Kindergarten

by Peter Rushforth

  All over the city, thousands of children sat in rigid rows in dark heavy-wood desks, the sort with the seat attached and an ink-well inset in the top right-hand corner. The windows were high and narrow, above eye-level, and the walls beneath the windows were tiled in browns, creams, and dark greens. White chalk curled in neat Gothic script across the blackboards. The dusty light-shades were at the end of long cords suspended from high ceilings. The children repeated their nine-times table, phrases from foreign languages, irregular verbs, the dates of wars and battles in which their country had been victorious. Their words echoed in the gloomy interiors. The pens had rusty metal nibs and had to be dipped into the ink-wells after every half-sentence. In every school the hands moved backwards and forwards between the ink-wells and the paper, the hands rose into the air to answer questions, the mouths opened and closed in unison.

  Young men and women in knee-length shorts, carrying tall sticks, strode up hills beneath dark fir-trees. Crowds sprawled along the shores of lakes white with the sails of boats, huddled beneath striped umbrellas, eating, sleeping, lying with eyes closed, waiting for the sun. Actresses stood at the tops of steps outside aeroplanes and waved. The planes had propellers and wicker furniture. Pilots had goggles and white silk scarves around their necks. Cigarettes dangled carelessly from the corners of their mouths. Zeppelins slid silently across the skies, half-lost in low clouds, and the crowds in the parks and beside the lakes looked up and pointed. Vast throngs rotated listlessly in cavernous dance-halls. People fought, outside, in the dark-ness, in the crowded streets, in, the parks, and violence erupted at any time, murders sensational and squalid. Everywhere, there were crippled men with missing arms and legs, supporting themselves on crutches, or pushing themselves along on cut-down perambulators or little wheeled carts, past the middle-aged prostitutes leaning in groups against the walls, smoking and laughing, their faces thick with make-up.

  In hundreds of cheap night-clubs, smelling of stale beer, gloomy with cigarette smoke, down dark stairs from street-level, a young woman wearing a top hat lounged back on a barrel, leaning to the left. Her right leg, nearer the audience, was drawn up until its heel rested against the knee of her left leg. Her hands were clasped around the raised knee. She was wearing high heels, dark stockings, and a suspender belt, and her short skirt was bunched up around her thighs, her frilled knickers exposed. The expression on her face was mocking, amused, sardonic. Middle-aged men watched her, rapt, awed, aroused, as she lay back sneering at them. Thin undernourished girls posed naked in shaky tableaux on tiny stages, the beams of the floodlights cloudy with the dust rising from the bare boards beneath their dirty feet, their bodies shiny with sweat, dark hair sprouting in clumps from their armpits as they raised their arms. Young men dressed as carefully made-up young women, in filmy billowing dresses, struck poses of immense hauteur, their heads arched back, their profiles sharp, believing themselves to look glamorous and desirable, as they preened, and kissed each other. They were too tall, and their hands were too large, though they painstakingly shaved their jaws and legs.

  In dark cluttered rooms all over the city, in the enormous wastelands of tall tenements, the crowded acres behind the public buildings, children, boys and girls with pale and tired faces, lay on unmade beds with dirty sheets, pushed into corners, as foreigners who could not speak German undressed them and fondled their bodies. They did exactly all that they were told to do. Their faces had the worn, joyless look of people who were hungry and needed money.

  In scores of cinemas, vast crowds sat in smoky darkness and watched impassively as, all across the city, the same images recurred in intensely contrasted black and white in all the films, full of dark shadows, claustrophobic and intensely enclosed, themes of madness and monsters, unimaginable horrors lying just behind the surface of everyday life. A terrifying figure with long hanging fingers and hypnotic eyes lurched across the angled roofs of a stylised city. A city lay deep beneath the surface of the earth, the mindless corridors of an oppressive city of the future, crowded with thousands of dehumanised people moving as one, the buried, submerged workers. A web of electricity created a powerful robot which looked like a beautiful woman. Floods poured through underground passages towards forgotten children. Hands clutched and gesticulated. A monster, made of clay, was brought to life to save a persecuted people. A murderer of children, tracked down through the crowded streets of a great city, his face avid and tortured, was unable to explain what made him do what he had to do as he moved towards a little girl, who looked up, smiling, towards the unseen killer, his shadow thrown across a poster behind her, seeking help to trap a murderer. A master criminal held the power of life and death over people who had not even heard of him as he worked to dominate the world secretly, altering and deciding the lives of millions. The director of an asylum, controlled by his patients, was hypnotised by a madman. Dancers moved in geometric patterns, absolutely in step, their bodies a tiny part of a larger design.

  Audiences sat and watched as the flickering light from the screens played on their faces in the smoky halls, now in darkness, now in light.

  An image of a man filled the whole screen. The camera looked up at him from below, so that he seemed larger than life, towering upwards like a statue in a temple to which crowds brought worship and sacrifice. His right arm was raised, rigid, and away from his body, so that the arm, the light behind it, was a dark and solid diagonal across the screen from the top left to the centre. His left hand clasped the heavy square buckle on the thick leather belt around his waist. The knuckles were pronounced in the heavy shadowing of the black-and-white image. A belt ran diagonally across his chest from his right shoulder, paralleling the dark line of the right arm. Pockets with buttoned flaps were on either side of this belt, to the right and left of his chest, the right pocket slightly raised and puckered by the raising of the arm. His tie, with a tiny knot, was slightly awry. His eyes were in heavy darkness, and the dark moustache, with the shadow from his nose, blotted out the area from the nostrils to below the top lip, like dark blood from a bleeding nose. His neck was in deep shadow, and his ears protruded. He leaned back slightly to accommodate the balance of his body against the raised arm. He was posed against the sky, and clouds moved behind him as he stood there, exalted, godlike, carefully posed in this startlingly histrionic position, assuming an expression of stern resolve. Stirring music played, and he stood there, amid the clouds, greater than life, his shadow immense, his power absolute, his confidence unshakeable, staring into a future which would be of his creation. Nothing else mattered but this.

  In front of him, perfectly in line, was a huge contingent of men in black breeches, stripped to the waist. Their stance was relaxed, their legs at ease, slightly apart, and they were holding spades, their hands resting on the handle at waist height, the bright metal cutting edge touching on the ground between their feet. At first, with their naked chests and black breeches, they looked like medieval headsmen holding their axes, all the executioners of history gathered together in one place.

  Outside the cinema, the crowds moved up and down the streets of the nation which was a city called Berlin.

  The people moved quickly, rather jerkily, slightly blurred, in a grainy scratched atmosphere of black and white, or a smeary sepia, as though everything were discoloured with rolling banks of smoke. The synchronisation was not quite right, and the people seemed to rush headlong down the streets. A voice commented on their actions, rather heavily jocular, or theatrically serious, with a liking for alliteration, stressing every fourth word. The voice spoke English, and was totally devoid of all genuine emotion, as though the people did not matter, were already lost in history. The words were quite separate from the scenes they purported to describe.

  A little boy called Emil—wearing the dark blue Sunday suit that his mother cleaned by holding him between her knees and scrubbing with a dampened clothes-brush, and who wanted him to go to a good school—pushed his way through the crowds, holding a suitcase and a bunch of
flowers for his aunt. He was followed by a crowd of children. He was searching for a thief who had stolen the money that was intended for his grandmother.

  Everyone was gazing into the distance, in silence. Children were carried on their father’s shoulders, held by the ankles, gazing into the distance, along with their parents. The people had strong faces, rosy, tanned by the sun in past years, and hands were held up over eyes screwed up against the falling rain. The reflections of the buildings and the crowds were very distinct on the soaked streets. Their right arms were lifted into the air, at an angle up and away from their bodies, pushing forward against each other, like children keen to answer questions in class, thrusting up their hands—“Please, sir! Please, sir!”—all those enthusiastic children, desperate for the approval of their watching teacher, who paused, looking out over the class, noticing those who did not know the answer.

  The crowds, stretching far away into the distance, wandering aimlessly year after year, had found someone to give their wandering a purpose, to shape them into a pattern, to make all the millions of them a part of history. Their lives did not belong to them any more. Each individual had ceased to exist. The city, crowded with millions of people, had become a dot on a map.

  HE SAW a long line of people stretching away into the distance.

  He saw women in calf-length grey overcoats, long dark hair, stumbling forward holding their children’s hands, families trying to cling together, men in dark clothes, heads bowed, carrying suitcases, a long procession trudging through the snow, unarmed, surrendering. They did not cry, or call for help, but stared with eyes full of all that they had seen. Their eyes were the only part of them he could see. He could never see them clearly. They were always partially hidden by the falling snow, and the barbed wire which surrounded them. As they moved forward, the snow began to fill in their footsteps. Long, sealed trains travelled eastward, through the snow, to unknown destinations, unknown places with strange names, a foreign country a long way from home, an immense and frozen emptiness.

  Their names were not known, and everything about them was forgotten. They would die, just like all the others, he thought, without names, without faces.

  eight

  HE WAS at the beginning of a story of which he already knew the ending.

  In fairy-tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, the innocent and the pure in heart always seemed to triumph, even after much fear and suffering: Hansel and Gretel outwitted the witch and escaped; the seven little kids and their mother destroyed the wolf; the three sisters in “Fitcher’s Bird” overpowered even death itself to defeat the murdering magician. But he could still remember the mounting desolation with which he read some of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tales when he was little. He had read them over and over again, hoping that this time the ending would be a happy ending, but the endings never changed: the little match-girl died entirely alone, frozen to death on New Year’s Eve, surrounded by burned-out matches; the little mermaid melted into foam after bearing her suffering bravely; and the steadfast tin soldier and the ballerina perished in the flames of the stove, leaving only a little tin heart and a metal sequin behind. He had been unable to put them away and forget about them. He had been drawn, compulsively, to read them with engrossed attention, and had wept as he found himself realising what the inevitable and unchanged end of the story would be.

  IT WAS raining again outside, and the wind blew in strong gusts. The sea was only a slightly darker grey than the sky, dull, reflectionless, possessed of great depths. The curtainless windows rattled and swam, and the empty playing-fields were drab and distorted. Low black clouds rolled heavily across the sky, like smoke from a burning city.

  In the 1930s, though the school, then as now, had been a boys’ school, the Ferry House had been turned into a house for a small number of refugee German girls, sisters of boys in the school, or girls on their own, and the school’s youngest boys, who had previously slept there, had been transferred to the main building. He had learned this from the letters, never having known it before.

  He looked around the bare white walls of the echoing, bare-boarded bedroom, and thought of Lotte Goetzel, Hedwig Grünbaum, Anna Kahn, Stefanie Peters, and all the other little girls, lying in bed, pictures and postcards on the walls, listening to rain falling, and thinking of their families in Berlin, writing the letters that he was now holding in his hands.

  In July, 1938, Lotte Goetzel had rejoined her parents in Berlin, after being at Southwold for two terms, and had not returned to the school.

  Berlin-Charlottenburg 2

  9th August 1938

  Dear Mr. High,

  Growing difficulties make it impossible for us to send our daughter back to Southwold. We have now lost all our business and it is impossible for us to pay the fees any longer. We know no one who can help us. Lotte was very glad to see her family, friends, and her little dog here, but we know she will miss the kindness she was shown in England. She was very unhappy in a strange land sometimes, but we know how much you tried to make her feel “at home.” We think it, perhaps, was too early to separate the child from home. As she is such a shy, quiet girl, we were really afraid that she felt so homesick so far away from us. You may think this is sentimental in us, but I think, as a father, you will understand our feelings. It would be our wish to give her in your school if we could, but perhaps it was too early. She is only 12.

  We are leaving Germany, and going to Holland. I have good hope of a position with a firm in Amsterdam. There is a Jewish school for children from Germany, and we hope to give Lotte a practical education so that she may be able to earn her own money by her hands, wherever she goes, with what the future may bring for us. All our furniture is packed and waiting to be sent away, but we do not know whether it will be possible to take it with us.

  We thank you with all our hearts for all you have done for Lotte. She sends a letter for you.

  With many good wishes for you and your school,

  Peter and Aline Goetzel

  Dear Mr. High,

  I am so sorry that I did not say goodbye properly to you and Misses High. I was too unsure. Thank you for the nice report.

  The sea was rough when we crossed, and most of the passengers were sick. Hanno Weiler and I were not. Hanno looked after me very nicely. His mother and father kindly took me home from Hamburg, on their way back.

  I am now hier in our house, and it is going to be sold. It was very exciting to help to get everything ready, and empty all the cupboards. A lot of lovely old things we found, where we never knew from. It was great fun.

  Grossvater is going to sell his farm and come with us to Holland. It is a big adventure.

  Mutti and Vati like the school foto very much. Vati has put it under glass, and all my friends like it.

  Love to you and Misses High,

  Your affectionate pupil,

  Lotte Goetzel

  I send you a foto. Please keep me in good memory.

  The little dark-haired girl stood at the edge of an empty field, holding a small Scotch terrier, smiling up at the camera. She wore a headband in her short hair, and was wearing a pinafore dress, with a brooch in the shape of a swan.

  In October a postcard had come from the Goetzels saying that they were safe in Amsterdam, and that was the last communication the family made with the school.

  Anne Frank and her family had been German refugees in Amsterdam.

  Some years ago, when they had been in the Netherlands (Jo had been seven, and had told all his friends at school that they were going to Never Never Land), they had visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, where the secret hide-out of the Frank family and their friends was preserved, where they had hidden for two years before being found and sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Corrie had a blurred memory of darkness, and echoing bareness, and, above all else, a little section of the wall where the remains of some pictures and postcards stuck there by Anne Frank had been preserved. The memory he retained more than any other was a post
card of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose. That single postcard had brought the dead girl very close to him. On another wall were pencil lines where the parents had marked the heights of their children as they grew towards adulthood, month by month; and a map where pins showed the advance of the allies through northern France, nearer and nearer with every week that passed.

  In spite of everything, she had written, less than three weeks before she and her family were taken away—his father had talked about the visit to the Anne Frank house in a school assembly, before he became headmaster, and read from her diary—I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.

  On television, a few weeks ago, a Dutch woman journalist, a sympathiser with Red Phoenix, had been interviewed about her comments on the current trials of terrorists in West Germany (the same terrorists, now imprisoned, for whom Red Phoenix were holding the Berlin schoolchildren hostage), and the interviewer had mentioned Anne Frank’s name in response to a remark about the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The woman had laughed, not sarcastically or ironically, but with genuine amusement, and called the diary her “least favourite work of fiction.” “This figure of six million dead Jews,” she had said, “must have been chosen, I suppose, for some cabbalistic significance, and everyone knows it has little basis in factual accuracy. It is a hoax. Surely you have read the books that prove this? It is a fiction sustained by Zionist propaganda to attempt to give some historical justification for the acts of Jewish military aggression against the Palestinian people. Some Jews did die in the war, of course, but so did millions of Poles and Russian civilians—and the figures here are not open to question. People always die in war.” The programme had ended with her laughing face, amused and incredulous at the interviewer’s naïvety, like a bright young lawyer defending a war criminal. When the film of The Diary of Anne Frank had been shown on television, all the characters speaking with American accents, a boy in Jo’s class had written: “It was in black and white. It was about a girl who was hidden from the Germans in a small room, and she wrote a diary about it, but at the end the Germans found her and her friends. It was a long film, but there wasn’t any fighting in it. It was set in the nineteenth century.”