The Watcher

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  There was a sign on the farmer’s gate which said no trespassing. But Netta and her friends often ignored it. She wondered, if she could put the same sign on her life, whether it would be ignored too. Perhaps, she thought, God was punishing her for ignoring the farmer’s sign. Because there seemed to be nothing but trespassers in her home. Trespassing on her life with her parents. If it wasn’t Karin, it was Jenny. And now she had Emmy to deal with too.

  Emmy had kept Netta’s parents away from her in hospital for fourteen whole days. At first they had told her it would be just for a week, but Emmy’s lungs were as bad as Netta’s and she wasn’t strong enough to leave – or so they told her. Her Oma and Opa sometimes went to the hospital too, but since children weren’t allowed to visit, Netta was left behind at home with Tante Bertel and Jenny.

  ‘If children aren’t allowed,’ Netta would pout to herself, ‘then how come Emmy gets to stay in hospital all this time? They must be lying,’ she’d grizzle, ‘just trying to leave me out as always!’

  So she’d stomp off to the piano and bang on the low black notes until Jenny, who seemed to be even more impatient with Netta than ever for some reason, would come from the other room hissing:

  ‘Do you think I need to hear that racket while I’m stuck here slaving away on my own?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Netta would mutter.

  But it was too late. It was always too late. Jenny would grab her by the wrist and yank her along to the cellar where Tante Bertel’s chickens lived. Then she would shove her in there, in the stinking dark, and leave her there for hours. Usually until she heard Oma or Opa coming home. Then Jenny would whip Netta out of the cellar and tell her to go upstairs and get herself cleaned up.

  ‘And if I hear you whingeing about this to your grandparents, I’ll put you back in there all night next time, got it?’

  Finally her parents came home. But then Netta felt they hardly ever looked at her, unless it was to show off their new daughter. ‘What do you think of your new little sister?’ they’d say, as if Netta was somehow responsible for this trespasser too. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ they’d say, as if a wrinkly pink ball that shits and pukes all the time could be beautiful!

  Everyone put on silly high-pitched voices when they talked to Emmy and then switched to their usual tired growls when they spoke to Netta, or each other. Netta thought there was a time, long ago, when the adults had used squeaky voices to talk to her too, but those days had obviously gone. Perhaps that was because she was an adult too now. But that couldn’t be possible at the age of seven and three quarters, could it? She didn’t want it to be true. She still wanted to play and have fun. But most of the things that were said to her now were things like: ‘Look after Emmy while I sort out the nappies, Netta!’ Or, ‘Hold your sister while I get the milk, Netta!’ She even had to take Emmy out for a walk in the pram after a hard day at school because her parents were busy in the surgery and Jenny was busy with the house and Oma was busy with Tante Bertel and Opa was still at the school. Peter and Josef would come running by asking her to play with them, but she’d just shrug at them and point out the great big stupid pram, which was no good for running through the woods with.

  ‘Pay attention, Netta!’ her teacher would say across the classroom as she saw Netta drifting off, her head propped up on one weak and tired forearm.

  She wanted to tell the teachers that she had been kept up all night by the crying of the baby, and that she wouldn’t even be able to sneak in a nap when she got home from school because she’d have to look after Emmy then until her parents were finished with their work. But she didn’t. She didn’t think they’d believe her. No one ever believed her when she had a story to tell.

  When her mama told her they were sending Netta back to the children’s home on Sylt next summer, it was the last straw. She cried and cried and couldn’t hold in her thoughts any longer.

  ‘I can’t go back there! It’s so horrible there!’

  ‘But it’s only for a few weeks again.’

  ‘A few weeks again! That’s forever!’

  ‘You’re still having trouble with your chest and you’re still terribly thin for your age, darling. The sea air will do you good.’

  ‘You don’t want me anymore, do you? You only want Emmy! You’re trying to get rid of me. You’re going to leave me there forever this time, I know it.’

  Through her tears she saw her mama look despairingly at her papa, saw her hand Emmy to him and come hurrying across the room to wrap her in her bosom.

  ‘Of course we still want you, silly. Whatever gave you that idea?’

  But Netta could not be consoled, until she heard her papa say in one of those adult mumbles that kids are not supposed to hear even though they are sitting right under the nose of the adult who’s mumbling it, ‘Well, what if we all go up to Sylt for a few weeks? We could all do with the break. And I think Emmy’s lungs would benefit from getting away from this place too.’

  ‘Really?’ Netta felt the surprise in her mama’s voice, which vibrated against her little head still nestled between her swollen boobs.

  ‘Yes. Look how often we’ve been up and down to the hospital with her already,’ Papa said, but even Netta had a feeling that wasn’t the part Mama was so happy about.

  And Netta was even more sure about that feeling when she saw Jenny standing in the kitchen doorway, rubbing at a plate with a tea towel, her face twisted in just the same way Netta’s had been when she had watched Peter and Josef running off into the woods as she was left pushing that stupid pram.

  Erika sat next to Max in the front of the DKW with all the excitement Netta had done the day the little girl had gone unwittingly to the children’s home for the first time. She was going away with her family. Her family. Her husband and two children. Not with her in-laws as well, or the housekeeper, but just the family that she had always wanted before the war came and ransacked her life.

  As the car drove out of the village she thought she saw Rodrick’s brawny back disappear into the pharmacy. She blinked away the tiny urge to look further, to see if it really was him. She tried to clear her throat of the sediment of desire that would inevitably be there forever and turned to look at her baby instead, sitting doll-like on the back seat next to her big sister.

  ‘How’s it going back there?’ she beamed.

  ‘Fine, Mama.’ Netta spoke for both of them, since Emmy was still a few months from her first words.

  Erika was happy to see her own excitement reflected in Netta’s, reined in though it was by the little girl’s irritation at having to look after her sister in the back when she should be riding up front with Papa as before and by the dormant bug of doubt curled up in her gut that this was all a scheme to abandon her to the merciless clutches of Frau Auttenberg and Herr Kahler again.

  As Erika cooed at her, Emmy’s face contorted and she coughed up some phlegm. Erika’s face dropped as she reached over to mop at her baby’s mouth with a handkerchief and glare out of the back window at Mengede receding into the distance with its eternal clouds of sulphur and its eternal phantoms of the past.

  As they drove out of the relatively cocooned little suburb and up through the country, Erika was shocked and a little shaken to see so many British and American soldiers still hanging around on the streets and rumbling by in great loutish lorries. It made her nervous. God knows, she thought, what it does to Max.

  She put a hand lightly on his right arm and felt it stiffen – just a little startled because he was so focused on the road, she told herself, and he corroborated this by smiling at her and adjusting his glasses with his left hand, allowing her hand to remain as long as she liked.

  ‘I’ll go and get the tickets for the ferry,’ he said as they parked near the checkpoint. ‘Why don’t you stretch your legs for a bit?’

  So she scooped up Emmy and did just that.

  ‘Netta, don’t go far!’ she called to her inquisitive daughter, who was already darting up the quayside, but quickly Erika turned her f
ace away from Netta and into the warm breeze allowing herself to feel cleansed by it, rejuvenated by it.

  Erika did not know much English so the words of the British soldier who came to stand by her side at the railings meant little, but she had a good idea what his intentions were. He smiled at Emmy, complimented her, she guessed, then he offered Erika a cigarette. She shook her head politely.

  ‘Nein?’ he said at the limit of his German. ‘Nein?’ he repeated, leaning on the railings now and looking her up and down through the smoke curling up from the tip of his own cigarette.

  She used to consider herself reasonably attractive. The long dark hair, the high cheekbones, they hadn’t gone away, but her confidence in her body had waned somewhat after the birth of each child, so it did her self-esteem no end of good to be getting this attention from a foreign soldier. And it did it even greater good when she felt the unusually possessive hand of her husband clamp itself around her waist and saw him throw an intrepid scowl at the soldier as he guided her back to the car.

  *

  Netta played on the beach every day. She was in heaven. Which was funny because hell was only next door. Their bed and breakfast was right next to the children’s home and after a few days of playing on the beach in uninterrupted sunshine, Netta felt the skies cloud over and she looked up from her sandcastle to see there were in fact no clouds, but an eclipse of Biblical proportions. It was Frau Auttenberg standing over her.

  ‘Well, well, fancy seeing you here, Netta.’

  Netta searched around desperately for her parents who were flopped nearby on a picnic blanket and replied, ‘I’m with my parents.

  We’re staying over there.’ She pointed at the B&B so there was no chance the matron might consider her a waif that needed taking in, strapping up and correcting this time.

  ‘And who is this?’ Auttenberg bared her yellowing teeth at Emmy who was planted nearby, her doughy legs completely covered by the unwanted sand from the moat around Netta’s castle.

  ‘Emmy,’ Netta said.

  ‘A new little sister?’ Auttenberg said, licking her lips.

  Netta nodded but Auttenberg was smiling now at her papa who was squinting across the bright sand at whoever it was talking to his daughters.

  ‘Nice to see you again, doctor,’ she called out, ‘I was just saying how well Netta is looking.’

  No she wasn’t, thought Netta, examining the woman’s clothes. She was all in black. She had never worn black before. She still looked like an enormous sack of globes, but now she looked like a solar system where the fiery centre had finally exhausted itself and gone out.

  ‘The sea air really does her good, doesn’t it?’ she was saying to Papa.

  ‘I hope so,’ he answered.

  ‘Well, if you ever need our services again, we’d be more than happy to have her back.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Papa said.

  And after an awkward silence which the waves filled in, she said, ‘Well, come on children, on with our walk.’

  That was when she rolled on and Netta finally noticed the line of kids trailing behind her. She looked up at it as it passed, a little proud of not being stuck in it, a little embarrassed at not being part of it. And then she saw Milla and she jumped up and quietly hugged her friend so that Auttenberg up ahead would not hear.

  ‘You’re here!’ Milla whispered.

  ‘You too!’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘Over there.’ She pointed with great excitement until she saw Milla’s shoulders droop.

  ‘Not with us?’ Milla moaned.

  Netta shook her head and sucked on her lips.

  The waves filled the silence again.

  ‘But I’ll be here every day, so when they do let you out—’

  ‘They never let us out. It’s worse than last time. She says she doesn’t have enough adults to look after us outside.’ Milla thought this next bit of news was best breathed between cupped hands straight into Netta’s ear. ‘Because Herr Kahler died.’

  Netta’s eyes grew wide at the news and she looked over her shoulder at the black clothes of Auttenberg. She looked back at her incarcerated friend. She thought for a second that if Herr Kahler was gone, it might not be so bad staying there for a while. For Milla. With Milla. She could ask her parents. She looked at them, her papa snoozing with his head in her mama’s lap. She looked at the bright sand, blue sky, the unchained space.

  ‘Camilla!’ Auttenberg’s familiar foghorn.

  ‘I’ll be here every day. I’ll see you whenever you come out.’

  Milla smiled weakly and scampered off.

  Netta waved limply and went half-heartedly back to her sandcastle, oblivious of her papa who had watched the two little girls’ interaction through one secret eye with anxious fascination and an aching in his heart.

  Max felt a happiness on the island which surprised him and scared him. The only time he thought about Jenny was as he watched Milla and Netta part and then it was just to think how little he had thought about her in the last few days. He looked out across the wide beach between the holiday makers and the sea; a rich blue and very still. Nothing like the sea on which his hospital stood in Gegesha; a charcoal, choppy wilderness that slapped at the stilts underneath the hospital. His body shivered, as if trying to expel the image and remind him that it was tourists’ legs he was seeing in the water now, not wooden stilts; and it was the jetty where the pedal boat rides started over there and not the wooden bridge which led to the slippery floor of his building where maggots abandoned the corpses and black fingers were chopped off with pliers. Where after years of trying to work by the light of makeshift candles constructed from spent rifle cartridges with a piece of cotton for a wick, they finally got electricity. Where, by the ever fluctuating intensity of light that electricity brought, he once turned from staring out over the grey sea to see Bubi, his young Polish helper, dash across the bridge and into the hospital, his voice cracked with grief, one of their wonderful new light bulbs dangling like a noose above his head, as he uttered one word: ‘Horst.’

  Erika felt tears bubble up inside her as she watched her sleeping husband twitching and weeping in her lap.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she whispered to herself and to him.

  She had thought this was all behind them. She was sure it couldn’t happen here anyway, on this idyllic family holiday. Her face burned as if she had had too much sun already, but it was in fact with sadness for him, pity for herself, embarrassment should anyone notice her whimpering man, and irritation that a perfect picture was being torn to shreds again.

  ‘Shh, shh,’ she said, stroking his hair with trembling fingers and all the tenderness she could muster. ‘You’re safe. You’re safe here. You’re safe with me. There’s no war here. It’s over. Shh, shh.’ She imitated the sea. ‘There’s no more war. Shh, shh.’

  She repeated it over and over, but with images of Rodrick clamouring for access to her brain, images of Jenny reclining in the back of her mind, images of Karin’s body floating behind her eyes and images of Allied soldiers crawling all over her country, she knew she would have to chant this mantra innumerable times before even she believed it, let alone convinced her fractured husband that it was true. And just then, as if the universe decided to throw her another obstacle, she became aware of the sound of a seal. She turned to look for the animal and for her daughters so she could show them this entertaining creature, but there was no seal. Incredibly the sound was coming from the little body of Emmy, who was coughing so hard she was retching, blue features now drawn on her red face, watery eyes bulging as she looked helplessly across the beach for help from where she was buried up to her waist in sand, Netta nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Emmy!’ Erika screamed as Max and she hurtled across the beach. Then, both on their knees, he clawed away the sand from her legs before Erika scooped her up, cradling her and forgetting every bit of medical training she had ever had.

  ‘What’s happening to her? What’s going on?’ she pleade
d to Max who was trying to listen to her chest and see into her mouth.

  Emmy was fighting for every snatch of that healthy sea air she could get and still making the terrible honk of a seal.

  ‘Hear that sound?’ he said to Erika as curious holiday makers began to crowd round.

  ‘Croup?’ she offered.

  He nodded. ‘Run ahead,’ he said, grabbing his daughter. ‘Turn on the hot water in the bathroom, full on and let it run.’

  She did as she was told and glanced back to see Max hot on her heels with an exhausted Emmy flopping about in his arms.

  ‘And see if they have a kettle in reception. Put that on in the bathroom too,’ he called out.

  She nodded furiously, crashed into the B&B, shrieked at a startled bell boy until he went to find a kettle then rushed upstairs and turned on the tap. Max, despite his little load, was there in no time.

  ‘Sit there!’ he said, indicating the toilet lid and passing Emmy to her.

  ‘She’s cyanotic, Max,’ she called out as he disappeared into the bedroom and began tearing the white sheets from the bed.

  ‘But she’s still coughing, isn’t she?’ he shouted as the bell boy arrived with the kettle.

  ‘Yes,’ Erika said, knowing that it was when she stopped coughing, stopped fighting for her breath, that it was really time to worry.

  Max came back into the room and arranged one of the sheets like a tent over Emmy with Erika’s head as the tent pole. He snatched the kettle from the boy and plugged it in, aiming its spout into the tent, which quickly added to the steam filling the room from the hot tap.

  This sauna tent was oppressive and yet strangely calming to Erika, who responded like a bird in a covered cage. On the outside, Max paced back and forth looking at the bizarre sight of his wife and daughter shrouded in the white sheet like ghosts and he prayed it was no premonition.