Caging Skies

by Christine Leunens

  'I must return now,' she mumbled. Too slow to come up with a reason to postpone her leaving, I followed obediently. Feeling gawky, looming two heads taller, I was only too happy to kneel and cover her with my duvet, which she accepted after much insistence. I'd tell my mother how she'd come by it the following day.

  I got up at 5 am so there'd be no chance of my mother getting to Elsa before me. I didn't want her to be shocked at any explanation Elsa might give her. I waited on the sofa in the hallway across from my parents' bedroom, which was just to the left of the staircase, so I couldn't possibly miss her. I got up to check the time — five minutes had passed since the last time I'd looked. By 7 am I was champing at the bit. My mother didn't answer my knocks. Unable to wait any longer, I walked in.

  'Mutter . . .' I stopped in my tracks. Her bed was made — there was no sign of her. Where had she gone? And when? Had she joined my father? Was he part of the resistance? In a way I felt relieved — I hadn't found the right words to use, but at the same time I felt I was in some kind of trouble. My grandmother didn't have any idea of her whereabouts. 'Maybe she went to get some brioche at Le Villiers,' she suggested. 'It's open by now, isn't it?' She was in the wrong epoch: Le Villiers, the French delicatessen in Albertina Platz, hadn't existed for five years.

  I checked the rooms downstairs in case Mutter had fallen asleep reading. Just as I was about to unlock Ute's room I heard her and my father come in. 'I catch myself hoping we'll be done with her once and for all,' my mother was saying in a low voice. 'I feel evil fearing for my own family. Love for my own kin is turning me into a bad person.'

  'Don't say that,' came his reply. 'You did everything to get her. You've been very brave. I'm proud of you.'

  'It's too much. I go up expecting to see some fanatic with a gun pointed at me! I'm changing. I'm no one to be proud of any more.'

  'You won't have to deal with it much longer, Roswita, I promise you.'

  'They were supposed to be here by now — where are they? All they're doing is bombing us! Civilians! People who are helping them!'

  I waited until they had gone past, then skipped the other way around the library and through the boudoir, and encountered, them rubbing my eyes. 'Ah, good morning, Mutter, Vater.'

  'Good morning, son,' answered my father.

  'My, my,' my mother said. 'Up as early as me.'

  How often had she spent the night away from home? But my father didn't leave her side and it was awkward bringing up the subject with him there, so I frustrated both them and myself with small-talk. My mother nodded too enthusiastically at my weather forecasts, forced tense smiles at the recitation of my latest dream, one in which her legs, as well as my father's and mine, had melted together and we could no longer walk around the house but had to hop.

  'And you?' I said to her. 'Did you dream anything?'

  'I don't remember.'

  'You must've slept too deeply.'

  'I suppose.'

  I followed them to the cellar, then into the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of my father taking a hot-water bottle from under the sink. He complained about a sore shoulder. Later I learned from Elsa he'd put hot broth in it, giving it a double use.

  I loitered around the stairs ready to intercept my mother on her own. But it appeared my father had relieved her of her task of caring for Elsa. By the time my mother took over again, she didn't even notice my duvet, or if she did she assumed it had been of my father's doing — or so I hoped.

  That first day my parents stayed closed up in their bedroom for a long spell. My father was first to emerge. He grabbed Pimmichen by the waist, began to waltz. She complained she couldn't without music. 'What? Mutter, are you really going deaf? You don't hear Johann Strauss's Fledermaus Overture?' My father put on that he could. She listened with her timeworn face and it perked up — yes, yes, she could. My mother gave it a try in her dressing-gown and slippers, which flopped every three steps. She stopped for a reason my father said only a woman could have come up with: that she couldn't waltz without her hair up. My father removed the clip keeping the hair out of her eyes and put it to the back. It took him a few minutes to understand how it worked, but the improvisation was respectable. Even if it didn't last long, our laughter did.

  He came back from the garden with a weed sack and a funny crook of a smile. The meal he put together was — how can I put it? — original. He made bitter salad from nettles, roasted chestnuts for the main course and dessert, collected mushrooms to add taste to our broth. He wasn't as good as Mutter at rinsing off the soil or cutting off bad parts, but we didn't mind. The garden was depleted after one foray, so he must have gone to the black market the next day. No one believed his tall tale — he had been on his way home when he came across a baby boar lying unclaimed in the middle of the street. As though a hunter had wounded it and it had escaped to within a stone's throw of our oven.

  Ignoring my mother's warnings that there wouldn't be coal to get through winter, he filled the tiled stoves. His behaviour was uncharacteristic but I wasn't going to object. We eased our armchairs towards the prettiest stove made of elaborate green tiles, watching mesmerised for the fire to get hot enough for the hatch at the bottom to be closed. It had all the mystery of a tragic play no one could understand, enflamed actors proclaiming their hearts in a dead language. My mother was cuddling up against my father and I wished Elsa could be with me. I knew they were thinking of her too, because my mother said something in my father's ear and he was instantaneously up and about.

  Although I wasn't unhappy with them, I was impatient to be alone. I had inexplicable urges to scratch Elsa's name on the wall near my bed, scrape it on my arm. I re imagined our kiss, longed to kiss her more deeply, kiss her shoulders, neck, girlish stubby-nailed fingers. The fact that my parents didn't notice my dreaminess only shows to what extent they were preoccupied with their own fate. I think from that moment on, my mind never had a second's rest from her. To other people I looked the same, perhaps, but to me, she was there as much as I was, if not more. It was a wonder no one could see her sitting on my lap.

  One winter night there was no moon. All our shutters were closed, and the windows that had no shutters had rugs nailed to them. The posters had doubled in every neighbourhood: 'The enemy sees your light! Verdunkeln! Make darkness!' Light had turned into an enemy. I went up on my knees, feeling my way to her. Darkness was my friend: it would hide my face, any awkwardness I might have. I would confess to her I loved her; I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. If ever we lost the war we could emigrate to America and I would marry her. I didn't mind marrying a Jew. She wasn't like the others I'd learnt about — she was an exception. Besides, she could convert to Catholicism. If my parents had safeguarded her, what could they have to say against it?

  My heart was pounding. I stopped at the top of the stairs and went over my words again. I was convinced she'd jump at the privilege of being my wife, the wife of an Aryan. Naturally, she'd accept. If she'd resisted me until now, it was only because I hadn't offered her any commitment; she'd assumed I was playing with her, looking only to have fun. I rested my cheek against her wall, drummed my fingers on it in our special way.

  'What?' she hissed.

  'It's Johannes.'

  Again I had to tap. It was a while before she opened. Enamoured, I reached in for her with the force of youth but, curiously, she made no effort to come out. I tried to wedge my own head in for a kiss but she pushed me back with a sigh.

  'What's wrong?' I thought she was mad because I hadn't come to see her sooner. I was in a tight spot for I knew that before I shared my plans with her she'd hold back, but it was hard to speak of such matters before she'd shown me some sign of affection.

  Her voice was annoyed. 'I can't live in this stupid black any more. I want to scream, pull my hair out! If it were only for me I wouldn't care! But if I died, what would change? For me there's not even any difference between awake and asleep! Just black, black, black!'

  'Shh . . .' I rubbed her hair
. 'You want me to give you my torch — with my one good battery?'

  'Do you have to ask?'

  I wasn't expecting her to snap at me, but decided it was only the discomfort she was undergoing. In a way I have to say I was flattered, as it meant we'd passed the barrier between polite acquaintances into a more intimate union. Nevertheless, I took my time going to get the torch. I wanted her to regret the way she'd addressed me. It worked. When I got back she reached out to feel it was me.

  'Here.' I put my hand around hers to demonstrate how it worked, keeping it there after I was done. She worked hers away.

  'Elsa . . .' I began, but all I'd intended to say seemed out of place. She cut me off anyway by shining the torch in my face. I reached out blindly to take it back but she'd already hidden it in her nook, which I was starting to hate. As much as she was dependent on others, there was something autonomous about her when she was in it.

  'Black', she started again, 'isn't even a colour. Nathan explained to me that black is nothing but the absence of all colours. I, therefore, am living in the absence of colour. I cannot see myself, therefore I can assume I am absent, I no longer exist.'

  'You do to me.' I leaned forward. 'I love you.' Her lips contorted and I found myself kissing her teeth as she cried so loudly I feared my parents would hear. I covered her mouth. Those were the last seconds of my happy illusion. I thought it was what I'd said that caused her such emotion, the equally intense love she shared for me, but after a long in-breath that nearly took my palm with it, she uttered, I was almost certain, his name.

  Shocked, I drew my hand back. She continued between gasps of air: 'Nathan, Nathan. Help me, help me, you're all that keeps me alive, Nathan.'

  I'd been unprepared for the jilt of rejection. In fact it was more than rejection: it was as if we'd been together and she'd just cheated on me with him. Hearing the planes overhead was a relief and I hoped at that moment she'd be killed. When a bomb exploded close to our house, the blast somehow set me free and I yelled from the pain she'd caused me. The air-raid siren made its familiar plaintive rising and falling howls and my mother called out for me. I slid down the stairs on my bottom. I heard her knocking things over in my room, beating my bed in the dark.

  I clutched my mother from behind. She didn't care where I'd just come from — all that mattered was getting to the cellar. My father must have lifted Pimmichen in his arms, because she was fussing that she didn't want to die without her teeth — please, couldn't he please go and fetch them. Pimmichen often described the funeral she wanted. She was to be buried in her wedding gown, her veil (spread across her upper two bedposts for as long as I could remember) covering her face, J. S. Bach's 'Slumber Now, Ye Eyes So Weary' being sung as the coffin was carried off. Just as pretty as on her wedding day, and of course we weren't to forget her teeth! My father regularly mocked her: 'Yes, in case you decide to smile!'

  Our nightclothes offered us small protection from the damp chill of the cellar. The flickering light bulb added to the gloom. My mother, father and Pimmichen hadn't had time to put on their slippers and the floor was hard, cold dirt. I looked down at mine, hoping no one would wonder how I'd found them in time. I picked the dried skin of paint off the newspaper, twisted it one way and the other, trying to allay the worry sneaking up on me, despite my anger, for Elsa, excluded from a decent shelter.

  The walls shuddered at every explosion. The stone structures were our only protectors, yet we knew they could from one instant to the next become our indifferent executioners. Pimmichen continued, 'My teeth. If anything happens, make sure you go through the ruins till you find them. They were just on the sink.'

  My mother turned to my father. 'If the roof is blown off, can you imagine what they'll see from above? If the house crumbles and the neighbours see? We'll be doomed!' She buried her face in her hands.

  'Don't worry,' my father reassured her. 'In that case we'll all be dead.'

  The house was shaken again. I watched the light bulb swing on its wire, our shadows giants swaying back and forth on the walls.

  'They might be by my bed. I don't remember. You'll have to check.'

  'What if some of us die, but some of us don't? Or if most of us do, but just one doesn't? Only one? Did you ever think of that?' My mother wrung her hands as she went over the various scenarios in her head. I'm guessing the one that disturbed her the most was all four of us dead and Elsa left unprotected. But maybe it was the scenario that left only me alive with an extra body to have to account for. I had a tragic vision of each possibility in turn.

  My father held her close, her head against his shoulder. 'We'll do our best to all die, won't we?'

  'Fine state that would leave me in. Look at me — dirty bare feet, toothless, looking like some beggar in the streets. I wouldn't get a proper burial . . .'

  'Oh, if this house falls,' remarked my father, 'you will have one to put Tutankhamun to shame. Can you believe the tons of debris they'll have to excavate in order to unearth you? Maybe you'll be famous in a couple of centuries.'

  The dust rose, was gritty between our teeth.

  'Don't poke fun. A burial is a serious thing — could mean the difference between heaven and purgatory. I come from a respectable family, you know.'

  'I always told you, you'll live to bury us all. Only people in the Bible live as long as you.'

  'Don't worry, I'm so cold, I'll catch my death for sure. You notice how they bomb more when it's cold? They do it on purpose! If they don't get us one way, they get us another. Our country won't count the ones who die from the flu, war victims as much as anyone else. But no, we who putter out slowly with strength and courage won't find our names engraved on any bronze plaque. They won't chisel our names into any monumental slab of granite.'

  'Jesus would've had a hard time crossing the raging sea with the likes of you. You're each worse than a hole in a hull.' My father got us to join hands. Pimmichen tucked my left arm under hers.

  'When I was a boy in school,' he said, 'I still remember that I sang with my classmates:

  Sing,

  To Kingdom come,

  Sing,

  'Til His will be done,

  Fear,

  Go on and flee,

  Faith,

  Come back to me,

  Righteous

  Is His mighty sword,

  Sing,

  And praise the Lord.'

  Pimmichen joined in — she knew the words. Then my mother meekly raised her voice with us. I sang out but it was as if someone else was singing for me, for I was in another part of the house, the fear of death — mine, hers, my whole family's — having converted my anger to a violent brew of love. It was the first time I made love to Elsa in my mind, more intensely than life would have enabled me to. I was brought back to reality when the light bulb met its end against the ceiling. It was as black as death. We continued singing as if nothing had happened. I dug my finger into the ground, wrote 'Elsa' until the dirt under my nails hurt. I'm sure it'll still be there to this day.

  viii

  The bomb alert was over. Apart from being chilled to the bone, we were intact. My father said we should take the cellar exit out to the street, because if the house had been hit, something could fall on our heads if we went back in through the inside. My first impression on emerging was how warm the air was. That was before I saw Frau Veidler's house, two houses down and across the street, in flames. Herr and Frau Bvlgari and a new neighbour, a young Dr Gregor, were proffering their consolation with no effect. Spotting my parents, they waved them over. I heard Frau Veidler say, 'I don't care about the house, but please, save my birds, save my darlings!'

  Since she'd been widowed she'd bought cages full of them. Neighbours quibbled about the noise. Her house supposedly stank; the postman had told us you couldn't go in without holding a handkerchief to your mouth. My father had joked with us, saying that if there wasn't enough to eat, would we like him to go and get one of her stinky little birds?

  The roof shrivelled of
f its wooden ribs; one side of the structure gave in. There was nothing we could do or salvage. The flames were warming me — a sensation I guiltily enjoyed. Pimmichen, I think, was doing the same. She rubbed her hands together, then, feeling my mother's eyes on her, checked them into an awkward configuration of prayer.

  An exotic white bird, as dainty as if made of lace, flew out of the burning framework. It was a dire spectacle, its trailing tail and wings aflame. I couldn't tell if its shrieks were accusing us of ill-doing or cursing us as a species, which in the end might have boiled down to the same. Frau Veidler raised her hands to her head and called out, 'Anita!' After a last brief suspension in the air, the bird fell lightly to the ground, where the flames continued their course.

  I wanted to stamp them out, but could not without trampling the bird. I knew I should end its misery — I remembered what I'd learned in the Hitler Youth — but it disgusted me to do it. The ribcage moved in and out with breathy notes like a punctured accordion. Frau Veidler smothered it between her breasts. Then she held the dead bird up. No one could get her to let it go. 'Those bastards killed my bird! God-cursed murderers! My beautiful little birds!'

  Our house was shrouded in smoke. I could sense that something was wrong. Had Elsa left her hiding place? Was she wandering in the streets? Without a word, I hurried back. The roof and windows were untouched, yet I felt her absence, was sure of it. I rushed up the stairs expecting something vague but dreadful, burst into the room.

  Nothing had moved, but there was a curious detail that would've given her away had I been someone else. Strands of her hair were sticking out of the bottom crack of the closed panel. I stooped and felt them, twisting the thin, dark curl at the end around my finger. Now that I knew she was all right, my resentment came back full force and I pulled out that lock of her hair. If she needed comfort, Nathan could give it to her.