The Wish Child

by Catherine Chidgey

  ‘They’ve all escaped to the West now, anyway,’ said Mama, gazing out the window. ‘All the Nazis.’

  *

  One winter’s day I see her sit up in bed and ask Erich to take her to the lake. ‘My son and I used to go skating there,’ she says. ‘Tell the nurse we won’t be long.’

  ‘Who’s the nurse, Mama?’

  ‘She is, of course,’ she says, pointing at Uschi. She grabs Erich’s hand, pulls him in close. ‘She’s stealing from me,’ she whispers. ‘I used to have an amber brooch – a pretty thing in the shape of a flower, with a real diamond at the centre. She’s stolen it. You can’t trust them, you know.’

  ‘That’s your sister,’ says Erich. ‘That’s Ursula. She’s looking after you now.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Uschi. ‘It’s not her fault.’

  I see him take his mother’s arm and slowly they make their way along the path behind the house. The air is still and bright and turns their voices to glass, and in the orchard the mouths of the hives glitter with icicles. Erich stops to peer inside them, to listen for the sound of the bees slowly beating their wings to keep warm – but they are empty, have been empty for years.

  ‘Opa Kröning carved those,’ says Mama. ‘I used to make a lovely bee-sting cake. The doctor from Berlin had two slices and then he said yes.’

  Yes, says the breeze that floods the wooden heads, yes.

  At the shore of the lake Erich brushes the snow from a bench and he and Mama sit and watch the skaters. One boy, dressed in black, flies past the others, leaping and turning, never putting a foot wrong.

  ‘He’s very good, isn’t he?’ says Erich – but Mama is gazing into the distance again.

  After a time she says, ‘She wanted to come here.’ ‘Who did?’

  ‘She wanted to look for a giant fish beneath the ice. I didn’t like it.’

  ‘A giant fish?’ Moving through the weeds, stirring the silt.

  A little girl slips and falls and begins to cry, and for a moment nobody goes to her, or even seems to notice her. Erich gets to his feet – ‘Is she yours?’ says Mama – but now the boy in black is helping her up and she has stopped wailing. Nothing broken.

  ‘What do you mean, a giant fish?’ says Erich. ‘Mama?’ ‘Mama?’ she echoes.

  ‘Who wanted to come here, Mama?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know, it’s gone now.’

  The boy in black is off again, streaking past the other skaters, and Mama is worrying at the fringe of her scarf, digging her fingers through the tassels.

  ‘There were so many letters,’ she says.

  ‘Letters?’

  ‘She must have written him dozens. He’s very good-looking, my son. He’s perfect. Not like the first one.’

  Erich turns away from the skaters and looks at Mama, and she looks right back at him.

  ‘These letters –’ he says.

  And she says, ‘I burned them all.’

  The boy in black swoops past them and begins to spin, first holding his arms out straight, then crossing them over his chest to turn faster and faster. Phantom, you are not my equal.

  ‘What was her name?’ says Erich, though he already knows; we both already know. Mama doesn’t answer, and for a long moment he thinks she has drifted away.

  ‘Sieglinde Heilmann,’ she says at last. ‘Siggi. That was how she always signed off – greetings to you and your mother, your Siggi. And then Sieglinde Thorpe. Oh yes. She kept writing even after she married, if you can believe it. Which just goes to show.’

  She falls silent. The temperature has dropped and everyone has left apart from the black skater, who seems to draw closer to them with every circuit. The only sound is blades on ice, knives being sharpened.

  ‘You mustn’t blame her,’ says Tante Uschi. ‘She thought you would run away again. Try to get to West Berlin. It was too dangerous.’

  They are changing the sheets on Mama’s bed. Erich tucks in the blankets, smoothes the pillows. The sound of the television reaches them: in the living room Mama is watching the Sandman sing his goodnight song. Children, dear children, I’ve had a lot of fun …

  ‘You don’t remember an address, do you?’

  ‘Somewhere in Charlottenburg, I think. But there can’t be that many Thorpes in Berlin.’

  After Mama is asleep Erich searches the house. He looks in every drawer and cupboard, upends shoeboxes, leafs through piles of receipts that date back twenty years and more. There are no letters from Sieglinde – but hidden in the toe of a slipper, wrapped in a handkerchief, he finds the amber brooch with the diamond at its centre.

  ‘I knew it would turn up,’ says Uschi. ‘It’s not her fault.’

  When Erich returns to Leipzig he goes to the post office and looks up the telephone book for Berlin. Tante Uschi is right: there is only one S. Thorpe. That night he begins a letter, then tears it up and throws it away and starts another. For hours he sits at his desk, trying to get the words right, beginning and beginning and beginning.

  The Secret That Is Not a Secret

  1996

  Near Leipzig

  All glories of this earth decay, sing the mourners at Mama’s funeral. In smoke and ashes pass away. Due to the acoustics of the place Erich cannot hear his own voice, only those of the people around him: Karin and Steffi, their husbands and children, Uschi and her son from her second marriage. Nor rock nor steel can last. What here gives pleasure to our eyes, what we as most enduring prize, is but an airy dream that fadeth fast. Every now and then Erich thinks he can make out a faint hum, but it must be the echoing of the hymns, the lingering notes of the organ, mustn’t it? He wants to get away, to leave this place where he cannot hear himself. Part of his last conversation with Mama keeps returning to him: He’s perfect. Not like the first one. When he asked Tante Uschi about it she changed the subject, and he was too concerned with finding out about Sieglinde to pursue it. Now, though, the remarks won’t leave him, and as he follows the coffin out of the church and watches it sliding into the hearse he asks his aunt again: ‘What did she mean? Who was the first one?’

  I hold my breath.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ says Uschi. She will not look at him. ‘You know how she was by that stage.’

  The back of the hearse clicks shut; the flowers gaze out the window with their yellow eyes. Uschi takes Erich’s arm and says, ‘I’m sorry’ – but for what?

  ‘I remember your wedding day,’ says Erich. ‘Your beautiful dress.’ The veil as fine as ashes. The photograph and helmet in place of the groom. The sawn fir branches trickling with sap. The spilled silk in the moonlight, Mama cutting through the parachute lines, Mama pushing the dead man into the hole. ‘Uschi, what did she mean? He’s perfect. Not like the first one.’

  His aunt sighs. ‘Well,’ she begins. ‘Well …’ She leans in close to his ear, pauses again. The hearse’s engine starts. Someone is sobbing. ‘They had a child, before you,’ she whispers. She nods to an acquaintance Erich does not recognise, searches for something in her handbag and does not find it. She clears her throat.

  ‘When?’ says Erich. ‘Another child?’

  ‘A boy, but it was terribly deformed.’

  An elderly man stops to shake Erich’s hand and offer his condolences. Uschi waits until he has moved away. Are there tears in her eyes? For whom?

  ‘They wrote a letter,’ she says, so quietly Erich hardly hears her. ‘They wrote to Adolf Hitler. To request a mercy killing.’

  So here I am at last: the false start, the incomplete casting, the secret that is not a secret. There is nothing Erich can say, not now, not with the mourners clasping their hands and sinking their heads. And is it just the organ’s final notes hanging in the air, this low hum? Is it the murmuring hearse? You are the child we were meant to have. No. No, because now Erich knows that there was another boy, and that there is another story inside his own that is buzzing in its box, wanting out.

  *

  Oh Mama, oh Papa. What parents write
such a letter? What parents offer cake to the doctor who comes from Berlin to check their child is as damaged as they say, a useless mouth, a life unworthy of life? Look at him sitting on the sofa in his spotless black suit, admiring Mama’s needlework. Look at him standing at the window, backlit by fields of wheat. He seems to fill the room.

  ‘I foresee no obstacles,’ he says. ‘The Führer has already given his permission.’

  ‘We’d like the matter dealt with swiftly,’ says Papa. ‘To prevent further suffering.’

  The doctor nods, accepts another slice of Mama’s bee-sting cake.

  At the hospital in Leipzig he views me in my little white bed. The future presses in at me from all sides and I buck and writhe, a grub pulled from the earth. It is blind, he writes. Missing a leg and part of an arm. Most likely an idiot. He consults with the other doctors and they agree this is the right thing to do, the merciful thing. In some maternity wards, they say, when such cases arise, it is quite natural for a doctor to take action. The nurses tuck me in tight. But why do their voices change? And what are they crumbling into my milk? Who rides so late through night and wind?

  No one remembers my real name – the records have been lost, as well as the certificate that identified the cause: a weakness of the heart. (Not mine; not mine.) They say, though, that I was the first, a prototype of sorts: that because mercy was shown to me, then mercy should be shown to other infants – the spastics, the epileptics, the half-breeds – and if infants were shown mercy then older children should not go without, and nor, for that matter, should adolescents. The paralysed, the deaf, the delinquent; all must receive their share. And what of the adults? Did they not deserve mercy? The depressive, the senile and insane? Those unable to walk, to speak? And so the mercy grew and spread. At first it came as hunger, as needles and as pills, and then, when we needed more and more of it, as a gas that we piped into sealed vans. Soon, though, the vans could not contain all our mercy, and so we filled rooms with it, rooms big enough to hold hundreds at a time, and it piled up and up, this colourless mercy; there was no stopping it.

  And if I had not been chosen he would have chosen someone else, the doctor who visited from Berlin: Mama and Papa were not the only parents to petition the Führer. He would have visited a different home, inspected a different child, and made the same recommendation.

  Years later, when he stands in the dock, he says: For fifteen years I had laboured at the sick-bed and every patient was to me like a brother, every sick child I worried about as if it had been my own.

  And he says: I am a doctor and I see the law of nature as being the law of reason.

  And he says: I am deeply conscious that when I said yes to euthanasia I did so with the deepest conviction, just as it is my conviction today, that it was right.

  And he says: Death can mean relief. Death is life – just as much as birth. It was never meant to be murder.

  And he says: I bear this burden but it is not the burden of crime. I bear this burden of mine, though, with a heavy heart as my responsibility. Before it, and before my conscience, I prevail, as a man and a doctor.

  And when the day comes, he puts on the red jacket and we walk to the gallows. His son, his only child, has chosen not to visit him one last time, but I climb the thirteen steps with him, count the thirteen coils in the knot. I stand on the platform, I wait for the hood and the noose. He begins to make his final speech but the hood cuts him off mid-sentence. And the trapdoor opens and hangs like a tongue, and I feel the great gulp of space beneath me, and I wait for the snap of the rope, and death can mean relief, and death is life.

  The killing of a person is a hard strain on the nerves of the person doing it, say the nurses. It never occurred to us not to follow the orders given to us. Just as soldiers at the front had to do their duty, so did we. I peer into their faces but they do not see me. I sit on their shoulders I hang from their ceilings I hunch on their windowsills. If the patient was extremely restless, which happened quite frequently, then three caregivers were required for the procedure. I clog the air I am smoke I am shadows, the ghost of the boy I should have become. The patients were relieved of terrible sufferings. We took them lovingly in our arms and stroked them when we gave them the medicine.

  Mama had herself sterilised after she gave birth to me, so it could not happen again. There she is, lying on the operating table as they lower the mask. There she is, counting backwards, undoing the possibility of me. Ten. Nine. Eight. How proud Papa is of her. What an example she is to her race. And soon she will be a mother again – an orphan is coming from the new Reich. Soon she will get her perfect boy, her reward, and the false start need never be mentioned. I look away.

  1997

  Berlin

  One spring day Erich takes a train to Berlin. First he goes to Normannenstrasse, to the grey concrete Stasi complex he still can’t quite believe is open to ordinary people – but there they are, the ordinary people, leafing through piles of buff-coloured folders, finding out about themselves.

  For years Karin and Steffi have urged him to request his file – but how could he simply walk into the building on the Dittrichring, right in the centre of Leipzig, where anyone could see him?

  ‘And why would it matter, if someone saw you?’ said Steffi.

  ‘Well,’ said Erich, ‘then they would know what I was doing.’

  When he told them he was going on a trip to Berlin, they would hear no more excuses. ‘You can ask to read it there,’ said Karin. ‘We checked.’

  Erich’s folders stand more than a handspan high. He pulls his chair into the table and looks at them for a moment, not knowing where to start. And then, without thinking, he glances over his shoulder – but of course, nobody is watching him. Nobody is taking notes.

  He turns to the last page – the most recent entry, made in 1989 – and begins to read, working his way backwards in time through hundreds of forgotten outings, conversations, purchases. On 26 April 1975 at 13:07 K r ö n i n g Erich, wearing brown trousers and a blue pullover with brown cuffs and waistband, entered the western hall of the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof on foot. He proceeded through the terminus to the Mitropa kiosk, where at 13:15 he purchased a cup of coffee. The presence or absence of milk could not be ascertained.

  He stares at the flimsy pages, draws them closer until the words turn to dust, but they offer up nothing beyond themselves. Here is his unremarkable life, told by those who shadowed him, who watched from doorways, waited in parked cars, listened on telephone lines. Someone using the codename ‘Körner’ had sketched a floor plan of his apartment in July 1980 … had they passed in the street? Sat next to each other at the bus stop? The dimensions of every room are recorded; the distance from the sofa to the telephone and from his bed to the light switch. He tries to remember back to that summer: was there a day when the apartment felt different? When a picture was crooked, a cupboard left ajar? If Körner had planted something, perhaps it is still in place, even now; perhaps it has kept on transmitting, telling secrets to a country that no longer exists. He turns the pages, skimming the entries, the lines blurring into ribbons of smoke. He thinks of the scraps of paper Sieglinde showed him in the ruined theatre, the little deletions she kept in her pocket like money – love, mercy, promise, pity, remembrance – and he wants to pry open all the sentences piled in front of him and splice them in. Backwards he goes, back and back, until he comes to the first page.

  MALE: We could build a giant catapult from rubber bands.

  FEMALE: They’d have to be big rubber bands.

  MALE: Or hundreds of small ones.

  FEMALE: Thousands.

  MALE: [inaudible]

  FEMALE: A jetpack.

  MALE: Powered by what?

  FEMALE: Compost. Or Rotkäppchen. Or my mother’s pickled onions.

  MALE: Would it take both of us?

  FEMALE: Depends on the potency of the pickled onions.

  MALE: [inaudible]

  FEMALE: Telescopic?

  MALE: Yes.
>
  I see him closing the last folder and walking to the front of the room, past all the other people reading their files. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I’ve finished.’ I see him hailing a taxi and asking the driver to take him to Charlottenburg. He stares out the window, looking for something he might recognise. Outside a Kaiser’s a young Turkish man is stacking oranges and pineapples, and inside the store, Erich knows, there are ten different kinds of butter, and more than a dozen flavours of yoghurt, and fluorescent lighting hanging from the ceiling like strips of the moon. After the Wall came down, he remembers, he and Bettina would go to the supermarket and stand in front of the rows and rows of different kinds of butter and yoghurt and cereal and jam and have no idea what to choose.

  When the taxi drops him off he pauses at the door of the apartment building and puts on his reading glasses, runs his finger down the list of names.

  ‘Erich?’ says a voice when he rings the buzzer.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘Come up,’ says Sieglinde, and the door opens.

  1997

  Berlin

  On a clear October afternoon a man and a woman take each other by the hand and make their way towards the Siegessäule. The sandstone column rises before them, a great fluted candle, and the figure in gold blazes against the blue high above, extending her wreath of laurel. The last time the man and the woman were here they were children, and the street had a different name, and they could hardly see for the smoke that stung their eyes and made them lose their bearings; the golden goddess was a smudge in the sky, a memory of light. They hesitate for a moment at the flight of steps that leads underground – but yes, this is the way, and they pass beneath the buzzing traffic and surface at the foot of the monument, where they can see the bullet holes in the granite base. There are holes in the bronze reliefs, too: in the Prussian soldiers leaving for battle, and in the flanks of wild-eyed horses, and in the major general brandishing his sword and the bugler sounding his horn. A priest with a punctured temple weds a headless man to a headless bride. The king is without his foot, the crown prince without his face; old victories drift apart and fragment. I press myself into these featureless places, these gaps in the record; I look to the east and the west. I cast my small shadow, fleeting, imprecise.