The Watcher

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  Five minutes elapsed and the hot water from the tap ran cold. But Max refilled the kettle and switched it on again.

  ‘We should take her to the hospital,’ Erika’s disembodied voice said.

  ‘Just a few more minutes,’ Max said, chewing on his thumbnail.

  ‘It could be too late then.’

  ‘What do the hospitals do? What have they ever done every time we’ve been back and forth with her, eh? They terrify her and have no answers. No, just give it time,’ he said, listening through the sheet at Emmy’s breathing, which had now lost its raucous sound. ‘How does she look?’

  There was a long pause, then, ‘Better.’

  A little bolt of triumph rushed through Max and sent him springing upright. He nodded at the boy, who had been standing petrified with his mouth wide open all this time, his signal to scurry back downstairs and tell the proprietor the incredible events he’d just been a pivotal part of.

  ‘Let’s take her to the hospital anyway,’ Erika said.

  ‘OK, but we should stay in the bathroom with the steam for a lot longer first, just to make sure her lungs are really clear.’

  He heard Erika sigh and knew she was itching to find the hospital now, but he was galvanised by his little victory and stood firm.

  ‘Mama, mama!’ Netta’s anxious voice pierced his musings from the other side of the bathroom door and he went through to the bedroom to find her, a little reluctant moon of distress in the system of Auttenberg which engulfed her.

  ‘She was playing with my group when you disappeared and some of the tourists on the beach told us you had rushed back here and that your baby had been taken ill. Is everything all right now?’

  ‘I think so, yes,’ Max sighed. ‘Thanks for looking after her.’

  ‘Always a pleasure,’ Auttenberg said, finally relinquishing her grip on the child’s shoulders.

  ‘What’s wrong with Emmy?’ Netta approached her papa, who sat on the bed wearily.

  ‘Her cough got very bad. We’re not sure why, but she seems to be—’

  ‘Max!’ Erika’s cry was like a huge dose of Benzedrine to him and he was on his feet again and full of energy. He burst back into the bathroom to see the sheet on the floor and Erika offering up Emmy for his inspection.

  ‘She’s all stiff. I think she’s got a raging fever too.’

  ‘It’s probably just the heat from the steam,’ he said with a hint of irritation as Erika barged past him into the cooler bedroom, moping at her daughter’s brow with her sleeve.

  ‘No, I think she’s burning up, Max, and look at her!’

  Max tried to manipulate her neck. It was rigid.

  ‘I told you we should have gone to the hospital,’ she shouted.

  He wanted to shout at her back and perhaps he would have if Frau Auttenberg had not been loitering still. Instead he scooped up Emmy and ran down to the car calling out over his shoulder, ‘Fraulein, would you mind awfully looking after Netta for a little longer? We’ll be back as soon as we can.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Auttenberg called back.

  ‘No!’ Netta wailed, convinced this was the start of another four week abandonment. She tried to follow her parents, but the matron, with all the authority now invested in her by the doctor, clamped the little girl between some of her orbs and they watched the red car speed away from them again, just as it had done last summer.

  ‘The drip is in, doctor.’

  ‘Thank you, nurse,’ Doctor Bähr said, keeping his gaze fixed on the infant’s face through his half-moon spectacles.

  ‘Meningitis,’ Max said over Bähr’s shoulder into the doctor’s ear, which was fringed with the only hair he had left on his head.

  ‘I thought you said it was croup?’ Erika said from the other side of the bed.

  ‘If it’s tubercular meningitis you could test for it with PPD, can’t you? I’ve read about great results in America and Canada,’ Max said to the old man’s pate which shone in the glare of the examination lamp.

  ‘Are you in the medical field, sir?’ Bähr said without looking up.

  ‘We’re both general practitioners.’

  ‘Oh.’ Bähr grimaced. ‘Nevertheless, you must both know it could just as likely be a bad case of the ’flu. The symptoms are very similar to meningitis.’

  ‘Blood pressure is dropping, doctor.’

  ‘Emmy, Emmy,’ Bähr said loudly, rubbing at the girl’s sternum with his knuckles. ‘Wake up! Wake up now.’

  ‘What about a spinal tap then?’ Erika asked.

  ‘Well, let’s just see how she responds to these antibiotics first. Then we may need to consider that, yes.’

  ‘Consider it now!’ Max barked.

  With slow and condescending eyelids Bähr looked up at Max for the first time over the top of his spectacles, paused, and then turned his attention back to the patient.

  ‘Darling, Emmy,’ Erika moaned, ‘come on, wake up and breathe for Mama now.’

  ‘Oh this is ridiculous!’ Max said to the air. ‘What if they’re not the right antibiotics and we’re just standing here like loons waiting for her to respond to them?’

  ‘We can do the tap,’ Bähr said, straightening up and folding his arms, ‘but we won’t get the results for a couple of days anyway.’

  ‘A couple of days!’ Erika gasped.

  ‘Young lady,’ Bähr said, ‘you clearly do not have a lot of experience, but even you should know that that is usual practice. Besides, this is a small hospital with limited resources.’ He mumbled his next words as if they were meant for his ears only, but clearly they were not, ‘And, here as anywhere else, there is still a shortage of good doctors and laboratory technicians since the Nazis got rid of all the Jewish ones.’

  His words pricked Erika and she resented the sense of guilt they injected into her.

  ‘How about,’ he continued, ‘you just concentrate on being mother right now and leave the medical decisions to me?’

  ‘Doctor,’ the nurse said and all three doctors turned to see her knitted brow as she read the thermometer she had just pulled from Emmy’s mouth.

  ‘Forget your resources and your “usual practice” and your experience,’ Max seethed, slapping at his trousers and pacing about the room, ‘Just look at what’s here in front of you and make a decision for God’s sake! There’s no time to wait for evidence and responses. She’s getting worse, what more do you need to know?’

  ‘I can’t find a pulse now, doctor.’

  Erika smothered a shriek with both of her hands as Bähr grabbed Emmy’s wrist, fingered her neck, listened to her chest, then began compressions. Erika watched through bulging eyes as her baby’s fragile rib cage was pounded again and again by Bähr’s blunt fingers.

  ‘Oh, God!’ cried Max. If only I had brought her in sooner, he thought, beating himself internally with every passive pump of his daughter’s chest.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Erika sobbed. I believe, I believe, she cried to herself, I have faith in you, she said to the heavens as Max’s rant to the doctor took on a whole new meaning for her. I’m sorry I didn’t always believe, but I got there in the end, didn’t I? Max showed me and now I have faith. Don’t punish Emmy for my own sins! Please, don’t punish her because of me!

  She rushed over to Max and gripped his hand as she’d once done under a blanket when they were wedged into the old armchair in her student digs together. Then, as now, she had taken a deep breath, as deep a breath as her rib cage would allow her to, squeezed there between him and the fraying upholstery, and had said, ‘Your faith is so important to you, Max, I know that. But so is my belief that there is no need for religion in the new Germany.’

  Then, as now, they had both stared in silence for a moment across the room to the gap under the door.

  ‘We are students of medicine,’ she’d continued, ‘students of science. We already know that physics and chemistry is what makes the world go round, not superstition.’

  She felt him twitch then beneath the blanket and
wished she had used a slightly less abrasive word, yet in that same moment she’d wanted to slap him for putting his life in the hands of those who believed a work of fiction, which described simply impossible events, to be true. That was simply stupid!

  But here she was now faced with the loss of her baby, with physics and chemistry stretched to their limits, and she could tell herself she was just regurgitating the code of her religious parents instilled in her along with table manners and good grammar, but her compulsion to pray for some supernatural being’s help now seemed to come from her very viscera, as if it had been planted there when that same being shaped it from a mystical clay many years before.

  ‘I think you both know how this works, at least,’ Dr Bäher said many minutes later with a stunning coldness, the immense cruelty of which only dawned on the parents when they relived this moment a thousand times over the next few months. ‘I’ve been working on the child for long enough now. Her heart refuses to beat again. So I’m going to stop. Time of death… Oh,’ he exclaimed quietly, as if the roundness of the time gave him some kind of satisfaction, ‘1800 hours precisely.’

  Netta’s dream world turned to bubbles which roared in her ears as she broke the surface of sleep, then in the long slow heart beat between dreaming and waking she felt the sheets around her fingers and realised they were not the bobbly flannel sheets of her little bed at home, which were as nice to stroke as a cat – but that was OK because she was on holiday, wasn’t she? However, before the heart beat was up, she realised what she felt was not the starched white sheets of the B&B either, but the limp grey ones of the bunks in the children’s home, boiled to death in that big copper tub and stirred resentfully by the taloned hands of the crow lady gripping that worn out paddle once broken across Paul’s backside. Netta blinked at the darkness above her and the mattress which hung there like a coffin lid gave her more clues. She was on the bottom bunk again, but did that mean..? She scrambled out of bed and stood on tip toe to try and see the face of the child in the bunk above. No Milla. Of course! Netta had only arrived after dinner yesterday and was given the first empty bunk on the end of a row of full ones. Milla had been here for weeks before and was somewhere in the middle of that row with a new bunk mate, and even a new best friend for all Netta knew. She felt sick. She knew Mama and Papa were going to do this to her again. She knew this family holiday to the beach was just their horrible plan to trick her into coming to this place again. She looked out of the window. The sky was a perfect blue, the waves twinkled as if it was raining sunshine and the driveway was covered in a thin layer of sand.

  Unlike the B&B, this place never had hot water in the showers, so after what felt like a breath-taking pelting with lumps of ice, during which Frau Auttenberg stood in the doorway, reminding Netta of the stone that was rolled in front of the tomb where Jesus was buried, the children dressed hurriedly and scampered downstairs for breakfast. Finally, on the stairs Netta caught up with Milla.

  ‘Milla,’ she hissed remembering Frau Auttenberg’s preference for quiet inside the house.

  ‘Netta! You’re back!’ Milla squealed, her hand over her mouth to muffle the noise.

  At the round table Milla sat down next to another girl, a big girl with one very thick eyebrow which stretched across both eyes. She was sitting on Milla’s right, which is where Netta always used to sit. But there was still a place on her left, which a little boy was heading for, so Netta ran with the kind of speed she usually saved for races against Peter and Josef and slipped into the chair first, much to the boy’s embarrassment, who now had to float around the table with all the places being rapidly filled, until he came to the two places no one wanted – either side of Flea-bag Fleur. He and an unlucky little girl took those places, sitting on the edge of their seats and turning their noses up at the smell of Fleur to show the rest of the table that they were not sitting there because they wanted to, but because they had no choice.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ Milla whispered as they tongued their salty porridge.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Netta said. ‘Forever I suppose, for all my parents care.’

  ‘Who are you?’ the girl with one eyebrow said stroppily.

  ‘Oh, Trudi, this is Netta. She stayed here last summer. Netta, this is Trudi.’

  ‘Hi,’ Netta squeaked, fascinated and a little scared of this enormous girl and her enormous black eyebrow. She wondered, a little jealously, just how friendly Milla could be with someone like this, but felt better at the thought that there was no way Trudi needed a pint of double cream every morning, so she would have nothing to give to Milla, nothing to make Milla’s eyes light up, unlike Netta would.

  And yet after the porridge the glass of cream didn’t come.

  But her papa did.

  As he walked into the dining room Netta’s instinct was to jump up and hug him, but she made herself stay in her seat and scowled at him instead to punish him for leaving her here. Besides, she had no idea what he was here for now. Just to drop off more of her things, probably, and tell her he’d be back in four weeks. She scowled even harder and crossed her arms tightly punching the air out of her little lungs as she did so.

  ‘Come on, darling,’ her papa said quietly, crouching down by her chair, ‘We’re going home. You’re coming with me and Mama now.’

  ‘I’m not staying here anymore?’ she said, her scowl melting.

  She turned to look at him and noticed his eyes were bloodshot. He tried to smile and stood up.

  ‘Come on, go and grab your things. Don’t leave anything behind now.’

  Don’t leave anything behind! She liked the sound of that. If they were going to leave her here again soon it wouldn’t matter if she forgot something, would it? So she was definitely not coming back if he wanted her to make sure she brought everything with her this time.

  She looked at Milla’s disappointed face and told herself it was OK, because Milla had Trudi now, so she didn’t have to feel bad about running upstairs, stuffing her things back into her valise and hurtling back down again lest her papa was gone again by the time she did.

  ‘I’ll see you on the beach perhaps,’ she smiled at Milla.

  Milla nodded. And her papa ushered her out into the light, leaving the black-clothed Auttenberg on the doorstep looking even more snuffed out than ever.

  ‘Take care now, Dr Portner,’ she honked, ‘and you, Netta.’

  Netta looked over her shoulder at the matron and was surprised to see her face looking soft, sad even. But her attention was soon diverted by the sand on the driveway which she joyfully shuffled her shoes through, just like she would leaves in the wood in a month or two.

  Then her papa’s words came blowing back through her head: ‘Come on, darling. We’re going home,’ he had said. Not, ‘We’re going back to the B&B.’

  ‘Are we going home?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  But that meant no more holiday, no more playing on the beach. Why was it over so soon? She began to whine, but immediately her papa stopped her by saying, ‘But we’re going to go to the beach one more time. Right now!’

  ‘Yay!’ she shouted and ran off ahead of him across the promenade and down onto the sand.

  ‘Netta,’ he called out and she turned to see what he wanted. Be careful, don’t do this, don’t go there, don’t do that!

  He hesitated. Then, ‘It’s OK,’ he shouted and sat down on a bench waving her off to play.

  She was so happy to be free again she didn’t stop to think where Emmy or her mama were, she just knew everything must be fine again otherwise she’d still be stuck in that horrible home. Occasionally she’d look up the beach to make sure papa was still there and there he would be, still sat on the bench, but sitting a little bit like a doll, a bit floppy and looking out to sea. One of these times, he caught her staring at him and waved her over.

  ‘Yes, papa?’ she said, out of breath from racing to him right from the water where she’d been paddling.

  ‘Come and sit
down for a minute,’ he said patting the bench, ‘I have something to tell you.’

  She did as she was told, a little reluctantly because she’d rather be paddling some more and because it felt weird being asked to sit down with her papa like this. I have something to tell you. The words could mean a nice surprise, but the way he said them and the look on his face told her it wasn’t that.

  Their eyes met and he snatched his gaze away back to the ocean again. He took a deep breath of that healthy sea air and let it out in a long and massive sigh. ‘Netta,’ he said, his voice quivering, ‘Emmy wasn’t well yesterday, was she?’

  ‘No,’ Netta said, following his gaze out to sea. ‘Is she all right now?’

  ‘Oh.’ He sang the word in a shiver. Netta hadn’t heard him use such a high pitch since she last heard him cooing over her little sister and that might have been yesterday, but it seemed an awfully long time ago now. ‘Well, you see, no… she isn’t… I mean, she was very sick. And she got sicker and sicker and we tried to help her, but Mama and Papa couldn’t so we took her to the hospital and the doctors and nurses there, well…’ She looked out of the corner of her eye at him and saw his eyes were full of tears and he was biting his lip with a trembling jaw.

  She rolled her eyes back out to sea and pushed her hands under her thighs. She knew something bad was coming. She knew her papa was sad, but she had no idea how to help him. It was usually she who was crying and he who did the comforting, just like when she had broken her nose on the ice last winter.

  ‘They did everything they could to help her too, but then Emmy’s heart stopped beating. And they couldn’t get it started again. And they did everything they could to get it started again, but,’ he spat out that last word as he tried to hold a great sob back. Then he took in a huge breath again and let the words tumble out in the air as he breathed it all out, as if they might be disguised in the whoosh, as if it was the only way he could get them out. ‘But she died, Netta. Your little sister Emmy has died.’

  Everything went quiet then. Even the gentle roar of the waves seemed to stop as Netta took in the facts. And just as when her parents told her anything she didn’t quite understand, she had questions. And asking questions now seemed like a better idea than ever because it also meant she didn’t have to think of what to say to a grown man who was crying like a child.