The Wish Child

by Catherine Chidgey

  ‘Excuse me,’ says Erich, but the man keeps shovelling. ‘Excuse me,’ he says again. ‘The cart – is it yours? Can I buy it off you?’ He opens his rucksack and takes out a jar of vegetables, the lentils and the gravy cubes.

  ‘One jar?’ says the man. ‘Are you crazy, or what?’

  ‘And some lentils and gravy cubes,’ says Erich.

  The man prods Erich’s rucksack with his foot. ‘What else do we have?’ Before Erich can answer he is rummaging inside the bag, pulling out the other jars. ‘That’s more like it,’ he says, twisting off a lid and fishing out a carrot. Erich bumps the cart down the flight of steps outside the theatre – he can’t risk leaving it unattended on the street – and then climbs through the smashed window. Inside, he props the double doors open to let in the light and hurries down the stairs, but even before he reaches the stage he can tell that Sieglinde has gone. She is not in her bed at the rear of the stage, either – and the ledger is missing. He searches the wings and the dressing room, checking inside the wardrobe, between the racks of costumes, calling her name. Back in the theatre he looks behind the columns covered in hieroglyphs and behind the golden sphinxes; one of them has been kicked in around the base, and he can see that it’s hollow inside, made only of plaster and wire. He walks down the central aisle, shining the torch along each row of seats – and there he finds her, crouched on the floor beneath the torn piece of curtain, no longer shivering, all too still. She is holding the ledger close. Hooking her arms around his neck, he half-carries, half-drags her up the stairs and then pulls her through the smashed window. Her eyes are flickering open and shut and her cheeks are cool and white, as white as the belly of the fish he once kept in the bathtub at home. He leans her against the building’s flayed wall while he heaves the handcart back up the steps and pauses to line it with his overcoat. For a moment the taste of the carp returns to him, and the smell of the beeswax candles burning in the branches of the Christmas tree, and Mama with her shining hair pinned about her head like a crown. He looks up and down the broken street: word of the surrender has spread, and people are emerging from their hiding places, climbing from their tunnels and their tombs, pushing their way to the surface to find out what is left. The dust and the smoke eddy in the dirty air and nobody can see very far ahead. Erich catches sight of a woman who looks like Mama, and he knows he must ask her for help; he is so tired, and he cannot lift Sieglinde on his own, Siggi who is so pale and still, her hair hard with blood. And the woman is turning towards him, and he is lifting his hand to her, waving her over, and now that she is approaching he sees that she is nothing like Mama, even though she wears a dress like Mama’s and shoes like Mama’s and a headscarf like hers too, and he wonders why for a moment he wanted to run to her and put his arms around her, this wrong mother.

  Together they carry Sieglinde up the steps and place her in the handcart. Erich covers her with the piece of velvet curtain and the fox fur.

  ‘Which way is Dahlem?’ he asks, and the woman points down the street in the same direction as the plundered shop.

  ‘I don’t know how bad it is there,’ she says, leaning over Sieglinde and clicking her tongue. ‘It’s a disgrace, what he’s done to us. A disgrace.’

  Erich runs back inside the theatre and fills his rucksack with the remaining food. Then he sets off, trying not to jolt the cart too much, every few moments asking, ‘Is this right? Is this the way?’

  Sieglinde murmurs, gives the smallest of nods.

  Now and then a smattering of gunfire can still be heard, but already the neighbourhood is busy with women putting things to rights: look at them shaking the dust from carpets and quilts, sweeping entranceways, clearing paths. How else are they to pass the time? One or two men have emerged too, but they don’t seem to know what to do with themselves; they linger in the shadows, awaiting their instructions, silver in their hair, gold in their mouths and lead in their bones. Tell me, who shall play the captain? On the corner a group of Russians is setting up a field kitchen and preparing to dole out soup in tin mugs.

  Sieglinde turns onto her side, watching the gutted buildings, the mountains of rubble pass by. Rows of soldiers clutter the kerbs, dirty and unshaven. Where have the streets gone? It’s far from clear. But isn’t that Mutti and Vati and the boys up ahead in the smoke, making their way along Kantstrasse – is it Kantstrasse? – and heading for the train that will take them to the Wannsee? A swim on a hot afternoon! Mutti will have packed a flask of coffee and a bottle of milk, some pears, buttered bread, some of her Apfeltaschen, and perhaps some boiled eggs, which Sieglinde and Jürgen will crack on each other’s heads when Vati isn’t looking. What else? The red bucket and spade for Kurt, and the picnic rug, and their swimming things, of course; a comb, so that everyone can be tidied up before they return home, and for Mutti herself the latest issue of Filmwelt, and the bottle of sun oil, and the wide-brimmed straw hat that casts forest light on her face. Vati will remind everyone of the dangers of speaking too loudly in open spaces such as the beach, where rumours can take off, skipping across the water, impossible to keep in check. Once he has changed into his swimming costume he will stand on the shoreline for a moment, hands on his hips, then wade out into the water and dive underneath. And look, he has disappeared, and Sieglinde wonders where he has gone; she can see no ripples, no kicks, no bubbles breaking the surface – but a few moments later there he is, quite some distance away, his hair dark and different, a different Vati. It is strange to see so much of him. His arms are bare, and his legs, too, thinner than you would expect, the ankles and knees showing their bones. And on the sand his watch still ticking, flaring in the sun, too bright to look at. Jürgen goes searching for stones that are the right shape and size, and who knows where they go when he flicks them across the water? No telling, no telling. He will ask Sieglinde to bury him in the sand up to his neck, but it will only make him cry, and she will have to dig him out again straight away.

  Mutti is wearing her sailboat skirt and sits in a wicker beach chair, flicking through her Filmwelt, studying the photographs of Zarah Leander and Marika Rökk. She shakes sand from the spine of her magazine, frowning.

  But it’s so cool in the water! It makes you forget the heat, the acrid streets, the city caught in your throat. The cut of the fallen glass. Do Jürgen and Vati push her head under the water and hold her down a little too long? Do they call her names? Do they wind her up in a towel and leave her there, knotted and wet? Does the sun beat her until everything hurts?

  No. No. She is sitting in a wicker beach chair with Kurt, digging her toes into the sand, pushing hot heaps of it from side to side; she is taking it in her fist and feeling its shifting form. The shape of nothing. You were rock once, she thinks. Her hair is drying in the sun, and when she unbraids it at home it will ripple and curl, but the curl never lasts; it slowly calms and smoothes, and by morning she is Siggi again.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Erich each time they hit a bump. ‘Sorry, I’m sorry.’

  No, they are not on Kantstrasse, never were on Kantstrasse. Just ahead her smoke family rises and darkens, figures of ash that hold their form for a moment, then crumble even as she reaches for them. And on Erich pushes her, through the crumbling ash, and it is nothing after all. Fine sand, falling.

  ‘Where are we now?’ says Erich.

  It might be Winterfeldtplatz, but Sieglinde cannot be sure; nothing looks quite right. She and Mutti and Tante Hannelore were forced to wait there for quite some time one morning while thieves and murderers were loaded onto the backs of trucks. It was snowing that day, an early winter, and the flakes sprinkled the cobblestones like powdered sugar, gathering about the roots of the dormant trees, clinging to the dark fragrant tips of the potted firs that guarded the grand doorways. Now white ashes cover the ground, this winter’s field, and smoke rises from the ruins, warm breaths spreading into the sooty air. All the trees stand raw and limbless. Nothing grows. If I now close heart and mouth, which to the stars do love to cry, still in my heart
’s depths gently sound the washing waves, low and mild.

  ‘It is like the moon,’ she hears a woman say. Who can tell her age? A dirty scarf covers her hair and ashes streak her face, and look, there is another woman with ashes on her face, and there a third, dabbing her face with ashes. Dab, dab. Across the brow, the temples, across the nose and the cheeks, the chin and even the eyelids.

  This is nothing like the moon, thinks Sieglinde. The moon would be clean and quiet and empty; a clear place, a new world. She would float in its cool light, clean and quiet and empty, she would be light, as light as nothing, the moon would be nothing at all. But nobody has seen the moon for such a long time, and perhaps, above the ashes and the smoke, it has rolled away from Berlin, a dropped coin, and when the skies clear it will have vanished, and people will wonder what they have done to deserve such darkness, and how they can restore the lost moon.

  ‘This way?’ says Erich. ‘This way?’

  Sieglinde nods, and they pass a sign that might say Barbarossaplatz, and a sign that might say Kaiserplatz, though she cannot be sure. She rubs her cheek against the fox’s sleek head. It warms to her touch, blinking its polished-pebble eyes, and begins to speak. A long time ago, it says, I could feel dew on the pads of my paws and the soft fur of my belly. At night the moon turned the forest to silver, and I watched the trees cast their silver shadows and heard the night birds sound their silver songs. The hens fell silent as I passed their flimsy coops, my shadow vast and spreading, my coat growing lustrous with blood. Now these eyes are not my eyes and I am split open, my heart removed.

  It’s all right, she says, everything is all right. Here is Tante Hannelore’s house, here are the stone children holding up the sky.

  Erich does not need to knock; the front door is wide open. The entranceway smells of urine and faeces, and a woman is kneeling, scrubbing at the tiled floor with a damp rag. She startles when Erich speaks.

  ‘Frau Schirmer?’ he says. ‘Are you Sieglinde’s aunt?’

  ‘Who are you?’ she says.

  ‘I’m Erich Kröning – I’ve brought Sieglinde. She’s been hurt.’

  The woman peers through the door at the handcart. ‘You’d better come in,’ she says. ‘I’m Frau Hummel.’

  But where is Tante Hannelore? Who is this woman, this Frau Hummel, showing us into Tante Hannelore’s apartment? Why is she beckoning to Erich to follow her past empty rooms and into the kitchen, where a bundle of nettles sits in the sink, and why is she bending to whisper into his ear?

  ‘Frau Schirmer took cyanide,’ she says.

  ‘What do you mean?’ says Erich. ‘Is she all right?’

  The woman straightens, eyes him for a moment. ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘Well, she poisoned herself,’ says the woman. ‘It’s quite the fashion. We buried her in the yard last week.’

  Sieglinde simply nods at the news. ‘I lost her jewellery,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how to tell her.’

  Frau Hummel unwraps her from the velvet and fur and checks her injuries, sponging her as clean as she can with a handkerchief dipped in water, combing the dried blood from her hair. ‘How many were there?’ she asks Erich, and then, when he doesn’t answer, ‘How many men?’

  ‘I didn’t see,’ he says, looking at the floor. ‘I wasn’t there.’

  The apartment is almost bare; a dining chair lies in pieces next to the tiled stove, and two of the four bedrooms are empty of furniture, their mattresses rolled up and standing on end. Frau Hummel and Erich help Sieglinde to her feet and put her to bed in her cousin’s old room, which is now occupied by Herr Fromm.

  ‘And where am I to sleep?’ he says. ‘What about my bad shoulder?’

  ‘You and your shoulder can sleep on the floor. Honestly,’ Frau Hummel says to Erich, ‘they’re quite useless. Do you live far?’

  ‘Near Leipzig,’ he says.

  ‘Leipzig! What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to fight for the Führer.’

  ‘And what does your mama think about that?’

  ‘I lost her.’

  Frau Hummel nods. ‘You can have the other room,’ she says. She unrolls the mattress for him, raising flurries of dust motes and soot. There is no glass in the windows, and Erich can see out to the treeless courtyard that is filled with rubble.

  ‘There’s my apartment,’ says Frau Hummel, pointing to a mound of bricks topped with a broken bath. ‘Herr Fromm and I were both on the second floor –’ She waves an airy hand at the ceiling. ‘Well. Nobody owns anything now. And everybody owns everything. Isn’t that the way they want it?’

  The septicaemia takes hold of Sieglinde the third night, dirtying her blood, running through each part of her before returning to her heart. She asks for Mutti and Vati.

  ‘We’re here, we’re here,’ say Frau Hummel and Herr Fromm.

  I sit at her side; I see the glint of glass that lights her dreams, and the vase in the shape of a hand that points with its broken fingers from beneath the rubble. We dig it free, we wipe it clean and we return it to Mutti’s dressing table, placing it at the centre of the crocheted mat Mutti made before she was married; a little net hooked in white silk. I take the bone-smooth fingers in my own, as if to introduce myself, but it knows me already: the china hand draws me close, and I feel the cold spreading from its fingers to mine, passing through my wrist-bones and travelling up my arm. This is how you die from a snake-bite or a bee-sting, I think. This is how you die from poison. The hand holds me fast, as fast as Mutti’s hand when she and Siggi cross the tramlines or alight from a crowded train, and sometimes Mutti walks too quickly and Sieglinde can hardly keep up, and she feels her feet might leave the ground and then she will not know where she is, and it is the same feeling now; I feel the urgent drag of the hand, there is somewhere we need to go, and we are diving into the tight-knotted centre of the lace mat, following the hand into the white loops that close above us like sea foam. This is how you fall in love, I think.

  By morning the sheets are drenched and Sieglinde is clammy to the touch, now hot, now cold. Frau Hummel taps her cheek, her hand, but she does not respond.

  ‘Go next door and ask for Frau Blaschke,’ she says. ‘Tell her to come quickly.’

  ‘Is she a doctor?’ says Erich.

  ‘Her husband was.’

  Another substitute, another shadow.

  Frau Blaschke says Sieglinde needs penicillin; she gives us her last two ampoules, but there are no more to be had. All we can do is keep her cool when she’s feverish and warm when she’s cold and hope that the poison works its way out.

  ‘Is she bleeding already?’ she asks.

  ‘Well?’ says Frau Hummel. ‘Is she bleeding already?’

  Both women are looking at Erich.

  ‘I … she was, she did bleed, but it’s stopped now,’ he says.

  ‘I mean her monthly blood,’ says Frau Blaschke.

  ‘Monthly blood?’

  ‘Never mind.’ To Frau Hummel she says, ‘Get her checked in a few weeks. Yourself too. There’s a woman in Steglitz.’

  We sit with her day and night; even Herr Fromm takes his turn. We sponge her face, brush her hair and tell her she must not leave us; so many have left already, and we cannot lose one more. When the Russians come to the flat they peer in at her and we say typhus and we say diphtheria, which are words we know they know, and we drag our fingers across our throats, and they do not stay.

  The first thing Sieglinde asks for is her ledger. She runs her finger down the columns, reminding herself of the items they describe, resurrecting home. She fills the bare bedroom with the ghosts of vases, clocks, scissors, shoes, and when she reaches the empty section at the back, where she has stored her father’s excised words, she moves the little scraps of paper around the page, trying to make sense of them, trying to put them into some kind of order. What had Vati said that final night, just before the siren sounded, when she opened the King Frederick cake tin and showed him the words
inside? We’ll burn them. But she had pushed them into her pocket, and they had fallen with her when the building fell, and they were buried with her when she was buried, and dug up again when she was rescued, and she had forgotten all about them until she put her hand into her pocket at the theatre and there they were, deep in the crease of the seam, catching under her nails: love, sorrow, surrender, promise. She knows she should have rid herself of them, burnt them, as Vati said – and there have been so many opportunities; so many fires – but here they still are, toppled across her lap like tiny bricks. And she cannot disentangle the memory of the opening of the tin from the memory of the siren, and the look on Vati’s face, and the falling of the building, and it is as if she pushed those things deep into her pocket too, and carried them with her: the siren, and Vati’s fear, and the great plunge into black. She should not have kept the words; she should have returned them to Vati as soon as she found them lodged in his trouser-cuff, and he would have dealt with them, and everything would have been different. She remembers what he told her that day at the zoo, when she asked him about his work: I make things safe. I take dangerous things away, so they won’t be dangerous any more. Why had she run away the night the building fell? Why had she not stayed sitting on the whitewashed kerb, waiting for Herr Metzger to come and put a blanket around her shoulders? She can feel Kurt tugging at her hem, trying to get her attention. She shuts her eyes and she is back in the theatre, back on the stage, and the men are reaching for her with their arms full of time, and they are opening the bottle and drinking its colourless contents, and they make her drink it too, and it is fire inside her. And when she sleeps now she dreams glassy dreams that will not hold their shape; they splinter and fall and lie sharp-toothed beside her, taking up too much room.