Waiting for Monsieur Bellivier Read online

  The soldier came back with what looked like a pair of thick, white football socks, and he handed them to her. She took off her black nylon stockings and pulled on the white socks. She even tried to put on her shoes, but she couldn’t, the socks were too thick. In stockinged feet, she was called in to see the man behind the desk. It was only then that she found out why they had brought her there. To serve her country. She was there as a doctor. She had been the best in town, and now that the town had been emptied of both Germans and Jews, she was needed in Dachau. She would be responsible for taking care of any ailments in the camp. Any ailments caused by the dirty Jews, that was. She wouldn’t be allowed to treat her own people, she was informed, but rather the Germans infected by them. And it wasn’t just because she was one of the best doctors that she had been brought to the camp, it was also because she was a charming woman, someone the German soldiers could fantasise about. Only the best was good enough for them. And she didn’t put her foot down. She never did.

  Monsieur Caro fell silent, and I wondered where I had heard that line about putting a foot down before, but my thoughts were interrupted when he continued:

  They wanted to know what she needed to run a doctor’s surgery, and she quickly drew up a list of medicines and instruments. In all the stress of leaving, she had even forgotten her stethoscope. It usually hung around her neck, but she had taken it off as she pulled on her coat. That was what she always did when she was leaving for the day. The corpulent man glanced at the list and then quickly handed it back to her. He asked her to note down all of the furniture she would need in the surgery. Other than scales, a measuring stick, an examination table, a chair, paper sheets and a few good lights, she couldn’t think of anything else. She tried to remember what there had been in her own surgery, but her memory failed her. A defence mechanism, perhaps. Or maybe she realised, right there and then, that she would never see her own practice again, that she may as well forget it as quickly as possible.

  Monsieur Caro rubbed his eyes.

  She spent her first two days in Dachau alone in a small room with a bunk bed without sheets. Twice they came in with food and coffee. No one spoke to her. Countless times, she opened and closed her doctor’s bag. But she kept her head high. If I had allowed myself to cry at everything I saw, I wouldn’t be alive today, she always said. Yes, yes … On the third day, a man came in with a pair of black boots. He asked her to put them on and follow him. They crossed the muddy field. She had put her old shoes into her bag. The barracks spread across the field didn’t look how she remembered them from her arrival. Some looked like old containers, but others were more like neat, modern houses. The man stepped into one of them, over by a small cluster of trees, and she followed him in. She immediately realised that she had just set foot in her new doctor’s surgery, and without uttering a word the man showed her round. Over by the door there was a small space which, with a bit of imagination, could function as a waiting room. The surgery itself was big and airy. There was an examination table, a chair, a desk, and everything else she had added to her list. The bulb hanging from the ceiling cast an unrelenting glow. Behind a partial wall there was a simple shower and a toilet, no more than a hole in the floor.

  In the midst of her misery, and despite the fact they had taken both her freedom and her self-respect, she had now regained some of her working honour. It was that tiny glimmer of light which gave her the strength to begin unpacking her possessions. She placed the morphine into a small metal cabinet on the wall. Several of the medicines she had requested were already inside. She studied one of the bottles to determine the strength, opened another and sniffed it, to double-check that it really was the medicine she had requested. She placed the nail scissors with the bandages. The last thing she unpacked were her shoes. She dampened a little cotton wool and tried to clean off the dried mud. Then she placed them in the shower area to dry off. Suddenly, she heard the sound of a child shouting, and she glanced out of the window. But all she could see was the cluster of trees, and that was probably her salvation. Not long after that, she heard a woman’s cry. She tried to open the door and discovered to her surprise, naive as she was, that it was locked. She went back into the room and peered out at the trees.

  After just a few hours in her new doctor’s surgery, her first patient arrived. It was the stout man. For the first time, he introduced himself. She noted down his name, Fritz Erk, in one of the notepads that would serve as both her register of patients and her prescription book. Erk was a diabetic, and now that he was away from home, his condition had worsened. On that first day, she saw just two patients: Erk and a soldier who had sprained his arm. Each patient had the key to her surgery. They unlocked the door, stepped inside, were treated and then left. The doctor was locked in, and the patients had the key. What a farce!

  Monsieur Caro started to laugh and cough. I couldn’t understand the humour in what he had just told me. It was as though he had suddenly forgotten his internal script, and once it had happened, he couldn’t hold back. His feelings took over.

  So, where was I? Yes, Judith took care of Erk and another soldier, and that evening, the dinner tray arrived. After she finished eating, she waited to be taken back to her bunk, but no one came. She even started to long for her spartan room. As evening turned into night, she eventually lay down on the examination table and slept. What she didn’t know was that she would do the same for over a year. The room was no longer just her doctor’s surgery, it was also her home. Judith got her doctor’s surgery and her patients, but perhaps not in the sense she had been expecting.

  Erk stopped by several times a week, and was probably the only person she had any personal interaction with. It was Erk she dared ask for newspapers; she was going crazy without anything to do between patients. He promised to see what he could do. The next day, he came back with bad news. It wasn’t possible. But she wasn’t stupid, my mother. Many less flattering words could be applied to her, should be applied to her, but she wasn’t stupid. The next day, after she had injected insulin into his German veins, she asked whether she couldn’t at least be given the medical journal Ärzteblatt. It was for their own good, she insisted. The field of medicine was making such rapid advances, and she needed to stay à jour. Particularly when they were living so close together. She needed to know what kinds of bacteria and viruses were running riot out there in society. Erk looked pleased, but he was slightly concerned he hadn’t thought of it himself. He wanted to help Judith. But not because he was good, remember that! Because he was a man.

  The very next week, he returned with a copy of Ärzteblatt. The cluster of trees and those journals were what kept Judith going. She must have read every copy at least ten times.

  Judith didn’t talk much about what she experienced in Dachau. She said she didn’t see anything. Just heard it. Shots and cries. Cries like she had never heard before, shrill cries, she called them pig cries. I suppose they sounded something like when you cut off a pig’s head, however she knew how that sounded. It makes no difference. But one incident she often returned to was how one day, after his injection, Erk handed her a rolled-up package. It was a pair of nylon stockings. By then, she had been in Dachau for a month or two. The clothes she had arrived in were all she had. She washed them in the shower every other day, and then hung them to dry above the radiator. Which meant that every other night, she was forced to sleep in her doctor’s coat. The nylon stockings looked used, there was even a ladder in one of them, but she washed them, dried them, and pulled them on. And here comes the inexplicable part.

  Monsieur Caro swallowed.

  The thought that another woman must have worn them struck Judith. She wasn’t stupid, after all. She knew that this woman was probably dead, that, in all likelihood, she had fallen victim to Erk and his men. How could she wear a murdered woman’s stockings! Which she had been given by the murderer! Even as a child, I questioned my mother on that point. I was eight then. Can you understand that? Eight!

  The room suddenly
felt very small. Monsieur Caro’s face was flushed and blotchy. I wondered whether I should say something to distract him, to turn his mind to something else, but I wanted to know what had happened.

  ‘What did she say to that?’

  ‘That it was important for her to wear her own shoes. To avoid the boots. And then she told that old story about not knowing how you’ll react in an extreme situation until you find yourself in one. Drivel! Drivel! Drivel!’

  Despite everything, I felt a certain responsibility for Monsieur Caro’s health, and so although it might have meant the end of his story, I asked him if he wanted to take a break. I told him I could come back tomorrow. Monsieur Caro glared at me angrily.

  ‘We may as well get to the end of this shameful tale. So we can draw a line under it.’

  I was more than happy to be taken back in time.

  After the stocking affair, she had asked for a change of clothes. Erk arranged it all. She was given a pair of white socks, two pairs of black trousers, two pairs of white underwear, two white shirts and a grey cardigan. All men’s sizes.

  She took care of her surgery. Laid out the latest issue of Ärzteblatt in the waiting room. She even asked one of the soldiers to bring in a sprig of pine, which she placed in a test tube on the waiting room table. It’s for all this that I blame her. What the hell was she thinking?

  ‘Did you ever ask her?’

  ‘She said it was her way of surviving. But she could hear the screams! Though actually, do you know what I find worst? That she had the stomach to talk about it. That she was, in some way, proud of it!’

  ‘But she was just telling the truth.’

  ‘To hell with the truth!’

  ‘She was a proud woman.’

  ‘Like hell!’

  This was the Monsieur Caro I recognised. But he quickly returned to his more restrained behaviour. As though he had made up his mind to tell this story to the end. His way of expressing the past was as though he wanted to pass it on, so that it would be preserved after his death.

  She fell ill herself. Though I say ill, she became weaker. But as the camp doctor, she could order whatever she needed. She took care of herself with iron tablets and vitamins A and D, all while her countrymen and women were dying just a stone’s throw away. She lived like that for a little over a year.

  She never set foot outside her doctor’s surgery until the day she left Dachau. Without warning, a soldier appeared and told her to pack up her things. She asked what she needed, because she was convinced she was being sent to tend to someone who was seriously injured, a patient who couldn’t make it to the surgery themselves. The soldier thought for a moment and then turned on his heel and left. He returned after a few minutes. ‘Whatever Monsieur Erk might need,’ was the answer. And so she dutifully packed the insulin, the needles and various painkillers into her huge doctor’s bag. It was summer outside. The birds were singing. The first things that struck her were the scents of the outdoors. For over a year now, she had lived in a relatively scentless environment. Sweat, damp, cigarette smoke, the occasional cigar, vomit, acetone, chlorine and food were all she had come into contact with.

  There was a train waiting in the station. A couple of men with Stars of David on their arms hurried past, a guard barking at them to speed up. She smiled at them. They stared back at her in terror. She couldn’t understand their reaction. She wasn’t wearing a Star of David. There was a huge black car parked alongside the train. The soldier gestured for her to get in, and she became scared. Her doctor’s surgery had become her only source of security. Had her time come? The door opened, and she looked inside. Erk was sitting in the back seat, and he asked her to climb in. A driver in a Nazi uniform started the engine.

  ‘Where were they going?’

  I had been drawn so deep into the story that I could no longer hold back my questions.

  ‘To Paris.’

  ‘Why Paris?’

  ‘German troops had occupied the city, Erk had been ordered to go there. He had requested that Judith go with him, since he couldn’t control his diabetes. And since her mother was French, she knew the language; in fact, it was her mother tongue. Practical, having that woman with him.’

  ‘But maybe Erk liked her, maybe it was a way to get her out of there?’

  ‘He was a swine! Let’s not try to dress this up.’

  They drove to southern Germany, and from there they took the train to the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Once there, they checked into a hotel – and not just any hotel, but the Hôtel Ritz by the Place Vendôme. My mother was given a sum of money for new clothing. An absurd gesture. Keeping a woman locked up for over a year, with access to only a shower and toilet, and then suddenly taking her to a luxury hotel in Paris and giving her spending money. She went straight to one of the most exclusive boutiques by the Place Vendôme and was quickly seen to by the shop assistant. Erk had told her that if anyone asked her name, she was Mademoiselle Dörner and she was his fiancée. Idiot German. It would have been more believable that she was his daughter.

  ‘Did she have to live up to that?’

  Monsieur Caro’s eyes darkened.

  ‘Do you mean me?’

  ‘Do I mean you?’

  ‘Never mind. No, she didn’t have to live up to that. If she had, she would have likely bragged about it too, like she had with the nylon stockings.’

  He sighed deeply.

  ‘I’m tired. But we need to draw a line under this.’

  Back at the hotel, she examined him and administered his injection, and then she returned to her own room. Yes, he did at least have the decency to book two rooms. Erk let her know that she was a free woman, so long as she came to his room at eight every morning to check his health.

  That night was the first in over a year that she had slept in a bed. But her body was stiff. She lay in the middle of it so as not to fall out. That was how she had slept on the examination table in Dachau. And that was when the anxiety came. She sweated, paced back and forth across her room. She heard the shots and the cries, and she saw the eyes of those emaciated men when she smiled at them. She tried to remember her father’s phone number. She rifled through her bag in the hope of finding something to calm herself down. On the table next to the bed, she found a brochure about the Moulin Rouge. Eventually, she pulled her coat on top of her nightgown and went down to reception to ask to use the phone. She fumbled with the numbers and was given help calling the switchboard, which could connect her to Germany, but the line went dead. She went to the hotel bar and got so drunk that a man had to help her back to her room. She lay down on the floor to sleep. The bed was too soft.

  At seven the next morning, she was already outside Erk’s hotel room. At eight, she knocked on the door. He opened it, seemed stressed, but asked her to come in. Her hand shook after the previous night’s drinking, and she fumbled with the needle. He slapped her, hard, and that brought her back to her senses. She did her job. In a way, that was his farewell.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They never saw one another again after that. He left. It was the 22nd of April, 1945. It’d make a good book, no? The Treasonous Mother.’

  I wanted to protest at the word ‘treasonous’, but I stopped myself.

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Everything and nothing. She landed on her feet, I suppose you could say. Met my father in Paris. A sensible man. Without him, things never would have worked out.’

  ‘And he was Jewish?’

  ‘Yes, thank goodness for that!’

  ‘Did she continue to practise medicine?’

  ‘No. She was done fixing people. She had five children instead.’

  ‘Five. So you have four siblings? Are they still alive?’

  ‘Yes, they’re all alive, I’m the eldest. They’re all fine, all but one, my little brother, he suffers from schizophrenia. Odd that we didn’t all develop it, considering our mother.’

  ‘How do your siblings feel about your mother? The same as you?’<
br />
  ‘I don’t know, and it doesn’t interest me.’

  ‘Why are you so hard on her? As far as I can see, she hasn’t committed any crime. I might have done the same.’

  ‘You, yes! I can understand that! You even put flowers on her grave, without any explanation.’

  Yes. He was right.

  ‘In any case, she’s been harshly punished. None of her children leave flowers on her grave.’

  ‘Not true. She got off lightly, considering her crimes.’

  ‘What crimes?’

  ‘Taking care of those terrified butchers. Those butchers who took the lives of millions of people! What worse crime could a person commit? She got off lightly. Only one person has ever dared judge her, and that was me! I forbade my siblings from honouring her, and they’ve kept their promise. Do you realise what you’ve done?’

  I was scared. Not that he would hurt me, but that he might die. His face was red, and his lips had started to turn pale. His hate would be the death of him.

  ‘You said yourself that your mother’s fate would be a good book. Could I write it?’

  He had calmed down now. Staring at the TV like it was on.

  ‘Please, could you turn on the TV.’

  I realised he wanted to divert his thoughts, but I couldn’t find the remote. I realised there wasn’t one. A debate programme was on.

  ‘So that she could be glorified in a book? No, thank you.’