The Hollow Bones

by Leah Kaminsky

  I miss Shepherd with an ache deep inside the hollow of my chest. The longing has made itself felt so many years later – the same kind of pain as the day we first met, when blind love fired its arrow into my heart and I knew I was His forever. It was at its worst the day He came to tell me He was going back to the Land of his Father. He told me He would come back one day and that meeting me was the proudest moment of His life. The waiting for His return, the hope I will see Him again, is anguish. I wish someone would tell everyone beyond Exit about our Great Love, but some stories are fated to be lost.

  CHAPTER 15

  2 November 1937

  Funkturm Berlin, the tall radio tower, cast a shadow across a cordon of soldiers lined up to greet the dignitaries as they arrived. Visitors had come from all over the world to attend the Internationale Jagdausstellung, a huge exhibition with everything related to hunting that one could ever dream of. Purple rhododendrons decorated the base of the tall podium, which was adorned with the ubiquitous red flag emblazoned with the swastika.

  As Ernst and Herta walked towards the entrance, Göring himself greeted them, flanked by soldiers standing at attention. A tuft of wild-boar hair poked out from the rim of his hunting cap, which partially covered his thinning hair. He shook Ernst’s hand eagerly.

  ‘I am so pleased you agreed to come. I am so lucky to get to see the intrepid explorer himself yet again.’

  They hugged like long-lost brothers, slapping each other on the shoulder.

  ‘No, no! The honour is all mine, Reichsjägermeister Göring.’ He turned to Herta. ‘And you must remember my dear wife.’

  The portly man bowed down to kiss her hand. ‘My dearest, I insist you and your fine husband come visit us next week at our summer house. I’m sure Emmy would love the chance to get to know you better.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’ Herta blushed, not knowing what else to say.

  Just then, two men wearing white fur coats and mink hats trotted up on horseback in front of the group, falcons perched on their gloved arms, thin leather straps tied to the birds’ legs. They had travelled all the way from Iceland. An entourage of Frenchmen dressed in red jackets blew their trumpets and a pack of beagles responded by wagging their tails eagerly, as if they were off on a hunt.

  Göring led the way inside the hall, and the men commenced the tour of the exhibition. Surely Herta was doing her duty today as the wife of an SS man; she had offered her body up to her husband in the morning, made a hot breakfast for him, tidied the house. And this afternoon, she forced herself to make polite conversation with all manner of men, held out her hand to be kissed as they whispered lewd comments in her ear, which, thankfully, Ernst did not hear. How wearisome to stand by politely, looking ornamental and picture-perfect. She tried not to yawn as Göring chatted to her husband about the dwindling numbers of bison and wild boar to be found this season. For a man who bragged about spending so much time in the great outdoors, Göring’s skin looked the colour of eggshell. And his rotund belly made her think he spent more time chasing beers than bears. She watched his stubby fingers, which tapped insistently on the ornate dagger strapped to his belt. Göring seemed thrilled to finally have the opportunity of crowing to Ernst about his hunting prowess.

  Herta took her leave while both men were still engrossed in conversation and snuck away under the pretence of needing to freshen up in the powder room. She stood on the ornate balcony, gazing down onto the strange scene, clutching the program to her chest. Herta had flicked through the pages earlier, looking at dinner-party recipes for how to prepare wild game. She saw herself entertaining their friends, the table laden with the centrepiece of a roast boar, an apple shoved in its gaping mouth. If it were up to her, the menu would be braised vegetables, but she had certainly married the wrong man if she ever wanted to become a vegetarian. Ernst’s breakfast consisted of salami and eggs, washed down with a cup of strong coffee; Mittagessen varied between bratwurst, roast chicken or veal schnitzel; and Abendbrot was usually rye bread, sausage, ham and cheese. He disliked vegetables, although if a carrot grew legs and started running away from him, the chase might entice him enough to catch it and eat it raw.

  On their way to the exhibition, Ernst had tried hard to explain to her that the pleasure came not from the kill itself. Rather, it was the sport – the skill, and the volume of game bagged in a single day – that made the hunter a professional expert.

  ‘Why can’t you just be proud of me, Herta?’

  ‘Proud of what, exactly?’ She brushed him off. ‘I can’t admire the violent deaths of your precious birds.’

  Now, her husband stood beside Reichsjägermeister Göring, surrounded by a flock of other important-looking men, all wearing their finest dress uniform. The exhibition hall swelled with a sea of rifle salesmen and cocky hunters who strolled past the animal collection: a stuffed brown bear wearing three medallions, a tiny cub at its feet; hundreds of orphaned antlers attached to bleached skulls mounted on poles; and her own husband’s Tibetan bird collection. A giant elk head hung on the main wall in a celebratory display of the hunter’s triumph. A choir of young boys from a local Hitler Youth group sang the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ with gusto. To Herta’s left, a spiral staircase wound its way up, leading from the balcony to the roof. She felt tempted to climb it and escape from this orgiastic celebration of deliberate death, like a bird in search of open sky.

  The hall that held such a huge gathering of men seemed like it was filled with little boys, and her beloved Ernst seemed the most excited one of all. Watching him speak so animatedly to his fellow hunters, she saw a side of her husband she would never be able to reconcile with her childhood image of him. How could a man who held such a deep reverence for nature and all its gifts at the same time be its destroyer?

  Ernst had been the shortest in his class. His voice was squeaky, and his mousy hair a wiry explosion that defied the ritual monthly battles against his father’s trimmer. Despite being one of the smallest, he could lift heavier weights, lunge further and jump higher than anyone his age.

  One morning he threw on khaki shorts and a shirt, tying his shoelaces carelessly as his mother called from downstairs: ‘Ernst! Schnecke! Hurry up, you little snail. You’ll be late for school again.’

  He checked the fish tank on his desk. It rested on top of a map of the world, covering over America, which looked huge and blurry under the glass.

  ‘One, two, three, four …’ he counted out loud, practising his English. The last of the bloated frogs’ eggs were promising to hatch, the embryos squirming inside their casing, waiting to burst into their watery surrounds to join their tadpole siblings. He counted them, too, recording various stages of development, some only wiggling the stump of a tail, others already sprouting tiny legs. He fed them with chopped-up boiled lettuce, then opened a jar filled with green aphids picked off the stems of his mother’s roses and sprinkled a few in for the older froglets. Several eggs had turned white. He scooped these dead ones out, feeding them to Aldo, who stood beside him slobbering and wagging his tail in anticipation. The water looked murky; Ernst scribbled a note reminding himself to cut back the amount of food, but not too much or the tadpoles would start going after each other. He measured out fifty millilitres of fresh water in a glass beaker and poured it into the tank. The tadpoles raced around in a feeding frenzy. One that was already almost frog-like, with only a stumpy remnant of a tail, dived off a lily pad that floated on the surface of the tank, landing with a wet plop onto the floor. Aldo raced to scoop it up, but Ernst reached the escapee first, tossing it back into the tank. He continued the rollcall, ticking off a list in his notebook: ‘Schatzi, Biene, Hase …’

  He paused, holding his breath. He peered in from the side of the tank, his eyes frenziedly searching behind rocks and weed. Bratfische was missing. Scheisse! Not another one. Full-grown frogness had created a small problem of late in the Schäfer household. The timing of a specimen’s momentous leap from the top of the tank onto the wooden floor of Ernst’s bedro
om was becoming rather hard to predict, often defying the meticulous growth chart he annotated carefully in his neatest Sütterlinschrift handwriting. Despite all his attempts to monitor the creatures, urging them to restrict their primordial call-to-land to after-school hours, the excited frogs seemed determined to embark upon their metamorphosal finale by making the perilous journey down the staircase precisely on the mornings Ernst was stuck in class. And, despite his best attempts to force them to take detours, they always seemed to head directly towards the deathtrap of his father’s study. A dangerous adventure for Ernst to retrieve them, too, earning him the strap each time one of the slimy creatures hid under the massive mahogany desk, or parked itself like a croaking paperweight on top of an open business ledger, the inky column of figures bleeding into a watery pool.

  This was likely to become one of those days, unless Ernst could find that damned Bratfische before it escaped under the door. He enlisted the help of his friend.

  ‘Get him, Aldo!’

  The dog obediently started sniffing along the skirting boards and under the bed while Ernst rummaged through his egg collection and checked behind the mouse cage, both well-known frog hide-outs. The rodents scurried away into makeshift burrows, as if the memory of the precocious scientist who had cropped their ancestors’ tails – an experiment aimed at exploring inheritable change – was imprinted on their brains. He glanced at the top of a pile of stamp albums and searched in the bottom of a basket of speckled goldcrest eggs collected during the previous week’s foray into the woods, an adventure that earnt him a detention from Herr Vogel for not having handed in his history assignment on time. The frog could have been anywhere, camouflaged among bottles of feathery green fronds that held creatures twirling madly in their tiny worlds.

  ‘Ernst!’ his mother called again.

  Bratfische was nowhere to be found. Ernst’s heart pounded and the hunger in his belly slowly turned into nausea, despite the smell of bacon and freshly baked bread wafting up from the kitchen.

  ‘Ernst!’ His mother’s voice rose an octave with every minute that passed.

  He abandoned his search, grabbed his leather satchel and bolted downstairs. His mother was seated in the kitchen, holding a cup of tea. Frau Klein, a walrus of a woman who harboured a weakness for gin, placed a steaming plate of food in front of him. He dived on his bacon and rye, followed by Zwiebelkuchen, her special onion pie, and a cup of hot cocoa.

  ‘This child will be the death of me, Klara.’ His mother spoke to the maid as if Ernst wasn’t in the room. ‘He’s always been a defiant little monkey. You know, one evening, when he was only five, he simply disappeared. Poor Albert organised the whole town to search for him. Constable Scharf even sent all of his men into the forest, fearing the worst.’

  Frau Klein stopped stirring her pot of soup and turned to look at Ernst, the whiskers on her chin catching the morning sun that was peeking in through the curtains. She caught him licking his oniony fingers clean.

  ‘Do you know where this cheeky son of mine was hiding the whole time?’ Frau Schäfer sipped her tea. ‘Down in the cellar, behind crates of potatoes. He was busy picking off rats with the slingshot Albert gave him for his birthday. A silly present for a small boy, I must say.’

  Ernst grabbed a linen napkin to wipe his mouth.

  ‘May I be excused, Mutti?’

  ‘Yes, yes. On your way. Hurry up, or you’ll be late.’ His mother shooed him away with the back of her hand, and he buzzed out through the back door.

  The children were standing at attention. Ernst snuck into the classroom just as Herr Vogel, standing in front of the blackboard with eyes closed, his face raised to the sky, began crowing. His ruddy jowls wobbled from side to side as the children joined in:

  Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,

  Über alles in der Welt!

  The Reichspräsident, Friedrich Ebert, stared down from a picture mounted on the wall, next to the black, red and gold flag. Ernst hurried across the room. He raised the lid of his desk and shoved his satchel inside. Standing to attention, he mouthed random vowels in the bits where he didn’t know the new anthem’s words, hoping the old rooster hadn’t noticed him sneak in late. The children’s voices droned on, sending Ernst into a bored reverie, wishing he was outside running around in the woods. A dove swooped down from the rafters and landed on her nest, hidden among the geraniums in the window box. She tilted her head and looked directly at Ernst, as if considering whether he was trustworthy enough to leave her two precious eggs unguarded.

  Herr Vogel flapped over to him, squawking in a falsetto, ‘Schäfer! Daydreaming again?’

  Ernst hadn’t realised the song was over. His classmates were now seated, elbows on their desks, hands clasped above open textbooks. A wave of nervous tittering spread across the room, all eyes fixed on him. His cheeks turned red. Gerhard Tierman and Horst Beiner sniggered from the back of the classroom; he knew he would earn a few more bruises on his way home that afternoon. He lifted the lid of his desk again and pulled out his English textbook.

  ‘Ah! Welcome back to earth, Herr Schäfer.’ Herr Vogel was standing over him. ‘Now, I am sure you would be delighted to read out loud to the class the English essay I asked you to write for homework yesterday. Or did Fräulein Völz forget to do it for you?’

  Herta stayed on the balcony throughout the welcoming speeches; no one seemed to notice her absence. There were delegates from around the world, proudly standing beside their country’s flag: the Union Jack; the Danish cross; the red, white and green stripes of Hungary. Göring waxed lyrical about virtue and family, and how the beauty of the hunt preserved and replenished nature. As she looked down on the scene below, a feeling of nausea rose within her; now she really did need to find the powder room. She reached it just in time to retch her entire breakfast into the toilet bowl.

  CHAPTER 16

  7 November 1937

  Herta stared out at the rain as she waited for Ernst. The cold wind tugged at leaves that still clung to the trees. A solitary starling fought desperately to stay aloft. The storm hadn’t let up for days, and she was growing tired of being cooped up in the apartment. Ernst left early each morning, spending most of the day working in his laboratory. He was so late finishing his thesis, which was now overdue. He would come home when it was dark and spend the rest of the evening either alone in his study or working with Geer, who was organising logistics for the expedition. At thirty-two, with a receding hairline and a solid paunch, Geer looked middle-aged compared to Ernst. Herta thought he was hardly the image of an intrepid explorer. But Geer seemed trustworthy and loyal. Lately, Geer was more like a wife to Ernst than she was, with all the time the two men spent together. Not exactly the life she imagined as a young bride in the first months of marriage.

  Seated in an armchair, she drifted off. In her swirl of dreams, she and Ernst were two birds caught in a trap. An old farmer trudged through snow to release them. They stretched their wings and soared together, high above fields covered with the dead. She tried to warn Ernst it was dangerous to fly with his eyes closed, but all that emerged from her beak was the language of song. Ignoring her doleful cries, Ernst swooped down to fight with wild beasts, returning to her not long after with his heart gouged out. She tried to stop the bleeding with her feathers. Hands sprouted from the tips of her wings as she reached out to him. His was a love so hard to embrace. She lifted him onto her back and carried him away, flying to the top of a distant tree. She would be his eyes.

  ‘I won’t let you leave!’ Herta shrieked as she jolted from sleep. Her darning fell from her lap.

  She rose to fetch a cup and saucer. A huge textbook that Ernst referred to as his bible still lay open on the kitchen table where he had left it after dinner the previous night: A Natural History of Uncommon Birds. It was a gift he received from Professor Weigold for being his assistant in Heligoland, while he was still a student at Göttingen. Ernst’s books were always strewn across the apartment and usually she ignored them
, with their dense expositions on dry subjects such as feathers, bone architecture, egg structure and nest-building. But this one was an elegant leather-bound copy, written in 1743 by an Englishman, with such beautiful, intricate hand-drawn illustrations. She couldn’t understand the text, but as she flipped through the pages she came across a slip of paper covered with Ernst’s scribble. It was a translation from the preface he had annotated as a possible quote for his thesis:

  It is indeed my opinion that all those birds which are seen with us only some part of the year pass into other countries when they are out of our sight … Many would make sleepers of them, and say they retire to holes underground, and in hollow trees, etc., and that they are so fat that they cannot fly far at the times they disappear.

  A sketch Ernst had drawn of the skeleton of an eagle caught her eye, the delicate spine holding up a large head. Elongated finger bones stretched themselves into wings, like a hand pulling on a glove. If only humans could enjoy the miracle of flight. She had read in one of Ernst’s books on Tibet about the lung-gom-pa, flying lamas whom Marco Polo reported having seen on his travels. They wore light clothes and could apparently reach up to twenty-five kilometres an hour in the air by swinging their limbs like a pendulum.

  Herta cast her eyes away from the book. She wandered around the apartment, which was littered with all sorts of magnificent creatures that once soared above the earth.

  Ernst stopped in the doorway of his laboratory and looked across at the unlabelled bird carcasses littering his desk, their skins already showing bald patches where the feathers had fallen out. He strolled across the room and sat down in a tattered chair by the bay window that overlooked the enclosure of Bobby the gorilla. He watched the ape as it strolled up and down, shaking the season’s early snowflakes from its head.