The Wish Child

by Catherine Chidgey

  Somewhere nearby, a wall collapses.

  ‘How long until they’re here, do you think?’ says Erich.

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘How far away is the Führerbunker?’

  ‘A few blocks.’

  Outside on the pavement a dozen people are cutting meat from a dead horse and a dozen more are hovering about it, zooming into any gap that opens in the swarm. With its muddy eye the animal stares up at a buckled air-raid shelter arrow that points nowhere. Volkssturm men and boys are digging trenches in the road; only their heads are visible, and their shovels full of dirt. A woman wanders past pushing a corpse on a wheelbarrow.

  ‘It’s not far,’ says Sieglinde, though as she looks around and tries to get her bearings she is not quite sure which direction they should take. She and Erich clamber past the piles of broken bricks and the abandoned vehicles with their smashed windows and their bullet-riddled bodies. Flames still flicker in some of the black ruins and every now and then a crash shudders through the air as masonry falls.

  They make their way north, to where they can still see the Siegessäule rising up through the haze. On Charlottenburger Chaussee, as they near the Brandenburg Gate, Erich points to a blurry mass a block or two away. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ says Sieglinde, trying to peer through the wraiths of dust and smoke.

  And is that the Reichskanzlei, that grey blur? There is a stench in the air that nobody wishes to name, and Victory’s stone horses are gouged and cracked, and Victory is crowning the ruins with laurel though she is no more than a smudge, and all the linden trees are stumps.

  An armoured truck slows down as it passes and a Wehrmacht soldier calls out to them. ‘What are you doing here? Go home. It isn’t safe.’ He is dirty and unshaven and his arm is bandaged.

  ‘Is that the Reichskanzlei?’ says Sieglinde. ‘We wanted to ask if the Führer is inviting any more children. He gives them marzipan to eat.’

  ‘The Führer?’ says the soldier. ‘Didn’t you hear the broadcast?’

  But no, we didn’t hear; almost nobody heard. Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony: music for the dead. Our Führer has fallen, fighting to his last breath for Germany; at the end of his struggle he met a hero’s death. I cannot forsake the city that is the capital of this Reich. Thus I salute the fortress, safe from fear and dread.

  Hand in hand we return to the theatre and shut ourselves in, sliding the broomstick through the door handles. The great painted half-sun is rising above the stage, or else it is setting. The night sky hangs at half-mast, too high to correct. Can it be true? Can the Führer really have fallen? That evening we feel the air shifting above us, lifting the corners of our covers, ruffling our hair. We blink and blink again, trying to dispel the afterimages of our own eyes – black moons, black suns. Yes, there is something moving back and forth above our beds; a dark wing drifting through the dark air, brushing our cheeks.

  ‘Siggi,’ we whisper.

  ‘Erich,’ we whisper.

  And our eyes adjust and we realise it is not a wing but a palm frond. The camel bows down to us, lowering its gaze, waiting. Erich grasps the skin behind the animal’s neck – warm and thick, a picnic blanket at the end of a day at the beach – and he pulls himself up just like Old Shatterhand, just like Kara Ben Nemsi, and then he helps Sieglinde aboard. To our left and our right the hieroglyph birds are shaking themselves free of their pillars and taking flight, and the hieroglyph eyes are blinking, blinking. The camel raises itself up on its beanstalk legs, up and up, until Erich thinks he might touch the stars, and then it begins to move, swaying along the sandy floor, pausing at the date palms so that Sieglinde can reach into their rustling hearts and pick the ripening fruit, and pausing again at a pond so she can choose a white lotus bloom to tuck behind her ear. On it sways, with the rhythm of a cradle, the theatre opening out ahead of us into a rippled desert. Our slaves crouch before us in rows, their foreheads pressed to the sand, awaiting their orders, and all the black birds are dissolving into the black sky. Erich forgets his mother and his father, and his other secret name. There are only the stars and the moon now, and Sieglinde at his back, and the soft dunes rising around us like dreams.

  *

  FRAU MÜLLER: Is it true?

  FRAU MILLER: Can it be true?

  FRAU MÜLLER: They say he was leading a charge against the Ivans.

  FRAU MILLER: They say he died with his hand on his heart.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Where is he now?

  FRAU MILLER: Where have they taken him?

  FRAU MÜLLER: They have picked his bones.

  FRAU MILLER: They have laid out his jaw in a box.

  *

  Something is emerging from the smoke: a cow heavy with milk, a line of horses and shaggy ponies pulling carts of hay and oats, a rooster that crows at the red sky though it is well past dawn. And then the Russian soldiers come with their grimy faces, their quilted jackets, their disintegrating boots, women as well as men, cocking their rifles as they pass. Up their arms they stack their stolen watches, four apiece, six apiece, on Moscow time and Berlin time. They set up their field kitchens, unload their rockets. They call them their Katyushas, like the sweetheart in the song who walks by the misty river. We make way for them at the water pumps, let them track manure through our homes; we give them our bicycles, our beds, and we hope they will not find the daughters we hide under piles of rags, the daughters we shut in cupboards and conceal inside walls. For whom should we fight now? There is no coming man. We have torn up the photographs of our sons and our husbands in their proud uniforms. We have unpinned our lapels, unhung our portraits; we have burned our books. And I am not sorry.

  *

  ‘Vati would enjoy this,’ says Sieglinde, twirling a new disc of paper. It shows a bare tree on one side and a cloud of green leaves on the other.

  ‘Does he like trees?’ says Erich.

  ‘He likes making things with paper. He cuts out silhouette pictures.’

  ‘Of people?’

  ‘Of places.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In Berlin, because of his essential job.’

  ‘He’s here?’

  Sieglinde rolls the threads back and forth; the tree is green and the tree is bare. Outside the rockets are taking wing, sounding their thin, high cries. She opens her ledger and shakes a handful of words into her lap: defeat, freedom, Mendelssohn, surrender.

  ‘Where did you find those?’ says Erich.

  ‘They’re Vati’s job.’

  ‘Why do you have them, then?’

  ‘I’m looking after them while he’s away.’

  ‘Isn’t he in Berlin?’

  ‘He had to go away, for his essential job. He’ll be back soon.’

  Erich knows this is untrue; he knows that her father is gone, just as his own father is gone, just as Onkel Gerhard and Great-Onkel Gustav and the airman in the barley field are gone. But he nods and listens as she talks on, as she invents her father the way all children invent their parents, the way the present invents the past, overlays it with visions of the things we have lost. The tree is bare, the tree is green.

  I see the news spreading, snaking down the line at the water pump. Erich and Sieglinde don’t wait to fill their buckets; like everyone else, they run for the abandoned shop. By the time they get there it is already teeming with people helping themselves to the supplies: tins of meat and fish and condensed milk, packets of rice and barley, cubes of gravy, jars of jam, sauerkraut and pickles. Two women are squabbling over a bag of semolina, digging in their fingernails until it bursts. Erich hesitates at the door but Sieglinde pushes him into the throng and they grab as much as they can, packing it into their water buckets and their stretched-out jumpers. They would like to eat it all on the way home; to sit down in the ruins – anywhere would do – and pour peas and sauerkraut and jam into their mouths, stop the clenching in their stomachs. They wouldn’t even need to sit down, they say to each other; they could e
at while they were walking, never mind bad manners. They could wolf down half a dozen tins of meat each, suck at rolled oats and condensed milk until it turned to porridge. Dip cabbage stalks in sugar and swallow them whole. Bite into onions as if they were apples.

  By the time they have finished talking about how they could eat the food they are back at the theatre, and they store it in the dressing room, hiding it at the bottom of the wardrobe.

  ‘Shouldn’t we have paid?’ says Erich.

  Sieglinde laughs. ‘Did you see a shopkeeper? And besides, we don’t have any money.’

  ‘I have ten thousand marks,’ he says, and shows her the banknote his father gave him, turning it sideways and pointing out the ghoulish figure hidden in the picture, feeding at the farmer’s throat.

  ‘Is it real?’ she says.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Erich. ‘Not any more.’ Sieglinde pulls two chairs up to the table that runs along the wall of mirrors and spreads out the embroidered cloak, smoothing it flat as if it is Mutti’s best white damask, as if it is a normal Sunday afternoon and they are preparing for a visit from Tante Hannelore. Mutti always uses a damask tablecloth on these occasions, and the little green demitasse coffee cups edged in gold with the handles you can fit just one finger through. Where are they now? Where is the tablecloth with its white-on-white chrysanthemums, and where is the dining table beneath it, and the carpet beneath the table, and the parquet beneath the carpet? What happens to all the broken things? Are they buried? Burned? Sieglinde thinks of the coffee cups and their special spot in the sideboard. She pictures herself reaching out to unlock the upper door, turning the little key, hearing the click as the snib releases. Then comes the waxy smell of the inside of the cupboard, and the shimmer of the cherrywood, a little deeper in colour than on the outside. The coffee cups are lined up on their shelf, each facing the same way, each sitting on its matching saucer. In a moment she will lift them down for Mutti, in a moment she will place them on the white damask cloth, in a moment Tante Hannelore will knock at the door and hand Mutti a box from the bakery, a white box tied with red ribbon and containing a nicer cake than the one Mutti has made. And Sieglinde must be careful with the cups, they are very old and precious and impossible to replace, and they will be hers one day. Every week Mutti counts them, ticking them off in her ledger, and that is the only place Sieglinde can find them now, unbroken, unlost, and that is the only place she can find the parquet and the carpet and the table and the damask, each one accounted for many times over in Mutti’s black ink.

  ‘Here,’ says Erich, handing her a can of condensed milk. He has stabbed it open with his pocket knife and they take turns drinking from it; long, sweet sips. He grins at her in the mirror and she loves him then, this boy who came from nowhere, his hair papery pale in the low light, one eye tooth twisted a little sideways, a freckle like a comma on his temple. They do not see me but I am there too, drifting between themselves and their reflections, waiting for my turn.

  They sleep soundly that night, and when Erich goes to fetch water the next morning the streets are quiet. He passes a man digging a grave in the blackened front yard of an apartment block; next to him a woman’s body lies on a handcart, stiff, livid. The scent of lilacs is in the air, and every now and then Erich can make out birdsong. There are no rockets, no bursts of gunfire, no tanks churning their way through the rubble.

  ‘It’s over,’ says a woman at the pump. ‘We’ve surrendered.’ She heard the news from her neighbour, who heard it from her sister, whose lodger has a crystal set. And is it true, this news? Is it to be trusted? All over the city the queues of women are talking, and so are the hidden daughters, and so are the boys with the helmets that cover their eyes. Pst, says the shadowman from the pitted walls, but there are no more secrets to keep. White bedsheets hang from windows.

  When Erich returns to the theatre he calls to Sieglinde but she does not answer. It feels even quieter than when he left that morning; different somehow. As he descends the staircase he notices that the double doors are open and the broomstick is snapped, and he can see the golden sphinxes flanking the stage, and the hieroglyphs painted on the thick white columns: birds, eyes, jackals.

  ‘Sieglinde?’ he calls. ‘Sieglinde?’ Something makes him lower his voice to a normal pitch, and when he says her name again he cannot shake the feeling that he is talking to himself. ‘Siggi?’ The sphinxes watch him, and the sun reaches its painted rays across the ceiling, and why are the doors open? And then he hears it: a whimpering coming from the stage, the kind of noise the farm dogs make when they tread on nettles, and he sees something on the stage and his heart stops ticking and the theatre is so silent; he climbs onto the stage and behind him the doors are open and he hears the whimper; he comes down the stairs and into the theatre and hears something and sees something and everything falls silent except for what he hears coming from the stage, and he can see something there, something that makes his heart stop ticking. You must not enfold the night in you.

  He finds her caught up in the folds of the curtain, the fabric half torn from its hooks and crushed about the footlights, red velvet spreading around her. In the curtain he finds her, half torn, red spreading and crushed, her hair stuck to her face, clogged with blood and half torn, her bed mussed and her mouth spreading red, you must not enfold the night in you, fabric ripped from her and crushed about the footlights. She holds her black leather pumps in her lap and skeins of hair spill from them, they are too big for her, the black shoes, but she will grow into them, and when Erich lifts the curtain he sees blood on her thighs, and over her lap she holds the shoes, blood and glass, her bed mussed, and the neck of a bottle jutting from between her legs, from beneath her shoes held over her lap, the blood and the glass on her thighs and the bottle jutting, its edges barbed and keen, the glass teeth of a glass beast, and you must not enfold the night in you.

  She recoils at his touch. Tears run from the corners of her eyes and across her temples and mix with the blood in her hair, clotted with red and spreading, and he can think of no words to say to her apart from her name, but his mouth forms sounds he does not know, or does not remember knowing, and they are soothing sounds although they have no meaning, and he speaks these to her, teraz jesteś bezpieczna, jestem tutaj, and eventually she stops crying.

  ‘Siggi,’ he says. ‘It’s Erich, your Erich, I’m back.’

  She answers him but he does not know what she says – has he lost all his words, can he no longer understand plain German? – jestem tutaj, jestem tutaj – and he puts his ear close to her ragged mouth. ‘Out,’ she says. ‘Take it out. Take it out.’ The bottle barbed and keen, the glass beast, the glass teeth.

  Did I see what happened to Erich’s Sieglinde, to our Sieglinde? Did I see who did this? Yes. I watched from the wings. I felt the kicks against the double doors, the tearing of the broomstick as they forced their way inside. I heard the boots descending the stairs – ten men, more? – and I heard their stumbling voices, saw the bottle flashing in the gloom, full when they arrived, drained as it passed from mouth to wet mouth. And I saw the wristwatches buckled about their thick sleeves, a dozen to every man, the radium aglow, sick moonlight, every one of them telling the wrong time. And I felt the kicks against her body, and the tearing of her skin as they forced their way inside. And after they each took their turn with her I admit that for a moment I wished that Erich would never return, that he would just go home to his mother and leave all this behind, unseen, unreal. But the sound of breaking glass jolted me back to Sieglinde: Siggi lying broken on the stage, far too convincing, a drowned Kristina Söderbaum pulled from the water in the final act. They broke the bottle’s neck and forced it in, blunt end first, because they were not animals, not like their comrades who were bedding down with grandmothers and invalids, so they’d heard.

  Erich takes the hem of the stage curtain and folds it over the bottle’s splintered edge, then begins to ease the piece of glass from Sieglinde. On the farm he has witnessed the births
of many creatures, including a few who never should have entered the world, nor even drawn breath – a two-headed lamb; a goat with its heart on the outside – and he has seen his father reach into a weakening cow, fasten a rope around the feet of her breech calf and draw the tangled animal from its mother. So this – yes, Erich can do this, he can undo this, he can make it right. He shakes his head to clear his thoughts. Sieglinde is quiet now, and utterly still. How long does it take? Neither child knows. Time is no more than a prize to be plundered, another spoil for the victors to snatch. For a moment Erich stares at the glassy broken thing already cooling in his hands, then flings it as far away as he can: let it smash against the painted pyramids, sink into the sand. He helps Sieglinde to sit up. The costumes on her bed are covered in blood; it looks black in the gloom. He tears off a piece of the velvet curtain and wraps it around her shoulders, then finds her fox fur and drapes it around her neck. She starts to shiver and will not stop. The fox’s paws scramble at the air.

  ‘Do you know the way to your aunt’s house?’ says Erich.

  She nods, teeth chattering. ‘It’s in Dahlem. But the roads are blocked. I tried to go there before, when my house … when it …’

  ‘It’s different now,’ says Erich. ‘Do you think you can walk?’

  ‘I … I …’

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Wait here a moment – I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  ‘No,’ she says, grabbing his arm.

  ‘We need a way of getting to your aunt’s. I’m sorry. I won’t be long, I promise.’

  He takes three jars of pickled vegetables and a packet of gravy cubes from the hoard in the wardrobe, as well as a bag of lentils; he and Sieglinde tried to eat them uncooked one night when there was nothing else, chewing away at the hard little pellets until they agreed it was like eating stones. He pulls out the two spare torch batteries hidden inside the bag, then sets off for the apartment building where he saw the man digging the grave. The man is still there, shovelling soil back into the hole now, and the cart is empty save for a dirty headscarf.