‘Have you polished your shoes?’ Mama asked Erich, but she did not wait for an answer; it was already time to leave. Ronja was waiting in her bridle and Erich harnessed her to the wagon and they were on their way, Erich driving, which was only proper in Papa’s absence. The day was overcast, the colour of stone, and the town hall’s stucco façade seemed to vanish against the white air as they approached, its leaden clock tower hanging disembodied above them, ticking away the minutes. On the front steps a mother calmed her baby, duping him with the tip of her milkless finger – a small deception soon learned by mothers, for no good comes from bowing to a child’s every demand.
The registrar welcomed them and told them how pleased he was to be conducting a wedding in such times. The groom’s parents, who had travelled from Dresden, sat in the front row and did not speak, glancing around them as if unsure they had come to the right place. But look – there on the long dark table, set between lit candles, a photograph of their son; no one could deny the resemblance. The bride and her witnesses took their seats at the front of the room, the chair next to Ursula occupied only by a steel helmet. She held her bouquet on her lap – artificial lilies bound with ivy, the dark leaves disappearing in the fall of her dress. She had wanted a song at her wedding, and so everybody stood and sang Two stand before you, Lord, to be joined together as one, and the fir branches filled the small space with their resinous scent, and the candle flames fluttered beside the groom’s photograph, wings of bright birds, and the guests stood in this makeshift forest and sang for the living bride glimmering in her silk as fine as the skeletons of leaves, and they sang for the soul of the groom, his grave at the western front but his spirit surely here. Nobody wept. Gerhard’s likeness watched from the table, smooth-cheeked and smooth-haired, silent in his pressed-tin frame, the hooked cross stamped above him, a tin star, his face catching the guests’ reflections so that the bride saw not her groom but his wordless father, breast pinned with medals, and she wanted to turn the photograph away, but it was too late to change anything now, much too late. And nobody wept, because this was no funeral; nobody wept, because only the defeated may weep, and we are not defeated, and to say that we are is to ask for the noose.
Alchemy
Who to his ,
Who spent the hours
Of in upon his bed,
He knows you not, you !
You lead us to into below,
You the in to ,
Then you him to –
Since all does for call.
October 1944
Berlin
FRAU MÜLLER: They took our fence yesterday. Uprooted it just like that.
FRAU MILLER: They took ours two weeks ago. It’ll be bullets and bombs by now.
FRAU MÜLLER: There’s nothing to stop anybody from simply walking into our yard. And into yours.
FRAU MILLER: I’d rather have no fence and more bullets and bombs for the British.
FRAU MÜLLER: The English.
FRAU MILLER: The English.
FRAU MÜLLER: The bells are gone too. We no longer note the passing of time. And who will warn us now? And how will we mourn the dead? And repel the lightning?
FRAU MILLER: Red as blood are the skies. That is not the daylight’s flood.
*
Whenever the siren sounded, we took our cases and our masks and began the descent to the windowless hole where the ceiling hung too close and the weight of the building pressed down and down; we went to our graves where the coal dust and brick dust caught at our throats and the cobwebs at our hair, and the damp ground held us and would not let us go. More often than not there was no electricity, and the shelter grew smaller and smaller in the dark. Elbows poked ribs; hips struck hips; coat-cuffs grazed cheeks and dislodged hats. And we gave our attention to these small nuisances rather than to the juddering earth: Be careful you don’t … Would you mind not …? Please refrain from … And more often than not – even if Herr Schneck had to mediate – a sour truce could be reached, if only until the next attack. At least we had our own cellar. At least we did not have to crush ourselves into one of the public shelters, hold our children aloft so they could still breathe when the oxygen level began to fall and the candle on the floor went out.
Brigitte lay down on the thin camp bed and rested her head on the thin pillow. Things need not have come to this, she thought. Things might have worked out so differently. If the Heilmanns had not lost their fortune she might be living in the Grunewald villa, with its tree-lined driveway and its lily pond and its telephones that linked every room – but it had been sold long before she met Gottlieb, and she had never even visited it; she was familiar only with her husband’s occasional descriptions and his meticulous silhouette cuttings of the house, none of which, he said, were ever quite right.
‘We could go back and check,’ she suggested, but he said it was some sort of administrative building now, and would not be the same.
She held up her hand to the lantern and saw the blood inside her skin, thick against the cellar’s dark horizon, and she closed her eyes. She walked through the lost villa, pulling the sheets from carved Venetian mirrors, uncovering the potted palms, the Bechstein grand piano, the tinkling chandeliers. (Was there a Bechstein? Did Gottlieb ever mention a Bechstein?) In the entranceway the carved bears danced along the back of Hannelore’s oak settle and the face of the grandfather clock glowed like a winter moon, so much smaller here than in the apartment. Brigitte reached inside its walnut case and raised the weights, but what was the time? Early morning, early evening? She did not know, she could not tell, she had no sense of where north lay. Out in the garden the crows gathered about the frozen fountain and the oak trees dropped their dead leaves. She opened the door to the ice house and descended the stone steps, and she could see her breath before her, and it was only breath, not smoke, and it did not reach for her lungs and make her cough and gasp, for it was only breath. Beneath the ground the slabs of ice lay packed in straw; cut from the frozen pond, they will last well into summer, when there will be rose-petal sorbet and dishes of ice cream and long pale drinks floating with bruised mint. There will be parties, too: a stylish band playing in the Japanese pagoda, the whole world is sky-blue when I look into your eyes, I’ll dance into heaven with you, and coloured lanterns strung in the trees, and lilies adrift on the lily pond, and about her shoulders not her little fox fur but wolf, white wolf. Berlin’s wealthy and high-ranking will be in attendance, and they will admire the splendid Persian carpets and the samovar and the topiary, and her four shining children in their white sailor suits. ‘We always wanted four,’ she will say, ringing for their nurse to come and put them to bed. After dinner a man glittering with medals will take her arm and say, ‘You must come to the Pfaueninsel. I will show you the birds with their feathers full of eyes, and the place where the king’s alchemist made ruby glass.’
But the garden begins to buck beneath her, and the white wolf slides from her shoulders and the lanterns fall from the trees, and the water that pours from the samovar is bitter, bitter, there must be something in the pipes, some sort of disturbance, and the slabs of ice are cracking, the great floes splintering as easily as glass. The crows take flight, they cover up the sky, ragged voices, ragged wings.
‘Mutti,’ said Jürgen, shaking her shoulder. ‘I’m thirsty.’ He was holding his bear by the foot, the stuffing oozing from a hole on the side of its head. It had lost its eyes and its claws and he was too old for it now, but she said nothing; she knew he wouldn’t allow her even to stitch up the seam, and anyway, it was too far gone. In the corner Sieglinde was singing the little sailor song to Kurt and teaching him the actions: a naval salute, a circle as the ship circled the world. Siggi pressed her hands to her heart, curved them in and out over the girl’s figure, rubbed a finger and thumb toget
her for money. She made a noose around her neck, and a hooked question mark drawn in the air, descending with the descending melody, a jabbed finger marking the dot at the bottom – and who was guilty of this?
In the apartment two more panes of glass are missing, and Brigitte sweeps up the pieces and tacks cardboard over the gaps. She takes out her ledger, notes the number of windows remaining. They are scarce these days; soon there will be none at all. Views covered up, light lost. The smoke is so thick we cannot make out the stars; they are only memories. We are too acquainted with absence. There are holes in our houses and we carry on around them, skirting the edge of the pit. We receive packages to make up for what is missing: a wristwatch, a winter coat, a manicure set. Whose initials are these? Do I see the shadow of a star? Those arrows won’t take you to Wolkowysk or Bialystok, there is no road to heaven, the clock is wooden through and through, it has no ticking heart. Still we trim our nails, wrap up against the cold, keep an eye on the time. There are patterns in the forests, a copse of larches planted in the pines, a note to the gods. Every autumn a swastika blazing in the canopy.
*
Mutti is counting the knives.
‘Brigitte,’ says Vati, touching her hand. ‘Brigitte.’
‘Nearly finished,’ she says, not looking up in case she loses her place.
Sieglinde wants to talk to Vati, but he is taking Mutti’s arm and she is saying, ‘You’re hurting me,’ though he is hardly touching her, Sieglinde can see, I can see, anybody can see.
Mutti checks her ledger. ‘Six dinner knives, two paring, two bread, one carving, three vegetable, four miscellaneous, one letter opener.’
‘And my dagger,’ says Jürgen, though it is only wood and can’t cut a thing.
‘And Jürgen’s dagger,’ says Mutti, making a note.
‘I suppose you’re aware of my spare scalpel blades?’ says Vati.
‘Blades? Spare blades?’ says Mutti.
‘I keep them in my briefcase, in case I need them at work. I’m sure you’ve seen them.’
‘I never look in your briefcase, Gottlieb. If I saw something in there, something official, how could I convince myself I had seen nothing? That would be very difficult, perhaps impossible.’
And this is true, we cannot make ourselves forget, and Sieglinde thinks of the words she has found in the cuffs of Vati’s trousers and stored in the cake tin.
‘All the same, the blades are in my briefcase, and my briefcase is in the apartment.’ Vati is smiling; is he joking with Mutti? Should Sieglinde and the boys also smile?
‘I must think about this,’ says Mutti. ‘I must give this my careful consideration.’ She begins to jot figures down on a piece of paper, asking herself questions and answering them too. How long is the briefcase in the house each week? Do waking hours count for more than sleeping hours, and if not, should they? Yes, she decides, they should. Therefore, the blades are in the house more often than they are not in the house, and therefore they belong in the ledger.
‘Brigitte,’ says Vati again, ‘it’s time for supper.’ He reaches across her to shut the ledger but she grabs it and holds it and will not let it go, and the knives topple from the dining table, and one of them – the smaller paring knife – lands tip-down in the parquet. For a moment nobody speaks, and Mutti gazes at her splayed ledger, which has slipped from her grasp and is lying open in her lap, and then she stands and begins setting the table, and the knives remain where they have fallen, and nobody mentions them all through supper, which is only potatoes and bread, and afterwards Sieglinde leads Kurt by the hand around the very edges of the room. Later, when Vati is busy with his silhouettes, Sieglinde retrieves them, handing them to Mutti one by one. You can hardly see the nick in the floor. Six dinner, two paring, two bread …
There is nothing Mutti will not count: segments of wood in the parquet; upholstery tacks on the sofa; Kurt’s breaths as he sleeps. And Sieglinde’s shrapnel, too, though she has never reached the same total twice. She lies with Sieglinde on her bed and says, ‘Perhaps if I started in that corner today …’ and Sieglinde says yes, that would be a good place to start.
She tells her mother where she found her favourite pieces: Barbarossastrasse, Hardenbergstrasse, Winterfeldtplatz, their own courtyard. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘That one’s a flower, and that one’s a ship, and that one’s a bit like a cat – see, it’s arching its back.’ Mutti turns out the light and raises the blinds for a moment, peering through the glass, checking, checking. The S-Bahn carriages slow as they approach Savignyplatz, sending a blue flash inside, where it flutters across the hanging shrapnel. Sieglinde thinks she and Mutti could make a story with the fragments, but Mutti is back on the bed now and is stabbing the air, counting under her breath, the numbers piling up and up, ninetyoneninetytwoninetythree, and there is no room left in which to speak. Sieglinde can’t recall much about the time before the war, but she knows Mutti was different then, knows she has been changed into something else. Who is this new mother? Who is this faint substitute, this shadow?
‘All is well,’ says Vati. ‘We have nothing to fear. We are happy and secure – the radio tells us so.’
And it is true that it still sputters into our living room, assuring us that victory is at hand, that the damage to our cities is slight; the enemy’s sights are inexact, their bombs fall wide of the mark, into open fields and cemeteries, they hardly touch us – or at least, we think that’s what it says, because the reception comes and goes, and if Vati has to scratch his nose while he is holding the wire we miss a few words. But yes, we are happy and secure, even as flares shaped like Christmas trees fall from the sky in the wrong season, even as housewives scrub flights of stairs that lead to holes in the ground, even as the shrapnel flies like hot hail and boys come collecting our bones. The enemy eats raw potatoes and rotten turnips but we have plenty of everything, rules and procedures and wonder weapons, substitutes and shadows, we are strong and our strength brings us joy, our work makes us free, our strategic retreats buy us time, our reverses lure the enemy to their doom, the newspaper and the radio and the loudspeaker on the corner tell us so, we are winning the war and we’re glad for the war, we have no need to think otherwise, no need to dwell on our losses and no cause to mourn the dead.
But if we are so secure, why does Mutti flinch at every noise? And if we are so happy, why does she never laugh? Or only at the newsreel stories, at least, with their footage of warehouses brimming with food, barrels of butter, great dunes of wheat.
‘Shh,’ Sieglinde whispers in her ear, because nobody else in the cinema is laughing, this is not the main feature, this is not make-believe, and anybody could be listening to Mutti laughing in the wrong place. And at our backs the projector hums like a swarm of flies, the beam emerging from a high and secret room, and if you could see memory it would look like that, dust motes caught in a streak of light like silt in mussed water, thousands of them, all scattered and strange.
I am not sure about any of this. Did I lie in the peat, my hands and feet bound? Did I call to my mother from the castle foundations? Did I sit on the stool pigeon-chested, my heart waiting for the needle? Or hang on a windy tree nine long nights? As I said – smudges and traces, breaths in and out. The evidence is unclear. Over the years you have tried to name me, pin me down, but I change my shape and slip away, a phantom, a rumour. And we have a talent for transformation: straw to gold, gold to iron, books to ashes, ashes to wonders. Where am I now? On the crease of the map; the place rubbed blank by years of folding and unfolding, turning to see where you are. You cannot get your bearings. If you look for me, I am not there.
I am the wish child, the future cast in water. I am the thrown coin, the blown candle; I am the fallen star.
November 1944
Near Leipzig
Sometimes, just now and then, things were not where Erich expected them to be. A window was on the wrong wall, looked out to the wrong view; a cupboard changed size; chairs bumped at his knees, footstools at his shins. H
is teacher said he was the most forgetful child she’d ever known.
‘You’ve always been like that,’ said Mama. ‘Think nothing of it.’
The bees buzzed inside the bronze head.
And it was true, he had always been that way, forgetful for as long as he could remember. He wondered if his parents had been too careful with him when he was little – if they had stopped him from running about and learning the shape of the world in case he hurt himself – but that could not be true, because hadn’t Papa hoisted him up on his shoulders at the Führer’s parade? Hadn’t Mama whirled him through the air in the garden, spinning him faster and faster until he thought she might lose hold of him?
‘Is it because I was in the sanatorium?’ Erich asked one day. ‘Because I was sick?’
‘The sanatorium?’ said Mama. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That place I stayed at when I was little. I slept in a ward with other sick children.’
‘Can you remember that?’ said Mama. ‘You were barely four.’
In truth Erich didn’t recall much, but sometimes certain images returned to him as he was falling asleep or waking: a woman in brown offering him a slice of bread and taking his hand; cool instruments against his skin; white-headed nurses serving cups of milk and tea, pulling curtains around a bed. ‘What was wrong with me?’ he asked. ‘Was I sick?’ and Mama said, ‘They just wanted to be careful.’
At the end of autumn Erich watched the drones being driven from the hives, their legs and wings torn off by the worker bees. They did not survive long, and eventually he stopped trying to catch them in jars to revive them with their own honey; they died all the same.
The Wish Child Page 16