Nothing would ever grow inside her: that was what the doctor who examined her had said. Frau Hummel stood at the side of the bed and wept, but it was not until a few years later that Sieglinde understood why.
‘You’re lucky,’ a friend said. ‘You don’t have to be careful like other girls.’
Not damaged, then, but free. She supposed she could see it that way – had to see it that way – and when she told Jonathan he said that it didn’t matter, that they could be a family of two. She met him at the Ballhaus Resi, where the tinted fountains danced in time to the music: a tall, broad man with toffee-coloured eyes, English skin and thick black hair. The Resi was where Allied men stationed in Berlin came on their free nights; wherever you turned you could hear conversations in broken German and broken English and see people waving their hands about, searching for the right word. Jonathan spoke excellent German, though with a trace of a Bavarian accent – the German master at his boarding school in Kent had fled Munich in 1933. He wore a carefully pressed suit and his hand at the small of Sieglinde’s back directed her with the lightest of touches. When the white lilac blooms again, I’ll sing you my prettiest love song.
‘Shouldn’t you be sharing yourself around?’ she said, aware of glances from the women obliged to dance with each other.
‘Probably,’ he said, and stayed with her. In Capri, when the red sun sinks into the sea, and the pale sickle moon gleams in the sky …
At first she had not noticed his slight limp, and when she trod on his foot and he did not react she thought he was simply being polite.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m out of practice.’
‘Didn’t feel a thing,’ he said.
‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
‘No, honestly. It’s artificial.’
‘Oh.’
‘I left the real one behind in Crete.’
‘Oh.’ His eyes were on her, waiting. Turn around once more before we go our separate ways, and tell me why you don’t want to see me again. She said, ‘That was careless.’
‘It was,’ he agreed. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’
*
‘You didn’t tell me he’s English!’ Frau Hummel hissed in the kitchen.
‘Didn’t I?’ said Sieglinde. ‘I must have forgotten.’
‘How can you forget something like that?’ Frau Hummel stabbed a knife into a plum Streuselkuchen, dumped a few slices on a platter. ‘You can’t just forget.’
Sieglinde put the coffee pot on a tray and Melanie went to the cupboard to get the good cake plates.
‘Not those,’ said Frau Hummel. ‘Use the blue ones.’
‘But they’re all chipped, Mutti.’
‘Mm.’
Jonathan jumped up as they brought the tray into the living room. ‘Let me help,’ he said.
‘We can manage,’ said Frau Hummel.
‘It’s no trouble –’
‘Stay where you are.’
‘Thank you, though,’ said Melanie.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Sieglinde. He is too handsome for me, she thought – but as he sat back down on the sofa and crossed his legs she caught sight of the strap holding his artificial foot in place, and she saw him tug at the cuff of his trousers to hide it, and she knew she could love him.
‘I don’t think your aunt likes me very much,’ he said later, when they were alone.
‘My aunt?’
‘I thought you said you lived with your aunt.’
‘Oh – no. I live in her apartment. She died in the war.’
‘Who’s Frau Hummel, then?’
‘She looked after me when … when my building was hit. There was nobody else left. We just stayed together – I helped her with Melanie – you know.’
He nodded. The coals in the tiled stove hissed and popped. ‘Do you have any photographs of them, of your family?’
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but wait a minute.’
In her bedroom she took her mother’s ledger from its drawer, lifting it from its cradle of soft jumpers and cardigans. She felt something tugging at the hem of her skirt – had she caught it on a nail? Stepped on an unravelled thread? But there was nothing there.
She sat next to Jonathan and they leafed through the eggshell-white pages together, she describing for him the belongings listed in her mother’s hand, and as she spoke the grandfather clock and the cherrywood sideboard and the green coffee cups and the little brooch made from Vati’s baby teeth rose from the ink and filled the room.
1957
West Berlin
Each evening before supper, when, she imagined, other young wives were bathing babies or sterilising bottles or reading bedtime stories, Sieglinde worked on her puzzles. She always had a jigsaw in progress on the dining table and she sat and fiddled with it while Jonathan brought bread and cheeses and meats from the kitchen and set them along the periphery of her unfinished scenes. They lay between them as they ate, these scattered places, upside down to him, she knew, like a reflection in a lake.
‘Where are we now?’ he asked when a new puzzle appeared, gesturing with his fork.
‘The eighteenth century,’ she said. ‘Just in front of the Doge’s palace.’
‘Tricky,’ he said, twisting his head to see. ‘The sky’s the same colour as the water.’
After supper she laid out her clothes for the following day. It was a habit Jonathan observed without comment now, though in the early months of their marriage he had joked about German efficiency. No, she had told him, not that – it was in case she had to get dressed in the dark in a hurry; in case there was an emergency. When everything was ready – underwear, skirt, blouse, cardigan, shoes, all arranged like a flattened self – she clipped the crossword from the newspaper and stretched out on the sofa with a small dish of peppermints or sugared almonds. Letter by letter she inserted the answers to the clues, each one slotting into its place in the grid. She felt a flurry in her chest when one of her father’s deleted words appeared; these were as familiar to her as certain names, and she still had all the little scraps of paper she had found in his trouser-cuffs – all except the one she had slipped into Erich’s pocket when he kissed her goodbye at the train station. Promise you’ll come back, she had said. Promise. Rain was pelting the roof and the platform was jammed with people and he stood so close to her that she could smell the damp wool of his overcoat and the clean soapy scent of his hair. He had black lines of boot polish under his fingernails despite Frau Hummel making him scrub them with her nail brush: We can’t have your mama thinking we didn’t look after you. He squeezed Sieglinde’s hand and said I promise, and then he boarded the train with all the other travellers trying to find their way home and was lost behind the rainy windows. She hadn’t heard from him since, even though she had written him dozens of letters. I am studying history. I think I want to be an archivist. Herr Fromm died this week – they say it was his blood pressure. I’d love to come and see your lake, and look for the giant carp. I am marrying an Englishman.
Sometimes Jonathan came and joined her on the sofa, lifting up her feet and putting them in his lap and then scanning the newspaper. If part of a story was missing, its remainder on the back of the clipped-out puzzle, he read the first half to her and then added possible endings, inventing lightning strikes and locust plagues until she laughed and held up the corresponding piece for him to see. One night he started to read an article to her about a bog body – the remains of an Iron Age child found in the 1920s.
‘Kayhausen Boy,’ she said. ‘I know him. I used to have a book about him.’
She turned over her puzzle and there he was in her lap, his skin welted by the pressure of her pen. The photograph was the same as one in Julia’s book, but they knew more about him now: they had X-rayed him, teased out the traces of old illness, the faults in his bones. Here was the cause of his uneven gait, and here the proof that he died in a cold season: two appleseeds from his last meal.
‘The reason for hi
s death remains unclear, however,’ read Jonathan. ‘Was he a criminal, or the victim of a crime? A sacrifice offered to the gods despite his deformity,’ he reached for Sieglinde’s piece of paper, ‘or because of it?’
The next day they visited their garden allotment. There were more than two hundred plots tucked in next to the S-Bahn tracks, and from the train they looked like a toy village, the paths making neat little shingle streets, each piece of land occupied by a tiny house complete with shutters and window boxes. Jonathan and Sieglinde came here on the weekends to tend their fruit trees and vegetables, and today there was a bag of pears waiting for them on their doorstep; a present from the widow who owned the adjoining garden. They often passed the time of day with her and the other neighbours, chatting over the fence about the hardiest varieties of climbing roses or the best time of year to prune a weeping cherry, but nobody ever asked about missing husbands, missing children. The fact of Jonathan’s Englishness was avoided too, for the most part; only one or two of the older neighbours refused to speak to him. Sieglinde tipped the pears into a bowl and arranged it on the dining table – a battered office desk, but it looked pretty covered with a cloth and decorated with a vase of flowers. She had sewn lace curtains for the windows and braided a rug for the floor from scraps of cloth, and Jonathan had painted the walls the same shade of yellow as the chrysanthemums that grew by the gate. A pair of deep armchairs sat in front of the fireplace, and on the wall a calendar showed castles of the Rhine.
Jonathan took the ladder from the back of the house and began picking apples while Sieglinde collected fallen walnuts, their hulls split apart and turning black. She prised them open and picked out the meat, taking care not to crack the shells, which she stacked next to her on the grass.
‘You’re only going to throw them away,’ called Jonathan.
‘I know,’ she said. He was a dark shape above her in the apple tree, backlit against the pale autumn sky.
‘When I was little,’ she heard him say, ‘my Irish grandmother showed me a tiny pair of gloves from Limerick. They were made from the skin of a stillborn calf and you could only wear them two or three times – the leather was that fine. They came inside a walnut shell.’
‘People were smaller then,’ said Sieglinde.
Jonathan climbed higher and higher. ‘We could stay here forever,’ he said.
‘We could,’ said Sieglinde, squinting up into the branches.
She remembered lying in her bed and listening for the sound of planes, the book about Kayhausen Boy propped open on her chest of drawers. She remembered the peaty smell of the pages, and tracing the boy’s shape with one outstretched finger, and listening. The pieces of shrapnel shivered on their threads. It’s gruesome, said her mother. Jonathan was calling something to her but she felt herself sinking into a swamp, wet earth closing around her, already dissolving her bones, turning her skin to leather. And who will dig her up? Who will find her and name her and decide: criminal, victim, sacrifice?
Only now and then did she catch herself wondering what her children might have been like. She could almost see them, little figures running on ahead of her, never quite turning back to look her in the face. Did they have Kurt’s curls? Would they lace and unlace their fingers as she sang the song about the lovesick sailor, their hands encircling the world, clasping the heart, making the noose? On they ran, Sieglinde’s children, into the smoke and the ruins, to where the rest of her family lay. Yes, she thought, they looked like her baby brother – a little like Kurt, and a little like Erich.
Erich. Over a decade later, she still thought about him, though she no longer wrote him letters: a choice is made, and first love fades, and the heart beds down in its basket of bones. At times she wondered whether she had invented him – a friend to wait with as the fighting grew closer and closer. Frau Hummel seemed not to remember him at all.
‘The boy who brought me to you,’ said Sieglinde. ‘Erich Kröning.’
‘It was so untidy then,’ said Frau Hummel. ‘So many people on the move. It’s hard to recall what happened.’
‘He lived with us, though. He sheltered with me in the theatre, and then he brought me to you. He stayed with us for months.’
‘It’s best not to think about that time,’ said Frau Hummel. ‘It’s best forgotten.’ Burn it, bury it, sink it in the lake.
But Sieglinde did not forget, and even as she lay next to Jonathan, Erich returned to her from the shadowy theatre, his pale yellow hair glinting beneath layers of costumes. He watched her from dreams, slender fingers spinning and spinning the paper discs pencilled with riderless horses and riders suspended in mid-air, bare trees and clouds of green leaves, and when he smiled at her she caught a glimpse of the one tooth that sat a little sideways, and when he turned away she saw on his left temple the freckle shaped like a comma, the suggestion of something still to come. And even as the years passed, in these moments she was not an adult recalling a child – not a woman of twenty-five, thirty, forty remembering a distant playmate – but a girl of twelve, and she could see herself in that twilight too, there on the dusty stage, the curtains hushing as they closed. Shh, shhhh.
April 1976
East Berlin
Outside the Palace of the Republic, the women wait. They squint up at the slick façade, the thousand mirrored windows turning the air above the crowd to bronze. The whole building seems to quiver. Nearby the old cathedral hunches beneath its scaffolds and the television tower points to heaven.
When the doors open on this first day, the women cannot believe their eyes: the great glass flower spreads it glass petals, and marble walls and marble floors shimmer beneath countless bubbles of light; they have never seen so much light.
FRAU MILLER: Is it real?
FRAU MÜLLER: What do you mean?
FRAU MILLER: All this polished marble.
FRAU MÜLLER: Of course it’s real. Can’t you see yourself in it?
FRAU MILLER: But we don’t have marble here. It must have come from somewhere else.
FRAU MÜLLER: Somewhere else?
FRAU MILLER: Over there.
FRAU MÜLLER: I doubt the Party would approve that.
FRAU MILLER: Perhaps it’s not real, then. They must have made it specially.
All day the women wonder about it – but they do agree, they are lucky to be living in this place, where everything seems so real.
Erich is here too; he has brought his daughters to Berlin for the day, to celebrate the Palace’s grand opening. Their mother Bettina has a cold and has stayed at home in Leipzig – ‘but I’ll send you a postcard, Mama,’ said Steffi as she blew her a kiss goodbye. ‘I’ll find one with the Palace on it.’
‘Thank you, Schatz,’ said Bettina. ‘I’d like that.’
‘We’ll be home by tonight, stupid,’ said Karin.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Bettina. ‘I’d still love a postcard of the Palace.’
The April morning is cool, and coal dust hangs in the air and smears the sky a dirty orange.
‘It doesn’t look like a palace,’ says Karin as they wait in line.
‘Where are the turrets?’ says Steffi. ‘For the princesses?’
‘It’s not that kind of palace, Schätzchen,’ says Erich.
The first thing the girls want to see is the bowling alley. The lanes are as bright as rivers, and when the balls skim the waxed wood it sounds like a dozen trains approaching at once – and then, like magic, the balls pass beneath the floor and return to the bowlers, a never-ending supply. Karin puts her hand into the hole to find out how it works, to feel for the trick – and before Erich can warn her a ball has squashed her fingers.
‘Let me see,’ he says. ‘Mmm. I think we’ll have to amputate at the shoulder. You won’t be able to swim in straight lines any more. What do you think, Doctor Steffi?’
‘At least the shoulder,’ she says. ‘Even a bit higher.’
‘It’s a terrible shame,’ says Erich.
‘Very very sad,’ says
Steffi.
‘You’re both dumb,’ says Karin.
The refreshment bar is a perfect circle.
‘So nobody’s served ahead of anybody else,’ says Karin, and Erich says yes, perhaps.
The girls have a Vita Cola each, which makes them burp, which makes them giggle, and then they buy a postcard to send to Mama.
‘Tell her about all the lights!’ says Karin. ‘And the Toilettenfrau!’
They sit in the vast white foyer on one of the sofas that stretches on forever before it turns a corner; there is room for half a dozen families at least, including grandparents. Two women sit to their right, wondering whether something is real or not; Erich can’t quite hear.
Before they leave they look at the paintings, Erich and his daughters and Frau Miller and Frau Müller: larger than life, the youth of the world fly red banners, and the ruined Frauenkirche looms against the red sky, and a white sheet covers the fighter’s body, and books burn, and Icarus glides higher and higher while a pilot falls from a plane. The way the earth is now is not the way the earth must remain.
Er Ich
1980
Leipzig
At the hospital a girl with light-brown hair and green eyes waits with her father, one arm in a sling. Erich blinks, blinks again – but of course, it cannot be Sieglinde. It still happens from time to time: he catches sight of her on the train, or in a passing car, or reflected in a shop window – and yes, sometimes in the faces of the patients who come to him with their breaks and cuts.
The Wish Child Page 25