The Wish Child

by Catherine Chidgey

  ‘We must put these things behind us,’ says Frau Hummel, sitting on the edge of the bed. ‘We must forget them.’ And she presents Sieglinde with a tin of herring she has been saving, mashing the fish with a fork and feeding it to her morsel by morsel. Sit up; dry your eyes. There is nobody waiting in the wings.

  *

  If Erich knew what the men looked like, he could try to find them. He could track them down like Winnetou, following their traces, stealing closer and closer until he snared them and brought them to justice – but Sieglinde says she does not remember their faces and does not remember what happened, and he knows better than to insist. And when he tries to imagine the scene all he sees is a page of holes, the core of the story gone.

  Persilscheine

  May 1945

  Berlin

  And so we turn the clock to zero. The fighting may be over but we’re still smothering the fires, stamping on the ashes. Every garden is a grave. We live with the lice and the rats; we are nowhere; we are nothing. There are no linden trees on Unter den Linden. We unpick the eagles and the swastikas, we weave our shoes of straw, stitch our shirts of nettles, sew the victors’ flags from the rags of our own. When the water supply is restored the Cossacks and Tatars kneel before our flushing toilets and wash themselves. Our skins are packed with dust that we can’t rinse away. We surrender our radios, give up our weapons, obey the curfew. We breathe in the smell of our ruin: wet bricks, rust, sodden plaster, charred wood. When the guns sound again we shudder for a moment, but it is only our conquerors rehearsing their parade. We report for work according to our names and we strip our factories bare of all the clever and marvellous things we have made, loading them piece by piece into wagons to be sent east, down to the very last bolt. Every garden is a grave, and every grave is too shallow.

  Slowly our daughters emerge, and the roses and jasmine bloom, and the lizards sun themselves in the wreckage, and songbirds return to the city, and every intact bell rings out, but not for us. I did not vote for him, and nor did they, and nor did you. Nobody speaks his name any more; he is the black sheep, the family disgrace, though we miss him, we miss him, and cannot say that we miss him – but we are discovering relatives we never knew we had: second-cousin Rachel, Great-Onkel Chaim. Glorious unwritten pages in our history, pages that never will be written. The cathedrals were tricks of the light. These days it is hard to keep clean, but out in the streets we begin to tidy up; we make chains of ourselves, passing the pieces of our homes from hand to hand, counting our blessings. We couldn’t leave even if we wanted to; there are no passenger trains and no petrol. But look, we say: the people in the rear flats have a view of the Ku’damm. Now that the war is over, let’s travel the whole of the German Reich. And what shall we do in the afternoon? We don’t know it yet, but the hunger year is coming: we will eat the leaves off the trees and we will eat grass, just like the animals they say we are. Our hands we clasp, our heads we sink.

  Erich and Sieglinde try to do their part, knocking the mortar off salvaged bricks alongside all the women; the Americans let them help as long as they don’t get in the way. They walk down roads that are ribbons of rubble; on some houses it reaches as high as the first floor and the front doors are buried shut. They launch themselves from rubble mountains, arms spread like wings, and hardly feel the jolt in their bones when they land. I watch them from blackened rooms, this rubble girl, this rubble boy; they have no tools but they pound brick against brick, pulling out the whole ones that can be used again, every so often catching sight of a mangled sleeve or a ripped shoe and looking away. What will happen to all the broken things that cannot be fixed? They will not be wasted; nothing is wasted. In a few years the Teufelsberg will rise up amongst the Grunewald trees. It might be scrap through and through, this devil’s mountain – broken bottles and twisted gates, smashed tiles and rusted springs, torn sleeves, torn shoes – but in time it will grow grass and flowers, and in summer people will bring their picnic baskets there, and in winter their skis and sleds.

  One day, when he is picking through the ruins, Erich sees something glinting in the ground at his feet. He digs at it with a piece of pipe and out it leaps: a tiny lead soldier, the same as the ones Mama made him throw into the lake. It leaves behind an imprint of its body, a corrugated hollow so detailed he can see the laces on the boots, the hands on the rifle. In a thousand years, he thinks, when dust and ashes have filled the hole, another boy might be digging at the same spot and find a copy of the soldier, a calcified double, and he will prise it from the earth and wonder at the tiny man made of stone.

  ‘I had a whole set of these,’ he says.

  Sieglinde nods, chipping off slabs of mortar that thud to the ground and raise grey dust. ‘So did Jürgen.’

  ‘Mama got rid of them.’ His voice is soft as he turns the toy soldier over and over in his palm. ‘She should have told me,’ he says. ‘They should have told me I wasn’t theirs.’

  ‘She did tell you,’ says Sieglinde.

  ‘Only because Heinz Kuppel told me first.’

  ‘What did she say, exactly?’

  ‘That I was the child they were meant to have.’

  They stack their cleaned bricks into piles for the rubble women to load onto wagons. Their faces and hands are grey with dust, as grey as the broken children holding up the façade of Tante Hannelore’s building. Sieglinde ignores a group of Russian soldiers when they pass by, keeping her head down, her eyes on her work.

  ‘Hello Fräulein,’ they say, but she does not reply, and when they touch her shoulder, tug at her sleeve, she simply turns away and keeps working. The chunks of mortar rain down.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ says Erich, his voice high and tremulous, a leaf in the wind. ‘Don’t touch her.’

  And are these the ones? Are these the men who kicked in the theatre doors, broke the bottle off at the neck? They laugh, clap Erich across the back. ‘Good little brother,’ they say.

  On the way home they pass signs nailed to trees advising the private addresses of functioning telephones, in case of emergency – but there is nobody to call. Sieglinde takes Erich’s hand and does not let it go.

  *

  FRAU MILLER: I dream of bricks, you know. Of piles and piles of bricks that never grow any smaller. One thousand by one thousand by one thousand.

  FRAU MÜLLER: I don’t think I dream at all. I can’t remember.

  FRAU MILLER: I found a dead horse in the street yesterday. Well, as good as dead. I cut some meat from it and took it home and when I returned only bones remained.

  FRAU MÜLLER: I saw the bones. People were fighting over them for the marrow. I saw a woman take the tibia, I believe it was, and strike another woman with it.

  FRAU MILLER: How dreadful. Did you … did you see the face of this woman who struck the other woman with the fibula?

  FRAU MÜLLER: The tibia.

  FRAU MILLER: The tibia.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Yes, I saw her face – as clearly as I see your face now, if you understand what I mean.

  FRAU MILLER: I believe I do, but I’m sure you did not witness the entire incident. I’m sure the woman concerned was only protecting herself and her family.

  FRAU MÜLLER: With the thighbone of a horse? Are we cave people? Are we savages?

  FRAU MILLER: I don’t believe cave people kept horses,

  Frau Müller. They ate them, perhaps, but I think you’ll find, if you check the history books, that the horse was not domesticated at that time.

  FRAU MÜLLER: My point, though, is that we cannot go around hitting each other with tibias.

  FRAU MILLER: Fibulas.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Fibulas. We are not savages. We are not monsters. If you must supplement your rations, go to Potsdamer Platz. Sell your mink. Sell your Meissen.

  *

  At Potsdamer Platz you can buy anything: minks and Meissen, silverware, cognac, chocolate, silk underwear, cigarettes rolled from the ends of other cigarettes. The vendors offer their wares in the latticed shadow of
Haus Vaterland, which once held the world. Who is guilty? say the posters nailed to the ruins. You watched in silence. Why no word of protest? These shameful deeds: your fault!

  ‘What are you looking for?’ a man asks Sieglinde and Erich. He has straight dark hair and blue eyes and wears the brim of his hat turned down.

  ‘I want to sell these,’ says Sieglinde, taking a handkerchief from her pocket and unwrapping her father’s deleted words.

  The man sifts through them, shaking his head. ‘Not much demand any more,’ he says. ‘To be honest, they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on.’

  Erich is staring at him and he pulls his hat down a little further.

  ‘Are you sure?’ says Sieglinde, lowering her voice. ‘Mutti told me she’d give anything to fill the holes in her books.’

  The man shrugs. ‘You should have come a year ago. It was a different story then.’

  Erich is still staring at him, his eyes flicking from his face to his hair to his trembling left hand.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ says the man.

  ‘I … you remind me of someone,’ says Erich.

  ‘I hear that a lot,’ says the man.

  As they walk away Erich keeps looking back over his shoulder. ‘I think it’s him,’ he says.

  ‘Who?’ Sieglinde is folding the handkerchief away, tucking it back into her pocket. ‘Careful,’ she says as Erich catches his toe on a dislodged cobblestone. ‘Watch where you’re going.’

  ‘Him.’

  Sieglinde turns to look back now too, but the man has disappeared into the crowd. ‘You think he’s alive?’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Erich. ‘He wouldn’t leave us, I know he wouldn’t leave us.’

  ‘He’d be in disguise, though,’ says Sieglinde. ‘A beard, a pair of glasses …’

  They study the face of each man they pass, but they agree: he would not look like himself any more. He could be anyone.

  *

  Why can I not leave them? Erich and Sieglinde, Frau Hummel and Herr Fromm: a family of strangers living in someone else’s house. Why can I not look away? I sit with them in the evenings when they eat their bread and fat; I cheer with them when the electricity returns, when the water comes stuttering out of the tap. I keep an eye on their tobacco plants growing on the terrace and cross my fingers for a good price. I know I am pretending. I know I am not one of them. Sometimes I want to kick at the walls until they come tumbling down; I want to set their borrowed rooms ablaze … and then I see Frau Hummel’s swelling waist, and I hear the ticking of the child inside her taking form. I keep waiting for her to rid herself of it – the abortionists are doing a roaring trade – but the months pass and the weather turns and she does nothing, and doing nothing is doing something, after all; doing nothing is making a choice. We could all remain here, couldn’t we, our little family? Tante Hannelore is not coming back, and her sons are in prison with the other fathers and sons, and there is no telling when they will come home. Yes, we could stay here forever, mother, father, brother, sister, and in February a baby to rock and wash and wonder at, a little life to love, a blank book. I hold up the broken windows with my broken arms.

  She finds us, of course; in the dead of winter Mama finds us. (Why did I think she would not look?) Papa is lost in Russia and the bronze head is at the bottom of the lake and even the foreign workers have left her: Erich is all she has. When the letter arrives from the Red Cross he has to change his story. He was mistaken, he says; he thought she was dead, killed in a raid on Leipzig, but he was wrong, and here is the proof: a note in her handwriting, sent to a son she also thought lost. He should not have given up hope and he should not have left the farm to come to Berlin and fight for the Führer – but Frau Hummel says none of that matters now, all that matters is that Mama is alive, which is a miracle, and we are grateful for miracles, and Erich can go home, and how many can say that? Mama wants him to come back and feed Ronja her favourite apples; she wants him to heat pfennigs on the oven and press them to the windows to make peepholes in the frozen glass. You are my only child, she writes. And this is why I cannot leave, and this is why I cannot look away.

  ‘Come with me, Siggi,’ says Erich. ‘Mama wouldn’t mind, I know she wouldn’t.’ They could go swimming in the lake in summer, and skating in winter, and he could show her where to find the juiciest mushrooms, and let her taste milk straight from the cow and honey straight from the hive.

  But Frau Hummel says no; Siggi is her responsibility now, and she cannot allow it.

  ‘I’ll come and visit one day, though,’ says Sieglinde. ‘And you must promise you’ll come back to me. Promise.’

  *

  When Emilie sees him step down from the train she does not run to him; she does not sweep him into her arms and cover his face with kisses. She stands quite still, watching him scan the platform for her. Almost a year has passed since he disappeared, and he is taller and darker, his pale hair deepened to tallow. His eyes alight on her for a moment and then move away, searching for the mother he left behind. Is she really so different? I see her taking off her headscarf and calling to him, and he sees her then, and when they embrace she feels a low, quiet hum in him, something that has survived the winter, and when he whispers, ‘Hello, Mama,’ his voice thrums against her ear like little wings – but inside her still, the frozen lake and all it holds.

  ‘I told the bees you were dead,’ she says.

  She forbids him to write to anyone in Berlin as punishment for running away. ‘How do I know you won’t leave again?’ she says.

  *

  The hives are waiting for Erich when he returns to the orchard; I watch them standing their ground, open-mouthed, their wooden eyes fixed on him. He shakes the apple-tree branches free of their snowy load so they do not break, and for a moment he is caught in a blizzard of his own making, and the figures surrounding him could be his parents and Tante Uschi, Frau Hummel and Herr Fromm – and Sieglinde, his Siggi, a shadow trapped in the shimmer of dust. And then the loosed snow settles, and the hives begin to tell their stories once more, and Erich stands and listens and tries, as always, to follow them: Of course my mother pleaded with me, sweet-stained fingers already dead beside me. A good man, a kind man, my cousin loved the knife, ash-handled …

  ‘Please!’ he says. ‘Please! You’re making no sense!’

  But on they chatter, the words merging into one long chord, filling the white orchard. In his pocket his fingers close around the little scrap of paper Siggi gave him when he left Berlin. He does not need to read it to know what it says, and as the hives babble and hum he repeats the single word to himself, and so do I: promise, promise, promise.

  *

  Even though Erich cannot write to Siggi, Siggi writes to him. One after another the letters arrive; I see Emilie slipping them into her apron pocket and then, when Erich has gone to bed, opening them and reading them. She is a polite girl, this Sieglinde, always signing off by sending her greetings to both Erich and his mother.

  But that is not the point.

  After Emilie has read the letters she folds them up again, along their original creases, and puts them back in their envelopes. And then she feeds them to the fire.

  And in our lakes and rivers the lightning bolts and skulls, and beneath our gardens the pins and medals and heads, and the little lead men in their lead uniforms, and on our bonfires the photographs, and yes, the names, too; the Adolfs and the Adolphs and the Hillers and the Hiedlers curling at the edges, going up in smoke. Our clothes are cut down to size, field grey, marine blue, marked with the ghosts of eagles. We are only living shadows – the remains of a dead era. The Reichsmarschall grows thinner by the day; he bites on poison and slips the noose, but they bring him to the foot of the gallows all the same. We will watch the films, we will visit the camps and we will answer the questions. Did we ever belong to the NSDAP? Did we ever donate to the NSDAP? Were we ever members of the National Socialist Doctors’ League? The National Socialist Students’ League? The
National Socialist Women’s League? No, no, no, no and no. Stamp the forms. Sign off on the past. This is our evidence: we saw nothing and we heard nothing, we did not know, how could we have known? Despite the bones in the foundations, the children in the walls, this is our story. We chip away at the bricks, the whole ashen city rings with the sound of our hammers and chisels, we hardly flinch when a buried bomb explodes. And the hunger year comes, and we do eat the leaves off the trees, and we do eat grass, but we are not animals and we did not know.

  The Wish Child

  1955

  West Berlin

  For some years, Sieglinde noticed, certain words were no longer spoken – certain words and certain names – in case they flew from the mouth and joined into sentences, rebuilt themselves into something that should remain broken. The days were blue and gold, blue and green, and the city was rising, beating the ash from its wings; how carefully we were putting ourselves back together! Trees were regenerating and houses too, and so were bankers and librarians, mothers and mayors, bus conductors, shop keepers, doctors, none of whom had ever been Nazis. In her history lectures at the new university in Dahlem, Sieglinde learned of the Gutenberg Bible and the Thirty Years’ War, the Prussian kings and the Year of the Three Emperors, but nothing about him, nothing about them; the textbooks stopped at 1913. After she graduated she took up a position at the Dahlem archives, which held antique maps and court proceedings, and letters written by royal hands, but she knew there were newer documents too, locked away, uncatalogued and undiscussed; great cairns of paper that could bury a person if disturbed. Sometimes, if she looked into the faces of children born soon after the war – if she studied, for instance, the face of Melanie, Frau Hummel’s daughter – Sieglinde thought she could glimpse that more recent history: high cheekbones, Slavic eyes. She remembered other faces then, and felt the sweat falling from their brows to hers, and the scratch of sour uniforms against her wrists, and she tasted the fermented breath forcing its way into her mouth. She heard the sound of a bottle breaking at the neck, and the ticking of the watches wrapped like tourniquets around rough arms, so much time, so many minutes ticking away while the men took their time with her, the radium faces and radium hands glowing in the dim theatre, and afterwards, her whole life long, she would always be running late because she could not bear the feel of a watch about her wrist. She remembered Erich’s face, too, leaning over her after the men had left, and his voice talking to her in a language she did not understand. He pulled the broken bottle from her and wrapped her in the velvet curtain and her mother’s fox fur, and the fox watched with its bead-glass eyes and said This did not happen. This is not real.