The Watcher

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  ‘Why do you think she’s a torturer, darling?’

  ‘Because she hurts me.’

  Erika kept her eyes on her notes, but her maternal ears were now trained on Netta.

  ‘How?’

  ‘She wallops me on the head with her pen when I can’t get the answer to her stupid sums.’

  In the armchair Max twitched in his sleep.

  ‘With a pen?’ Karl said doubtfully. ‘Can you really wallop someone with a pen?’

  ‘She can. She must have been practising for years. It really hurts, Opa. She whacks me all the time. I don’t think she likes me. I’m sure the other kids don’t get hit as much.’

  Unnoticed, Max’s head rolled to one side, then snapped back to the other. His hands jumped up from the arms of the chair, then settled uneasily back again.

  ‘And most of the time she gets it all caught up in my hair and then rips it out.’

  Netta’s words were pouring into her father’s ears and dyeing his dreams the colour of pain.

  He is back in the office in Gegesha, having been dragged out of his bunk in the early hours by two guards as Edgar shouted after them, ‘Where are you taking him? What are you doing, you bastards!’ He is choking on the floor from the way they’ve used his shirt as a leash and a Lieutenant is firing questions at him about his father-in-law, a Captain of the Border Guard. Then Volkov’s hands are round his neck and Max’s blood boils at the filthy touch of the man that murdered his brother Horst. He tries to resist, but the sergeant brings his knee up into Max’s face. Max shrieks with the pain and collapses to the floor. There’s a jangling and scraping above as a huge bunch of keys on the desk is grabbed and brought down on his head.

  ‘Tell us the truth!’

  Ch-mp.

  ‘Tell us the truth!’

  Ch-mp.

  ‘Tell us!’

  Ch-mp, ‘Tell us!’ Ch-mp, ch-mp. The keys bite into the ball of human on the ground.

  Max puts his hands over his head until they curl up, bruised and bleeding. Then only his skull is left to protect him from death as the keys thump into him again and again. The barracks key, the office key, the solitary key, the kitchen key, the key to the storerooms, the key to the locksmith’s workshop, the key to the armoured car, the key to the main gate, the key to freedom – that’s what each and every one of them is. Where once he thought the guards brandished them to keep him captive, now he knows that all together and wielded like a multi-headed mace, rapped over his head until his skull caves in, they are in fact the keys to freedom, because death is the only road to freedom now.

  ‘Look!’ cried Netta and leant forward to show Karl and Erika her sore scalp and the clump missing from her hair.

  Erika gasped at the sight of her daughter’s vandalised body.

  Max gasped as he tried to break the surface of his nightmare, but still being beaten by the demons there he lashed out at them in one last desperate attempt to free himself and miraculously sent Volkov flying across the office.

  ‘Max!’

  He woke to find Erika kneeling beside him, cuts in his knuckles and his mother’s favourite vase in pieces on the living room floor.

  Nearly every morning break time it was the same routine: Netta would collect up everyone’s money, slip over the wall, buy a bag full of doughnuts from the smileful shopkeeper and reap the rewards, both in sugar and in attention, back in the playground. The only thing that was thankfully never the same as the first time was the arrival of those two nuns.

  The whacks on the head from Schwester Hildegarda’s pen became a routine too and, although the pain never ceased to shock Netta, she began in a strange way to enjoy the attention that this brought her from the other kids as well. She was admired for the beatings she took and the way she never cried, no matter how much she felt like she wanted to inside sometimes, which clearly annoyed Schwester Hildegarda, who would then try and think of more and more callous ways for Netta to earn a beating sooner.

  ‘Anetta, if x equals 3y minus z, what is the value of x when y is 4 and z is 1?’

  Netta’s eyes bulged as her brain tried to cope with all the information the Schwester fired at her. ‘Pardon, Schwester Hildegarda?’

  The nun sighed dramatically then gobbled out the question again, but much faster this time. ‘If x equals 3y minus z, what is the value of x when y is 4 and z is 1?’

  Netta grabbed her pencil and began to try and write down the question.

  ‘Do not write it down! If your big head cannot handle a simple little question like this perhaps you are in the wrong school. Now for the final time…’ And as Hildegarda rattled off the question once more, Netta looked around for inspiration and saw Peter mouthing something to her from his desk at the front of the class. She missed it so he began again with a wide mouth, not unlike the baker’s wife’s smile, but, whether by accident or design, her teacher’s big black plumage swished in the way and blocked the rest of Peter’s answer.

  What number begins with a smile, Netta thought frantically, one, two, three, four? No, they’re all pursed lips and tongues. Five, six, seven. Hildegarda raised her pen. Eight! Eight begins with a smile, she thought jubilantly, and since she didn’t have the time to explore any further numbers, she blurted out quickly, ‘Eight. The answer’s eight.’

  ‘Idiot!’ the nun spat and the pen whipped at Netta’s scalp.

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘Eleven,’ Mary answered in a flash and Netta winced both with the pain and the realisation that eleven begins with a smile too and it was only three away from eight. If only she’d had a little more time!

  That break time Netta was still so furious with her Maths teacher that she didn’t eat her doughnut as usual.

  ‘Not hungry?’ Peter’s words were muffled, his mouth stuffed with warm dough, but Netta understood him.

  ‘Yeah,’ Netta said, ‘but I’m going to eat mine in class.’

  ‘What?’ Mary squeaked through lips ringed with sugar.

  Netta was sick of Hildegarda showing her up in front of the class. It was time for her to up the ante even more – show the stupid nun she wasn’t afraid of her, and wring even more admiration and attention from her classmates.

  The air in the next Maths class was fizzing with the anticipation of Netta’s latest dare. Everyone had heard about it and they could barely sit still in their seats or concentrate on their sums. Even her brightest students were making silly mistakes and Schwester Hildegarda could sense the atmosphere; sense there was something she didn’t know, but ought to.

  She stopped attacking the blackboard with chalk and spun round to face the class. Some of the students at the front snapped their heads back to the blackboard so she knew the font of this disorder was somewhere near the back. She eyed the far rows, but there was no sign of trouble, even from Anetta Portner, so she went back to scribbling out equations.

  That was when Netta eased the slightly squashed doughnut from her pocket and, when enough kids had turned to look at her again, took a big, pantomime bite from it. With her nose in the air she chewed it slowly like a cow, savouring every moment and sending electric shocks of fearful thrills through her classmates. Some of that electricity reached the teacher and she turned to find out where it was coming from. But by this time, of course, Netta’s doughnut was back in her pocket and her jaw still.

  ‘Copy the equations into your books,’ Hildegarda said suspiciously. ‘Then get on with solving them. You have ten minutes,’ she said as she sat, opened a Bible at Deuteronomy and read:

  If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stone
s. So you shall purge the evil from your midst…

  She stopped and looked up as that spark of rebellion reached her again. This time she spotted a blur of movement at the back somewhere around Anetta. She stood up and silently stepped between the desks where everyone was busy scribbling into their books, even Anetta. She stopped at Mary’s desk. Mary looked up briefly, then carried on solving equations. The nun moved on to Boris’s desk. Boris didn’t even acknowledge her presence; he was far too busy trying to finish on time. She moved on to Anetta’s desk and felt the entire class behind her turning to watch. Hildegarda examined the girl’s exercise book. Anetta, of course, had barely begun to solve the first equation, but what intrigued her teacher was the glistening of her fingers holding the pencil. The nun stood there for a while until Netta looked up at the giant turkey towering over her and smiled utterly insincerely and with what appeared to be swollen cheeks.

  ‘Everything all right, Anetta?’ Hildegarda asked with unusual concern for her student.

  Netta nodded, her lips tightly sealed; lips, Hildegarda observed, which sparkled with sugar.

  ‘I asked you a question, Anetta. At least have the courtesy to answer me.’

  Hildegarda heard a collective intake of breath from the children who thought she was unaware of them and saw Netta move her jaw slowly and awkwardly, her tongue shifting the pulpy contents of her mouth out of the way so she could mumble, ‘I. Am. Fine. Thank—’

  Schwester Hildegarda grabbed Netta’s mouth between her claws, prising it open and displaying the evidence for all to see. Netta nearly choked and inadvertently spat pieces of chewed up doughnut in her teacher’s direction. Hildegarda stepped back to avoid the offending mess, releasing Netta from her grasp, who then swallowed and, incredibly to both her teacher and her classmates, giggled as she licked her lips.

  ‘You repulsive little creature,’ the nun cried, ‘I have never known such wicked behaviour from a pupil of mine.’

  Netta was ready for the wallop, but it was a small price to pay, she felt, for such a wonderful scene.

  However, Schwester Hildegarda was not brandishing her pen, nor did she return to the desk to retrieve it. She just stood quietly for a moment then said something which pulled the rug out, quite violently, from underneath any sense of triumph Netta was feeling right then. ‘Let’s see what your father has to say about this behaviour then, shall we?’ And as she walked to the classroom door on her way to make the telephone call, she was heard by some of the gobsmacked children to be muttering, ‘So you shall purge the evil from your midst.’

  Max was furious. He was just about to leave the surgery to spend the afternoon doing house calls; house calls that would now be delayed and add hours onto his working day, not to mention indignation onto already impatient patients. Erika had a full appointment book for the surgery so couldn’t do any of the home visits for him. All she could offer were pleas to drive safely as he yanked the motorbike from the shed and made the engine roar on his behalf. At least going on the bike he would be able to cut through the traffic and get to the school and back a lot quicker than if he went in the car.

  As he zoomed over the bridge, a memory raced through him on the wind bawling in his ears. It was of another bridge and another motorbike.

  The bridge is over the river Oder in Breslau. And the motorbike has been abandoned among the bodies and debris of a fierce battle which took place there before he and the rest of the prisoners were herded there by their Russian captors.

  The prisoners have all been stripped of their overcoats, watches and laces, and Max is shaking with fear, assuming they are all about to be executed. But then the trucks arrive and he sees the prisoners at the front being ordered to climb into them, and he knows it is not his time to die. Not yet. He sees that some of his comrades ahead of him have realised this too; realised they will be needing something to replace the stuff Ivan has just taken from them, so they crouch down and strip the coats from the corpses, pulling off boots from stiff-ankled feet. Max spots the motorbike lying in the dirt with a leather jacket still wrapped around the handle bars where the owner had hung it just before they were attacked. He was glad he didn’t have to take it from a dead man. Looking at the rest of his unit stripping the bodies, they seem to him to have acquired his detached clinical attitude to cadavers, an attitude he is quickly losing.

  One of the trucks honks its horn.

  But it wasn’t a truck; it was a car on the bridge in Mengede. Max had drifted across the road and was heading straight for it. The car honked its horn again and brought Max back to the present just in time for him to swerve out of the way and he skidded to a halt by the side of the road.

  His heart was racing. He shook the past from his head, slapped his own face in anger and an effort to keep himself alert, and set off again more furious than ever now that this interruption to his day nearly cost him his life.

  He was shown to Netta’s Maths classroom by a young nun, who hung around in the doorway after, eager to watch the fireworks, no doubt, until an older nun, who introduced herself to him as Schwester Hildegarda, barked at her to run along.

  Netta sat behind a desk at the front, her head drooping, wringing her hands in a way which worried Max; worried him because she was clearly frightened of one of the two adults in this room, if not both, and he didn’t want it to be him.

  ‘Dr Portner,’ he said, shaking the nun’s icy hand.

  ‘Well, Dr Portner, I am very sorry to have dragged you all the way over here in the middle of the day…’

  Dragged? Max thought this was an interesting choice of words. There was no way this woman could have dragged him anywhere, but he had a feeling she liked to believe she could, and that she liked to practise on little girls.

  ‘…But I think you would want to know just what your daughter has been up to.’

  ‘I would like to know that, yes,’ he said to the top of Netta’s bowed head, ‘as it must be very serious for you not to be able to tell me over the phone.’

  The nun’s perennially red face blanched and rippled ever so slightly at this, but she soon regained her composure and announced, ‘Anetta is not the brightest student in my class, to put it mildly, Doctor, and yet she thinks she can afford to daydream and misbehave instead of applying herself.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Today in class I’m afraid this insolence of hers reached its zenith when she thought it appropriate to eat this.’ She produced exhibit A from the drawer in her desk.

  Max examined the half-eaten doughnut then his daughter. He had to smother a grin, not just at the absurd histrionics with which the nun had produced such an inoffensive article, but at the thought of Netta enjoying food at last.

  Schwester Hildegarda crashed on. ‘For the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty,’ she said in Netta’s direction, ‘and slumber will clothe them with rags. Proverbs, twenty-three.’

  Max was not impressed. Hildegarda noticed from the corner of her eye so tried something else, which, when Mother Joseph quoted it to her the other day after their run-in in the baker’s, impressed her deeply. ‘For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly,’ she said, grabbing the doughnut and waving it in Netta’s face, ‘and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.’

  ‘I am not sure Netta’s god has ever been her belly, Schwester Hildegarda,’ Max began with a smirk.

  ‘Well, she did indeed glory in her shame, Doctor Portner. She laughed at me, would you believe, in front of the whole class when I caught her in this gluttonous act.’

  Max could believe it. He found her laughable too.

  ‘Is not life more than food?’ she quoted.

  ‘Not when you’re starving,’ Max mumbled as he crossed his arms.

  ‘Food will not commend us to God,’ she said, still brandishing the squashed half-doughnut.

  He was thinking of Gegesha. God, food, God, foo
d. I know which one I would have chosen on those dark famished days, he said to himself.

  ‘But I say, walk by the Spirit,’ she continued, pacing up and down in front of Max and Netta, ‘and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these…’

  Max flinched with every word in her list, not just because they were so irrelevant to Netta’s predicament, but because some of them touched a nerve in him and made him wonder if the nun had not really brought him here to chastise him rather than his daughter.

  ‘…I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Galatians five, sixteen to twenty-six, Doctor.’

  Max was speechless, but that was fine by Hildegarda because she hadn’t finished.

  ‘Did you or your wife supply Netta with such an… indulgence?’ She probed the thick air between them with the doughnut.

  Max suddenly felt what it was like for the children in her class to be on the receiving end of this teacher’s temper and answered swiftly, ‘No, we did not.’

  ‘No, I thought not. It looks like something that is made in the baker’s shop next door, so I am reliably informed, which tells me that Netta must have left the school grounds today without permission to obtain it. Yet another misdemeanour to add to the catalogue. So, what do you have to say for yourself, Anetta? What do you have to say to me and your father who has had to take time out of his busy day healing the sick to come and witness this?’

  I’m not sure I had to take time out of my busy day healing the sick to come and witness this, Max grumbled inwardly.