The Watcher

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  ‘And my mama has to work now, in an office, so there’s no one to look after me in the holidays.’

  ‘Oh.’ Netta felt sorry for Milla. When her papa was away all those years she had Opa and Oma and even Tante Bertel to look after her when Mama was working. ‘I’m just here to get better. I cough a lot because of all the smoke where we live.’

  ‘Oh.’ Milla felt sorry for Netta. She never coughed and where she lived the air was always clean and smelled like Christmas trees.

  Before the pile of dirty sheets was too big for them to carry, they hauled it downstairs to the laundry room where a woman with a nose like a beak and hands like claws grabbed them and threw them in the great copper washing tub. The crow lady, as the kids called her, grabbed the stirring stick to wash the linen with and Netta noticed how short it was; how it seemed to have been snapped in half. Milla tugged on Netta’s sleeve – there were more sheets to bring down yet. But it was too late. The crow lady noticed Netta staring at the stick and squawked:

  ‘What do you think you’re looking at?’

  Netta jumped, surprised to find the lady sounded as much like a crow as she looked.

  ‘Get on with your chores or I’ll break the rest of it over your bottom!’ And she yanked the paddle from the hot water to show she meant business.

  The girls scampered back up the stairs, but halfway Netta stopped and held onto Milla, not just because she felt out of breath and needed to cough, but also so she could ask Milla what on earth the crow lady meant.

  ‘Paul caught a crab when we went to the beach last week – a big one! – and was keeping it as a pet in a box under his bunk.’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘The boy with the glasses. In the bottom bunk opposite yours.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Herr Kahler found out and dragged him out of bed in the night and smacked him on the bum with the stirring stick until it broke. Blood came through his pyjamas and everything.’

  Netta was terrified. That stick was old and worn, but it was still far too thick to break on a little boy’s bottom without some incredibly hard whacks.

  After their chores were done they were all starving and tucked into their dinners with gusto. But Netta had barely touched her chicken when Auttenberg’s voice made her freeze with her fork halfway to her open mouth.

  ‘Is this how we sit at dinner?’ Auttenberg orbited the table, prodding at some of the children’s shoulders so hard that their faces nearly plunged into their food. ‘Hunched over like animals at a trough?’

  Auttenberg had a fist full of wire coat hangers. With pictures of the broken paddle still in her head, Netta felt her thighs start to tremble at the thought that these were what matron preferred to use to beat children’s bottoms. But she didn’t drag anyone from the table and begin beating them with the hangers. Instead she took one and passed one of the boy’s – Henrick’s – arms through it from behind and yanked it up to his shoulders, forcing them back and pulling them together.

  ‘Now, that looks a lot straighter, doesn’t it?’ Auttenberg admired her handiwork. ‘Doesn’t it?’ she honked.

  ‘Yes, Frau Auttenberg,’ the children sang in unison, and it was the saddest sounding song Netta had ever heard.

  ‘And we wouldn’t have to do this if your parents had been a bit stricter with you in the first place,’ she muttered as she went around the table ensnaring each child in a coat hanger before allowing them to finish their dinner. It was the most exhausting dinner Netta had ever had. And just to top it all, Auttenberg came around at the end of the meal with a giant bottle of cod liver oil and shoved a foul tasting teaspoon between each pair of curled lips.

  This was the first time Netta had ever tasted it. She was already expecting something horrible by the look of the scrunched up noses on the children that received the oil before her, but she had no idea it would be that horrible. Despite what her mind told her would be best to do with Frau Auttenberg and her entire system of globes bearing down on her, her mouth took charge, overruled her head, and spat the oil out onto her plate.

  Many of the kids around the table slapped their hands across their mouths to hide their gasps just in case they got into trouble for making such a noise. But they needn’t have worried. Auttenberg was far too shocked and appalled by the beastly sight of the spoilt little doctor’s daughter spitting onto her plate. And she told the entire room so. However, she did it in such unusually quiet tones that it was the most frightening thing the young ones had ever heard, like subterranean rumblings ahead of a volcano blowing its top.

  Netta was afraid she would end up like Paul, unable to sit down for days, but she just couldn’t keep that awful goo in her mouth. She had no idea how the others did it, but she would be asking Milla the secret as soon as they got out of the dining room.

  However, Netta didn’t get out.

  Everyone else was allowed to be unhooked from their coat hanger shackles and leave, but Netta had to stay. When everyone had left the room Auttenberg shoved another teaspoon of the cod liver oil at Netta, but her little opponent knew what it tasted like now so there was no way her mouth was going to be opening up. And just to make sure, her teeth clamped down like a portcullis behind her pursed lips. The spoon jabbed at those lips and cracked against her teeth like a battering ram, but although she was alone at the Round Table, Sir Netta the Noble would not be letting the dragon through.

  ‘Fine,’ Auttenberg said, ‘but you will stay there all night if need be,’ and she left the room.

  Every half-hour that poisonous teaspoon would try and break through her defences, but Netta stood her ground. She would even dare to return the glare of the goliath above her sometimes and after three or four attempts she thought she saw something like admiration pass across Auttenberg’s stony expression. It was so uncomfortable sitting on the wooden chair for hours, but eventually she fell asleep from utter exhaustion.

  She was woken, as usual, at 6:30 the next morning and felt the sores where the coat hanger had cut into each armpit.

  Milla’s head appeared upside down over the edge of the bunk, her blues eyes burning with concern and wonder. ‘How are you? What happened?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Netta smiled. ‘Nothing happened,’ she boasted, the faint taste of chicken still between her unbrushed teeth, but not a hint of cod liver oil anywhere.

  Milla was more in love with her new friend than ever and Netta knew it. She was proud of it; and of the way Frau Auttenberg was so quiet at breakfast that morning. Perhaps she’s less used to late nights than I am, Netta thought with a wry glance at the two planets suffering constant collision in Auttenberg’s skirt as she disappeared into the kitchen.

  ‘Do you think we’ll be going to the beach today?’ Netta whispered to Milla.

  ‘I hope so. If not we’ll definitely be allowed into the garden. It’s such a sunny day.’

  The garden! Netta scoffed to herself. I can do that anytime at home. What’s the point in suffering this rubbish if I—

  A pint of double cream clunked down on the table in front of her.

  ‘Drink it up, Netta! You’ll be having this every day until we start to see some meat on those scrawny little bones of yours.’

  A tired Netta caught the smirk on the matron’s face as she walked away again and she felt like crying. Until she noticed Milla’s expectant fidgeting and her cream-craving face.

  If I see another child with respiratory problems…! Erika thought as she showed the mother and a wheezing boy out of the surgery. Perhaps we should consider moving, all of us go and live by the sea, she sighed inwardly, a notion which was only reinforced by the presence of the irritating police officer hovering in her corridor the way the smoke from the steel works did over the house.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said a little too cheerfully, ‘but I have another patient to see now, so I don’t have the time to talk.’

  ‘I know you have,’ the officer grinned, his cap jammed under one arm, tapping a rolled up newspaper into the palm of his han
d as he might do with his truncheon at other times. ‘It’s me. I’m your next patient.’

  ‘Er, no.’ Erika’s laugh was infused with a sudden nervousness. She marched into the surgery to check her appointments book. ‘I have a Herr Hum—’

  ‘—mel, yes,’ said Hummel, who had followed her in and closed the door behind him, ‘That’s me.’

  Erika wilted. ‘Of course.’ She swallowed hard. ‘Of course it is. I should have recognised…’

  She gestured to the policeman to sit down and, although she knew by the smirk on his face that this wasn’t strictly a medical appointment, she decided to play along: it would be the best way to demonstrate her innocence, she thought. ‘And what seems to be the matter today, Herr Hummel.’

  ‘Well, actually,’ Hummel said, straightening, putting down the newspaper and cap on her desk, and putting both hands on his lumbar region, ‘I seem to be getting a lot of aches and pains in my back these days and I was wondering if you could take a look.’

  ‘Certainly,’ she said, rubbing her hands to warm them before touching the patient’s skin. Although it was a hot day and her hands were perfectly warm before he arrived, she felt her extremities getting cooler with every second she spent in the presence of this frigorific ass.

  ‘Could you just slip off your tunic and untuck your shirt so I can take a look.’

  Hummel didn’t say anything, but just leered at her as he did as she asked. She was intending to feel around his spine for any signs of displacement as she would for any other patient, but she decided to just observe the area, partly because of that repellent expression and partly because she did not want him to feel her trembling hands. She got up and walked around behind him.

  ‘Is that OK, doctor?’ he said, lifting the shirt halfway up his pasty back.

  The spiders of hair crawling up it from beneath the waistline of his trousers almost made her gag. It was nothing she hadn’t seen on the backs of a hundred male patients before, it was just that anything on this particular human’s body was likely to repulse her, just as that conceited expression had from the first moment she ever laid eyes on him.

  ‘Doctor?’

  ‘Yes, fine,’ she said abruptly. And then after the speediest of observations, ‘Well, it all seems to be in order. Nothing out of place.’

  ‘You can tell that just by looking?’ he said and she glared at the back of his head and the ridiculous line in his thinning hair left by that policeman’s cap of his.

  She ran her fingers down his spine quickly lest the spiders ensnare her and spin a web she could never release her hands from. ‘Is it a dull pain that lingers or a sharp pain that only comes once in a while?’

  ‘Occasionally it’s sharp and brief. Other times it’s dull and lingers all day.’

  What a surprisingly unhelpful response, Erika said caustically to herself. And then out loud, ‘I imagine it’s an occupational hazard. Do you spend a lot of time at a desk?’

  He was about to answer, but sized her up first as she sat down again, just in case that was a thinly veiled criticism of his policing style.

  ‘I do spend some of my working day writing reports and such like.’ The smug look vanished for the first time.

  ‘Well, I would recommend a nice hot bath or a water bottle around the lumbar region there when it’s lingering. Or you could just apply some menthol and methylsalicylate rub which you can pick up at the pharmacist.’ She usually only described it as menthol rub to her patients, but she added the methylsalicylate in the hope that it would bamboozle him, remind him of her superiority in this room and hopefully make him sound foolish in front of the pharmacist as he tried to recall the word. ‘You could ask your wife to apply it if it’s easier.’ She was rather pleased to notice an almost imperceptible twitch as she said this. ‘Do you have a wife, Herr Hummel?’

  ‘Er… no, I don’t actually,’ he said, busying himself with putting his tunic back on.

  What a surprise! Erika jeered internally and sat back in her chair.

  ‘If only I could find one as attractive as you.’ The leer was back.

  Erika chose to ignore his exclamation and pretended to make a note on her pad.

  ‘And all this without the aid of make-up!’ he chuckled, holding his hands up as he might in front of an exquisite painting in a gallery. ‘You have no make-up on today, do you, doctor?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said, continuing to scribble, though she did wish she had some on now to mask her cheeks, which were beginning to flush.

  ‘You never wear make-up to work, I take it?’

  ‘Er… no.’ She looked at him now wondering what on earth he was getting at, as he was clearly getting at something.

  He picked up the paper and began to leaf through it idly and continued, ‘Oh, I just mention it because you had make-up on that day I first met you in your living room there. And I assume you had been at work that day? It was a weekday after all?’

  ‘But it was an evening, if I remember rightly.’ Erika’s turn to be smug. ‘I was probably about to go out somewhere. With my husband.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he sniffed without looking up from the paper. ‘It only struck me on that day particularly because I could have sworn you had a bruise just under your eye. I mean, the make-up did a really good job of covering the colour. But I suppose it was a little swollen too.’

  Erika blanched and was about to splutter an excuse for the swollen eye, but she didn’t need to. Hummel was too busy slapping the paper and guffawing. ‘Did you see this today?’ He read, ‘The actress, Ida Wuest, who is now 66 years old, was recently denazified in Berlin. According to the findings of the Court, she had sometimes publicly expressed her appreciation of the Nazi movement, but the Court took the view that, as the President of the Welfare Organisation for Old Artists, “she was, like all prominent artists, compelled to make certain concessions”. Compelled to make certain concessions! What the hell is that supposed to mean? Bloody artists! The Court was satisfied that she was no active Nazi and had lent her financial assistance to various Jewish artists. Oh, well that’s all right then, as long as she threw some cash at some Jewish artists, as if it would even make a dent in her bank balance! Don’t you think, doctor?’

  Erika was about to appease him with an Mmm or something but she couldn’t get a sound let alone a word in edgeways now.

  ‘And did you see this? The half-monthly Youth Periodical “Der Brennpunkt” makes the following comment on Dr Adenauer’s statement on the Jewish question: “It might be wrong to consider the entire German nation guilty of the murder of six million Jews. We should, however, have sufficient community feeling to realise how strongly in those days we were connected with those people who committed the crimes. They were Germans. To-day we have established a new State. One of the mortgages we took over is the death of six million Jews. We are not entitled to forget. We have to prove through our deeds that we try to right the wrongs, as far as this is possible. If the Jews of to-day are to gain confidence in the “other” Germany, it is our duty to show them our goodwill.’

  Erika felt sick and this time it was most definitely not morning sickness. What was this man trying to do to her? Was he here to accuse her of Karin’s death? Or was he here to dredge up her past as a supporter of the National Socialist movement? He couldn’t possibly know anything about those shady choices she made as a youth, could he?

  ‘Our duty? Not entitled to forget?’ He was banging on. ‘I never did anything that I need to forget. I never did anything but my duty, did you, doctor?’

  ‘Well,’ she stuttered when he finally came up for air, ‘I agree with the…’ She flapped a hand at the paper. ‘I agree that the whole nation is not guilty, but we can all do our bit, can’t we, to try and right the wrongs of the past. Yes,’ she relaxed a little as a miniature epiphany tickled her, ‘perhaps we all have to share responsibility as a society for the crimes committed in it, if we are to move forward as a people.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Hummel wasn’t convinced,
but he had found another point of interest in the Mengede Zeitung, which may well have been the real reason he had brought this paper with him today. ‘Ah, here it is! I saw this ad in the Classifieds earlier and thought to myself, I must ask Dr Portner about it.’ He lay the newspaper on her desk and tapped at the appropriate lines:

  Employment

  Busy professional family (doctors and teacher), requires exp. live-in housekeeper betw. 30-55 years of age. Box 854

  ‘Is that your advertisement?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Must be strange having to put a new advert out for a housekeeper, and so soon after your previous one… departed.’

  ‘Well, as it says there, we are all very busy people. My father-in-law with the school, my mother-in-law with her infirm sister, my husband and I with the surgery and our daughter.’ She was about to add that she had another on the way, but her pregnancy was none of his business and she had justified herself to him quite enough already.

  ‘Yes, yes, but what I was most interested in was the age range you have in the ad: 30-55 years of age. Very specific. Why so, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  She absolutely did mind him bloody well asking, but was pretty sure he was no longer sitting there as her patient now, but was back in his official capacity as Officer Hummel, despite his cursory way of asking these questions. So she answered.

  ‘Well, we don’t want someone who’s too old and needs looking after themselves when they should be looking after the house and our daughter.’

  ‘Of course,’ Hummel said with a dash of impatience, ‘And the lower age limit?’ Which Erika knew was what he was really interested in all along.

  ‘Well, to be honest with you, officer, Karin, God rest her soul, was just a bit too young in many ways; a bit too inexperienced, naïve even.’

  To be honest with you. Hummel loved and loathed that phrase. He loathed it because it was such a pointless thing to say in a conversation, unless, that is, every single other thing the speaker had said in that conversation was a lie, which it probably wasn’t. More likely, Hummel believed, it was only ever the statement connected to the phrase to be honest with you which was to be taken with a very large pinch of salt, hence the speaker’s need to preface it with a plea for credence. And that is why he loved it.