“Did they say no?”
“A no would have been disappointing, but we would get over it. It’s a maybe.”
For me, a maybe was better than a yes.
Maybe meant no.
A SMALL RALLY STORY
The word homosexual made its appearance regularly.
The crowd seemed to grow thicker around me. We all looked the same but our minds were different. I wanted to leap inside one of them and see for myself.
Did those boys know who they were? Did they like it? Even if I didn’t always like who I was, I always knew who I was. The boys in Inland, Tomas included, liked who they were but didn’t know who they were. They only liked who they were told to be by various adults. Now, tell me which one is worse?
To know who you are, even if you don’t like yourself?
Or to not know who you are and love yourself?
“Heil Hitler.”
Their arms shot into the sky. “Heil Hitler.”
After the second ‘heil’, it was decided. I did not want to be some background noise. When the next ‘heil’ came. I wanted to give them my best defiant left-handed heil Hitler. A heil Hitler to beat them all, but I had the sense not to. This was real life, and in real life, people die – even children – if they speak out publicly against the moustached man. Instead, I felt. I tore through the curtains of boys. They spoke backward.
I couldn’t understand what it all meant, and the more I learned, the less I understood.
Heil Hitler.
Reltir lieH.
I closed my eyes, heard, and held my head on the steps.
37
The Ladder to the Stars
*Laser Lemon*La Salle Green
Oskar had not come home that night. I found out later that he had been stumbling around Inland, eventually reaching the deserted train station, where he cursed at the Bahnhof air. “They should have been safe!” he cried over and over.
His once kind, blue eyes, like the winter jumper, had gone grey, and he had plans. We heard him drunk outside, banging on the cabin doors and sweating.
“If he tries anything, I’ll kill the bastard,” Penn said.
Our fear grew in larger patches on the wall, but we resisted the urge for hysteria.
Bravery even tried to stand up in Derrick, but its knees quivered as he made his way to the door, to see the damage.
Penn ordered him back to bed.
“Nein! Bett, Derrick.” His voice was calm and firm.
A few minutes later, Oskar entered the room. I could only just make out his shape at the door. Whisky and guilt filled the air. He did not speak but made his way past the door and under my covers. Everything was quiet. We were noiseless and opaque. We did not breathe.
He took me. I did not struggle. I did not scream. “What’s wrong, Oskar?”
The night’s blackness hung suspended over my head. I wanted to stay hidden in the shadows, but the yellow light that lit Inland’s courtyard dragged me out by the collar.
Naïvety shone out of me.
It was Oskar that spoke. “Punch me.”
There was a fleeting moment of pity that washed over his wrinkled face.
“No.”
He tried again. “Punch me, you little faggot.”
That did it. Tears and blood. I punched him, and he fell. It wasn’t enough. He wanted more.
And more—
And more—
I pounded him harder, even though my hands were breaking.
“Harder! If I were your Papa, how would you hit me? Hit me!”
“I’m not angry at my Papa.”
My fist bled.
I stopped.
“Then where is this anger coming from?”
With my loudest voice. “You’re making me angry!”
Oskar’s legs didn’t work. Neither did his hands. Or his fingers.
He collapsed on my shoulder.
And then he told me.
There was an air raid at Mittenwald, but the sirens were late. By the time the farm was alerted, it was too late. They had to run. Elsbeth fell. When Oskar’s brother stood her up, they made their way to the shelter, and she noticed she was bleeding.
Howling misery.
Sweat, sick, and tears were soaked into him, and I felt the kind of sadness that starts as a lump in your throat and stretches its way out of your skin. The night was as black as the whisky he was drinking.
I thought about Oskar – not his sadness, but my own. He made me hit him. He frightened me. No one so good could do that, I thought. He fell off his perch. The stars were crumbling.
We went to Teichmann’s shed, where we stayed until Oskar had sobered up and could take the abuse from Kröger. “You think your wife and family would want you to act like this? Get a hold of yourself and grow up, Oskar.” It was just the right amount of harshness that could only come from him.
He was right, of course. When we are grieving the loss of someone we love, we become selfish. I could tell that Oskar didn’t feel comfortable with the grief – that it was unjustified. “I’m not going to be a Papa anymore, Josef.”
If he’d have known, Oskar would never have left Elsi alone under those stars.
“I’m so sorry, little man.” Oskar laughed and covered his mouth like he was mad at himself for forgetting his sadness. “God, I’d love a damn cigarette.”
His tobacco heart was breaking.
That night I realised how fundamentally wrong the idea of good and evil was. Sometimes the people we think are good aren’t as good as we would have hoped. I had to stop decorating people.
It was a quarter past two, Oskar climbed a ladder to the stars, and they fell and knelt around him.
Oskar was the man who taught me that you don’t have to have fame, fortune, or status to be remembered. You can be good. As a child, kindness was the only thing I required from anyone, but it was hard to come by. I will always remember Oskar and his kind blue eyes, like melting wax.
“I could give myself a fair bit of advice if I was your age, Josef?”
“What would you say?”
“I’d say smoke less and fuck more. A whole lot more.”
38
Blood and Honour
HONOUR
In the last few years of the war, class was a disaster. I felt sorry for Simons. Von was kicked back on his chair, talking to another student when the ruler came down on his desk. “Fuck!” It startled the boy.
The rain outside sounded like a mandolin.
“Language, Rouvon!” Simons spoke from behind the ruler.
“Oh, I’m fucking sorry, Frau.” The boy didn’t realise he had said it. The class broke loose with laughter.
He wasn’t off the hook yet. She instructed Von to the board to draw a graph. He set the chalk between his fingers, rubbed the powder on his shorts, and began. The line was coiled from the boy’s jocular hand.
Derrick’s neatness called out from his seat.
“Wow, Von. That line is as straight as Manfret.”
“Shut your whore face,” Von replied from the board.
“The language of it!”
Poor Frau Simons.
I was halfway finished with the Schultz painting. It was one of my best works yet. Every colour of the painting conspired to bring your attention to the dog who stood between the grey pillars. His expression was strangely human-like and bore the expression of one comfortable with being superior.
Snow danced in the light, my face shone timidity.
The river was ice.
Von was bored. He wanted to play soccer, and in trying to convince me, his face came dangerously close.
“How do you know when it’s done?” He looked at my painting.
“At some point, I stop.”
A playful smile crept on his face. He picked up my painting and did a pretend swing.
“Play or the painting gets it.”
My heart jumped out of my chest. “No! That’s mine. Give it back. It belongs to me.” My eyes were swollen.<
br />
“I’m sorry.” The painting was gently returned as quickly as he stole it.
“I didn’t want you to cry. I’m sorry, Josef.”
I was held. I asked Von to sit with me, close on the ground, in the snow. This was the closest thing I would ever get to asking him to stay. I explained everything to him.
A difficult conversation.
Me: “I don’t know. I have always been quite content with my paintings.” I shrugged skeptically. “For the most part.”
Von listened, hand on mine. My thoughts bohemian.
Me: “Everyone always talks about how grand is to be expected to lose but to try anyway.” The sky was the only thing holding me up. Even as my hands pressed against Von’s, they trembled.
“Everything is raw. They tell you that you must do it for all the other hopeless hearts out there, and to prove the cynics wrong, but it is soul-crushing, Rouvon. I feel invisible – unimportant.”
Von: “But do you love to paint?”
The world was a blur of colours that melted to greys. Just the sound of my heart in my head.
Me: “Yes.”
Von: “There you go.” A slight nod. “You are very clever. I think you are a good artist.”
Me: “I want to be great, not good.” I continued. “Good gets you a slap on the back. I want to be great and be brilliant forever.”
Von, his freckles looking down: “And you will be, Josef, but on your own merits. You will not be great like the greats, but you can be great on your own terms. Your kind of great is brilliant.”
My eyes welled up as he spoke. These tears were words.
At one point, I laughed. I learned to thank my tears and accept them as a gift rather than a watery reflection of weakness. It might sound like an oddity to you, but if tears are the only thing that can stop me from becoming a puppet string man, someone afraid to feel all of life’s feelings, then crying is the smartest thing a boy can do.
BLOOD
A call came from the grass. “Manfret cut his arm off!” Boys were running.
Naturally, I had to investigate. Crowds do what crowds do and gathered to the scene of the suffering.
Manfret did not cut his arm off, but he came close. He’d been cutting deeper and deeper over the years. We had no idea. He was in ten shades of agony on the grass. The colours inside hated him. The scars were discovered when he was made to remove his shirt.
He locked everyone out of the cabin that evening, but I found an opening in the window and snuck in. The boy was spread out on the mattress.
“It’s snowing outside,” I said. “You should come out. Everyone is playing.” For me, the very fact of snow has always been amazement.
Manfret looked up. The soft lines of his childhood becoming chiseled. “I’m a mess, and now I can never go home. They hate me, and I’m ugly.”
He said it with the ugliest cry I have ever seen. It was the cry that was ugly, not him.
Second World War Germany was a very superficial place, and it seeped into the bones of the children.
“No, you’re not.” I told him.
“You don’t know what it’s like.”
“I do.” I crouched beside his bed and gave him a glimpse into my mind. “Josef needs to speak up. Josef is too quiet... Josef is too... Fuck that.”
He smiled.
“I can’t be anything other than what I am.”
“You’ll go mad trying to please everyone, Manfret.”
Hands on soft cotton sheets, an image came to view. I wondered what the world would be like if every strange, little child got to be what was in their hearts.
The prodigy son the Wünderlich’s wanted never arrived. Missed his train. One got shot in Russia. The other was a disgrace.
Herr and Frau Wünderlich didn’t receive a single thing but money. Rich people got richer. During my time in Inland, I learned that people feel safe and important with money. They would do anything for it, even give up their children.
“I wrote to them, and I told them I was unhappy.” He had a cigarette in one hand, a toy car in the other.
“They sent me this toy and told me they were sorry.” His anger and resentment lit up the cabin walls.
“They weren’t sorry. If anyone told me I was privileged, I would laugh.”
Manfret spent his entire life trying to forget those childhood moments.
The door spoke in various tongues.
“Manfret, are you in there?”
A choir from outside. Snowy, gloved hands.
“Let us in. I can’t feel my toes.”
Even the light laughed at them.
“Do we even need toes?”
I offered my hand. “We should let them in.”
When we did, Manfret was piled upon, and we played games for the rest of the night. The simple things of life became love.
We always think we aren’t good enough.
We are always hiding.
Always hoping that no one would see, for fear of everyone knowing.
What if everyone knew?
What if they all came to witness?
Would they like what they saw?
Or would they hate it, too?
Too many people hate themselves. What if for once we said something good about ourselves. Not about everyone else, but ourselves.
Go on, try it. Say something nice about yourself.
I’m waiting.
Repeat after me.
I am ______
39
The Music Man
*Miserable-Tobacco* Madness
In the days that followed the air raids, people were still being dug out five days later – wedged between the fallen beams. The youth leaders would tell us to look away when another body was brought out. I did, but a lot didn’t. The British knew that Nazis took residence in Munich, so our unlucky town was caught in the in-between – collateral damage.
I watched as Tomas was given a hand-written advertisement for a street sale. People sold belongings that weren’t destroyed in order to keep afloat.
I sat in the rubble, observing a thin lamppost through a shimmering twilight puddle. I thought it was so beautiful that I had to show Von how it looked, and I made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it. I was the only boy I knew who would bring a sketchpad and a pencil to a bomb site, but I did it so cheerfully, you couldn’t help but be charmed.
Tomas was not. He and Kröger sat eating sandwiches on a pillar. It was wet from the rain and soaked their trousers.
“Do you think there’s anything wrong with my brother?” I felt Tomas’ eyes on me. I heard it all, but I didn’t look up.
Flecks of bread came out with Kröger’s words. “What do you want? A numbered list?”
In the peaceful Europe we live in today, it is hard for those who did not experience the war to understand it and the bitter emotions to which it gave rise.
That night, our sky belonged to the bombs. It froze the stars. Inland was a small town, and bombing for the third time held no strategic benefits. I realise that they didn’t mean to bomb Inland, that it was a big mistake. But it made no difference. More bombs.
Oskar searched for his calming tobacco, but there was none left. My compassion looked up at him. He tapped my hat.
Some Germans were left traumatised by the war. Children’s first memories are hiding behind screaming mothers. They remember the muggy bomb shelters and the burning smell of human remains. Through all the helping, guiding, and digging, I would see the littered scraps of humans. An old searchlight man stood still in a crowd, tears in his eyes and he couldn’t breathe. I knew the person he was searching for was one of the humans that would never come back. He moved with the others until he was out of view.
The stars sang from behind the smoke, managing to let a little light slip in front. The people, too, sang German lullabies, and the sounds were so delicate that it gently brushed the hair on my skin. Manfret Wünderlich was singing along.
I imagined Hitler above the town, li
ke a musician on the hill, orchestrating the musicians, the instruments moving to his will. Below, notes formed on the pavement, and bombs dropped from the sky.
Herr Hitler happened to be in Munich that air-raid night, and before the alarm had been sounded, he was already safely tucked away in a private shelter complete with rugs on the floors, baths, and, reportedly, even a movie projection-room.
While hundreds and hundreds of people were buried under rubble, struggling horribly to breathe, he might well have been watching a movie.
In the wake of it all, he announced that everything would be built better than before. We heard him in the radio wave colours when we were cleaning up the next day.
The whistle came. It meant safety and the end. German civilians would come out in turns – some running back home expeditiously to inspect the damage to their homes. The purple ones came slower, linking arms. It was those people that would thank us, with a hand-patting smile. “You did a great job, young man.”
Lines were formed.
Another roll call.
Screamed orders.
Von found and stood with me. Children were fidgeting and playing with the rubble.
“We’re missing a few.” Pages of names and upside-down words were flipped. “Schneider for one.”
Von’s arm tightened on mine. “Josef, we have to stay here.”
“Tomas!”
I rounded the corner, and I saw it.
A boy was lying amongst the rubble, patting a dog. The moulting dog could care less, but he did let Tomas pick him up.
That fucking dog.
Some quick words were needed.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t leave him, Josef.”
“I don’t want to lose you to a damn dog! He doesn’t even care.”
He does care, Josef. He cares very much.”
But I knew. As I hugged him, I realised. Tomas could not have left that dog there, the same way the purples in the bomb shelter couldn’t help but sing.
The Boy Who Saw in Colours Page 24