Caging Skies

by Christine Leunens

  My parents said that if Pimmichen could talk, she was well. It was time for me to go back to my room. That was when I noticed a host of minute oddities and wondered if my grandmother was really well, or was it my mother who was sick? For example, every day my mother aired the house — opened the windows wide, rain and sun alike. Nevertheless, in the morning when I got up there was a sickening smell of faeces rising, which meant it could've been mother who was sick, or Pimmichen, but that was less likely because Pimmichen's bedroom was at the bottom, closest to the toilet, and she seemed to be faring fine lately. I say this too because I once saw my mother emptying a ceramic pot, but she looked so ashamed I couldn't bring myself to ask her what was wrong. She was obviously too weak to go out of her bedroom at night.

  I was sure I heard steps up and down the hall in the middle of the night, wondered if it was my father pacing. If I listened carefully I could have sworn that despite the almost perfectly simultaneous steps there were two people walking, so my mother must have been with him. I mentioned it but she said it wasn't her, or him, it was my grandmother up and roaming about. I slept in the room next to my parents' room, so whatever noises I heard, they should have as well, but regularly upheld that they didn't. Out of curiosity I asked my grandmother what it was she was doing up at such hours, but she didn't know what in heaven I was talking about. I had to explain and repeat myself before realisation dawned: she told me about how she used to walk in her sleep years back. Pimbo would tell her about it in the mornings, but if he hadn't sworn it on his mother's head, she never would have believed a word.

  The walking stopped. About a month later, at daybreak, my mother let out a shrill scream. At breakfast she apologised to Pimmichen and me if she'd woken us — she'd had a nightmare. She rested her head on the table, buried her face in her arms, and admitted that she'd seen me as I was injured. I realised she cared about me more than I'd assumed.

  The following night something came crashing down and I hurried out of my room to see what it was. I thought my grandmother had fallen over one of the console tables bearing a lamp. But pieces of the ceramic pot were scattered across the floor, along with what had been causing the stench. My father was crouching down beside my mother, helping her collect the pieces. She couldn't bring herself to look up at me as I gaped down. I noticed her hands were trembling. If she was too unwell to go to the toilet, she shouldn't have been trying to carry the pot on her own; it was foolhardy of her.

  My father put his arm around her, told her she'd be okay, she should've woken him up so he could help, he was sorry he hadn't heard her. In her nightgown my mother looked thinner than when dressed. Her breasts had diminished, her feet were bony, her cheekbones protruded in a way that crossed the fine line from beautiful to afflicted. My father lectured, in summer, that I'd catch bronchitis or pneumonia if I didn't get back into bed fast, fast, fast. He helped me back, his arm around me, then stalled at my door as if he was going to own up to something. For the first time I was worried sick my mother might be dying of an incurable disease such as cancer. He took a breath and told me to sleep well. Sleepiness came, but sleep didn't.

  v

  My father came home less from the factory, and when he did, it was usually at noon, in and out, just enough time to get some papers. He was poorly shaven, his eyes haggard and bloodshot. Then he stopped coming home at all. For an hour or two of sleep, he said, it wasn't worth it. If possible, my mother grew more edgy: every noise made her jump. It was as though she was expecting him to come home every minute, and there were many minutes in her day.

  At last he showed up with a jigsaw puzzle under his arm, concealed behind a magazine. I knew it was for me and was glad because I was bored, with little to do all day besides contemplate my wounds and read newspapers, but even good news became monotonous — the superiority of our armed forces, victory, and once again victory. He ran upstairs and hurried back down two steps at a time with some files. I thought he was checking the mail. To my bitter disappointment I realised he'd left again and had forgotten to give me my gift. I brooded on how many days it might be before we'd see him again, then decided to go and get the puzzle myself. After all, he had a lot of worries and I was sure he wouldn't mind.

  I couldn't find it anywhere. It wasn't in his study or anywhere else upstairs. I had seen him go up with it, seen him come down without it. It was insane. It had to be there. But it wasn't, not even in the most unlikely places, and I stubbornly went through them all. Given that I used to be left-handed, I was understandably clumsy. Things were easier to take out than to put back properly. I stuffed the boxes, letters and papers roughly back in their places. To my amusement, I found an old picture of my father — picked his determined face out of a classroom of less mature faces. I found foreign monies, old primary school reports of good conduct, pipes smelling sweetly of tobacco, but not what I was looking for. I gave up as many times as I renewed my search.

  'What are you doing up there, Johannes? Up to no good?' my mother called up.

  'Nothing,' I said, and she summoned me down to keep her company.

  I complained of my father's long absences. She told me she was going to go and see him at the factory. I was glad she said I could go too, for I'd have the opportunity to ask about the puzzle.

  It took four trams to get to the factory, which was outside the city limits on the eastern side — the other side of town from where we lived, past the twenty-first district, Floridsdorf, which itself was a long way out. Any man can guess how humiliating it was for me when an old lady got up so I could sit, but I had to accept because it was getting stuffy and I hadn't recovered sufficiently to hold on during the stops and accelerations. The last tram came to its terminus and the handful of us remaining had to get off. I stepped down and my mother clung to my arm. I think it was the bombarded buildings that bothered her. Steel ribs stabbed out of stone guts. We had a long walk to the factory. I had to rest on benches along the way; my mother was content each time to drop the basket she was carrying. The surroundings were stripped of all joy. There were breweries, mills and other factories larger than my father's whose chimney-stacks seemed to be what was causing the rugged ceiling of stone-coloured clouds, a ceiling that looked as if it would crumble and fall down sooner or later.

  Ever since I was a small child I had disliked going to the factory. It gave off smells that made me breathe as slowly as I could as if to prevent too much from entering my lungs. The nausea it gave me was as much mental as it was physical. I imagined I was stepping into a clanking, steaming, spitting machine whose stomach was a glowing pot, whose heart was a clamorous pump, whose arteries were pipes, and I was nothing but a trivial boy coming to watch it. If I couldn't be useful to its life process, it considered me waste.

  My father's office was empty. Papers covered his desk, a cup of coffee awaited him. I put my hand around the cup to warm my fingertips, but it was long cold. I saw a picture of Ute and me I'd never seen before, in a boat my father was rowing. The white-capped mountains looked as real floating on the surface of the dark lake as they did standing up to the clear sky. I didn't remember ever having been to Mondsee, or any other lake near Salzburg. Then a factory worker recognised my mother and shouted to another, who tapped the shoulder of the man next to him.

  Before long a group of men, cologned though unshaven, were standing around us, ogling my mother's basket. I saw one work his elbow into the ribs of another, but no one was willing to help.

  'I'm looking for my husband. You recognise me, don't you, Rainer?'

  Rainer nodded his head and mumbled, 'He told us he'd be back today.'

  'And?'

  'No, ma'am.'

  'Did he have an appointment somewhere?'

  Rainer looked around for someone to answer for him; all he could get from his fellow workers were shoulder shrugs.

  'Do you know where he is? Where I can find him?' my mother asked. 'I brought him some things. Should I leave them here? Will he be back?'

  The man who'd elbowed
the ribs of the other spoke up. 'He said he'd be back today. That's all we know.'

  My mother and I sat on a discarded rusty pipe outside. We shared a sandwich. We shared an apple. The sky grew dark, threatened a downpour that didn't come, only a mist depositing transparent pinhead-sized eggs on our hair. Trains were crossing the faraway fields like a never-ending army of wormish creatures. We crumpled leaves, broke twigs, poked the ground with an old frayed feather, and even got down to playing Paper, Scissors, Rock, like we used to. But my father didn't come.

  At home, my mother received a telephone call informing her that my father had been taken in for some routine questioning. She was sure that the clicks she heard were not just from the eavesdropping of those families who shared our party line. Pimmichen gave my mother all the attention she could manage — brought her slippers, pots of tea, hot-water bottles to comfort her as she sat for hours in the kitchen asking the ceiling what they wanted with us poor people. As if to make up for my mother's behaviour, my grandmother confided to me that the Gestapo had searched our house more than once when I'd been away fighting — which was why my mother was at her wits' end. Pimmichen held her hand, kissed her on the forehead before she went to bed. My mother took no notice. She was in her own world, and the more she bawled, the more I saw her as a weak, irrational person.

  I was convinced that if she seemed reluctant to support the Führer, it was only out of fidelity to my father. I took advantage of his arrest to set the facts straight, explained all over again Adolf Hitler's dream, how interfering with his plans, if that was what my father had tried to do, was a crime. If we were to become a healthy, powerful nation we had to be ready to sacrifice all who opposed us, including our families. She must stop whimpering, otherwise she, in a way, was a traitor too. She pretended to listen, but I could tell most of her was elsewhere, and the part that wasn't didn't quite agree with me, even though she nodded and repeated, 'I see, I see.'

  I wanted to make her admit that my wounds were heroic, and followed her around the house to do so. The more she refused to answer my questions directly, the more I suspected she didn't really see it that way. I resented my father for having blinded her to the truth. She was slouching with her elbows on the windowsill, her mouth touching the glass, a steam sphere swelling around it. I couldn't help myself, it was still on my mind: I brought my wounds up again, told her the cause was more important than me, my father or any other individual. I told her, for her information, that if I had to die for Adolf Hitler I would be more than happy to.

  She replied, 'You will! You will! If you don't be careful, open your eyes, you will die!'

  I was shocked: I'd never heard her scream before — I mean, at someone. She ran to the sofa, pulled a pamphlet out from under the cushions and thrust it into my midriff. 'Here! Read this! This is what I have to look forward to! You and your dear Führer! I'm glad Ute died! I'm glad! If she hadn't, they would've killed her!'

  I sat down, read as she breathed hotly over me. The pamphlet said the parents of a handicapped baby had petitioned Adolf Hitler for the baby to be killed, after which he ordered the head of his personal chancellery to kill all other infants having biological or mental defects, initially including those of up to three years of age, but later extending this to sixteen. It claimed 5000 children had been killed by injection or deliberate malnutrition. I didn't have the heart to reassure my mother that it was for the best, since I knew how she felt because of Ute.

  I kept reading and came to the part concerning the unfortunate necessity to rid the community of its burdens, which included the mentally and physically handicapped, and, among the latter, the invalid veterans of 1914–18, which stupefied me. At least 200,000 biological outcasts had been killed, and a new process of carbon monoxide gas was under development. I read the paragraph over three times. It only mentioned the veterans of the Great War, not those who'd been wounded fighting for the Führer's cause in our time. But would it be extended to us later on? I felt sick to my stomach, then enraged that I'd doubted the one person I deified. I ripped up the pamphlet, shouted at my mother not to be so gullible, not to fall into the trap, it was just enemy propaganda. I would be glorified when the war was over. The ripped-up pieces remained where they'd fallen the next day and the next.

  That night I had a nightmare. A group of men speaking a language I couldn't understand were going to push me off a cliff. The hate in their eyes was unmistakable. I kept begging them to explain: 'Why? Please, what did I do wrong?' One pointed to my bad arm. I looked down. It looked uglier than it really was — shreds of tissue hung off the stub, the bone was sticking out and I had to push it back in. I pleaded, 'I can fix it, I swear! Just give me an hour!' but they couldn't understand and were in a hurry to push me off because a picnic awaited them on a chequered cloth behind them and, more queerly, the Prata Ferris wheel in the distance, overloaded with children pushing each other off for fun.

  I woke up and heard steps again. I listened until I was sure there were two steps each time, even if it sounded like one, because once in a while a heel to toe step had an extra heel or toe. For some reason, in the middle of the night it was easy for me to believe that the ghost of my grandfather was walking with my grandmother as she sleepwalked, keeping her company. This thought made me too afraid to get up and look, or go back to sleep. I badly wanted to turn on a light but it was forbidden, because the bombers could spot us if I did, and anyway I wasn't about to reach my arm out of my covers through who knew what spooks.

  The following morning, when my mother had gone to find some bread and I was in the toilet, I heard the knocker. By the time I got to the door I expected to see no one still standing there, least of all my father. At first I didn't recognise him because he'd lost weight, his nose was broken, and his clothing was as ragged and disreputable as a vagrant's. My next thought was why was he knocking on the door of his own house? The surprise on my face brought contempt to his.

  'No, I'm not dead. Sorry.'

  I was speechless. He pushed me aside and went about snatching items. I heard the drawers in his study opening, closing, furniture being scraped around. He came back down to face me. 'You've been going through my things, haven't you, Johannes?'

  I should've explained about the puzzle but couldn't bring myself to. All I could do was shake my head.

  'Funny, nothing's the way I left it. You can go through whatever you want whenever you want, I've nothing to hide, but if you do, at least try to put things back as they were.'

  I acted as if I didn't know what on earth he was talking about, but he was holding papers I knew I'd messed up. On recognising his class photo sticking out, I averted my eyes. My behaviour confirmed his suspicions. By the time my mother came home he was gone, with files stacked up to his chin. She took the four trams without me. I spent the time hating my father for his false accusations. No, I hadn't denounced him.

  Despite the newspaper columns claiming our superiority, the Allied bombings continued to inflict damage. We had no railways, no water, no electricity. I saw my mother carrying a watering can upstairs, which was ridiculous. We didn't have enough water for ourselves — who cared about the stupid plants? She did. They were among God's creations and had a right to live like anything else. Later, she was preparing to boil potatoes and didn't have enough water to cover them. I thought about the amount she had taken for the plants and went to see if any was left over. I was surprised to find the can gone, the plants stiff, the soil dry.

  I began to spy on my mother through my keyhole. I saw her carrying a sandwich and two lit candles upstairs, which could have been normal enough, but she came down too soon with only one. The next morning I saw drops spattering off the edge as she limped along under the weight of the watering can. I waited impatiently and, later on, when she was helping my grandmother wash in no more than a bowl of water, sneaked up. There was absolutely nothing, no one. I looked everywhere — under the twin bed of the guest room, in the filing cabinet of my father's study, every crack and corner o
f the attic — nothing.

  The more I spied on her, the more I witnessed strange behaviour. I wondered if she wasn't going crazy. In the middle of the night, up she went again with candles and whatever food she hadn't eaten. Was she practising rites? Communicating with the dead? Or did she just want to eat away from me? Sometimes she didn't come back down so promptly, or at all. Whenever she was out and Pimmichen was sleeping, I made inspections. There was a smell, I was sure there was; the guest room in particular didn't smell unoccupied. I stopped to listen but there was nothing, not inside. Maybe the faint noises I was hearing now and then were coming from outside. Was it all in my head? I squinted around at nothing, absolutely nothing. Perhaps I was the one going mad.

  My mother asked me if I'd been spending time upstairs when she wasn't home. I couldn't work out how she knew, because I'd been careful to leave things exactly as I found them, and to be flicking through comics on my bed when she got back.

  'How do you know?'

  She took some time to find an answer. 'Your grandma sometimes calls you and you don't hear.'

  I could tell it was an outright lie — my mother didn't know how to lie. I continued my search. I looked in our cellar, in the small room behind the kitchen. I looked over the entire house, centimetre by centimetre. Even when she was there I walked around, examining the joins in the walls. It made her nervous.

  'What on earth are you looking for?' she asked.