maminka, must have paid off because this time I sailed through each exam with relative ease. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. I felt as if an angel was watching over me. When I closed my eyes, I would picture Oma’s face always with that enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. Every night when I went to bed, I would talk to her before falling asleep.

My six-month internship was to begin in April. While I was still at university, I was scared I might not be able to find a suitable position but thanks to my tutor’s extensive connections I was offered an internship contract with IOTD, the International Organisation for Trade and Development, where I would be working in the economic department, helping to promote companies from Central Europe in France. The office was based in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, in a beautiful historical building, facing the Eiffel Tower.

I had all of March to myself. I strolled the streets of Paris, window shopping in the expensive Grandes Magazins were the most I could afford was a pair of socks. I went to some of the famous sites I had not had time to go to before. Of course, I had been to the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and the Louvre but now I was able to explore the city a little more and get to know it better. I met with some friends from the university, but I never managed to get beyond petty small talk or conversations about our studies. They were from different backgrounds and it was more difficult than I thought for me to open up.

I had hoped Klára might be able to visit but she was busy with her job back in Bayreuth. After a while, I started to feel lonely and listless. When April finally came around I couldn’t wait to start working.

On my first day at the Organisation, I got up extra early – I had to be in the office by nine but I was so nervous about being late I was already up by six. I had woken before my alarm anyway and lay in bed trying to imagine myself walking into the office and shaking hands with my new boss. I was hoping things would work out well there.

Once I got out of bed, I took a cold shower. The hot water wasn’t working properly, so I had no choice. I promised myself I would move out of this place as soon as I could afford to.

Just a week ago, I had bought an elegant black outfit, not from one of the expensive Paris stores, but from H&M which was where I went shopping for nearly all my clothes. I completed the look with new shoes, heels not too high, just right for the office. Fully dressed, I started to apply my makeup, taking extra care to hide all my imperfections. Every time I got my period I had a breakout and with my usual good luck, I was starting my job with a face full of pimples! I thought of Klára, who never had a single pimple on her face. It seemed so unfair.

Finally, I put on a nice pair of gold earrings Maminka had given me as a gift when I turned eighteen, and a bracelet I inherited from Oma. I looked in the mirror and felt pretty satisfied with the effect. I no longer looked like a student, staring back at me was a grown-up working woman. I hardly recognised her!

Although I made a good impression on my first day, as the weeks went by I somehow managed to frequently be late. I would get up at 6:30, which still left me twenty minutes to spare and yet for some reason I was always running behind! I couldn’t imagine I was the one to blame. It was the Parisian time – one moment you had 30 minutes to spare, the next moment you looked at the clock and you were late! This city just seemed to gobble up time. No wonder the French were always late.

My boss, the director of the economic department, was a hefty man in his mid-fifties, who was now in his third year in the Paris office. His name was Stanislaus but everyone called him Stan. He was German but spoke some Czech. I thought this was because he had previously served as a diplomat at the German Embassy in Prague. And this was also probably why I got the internship.

Stan hated chaos and liked everything to be organised perfectly. He was rigorously disciplined and stuck to his routine like clockwork which might have been appreciated in Germany but not here. The perfect organisation was a rare thing in France, and in spite of trying my very best, chaos became my everyday routine.

He lived only a ten-minute walk from the office. This allowed him to avoid the stress of traffic or public transport but put even more pressure on me. By the time I got into the packed local express train, RER B, and prayed that the train door would simply close behind me without delay, Stan was calmly waking up and listening to Deutsche Welle, a German radio news station.

He and his wife did not have any children together, but Stan once told me he had a daughter from a previous marriage who was my age and lived in Brussels. He proudly showed me photographs of her, displayed on his desk. To me, she wasn’t pretty. She was huge, just like Stan. But she was smiling and had long blond, hair making her look attractive. I said she looked very friendly and that I hoped to meet her one day.

CHAPTER FOUR

STORY OF LENKA

I stopped at Sauersack, an abandoned concrete plant with a long story. It was built under the German occupation for the mining and processing of tin ore. At the beginning, the tin was mined by the locals. Once they left for the war they were replaced by prisoners. When the war ended the factory had been left derelict. No one cared about the concrete ruins. It was left to slowly crumble.

I sat down on a broken step. Instantly, the atmosphere of the place took hold of me. No matter how many times I came here, my mind always filled with questions about how things must have been back when the factory was still running. How many men had died here, at the precise spot where I could now walk freely? All because of one man’s absurd desire to conquer the world who knew how to seduce crowds.

I thought of Oma, who must certainly have remembered Sauersack being built. She would have been around twenty years old at that time. What a shame, she was no longer around. She could have told me so much about this place and I could have asked about every detail of how life was back then.

As a child, Oma’s life had seemed as simple as the rice pudding she used to make for me as a treat. It never occurred to me that she had once been young and that she would have suffered many hardships. Just as Mrs Richter had said, there must be so much I didn’t know and never thought to ask. I suppose I could ask Maminka, but she didn’t seem to know much either. Perhaps I should go to that meeting after all.

I stood up and walked over to an old cylindrical tank, filled with stagnant water. I leaned over and peered inside seeing nothing but my own reflection on the green slimy surface.

A middle-aged couple approached and passed me, one of them with a map in their hands. From their conversation, I picked up that they were visiting the wartime sites of the Ore Mountains. They had just come from Svatava. I had never visited Svatava myself because there was not much to see, except an ugly statue. But I had been to another concentration camp: Theresienstadt in Terezin. When I was in my third grade, we went on a school trip there. I remember how excited we all were getting on the bus. Our excitement was probably due as much to the fact we were getting out of school for the day as to our fascination with the horrors that had taken place there. Horrors that as children we barely understood.

Before we set off, our teacher gave us thorough instructions about how we were to behave and described what we would see there. She told us to be respectful at all times and that we were not allowed to run around or scream.

One of my school mates, Ivan, a boastful boy who had gipsy heritage, said he had visited Theresienstadt before and that his guide had been an old woman who was one of the survivors. Ivan, we all knew, was prone to making things up, so none of us knew whether to believe him or whether this old woman was just a figment of his imagination. Secretly, though, we all hoped that we would meet the old lady and that she would be our guide. We arrived at the main gate, chatting and laughing. Above the gate was the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei – Work sets you free. An added insult to the many who laboured and, far from being set free, had suffered and died here.

Inside the gate, we were greeted, not by the old woman of Ivan’s story, but by a young man in his thirties, who specialised in accompanying groups of school children. We all sighed with disappointment and were swiftly told-off by our teacher.

Our guide explained how Jews, Communists and gypsies were arrested by the Nazi regime and sent to concentration camps like this one, built all over Europe. At the camps, prisoners were forced to work and were eventually put to death, he explained. He didn’t go into detail about conditions in the camps, or how they were killed (details which I learned to my horror some ten years later, when I visited Buchenwald in Germany). Because this was the communist era our guide talked in terms of ‘bad’ Germans and of the ‘good’ Russians, who were presented as our liberators, the saviours of the Czechoslovak people.

We walked around in groups. The only thing I really remember were dormitories with bunk beds to which some visitors had tied small bouquets of roses. Afterwards, we went to a nearby restaurant where the teacher ordered pancakes with strawberry jam. I ate three and was sick on the bus the whole way back.

When we arrived back in Kraslice, it was Oma who came to pick me up at the bus station. On the way home, she asked me about the excursion. I told her that I now knew what she had been doing when she was young, that she had been killing Jews, Communists and Gypsies because that was what Germans had done during the war. She looked at me with horror and slapped me hard across the cheek. Oma had never slapped me before. Not really understanding what was going on, I covered my sore, red cheek and started to cry. I promised her I would never say anything like that again. Inside, I also made a promise to myself that I would never tell anyone that Oma was one of the ‘bad’ Germans, a traitor to the Czechoslovak nation.

Later that day Maminka explained to me that not all German people had supported the Nazi regime or worked in the concentration camps.

‘Sudeten German were not traitors. They had lived in these regions for centuries and had to leave for Germany after the war. Because your grandfather was Czech, Oma was allowed to stay here.’

‘But didn’t she let Hitler in?’

‘Lenka, darling, it is much more complicated than that. There is so much you don’t understand. Did you know that our region was liberated by the Americans and not the Russians?’

‘The Americans?’

‘Yes, darling, the Americans. They came to liberate Kraslice and Pilsen. But we are not allowed to talk about it, so keep it as a secret and never mention anything to anybody.’

‘So who are the fallen soldiers whose graves we cover with red and white carnations every May?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And why are we not allowed to talk about it?’

‘Because we have to do what the Russians say. Our country is occupied by them and we are under their supervision. But you must not talk about it. Promise?

‘Yes, I promise,’ I hugged Maminka tight to express my loyalty.

‘If you say to your teacher we were liberated by the Americans, she could report me and I might even go to prison,’ she warned me one last time.

‘I understand. I’m a big girl now, Maminka. I know you adults are lying all the time. I swear I won’t tell anyone Oma is German either, so she won’t end up in prison.’

Maminka looked at me tenderly, but I could sense her unease.

That day I learned that speaking my mind could be dangerous and I decided that to be safe I would stick to saying only what others wanted to hear.

Two weeks after I came back from the school trip, Oma found out she had breast cancer which had already spread throughout her whole body. She had less than nine months to live.

Nine months didn’t seem a long time. And yet in that time, a child can grow from just a cluster of cells into a complete human being. In Oma’s case, the process was reversed and she went from being a fully functioning human being to becoming increasingly dependent until she was like a baby herself. Eventually, there was really nothing left of her and she disappeared altogether. It seems so strange that a human being can just disappear, but no more strange than the way we start our lives, appearing seemingly out of nowhere. I wondered what the child might have been like. Now, of course, I would never know. But did it still exist somewhere, that potential life, waiting to be born? With all my heart I hoped it did. 

CHAPTER THREE

STORY OF LENKA

The next day I woke late. Going downstairs I discovered Maminka had already left for her surgery. I made coffee, got dressed and decided to take my old bike out for a ride. In Paris, I didn’t own a bike so if I wanted to do any cycling, I had to borrow one, which wasn’t always easy. Besides, cycling there, in the heavy traffic, had none of the pleasure of riding through small muddy paths in the green forests of Kraslice. This was one of the things I loved most to do. Just me and my bike, surrounded by nature. I was hoping that getting out in the fresh air would help me shift the heavy feelings I had been carrying with me since leaving Paris.

Here in the Ore mountains, each season has its own charm. Winters are cold with temperatures reaching below zero. The mountains, glistening white with snow, are like a scene from a fairytale. The beauty of winter gives way to bleaker landscapes with the arrival of the first rains and drizzle in spring. Summers are mild, with brisk misty mornings scented with moist grass and wildflowers.

Cycling on the half empty road, I passed by the huge red-brick lace factory when a familiar voice called out to me from the other side. I turned to see Mrs Richter, Oma’s friend, who used to visit her when I was a child.

Still tall, her heavy figure was now bent forward with age. She leaned on a walking stick and with her free hand beckoned me over.

I crossed over to her side of the road. With a warm smile, she reached out to embrace me, struggling to keep her balance. Her wrinkled hand gripped the stick tightly, blue veins clearly showing through her tissue-paper skin, almost transparent with age. I was scared if she might actually lose her balance and fall on top of me. I wasn’t sure I would have the strength to stop her knocking me and my bike to the ground.

She leant in and gave me a kiss on the cheek smelling of mint bonbons and washing powder.

‘You’ve become a real young lady, Lenka. Paris must suit you,’ she said. Her voice was full of pride. One might almost have thought she was herself my grandmother, not just a family friend.

‘I don’t blame you for wanting to leaveKraslice! What is there for a clever girl like you here?’

I guessed she wasn’t expecting an answer and she went on without waiting for one. ‘When I was young this town was a different place, you’d never want to leave, everything you needed was right here. That factory over there used to be full of girls all making lace. We made the best lace here, everybody knew Graslitz lace. Now it’s half empty, and we buy lace imported from China. Imagine that!’ she said, using the old German name for the town. ‘And our musical instruments, we were famous for them too.’

‘Well they are still making trumpets at least,’ I said, trying to look for something positive to say.

‘And it’s doing very badly. Reinhard told me it’s only a matter of time before they go bankrupt. I bet you, that factory will close down soon, like the hospital of ours,’ she pointed her walking stick in the direction of the building where Oma had once worked.

‘What a disaster. Things go from bad to worse in this town…,’ she sighed.

I had the feeling that if she started talking about the past, I might be standing there all morning. Eager to get on my bike but not wanting to offend the old lady, I enquired about her health, hoping that the litany of complaints would not last too long. I knew from Maminka she suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure.

‘I’m getting old, you see… I’m nothing like I was in the old days, now I have to take this blasted stick with me everywhere I go,’ she shook the stick vigorously in front of my face, ‘otherwise, I might fall!’

I leant back, away from her stick, afraid she might hit me in the face with it.

‘But I keep walking every day. And your mother has been looking after me very well. I’m telling you, she is a good doctor, your mother…How long will you be staying here?’

‘I leave next Sunday.’

‘Excellent!’ her eyes twinkled. ‘You’ll still be here for our annual meeting of Sudeten Germans this Friday. Will you come?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, refusing to commit.

‘I have already sent an invitation to your mother. You must come with her,’ she said grasping my hand, ‘I would be so happy to see you both there.’ Without giving me a chance to reply, she added, ‘You youngsters barely know about your own history… There is so much you don’t know Lenka.’

With her last words, she was looking meaningfully into my eyes.

She was a nice lady but I would barely know anyone there. People at these gatherings were from the old generation.

She looked in the direction of her home.

‘I must go now. Reinhard is waiting for me. He is on his afternoon shift today and I must be home before he leaves. Otherwise, he will worry. He treats me like a child,’ she apologised, laughing. ‘I will see you at the meeting,’ she added.

I jumped on my bike, saying goodbye to the old lady. As I was leaving, I glanced back at the red brick factory, thinking it had been standing here as a silent witness of the passing time. I turned away and set off towards the edge of town heading for Rolava, leaving Mrs Richter behind.

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

STORY OF LENKA

As she made coffee, she asked me questions about my trip. I answered as I always did, telling her the journey had been fine and I had managed to get enough rest on the bus.

As I spoke, she carelessly glanced through the post she had received that morning. I watched as she found amongst the letters, a small envelope. As she opened it, a sudden expression of unease casted a shadow across her otherwise calm features.

‘What’s that?’ I asked lightly.

‘Oh, it’s just an invitation…’

She handed me the small slip of paper, her hand slightly shaking.

‘An invitation to the Annual Meeting of Sudeten Germans?’ I asked her, surprised.

After the war, many Germans had been expelled from what was then Czechoslovakia and forcibly rehomed over the German border. The few who remained here were mostly women married to Czech men or workers with unique skills. Years later, when the Iron Curtain had fallen, people started to organise events just like this one. Sudeten Germans from both sides of the border could meet and socialise together.

I wondered if this innocent looking piece of paper might have reminded her of Oma. She was a Sudeten German. She had died some years back of cancer. Maybe it had brought back to mind the terrible suffering she went through in her final days.

‘Somebody might have thought Oma was still alive,’ I suggested gently to Maminka. She now kept turning the small card in her hands, searching probably for a sign of the mysterious sender. It didn’t carry any signature, return address or even a postage stamp. Finally, she gave up and placed the card out of sight. She hid it under a pile of the housekeeping magazines she subscribed to.

This unexpected delivery led us to spend the rest of the morning sharing memories of Oma. She was the kindest person to me. The best Oma, I could have ever wished for. Whenever Maminka was busy at work, she came over to our house to look after me. She would never complain about me. Whatever Maminka forbade she would allow me to do.

However, Maminka said it was quite a different story when she was young.

She could be a cold fish. She wouldn’t accept anything less than perfection. Sometimes it seemed to me the only thing that was important to her were my grades. She pushed me to study medicine. And it wasn’t only for the sake of glory. -‘There are so many lives to be saved,’ she would cry. ‘You must become a doctor. Your life must have a meaning!’ - she would then shout furiously, whenever I wasn’t at the top of the class.

>Oma was a nurse. She had been married to my grandfather for thirty-two years. He was Czech which allowed her to stay and saved her from the post war expulsions. Like many men of his generation, he smoked heavily and died of lung cancer in 1990. A year later, Oma was diagnosed with breast cancer which had already spread to her bones. By this stage, nothing could be done. She moved in with us, and Maminka looked after her. She was doing the best she could to make her mother as comfortable as possible. Despite suffering terribly, Oma rarely complained. I remember her telling me that the cancer was God’s punishment for all that she had done. I could never understand why. She would have given her life to helping others. I didn’t feel she deserved such harsh retribution.

It was distressing for both Maminka and me to see her in such pain. We were not able to help her. In the later stages, she was transferred to a nearby hospital. She died there.

Being a nurse in a small town, everybody knew her. She was very well thought of by the locals. I’d never heard a bad word said about her. On the day of her funeral, a crowd of around a hundred people gathered to pay their respects and listen to the glowing eulogy given by the local priest.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Maminka suggested, finishing off her coffee. ‘You look pale…’

‘I’ve just spent more than fifteen hours travelling,’ I replied. ‘I have a good reason to look pale.’

‘Yes, a very good reason actually to get some fresh air,’ she agreed.

She was right. We changed our shoes and set off for a brisk walk into the woods. 

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

STORY OF LENKA

For almost as long as I can remember I had wanted to leave Kraslice the small Czech town where I grew up. Tucked away in a valley in the Ore Mountains, close to the German border, surrounded by steep hills and green pine forests, Kraslice is a picturesque place. But to me it was a forgotten place, a town even most Czechs would struggle to find on a map. I was afraid if I stayed there, I would end up stuck, just like Maminka. Married to a local boy, someone I had gone to school with and known my whole life. Not because I particularly wanted to marry him, but because he was the best of the limited choices available. I longed to get away, to experience city life, to go to a place where I could wander the streets anonymously and where the possibilities were endless. So when the first opportunity presented itself, I left.

    When still a child, Maminka insisted that I learn French as my second language. She took me to Marie who was the only French teacher in the whole town. Marie was blind and old. She was probably the same age as Oma but somehow looked much older. She must have remembered a lot. I was well mannered and had never dared to ask her what caused her blindness. Maminka told me she was born like that. But Oma said, that Marie became blind while she was a prisoner during the war.

‘Prisoner…what war?’ I didn’t understand. 

Oma laughed at the seven years old child I was back then.

‘This was a long time ago. Her eyes got infected and she became blind. I believe she couldn’t find her way back home and had to stay. But Lenka, my little angel, you must swear to me, you won’t ever talk to Marie about anything I’ve just told you. No war, prison or eyes! It might still hurt her feelings. Do you understand?’

‘I promise I won’t.’

With the passing time, I realised Marie was the best teacher I’d ever had. I loved everything about her. The warmth of her small apartment, the sound of her calming voice, her delicious scent of camomile surrounding her body. When I was reading aloud from my French textbooks, stumping at every second word, she was patiently listening, her thin fingers sliding down the white pages of her own books, written in braille. Once I had enough of reading or conversation about the weather I pretended I needed to go to have a pee. Her toilet was outside, in the hallway. I always took at least five minutes before I came back!

Sometimes she offered me lemonade or freshly baked buchty sweet strawberry jam buns, which she got for herself at the nearby bakery.

When I entered high school, I had a proper French teacher. He was young and full of energy but also a real pedant. Impressed about my reading and conversational skills he decided I had to improve my writing too. Every Friday afternoon, he loaded me with additional grammatical assignments which I had to execute.

‘You do this over the weekend and no excuses!’ he always said as if I had ever dared to protest.

He was nothing like Marie. He was a proper teacher. I couldn’t lead him by the nose! I wouldn’t dare to argue about anything he asked me to do. And so, in spite of myself, my grammar improved to a great level. In my final year, he had the crazy idea I should enter the French Cultural Knowledge Contest. So I did.

On the day of the competition, the jury asked me what I knew about the French cinema. They surely expected me to talk about the Lumière brothers and their cinematograph invention. Instead, I spoke about Angélique, Marquise des Anges, a historical romance film from the sixties, I knew from the television. The jury looked amused but didn’t stop me and by a miracle, I was granted a third place. The prize came with a grant from the French government. Bingo! This was my ticket to escape the boring town of mine. I packed my stuff and moved to Paris to study French at the Sorbonne. Later, I enrolled for a degree in international relations at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science. 

That had been three years ago, I was now in my final year and about to start an internship at the International Organisation for Trade and Development.

Of course, Maminka still lived in Kraslice and every holiday I dutifully returned there. Divorced and alone, I knew she looked forward to my visits. Whenever we spoke on the phone, she never missed an opportunity to remind me I had promised to come back whenever I had the chance.

This time, though, it was different. For the first time since I had left Kraslice, I actually wanted to be there. I found myself longing for the safe familiarity of the town of my childhood.

She picked me up from a bus stop. As soon as she pulled up in her old reliable Skoda Fabia it felt like I had never been away. Once I was comfortably seated in the passenger’s seat, enveloped by the familiar fragrance of the interior upholstery – slightly musty – mingled with Maminka’s perfume – floral and sweet - I felt a wave of emotion and my eyes filled with tears. I was glad she kept her eyes focused on the road and didn’t seem to notice anything.

In Paris, I had been having an on-off relationship with Samir, a Moroccan guy I had met and fallen hopelessly in love with. It was obvious to everyone but me that it was not going to work out and when I discovered I was pregnant it came to an abrupt end. There really was no chance I could have had the child. Samir didn’t want to know and I was in the middle of my studies, so I made the difficult decision to have an abortion. By this time it was obvious the relationship was over. I knew he was seeing other women but I had hoped at least that he would come with me to the clinic and he assured me he would be there. But when the day of the appointment arrived, he gave me an excuse. I had to do it on my own…

I returned to my small Paris flat with a feeling of emptiness inside me that no matter what I did I could not seem to shift.

I stared out the window as we passed rows of square concrete buildings, the cultural centre, the well-kept police station and the crumbling White Swan hotel, dating back to the era of the Habsburg monarchy. Though many things have changed in my life, Kraslice seemed the same as it has always been. If I could, I would turn back the time. I wished to feel the lightness of being a child once again, walking these streets, having nothing to worry about, except not being late for school and having good grades.

I looked at Maminka sitting next to me, behind the wheel of the Skoda Fabia. I haven’t even told her about Samir, or any other guys for that matter. She was a pragmatic woman, a doctor, and I knew her opinions about unwanted pregnancies. I remembered when a local girl, one of her patients, had become pregnant at sixteen Maminka had shown little sympathy. There was simply no excuse for it in today’s society, she said, with contraception readily available. The girl must have been careless or stupid, or both. Imagine what she would say if she knew that I, her own daughter had made the same mistake.

I never wanted to be like her. Growing up, my head was full of dreams and ideas. I never planned anything. If things went wrong I didn’t stress about it, what was the point, anyway. Unlike Maminka and most people in Kraslice, I didn’t judge people because they were different or did things differently. On the contrary, I have always been attracted to people and experiences that were different. My imagination and curiosity seemed totally incomprehensible to her. She would often tell me to stop fantasising. But it was partly this sense of adventure that led me to stay in Paris. I sometimes wondered if there was a tinge of envy within that incomprehension. At times like this though, I wished I could be just a little bit more like her.

Finally, we arrived home, a white three-story house with a neat garden close to the banks of the river Svatava. Once inside, sitting at the table, I gave Maminka the present I had bought for her. A cheap bottle of perfume (though highly expensive for my limited means). I wished I could have afforded something better but was touched to see real gratitude in her eyes. She sprinkled herself with its pink-coloured contents, even letting out a little ‘woooh’ as the sweet, heavy scent reached her nostrils. 

CHAPTER TWO