The Wish Child

by Catherine Chidgey

  That winter was the coldest in many decades. Erich stayed inside by the fire and read all of his Winnetou books again from start to finish, and when Mama found him crying and asked him what was wrong he told her that Winnetou was shot in the chest and died in Old Shatterhand’s arms. The air was full of shot and shells. Who hath warned you to flee?

  ‘It’s just a story, Schatz,’ she said, wiping his eyes with her handkerchief.

  ‘And they shot his horse Iltschi, too, so they could be buried together.’

  ‘They shot his horse?’

  ‘It’s an Apache custom.’

  ‘What a savage practice.’ She stroked his hair.

  In December Tante Uschi’s cat had a litter of kittens, and Mama said Erich could keep one as a Christmas present. He chose a black-and-white girl – the tiniest of the six.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Mama. ‘She doesn’t look very strong. We need one who can look after itself. Catch the rats in the barn.’

  ‘I’ll call her Anka,’ said Erich. ‘She reminds me of the other Anka.’

  ‘Anka?’

  ‘The cat we had when I was little. She was black and white too, remember?’

  ‘So she was,’ said Mama, but she was looking at Tante Uschi and Tante Uschi was looking back at her and something unspoken passed between them. ‘Yes, she’s a bit like her, like Anka,’ said Mama at last. ‘Very well then.’

  When the kittens were weaned, though, and the time came for Erich and Mama to collect Anka, Tante Uschi told them that she had died. ‘She was just too weak,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Erich.’

  She offered him one of the others but he didn’t want a different cat; they were the wrong colour; they were all wrong, just as windows and cupboards and chairs and footstools were sometimes and without warning wrong. In his bedroom he took Papa’s letter from the honey jar and unfolded it, smoothing the thin paper flat. Home seems unreal to me too. I am forgetting the shape of your mouth. When Mama came to tell him supper was ready she found him reading it and she took it from him. He should not be looking to the past, she said, because nobody could change the past. Think instead how lucky he was to be born a German boy, how beautiful Germany would be when the war was over and the Führer could build his pavilions and palaces, and turn the cannons back into bells.

  ‘Will the fighting reach us?’ said Erich.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘We’ve done nothing wrong,’ said Mama.

  ‘Heinz Kuppel says the phosphorus bombs can turn you into a human torch.’

  ‘Does he,’ said Mama.

  ‘And it keeps burning even if you put water on it. In Hamburg the people jumped into the Alster, but when they came out the phosphorus on their skin just started burning again.’

  ‘Well, we don’t live in Hamburg,’ said Mama.

  ‘The police hunted them down and shot them. To grant them a merciful release.’

  ‘There you are, you see,’ said Mama. She was still holding the letter; now she folded it up without looking at it.

  ‘Heinz says the Führer has invented a plane so fast it has to shoot backwards,’ said Erich. ‘So it doesn’t hit its own missiles.’

  ‘Come and wash your hands,’ said Mama.

  In the distance I hear a thunderstorm starting to roar, or the hiss of bees against hollowed wood, or planes approaching Leipzig. I am unsure which; I make mistakes. The letter has given Mama ideas, and I watch as she packs up Papa’s things – his hairbrush and shaving brush, his church hat, his shoes and braces. She keeps one pair of trousers to cut down for Erich, as well as a shirt or two, but everything else disappears into the boxes for the Winter Relief, and this is the decent and correct thing to do, because there are people in sore need, bombs blowing apart their homes, firestorms sucking the clothes from their backs, and it is our duty to help them (and if we do not, then our names will appear on the board in the main street).

  And Erich wants to do his duty, he has learned about it at school, and he knows there is a knife he can own when he is older that he can wear at his waist as a sign of his duty, and although he is not sure of the purpose of the knife, owning one is the important thing; after that a knife’s owner discovers its purpose as a matter of course. And are there not needy people on his doorstep? Mama seems to have overlooked the foreign workers, even though they are doing the jobs that Papa used to do, and sleeping right there in the barn, but once she realises there is a need for Papa’s things on the farm she will wonder why she did not think of it herself, and she will say how clever Erich is to come up with such an efficient solution.

  Later that evening, when Mama is washing the dishes, Erich takes some of the clothes from the Winter Relief boxes and goes to the barn. When he pushes open the door he sees shapes in the hay, and at first he cannot tell which shapes are animal and which are human, but one of the shapes stands and comes towards him.

  ‘These are for you,’ says Erich, and the shape lifts up the trousers and jumpers and socks and says, ‘Dziękuję.’

  ‘Dobranoc,’ says Erich, and even as he says it, even as the shape in the barn smiles at him and ruffles his hair and repeats dobranoc, he knows he must never let Mama hear him speak this word, nor any words like it.

  Erich wonders what Papa would say if he returned home and found the foreign workers wearing his clothes – and then he reminds himself that missing means more than missing, and lost means more than lost, and fallen more than fallen, and he remembers Mama taking him to the hives and telling the bees about Papa. Dead. Dead. Dead. A hammerhead driving in nails. The bronze man stands in for Papa now, watching over the house day and night, the bees humming inside his head, creeping through the notes Mama tucks up inside him. Sometimes Erich imagines this hollow father putting on Papa’s clothes and doing Papa’s work, fixing all the things that are broken, brushing Ronja’s coat until she shines, a bronze horse for a bronze rider, baling up hay for winter and choosing the seed potatoes for the coming year, his cool hands checking for rot, counting the eyes.

  Early the next morning Mama winds the wedding clock, and the little husband emerges from its insides to signal a fine day. She scrapes some butter onto Erich’s rolls – how fortunate we are, how removed from all danger – and she is standing at the kitchen window drinking her cup of chicory coffee and looking out into the yard, where the puddles have turned to ice and the hens are pecking at the frozen ground, and all of a sudden she catches her breath. She blinks, and blinks again, and Erich looks out the window too and sees Papa walking past, and Mama is still not breathing – except this Papa is too young to be Papa, and a little too tall, and it is not Papa but only his clothes. And Mama has understood this now, and she turns away from the window and places her cup down on the table and says, ‘Erich, what have you done?’

  He tells her about giving the clothes to the people in the barn, but she does not praise his clever solution, and she does not wonder why she failed to think of it herself. Instead she says that Erich must take the clothes back again, and he must wash them and return them to the boxes, because we have to consider our own people first, the people without homes or butter or clothes, and besides, the foreign workers are used to a lower standard, and the barn must seem a palace to them.

  ‘We won’t mention this again,’ says Mama, and she pats Erich’s hand.

  There are so many things Mama does not mention: the foreign workers, Anka the cat, Papa, Tante Uschi’s dead groom. More and more Erich senses Mama is keeping things from him.

  ‘Look at him,’ she once said to Tante Uschi. ‘My beautiful boy.’

  ‘More German than we Germans,’ said Tante Uschi, and Erich did not know what she meant, and he wanted to ask, but he saw how Mama looked at her, and it was the same look she gave her when Anka died.

  And Erich cannot stop repeating the phrase to himself now: more German than we Germans. He writes it down to see if it makes more sense that way, but it is a phrase that holds its tail in its teeth and wi
ll not let him in. There are others: the secret that is not a secret; life unworthy of life. Just as with certain words, even your own name, the meaning drains away the longer you look.

  In January the army visits the village and hands out anti-tank grenades, and all the mothers line up for their turn. See how easy they are to use, see how effective? The recoil is so slight you will hardly feel it. A brief talk, a hasty demonstration: hold at shoulder height, take aim at enemy, fire. Heinz Kuppel is allowed a turn because he is already ten, and when Erich is ten he will be allowed to join the Jungvolk and fire a Panzerfaust at the enemy too.

  ‘Do you want a try?’ one of the soldiers asks him, but Mama says, ‘He’s only nine.’

  ‘Go on,’ says Heinz Kuppel. ‘Are you a coward? You know what they do to cowards.’ He tightens an imaginary rope round his neck, lolls his head to one side.

  At school Frau Ingwer says they must be prepared, because the war is coming closer all the time, and there is no telling when it might arrive. She reads to them: Emergencies in daily life, in war as well as in peace, can confront you at any moment. Only those who know what to do and who are alert and quick in the face of danger will survive. If your house is on fire, if you are threatened by flooding, if you enter a room filled with gas, if you are caught in a mass panic, if enemy planes are approaching, you won’t have time to check this book for the most sensible thing to do!

  The children make themselves very small on the classroom floor, pretending the bombs have found them at last, and when Frau Ingwer gives word they curl up even smaller, mouths open wide to release the pressure, arms crossed tight over their chests to hold themselves together. They no longer mark the movement of German troops on the map; in fact, there is no map on the wall at all any more, and sometimes Erich looks at the blank space where it used to hang and finds himself thinking: where am I? What is this place? At home he still has the silk map from the wrecked Spitfire, and he has identified where he thinks his village is – he knows where it lies in relation to Leipzig and Dresden, although it is far too small to be named. And that is a lucky thing, because the silk map is an enemy map, a map of escape and evasion, which is why it is so quiet when Erich crushes it into his fist, and if the enemy does not know about his village then perhaps the war will miss them. And if the scale is one to one million then his house must be less than a millimetre wide – less than a stalk of grass, less than a piece of string, and he himself less than a hair’s breadth. (And yet, and yet, there is always another home hanging in the shadows of the places we inhabit, hidden in the crease of the map; always another mouth, another cat, another window.) He folds the map up as small as it will go, the silk cities collapsing silently in on themselves, and he thinks: I am nowhere, I am nothing.

  ‘What do you have there?’ says Mama, and Erich has to show her the map, because keeping secrets is wrong, although talking is also wrong if you talk to the wrong person or mention the wrong things.

  ‘I found it,’ says Erich, and he knows that Mama knows where it came from, but the airman is another thing she never mentions: to do so would be to raise him, a black-winged curse, and who can say what he might demand? And so Erich does not mention him either, even though he is buried on their land, so close to their house, as close as the foreign workers in the barn.

  February 1945

  Berlin

  When the Heilmanns visit Tante Hannelore in Dahlem to wish her a happy birthday, the top floor of her building is gone. Through the smoke – which is part of the weather these days – Sieglinde can make out the remains of the figures that flanked the windows: stone children reaching skyward, fingers missing, heads missing, holding up the air. Two of the bombed-out neighbours have been moved into Tante Hannelore’s apartment – Frau Hummel, and the elderly Herr Fromm.

  ‘I’m happy for the company,’ she says, but when Herr Fromm is out of the room she mouths, ‘Not very clean.’

  Each day she goes to the chestnuts and oaks in the courtyard and chops off another branch for the stove. A terrible shame, but what’s to be done? It’s trees or furniture. Sit down, she tells the Heilmanns, sit down, and tell me how you are. She is sorry she does not have any Spekulatius biscuits for Jürgen, but she cuts some bread into oblongs and serves it on the blue china plate; they can pretend, can’t they? ‘I think this one’s a windmill,’ she says, examining a piece before biting it in half. ‘Yes, it definitely tastes like windmill. What do you think?’

  Sieglinde does not want to pretend that a slice of bread is a biscuit; everyone can see it’s bread, and not very nice bread at that. She longs for the soft warm rolls they used to have for breakfast, and every night she dreams of food: meatballs with capers, potato pancakes, stewed berries with vanilla sauce.

  ‘Mine’s definitely a windmill,’ says Jürgen, nibbling around the edges. ‘See, Siggi?’

  ‘Looks like bread to me,’ she says. ‘I heard they’re putting sawdust in it now.’

  ‘Is that true?’ says Jürgen, examining his piece.

  ‘Of course not,’ says Mutti. ‘Sieglinde, apologise to your brother.’

  ‘It’s just what I heard,’ says Sieglinde.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t be listening to rumours.’

  And she is right, Mutti is right, she shouldn’t be listening to rumours, but how to ignore their glint? They make the best stories: bread from sawdust, bread from bones, soap from fat, books from skin.

  Jürgen slides his piece of bread back onto the blue plate, which is very bad manners, but Mutti does not notice; she is looking around the room and frowning. ‘Where is your samovar?’ she says.

  ‘Oh, I hadn’t used it in so long,’ says Tante Hannelore.

  ‘But where is it? And where’s the bamboo screen, and the Persian carpets? And your Mother’s Cross?’

  Sieglinde notices it now too: Tante Hannelore’s apartment is emptier, even with the extra people living there, which is a strange thing.

  ‘The Russians will take it all anyway,’ says her aunt. ‘They’re cutting glass from windows and leather from chairs and sending it home.’

  ‘Hanne,’ warns Vati. ‘There are still possibilities.’

  She laughs. ‘Did you know, children,’ she says, ‘that dentists have to start pulling people’s teeth through their noses?’

  ‘Hannelore. Don’t,’ says Vati.

  ‘Because nobody dares open their mouths.’ She takes a small embossed case from a drawer and hands it to Sieglinde. ‘An early birthday present for you. It’s a long time until you’re eighteen.’

  Inside the case are the iron bracelets, black against the sky-blue silk, and Sieglinde lifts them out and fastens them about her wrists, and they are bands of dark forest, a night full of holes, as fine as Vati’s best silhouettes. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘they fit me.’ She shakes her hands, and the bracelets do not slip off; yes, she has grown into them.

  ‘And this,’ says Tante Hannelore, removing the iron ring from her wedding finger. It is warm and smooth and Sieglinde traces the message scored into its surface: Gold I Gave For Iron. Round and round she turns it, and the end is the beginning, iron and gold side by side, one slipping into the next.

  ‘It’s too much,’ says Mutti, but Tante Hannelore insists. ‘She might as well enjoy them now. Just keep it to yourself, or Adolf will want them for bullets.’

  What a thing to say out loud! But this time Vati lets it go. She is over-tired, that’s all, just like everyone; she is not herself. The long hours working at the first-aid station are taking their toll.

  Sieglinde is allowed to wear the bracelets underneath her sleeves on the way home, and she is unafraid as she passes the broken buildings, the men digging for bodies, the Hitler Youth boys pumping water from people’s cellars so they do not drown. She is made of iron, and nothing can hurt her. She is not even tired. Fire, stand on this earth like a raised sword. When the siren sounds, she does not flinch.

  ‘Quickly, children,’ says Vati, and they make their way to the great flak tower next to
the zoo; it is too late to return home. Towards the bunker they file, remaining calm, hurrying but not jostling, not shoving, even though there are so many of us, many more than the tower was built to hold.

  ‘Siggi,’ says Jürgen, ‘are we losing? Have we lost?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘There are still possibilities.’

  ‘What kinds of possibilities?’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘the cold. That’s a possibility. It’s been so cold this year that it’ll freeze the Russians in their tracks. Stop them from reaching Berlin.’

  ‘Can’t you read?’ says a woman, jabbing Vati with her umbrella and pointing to the sign above the entrance: Men Aged 16 to 70 Belong in Service, Not in the Bunker! But she knows nothing of Vati’s important work, this jabbing woman, and now is not the time to explain it, and anyway, it is a secret and cannot be explained.

  Inside there is no room to sit down, no room even to kneel to tie Kurt’s shoe though he is tugging at the hem of Sieglinde’s skirt, telling her his laces are undone. The flak guns pound and pummel the sky above us and something is pressing at the walls and forcing the doors; something is sweeping in from the steppe, hackles raised, teeth bared, it is the season of the wolf but we are safe here, the walls are thicker than Vati is tall, and if they are strong enough to shield the altar of Zeus, the head of Nefertiti, all our priceless treasures, all the things that cannot be replaced, then they are strong enough to shield us, and so we are safe, we could not be safer, and even if we cannot move, even if we have to empty our bladders where we stand, we have nothing to fear. We are made of iron. Look, there are signs telling us what to do, there are procedures and rules and warnings, and radium arrows that glow in the dark like the hands on Vati’s watch. And what time is it? How late is it? Impossible to say.

  *

  The next day Edda Knopf comes to tell Sieglinde the news – Julia is dead, killed in an air raid as she was walking to her grandmother’s house.