The Wish Child

by Catherine Chidgey

  As his eyes adjust to the low light he sees a large mass to her left, crouched at the end of the stage.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ he whispers, ‘but I think there’s a wolf in here.’ He points to the animal; its flanks gleam in the glow of the torch and he begins to back away. But can’t wolves see in the dark? Can’t they scent their prey?

  The girl laughs and shines the torch on the beast: a golden sphinx gazing out to the rows of empty seats, and a second identical one at the other end of the stage. Columns decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphs soar up behind the sphinxes, as thick as oaks, and Erich can make out desert scenes painted on the walls: pyramids and camels and sand dunes, Bedouin tribes dressed all in white, oases ringed with slender palms. Directly above the stage a great gold half-sun sends its rays as high as the ceiling, and behind the girl the red velvet curtains ripple and shake with the force of the firing overhead, and they are dark trees in the wind, and Erich thinks of the forest behind the farm, the soft rippling pines. The girl takes the torch and runs down the aisle and up the carpeted stairs again, sliding a broomstick through the handles of the double doors. When she returns to the stage she steps into the wings and Erich hears a rolling sound. Slowly the curtains part, and in the shadows to the rear of the stage he sees a makeshift bed.

  ‘Do you live here?’ he says.

  ‘Just for now.’

  ‘Can I stay here too?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Do you want an apple?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Erich.’

  ‘I’m Sieglinde.’

  She takes him to a room filled with mirrors. The only source of light is a row of high, narrow windows set at pavement level; most of the glass is missing, and Erich can see soldiers’ boots walking past out of step, and women’s legs wearing men’s shoes. A jumble of music-stands takes up one corner, and a large wardrobe occupies another, its door hanging open to reveal lamé, sequins, feathers; the lair of some strange and glittering bird.

  ‘Do you have any more food?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know Berlin would be so, so …’ He looks away for a moment, then searches through his knapsack. ‘I have this,’ he says, handing her the jar of milk, and she does not wait to be invited; she unscrews the lid and drinks, and he watches almost half of the milk disappear. He has never seen such a hungry girl.

  ‘You finish it,’ she says, but he shakes his head. She pushes aside the clothes in the wardrobe and stores the jar at the very back, where Erich can see a box of sprouted potatoes and half a cabbage, a few jars of vegetables, a stump of bread. Every now and then a draught from the street pushes the smell of smoke inside and riffles through the racks of costumes and the piles of old programmes. Posters droop from the walls: Renée Debauga the Kaleidoscope Dancer, Mario Tombarell the Incredible Ape Man, Helly the World’s Youngest Equilibrist.

  ‘What do you think?’ says Sieglinde, holding up a shawl that tinkles with dozens of thin gold coins. ‘It’s not real money.’ She wraps it about her head, turban-style, and looks at her dim reflection for a moment.

  ‘Where are we?’ says Erich.

  ‘We are crossing the desert,’ she says. ‘We are on our way home. Our slaves are making the palace ready, unrolling the carpets, polishing the bells, filling the fountains with wine.’

  ‘Picking the dates from the date palms,’ he says.

  ‘Cooking the larks and the peacocks.’

  ‘How far away are we?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell in the desert.’ She hands him a cloak stitched with birds and eyes, and he ties it around his shoulders, and he is a pharaoh, a blue-eyed king, and he will live forever.

  On the stage she makes him a bed next to her own, fashioning a mattress from a pile of costumes. He spreads the embroidered cloak over the top, and his blanket from the train, and she draws the curtains closed and stands the torch on its end like a little lamp while they get into bed. From beneath her mattress she retrieves a large, marbled ledger and tucks it under her covers. The guns have stopped firing and in the quiet of the enclosed stage their voices come and go, as if their words are taking form in the dark air and gliding about them, looking for a place to roost. High above like a vast book hang a dozen different backdrops, a dozen different possibilities: ballrooms lit by chandeliers, castles overlooking snowy ravines, exotic marketplaces filled with spices and silks, bare washes of white and blue to suggest the shimmering distance. And beneath their beds are trapdoors; you can run your fingers along the cracks in the boards, feel the faint musty breeze from below – but they are latched shut, these secret doors, they are solid, they will not fall away without warning. Here in the ground Erich thinks of the bees, who are of the air, touching the earth only to gather water or to die.

  Sieglinde is shining the torch against the stage curtains and making shapes with her fingers: foxes and bears that tremble against the folds of cloth and do not hold.

  ‘We should save the batteries,’ says Erich.

  ‘There are others backstage. I hid them in a bag of lentils,’ she says. ‘And I don’t like the dark.’ But she switches the torch off.

  Erich can hear her turning over on her mattress of costumes, sighing, trying to get comfortable. Somewhere in the distance a clock strikes; he counts off the hours and can sense Sieglinde doing the same. Eleven. Forever until dawn.

  ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’ she says.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘My parents couldn’t have children.’

  ‘But they had you.’

  ‘They adopted me, from an orphanage in the Wartheland.’

  ‘Are you Polish? Can you say something in Polish?’

  ‘I’m German.’

  ‘What happened to your parents?’

  ‘I lost them,’ he says. ‘Mama on the farm, and Papa in Russia. They’re gone.’

  ‘No, your real parents.’

  ‘Oh. I suppose they’re dead.’

  ‘Do you know their names?’

  ‘No.’

  Her voice is becoming slow, drowsy. ‘Do you know your name?’

  ‘Erich Kröning, of course.’

  ‘But your other name,’ she says, yawning. ‘You would have had a different name before.’

  ‘I don’t know it,’ he says. ‘I don’t know any other name.’ He stares into the dark, up to the unseen backdrops. A river, a snowdrift, a mirrored hall – who is calling him? What is she saying? Yes, there is another name, a different name; he can feel the flicker of its wings, but it will not settle.

  ‘How many in your family?’ he asks.

  Sieglinde is silent for a moment. ‘I’m the eldest, and then there are two boys – Jürgen’s ten and Kurt’s five. Jürgen looks like me but with curly hair, and Tante Hannelore thinks Kurt looks just like Vati.’

  ‘Were they evacuated?’ says Erich.

  ‘No,’ says Sieglinde.

  ‘Oh.’

  She is silent again, and Erich wonders if she has fallen asleep. ‘Did you lose your family too?’ he whispers.

  She does not reply, but after a moment she says, ‘Do you know any stories?’

  He closes his eyes and thinks of his grandmother, of her soft lap, her mottled hands, her voice in his ear. ‘A long time ago, there was a castle in Saxony,’ he says. ‘A fortress. It had a murder hole and stumbling steps and marksmen who could fire arrows straight to the heart of any attacker – but it had another defence too. A secret inside its walls.’

  ‘Like a secret passage?’

  ‘No, a different sort of secret. When it was built, people thought that setting a child into the foundations would protect them, and so a boy was bought from a local mother. As the wall went up everyone heard him cry out I can still see you, Mama –’

  ‘Everyone heard him?’ says Sieglinde.

  ‘Yes, and then when the wall was finished and he was trapped inside he cried out again – I can’t see you now, Mama. The mother went m
ad and threw herself off a cliff, but they say her ghost came back, scratching at the castle walls, trying to find her son.’

  ‘It wasn’t a very secret secret,’ says Sieglinde. ‘Is the castle still standing?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Erich.

  ‘Hmm.’

  Some time later a noise wakes him. For a moment he does not know where he is, and the darkness is so total it makes no difference if his eyes are open or shut. The noise comes closer, a low drone, and he thinks he hears the voice of Luise’s hive speaking to him through her wooden mouth, and she is saying his name, Erich, Erich, wanting him to follow her into the forest where the wild berries grow – but no, it is not Luise, Opa Kröning’s first love; it is the girl from Berlin, the girl who saved him.

  ‘Are we safe here?’ he says.

  ‘As safe as anywhere,’ she says. ‘I always put the broomstick through the door handles.’

  That is not what he meant, but the noise is not the engine of a plane and it is not flak guns and bombs. It is pebbles at the bottom of a rushing river; it is glass marbles; it is beads in a baby’s rattle; it is bees humming in their hives.

  When Erich wakes again Sieglinde is making her bed.

  ‘What time is it?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know, but it must be early. No fighting yet.’ She slides the ledger underneath her mattress. ‘Come on,’ she says, pulling back his blankets. ‘We need to have breakfast, and then I need to find some shoes. Mine are worn through.’

  In the dressing room she breaks the last of the bread in half and spreads it with sauerkraut – more juice than sauerkraut, in truth, but it softens the bread enough that they can chew it. They share the remaining milk, and then they search the cupboards and shelves, rummaging through programmes, wigs, parasols, sheet music, boxes of makeup.

  ‘What about these?’ says Erich, holding up a pair of black patent-leather pumps.

  ‘Oh yes! They’re just like Tante Hannelore’s dancing shoes,’ says Sieglinde. ‘I’ll have to grow into them, though.’ She finds a pair of scissors in a sewing basket and trims a skein of hair from one of the wigs, packing it into the toes, adding a little more and a little more until the shoes fit.

  Erich is sitting at the long table that runs in front of the mirrors, cutting a circle of paper from a programme.

  ‘What’s that for?’ says Sieglinde.

  ‘You’ll see.’ He takes a pencil from his pocket and draws a pair of wings on the front of the circle, then a bee’s body, wingless, on the back. With a needle he pierces a hole on either side of the drawing and feeds a length of cotton through. ‘Watch,’ he says. He rolls the threads back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, and the picture flutters and flips, and the wings join to the wingless bee.

  ‘Like magic,’ says Sieglinde, clapping her hands.

  He draws more pictures for her, and when the fighting starts again they keep on playing, cutting out more circles, thinking of more pictures, forgetting they are hungry, until the table is covered with riderless horses and riders suspended in mid-air, empty cages and cageless birds, fishbowls and fish, beetles and jars.

  ‘Wait, I have an idea.’ Sieglinde cuts out a new disc of paper and writes ER on one side and ICH on the other. ‘Look,’ she says as the two words spin and combine.

  Er and ich, he and I; we turn and turn and for a moment we merge.

  *

  One afternoon, about a week later I think, though I cannot be sure, I follow them up the carpeted stairs to the swinging double doors. I wait as they pull the broomstick out of the door handles and then I go with them into the streets. We can hear the rifle fire and the thudding of the shells a few blocks away. We keep to the walls whenever we can, stealing along them like shadows, until we come to a long line of women. That’s where the food will be, says Sieglinde, and we join the end of the queue even though we cannot see its head. We do not remark on the bruise-coloured bodies piled like a barricade on the street corner. We look no further than the person in front of us. The air is gritty on our teeth and tongues and we cannot see the sky.

  ‘He’s gone to Argentina,’ a woman just in front of us is saying. ‘They smuggled him out in a U-boat.’

  ‘No, he’s in Bavaria, in the alpine fortress,’ says another.

  ‘I heard he’s on his way to the South Pole,’ says a third.

  ‘I heard Spain.’

  When the shelling reaches us we run for a burnt-out tram. Five or six of the queuing women are hit, perhaps seven, but we do not care, we do not look at them, we regroup in the correct order, we make sure we hold our place in the queue.

  Hitler Youth boys arrive and hand out pamphlets: Berliners! Hold fast. Wenck’s army is on the march. Just a few more days and Berlin will be free again. We know there is no army to speak of, just as there is no meat, no school, no water, no news, no power, no milk, no home, no hope, no sun, no sky. The Americans have not turned against the Russians and are not coming to our rescue, there are no wonder weapons, the ghost army will not save us, these boys will not save us, those ditches and these barricades and that Panzerfaust will not save us.

  ‘We’ll be lucky if there’s anything left,’ says the woman ahead of us, checking her watch. She turns and looks Sieglinde up and down. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘Rub your face with ashes,’ she says. ‘Tie a shawl over your hair. Tell them you have a disease. Paint sores on your skin.’

  When the woman reaches the head of the queue she is asked for her ration card.

  ‘I lost it in a raid,’ she says.

  ‘I can’t give you anything if you don’t have your card.’

  ‘But I lost it in a terror raid. It’s gone.’

  ‘Without the card there’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘Quite right,’ calls a voice from further back in the queue. ‘You should have brought your card. She should have brought her card.’

  ‘I don’t have a card,’ whispers Erich.

  ‘Neither do I,’ says Sieglinde.

  *

  We are lying on our beds in the dark theatre. Is it day or night? How long have we slept, and how much time is left? Listen: the tanks are crossing our flimsy barricades; the rockets are shooting by like comets, setting the sky on fire. I feel it haunting all my limbs: magnificent Walpurgis Night. Will the world break apart, will it bury us, will the castles and ravines and rivers fall all at once, a ballroom in the marketplace, snow in the mirrored hall? We pull back the stage curtains and the rows of seats crouch in the gloom. Bring on the juggler, the strongman, the conjurer; bring on the dancing bear.

  Erich moves the beam of the torch around the walls. ‘Is that a new crack?’ he says.

  ‘Perhaps it was always there,’ says Sieglinde. She is making her bed, tucking the ledger underneath it for safekeeping.

  ‘No, I think it’s new.’

  ‘The building’s stronger than it looks,’ she says, coming and sitting next to Erich on the edge of the stage. ‘Did you know, if you hold an egg longways between your thumb and finger, and press down as hard as you can, it won’t break?’

  ‘That doesn’t sound right,’ says Erich.

  ‘I know, but it’s true,’ says Sieglinde. ‘Vati showed me, when we still had eggs. It’s because of physics.’

  ‘What are physics?’

  ‘The laws that make the world work.’

  ‘Our hens have to lay sixty-five eggs each per year,’ says Erich. ‘That’s the law.’

  ‘What happens if they don’t?’

  ‘They’re punished, I suppose.’

  ‘Sent to the camps?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘We’re safe here,’ says Sieglinde.

  ‘Yes, we’re safe here,’ says Erich. He switches the torch off. ‘Have you ever met him? The Führer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He came to Leipzig once, for a parade. I saw him drive past in his black Mercedes. He didn’t look like the stamps.’

  ‘It mi
ght have been a double.’

  ‘A double?’

  ‘How do you think he does everything he does?’

  Erich turns in the direction of Sieglinde’s voice; he can just make out her shape, sitting to the right of him on the edge of the stage. ‘So I didn’t see him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps not.’

  A small amount of light is trickling down the stairwell now, picking out the gold-pawed sphinxes. They are pricking their ears, pressing their wings back against their haunches, waiting for an updraught.

  ‘How many doubles are there?’

  A boom sounds overhead, louder than thunder, and pieces of plaster patter down from the ceiling. The stage floor shakes. Look out! Look out! Another boom, closer this time. Sieglinde catches her breath.

  ‘I heard that he invites children to come and stay in the Führerbunker,’ says Erich. ‘He gives them marzipan to eat, and lots of vitamins to make them healthy, and they can hardly hear the fighting. It’s like being in a pyramid.’

  ‘How does he choose them, the children who get to eat the marzipan?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose he takes the ones who are very good, and always obey their parents.’

  ‘What about the bad children? What happens to them?’

  ‘They’re sent to the camps,’ says Erich. ‘They have to concentrate on what they’ve done and promise not to do it again.’

  ‘And if they don’t promise?’

  ‘They’re made into glue.’

  Sieglinde laughs. ‘Yes, glue!’

  ‘They end up holding wallpaper to walls.’

  ‘Sealing letters shut.’

  ‘Sticking stamps to envelopes.’

  The noise above grows louder; closer. There is a sudden rushing sound as one of the backdrops falls partway open and hangs high above the stage; a night sky, clear and deep and full of moonlight.

  ‘He’s going to fix everything,’ says Sieglinde. ‘After the war, he’s going to put it all back together. New trees in the Tiergarten and new animals in the zoo. He’ll mend all the houses, and he’ll build the Triumphal Arch, ten times as big as the one in Paris, and the Great Hall, which will have its own clouds.’

  For a moment I can see it too, this new place, all the pieces put back together. The Reichstag unburned, the Gedächtniskirche unbombed, all the little lakes in the Grunewald joined up again and turned back into the ancient river they once were: ships sail through the forest, winding through the beeches and the oaks, their masts as tall as trees.