When Mama had fallen asleep Erich crept back to his own room and switched on the bird lamp for the foreign worker. For a moment the two of them watched the shapes circling the room, round and round, round and round, and then the foreign worker made his hands into the shape of a bird, swooping them across the quilt towards Erich and alighting on his wrist for just a moment.
‘Czesław,’ he said.
I see the enemy surging into Germany from all sides, pouring through the many holes in the map: Cologne, Frankfurt, Dresden, Hamburg. I hear Mama and Tante Uschi speaking in hushed voices about falling, about taking. They cut off each other’s hair, sew their grandmother’s garnets into their hems and seams. Where are the wonder weapons to save us all? What of the limitless foodstores, the vast shelters hidden in the mountains? And who will lead us there now? Look: is that not Anka in Tante Uschi’s garden, Anka the black-and-white cat who was too weak to survive? Is she not sunning herself on the path, drinking from puddles, stalking the sparrows? We have called up the spirits, and can no longer get rid of them.
Kindertotenlieder
O , each of us our own .
A that proceeds from a
In which we knew , and .
April 1945
Berlin
It is hard to keep a steady hand these days. I watch Gottlieb in his office at the Division; the books are piled so high on his desk that he cannot see over them, cannot even see the blurred outline of his neighbour, also walled in by books, and the faster he works, the less precise his cuts. There is so little time. With every line, he breaks off a piece of the world.
He has never been a careless man, but quotas must be met, and the list of prohibited words is growing longer and longer. Soon, he thinks, there will be no language left – only margins. And questions are being asked about the disposal of the excised material; a routine weighing of the ashes from the furnace has suggested that not everything is being destroyed. Where, then, are the survivors? There are reports of stolen words, smuggled words, turning up in people’s cellars and attics, hiding in their allotment sheds, making their way onto the black market – does Herr Heilmann know anything about this? Is it possible he has been taking the waste home with him, to burn as fuel, perhaps, given the scarcity of wood and coal? (We must not speak of scarcity.) Or might he have suspicions about one of his colleagues …? There are two possibilities, Herr Heilmann. You can tell us what you know, without fear of reprisals (we must not speak of reprisals), or you can remain silent. If you choose to remain silent and later it comes to light that you do know where the missing words have gone, there will be serious reprisals.
Gottlieb has no idea what to say. It might be simpler, he thinks, for the Division to start from scratch; to write books that need no correcting. How would such a book begin? With a family? Yes, with a family who live in Berlin – a good, decent, German family. A song his uncle used to play on his accordion drifts into his head: Five wild swans once went a-roaming, swans that shone so softly white. Sing, sing; what came to pass? None was seen again. He considers the qualities of paper: the peach-skin edges of old books, the slip and sheen of playing cards. Membranous bibles, dead-leaf postage stamps, newsprint that tears along certain grains. ‘Perhaps the furnace is hotter than calculated,’ he says. ‘I read of a church bell reduced to a handful of ashes.’
He begins to take very careful note of his actions, monitoring himself for any lapses. He cuts out a word, moves it to one side of his desk, cuts out another, moves it to one side, and when he has amassed a reasonable pile he sweeps them into the bin at his feet. True, his briefcase sits nearby, but he never leaves it open, he is certain, fairly certain, and besides, if any words fell into it by accident he would find them when he unpacked his things at home. He watches the little slips of paper tumbling through the air: snowflakes, leaves, white-winged birds. If he chose he could still read them, but he has trained himself to recognise only their shape, not their meaning. He can work more efficiently that way.
‘You haven’t found anything unusual in my briefcase, have you?’ he asks Brigitte.
‘Like what?’ she says. ‘What’s unusual?’
‘Small pieces of paper. So small you’d hardly notice them.’
‘You know I don’t look in your briefcase.’
‘I just thought you might have noticed something.’
‘Noticed something that’s almost too small to notice?’
He does not like the direction the conversation is taking; soon she will be asking him again if he notices anything different about the living room. He examines his latest silhouette – the Dom in Cologne. Is it accurate? True? He compares it to his book of photographs. He knows that a silhouette cannot show every detail – the saints in their sooty niches, the jutting gargoyles – but the outline is what matters, the suggestion of complexity, of dark and light. He snips at the black paper, removing a splinter here, a splinter there, each as fine as an eyelash. He understands the perils of cutting away too much at once. Patience, precision: he had hoped to pass these qualities on to Jürgen, and tried giving him a pair of scissors and the outline of a house, but the boy cut smoke and flames rising from ruins, a dirty mess, not a straight line in sight.
Gottlieb imagines entering the paper cathedral, the air close and cool, and he lies down on the paper flagstones and looks into nothing, nothing, a relentless black that rolls over him and about him. Here there are no saints and no gargoyles, no great fanned ribs of stone, no spires that strain to pierce the sky and open heaven, just his own dark solitude, the darkness inhabited before birth, the still dream before we wake into blood to face the knot and the knife.
The evening is quiet, for now: the children are in bed and Brigitte is making notes in her ledger, the nib of her pen gasping across the page. And if he is honest, if he stops what he is doing and looks around, then yes, he can see that the living room is bigger, just as Brigitte has said so many times, although he has not noticed it happening, has not noticed a thing – or at least, nothing worth mentioning. And perhaps he should have listened to her, and perhaps, for a time, there were two possibilities: speech or silence, yes or no, white or black – but now that time has passed.
And then one day, as Gottlieb is sweeping his deletions from the clifftop of his desk, he sees a word separate itself from the rest and lodge in his trouser-cuff. And when he retrieves it, he sees that two other words have settled there also, and he might have been carrying them around for weeks.
That night he asks Sieglinde if she has found anything in his pockets or cuffs, anything unexpected, though there’s nothing to worry about, no reason to be afraid. Why then does he start when she says yes and fetches the cake tin with Frederick the Great on it? The rearing horse, the stone king, he stood with his four million Prussians against forty million enemies, but they were not able to defeat him even in the most hopeless situations. She shakes out the words, every last one – there must be a dozen or more – and holds them in her cupped hands as if she has found a fledgling too weak to survive on its own. There are not enough of them to explain the discrepancy in the weight of the ashes, it’s true – but there are enough to cause problems.
‘We’ll burn them,’ he begins to say – but all of a sudden the siren is sounding and Schneck is at the door shouting at them to hurry, the warning system did not activate and the raid is starting and they must hurry.
Gottlieb turns off the gas and opens the windows; already the planes are overhead and the flak guns are booming. Kurt and Jürgen are blinking, barely awake, and Sieglinde is ushering them out to the landing while Brigitte pauses to wrap her fox fur about her neck. They leave their door open, as they must, and as they make their way down to the cellar the stairwell shakes beneath them, and Gottlieb thinks of his visits to Luna Park when he was a boy, and the shimmy-steps that would not keep still, and the swivel-house that tilted to one side, forever on the brink of falling.
*
In the cellar Si
eglinde notices that Kurt’s jumper is on inside-out and back-to-front, and she wants to fix it, to tell him to raise his arms and let her pull it over his head, but he is leaning his soft body into her side and asking her to sing the song about the little sailor and the girl who dies for love of him. Together they do the actions to go with the words – the salute, the ocean, love, death – and each time they start the song again they drop another word and another until they are hardly singing at all, and only their hands are telling the story: And who was guilty of this? I can hear the shrapnel clattering above them, filling up the world, and it is the future falling all at once and in shapes nobody can decipher, and Sieglinde imagines opening the blinds in the morning to find every window blocked with it as high as the fourth floor. And we can hear bundles of stick bombs rustling like flocks of doves, and canister bombs slapping down like wet sacks. And she does not hear the bomb that hits them, but she feels it pick her up and shake her and shake her until all she can see is dust.
April 1945
Near Leipzig
One day Erich finds Mama removing the candles and flowers and little plates of food she has placed about the bronze head.
‘They’re almost at Berlin,’ she says. ‘We cannot win.’ Out with the dish of honey. Out with the quartered apple.
‘You’re not allowed to say that, Mama.’
She laughs. ‘If they come, we must hang a white sheet from the window.’ She hands him a vase of dead crocuses to empty, and when he tips the green water away the rotten stems collapse in his hands and leave behind their rotten smell on his skin.
And yes, Mama has stripped the altar bare. And yes, she tells Erich to surrender, but she also gives him a knife and tells him to aim for the heart. Like this, like this; the Russian is a savage and will butcher us in our beds. She empties the head of its bees, shaking them out like coins, but they do not fall; they hang humming in the air around her, spinning their wings, mumbling amongst themselves: will they swarm, will they sting? She opens the window and away they fly, disappearing into the orchard, into the wooden mouths of the hives, where, after all, they belong. She cannot dislodge the honeycomb from inside the head, though – or she does not care to; it holds fast, a tumour clogging the cranium, and within it lie her many wishes, all the little notes she has pushed into the dark since before the war began, their paper wings caught in the wax. There are too many to remember. You-you, you, calls the turtle dove.
‘Take this,’ she says, handing Erich the head, and she moves through the house gathering up his toy soldiers, the flags from the parade, their volume of Mein Kampf, the framed portrait of Papa in his uniform, the Führer’s blanket, which she has never finished because she could never get her stitches perfect, and Pictures from the Life of the Führer, with all its pasted-in photographs that took Papa so long to collect and mount.
‘What are you doing? Mama?’
Before he can stop her she has fed the paper flags to the oven, and they are flaring and roaring, a crowd welcoming their king, and then they are withering away. She slams the door shut on them and piles everything else into a box. Papa’s photograph lies on top, his face cut out of his uniform.
‘Follow me,’ says Mama, putting on her shoes.
‘But where are we going? And where is Papa’s face?’ ‘Are you a German boy?’ she says. ‘Are you a true German boy?’
He no longer trusts her, this woman who says she is his mother. The head is cool in his hands, lighter than expected, and out in the bright white day he can see the tiny blemishes in its surface. He hugs it to himself. Of course he is a true German boy, and he is ready to defend Germany, and the Führer is Germany and Germany is the Führer. He wants to fight, to run away to the front. He could run away to Leipzig easily enough, or even Dresden – but Leipzig is too close to home, and there is no Dresden any more. One last note flutters from the head: A child for Ursula.
‘Leave it,’ says Mama.
At the shore of the thawing lake she puts down the box. I know she is going to throw everything into the water; Erich knows this too, and so do you.
‘Help me,’ she says, weighting down the Führer’s blanket with a rock, and I want him to say no, to stop her, but he takes up a little lead soldier and hurls it as far as he can, and then another, and another, and I feel myself sinking – for despite everything I am a German boy, a true German boy. Papa’s album of the Führer’s life is next; it lies open on the surface for a moment, walking on water, until its pages steep and swell and can no longer bear their own weight: Goebbels at the opening of the Autobahn; Himmler with the Führer, inspecting his personal guard; Göring applauding the Philharmonic; the Führer sailing on the Rhine – down they go, the demigods, the demagogues. Erich is crying now, but is she sorry, is Mama sorry? I cannot tell, I cannot read her, even when she throws the framed photograph of Papa, though Papa’s face is missing and so it is just a uniform she throws and not Papa, not Papa, and perhaps at the bottom of the lake, in the secret movement of the currents, a picture from the album will float free and position itself in the hole left by Papa’s missing face.
The last thing to go is the bronze head. When it leaves Erich’s hands his body seems to want to follow its trajectory, to plunge with it into the water, but he stops himself and watches as it hurtles through the air, its eyes turning to the sky, a single bee escaping from its neck. Now it is time that gods stepped out of lived-in things; time they ripped down every wall in my house.
On the way back home they pass the bomb crater, which the foreign workers still have not fixed. It is starting to fill with water, and when Erich peers inside he sees the shape of himself, his double caught beneath the surface. He raises a hand, and so does the boy in the hole. He shakes his head, and so does the boy in the hole.
He cannot stay here.
In his bedroom he packs the things he will need: his bag of marbles, the silk map, the ten-thousand-mark note that may still be worth something, the wristwatch that Papa sent him with the backwards N and the backwards R engraved on the reverse. He is no coward, no Polish dog. He thinks of the Führer, who has chosen to stay in Berlin to defend Germany to the last, and the Führer is Germany and Germany is the Führer. There is only one way to save ourselves, and that is through bravery at all times. That will in the end result not only in laurel wreaths, but also in victory. We wipe the blood from our eyes and look directly and without fear at the enemy. Their seductive phrases find only deaf ears with us. Our salvation is in weapons.
If Erich were in Berlin instead of here, which is nowhere and nothing, he would be issued a weapon and ordered to fight, no matter his real age, and when the enemy came Erich would push him back street by street, and he would take on tanks single-handed and blast them to pieces no bigger than coins, and bring down aeroplanes too, snatching them clean out of the sky, and the Führer would decorate him and call him his Winnetou, his Indian brave, his blood brother.
He waits until Mama has left for the market and then he packs some apples, a piece of sausage and a small jar of milk in his bag. He goes to the stable and says a quiet goodbye to Ronja, who pushes her head into his neck and sighs a warm sigh. And then, on Mama’s pillow, which still smells like her, he leaves a piece of paper. I think it must be a letter, but I don’t know what it says; I don’t know what a boy who is leaving his mother would write to her.
April 1945
Berlin
Someone who looks like Herr Metzger is standing over her, saying her name, helping her to her feet and leading her away from the crumpled building. You’re all right, he keeps repeating, you’re all right, but Sieglinde does not know whether to believe him, this man in the shape of their neighbour: he is white from head to foot, even his hair, even his mouth. And then she glances down at herself, at her own arms and legs, and they are white too, and there is a row of white figures laid out on the pavement, though it’s not a pavement any more, and other figures are being pulled from the rubble. The fork will prick, the broom will scratch, the chil
d will choke, the mother crack. Don’t look, Herr Metzger is saying, don’t look, but she has looked already, she has seen them already lying broken beside the broken building – Mutti, Vati, Jürgen and Kurt, she has seen them laid out and she knows they are dead, all four of them. Herr Metzger holds her tight against the black woollen coat that he keeps in camphor to repel the moths, though it is white now too, and again he says that Sieglinde mustn’t look, and Sieglinde agrees she will not look, because Herr Metzger has told her not to and it is wrong to disobey.
‘Come and sit over here for a moment,’ he says, leading her to the kerb that is painted white so people will not trip and hurt themselves. ‘We’ll try to find you a blanket. Wait here like a good girl. Everything is fine.’
So Sieglinde sits where she is told, her back to the broken building, and she spies a book lying open on its spine, its pages turning and turning as if the smoke is thumbing through them, looking for a place it has lost, and she knows that it is Mutti’s ledger, and she tucks it into her jumper and looks for other things she might recognise. She sees shoes without tongues, lamps without shades, clocks without hands; she sees ripped-open sofas, their stuffing burst from gashed velour, and patterned stove tiles scattered like one of her jigsaws tipped from the box before she has picked out the corner pieces and the edge pieces, when it seems impossible it will ever look like the picture, and she sees part of a fox fur that might be Mutti’s, its satin belly torn, its mouth stopped with brick dust, the rest of it buried in the rubble, and she sees a broken Volksempfänger with a smashed dial and a bent needle, and it looks like their Volksempfänger, but everybody has one, after all, so that the Führer can be in everybody’s living room at once, and therefore Sieglinde is not sure if this Volksempfänger is theirs, and she does not think it would have the Führer’s voice inside it now anyway, which is terrible and makes her want to cry, because he would know what to do, and when she turns it over she is right: it’s quite empty. And amongst the disorder she does see things she knows – parts of things, from other apartments in the building, although when she looks again she sees that they are not things, or rather, until the bomb hit the building they were not things but people, neighbours, and Sieglinde looks away from these things just as Herr Metzger told her to do.
The Wish Child Page 19