Caging Skies

by Christine Leunens

  'Johannes will be unable to attend,' he interrupted.

  'Heil Hitler.' Josef's greeting was followed by four echoes.

  'Heil Hitler,' my father muttered.

  'Why?' Josef looked at me, surprised.

  'Why? Have you seen the shape his feet are in after the last time? I don't want him getting an infection.'

  'Who said?' I protested.

  'Blisters are not an acceptable medical reason for absence. He must attend.'

  'My son will stay home and rest with his family this weekend. No more coming home like that, not able to walk, passing out from fatigue. An infection can lead to gangrene.'

  'I didn't pass out from fatigue! I fell asleep! Vater, you weren't even home!'

  My mother, ill at ease, shifted from foot to foot and told Josef I would attend the next camp.

  'I'll have to report it if he doesn't attend this one. You give me no choice.'

  'But he can't walk,' she pleaded. 'My poor little boy.'

  'Yes I can! It's just blisters — who on earth cares?'

  'He should change his shoes. I have already told him they're inappropriate.'

  'I beg your pardon?' asked my mother.

  'They are not in keeping with our style. They must have shoelaces, like ours. His are too dark, too big and bulky. These are Land shoes.'

  He meant peasant shoes. I guessed how hurt my mother must be — anyway, one look told me she was doing nothing to hide it. She had been proud to let me wear her father's old hiking shoes, the ones he wore as a boy. Now Opa's shoes weren't good enough.

  'My son is not aware of the long-term dangers of abusing the feet,' my father cut in.

  'Does he have flat feet like you?' Josef questioned.

  My father, at first taken aback, scanned me from head to toe with his betrayed expression. Flat feet were just a subject Josef and I had talked about once around the campfire, and if I'd mentioned my father's, it wasn't in a way as to say anything bad about him the way he made it sound.

  'Not to my knowledge.'

  'Then it's in his — and your — interests that he come.'

  Josef was determined. Young as he was, in his uniform, he came off as a military authority. My father, I could tell, was tempted to speak his mind, but my mother's pleading eyes just managed somehow to keep him from doing so.

  iv

  After three years of impatience, Kippi, Stefan, Andreas and I were old enough to join the Hitlerjugend. We were euphoric, especially Kippi and I, who dreamt of getting into Adolf Hitler's personal guard when we grew up, because we'd heard that the selection was so elitist, a cavity in your tooth was enough to have you rejected. We liked to come up with all the faults that could disqualify us and remedy them. Lack of strength, stamina, courage, certainly, but more often petty reasons such as the tooth decay one, against which we, among the few, would go so far as to brush our teeth in camp. I had an ingrown toenail and Kippi would perform operations on it. No way was I going to have a minor defect mentioned on my medical records. We were supposed to tolerate pain without flinching, but we were not exactly a picture of stoic endurance: we both laughed as soon as I saw the scissors coming. Kippi added to it by making them open and close like a hungry beak and the look on my face made him bend over in two. Sometimes he had to wait minutes before he could stop laughing enough to restart.

  Kippi, at fifteen, had hairs growing out of his ears. We both agreed that the Führer could interpret them as primitive traits relating him to the monkey. The humiliated look on Kippi's face was enough for laughter to cut off my breath. That's when I got my vengeance: the tweezers had a hungry beak of their own, capable of opening and closing before tearing his hairs out three at a time.

  The boyish days of fun and adventure reached their end and we said our goodbyes to the Jungvolk. The Hitler Youth camps were rough, the competition in sports equally so. No one said, 'It's only a game' any more. It wasn't — it was a trial of superiority. Moving up had its drawbacks. From being the oldest, I was now the youngest, and likewise in strength. The older boys could fence well. I came at them slashing my foil wildly and, after a few minor movements of their wrists, found myself empty-handed. They could ride and jump. I had to hide my fear when I was supposed to saddle my horse, and every time I made a move to tighten the straps the tetchy creature warned me against it with bared teeth. I dreaded those days.

  The older boys plagued the younger ones — made them clean their shoes, tend to their groins. No one liked to do it, but they beat you up if you didn't. Sometimes one of the boys told on them and they got into trouble. No form of homosexuality, however slight, was to be tolerated in Adolf Hitler's regime. But tattling was answered with getting even, getting even with fresh tattling, a threat with a bigger threat: it never ended. When we went to collect money and items for the poor, in the Winterhilfe from October to March, some boys pocketed the money, used it for women.

  In one exercise we were to kill a pen of ducks with our bare hands. It was stressful because once we freed the latch they came to us in trust, quacked as if we could understand exactly what it was they wanted. One of the ducks was followed by a dozen ducklings and they had to be killed too. It was as if they were asking us to kill our own childhood, somehow. If a boy cried after the deed was done he was so thoroughly mocked that no one wanted to be in his shoes. He ate fowl like everybody else, would enjoy the duck once it was on his plate after others had worked to prepare it, wouldn't he? He was nothing but a whimpering hypocrite, a good for nothing! Were there any others like him? Speak up! In some corner of my mind I slammed my fists down on the piano I had never learned how to play. Maybe that's what helped me not hear the necks cracking.

  Kippi asked me afterwards, if I had to kill him for the Führer, could I? I looked at him. His face was so familiar, I knew I wouldn't have been able to. Neither would he have been able to kill me. But we both agreed this wasn't good — we were weak, and would have to work on it. Ideally, a leader told us, we should be able to hit a baby's head against the wall and not feel anything. Feelings were mankind's most dangerous enemy. They above all were what must be killed if we were to make ourselves a better people.

  What spoiled the atmosphere most were the pirates who began turning up from everywhere. The more we talked about how much we didn't fear them, the more we really did. There were the Roving Dudes from Essen, the Navajos from Cologne, the Kettelbach Pirates, gangs our age proclaiming eternal war on the Hitler Youth. It was unsettling. They moved about the Reich at will, infiltrated the war zones.

  We were just outside Vienna on one of our routine marches — it must have been late summer — and suddenly there was a considerable addition of voices to our song. I lifted our flag higher, so the newcomers could spot the red-white- red bands and swastika emblem. There was no one in sight. We stopped singing and it became clear that the correct words of our song —

  Honour, Glory, Truth,

  We seek,

  Honour, Glory, Truth,

  We reap,

  Honour, Glory, Truth,

  We keep,

  In the Hitler Youth!

  had been changed to:

  Untruth and dishonour,

  They seek,

  Yes, it's true,

  They reek,

  And we, we beat,

  Hitler's Babies!

  From behind the hill they emerged. They were wearing chequered shirts, dark shorts, white socks, which struck me as inoffensive enough. But soon we were surrounded, outnumbered. Close up, the metal edelweiss flowers they wore on their collar, the skull and crossbones, were unmistakable. They were the Edelweiss Pirates. Some girls were with them. They looked us up and down in contempt, for we were an all-boy group. One girl, looking our leader Peter Braun in the eyes, fondled the privates of the young man behind her.

  They poked fingers in Peter's nose and eyes, and were in no time kicking him in the ribs, the face. We came to his rescue, though not as efficiently as we'd have wished. It wasn't long, at least not as long as it
seemed to us, before we were all on the ground, twisting and groaning. Only one of them didn't get away as easily as he'd thought — we had his shirt and a few of his teeth.

  In school that year the crucifixes were replaced by posters of Adolf Hitler. We learned about eugenics and the sterilisation of what the Americans called 'human junk', which had been practised in thirty-something states of the United States as far back as 1907. The mentally retarded, unbalanced and chronically ill were detrimental to society and had to be prevented from bringing more of their kind into the world. Populations of low-life must be sterilised as well, for generation after generation they remained poor and alcoholic. Their dwellings were perpetually shabby. Their daughters were as bad as their mothers and grandmothers, unable to avoid teenage pregnancies that brought about yet another generation of promiscuity. Distinguished professors of leading American universities had proven that the tendency to poverty, alcoholism and low-class lives was genetic. Possessors of these traits were therefore forbidden to multiply and the mandated surgery put into practice in these states helped to limit many undesirable groups of people.

  We learned more about the Jewish race. Their history was a long one of betrayal, cheating and incest. Cain killed his brother Abel with a stone in the field; Lot was tricked into having intercourse with his two daughters so they could have Jewish sons, Mo'ab and Ben-am'mi; Jacob cheated his starving brother, Esau, out of his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup. In the Great War, as we were dying by the thousands on the Russian front, the Jews were busy writing letters in the trenches! This tortured my curiosity. To whom were they writing? What was so important, that amidst the bullets and bombs, just as they were about to die, they must take pen and paper out of their pocket and write? Was it a goodbye, a final declaration of love to a fiancée or parent? Or secret information — where the reserves of jewels and gold were hidden?

  We learned, too, how Jews were unable to love beauty. They preferred ugliness. We were shown paintings they had created and admired — ugly works where a person's eye was not in the right place but in front of his face, paintings where hands looked like the bloated udder of a cow, where hips joined directly with breasts, where subjects had no neck, no waist. One seemed to be shouting with all his might but had no mouth, like a scarecrow yelling silence at the crow-infested cornfields.

  I admit that this knowledge kindled in me a morbid fascination with the Jews, but before that could have led to any misplaced ruminations, the time for the pursuit of learning ran out. The bombings had begun, and Vienna was a base of air defence. For boys our age it was as exciting as being in the movies. We were potential heroes for the world to see, giants whose every word and move was being projected on some big eternal screen of life entitled History. Our lives were puffed up to an immortal size. We were acting in a to-be-famous world event.

  Peter Braun and Josef Ritter were old enough to volunteer for the Waffen-SS because in 1943 the minimum age had been lowered from twenty to seventeen. You only had to be fifteen to be a flak helper, but we younger ones were jealous because many of the real posts around the anti-aircraft guns were manned by boys that we'd known from the Hitler Youth, but not yet open to us, equally brave and able. It was as if they'd been given real roles while we were only thrown in as extras.

  Our turn to prove ourselves came soon enough. A flock of Allied air bombers moved in a V across the sky, wings touching, like indifferent birds letting their droppings fall down on us. It was an expression of contempt and we fired back our outrage, though sometimes right in the midst of the action, I was reminded of what it had felt like as a child to be fully lost in play, only this time our toys were bigger and more costly. Watching anything fall from so high was hypnotic. The bombs whistled on their way down, the planes hummed a sad tune, spun down the hundred flights of a loose staircase. Kippi headed across a field to check the nose and tail of a plane fallen there. A bomb dropped far enough away from him, but lifted up a heap of dirt in the air. One second Kippi was standing there, the next he was replaced by a mound of dirt that looked like an absurd improvised tomb.

  If only he could have come back to life, we could have split our sides laughing about it. But without Kippi I didn't laugh or talk much to anybody any more. It was the beginning of an irrepressible loneliness, of walking around with a big old hole in my gut. I surprised myself sometimes by looking down and realising that the hole wasn't really there.

  More upheavals were in store. We flak helpers had become accustomed to living with each other, eating together in the refectory, sleeping in the same dormitory. Kippi had been my best friend, but there were others I'd enjoyed living with. Then from one day to the next, we were broken up and sent off to different sectors. As the war went on we were given less leave, and cut off more and more from our families. We'd turned into soldiers like all the others.

  I was rarely home, and when I was, my mother didn't grieve at my leaving when it was time to do so. Barely had I sat down on the sofa when she asked me what day I had to depart. Once she knew the day, what interested her next was the hour. She never asked me what it was I was doing, whether or not I had risked my life. I resented the fact that she obviously liked it better when I wasn't home. She was nervous with me around, seemed afraid of me. If I was walking down the hall when she came out of her bedroom, she turned back into it. If she heard I was downstairs while she was, she could stay in the bathroom for hours. She stopped what she was doing if I joined her in the kitchen. Once, she was making herself a sandwich. On seeing me, she began scrubbing the sink, which looked clean to me. I deliberately stayed, but she wouldn't eat as long as I was there. At the table she pushed her food around on the plate. I thought she could at least think about me, but I couldn't bring myself to draw attention to my own empty plate without feeling like a beggar.

  With the food rationed, my grandmother had grown infirm and spent most of the day in bed. If my father and I happened to cross paths he was always anxious to know how and what I was doing. If I hinted at my mother's behaviour he denied it, sighed and rubbed his eyes, or was in a hurry to be on his way.

  As the bombings intensified, I and others at the air defence posts grew recklessly brave. My mother's attitude numbed me to any sense of danger. In critical moments it pushed me to take risks. It was a freedom, having no one fearing for me; I feared less for myself, but the hole in me grew wider. During one air raid, I was running for cover twenty metres behind two new flak helpers when a line of fire made my next choice of direction tricky. It was an unexpected raid, at dawn, after we'd assumed we'd seen the last of them for the night. The way the dirt shot up high, it always seemed that the enemy was below, not above. That was a less frightening way to think about it. Once again, it would pass alongside me; I had faith as I bolted as far as I could to one side when my instinct told me to.

  I was as happy as a newborn babe, I have to say, when I woke up in the hospital and found my mother crying over me, calling me her poor baby, her poor little boy again. That was before I knew the extent of my injuries. No one wanted to tell me at first, because the joy of discovering I was still alive was too great, and I wasn't noticing them on my own. The faces of my father and mother gave it away — their smiles were half smiles, hiding some unspoken regret. I began to understand that something was wrong.

  I wish I'd never looked at myself again. I'd lost the cheekbone under my left eye, could no longer move my left arm, either at the shoulder or elbow, and I'd lost the lower third of my forearm. I was in a state of shock, which weakened me more, I think, than my actual injuries. I woke up in my bed at home, took swift looks under the sheets to see if what I dreaded was true, and each time it was, irreversibly true, I let myself sink back into the comfort of sleep. At intervals I fiddled with the dent in my face, the loose skin, the hardened, worm-like scars.

  I slept for months. My mother woke me up to feed me. I swallowed only a fraction of what she'd hoped and slumbered again. She accompanied me to the toilet, held my head against her stomach,
never complained about how long it took. If I caught a glimpse of my maimed limb or the look on her face as she was eyeing it, my will to recover took a blow.

  In the end it was thanks to Pimmichen that I got better. My parents came for me in the middle of the night. I thought it was another air raid at first, but sensed the moment I saw my father putting his handkerchief to his eyes that they were taking me to Pimmichen's deathbed. Drained of all energy by the time we got down the stairs, I had to lie down in bed next to her. We both lay on our backs; Pimmichen's moans awakened and renewed mine as the hours went by. Day had brought a bright, dusty column of light into the room by the time I opened my eyes. We were nose to nose. She was looking at me through watery cataracts, her smile sticking together in places as if her lips had been stitched with saliva threads coming apart.

  My mother said I should return to my room so my grandmother could rest, but neither of us wanted to be separated again. Pimmichen couldn't talk but held feebly on to my hand, and I on to hers. Our movements were uncoordinated and that created a bond between us. There was something funny about the way we each fought to sit up on our own so my mother could feed us: despite our difference in age, we were in the same boat. Each of us looked forward to watching the other. Whenever the tea dribbled down a chin, or my mother was too enthusiastic with the amount of potato she stuffed in a mouth so that most fell back out, we chuckled. Little by little, Pimmichen began to eat more — half a small potato more, two spoons of soup more — and so did I. She went across the room for a towel on her own, then so did I. I was proud of her, she was proud of me.

  Once Pimmichen was able to talk again, she told me all kinds of things I never knew. Pimbo, my grandfather, used to hunt with a small falcon called Zorn, but one day when he went to feed it, it bit his finger. Luckily he was wearing a ring so it didn't hurt him much; he could have lost his finger otherwise. The beak was strong enough to snap a mouse in two — maybe it was the shining ring that had made it bite. Birds were unpredictable, she told me. One day a magpie came through the open window to her bedroom and stole a ruby necklace from her. Luckily, she saw it with her own eyes or she would have blamed the Polish cleaning woman.