The sound of seagulls came on the breeze. The hot June sun shone. Midges seemed to love him, and the black shorts, new and still stiff with starch, chafed badly.
“Password?”
They roared it out: “Blood!”
“Motto for the day?”
“To remain pure and become mature.”
It was only ten o’clock but Nicolai was sweating. He had emptied his water bottle and thought with longing of the cool water in pitchers with ice, back at the hotel. It was too hot to bother to get out the exposure metre. He set the camera to a 250th of a second at F8 and pointed it. It was best to pick one figure from the many. He chose one boy, very athletic and concentrated. The Leica was perfect for action shots. The sun burnt the back of his neck: he was Robert Capa on a hill in Spain, with the smell of death in the air, aiming as troops were dodging bullets. His father had shown him photographs of the Spanish Civil War in an American magazine. His hero used a Leica too. Together, they had marvelled at them.
“Down!”
The boys sprang forward, noses in the sand. They did twenty push-ups.
“Twenty more!” He clicked, wound on, clicked. The sound the Leica made, that silky soft zipping noise as the focal-plane shutter moved across, was intensely satisfying.
“Up! Forward march! Run!”
To the rear of the disappearing column, a boy was making faces at him, a small lad with big protruding ears and a cheeky face; he was waggling his hands and sticking his tongue out.
“Jammy bugger. I know you. You’re the one staying in the fancy hotel.” The funny-faced boy sauntered forward. He had lagged so far behind that the troop had run off without him. “Bloated member of the bourgeoisie, that’s what you are.”
Nicolai put the camera in the bag, did it up and put it on the ground a little way away where it would be safe, then turned and squared up to him. His heart had already set up a steady thump of alarm.
“You and the other softies missed a right treat last night. Our Herbert got us up in the middle of the night, down on the beach, marching for hours. You should have heard him. ‘Mummy’s boys can lie on soft pillows. Our country needs strong fellows, not cowards. We will be hard, hard with ourselves.’ We stumbled back into camp, half dead. Where are our leaders in the morning? Down at the hotel having breakfast with you lot while we’re still trying to light the bloody fire and shit in a bucket.”
The tone of outrage rose high; Nicolai could not help smiling. The boy smiled back. It wasn’t going to be a fight after all.
“Nicolai Bucherer,” he said.
The other held out his hand. “Klaus Losch. They haven’t noticed I’ve gone. They don’t do roll call till the evening. Let’s bunk off. We can swim and then go back to your hotel. You can buy me an ice cream.”
Nicolai had never bunked off anything.
“Well? Got any better ideas?”
He shook his head.
They tore out sharp blades of seagrass, whistled through them, then rolled down the dunes until they grew bored of shaking sand from their hair. Klaus knew the routine, it was his third year at this camp. Though much smaller than Nicolai he was nearly two years older, almost sixteen. All along the beach he tried in vain to get Nicolai to hand over his camera, claiming he could persuade girls to do handstands and lasciviously miming how he would take pictures of them.
“That one.” Klaus pointed. “The redhead. What a figure.” He wolf whistled, then blew out his scrawny chest and beat on it. “Me Johnny Weissmuller—she Jane.”
He meant Fräulein Lore. Wearing her bathing suit, she sat in the shade of a rented basket helping Sabine build sand castles. Each time the little girl in her huge floppy sunhat marched purposefully down the beach to fill another bucket with water, Fräulein Lore raised her head and stared out to sea. They made a pretty sight.
“Let’s go and talk to her.”
“No. We’ll swim,” he said.
He could not have borne it if Klaus had tried to make her do a hand-stand. Though opinionated, his new friend was easily persuaded and they headed towards the water. Fräulein Lore did have a figure like a young girl’s. His mother had remarked upon it, said something about eating less herself. Nicolai lingered. This was the picture he wanted; the woman in the dappled shade, the light falling obliquely across her, the lovely curve of slender legs against the weave of the basket, the hair falling down her back, loosely tied. Quietly, he took the camera from his bag, felt for the 90mm lens. As he turned the knurled wheel, the black frame closed on a tiny, perfect image. In a moment she looked up. She waved. He waved back. Happiness pierced him.
They swam, ducking each other, lay in secret dips in the sand dunes staring at the sky. Trips like this to the mountains or seaside were the only holiday Klaus ever got. He liked the swimming and the football, hated the drill and so got out of it.
“You waste your energy complaining. You can pick and choose, idiot. Francke fancies your mother. So you can do what you like, see?” said Klaus. Nicolai digested this.
“How do you know he fancies her?”
“Pretty obvious. You can see it. She’s a real sexpot.”
“You’re mad.”
Batting away Nicolai’s incredulity with both hands, Klaus claimed expertise. “It’s the way they walk, obviously. The ones who want it walk differently from the ones who don’t.”
One foot placed directly in front of the other, he minced along the sand dunes, thin hips sticking out, swaying from side to side, one red-knuckled fist poised delicately above the brown leather belt. “See? When they do that it’s because they’re mad for it. Some of the really desperate ones lick their lips when they look at you.”
Nicolai burst out laughing; but Klaus, frowning at his disbelief, skidded back down the dune, showering him with sand.
“If they look at you straight, without blinking, they really like you. God’s truth. Like this.”
They practised their blank stares, the winner being the one who made the other blink first. Klaus won every time. Then they ran through their BdM jokes.
“A class is set the essay: Would young Werther have committed suicide if he’d been in the Hitler Youth? The top boy writes an excellent piece and he gets to choose the next topic. He thinks for a long time— then inspiration strikes. Would the Maid of Orleans have remained a virgin if she’d joined the BdM?”
“Do you ever think of anything else?”
“What else is there?”
“You should be a writer, Klaus.”
“Fat chance. I’ll probably end up on the railways, like my dad. We bloody workers never get a look in at any decent kind of a job. My dad doesn’t hold with any of this ‘born to die for Germany’ nonsense. He says we’re born to live. I know what I’ll do when I get in the army.”
“What?”
“Sabotage. Sugar in the petrol tanks.”
“What does that do?”
“Stops them dead in their tracks. But it doesn’t do it straight away, see, so you don’t get caught. The engine snarls up a kilometre or two away. You have to be clever about it. I’ll defuse the bombs. Or even better, prime them so they blow up the generals. Finish them all off.”
“You are insane.”
“Just wait.”
“Why go to the army, if you’re so against it?”
“What choice have I got? That’s what happens to the proletariat. When they talk about shedding German blood, it’s the workers they’ve got in mind. We’re cannon fodder. We’re innocent. So we have to defend ourselves.”
His defence of the innocent was so bloodthirsty, it made Nicolai laugh.
“My half-brother believes in all that German blood and honour stuff,” he said. “He’s really dedicated, he’s an officer cadet, wants to join the Schutzstaffel as soon as he can.” This was the wrong thing to say.
For a long time, Klaus remained silent, chewing at bits of the wiry grass. Eventually, he spat out an indigestible matted mess. “People like your brother. That’s the heart
of the problem,” he said. “If educated people believe in the Party, then there’s no hope. The masses just want jobs. And beer.”
His new friend, always begging for ice creams and sandwiches, was not so much greedy as hungry. Klaus had never gone home from school to the certainty of a hot lunch. His mother was dead; he and his father lived in St. Pauli “in a stinking tenement. Cockroach hotel, I call it.” When pushed, he described the filth and decay, not with shame but with hot anger.
On the last day of camp, wandering around the hotel, they ran into his mother. When Klaus was introduced to her, he bowed. “Delighted to meet you, dear lady.” He clicked his heels and bent over her hand and almost kissed it in a way Nicolai found very ironic, though she did not seem to notice, or mind.
“But aren’t you boys supposed to be up at the camp?”
“We got lost in the forest,” said Klaus, urging her to write a note to excuse them, which she did. Waiting for her to finish it, they exchanged addresses on the grand hotel paper. He wrote an immaculate copper-plate hand, with all sorts of curlicues and flourishes. Nicolai marvelled at the beauty of it. They said goodbye out on the sands: camp was breaking up and already parents were turning up to collect their boys. Delighted to be free, Nicolai turned the first cartwheel of his life. Klaus was his witness. He watched him out of sight, running down the beach backwards and waving the note like a trophy.
“Who was that peculiar boy?” his mother asked, on her way up to change.
“A leading member of the Hitler Youth,” he said. “About to graduate with honour. It really is true that the workers show us the way, isn’t it?”
His mother carried on up the stairs. She had probably never met a real worker.
Everybody gathered in the salon to hear radio news of the war in France before the early dinner sitting, the one the children went to. His mother dined in solitary state. Sitting in the comfort of their cosy evening together, of Sabine safe asleep upstairs, he noticed how thin Fräulein Lore was becoming. She was leaning slightly forward, listening intently, and the summer dress she wore each evening gaped at the back. At supper, she had one spoonful of soup, crumbled a roll. He looked at her very directly, trying to make her look back at him properly, as a woman might look at a man. Though she smiled at him very nicely, she always blinked. At night, she fell asleep at once, as if exhausted. He tiptoed into her room and studied her by moonlight, examining the freckles, darker spots on her clear skin, trembling to touch her long pale lashes, worrying that his breath might wake her.
The sun woke him early. He had a week of real holiday and wanted to relish every minute. The maids had laid the tables for breakfast but nobody was there except for him. He poured a glass of milk, took one of the delicious morning rolls. Breaking the crisp crust, he dug a finger into the soft white bread. With the knife, he raised a thick curl of white butter and plopped a spoonful of bilberry jam on top. He bit hard, squeaking through the butter, leaving teeth marks. A church bell nearby started ringing; it went on and on. He turned on the radio. Von Kluge’s Fourth Army had entered Dunkirk, capturing thousands of French troops, the announcer said. Hitler had ordered all church bells in Germany to be rung to announce the end of the greatest battle in world history. Like the wind, he ran upstairs. The bells ringing meant the end of the war. His father would come home; perhaps he would even join them here. Determined to be the first to tell his mother the great news, he threw open the door to his mother’s dressing room, which gave onto her bedroom.
Colonel Oster’s jacket lay on the sofa. Two highly polished black shoes stood neatly, side by side. A pair of black trousers hung over the chair beside the dressing table. The door to the bedroom was closed. Nicolai went back downstairs. He went out to the porch and sat for a long time and thought about it. What a fool he had been not to realise that the Colonel came here. That was why his mother dined late every night and not with them. That was why she had been so keen to come to camp. And he had imagined that it was for his benefit.
In the afternoon, Wolfgang arrived. From his attic window Nicolai watched the chauffeur open the passenger door of the long black car, its high polish flashing white against the haze of sand and sky. The sheen and curve of the bonnet had the iridescence of a tenement cockroach. The white-blond head got out; the door clicked shut, the chauffeur carried a case in, came out again and the insect scuttled down the ramp and away, underground. Wolfgang had a room to himself. It would be easy to avoid him: his half-brother never wasted his valuable time with inferiors. Perhaps he knew about the affair. Perhaps everyone knew except for him. Nicolai stood for a long time, watching the day fall away. Slowly, the red ball of the sun dropped from the sky into the water, and the sea, instead of boiling, swallowed it.
“What’s the matter, Nicolai?” asked Fräulein Lore.
“Nothing,” he said. “Time to dress for dinner.”
He was dining with the adults. From outside the glass door, striving for the right expression, Nicolai saw Colonel Oster standing in the middle of the dining room as waiters scurried round him. His mother reached up to embrace Wolfgang, now as tall as the Colonel, elegant in his cadet’s uniform. As she kissed her firstborn, he saw how exactly alike they were in colouring, their neat oval faces the same. The three of them could have been a family; the Colonel clean-shaven, still handsome with his grey-blond hair and pale glinting eyes. He was probably in his early forties, just a few years older than his mother, but the long cruel furrows from nose to chin aged him. Nicolai, with his dark hair and his father’s long face, belonged to a different race.
Wolf stood with his mother’s arm loosely round his waist, very erect, smiling with that utter confidence he always had which actually stole something away from every person. Nicolai wished his father was there to wink, to make a Wolfgang joke, to make the world safe again. The bitter jolt of knowledge shuddered down, that he could never tell his father what he knew. He felt them all receding, continuing their lives from a great distance. Then he put a face on and pushed through the doors, into a clamour of voices and glasses. Champagne had been ordered and Nicolai was given a glass.
“Aren’t we lucky,” his mother said. “Some good things aren’t rationed.” She dimpled and smiled with the tiny black balls of caviar caught between her teeth. If he waited all his life, she would not say one original thing.
Colonel Oster proffered a hand. It was frightening when those hard pebble eyes remained fixed on him. “Where’s your uniform, my boy?”
He had been so happy to take it off, had chucked it into the corner of the room.
“I didn’t like to wear a dirty one, sir. The other’s in the wash.”
“Remind me to give you a very fine pair of binoculars from the Oster factory. We make the best ones, you know.”
“Thank you, Herr Oberst.”
After that he ignored Nicolai, who picked at his fish while they talked military talk about reparations and how they would make the French pay. History, the Colonel said, was written by the winners. He explained the success of their strategy; said everything was legitimate, if you won. Everybody laughed. Wolfgang talked loudly of blood and honour, pushing back the fine hair, which kept flopping over his forehead. His mother hung on his words and patted his hand and adored her big boy. Nicolai drank his wine down in two long fizzy draughts. Wolfgang had very neat features, cut out of a paper pattern and tacked invisibly together by an expert hand so the seams did not show. Other people were not so precisely assembled; he was himself jagged. Nicolai observed that, for the others, he was barely there. He was a shadow of Wolf, a lesser version. The waiter refilled the glasses. He drank.
A boy got his strength from his father. Wolfgang’s father, hero of the Great War, had been carried off in the influenza epidemic of 1923, when Wolfgang was a baby. So he couldn’t have been that strong, could he? His mother went on smiling and nodding and agreeing with everything the pair of them said, and laughing at the Colonel’s jokes. She behaved as though nobody would notice her extreme good humo
ur.
“My father will be a colonel,” said Nicolai unexpectedly. They looked at him. He felt his face flushing and, emboldened, he seized his moment. “He’s brave. He’ll be a great war hero. Better than Wolfgang’s father. Much better.”
His voice had come out too loud; the adjoining table hushed. The Colonel opened his mouth. Laughter burst out of him. Wolfgang, aping him, started laughing his false ha-ha-ha. The Colonel’s eyes shut, shoulders shaking with mirth; his mother’s mouth was open, showing her white teeth, pink tongue, the smear of lipstick at the corners of her mouth. He was drawn out of himself, sucked into their hot stream of noise. Before he could disappear down their open red gullets, Nicolai shrank back into his body. He let himself concentrate on the man’s black shoulder and fell, dizzyingly, into its depths, pulled down and down. Somebody had a hand on his shoulder. In a little moment his mother swam back into focus.
“You’d better go to bed, Nicolai,” she said, smiling brilliantly. “I think you got a little too much sun today, darling.”
He got up, bowed, said good night. He hated his mother. He marched down the corridor that led to the salon. The waiters were busy serving dinner. He hated them all. He turned towards the kitchen and went past the rooms where the maids clattered and chattered. Two of them were piling up dirty glasses. The second room was empty. All the clean things were here, the morning salt and pepper pots, the coffee cups and eggcups and saucers lined up and waiting to go back on the breakfast tables. The sugar sifters were in his hands before he knew why he wanted them.
It was very quiet in the underground garage. The Colonel’s car was at the far side. Nicolai unscrewed the top of the sugar sifter, cupped his hand and carefully directed the white sugar into the petrol tank. Wars were about winning. He emptied the second sifter in. Then he licked a finger and wiped away the little white granules around the rim. He screwed the cap back on, feeling the sugar crackle as he turned it as tight as it would go. He crept back upstairs, returned the sifters to their place. He wondered how far the car would travel before the sugar got into the engine. He hoped that it would break down irretrievably.
The Children's War Page 14