The Wish Child

by Catherine Chidgey

  ‘But how did she die?’ says Sieglinde.

  ‘I told you, an air raid,’ says Edda.

  ‘Oh,’ says Sieglinde, but she thinks: did a mine hit her directly? Or was it shrapnel, falling masonry, shells from their own anti-aircraft guns? Did she suffocate? Bleed out? Did the pressure burst her lungs? Was she decapitated? Shrunk by the heat to the size of a child? Is she all mixed up with other people’s bodies? Or flattened like Kayhausen Boy, an empty skin, a person-shaped bag? There won’t be a funeral, says Edda; there’s no wood for coffins, and no cardboard either. After she has gone Sieglinde takes the Frederick the Great tin to her room and shakes the words out, turning them face up and whispering them to herself: mercy, promise, love, surrender. Kurt and Jürgen are chasing each other round the apartment, firing imaginary guns and launching imaginary grenades, dying imaginary deaths.

  ‘Please, boys,’ calls Mutti. Her nerves are bad, and she needs some peace and quiet. She lies on her bed and asks Sieglinde to bring her the ledger. She leafs through it for a moment or two, brushing her hands over the pages of neat figures, everything accounted for, and then she enters the iron bracelets and ring, ruling up perfect columns and rows, writing the date where the date should go and the description where the description should go. She stops, frowns.

  ‘Is a pair of boxed bracelets one item or two?’ She does not know and cannot decide. She looks around for the bracelets so she can solve the matter once and for all. A crow is on the window ledge, black and grey. ‘How much meat is on a crow, do you think? People are trapping and eating them, Siggi. Crow schnitzel. Crow roulade.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s just a rumour, Mutti.’ Sieglinde has slept in the bracelets; she can feel them through her jumper and does not want to take them off, but she must not aggravate Mutti’s nerves and so she pushes up her sleeves.

  ‘They keep rabbits on their balconies, don’t they?’ says Mutti. ‘Kitchen rabbits. Everybody knows what that means. Why not kitchen crows?’ She takes Sieglinde’s hands and studies the bracelets, unhooking them and holding them up to the light. ‘They torpedoed our cruise ship, Siggi, did you know? Thousands lost. All the poor refugees.’ She shakes her head. ‘Two separate items, I think. We’ll put them away for you until you’re older.’

  And she is shutting them in their case and shutting the case in her dressing table, and the hand-shaped vase that sits on top is trembling on its crocheted mat, but it does not fall over, which is just as well, because Vati doubts he can repair it again, and what then? Sieglinde remembers the story he told her when she was little, about the lady trapped inside the dressing table, waving her white hand for help – she had believed him, even though the drawers were far too small to hold a person. She had believed him for months, despite the evidence in front of her, and then when she no longer believed him, she still pretended that she did.

  ‘And the ring,’ says Mutti, holding out her hand, and it is not fair that Sieglinde should have to surrender the jewellery, because hadn’t Tante Hannelore given it to her? Hadn’t she wanted her to enjoy it now, right now, before there was nothing left?

  ‘Frau Metzger wears her jewellery all the time, even to the cellar,’ she says. ‘I’ll be careful with it.’

  ‘And if Frau Metzger is buried in a blast when she’s wearing all her jewellery? If her body’s never found? It’s too risky.’

  Sieglinde says nothing; she must not make things worse. She thinks of a story she has heard: that the Führer is keeping a gentle gas in reserve, specially for the German people, so that they can be put to sleep if the torturing Asiatic hordes arrive. But she does not mention this either.

  Mutti unlocks her jewellery box – why does she keep the key in the lock? – and clears a space for the iron wedding ring, taking out the brooch made from Vati’s baby teeth.

  ‘Can I see?’ says Sieglinde, and Mutti passes it to her. It is slight between her fingers, the teeth impossibly small. ‘Why don’t you ever wear it?’

  ‘They’ve fallen out of fashion,’ says Mutti.

  ‘Can I wear it?’ says Sieglinde. ‘Just for today?’ She can still make out the shape of the bracelets pressed into her wrists, red lines looping like brambles, but they are fading fast.

  ‘Just for today, then,’ says Mutti, and she pins the brooch to Sieglinde’s collar.

  If Vati notices it he does not say anything. It nibbles at Sieglinde’s braid when her hair falls over her shoulder, which used to make him laugh – but she knows his work is hard on his eyes, even though he never says how, exactly, and perhaps he has not noticed the brooch.

  ‘What are the possibilities, Vati?’ she asks him.

  ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘You told Tante Hannelore that there are still possibilities. What are they?’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. He doesn’t answer her question, but it’s clear that he knows about the possibilities, and it is just his job that prevents him from explaining them.

  And then later that day, as if by magic, Sieglinde finds a leaflet; she is tidying the kitchen and there it is, slotted into the letter rack, and even before she picks it up she can see that it is about the possibilities.

  ‘Look, Jürgen,’ she calls. ‘I told you so.’

  There Are Two Possibilities …

  We are Germans!

  There are two possibilities:

  Either we are good Germans or we are bad ones.

  If we are good Germans, then all is well. But if we are bad Germans,

  Then there are two possibilities:

  Either we believe in victory, or we do not believe in victory.

  If we believe in victory, then all is well. If we do not believe in victory,

  There are again two possibilities:

  Either we take a rope and promptly hang ourselves, or we do not hang ourselves. If we take a rope and promptly hang ourselves, all is well. But if we do not hang ourselves,

  Then there are two possibilities:

  Either we give up the fight, or we do not give it up. If we do not give it up, all is well. But if we do give it up,

  Then there are again two possibilities:

  Either the motley criminals of the Red mob following hard on the heels of the Anglo-Americans liquidate us immediately, or according to Stalin’s wishes deport us to work in the icy wastes of Siberia.

  If they liquidate us immediately, that is still relatively speaking good. If they deport us to Siberia or somewhere else,

  Then there are again two possibilities:

  Either one succumbs on the way there due to the unaccustomed stresses and hardships, or one does not die so quickly.

  If one dies quickly, one has deserved it, but is still lucky. If one does not die quickly, that is unfortunate.

  Then there are still two final possibilities:

  Either one slaves away for foreigners until the end of one’s life, without ever seeing one’s homeland and family again, or when the opportunity arises one gets shot in the back of the neck. Since both of these possibilities lead to the grave, there are no further possibilities.

  Therefore:

  There are not two possibilities!

  There is only one!

  We must win the war, and we can win it! Each man and each woman, the entire German people, must summon their utmost in courage, discipline and readiness for action.

  Then our future and the future of our children will be secured, and the German people will be saved from a descent into Bolshevist chaos!

  ‘What is it?’ says Jürgen.

  ‘Nothing,’ says Sieglinde.

  In the living room she opens the door of the tiled stove and throws the leaflet inside. She thinks of the words she has stored in the cake tin: defeat, mercy, sorrow, Versailles, forgive, the scraps of paper as tiny as lost teeth. All day she can taste blood in her mouth.

  That evening I watch as Sieglinde goes down to the cellar, where the walls are not real walls but stacks of loose bricks; should a bomb hit the building, should rubble block the door, shou
ld a fire above suck out all the air, she can simply step through to the neighbouring cellar, and if their door is blocked she can try the next one, and the next. The whole street is like this; the whole city: false walls, trick exits (and there are other ways to leave: the rope, the revolver, the glass ampoule bitten open). She listens for a moment, but everything is silent. One by one she lifts the bricks away, then steals through to next door. She examines their board games, their small shelf of books, the bucket behind the curtain, the ticking clock. She lies down on one of their camp beds and closes her eyes, and she belongs to a different family, and lives a different life. Mutti plays the piano and buys her sky-blue ribbons for her hair, and Vati is in the Wartheland, helping the new settlers and winning medals for mercy, and Kurt is a little sister and Jürgen is a dog. Julia is not dead, and she is training Sieglinde to be a youth leader herself, because she has noted how well Sieglinde knows her songs and her rules and her German history, and how much she loves the Führer, would do anything for the Führer. I lie beside her on the narrow bed. I have a mother and a father and I jump on icy puddles in my winter boots, I build sandcastles and help with the harvest and swap marbles for shrapnel and shrapnel for marbles. I attend the meetings, sing the songs. I leap the fire. I earn the knife. We could just keep going, she and I, passing through walls, changing our names, until we find a way out.

  March 1945

  Near Leipzig

  ‘I’m going to apply for a child,’ said Tante Uschi.

  ‘Yes. Good,’ said Mama, nodding. ‘There are so many of them.’

  ‘Will you help me with the letter? The forms?’

  ‘Of course. Boy or girl? You can specify.’

  ‘A boy. I’ll name him Gerhard.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mama. ‘Yes!’ She clapped her hands. ‘This is just what we need!’

  ‘But what about the real mother?’ said Erich. ‘Won’t she mind?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Tante Uschi, stroking his hair. ‘Oh, Schatz. They’re dead, all the real mothers. That’s why the children are in the children’s homes.’

  Erich could not sleep that night; he kept seeing Anka the cat running through rooms he thought he knew, chasing leaves in a blurred garden. Mama was holding him by the wrists, whirling him round and round, but the sun was too bright and he could not see her face, and the bees were too loud and he could not hear her voice, I will bake my bread from the blood of your children, who say ye that I am? I am not he, and look, someone is taking his hand, a woman in brown is offering him a piece of bread and taking his hand and leading him away. The shadow birds slip across the walls, over his bed, his face. They retreat to the corners of the room, and then they come back.

  In the end it is Heinz Kuppel who tells him. He and Erich are in the school attic, sweeping up the remains of last year’s medicinal herbs so that everything is clean and ready for the new crop when spring comes, and although the March day is cool outside, the space beneath the roof is warm and close and sends their voices echoing back at them. Heinz says there’s no point in collecting herbs for the soldiers any more, not now, not since the Americans have crossed the Rhine and the Russians have crossed the Oder, and he does not know why Frau Ingwer still wants them to do it, and perhaps it is just to make everyone feel they are helping. He eats a foxglove leaf – he says it is a foxglove leaf – to prove it cannot harm him, to prove he will not die, and then he says that in the cities they are handing out cyanide, you can get it from the chemist, and then he says that Erich is not Erich, that Mama and Papa are not Mama and Papa.

  ‘They got you from a children’s home. They went there and they picked you out. You’re Polish. My brother told me.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ says Erich. ‘Your brother’s dead.’

  ‘He told me ages ago. He remembered you arriving here. You weren’t even a baby.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ repeats Erich, but we both know this is untrue. ‘Mama still has my cradle, I’ve seen it. Papa carved the acorns on it himself.’

  ‘There’s always been something different about you,’ says Heinz Kuppel. ‘Don’t you think? I bet you wouldn’t eat a foxglove leaf if I told you to.’

  ‘They’re for the soldiers. We’re not allowed to eat them.’

  ‘These? They’re just scraps. Leftovers.’

  ‘We’re not allowed to.’

  ‘Coward. Polish dog.’

  When Erich tells Mama the story Heinz Kuppel told him, she says the Kuppels are not the most honest of Germans. She happens to know that they lie to the Reich Food Estate about their crop yields and then sell the difference on the black market. ‘He’s always been trouble, that boy,’ she says.

  ‘He told me they’re giving people cyanide in the cities,’ says Erich.

  ‘Well there you are!’ says Mama. ‘What nonsense.’

  The next day, when Oma Kröning comes for lunch, Erich says, ‘I remember the sanatorium, the home. I remember sleeping there with all the other children.’

  Oma Kröning turns pale and puts down her knife and fork. She says, ‘Emilie …?’

  And Erich knows that it is true.

  Mama says it makes no difference, none at all. ‘You are the child we were meant to have,’ she tells him.

  ‘But where did I come from? Am I Polish?’

  ‘You’re German. Anyone can tell that. What other things did Heinz say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She nods. She offers little else on the subject; the more Erich asks her about it the shorter her replies grow.

  ‘What have I done?’ he asks. ‘Why are you angry with me?’

  ‘I’m not angry,’ she says, but she no longer tucks him into bed or kisses him good morning, and her voice is the same voice she uses when she speaks to the foreign workers. Sweep the floor. Count the eggs. Clean out the ashes. It is the same voice she uses, too, when people from the cities come to the farm wanting to exchange carpets and gold rings and oil paintings for eggs, meat, schmaltz. Such bartering is illegal. You should know better. The only time Erich hears her soften is when she whispers her prayers to the bronze head.

  *

  And finally the war came to them: a flurry of bombs meant for someone else but dumped on the nearby countryside in those final imprecise weeks, impossible to divert by prayer or fear or charm. There were no factories here, no bridges or railway lines of any significance – but weren’t we loyal Romans destroying those ourselves? – and for the most part the bombs landed on potato fields and turnip fields, in the forest, in the lake. Mama and Erich were inside when it happened, eating lunch; they heard the noise of the engine in the distance and thought it was the bees, and although the noise came closer and closer they did not move, because nothing could happen here, because here was nowhere, strategically speaking, a place too small for the map – and then they looked out the window and the dirt was spraying skywards in front of the barn, and the house was shaking, and the foreign workers were shouting and running. Erich rushed to the door and pulled on his boots, and Mama leapt up as well, and Erich thought she was coming to help him, to help the foreign workers, but she took him by the shoulders and he felt the hunger in her hands – holding him back, pushing him away? – and then she said, ‘No. They’re not our people. We cannot risk ourselves for their sake.’

  He ran from her, as fast as a greyhound, past the stable where Ronja whinnied and stamped – Ronja, who flinched at neither thunder nor fire – and on to the barn. The yard and the buildings and even the sky seemed not quite real through the smoke, and he headed towards the voices rather than trusting his eyes.

  ‘Here!’ cried one of the workers, signalling to Erich, who could hardly make out the brown-clad figure against the dirt. He could see now, though, that the side wall of the barn had collapsed, and that a man lay trapped; two others were struggling to lift the wall away from him. Erich crawled underneath it, squeezing himself into the tight, low space, then pushing up with his back and shoulders, and finally the men were able to lift it free, and then he was
dragging himself to his feet, as brown as the men now. The air had cleared enough to make out the crater in front of the barn: a great hole in the soil, as if something had been uprooted.

  At first Mama refused to allow the injured man to recuperate in the house. ‘He’ll steal from us,’ she said, ‘or worse.’

  ‘He can have my bed,’ said Erich. ‘I’ll sleep on the floor.’

  ‘Your bed!’ said Mama. ‘Do you know what the Polish did to our people?’

  O generation of vipers.

  ‘I’m Polish,’ said Erich.

  ‘No,’ said Mama. ‘You’re an orphan, you were a German orphan born in Poland, which is now Germany.’

  The sound of hammering reached them; the two unhurt workers were repairing the barn.

  ‘What happened to my parents?’ said Erich. ‘Is my name even my name?’

  ‘You are Erich Kröning,’ said Mama. ‘I am your mother.’

  No, Erich thought.

  No, I thought.

  She finally allowed the injured man inside when Erich pointed out that he would recover more quickly that way, and be able to return to his work; the fences needed mending and the ditches clearing, and the bomb crater had to be filled in and smoothed over. The man slept in Erich’s bed and Erich slept in Mama’s, occupying the hollow left by Papa. It was strange to lie down in a different room, with the sound of Mama’s breathing so close by and the darkness coming at him from unfamiliar directions. He could not fall asleep. He began counting the months until his tenth birthday, and then the weeks, and then the days. It occurred to him that he might be ten already; that his birthday might not be his birthday, just as his mother was not his mother. If he were ten he could join the Jungvolk, and then he could learn how to launch a Panzerfaust, how to operate searchlights and flak guns, how to blow up a tank, how to slit a throat. And perhaps if he did well at these things – if he showed what Frau Ingwer called a natural ability – he might be chosen to meet the Führer, who thought of all children as his own. For you are flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood, and in your young minds burns the same spirit that possesses us. Erich had even heard of children invited to stay in the Führer’s bunker for a week or two, and they were fed marzipan and vitamins and hot chocolate. He had seen photographs of them in the newspaper, these children, shaking the Führer’s hand and asking him questions they must have rehearsed a hundred times, questions approved by the officials, because you couldn’t ask the Führer just anything.