The Children's War

by Monique Charlesworth

  “Be generous, Nico, be kind,” his father often said, being himself both of those without any effort. Nicolai tried to comply. His mother held the monopoly of a certain kind of knowledge, sensible seeming and reasonable, that was never to be argued with. Always right, she completely missed the essence of things.

  As he came up the stone steps into the back hallway, the aroma of veal sausage blended with the house smell of furniture polish and flowers. Winter and summer a huge bowl of flowers stood on the highly polished French table in the middle of the hall; the fire in the big marble hearth brought out their scent. (“In life,” his mother said, “it’s the little luxuries that make all the difference.”) He slung his satchel onto the ornate coat stand, carried on into the long white kitchen.

  “Good day at school?”

  “Fine, thank you, Magda.”

  His pleasure dimmed at the sight, under the apron, of the telltale blue blouse that went with their cook’s best suit of navy serge. An afternoon with his mother yawned ahead.

  Careful of her going-out finery, Magda held the mashed potatoes comically, at arm’s length. “Don’t wriggle, Sabine, it’s coming,” she said.

  Enthroned in her high chair, his baby sister was beaming at him under her crown of golden curls. “Ni-co! Ni-co!” She drummed her feet in anticipation, stretched out dimpled hands.

  Magda slid the dishes on the table in the bustling way of a person with no time to waste. She had made white cabbage salad with caraway seeds: it was what he thought of as a white food day. The metal tips of her town shoes rang out in a businesslike way on the tiled floor; her thin face, cheeks flushed from the oven, wore its usual slightly anxious expression. She had grilled the Weiϐwurst, had gravy keeping warm. He spread mustard lavishly, relished the first succulent bite as he cracked the sausage skin. “Magda, it’s heavenly,” he said. “Actually, you’re an angel.”

  Her rare smile made her almost pretty. Sabine suddenly stuck her finger into a mound of potatoes in which butter melted, then cried, because it was hot. Magda kissed the finger and shushed her. The trick was to stop the baby from eating so fast that she would be sick. Magda loaded her little spoon, blew on it while trying to stop fat little fingers from snatching and spilling.

  Nicolai made fortifications with his potatoes, forked waves into a gravy moat. Caraway seed men attacked and defended; the sausage battering ram won through. Magda had saved a portion of fruit compote for him. She ladled on cream. He plunged a spoon through the white lake to the red currant depths, then swirled the two into a Catherine wheel. Magda was already washing the dishes; she would have no time to chat today. The three of them usually ate together in the kitchen; there had been a suggestion that when Sabine outgrew the high chair they would join their mother, who, when at home, lunched in dining-room splendour. Nicolai hoped not.

  From his room on the fourth floor, he watched Magda hurrying off to catch the trolley bus into town. The curled feather on her best hat went bobbing along the other side of the hedge like a tall passing bird. He stepped over the track to the station house and picked up the young lady with a red dress and a little Scottie dog attached to her base. He placed her on platform 1 next to the sign for the express train to Munich, which never came. She would just have to wait. His father had laid out the roads and bridge, extended the track, which so completely colonised his room that he had to clamber over it to go to bed. They had spent hours on it. Often Nicolai, hovering on the brink of tedium and hating his own ingratitude, redoubled his efforts to be pleased. Trains were the dream of his loving father, who had been poor, whose boyhood had never known the comforts that time and money bought. He could never quite live up to the expectations of joy.

  His father must have realised. For his thirteenth birthday the previous month, he had given him the new Leica IIIa, which lay distractingly on his desk. “You need something to engage heart and mind,” he had said. “This will show you the world.”

  Nicolai undid the two studs and opened the tan leather case to admire its magnificence. He looked at himself in the lens. There seemed to be a faint fingerprint on the glass. He breathed on it, took a soft cloth, polished it away. He was waiting as patiently as he could. As soon as his university work eased, his father, whose own patience was endless, was going to demonstrate the camera’s refinements. They were going to set up a darkroom in his bathroom. He felt a kind of advance nostalgia for the age of trains, for the simple time which was already passing.

  Replacing the camera, Nicolai got down to inspect the station. He could lay a camouflage net over the roof to guard it from enemy attack. He needed new paint colours, a drab green and more brown. Flat on the floor, one ear pressed against the track, he stared across the platform and through the ticket office window. The ticket inspector’s tiny black eyes and lacquered head looked back. His giant eye filling the whole window must terrify the little man. He winked. Then he opened his eyes as wide as he could. The little metal face remained impassive. Nicolai wondered whether, if he laid the young lady on the line and ran a train over her, her head might come off. In which case he might get out his old paints and dab some blood around her severed neck. He had derailed the train several times without denting her when a high thin wailing arose farther along the corridor. Sabine generally woke up miserable after her nap. Any minute now his mother would be along to get her up, intruding into his glorious free afternoon.

  He opened the windows as wide as they would go. Using the chair, he stepped up onto the windowsill, climbed over the single safety bar and, still clutching it, lowered himself backwards so he was kneeling on the chilly ledge outside, head still in the room, legs and feet protruding precariously into space. He glanced out. There was nobody coming. He looked along the Elbchaussee. A trolley bus passed without stopping. It looked no bigger than the model one under his bridge. Thirty metres below, the front garden was an improbably neat green rug, the evergreen bushes sprouting heads of broccoli. The long black line on the Elbe beyond was a tugboat, probably pulling barges full of coal.

  He forced himself to stand up on the sill, felt the old pull of the ground calling him, telling him to lean farther and farther out, to let go. He wouldn’t do that. He let his weight sag experimentally against the window. The hinges of the shutters, on which fresh paint was already cracking, might be rusty underneath, might not take his weight. He might fall, screaming, onto the gravel far below. A vision came of his half-brother, Wolfgang, wearing a black leather coat over his brown shirt, leading a funeral procession full of Jungvolk.5 The Jungvolk all sobbed. Wolfgang, come specially from Lübeck, opened his mouth wide for the oration. It remained open, stuck. Nicolai screwed up his eyes and stared up into the sun until black spots floated across his pupils. Still he could not imagine praise coming from Wolfgang’s mouth.

  He pulled himself farther forward, so his chest was resting more securely on the double ridges of the window and shutter, held together by their two interlocking handles. He got a purchase with his feet. A tiny spider, dislodged from its web, ran along the green-painted ridge with its band of dirt. He watched it scurry down the dark space between the wood and the glass. The sun warmed his back. His stomach fluttered with anticipation. One, two, go! Nicolai shoved his boots hard against the sill. The conjoined window and shutter swung open. His breathing constricted with an intensity between excitement and fear as he hung in space, cantilevered from the window, then his feet were scrabbling for the branch beyond. He scissored his legs round it. He edged backwards, holding on to the metal handles. Bark scraped his bare knees. This was the difficult part, letting go and falling, flailing through twigs for a handhold. Bang. He was safe on the branch. He got his breath back. The path below was still empty. His open window was innocent. He shuffled his bottom along the branch as fast as he could to the point where, from the house, a boy on the tree was invisible.

  He was a squirrel, leaping from branch to branch, except anybody who leapt would crash down and smash his bones. Getting back in that way was impo
ssible. He always shinnied down the tree, went in at the side door past the larder. Magda would not let anyone near her larder, not even him. But Magda was out.

  “Nicolai!”

  His mother’s voice, quite near, was coming from the nursery.

  “Nicolai, where are you?”

  Now she was in his room, but even if she looked out of the window, she could not see him. He kept quiet.

  “What’s become of your brother? Say Ma-ma, my Süϐelein, say Ma-ma.”

  “Da-da-da!”

  He lay on the branch and waited. Soon, she and the baby would go off to the park where Sabine would inspect every ant and fallen leaf, and his mother would have nobody to quiz with her dull questions about school. He wondered what was taking them so long. A little figure turned off the Elbchaussee and shimmered around the corner. The woman came closer and closer to their house, turned in at the gate and came up the path. It was much too early for coffee and cake visitors. She made a funny figure, foreshortened and looking down at a piece of paper in her hand. She looked up and saw him. She stood there gazing at him with her blank face. Damn and hell. That was why his mother had not gone out. Now he remembered. Some woman was coming to be interviewed for the nursemaid’s job. As the doorbell rang, she took off her hat, smoothed down her hair, repinned it.

  Nicolai shinned down the tree, successfully conducted a raid on the larder, acquiring a piece of Magda’s excellent cheesecake. Heading across the big hallway towards the stairs, sniffing the damp, lemony richness, he paused. The women were in his father’s study. The door was closed. He sidled up to it; the keyhole was big and he could hear their voices quite clearly. It was important to obtain intelligence about the enemy. There had been three nursemaids in the past year and a half. He had disliked them all. They always had the room off the stairs that led to the cellar, for which he envied them. The small window onto the garden was overgrown with ivy, which gave it a magical green glimmer.

  “You’ve come a long way, Fräulein Lindemann.”

  “The Ruhrgebiet.”

  “You worked in a shop and a restaurant. I see here that you took a degree in law. My goodness. That’s quite unusual, isn’t it?” His mother sounded puzzled. Balancing the cake on one outstretched hand, he grazed at it, soft-lipped like a horse, so as not to make a mess.

  “Well, Frau Bucherer, I always loved to work. When I gave up the law I decided to work with children.”

  “You’re sure this is the kind of work you want?”

  Sabine was chuckling. Sliding on her bottom across the polished floor, she tended to work backwards around his father’s vast mahogany desk.

  “Very much so, Frau Bucherer. I love children.”

  “Inge Riemke spoke very highly of you,” his mother said. “What is the connection?”

  “How kind. My brother, Willy, was at art school with Frau Doktor Riemke.”

  “How interesting.”

  Nicolai wondered that the conversation could proceed with such dry inevitability, every question a stone falling into a hollow place as his mother, eliciting the usual answers, learnt nothing. Sabine began wailing. She often pulled herself up under the desk and banged the top of her head.

  “Have you hurt yourself, Sabine?” His mother’s voice changed. Nicolai wandered away upstairs. He did not succeed in decapitating the girl in the red dress.

  In a while he heard his mother calling him down. Sabine was sitting on the woman’s knee. He put out his hand. The woman’s hand was cool. Smiling, his mother put her arm round him. This rare gesture told him that she had decided to take the woman on.

  “This is Fräulein Lindemann, our new nursemaid. From Wuppertal.”

  “Very pleased to meet you, Nicolai,” she said. She had quite a nice voice. He heard no trace of the Rheinland twang of their last chauffeur, who came from Mülheim an der Ruhr and made the same stupid joke every day about the way Hamburgers spoke, endlessly going on about how they walked on the spitzen stein.6 He studied her. Her dress looked homemade. She had thin arms and legs; near her ankle one stocking had been darned with thread that almost matched. She was on the pale side with reddish hair, eyelids heavy over light greeny-blue eyes. Because her eyebrows were almost invisible, she seemed to have an endless forehead. She did not seem the hysterical type. It was quite hard to see what type she was. This one seemed calmer than Fräulein Schwartz, their previous nursemaid, who would certainly have thrown a fit if she had seen him up the tree. Because she had not ratted on him, he came to a decision. He would give her a chance.

  Voices shrilled, the classroom roar went on and on. His classmates were baiting Jochen Dressler, calling him “Jew lover,” though there were no Jews in their boys’ Gymnasium, which was one of the finest in Hamburg. Langenscheidt, voice booming above all others, led them all on. Nicolai cast a sidelong glance at poor Jochen, whose parents were devout Catholics. Conspicuous in blue shirt and pullover, he stared stoically into space. Nicolai could not have borne persecution with such noble silence. His own father was also not a Party member; he had prevented Magda from hanging out her National Socialist flag. On festive days theirs was the only house along the street that did not display one. But it went no further. Nicolai opened his mouth; catching Langenscheidt’s rolling eye, he shut it again. If he said anything, they would round on him too. Elbows on the desk, he propped his head in his hands, stuck a middle finger hard into each ear, crushed thumbs and knuckles tight up against his skull. The jeers and racketings flattened into underwater silence. The blood pumping in his head was deep diver breathing. He relaxed his fingers slightly, bringing a rushing sound. It was a waterfall cascading a thousand metres into a rock pool far below. From an immense height he contemplated the black meniscus of the tiny pool in its white ceramic rim. Then he dived. His shrunken body arced. The dark circle opened. He vanished into the inkwell. School drowned. Nicolai stretched out spectral fingertips, the porcelain walls receded and he swam free in a liquid the lustrous green of a Heineken bottle.

  He found himself on his feet, having presumably risen with the class as a body.

  “Good morning, boys!”

  “Good morning, Herr Schacht.” Papers were being handed out for the maths test.

  “Half an hour. All those who do not finish the paper will get a zero,” said Herr Schacht, without raising his voice. With exaggerated groans, the boys settled to their task. Beside Nicolai, Heini chewed a pencil, legs twisted in mute anxiety, though the sums were easy: How many houses at 15,000 Reichsmarks could be built for the 6 million RM cost of constructing a lunatic asylum?

  Nicolai wrote large, angling his work so his friend could see. The bell pealed, the others stampeded; Herr Schacht held up a broad hand. “Bucherer—I hoped for more from you, my boy.”

  “What is it, sir?”

  The master had seen him helping Heini. He watched the sun light up the tiny hairs growing from Herr Schacht’s ears and glow through his lobes while he talked at length about how contrary any form of cheating was to the true sense of National Socialism. Nicolai, unable to disagree, could not find any way to wriggle out of blame since the obvious explanation—that Heini’s father went mad when he got below a 3— would not do. A tumult of gibberish was rising from the yard below, where Langenscheidt and his pals capered feigned lunacy.

  In the changing room, pulling on gym socks, thrusting long feet into plimsolls, Heini took the bad news in silence. He was to stay behind, do another paper. Nicolai studied the parting in his fair hair, the way he looped the lace over a finger. The white showing above his pupils gave him a startled air; maybe that was how his friend acquired his old childhood nickname, “Little Hare.” Maybe there was another, hidden reason. There was no softening the blow. Already, his friend was up and darting away. Nicolai trailed behind. Friendship was a precarious, precious thing, liable to break at any time.

  As energetically as he could, Nicolai jumped on the spot, arms swinging, already slightly out of breath though they had only just begun. They drilled with
the medicine ball for half an hour, then it was sprinting or the long jump into wet sand. He jumped, fell awkwardly short of the mark, getting a mouthful of sand. He shot up, spat it out and looked round. Herr Blank, the sports master, had not noticed. Hours of drill in shorts and singlet in the cold had taught him never to answer back, never to do anything but try his utmost. They ran laps and relays. He ran, throat aching with the effort. To soothe himself, in his head he repeated an old marching song: one, two, twenty-two, that’s how the farmer walks through the mud, three, four and thirty-four. Singing away to himself, he did not have to see Heini turning effortless cartwheels, talking to others and laughing. How did those dull boys find so much to say?

  “Where’s your uniform, Dressler?”

  Herr Blank’s face had gone dark red. In silence, the boys buttoned up brown shirts, pulled on shorts. Jochen, alone in their whole Gymnasium, did not wear the uniform of the Hitlerjugend or Jungvolk.

  “You read the newspapers, boy? The Second Decree for Implementing the Youth Law came into effect on March twenty-fifth. Duty service is obligatory now.” He was so near that their noses were almost touching. “Obligatory, Dressler. Do you imagine that you alone will not serve your country?”